Fictography

NaNoWriMo Chapter 7

2010-11-25T12:00:00.000-08:00

“So...how did it go?” asked Emma as David emerged, meek and humbled, from his meeting with Coach Ramirez.

“Greg broke his breastbone,” said David. “No. I broke it. In two places.”

“Oh. That’s...that sucks.”

“Yeah.”

She walked alongside him silently down the empty after-school hallway until he said, “Everyone thinks I did it on purpose.”

“Everyone? I don’t.”

“Everyone on the team. They think I hurt him so that I could be the best player.”

“That’s stupid. Why would you do that? You don’t even play the same position. Hurting him is just going to make the whole team worse.” Emma realized this wasn’t a very consoling thing to say a second later.

“I know,” said David sharply. “He’s going to be out all season, probably. If we’re lucky, he’ll be able to do sports again in the spring.”

“Are they going to let you stay on the team?”
“I think so. Coach Ramirez says he believes me that it was an accident. He just hardly ever sees an injury this bad and he doesn’t understand how a kid like me could knock over someone Greg’s size. He says me running into him should have been like running into a brick wall.”

Emma couldn’t help agreeing in her head. There had been a funny look to the collision, as though the physics were slightly wrong. He shouldn’t have been able to hit Greg so hard. But she learned from her previous comment and didn’t say anything. Instead, as they pushed through the double front doors of the school and David made for the rack to which his bike was locked, alone as though in isolation, she told him, “Tuesdays I go horseback riding. Do you want to come? It might get your mind off things.”

“I’ve never been horseback riding,” he said.

“It’s not rocket science,” Emma assured him. “It’s easy. Plus it’s relaxing. Come on.”

David finally agreed, so he unlocked his bike and they crammed it back into the back seat of the Corolla. She made a mental note to stash some old towels back there if bike-carrying became a common activity. They unloaded the bike at Emma’s house, where she lent him a pair of her mother’s hiking boots to replace the smooth-soled Converse he was wearing. Her mom probably wouldn’t be too delighted to discover that a boy could fit into her shoes, Emma thought with amusement.

She took them down to the arroyo, where the sun was filtering through the trees, pretty as a picture. She gave him the docile Summer and herself took a more spirited white mare named Dazzle. Dazzle was an ambitious choice for a novice like Emma, who had only started riding again three months ago after a hiatus since she left the Girl Scouts, but she was feeling confident. The mare pawed the ground nervously and swiveled her ears while being saddled, but once Emma was on her, she became docile enough. David was probably more nervous than the horses, at least at first. He stood around awkwardly looking at them as though he had never seen a horse before, and seemed afraid to touch them. Emma walked him through the steps and he managed to mount Summer without incident.

August’s oppressive heat was finally giving way to something more autumnal, though it would probably be back with a vengeance in a few days. They rode down the trail on the east side of the concrete conduit with the pathetic trickle of water running down the middle that had the affront to call itself a river. It was hard to believe that, after a heavy rain, it could be a frothing torrent. Aside from a few joggers, there weren’t many people around on a weekday afternoon. The wildlife was out in force, though. Countless squirrels scavenged for acorns amid the dry leaves that carpeted the ground. Hawks circled overhead, well aware of the abundance of squirrels. Shy rabbits hopped around on the hills, tricky to spot until one of them moved. Emma saw a snake. They both thought they saw something bigger away in the bushes, but they couldn’t get a clear look at it. David relaxed and soon seemed to be enjoying himself.

“You’re right; this is fun,” he observed.

“I’m always trying to convince boys to try horseback riding,” she told him. “They all think it’s way too girlie. I keep saying it’s like the Old West! Just imagine you’re a cowboy!”

“Get along, little doggie,” drawled David, cocking an imaginary cowboy hat and making a pistol with his fingers. He pointed it at an innocent squirrel. “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?”

“That’s not the Old West,” Emma informed him.

“Depends how you define old,” was David’s lofty response.

The dappled sunlight disguised a creature in the trail in front of them until they were quite close. For a moment Emma thought it was a dog, but she quickly realized that it was actually a coyote, the first she had ever seen down here. It snarled and darted away into the trees. Dazzle was startled. Emma tried to rein her in, but she reared and threw her to the ground. She lay there, unhurt but winded.

David jumped off Summer and came to her side, asking, “Are you all right?”

The skittish white horse was still panicky. David’s sudden movement startled her even more, and she struck him squarely across the face with a kick before bolting down the trail. The blow should have knocked him over and taken off half his face, but again David seemed strangely solid. He turned to her, giving her a hand up, and laughed, “Hey, it’s a Rose High coyote!”

She lay where she was, mute with stunned horror. She suppressed the urge to scream.

The horses hoof actually had taken off half his face. Rent skin was hanging from his cheek to his jaw, torn all the way down to the bone, and revealing, not the off-white of a human skull, but something else: a patch of gleaming chrome, distinctly mechanical and not organic. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human. It was like nothing Emma had ever seen before.

As she watched, the flesh began to repair itself, crawling back into place to knit the wound back together. In a moment, it had closed completely and David’s face was once again its smooth and flawless self. No hint of a scar remained.

He was looking at her, concerned. “What? Is something wrong?”

“That...your face...” she managed to gasp.

“My face?” he touched his cheek. “It’s fine.”

“But a second ago it was ripped off!” she protested. “What just happened? Who are you? What are you?”

“I’m...” David bit his lip. “It’s complicated.”

“No!” cried Emma. “It’s not just complicated! You dropped out of nowhere onto the hood of my car. You were wearing these weird clothes. You refuse to talk about where you came from. You had nothing with you, but you’ve got an endless supply of money. And you have a freaking metal skull! You’re not even human, are you? Tell. Me. What. Is. Going. On!”

“You’d never believe me,” he told her.

“Try me!”

“All right,” he said. “But you’re not going to understand. It’s not going to make any sense.”

She just waited.

He said, “I am human. You should know that first of all. I’m genetically the same as anyone else. But I’m augmented. I have internal enhancements that make me stronger and faster than any ordinary human. There are also nanites in my blood—tiny, invisible machines just a few atoms long that swim around in my bloodstream and repair things. Those are what fixed my face.”

“But there’s no such thing,” Emma retorted. “You’re talking about technology that doesn’t even exist!”

“It doesn’t exist yet,” was David’s reply. “But you saw it for yourself. I have it. It will exist, and I will have it formed inside of me by nanotechnology when I am an infant. It’s done to all children in my time. I’m not from here, you know. I’m from an entirely different place. An entirely different time: A hundred and fifty years in the future.”

“But then...” Emma whispered, “How did you get here?”
“An accident,” the boy from the future explained. “My father—who is not what I told you; he is a scientist, and a very brilliant and accomplished one—created something he could not explain, something the likes of which no one had ever seen before. It was a sort of vortex of energy. But now I know that it was a portal: A doorway to your time. And I fell through it, completely by chance.”

“That’s the most fantastical thing I’ve ever heard,” said Emma. “You can’t possibly expect me to believe you. And yet...and yet I do. I want to. It makes everything about you suddenly make sense.”

“There’s something else,” David added. “I said I fell through by chance, but it felt almost as though I had been pulled through. And just before I fell, I heard a voice. Your voice. I’m sure of it.”

“Then...” gasped Emma. “You were brought here...to meet me?”
“I would like to think so,” he said, and he reached out a hand and gently touched the side of her face. “Do you believe me? If you think I’m a horrible liar, I can’t fault you.”

Emma thought about it, but with all the strange things that had been going on around David, she was ready to believe anything about him. “I believe you. I know you wouldn’t lie to me.”

“I wouldn’t,” he told her. He took her hands and raised her to her feet.

Something was still bothering Emma. She asked, “But if you came from a different time and everything...then what about that man? Is he really your father?”

“I don’t know; I haven’t even seen him,” said David. “But if it wasn’t him, then it was someone else who knew an awful lot about me. He could have come through the same way I did.” He added, “He’s not really a fashion designer like I told you.”

“Uh, yeah, I’d figured that out,” said Emma. “What does he want?”

David shrugged. “To bring me back, I guess. But...I don’t want to go back. This is better. I like this and I don’t want it to stop.”

He was still holding her hands. Emma replied, “Neither do I.”

He drew her in close to him and kissed her. She sought the feeling for any hint of the mechanical, the robotic, but he was as warm and soft as any human and his kiss, as she finally met the lips that she had longed after ever since she had first seen him, was the most delicately wonderful feeling she had ever experienced.

As she finally pulled away from the kiss, she looked into the bottomless depths of his clear blue eyes and he gazed back at her. So deep and full of meaning, those eyes. She could easily believe that they belonged to someone who was extraordinary. David was powerful and he could accomplish great things with his enhancements, ordinary in his time but unique to this age, but he was still so human, especially his feelings. He made mistakes. He had regrets, sensible ones based on the shame of something he should not have done and irrational ones stemming from events he could not control. He could be broodingly sad or jubilantly happy. And most of all, though she barely dared to voice the word even in her head, he knew how to love. And that was why he needed her to complete him.

Looking around, he said, “We’d better find the horses.”

They walked down the dusty trail and eventually located Summer and Dazzle, no longer panicked and now nosing around in the dry leaves for something edible. Emma stroked Dazzle and talked to her soothingly. When she was satisfied that the skittish horse was calm, she put her foot into the stirrup to mount, but David told her, “I don’t know. Maybe horseback riding is not for me.”

“You need more than one ride to decide that,” she told him.

“This has been a pretty eventful ride. I think I’ve figured out everything I want to know.”

“Oh, come on,” she teased him. “You have to get back on the horse. I’m the one who got thrown off and I’m getting back on, see?”
“I would still rather walk.”

Emma gave up, took both pairs of reins, and they walked the horses back to the stable. David did his best, which turned out to not be very effective, to help her with the horse gear and the rub downs. One more failure to convince a guy to take up horseback riding, she observed with amusement. But she didn’t really mind. Being with David would be worthwhile no matter what they were doing.

NaNoWriMo Chapter 6

2010-11-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

Olivia was wearing a short red dress and had her hair pulled up in a complicated knot, except for a few curled strands that fell down the sides of her face. She pranced up to David in strappy gold heels that looked to him like a broken ankle waiting to happen. He was talking to one of the other players, a junior named Evan.

“Why can’t you have a three-digit number?”

“You just can’t. Why would you want to?”

“And 11 and 16 are both taken?”

“I’m 16 and Greg’s 11.”

“This sucks!”

“Dude, it’s just a number.”

He turned to Olivia and gawked. “Wow. You look amazing.”

She twirled on her heel. “Thanks.”

“I, um, we’re not doing anything fancy, are we? Because this is just what I brought to change into after practice.” He was wearing a green and white plaid button-down shirt and jeans with an old cracked leather belt, both thrift store finds, plus his trusty Converse, which perhaps didn’t merit the adjective because they weren’t actually all that comfortable.

She flipped her wrist dismissively and assured him, “Whatever. You look fine.”

“So where are we going?” he asked as they took the gravel path that led down the hill from the field to the student parking lot, where they got in Olivia’s car.

“There’s a bunch of places in the mall. Where do you want to go?” she replied.

“Er…I just moved here. I have no idea what’s around here,” he told her.

“Okay, well, the theater is in the Santa Anita mall, and there’s a bunch of stuff there. There’s Cheesecake Factory, there’s Panda Express, we could just go to Subway...what do you feel like?”

“I’ve never been any of those places,” David told her.

“You’ve never been to Subway?” she said, giving him a quizzical look.

“There aren’t any where I’m from,” he defended himself.

“Where are you from that there isn’t Subway?”

“The middle of nowhere. Seriously, you would never have heard of it. You should decide where we eat.”

“Okay, I pick Cheesecake Factory. I like their salads. Hey look, there’s a peacock!”

Because of the non sequitur, it took David a moment to realize that there was, in fact, an iridescent blue peacock strutting down the median, its long tail trailing behind it.

“Wow,” he said. “I’ve never seen a real peacock. What’s it doing here?”

“There are tons of them in Arcadia,” Olivia explained. “They’re like the official bird or something. You see them everywhere.”

“That’s so cool,” said David. “I’m starting to like it here.”

“So are you going to stay?”

“Yeah, I think I’m going to have to.”

Olivia navigated an enormous parking lot to the restaurant, found no parking nearby, and wove in and out looking for spots until she finally found one on the opposite side of the mall. She explained, “It’s because Cheesecake Factory is right by the theater. The parking is always full.”

She took him inside a beige box of a restaurant decorated with the look of a focus-group-approved corporate attempt to mass-produce a homemade feel. The word “neighborhood” featured prominently. A waitress seated them at a corner table with a window overlooking the parking lot and handed them two menus. There were ads for an amusement park on the back. They ordered guacamole as an appetizer and chatted while they ate it with tortilla chips.

Olivia asked him, “Who was the first girl you ever kissed?”

Nobody—affection tended to be less demonstrative in his native time--but David wasn’t about to say that. “Oh, it was this girl, a long time ago. You wouldn’t know her, of course.”

“For me, it was the boy I went on my first real date with when I was eleven,” Olivia said dreamily. “He lived up the street from me. We went to the 7-11 to get Slurpees. I got a red one. He got a blue one. I remember everything about that day. And as we were walking back, he kissed me. It was cold because of the Slurpees. His mouth was all blue. But I felt this fluttery feeling like there were butterflies in my stomach, and that was when I knew I was in love. We dated for two weeks…”

“Love,” said David quietly, rolling the word around in his mouth. Suddenly it hit him. He had completely misunderstood dating. It wasn’t a social alliance for posturing and gaining face with the other teenagers. Well, maybe it was, but that wasn’t its primary purpose. It was what you did with the person you loved.

And that person wasn’t Olivia. It never would be.

He stood up abruptly. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“What? I don’t understand,” said Olivia, confused.

“I should never have gone on a date with you. I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel that way about you. This has all been a mistake.”

“Oh, David, don’t be silly. You have to stay; our food is going to be here soon, and…”

“I’m sorry, Olivia.”

He left.

“So he decides to go out with Olivia and he actually just straight-up told me about it to my face even though I’m sure he knows I like him because I act like an idiot every time he’s around and I totally thought he felt the same way about me but he can’t or he wouldn’t have done something like that, and I know I should just get over him but I can’t and I keep thinking about him all the time. Also, his dad’s really creepy. I just don’t know...Summer, what do you think I should do?”
Summer flicked an ear towards Emma and snorted.

She sighed and resumed combing. “You never have anything useful to say. But that’s the great thing about horses, too. You always listen. Other people keep wanting to break in to tell you about their own problems.”

She finished extracting the most stubborn burrs out of Summer’s long black tail and began picking the stones out of her hooves, but she had only just finished the first hoof when someone pulled up outside the stable on a white and chrome bicycle. As he stepped off, she saw that it was in fact David, appearing as though she had summoned him.

She stared at him icily.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here. You told me you take care of the horse on Sundays down here.”

She ignored him and dug a piece of gravel out of Summer’s left front hoof.

“I didn’t end up going to the movie with Olivia,” he told her. “I left before dinner.”

“Well, good for you,” she told him, focusing on the hoof pick.

“I shouldn’t have gone out with her at all,” he continued. “It was a mistake.”

“A mistake? How do you go on a date by mistake?”

“I just thought she wanted to hang out.”

“On a Friday night? With dinner and a movie?” She moved to the back hooves.

“I was wrong. I told you, it was a mistake.” He shrugged helplessly.

She looked up. “You mean that?”

“Yes. I was confused. I didn’t understand how I felt. Now I do. I couldn’t go out with Olivia because I don’t feel that way about her, I feel that way about someone else.” He swallowed. “About...you.”

She put down the hoof pick and stood up, resting a hand on Winter’s glossy side. “Wow, I...I never expected...I mean, I hoped, but...what I mean is I think I feel the same way about you.”

“Really?” David broke into a smile. “So does this mean we’re...what do we do now?”

“Well, I’ve got to finish this last hoof before I do anything else.” She knelt again and extracted the last few stones. “Want to get out of here?”

“Okay.” He slapped the top tube of his bike. “Can I stash this in the back of your car?”

“Sure, if it isn’t too dirty.” Emma looked at him oddly as they walked the bike to her car. “What is that? Where did you get it?”

“It’s a fixed-gear bike. Pretty deck, huh?” He grinned proudly. “I bought it. I can’t just take the bus to school forever.”

“Did you get a job?”
“No. When would I have time for that?”
“Then where did you get the money? You said you just had a little bit left, but you bought all new clothes and a bike.”

“They aren’t new clothes. They’re all from Goodwill,” said David, as though it were a point of pride.

“Yeah, but still...where is all this money coming from?”

David sighed. “I have my dad’s credit card, okay?”

Emma asked, “Why hasn’t he canceled it?”

“I don’t know! Enough with the questions!”

“I’m sorry,” said Emma quickly. She didn’t want to get their relationship off to a bad start by pestering him, and she already knew that he didn’t like to talk about his past. She drove them back to her house; they could have gone and hung out somewhere, but she mostly hung around at home. Her mother worried about her sneaking out of the house and going to parties or getting in trouble, but if Emma had ever snuck out, she wouldn’t have known where to go. Drinking, smoking, and drugs were things that she knew went on but not who did them, when, or where; the more exotic dangers, like fishbowl parties and vandalism, were nothing but rumors. David seemed her speed on the surface. Perhaps that was why the hints of a darker undercurrent were so troubling to her.

They sat around on the couch, talking aimlessly, eating chips and watching TV. Her mother was home and annoyed them all afternoon by popping in and out constantly with glasses of water or meaningless questions, but vindicated herself in the end with homemade lasagna, which made David reiterate his belief that she had to be the best mom ever.

“So I take it ‘best mom ever’ is entirely based on cooking ability?” Emma observed.

“No,” said David. “It’s just based on being cool. And best. In all kinds of ways.”

“I’d think your mom wouldn’t appreciate you saying that about my mom.”

David gave a short laugh. “Heh, my mother would be going for ‘worst mom ever’ if she was going to win anything.”
“Why?” asked Emma. David had finally said something about his past of his own volition.

“Because she left when I was four.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have to be. I barely even remember her. I think she used to read to me and sing while I was falling asleep. I thought she loved me. And then one day she just walked off and never came back. That’s how it felt to me. I know there was more to it. My dad tried to explain. I remember there was a lot of arguing and fighting, mostly when they thought I was asleep. It scared me. I didn’t understand what was going on.” He sighed. “So it’s just been my dad and me ever since.”

Emma paused and said, “It’s just been my mom and me around here for a while, too. My dad died two years ago.”

“What happened?”

“An accident. He worked at JPL and something went wrong. Terribly wrong. We never learned the details, but...there wasn’t even a body.”

She allowed David to put a consoling, but also exploratory, arm around her shoulder.

Talking about parents suddenly reminded Emma of something that thoughts of David and Olivia had pushed from her mind. “Oh—I just remembered. On Friday, we saw your dad!”

David’s jaw dropped.

“Or someone who said he was your dad, anyway. That’s what my mom says. He was asking about you and he had a picture. He was wearing this weird all-black outfit...”

“My dad? But how? That’s impossible!” David gasped. “He can’t be here. He just can’t!”

“If it wasn’t him, it was someone else who had a picture of you and knew your name,” was all Emma could say.

“My name...but that must mean...” David seemed to be talking to himself. “The school records! Of course. But I can’t just leave school. I’ll just have to try and avoid him.” He looked up at Emma. “I don’t want him to find me.”
“We won’t let him,” Emma assured him, though she knew that she had no way of helping.

David noticed that Olivia’s trick of always finding him worked both ways: That Monday, he didn’t so much as glimpse her, and he was already keeping a vigilant, almost paranoid eye out because of his father. He continually felt that a black-clad figure might loom up behind him and force him to return to his previous life.

His appearance was, upon reflection, not so much of a mystery. Of course he had come the same way David had, only intentionally, in search of him. But he wouldn’t have come if there was no way of return—David felt sure of that. And if there was a way of return, he would have to leave everything—his new friends, his place on the soccer team, and Emma.

Emma had met him before first period, skipping up to him and flipping her hair over her shoulder with her characteristic vibrant energy. She took stock of the gray T-shirt he was wearing, which was printed with the black letters DRESS CODE VIOLATOR.

“Nice look,” she teased.

“Yeah, I was wearing a Pabst Blue Ribbon shirt,” he had explained. “It turns out you’re not supposed to advertise alcohol at a high school.”

“Who knew?” she commiserated.

Now she was up on the bleachers, watching him practice. It was high pressure. Some of the players, like Evan, seemed to like him, but Greg and most of the older boys resented him and chose every opportunity to needle him. They would steal his stuff and shove him against the lockers in the locker room. He knew that they’d only treat him worse the better he performed, but still he couldn’t overcome the desire to prove himself to them.

They were doing three-on-two drills and Greg was goalkeeping with a vengeance. He had already blocked two of David’s shots, much to his vexation, since he had to wait for the drill to cycle through the rest of the team before he got another try. He accepted a pass from Evan, dodged around one of the defenders, put on that steely smile of resolve that heroes from action movies get before they kill the big boss, and aimed a precise curve shot just outside of Greg and inside the left goalpost.

Greg blocked it.

He groaned and kicked a clod out of the dirt. Evan smiled mildly. “It was a good try. Aren’t you glad he’s on our team?”

“That should’ve made it,” he grumbled to himself as he halfheartedly switched to defense. He momentarily considered letting the new offense team get a shot just to break Greg’s streak, but he couldn’t abide the idea of someone else making a shot that he couldn’t. Walking off the field a moment later, he cast a resentful glance back at the goalie, who stood in the sun looking like a golden Greek deity.

He didn’t look up at the bleachers while he waited. Emma would give him a thumbs-up or an encouraging smile, which would only annoy him further. There was nothing worse than being congratulated for failure.

Just before his turn, Coach Ramirez blew his whistle. “Okay, we’re done! Time for some cool-downs.”

“What?” David protested. “Nobody’s gotten a single shot past Greg yet.”

“Then he will bask in his ephemeral glory,” the coach told him.

“Aw, come on,” said Evan. “Just give us one more chance.”

“Oh, all right. Quickly. Defenders, back on the field.”

David wet his lips and glanced back and forth at Evan and the freshman they were playing with. They both knew that he should do the shooting, so the brief exchange of passes was largely just for show (and, of course, practice). He sized his opponent up. Six-one or six-two, a solid, muscular 200 pounds. David was shorter and more slender. Greg would expect him to use speed, rather than strength, but David could surprise him.

He avoided the defenders, two skinny and hopelessly clumsy underclassmen, and headed straight for the goalie. Greg stood light on his feet, waiting for a feint to the left or the right. David met him head-on, taking the shot just a second before they collided. He knocked Greg to the ground with a crunching impact so hard it made his nanocomputers rattle.

Picking himself up, he allowed himself a smug grin and a nod to Emma in the bleachers, but then he realized that Greg wasn’t getting up. He was lying curled up on the field and seemed to be having trouble breathing. The rest of the team gathered around him until the coach pushed his way through. A few minutes later, sirens could be heard approaching, and then Greg was being loaded into an ambulance by a couple of paramedics, while David watched helplessly from the edge of the field. The other players gave him wide berth. They shot him angry or reproachful glances, and Evan said, “Jeez, David. It’s just a game.”

NaNoWriMo Chapter 5

2010-11-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

The first week of school always went by dizzyingly for Emma, and this year several teachers had saddled their classes with tough assignments right away, so she found herself looking forward to a fun, fun weekend of math analysis and fighting with the school’s WebAssign page, which was supposed to allow you the convenience of entering your answers online and finding out immediately how many you’d gotten right, but actually allowed you to spend all night figuring out the precise way to phrase your answers to get them accepted. So far she had discovered that “15 kilometers” didn’t count, while “15 km” did.

History was one of the tough ones. She explained this to David as Mr. Grady told them, “Make sure you read the whole section on World War One by Monday. And write a two-page summary.”

“That section is like fifty pages,” David muttered, putting his thumb on the cover and his index finger at the end of the section and measuring it between them. “It’s like a centimeter thick!”

“He assigns a ton of work, but don’t worry, you don’t really have to read all of it,” Emma assured him. “Just skim and find a couple of things that sound important that you can put into the summary. His reading isn’t the bad part—it’s all his essays. We swear that he just grades them by how thick they are. Or by how much they weigh. We call it his grading scale.”

David laughed and then, realizing that he was still in the middle of class, tried to stifle it.

“But he never reads them,” said Emma. “I mean, how could he? MacKenzie says her sister put ‘Do you even read this?’ in the middle of one of her papers and turned it in and he didn’t even notice.”

David was feeling along the gouged rubber edge of the table. “Look at all the people who have written and drawn on this.”

“Yes, many pens have been tested here,” Emma agreed.

“ ‘Bored...’ ‘Kevin Was Here...’ Hey, here it says ‘Band-Aids.’ What do you think that means?”

Now it was Emma’s turn to stifle a giggle. “Oh my gosh, that was my friend Melanie! We had U.S. History in this room last year with Mr. Grady, and we had this joke about Band-Aids, and no I’m not going to tell you anything about it because it was just our thing with the two of us, and she must have written that on the desk!”

“Now I’m going to spend the rest of my life wondering what was funny about Band-Aids,” said David.

“And I’m going to spend the rest of my life not telling you,” Emma replied smugly.

The words the rest of my life seemed to resonate strangely with Emma. It was a mundane enough turn of phrase, but here it took on new meaning: The idea that she might have had an effect on David, however trivial, that would last him for the rest of his life, and that, even though he had arrived less than a week ago, she might know him for the rest of his life. When she allowed herself to think about it, she hoped she would. She liked the idea of him always being there, with his shy and gentle demeanor and those startling blue eyes. She found herself spending more and more of the time when he was around admiring him. His face was flawless, as if it had been created using the statues of the great masters as a guide. His lips seemed made to be kissed. The longer she looked at him, the more she wanted to try it.

She tried to push these thoughts from her head. Was she in love with him? It didn’t bear thinking about. Seventeen-year-olds didn’t know anything about love, as her mother constantly reminded her. Anyway, she would never get up the courage to tell him.

David once again looked for Emma at lunch and once again found instead, or rather was found by, the blond girl named Olivia. She smiled and walked him to an unoccupied table. He haplessly followed. The customs of this time were all obtuse to him, but high school politics the most obtuse of all (he had confided this opinion, stripped of the fact that he was a time traveler, to Emma, who assured him that she had never understood them either). How did he tell Olivia that he didn’t really want to sit with her? It seemed rude to try to avoid her, and besides, she had an uncanny ability to appear beside him out of nowhere. Once she said she wanted to sit with him it seemed rude to say that he didn’t want to sit with her, and besides, that wasn’t strictly true. He liked Olivia just fine, but he wanted to spend more time with Emma. He also wondered about the repercussions of upsetting Olivia. She seemed like a focal point of the school’s social structure. He didn’t want to put a black mark on his record right away.

“So do you have any plans this weekend?”

“I don’t even know what there is to do around here,” he admitted.

“Do you want to like go to a movie and catch a bite to eat later, then?”

Aha. This was what was known in this time as a date. David reviewed what he knew. A date was a social activity between two people who were usually of opposite genders, and it established some sort of social alliance the purpose of which fit into the larger social structure of the school in a complex way. A lot of these led to anger and hurt feelings, but they were generally regarded as something good. Dating could be a status symbol, especially for the boys. A popular and attractive girl like Olivia would make a good date.

There was no substitute for learning from experience. Once he went on a date, he would understand them perfectly well.

“Yeah, okay,” he replied. “That sounds good. I’ve got soccer practice after school, so could we do something after that? Oh, and I don’t have a car. I hope that’s okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. My parents bought me a car for my birthday. You can ride with me.”

“See you then,” said David. He glanced up at the big clock in the cafeteria, set so high on the wall that it required a ladder to set. Later in the year, Emma had told him, it would gradually slow and the prohibitive difficulty of setting it would mean that students would have a less and less accurate idea of how much time there was until class actually started, and that none of the teachers accepted “But the cafeteria clock said...” as an excuse for tardiness. But right now, at the beginning of the year, it was accurate. The real impediment was that it was analog. David had only the foggiest idea how an analog clock worked, something about big hands and little hands and what number they were closest to, but after a minute of calculation he decided that it was probably 12:40 and he therefore had five minutes to get to class. He wadded up the paper bag in which he’d brought his lunch, per Emma’s suggestion, banked it off a wall greasy from the sodas and apple cores that other students had banked off the same wall and into the trash can, and told Olivia, “See you in English, then?”

“Sure thing!”

He slung his frayed green messenger bag over his shoulder and wove his way between the tables, passing Emma and her friends along the way. “Hey, Emma,” he told her casually.

“Hey, David. I haven’t seen you around much outside of class.”

“Oh...” he shrugged. “I was looking for you, but Olivia caught me first. We’re going on a date after soccer practice. Should be fun.”

“Have fun, then,” replied Emma diffidently.

As soon as David left, MacKenzie leaned over to Emma and hissed, “Olivia? Really?”

“I guess so,” said Emma helplessly.

“But that’s just wrong! He’s nice! Olivia shouldn’t even be allowed near nice boys!”

“Tell me about it.” Emma tried to sound casual, but inwardly she roiled. She had misjudged David. He seemed so sweet on the surface, but then, like all boys, he gravitated to the girl who was blond and pretty and would giggle and flutter her eyes at him. No boy ever said that he liked shallow, airheaded girls, but there they always were, with admirers following them around like puppy dogs. Surely there must be boys who saw through the facade and picked the nice girls instead of the pretty ones. David had been one of them, she was sure of it. More than that—she had been so sure that he liked her. He would smile quietly when he saw her. Sometimes she caught him looking at her out of the side of those clear, bright eyes when he thought she wasn’t watching. He seemed to want to be near her just as she always wanted to be near him, but then...Olivia. Apparently she was the type he really wanted.

She grabbed her bag and trudged off to class.

The man called Allan Wright stood on the shoulder of a tree-lined road, holding the device with the antennas and looking up at an apparently-empty spot in the air. He was no longer wearing the helmet or gloves, but he still stood out, all in black amongst the suburban mundanity.

“Why would the entry spot be above the ground?” he pondered. “Surely the location parameter is not spherical. Then one might materialize five miles above the lab, or buried underground. I hope he wasn’t hurt by the fall.”

He pointed the locator device at the ground. “There’s the spot where he landed, and there are his footprints. Ah, good. So he was able to walk, at least. But then they disappear. It’s too sudden for the energy signature to simply have worn off of him; that would take hours, though it’s certainly gone by now. He must have been picked up.”

He pocketed the device and pulled out a tablet computer, reasoning aloud to himself, “Starting from scratch is difficult. He would have helped himself along, inserted himself here and there and made a trail for himself. Where there is a trail, someone else can follow.”

