MY HEART IN STONE

PART TWO:

It didn’t take long for the med-techs to catch up with them in the hallway, along 

with the Team doctor who was insistent that, in the face of all personal distress, a

physical was absolutely necessary to nullify any lingering effects of the warp.  

Somehow the idea of letting others fuss and work over her triggered a survival 

response: the anger, shock, and horror morphed into a surreal numbness that felt

as systematic as the exam, a deadness that disconnected her from all feeling.  A 

part of her wanted to rebel against that, for there was no Cort to kiss her senses
back to life, no rough warm hand to hold hers, no rain-soft voice to coax her love.

Just…void. 

Another part of her urged her to keep moving through this void because others 

commanded her to do so, because she knew that if she lay down in its awful mist, 

she’d never rise again.  So she let the doctors and aides handle her, check her 

vitals, ask her questions. Then, they left her alone in the examination room. 

Which might have been a mistake except for the one pinprick of thought that 

kept flaring into her mind: a star she saw piercing through the haze above the 

Roman city as they raced to the portico where Maximus would be taken.  She 

had pointed it out to Cort and they smiled at each other.  

She sat now on the exam table, feeling the past several hours sink down and take 

her soul with them. She stared at the cold tile, at her cold bare toes, mentally 

wrapped herself up in the frigid air of the exam room.  It was a cold shroud for 

the cold tomb of her heart; fitting, that, now that the fire was taken.

A star.  Of all the things she wanted her mind to focus on now, it was a star that 

eclipsed them.  

What had Cort said to her before?  “…if you love the stars, you can’t fear the 

night.”  Or something like that.  It didn’t matter.  She held onto it because she 

could hear his voice, could hear him murmur as they lay in the warm cup of the 

glade, surrounded by silvered pines and glowing azaleas.  She lay back onto the 

exam table and closed her eyes, trying to see the stars, trying to recapture their 

spray across the sky as he…as he…a tear rolled helplessly down her cheek.

Can I pray now?  She silently asked.  Can You hear me calling?  Is he all right?  

Is he unhurt?  Dear God, wherever he is, please do something.  Please make him 

safe!  Don’t let him come to harm.  Send Your angels, dear Lord…please keep 

him safe, dear God, keep him safe so I can find him again.

The door opened and Rachel braced herself for still more tests by the clinical, 

neutral personalities of the doctors and staff.  Instead, it was the burnished head 

of Deidre poking itself in, apparently finished with her assessment.

“You ready to go, Jedi?” she asked, slipping into the room.  Deidre, like herself, 

was still dressed in the ragged robes of their retrieval, torn, muddied, far from 

the brilliant colors they had chosen from the start.  Rachel nodded and slowly 

pulled herself up into a sitting position again.  “I’m going to go back to my 

apartment,” Deidre explained, “and get out of these clothes and celebrate my 

return to civilization with a good hot shower.  I bet you’d feel a bit more capable 

if you did the same.”

“I…I’d have to go by Cort’s…I have most of my clothes there.”  Rachel said, 

faltering, and felt a whole new well of tears rise up.  The house would be empty 

now, wouldn’t it?  Deidre watched her fight them off for a moment, then came to 

stand next to her at the exam table.

“You want me to go with you?” she asked.

“Yes,” Rachel answered, rather quickly, and winced. Could she stand to return 

knowing he wasn’t there? Did she want Deidre to see her fall apart again?  “I 

mean, no.  Maybe…”

“I’m going with you,” Deidre answered, her tone brooking no dissent.  She gave 

Rachel another hug. “None of this is over yet, okay?  You’ve got to remember 

that.   Besides, Terry is upstairs about ready to beat someone or himself into a 

pulp…probably himself, ‘cause you know how he is.  Which means you and I need 

to go talk to him soon before he decides to commit seppuku…or something 

melodramatic and heinous like that.  You never know…”

Rachel didn’t want to, but found herself laughing at the thought of such theatrics 

from Terry, laughing over the dry humor in Deidre’s voice.

“And…” Deidre took a deep breath, “I’m sure he’s in quite a state about 

Maximus.  I know I am.  Sid apparently disappeared with him…has some spider 

hole tucked away in this…place,” Deidre added with disgust, waving her hand to 

indicate their surroundings.  She captured Rachel’s gaze.  “I just talked with 

Terry on the office phone.  He wants us to go freshen up. It’ll help us deal with 

the next few steps better. So…you ready?”

On their way to Deidre’s car, Rachel listened to her retelling of Terry’s account 

of what happened to Maximus.  He had chased Sid down the corridor where 

apparently there was a secret door, through which the nanocreature hauled both 

a protesting Brianna and a dead-to-the-world Maximus, through a door that left 

no trace of its existence once it slid shut.  Terry had beaten upon the wall to no 

avail; Sid had what he wanted and there would be no more of their involvement. 

