Chapter 27
Ella
Mom must be sleeping, too, because I’m with her again, in her dream. We still ride the feathered back of Finnah, and the two of them, Mom and the massive green bird, seem to know where they’re going. We rise through the sky, which the green birds have a way of spinning into dancing emerald wisps. The breeze is warm and dreamy, and all the edges around us are fuzzy.
“Hey, you,” Mom says. She turns back to look at me and smiles, even with her eyes, genuinely unworried.
“Hey yourself,” I say, laughing.
Mom’s dreams are both the best and the worst place. I love being able to speak and be near her, but to understand her this deeply means seeing and accepting all the pieces I’d rather not know, the things she’d never willingly tell me.
I lean into Mom’s back, her long blond hair smooth against my cheek as she turns forward once more. She’s as real now as she was bumping up against me as we tumbled down Baluurwa in the blamala crab’s spit bubble. I fill my lungs with her smell: spring daisies and cottage nights curled under the quilt Grandma Suzie made for us, our favorite place to hide away from the world. As Mom breathes, both our bodies rise and fall again and again, as Finnah’s great rib cage expands between our legs.
“I like you with me,” Mom whispers. “When I carried you within me those nine blissful months, I felt the security of someone as close as my own pulse. After you were born, that love was so tightly wrapped around us. I knew I’d finally found the one who’d stay with me forever.”
“But what if I go to school in another state, or another country? What if I live long enough to get married?” My knowledge that neither of these things is possible can’t touch me in this dreamland.
“I don’t mean in body,” Mom answers sleepily. “Being easy to leave isn’t about the absence of physical presence. It’s the withholding of love, the rejection of desire and affection. Even when we fight—and I’m sorry, Ell, really, for all the ways I do the wrong things, say the wrong things—we share the same blood, the same hair and skin, the same experiences. Even when we run away from each other, we always look back. We always run back. You love me even when I’m a helicopter parent and make life a little miserable for both of us.
“I’ve always felt like I’ve grown up right alongside you, Ella,” Mom continues. “No one teaches moms and dads how to parent, how to love their kids the right way. What right way? Am I right?” She chuckles. “Especially when it comes to cancer kids. You’ve taught me what love is. I hope you hear that. You’ve taught me to love, because even when I make a mess out of everything and fall hard from the pedestal of motherhood, you pick me up. You continue to love me. Which is baffling. Truly baffling to me.”
“Mom—”
“It’s true. So no matter if we’re together or whole worlds apart—like Earth is from Jarr—I know you’ll never leave me. I carry you in my heart. Even if I die, Ell—and I may die before I wake from this beautiful place—you’re a part of me and I’m a part of you. If cancer takes you—and I say if because I am holding onto the hope I once thought so foolish—a part of me will die, too. I don’t know if life would be worth living then. Would it, Finnah?” Mom directs her attention to the large blinking eyes, past the three-foot-long eyelashes, of the great green bird.
“Tessa, life is always worth living—however short, however long,” answers Finnah. “Some, however, feel that life without goodness, joy, and peace is not worth saving. This is why Jarr is changing, why its inhabitants have grown fierce. When we lose faith in each other, the battle is over.”
Mom responds to Finnah as if she’s forgotten that my arms are around her waist, that my exhalations flutter the hair at her back. “Ella gave me that faith. Without parents—or any blood family—I began as a lostling. I was lost before I was ever found. The only real family is the one I made with Arden, Ella, and even Archie. But it’s all so fragile, tender, losable. As close as I get to happiness, to stability, the situation shows itself to be fragile. Ella’s illness. Arden leaving us. Ella’s capture by Bangols. I’m sucked back to Earth, alone.”
“Being alone is not the worst fate,” Finnah answers, ducking beneath a cloud.
“I’ve clung to Ella so tightly all her life for fear of losing her that I’ve made fear its own being, and it stalks me.”
“If you created it”—Finnah snorts through a golden beak—“you must also have the power to obliterate it.”
“I agree with Finnah,” I say.
“Oh, Ella, I didn’t see you there.”
I shake my head at Mom, who yawns and stretches her arms as if only now wakening.
She asks me, “You didn’t hear what Finnah and I were discussing, did you?”
