It is ironic, really, that what he really needs is time travel. If he’d said so – said ‘by the way, really I just need someone to go to the end of the world’, Kellyn would have been well ahead of the game. Cagney might have been cautious with his powers, careful and concealing, but the part of Kellyn that was Elite’s had flaunted hers, playing in time the way some children played in the water. The end of the world was beyond her normal playscape, of course, but it might have been doable. And between him and her? Probably child’s play.
But space – space is new. One moment they are standing, and she is taking a careful look at the unfamiliar faces around her; the next, there is a name in her head, Gail, and she is flung into another place. She can feel the time change around her, straining; time is not the same in space. And it’s cold – cold and somehow lighter, and she opens hazel eyes wide to look around. They have their instructions – but they are not without fear. Casually she moves her feet but she doesn’t move forward the way she would like; it is not like water, as if there is no resistance at all. One other calls, help me!. Another just, help!. Kellyn glances towards the first mind-voice first, towards the bay boy with the big white socks, but before she can consider moving in his direction another has gone to him to help. They are struggling forward.
And the other boy – he has stepped onto the back of some strange creatures. Actually, she thinks, they look similar to some of the things that live in the depths of the ocean; she has seen them, from a distance, standing dangerously at the edge of the ice. Glancing around she finally decides that only those who know each other have decided to work together; stubbornly, she decides she will succeed on her own.
Space is not empty, as they have found, and Kellyn notices that there are large pieces of debris floating about, seemingly aimlessly. They will give her momentum, if she can push off of them. But they drift too slowly towards her: carefully she grasps at the slippery lines of space-time and tugs, tugs until time shifts around her and the first of many platforms of space-ice-rock taps against her hooves. Scrambling she stands on top of it and then launches off towards the next one, and then from that landing towards the next. It forms a sort of rhythm: leap, land, push off; and if the next rock isn’t quite where she needs it to be, she tugs the threads of time until it drifts into her reach.
The warmth grows, and the dark rises. Not suddenly – but as if the world gets denser, as if the light is being sucked out of it. They coincide, the dark and the warmth, and so it is there that Kellyn aims for. But just before reaching it, she looks back. Turns back, standing on the last rock; she can tell that another leap will end it: the others have vanished into this space and she can feel its tug, feel herself drifting towards the end. But a part of her wants to make sure nobody else needs help. She can’t do much…but she could send some rocks their way….if they ask. She sends a tentative query into the dark, waits, helps if she’s asked.
And then she turns, and jumps, and falls. Falls into warmth and then nothing. And wonders if this is the end. If the dark god of her mother really wanted nothing more than more sacrifices.