Terry found that his only recourse was to retreat to his upstairs office and try to 

put back together the events that had taken place so quickly.  Her phone call had

found him slightly breathless and bristling with anger and frustration, on the verge 

of tearing down the entire complex of Emerald City in order to put things aright.

She stopped listening, though, when Deidre’s car turned the corner to start down 

the lane of the little blue house.  It was several long seconds before Rachel realized 

her right arm was locked straight, her hand gripping the side door handle with 

white-knuckled tension.  Her other hand was bracing against her thigh and she 

realized she was using her legs to push herself into the back of her seat, as though 

she were preparing for some collision.  Whether Deidre noticed this reaction or 

not, she didn’t say; but she fell quiet as she pulled into the drive.

They had been in “Gladiator” for nearly three weeks now in non-movie time,  and 

while the grounds surrounding the house looked well kept, she could see that the 

azaleas were waning in their effervescent blooms.  The front porch looked dark, 

bereft.  What had she expected?  To see him lounging in the chair, hands behind his 

head, feet propped up so she could get the full benefit of his long figure…?  Rachel 

took a deep breath as Deidre turned off the engine and relaxed her arms, her hands. 

Keep moving, don’t stop to dwell.

The keys slid in, she opened the door.  No one had been in to do housekeeping…their 

orders, because they expected to come back to do it themselves.  It was dim inside, 

so she began turning on lamps.  There, on the couch, lay one of his vests.  Absent-

mindedly, she picked it up and turned toward the bedroom.  She forgot Deidre was 

there.  She needed to put the vest…in its right…place….

On the bed, still mussed, her kimono robe piled at the foot of the bed…one of his 

shirts on top of it…jeans nearby…hair ribbon…

She dropped the vest and scooped up his shirt to fall half sitting onto the bed, clutching 

the shirt, pressing it to her face, some small vestige of his presence…

Oh God…it still smelled like him.

Most of her consciousness was only aware of the fragrance of his body and cologne 

that lingered in the soft cotton of the shirt.  She drank it, breathed it in, stored it 

away.  It wasn’t until Deidre came in and sat beside her that she became aware of 

her own sobbing.

“Would you like to pack some clothes and get changed up at Terry’s office?” Deidre 

suggested gently after several minutes.  

“We were going to come back…” Rachel whimpered, inexplicably worried about 

the untidiness around her now.  “We didn’t think it would take us that long…and 

then we were going to meet my father…”

“You’ll still get to do that,” Deidre responded, quietly, waited for Rachel to meet 

her gaze before raising her eyebrows in that way that meant she wasn’t about to 

give up, wasn’t about to let Rachel give up. Rachel wiped her nose, tried to bring 

her breathing to a normal level.  She’d been hyperventilating from the searing that

had gone through her from the first whiff of Cort’s shirt.  Nodding as if Deidre had 

just lectured her on the merits of keeping one’s chin up, Rachel set the shirt to her 

side, at his pillow. He’ll be back for it, she told herself, and got up to bathe herself 

in the bathroom.  A half hour later, freshly scrubbed, hair washed, and feeling “much 

more capable” in a white blouse and black sleeveless dress, Rachel found Deidre 

on the front porch, cell phone in hand.

“Just talked to Terry again,” her flame-haired friend said as Rachel locked the 

front door behind her.  She looked a bit pale and tight-lipped, but said nothing 

more than what they needed to hear at the moment. “Sid’s finally been in contact.  

He’ll be in Terry’s office in about an hour.”

She watched Henri and Mikol walk down the corridor side by side and turn the 

corner. Cort had just undergone his second examination by the French doctor and

the two men were discussing the results as they walked.  After they had gone, Gerta 

slipped out from behind the cover of the lab doorway and approached the one to 

the room where Cort was being kept at present.  Casting a quick look down the 

corridor once again to make sure Mikol was not returning, she entered the room, 

closing the door quietly behind her. 

As when she had first seen him, the young man lay perfectly still on the cot, only 

now he was no longer dressed in the Roman garb of his days in the Empire, but 

wore again the tattered pastor's clothing from his own movie.  A bank of screens 

on the wall monitored his vital functions.  Mikol had devised ways of doing this 

that did not involve the use of attached wires. She looked at the monitors, her lips 

pressed tightly together.  Mikol, damn his soul, had devised...many...new technologies 

that the rest of the world knew nothing about. 