“No,” I lie.
“Oh good. Well, since you’re back there, can you massage a knot in my back? I feel so tightly wound, Ell—not that I must hold on too tightly, Finnah. Your ride is smooth, I promise.”
I scoot back a few inches on Finnah, then rest my hands on Mom’s shoulder blades. My arm that broke when we crashed on the Millia’s beach has healed to a nagging ache. Here, in this sleepy, distinctly other place—where Mom and I can meet worlds apart—my arm feels as good as it did precancer. The gash and burn from our crash into the Bangol fortress is also absent.
Like Mom said, her shoulders are tight and I can feel the knots, firm and round. I push into one, and she cries out. “Too hard?” I mumble. Her hair sways as she nods. I continue to press my fingers and palms against her shoulders, but something isn’t right.
I lift the back of Mom’s white tank top and nearly tumble, startled, and must grab Finnah’s feathers so I don’t slip off into the dreamy sky. There, at Mom’s scars from her childhood scoliosis operation, grow jagged ridges beneath her skin. From each of her shoulder blades, brown mounds bulge. I wipe my hands on my thighs, as if whatever is seeking to exit her could infect me through my fingertips.
“What is it, Ella?” she asks, turning her chin toward me over one shoulder.
“I-I don’t know, Mom.” As I say these words, the brown mounds push through the final layer of pink flesh and spill out. Umber-colored vines unfurl from the holes in Mom’s skin. They emerge slowly, delicately, thick at first but then thin and yellow-green at their tips. The vines are young and produce stems and buds that bloom into deep dusty-green hearts.
“My back, Ell. It hurts. Please help me.”
I can’t reply. There are no words to make sense of what’s happening. The vines continue to spill out of the two slits on Mom’s back. They appear aware. They inch over my legs, and the leaves study my face, caressing my cheeks. They slip behind my head, beneath my hair, to where my cancer biopsy scar lives silently, rippled and red. My eyes grow wide. My scar!
Frantically, I brush the tangled hair from my neck and touch the puckered flesh. It’s tender, as it has always been, as if the nerve endings were traumatized in surgery and left to mourn their injury in futile protests. My fingers trace the familiar line, the bumps at either end of the incision, the parallel ridges from the stitches.
I exhale, relieved. My scar hasn’t burst open. It remains its own kind of ugly. All the while, Mom’s two gashes, one on each shoulder blade, tear wider as the vines leak out like froth on a pot bubbling over. She reaches over her shoulders. Her fingertips are just shy of the gashes. She pushes her elbow and her left hand stretches farther. She caresses the vines, and, to my confusion, seems comforted.
“Oh, I see now,” Mom says with a sigh. “My insides are showing on the outside. I’ve always felt different. Out of place. Nowhere to belong. No one to understand.”
“Mom, you’re talking crazy. You belong with me. I understand!”
She doesn’t hear me. We’d been flying through a peachy sky streaked with wisps of solemn clouds. Since the inception of the dream, a slowly approaching blackness has stolen the scroll of red and margin of blue in the sky, revealing twinkling white flecks that dance around us.
Beside the st
ars are planets each turning at their own pace. One is a brilliant orange, radiating yellow and revolving quickly. The atmosphere around it is peppered with debris, its content too small to recognize yet large enough that you can appreciate its many forms. This hustling orange world extends a yellow glow, connecting like a stretched sock to a smaller planet. This one is teal with two revolving white rings, situated ninety degrees from each other, spinning in opposite directions. Through this channel of yellow, fragments float lazily from the orange planet to the blue. I can make out small clouds of dust mushrooming off the blue planet as the rubble collides with it.
Finnah chirps, “There are more than a thousand connected realms. There is the mother planet, rich in Naiu, and then its derivative—usually smaller, usually appearing devoid of Naiu, but it is there. The derivative cannot see its mother world, but if it slows down, holds its breath so that time rushes on without it, then Naiu can be felt. Naiu formed the derivative worlds, all worlds, and even unseen it is in everything and in everyone. It is undeniable.”
Mom and Finnah cock their heads from side to side, appreciating each planet and its too colorful, too radiant threads binding the mother to its equally vibrant derivative.
