by Brandon Barr
“Sometimes the past is better forgotten,” said Aven.
“But not Harvest…not my mother, my father. I really miss them. I mean, I…” Pike gripped his hair in his hands. It was happening again, that feeling of something slipping away from him…
“I’m sorry,” said Pike a moment later. “What was I just saying?”
Aven’s mouth opened, but he stayed silent.
“We were talking about Toes,” said Pike, “and the other kids, and I started to say something else. At least, I think so.”
“About the future,” said Aven. “Forgetting the past. Looking forward to the future.”
Pike nodded. “The future. Yes, that’s right.”
“I’ll see you in the morning,” said Aven.
“Alright,” said Pike. “Goodnight. And thank you. Thank you for understanding.”
______
ZOECARA
The midnight hour was fast approaching. Zoecara had to hurry, but she didn’t want to run, lest she break into a sweat. There were two important rendezvous she had to make tonight, and she didn’t want to show up sweaty.
The enclave’s little trip to Aven’s farm was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. The sooner that she rid Loam of the Guardians, the better. More specifically, the sooner she got rid of Rueik, the better. He had become dangerous. If he voiced his concerns to Karience, there was no telling what might happen, for the Empyrean had grown deeply suspicious ever since the murders.
But murdering the Emissaries was a risk her master, Raith, had wanted her to take. Raith had other Shadowmen in place within the Guardian order on other worlds, including Bridge, but he was being cautious. He had warned her there were other Beasts trying to infiltrate the Guardians. Naturally there would be, but her master had such a strong foothold, she doubted any rivals would last long undetected.
The cobblestone alleyway leading to Dheeg Sar’s ice shop was dim, the huge metal door gleaming in the moonlight. Zoecara pounded loudly on the door. The metal was cold from the ice inside. “Dheeg Sar, open up!”
She disliked having to trust these mercenaries. Their greed was easy enough to manipulate, but they were undependable. She disliked having to rely so heavily on them.
She pounded again and waited. Finally, a clank sounded, and the metal door slid open on its crude track. The doorway was large enough to admit the massive ice blocks that were gathered from the mountains and the horse teams who hauled them. But Dheeg Sar opened it only a crack.
“You have a corpse to freeze?” came the voice from within.
“It’s Zoecara.”
The door opened a hair more, enough for her to slip inside, where only darkness met her.
“What if I told you I could get you six or seven VOKKs?” she said into the cold blackness.
“Speak on,” came Dheeg Sar’s voice very near her.
“Could your ship come tomorrow night?”
“It’s hiding on the far side of the moon. It can arrive whenever I signal it to.”
“Do you have a tracker I could wear?”
“Yes,” said the voice, moving closer, becoming a dark grey shadow touched faintly by the glow emanating from the slit in the door. Dheeg Sar’s face was like a ghost.
Zoecara glanced outside, her thoughts turning to her next game piece to move.
“Signal the ship, and give me the tracker. Tomorrow evening, at nightfall, I’ll have the Guardians with me. They’ll all be yours.”
______
AVEN
Aven couldn’t sleep. He had to talk to Pike.
He dressed quickly and left the room. He’d lain in bed for an hour, thinking about the exciting promise of tomorrow. The farm would be his, and his friends were coming to celebrate. But Rueik’s warnings about Zoecara disturbed him. Rueik’s fear that Pike’s mind had been tampered with by Zoecara seemed irrational, but Aven couldn’t shake the fear off. What might Zoecara try to do if she truly thought he and his sister were Shadowmen? What was Rueik hinting at but wouldn’t say?
The lighted hallway made Aven’s own fears seem silly. In his bed, with the lights off, things had seemed more distressing and urgent. Aven stopped and leaned against the wall around the corner from Pike’s room.
What would he say? Pike was likely asleep. Aven would have to tell Pike something to justify waking him in the middle of the night. Aven stared at the wall opposite him.
What was he doing?
The faint swoosh of a door opening and closing from around the bend in the hallway startled him. What if someone came this way? He didn’t want to be seen hanging around in the hallway in the middle of the night.
Aven began to walk hurriedly back toward his room. He checked over his shoulder, wondering who it was, but the hallway was empty.
Aven recalled Rueik’s words: Maybe I’m just being paranoid.
Aven understood, now, how easily suspicion became fear, and fear, paranoia. Fear made the irrational plausible.
The rational answer was that someone had simply gone to the kitchen for food. Or they couldn’t sleep and went out to pace the halls. But no matter how likely that answer was, Aven couldn’t stop the questions from coming.
Why would Pike leave his room so late at night? Or was it someone else who had been in his room? Was it Zoecara?
Had she tampered with his mind?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
ZOECARA
Prince Damien’s residence was within the Royal Palisade. As a Guardian, Zoecara had unquestioned access to this area. The Royal Palisade was one of the greatest primworld accomplishments on record. It was a vast structure, encompassing the Court Academy, the library, and the Hall of Genealogy. It also contained spacious and luxurious manors for half the Royals living in the city. The Palisade was so large that sailors traveling to the Royal City could see it long before they saw the land it sat upon.
