It was Monday night in Chicago, and in the kitchen of a small apartment, two cereal bags crinkled as a teenager in a stained and faded T-shirt poured what was left of the contents into a red bowl with the words “POPCORN TIME” on the front of it. From the living room came the sound of a television on low volume. A woman’s voice was saying, “…and the return of things lost to us. For example, Ectopistes migratorius. The last confirmed member of the species in the wild died in March of 1901, near Oakford, Illinois, but today, in parts of the US and Canada, if you step outside and look up, you may see a flock darkening the sky. The woodlands needed to support this species have also—”
Boe shook his head when he realized he was moving his lips along with the show’s narrator. After crumpling the empty bags and trashing them, he pulled up a talk channel on his interface and increased the volume with a thought.
What’s the Whether? was for unregistered Avowed, by unregistered Avowed. It had been verified authentic by way of an Artonan ambassador to China back in the late twenties saying that she knew the Avowed who’d started it and she thought it was a great idea.
Boe still avoided trusting the news they delivered too much, but he did think the station was more reliable than most sources that claimed to be voices for unregistereds. Some of these things were definitely traps. A lot of them were run by bored people and creeps who didn’t have any powers beyond their ability to gull others into paying attention to their fakeass stories about life on the run from the authorities.
And the What’s the Whether? speakers weren’t intolerable in any of the ways that some real, online-infamous superhumans in hiding tended to be. Boe preferred to feel like he was a reasonable criminal among reasonable criminals while he ate his supper. He didn’t want to hear a bunch of other unregistereds, or wannabes, whipping themselves up to new heights of Avowed supremacy or down to new lows of self-pity and loathing.
He ate a chocolate oat star and listened to a man who was going through daily reports of Avowed activities around the world. Right now, he was talking about a few nations that wanted to expand their Avowed Zones to include the C and B ranks. And Healers. Someone always wanted to scoop up the Healers.
The man was sounding so upbeat about the news. Boe didn’t know why.
Like the noisy bigots inside every country don’t crush these plans out of existence whenever they come up. Like Anesidora doesn’t smash them to dust from the outside.
Anesidora smashed more elegantly and righteously. With gorgeous superhuman faces and concern for the safety of Avowed in places where they would be in the extreme minority.
But they still did their part.
Sure, invite tons of people away from our island and lure them into separate spots all over the globe so that they have less collective identity and power. Your country gets a handful of the safer ones to parade around, and Avowed get more living options…right up until you decide you want to keep them forever in the new cage and demand magical services from them.
Superhumans are dangerous. Superhumans are useful. We like to watch them, we want to be them, and we don’t want them to be too close. They are us, and they are not us. We gave them to the Artonans, and the Artonans gave them powers. Aren’t they lucky? Aren’t they obligated?
Same stuff bubbling up for decades, in barely different flavors, thought Boe.
He wast just glad the conversation was on more ordinary news today instead of Matadero and SAL. There was a growing amount of murmuring about what would have happened to Earth if the attack had destroyed the cube and Anesidora with it.
Since Boe had ended up naked in the jungle with a bunch of people who had first class tickets out of here, he doubted the answer was, “Nothing too serious.”
Alden’s alive. He’s all right. I’m supposed to be figuring out how to use half of his money to take care of everything here in Chicago. Just give me millions and trust me to use it wisely, why don’t you? Because that’s not an extreme act of faith at all.
He picked me to go with him if Earth ends, but he didn’t show up to join me because he was being heroic. Again.
He’s so damn fucking impossible to live up to. If he somehow manages to find another person just like him in the hero program and they hit it off, they will lead each other straight into early graves.
Is he really all right?
Boe opened the fridge. He’d just wrapped his fingers around the cold handle of the milk jug when a message arrived. It was a picture of a bright blue frog sitting on a palm frond with “Missing You” underneath it in bubble letters.
A call followed before he could think of an appropriately snarky reply.
I shouldn’t answer the asshole.
He did.
“You miss them, don’t you?” Alden said the moment his face appeared. He clearly thought he was so funny.
“Miss who?” Boe had grabbed his phone off the counter with his free hand, and he held it to his ear automatically, even though nobody here in his own kitchen was going to notice or care if he was talking to thin air.
“Ribbit,” said Alden.
Boe did his best to look confused. “Why are you ribbiting?”
“Did you not open my message and get the picture?”
“What picture?”
Green eyes narrowed at him. “Liar!” Alden announced confidently. “You always read my texts when you’re awake. I know it’s because you miss me almost as much as the frogs.”
Boe let the milk thump onto the counter beside his bowl and unscrewed the cap with one hand. Alden was probably inside Matadero. The System liked to blank out his background when he called from there. It looked like his head and shoulders were floating in front of the nearest cabinet.
What’s he doing there tonight?
Boe glanced at the time. Alden should have finished his Monday evening class on how to magically inflict and endure harm about fifty minutes ago. He usually did homework at a spa with the Brute roommate afterwards, but if he was already at the cube, then he’d skipped that.
“I was just thinking about you,” Boe said.
“Of course you were!”
“I was thinking that you probably injured yourself saving three or four people and an orphaned whale calf today, and that I might never catch up if I don’t go faster.”
“Five people. All human. No whales.”
Boe knew this was a joke. He could tell. But at the same time, there was a kick in his pulse, a brief wondering, too much milk going into the bowl before he caught himself.
“Ha. Ha. Ha,” he said, holding the jug up to his nose to sniff it belatedly. It was fine. “That’s how funny I think you are.”
“That was a dark, slow laugh.”
“Was it?”
“It was villainous.”
“If the name fits…” Boe muttered.
“Yes, you’re very evil and all,” said Alden, leaning back in a way that confused Boe for a second before he realized that his friend must be sitting on something.
Or slouching in bed? Is the System refusing to let me see Matadero’s pillows?
He’d bother it about that when he was bored sometime.
“Are you at the cube?”
“I am. My goal was to take a nap before I headed to Artona I to see the healer. My meeting with her is in the middle of the night from my perspective, so I thought I should at least try to get some rest before I headed over.”
The mind healer.
At home, Boe often had his barrier down. Most of the neighbors were on the bland side. The ones who weren’t were familiar enough or distant enough that feeling them was more irritating than terrible. It could even be nice, at times. The woman in the apartment next door brushed her furry mop of a dog almost every night, and it was a simple enjoyment.
His parents were on the sofa, watching the show.
They weren’t feeling much of anything.
“I managed to shower, fly here, and shove a couple of tacos in my mouth in less than an hour,” Alden was saying. “The Keeper of Hot Potatoes only beat me by four minutes this time. Smug little jerk. I should take away his meditation pillow so that he has to sit on the floor.”
“Are you talking to yourself, or was I supposed to understand that?” Boe asked.
Alden hadn’t told him about the mind healer until he’d already made the first trip. He didn’t want me to try to talk him out of it.
Boe wanted to talk him out of it. And wanted to tell him he hoped it worked for him. And wanted to ask him lots of questions about it. He wasn’t doing any of those things for some reason.
“I have planning software! Hot Potatoes is my avatar.”
“You’ve entered middle age prematurely. Also, you have obsessed-person eyes right now.”
“No, it’s good. I’m learning to use it in moderation. And my day was still very efficient.”
“Oh yeah?” Boe stuck a spoon into his bowl. “What did you do?”
******
******
An early morning jog with Lexi and Haoyu. The air cool, the sky gray. Not much talking because that was Lexi’s preference. It was good to start the day with only your own thoughts competing against the sound of your feet.
A lot of talking a few hours later, though, in Artonan Conversation class.
When Kelly saw Alden coming through the door with Lute, she said, “Look! My assistant instructor showed up today. And our truant boy with a magic mouth. Everyone say your hellos from least to most formal. Go!”
Alden had decided to attend class as moral support for Lute, who’d reluctantly emerged from their apartment instead of letting the school continue believing he was away because of his Chainer duties. Immediately after Kelly’s greeting, it became obvious that the two of them wouldn’t be able to slip in a little wordchain learning like they’d done with Instructor Rao. The freckled grad student didn’t even structure the class the same way. She had pairs coming up to the front of the room to act out conversations they were supposed to have prepped over the weekend, between themselves and an Artonan who they wanted something from or who they wanted to avoid doing something for.
