Alternate ending 1: Idyll

  The air is rent as horrible, inhuman sound pours from the scientist’s throat. In my arms, the child begins convulsing. Her mouth and gray-lavender eyes snap open in a wail of pain. Shane drops to the floor, nails carving deep rents in his own face, jaw clenched around an answering scream. I am immobilized by the sound, able only to watch Jordan stumble closer to Tamar, pulling herself along the wall as if incapable of standing unaided. Jadan looks on resolutely as Kiran, lips a grim line, shakes in his grasp.   The silence is so loud that I don’t hear Urzica at first. Tamar spits a ragged chunk of flesh to the floor with a grimace and a splat and only then, rising through the ringing of my ears come the faint, liquid gurgles and the scrabbling of his nails along the tiles.     The low, glassy waves swish and suck around our feet, sand and tiny shells dancing ticklishly up the backs of my calves. Jordan insists that everyone should know how to swim, but Micah is getting more splashing and laughing done than anything else.   How long until Kiran comes back? I write, and hand pad and pen to Shane.   A week, if we’re lucky. The monkey eats too much. the pad says when he returns it to me. His handwriting has improved since he lost his hearing to Urzica’s drugs and his psychic senses to whatever it was that Kiran did that day, but it hasn’t improved very much. He’s too stubborn to let it.   The thin white scars on his cheeks echo the elegant calligraphy of the scriptures inked on his skin. I let my eyes slide past them and out past Jordan’s lean, glistening shoulders, past Tamar’s coppery limbs pulling hard at the calm water to the turquoise haze where the sea meets the sky. The back of my neck feels like it’s starting to burn, despite the cool winter breeze.   Do you ever miss snow? I ask Shane.   Sometimes, he writes back, But not very often.   “Look!” Micah comes padding up to us, neon-green bathing suit half-askew from her exertions. She allows me to straighten it as she unfolds Shane’s fingers and tips a tiny, red sea star into the middle of his palm. “Jordan told me if I make a wish on it, it’ll come true!”   “Ah, that’s only if you make a wish then throw it back into the water,” I tell her. “It needs to be in the ocean to live.”   She nods a little, peering up the beach distractedly, then takes off running with a shriek.   “Daddy!” she laughs as tall, dark Raphe throws her into the air.   Beside me, Shane tosses the starfish back into the waves with a tiny plunk.   Did you make a wish? I ask him.   No, he writes back.   As Jordan flops down dripping between us, I tip my smile towards the sun.          

Alternate ending 2: Bound

  Urzica crumples to the ground, a fine blue glow leaking from every orifice.   The silence is abrupt and nearly as loud as the screaming it follows.   For a while, no one moves except Tamar.   “Let me out of here!” she calls, the metal of the table groaning under her struggles.   Jordan is shaking slightly at my feet. Shane appears to have passed out. Jadan is crouched on the floor, thoroughly absorbed in rocking Kiran back and forth. The child in my arms is far too still, her odd-hued eyes glazed and open.   Tamar's wail echoes hollowly down the corridors when I lay the girl on her chest.     They corner us on the bridge, where we’ve paused for breath. Jordan’s ankle is swollen badly and I have to carry most of Shane's weight. He is dead limp, breathing so shallowly it doesn't stir the hairs on my neck. Kiran is barely aware enough to walk, not responding to Jadan’s constant whispers. Tamar is grim, gore-streaked, clutching her daughter’s lifeless body.   “What are we going to do?” She mutters. She looks down at her child's pallid corpse, her arms tightening until there is an audible, stomach-turning crunch. She shrugs off Jordan’s hands as the first car pulls up behind us, disgorges the first set of dark-clad officers.   “Don’t move,” one shouts, and I motion to Jadan to stay still. Their gun barrels are black, highly polished, multiplying as more cars pull up, vans, dogs, men, until their weight overturns the moment.   When it happens, I see everything at once, watch the seconds unfold like petals, like letters strung together to make a word I’ve always known. Kiran moving, darting suddenly forward into the leaden wind and his back blooming red, Jadan, desperate, his skull streaming fragments as he falls and I’m numb to the heavy impact on my chest, Shane’s weight lurching against me and the sound of tearing cloth, the cold scrape of the rail at my thigh, sudden weightlessness, Jordan’s scream lost somewhere above me.   Her face haunts the silt-dark water, skeletal and sunken against white, white sheets, waiting behind meshed-glass double doors for me to call her away. And I remember once his voice beckoned me up from some fathom of night and his warm hair fell around my face like a cascade of blood, and the iron bands around my lungs had loosened then, but won’t now.            

Epilogue

   220;You’ve preformed your duty as a superior officer most admirably, as usual, Gojun. You may return to your rooms now if you wish.”   “Do you think it’s fair to keep doing things like that to them?”   “Fair?” Hir chuckle makes twisting ripples in the air. “That’s just the kind of question I’d expect from you. But, entertaining as it was, this time it wasn’t under my jurisdiction.”   “It’s Karma, then?”   "Sometimes. But tell me, oh Dragon King of the Western Seas, have you ever been bored?”   “No.”   “Of course not. You are what you are. And that’s why you’ll never understand,” The brush of hir narrow fingertip stirs hir lotuses, blurs the images reflected between them. “It’s the way they want things to be.”