This would be her fifth visit to Prince Damien’s domicile. She always made sure to conceal her destination by stopping at a cubby in the library to pretend to read a few pages, waiting to see if anyone came in pursuit. Then she would take a rarely-used passageway to the orator’s chamber, which was linked by an elaborate stairway to the residences above.
Damien was the key to the heart of the opposition, those Royals who had resisted the signing of the Guardian’s charter from the beginning. The opposition was crucial to her plans. After the Guardian Tower was a heap of rubble, she would be the sole remaining representative of the order. She would spread lies about the Guardians that would inflame every sore point. Eventually, even those Royals who embraced the charter would turn against it.
Damien was her way into the opposition. Zoecara had been cultivating him for some time. She had chosen Damien specifically because he held every puzzle piece she needed. He was one of the most powerful members of the opposition, but also one of the youngest. He was sincere and principled, respected even by those who opposed him. And, just as important for her plans, he was a bachelor. If he were a pot of stew, then he had just the right ingredients.
The first time she had visited Damien was to voice frustration at his continued attempts to overthrow the charter in the Hall of Discourse, where the three quorums came together to argue and cast their votes.
That first encounter had been pivotal. Damien, winsome and passionate as ever, had heard her arguments, then crushed them. As she’d known he would. It was what she was counting on. She left his chambers that day feigning confusion and uncertainty. Damien’s excitement at her near-conversion was obvious. From a psychological standpoint, changing another person’s point of view on a deeply held belief was one of the most intimate experiences two humans could share.
By the end of the next visit, she had given into his arguments and become his ally. The two encounters after that lasted into the early hours of morning as they found themselves talking about each other’s lives just as much as they talked about the charter. Zoecara was proud of the persona she’d created for him. Tonight, it was time to put a
way subtlety and take a risk. All the small, endearing moments together needed to pay off.
He was the key to severing the Guardian’s hold on this world for good. And, if she navigated tonight well, she hoped to solidify her power here on Loam.
“Missionary Zoecara, what a pleasant surprise,” said the butler, ushering her inside. The fatherly servant looked at her in the light of a hand-held candelabra. “What’s happened? Why the tears, young lady?”
“Please,” Zoecara said. “May I speak to the prince? It’s urgent.”
When Prince Damien arrived in his night robe, his short hair was a curly mess. His handsome face was edged with genuine worry, and his gorgeous lips were parted, poised to comfort her.
“Zoecara, what’s happened?” His voice was warm, full of concern.
She stood beside the candelabra the butler had left, and placed a hand over her mouth, attempting to compose herself. The prince answered her wordless beckoning and reached out and held her in his arms.
She breathed out heavy, panting breaths, her lips not far from his ears. Breaths that could easily be misinterpreted.
“It’s Karience,” she said. “I shouldn’t have spoken up, but I couldn’t help myself. I said one thing in defense of the opposition and…it started an avalanche. By the end, I had confessed I stood with the opposition. I even told her about us.”
Damien pulled away enough to look at her, but his hands remained strong against her back. Zoecara met his gaze, letting a fierce, spirited anger emanate through her tearful eyes.
“The Empyrean is as closed-minded as your quorum head, Queen Nira,” said Zoecara. She smiled weakly. “And her arguments are just as flatulent.”
Damien smiled, then laughed. “Your courage amazes me,” he said. “You are an amazing woman. An amazing person. What makes you different than most is your willingness to listen. Do you remember that first time we met?”
“Yes,” said Zoecara. “I left that night so scared. You shook my entire foundation.”
“You allowed yourself to be vulnerable. A very rare virtue. Zoecara. That night you shook me, as well. I had never met another person so willing to listen to a different perspective. You made me realize how stubborn I could be. That I need to put aside my responses and counter arguments until I fully hear out the person I disagree with. That one night has changed my life. My relationships with the pro-Guardian majority have become more cordial and complex. And I have you to thank for that.”
Zoecara hid the pleasure his words brought her. He was so perfect. A man like Damien would only continue to rise in power, and she needed him like a parasite needed a host. To feed off of his integrity and good standing until she was strong enough to stand on her own.
Zoecara turned her face away, a fresh round of tears coming. “There’s more. Karience is stripping me of my title. She says if my allegiances have changed, there’s no place for me here. She said she is going to ship me offworld with a recommendation that I be removed from the order.”
Damien drew her in again. Once in his arms, she snuggled up to him. “Loam has grown on me,” she said, her tone a mix of anger and warmth. “Its people, and the simple beauty of life here, are so different from the upworld I came from. I feel like I was just beginning to call this place home. And for that, I have you to thank. Your kindness to me and your friendship.”
His hands moved warmly upon her back. “Zoecara, if you want to stay…I won’t let them take you.”
Zoecara pressed her face into his firm shoulder. “There’s nothing you can do,” she sighed. “They have too much power. They’re too strong.”
“They have power, but they are still limited. This is not their world yet.” He tilted back to look into her eyes. “Will you trust me?”