The tablet had little difficulty acquiring a signal, sidestepping the primitive encryption that had been saddled with the password LETMEIN by a family that was either foolish or indifferent. Trackers traced their way through the formless tangles of the infant internet, seeking nodes of use in this search. Missing persons and found persons. Vehicle registration. Credit cards. Criminal records, which to his relief turned up empty even of minor incidents like the one with the police officer. Online journals, where the private thoughts of the careless might yield a clue about a chance encounter with a stranger. Finally a tracker reported back, like a hound howling as it picked up the trail of its quarry. A camera, a security camera at a bank. It showed nothing, a stream of people with grossly enlarged heads and legs tapering away due to the distortion of the lens, stepping up to a row of ATMs to conduct their mundane transactions. And then there was a quiet patch, a moment when no one was around. But the tracker looked deeper. It appeared to be a video feed of nothing happening. It wasn’t. It was a digital composite, careful, thorough, and automatic, created to mimic the camera footage down to the smallest pixel. Generated, in fact, with the aid of nanocomputers, recognized now with a thrill of camaraderie by those in his fingertips, resting on the tablet. At the same time, an error showed up in the balance of one of the ATMs.

Allan’s brow furrowed. “Stealing? That will not do.”

Another tracker danced and jumped on the site of a positive hit. A school record. High school. Senior year. One record among a thousand identical records, looking on the surface just like every other, but concealing an anomaly, the secret that its data had not been input by a weary data-entry clerk in some fluorescent-lit cubicle, but had been created internally, as though through spontaneous generation.

He didn’t even have to open the picture. There he was, David Smith.

“Enrolled in school of his own accord,” he said with a smile. “That’s my boy.”

He looked around. The road was empty. He checked his wrist, recalled that he had skinned over his built-in chronometer in preparation for the journey, and checked the clock on the tablet instead, grumbling, “He said one hour. Eleven hours ago!”

Allan Wright shrugged and strode off in the direction of the school. He chose a pace that would be quick but not unnatural to an unaugmented human. The school was not far. He arrived in perfect time, just as the students were pouring out in a riot of conversation. He found himself waiting alongside a few other parents.

Allan realized that he was late and was catching the last of the students. He could easily have missed his son. He approached one of the other parents, a dark-haired woman with a no-nonsense look, and asked, “Have you seen a boy who looks like this?”

She examined the crumpled photograph he held and asked, “What’s his name?”

“David.”

“And what, you don’t know if he goes to school here or not?” she asked, looking at him doubtfully.

“He ran away from home,” he explained.

“Ran away from home and went to school?” said the woman, and while he tried to think of a reply, she added, “Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m his father.”

“Oh, are you? And how do I know that’s true? Anyone could say that.”

“I am, regardless of whether I can prove it or not,” said Allan, whose patience was wearing thin.

“Well, I haven’t seen any boy who looks like that,” she finally announced, as though she had just made up her mind on the subject, and returned the photograph.

“You could have just said that in the first place,” Allan told her testily.

Just then a teenaged girl, who had bright pink clips in her hair but an attitude as though she had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, came trudging up. “Hi, mom.”

“Hi, sweetie,” the woman replied. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Let’s just go.”

They piled into a white car with rusting fenders and drove off, leaving him standing vexed in the parking lot.

“This is a primitive age,” he said to himself. “It was my understanding that in this age, men were in charge of everything, and the women were oppressed by the men and had to do as they said.” He watched the little white car driving away. “Apparently not.”

Emma craned her neck to look out the dirty back window. Washing the car was one of those chores that they never got around to. “Who was that guy? He looks like he’s cosplaying the Matrix.”

“He’s whatting?” Her mom shot her a warning look. “That had better not be a dirty word.”

“It isn’t,” Emma sighed. “Who was he?”

“He is, or rather he says that he is David’s father.”

“You didn’t tell him anything, did you?” Emma yelped. She felt that the events of the day absolved her from the need to worry about him, but she did anyway. “David says he’s totally evil!”

“No, I didn’t,” her mother assured her.

Emma relaxed. “Well, that explains the clothes, anyway. He said his dad was some kind of weird fashion designer.”

But the image of the man in the black coat stayed with her. She felt more and more that something didn’t add up about David’s mysterious past.

NaNoWriMo Chapter 4

2010-11-22T18:55:00.000-08:00

When David had hacked himself into the school database—a laughably easy task; he wondered that half the school wasn’t fiddling with their grades—he had registered as a senior, as per Emma’s estimate, but put himself in 20^th Century History, a class for juniors, anyway. His logic, at least on the surface, had been that he didn’t know much about the time in which he’d landed and didn’t want to spend all his free time doing background research on the internet. However, he had to admit to himself that there had been another factor: Emma was in it.

He had felt irrationally, inexplicably happy when the dearth of free tables forced him to sit next to her. She made him feel shy, but also strangely secure. Maybe it was just because she had picked him up while he was still reeling from the vortex, but when she was around, he felt like he was going to be okay and his anxiety about fitting in with his new surroundings vanished.

“What are you listening to?” asked Emma, noticing the ear buds that he had combed his hair over so that Mr. Grady wouldn’t see them.

“Spoon,” he replied.

“Who are they?”
“You don’t know?” He had meant that honestly, since his only reference points for musical popularity were Dash and Lennon, both of whom he realized classified good music as “music no one else listens to,” but it came out sounding incredibly arrogant. He didn’t want to sound arrogant to Emma. The truth was that talking to her made him nervous, a fluttery, tickly feeling in his stomach that set him off balance so that he found himself never quite saying the right thing, and often retreading conversations in his mind later, thinking of things that he should have said instead. He added, “It’s just some band that Lennon introduced me to.”

He tried to pay attention to Mr. Grady, but Emma was a constant distraction. She had one lock of curly hair on the right side of her face. It curled because she would twist it around her pen while she was thinking. She was cute when she was thinking and even cuter when she was laughing, which was frequently. She would have been small by the standards of his time, small and light, but not dainty or delicate, more vivacious. He felt that he could spend hours looking at her and admiring her qualities.

He actually had just forty-five minutes, but that was all right. He would see her again at lunch.

Emma was in much the same mood at the beginning of lunch before she was rudely intercepted by Olivia. Olivia, who was blond, of course. And thin, of course. And the captain of the cheer squad, of course. And who seemed to be under the impression that everyone wanted to be her friend and would always be delighted to talk to her, regardless of the time or subject, and was ignoring Emma’s subtle signals that she was in fact the last person she wanted to see right now.

Especially when the first thing she did was bring up David, who had just appeared on the far side of the cafeteria. “I saw you were eating lunch with that new kid the last couple of days. David, right? I heard he bench pressed like a million pounds in body conditioning and the other boys are like so jealous of him. Do you know him or something?”

“He’s just a new kid. I sit next to him first period,” said Emma. Divulging the absolute minimum amount of truth was often a good strategy with Olivia, and she was particularly averse to the idea of her getting interested in David.

“I have English with him,” said Olivia, as if asserting her equal claim on him based on shared class quantity. “Isn’t he totally cute? I love his hair.”

He had traded the generic getup of a few days ago for skinny jeans, a vintage Coca-Cola tee, a cowrie shell bracelet, and navy blue Converse, no doubt (thought Emma) the influence of the two guys he was currently hanging out with. His hair had gone from combed to carefully tousled. Emma was glad that he was making friends—he seemed so shy and reserved—but thought that she might need to warn him about which guys he should hang out with if he wanted to be taken seriously.

“Do you know where he’s from?” asked Olivia. “Did he just move to town or something?”

“No, he doesn’t really talk much. He likes to be by himself.”

“That’s no good. He’ll never make friends if he always stays by himself.”

“Looks like he’s already made a couple, at least,” Emma observed. “Dashell and Lennon.”

“Yeah, well, he’ll never make real friends.” Olivia flounced across the cafeteria—she was the only person Emma had ever met who could flounce even when she wasn’t wearing a skirt—and began chatting with David, pulling him away from the other two boys.

“I guess I walked into that one,” said Emma ruefully, as she turned to go look for MacKenzie.

If the rules of soccer have changed in the past hundred and fifty years, thought David, I might have some explaining to do. Everyone played soccer in his time, but he had never been any good at it and quit when he was fourteen. It turned out that not very good by his standards was excellent by these people’s standards. He was juggling the ball back and forth absently, looking around at the couple dozen other teenagers, who ranged from skinny, acne-spattered freshmen to the tough-looking seniors who were the team’s stars. The only person he recognized was Greg, whose dark eyes had flicked onto him when he arrived and then away again with an almost imperceptible sneer, and who now stood with his hands on his knees, his wiry arms tanned and golden in the sun, black hair pulled back with a sweat band, a picture of pure focus.

Coach Ramirez, who had very short hair, wraparound sunglasses, and a wide grin, told them, “Okay Coyotes, I’m not going to lie to you: This is going to be a tough year for us. We lost two good midfielders and a great striker. Luckily, we’ve still got our excellent goalie. Greg is also the team captain, so make sure to listen to him.” He slapped Greg on the shoulder. “We’ve got a lot of new students on the team. Glad to have you, but you should know that I push my team hard. We’re not just here to play around. You will be on time for every practice and you will stay focused and do what I say, or you will no longer be a part of this team. It’s a privilege, not a right. Understand?”

There were nods and murmurs of understanding.

“Great, we’re going to start with some warm-ups. We’ve got some cones set up; you’re just going to dribble the ball in and out of the cones, to the end, and then back. Okay?”

What David liked about sports was the tactile aspect. The slick grass. Cleats kicking up clods of dirt. Sun and sweat and August heat. That solid feel when you made contact with the ball. Movement and energy.

They did some warm-ups and some speed drills and then started a keep-away variant where two players try to pass the ball to each other and the others try to intercept it. Two of the freshmen began, but Greg quickly captured the ball from one of them and one of the midfielders, a ginger-haired boy whose name David had not learned, intercepted it from the other. They were both good and several minutes passed, to the increasing frustration of the rest of the team, as they deftly kept the ball away from everyone else. David stayed at the fringe of the group, watching, learning to judge how they moved, before darting in and intercepting a pass to Greg.

The latter gave him an acid glare as he returned the ball to the midfielder. The other players, Greg included, could never be as quick and agile as David could in their unenhanced bodies. He found that he could head them off and avoid their attacks. The midfielder was not bad either; between the two of them, they kept possession of the ball until the coach finally blew his whistle and announced, “Okay, okay, enough of that. Water break.”

The players diffused in various directions, most back towards the bleachers, where they collected their water bottles. Coach Ramirez pulled David aside. “That was some passing.”

“Thanks,” he replied.

“And I noticed that you’re left-footed.”

David nodded. He was left-handed as well, not nearly as much of a rarity in his time, since it was a common request among parents for its novelty value and association with creativity and individuality. It had been his mother’s choice, not that she seemed to care about that or anything else about him anymore.

“Well,” said the coach, “I would say we have our new left shooter.”

“Great!” said David. “I played left shooter back in junior high.”

He went to get some water, just then noticing that there was someone sitting on the top row of the bleachers, watching the practice. It was Olivia. But, he realized, she wasn’t watching the practice. She was watching him.

The suburban side streets were quiet and dark at three in the morning, their occasional streetlights too sparse to really provide much illumination. A lone patrol car far at the end of the street was industriously applying tickets to the cars whose owners had been foolish enough to leave them on the street overnight.

Only an orange tabby, pursuing its own private business, observed the shimmer and flash of light, a flash as if a door to a bright room had been opened in the middle of the air and let a chink of light through. The cat fled to the safety of a hedge as two figures seemed to tumble out of the door and into the middle of the street.

They rose and looked around. They were dressed identically in black jackets, black pants, black gloves, and black helmets with visors, the last of which they now took off. Both were middle-aged and male.

“We made it,” one stated.

“Yes,” observed the other. “Now you have seen for yourself: The anomaly is a portal. It destroys nothing; it only transports it.”

“Through space and time,” said the first wonderingly. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. The ramifications of this...” He shook his head. “First we must find my son. Ramifications can wait until we return.”

The second smiled to himself.

The cop, who had worked his way to their part of the street, spotted the two men and approached them with a condescending swagger. “You two are begging to get hit by a car, standing in the middle of the street dressed like that. And what do you think you’re up to anyway, sneaking around the neighborhood in the middle of the night all dressed in black?”

“We were not sneaking,” said the second.

“We’re sorry,” added the first. “We don’t want any trouble.”

The officer did not seem satisfied, particularly when he noticed the sidearm on the second man’s belt. He pointed to it and asked, “Do you have a license for that?”

“Yes,” the man replied indifferently.

The cop seemed to realize that there was something odd about the weapon. In fact, only its general shape resembled a firearm; otherwise it looked more like a plastic child’s toy. “Wait, hang on. What is that?”

The second man removed it from its holster and held it flat on his palm for inspection. “It’s a T-38 400nm interference ray,” and at the cop’s blank look, he rephrased, “A stun gun, like a taser.”

“That’s the darndest thing I’ve ever seen,” said the police officer, “And it doesn’t look like any taser.”

“Shall I demonstrate it?” asked the man in a carefully measured tone.

“You watch yourself!” the cop replied sharply. “Now put that thing away nice and slow.”

He obliged.

“Do you two have any identification?”
They looked at each other and the first man admitted, “No. Is that required for walking down the street?”

“I think I’d better take you two down to the station until we can get all this sorted out,” the cop said, as though his mind had been chewing through the information and had finally ground out this result. He pulled out a pair of cuffs.

“I don’t think you want to try that,” the second man warned.

“You just take it easy,” the cop advised. “And don’t try anything with that funny weapon of yours.”

The minute he slapped a cuff on one of the first man’s black-gloved wrists, the man snapped it off as if it had been a handcuff-shaped twig. With the back of one hand, he struck the police officer with such force that he fell onto the street, unconscious.

“That may not have put us off to a good start,” the second man suggested.

“He was only going to be trouble.”

“Yes, but threatening him with the stunner was probably a bad idea.”

“No matter. He has no idea who we are and we will be gone again in a day.”

“What about ID? I thought you said we wouldn’t need any.”
“No, I said that we could get the appropriate ID more easily from here. If it worries you, then perhaps we should split up. I can go arrange for some appropriate identification; you can begin searching for the boy. What method were you going to begin with?”

“The energy signature of his arrival. That will give me a good starting location, since this old-fashioned GPS network may not pick up his locator chip very well.”

“And are you picking up the signature?”
The first man pulled a small device with a few antennas and a screen out of his pocket and spent a minute setting its parameters before flipping it on. He said excitedly, “It’s less than three miles away!”

“I believe the landing site is a random location within a certain proximity of the other portal,” said the second man. “However, I don’t expect to gather enough data to ever prove this. Now, what name are you going by?”

“Allan Wright. What about you?”

“Richard Cooper. I’ll have valid ID for both him and Allan Wright in an hour. Now go find that energy signature; I can always find you.” He glanced down at the supine officer. “We should make ourselves scarce.”

The other nodded. They put their helmets back on and then, with an imperceptible shimmer, vanished.

NaNoWriMo Chapter 3

2010-11-22T18:53:00.000-08:00

The first day of school approached for most students with a knell, like the Grim Reaper. This, in Emma’s opinion, was stupid. All her friends were at school. Of course she hung out with them other times, but she could only use the car when her mother didn’t need it, and up until days ago she’d needed to be back by dark. School had an element of convenience in that everyone was gathered in one place, and on the first day of school, there was the added bonus of gossip to catch up on.

Today, she had to admit that she had an ulterior motive. She was really, really hoping to see David.

He was so mysterious. He had just appeared out of nowhere, reluctant to talk about his past, desperately needing her help. But it wasn’t just his mystery that made him keep popping into her mind. He just had a draw to him. There was something special, unique, unlike all the other boys she knew. Something that made her long to be around him.

What she felt approaching like a knell was graduation. Everyone else was already chattering about their plans, but Emma had scarcely even begun to think about college. Partly it was the money; her mother had done the best she could after her father died, but if Emma couldn’t snag a scholarship, she would have to scrape together every penny she could make at summer jobs to make it to even a state college. But mostly it wasn’t the money; it was her. Her friends wanted to be doctors and artists and teachers and they knew—they just knew. Her friend Amy had aspired to be a cop since she was ten, and still did. Emma had no such luck. She found a lot of things mildly interesting—reading, writing, music, and of course horseback riding—but nothing felt like it was really her thing, something she wanted to commit to for the next four years. She wasn’t even positive she wanted to go to college, her mother’s strong encouragement notwithstanding. Her future just felt like it didn’t add up to anything.

“This is going to suck,” MacKenzie announced, falling in beside Emma as they walked down the cinder-block hall in search of their new lockers.

“Whatever, it’s school,” Emma replied.

“Math first period. Chemistry second. I rest my case,” said MacKenzie, handing Emma her schedule.

“Awesome, we have Math Analysis together!” said Emma. “See? Not so bad.”

“And what, we’re going to hang out together and talk and do class projects together? It’s math. It sucks no matter who you’re sitting next to.”

“We can do calculator races,” Emma submitted humbly.

“Whatever, you’ve got a TI-84 Plus. You always win,” MacKenzie grumbled.

“Where’s your locker?”

“188.”

“Check it, I’m 190! See? Today is just getting better!”

MacKenzie looked at Emma as though she had sprouted a second head. “Did you have Valium for breakfast or something?”

“No, I’m just ready for school to start. Something wrong with that?” She pulled open the door of her creaky, dirt-brown locker. “Hey, my combination is 1-2-12. Isn’t that weird?”
“And now you’ll need to go get it changed, because you just told it to like 100 people,” said Mackenzie.

“Whatever.” She shoved all her books except her math book into the locker and slung her backpack over her shoulder. “Ready for math?”

“There is no such thing as being ready for math. As I already said, it’s going to suck.”

MacKenzie turned out to be right.

There was much grumbling and bemoaning between first and second period, wherein Emma pointed out that sharing a class was good because that meant that they could complain to each other. MacKenzie pointed out that they had five other classes that they wouldn’t be able to commiserate about, starting with this next one.

True enough, Emma thought as she dropped her bag on a table in the back of the history room. The walls were plastered with timelines and quotes from famous people, and the room made itself a relic by containing a blackboard and chalk. As other students trickled in, her suspicions that this class contained nobody she knew became stronger and stronger.

But then, just before the bell, in walked someone she did know.

He was medium height, slender almost to the point of fragility, with fingers that were long and delicate without their gloves. His skin was pale, nearly translucent except for the color in his cheeks and lips, with a perfect complexion. She had thought previously that his hair was blond, but it wasn’t. Now she could see that it was a light golden brown, the color of caramel, and if fell in silky locks across his forehead so that he had to brush it out of his crystalline eyes. He was dressed to blend in, with nondescript jeans and a T-shirt.

He looked around the room, scanning the various tables already occupied by pairs of students with no interest in the new kid, until his eye met Emma’s.

He drifted to the back of the room and gave her a shy smile. “Hi.”

“David!” she said, trying to conceal the sudden thrill she got from seeing him. “You decided to come to school after all.”

“I told you I would.” He looked down at her bag, which slouched on the other side of her desk as if it had a mind of its own and would consider relocating to be a terrible inconvenience. “Is someone sitting there?”

“No!” she quickly slid her bag back over to her side of the desk. He took the other chair and took off his own backpack, which was red and black.

“All my stuff is brand new, of course,” he said. “It looks like I just got off an assembly line.”

“No, you look good,” she told him, then thought that was too much and backpedaled. “I mean, your stuff looks good. It’s a nice backpack. Looks like it would do a good job. Of holding books or whatever. I guess you decided not to wear the outer space jacket to school, huh?”

He laughed, which made his eyes sparkle. “Yeah, I really don’t like my dad’s stuff. It’s weird and I get way too many funny looks.”

“Those clothes were really weird!” Emma agreed. “I just didn’t want to say so because who knows, maybe you really liked them. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. But keep those clothes around. Maybe you could make them into a Halloween costume or something.”

“I’m going to keep them,” David told her. “They’re the only thing I’ve got left from home, remember? If I got rid of them, it would be like I had appeared out of nowhere. Like I was nobody at all...before you found me.”

She looked up and met his eyes, which were deep and sincere, but just then, a squat, balding teacher in a sweater vest walked to the front of the room, rubbing his stomach, and announced in his best attempt at a room-commanding voice, “Everyone awake? Did you all have a good summer vacation? Well, I’m Mr. Grady, and this is 20^th Century History, so if you’re not supposed to be in 20^th Century History, then that means you’re in the wrong room!”

“All right, you boneheads!” Mr. Otis, unlike Mr. Grady, could command a room whether he was trying to or not. He wasn’t mean, just blunt and really, really loud. “Time to see what you guys are made of! We’re going to start with the bench press. We’re just doing this to get an idea of where you’re at now so that we can see how much you’ve improved by the end of the semester. Who wants to be first?”

“Look at the new kid,” snickered one of the guys. “What is he, like 12? Aren’t you supposed to be in junior high gym class?”

“Total spaghetti arms.”
“Don’t get out of your parents’ basement much, do you?”

David stood by the wall, studying his immaculate white tennis shoes and meekly accepting the ridicule. He kept one eye casually on the other boys, lifting a hundred or a hundred fifty pounds, until Mr. Otis asked, “Is that everyone? Hey! You in the corner! What’s your name?”

“David,” he answered quietly.

“Well, come over here and have a try at the bench press. How much do you think you can start with?”

“He’d better just start with the bar. It’s a pretty heavy bar,” said an older boy, whose position as the TA gave him more responsibility but no more courtesy.

“I can do more,” said David, settling himself on the bench.

Mr. Otis sized him up and said, “Greg is right. Maybe we should just start with the bar.”

“Okay,” said David, lifting the bar, then lifting it again in case Greg was still not convinced.

Mr. Otis said, “That looked pretty easy. What do you say we put a couple of 20s on there?”

“If you like.” David lifted the now 90-pound weight.

Mr. Otis added some more.

And some more.

The other boys, some of whom had been doing sets on the other machines but most of whom were talking and goofing off, began to gather around them.

David pressed 200. 300. Just shy of 400, he finally let the bar sink down onto his jersey-clad chest, now drenched with sweat and gasping for breath. Greg, who had lost his mockery sometime around 250, began to lift the bar back on the rack and found he couldn’t. “Hey David, can you give me a little push here to get this back up?”

David obliged.

By now, everyone was watching him with faces in various expressions of astonishment. Mr. Otis himself only said, “I guess it’s time to do the mile.”

David pondered whether to hold back as they filed up the concrete stairs from the weight room to the track, but he decided against it. Some of his friends had implants that could make them outrun a car, but David, with the basic kit that he had never felt the need to replace or upgrade, was decidedly only human-plus. He’d be as good as an exceptional boy his age, but not impossibly good.

“David, get out there in lane eight,” Mr. Otis barked. David obliged. He dug in his toes, let his fingertips brush the ground, and waited for the whistle.

In an instant he was ahead of the others. The track curved around once, twice, a third time, and finally, with pain just beginning to sear his side, he passed the starting line and jogged to a halt. Mr. Otis paused the stopwatch. “Five minutes, four seconds. Not bad at all!”

“Not bad? That’s an understatement,” came the voice of another teacher, who had appeared some time while he was running. He held out a hand to David. “I’m Mr. Ramirez, the soccer coach. Who are you and why aren’t you on my team?”

“David Smith, and...I didn’t know?” he said hesitantly, taking the proffered hand.

“Tryouts are today and tomorrow, but you don’t need to try out. Just come on Wednesday, right after school. As far as I’m concerned, you’re already on the team.”

“Oh, okay. Cool,” said David, trying to gauge exactly how special this offer was and, thus, how much enthusiasm he should express. Human school wasn’t quite coming naturally to him.

“Sorry you had to suffer through our cafeteria food,” said Emma. “Important rule I should have told you before: Always bring a bag lunch.”

“Thanks for the tip, but I don’t really have a kitchen or anything,” said David.

“Where are you staying?”

“Just a motel. I should get an apartment, though.”

“Remember, you can always come stay with us.”

“I know,” he said, standing up and taking his empty tray. “Where do these go?”
“You can just pile them over there at the end of the lunch counter.” As he moved away, she grabbed his sleeve. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask—are you doing all right?”

“In what respect?” he asked reasonably.

“I mean, you’ve been running away from home and it’s none of my business and I’m not going to ask if you don’t want to tell me, but it must have been something bad. And then you got robbed and practically mugged. And now you’re here, trying to fit in and be normal at a school where you’re new and don’t know anyone. I figure it must be a lot.”

“I’m doing okay,” he answered. “Thanks for asking. It’s nice to know that someone cares about me.”

David, on his way to the parking lot and the bus stop after school, found himself meandering up a wheelchair ramp that turned back and forth several times, raising itself about a meter every time. This seemed inefficient to him, so he grabbed the rail of the next level up and vaulted over, then did the same a couple more times until he was at the top.

Two boys were sitting on the rail, smoking cigarettes. One, who had a patchy beard, wore plaid shorts, a Gap Athletic shirt with the G and the L scratched off, green and white Vans, and oversized sunglasses with green plastic frames. The other, who had hair dyed a shade of red just purple enough to show it wasn’t natural, wore big horn-rimmed glasses, tight jeans, and an antique watch with a leather band. The first held a skateboard plastered with stickers; the second, a frayed messenger bag repaired with duct tape.

“Sweet moves, man,” said one.

“Pretty deck,” the other concurred. “You know parkour?”

“Uh…no, actually, I don’t,” David admitted.

“Parkour? Free running? It’s this sweet sport. French. Well, know it or not, you’re totally doing it.”

“You’re that new kid, aren’t you? David?” observed the first boy. He dropped his cigarette butt onto the asphalt and ground it out with the heel of his flip-flop. “This is Lennon. I’m Dashiell. You can call me Dash.” He hopped off the rail. “Do you skate?”

“No, I’ve never tried.”

“I can do a wicked grind down that rail. Check it out.” Dash jumped the skateboard onto the rail and slid down, back and forth, to the bottom. The impressiveness of the move was somewhat mitigated when he had to walk back up. He told David, “You should try it. You’d be good at skating.”

He pushed the board over to David with one foot. David gave it a try and found that, as per Dash’s prediction, he took to it naturally. Dash showed him a few moves and declared him an expert in the making. “I want to get into bike tricks, too. There’s this fixed-gear bike that I really like, but my parents say if I want it I should get a job and pay for it myself.”

“A fixed-gear bike?” asked David, confused. “What’s that, a bike where the gears don’t turn?”

“No, it’s a one-gear bike where you can backpedal and do awesome stuff...”

Lennon, who was bored by the sports conversation, announced, “Let’s blow this joint, man. Let’s get some coffee and then go to Penny Lane. I hear the Shins just rereleased Inverted World on vinyl.”

“Vinyl?” asked David, who suddenly felt that he might have seriously misjudged the technology level of the era into which he’d been thrown.

“Yeah, it’s so retro. My dad gave me his old turntable.” To Dash, he added, “We taking my car or yours?”

“We’d better take yours. Mine isn’t working so well. The key kind of got stuck in the ignition and it still works but I can’t lock the car anymore. I figure if anyone tries to steal it, the joke’s on them anyway, and they’d need to know that the driver’s side door doesn’t open and you have to crawl in from the passenger side.”

They began to walk off together, then looked back at David. Lennon asked, “Are you coming or what?”

“I didn’t know I was invited,” said David.

“Well duh, you’re new here and someone’s got to show you all the good hang-outs.”

David obligingly caught up with them as they piled into Lennon’s maroon Geo Prism. The two boys began arguing the second they pulled out of the parking lot.

“Where are you going?” demanded Dash. “You have to turn right to get to Zephyr.”

“I thought we were going to Café Culture,” Lennon protested.

“Zephyr is better. They have smoothies.”

“You’re getting a smoothie, seriously? Café Culture has better coffee and it’s all organic.”

“You can get organic at Zephyr. And they have all those couches and stuff, and you can smoke hookahs on the porch on Sundays.”

“It’s not Sunday,” Lennon pointed out.

“David, where do you want to go?” Dash called to the back seat.

“Um…Zephyr, I guess?” David chose randomly.

“Rock on! Told you Zephyr was better,” Dash said, elbowing the driver.

“Shut up, he’s never even been there.”

Zephyr was an old house with grey shingles that had been converted into a café. The interior was still divided into rooms, which were filled with overstuffed couches occupied by teenagers writing in their journals or using Macbooks.

At the counter, a Japanese girl with black mascara and a nose piercing scowled at them. “Ugh, it’s you guys again? What do you want this time?”

“Come on, Marianne, you know you love us. We’re your best customers,” Lennon wheedled.

“Most pain-in-the-butt customers. And you brought some loser friend with you. Great, you made my day. Just tell me what you want.”

“Organic free trade iced chai latte with extra foam,” said Lennon.

“Organic free trade blended almond white mocha,” said Dash.

“Organic free trade…what he said?” said David, pointing to Dash.

“Dude, you don’t always have to do what Dash says,” the other boy protested.

“Maybe if all your ideas didn’t suck,” Dash suggested.

“Am I lame?” David brooded as he accepted his drink from the unimpressed Marianne, whose fingernails were painted black.

“Nah, Marianne’s just a total ice queen,” Lennon assured her.

“She’s so deck,” said Dash.

“Tell me about it.”

“I could be, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know anything about clothes or music or anything.”

“We can help you with that,” said Lennon, sipping his latte with studied coolness. “We’re going to Penny Lane anyway. We’ll hook you up with some sweet jams.”

“And then we can go thrift store shopping!” added Dash.

“Good idea!” To David, he added, “We could get you some dope vintage stuff.”

To David, his clothes were already vintage, but he didn’t say anything. He allowed them to drive him down to a record store across the street from a community college where Lennon said he was taking some Running Start classes. As they opened a door with a little jingling bell tied to the handle, the owner called, “Hey guys. You here for all that Velvet Underground we just got in on vinyl?”

“Not today, Steve,” said Lennon. “We brought our friend who doesn’t listen to much music and we need to hook him up with something good.”

“What format?”

“Probably just some CDs he can rip and put on his iPod.”

“I actually don’t have an iPod,” said David, choosing that as a better response than asking what an iPod was.

“Then you’re in the right place!” said Steve. “We buy and sell used iPods. Here, let’s pick one out for you.”

An iPod turned out to be a portable music player about the size of a deck of cards. David, who like most kids his age just uploaded his music directly to the nanocomputers in his ears, found this concept curious. Steve rummaged through a bin of music players, rattling off storage capacities roughly equal to that of David’s pinky nail, and with David’s help they eventually settled on a silver 8 GB iPod Nano with a slight scratch across the screen. Steve threw in a pair of cheap earbuds for free as the other two boys quibbled over bands and albums and, at David’s suggestion that they each pick out a couple that they liked, settled on four CDs that they assured him he absolutely could not live without.

Those things stashed in his backpack, they walked him across the street and past the community college to Out of the Closet.

“It’s a queer thrift store, which is why the clothes are so good,” Dash explained.

“What does it even mean to be a queer thrift store?” David pondered. “Is that a thrift store owned by queers, or do queers donate the clothes, or does that just mean it’s painted pink?”
Dash furrowed his bushy eyebrows. “You know, I don’t know.”

Lennon had already dived into the jackets. “Hey, check out this peacoat!”

“You already have a peacoat,” said Dash.

“Not for me, it’s for David. Here, hold this.” Lennon handed David a navy-colored wool coat with big wooden buttons. They spent even longer at the thrift store than at the record store, but eventually they found themselves sitting on the rim of the fountain in the middle of the community college lawn, David surrounded by three large bags stuffed with ironic clothing, Lennon plucking away at an acoustic guitar that he kept stashed in the trunk of his car. He bit his lower lip in concentration while he played.

