Eden's Garden: A Nia Rivers Adventure (Nia Rivers Adventures Book 5) Read online

  Eden's Garden

  Jasmine Walt

  Ines Johnson

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Also by Jasmine Walt

  Also by Ines Johnson

  About the Authors

  Copyright © 2018. Jasmine Walt & Ines Johnson. All rights reserved. Published by Dynamo Press.

  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to [email protected]

  Cover art by Rebecca Frank

  Edited by Robb Grindstaff

  If you want to be notified when Jasmine’s next novel is released and get access to exclusive contests, giveaways, and freebies, sign up for her mailing list here. Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.

  1

  Every story has an ending. No matter how long or twisting or winding, or if you go in reverse, or up or down, or if you cross over your previous path a couple of times and then circle back around again, the end of the line is still inevitable.

  Circles aren’t immune. The curved paths still abide the properties of existence. They have a starting point and a stopping one. Though it might be harder to decipher the beginning and end, those points are still there. There is still a boundary line that’s inescapable.

  Every life is a line. There is a set point that enters the planet, strikes the pavement, or marks the parchment. And there is a terminal point where all traces of the individual, the impression, the imprint cease.

  All things come to an end. And that included my life. I was immortal, but I had never truly believed I’d live forever. The math wasn’t on my side.

  Here’s my point: if this was the end, why hadn’t I ceased to be?

  Thoughts zigged and zagged in my mind. The shape of my mind wasn’t closed like a circle. It felt boundless, open. There were no lines, no corners, no curves. All of this would’ve perplexed my friend Euclid, who was credited with having systematized the mathematical concepts of geometry.

  The wiry old man with a long, white beard in two parallel lines that draped from his chin was fond of saying that a line is length without breadth. I remembered the day he’d said it. The Alexandrian sun kissed my skin as I sat on the white stone steps outside the Library of Alexandria.

  My memories of five hundred years ago weren’t this vivid. This particular memory was more than two millennia old, but it was clear and detailed, from the spice of the eucalyptus trees and the spice of cardamom. And those weren’t the only things I remembered.

  I remembered, well, everything. Was this death? Swimming in the mire of the crystal-clear memories of my life?

  Three thousand years of memories swirled around in my head like a galaxy. Each specific memory was a starry point of light. I only had to reach out and touch. I reached for one of the farthest ones.

  In the memory that I caught hold of, I was bent over a slab of clay. Men and women surrounded me as I etched wedged shapes on the tablet with a blunt reed. The shapes were pictures. More like pictograms. More exactly like cuneiform.

  Oh? Would you look at that? I’d taught humanity one of its earliest forms of the written language.

  I reached for another bright point in my memory, further back. This time I had a spade in my hand. I was digging. No surprise there. What surprised me was what I found in the dirt.

  It was a giant skull with huge, vacant eye sockets, a long snout, and pointed teeth that were each the size of a man’s hand. The people around me shouted and shrieked about giants, ogres, griffins, monsters. But I knew better.

  I knew exactly what the bone was and what animal it belonged to. I’d seen this great reptile before, walking over the earth, flying through the sky, breathing light so bright it singed the treetops. But at that moment, I hadn’t been able to remember the name of the magnificent creature. I knew it now: dragon.

  I cleaned the dirt off the dragon’s skull carefully, still unable to call it by its name in that time. Wrapping it up, I brought it back to the light to inspect it. I wracked my brain for all the information I had inside but couldn’t come up with an answer. Instead of upsetting me, it thrilled me to know there were things that I didn’t know.

  I reached beyond that bright point of light and captured another memory. This one warmed my heart. The first time my heart had skipped a beat. See, there was a boy.

  A boy with dark hair and soulful eyes. He was recreating life on parchment. He painted in wondrous color with such detail, it was hard to believe the rendition wasn’t the real thing.

  I marveled at his work. When he turned to me, the look on his face took my breath away. With just a glance, the connection was instant, complete, absolute, as if he’d touched me with his gaze. A light within him had shone on me, through me, and enveloped me. I knew in the bottom of my very being, of whatever I was, that the connection would be forever.

  Only one other bright spot remained before that soul-altering one, and I reached for it. It was my first memory. My starting point, the moment I came into existence.

  I remembered being swaddled, but not by cloth. By something soft and warm and spongy. It was red and pulsing. I couldn’t move much, but didn’t feel the need to.

  I was safe. I was protected. I was loved. But then one day, that world turned me upside down. It pushed me out.

  I was remembering my birth.

  Red gave way to darkness and then a light so blinding that I cried out. A face peered down at me. The expression was inscrutable. Even as an infant at the start of this new life, I knew to be quiet while held in this enigmatic person’s gaze.