“Umbilical cords,” Mom whispers. “Everything’s connected. One planet sustaining another.”
“The bond is not always that peaceful, that respectful,” replies Finnah, speaking in hushed awe through her mammoth beak. “Naiu is good, innocent, and naive. It recoils from evil, taking with it its goodness. The evil then has space to grow. Naiu does not recognize that by leaving, it expands the very thing it wishes to rebuke. Not everyone is kind to fellow creatures and the creation they inhabit. In the formation of the worlds, Naiu was spread thin in places, giving rise to unhappiness.
“On Earth, the cruelty between humans is terribly shortsighted. Just as one planet is connected to another, so, too, is everything made of Naiu. When you wound another, you cut out your own heart. Speak words of ill-will, and you slice yourself in two. Touch the land with lust instead of love, and you rape your own identity.”
“If we’re all connected, Finnah, tell me: Why have I always felt so alone?” Mom is crying. “It’s so beautiful. If only all people, all creatures, could see the worlds from here …”
Finnah turns to look at Mom. “Is it that you are alone, or that you are running from something?” she asks fondly.
Mom shakes her head, her tears falling to her shirt and watering the vines that have coiled their shafts around us. “What do you mean?”
“If you still yourself, separate yourself from your notion of time, what do you learn? Perhaps you feel alone because you are out of your birth rhythm.”
“Because I’m of a different rhythm.” Mom’s voice contains no self-pity but is crisp and firm and suddenly alive with hope.
“Yes.” Finnah nods and glides between the swell of planets. A large purple-freckled sphere dances through the murky abyss. It’s surrounded with an iridescent blue sheen, which carries large ships with rippling sails on the cusp of space. The ships drop nets that scoop beneath them, where cheeky fish with spears for noses dart out of the way. One leaps from the blue sheen like blown taffeta and arcs in a perfect rainbow above the hunters. The fish dips beneath the vessel once more and hurries through the flowing atmosphere to the derivative planet, a pale green world with small pockets of blue, like Earth inverted.
“You’re right, Finnah,” Mom says, snapping me back to the giant bird and the vines and the rushing air and my cancer and my orphan mother. Her voice is full of breath. “I don’t know what I’ve run from all my life, yet I’ve always sensed it. I’ve feared it, like a shadow that falls on me from behind. When I turn, whoever was there is always gone. In a way, this presence has created an absence.”
Finnah wheezes. I hadn’t noticed until now, with Finnah’s strained gasp, that Mom’s vines have wound themselves more tightly around the three of us. Mom turns to me over her shoulder. Only her neck moves; her arms are coiled at her sides, her legs fixed to Finnah’s feathered body. I’m similarly twisted in the firm growth. It’s nauseatingly claustrophobic, so I wrench my torso to and fro and pull at the vines, making only small headway. A leaf slaps my hand.
Then I feel it. Something’s bulging above my shoulders. There’s a pushing, from inside, and the scar on my neck throbs. Then the skin breaks, painfully jagged like torn paper. A trickle of blood runs down the gully of my spine. A newborn vine creeps out of me. It slinks along my skin and inches its way to my right cheek.
Mom’s lips are blue. Her eyes are wide as she watches me, the whites glowing in the starlight. They brim with tears, reflecting the twenty nearest planets that dance and spin around us. She blinks, and the reflection drops the planets to her cheeks, where they tumble down to water the vines.
“I’m sorry,” Mom says almost inaudibly. Finnah’s wings are contorted within the conquest of the hungry vines. The great green bird flaps with strained effort, constricted, and we fall in the shifting expanse of sky and colliding atmospheres. Constellations of one planet butt up against another. All we can do is soar. My lungs bash against my heart, which slams against my throat. My hair, and Mom’s, lifts from our shoulders. Still, Mom looks back at me, whispering, “Ella, I’m so sorry.”
Chapter 28
Archie
Something is amiss,” grumbles the Lord of Olearon. He narrows his black eyes as he stares up at Baluurwa the Doomful. “By now, the green bird should have reached the glass city and our warriors be visible as a line of red above the maze.”
“They are on their way,” Azkar replies as he loads his sack with Bangol foodstuffs, a look of disgust across his scarred face.