“What am I supposed to do with the scarf?” asked David.

“Wear it,” Dash replied.

David had no idea how one wore a scarf, but instead he asked, “Won’t it be too hot?”

“It’ll get cooler,” Dash assured him.

“Is it going to get that much cooler? It’s really hot here. You have palm trees.” David found that novel.

“So you must have come here from a long ways,” Dash guessed.

“Oh yeah.”

Pluck, pluck, strum, strum, in the California sun.

NaNoWriMo Chapter 2

2010-11-15T15:43:00.002-08:00

The boy who called himself David woke up from a series of restless dreams to warm, comforting sunlight streaming in through white tulle curtains. It had a dreamy look to it that made him wonder, at first, if he were really awake. But he was, and this room was nothing like his bedroom. He slumped back down onto the bed. So everything from the previous day had really happened. It must have—all the muscles in his body ached. Whatever that thing had been, it hadn’t killed him, but it seemed intent on impressing upon him that it could have if it had wanted to by making him feel like he’d been halfway dismembered. He wondered what the people at home thought. He’d inadvertently made himself the subject of an experiment they had probably been itching to try. They had never even tried seeing the effect of the orb on any kind of solid object, for fear of unleashing the terrible energy that it had absorbed, but here he had gone and fed it a human being. What had it looked like from their perspective? He had just disappeared, probably. Fallen in and not come back out. They would think he was dead. He was effectively; he wasn’t coming back, that was for sure. There was one speck of ironic consolation: His friend had probably gotten into an enormous heap of trouble.
He threw off the comforter and stepped out of bed. Emma had apologetically explained to him the night before that this was a girls-only household and they didn’t have any guy stuff around, but they had hooked him up with a pair of flannel pants (too short) and a T-shirt (too large) to sleep in, plus women’s shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, and a hazardous-looking razor. The latter was, as he understood it, hazardous because all razors in this era were designed that way, not because that was a special property of women’s razors, but he had grown up in what Emma would term a boys-only household and therefore didn’t know or desire to know much about women’s hygiene. After his shower, he decided to allow the thin layer of blondish peach fuzz to remain on his cheeks rather than risking slitting his throat with that primitive instrument.
He had no choice but to wear his clothes from the day before, which weren’t even suited for daily life back where he was from. He examined them for damage. They seemed okay; the illusion of heat and burning must have been just that—an illusion. He decided not to wear the jacket or the gloves. The shirt and trousers looked tolerably like 2000’s clothing as long as you didn’t know that they were made of metamaterials, so that just left the boots. Nothing to be done about those.
He descended the stairs cautiously, fleetingly imagining the possibility that his host family might have forgotten that he was there, or left to do whatever people back then (or rather, back now) spent their time doing. But there they were, gathered around the dining room table. Sandra looked up and told him, “Ah, David, you’re awake. I made you some strawberry pancakes.”
Fresh fruit? They must be rich, contrary to the appearance of their home. Unless they’d splurged on strawberries just for him, but no, both of them had strawberry-stained plates. He said, “That sounds good.”
Sandra got up and went to the kitchen. At the bottom of the stairs, he hovered awkwardly until Emma waved him over to the table. “Come on, have a seat.”
He did. The morning light streamed through the dining room’s big south-facing bay windows, which were framed with green-and-yellow checkered curtains that lent the room a cheerful feel. Emma looked cheerful too. She was a short girl (unless girls in this time were just not as tall) with dark brown hair framing a round face with dimples and bright eyes. She didn’t look at all like a girl from his time.
Sandra set a plate in front of him piled with the most gorgeous pancakes he had ever seen, steaming hot and topped with sliced strawberries and a dusting of powdered sugar. His eyes widened. “Wow. These are amazing!”
“Thank you. Now, Emma, why don’t you ever tell me that?” asked Sandra, putting a spatula-wielding hand on her hip.
“Maybe because you gave me the burned ones?” Emma replied.
“I’m not going to give burned pancakes to a guest!”
Getting involved in the argument seemed much less appealing than diving into the stack of pancakes, which he did with relish. He tried to think of the last time he’d had a fresh strawberry. His last birthday, he thought, some four months back...or a hundred and fifty years from now, depending on how you looked at it. He felt like he should eat them slowly and savor them, but that was impossible. They were just too delicious.
“That is the fastest I’ve ever seen someone eat a plate of pancakes,” said Emma. “Do you want some more?”
“Are there more strawberries?” asked David eagerly.
“No, you just ate the last of Earth’s strategic strawberry reserves.”
“I did?” he asked, momentarily panicked. “Oh. Ha, ha. Very funny.”
“Mom!” Emma yelled. “David wants more pancakes!”
“Don’t yell between rooms!” Sandra yelled back, but came and took David’s plate anyway. A minute later, she emerged from the kitchen with another laden plate, which David polished off just as quickly. He was so hungry. He began to worry that he was giving himself away—after all, didn’t organics need less food than normal people?—but Emma’s mom told him, “You’re a growing boy, so you just have as much as you want.”
“Your mom’s the best!” he told Emma later while they were loading the dishwasher, a procedure that made him feel like he was at the very boundaries of civilization, but which only seemed fair in exchange for that amazing breakfast.
“What, because she made pancakes?” laughed Emma. “She does make the best pancakes in the world, but it isn’t rocket science, you know.”
“Rocket science is easy compared to good cooking,” he told her sincerely. His father excelled at the former and could barely attempt the latter.
“You should try her omelettes,” said Emma.
Emma started the dishwasher and flipped over a magnet that was stuck to it. It was labeled “Clean” on one side and “Dirty” on the other. “We have a system,” she explained.
Walking him back to the family room, Emma asked, “So, um, what are you going to be doing now? Were you on your way somewhere?”
“Just away,” David replied with a shrug. “I guess I may as well stop here as anywhere.”
“So what are you going to do now? Are you going to get a job or something?”
“I guess maybe I should, but I mean I’m just seventeen and it’s not like there are loads of jobs around.” He had read a bit about current events on the computer.
“I thought you said you were eighteen.”
He held a finger to his lips. “I just didn’t want your mom calling Child Protective Services on me,” he admitted.
“Are you going to school, then?” Emma asked. “If you’re seventeen, you’d be what, a senior?”
“School?” he asked absently. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
“You should,” she said. “Rose High—that’s where I go—is starting tomorrow and I know that’s like the worst start day ever because it’s still August and seriously what’s with that, but you should go. You wouldn’t want to be just another high school dropout.”
“I guess you must think education is really important,” David surmised. His dad had attempted to hammer the same sentiment into him, but it hadn’t taken very well.
“Not really,” said Emma. “School sucks mostly and there’s math and stuff, but my friends are cool and you could meet them, and I don’t know, maybe we would have some classes together or something. I mean, you’re all alone, right? You don’t know anyone here or anything, so I figured I could introduce you to people...”
“That might be nice,” he said, and Emma seemed to perk up at the prospect.
She added, “And I’m sure my mom would let you stay in the guest room as long as you like.”
“I shouldn’t,” he said reluctantly.
“It’s not like we’re using it for anything.”
“I know, but I shouldn’t just take advantage of you guys like that. I’ve still got some money.” That wasn’t true, but the truth would be hard to explain. “I can find a place of my own.”
“What are you going to do when your money runs out?” she asked. “Living on your own is expensive. There’s food and bills and everything. If you stay here, it won’t cost you anything, and...” her brown eyes twinkled... “Mom can make you strawberry pancakes every single morning, if you like.”
“That is...very tempting,” he admitted honestly. “You guys have been super nice to me and I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t picked me up, but I can’t just stay here forever. I’ll be okay, I promise.”
“Do you need a lift somewhere?” Emma asked.
“Down to the mall would be nice, so I can pick up some new clothes and stuff,” said David.
“New clothes are definitely in order. Speaking of which, those might not have been the best choice for hitchhiking,” Emma informed him. “They kind of stand out. Make you look like a target.”
He gave a short laugh. “Tell me about it. My dad is this fashion designer who does all this crazy future postmodern outer-space-looking stuff, and I always end up having to wear it.”
“I can help you pick out clothes if you like,” said Emma eagerly.
David, who hadn’t anticipated that question, fumbled for an excuse in his mind. Girls had a big advantage in this area over boys; they could just say that they had girl things to do and any man in the world would immediately give them miles of space. Guys didn’t have any equivalent category of guy stuff that girls were forbidden to pry into. Luckily, he was delivered from the problem. Emma smote her forehead with her palm and cried, “Shoot. It’s Sunday and I have to take care of Summer. It’s this horse that I ride over at the arroyo and part of the deal is I have to contribute a certain amount care. Can I just drop you off at the mall?”
“Yes,” he said quickly, trying not to sound overly enthusiastic. “Go play with your horse. Or whatever you do with a horse. I can just take the bus from the mall.”
“Need some change?”
“What, like change of scenery?” He’d gotten his fill of that.
“No, like coins to pay for the bus.”
Idiot! “Yes, please.”
He tried to talk to her on the drive over to the mall, but his mind seemed to stall while thinking of things to say. He didn’t know enough about this world to hold a normal conversation. If Emma found that weird, she didn’t show it; indeed, she seemed genuinely interested in everything he said. She seemed like a nice girl. He liked her.
As she pulled up in the mall parking lot, she told him, “If you aren’t going to stay with us, you’ve got to at least promise me you’ll come to school.”
“I’ll come to school,” he agreed. Emma and her mother were the only people he knew, and he wanted to see them again. He got out of the car, grabbing the canvas tote bag that he had accepted from Sandra as a place to stuff his jacket and gloves instead of wearing them, and waved goodbye to Emma, who lingered as long as she could before driving off.
When she was gone, her took stock of his surroundings. It didn’t look to be much of a mall—just a few large retail outlets around a parking lot—and it was pretty quiet on a random Sunday afternoon. A few parents, arms dragged in opposite directions by rowdy children, were trying to finish their back-to-school shopping. He located a couple of ATMs on the wall of a bank. A bit public for his tastes. Anyone who bothered to look at him for more than a few seconds was bound to figure out that he was up to something odd, and if he wasn’t careful, they might call the police on him and he’d really be in a world of hurt. He made a mental note to keep an eye out for metal detectors, too. If he set one off, it would be hard to explain.
He approached the ATM and laid his hand on the screen. It was a computer like any other computer. He could feel it. He could feel the tingle of the nanocomputers gravitating to his fingertips, making calculations, rearranging themselves to emit signals that the ATM could understand. Specific signals. Signals designed to make the machine forget that he was a broke teenager and think that he was the almighty ruler of banks and it must show him obeisance. With a beep, it obligingly did, and displayed a list of options on the screen that would not have been available to an average user. He settled for $500 and took, with bemusement, the primitive slips of paper that the machine spat out at him. Before leaving, he placed his hand on the screen again and let the nanomachines soothingly convince the ATM that this had never happened and it had absolutely no idea where its missing cash had gone and it was probably the fault of that other ATM over there which, you know, had been hanging with the wrong crowd lately.
He was about to head over to one of the clothing outlets when an electronics store caught his eye. He said to himself, “If I had a computer, I would be able to do this from anywhere. School records. Driver’s license. I could put myself wherever I wanted.”

The vortex swirled ravenously, casting its stark illumination on the faces of the four scientists clad in long white lab coats, two male and two female, who stood by the rail peering down at it. The room now contained three stoic guards in carbon-fiber armor, armed with lasers, one posted at each door.
One of the scientists, a young Asian woman with her hair pulled back into a bun, held a tablet and a stylus and looked anxiously at the other three. The other woman was shaking her head and saying, “None of the readings show any further deviations—they’ve gone back to the precise levels they were at before. He was subject to a tremendous amount of energy. He was probably destroyed the second he touched it.”
The third scientist was resting one arm heavily on the rail. His other hand was in his gray hair. The flashes of light illuminated two astoundingly clear blue eyes, full of despair. He said, “Then 116 is dead.”
“Our instruments can’t pick up any sign of him. He is gone.”
“Shut it down. We should have long ago. We should have the moment it was created. I knew that it would only be a danger. We must destroy it before someone else gets killed.”
The fourth scientist, the eldest and tallest of the group, said abruptly, “454, do you remember the polarity experiments we were doing back in April?”
“I think so,” the youngest scientist said timidly. She tried not to cower when the director turned to look at her.
“Go find those results for me. 2358, please go make sure that the stabilizers were not showing any deviations around the time of the accident. There was a distinct flare-up and we wouldn’t want that to have been due to our negligence.”
The two female scientists left. He came alongside the one leaning on the rail and said quietly, “2181.”
“What.”
“Your son is not dead.”
“You heard 454. Destroyed instantly.”
“No. You know full well that what the vortex absorbs isn’t just being destroyed. That would violate the conservation of energy. But our measurements indicate that it isn’t being stored, either. The anomaly contains a great deal of energy, but nowhere near all of it. It’s going somewhere.”
“I know all this.”
“And where the energy is, there your son is also. Alive and unharmed.”
“Impossible. You think that you can console me with these fairy tales?”
“They are not just tales. I have studied this phenomenon for a long time, long before it was created. Do you know that this is not the first anomaly of this kind to be created?”
“I keep track of all the latest research. There hasn’t been anything like it.”
“This is not recent. A hundred and fifty years ago, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory created one, also by accident. The equipment was more primitive, yes, but the phenomenon was the same.”
“And you want me to believe that this was never studied and never published, and that it has just been forgotten?”
“There were preliminary studies, but they could never reproduce it. The fact that they had created one in the first place with their level of technology was already phenomenally improbable. Two years later, the lab was destroyed, and the anomaly with it, along with all of their unpublished results. All attempts to recreate it failed, and eventually it was forgotten as just one more false result.”
“I’ve heard about the explosion,” 2181 said. “I know that it was very mysterious. There was a strange message left at the site, wasn’t there?”
“ ‘Here lies David’s beret,’” said the director. “No one knows what it meant.”
“If the data was destroyed, how do you know about it?”
“The physical copies were destroyed, but not the memories of those who worked on it. One of those was my great-grandfather.”
“I don’t see how knowing any of this will help.”
“There’s more. I believe that there is a connection between the two anomalies, some kind of energy link that transcends time and distance. When your son fell through that vortex, he landed somewhere near that lab…a hundred and fifty years ago.”
2181 shook his head. “Why are you telling me these stories? What can you hope to accomplish.”
“2181,” said the director gently, “You don’t need to doubt me. I want what you want. I want to help you find your son. I tell you that you can, and that both of you can return safely.”
2181 smiled ironically. “I suppose that I should just throw myself in after him. You would like that, wouldn’t you?”
“You?” said the other. “You can do whatever you choose. But I am going through the portal.”
2181 looked up, startled. “You?”
“Yes. I cannot fault you for not believing me and I cannot expect you to go through yourself, but we must find the boy. I know that it is safe and I have decided to go. It is up to you whether or not you want to accompany me.” The director turned sharply, then said, “You have until the end of the week to make up your mind,” and strode out of the room, leaving 2181 still staring into the vortex.

NaNoWriMo Chapter 1

2010-11-15T15:43:00.001-08:00

2010
Emma couldn’t help but agree when MacKenzie announced, “There are no good boys left. Not in the whole word. Not in the entire universe. Not. Even. One.”
She did a mental retread of the short list of boys with whom she’d been romantically involved. Brad, fourth grade, first kiss on the back of the school bus. Next day he’d bragged to all his friends about it and opened her to a world of teasing. Tyler, her seventh grade crush. At the urging of her friends, she’d told him that she liked him and he’d rejected her because he said she wasn’t pretty. (She had braces at the time.) And then in ninth grade, Bryan asked her to the school dance and then tried to feel her up with about as much subtlety as a charging rhino. That had been the limit of her forays with boys so far, apart from a few crushes on upper classmen who didn’t know she existed. So she was inclined to agree with MacKenzie.
Still, friends are for teasing, so she asked, “What about Toby?”
“What about Toby?” asked MacKenzie, twirling a lock of curly brown hair around an immaculately manicured finger.
“Is he another one of those worthless guys that the world is supposedly completely populated with?”
“I didn’t say they were all worthless,” said MacKenzie nonchalantly. “But look, that guy in the movie, Josh? He was so totally sweet. He listened to her when she was crying and let her talk even though she was talking about the other guy and he totally was just totally cool.”
“Totally,” Emma agreed.
“I know you’re making fun of me. Stop it.”
“No! You’re right! Movie guys are way better than real-life guys. I would know.”
They strolled across the popcorn-encrusted floor of the lobby and out into the parking lot. It was an August night, what little darkness there would have been broken with the orange glow of the valley’s perpetual light pollution. The air hung heavy around them, hot and thick with car fumes and someone’s cigarette. Still, the semi-darkness was novel to Emma, who was sixteen years and six months old today and could legally drive at night and carry passengers. She parted ways with her friend in the parking lot.
“See you Monday?”
“Ugh, don’t remind me.”
Some teenagers got sweet rides, some got white 1999 Corollas. Emma was in the latter category. She got in and went through the mental checklist: Seatbelt, mirrors, headlights, parking brake, shift into drive, go.
While following the tree-lined road towards her family’s home, Emma sighed. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t care about boys; she did. She was seventeen, about to be a senior, and had never had a serious boyfriend. She was so lonely.
With a startling thud, something abruptly landed on the hood of her car. She yelped and slammed on her brakes. What was it? Something big, and it hadn’t been there a second before. This accident could not possibly have been her fault, she found herself preparing to tell her mother.
She flipped on the emergency lights and stepped out of the car, and her worst fears were instantly realized. She had hit someone. No, she corrected herself, someone had hit her, she was sure of it, though she couldn’t explain how or what that meant. It was a young man. No, a boy, about her age, curled up in a fetal position and shaking.
Never pick up hitchhikers, came her mom’s voice in her head. They’ll murder you and I’ll find your dismembered body in a ditch! Did you hear me? Dismembered! And beheaded! I won’t even know it’s yours until we find your head stuffed in the glove compartment of your car after they pull it out of the LA river a week later! And think of how I’ll feel then.
“I don’t think you could hide a car in the LA river,” Emma muttered to herself. But this seemed like a special circumstance, and besides, this person didn’t look like an ax murderer.
She walked over to the boy, who was eerily illuminated by the blinking of her emergency lights. He was lying on his side, arms wrapped around himself, trembling and crying. He wore strange clothes: A jacket of some kind of synthetic material, matte black except for gray chevron stripes on the sleeves, that zipped up to his chin, fingerless black gloves, and clasped high-tops like ski boots.
“Um...excuse me...are you all right?” Emma asked awkwardly. He didn’t respond. She stepped closer and bent down, hands on her knees. “Hey...can you hear me? Are you okay?”
The boy turned a fearful face up at her. Even in the dimness, encrusted with dirt through which tears were tracing little paths and surrounded by a mess of untidy light-brown hair, it was an attractive face.
“Can you understand me?” she asked.
He nodded.
She knelt beside him and put a hand lightly on his shoulder. He flinched away. “You need help. You can’t stay here. Is there somewhere I can take you?”
“I’m lost,” he said in a dry, cracked voice. “I don’t know where I am.”
“That’s okay...listen, I’ll just take you to my place and then we can call someone to come pick you up.”
“O...okay,” he stammered.
“Are you hurt? Can you move?”
“No,” the boy replied, then seemed to realize that this was an insufficient answer and elaborated, “I think I’m all right.”
He allowed her to take his arm and raise him to his feet, which turned out to be more difficult than she had anticipated. His slender frame was astoundingly heavy. Then, leaning on her heavily, stumbled to the car. She put him in the passenger seat, where he sat mutely looking out the window while got in.
“Buckle your seatbelt,” she told him, noticing that she hadn’t. She was going to catch enough flak for picking up a stranger without subsequently endangering him.
He looked at her, uncomprehending.
“Buckle up?” she repeated, unbuckling and rebuckling hers by way of demonstration. He seemed to suddenly comprehend what she was saying and copied her. He must have a concussion or something, she decided as she drove off. He certainly looked like he could have been mugged. He didn’t speak all the way to her house, just sat hunched in his seat and shook. She decided not to ask him any more questions until he’d gotten steadied a bit.
The windows were dark when they arrived home. Her mom must already be asleep. She let herself in with the boy in tow and settled him on the old paisley couch in the family room. There was an afghan thrown over the back of it, which the boy immediately pulled around himself. He was still shaking. She wondered if he was in shock. Looked like it. She tried to remember the symptoms from her first aid and CPR class in eighth grade—confusion, disorientation, anxiety—but this proved unhelpful, as she couldn’t remember how to treat it. She brought him a glass of water, which he held in both hands and drank thirstily, and then told him, “I’d better wake up my mom and tell her what’s going on.”
He nodded, so she left him on the couch and went up the stairs. The door to the master bedroom was closed. She always felt it to be a kind of sacrosanct boundary and, as she tapped lightly on the door, realized just how displeased her mother was likely to be when awakened to a random teenaged boy in her house. But Emma could cling to the knowledge that she had not broken the two laws.
The two laws were the admonitions that her mom gave her just about every time she left the house. “Drive safely” was the first. “Be wise” was the second. After the umpteenth repetition, Emma had offered to tattoo “drive safely” on one hand and “be wise” on the other to spare her mother having to actually say them.
Tapping produced no response. She knocked. Still no response—her mother slept like the dead--so she finally violated the sacrosanct threshold and opened the door. Her mother was asleep. She touched her shoulder and said, “Mom?”
She rolled over away from her.
Emma rolled her eyes and shook her harder. “Oh, come on. Wake up!”
Her mother sat up, brushed the hair out of her eyes, and asked, “Is this an emergency?”
“It was,” Emma said, figuring that was a fair reply.
Suddenly accusatory, her mom demanded, “Did you crash the car?”
“No!” she answered, holding up her hands helplessly.
“Then what happened?”
“Well, um...I was driving home from the movie and there was this boy lying in the middle of the road…” she’d carefully considered how to phrase that part, “…and I thought he was hurt or something, so I stopped and I, um, picked him up and brought him home.” She rushed through the last bit of the sentence, shifting from foot to foot anxiously.
“You what?” her mom cried, then reasonably added, “Never mind; I heard you the first time. But you should never pick up a stranger, ever! I told you to be wise!”
“I thought that just meant don’t have sex with random guys,” said Emma defensively.
“It means be wise! And that includes not picking up random strangers from the side of the street! What if he had been an ax murderer?”
“I thought of that,” Emma explained, “But he didn’t have an ax.”
Her mom seemed to be calming down a little, and asked, “When did this happen?”
“Just now. We got home like two minutes ago.”
Her mom got up and began to dress. “Well, now that he’s here, I suppose we’d better figure out what he needs. What’s his name?”
“I didn’t ask,” said Emma. “He seemed really out of it.”

He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was until the girl gave him the glass of water, but he now realized that he felt like a dry husk. He finished the water gratefully. His senses seemed to be returning. He didn’t feel as dizzy and confused as he had an hour ago, which was reassuring, but his surroundings still seemed strange and unfamiliar. In fact, the more time passed, the more sure he became that he wasn’t really disoriented at all—his surroundings really were strange and unfamiliar. He had abandoned the theory that he was dead about the time the girl had talked to him, since she didn’t seem to think either of them were dead, which left the question: Where was he?
He set down his glass and looked around the room. It was some sort of living room, but shabby and old-fashioned to the point of antiquity, with the soft, organic look that he associated with historical movies. Everything seemed to be made of wood: the doors, the molding, the picture frames, the battered desk in the corner, even the feet of the couches. The floor was covered with thick, fuzzy beige carpeting. He imagined what it would feel like to take his boots off and sink his toes into it. The people here dressed oddly, too.
Then he noticed an object on the desk, a flat black rectangle with a keyboard in front of it and some cables trailing behind the desk. “Computer,” he murmured to himself. “I could use that. My nanites can figure it out.”
He booted the computer and discovered that it had internet. His fingers flew across the keys and his eyes flicked back and forth with preternatural speed as he searched, a search that became more disturbing by the second. “2010,” he whispered. “Then that’s really where I am? But what can I tell her about me? I need to be someone...someone with a reason to be here.”
Names, he thought, and began browsing again. Common names, ordinary names. David. And a story.
The sound of footsteps on the stairs startled him and he quickly shut down the computer and returned to the couch.

Emma found the boy where she had left him. He had cast off the blanket. She considered taking the seat beside him on the couch, but remembered how he’d flinched away from her earlier, so she sat on the loveseat instead. Her mother sat beside her.
In the lit indoors, she could finally get a good look at him. He still looked like he had been through the wringer, but he was undeniably handsome. His face was smooth and youthful, with full pink lips, a straight nose, and pale-lashed eyes, set wide but not too wide, of an unimaginably clear light blue.
“I never told you my name,” she said. “I’m Emma Cooper, and this is my mom, Sandra. How about you?”
“David Smith,” he said uneasily.
“You’re sounding a little better.”
“I feel better. Thanks for picking me up.”
Her mom asked, “Is there somewhere we can take you? Someone we can call for help?”
He shook his head miserably.
“What about your parents?”
“You can’t call them. I can’t go back,” he muttered.
“Well then, if you don’t want to go home, we’ll have to call child protective services to come pick you up. They’ll be able to help you better than we can,” her mother said decisively. She picked up the cordless phone on the desk.
“Go right ahead. I’m 18,” said the boy indifferently.
She put the phone back down.
Emma asked him gently, “What happened? How did you get there, where I found you?”
He turned his clear eyes up to her, wide and sad. “I was running away from home, hitchhiking. This guy picked me up and I thought he would be okay, but he took all my stuff and threw me out of the car. That was where you found me.”
“And you have nowhere to go?” said Emma’s mom. “That was very foolish. You shouldn’t have left home. Your parents are probably worried sick.”
“It’s just my dad. And you would have run away too if he were your dad. Please don’t ask me any more about him. I really, really don’t want to talk about it.”
Emma said, “So now all you’ve got is...”
“The clothes I’m wearing.”
“You poor thing,” said Emma’s mother. “Where were you going? We can take you.”
He shrugged. “Nowhere. Anywhere. Anywhere that isn’t home.”
Sandra announced, “Then you’ll just have to stay here tonight.”
He smiled shyly. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
“Great,” said Sandra. “You can share Emma’s room.”
The two teenagers exchanged startled and panicky looks.
“Just kidding,” she laughed. “You can have the guest room.”

NaNoWriMo Prologue

2010-11-15T15:41:00.000-08:00

2160
"It's just a big ball of energy."
"What does that even mean?"
"It means it's...I don't know, a bunch of energy all in one big pile, and it keeps making more and keeps sucking more of it in, sort of like a black hole except with energy instead of matter."
"That sounds like complete bull to me. I seriously...like, that means nothing. At all."
The boy whose name was only the number 116 sighed and looked at his friend. 838 was a showoff. At a slim 185 centimeters, his black hair and heavy eyebrows both flashed with white in a decision his parents had made and he heartily approved of, he exuded a permanent air of being the center of everything. He acted that way, too. He had a tricked-out airbike that he rode everywhere, even indoors, and he would never get off until an adult started yelling at him. He would magnetize the soles of his feet and hang upside down. He got himself cool-looking cybernetic upgrades and then got them removed three months later when he got bored with them.
Right now he was reclining with his arms behind his head and his steel-booted feet on 116's dad’s antique wooden coffee table, which was not going to go over well with the latter party. 116 knew that his friend was trying to annoy him, but it was still working. It wasn't that 838 didn't believe him; more likely he was actually curious and was trying to get 116 to tell him more while still feigning disinterest. Well, nothing to do about it but play along.
"I don't know how it works. I'm not a quantum physicist. That's my dad, 2181. He designed the thing."
"I thought you said it was an accident."
"It was. I mean he designed the energy transformer that they were trying to make, but when they turned it on, it began to malfunction. Nearly destroyed the whole facility. They had to evacuate. Observing it remotely, they found that it had formed this ball of glowing stuff right in the middle of the lab. It all seemed stable and there wasn't any radiation or anything, so they went back in. They've been analyzing it ever since. No idea what it is. The machines are running full power and it just sucks it all in and doesn't send out anything except flashes of light. They don't know where it's all going."
“Your dad must be a pretty sucky physicist if he makes that huge of a screw-up by accident.”
“Is not! My dad’s about a million times smarter than you and he made something awesome.”
"Why don't they just turn it off?" asked 838 boredly, or, more likely, faux-boredly.
"My dad wants to,” 116 admitted. “He’s nervous about the whole thing. He wants to shut it down before it gets out of hand and someone gets hurt. But he can’t because they don't know what would happen if they destabilized it. What if it ate the whole city or something? Besides, they're scientists. They want to know what it is. 496—he’s the director—he’s really interested. He has all kinds of ideas. If they turned it off and then they couldn't figure out how to get it back, they'd never find out."
"So what does it look like?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen it."
"Hasn’t it been there for what, two years? Your dad hasn't let you look at it?"
"Of course not. It's a giant energy anomaly. It could be incredibly dangerous. You think they're going to let some random seventeen-year-old into the lab?"
"You're not random. You're 2181's son."
"Doesn't matter. The lab's on complete lockdown. Nobody gets in without security clearance."
"Nobody?" 838 grinned.
It took a second for 116 to catch up, but then he protested, "No! Absolutely not. That's the worst idea ever. Don't even think about it."
838’s grin became ear-splitting. "Like I said, you’re 2181’s son. And with biometrics, that means it’s a fifty-fifty chance, probably on lucky chromosome 27."
"I'm not going to help you break into the lab!"