  My cry broke, abruptly as a pencil scratching off the end of a paper. The face didn’t change in expression, but my silence felt like the right thing. The shimmer of approval pleased me. And then the face was gone.

  Arms reached down and pulled me onto warm skin. That skin was toasty-brown and warm. Her face was clearly readable. Pink lips stretched wide, and my heart kicked into gear. I sighed as she cradled me next to a heart that matched the beating of mine.

  The moment was perfect. I thought it would go on forever. It did not.

  I’m certain it was a long moment, many years, decades even. But after some time, those arms fell away from my mature body. My mother had come to the end of her line, the acquittal of her imprint, the absolution of her impression, the annulment of her self as an individual.

  My mother.

  I’d had a mother. But she was gone. And now, so was I.

  My eyes blinked open. Just as with my birth, a bright light blinded me. I squinted, but the light wasn’t so harsh that it harmed me. Instead, it overwhelmed me.

  It took
a moment to get used to the glare, and then a face appeared. It wasn’t my mother’s face. It was the inscrutable face, the enigmatic face, the first face I ever remember seeing after leaving my mother’s womb.

  That face stared at me again. I gasped, sucking in air, but I didn’t cry out. Still, somehow, I instinctively knew that any type of histrionics would not be appreciated, that it would displease this being. And I didn’t want her displeasure.

  Her. Yes, this being was female.

  Her features were soft and rounded like a woman’s. But woman seemed the wrong word. Female, feminine, those were right. Because I knew that, though female, she was not human.

  She stood nude, peering down at me. Her body approximated female humanity, but there were things missing. Like breasts, for one.

  She had a chest with bumps that could barely pass for an A cup. There were no nipples. Her hips were rounded and her abdomen flat. She had no belly button. Her limbs were long and toned. There were no muscles, but something told me she was stronger than she looked.

  Her eyes were wide, abnormally so, but perfectly symmetrical. They covered a third of her face in a half moon-shaped crescent with no eyelids or lashes. She didn’t blink, she only stared. It was a blinding, pupil-less stare with eyes the color of the sun that radiated the same heat.

  There was no hair atop her head. Instead, there were raised nodes in a swirling pattern, much like the meditating Buddha statues decorating the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

  I lay there in the pool of light as we stared at each other. She studied me, like a specimen in a lab. I tried to move, but my limbs wouldn’t budge. Something invisible held me down to the lab table.

  “Hold still,” the female said, “or this will hurt.”

  She held up the index finger of one hand. Using the other hand, she peeled the skin from her finger. Just like in the kid’s movie of an alien trying to phone home, her finger lit up. I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer. I tore open my lips and screamed.

  2

  That finger came closer and closer to me. Like a pinlight an optician uses to detect problems with your pupil. The bright light was worse than being plunged into darkness. I could see everything that was happening to me.

  I was trapped in some type of lab, being dissected by some type of androgynous mad scientist. Only, she wasn’t slicing through my body. When I looked down the table, I didn’t see my body.

  There was nothing there. I was a disembodied head. That’s why I couldn’t move.

  If I hadn’t been freaking out before, I sure as hell was now. Was this hell?

  “Keep still, or I’ll get your breasts crooked,” she said. “I doubt he’d like that.”

  He? He who? And what did she mean she’d get my breasts crooked? I didn’t have any breasts anymore. And that’s when I felt my nipple tighten.

  I looked down again. And there was my right boob. That glowing, alien finger hovered over my skin, not touching it. Actually, both of her hands moved over me. Her fingers moved like the two sides of a waltz, right and left coming together and then moving apart. Weaving in and out and around like knitting.

  Yes. That’s what she was doing. She was knitting skin around me. The me that I could see was a body of pure white light.

  “I’m not dead,” I said.

  She said nothing. Her face was pinched in concentration as she worked on my abs. I figured I shouldn’t interrupt her or my flat belly might turn into an eight-pack.

  I wanted to say more, to ask a question, but I knew better. Well, I may have known better, but I didn’t do better.

  “I’m not dead,” I repeated. “But I’m not exactly alive either.”

  She cocked her head to one side as though to examine me from another angle. In the space I was in, there was only that blinding light on every side, and even from the ceiling to the floor.

  She waited for me to answer my own question. This was a test, the final exam of life. Unfortunately, I hadn’t studied. Still, somehow, I knew the answer.

  “I’m being reborn,” I said.

  The second it took for her to respond felt like an eternity stretched over infinity. Finally, she smiled. The skin forming on my back crawled. My toes tingled. My toes weren’t completely covered by skin.