Noticing her own reflection in the closest screen, she muffled a wry snort.  She was 

a short woman, not quite five feet tall, small-boned and thin.  Her straight brown 

hair, already well-streaked with grey, was pulled back into a bun at the nape of her 

neck.  Mikol liked to call her "the sparrow", finding her very much like one of the 

common little birds that flocked about the streets of Hromada or perched on the 

high walls of Kamen, never giving up their search for crumbs. She knew the descrip-

tion was apt.  She was brown...and common...and no one noticed her any more than

they did the little birds she so resembled.  At 45 she had given up even the looking 

for the crumbs of life.  All there was left for her was...this.  Kamen.  Stone.  Wasn't 

there some Bible verse, she mused, wherein if one asked for bread, one would not 

be given a stone?  She snorted again.  Obviously whatever it was did not apply 

to her. 

Though her body was not and had never been special in any way, her mind was 

extraordinary.  She had a paper trail through the finest universities of eastern 

Europe to prove it.  Looking at her, one saw the sparrow, not knowing that within 

her lived the brain of an eagle.  She had come almost to enjoy that, to derive a 

certain pleasure from being dismissed by her physical appearance as, all the while, 

the eagle looked out of her eyes. 

Only once...just once...in her life had anyone ever found her beautiful.  Palan.  She 

had been 21, a graduate student in Prague.  Blinking back a tear, she let herself 

remember that day in late spring when she had been sitting on the grass under a 

tree, books spread around her, her eyes intent on the small calculator in her hand. 

He had approached so quietly she did not even know he was there until he suddenly

spoke.  "Such a flower," he had said...had he actually called her 'a flower'?..."should 

not spend its days in this dark shade."  He had squatted just beyond her books, 

smiling at her, smooth blonde locks falling across his forehead. 

Yes, that was how he had come to her, bringing the sunshine of himself into her 

shaded world.  And during the summer that followed, he had taught her everything

he knew of sunlight, then in September he had gone to Bosnia as part of his research 

project and had been shot down as he hiked a mountain road. After that, she settled 

into the sparrowness of her being, had never looked for, never found, the sunlight 

again. She sighed, a long and ragged sound. Enough of that! 

She turned away from the monitor, looking now down at Cort. Her tiny fingers 

brushed his cheek.  "And you, were you the sunlight of someone's life?"  Her chin 

trembled slightly. No,she thought, I will not go there, I will NOT.  She closed her 

eyes, willing herself into composure. 

Blowing out a long breath, she opened them again, still strangely disturbed by the 

presence of the young man before her. He did not look at all like her Palan, not 

with his deep tan, his long chestnut-brown fall of hair. But he was...beautiful.  If 

you could call a man beautiful, he definitely was. There was nothing feminine 

about him, surely, but the lines of his face went somewhere beyond the merely 

handsome. Palan had been beautiful, both inside and out. She looked at Cort 

seriously. "Are you beautiful inside as well?" He must be. Mikol only retrieved, 

well, attempted to retrieve, the ones that were. 

Mikol had once been beautiful outside, was still an extraordinarily handsome man.

But inside? That was a different story. She had always envisioned his innards as 

half-melted tar oozing down some jagged slope. And...yet...he had this obsession 

with what made a good man good. He wanted to be able to lay his hands on it as 

though it could be made tangible. What would he do with it, could he ever manage 

such a thing? 

Over the last decade he had tried...many times...to bring such ones here to Kamen.

The results had been...unsatisfying...to say the least. Francesco had died in transit, 

Judah within a week. But still he retrieved. There had been many, too many, all 

unsuccessful. He tried a slightly different sort, retrieving John Clayton, hoping his 

more primitive upbringing would betoken a more likely survival. But when John 

had regained consciousness after the warp, he was quite mad, had escaped from 

his room and leapt to his death from the parapet. 

Her fingers wandered to Cort's hair, brushing a strand back off his forehead. "And 

you? Have you been somehow...damaged?" She could not even imagine what it must 

be like to go through Mikol's warp, to have one's very self scattered into a million 

fragments. Mikol himself had technology that protected him, protected his retrievers, 

from such effects. But it never worked on the characters he attempted to bring back. 

They had to come through with their spirits naked, so to speak, and it was patently

obvious to everyone but Mikol that it was never going to work. 

She walked a complete, slow circuit around Cort's cot, studying his face from every 

angle. "So beautiful," she murmured. "But what has his warp done to you?" 

"Get the hell OUT!" Mikol stood in the doorway. She'd been so deep in her study 

she had not heard the door open. Mikol moved very quietly anyway. Like a shadow. 

He crossed the room in four long strides, grabbing her roughly by her upper arm. 

"You are not to come in here again unless I am present!" He glared at her, eyes 

blue ice with no hint of sunlight in them. "Do you understand?" 