Alden was put to work as a fill-in for a couple of missing students, and he was also a partner for Kelly when she wanted to show how the mock convos could have been more natural. Lute was the next best thing to having an actual Artonan in the room with them, as far as vocal abilities went, and he ended up being called upon to provide ideal pronunciation examples for everyone to try to match.
When he got one wrong, the way Kelly smiled at him was threatening, and by the end of class, she’d inserted him into several improv pairings with the best students. Alden assumed she was making Lute talk more than everyone else because he’d been missing classes, but at the end of the period, she called them both over and karate chopped Lute lightly on top of the skull.
“No,” she said.
Lute ducked and grabbed his brown hair. It was fading to a duller, lighter shade. Whatever he’d been washing it with all weekend was only partially stripping away the nutmeg hair color. “Huh? I didn’t do any—”
“What’s a Chainer doing in Convo IV?” Kelly was pulling a piece of chewing gum out of the pocket of her shorts.
“Learning Artonan,” said Lute, watching her cautiously.
“So I gather,” she replied, “but what I mean is, ‘Why are you only in Convo IV?’ If you’re working already, and you’re going to be working for the rest of your life, on the Triplanets… You guys have some kind of serious job security. Correct? That’s what it seems like from the outside. If that’s how it is, you need to be in all of the culture and language classes you can squeeze into your schedule, don’t you? You are not a person with a mysterious future ahead of you. You’re an often off Earth person. For sure.”
“I—”
“Your schedule doesn’t look like you’re squeezing anything in to me.”
“You can check my schedule?” Lute asked. “You’re not even a real instr—”
“Your schedule looks verrrryy relaxing.” She cracked her gum. “I guess the music class might not be? I’m not into music, and I’m not the boss of you. But don’t you think you want to slip in a little extra work related to your work next term?”
Lute frowned.
“And you!” Kelly turned to Alden. “You’re signing up for some uni language classes next term, right? I don’t know why you were in this class at all.”
“Because Convo VI wasn’t being offered this quarter, and the instructor for V didn’t believe I could keep up with his course if I started late in the term.”
“Screw high school classes!” said Kelly. “What’s with all these inefficient rules? Come hang out with me and my people. I’m doing a course with Warin-doyis next quarter—visiting performance artist from the mother planet. He’s going to be teaching us a kind of oral and visual storytelling. Now that should be a challenge.”
Luke looked interested in that.
“I don’t think I can just join a special class for people getting their Masters degrees when I haven’t actually finished high school,” said Alden.
“What are they going to say about it if the instructor invites you?” Kelly replied. “Do you want me to ask for you? I’ll ask for you.”
******
******
“So if that works out, I’ve got three classes lined up for next quarter,” Alden said. He was lounging on top of the blanket in “his” hospital room at Matadero, watching Boe shovel cereal into his mouth.
“Gym, Engaging with the Unexpected II, and the Artonan class. I’m getting a lot of practice in naturally, but I don’t think accelerating the language acquisition as much as possible is a bad idea. Communication is a survival skill. And maybe if I have a college credit to wave in an advisor’s face, they might agree to let me take some of the uni level culture classes instead of the high school ones when they come up.”
“Switch programs completely,” said Boe. “Forget the violent life, and become a professorial type in a tweed jacket who specializes in studying alien performance art.”
“Yeah, that sounds like me.”
On the wall beside him, a time-lapse video compilation was playing. He’d wanted the room to feel more alive, and something like the news channels weren’t conducive to his hopes of resting. At the moment, the video was of a giant gingerbread house being built.
“I wonder if I would,” he said, watching icicles made of sugar appear one by one.
“Become a tweedy xenoart professor?” Boe asked.
Alden refocused on him. “I meant switching majors. If I could still have the gym courses and just a few other Talent Dev classes, without the full hero program package, I wonder if I would switch. And what I’d switch to. That’s not how it works, but I have thought about it a couple of times lately.”
Boe set his bowl down.
“Keep eating, you animal,” said Alden. “Soggy cereal is a crime.”
“Are you seriously thinking about stuff like that?” Boe asked.
“Why do you look so surprised? I think about normal teenager matters occasionally.”
“You’re the one who just spoke the phrase ‘normal teenager matters’, so you already know why I’m surprised. Good job on the self-awareness.”
Alden let his head fall back onto the pillows that were mounded behind him. “Fair enough. It’s most likely because of the invite to come play publicity games with the hero team in Chicago. And I do see all of the clubs and career stuff every time I walk past the dorm bulletin board. And I’ve been around some Artonans who are thinking hard about their…careers.”
Boe frowned at that.
“I’m having a season of choosing,” said Alden.
“What are you choosing then?”
“So far, I’ve said ‘yes’ to mind healing and some clothes, and ‘no’ to cultivating a fanbase.”
He decided not to mention saying no to Natalie.
“The last one is one of those things that makes me worry about some of the hero program courses I’ll run into. I can put off the publicity and popularity stuff for a while, so it’s not like it’s an urgent problem. But eventually it’ll come for me. And if I survive through university, they are going to make me take so many classes on how to be a celebrity Avowed who says and does all the right things.”
They made you take those classes even if you were planning to do something less public.
“And now you’re casually mentioning not surviving through college,” said Boe. “Normal teenager time ruined. You can’t even keep up the charade for two minutes.”
“I could go to med school,” said Alden. “Or be an architect. I could decorate cakes for a living.”
The gingerbread house was definitely influencing his mental list of alternate career options.
“I would enthusiastically approve of all of those,” said Boe.
“What are you going to do?” Alden asked. Are you really going to stay unregistered forever? “There’s room in my apartment if you want to come join the CNH cake decorating medical architect program with me.”
“You’re just trying to get me there because you know I’ll never catch up to you if I’m on that island.”
“Catch up to me?”
“On the numbers of lives saved. Emergency teleports, wall-to-wall Avowed…how am I supposed to teach small children to fear solo camping expeditions in a place like that?”
So that’s a no. Alden made himself smile anyway. “We spent half of gym today learning to fall down,” he said. “From different heights, at different speeds, with other people in our arms. Apparently our injury numbers for that kind of thing were bad last week.”
“Can’t call yourself a superhero until you learn to shake off a hundred mile per hour safety roll?”
“Something like that.”
******
******
The nightmare woke Alden up half an hour before the alarm he’d set would have, and for the first time, he was glad about it.
This just doesn’t belong in my head anymore, he thought, spitting toothpaste into the sink. It’s pointless suffering. I’m saying no to it and no to the idea that I would be incapable of doing anything to make the situation better if Thegund happened again. I wouldn’t be helpless. I wasn’t even helpless back then.
And I didn’t end up there against my will.
That last part was a fact that he’d been reminding himself of over the past day. Because if he didn’t, it was too easy to rage at the unfairness of it all. He had been carefully misled and casually used, and if Stuart was right, then Ro-den’s team had been risking their lives, and his and Kibby’s, mostly for the sake of Ro-den’s power and status. And by extension, their own.
I wonder if he wanted the lab back. If they all hoped he was only a couple of years and a few schemes away from putting their futures back on track or something like that. I got him his people and a few pieces of equipment that had been hidden from Yiplack…for all I know that mixer thing and the bad impact juice were critical artificial demon ingredients. Or they were worth a billion dollars, and he was going to sell them to buy a politician.
But I knew he was sketchy. I knew they worked for a sketchy person. I just got so caught up in the idea that they needed me to protect them from a worse bunch of sketchy people.
Kibby and her sister needed someone.
His toothbrush handle clattered against the edge of the sink.
He told himself that it wouldn’t be fair to feel like anyone had been cruel to him. They wanted things. He had been a way to get them. It wasn’t supposed to go wrong. And when it went wrong, Thenn-ar had spent her last breaths trying to help him understand what was happening.