  I reached up to my head, and my hand passed through the space where my head should be. I held up my hand. My fingers weren’t the toasty brown they had been my entire life. They were the color of light. I was light. My light was slowly being encased inside skin. Flesh knitted over the light of my being, encasing me in the brown skin I’d originally been born with.

  I looked back to the female. This time I asked a question. It was the most important question of my life. My old life and this new one.

  “What am I?”

  “What do you call yourself in this time?” the female asked.

  I hated that she avoided my question, but her dodge felt familiar. I tried to move again, but I didn’t understand how to move when I didn’t quite have a body. I felt insubstantial as a being of pure light, like I could float away at any moment, or scatter and dissipate like a wave pulling back into a vast ocean. It was terrifying.

  Even with my eyes shut, all was light.

  I knew how to do this, but thinking about it was too much. Just like having all my memories come at me at once was too much. It was like thinking sideways; everything came at me from directions I didn’t know how to receive.

  I reached up to my head again, this time gratified to feel something solid. I opened my eyes.

  She watched me with the same impassivity in her bright gaze. Her eyes were pure light, the same as my body. But I didn’t fool myself into thinking we were the same. She was more. She was so much more than I could even fathom.

  “Oh my god,” I whispered.

  She leaned in. Her mouth cracked into what could be interpreted as a smile. “Indeed.”

  I took in a deep lungful of air, unsure if my lungs had even formed yet. Unsure even if I had lungs. Was air even necessary for light-people?

  And still she, or I suppose She, gazed down at me, waiting patiently for my answer.

  “Nia,” I said. “I call myself Nia.”

  She scrunched up her nose and looked off in the distance as her fingers continued to work. It was deceptively human-like and made me feel comfortable. But then she focused those light-bright eyes on me again. I was dealing with someone, something, beyond my comprehension.

  “Nia.” She said my name. “Knee-ah.” She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth with the consonant and then sighed on the vowel. “I don’t like it.”

  My mouth, which was now fully formed, fell open at her pronouncement.

  “But it’s your choice.” She shrugged. “Your free will.” And then she scrunched her nose up again, as though she were repeating my name in her head and finding it just as distasteful.

  “And you?” I asked. “What do I call you?”

  “I find the need to name things fascinating.”

  Her fingers gave an upward tug, as though she were tying a knot. I felt the pull in my knee, like a doctor taking a rubber hammer to the joint to test reaction. My leg jerked, flexing and relaxing at her machinations. Then she moved her looming hands down to my toes.

  “Just as I find it fascinating that most beings like to have their essence cloaked in materials. I much prefer to roam in my natural state, but I’ve found it makes those around me uncomfortable. There was a time I didn’t care, because caring and emotions weren’t actual things. There was only instinct. But, at some point in time, my creations began pulling flesh around their light. It mutes their instincts.”

  I had nothing to say to that. Here I was talking to God. Maybe that wasn’t the right word. She was the Creator, that much I knew from the return of my memories.

  But my memories grew fuzzier as she knit skin over my light. I still remembered my mother’s face, but the color from the scene and the details were fading. The stars in my mind dimmed, moved farther an
d farther away, beyond my reach.

  “It’s your flesh,” she said, as though reading my mind, probably because she could. “Your skin suppresses your light. Like I said, most of my creations prefer skin. At first, I thought it had to do with the atmosphere of Heaven and the dust getting into your light. Most flora and fauna wear only their skins, but not mankind. From birth, human beings preferred to be swaddled in materials that further encase them and keep them separated from others. I’ve never quite understood it. And then you lot developed compassion to share the sensation with each other.”

  She shuddered. All I could do was stare.

  “Eden,” she said after a few seconds of silence.

  “What?”

  “That’s what I prefer to be called,” she said. “Eden. I also like Gaia and Ra. They’re all soft sounds. I find that I like vowels. Very easy on the ears.”

  She reached up and tugged at her elongated ears. They were pointy at the top, like the renditions of elves in children’s books.

  “Funny little appendages,” Eden said. “I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them the first time they appeared. I started wearing them myself a few cycles ago. They balance out the head, don’t you think?”

  She wobbled her head left and right. Again, I could only stare mutely.

  “The only true sense is touch. I didn’t see the need to evolve beyond the tactical sense of touch. Light is simply a wave, which we experience as touch. Sound is just another wave, only it touches the ear. Smell, taste, sight, all are waves that touch us in different ways. It’s redundant, really.” She waved her hands as though brushing the notion aside. “But I allow my creations to explore and evolve in their own state of being. Up until a point, of course.”