Islo chimes in, “Right, Azkar. I bet they reach us before nightfall.”
Much to the company’s surprise, as if Islo had called forth the Olearons, the thin forest beyond the southern maze begins to glow. Archie leaps to his feet at the sight.
“Good, then.” The Lord exhales and drops his gloved hands from his narrow waist. “They will arrive shortly. Until then, let us conclude final preparations—only what is necessary—so we might depart swiftly.”
Junin and Islo nod their heads of thick dreadlocks and hurry to their tasks. Ardenal fetches Ella a carved stone goblet filled with water, urging her to drink and sit while she can, now that she’s awake. Luggie hovers at her side.
Nameris and Nate bicker as they construct the Tillastrion on the stage, using the Bangol throne as a table. There they have collected a small group of objects: a flaking ember; a wooden box with a broken hinge meant to hold dried sea plants; an enchanted stone from the maze; a broken shard of the blamala crab bubble.
Archie overhears Nate’s objections. “I can’t see how this device,” he begins, “can possibly transport our company, plus a contingent of Olearons, to Earth.”
“What is your issue, human?” retorts Nameris. “Is it our choice of materials, their combination, which is not yet complete, or the size of the device?”
“Size, of course. You saw the Bangols’ massive machine.”
“From my research of Tillastrions—though I have only studied them, never constructed one myself—it was excessive.”
“Okay, fine,” Nate grumbles, “but I reckon ours can only move, let’s say, eight, but we’ll have twenty times that soon.”
Nameris shakes his head at the disgruntled sea captain. He sits gently on the arm of the rock throne. “Let me teach you something, human—”
“Nate.”
“Nathanial, the Bangols believe size is of utmost importance, hence their recklessness in conquering new territory, even at great cost. This misconception extends to their Tillastrion as well. However, anyone familiar with Naiu knows that it perceives desire, longing. What needs to be great is not the size of the device, but the will to carry it where it needs to go. Think of Archie and the Atlantic Odyssey.” Nameris waits for his point to resonate.
Archie feels his palms sweat and his shirt dampen
with perspiration where he leans against the amphitheater band shell, listening. He vividly recalls his longing to reunite his family, healthy and whole. He and Zeno operated the Tillastrion—which indeed was small, only a box, clay bowl, and glass sphere—in Archie’s cabin aboard the Atlantic Odyssey. After the swirl of lights, they found themselves still on the ship, and Zeno was distraught. He blamed Archie for not caring enough, when many would argue that Archie cared too much. He inadvertently brought the Odyssey and its passengers along with him on his mission to find Arden and Ella’s cure.
Nate winces at the memories of his ship plucked from its course across the North Atlantic Ocean, its siege and destruction by the Olearons, and the murders of his passengers by the Millia sands, all because of the size of Archie’s desire. Finally, the captain understands.
“So,” Nameris says, rising, “how badly do you wish to return to your planet? How much does Ella desire to save her mother?”
Nate is silent but nods thoughtfully.
“We will have no trouble with our little device once it is built.” Nate returns to combining the objects.
Suddenly, Archie feels a hot hand wrap itself around his upper arm. From the way the long fingers bore into him, Archie knows the grip belongs to the Lord of Olearon—but which Lord, he is not certain. Not the Maiden, Archie laments, the one Olearon he desperately wishes to speak with.
Archie’s heart thuds against his ribcage. He pulls away hastily, high-steps down the stage stairs, and nearly tumbles over a sheet of crudely hammered metal. All around them is the wreckage of foolhardy industrialization, forged greedily from the earth. Discarded gears, bent and beginning to rust, are strewn carelessly amongst the bones of cradle birds and the chewed skins of the Bangols’ favorite fruit.
Archie dodges all this and sidesteps the mouth of the cavernous mine. He retreats until his back presses up against a curled piece of clay. The Lord advances on Archie step for step. Which one is it? Archie wonders. The 30th Lord, Dunakkus, or the 29th? The look in the Lord’s eyes is grim, menacing. He towers above Archie, who peers up timidly through his bushy eyebrows. When the Lord does not speak, Archie smiles awkwardly and shrugs, then slips out from between the Olearon and the clay.
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