They weren’t trying to get me hurt or themselves killed. They thought the risk was growing, but obviously it was still small enough in their minds. And I was being paid by their wizard.
Paid with information about his skill that a wizard with proper discretion shouldn’t have given him. Telling Avowed to put off affixation until the last second was creating a potential disaster. Have fun playing chicken with the System until it gives you extra treats, everybody. And then enjoy having your affixation ripped apart if you’re ever without a System when your unbound authority is too high.
Alden had known enough about Ro-den that he should have asked everyone involved more questions. Insisted on fuller answers.
I’ll be smarter and stronger in the future. I’m glad I was there for Kibby. It’s over.
He hoped what he was doing with Yenu-pezth would eventually leave him with those three thoughts and set him free from the rest of Thegund.
He put on the softer pezyva tonight and the driftwood brooch. He had two jars of honey in his bag. When he left his room, the abandoned hallways of Matadero’s hospital were as quiet as ever.
I don’t suppose I could rent a room here after the Artonans leave and use the cube as a private getaway.
That would solve the problem of where a human wizard was supposed to practice his noisier or more dangerous spells.
He traveled down to the floors that would be flooded if something ever went very wrong and waited beside his suitcase for his teleport to arrive. A few minutes later, someone appeared in one of the alcoves across from him. For some reason, he didn’t feel surprised at who it was.
The bald, tattooed head. The height. Ro-den wore the remains of a jovial look that must have been directed at whoever he’d been with at this late hour, but it was in the middle of morphing into something realer.
Boredom, annoyance, exhaustion—Alden didn’t have the chance to find out what the look would have become. He was spotted too quickly, and instead, there was a flicker of observation and calculation.
He’d just checked himself in the mirror, so he knew what Ro-den saw, even if he couldn’t guess what the man made of it. Clothes tailored for a human who had business on the Triplanets. The brooch. The commendation. An abused and repaired suitcase with the messenger bag resting on top of it.
Alden wondered if there would be a flippant remark, but mostly, he expected to be ignored.
“Alden, your bags are packed, and you’re all dressed up,” Joe said in English.
The wizard’s face brightened, just the littlest bit, with a polite curiosity. It was an interest that was friendly enough to not be threatening, but not so friendly it would look fake after their supposedly clear estrangement from each other.
At least that was what Alden thought the expression was supposed to convey to him. It was failing. Not from any flaw he could have pointed to on Ro-den’s face, but on the gut feeling level. He looked like Joe. And he looked like a liar.
He looked like someone who really wanted to know where Alden was going.
“Off to somewhere exciting?” Joe asked, right as Alden reached that conclusion.
He wants to know why I’m so well dressed. Who will I be talking to in this outfit? Why have I bothered to change my style? Why do I have somewhere on the Artonas to be, when he knows I’m not supposed to be summoned for months? What could it possibly be about, and most importantly, is it all about him?
Options filled his mind. All of them were good.
Say you’re going to have the privacy contract removed by a professional you’ve found. Say you’re friends with the Primary’s whole family now. Say you’re going to testify before the Grand Senate that naughty wizards shouldn’t be let off easy with cushy teaching jobs.
Say it’s none of his business. Tell him to go bury himself in a fourth bowel.
His teleport notice appeared, and he accepted it. Only five seconds to wait this time.
Alden looked Joe in the eyes and smiled slightly.
He disappeared.
******
******
“Look quickly!” Stuart’s eager voice greeted Alden as he arrived in a teleportation chamber much more breathtaking than the one he’d just left behind. “Alden, look! We’ll only be here in Vethedya for a moment.”
Holding onto his bags and turning in place, Alden tried to take in the view before they were sent onward. A floor the soft, lustrous white of a pearl, and no walls or ceiling that his eyes could discern, only sky. The clouds were dark-bottomed and rolling in an unfelt wind.
“The storm is supposed to pass over the city and give its rain to the land that way,” Stuart said, pointing in a direction that meant nothing to Alden when he had only a foreign sky for reference. “Do you like it?”
“It’s beautiful.” He faced Stuart, only for his eyes to be pulled away a second later by a flash in the cloud over the Artonan’s shoulder. “Lightning.”
They were teleported on toward their final destination before he could say anything else. This time, instead of arriving at the far end of the walking path that lead to the House of Healing, they appeared in an alcove in the House itself. It was open to a small receiving room that was empty of people and unfurnished except for a tall set of cabinets running the length of one wall. For the sake of tradition and out of respect for the healers, Alden would occasionally be walking the long way here; but since his time was inconveniently synched with Yenu-pezth’s right now, it was okay to take this easier route.
“I just saw Worli Ro-den,” he said, stepping out of the alcove onto pale green tiles. “He was arriving at the cube as I was leaving.”
Stuart’s look of mild curiosity was quickly swept away. “Don’t <
“I did,” said Alden. “I do.”
“That,” a voice said from the hallway, “is welcome news to these ears.”
Yenu-pezth appeared in the doorway as she finished her sentence. She looked much the same as the last time Alden had seen her. Hair in a dusty shade of purple was coiled around her head, and she was carrying a bread loaf in a basket rather than sharing it with woodland creatures.
Alden and Stuart both gave her small bows.
“Your ears are a good color,” she said approvingly to Stuart as they straightened. “Are you here to protect Alden from the dangers of the inward path’s grottos, or do you hope to contemplate in one of them yourself?”
She sounded prepared to tease both of them as much as she could.
“I promise to leave when I’m told to this time,” Alden said.
“I won’t argue with your wisdom or worry about your carefulness with Alden’s mind,” said Stuart. “And I was going to use the path if it wouldn’t disturb anyone else’s healing.”
Alden wondered if Stuart needed a break from his family and time to himself after the reunion with his former schoolmates.
“You are always welcome, dear Stu.” The healer put both of her eyes on Alden. “How have you been since we last spoke? And have you become sure of any desires that were once uncertain?”
Deep breath.
“I’d like to replace the nightmare tonight. I think at least a couple of the new dreams I’ve imagined are good enough. If you agree.”
“I will be sure if you are sure,” she answered easily. Then she added, “I’ve spent the past several nights reading the opinions of your planet’s <
> and scientists on the human mind, and the opinions of Artonan healers and philosophers on the same. I will develop my own knowledge as we go. But isn’t it a wonder? To have found thought so much more like than unlike our own in another part of the universe! Come. I am honored to be trusted as your healer.
“Stu, you go steep.”
******
They started their meeting in a private sitting room, having a conversation about Alden’s preparations, his wants, and his concerns.
“I feel like a—” paranoid asshole “—ungrateful person for insisting on as much mental privacy as you can reasonably give me. I’m sorry to be troublesome.”
She was sitting in the chair across from him, legs crossed and beringed toes on display while she ate bread with the honey he’d brought.”
“It’s not an uncommon request,” she said, “and not as difficult to work around as you fear. Thoughts need not be clearly viewed to be competently changed. If I say to you, ‘Imagine being bitten on the finger by the ryeh-b’t Stu gave your name…there, see? Your hand moved. And those are only words you know to be untrue interacting with your brain. Spells cast upon the mind have much more power to shift a person.”
“I’m glad I won’t be a bad patient.”
“I once had to keep a mind intact for a time after the body had died. That was a bad patient.” She took a bite of her bread. “You’ve agreed to let me monitor your emotions, and you won’t answer my questions with lies while I make alternations. That’s enough for what we’ll do today. Let’s talk about some options for your comfort, and then we’ll go to the inward path. You’ll become more sure of yourself, and your mind will be more open to change after a walk there.”
She was going to put him to sleep and then induce the nightmare. The options he got to choose from ranged from the simple question of what he wanted to sleep on—a womb-mimicking float tank was available if he preferred that—to the more complicated ones of what types of drugs she could administer and how much stress and fear he was willing to put up with.
Since it was a nightmare being replaced by what were basically more realistic nightmares with happy endings, there would be moments when he wasn’t at all pleased to be trapped in the process.