Three days later, as they crouched in the weeds looking out at the energy fence, 116 muttered, "I can't believe you talked me into this."
"Live a little," 838 told him.
"I want to. Like another 100 years. Which I won't if we get caught, because my dad will kill me. Literally."
"Oh, come on. It'll be fine. You’re a lucky 27, aren’t you?"
“And why do you own a biometric tester? Where did you get that? I mean, you’re not allowed to just buy those things, are you?”
“It’s handy. Haven’t you ever tried to get into an over-21 club?”
“Let me think. No.”
A pair of headlights flashed over them and they both flattened themselves into the grass. The hovercar passed and once again the only light came from the blue glow of the fence.
"So you told me you had a way to get through this," 116 hissed.
"Have a little faith!" said 838. "It's just an electro-optical field. We should be able to divert it into another conductor." He held up a little metal cylinder with grooves running around it and flipped a switch on the bottom. He held it out towards the fence.
"Careful with that!" 116 warned. "If the current jumps to that thing while it's in your hand, you're going to get quite a shock."
838 tossed the cylinder. It landed a couple of meters from the fence. The blue lines of current began to warp, then jumped to the cylinder, forming a V-shaped path where the current diverted from one eight-foot-tall fence post to the little object on the ground and then back up to the next fence post.
"Now we can just step over. You remembered to wear rubber-soled shoes, didn't you?" asked 838.
"Of course I did! I'm not stupid."
They rose, furtively looking around to see if there were any more cars, but the roads were empty at this time of night. Even the streetlights had dimmed down to power-saving mode, ready to flash on again when a vehicle approached. They crept forward, gingerly stepped over the diverted fence, and approached the lab. It was only a few stories tall, for the majority of the facility lay underground to minimize vibrations, but the starkness of the architecture, the blankness of the opaqued windows, and the darkness of the whole scene created a forbidding impression. 116 had come here with his father before the anomaly happened and he had never been frightened, but that was during the day.
The only lit areas were the entrances. The two boys headed for a small side door that looked greenish beneath a dim fluorescent bulb. 116 pressed his thumb onto a panel beside the featureless door. Immediately there was a chirp, a green light flashed, and the door slid open. The hall lights were already on. 838 gave him a grin and two thumbs up.
"That was easier than I expected," 116 admitted.
"Should be smooth sailing from here," his friend told him.
"Yeah, unless we get caught by a security robot."
116 tried not to act startled every time the lights came on as they crept along the hall, down three flights of stairs, and through the outer labs. It was only automation, he told himself. Nothing to be afraid of.
Most of the lab's doors slid open silently at their approach, but they now reached one with another biometric lock, this one surmounted with a keypad.
“I’m so going to get sent to a forced labor camp or something,” he muttered. “My dad’s going to open a forced labor camp so he can send me to it.”
“Quit being a wimp!”
116 swallowed and touched the lock. It beeped and flashed. The keypad lit up.
“You said you got his code,” hissed 838.
116 nodded and punched a series of keys, saying, “He had it written down. Genius for physics; terrible head for passwords.”
The door slid open with what seemed like intentional slowness and out poured a widening stripe of white-green light. The boys’ jaws dropped.
The room was a huge dome. Towering machines covered with displays, conduits, and flashing lights covered the walls. Iridescent energy streamed from six nozzles spaced evenly around the room down towards the center where, fenced off with waist-high plastic rails, was the anomaly.
It was so bright that they needed to shield their faces until their cybernetically enhanced eyes could acclimate. Then they saw that it was an orb of light, roughly spherical but constantly warping and distorting, easily ten meters across, ten meters of blinding, pulsing, almost solid-looking radiance. Swirls of color, mainly green and yellow, mingled with the whiteness. Now and then, it gave off a brilliant flash of green that cut out the machines and rails as stark silhouettes. The room was filled with a staticky hum.
“That...is awesome,” whispered 838. They both felt the need to whisper.
“Told you,” said 116, allowing himself a moment of smugness. “And my father...”
“...Is not a bad physicist.”
They stepped cautiously into the room, awe and curiosity temporarily pushing aside the fear of being caught. The door slid silently shut behind them.
Approaching the rail and gingerly putting their hands on it, they could see that the center of the room was a full story lower than the place where they stood, and that the orb, which had appeared truncated like a setting sun from the door, was in fact a full sphere even larger than it had first appeared, most of which was below them.
They just stared at it for a while, and then 838 moved over to one of the streams of energy that fed it. They were railed off as well and flowed along at knee height, forming eddies and currents.
“This thing pulls in enough energy to power a whole city,” 116 told him.
“And it just all makes light?” said his friend.
“It doesn’t just make light. You could make that much light with one percent of that energy. We don’t know where the rest goes. It just disappears.”
838 knelt to get a closer look. “I wonder if you could touch it. What would it feel like...”
He began to reach out one gloved hand. 116 grabbed it and pulled it back. “Don’t. Seriously, don’t. We have no idea what would happen.”
Just then, a sudden noise made them both jump up and turn around. “Security!” hissed 838. “Time to get lost!”
“If it’s a drone, maybe if won’t come in here if it doesn’t hear us,” 116 whispered back.
They crouched by the energy stream, trying not to breathe. The sound resolved itself into human footsteps. 838 gave the other boy a pointed look, to which he responded with a helpless shrug. As the footsteps approached, 838 finally said in his lowest voice, “Seriously, we have to go!”
“We can’t!” his friend replied in the same tone. “They’re coming towards that door!” And he pointed towards the door through which they had entered.
They looked around wildly for other exits. There were several across the room, but all were separated from them by the energy streams. 838 rose and put his hand on the rail. 116 watched the door, paralyzed, a lump constricting his throat. There came a chirp.
838 didn’t wait for the door to open. He vaulted up onto the rail and jumped across the iridescent current of energy onto the other rail and then back down. He turned to his friend and waved a hand. “Come on!”
116 climbed onto the rail as the door opened. A man entered, tall, gray-haired, with a hard-lined face. When he saw the boys, he yelled, “What are you kids doing in there? Get over here!”
838 was already bolting for the far door. 116 jumped across and onto the other rail, landing just by the intersection where the stream flowed into the orb of light.
I’m so lonely.
Loneliness was the last thing on the boy’s mind at the moment, but the thought had suddenly entered his mind. Or else he had he heard it, so quiet as to be subconscious. He did not ponder this; he had no time to think, only to escape. But then his right foot slipped. Slipped? It felt as though it had been pulled. He tried to balance himself with his hands, but the rail was thin and slick. He couldn’t get a grip. A second later he lost his balance entirely and, with a sickening feeling, found himself plummeting off the wrong side of the rail and down, down into a vortex that swirled ravenously as though it had been anticipating him, and he was consumed by light and color.

Archipelago Part X

2009-04-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

The eldest Mrs. Liu told the best stories, hands down. When he was little, very little, before Pia was even born, he would pile into the Liu living room with about two hundred other kids and she'd be sitting there in her armchair with a plastic mug of something hot, and she'd take a sip all calm and quiet, and then put the mug down, then pick it back up, take another sip, look around slowly until they were positively squirming with anticipation, and then begin.
He could only just remember her, with her wispy steel-grey hair and soft chinless face, and the room all stuffy with wall-to-wall kids, but hte stories he knew by heart.
"Once there were two countries, both great and powerful so that the whole world followed one or the other. One was good. The people who lived there were free to do as they liked, and they were prosperous and happy. But the other country was evil. They watched their peoples' every move. They told them what they could or could not do. They locked their borders tight so that living there was like being in detention. The two countries did not trust each other, but were always watching carefully, waiting for the other one to attack, and always competing because each one wanted to become the greatest and gain control of the whole world.
"Now the laeder of the good nation was young and handsome and everyone loved him. One night, he was wondering to himself, 'How long will this go on? If we make a weapon, they make a more powerful one. If we build a building, they build a taller one. What can we do that they will never be able to beat?'
"As he spoke, he looked up and there was the moon, big and bright and white. And he thought, 'I know what we will do.'

Archipelago Part IX

2009-02-03T23:53:00.000-08:00

Just a couple days later, Joshua spent a few hours fishing off Assembly Dome with some other boys instead of coming straight home, which was why he was probably the last person in the world to hear about the wardens. He had, in fact, been reveling in the fact that he didn't have any homework all weekend and had taken the most circuitous possible route home. By the time he came tramping down the hallway with his school bag slung over one arm and two lingcod over the other, his parents had heard the news from whatever source adults learned about stuff from, explained it to his sisters, and finished discussing it amongst themselves. Joshua wouldn't have heard at all (for the moment) if Mr. Tzara hadn't shown up.
He was just docking his clean blue jet ski as Joshua topped the stairs, so he showed up just as Joshua was poking his head into the fridge. Joshua heard him greeting the elder Orbins and trotted out, momentarily postponing his already-late dinner to see what was up.
The young man did not have his bag slung over his shoulder, so he was not planning on staying. His dark hair was combed and his face shaven, but he was only wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, as if something had come up abruptly. He had a curious look to him, at once relieved and troubled.
Joshua's father was pouring him a drink, and he was asking, "Did you hear about Allen and Lang?"
"Of course we have," replied Joshua's mother, as Joshua said, "I haven't."
"Not really a surprise," said Joshua's father.
"Well, yeah, anyone could see it was all over, but Mr. Allen apparently didn't," said Mr. Tzara.
"What?" asked Joshua.
"No, he knew, he just didn't want to believe it. Because he was trying to make it work, he really was," said Joshua's mother.
"What happened?" Joshua demanded, more loudly than someone his age was really supposed to.
His mother put her hands on his shoulders, which annoyed him, and explained, "The Allens are splitting up. Mrs. Allen is leaving for Mr. Andre Lang, but Mr. Allen got very angry when he found out and he actually started a fight. He doesn't want her to leave. It's not going to end well."
Joshua thought about the Allens. Their eldest child, Teddy, was Olga's age, Rudy was almost Pia's age, and Molly and Joey were younger. His parents used to joke that their parents never figured out that names didn't need to end with the letter Y, but his family wasn't really better. And now they were splitting up? Why?
"It's too bad about the kids," sighed Joshua's mother, but then asked, "Was that really what you tramped across three islands to tell us? Seems like a quick radio would have sufficed. Especially since everybody's talking about it and you must have known that we'd already heard."
"No, actually, it was something else." Mr. Tzara then paused so long that Joshua's father prompted him with that raised-eyebrow look that only his thick black brows can master, then finally said, "Julia's pregnant."
"That's great! Congratulations!" said both Joshua's parents at once, his mother hugging him and asking, "When did you find out?"
"Just now," he replied. "She just told me."
"This will be so good for you," said Joshua's mother.
Mr. Tzara nodded, then said, "Yeah... one down, one to go."
"That is the wrong attitue," she told him sharply.
"I know," Mr. Tzara responded gloomily. "But the initiates say at least two. They'd rather three or four, but they'll take two and then I'm done."
"I'm sorry. It's too bad, really. But you're a good match and a valuable line."
"Wasn't worth it," he muttered, sighing and dropping his head into his hands. The two other adults sat down on either side of him to console him and eventually managed to lift his spirits enough that he allowed Joshua's father to bring out a bottle of liquor and have a toast before he left.
After Mr. Tzara the younger went home, Joshua's father asked his mother, "Have you ever noticed how the matches that everyone says are advantageous end up not working out, but if a couple ever gets married completely against the initiates' recommendations..."
"...True love," she finished.
Joshua put down his fork and came into the living room to quietly ask, "Father, is that true?"
"Is what true?"
"That if it's a match of two good bloodlines, they won't love each other, but if they love each other, they'll have worthless genes."
"Seems that way sometimes."
Joshua shoved his hands in his pockets, looked up, and asked, "Well...which one are we?"
"It's not really that simple," his father explained.

Archipelago Part VIII

2009-01-27T16:29:00.000-08:00

He didn't realize how much he'd grown until the first time he cracked his head on the low doorway of the ballast level. Not having much call to visit the ballast now that he was technically an adult and his sisters and their peers were handling the routine chores, he mustn't have been down there in something like four months. But when his mother looked up from an old bundle of wire she was desoldering and asked him to fetch Pia, he did. Mothers were still mothers.
Just at the bottom of the narrow stair was a steel door with a wheel you had to turn to unlatch it. The door was a little smaller than the corridor it led into because it sealed all the way around. Distance from the bottom rim to the top rim: six feet even. Average height of an Orbin male: six foot two. Apparently they were slow learners, too. If you were on the stairs or in the engine room, you could pretty much tell when someone entered the ballast by the cry of pain that came echoing up. "Ow!" meant it was his father or the captain. "Dammit!" meant it was Mr. van der Durn, Tobias, or the precaptain. When Joshua felt skull meet steel, his reaction turned out to be something roughly like "Waagh!"
Pia laughed and then ran to pull a piece of foam off the cooling coil and hand it to him with a fond smile. It was rather cool than cold--the foam was only insulating a water pipe, after all--but it soothed the throbbing a little. That's how Pia was; she'd laugh at you and help you, but you always got both.
Luckily, his duties didn't bring him around pumps and turbines and camshafts much. He spent most of his work time at the assembly dome, most of his free time on the Martinez island with Greer.
He was grown now and he and Pouneh still weren't lovers. They walked together, fished, swam against each other in competitions, talked about teaching. That was all. He'd found an off-island girl, a Martinez. Neither of them liked the other particularly, but he liked having a girlfriend and she liked having a boyfriend. Besides, she was fun. She had a great sense of humor. Plus her hips and butt were beyond perfect. They had to be the standard after which every other woman's would be patterned. They were what led to him losing his virginity to her on a stormy evening in her apartment. She had a certain flair that only made his greenness more embarrassing, but she was nice about it. She tried not to make him feel bad even when things got unexpectedly aborted thirty seconds in.
Her parents had offered them an apartment to share on their island. His parents weren't so hot on the idea; they knew that this relationship wasn't going to last. They needn't have worried. He had no intention of moving out of his little apartment on the second floor of their living quarters. He wouldn't admit it, but he was afraid to move off Orbin Island. He just belonged there. "Once and Orbin, always an Orbin," his father would say, and the proof was the van der Durns, who hadn't been called Orbin for two generations (except for Jackie's mother, of course) and were still hanging around.
He hadn't been sure what happened to guys who graduated with fine grades but no specialty. He found out. They taught. Not math or science, of course. Reading and writing. At least right now; the initiates had decided that a sixteen-year-old had the skills to teach primary school, and that his youth would help him better connect with the kids. It was a popular idea at the time: out with the old, in with the new, and all that.
Well, maybe so. Sometimes it was infuriating trying to get a roomful of eight-year-olds to shut up and pay attention, made even worse by his knowledge that at that age he'd been the worst offender. Some parts, like grading, were boring. But mostly it was fun. Way more fun than spending time with a group of adults droning about weather patterns and favorable matches. So far the kids had been well behaved and seemed interested, but then, the semester was less than a month old.
As he stumbled off his jet ski onto the dock, he rubbed his eyes with the heel of one hand. The problem with this work was getting up so horribly early. The four kids who had arrived early chased each other across the deck, which was irritating to someone who just wanted to go back to bed. Mondays and Wednesdays were the problem. The other days he only taught afternoons, though he didn't get to sleep in much later because teaching was, in fact, a lot of work.
The fog was beginning to clear from his brain as he weaved through the kids, up the empty staircase, and into the third grade room. Mrs. Liu the Astronomer (who mostly taught but they called an astronomer anyway) was stapling articles from the children's magazine onto the walls.
"Good morning, Joshua," she said cheerfully.
"Good--agh, sorry--good morning," he replied, first hoarsely, then after he had cleared his throat, more clearly. He dropped his bag onto the table. The canvas, worn until it was fuzzy, crumpled all his papers uniformly. Well. He skimmed his notes. Oh, right. Today should be fun. He was introducing mythology.
Mrs. Liu passed on to the next room. Outside, the squeals of the children bounced and skipped up through the window, then were overwhelmed by tramping feet as the kids themselves came bouncing and skipping up the stairs into the room. He didn't assign seats, but they'd just come in on the first day, picked seats, and stayed there. He'd moved two students: Lila, who absolutely couldn't stop talking to her friend Agatha if they were next to each other, and John, who would sit in the very back corner and never talk unless Joshua made him participate. The other twenty or so students he allowed to stay where they chose. Now that they'd found their seats, they were jostling each other, whispering and laughing, shooting rubber bands.
He laced his fingers together behind his neck, twisted left and right, and announced, "All right!"
He liked that more than a normal teachery kind of greeting. The students quieted down.
"Everyone here?" They nodded. "Everyone awake?" They nodded again; he was probably the only one who was still working on that. "Everyone do their homework?" Some nodded. Some looked at each other or dropped their eyes. He laughed. "Well, don't worry; you don't need to take your workbooks out just yet, because first we're going to talk about mythology. Who here has heard a myth?"
All hands went up. "Good. Now who can tell me what a myth is?"
A few hands went up, more hesitantly. Lila looked confident, though, so he called on her.
"It's a story that's not true."
He nodded. "All right. Myths aren't true. But there's more to it than that, right? Like I could just make up a story right now, but it wouldn't be a myth, would it?"
They shook their heads.
"So what else is special about myths?"
Dom put a hand up partly and started to take it down again, but Joshua called on him anyway. "Yes, Dom?"
"Well..." the boy started to speak, stopped, furrowed his brow. "Well, they're not just something you made up."
"All right. You didn't make up all those myths you know. Who did you hear them from?"
Their answers varied. Some had heard them from friends, some from teachers, most from their parents. So Joshua asked, "Well, they didn't make them up either, did they? Where do you think they heard them?"
Dom put his hand up again and said, a little more confident this time, "Maybe they heard them from their parents."
"Okay, then who did their parents hear them from?"
"From their parents."
"Great. A myth is a story that gets passed down from generation to generation, from parents to children, or from teachers to students. So no one really made them up: they just go back and back and back."
That was a difficult idea. The kids looked confused, except for a few who were mostly not paying attention. One of the girls raised her hand and asked, "But...someone had to make them up, didn't they? I mean way back, a long time ago?"
"No, that's what makes them myths. They've just sort of been around forever. As long as we've been here, we've been telling each other myths. Nowadays we think of myths as being kind of silly, like grown-ups wouldn't care much about listening to myths, but it hasn't always been like that. People used to think myths were very important. In fact, a long time ago--when your great-grandparents were your age--the initiates used to tell myths."
A few kids laughed. A few looked disbelieving. Nicho, who thought he was very grown up, protested, "They wouldn't care about stuff like that. The initiates do laws and contracts and important stuff."
"That's how we think of them now," said Joshua, "But they used to do different things. Back then, they thought stories were so important that they specifically kept track of them and passed them down."
"But...why?" asked another boy.
"Well, they just thought there were important things we could learn from myths."
"That's silly," said Lila.
"And the initiates decided it was silly too. That's why they stopped."
The kids still looked confused, but there were no more questions, so he went on. "Has anyone got a myth that they'd like to tell?"
A lot of hands went up. He spotted one connected to a little brown-haired girl in a shirt with ruffled sleeves. That was good. She'd hardly ever talked since her parents split up. "Yes, Molly?"
She looked startled to be called on, glanced about, bit her finger and finally began. "It's about two friends who were really good friends. And one of them they were going to kill because they killed people back then if they did bad things. But he wanted to visit his family first and they lived a long ways away. So his friend offered to take his place. But the first guy took too long and almost didn't get back in time so they were about to kill his friend, only he got back just in time. And the king was so impressed by their friendship that he let them both go."
She'd begun to waver by the end, but she finished the story, one of the longer times she'd spoken, so he told her, "Thanks, Molly. That's a very well-known story you've told us and it's a perfect example of a myth. Now, can anyone tell me where that story took place?"
Too big of a jump. They just looked at him. He tried again. "Was it on Assembly Dome?"
They shook their heads.
"What about Ag Dome? Was it there?"
More headshakes and a few giggles. They knew he was being silly. He asked, "Where was it then?"
A few hands went up. He called on a girl, who said, "It's on land."
"There we go. On land! Lots of myths take place on land. What do you guys know about land?"
By this age they'd all heard of it, but their knowledge was spotty.
"It's big."
"It's all covered in dirt."
"It doesn't float; I heard it just holds still..."
"There's no such real place."
"You've got the idea. Land is a mythical place that isn't on water. It isn't like an island. Islands are still on the water, when you think about it. But land is a place where, no matter now far down you go, you'll never find the ocean. I also heard someone say it's big. That's for sure! Think of all the islands together. Land is even bigger than that. Hundreds of times bigger, maybe thousands, so big that we use sea terms like miles when we're talking about it. It's covered with plants and animals. Think of being on Ag Dome, except that it stretches on and on as far as you can see. There's no water underneath it, so it doesn't sway. And, even though it's funny to think about, people used to think it was a real place."
Nicho's hand was up by now, of course. He asked, "How could they think that? Did people just used to be more stupid or something?"
"Now, don't say that," Joshua laughed. "I'll bet they knew some things we don't remember anymore."
He glanced at the clock and found that he'd only used up about two-thirds of the time he'd allotted, but they'd covered everything he'd meant to introduce today. Time management wasn't his strong point. He moved on anyway. "Okay! I think that's enough myths for one day. Tomorrow we'll talk about different types of myths and all the special terms we use when telling them. Right now let's all get our workbooks out. I know, you thought I wasn't going to ask! Well, live and learn. Now you know that just because I don't ask first thing in the morning, that doesn't mean you're off the hook."
Some kids still grumbled, but they pulled out their workbooks. Joshua looked out the window at the broad ocean. Tomorrow he'd teach them the three kinds of stories passed down from the initiates. The land dweller stories. The stories of the full ocean, thick with millions of people, boats, and islands. And finally the true stories, which really did happen in the archipelago, only long ago. And after that came the weekend and he'd see Greer. He definitely wanted to see her, but he was also intent on not being on Orbin Island because Mr. Tzara had his kids this weekend and the single Orbins often got enlisted to help take care of them. Of course he liked Mr. Tzara and felt sorry for him and in theory wanted to help him, but not if it involved babies. Joshua did not willingly interact with anyone under five.
Eight year olds were another matter. They had their workbooks out. He turned his attention back to the class and told them, "Go ahead and open those workbooks to page six."

Archipelago Part VII

2009-01-21T14:04:00.000-08:00

Waves were still towering and wind howling while the Abidijians climbed off their boat onto the relative safety of the Augusto island, but it wasn't until the next morning that everyone else dared to climb down from their homes to survey the wreckage of the archipelago.
The morning dawned as cool and clear as the beginning of the world from that story where it all begins with light. There were a few breaks in the cloudy sky. Dawn pinked everything. Little dark shapes began climbing down the stairs of the other islands, walking around the rings, inspecting what boats were left. And then out came the Orbins, Joshua holding his father's hand, Joshua who would not really understand the magnitude of what had happened until he was much older.
These were the facts, as they went down in the official records.
Five islands, Orbin among them, had broken one strut. Hoch island had broken two. Eluard island had broken all three, but through some fantastic turn of fate, had stayed upright, though its ring got tangled in the remnants of the struts and was only repaired with great difficulty. Abidijian Island broke all three struts and toppled. Hopes that the buoyant ring might have kept it afloat were dashed immediately. A few bits of junk rose to the surface over the next couple of days, but not much.
The captain of Abadijian Island--who was actually a Novak--had managed to keep everyoen calm and under control. When the second strut broke, he got on the emergency intercom and began preparing for an evacuation. When the final one snapped, he got everyone down the emergency stairs, into their largest boat, and out through the ring gap to the open ocean, where they endured a harrying few hours riding the storm before they managed to dock with Augusto Island.
Actually, it was almost everyone. When he'd gotten his people into the boat and taken a head count, two were missing. They waited for four minutes. No sign of them. There was no more time. They briefly entertained the hope that the missing persons might have been onboard a different island at the time, but when the initiates and the captains met later in the day in the assembly dome, that hope was put to rest. Old Mrs. Abadijian and Miss Kili Abadijian must have gone down with the island.
Everyone had been strapped into the boat, so there were only a few scrapes and bruises there. Elsewhere, there were a good number of broken bones and some more serious injuries. Mr. Gabe Peterson, who had been in the engine room of his island trying to make some emergency corrections, hit his head on a machine and they found him bleeding on the floor. He seemed to recover okay, but afterwards he was all absent-minded and kept forgetting stuff people would tell him, and he never really got better. He was one of several concussions. Two women got seriously hurt by falling objects: one had her foot crushed, and another broke her back. There was one casualty, a man who got some bad cuts and bled to death because they couldn't get him to the medical level of Assembly Dome until the weather had died down.
Four islands had broken their turbines in one way or another. Two rotors had been torn clear off, one of which Zlata Loukoumana swore forever afterwards had gone spinning by within an inch of her window. Joshua, wowed by her superior years, believed this story for many years until Tristan convinced him that she'd made it up. Twelve rings had significant damage, including two that had been torn halfway open. And then there were broken windows, rent stairways, missing rails, and all the multifarious indoor damage.
All this could be repaired. The Peterson and Allen synthesizers could recycle the scrap into new rails and windows. Of course some material had been lost, but ordinary harvest from the water would eventually make up the difference. The boats were more problematic. None of them escaped fully unscathed, but one yacht, five speedboats, two jet skis, and nine kayaks were missing. Four of the remaining boats would need complete overhauls to get them working again. The synthesizers were only big enough to make jet ski hulls in one piece; to make the others, they had to rivet panels together into hulls. Synthesizer-made boats were always ugly and clumsy compared to the originals. The only mercy is that both seaplanes survived intact.
When they'd decided the weather wasn't going to flare up, the pilots went up to look for boats and debris that had been flung far away. Some of the boats went to pick it up and bring it back. There wasn't much. The boat mechanics all got together and conferred and looked over the pieces, and eventually they decided taht they would get the four working again, make one speedboat, and use the rest for kayaks. They didn't need a new yacht because the Abadijian yacht had of course survived, and it would do to replace the one the Rivieras had lost. Needless to say, no one even mentioned replacing the lost island.
It was the worst loss to the archipelago since some 45 years before, when (as Joshua's grandmother related to him) Rec Dome had sunk. It'd been a long time since that storm, which for one reason or another they called the Veterans' Storm. People had died then. Lots of them.
Sinking a dome seemed like an even more unlikely happenstance than sinking an island, but Joshua was taking APE this year and asked his teacher, Mr. Lang the mechanic, about it. He assured him that the way domes were balanced it was actually easier to tip them, not to mention that they didn't have rings for support. In a fit of maliciousness, he related this to Olga, who was afraid to go into either dome if there was any hint of adverse weather for weeks.
So the only people who remembered Rec Dome now were pretty young when it sunk and pretty old now. They described the big movie theater, the pool tables, the arcade games, plus all kinds of stuff he couldn't envision, games and things that didn't exist anymore except in computer simulations. He thought of Rec Dome as a kind of garden of delights, and the time when it existed as an age of leisure when people had nothing better to do than play games. His grandmother assured him that there had been just as much work back then.
Joshua wished Rec Dome were still around even though he never did those kinds of things now. He didn't play board games like his sisters did. Even when the computers were open for common use and had power, he'd log on and play tetris for a couple minutes, but he was abysmal and easily bored and usually gave up even before he lost. It was way more fun being out on the water. Swimming, polo, jet skis, fishing, and his two exhilarating trips up in the seaplanes were all way better than boring games. But he imagined that the games in Rec Dome would be better, and that if he had such a facility at his disposal, he'd want to hang out there all the time.
But there was no Rec Dome, and now no Abadijian Island either.
The initiates didn't care much about old Mrs. Abadijian, but they took the death of Kili Abadijian very seriously. Pouneh thought, like she always did, that it was terrible how they cared about one person and not another. But that was just their job. They weren't supposed to feel sorry for people. And since she was childless, the archipelago had lost one precious strand of the Abadijian bloodline.
Several people went up for hearings in the aftermath. Captain Novak first, for launching the boat without her aboard, but he was acquitted in no time when they concluded that if he had waited a few minutes longer, the boat might not have escaped the wreck of the island. They even chastised Captain Eluard, who had not been ready to evacuate her badly damaged island. The forecasters had predicted everything correctly and the navigators had plotted the most reasonable course; there was only a ten percent chance that the cyclone would move as it had.
They came down the hardest on Mrs. Novak nee Matsudo, who was in charge of structural maintenance for half the islands. It was true that she had only taken over the position eight months before. It was true that she had twin toddlers. It was true that everyone neglected structural maintenance, including the other maintenance director, and the laborers would probably have grumbled and put it off if she had told them to do anything. But it remained that she had not inspected Abadijian Island's struts, not even in the face of the oncoming cyclone.
The initiates debated for several weeks about what to do with her. She cried in front of them (which never helps), said she'd married into Kili's family, that they'd been close, that she'd suffered enough. But the initiates seemed intent on finding someone to punish. They hadn't decided yet, but it wasn't looking good for her on that cool morning in June when she made the decision for herself. She jumped off the roof of Augusto Island and landed on the deck sixty feet below. For once the initiates showed remorse. Their deliberations had added to the tragedy, said Initiate Allen. Of course they weren't nearly as sorry as they would have been if she hadn't been survived by two healthy sons.
Things settled down far quicker than they should have. The initiates and captains argued at length about what to do with the survivors, and eventually they decided to put the Novaks on the Patel island and the Abadijians on the Munroe island. Instant uproar from all sides. Munroes railing that their share of their island was getting smaller and smaller. Novaks and Abadijians protesting against being separated. Patels grumbling in general, since this decision forced them out of their stand-offish position at the edge of the archipelago.
Now, eight years later and considering events that had just been a bunch of boring grown-up talk to him when they happened, the housing arrangement seemed so natural that he could scarcely imagine it being any other way. Joshua figured it didn't take long before new things seemed normal, and things that must have been normal once, like Rec Dome, seemed strange.

Archipelago Part VI

2008-10-12T20:32:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, him and Pouneh, laughing and running around the ring. Sometimes Jackie was with them, but she was a little younger and it seemed like a big difference. Sometimes Anna or Mateo or someone else off-island, but that felt like a big difference too. This time it was just them.
It was raining. They hardly noticed. Adults might care if they were wet or dry, but not two kids who spent as much time in the water as out. They were currently wearing only a pair of shorts and a red leotard respectively. Pouneh liked red. Not pink. She hated pink and all those girlie kinds of things. Which was good. If all she ever wanted to do was paint her nails and blow bubbles, he wouldn't have wanted to play with her. But she wasn't like that. She just pointed to the speedboat on the other side of the pond and announced, "Race you to the boat!"
"I'll beat you," Joshua told her. "I always do."
"Not this time."
"Oh yeah? Why not?"
She took a running leap off the ring, hit the water, and yelled back over her shoulder, "Because I got a head start!"
"Hey, no fair!" he called after her, then jumped in. It was pretty warm still, and spattered with rain. He assumed his straight-backed, straight-legged racing stance, lower in the water than his normal swimming stance. Kicking his legs and barely even using his arms, he shot forward like the torpedoes the captains fired off once a year to celebrate winter solstice. He only rose every few seconds to breathe. This turned out not to work as well as it did in real kids' races, because it was raining pretty hard so when he first came up for air he got a mouth and nose full of water instead and lost a few precious seconds sputtering. He changed the angle of his head and solved the problem. Pouneh was already a quarter of the way there, visible only as a churned-up streak and an occasional flash of red. He didn't worry, just focused on covering distance. Water swirled around him and drummed on his back. It wasn't until he also felt it splashing on his face that he realized he'd almost caught up with Pouneh. He could catch glimpses of her bubble-wreathed feet through the green underwater gloom. He grinned. Another surge ahead and they were beside each other. She stuck out her tongue. He made a face and, with one powerful kick, pulled ahead.
It felt good to be winning. At first Pouneh was at his heels, pouring all her effort into keeping up with him, but he kicked at her hands and kept his lead. He ignored his developing side stitch.
One strut crossed their path most of the way across. He figured he was far enough ahead to do a trick. He jumped out of the water high enough that his palms hit the edge. There was a moment of uncertainty while his hands slipped on the wet metal, but he got his grip, did a chin-up, pulled his feet onto the edge so that he was momentarily squatting froglike with his knees up to his ears, sprang to the other side of the strut, and dove off so that he hit the water again with a mighty splash, cutting down into it without having lost much speed.
There was no fanfare as the race ended, since they were the only people present. He spotted the shadowy underwater form of the speedboat. His fingers met rubber. Hanging onto the ring and looking back, he had a glimpse of his opponent charging towards him and then they were both hanging onto the tire beside the sleek white boat, gasping for breath, laughing in the rain. When he'd caught his breath, Joshua told Pouneh, "See, I told you I'd beat you."

