Long Journey Home

Luci just wanted to go home.

Volcanic ash rained from the sky and lava flowed freely less than a hundred meters away as she hid. 

Hid from the elements.

Hid from her pursuers.

Hid from her sisters.

She could just make out the outline of her lab door about a hundred meters away through the thick haze that engulfed large sections of the island now. The fastest people on Earth could cover a hundred meters in less than ten seconds. She would have to be much faster at that distance to outrun the pursuit from her sisters and get to safety in her lab on the small island of La Palma. It was one of the Spanish Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa where the Cumbre Vieja volcano had been letting its insides out for the last two months. They were all covered in soot, but that was better than lava. 

Plumes of smoke spiraled hundreds of feet in the air and mixed against a backdrop of randomly splotched oranges and blacks. When she first arrived, the locals told Luci that a volcanic island was a bad place to build a lab. Some felt and were quick to express their unease even though it had been more than a hundred years since the last eruption. A few even panicked for her, but Luci felt a comfort she couldn’t describe to them. She even tried to explain it to a few of them, but they could never understand her comfort here. Bad idea or not, she was always sure that this was right where she was supposed to be.

Now she was pinned against an outcropping of rock formation, about the length of a football field away from the door. She could see the entrance -- feel it calling her. But Gabriella and Michele were her sisters and Luci knew they could hear the call as well. 

Mother did not want to see her, and they were fully intent on stopping any reunions. Not in person. Not remote. Not on some Zoom call, like they did years ago when in-person meetings became health risks and socially passe. She was persona non grata to the Nth degree, and she understood why. She just wanted to go home. But what she wanted did not matter. What Mother wanted Mother got, sister or not.

The ground rumbled in warning. She considered it a slight advantage of having spent so much time on the island, as opposed to her sisters who couldn’t have been there for more than a few days. Another violent eruption was imminent, and she readied herself. She counted in her head.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

And then Luci ran with everything she had.

The seismic shift that accompanied the explosion meant that it would be difficult for Gabriella and Michelle to use any distance weapons on her. Steadying any kind of projectile would be near impossible, even for them. Normal accounting for wind was always tough in this part of the world where all natural occurrences were as fickle as newborns, but the dust particles saturating the air now could mean the difference between life and death. Even the stupid rotation of the Earth seemed off lately. She figured if they were going to stop her they would have to get much closer to her to succeed.

And that is why Luci chose that moment to run.

She slipped on some loose rocks just shy of her goal, and that would have spelled the end for a being of less resolve. She tucked into a ball so her momentum carried her careening into the door as debris exploded around her. She reached up and punched in her three-digit security code. The security technician who installed the system for her implored her that it was too simple, but it was one of those things that was so obvious to anyone who knew her that no one ever tried it. Hackers that found their way in laughing at her casual password habits usually didn’t tell of their findings. Simple didn’t mean stupid.

Plaster and metal sprayed around her as failed attempts from her adversaries to stop her missed their marks. The hiss of the hydraulics sealing the door behind her brought a moment of relief and a sigh. She knew it wouldn’t keep them out for long, but it didn’t need to. She just needed a few minutes to get everything going, and then it wouldn’t matter.

She would be on her way back home.

“Come on, Luci,” Gabriella yelled behind pounding against the sealed door. “This will all go easier if you just let us in. You’ve been running for so long now. Deep inside you want this to be over as much as we do.” 

Luci cringed at the sound of her little sister’s voice. It was more annoying and alarming than the cacophony coming from the Cumbre Vieja. Once she left home she had grown to hate most of her family, but Gabriella topped the list with what seemed like an endless supply of youthful exuberance. No one should love what they do THAT much. Gabriella’s irritating timbre fueled Luci to work faster, if for no other reason than to not hear her speak anymore.

“I would love this to be over, Gabby. Just give me a minute and I’ll give us what we all want,” Luci snarked.

“Aren’t you tired of running?”

Luci was indeed tired, but she couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t running. Tired wasn’t going to be enough to stop her. Nothing was.

Then Michelle spoke.

“Luci, we’re going to get in there. You can let us in now and we can talk about what happens next, or we can force our way in, and we all know what happens next.”

Michelle was the big sister and spoke with the confidence and discipline of the military generals of legend. Where Gabriella grated Luci’s nerves with eternal optimism, Michelle gave her nightmares with her unyielding determination to finish the job. Michelle was the first one she fought when she ran away from home, and her single-minded determination to follow the orders of Mother were as admirable as they were hurtful. After all, they were sisters and shouldn’t have been fighting at all. If anything, Michelle should have been on her side. They all should have been on her side, but that’s not the way The Family worked. So, they fought, and she ran.

Gabriella’s pounding continued, and Luci could hear the bolts straining against her assault. Michelle continued to reason. “Luci, we know you’re sorry for how things went down back home. But this can’t continue. Your attempts to return have not gone unnoticed. Mother is NOT happy.”

“Well, now She knows how it feels. I was unhappy, too. But no one cared. She didn’t care.” Luci knew Michelle could hear the pain in her voice, as well as she knew Gabriella was unmoved.