“So, you consent to much too much distress, and I will be the one who decides on healthy limits,” Yenu-pezth concluded in a chipper tone as they finished up. “Let us go see the room and thank the <
I was trying not to consent to too much distress, though, thought Alden, getting up to follow her out of the sitting room and down a corridor. He’d been cautions about coming across as too casual with regard traumatic experiences after the whole asking Big Snake for a mock drowning thing. It’s not like I like being terrified. I’m trying to get over it and never do it again.
He hadn’t known what to expect from the treatment room, and he was really glad to get a tour of it and an explanation of it all. The ceiling was mostly hidden by interwoven branches that had fallen from the trees in the healing grove that surrounded the House. They were festooned with organic materials and enchanted objects—spell ingredients in ornament form that Yenu-pezth could use as needed. When they arrived, the attendant was standing on a short step ladder, carefully removing and storing some of them and adding others based on requests the healer had sent while she and Alden were talking.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The man was a contradiction in motion, practically flinging the ladder around to reposition it and then wrapping each ingredient in small cloths so gently Alden was convinced he could have bundled up a butterfly without damaging its wings.
He had the air of someone who’d worked at this place forever as he welcomed Alden without batting an eye and told him not to worry about the temperature, because the bedding he’d be sleeping on was going to have a cooling mat. He’d be positioning the bed in the most <
> to some other man who’d just been tasked with prepping the potion injector, if the fellow didn’t get finished on time. The attendant and Yenu-pezth both had a long laugh at that poor soul’s expense that Alden didn’t quite get, but he was relieved to depart with the impression that having your nightmares replaced wasn’t the kind of ordeal that fazed anyone here.
Other than me.
By the time they made it out to the path, he was glad to let the weight of it fall on him and clear his nerves.
“Today the purpose of our walk is narrower,” Yenu-pezth said. She faced Alden with both hands in her pockets, her shoulders relaxed and her expression placid. “Now is the time for you to acknowledge what you have decided to let go—to find and understand the strands of your life that have held it in place even though you wish for it to be gone. Now is also the time to welcome what will be built in the place where the evil dream once stood. Do you agree that this is a good purpose for our walk?”
Alden’s, “Yes,” arrived a little late, slowed by the pondering that the path encouraged. He found himself relaxing into it even more smoothly than before. He started to have a thought about his promise to Stuart and Healer Yenu that he wouldn’t have to be dragged away from here by the front of his shirt again, but before he could follow that thought all the way to wherever it would lead him when he was in this state, Yenu-pezth was asking another question.
“You could have chosen many kinds of correcting dreams, Alden. You have chosen ones that are harder, in some ways, than the dream you already endure. Why?”
And so they started their walk into the sloping, curving corridor of the path, and Alden was barely aware of the walls rising around him as he looked more closely at his own answers, trying to find where the truths that were worthy of being spoken through the weight lay.
******
“Because I’m afraid.”
The first answer clear enough for the path was spoken as they paused to observe the play of light and shadow around a line of wooden spars that stuck out of the wall just a finger’s length beyond Alden’s reach.
Why fight a demon and escape with Kibby instead of simply being rescued early, or finding a safe way to teleport out, or any of many other happy fantasy outcomes? Because he was afraid of chaos. The way it clawed and wore you down. The threat of losing yourself to the taint of it. The unforgettable horror of seeing that first touch of a demon against living skin, witnessing that kind of madness on the woman’s leg—rot, pain, fleshy sawdust.
“I won’t become less afraid, if I just throw all the bad parts out of my head. I want to face them and know I’m capable of facing them.”
“Will it be acceptable,” she asked, “if the fear never completely leaves you?”
“It will,” he said a short while later. “I know it’s not reasonable to want to be completely fearless.”
“Do you have other reasons for choosing this solution to your problem?” she asked, nudging his elbow to move him farther along the path.
He did have other reasons, some clear, some difficult to put into words. He spoke most of them plainly when he found them, his emotions so still that worry over how they would sound to the healer could be set aside.
I thought the big demon would get us when the first night came, even though Kibby promised the lights would work.
I wondered if that would be better. A couple of times.
Other reasons, he managed to speak without really knowing the why of them, only that they were connected to the question enough to rise to the surface of his thoughts as he stirred them.
“Stuart says I can have a choosing season, so I am.”
He was passing through the curtain of flowered vines as he said that. No…actually he was just standing still in them, tendrils draped around his shoulders like a cloak. He decided to move toward Healer Yenu, who was waiting for him patiently a couple of steps away.
“In a choosing season, I should try to understand how I feel about places like Moon Thegund instead of avoiding them,” he said. “If I run away instead of fighting, my choice will be based on incomplete information.”
“We can talk about what having a season dedicated to choice means for you during our future walks. If you want to,” she said.
“I do want to, and I don’t want to,” Alden said. The part of him that was trying to tell him he was speaking in dangerous riddles was too stifled by the path to be obeyed.
“Would you like to move away from the vines now?”
“I do want to, and I don’t want to,” Alden said honestly, even as he wondered why he hadn’t already stepped away from the vegetation.
Yenu-pezth hid whatever her mouth was doing with one hand and then reached for his elbow again. On the return trip, just as Alden was reaching a state close enough to normal to start realizing that he’d gotten a little too comfy on the path again, the healer brought up one final question for him to consider.
“The evil dream that troubles you begins in the moment when you believe you did wrong. Your hesitation to run toward the child’s whistle is a source of shame for you. The shame breeds a dream of disaster, in which you can’t find her despite desperate effort.” She let her words settle over him, giving them their due time. After Alden had nodded, she continued, “If the dream is something that disturbs your rest and steals your strength, and we have agreed that you will be more as you want to be without it, then is the shame you feel something you should let go of, too?”
It was a question he slowly discovered he had no answer for, at least not one good enough to be spoken through the weight. They had already exited and were heading through the grove toward the main building together before he could even say, “I don’t know.”
Yenu-pezth was walking close beside him. “That’s a fine admission for now. We will leave it for another meeting. But whenever you wake from these better dreams I am about to give you, ask yourself this again. And steep for as long as your day allows with the truth that guilt’s only gift to any of us is instruction. Often, it is an instructor with little sympathy for its student and a fog-cloaked view of the situation it was born in. If there is no lesson for you to learn from guilt, then it has nothing else to offer you. A righteous scholarly exit from a useless instructor is the only choice sometimes.”
The healer’s use of the word for “righteous scholarly exit,” and the memory of Stuart using the same one to try to get him to abandon Instructor Rao’s class, was so amusing Alden had to laugh. But the laugh didn’t happen until the words had been fully absorbed. Which meant he giggled inappropriately right as he was being shown the injector that had been prepared just in case he had an unexpectedly awful reaction to any of the other injectors lined up on the wooden tray the attendant was holding out for him and the healer to see.
“He’s well,” Yenu-pezth said to the man. “I must have said something funny to him on the path.”
A while later, Alden was lying on a frameless bed that had been salubriously positioned under a gap in the branches. The room was quiet except for Yenu-pezth’s clothes rustling as she arranged a few of her personal tools.
“You’re not going to stab me with that are you?” Alden asked, trying to keep himself light and clam as a nervous energy began to make itself known again.
She had just pulled a long pointy pin of some kind out of her sleeve.
“I certainly will,” she said. “Monitoring your pain response, comparing it to what you’re feeling in the dream, using it to adjust your fear more quickly and naturally—stabbing patients works well.” She placed a hand on his forehead while he blinked at her. “Don’t worry. By the time you wake up the <
> will be healed so well you’ll have to search to notice them.”
Her hand was warm and dry.
I’m really doing this. He was ready to get knocked out now. Before he started thinking too much.
“Do you want Stu-art’h to be here?” she asked. “He will let himself in if either of us show him the corner of an invitation. It’s up to you. If you say yes, you may wake to find him glue-spelled to the wall as punishment for bothering me.”
Alden smiled at the image. He would have rejected the idea instantly if he’d been worried about crying or flailing around in his sleep, but he was getting drugged into stillness. A patient screaming or flinging an arm at the mind healer in the middle of treatment was uncool, so they headed that off.