Archipelago Part V

2008-09-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

Olga was afraid of water. She had been now for eight years, five months, and twenty-four days. The date was easy to remember for the adults and even easier to remember for the kids, since it was the only event of its kind in their memory. That was the day of the April Cyclone.
Some people still counted time by it. Adults remembered where they were and what was going on. And of course the Abadijians looked back on it with particular bitterness.
For Joshua's part, he was five at the time and thought it was exciting. Pia was a baby and too young to remember. But Olga was not quite three, and she was terrified.
It started like any other cyclone. They were common, of course, and crossing the hurricane corridor was always risky, but their forecasters were experts. They saw it coming. They plotted the arrangement of the islands. It was only a class III at the time. But it must have hit a hot spot or something they hadn't anticipated, but because it curved around and hit them full force before the islands were in order. The cyclone rose to a class V and tore through the archipelago. That's how it went down in the official record.
Joshua remembered the rain. He'd never understood the meaning of driving rain until it struck. Not that it came on suddenly. It had been raining for several days while they moved, which was no fun, because he wasn't yet old enough to swim unattended and his parents didn't want to go out in the rain. He and Pouneh had nothing to do but tear around the deck, slipping now and again on the wet metal, and then come back with scraped knees and dirty feet and his mother would complain that even when they didn't go in the water they still steamed up the windows. And then they would play inside with Pia for a while, because Pouneh liked babies and Pia needed to be minded all the time now she could stand up.
They knew the islands were moving, but didn't particularly think about why. It just happened sometimes and then you couldn't swim outside the pool but they weren't old enough to do that anyway. They ran around in the rain. The rain came down harder and the wind went from a whisper to a howl and a shriek that whipped the fat raindrops into their faces. Then Pouneh's parents told them they couldn't go out anymore because there was a storm, so they pressed their noses against the windows to look at the tossing gray waves and the forms of the other islands, wraiths vanishing behind oppressive sheets of rain. They rocked mesmerizingly. Orbin Island, though, was anything but mesmerizing. It tossed about crazily so you couldn't even walk around without hanging onto the furniture. It wasn't even safe to climb the stairs from one part of the living quarters to another, so he didn't see Pouneh again until it was all over. He stayed glued to the window, relishing the motion of the room like it was a seaplane ride, not even trying to go to sleep, and his parents for the only time in his life didn't make him go to bed. They had their hands full with two squalling toddlers.
The storm peaked in the morning. His parents couldn't cobble together any breakfast for him. The sun must have come up, but it just went from black to dark gray. Joshua at the window, where he'd finally buckled down and buckled himself down, could mostly just pick out the other islands by the white lights in their windows.
Olga came stepping and rolling and sliding across the living room and grabbed the edge of the window seat in her pudgy hands. "Jotha," she whimpered, "Ith too much water."
"It's cool! Come up and watch!" he said, and pulled his apprehensive sister onto the seat beside him and held her around the middle so she wouldn't fall off. She screwed up her face and started crying again.
"Don't be such a baby," he told her.
She whispered, "Are we goina die?"
"No," he snorted. "It's just another storm."
Suddenly a resounding crack made the island shudder. The rocking took on a crazy lilt. Joshua got all wide-eyed. His grip on his sister tightened until she squirmed and cried, "'Top it! You're hurting me!"
His father staggered in, looking afraid. Joshua didn't like it when he looked afraid. Parents shouldn't be afraid of anything. But his dad lurched across the room, grasped the windowsill as the island swung back, and told them in his I-mean-business voice, "I want you two back in the bedroom with your mother and Pia."
But something had caught Joshua's usually-obedient eye. He pointed out the window. "Daddy, look, it's a boat!"
"What?" His father furrowed his brow and leaned forward to look out the window, balancing a knee on the window seat, and spotted what Joshua had already seen: a little yellow spot, not lashed securely into the docking area of an island but tossing about amid the titanic waves. His father whispered, "It is, by the solid lands. Must have broken free."
"But daddy, look at the island!" Joshua said, and pointed. Even as it lashed back and forth, it held an impossible angle, an angle that should have pulled the ring half out of the water by one strut, but instead of a strut, there was only a stub.
"Which one's that?" asked Joshua, who could not yet remember all their positions in formation, nor identify them by sight even if the weather had not obliterated all distinguishing features.
"Abadijian," his father replied grimly.
The island hung, imbalanced, but the remaining two, but another shrieking blast of wind twisted it around and ripped off another strut. With no semblance of balance left, the final strut seemed weak as a straw. It broke in an instant. The island wavered for a few sickening moments, kept aloft only by its own ballast, swinging farther and farther to each side, until it finally leaned too far to balance and fell over, slowly, slowly, ballast and undersides becoming visible for the first time ever, half the deck vanishing, then half the living quarters, then finally the turbine, its rotor's wild spin stalling suddenly as it hit the water's resistance but still cutting a slow, foamy path like a giant propeller. The corpse of the island lay there for a minute or two as it took in water through every possible opening, then sank bit by bit, dragging its ring down with it. The boat, its purpose now obvious, fought through the swells and against all hope stayed afloat until the storm calmed enough for it to dock with Augusto Island.
Joshua's nose, pressed against the window, left a wreath of fog.

Archipelago Part IV

2008-09-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

"You will never, repeat, never forget to disengage the rotor again!" laughed Mrs. van der Durn, Jackie's mother.
"Enough of that," grunted Pouneh's father. "No damage we can't repair easily, and the kids are getting valuable experience."
The kids were, in fact, having a blast. It was Joshua and Jackie and Pouneh and Tobias and Jackie's big sister Susanna, who hated being called Sue. All of them except Susanna were delighted that another summer of maintenance work was being put on hold by the damage to the Orbin Island turbine. Joshua had never been on the turbine deck before; of all the places on the island, that was the most off-limits, even including the engine room and the navigation room.
Tobias had climbed up there once when he was younger and got in a world of trouble. Jackie said she snuck up there all the time. But even though getting up there wouldn't be very hard and he could probably get away with it, he never had. He didn't like breaking rules just because he could, not like Jackie. He was more like Pouneh.
But now, for the first time since ever, Mr Orbin, Pouneh's father, unlocked the gate and swung it open and led them up the narrow stairway to the roof of the living quarters. It was a pretty good view from up there, plus dangerous, because there was no rail or anything. The slight rock of the island made him reflexively brace himself. Good thing they had picked such a calm day, though of course that was on purpose. The steel roof was sun-hot under his feet.
Pouneh's father passed out harnesses. Joshua tightened his until it was snug around his stomach and thighs. It made him feel more secure even though it wasn't secured to anything yet.
One by one, they climbed the ladder. He clung to the rungs tightly. He wasn't afraid of heights... was he? Below them, the glassy ocean grew broader and broader. The island looked tiny below him as he clambered onto the little caged platform and sat there, wind ruffling his thick black hair, legs hanging over the void. The hamstrung rotor creaked back and forth in front of him. He risked a look down.
The world was at his feet, literally. Right below him, Orbin Island, now lashed at the southern end of the group. And beyond? Beyond was everything. Their current neighbor islands, Munroe and Riviera. Agdome. Assembly Dome. The other islands, which he identified one by one. Martinez. Roselli. Greene. Vaughn. Liu. McFairan. Allen. Peterson. Augusto. Lang. Matsudo. Hoch. Karoly. Patel. Eluard. The people on the closer islands looked like little dolls, those far away like specks to small to recognize except for a splash of yellow that could only be Diego. Then nothing but endless ocean, wrinkled here and there by a wave, sliced for a moment by a dolphin's back, stretching out to the horizon in every direction.
Suddenly Joshua felt that he and his island and the whole archipelago were very small.
The gulls, who had mottled the upper deck with their droppings, were not enthusiastic about having their space invaded. They hopped backwards along the rails and mewed. The kids stepped around their nests. They'd all been told plenty of times to never disturb a nest. Pouneh's parents and Jackie's parents stood on the roof of the living quarters, shading their eyes with their hands and shouting instructions up at the kids and the precaptain.
"Be careful up there!" called Mrs. Orbin-Pouneh's-mother.
"Don't worry so much!" Tobias yelled back. This was before the initiates had their little talk with him about his attitude.
"Someone is going to fall and die!" Pouneh's mother persisted.
"That's how we keep the gene pool pure!" was Mr. Orbin Precaptain's reply.
"Agh, I can't believe you just said that!" Pouneh's mother cried, and her father simultaneously, "That is not funny!"
Jackie elbowed Joshua and whispered, "Is he talking about Emmy?"
"I don't think so," he said slowly, but he wasn't sure. She'd died (his mother said "passed away") maybe a year ago, but people still talked about her. It seemed like she was important for some reason.
"All right, kids!" Precaptain Orbin yelled, and they all gave him their attention. Joshua swung around so his back was to the rail. The Precaptain was tall, even for an Orbin, with a broad white smile when he was happy and thunder-dark eyes beneath thick brows when he was angry. His gruff bark could get anyone's attention. There was a reason Captain Orbin had chosen him as a successor, besides the fact that Mrs. van der Durn wasn't interested.
"Jackie, Joshua, you'll be staying here," he announced, waving his hand at their simultaneous cries of dismay. "Don't worry, you'll be doing something important. I need you two to get a hold of the rotor and get it lashed to the rail so we can work with it safely. Jackie, you got that cable?"
She nodded and held up the steel coil that was slung over her shoulder.
"Great. Now Susanna, Tobias, Pouneh, come on up and let's have a look at those gears."

Archipelago Part III

2008-09-09T22:58:00.000-07:00

The ocean was still as glass when they walked back to the Orbin island. No waves crested the ring. The last stripe of purple on the horizon provided a little light, as did the half moon in the east that was a whole moon if you united it with its wavering reflection, casting a faint silver light that outlined the tall black forms of the islands. All was still. Even the rotors barely moved.
Their bare feet were the only sound as they climbed the stairs, dark green paint chipping to reveal a layer of yellow paint which itself was nicked here and there to reveal the plain steel. The water dripped from their feet, which really were beginning to get cold in the night air. He stopped at the first landing while she skipped on up. Oddly, he didn't turn in to the hallway right away. It took him a moment before he realized he hadn't, and another moment to realize why. He'd been staring at Pouneh as she climbed the stairs. He dropped his eyes, blushing with humiliation, just glad that Pouneh hadn't caught him looking. For a second, he just stood there alone in the bright pool cast by the landing light, his own island of lavender-white fluorescent light.
The island was barely rocking. He followed the sounds of voices and Pia's laughter into their family room, where his sisters were working on a puzzle together, a new one. Mrs. Karamov nee Martinez liked to cut them in her shop out of spare pieces of plastic and gave them to kids, even painted pictures on them sometimes. Of course Joshua was too old for that sort of thing.
The youngest Mr. Tzara was there, talking with his parents. He looked tired, like he usually did.
"Hi, Mr. Tzara," Joshua said offhandly. "You spending the night again?"
Mr. Tzara nodded with a weary smile.
"You're back awfully late. Did you do your homework?" asked his mother.
"Yeah," he replied offhandly but falsely.
His mother raised one eyebrow.
"It's not due till Friday. I'll do it tomorrow, okay?" he protested.
"Joshua, you need to get your grades up. You're only two years away from graduation if you can pass everything," his mother said sternly.
"It's just algebra is the problem," he muttered, exploring the crack between two tiles with his toe.
"That's not what Mrs. Kim told me about your science grades," his dad interjected.
"Just 'cause of the group project where Lazlo wouldn't do his part," he grumbled.
"I think you could have tried harder too," said his mom.
"Oh, lay off the kid," Mr. Tzara interjected. "Nagging him won't do any good."
"Tell me about it," his mother sighed, but his father asked the young man, "Been another bad week?"
He nodded miserably. Joshua's mother placed a matronly hand on his back and told him gently, "You can stay here as long as you want."
"Want to play polo tomorrow after classes?" asked Joshua eagerly.
"And homework," his father added.
"After classes and homework?"
"You got enough guys on this island for that?" asked Mr. Tzara.
Joshua cast his eyes back in his head and ticked them off on his fingers. "Well, there's Uncle Mina. And Mr. Orbin the precaptain. And of course Tobias. So that's two on two."
"Sounds like three on two, unless my counting skills fail me," Mr. Tzara the youngest pointed out wryly.
"Oh yeah. Right," Joshua laughed.
"Well, sure. I'll play."
The homework interrogation seemed to have ended, so he felt safe stepping over the puzzle quickly but not quickly enough to keep his littlest sister from squealing "Move! You're in my way!"
He plopped into the chair bolted in the corner beside his father. The island swayed comfortably. He picked up his book from the end table where he'd tossed it, the speedboat racing book, written by the father of old widow Vaughn, and flipped to the dog-ear that marked where he'd stopped last time. He read, intermittently catching snatches of the conversation the three adults had resumed.
"You think they'll drag the initiates into it?"
"He's pretty angry. You don't usually hear him saying things like that."
"The kids--what was the last one?--oh, right, Joey..."
"I say you can't trust what Allen nee Liu says."
"But after putting all that work in..."
"Olga!" Pia's sharp voice broke through.
"I didn't do it," the older girl protested.
As the island swung back, another piece of the puzzle tumbled out of place.
"See? It wasn't me," Olga announced, vindicated.
"It was the first time."
"All right, you two, cut that out," their father announced.
"She started it," Pia pouted.
"And you know perfectly well that I don't care who started it," he informed her, looking at her sternly over his square frames.
But Olga had frozen. The color was draining from her soft face. As the island rocked and the room tilted and Pia sighed and picked up the plastic pieces she clearly wasn't going to be able to assemble, nobody needed to ask what was wrong.
"Olga, don't worry; this can't be more than a four," said their mother, running a comforting hand through her hair.
"But... it came on so quick..." the girl whispered.
"Don't worry," her mother told her. "It's not another storm."
The room rocked and Pia sealed the puzzle pieces in their bag and Olga huddled against her parents' legs and hugged her knees.

Archipelago Part II

2008-09-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

His body was starting to change, which he viewed with a mixture of fear and eagerness, like he imagined the Miyamotos must have felt before they left. Except not as dire as that. We weren't talking a "never coming back" kind of thing here. But it still felt like diving into the unknown. His father sat him down a couple times and haltingly talked about wet dreams and girls and sex until the awkwardness of the situation overcame both of them. The second time he'd given his father a pained look and said, "Dad, can we please just not talk about this stuff?" And they never did again. His dad left a book about it lying around, which he perused with a sort of covert curiosity, wondering whether his parents had the book printed specially for him, or whether it was someone else's. Either way was kind of creepy.
End result, he was only vaguely aware of what to expect, and every change made him momentarily panic before he figured out what was going on. And then it wasn't much better sometimes. He always got erections at the worst possible moments, like when he was swimming. He switched to the baggiest trunks he had, but still couldn't convince himself that it wasn't horribly obvious. He was afraid of Jackie noticing because she made fun of everything about him and if she found out about something like this she'd never stop teasing him ever, but he was even more afraid of Pouneh finding out.
He wished he had a brother. A big brother would understand how he felt. They could maybe talk about stuff without it being weird. Or at least they could just hang out together and be the same. It used to not matter whether he hung out with boys or girls, but now they might as well have been aliens. That made him realize that almost all the kids on their island were girls. And just his luck, he didn't have a big brother. He had little sisters.
Good things were happening to him too. He'd lost the belly he'd had as a kid and was instead beginning to develop a chest and broader shoulders. Amid the angry red spots that had decided to mottle his face, a little coarse black fuzz was becoming visible on his cheeks and upper lip. He proudly shaved this off once a week, even though most weeks he didn't really need to. Right now he could feel a tiny layer of stubble, which he hoped was visible against his dark-tan-or-light-olive skin and would make him look very masculine. Hopefully that would be what Pouneh noticed.
They were walking down one of the struts, toes curling automatically around the edges of the beam. He squinted in the afternoon sun. Best part of the day always got wasted in class, except for summer, when it was wasted working. Boring, boring, boring. Patching tires, monitoring the ballast pumps, scraping barnacles off the undersides of the decks, lashing and unlashing rings so they could move around, though of course he never got to actually drive anything except a Jet Ski. The only cool time was when the rotor jammed.
Pouneh held her arms out to balance. He found himself looking at her. Didn't even think about it; did anything except think about it. After all, this was Pouneh. If it was Anna or Maddie or Prethi or anyone from one of the other islands, it would have been different, because those were the kind of people you married so they were the girls you thought of as pretty or whatever. Not Pouneh, who spent so much time with their family that a couple of the McFairans thought she was his sister. Pia even called her "sister" until... well, she still did sometimes.
But there she was, walking in front of him, her skin all chocolatey brown against the deep deep blue of the water and the light blue melting into orange where the sun was setting and her hair was all tumbling down her back and she wasn't like a little girl at all. She was getting all soft and curvy in places he didn't even want to say out loud.
They walked out onto the ring, Joshua hopping from tire to tire, Pouneh mostly stepping around the edges. The Orbin island was near the middle of the archipelago at the moment. The Martinez and Greene islands were lashed to them, north and east, and towered overhead casting long black shadows over the sea. The other islands stood out like misty silhouettes, farther away. Walking along the ring with a girl... they were to young to be thinking about this sort of thing. Weren't they?
Pouneh didn't seem to be acting any different than normal. She swung her arms as she walked and said, "Man, this has to be the coldest October ever. I'll be so mad when we can't swim anymore."
"Just too cold out of the ring," he said. "It'll be plenty warm in the ponds clean into winter."
"Yeah, well, you just say that cause you never think it's too cold," she protested. "Remember when it iced up last year? And you were out there and your mom was freaking out, going all 'Oh no, he's going to freeze to death!'"
She giggled and he laughed, feeling awkward, like he had to make sure he sounded good and didn't say anything stupid. Since when did he care about this kind of thing? But he did. When their laughter died down, all he could say was, "Yeah, that was... pretty cold."
To punctuate his words, a wave swelled over the ring and flooded them to their ankles. Pouneh squealed and skipped back in a half circle, avoiding the hole in the tire without seeing it. The water sucked around his feet. He kicked some at Pouneh. She yelped.
"Oh, is that cold?" he laughed, splashing her again.
"Yes!" she squealed.
"Too cold for you? It's barely even fall. What are you going to do? Are you just going to stay inside all winter? Better get back onto the deck! The water's cold!"
She screamed and skipped away towards the outside of the ring, shouting out, "Stop it, Joshua!"
"Oh no, the water's so cold!" He teased. Another wave washed over them. Pouneh followed the edge until they reached the steel cables lashing their island to the Greene's. Not waiting to reach the gangway, she scampered across the cables like a cat, leapt off onto the other ring, and dashed off, crying, "Help! Mateo! Jen! Save me!"

Archipelago Part I

2008-09-04T18:02:00.000-07:00

The elder Mr. Carley always wore shoes, which Joshua thought was the weirdest thing in the world. It was weirder than Diego's hair. Weirder than old Mr. Liu's stories. Weirder than Olga being afraid of the water, because at least there was a reason for that. Lightning storms were weird but they only happened once in a while, but Mr. Carley was there all the time in his worn gray-white shoes. They'd been his father's and his grandfather's. Back in his grandfather's day, so he said, everyone wore shoes.
The idea of someone old Carley's age having once had a grandfather seemed so remote to Joshua that he unconsciously thought of those days as the dawn of time, a time of strange occult practices back before practicality was invented, when you didn't need a good reason for doing things. Because it was hard to think of anything less practical than having a dedicated shoemaker who made sure that everyone in the archipelago had something on their feet all the time. He imagined them all wearing solemn initiates' robes. Walking around slowly, heads held high, thinking carefully about where to put each shod foot. But he knew it couldn't really have been true, any more than Mr. Liu's stories.
He really did wear shoes, though. Everywhere. Inside and on the deck and even if he went walking out on the ring. He only took them off when he swam, and even the, he'd sit on the edge of the pool and unlace them just before he got in, and then he'd put them back on as soon as he'd dried off. Annike swore she'd seen him wear them in the water, but this was the same Annike who swore she'd seen a floating rock once, so that didn't mean much. He said he hated getting his feet wet, which Joshua thought was kind of like not liking sleep. Joshua told his mother that once and she laughed and said it was a good comparison for him to make because he slept ALL THE TIME. But that it was okay because he was growing fast and needed his rest. He was five foot four now, about the same as her.
He could count the number of other people with shoes on the island with one hand. Sandals weren't shoes; they didn't count. Even Jackie wore sandals. She had arch problems and they helped. Joshua had owned a pair of sandals when he was about eleven but he didn't see the point and wore them about twice and never got a new pair when he outgrew them. He wanted to look like the other boys and none of them wore sandals.
"I just don't get the point," he told his funny uncle Mina, the one who lived on the top floor and wasn't married. He lived to regret his wording when two weeks later he was running through the engine room and took a screw through his left arch. It got swollen and infected. He spent weeks hobbling around with the whole thing wrapped in a giant bandage and listening to Uncle Mina make a wisecrack about "getting the point" at least once a day. He still had a round red scar there.
Okay, so in the engine room you should wear shoes. Also in the gardens of the other islands that had such things, where there were thorns and rocks and sharp things. But other than that, why? There was just the tile of the living quarters and the concrete of the hallways and the steel grating of the decks and stairways and the soft rubber of the ring. Nobody should wear shoes all the time. That's just weird.

Revision of Lycanthropy Ch. 10

2008-08-03T13:23:00.001-07:00

Toru awoke to darkness and the sound of a young, agitated voice upstairs. “Mother, father, wake up! He is gone—I knew it—climbed out—now he will do something bad for sure—I am scared—I knew he was going to get in trouble—you have to stop him!” or something like that, but so broken with sobs as to be nearly unintelligible. Two other voices, quiet and sleep-drugged, joined it. He spent a moment orienting himself. He was at Cre and Ari’s house for the second night, may the third guardian come swiftly for Lady Mina. It was still early in the night, probably only late shadow. The child’s voice must be Jeni. She had woken her parents for some reason and was now trying to tell them something, but was too upset. He nearly turned over to go back to sleep, but then heard the parents hurrying towards the stairs and decided it must be important. He sat up.
A golden flicker on the stairway preceded Ari, who held the candle, and Cre, who held his daughter’s hand. The little flame made shadows bounce eerily across their faces, already furrowed with concern.
“Colin has gone missing,” Ari explained. “Can you watch Jeni for a moment?”
“No!” cried the girl. “I want to help find Colin.”
Her mother sighed. “Oh, all right. But hurry and get your feet bound. We don’t know here he might have gone.”
The parents quickly tied their sandal straps around their ankles and headed out into the darkness, one holding the candle, the other the child’s hand. Toru waited. Their tenseness and uncertainty seemed to have seeped into him. Cre returned with Jeni and put her to bed, but the look of pure annealed anger on his face made Toru decide not to ask any questions. Eventually he dropped back to sleep. Apparently the boy was brought in while he slept. It wasn’t until dawn, when he awoke to the sounds of one terribly weary-looking Ari heating some porridge, that he finally asked what had happened.
Ari pushed a warm bowl and spoon into his hands with a sigh. “Colin has been hurt.”
“He has?” said Toru with his mouth full, mostly surprised by her daughter’s apparent prescience. “What happened?”
The mother heaved a sigh. “A… a bad accident. He broke two ribs and got a nasty gash on his arm. He lost a lot of blood, but the doctor says he’ll be fully recovered in a few months. Children are very resilient.”
“Wow. That…wow.” He could think of nothing to say that didn’t sound stupid, so he reverted back to porridge. Someone’s kid who you barely know but are staying with gets badly hurt? What were you supposed to say? His thoughts began to wander off in the direction of perfectly tailored statements for use in very specific situations, but brought himself back before wasting too much time on sympathy statements for someone whose livestock had all been killed by those giant killer bees from beyond the Avaril Sea. Breakfast first.
Fortunately, Ari didn’t seem to want to talk much. She soon hurried back upstairs to check on her son, and Toru laced up his sandals and headed off for a day of tiles and mortar.
He liked his work. Wet plaster, stepping carefully from rafter to rafter, the satisfaction of seeing the tiles all laid out in neat rows, and besides, he could daydream as much as he liked or even pause for a moment with his legs dangling over the wall of an incomplete building and gaze up at the sky. The rain sputtered throughout morning, but died off before light. He expected the clouds would break by the end of the day.
The boy’s accident was all that was spoken of during the day. Details were sketchy as they sifted from one builder to another, but it definitely involved the town guard. He didn’t enlighten them as to the bit he knew. He deplored gossip.
Lehana, however, had no such principles, and by the time he returned to their someday-home for lunch, she knew as much as he did. After work, she knew more. Cre and Ari had had to send their daughter to stay with her matu Mara all day, though, because for unknown reasons, she went into conniptions whenever she saw the doctor. Malore had spent the entire day in the village sorting things out, much of which involved calming the hostilities between Cre and the guard, who had broken into physical violence when Cre suggested that the guard’s rather incredible claim—that the boy was a biform--was a lie. However, the guard was vindicated by a clear set of paw prints left in the muddy street. He had also sent his courier for the nearest healer. The boy was now conscious and recovering, but wild rumors about the nature of his biformism were breeding ill feelings among those who were not friends of Cre and Ari, arousing a surge of support among those who were, and leaving everyone generally edgy. This being a peasant issue, Dumar of course didn’t even know about it.
"Toru, I've known you for eleven years, and I can tell when you stop listening to me," came Lehana's warning voice.
He focused back on the young woman across the table from him and protested, "You can't! Besides, I was listening."
"Yes, I can."
"How?"
"Your eyes go out of focus."
"Oh." Oops. He furrowed his brow. "Really?"
"Yes. After the part where you zoned out, I was suggesting that I could come over with you during public time tomorrow, since it's your free day."
"Would they want that? I don't think they'd want a whole gallery of sightseers looking at their wolf boy."
Lehana rolled her big almond eyes. "Not that kind of visit, stupid. A sympathy visit."
He spent a moment pondering how that was different, but decided it was probably beyond him. He shrugged. "I suppose we could...huh." He laughed at a memory.
"What?" she asked.
"Remember when we were trying to pick a place to move to? You didn't want to come to a little place like Imuranati because you didn't think it would be exciting."
She laughed. Her laugh made him laugh, like it always did, and they both broke down into giggles. When Lehana got control of herself, she said, "And now, barely five days here and there was a wolf in the woods and someone we met turns out to be a biform. What's next?"
"Let's see...maybe Anar and Tamela's baby becomes a changeling...I guess the town could get sent off to war..."
"I guess we got off pretty easy after all," said Lehana with a sigh. "We've made some friends, got a house, you've got a job that's making us plenty of money."
"Err...about that," said Toru hesitantly. He had been hoping to put off explaining the situation to her until at least tomorrow, but it was kind of a silly hope. It wasn't like things were going to be any different tomorrow.
"What?" She narrowed her eyes and asked, "You did get paid for the week, didn't you? The town didn't suddenly not need a roofer or something."
"Yes... no... and here it is." He pulled out his leather wallet, which had been resting as a comforting weight in one of his trouser pockets, and handed it over. She hefted it, frowned, and poured it out on the table with a jingle of coins. One by one, she slid them into a pile with her fingertip. When she had finished counting, she just hovered her finger over the table for a while, as though expecting more to appear. Finally she told Toru, "Eight sesterces."
"I know."
"I thought you were working for twenty-four a week."
"I am."
"Are my counting skills just woefully inadequate and you only worked two days?"
He paused a moment to tick off his fingers and make sure she had added right, then answered, "No. But apparently I get that much and Dumar gets the rest."
Lehana stared at him blankly, then said flatly, "Dumar gets a third of our money."
Toru sighed. "That's what the master builder told me. I know. Four sesterces is a lot to pay to be told we can't marry."
“Well!” she rubbed her hands together and announced, “We’ll just have to learn to live on eighteen a week.”
He gave her a baleful look. She trotted around the table and sank her knuckles into his shoulders. They were a little sore from the day’s work, but in a moment she had them so relaxed that he wasn’t sure he could even raise his head from the table. He began to see things in a different light.
"I used to imagine that we were peasants from different estates and we could meet only on the street between the two. Or better yet, that you were a duchess and I was your peasant servant and we couldn't even speak to each other for fear of arousing suspicion, but we'd lock eyes from across the room when no one was looking. It seemed to me that we could love each other more if everyone else forbade it, for then it'd be our love, not theirs. But our parents were the ones who planned this in the first place, who brought us together. Everyone we've met in Imuranati would grant us the right to marry, including Malore. Only Mina forbids it. I think we're going to be all right. We can scrape by on eight sesterces a day if we're careful, specially since I'll have to stay with Cre and Ari a little longer anyway and I’m sure they’ll let you join us for public meals. And now we know we're not here together because the baroness recommended the match or because there's money involved or anything. It's just us."
The words made him feel better, but inwardly he granted himself the gratifying image of a tentacly monster crawling out of the ground and strangling the baron and baroness, its slimy coils squeezing them in a bone-crunching embrace while they struggled feebly.
Shadow wore on and he retired back to Cre’s house, where the inhabitants had already retired. There was someone else there, someone a few years younger than him, sitting on the bench with his shoulders hunched and his arms crossed on top of his knees. Toru started when he noticed a sword on the stranger’s belt.
“What’re you doing here?” he demanded.
“What are you doing here?” the stranger retorted raising an acne-spattered face.
“I’m staying here. They said I could.”
“Well, I am too, and Malore says so. I have to watch that little monster-boy of theirs.”
“Colin is no monster,” said Toru indignantly, more out of instinctive dislike for this newcomer than out of any particular knowledge of the boy. “He is just sick.”
“Makes no difference to me. I stay here until Malore says otherwise.”
Toru moved his mattress to the other side of the room to sleep. His free day began with dreams about a river. He was walking along its bank, watching how the course was now rapid, now calm. At one point, it fell over a waterfall into a gorge carved by the force of the water. He walked through the tall grass by its bank, the air cool and tasting of fresh water, the sky like crystal.
In the morning, he only stayed to ask after Colin, who seemed to be recovering, and to ask whether they would mind if Lehana came back over with him during shade.
He was restless during mundane time, since the feeling clung to him that he had earned only two days' wages and really should not be taking a day off. He restlessly paced around for a while, but eventually Lehana thought up a long list of small chores for him to do around their house, which hardly merited them, having been thoroughly cleaned five days ago. He did not mind because he could watch her out the window while she played with Momo, chasing the little black goat back and forth across the space behind their house. Thus occupied, he used up dawn, morning, and light, and then they visited Cre.
Toru stood a step behind Lehana as she knocked on the rough door, which was half shadowed by its own jamb in the light of shade. They were met with the stocky, bearded figure of Cre, looking weary but greeting them with a half-smile.
Lehana shrugged off social mores with her usual ease. "We’re here out of purely selfish motives, I promise. We thought it'd be a terrible shame for us to spend free day alone."
"I am sure we can help you there," said Cre, stepping aside to let them in. Colin must have been upstairs, but Jeni was lying on the floor with her bare feet in the air, playing with two small figures of twigs and twine while quietly chattering to herself. Ari, her hair pulled back beneath a dust-colored handkerchief, was kneading out some bread dough on the counter. The youth from the night before stood at the bottom of the stairs, clad in a russet-colored tunic and still girded with a sword. Toru had forgotten to mention him. Lehana noticed this immediately and looked questioningly from the youth to Cre.
He lowered his voice and told her, "An order from Malore. He holds that Colin might still be dangerous, injured or not. He is stationing one of his guards at our house until the healer can come and say that he is no longer a danger."
"I tell you, the nerve," said Ari over her shoulder, punching her frustration into the dough. "To order that kind of measure for a little boy who cannot even sit up right now. I know he is not overstepping his bounds, but really, to have someone armed staying in our house at all times?"
"It is not as though I have nowhere I would rather be," interjected the youth with a sullen look.
"My apologies, Torami. It is no fault of yours."
"Is he doing any better?" asked Lehana.
"Far better," replied Ari, dusting the extra flour off her hands and taking off her apron. "He is awake and talking. You may come up and see him, if you wish. He seems to like having visitors."
"Which is good, since half the town has come to see him," added Cre wryly.
The little girl suddenly raised herself so that she was sitting, supported by her hands. "No! Do not go up. He still has the bad thing. He could hurt someone!"
"Daughter!" Ari strode across the room and bent over to address her daughter in a sharp whisper. "You are not to speak that way to our guests, do you hear? I simply cannot believe your behavior of late. Why on earth will you still not apologize to your brother even now that he has been hurt?"
"But he was..."
"Whether or not he is a biform, he is still your brother, and you need to apologize to him. Now, I do not want to hear another word out of you while our guests are here."
Jeni folded her arms in front of her, smooth little brow furrowed. Her mother gave Toru and Lehana an apologetic look. Lehana gave her an easy smile. Ari led them up the stairs, which were warped in the middle and shiny from use. The shadow sun was cutting in through the window and caught the little boy lying beneath a woolen blanket. He did not have much color in his face, but otherwise looked healthy enough, and was looking at them with interest through his brown eyes. Toru tried to imagine grey fur spreading over him, his round face stretching and narrowing into a toothy muzzle, hands collapsing into paws, and then him standing, shaking out his coat, and leaping out the window as a wolf, but it was a stretch.
Ari knelt beside the cot and asked her son, "How are you feeling?"
"It still hurts," he admitted.
"Such a brave boy," she told him, ruffling his hair. "Soon the healer will be here, and then she can have a look at you and can probably make you feel a lot better."
The boy looked up suddenly and asked, "When does she get here?"
"Oh, probably some time tomorrow. Perhaps the day after."
Toru would have sworn that the look on the boy's face was one of alarm, but it passed quickly and he looked cheerfully over at the two of them. "The wanderfolk!"
"Yes, son. You remember Toru, and you have also met Lehana. They were there when we went to dinner with Felisi and Mara."
"Of course I remember Toru. He is staying with us until he gets married.” He spoke musingly, turning the two names over in his mouth, and then abruptly stated, "My name is Toru."
"What?" said Toru, his eyes narrowing, a sinking feeling deep in his chest. The boy's head had fallen back down on his pillow and he spoke to empty space. "No! Do not touch me. You are not one of the guardians. What if you kill me?"
His mother placed a hand on his forehead, but he cried out lashed at her as if he did not know her, mindless of his wounded arm. She said, "He has a fever. He must be delirious. Cre! Hurry! Something has happened to Colin!"

