Epilogue

Epilogue 3.29

---Em---

     I stumble out onto the ash-covered street. Everything's a blur. Like I'm dreaming. Gail's mouth moves, but there's no sound. Just a jittery ringing noise. But my vision focuses in on something. Colby. My heart overclocks, pumping acid through my veins.

     I'm not here. Override. Autopilot. This power... this force that Melody awakened within me. It's in control. My hands are thrust forward. The skin blisters as searing energy gathers into a globule above the M shape hatched across my palms. Misnomer. It's not energy—it's me. My essence.

     My bones rattle from the kickback as the soul pellets fire out of me. My arm is nearly ripped right out of its socket. I smell the sizzling heat as my spirit energy rips through the air, searing the atmosphere in its wake.

     Colby shouts something, leaping out of my line of fire. But I can't hear him over the ringing in my ears, the pulsing in my soul. I keep on firing.

     Be here.

     That's all I can think. This is your pain, I tell myself. Don't tune it out.

     I open my eyes, not the ones I use to see, but the ones I use to feel. And then I'm here. I'm here, and Mya's dead, and Colby has to pay. I fire off a couple more soul projectiles. One of them takes a chunk out of his thigh. The other busts open his shoulder.

     "Bryan... please," Colby looks up at me, gurgling blood. I must've hit him more than a couple times—three distinct trails of red dribble down his shirt. I look into his eyes as he crawls away from me and out onto the street. I can barely recognize the boy who had my back when the class bullies got together to punch my lights out after school. The boy who invited me over to his house every day to play video games when our mothers thought we were doing homework. The boy who realized that I was in love with Olivia before even I knew it and promised not to get in the way, even though he'd been crushing on her for even longer than I had.

     It's not that I can't recognize him. It's that I won't.

     Somewhere, that Bryan, the one who kept staring at the cracked screen of his phone... he died. Or maybe he's been dead ever since the world ended. Maybe it's only just catching up to me now. My past. My home. My family. Colby. Olivia, even. What do they really mean?

     Where's the continuity? Has all of this been the epilogue to my pathetic little life?

     Of course it hasn't. The End wasn't the end.

     It was a reboot.

     In this new canon, Colby isn't my friend. He's the enemy.

     I shoot him a couple more times, shuddering as I feel each hollow cavity rip open inside me. The more of my soul I use to attack him with, the less there is left for me.

     But I've never felt this much power well up inside of me. The boundaries between my body and the world outside have dissolved; I can feel the particles colliding in the air that surrounds me. I can feel the light, feel each ripple of sound brush against my aura. Feel each individual particle within me and around me vibrate. But it's more than that.

     Everything's become malleable. And everything I can feel, I can destroy. Ripping, that awful tearing through the fabric of space and time, was always accompanied by a sick crunch—a queasy screech in the pit of my stomach. But this isn't ripping. It isn't even peeling.