“If he wants to, that’s fine,” he said. “But I won’t know either way, and I’m not afraid to be alone with you.”
“I am honored. And Stu will be thrilled.” She leaned closer. “The hardest part for the patient is deciding and trusting. You’ve done that. Now rest.”
But what if I accidentally show I have authority control? What if I—?
He felt the pinch of an injection against his arm.
Be still, Alden. Be quiet in all the ways that matter.
“You were sneaky with that injector, Healer Yenu,” he tried to say.
But he wasn’t sure if he did or not. He opened his eyes and found himself standing in a seemingly endless plain of grass.
Thegund, he thought.
The nightmare had begun.
******
[Note: Got this one finished! Sunday will be our second skip day of January. ]
How did I get here?
The tall, yellow grass surrounded him in every direction.
How is it happening again?
No wind. If he held still—and he was holding still, his feet planted by uncertainty and horror—then nothing moved. Even the clouds, hanging low overhead and dimming the day, appeared motionless.
Why?
It was so quiet.
During a storm on Anesidora, facing a raging sea, he’d told Stuart about this. About how he hated it.
“Even before the Contract failed, it sucked….That place felt like death even before it turned into death.”
That conversation had happened. Once upon a time. When had it been?
Something’s gone wrong.
Alden turned slowly in place, straining his eyes.
I have to get back.
He looked for any sign of life, anywhere, and he didn’t find it.
Home. Earth. Now.
“System!” he shouted. “Contract! Are you there?”
The wizards with Alis-art’h were supposed to be building a new one. A better one. If this was the bad side of the moon, and the grass had had time to grow back, shouldn’t it be here?
“Contract!”
Please, not again.
The answer that came wasn’t the one he wanted.
He felt a pressure that had once been so unfamiliar he’d first clumsily identified it as a privacy violation. Being spied upon.
Eventually, it had become a very familiar enemy. That thing you had to assert yourself against all the time, that would wear away at your edges and leave you slightly askew. Chaos.
No.
Alden told himself it wasn’t too much. He wasn’t worn down. It didn’t feel as bad. He tried to calm himself.
But a speck of black drifted lazily up from the ground a few inches in front of him. As it floated upward, it skimmed a single blade of grass. The vegetation withered and curled.
Alden’s breath caught in the middle of his chest. It felt like a knot tightening painfully there.
Sometimes, they change direction suddenly.
He backed away from the demon bug, and when backing away wasn’t enough to control his fear, he turned and ran.
More black specks were rising. A buzz of sound was filling the air.
It was happening everywhere he could see as he fled. He thought the swarm was a little thinner in the direction he’d chosen, but he still had to slow to a walk to dodge the bugs.
And it was so much like it had been last time. Only worse. He didn’t have the lab coat for protection. He didn’t have an object preserved, so he didn’t have his trait.
The corrupted zone has to have an edge, he thought frantically. What if I’ve picked the wrong direction after all? Am I moving toward the center of the problem or away from it?
Beneath his right foot, the ground gave way, and he stumbled.
Careful. Slower, he commanded himself, staring at the crumbling edges of the hole that had tripped him. Keep walking in this direction. Stay alive until help comes. Stay safe.
That’s the most important thing.
As if the thought had summoned it, a sound other than the buzzing reached him. It was so quiet he thought he’d imagined it at first. But then, as he realized it was real and as he recognized what it was, that tiny, silver chiiirrrr-chirrrpp of noise became as loud in his heart as anything he’d ever heard.
“Kibby.” Her name knifed its way out of him on a breath. Not you. You’re not supposed to be here. You’re never supposed to go through this again.
“Kibby, I’m coming to find you!” He screamed it. She had to hear him. “Kibby, keep whistling! I’m coming!”
He rushed—cautiously enough that he wouldn’t break his neck in a fall and leave her here in this hell by herself, but fast enough that it was only a matter of steps before he was struck by a demon that had once been a simple grasshopper. It had zigged toward him when he had expected it to travel past him. Both of them were moving too quickly for him to dodge it.
The demon smashed into his chest on the upper left side, and he looked down, registering the hole it had left in his Hawaiian shirt, bracing for that feeling he’d gotten the very first time one of them had touched him.
A hurt that wasn’t physical. An intense, violating confusion of a sensation that he hadn’t had the ability to truly understand.
Now, the mote of concentrated chaos had hit him, and it was a bad feeling. A blow. But a milder one than he’d anticipated. It was less, or he was more.
Who cares? Keep going. He started moving again. I have to get to her. Can she hear me calling out to her? What if she stops whistling?
The thought gripped him like a fist, and he sped up. I can’t lose her. Where is she?
Realization burst inside him a second later, and it was a wonderful realization.
What am I doing? This isn’t before. I know now that I can do it without a System’s help. If she’s close enough to hear, I can…
Alden had his skill. He was his skill.
The very first, most basic part of what he could do with his bound authority was something he was still learning about. In gym class with tennis balls flying toward him, in an intake apartment with Hadiza handing him a beautified ice cream cone, and also in his room at Celena North, imagining his affixation in a way that was a little kinder. Not the confining chains and the machine he’d pictured so many times after he’d finally grasped what his species wasn’t supposed to be able to, but something else.
Targeting my entruster. Choosing the person I want to serve with my power.
It was strangely easy and clear to him right now. Like an unfolding of a small but very important part of himself. A turning toward and an acceptance of…a personal sun.
Kibby. There you are.
Alden was sure he could have found her from a whole world away.
******
******
“The dream that troubles Alden is filled with fears that muffle his reason and hide truths from him. To help him, I don’t tell his mind what is reasonable or truthful. I only present the challenges and alterations he has discussed with me, and I watch over him as he experiences them.”
Yenu-pezth’s eyes were closed, but her bare feet moved unerringly along an oval path laid out on the floor in the white smoke from a yosha plant. The leaves smoldered in a shallow bowl placed on Alden Thorn’s chest, and Stu-art’h watched the steady rise and fall of it from where he stood in the corner of the room.
“His walk with me earlier enhanced his ability to make connections between present questions and past experiences,” the healer continued. “I help him maintain that openness of thought beyond what would normally be possible in a state of heightened stress. When the fear becomes so strong that he is in danger of becoming trapped by it, I sweep some of it away. I interpret the tone of his confusion, as well as the threads of his satisfaction, confidence, and loss. In this way, I know when he has found what he hoped for. Sometimes, I check in with him by reminding him of what we are doing, but most of the time, he is unaware that he’s dreaming.”
Stu-art’h waited for her to finish another turn around the sleeping human before he spoke. “He should have disliked me after our first meeting, even if he did accept my apology. After I learned he was lost, I contemplated his behavior and his sufferings. I admired him. I wished that I could have a chance to meet him again, but I didn’t think he would want to meet me.”
Yenu-pezth didn’t reply. She had just stepped closer to Alden and bent over to prick his fingertip with her long pin.
“The Mother brought him to our house for reasons I understand. But then she allowed him to stay without announcing his presence to anyone. He came to see me. He seemed happy to meet me after all, but when he left, I thought perhaps that had been out of politeness.” He took a couple of steps toward the center of the room. “Later, he sent me videos from Earth of things he likes. Musicians marching in formations and black and white animals called panda…”
“Stop sneaking away from your corner,” said Yenu-pezth. “Nothing bad is going to happen to the human you’ve discovered such a fondness for.”
******
******
“There are too many demons. What if your human brain is distracted trying to see them all, and you don’t notice bad ground? The car will roll over.”
They had spent two human days packing the car and preparing to survive a long trip. Alden had stopped being baffled that they were both here again. For some reason, it had happened. For some reason, most of the lab had been rebuilt. For some reason, the universe wanted Alden Thorn and Kivb-ee dead.
And the why just didn’t matter to him. It had stopped mattering the moment he’d found her there in the grass, put his arms around her, and told her not to be afraid.
The universe could go fuck itself. Alden was going to make sure Kibby got out of here and lived forever.