Half-dragging the diminutive woman across the floor, he practically threw her into

the hallway. When he released his grip, she staggered completely across the corridor, 

her right shoulder smashing hard against the stone wall. "NEVER let me find you 

in here alone again! NEVER!" He slammed the door closed and she whimpered 

with pain, sinking to her knees. 

"Damn woman!" he muttered, looking quickly at Cort, then turning to check the 

monitors, a deep frown line creasing his brow. It had been a full year since his last 

retrieval attempt. That had been John Clayton from "Greystoke." Since then all 

his attention had focused on one man...Cortland Wells. He watched The Quick and

the Dead over and over, fascinated by a character who had begun as a loved child, 

cherished by his grandmother in every way a child should be cherished, then thrust 

into a life of self-indulgent violence while still a teen, only to become a pastor who 

gave himself completely for the good of his flock. Then that, too, had been taken 

from him and he had been plopped like some lab rat back into a cesspool of violence 

yet again. This was far better than someone who had just been good his whole life. 

With a deep hunger that ate at his guts he wanted to find out what made this par-

ticular man tick. Then Dimetri had failed to retrieve him. His anger still seethed 

about that. And the god dammed nanotech had gotten him!! Damn Sid to hell and 

back. And not only had Sid retrieved Mikol's desired target, but had sent him 

bloody-quick off into Gladiator. And again Dimetri had failed him. As had Brianna. 

He had been forced to go himself, to do himself what he paid others to do for him. 

He would never forget this. 

He turned, looking down at Cort.  But he had done it, had retrieved the priest, the 

farm boy, the gunslinger. He smiled. Perhaps a few years of bank robbery would 

be enough to see the priest through the warp? He had pinned all his hopes on it. 

Then his smile faded as he recalled that Francesco had been a self-centered, rich-

boy warrior in his younger days. That had not been enough to counteract what he 

had become as he matured. His lip curled as he remembered the disappointment 

he had felt in the warp chamber, looking down at the dead body of his prize. 

Reaching out a hand, he gripped Cort's chin, squeezing his strong fingers tightly. 

"Not this time! You hear me, Cortland Wells! NOT... THIS...TIME!" 

His consciousness sifted upwards from the pit of whatever dark canyon he'd been 

lying in. He hurt. His individual cells...hurt.  It was a sensation he'd never felt 

before, that cellular awareness.  All he knew was that whatever little building 

blocks went into making up his body...all of them felt tumbled into some heap, 

dented, warped, their corners smashed off. It had been better in the darkness, in 

the midst of utter nothingness, but his mind insisted on rising to the rim of it.  "Go 

back!" he shouted at it. It ignored him, rising still. 

As it cleared the canyon's rim, his consciousness threw its legs over the rocky ledge 

of it and he somehow rolled, knowing he was lying on his back. He must have rolled 

into cactus. That was the feeling of it. He was prickled, punctured, and he ground 

his teeth together just to live that one next second. 

"Breathe," his mind told his body. "That is enough. Just breathe."  But even that 

did not come easily.  He felt a sort of...ripple...in his lungs as the air came in and 

out. What in the name of God had happened to him? 

Then he remembered.  Redemption was exploding around him as he stood facing 

Herod in the street. They thought they'd been careful enough, arranged the barrels 

of gunpowder in such a way that he'd be safe where it had been decided he should 

stop.  He felt again the force of the hot burst of air slamming against him. He 

remembered flinging up his arms to protect his face as pieces of buildings hurtled 

toward him. That was all except for the blackness that had come down on him. 

There was nothing more until this moment. 

He sucked in shallow breaths. Anything deeper and he felt his lungs would crack 

open. Good God! He must still be lying in the street under the rubble! 

HEROD! His whole body spasmed with the remembered name. Had he survived 

the blasts?  Oh, Lord! He needed to get up...he needed to see if Herod were still 

standing there, ready to fire.  Ellen would be coming!  Herod would kill her if he 

didn't get up!! 

He twisted his body to the right, intending to push against the dirt he lay on with 

his hand. Nothing was there. He fell heavily about three feet onto something hard. 

Oh God...oh God...oh God!  He'd left a trail of himself on the way down. He could 

feel it. Without looking he knew, knew scattered bits of his body were no longer 

with him where he now lay.  He would have screamed with the agony of the knowing, 

but he couldn't get enough air into his lungs.  So he lay there, crumpled on his right 

side, soundlessly crying, "Oh God, oh God...." over and over and over again. 

A door opened and blearily he saw boots hurrying toward him, a form beginning 

to bend over him. "Herod!" he gasped and plummeted headlong back into the 

canyon. 

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