Chapter 6: The Incata

6

Bealz's head swims sickeningly. He lurches to his hands and knees and vomits violently. His eyes water painfully, slowly adjusting to the sudden burst of a much too bright light. Sitting back on his haunches, he rubs furiously at his face, trying to clear his vision while his heart races with panic and his breath quickens.

He'd just watched his mother kill Ms. Penny by touching her. Something else had happened, though. Something in his mother had changed.

And then she had brought him here.

Bealz knew where he was. Recognized it immediately. He'd seen this sky, smelled this air and felt the silken, golden grasses pressed down beneath him before. This was the Incata. A dreamworld that he could not believe really existed.

This was supposed to be a mental trick, like the many different counselors used to talk to him about. A place for him to go, to escape into his mind when things got too bad out in the real world. But this was no dream. This was no subconscious escape, no break from reality.

This was real. His mother had brought him home. That other place, the dingy little room they had just stepped out of, and the filthy alleyways, the crowded El trains, Deshaun and Dakari and Ms. Penny and the hellish life lived on the south side of Chicago, that was the dream. Bealz had somehow known it all along.

But even though he felt a familiarity here, his body, all of his senses, screamed out in alarm, disoriented by the slightly different quality of the air, the vibrant colors swirling through the grasses, the somewhat stronger pull of gravity. Everything was so much like Earth, but nothing like it just the same.

Slowly getting a handle on his breathing, Bealz's eyes begin to clear and he can look around, see through the receding tears. They had stepped through atop a small, gently rolling hill overlooking a small flower filled valley. His mother, standing with her back to him, looks down at the peaceful scene below them.

“Aren't they pretty?” she asks.

Bealz is speechless at the sight of the fiery storm that still wrapped itself around her. Here, in the Incata, it revealed her in all of her true glory. His mother was a warrior. A fierce, steel and leather bound warrior. There was a great, yew-wood bow and a quiver filled with electrically sizzling and popping lightning bolts slung over her shoulder. She had a great broadsword at her side, larger and heavier than anything Bealz himself could lift from the looks of it, even with both hands, and a wicked looking dagger, her hand resting on its pommel, sheathed opposite the sword.

As she continues to look out over the valley before them, the flames engulfing her begin to gutter and taper away and she slowly slumps back into her normally crumpled, confused, self.

“I come here when it gets too hard. She doesn't know I can do that. If she did, she would have locked me out a long time ago...when she banished me...” Monique Felani says wistfully.

“But,” she goes on, brightening a bit. “I can still come here anytime I want! Sneak right in through the back door,” she giggles.

Turning to look at her son, the sadness in her eyes belying the laughter, she says, “This is where I am when I'm gone, baby. This is the only place that still makes sense, you see?”