“My human brain is good,” he said, looking down at the plate of food on the table in front of her while his fingers finished braiding her soft brown hair. Since he’d started hairdressing, she’d pointed out fifteen different reasons why leaving today might result in disaster, but half of the scrambled curds he’d made her were gone and all of the marleck berries. So whatever was making her nervous wasn’t bad enough to kill her appetite.
And she’d seemed fine when they were picking the berries. Where one of the greenhouses had been before, there were marleck bushes now, irrigated by the same sprinklers that Elepta had used.
Formerly irrigated—Alden had taken every single one of them. They were loaded into the car with a thousand other things.
He wrapped the piece of string she wanted as a hair tie around the bottom of the braid. It matched the auriad around her neck. It almost perfectly matched his own. He wore his casting tool openly on his wrist right now, and he’d caught his little instructor looking at it smugly a couple of times. She was proud of her contribution. Proud they matched.
“My human brain is even better than the last time we were together, and it got us out of here then, didn’t it?” He leaned over to see her face. “Why do you look so doubtful? Are you being funny-mean to me with that face?”
When Kibby didn’t answer, he tried to guess what might be making her more hesitant to go this time than she had been before.
The lack of necessity could be it.
When they’d fled the lab in the past, there had been no other choice. She’d been weakening. Help had been too far away. Now, this new lab looked like a fortress. And it didn’t help that the land surrounding it was still swarming with tiny demons that hadn’t yet lost their grip on existence and dispersed into the general spreading chaos. Some of them were powerful enough to put holes in the old car.
Or maybe it was less about power in that case and more about the chaos around some demon bugs having exactly the wrong effect on the wrong part of the enchantments that protected the vehicle. Whatever the case, he was telling her they were going to drive through miles of the things.
And we’ve both seen those trails in the grass again. Something bigger—
A buzzing caught his attention, and he looked up to see one of the stray demons that sometimes made it into the lab drifting around over the microwave.
“Kibby, can I have this?” he asked, pointing toward the paper napkin beside her plate.
She nodded, and he picked it up.
I could swear this is the same kind of napkin we have at Cafeteria North. Did I bring it with me in my pocket and forget?
The origin of disposable paper products was less important than making Kibby feel better. He preserved the napkin and walked over to the microwave.
“Watch this with both halves of your attention,” he said, holding the napkin in front of the oncoming demon bug.
She made a sound of protest right before the demon bumped into the magic created by Alden’s skill. But the transformed creature shattered on impact and disappeared except for a single blackened fragment of something that might have been a piece of exoskeleton.
Or it could be literally anything else considering chaos is involved.
The fragment fell to the floor.
“The first time one of those hit my shield, I was scared,” he told her. “It seemed so strong. Now, I understand more, and I’m a lot stronger. My skill is more powerful than it was when I carried you to Knight Alis-art’h.”
“You carried me most of the way,” Kibby corrected. “I helped you get to the travel dome at the end.”
Alden nodded. “You did.”
“You were hurt,” she said in a small voice, her face turning back toward her plate. “Last time, you were hurt. Avowed Rrorro helped you…but it was…”
Broken bones. Abraded lungs. Skin missing from his feet, and sores burning on his back. The memory of waking up for the first time in the travel dome, only partially repaired and in pain, filled Alden.
If I end up in that shape again because I insisted we leave this place…what happens to Kibby?
He watched her finish her breakfast. He suddenly felt a dread even more oppressive than the chaos crushing in on him.
******
******
“This is interesting.” said Yenu-pezth, regarding Alden’s sleeping form. “He’s found a fear we didn’t plan for. Or perhaps one we did plan for has arrived on its own, at a point in the dream when I didn’t expect for it to appear.”
“What do you do for him now?” Stu-art’h asked.
She thought for a moment, then she reached for a wand that lay on the floor beside Alden’s ear.
“He’s trying to calm himself and think through it,” she said, drawing a sharp line in the air with the tip of the wand. “I will make space in the dream for him to do so.”
******
******
Alden walked the curving halls of the lab’s residential section. He was alone for now, trying to control his doubts. He’d had a plan, and they’d been working toward it from the moment they’d reached this place. Now, he was worried that getting away might actually be a mistake.
If I’m wrong about being strong enough to get us away from here, she could be stuck out there with my corpse and no way to survive.
This corruption event wasn’t like the last one. It was different in ways that were all to their benefit, except for their mutual lack of knowledge about how they’d ended up back on Thegund. This time, Alden had thought he could get them out.
The plan was all there in my head. Almost like I worked on it before I ever got stuck here again.
Sprinklers. Food. Mover discs. All the other supplies. The walls of the charging shed had been a pain in the ass to tear down and load onto the roof of the car, and it might not charge very well without the base, which would have to be left behind. But if it got them even a little farther on wheels, then Alden wouldn’t resent hauling it along.
They were supposed to get out of the chaos, head for the place where Alis-art’h had arrived the last time this had happened, and keep going.
The ruins of an abandoned city were in that direction. A few people still lived there. They would find shelter and some means of communication with those reclusive few if they could. If not, they would cross the whole freaking moon, and Alden would walk into Chayklo with Kibby on his back and say, “We politely request assistance,” to the first Artonan he found.
It sounded possible. If a lot of things went wrong, there were even plans B and C and D…but there was no plan that worked for Kibby if Alden got himself killed.
He passed door after door, agonizing over the matter.
I’m almost positive I could do it.
And I’m almost positive I could keep her safe here at the laboratory until help came, too.
He could preserve her every waking moment. He had more than twice as much bound authority now. His skill would hold, he’d be more stable, and he wouldn’t tire before someone showed up.
If they came as quickly as the Quaternary had. If they came at all.
At some point, do they just give up on repairing this shitty moon and abandon it for good?
There had to be people who cared about it. They’d built another lab. And if she was protected by his skill most of the time, then Kibby would be all right for as long as Alden was.
Last time, leaving had truly been the last resort. This time…it was a choice he had to make for both of them.
Choice.
My choosing season. I was glad to have one. How did I end up here?
He brushed the thought away and refocused.
The responsibility for getting everything right and not getting them killed had been hard before, and now here it was again, in even more overwhelming amounts. Kibby would go if he said to or stay if he told her that was best.
He felt so gut-churningly alone with the decision that he wanted to scream.
Am I freaking out? I want to. But I can’t do it in front of her. No scaring the little girl.
Abruptly, he turned into one of the rooms, no goal in mind other than getting even more privacy. He just needed a moment to compose himself before he went to find her and tell her, warmly and confidently, that he knew what he was doing.
That’s how it works now. You’re the rock. You get it right or wrong.
The weight of the responsibility made him feel so acutely lonely.
The door shut behind him. He slid down it, and let himself squat there, eyes closed, trying to recalibrate himself.
When he opened them again, he found himself facing a familiar painting on the wall.
“You,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
But then again, none of us are.
The knight in the painting was exactly as Alden remembered from when he’d seen it at the Rapport School. How long ago was that?
Although the barren red landscape and the knight with his spindly plant and his lantern were there, the painting had lost its magical pull. Instead of falling into it, Alden was able to look at it normally.
It must be a copy, he decided, approaching it.
The magic might not be there, but he still recalled the feelings the artwork had given him as clearly as if he’d seen it only a day or two ago.
The knight was tired. He was besieged by chaos on all sides. He protected one tiny patch of that world from the shadowy figures of the demons.
He was alone in a hellscape, too.
Alden pressed his hands to the painting on either side of the man’s image. He felt the roughness beneath his palms, let his face draw close. He thought about what he saw there for a long time.
“Thank you,” he said finally, stepping away. “You’re amazing there with your light and the life you’re guarding. I’m sorry you had to be in that place. I hope the fact that there’s a painting of you means you made it out.”
He left the room and found Kibby waiting beside the loaded car. He crouched in front of her, gravel shifting beneath his feet.
“Listen,” he said, reaching for one of her hands and smiling at her with every bit of confidence he had in him, “this place is dangerous for us. Being trapped here for so long hurt us. Too much chaos, the not knowing, that time you almost took out my eye with a rock you threw—”
“The best Avowed should have been able to catch that,” Kibby said.