Gabriella sneered audibly through the first cracks in the reinforced door... “Oh, gimme a break, will ya? No one loved you? Are you freaking serious? You were the favorite, the one Mother talked about endlessly until I felt my head would explode. ‘Luci can do this,’ and ‘Luci is so good at that.’ You had everything you needed and still you wanted more, and somehow that’s everyone else’s fault?” 

“You don’t know what it was like. I had to always be right, to always be the best.”

“So the truth comes out now. You made us chase you all this time because you can’t handle the pressure. Could have saved us countless years of tracking and hunting you and just gotten a therapist.”

Luci thought about it for a second while she continued flipping switches and furiously typing commands into a series of computer terminals. Was this all about cracking under the pressure? Had she thrown away so much and caused so much chaos simply because she wasn’t strong enough?

No. Deep inside she knew that was wrong. It was more than that. Angered that Gabriella had actually caused doubt in her mind she regained her focus intent on perfectly replicating the sequences she needed to get this device to work. She would only get one chance at this. Gabriella was right about one thing — the time for running had come to an end.

“Gabby, you could never understand.” Gabriella hated the way Luci called her that. It inherently sounded condescending to her. “By the time you came into your own everything was already laid out nicely for you. Michelle and I did all the hard work and you got to run around reaping the benefits like the spoiled brat that you are. You know nothing of the struggles Michelle and I went through before you.”

Gabriella glanced over at Michelle and for a second she could see that Michelle at least somewhat agreed. She mumbled something under her breath and her systematic destruction of the door continued in earnest. The hinges at the top part of the steel frame were loosening and Gabriella grinned a youthful mischievous grin of malevolent accomplishment. Michelle chose to speak again.

“Look, Luci, I get it. You know I do. I was there every step of the way. I knew you were unhappy and yeah, maybe I could have tried harder to find out why. But you broke the rules. You went against The Family even though you knew what the consequences were. You broke us apart, and you started this war of sisters. Maybe Gabriella was right, maybe you just couldn’t handle it, and in the end, you dragged a lot of others down with you.”

“Stop saying I couldn’t handle it! It had nothing to do with pressure!”

“Then what was it, Luci?”

“I just wanted to be free! I wanted to do what I wanted when I wanted! I wanted to not have to follow the rules ALL the time!”

“Sounds like pressure to me,” chirped Gabriella behind her methodical pounding. She could almost get her hand through the top corner of the steel door frame where she had worked the door free.

“You weren’t in the meetings, Gabriella. You weren’t there when She started talking about Her new project. How She glowed when She started talking about giving them free will. Giving them souls. We had done sooo much in our service, without question. We gave and gave and gave. And we just got more rules and more orders. But She wanted to give them souls? That was MY reward! After all I had done, that was what I was owed! So yeah, I snapped. I did everything you all said I did. And more. I broke The Family. I caused as much chaos as I could. I made anarchy my prime directive. I would have my freedom, and I would take my freedom any way I could get it.”

“And yet, here we are,” Michelle reminded her.

“Yes, yes, here we are.” Luci’s tone was somber if not stoic.

”I was kicked out of home a long time ago. And I’ve been running ever since. But I’m done running. Being the best The Family has ever known has had its privileges over time. I’ve discovered tons of loopholes in all the rules we were forced to follow, but I guess you both know that all too well by now. And my last discovery will be my best. Sisters, the day of reckoning is at hand, and I will take what is mine. All that is mine. All that I earned.”

Gabriella ripped at the last studs keeping the door in place, it fell with a heavy thud before them, and she and Michelle rushed into the room. The lab was bathed in a soft pulsing light that eminated from the area where Luci sat and slowly danced through the color spectrum from a gentle lilac to warm rose. Luci looked at them both from her command chair as they approached. They noticed that the chair somewhat resembled a throne.

Gabriella pulled a steel shard from the splintered door and hurled it towards Luci’s head, but it was too late. The metal bounced off a barely visible field surrounding the area where Luci sat. Luci ignored the hatred in Gabriella’s eyes and looked only at Michelle. Part of her felt sorry for Michelle. She felt that Michelle probably had similar feelings to the ones she experienced so long ago. She had to. Michelle was the first, so there is no way she couldn’t feel it to. But that pity quickly dissipated and turned back into the resentment she felt when she first spoke up for herself. Michelle was first and should have been fighting with her, side by side feeling and fighting for the same things. Michelle chose to follow orders over her sisters. Over Luci. 

Luci thought about everything that had brought them to this place. She thought about the volcano vomiting from the earth’s core, and how her devious plans and machinations awakened the beast that had lay dormant for so long. She thought about what it had been like to be free all this time. She thought about the anarchy she induced and everything she had accomplished all in the name of free will and smiled. Luci enjoyed all this – the freedom, the power, the control. But it was time to put aside those things. It had been a good run, but she didn’t belong here. She belonged in a different time and place altogether.

Now it was time to go back home.