Lycanthropy Ch. 19

2008-06-20T23:35:00.000-07:00

Toru was drifting in a sea of molten glass.
At least, that was what it felt like. It felt like he thought it would from watching the glassblower back home. The glass studio was one of his favorite places to visit, only the glass was so hot, white hot, so hot that it must surely consume him…
It enveloped him completely. Thick but light, it poured over him, seeping everywhere, into the eyes he could not close, through his nose and mouth down his throat and then out through his open chest. He was drowning, but he could not move. The pain ripped at him inside and out until it was almost not like pain, more like a throbbing radiance that pulsed through him so strongly that he wavered in and out of blackness. Just when he nearly stopped noticing the burning, one of the birds darted in and ripped something else out of him. Birds? Perhaps they were bats, or some kind of water animal (the substance around him did feel like it might be home to swimming creatures). He could not tell, because he could see almost nothing, just fields of swirling color, and they showed up as darker patches. And anyway, now and then when he lost consciousness, he would awaken somewhere else. The dark figure had long since disappeared.
After an eternity, he found that the sea was growing thicker and harder and he was floating up to a surface he had not known was there. But when his head broke through, he still could not breathe, for the thick, fiery stuff still filled his mouth and nose, and he could not clear them, for his muscles were locked beyond the slightest motion, if indeed he still had any muscles and his limbs had not transformed to bars of stone, as they felt.
And then someone was there. At first he could not see who it was, with his eyes dazzled with light and glazed with the glassy liquid, but slowly they cleared, and it was a woman. She had the kindest soft face that he had ever seen, like a mother with many children, but there was pain in it as well. Seared as he was with fire and light, scarcely able to hold onto a thought, he felt her before he knew her. Even from a distance, she diffused a warmth that was somehow comforting and refreshing even from where he was. It took him a moment before he focused his mind enough to realize that he was seeing the first guardian for the first time.
And then abruptly he could move again. Though his muscles were stiff and sore, he tried to swim to her. His arms felt so heavy. He still could not breathe. But he had to touch her, he just had to. She was not far off now. Just a few more yards. Now she was within reach. She saw him. She was kneeling and holding out her hand, a hand like music and like spring, but just as he summoned all his strength to raise his leaden arm, her face distorted with pain and she staggered backwards, clutching her side, for after a thousand years, her wound had not healed. Toru grasped wildly, but whatever she was standing on could not hold him. He had used his last ounce of strength in reaching up. Now he sank again and could do nothing but lift up his face as the molten light closed over his shoulders, his neck, and finally his mouth and eyes, with a wave of pain that sent him again into blackness.
Sometimes in a dream, Toru would awaken into another dream and would think that he was really awake. This might happen three or four times in a row, with him taking a moment each time to realize that the events of the previous dream weren't real, but the real awakening always came with such lucidity that he did not need to question whether he was really awake or not. So it was now. He felt he was awakening from the past three days, though he knew that only the last bit had been a dream.
He was weary. The whole part with the sea of glass and the dark figure may have been a dream, but it had sapped his strength as though it had been real. His mind too felt sluggish and he had difficulty thinking. The first thought that formed solidly was that he now knew what the sun really would be like if it melted. Nor was it anything that he would want to touch! Yet it had been like clouds' blood, in a way. If so, his whole body should still be all clear—transcendental was the word for it—and have that funny feel, but as he'd never actually touched clouds' blood, he couldn't say what kind of funny feel it was (people said it didn’t hurt) nor whether he felt like that now.
It now occurred to him that his eyes were open. If he attempted to see his surroundings, he would probably meet with success. Everything came into focus before him. Dark stripes on a light surface resolved into beams across a ceiling. Their ceiling. Shadows just pooled on the near sides of the hollows in the plaster and spilled off the heavy oak beams. He tried looking around. He was in their common room, lying on a few blankets on the floor. Lehana sat on the bench across the table from him, arms folded on the table, chin buried in her arms so that he could only see her face from the nose up. Her expressive black eyes, the Lehana-eyes he liked so much, searched him out.
“Are you awake?” she asked tentatively.
He nodded and ran one hand down over his face. The illusion of drowning was proving difficult to shake. Probing around his mouth with his tongue revealed only dryness, yet he still felt that there must be traces of the glowing liquid lodged somewhere back in his sinuses.
“I’ve been thinking for a while about what I’d say to you when you woke up,” she said, voice muffled by her bare arms.
“Maybe…” he rasped. His throat felt thick and parched. He cleared it and tried again. “Maybe there’s really nothing to say.”
“I suppose not,” Sahina murmured. “The healer has told me all about it already.”
“How did she…? Oh. The thing. The biformism.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s gone now. You don’t need to worry anymore. It must’ve been hard for you. I’m sorry.”
“Well… not gone. Gone from you.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know you gave it to someone else. So someone still has it.”
“What?” Toru half snapped at her, before sifting back through his mind. “Oh. So that’s what happened, I guess.”
“Don’t you remember?”
“It was kind of confusing.”
“Well, someone’s got it now, over there at the villa. Malore and the people he took came back really quiet, everyone says. I talked to Athali ‘cause she was with them and she won’t say anything just yet but told me Malore’s going to meet with the baron this public time and when he gets back he’ll explain what happened to everyone.”
“You worried?”
She nodded. “I don’t know what happened, but I have this feeling it’s going to be worse than anything we thought it might be.”
He raised himself to his elbows. That turned out to be rather easy, so he took hold of the bench nearer to him, which was within an easy arm’s reach, and pulled himself onto it so that he could rest his head and arms on the table and mirror Lehana. His muscles did not appreciate this, but it was worth it; the dimpled shadow on her visible cheek showed that she was giving him a little smile.
“You can put your mind at rest,” he told her. “Our part’s over now. If things happen now, big things, we can weather them. We’re made to do that. We were born during the war.”
His father, whose experience with women was almost nothing before he had married his mother, had divulged his entire, modest knowledge of the subject to Toru over the past few years. Most of it sounded very sage, but when it came down to it, didn’t resemble any behavior Toru had actually seen in women, least of all Lehana. One such fact was “No matter what you say, they’ll find a way to take it wrong.” Toru now suddenly had an opportunity to confirm this statement from firsthand experience. His words had the opposite of their intended effect. Lehana bunched her eyebrows together, smile-dimple disappearing, and demanded, “Why do you keep saying ‘if?’ You know exactly what’s happening at the villa because you started it all. The baroness…you must think she is much prettier than me. And she’s rich and powerful and everything. No wonder.”
“No, I didn’t!” Toru protested, then calmed himself. “Look, Lehana, it was that biform thing. It was there in my orime, like a voice in my head, controlling me. I couldn’t do anything about it.”
“Don’t lie to me,” said Lehana, looking away and knitting her brow as she did when she was concentrating on not crying.
“I’m not lying to you,” he promised, trying to take her hand in his. She pulled hers away.
“I talked to the healer. She told me all about what lycanthropy does to your orime. It doesn’t change what you want. Whatever you do as a biform is what you would have wanted to do anyway.”
“How can she know that? Was she ever a biform?” he snapped.
“She’s a healer and the orime is her specialty,” Lehana told him.
“Yeah, but you know me. We’ve known each other since you guys came to town when we were just kids. Are you going to trust her or me?”
She gave him a pointed look, but remained silent. Completely silent. He could hear the Urubar wind shaking the leaves off a tree behind their house and the slow clip of a donkey. The air in the room seemed to grow thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier.
Finally he sighed and admitted, “All right. I guess at the time it was what I wanted. I don’t know if it was because I was sick or not. Look, men can be idiots; you know that. But I can tell you what I want now and it’s the same thing I’ve always wanted: to be right here with you in this very house. For the rest of my life.”
“I guess… I guess I can believe you,” Lehana said reluctantly.
“You guess? What am I supposed to say?” he protested.
“Well… you said the same kind of stuff before. So how’s it different now, so I know to believe you this time?”
“You’re just going to have to believe me because that’s all I can possibly say,” he told her. This conversation was getting annoying.
She turned back and looked him in the eye. “What if I don’t?”
Toru pushed against the table with his hands and stood. He heaved a sigh. “Look,” he said, “Believe me. Or don’t believe me. Whatever you want. I don’t really care anymore. But it’s too late to change your mind now. We’re here, everything’s arranged, we’re going to be married, and that’s going to be the rest of our lives, so don’t go messing it all up now.”
“I… I’m not sure that’s what I want anymore,” she said, choking on the words.
“But what are you going to do?” he asked. “Run back to your mother and father? They think we’re already married. They were the ones who arranged everything in the first place, remember? Ungrateful, that’s what your father’d say. You’re ungrateful not to appreciate all the work they put in for us. But I do. It’s still what I want, and it’ll happen, so you’d best figure out how to make it what you want as well.”

Lycanthropy Ch. 18

2008-05-25T22:48:00.000-07:00

Malore rose with a look of resolve. “Firsu, Bo, come with me. This is a dangerous situation and we must act immediately.”
“Sir, do you believe that the wanderfolk was the lycanthrope?” asked Bo.
“We have no assurance, but the timing is most suspicious, and if he is, there is another lycanthrope still at large in the baron's villa. Come. Eskale, there may have been injuries. We will need you as well.”
“Will you need my assistance?” asked Akiva.
Malore paused and considered. “Should we encounter the lycanthrope and be threatened by it, would your knowledge equip you against it?”
“No, sir. I am not even a swordbearer.”
“Then I would not bring you where you might be in danger. This may become a cause of conflict between the baron and me, and it would be best for you to remain out of such a situation. Athali, perhaps you would accompany us as well?”
“As you wish, sir,” replied the old nurse.
“Good. Mikal!”
The knight's servant appeared at the doorway.
“Have Celestial saddled along with four others. Sahina, you may manage my affairs until we return.”
She nodded. Firsu followed the knight outside and then to the stables, which were a little farther down the hill than the rest of the buildings, to the south of the road. A stable boy was hastily saddling the last of the horses. The best of the horses was Malore's silver stallion, but the rest were all good saddle horses, and Firsu took the reigns of a bay with a star on its forehead. He seldom rode anymore. It had been some four months, he thought... that was right, since Ivibar, when he had accompanied Malore to the foothills baroncy. Well, it was rarely the luxury of a peasant to merit a horse.
They rode to the villa. Nothing looked amiss when they arrived. A few citizens were waiting, though they would probably go home disappointed, as public time was nearly over. They themselves would almost certainly return well into private time.
Malore dismounted, but as the green-cloaked doorman took his reigns, he told him, “The baron is out, sir.”
“He sent for me.”
“He did, sir, but not long before he himself left to escort his friends home. In fact, I would judge that you missed him by half a quarter at most.”
“I had wished to speak with him, but no matter. We shall bring back the wanderfolk, and if I still need to speak with him, I shall leave word with you on our way out.”
“Very well, sir.”
As they dismounted, Bo whispered to Firsu, “The grounds are so quiet. Surely there cannot be a rampaging biform in there.”
“Who said it needed to be rampaging?” asked Firsu rhetorically. That quieted the young swordbearer.
They crossed the threshold with mixed caution and confidence, passing the spurned citizens. Bo in particular held back and bit his lip nervously. As he paused just inside the hall, Firsu gave him a sharp look and a jerk of the head to hurry up. He would probably be useless if they had to face any real danger. Still, options were limited and he was the right choice. Quiet young man, not too bright, but honest and respectful, not like those other cocky young swordbearers. What a pity so few of the older swordbearers remained!
The hall was empty and growing dark as shadow fell over the windows, but it was not particularly surprising that the lamps had not yet been lit. A young servant stood at the door of the baron's audience chamber, looking placid and a little sleepy. Seeing Malore, he looked up and asked, “Are you the knight, come for the wanderfolk?”
“Yes. Can you take me to him?”
“He is within, sir. He has taken very ill of a sudden.” The boy walked ahead of them, dragging his feet. The audience chamber was empty as well. It was a lavish room, hung with tapestries and littered with gilded furniture, but nothing indicated any kind of struggle, nor even that the room had been inhabited, save an upturned corner on one patterned red rug.
The wanderfolk lay stretched out on one couch, breathing lightly as if sleeping, but with his eyes half open, stirring like one in a bad fever. Now he arched his back and raised one hand towards the oculus. His lips were parted and seemed about to speak, but instead he let out a soft sigh and slumped back onto the cushions. The doctor and the nurse went to his side. Eskale took his wrist. The wanderfolk jerked it back and cried “Don't touch me!” so suddenly that both the doctor and the nurse took a half-step away, but he was still looking at the ceiling and whispered, “There is nothing left... you will break all my bonds...” and then his eyes rolled back and he was silent.
“He is certainly delirious, but whether it is biformism or some other illness will require a closer examination, and I would not say with certainty until I have Akiva's opinion,” Eskale told them.
“Did you see what happened?” Malore asked the servant boy.
“I was only in the hall, sir.”
“What did you see?”
“Sir, Lord Dumar was speaking with his friends when the wanderfolk came and demanded a private audience. Dumar obliged him. They only spoke for a little while and then Dumar came out and ordered me to send a messenger to you to come get the wanderfolk because he had suddenly collapsed. Then he rushed off into the women's quarters. I went and got the messenger. When I came back, Dumar was just coming back too, and he looked very grave and told his friends, 'I am afraid I must ask that you depart at once. Come, I shall escort you home.' So they left. I went in and found the wanderfolk on the floor, so I moved him onto a couch. He has been like this all the time, speaking strange words and seeming unable to recognize anything around him.”
The servant spoke matter-of-factly, betraying no particular interest in the events of which he spoke. Malore turned very grave during this speech. He turned, placing one hand on the hilt of his sword, and told them, “Come. And pray this is other than it appears.”
“What do you think happened?” asked Bo as Malore strode swiftly back down the hall.
“Whatever it is, that servant does not know of it,” Malore replied, “But I rather fear what we will find in the other side of the house.”
Firsu thought that Malore could have stated that in a less dramatic way, but he remembered the child biform all too clearly, and did not want to dwell on what an adult with the same capabilities might do. And Dumar, no less.
Malore led them down the corridor of snakes and monsters. They had not gone very far into the women's quarters when they heard voices, female voices and agitated. There was first an exchange that they could not quite hear, and then one voice said, “Go get help! Hurry!”
Firsu instinctively broke into a run around the corner and the palette suddenly changed from light blue walls and brown flags to red, almost eye-dazing red, so much red that close by his ear Bo staggered and gave a whimper and, farther back, Athali whispered, “Third guardian have mercy!”
The doctor was already pushing past him while he was still taking in the situation. One of the baron's guards lay on his chest, one arm stretched in front of him, face turned as though he were craning to see something farther down the hall. His skin was such a shade of blue-white that no one could doubt that he was dead. A servingwoman knelt by his side, looking up at them in agony and crying, “Come and help!”
Blood covered everything. It saturated the clothing of the dead man, as well as the hands and arms of the woman, and it was seeping into her dress where she knelt. A pool spread around his belly and legs and stretched behind him in a trail only a few pitiful yards long. Eskale knelt and doubtfully put two fingers on the guard's neck, but quickly shook his head.
“Help me! We have to get him to stop bleeding!” the woman implored, her eyes glistening with tears.
“I am afraid he stopped bleeding long ago,” the doctor told her quietly.
“Help or leave! Or would you mock me?” she cried.
Malore closed the distance to her in one long stride and placed a hand on her shoulder. His voice, still grave, was kind. “Listen to the doctor, good woman. It is too late for this man. But if you help us, we may be able to save others.”
She looked up, still choking with tears, and asked, “Who are you?”
“My name is Malore, and I am a knight under Lord Dumar who lives some eight miles east of here. He sent me word of a situation and asked me to come, so I did and brought four of my peasants. That is Eskale, and here are Firsu, Bo, and Athali.”
“And what do you want?”
“I want to know whatever you know about what happened here.”
“No more than you, sir. Dumar often has his peasants work well into public time. The two of us—that is me and my friend Evali—were just going from the laundry back to our quarters when we found him. I sent her for help...but I see now that we were too late. And you arrived but a moment afterwards.”
The knight took her hand and gently raised her to her feet. “I think you have spent enough time in this place of death, good woman. You should go tell your friend that help is not needed. What is your name?”
“Anamara, sir,” she said. She wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her free hand.
“I will call you if I have need of you.”
She nodded mutely and slowly walked back down the hall. When she was gone, Malore looked at Firsu. “What do you think?”
“What is there to say? He was mortally wounded and he crawled after the killer until his strength gave out.”
“Eskale?”
“I have not had a proper look at him, but I shall now,” replied the doctor. He rolled the corpse onto its back. Blood, already dark and thickening, could not cover it thickly enough to hide the slash that ran from navel to thigh.
“An ill-aimed stroke, but effective,” said Eskale. “Opening this artery in his groin would have made him die in a few moments.”
“Ill-aimed? Then perhaps not someone accustomed to fighting?” asked their knight. The others all shrugged. Firsu glanced at Bo and saw that his face had assumed a color not unlike the dead guard's and that he appeared to be struggling hard not to be sick.
“You must be made of harder stuff than that if you are to be a swordbearer,” Firsu told him. “Imagine that you are the one who killed him.”
“I only wish to keep the peace,” Bo replied weakly. “I am not a warrior like you.”
Their knight had been stroking his beard thoughtfully, and now announced, “We are looking for a man who would stab a guard with his own sword.”
Firsu nodded. “His sword is missing.”
“What of it then, sir?” asked Eskale, rising to his feet.
“If we are lucky, perhaps it is a peasant's uprising.”
“What, sir, like the one in Breakwater?” cried Athali in dismay. “I would wish that it be anything but that sort of reckless waste of lives.”
“But that is not likely,” said Eskale. The knight shook his head. Firsu agreed but said nothing.
“What then?” asked Bo. “What do you really think happened?”
“I shall say nothing until I know it to be true,” was Malore's grim reply.
They gingerly stepped around the body and continued silently down the hall. The very next door stood open, wide open. Firsu silently pointed the knight to the handle, which bore a dark stain. The knight nodded. They stepped through, Malore just ahead of Firsu. No one was in the room, just a mirror with a table and stool in front of it, and a pair of chairs on the other side of the room. The door on the far side was open as well. And there was Mina.
She lay on the ground, slumped against a couch with her head bowed. A sword rested in her chest. There was not much blood, since the weapon was still in the wound, and it was camouflaged by her red silk dress, but the sight of her lying there amongst the lush drapery and the cushions and the furniture with legs carved into paws was nevertheless the grimmest they had encountered so far.
Malore had stopped just inside the room and was surveying the scene silently. Firsu came to his side, also silent. It was the doctor who said, “By the third guardian, surely not the baroness!”
“Well?” asked their knight.
“She...could not possibly live with a wound like that,” he said, “But I will check.”
He knelt by the baroness, felt for her pulse, and checked her breathing. Then he looked up at them and shook his head. “Stabbed just to the left of her sternum, straight through her heart. She must have died in a few moments.”
Firsu had seen many corpses in his time, but this one made him shudder inwardly. Such a way to kill someone, straight through the ribs. The killer would have had to be almost holding her down to get enough force for a wound like that, so deep that only an inch past the hilt remained visible.
Malore was just looking to him for an opinion when a movement on the other side of the room caught their attention. There was a human form sitting or crouching behind a table in the corner. Everyone tensed. Firsu placed his hand on his hilt. The knight called out, “Who is there? Show yourself!”
A girl, wide-eyed and shaking, half rose. Firsu took his hand off his sword. She was certainly a peasant, but a finely dressed one, probably one of Mina's personal maids or attendants. A black eye and several welts were beginning to swell on her face and neck. She looked at them fearfully.
Malore stepped forward. She stepped back, palms pressed against the wall. He asked her gently, “Did you see what happened?”
She only stared at them, so he repeated his question more firmly. She nodded.
He asked, “Who was it?”
She contorted her face as though she were trying to say something, but also trying very hard not to cry, and ended up saying nothing. Malore informed her, “You are the only witness to this horrible act. We need you to speak.”
“Oh, sir, can you not see that she is in no state to be answering questions?” Athali finally protested. She went to the girl’s side and took her by the arm. The girl allowed Athali to lead her to a couch and sit her down. The nurse took a handkerchief from her pocket, spat on it, and began wiping the blood off the welts. Touching her fingers to the girl’s inner forearm, she murmured, “Poor thing. This bruise has finger marks. Someone has been very rough on you. I think he did not want you to say what you saw. He threatened you, did he not? Told you to be quiet?”
She nodded.
“Well, we are here now, and that good man over there is the knight Malore, and he will see that justice is done and the innocent are protected. So you do not need to worry, okay? You can tell us what happened.”
The girl still looked fearful, but she wet her lips and said in a cracked, tremulous voice, “It was him. That…wanderfolk.”
“Toru?” asked Malore.
“I do not know his name. He came in… he yelled at her… he stabbed her. Then he saw me, yelled at me… told me not to say anything.”
“And he hit you?”
She nodded again.
Malore took a seat on the couch next to the girl and asked, “Are you sure of all this?”
Bo chipped in, “But it all makes sense. The wanderfolk was the lycanthrope, was he not? We should expect these kinds of acts from him.”
“Quiet, you fool,” Firsu hissed, unable to contain his annoyance.
Malore was now looking at the scrapes across her face. He turned his hand backwards and slowly mimicked the motion that would have been needed to make them. Then he turned to the rest of them and asked, “Does Toru wear a ring?”
“A wanderfolk? Surely not,” replied Firsu.
“Especially not working a trade under Dumar,” added Bo, who then winced with the impropriety of what he had just said and was silent.
The knight asked the girl once more, “Are you sure it was the wanderfolk Toru?”
She had grown even more pale and frightened, but finally she shook her head.
“All right. Then who was it?”
“He… he said I must not tell,” she said in a breathless voice. “He said I must say it was the wanderfolk He was so angry. If he found out I told…”
“Did I not tell you that Malore is a knight?”
“Yes, but he is not a baron,” she whispered.
The knight set his teeth and bowed his head in acceptance. It was a slight gesture and the servant girl, looking at Athali, could not have seen it. Firsu, however, did.
Malore told the girl, “Look at me.”
She did.
He asked, in the calmest voice possible, “Was it the baron?”
She only stared at him, lips parted, eyes wide.
He asked again, “Was it Dumar?”
She nodded. Bo looked questioningly at Firsu for affirmation, and he crossed his arms over his chest and nodded slowly. As if it could have been anyone else. It was Eskale who murmured, “By the Maker himself.”
The girl said, “He came in and he was angry. She was about to start laughing at him like she would any other time, but then she saw that he had the sword and there was blood on it. She asked what happened. He would not say but kept demanding that she tell him what had happened, and eventually she slipped back into the way she normally is, and she told him he knew perfectly well that she had been with that wanderfolk and if he was jealous because his little Sahina did not turn out to be everything he had hoped for, well, that was his problem. And then he got really angry and started yelling at her about how she was his wife and she should do what he says and he started threatening her with the sword and then he says…he says ‘I have had enough.’ That was all. And then he stabs her.”
“May the third guardian be just,” said Athali.
“Thank you, child,” said Malore, still calm, though remaining so through visible effort. “Will you be all right?”
“If Dumar finds out…”
“Dumar will not hear it from the lips of any of this company. And I swear by the Third Guardian that I shall see that justice is done.”
She nodded blankly. Malore stood and nodded to the rest of them. “Come. I do not believe there is anything we can do here.”
Athali came quickly to his elbow and said in a low voice, “But the servant girl! Surely we cannot just leave her here. Look how shaken she is.”
“You act as though she were within my jurisdiction. She is a peasant of the baron.”
“But Dumar is… he must be…”
“I know. And I think that I should act with propriety.”
He strode off, Firsu and Eskale at his side but the other two following only reluctantly. Bo kept insisting, “But the baron! He killed her! Must we not remain as witnesses?”
“We were not witnesses,” Firsu pointed out.
“But the baroness. The sword. And him.” They were back in the red-floored hall. “He could get rid of it all after we leave.”
“He probably will,” was the knight’s reply.
“And then we would only have our word to say what we saw.”
“That is true and it is a loss,” said Malore, “But once you recall that we are all under the baron’s jurisdiction, even me, you will see that it could turn out very much the worse for us if we are found in his villa in the middle of everything.”
It took a while for the young peasant to consider this. Then he asked, “Then you will not meet with Dumar at all?”
“Of course I will. But it will be later and on his terms, when he feels comfortable. Right now I must get a snake to the duke as quickly as possible.”