He laughed for her. “I should have. You’re right. But this place is dangerous. It stinks. And my skill and I are strong enough to get us out. Trust me. I’m going to take you to Chayklo. We’ll watch a poetry festival and you’ll explain all the complicated words for my human brain, okay?”
Her face turned serious. “Yes.”
“All right,” he said, putting some enthusiasm into it. “Let’s go.”
They climbed into the car. Shared seat. With the risk of crashing into a demon grasshopper and having it come through the windshield, Alden wanted to shield her for the whole drive to the perimeter of the corruption zone. It hadn’t spread so far yet. If everything went perfectly, Kibby wouldn’t have to feel the chaos again.
I’ll get us beyond its reach then let her take over for a turn, he thought, pressing the memorized series of buttons. Her stomach will still be full from first meal. She’ll be wide awake and smiling.
“Where did you get these?” Kibby asked curiously, reaching for his forehead.
A second later, the sunglasses that had been resting there were knocked down onto the bridge of his nose. I brought these with me, too?
“From some Ryeh-b’t Avowed on Anesidora. They are the traditional face jewelry for people in Hawaiian shirts.”
“They look like protective glasses for too much light.”
“They’re that, too,” he agreed. The engine whooshed to life. “Can I protect you with my skill now?”
“First, I have to tell you I added something to the car. Another ingredient for weapons. In case we need one.”
“More explosives?”
“It’s the green jar in the back. It doesn’t explode on its own.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t drink it,” she warned.
“I’ll try to resist.”
She looked at him with one brown eye while the other turned slightly to stare over his shoulder at the place they were leaving behind. Again. “You can use your skill on me now.”
He nodded at her. “I’ve really missed you. Let’s get out of here and watch some Klee-pak together.”
******
TWO HUNDRED ELEVEN
[A/N:
It's possible that this has more typos and klunky writing than usual. I don't think it does, but I was a bit foggy (see last post) doing the revision. I hope it's nice! If not, I will give it another pass when I'm well. ]
“We can’t kee—keep going so fast-t. Ow. We’ll flip over, Alden!”
Kibby was bouncing and swaying as the car plowed through the terrain. Alden had strapped her in as soon as he realized they’d run into a problem that couldn’t be dealt with while he held her preserved. Her harness and the grip of her hands on it weren’t enough to steady her when the car was crashing through grass and over potholes.
“We won’t flip. We’ll be fine,” he said, swiping blood off his brow before it could run into his eye. He wasn’t buckled in, and he’d smacked his head on the sharp corner of one of the crates that held their food. It was only a cut, but it was dripping all over the place. He left red smears on the supplies as he dug through them in search of the largest tarp they’d brought. “Found it! And I’ve got your things, too. Tell me what else you need.”
He fell back into his seat, clutching the silver tarp and the jar of green stuff he wasn’t allowed to drink, and a doughnut shaped thing Kibby said was a detonator. She was fighting to get her hands in her pockets. When she did, she pulled out tape and a couple of metal containers shaped like test tubes. She’d taken them from cabinets in the main work labs yesterday.
“I need…” Her eyes turned to the screen on the dash that showed the car’s surroundings.
“Don’t look at that,” said Alden. “We can do this.”
Kibby turned her head. “I need a while. A little while. Not long.”
“Good. I need a little while to get ready, too.” He was managing well with the false confidence, he thought. And if the well of stress inside him was bubbling out, then it would be hard to notice over the rattling and crashing sounds, the spatter of dirt against the exterior of the armored vehicle as its metal wheels fought their way through the landscape, and the obnoxious warning alarms pinging. One for damage to the front of the car, one for excess speed, one that he was sure must mean, “Oh my God! Why are we crashing into a hundred demon grasshoppers a minute, you fool?!”
They’d run into trouble in the worst possible area. He thought they were less than an hour from the edge of the corrupted zone, assuming they kept driving at the cautious speed he’d maintained ever since they left the lab. But the demons were thick here. The black specks looked like flakes in a dark version of a snowglobe, freshly shaken and making the car scream.
Alden had taken a few hits while he held Kibby. He swore at least one of the little horrors had just appeared inside the car instead of crashing through a weakened point. I knew leaving during the swarming would be bad. I prepared for that.
He hadn’t prepared for the animal graveyard. One second, they’d been rolling through the increasingly patchy and weirdening grass. The next, they were in an area that must have been stamped short by the feet of the bokabv herd that had fallen there. Around fifteen corpses, most big, a few small. Alden was sorry for the poor things.
As he’d directed the car to go around the area where they’d died, he’d felt the chaos rising. And the car seemed to agree with him. It had given him a warning of some kind, written in logograms he couldn’t read well, right before the biggest demon Alden had ever seen stood up from where it had been laying hidden in the grass and charged toward them with a bleating cry that continued even after its mouth was closed.
Alden barely had time to register that it was a bokabv, or had once been, before it rammed the front of the car with a forehead grown misshapen. Bony knobs massed there, bursting through skin that oozed with blood that shouldn’t have had the same bioluminescent quality as the undemonified animal’s saliva but somehow did.
Alden could still see a gleam in the dent on the hood from where it had hit them. He could see the demon itself, chasing them relentlessly. It seemed farther behind than the last time he’d checked the rear camera. But that was only because they were driving ahead at destructive speed. As soon as the car hit a ditch too deep, it would be on them.
Alden wondered if the part of it that felt exhaustion had broken. Maybe the part of it that understood they were now far away from the herd it must be trying to defend had shut down, too. If it chased them because it was crazed, hurt, and changed, that was sad; but there was no avoiding the truth that when it caught up to them it was, in the best case scenario, going to kill itself in the process of destroying their car.
Alden was sure that sitting tight and hoping the vehicle beat the demon before the demon beat him was the wrong call.
Should we have stayed at the lab after all?
The thought intruded on him as he tried to make his plan for getting on top of the moving car. He pushed it aside.
Slow it down a lot, but don’t stop. Accept that you’re going to get peppered with the little ones. Don’t let it distract you. We’re almost to the edge of the corruption. You have to get the car and Kibby out of here.
Just one big, terrifying demon in the way before things got significantly safer for them. That was all.
“I finished!” Kibby was holding out a contraption that had way too many parts. A tiny question about how this shoebox-sized nest of wires and tubes had appeared so quickly from so few components flitted across Alden’s thoughts and then dissolved in the sea of more pressing concerns.
“Okay,” he said, taking it from her. “Okay. You’re in charge of keeping the car going. Stay in here. Don’t come outside no matter what.”
“What if you need help?”
“You already helped. I won’t need more.”
He thought about telling her to keep going even if he fell off or died. Putting that out there right now might do more harm than good, though.
“I’m going to shield us from the explosion and whatever happens next.”
Do you think I can do it? he wondered.
“You can,” said Kibby.
“Of course I can.”
******
Of course I can. What a thing to promise.
Alden was moving.
Pulling himself up onto the top of the car, the walls of the charging shed providing some help since the tie-downs for them gave him handholds. Unfurling the tarp. Shouting for Kibby to slow them down a little more.
Getting hit by chaos.
More chaos than he was used to even from before. Asserting himself. Asserting his skill.
Hearing the buzzing. Feeling cool air on his back as his shirt collected another hole.
A man tried to stab me in that spot once. He’s dead now, and I’m still here.
That was something he could think about later. The car was slowing, helping him get the tarp right without so much flapping.
It was soft, light. His hands acted like they knew what to do with it better than they would have if he’d tried something like this the last time they were here on Thegund. Not that getting coverage for the back and, to some extent, the sides of a large car with an even larger cloth was as complicated as an origami turkey.
He was glad he couldn’t see in two directions at once like an Artonan; looking away from the approaching demon would have been impossible if he’d thought he could get away with splitting his attention. He kept his center of gravity low, kept his feet shoved under a strap so tight it threatened his circulation. It was a somewhat pitiful effort to give himself one more layer of security in the event that the ground gave way beneath the weight of the car.