Her mouth parted, and she looked up at him, letting all the trust and love and hunger she could summon show upon her face. “Why wouldn’t I? You are the most trustworthy man I’ve ever known.” Her eyes stayed fixed on his, pulling him in, calling to him. “You’ve changed my world, Damien. I see everything differently because of you.”
Damien’s hand ran up the side of her face. His head dipped down, and their lips met, his pressing softly into hers, delicious, tender. It was just a moment, and then he lingered intimately close, his face warming her skin. She exhaled with a shudder, her breath washing over him, calling him back.
“Damien.” Her words were barely audible. “What does this mean?”
“It means my feelings for you are far more than for a friend.”
She looked into his eyes for a moment, like a girl lost in a dream, then shifted her eyes away, overwhelmed.
“You should stay here tonight,” said Damien.
“Stay?” she whispered.
“My home is yours, for as long as you want. I’ll have a room prepared for you.”
Responses came to mind, but she forced herself to go slow. She’d learned a valuable lesson from Rueik. If she wanted this man to make her a queen of Loam, he was the one who would have to vanquish her, and not the other way around. She was the clay and he the sculptor.
Sooner or later, she would bed him, and then her control would be solidified. In the same way she fulfilled his longing to persuade others of his cause, she would fulfill his fantasy of being a man to a woman. She, the innocent beauty enraptured by his every touch.
She would esteem him, validate his causes, give him space when he needed it, and always, always cry out in love making, as if he were a god.
Again his lips pressed into hers.
One step at a time, she told herself as her mouth moved in tandem with his. She still had tomorrow to worry about…the gathering at Aven’s farm. If it went as well as tonight had, she would be the only Guardian left alive by the end of the day.
_____
WINTER
Winter couldn’t sleep. She sat on the floor by her bedroom window, her arms wrapped around her knees. The lights of Anantium had dwindled down until there were now no candles burning in any of the buildings she could see. Whisper’s tiny legs tickled the back of her wrist.
Her eyelids were beginning to grow heavy. She closed them. The sense of dread that had been haunting her began to ease.
I love him. I cannot lose him. Her thoughts were half a prayer to the Makers and half consolation for herself. Aven is a part of me. I need him. His life is just beginning to have joy and hope. My vision cannot come to pass. It mustn’t.
Her thoughts trailed off into dreamlike images. Vague, wistful. A scene from their childhood. Aven laughing under a canopy of trees. Him sitting and talking with her in her room as she wove a crown of twigs under candlelight.
Then the vision came again, shattering everything else before it.
Blood spattering on a metal floor. Two legs, severed at the thigh, falling from a hulking shadow. Aven’s legs.
Winter’s heart pounded, and she fought to awaken from this nightmare, but what she saw in her mind’s eye wasn’t a dream to be chased away.
A massive head lowered to the floor and almost gently took one of the legs between its lips. The monster spasmed forward, the leg disappearing into the cavernous mouth. The creature’s sagging throat rolled as it swallowed.
Winter grabbed her stomach and was vaguely aware she was vomiting, but the vision would not release her.
The monster stared at her with its cruel eyes.
She wanted to turn away, but it was not possible.
Slowly, the monster faded from sight, and she felt something push her. She was plummeting down toward a thick canopy of green, the ragged outlines of giant leaves like serrated saws rushing up to meet her.
Winter screamed.
The roar of the wind in her ears grew deafening, then she hit the fronds and heard a sickening crack.
All went dark and silent.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
AVEN
“This is what my sister will be learning to prepare for her new role?” asked Aven.
He was sitting with Arentis
s and Daeymara around a small circular table in the Missionary enclave, the late morning light piercing the windows in the outer wall. The vid screen hanging from the ceiling was only a dark, mirrored reflection. No moving images of distant lands and peoples.
“Yes,” said Daeymara. She fanned the pages of the thick book on the table before her. “Six-hundred and forty-seven pages of procedure and case studies.”
“I look forward to assisting your sister in her training,” said Arentiss. “Where is Winter now?”
“Asleep,” said Aven. “She’s not feeling well.”
He wished it was just an illness. And, in a way, it was. In reality, she’d had another vision, though Winter wouldn’t tell him about it. He’d stayed by her bedside until her breathing calmed, and she fell asleep.
Aven felt a slight touch on his right knee, then another. He put his hand under the table and found small, slender fingers waiting for him. They slid softly into his.
Arentiss wasn’t smiling, but there was a warm glow on her face that made Aven smile.
“I wouldn’t mind training your sister either,” said Daeymara. She looked at Arentiss. “What do you say we split our time with her?”
“You only have a matter of weeks before your mission. It makes little sense for you to start her training, only to leave her. Besides, I am more than capable of training her myself.”
Aven found himself strangely torn by Arentiss' words. He was sad that Daeymara would be leaving soon. Though he barely knew her, she had made an impression on him. He hoped that in her remaining weeks they could spend more time together.
At the same time, he was happy that he was getting to know Arentiss better. Her soft fingers were beginning to feel comfortable in his. She peered at him now. Her blue eyes, though beautiful, were difficult to read. He felt certain her needs weren’t purely practical. He saw an underlying passion beneath the surface of her well-composed face.