Lycanthropy Ch. 17

2008-05-05T01:43:00.000-07:00

The children and the teenagers were all there to meet the group coming down the path from the baron. Jeni, of course, was waiting for her parents and to hear what they had decided about Colin, who felt better but was still not allowed to get up. She had to go with her batus because she was too young to go by herself. The others all came because they wanted to see the healer. Of course so did Jeni, but as the other kids her age crowded around the healer, she ran up to her mother and father and asked, "What did you decide?"
"Colin is fine," said her mother, taking her hand. "We were right that he does not need to be guarded anymore."
"But Torami came anyway," Jeni pouted, glancing at Danili and her friends.
Her mother ruffled her hair. "Just ignore him. He will not tease you if you do not respond."
Jeni nodded, though ignoring him was hard and it had never made him leave her alone so far.
Her parents paused to talk to Dan and some of the other adults, so she ran over to join the others crowded around the healer. They were crying, "Tell us about the third guardian!"
"What do you want me to tell you?" she laughed. "I have only met her once not counting when I was a baby, and that time she did not wear her true form."
"What did she look like then?" asked one of the older girls.
"Like a man in a long gold robe."
"How do you know it was her?" asked Danili skeptically.
"Because she wished me to know. If she wishes it, she need only glance into your eyes and you will have no doubt. If she wishes to remain unrecognized, though, only a seer can discern her identity."
"What did she say to you?" asked Clara, who had squirmed her way to the front of the group.
"She only paused for a moment and told me, 'You have done well so far, but there is much left to do.'" And now the singer shook her head. "Really, though, I know very little about the guardians, for it has not been my privilege to spend very much time with them."
"But we know nothing at all," said Mori quietly.
"Nothing? Really?"
"No. You have been everywhere and seen everything and we have not."
"Well, what would you like to know?" she asked Mori.
He looked up at her with his big eyes and asked, "You are a healer. Can you tell us about the Healer, the real one?"
"Oh my. That is a very big question, very big indeed. What do you know of him already?"
"Nothing, like we said," Clara threw in impatiently, but her brother Jakobi said, "Just that he is coming someday and he can heal everyone, even better than the third guardian. They say that he can even bring people back from the dead."
"That leaves a lot, even though no one knows much about him. Where to begin..." She took a deep breath and slowly let it out through her teeth. "I think we'd better begin with the wounding of the first guardian, because that was when things really began to go wrong. Do you know about that?"
Jeni and her friends nodded and said, "Yes, everyone knows about that."
"Good. Then tell me."
Everyone was quiet and some of them looked at Mori. They all knew that this sort of thing was his job. He looked down and shuffled his feet awkwardly for a minute, but he liked telling stories, so he quickly worked up his courage and began.
"A long time ago, the Maker made people. He also made the Guardians, three of them, to help him take care of the people. For a little while everything was good. Everybody got along and nobody fought. Also nobody died. They just lived a long time and then the Maker came himself, because he was right there in those days and spent time among people, and he would take them by the hand and lead them to his house in the sky. No one was ever angry or afraid.
"But that made the Enemy angry, so he came to earth to cause trouble. He could not touch people anymore because he was punished that way because, right, because he took people and twisted them all out of shape and made the fey, but that was earlier. So instead he came and began whispering evil things into their ears while they were asleep. Then people started arguing and fighting. That was bad for them, but the worst part was that all that evil stuff they were doing made it so they could not get near the Maker as much. The first guardian tried hard to make everyone be good again, but people liked being bad and they did not listen to her.
"One day, she saw two brothers fighting, and she went to step between them to make peace, but one of the brothers was so angry that he pulled out his knife, which up to then was only used for hunting, and he tried to strike his brother, but instead he struck the first guardian in the side and the knife went deep into her. It hurt her badly.
"Then the Maker had to leave because everyone had gotten so bad that just being near him would burn us like fire. He left the Guardians to take care of us, but things just got worse. He left the third guardian in charge of bringing people to his house at their time, but they began to kill each other and die of diseases and things too early. The first guardian is still trying to make everything better, but her wound has never healed and it causes her too much pain. The wound cannot heal until we all stop being bad. Also the Maker can never come back to be with us again until it is all better and we have atoned for everything we did wrong. And that is how it has been ever since."
He looked up for approval. Jeni thought he had told the story very well, better than she could. The healer seemed pleased as well. She told him, “You know the story, I see. So you can see why we are in such trouble. So much is wrong with the world. No one can possibly solve all our problems—well, no one that we know of—except the Maker. But the maker cannot return until all our crimes are atoned for, because his very presence would destroy us. What, then, are we to do?”
“The healer,” another child whispered, one of the citizens.
“That's right. See, people got very hopeless, and finally someone asked the second guardian if there was anything at all that we could do. He said no, we were far beyond being able to save ourselves. And of course that made everyone even more hopeless, but eventually someone thought to ask if there was anyone else who could help us. And he said yes, someone called Healer could. But no one knows who he is, nor where to find him, nor nearly anything save the little more we have learned from the Second Guardian. We know that he lives, but very far away, beyond this world. We know that he is not a man—nor a woman either; yes, we have asked—nor an animal nor a guardian nor any other type of creature we have ever encountered. We know that some day he will come. We do not know when.”
“And when he comes, he will make the first guardian better?”asked Jeni.
“Yes. The second guardian said he would.”
“Will he come back soon?” asked one of the shepherd boys.
“I'm afraid that is all I know. But if you have other questions, I would love to answer them.”
They did, especially Jeni and her friends.
"How old are you?" asked Jakobi.
"Twenty-seven."
"Are you married?" Clara wanted to know.
"Of course." And she held out a hand to show her wedding mark. It was red with black lines and a little bit of green, a round design kind of like a flower.
"It is very pretty," Jeni told her.
"Thank you."
"Do you have any children?" asked Clara.
"No."
"Why not?"
The healer explained, "The Maker has jobs for each of us. Not everyone does the same thing. Some people he decides should be parents, but right now, I'm very busy being a healer and would not have time to be a parent. Someday I hope he will let me be a parent, but not right now."
Jeni loved every word this wonderful stranger spoke, but Torami was already bored. He told his friends, "Come on. We should find something to do.
Just as they turned away, Jakobi asked, "Do you know vinata?"
Jeni did not know what that was. It made Torami and the others stop, though. She quietly asked her batu, "What is vinata?"
"It is a way to defend yourself, special to the servants of the third guardian," he replied.
"You would do better to ask one of her little stars a question like that," said the healer.
"But we have never seen a little star," protested Clara, stamping her foot. "No one special lives in our village. No one! Well, old Ederani is a prophet, but he just kept saying everything was fine, so no one ever listens to him anymore. And he never said all this was going to happen."
"And you are bright enough for us. Bright just like a star," added Jeni admiringly. It wasn't exactly what she wanted to say, but it the best way she could figure to describe the healer. She shone, but not in a way you could see. It was more like something you felt.
"Well, do you know it or not?" called Torami impatiently.
"Young man, you are old enough to know that every servant of the third guardian knows some vinata," she replied.
"Show us!" all the children cried at once, crowding in so close that she had to push them gently away with her arms.
"All right, all right," she said, laughing, when she had got a little space. "Is anyone here a swordbearer?"
"I am," said Torami, stepping forward.
"Are you up for a bit of sparring?"
"Always am," he replied, and approached her with a grin, but first he shoved the kids out of the way, pushing Jeni rather hard in the process, and ordered them, "Give us some room!"
He took up a fighting stance and raised his fists. The healer just stood and casually looked at him, then said, "Well? Come on!"
Torami swung. He was going easy on her, Jeni could tell, probably because he never fought with girls. Even so, at first Jeni was afraid the healer was going to get hurt. She remembered the time Torami punched her brother and how long it took for his nose to stop bleeding. But this time, his blow missed. He swung again and missed again. Now he tightened his fists and stopped going easy, but he could not hit her. She didn't even seem to be moving very fast. She just knew exactly how to lean to one side or the other or to take a small step so that his fist slid neatly by her through open air. Torami tried to follow her motion, but he just got off balance and finally stumbled and had to catch himself with one hand. Jeni and the other kids cheered. Torami stood back up and kicked the dirt in frustration.
"Try again?" she asked mildly.
"That was not fair," Torami muttered.
"How?"
"The sword bearer should get to have a sword."
"I had no sword."
"She beat you fair, so admit it," called one of the shepherd boys. Torami just glared.
“But someone good at vinata ought to be able to beat him even if he does have a sword,” said Danili's friend Li.
“I never said I was good at vinata,” laughed the healer.
“I heard that the bright ones can defeat a wild wolf with vinata,” said the youngest shepherd boy.
“I heard they can defeat a lion,” said the middle one.
“That is nothing,” interrupted the oldest one. “Just one of them can defeat a whole band of soldiers with armor and swords and bows and arrows.”
Jeni had been lost watching the exchange, but now she felt her mother's hand on her shoulder. Her mother said, “Come, daughter. Public time is passing swiftly.”
“Torami is a sword bearer, but he cannot win a fight,” she said with a grin, craning her neck to look up at her mother.
“Well then, I suppose we shall have to hope that he is never defending us,” said her mother.
“I would not want him to defend us,” said Jeni. “And anyway, lots of the other boys will be sword bearers, only they are just not old enough yet, and I would rather they defended us because they would be better.”
Her mother laughed and told her, “We will have to wait until the marshall comes through again before we find that out. Now come. We must get dinner prepared.”
Her mother began to pull her away from the crowd. The healer looked up and said, “You don't listen to your little seer much.”
At first they did not realize that she was addressing them. Then Jeni's mother laughed and said, “Jeni is not a seer.”
“How do you know that?” asked the healer.
“How could she be? She is just our daughter.”
“Well, what guardian was she born under?”
“The second,” said her mother with a frown.
Her father had joined them by now, and he stepped forward and spoke to the healer quietly. “Akiva. I would speak to you of this—it was already my wish to do so—but not here in the company of all. Would you perhaps come see us tomorrow near the end of public time?”
“Of course,” replied the healer.
“Thank you.”
Jeni was rather bewildered by the exchange. She knew they were talking about her, but could only look from face to face as they spoke because she could not follow what they were saying. But now her mother took her by the hand and led her away quite firmly. She walked slowly and looked back over her shoulder. Torami had come back to the healer and was talking to her, looking a little ashamed at his loss.
“Are only the servants of the third guardian allowed to learn vinata?”
“No, but she teaches it to them specially, and aside from her instruction it is considered a marvelously difficult skill to master.”
“Well... do you think you can show me? Just a little?”

Addendum to Lycanthropy Ch. 15

2008-04-24T01:00:00.000-07:00

As he stepped out the door, Cre and Ari were just passing his house with that old nurse Athali who had been there the night Firsu found the wolf, accompanied by the woman he had to assume was the healer. A woman, and young too, less than thirty by the looks of her. He paused and then followed them at a distance. Her gender did not bother him, though he had been expecting a man, but her age did. Of course when he was a child, all kinds of honors had been awarded to people younger than her, but he had somehow managed to avoid all of them. Such customs were unwarranted anyway. As if some twenty-year-old deserved to be a knight. Well, all that was decades ago.
The couple glanced at him briefly and then walked on in silence. That was fine with him. As he reached the path up the knight's hill, he saw a pair of men speaking to the door guard. Gavi was one; he couldn't quite identify the other, but presumably it was Anar. They proceeded into the manor. He was not sure how many people the knight had called, but this seemed to be most of the relevant parties, not counting the children.
Athali paused to catch her breath at the top of the hill, her hands on her knees. The others waited. As she straightened back up, she saw Firsu and gave him a nod. Her look was mild, but not pleased. She told the healer, “Here is someone else you shall need to speak to. His name is Firsu, and he is the one who discovered that Colin was a biform.”
The healer turned to him. She had a sensible, no-nonsense look that raised his confidence some, and if Cre and Ari had swayed her opinion of him, she did not show it as she shook his hand with a small smile and repeated, “Firsu. My name is Akiva.”
“You have come to a serious situation, as you surely know,” he told her. “I hope you are prepared for it.”
She replied simply, “I am. But come, I am eager to meet your knight.”
Firsu nodded to the boy at the door and led the healer out of the harsh light of early shade and into the corridor. She was looking at him now intently, almost curiously. He considered asking her purpose, but refrained. As it happened, he did not need to. In a moment, she asked, “What happened to your arm?”
“The war,” he grunted. Hopefully she knew when to mind her own business.
Apparently she did not, for she asked, “You were wounded?”
“No. The bonds were broken,” he told her as shortly as he could.
“By a transcendental weapon?”
“A what?”
“A weapon dipped in clouds' blood so that it turns all clear. They pass straight through things, but sever all the bonds on the way.”
“That was it.”
“I could have a look at it, you know,” she told him with an encouraging smile, but he just shook his head.
“Sixteen years since I used it. Far too late now.”
“Don't speak so surely. Bond damage does not scar or heal like physical damage. It can exist for years and then be suddenly repaired.”
“The medics looked at it. There was a healer among them. They said they could do nothing more.”
“Did they bathe it in alcohol?”
“Yes.”
“Overnight? It often works best while you sleep.”
“Yes.”
They had reached the doorway to Malore's main audience chamber, but she paused and persisted. “Did they try treating a poultice with clouds' blood?”
“Come. You wanted to meet our knight,” he said curtly, and strode past her into the great round chamber.

Lycanthropy Ch. 16

2008-03-13T21:44:00.000-07:00

Toru woke heady with victory. It was a light, yet overpowering, feeling that bubbled up in his chest and made him feel giddy, but also powerful. It was the way he'd imagined he would feel if he'd ever beaten his brother at a game. They'd played since as far back as he could remember with pegs on a board carved into a piece of scrap wood, moving and capturing and all that, but his brother always won. Not just when they were small and his few years' seniority made a great difference, but all the way up until they were teenagers and he left. And he didn't just win, but he laughed at Toru and pointed out what mistakes he had made and told him how stupid he was to make a move like that. When Toru was very young, he would start crying, and then his brother would laugh at him for crying. But their father made him keep playing.
"Sometimes you'll be forced to play even when you don't want to," his father told him. "That's why you have to be able to win."
But Toru never put much stock in winning. He just liked to lie on the ground with his arms folded in front of him and his face buried in them so that just his eyes peeked out and look at the board, at the pieces and their shadows and the shadows that pooled in the little trenches carved between the squares, and the shadow of the board on the pebbly ground where he might spy a train of ants or one of those little red spider things that just looked like a red dot. Much of the time he liked to look at his toys rather than playing with them, something else his brother teased him about.
No good teasing his brother back, though. Because he'd been through everything and he remembered. If Toru ever gave Denu a bad time, he'd grab him by the neck of his tunic and start telling him about the soldiers and when they burned the town and how their youngest brother died when he was still a baby, until all soldiers gave the younger boy nightmares. He grew past that stage, but only partly. That was one reason he wanted to move to a little place like Imuranati. How could it possibly have any connection with those great events? But it did. He had made a mistake moving into one of Shenu's old allied baroncies. Everyone here knew the whole story, how when the baron Antoni died, he willed the young knight Shenu to be his successor, but his children Zakari and Carolina protested, and the duke actually let them raise armies and fight until Shenu eventually emerged victorious. And now he was lying with the early morning sun pouring across his face on a couch in the women's quarters of the villa of the Red Tree baron, Dumar, husband of Mina, whose father had been Shenu's friend, mentor, and foremost ally in that conflict.
He sat up and looked around the room. It looked the same as it had the previous night, but rather than cheering the scene as one might expect, the sunlight made it all look a little uncanny, like when light shines into a ruin all overgrown with moss and vines. It struck him that he could not recall the last time he had woken up so late in the day. The fire had either burned out completely or down to a few embers in a pile of light grey ashes. The incense was out. Mina was not there.
He found his clothes in a pile beside the bed. He appreciated the feel of woven linen and wool against his body after the silk, the velvet, and oh, Mina's skin. He fastened his belt and turned his attention to lacing his sandals. When they were sturdily knotted and he had thrown his cloak over one arm, for it was too warm to wear, he paced around the room once before turning to the inner door. He was in the women's quarters, which struck him as a bit silly, but it did not feel off-limits to him. Pity the fool who tried to tell him where he could or couldn't tread!
He almost wished that some pathetic peasant, some maid or attendant, would challenge him. He could show them who they were dealing with, a thought that made a ripple of pleasure raise hair on the back of his neck for just a second. But he met no one. The first person he spotted, seated in a little side chamber with her back to him, was Mina. He slipped into the room. She was brushing her hair while looking into a decorated mirror of polished silver. She turned to look at the real Toru and away from the one who approached in the oval surface. Her perfectly designed face regarded him with that haughty look in its black-lashed feline eyes. It rankled him.
"Do you look at everyone with such disdain, or is it specially reserved for me?" he asked.
She laughed shortly and resumed brushing her hair. "Really, you flatter yourself to imagine that I would reserve anything especially for you."
"Except yourself," he said, folding his arms across his chest.
"Oh, that?" she laughed again. "Hardly. You were there. Let it never be said that I do not use what is at my disposal."
"But you summoned me all the way from Imuranati. And in your voice and gesture it seemed that you desired me in particular. You did choose me over your husband."
"Well, between you and that bloated oaf, it is hardly a choice. Besides, he found his own way to occupy himself last night, though I doubt he made much headway. Hmmm... I must ask the stable boy what time that prim little citizen left. Before shadow would be my guess." She finished with her hair and set down the ivory-handled brush on the table in front of her.
"I wouldn't speak so casually to me if I were you," he said in a voice that was almost a growl. "I'm capable of more than you know."
"Do stop talking," she told him lightly. "I do not know how long I can keep from laughing at that accent of yours."
He jumped forward and grabbed her wrist with one hand, pulling her closer to him until they were face to face. He didn't know if he was stronger than before--overpowering Mina should have been easy for him under any circumstances--but it felt that way. Her wrists, so soft, seemed ready to crack if he squeezed any tighter. She had lost her poise and stared at him almost fearfully. He spoke slowly, deliberately. "Now, you may be a baroness. You may outrank me twice. But right now, that difference doesn't feel so important, does it? It feels more like I'm stronger than you and could do whatever I like. Oh, sure--you could call your guards, and maybe they'd best me, but like I said, I'm capable of a lot that you don't know, and if I had to fight them, that'd make me angry, and I don't think you'd want that. So you just watch your tongue. I'm going to have a little conversation with Dumar."
He threw her back against the table, where she sat motionless, searching him with her eyes as he strode out of the room. It was only snakes in this corridor, curled in the corners as decorations or winding their way up paintings of columns, and that made him uncomfortable. He fit better among the two-headed dogs and poisonous dragons. He was beginning to understand how they felt. He passed one of Mina's attendants coming the other way, who gave him a suspicious look but walked on. He was not sure of the way to Dumar's quarters, so he navigated back to the front hall and then went the other direction. Here, windows all along the left wall let in light and the crisp air of late Urubar. Outside, the courtyard was still in tranquil affluence, the silence only broken by the play of fountains and the singing of a single blackbird. He did not have to walk far down the hall before he heard voices punctuated with raucous laughter. The baron was involved in some serious matters of state, no doubt, thought Toru wryly.
A doorman in the standard green tunic stood at the door, but Toru shoved past him with what must have been a deadly look, because though he opened his mouth and began to raise one hand, he just stared after Toru. Here, in a gracious room lit by a high oculus, four figures who were clearly nobility reclined, lazily eating grapes and sand pears while they talked and laughed. The man in the middle, who was perhaps thirty, wore a green velvet tunic trimmed with fur, and between the gold chain around his neck and the gold band running through his brown-black hair and the gems that glistened on his thick fingers, Toru did not need to guess whether he was the baron.
He and the others were setting down their goblets and looking up in annoyance. The others turned to the baron for an explanation. He shot Toru a look beneath heavy, furrowed brows and said, "Wanderfolk, you do not have an appointment. You had better be gone before you begin to annoy me."
"I believe you're going to speak to me now, appointment or no," Toru told him in a low voice.
Dumar raised his goblet to his lips and grinned over its rim. "You are rather arrogant, considering that I have not the faintest idea who you are."
"No? Then let me refresh your memory. My name is Toru. I had an appointment about a week ago when I wished to have my marriage approved. You left the matter to your wife, who refused us. Now I'd like to speak to you privately."
Dumar snorted. "Any of these men could have you crucified with a single word. Surely you are not serious."
By the enemy, were they all barons? Toru didn't stop to guess, but simply said, "It concerns Mina, who summoned me back this shadow."
Dumar bit his lip and glanced around uncomfortably and finally said, "Perhaps you are right. Friends, I am afraid I must take your leave for a few moments, but I assure you it shall be brief."
He stood, slowly and leisurely, and strolled over to Toru. "Come, let us take this conversation into the hall."
Toru turned, keeping his eyes on the baron but allowing himself a smirk, and the two walked back out into the hall side by side, both outwardly relaxed but watching each other very, very carefully. The baron shot a glance at the doorman and led Toru down and into the next chamber, which was unoccupied. He threw himself into a chair, steepled ring-heavy hands before him, and looked up with mock attentiveness.
"You really should keep an eye on your wife," Toru advised him.
"Oh, should I?" replied Dumar in his slow, sardonic voice.
"You never know what she might be up to," Toru continued
"And you think I do not already know?" laughed the baron. "Nothing goes on in this villa that I am not aware of."
"It seems to me that you must be either ignorant or foolish," said Toru, confidence beginning to build within him. "You never know when things will begin to spiral dangerously out of control."
"I thought as much," the baron surmised. "Here you are, Mina's latest pet, all swollen with pride, ready to challenge me for her hand. Surely you do not think you can win her by opposing me. You are not the first pretty young man to try this, you know."
"But none of the others was me," said Toru with a grin.
"Your boldness is amusing, but you are still not her husband."
"True enough," murmured Toru, and in a low and brooding voice, he pondered, "I suppose Mina is yours, really, and to win her... I'd have to be you." And then he found his lips forming the words, "My name is Dumar."
The startled look on the baron's face gave him another burst of self-satisfaction, but just then he realized that they were not alone after all. There was another man, his face downcast and shadowed, who had been standing silently in the corner, but now stepped forward. Fear gripped Toru's heart with an icy fist. The figure, all draped in black so deep it seemed to suck light away from the rest of the room, was coming for him. He searched his memory, but surely this was no one he had ever seen before, nor even a character out of one of the old stories. It was entirely new to him. He staggered backwards. The dark figure just strode faster and with one hand as solid as the paving stones of the street, knocked him backwards. Mindless of how he struggled and lashed out, it reached down into his chest as though it were some transcendental substance. At its rending touch, his strength drained away from him and with it his confidence, and the room swam with colors and pictures until he could no longer keep his head.

Lycanthropy Ch. 15

2008-03-01T03:40:00.001-08:00

The healer Akiva stood in the middle of the room under the light of the oculus, while the others sat on the couches around the room, listening intently. Malore, of course, was in the highest position, between his son, who looked bored, and his young advisor Sahina. As usual, his wife was not well enough to join them. On the next couch, the doctor and that old nurse, Athali, who had been there the night Firsu found the wolf. Next, the boy's mother and father, who had brought the healer. Firsu himself was on the other side of Malore on the next couch over from Gavi and Anar. He had brought with him a young man named Bo, the son of the blacksmith but a swordbearer himself, who had been leading the other shift of guard duty. No children were in attendance, of course, though there had been a question about whether they would be needed for questions. In the end, Malore's servant was kept on hand, standing by the door, so that he might fetch anyone else who might be needed.
She had just announced, "The boy is not a lycanthrope."
A murmur spread around the room. The boy's parents, who already knew, still looked relieved. Cre gave Firsu a withering look, prompting him to say, "Well, the second guardian will testify that he was one two days ago."
"I did not say he was not one then," she said reasonably, "Only that he is not one now."
Malore said, "We need not waste time discussing further whether he might not have been a lycanthrope before. The boy himself admitted it, as Ari has told us. The pressing question, as I see it, is: does this mean that the danger is gone? Akiva, can you answer that question?"
"I can, sir. In fact, it depends on the condition the boy had to begin with. There is a condition very like lycanthropy that spontaneously occurs, lasts for one night, and spontaneously leaves. If you have no evidence that he transformed more than once, this may well be the case."
Anar quietly shook his head and Gavi said, "The calf. Something killed it two days earlier. The wolf from the woods was quite dead at the time; I can testify to that. And we did remark that the beast that killed the calf seemed to have behaved strangely."
Akiva had the look of one who regrets something that can't be helped as she said, "In that case, he was probably a victim of genuine lycanthropy. What seemed strange to you about the wolf's behavior?"
"For one, it fearlessly ventured quite close to the town," said the hunter. "Its tracks also seemed confused, as though it did not know where it was going, and it killed the calf but did not eat it."
Akiva nodded. "Typical behavior of a child lycanthrope. Children with biformism usually behave in the way they expect biforms to behave. A child familiar with lycanthropy would mimic the behavior he heard about. It seems that this boy was not familiar with the condition, so he behaved as he expected a wolf to. Though it may not seem this way, is a great good fortune that the one infected was a child. With adult lycanthropes, it is rare for an outbreak to pass without loss of human life."
"Then praise to the third guardian," said Malore, but added, "Your words would indicate that true lycanthropy is not spontaneous, and does not leave on its own."
"I'm afraid that is so."
"Then he did catch it from the wolf after all?" asked Anar.
Akiva shrugged. "I was not there."
"Ari, would you please share the boy's account of the meeting?" asked Malore.
"Certainly, sir. He said that he found the wolf in one of the caves on the hill. It seemed to be sleeping, but then it greeted him and said his name, though it had no way of knowing it. Then it died."
All eyes turned back to Akiva, who gave a knowing look. "Yes, that is how lycanthropy is transmitted. As you know, it is an illness of the orime, and the orime is closely linked to breath and more specifically to speech. And to names, since each person's orime is unique. To leave one host and move to another, the disease just needs to claim the name of the new host."
"Wait a minute. When someone with lycanthropy speaks, is it the disease speaking, or the host?" Sahina wanted to know, though she was probably the only person in the room who would care about the distinction.
"Most of the time the host, for lycanthropy only impairs your judgement, never changes your thoughts or desires," Akiva replied. "Only when the disease changes hosts does it speak by itself without the host's control."
Sahina made a note of this on the tablet she was carrying and immediately had another question. "That would indicate that the disease itself has its own thoughts."
Akiva furrowed her brow and replied, "I suppose, in the way plants choose where to grow or when to bloom. It attempts to ensure its own survival. But it has no intellect or perception of its own, but only makes use of the orime it is currently inhabiting."
"And when it speaks through the host, is the host aware that he has spoken?"
"I don't believe so. But of course the host immediately falls into delirium as it rids itself of the harmful influence, so whatever happened immediately beforehand could easily be lost in the confusion."
Sahina was about to pose yet another question, but Firsu was tired of her nonsense and broke in. "Enough of this. We have a real problem to deal with."
"Firsu is right," said Malore, though he gave Sahina a sympathetic look at the same time. "Now, healer, one last question. Is there still danger, and if so, what?"
"There is," she replied. "Grave danger. If Colin truly used to have lycanthropy, he must have passed it on to someone else."
"Then..." Anar gripped the curled couch arm, and for once he was not smiling. "There is a lycanthrope, a wolf, in Imuranati right now? Then anyone could be in danger!"
He half rose, but Malore with one authoritative gesture returned him to his seat. The knight spoke calmly. "Thank you for answering our questions, Akiva. You may sit down. Now, everyone, it is true that we have a lycanthrope in our midst. We must act and act swiftly. The first thing to do is to identify the biform."
"Just have Akiva do her test on everyone," said Malore's son, who as usual had not said much and might as well not have spoken at all.
It was Ari who tartly replied, "I do not think the test would work as well on adults."
Akiva, who had joined the couple across the room from Firsu, nodded and said, "It can be much more difficult to test adults."
"Well, it cannot be everyone," said Sahina with her irritating authority. "It can only occupy one person at a time, and since it is transfered vocally, it is not only someone whom the boy has been around, but whom he has actually spoken to in the past two days."
"But... that is nearly everyone!" Ari protested. "Since he was wounded, half the town has come to visit him. He spoke to many of them."
"Then we alert everyone to the danger and post a guard at all hours to respond to any suspicious behavior," said Firsu.
"How can we be sure the guard is not the biform?" someone asked.
"Because we select them from the other half of the town," said Firsu, getting annoyed with all the questions and delays. Who knows what the biform was up to while they talked.
The discussion was getting disorderly now. While one person asked, "I thought lycanthropes just did what they would normally have done. How do we know what behavior to call suspicious?", another wondered, "Even if we did find the biform, could it not just jump to the guard or someone else?"
"If it does change hosts, then we not only have proof of suspicious behavior, but we know who the new host is," said Athali. Everyone promptly quieted down and looked to her for an explanation.
"Well, to move hosts, the first person must claim the name of the second person," she continued. "So if I were to give the illness to Ari," looking to her left, "Then I would have to say, 'I am Ari' or something like that to her. Is that correct?" The healer nodded. "But aside from perhaps children playing make believe, such a phrase is hardly likely to come up in conversation. Thus, we will know if the disease ever moves."
"Besides which, the old host will then go delirious," the doctor added.
"Athali, you are truly the most sensible person here," said Malore. "Then that will be the first thing to alert the town about. We will post a guard at all hours with the primary goal of making sure that no one is alone. That does mean double guard, and those selected from men who were not around Colin in the past two days. Firsu, do you think you can manage that?"
Before Firsu could reply that of course he could, Anar suddenly cried, "But we know who the biform is!"
Everyone turned in surprise to look at the youth, Gavi beside him looking the most surprised of all. He said hesitantly, "Well... the biform is whoever Colin said that to just before he lapsed into delirium."
"So it is," said a few voices at once, and Firsu along with the others turned his eyes to the parents. Malore asked them, "Cre, Ari, do either of you remember who Colin said this to? I need not stress the importance of this question."
Cre turned to look at Ari, who just sat there helplessly and had just begun to stammer something about how many visitors there had been that day when the little green-cloaked messenger from the baron ran in. He leaned over and breathed hard for a few moments, then straightened up and announced, "Urgent message from Lord Dumar, sir. He wishes to inform you that the wanderfolk has unexpectedly collapsed in the middle of an audience with him, and could you please send someone to retrieve him, as his presence is being most disruptive."