The strange thing is…
He let the edge of the tarp drape over his own head, down his back a little, making sure he’d have some coverage too. He preserved it.
“Are you sure I can just drop this thing?” he shouted. The bomb and its detonator were tied to his waist by a couple of loops of thin rope so that his hands could work. Worst fanny pack ever.
Kibby’s shout from the car was muffled but affirmative. As if it had heard her, the bokabv demon issued its battlecry again. It was so loud that Alden had to look. The beast was gaining on them. Rapidly.
And Alden was already feeling the strain of holding a large shield in a place where thousands of smaller demons surrounded him.
He inhaled deeply, the smell of rotting grass and something like boiled egg coating his nostrils.
The strange thing is, I think I can do this.
Not for long. Not perfectly. But if Kibby’s bomb worked and if the bokabv was already weakened by attacking the car…
He tossed the bomb into the crushed trail of grass in their wake. He held their shield in one hand, the detonator donut in the other.
She’d said you sank your fingers into the depression on the inside of the ring and said, “Pierce.” Like it was an injector.
Alden stood, eyes glued to the bokabv as it approached the bomb in the grass. What if it sees it? Will it turn? What do I do if it comes around and attacks from the side?
Meet it with the shield. As many times as it took. Survive.
Strange, he thought again.
He could see the bokabv very clearly. The bony mass of its head, so unlike the sweeter, softer face of a normal one. The almost blinding glow of its matted fur. The things happening around it that were a little more wrong than all the rest of the wrong here. Behind it in a narrow strip, the ground looked like it had been trampled by hundreds of creatures instead of one, the grass all vanishing in an instant like the touch of its feet were fire, scorching down to bare dark soil. And off to the sides, Alden saw the subtle motion of stems curling in death or thickening and lengthening with altered life.
Strange that I think I can do this. His mouth was dry. Almost time.
His brain was working overtime to connect this moment to so many others. He remembered another bokabv he’d met at some point, nudging his face with a velvety snout. And Instructor Klein barreling toward him with an oversized dog crate that had flattened into a pancake.
This is so much more serious than that.
He remembered being told by the Earth system that he’d leveled. Puking in the toilet afterward. Lexi telling him Anesidora was the only place on Earth that really wanted Avowed. An injector for soothing a stomach that had been overwhelmed by a fear that would be with him for longer than any virus.
“You don’t know how to use it,” Lexi had said.
I do now. Alden ducked behind the shield.
“Pierce.”
******
The heat felt like it was trying to scour the skin from his back. The ringing in his ears seemed like it was pulling him right back to his own past. And the chaos wanted to wipe away his existence.
Alden’s entruster was in the car below him. Something that felt every bit as strong as Klein had just slammed into his shield, and the buzzing of a thousand demons had vanished into the endless bleat of a thing that should have died already.
Please, let it be dead.
He was no longer sure he could do this.
His skill barely held.
But…it held.
******
******
On the other side of the hardest moment, there were better ones.
Driving out of the corrupted zone not long afterward in a car that absolutely wouldn’t hold up for the whole trip, not after all it had been through. This time, Alden could feel the chaos diminishing rapidly. He knew with his own senses when they’d made it out instead of having to rely on Kibby. His body was in one piece, not a single broken bone or torn muscle. Though his Hawaiian shirt was Swiss-cheesed beyond hope of repair.
They traveled. The stupid remote for the mover discs had gotten hit, even though they’d stored it in what should have been the safest part of the backseat, with all their other supplies protecting it from the world outside. But showing Kibby he could lift the car—minus armored doors— well enough to get it out of some mud they’d tried to cross felt great.
And when they took a break in that place and planted their sprinklers, they gushed so much water so quickly that both of them got the luxury of as much as they wanted for baths.
Sleeping and leaving Kibby on watch was always hard. Alden worried about something happening. Shifting to foot travel was intimidating, but camping on Thegund, in the daylight, wasn’t bad. He could haul a lot more food than the average backpacker.
And, eventually, they found people. Suspicious, hermity people who lived on the outskirts of a ruined city. They weren’t exactly welcoming, but Alden was happy to meet them.
Because meeting them meant getting word to the rest of the world. And that meant that one day, when the two of them were still supposed to be suffering in the middle of the corruption, he instead got to look out of the window of a flyer and see Chayklo.
With Kibby safe beside him.
******
“What happens next?”
Alden felt a tug on his shirt and looked down to see Kibby beside him. They were in the back of a small crowd, at an outdoor poetry event that looked like it could have been the same one she’d sent him videos from.
I guess we decided to come here because I promised.
They had been in Chayklo for some amount of time. It was all right. He was calm.
“What happens next?” Kibby asked again.
He knew she wasn’t talking about the next poet. It was a bigger question.
What do we do now that it’s over? What are we going back to if our old normal doesn’t exist anymore?
Weren’t those questions he’d had to deal with last time?
And I’m still figuring out answers.
But if he had to give some now, the things he knew…
“We leave,” he said. He remembered the lights of the emergency vehicles on the night his world had ended for the first time. He remembered a System going out. He remembered carrying Zeridee-und’h on his back, staring down at a flooding Apex.
“We’ll never forget, but we do need to leave. And you have to know that just because these terrible things have happened to you…more than your fair share of them…it’s not always going to be that way. You’re going to go to your new school on Artona I, and you’ll weave friendships there and learn so much magic. And I’ll…”
Keep growing, he decided eventually. Outgrowing old dreams and bad ones, growing into everything new.
That was what he hoped was happening for him with all the changes that had come after Thegund. I was making an active effort to leave this place behind, he thought. With Stuart’s help. And Yenu-pezth’s.
Disorientation.
Realization.
Wait. I’m dreaming this, aren’t I?
As soon as he asked himself the question, he knew that he was.
Is it going well?
He wasn’t certain if he was the one wondering that all by himself or if this was one of the check-ins Healer Yenu had mentioned she might do.
“I think it is,” he said, staring around him. The world had been so immersive and clear, but now he felt separate from it. “I’m happy with how this one went. What happens next?”
I just answered that, didn’t I?
As it turned out, what happened next from his perspective was waking up.
******
Alden opened his eyes and saw the branches against the ceiling overhead, though the light in the room was much dimmer than it had been when they’d begun.
He was definitely well-rested. He remembered pieces of the dreams. At least three of the ones they’d discussed. They were full of gaps, as dreams remembered upon waking tended to be, but what he did recall was vivid.
Three was good. If it had gone badly, he might not remember any of it.
Three means it went well, right?
He turned his head, looking for Yenu-pezth, and spotted Stuart instead. He was in the corner, sleeping on a mat of his own.
That’s really nice. It’s better to wake up in a House of Healing with someone you know around instead of all alone.
He checked the time on his interface. It was morning on Artona I, not super early. Outside the sun would already be up.
He missed his chance to stealth feed the bokabv, unless he went and came back.
Anyone spending the last day of their weekend at the Rapport School would be up and about.
And it was Tuesday afternoon for Alden.
He was too comfortable right now to worry about it. He lay there for another half hour, trying to grasp all the dream fragments he could, until Stuart woke up.
“Hello,” said Alden.
“You’re awake!” Stuart said, sitting up. “How do you feel?”
“Not very different,” Alden answered. He sat up himself. “But a little more solid. In some way that’s difficult to define. I’ll have to contemplate it some more.”
“I will be silent.”
“I didn’t mean right now. I meant over the coming days.”
“Healer Yenu said it went well,” Stuart told him. “It hasn’t been very long since she left. I’m supposed to tell you to enjoy relaxing experiences until your appointment with her later today.”
“Healer-ordered relaxation?” Alden stretched his arms. “I don’t mind that. Are you supposed to be busy with your own work this morning?”
“I’ll go check on the bokabv’s environment. Then I should do some preparatory work for my classes tomorrow. But I can help you find relaxing—”
“We’ll go check on the field you planted around the bokabv,” Alden said. “And we’ll give Quinyeth honey. And we’ll tell every single person who tries to talk to you about anything that isn’t fun that they’re damaging my delicate mind. That sounds very relaxing to me.”
******
******