Lycanthropy Ch. 14

2008-02-26T21:48:00.000-08:00

They were all sitting in the grass a little ways off the road. It was finally sunny again. Mori was at the edge of the group, leaning forward with his hands on his knees. He was telling a story.
"So there were these four guys, and they all went up into the woods and they found this cave, so they spent the night there. But in the morning..."
"One of them was missing," Clara interjected.
"...yeah, one of them was missing. So they went looking for him outside. And they didn't find him so they went back in the cave to sleep. And..."
"Another guy went missing," Clara said again.
Mori sighed. "Let me tell my story!"
"I already heard your story," Clara pouted.
"Well, I did not," said Jakobi. "So stop ruining it."
Mori continued. "So this time they went to look for him inside the cave. Only they still didn't find him. So they went to sleep again, but this time one of the guys only pretended to go to sleep and in the middle of the night he heard something, kind of a crunchy noise, and so he looks up and he sees just the shadow of something leaving the room, and there is his friend, but with his head bitten off."
"Gross!" laughed Jakobi.
Jeni took a thoughtful lick of juice from her sugar cane and asked, "Then what happened?"
"He went deeper into the cave to find out what killed his friend. But eventually he has to sleep and he is afraid because all his friends died while they were asleep, but he does anyway and he wakes up and there is a minotaur standing over him."
"Minotaurs are all dead," said Jeni with a confused frown.
"Well, this one was not. And the minotaur says to him..."
"Hey, look, someone on the road!"
Jeni whipped around to look when Jakobi spoke. Sure enough, there was a figure approaching on horseback. She gasped and cried, "It is the healer!"
"Really?" the children all scrambled to their feet. Mori cast away his empty piece of sugar cane and asked, "How can you tell?"
"Well, it just is. Look at her!"
The figure was approaching quickly because she was riding. Jeni could already tell it was a woman on a white horse. It had to be the healer.
Jakobi with his long legs began running up to the road. He turned back and yelled to the other three, "Come on! We can be the first to meet her!"
Jeni and the others ran after him and caught up with him a little before the healer reached them. She rode up and pulled her pony to a stop. They crowded around her, except Mori, who held back and just looked at her intently. She was young and beautiful. She had long hair in two braids under an embroidered red scarf. She must have come from very far away, because she dressed differently. She wore a black coat, not a cloak, and beneath her knee-length skirt she had trousers like a man. The pony also carried several bags and bundles full of her special healer supplies.
It was Jakobi who politely asked, "Stranger lady, are you the healer?"
She laughed. When she talked, she had an accent, kind of like the wanderfolk, but a little different. "I am a healer. There's more than one of us, you know."
"I knew you were!" Jeni crowed, while Clara said, "But you are our healer, the one who is going to make Colin all better."
"If Colin is the name of the boy. I heard that there was a boy stricken with lycanthropy and that my skills were needed."
"That is my brother," said Jeni. "Are you going to make him better?"
"I will try my best," the healer said seriously, "But lycanthropy is a very serious thing. If that is what your brother has, he is very sick. It could be hard for him to get better."
Jeni nodded her understanding.
With a smile, the healer put a question to the whole group. "Now, if you would like to help me with something first, can any of you tell me where I am intended to stay?"
"With Dan and Athali," said Jakobi promptly. "Come on, we'll show you where it is!"
"That would be very helpful," she said. She clicked her tongue to make the pony walk, and they walked ahead of her, Clara and Jeni sometimes breaking into a skip to keep up. They led her all the way into the village, where there were people who saw them and marveled at the healer. They showed her where to turn onto their alley. There Jeni considered things inwardly for a moment, then announced, "I should go tell my parents. Situ, batus, you guys go with her the rest of the way."
She threw open the door to her house and ran in, crying, "Mother! You will never guess who just arrived in the village. It is the healer and we were the first to see her and I was the first person who knew it was her and they are taking her to where she is staying right now and she is so pretty and she is going to make Colin all better!"
Her mother had been sitting at the table working on mending, but she stood up, placed one hand on Jeni's shoulder, and said, "Daughter, I just have one question for you."
"Has Mara been giving you sugar again?"
Jeni nodded. "Uh huh, and she said it was such a nice day we should go out and have some fun, so we were playing down by the road, and we saw her coming. Come on! I want you to meet her!"
She pulled her mother by the hand out into the alley and over to the house on the end. The door was open and the white pony still standing there while Mori and Jakobi helped old Dan unload it, so she just led her mother inside. There was the healer, along with Clara and Athali. She did not need to point the healer out. She was so pretty she almost glowed in the little room. She was just now pulling off her scarf to reveal hair the color of gold.
Her mother stepped forward and said, "You must be the healer. My name is Ari."
"Mine is Akira," said the healer, taking her hand.
"Have you been informed about the situation?"
"A bit. There is a boy, believed infected with lycanthropy."
"Yes. I am his mother."
The healer nodded silently. She didn't say anything sympathetic, but she had a kind look to her. That was good; way too many people told them how sorry they were and it didn't help much. She asked, "Is it just the boy you are concerned about?"
"You would have to ask Sir Malore about that." That was Athali. "I believe he is concerned about how the boy came down with the disease and whether he might be contagious. We do not want any other lycanthropes to catch us unawares."
"Wise concern. I hope this town is not expecting me to just come and make everything right, for I'm only human."
"But you are a healer!" Clara blurted. The boys, just coming in with the rest of the luggage, nodded, and so did Jeni.
Akira looked down at the girl and smiled. "Yes, and that does make me a little bit special. But that just means the third guardian picked me to be extra good at some things. It doesn't mean I can do everything."
"When can you come have a look at Colin?" asked Jeni's mother.
The healer spent a minute unpacking things from her saddlebags and moving them into her satchel, and then replied, "Straight away. I don't know how much there will be for me to do--it could take weeks for us to get everything sorted out and dealt with--but the first thing is to find out whether the boy is a werewolf right now or not, and I can figure that out quickly. Well, I can quickly tell you to the negative. It is a bit harder to tell if he is."
She threw her satchel over her shoulder. Jeni and her mother led her to the door and back down the alley, past Dan leading the pony around to their stable. The other children followed them, but the healer told them, "You all need to go home now. It's time for me to work and I can't work very well with too many people around."
The three nodded and withdrew, but not before Clara could protest to her brothers, "That is not fair! How come Jeni gets to stay with her and I do not?"
"Her brother is the biform," Mori told her quietly.
"So? Why does that make her special?"
Jeni ran ahead to hold the door while the two women entered and went upstairs, talking about Colin and his biformism. The healer said, "It should be easy to tell if he still has it. All I need to do is give him a simple test."
"Can I watch?" Jeni asked eagerly.
"You sure can," the healer said. "Just make sure you only watch and do not disturb us."
She nodded vigorously and quietly and followed them. Colin was awake. He had woken up maybe a quarter earlier, but soon after that, their mother had told Jeni to go play with her friends. He looked good, though. He was sitting up. Jeni still hadn't apologized to him while he was conscious, but this was not a good time. She didn't want the healer to know how she had acted. Her mother sat down on the stool by her brother's bed, resting her arms on her knees, and told him, "The healer is here to see you, Colin."
"Really? That is her?" he asked, looking up.
"Sure is. Now be sure to be polite to her, because she needs to diagnose you and figure out how to treat you, all right?"
"I will," he promised.
Then the healer came up and dropped to one knee beside his cot and tossed her head to throw her braids over her shoulder. "You must be Colin. My name is Akiva. It is good to meet you."
"I am glad to meet you too, Akiva," he replied.
"Now, have your parents talked to you about why I am here?"
"A little. I got biformism from a wolf," he told her cheerfully. "I am better now, though."
"Maybe you are, but that is my job to figure out. And you should not sound so cheerful. Being a biform is a very serious thing, especially this kind."
"Yeah, but it is kind of cool though. I got to turn into a wolf."
The healer laughed. Her laugh was beautiful, like her. "All right, Colin, but you should not always want to do something just because it is cool. Now I have something else to ask you. Do you like honey cakes?"
"Yeah. Sugar cane is my favorite, but I like honey cakes too."
"I like honey cakes and they are my favorite!" Jeni couldn't help interjecting.
"Good, but right now I am talking to Colin," the healer told her pointedly, and Jeni put her hands over her mouth, rather abashed.
The healer told Colin, "I just so happened to have brought two honey cakes with me for the trip and I didn't eat them. Would you like to play a game with them?"
"What is it?" he asked, curious.
"It works like this. I give you one of them. Then I take the other one and go downstairs and wait a while. You can eat yours if you like, but when I come back upstairs, if you ate yours, I get to eat the other one. If you didn't eat yours, then I give you mine and you get to eat them both."
"I would win at that game," Jeni whispered to her mother.
"Do you understand the rules?" the healer asked Colin.
"Yeah. How long do I have to wait before you come back?"
"That you do not get to know," she said mysteriously, but with a twinkle in her eye.
He laughed and held out his hands cupped together. She placed a little round roll with a lightly browned crust in his hands. Then she turned back down the stairs, first telling their mother, "Now, be sure that you do not tell him what to do. He must decide for himself."
Their mother stayed beside Colin, but Jeni followed the healer back downstairs, where it was only them and that stupid Torami. She didn't like him. He teased her. She wanted to be near the healer, though, and especially to ask, "Can I have the other honey cake?"
"You have to wait to see if he eats the one he has," the healer scolded her lightly. "If he doesn't, I have to give him this one."
"Oh." Jeni thought for a moment, then came up with a new question. "Can I play the game next?"
This time the healer laughed. "No, this is a special game. I am using it to diagnose your brother to tell if he is still sick."
"How does eating cakes do that?" she asked quizzically.
"Well, let's go back upstairs and find out what he did."
And they did, Jeni turning to stick her tongue out at the teenager with the sword that was too big for him.
Colin was still there and he still held the cake. Jeni's heart sank when she saw that, but he crowed and announced, "I won the game!"
"You sure did, and here is your prize," the healer said, and gave him the other cake. He immediately began eating them. Jeni pouted, but only for a moment, because the healer added, "And I have an even better prize for all of you, because I can tell you that this boy is not a werewolf."
"Yeah!" cheered Jeni involuntarily. The relief that swept over her was much sweeter than honey.
The healer walked back over to their mother and quietly told her, "Now, may I have a word with you?"
She nodded and the two moved into the other room, pulling the curtain closed behind them. They had not told Jeni she couldn't follow them, so she crept to the doorway and pulled the coarse cloth aside just a little way so she could watch. Colin was still busy eating the honey cakes, so he didn't pay any attention to her.
First her mother told the healer, "Thank you so much. You have no idea how glad we are to find this out."
The healer said solemnly, "I am glad as well. For I did not wish to tell you what would have happened if he had not passed the test."
"It was a strange test. How could you tell?" asked Jeni's mother, the very question Jeni had wanted to know.
"Very simple. What do you know of lycanthropy and how it affects your orime?"
"Very little, I'm afraid," Jeni's mother replied. "Just a bit that our knight's advisor looked up."
"Well, it changes nothing in your nature. Your opinions, desires, and feelings remain exactly as they were. However, it cripples your second nature, that is, your self-control. One with lycanthropy cannot do anything save that which he most desires to do at the current moment. I gave your boy one cake with the promise of another. Now, most children his age know when it is better to hold out for a reward and will wait, as indeed he did. A lycanthrope, though, can see only that he is holding a cake and he wants it and would eat it immediately, probably before I even left the room. Of course, if he eats the cake immediately, he may just be an impatient child. Thus, it can be hard to determine for sure if he is a lycanthrope. However, he is not one, and I can say that quite confidently."
Jeni didn't understand a word of that explanation, but she was pretty sure the healer was saying that Colin wasn't a biform.
"Will he recover, then?" asked her mother.
"It seems to me that he has already recovered."
"Really? So quickly?"
"Tell me, has he had any very unusual symptoms between when he was found to be a werewolf and now?"
"Oh, yes. Just late yesterday morning, he fell into delirium and said the strangest things. We were very concerned. He only came out of it just a little while before you arrived."
The healer nodded and said, "I thought as much. The 24-quarter delirium, we call it. When a harmful influence, such as biformism, leaves an orime, the orime purges the damage. You'll hear the person crying out all kinds of strange things that they acquired during their time as a biform. Very often they see themselves being approached by a threatening figure and they may respond with fear. They are delirious for a day and then wake and are free of its influence."
"Then it is over. I am so glad."
"It is over for Colin, and I must admit I'm glad as well, though it may still end up the worse."
Jeni's mother looked at the healer questioningly and said, "I am sorry, but I do not follow your meaning."
The healer sighed and dropped her gaze before she said, "If Colin had still been a lycanthrope, what would you have expected me to do?"
"Why, treat him, I suppose."
"How I wish I could!" the healer sighed. "But I can do nothing. There is no treatment for lycanthropy."
"Then... he would have just stayed a biform? For his whole life?"
"No. It is far too dangerous. If an individual stays infected, he will likely fall into a coma and die within a few years as it eats away his orime. But this never happens. No. He might recover on his own, but much more likely he would pass it on to someone else."
"It can spread?" gasped Jeni's mother.
"It can leave one person and enter another," said the healer. "If the boy was infected, he could pass it off to anyone near him. Likely someone far more dangerous. We have been searching for a cure almost since the wounding of the first guardian, but at this point, we know of only one way to end a case of lycanthropy."
"What is that?" asked Jeni's mother.
"To destroy the carrier," said the healer solemnly.
Jeni's mother took a step back in horror. "You would have ordered that my son be killed?"
The healer reached a hand out to her and said, "Please, Ari, understand. It would have broken my heart, but we healers must constantly inflict pain in order to do good. Sometimes there must even be death. But think of everyone in this village and what would happen if each of them became a lycanthrope."
A pause, and then Jeni's mother nodded slowly and said, "But you will not have to go to such measures, because Colin has recovered on his own."
The healer nodded in reply.
"Then what do you need to do next?"
"When public time starts, I would be obliged if someone would take me to see your knight so we can discuss what needs to be done. In the meantime, though he seems to be on the mend, perhaps I should have a look at his physical injuries."
Jeni quickly scampered downstairs so they would not catch her eavesdropping. It was still Torami down there, now sitting at their table polishing his sword. He grinned at her and whispered, "Your brother is a wolf."
"He is not!" she said.
"He is too. A freak."
"He is not!" she repeated, stamping one bare foot.
"I would not want to be you, with a freak like that for a brother."

Addendum to Lycanthropy Ch. 11

2008-02-24T16:46:00.000-08:00

Her parents were talking quietly, like adults do when they are worried. Jeni was worried too. She sat beside her father's chair with her arms wrapped around her knees and listened.
Her mother was saying, "Having Athali around is a great help, of course, but Eskale says there is nothing he can do about something like this with no discernable cause."
Her father nodded and replied, "But all of light and he is just the same. How long can he even survive like this?"
"Do not worry," said her mother firmly. "Athali has taken care of all the children in Imuranati for fifty years. She says that having a fever will do him no permanent harm. He will just need some time to recover his strength."
And then her father, very quietly, "I am not worried about physical harm."
And her mother looked at him for a while, then gave a pointed look at Jeni and said, "I do not think we should discuss this just now."
Her father nodded knowingly. Her mother got up and, after puttering around the room a little, went up to check on Colin. Jeni tugged at her father's arm until he looked down. She asked, "Father, what is wrong with Colin?"
"Oh, sweetie," he said, moving from his stool to the ground beside her and putting one of his big arms around her. "Colin is hurt. He got badly hurt and even broke some bones. It will take him a long time to get better."
"No, I did not mean that. I meant the other thing. The thing you and mother are so worried about."
"Ah. Daughter, do you know what a biform is?"
She thought a while. She knew the word, but wasn't exactly sure what it meant, but she could give an example. "Like a bushmouse."
"Yeah, that is right. What does a bushmouse look like?"
"Sometimes it looks like a mouse and sometimes it looks like a bird."
"Yes, it does. It can turn into either one. But it is like that when it hatches and it stays that way its whole life. Not all biforms are like that. Sometimes animals and even people can catch biformism--that is what we call it when you have it--like you catch a cold."
"You mean I could catch it and then turn into animals?" Jeni laughed, clapping her hands together.
Her father looked serious. "You would not want to. It is bad for you, like being sick. Except that biformism does not make you sick in your body, the way a cold does. It makes you sick in your orime. Do you know where your orime is, Jeni?"
She was glad when he asked her a question that she could answer. There were way too many things that she did not understand, and others that she thought she understood but could not explain. She touched her chest with one hand. "It is deep inside me."
"All right. And what is it?"
"It is... the place where all my thoughts and feelings and memories are. It is the thing that makes me, me."
"That is exactly what it is. Now, if you get sick in your body, your body will get weak and bad things will happen to it. If you get sick in your orime, bad things will start happening to it and you will start thinking and feeling things you normally would not."
Suddenly it all fit together. She asked excitedly, "And that is what happened to Colin? That is why he does not recognize anyone and why he is saying those strange things?"
"You are a very clever girl," her father told her, and she glowed inside. He went on, "When your brother found that wolf in the woods, we think he caught biformism from it and it made him able to turn into a wolf at night. It made him act funny and do some bad things."
"He climbed out the window just at the beginning of the day!" she said. "I was only pretending to be asleep because I knew he was going to do something bad. Now I know why!"
"Yes, and he did something very bad. He turned into a wolf. That is why everyone in town has been afraid of a wolf, because Colin has been running around like that at night. That is also how he got hurt."
"Did he hurt himself?" she asked quietly, because she felt this was a very serious subject.
"No, and we may all thank the third guardian for that. In fact, we should thank her that he did not get killed. He must be very important to her. But he was running around as a wolf, and our town guard Firsu saw him and hurt him before he realized his mistake."
"That is awful! He should not have done that!"
"No, he should not have, but look." And here he looked into her eyes intently. "Try not to be angry at him. I know it is hard. It is hard for me too. But everyone makes mistakes, even though this was a very big mistake. And Colin looked exactly like a wolf."
Jeni nodded and tried very hard not to be angry. Then she thought of something that scared her badly. She said hesitantly, "Father... is it true that sometimes when people get very sick... they can die?"
"Yes, I am afraid it is true," he told her.
"Then... could Colin die because he is very sick in his orime?"
"Oh, Jeni." Her father gave her a hug and told her in her ear, "We do not know. All we know is that he is very sick right now. But there is a healer coming, and when she arrives, she will know what to do."

Lycanthropy Ch. 13

2008-02-19T23:05:00.000-08:00

"Stop brooding like that," Lehana ordered.
"If I had more than three sesterces in my pocket, I would," Toru grumbled, looking at the ceiling and finding pictures in the irregular plaster surface. One bit looked like a horse.
"You have no coins in your pocket because I have them all," the young woman pointed out. "And you can imagine that I have as many coins in my apron as you would like. So stop brooding."
"No. I refuse." A dark part, a shallow shadow, looked like a figure in a hood. You could see part of his face poking out from underneath.
"What happened to that cheerful young man who was willing to work as a slave for five years to marry me?"
"He starved to death."
"Really, stop brooding. You're being ridiculous."
"I'm not being ridiculous. The rest of the world's ridiculous."
"Come on." He heard the sound of pouring and saw her out of the corner of his eye filling a cup from that pitcher she liked, the one with the relief patterns of trees, which he had almost broken loading onto the wagon and she had just about loosed her bonds. She pressed it into his hand. "Have some wine. It'll make you feel better."
"I refuse to taste another drop of that putrid grape juice they drink around here."
"This is one of the bottles we brought."
"Oh, is it?" He looked at the cup, which was cool in his hand. Its contents distorted and dyed the bottom, which if you emptied it enough times would start looking distorted on its own. The smell was pleasantly familiar, like all those days of running around in the vineyards as a kid. He took a sip. It was good, and he smiled. "Thanks, Lehana."
"No problem. Are things looking a little better now?" she asked with a smile on that cute little round face.
"No. Something else bad'll happen."
"I wash my hands of you today," she sighed.
A hesitant rap on the door came timed so perfectly to punctuate her words that he had to laugh to himself. She opened the door. A boy stood there, probably a citizen's son but not one he had seen around the village. He wore a courier's short cloak and cap. He shifted his weight uncomfortably, scratched his ankle with the toe of his sandal, and rubbed his nose.
"Hello?" asked Lehana gently.
"Is this where Toru lives?" asked the courier hesitantly.
"I'm Toru," he called from across the room, and stood up.
"Oh!" The boy sounded a little startled, maybe crestfallen, as if he had been hoping that he wasn't there. He stammered, "I was not sure, because I did not know where you lived, so I asked Mara in the square and she said she was a friend of yours and you lived here."
"She was right," Toru told him. "Who's looking for me?"
"I am," said the boy, and realizin that that wasn't very helpful, added, "On behalf of your baroness, Lady Mina."
"Mina...?" he and Lehana both gasped at once, and he added, "What does she want?"
"An audience with you by shadow," said the boy, shifting from foot to foot and looking down.
"And why should we grace the baroness with our presence after what she's done to us?" asked Toru.
"Umm...it is not 'we,'" the boy timidly pointed out. "She only wanted an audience with Toru."
Wierd. "All right, why should I grace her with my presence, then?"
"Because she is your baroness and to enter her territory is to promise your alleigance and obey her commands," the courier recited.
"Well, you can tell her to eat the dust off my sandals, because I would not trust her if she spoke the words of the second guardian, and would rather spend quality time with my goat." He felt a warm rush of pleasure at getting to voice the insult he had been perfecting for days. Lehana turned him a horrified and incredulous look.
"She wants to discuss your proposed marriage," the boy said timidly.
"She does?" he asked incredulously, and his betrothed echoed, "She does?"
The boy nodded.
"But...only me? Not Lehana?"
Another nod.
He felt a light hand on his arm and a chin on his shoulder which pressed into his tunic as she spoke. "That's weird, Toru. Really weird. She shouldn't request something like that. Be wary."
"Of course I shall be wary of the woman who is trying to stop our marriage," he told her, clasping her hand. "But I shall also get my way. I can handle her."
"Toru, you can't take care of yourself."
"I said I can handle her," he replied sharply. The chin and hand vanished. He grabbed his cloak off the wall. It was nicely warmed, due to Lehana's innovation of hanging their cloaks next to the fireplace instead of next to the door. Fire warmth felt different than the warmth of a garment just worn by someone else, and better, he thought. Warm, with a crisp, dry edge. He threw it around himself, fumbled until he felt the prick of the clasp, and fastened it at the shoulder.
"Then...shall I tell Lady Mina that you shall come directly?" asked the courier.
"Yes."
The courier ran off, cloak flapping behind him in a streak of deep viridian. He shut the door and turned back to his betrothed. She had seated herself at the table, chin on her hands.
"You'll miss dinner," she said.
"I'll be fine," he told her, opening the pantry and poking through it until he found some cheese and the end of a loaf of bread, which he knotted up into a cloth and slung over his shoulder. He gave her an encouraging smile and left the house.
Not until he left the smooth basalt flags of the main road and started down the rutted path to the baroness' manor didhe realize that it was almost dark. People always said that you could never catch the moment of the new day, but he was pretty sure that this was it. The trees were black but the sky blue fading into purple and then orange in front of him, far too bright a sky for how little light it cast, but striped all over with dark maroon-edged clouds. Its fine gradient looked back up at him from the puddles in the wheel ruts, where the ground was still muddy. At least it had stopped raining.
He didn't feel like going back to get a lamp, but as the woods closed in on either side of the path, he couldn't help noticing that a perfectly reasonable and well-traveled road during mundane time, the most ordinary thing in the world, could be almost frightening as it neared private time. If it had wound, it would be the sort of road from a horror story where the hero turns a bend and comes across a many-headed giant devouring a human. It did not wind. It proceeded almost straight, for he was past the hilly area now, so that it was the shadows stretching out from the trees that limited his sight. Somehow, none of this frightened him. Rather, his surroundings made him feel strong, heady. For he was the one in the woods at night, so he must be the monster, the thing that made people afraid to travel this road. He threw back his head and laughed. It felt good to laugh.
The way only grew darker as shade ended. One last furtive gleam lit a treeless patch, and there he stopped to untie his food and eat it, not carefully as he usually did, but bolting it down without concern for enjoying it properly. He shook the crumbs out of the cloth, wadded it up, and shoved it into his cloak pocket. The sky was black now. He looked up as he walked, since there was hardly enough light to see his way anyway, and watched as one by one, faint spots of wavering light pricked the void. Isolated lights became clusters and chains and then the vast shapes of heroes and monsters that he recalled from stories. He was not very good at remembering the names of constellations, but he could always pick out new shapes from the ones he couldn't identify and think up names and stories for them. The heavens were vast and cold.
The woods surrounding Imuranati were past now, and he walked through stubbly fields that still smelled freshly mown. He cut across a bend in the road and felt the shorn stalks poking into his feet through his sandals. He was not having any difficulty finding his way in the dark, though by now only the faintest stripe of purple remained in the west. The villa was in sight now, sprawling in its own decadence. He cautiously made his way around the outer wall, staying low as though he were a thief, not a petitioner. He paused at the outer gate. The courtyard looked strange in the dark. The stone heroes and kings of the day became the sorcerers and villains of the night. The plants, too, looked strange, like many hands straining to grasp him. The fountains, though, sparkled with moonlight. Just one of the doors was open and letting forth a wedge of orange light with a dark patch in it that was the doorman.
It was the same peasant who had been there last time, and Toru offhandly thought what long or irregular times he must be working.
"Toru, right?" asked the doorman, and snickered at his affirmative reply. "You are expected. Come."
Back down the hall where snakes devoured monsters. What a place the world must have been before the snakes! Here a three-headed eagle, there a man with the head of a lion, there a creature like a wolf, but covered in scales instead of fur. Fearsome world! Good for them that the maker had sent snakes to battle and defeat such creatures. Now humanity had only the fey as a threat. Them and herself. These days, men seemed to be the authors of everything wrong with the world.
The doorman did not show him into Mina's quarters, but merely opened the door for him and then bowed and withdrew as he entered a chamber of golden lamplight. Mina reclined on the cushion-strewn couch, one arm supporting her head, as if she had not moved since their last meeting. Her dress was of blue silk and looked lighter and airier than he would have thought possible, as though it were a shroud of fog that might dissipate at any moment. A single armband glinted, as did her rings. She gazed at him evenly, one side of her mouth turned up in a devious smile.
He tried to determine if anything else in the room was different, and found that his memory of their previous meeting, aside from the very memorable words exchanged, was dim. Had the walls always been painted with windows looking out into gardens? Was that low table always in the middle of the room? Maybe, but it didn't always have that incense burner with two smoldering strips of bark that made the air feel thick and rich. She had the fire stoked higher than was really necessary for Urubar--Lehana did not intend to even light a fire until the beginning of Nagabar--which left the room quite warm. He could not help relaxing in the warmth, though he fully planned to give the baroness an unparalleled tongue lashing.
"Toru," she said slowly, the smile spreading all the way across her face and revealing just a stripe of her gleaming teeth. "I was expecting you, but earlier."
"Then you should have summoned me sooner," he said shortly. "We do live a distance away, and we lack a courier's pony."
"Well, I suppose you came as quickly as you could, given the circumstances," Mina replied, raising herself to a sitting position slowly and elegantly. "Malore's whole village seems to be in quite a turmoil. I really do not know how he handles it all."
"I was not under the impression that you summoned me here to chat," he told her sharply.
She cocked her head. "And what was your impression?"
"Your courier informed me that you wished to discuss the terms of my marriage."
"Oh, that, of course. How dull! And besides, it is private time now, or nearly so. It does not seem to me that discussing such matters now would be...appropriate."
She stood, began pacing around the room. Her elegant gait made her entire body sway. No motion of hers seemed unnecessary, but every one graceful and minimal. A curl of smoke rose from the bark and, for an instant, its shape echoed her body. She did not speak for a few minutes. He thought that discussing a marriage was a perfectly reasonable activity for private time, but did not feel like saying so, so he just watched her. She paused in front of the marble-mantled fireplace. She spoke, looking at the flames instead of him.
"So tell me, who is this woman, your betrothed?"
"She's another wanderfolk from Vineyards, like me."
"I know that, fool," she said. "I met her. But I want to know what you think about her. Describe her."
"Well..." he sighed, looked at the ceiling for inspiration. It was painted with an oculus. He had lavished Lehana with superlatives plenty of times, but it seemed strange to do so here, in front of a woman who anyone would grant was her superior in wealth, position, beauty, and manner. He leaned on the arm of the couch and fumblingly searched for words. "Well, she's my age mate... just a little younger than me. I believe she knew she fancied me before I did her. She used to look at me...she has these little dark eyes that twinkle like nothing, and she'd look at me sidelong and smile, like she knew something I didn't. I really like her eyes. Her hands and feet, too. She loves to just spend time together, doing anything. She loves animals. When you see her with an animal you just know...she once got this swallow in her garden tame enough to climb on her hand and she would hold it close to her...and you look at her and know she'll be a good mother someday."
The words fell flat. He could not capture his betrothed in words. What were her hands and feet next to the smooth, tapered fingers of the baroness, which she now held half-entwined? What childish look of hers could ever have quickened his heart? And how frivolous, her love of animals, compared with the refined pursuits the woman before him must surely occupy herself with. But she did not reply, just kept looking at him, lip curled ever so slightly in disdain.
Finally he told her flatly, "Well, will you grant us permission to marry or not?"
She laughed a silvery laugh. "If I had planned to do that, I should have done so at your first audience."
"Then you brought me here just to mock me?" he snarled. "I can have nothing more to say to you."
He turned his back to her and stepped towards the doorway, but her voice caught him almost immediately. "But it will be far past the curfew when you arrive back in Imuranati. Surely you recall that there is a curfew in effect in your village? I cannot in good conscience allow you to leave."
"Stop toying with me!" he yelled.
She smiled again. Why did she always smile? Because she had him in the palm of her hand and could do as she liked? But now she spoke. "I did not call you here to mock you, Toru. Really, why are you so set on marrying that wanderfolk girl? What is she to you? Some child you grew up with, no doubt, whom your parents selected for you at some early age. And you would settle for that? Have you no ambitions?"
The room was rich from the burning bark. He told her, "Some of us have options and others do not. I have done the best I could."
"Have you?" she asked softly, turning to look up at him through her long, elegantly curved lashes. The fire caught her cheek and lips and touched them with an extra hint of red. Those perfect lips. He found himself unable to take his eyes off them. They moved, wet slightly by her tongue, as she told him, "Would you settle for a common citizen when you could have someone who commands citizens? What does your betrothed have that I do not?"
She moved away from the fire, seeming to float rather than walk, and in a minute she was in front of him, her flickering green eyes still locked on his. He leaned towards her, placed his arm around a waist soft as a dream beneath its fine layer of fabric, and kissed her.

Addendum to Lycanthropy Ch. 4

2008-02-11T22:00:00.000-08:00

Lehana skipped out of the house and, passing Toru with no more than a smile, took Ari's hands. "Ari! I'm glad to see you again. It looks as if you've met Toru?"
"My children encountered him first, but yes," the woman replied.
"When did you meet her?" asked Toru, bemused by the lightning-swift networking skills of his betrothed.
"Just during dawn," she shrugged. "We were both out shopping and she introduced me to some of the other women. Mara and Tamela... oh, look, there she is! Tamela! Come meet Toru!"
And out of the midday crowds strode a plump young woman with red hair and apple cheeks. She was a few years older than them, but had her hair tied back with a striped scarf and was obviously well into a pregnancy. Toru couldn't tell how many months, because he knew nothing about children. He would have his own someday, of course, but he and Lehana had agreed that someday didn't need to be soon.
"Toru, good to meet you," she said. "The builders must be very happy that you have arrived. We have been needing a new roofer for some time now."
"Yeah, that's what our old baron told us," he replied.
Ari placed a hand on Tamela's stomach and asked, "How are you feeling?"
"Really, Ari," said the young woman in a tone of mild reproach, "I am not the first woman ever to have a baby."
"No, but you are the first of the little soldiers."
"Little soldiers?" asked Lehana, then caught herself and realized, "Oh, that's right, this baroncy was mobilized during the war."
Toru surpressed images of the razed village and his parents cradling his baby brother in the shade of the last standing wall of their house. And the smoke. It was his first memory, the smell of smoke and watching it rise in oily black plumes off the fields. He shuddered internally. The women took no notice; they were conversing quite offhandly.
"They were both little soldiers, Tamela and Anar. I do not think you have met Anar yet?" Ari paused and they shook their heads. "They are the only two in Imuranati."
"Ari keeps calling this one a little little soldier, but I do not think it works that way," Tamela interjected.
"Anyway, Tamela's father Gavi went off to war and earned all kinds of honor and he became a citizen after the war, much to the dismay of Firsu. He is our town guard...perhaps you have seen him around at night?" They shook their heads, for they indeed had not. "Well, though one is no less a swordbearer than the other and by all accounts, they fought with equal valor, Firsu is a born soldier, suited to nothing else. Those were really his years. When he came back and was not promoted, it was a real blow to him, and some say it was that, not being wounded, that made him as he is today. Gavi adjusted just fine, surely in part because he returned home to find such a beautiful daughter. He is one of the woodsmen now, you know. Tamela was four years old when the war ended, of course, and she grew up with Anar as her only age-mate, since they were the only little soldiers born and there were almost no new children until the men came home. Eventually it became pretty clear that they were going to marry, which is why Anar got apprenticed to Gavi. Anar's father, though," and here she became quiet and solemn, "He went off to war and never returned."
"Well, we all lost something in the war," Toru said quietly, masking his resentment as well as he could. Lehana, of course, was not fooled, and she squeezed his shoulder and reminded him, "That was a long time ago."
"But you live in the Vineyards baroncy, and it was not mobilized," said Ari, giving them a puzzled look. "Just a few knights who were particular friends of Lord Shenu rallied to him, and that would not concern wanderfolk like you."
"We were not mobilized. But perhaps you recall that Vineyards lies between the baroncies of Shenu and his allies and those like Red Tree, who supported Lord Zakary and Lady Carolina. The armies were not always so kind as to simply march through."
"It was a bad business all around," Ari said seriously. "I do wonder now and again whether when the duke turned down Lord Shenu's petition, he should not have just accepted his fate. It would have left the rest of us with our lives intact, and who is to say that the Lord and Lady would have been such bad rulers. But none of us felt that way at the time."
Toru had grown more and more immersed in the confused mix of true accounts, myths, and early childhood memories that comprised his memory of the war. Thus it was that he was surprised when Tamela said in a low voice, "There go Danavi and his friends."
She jerked her head to the north and as the rest of the group followed her gaze up the street, they saw in the distance a group of riders gallop down the road from the knight's manor and up the main street, quickly disappearing in the dust they kicked up.
"Who are they?" asked Lehana.
Tamela just gave a disdainful sneer. The other woman answered, "Malore's son and his friends. Poor Malore. His daughters turned out well enough, but Danavi? He is having some trouble growing up."
"That is putting it mildly," said Tamela, tossing her head.
"What's so bad about him?" Lehana inquired.
"He's the most irresponsible person on the face of the earth. Grown soft, accustomed to the noble lifestyle. Twenty-two years old and still living in the manor with his father! I need hardly mention that he does nothing to earn his position."
"He does sometimes assist his father and help to settle disputes," Ari pointed out.
The younger woman nodded reluctantly. "Yes, but that is hardly sufficient material to grant him knighthood. Besides, he has done less and less so of late. I believe he is lying low so that the general outcry will not make the knight just throw him out."
"What, he isn't married yet?" Lehana wanted to know.
"No, for then he really would have to move out and assume the lifestyle of a commoner," Tamela explained. "Besides, he does not wish to marry anyone of common birth."
"I did have high hopes for that young lady Malore had sent up from the estate to the south," mused the older woman. "She is the daughter of a knight, after all."
"That plain thing? With the glasses? Not a chance. Besides, she is practically an old maid. I do not think she has any interest in marrying, even if she had a chance to."
"That is not a very nice thing to say," Lehana admonished.
The other young woman just shrugged. "It is true."