by Tracy Korn
She clears her throat. “It would be the greatest of honors, sir.”
“I’m so happy to hear that. Well, then…about the air. As I mentioned, our teams have been toiling over the endless records that were housed in the ship’s databases. They go back over a hundred years. While the port-cloud brought civilization into the future, it also shortened it considerably for most of its inhabitants. In light of the technology Arco Hart and Azeris Frank have been able to unearth, it would simply be going backward to even attempt reconstruction of the port-cloud.”
“That’s incredible!” Jax says.
“Well, that’s not all. As you can see by looking out any window, we have a lot of rebuilding to do. Our neural telecommunications system depended on the Grid, which has been damaged beyond salvage. Sometimes, that’s what it takes to move forward, however, and that’s what we plan to do with your help, Mr. Ripley. Would you consider working with my office to redesign and implement our new neural network?”
“I…I don’t know what to say.” Jack almost laughs.
“Well, I hope you’ll say yes.” President DeAngelis grins.
“Ah, yes…yes, of course. Thank you, sir.”
“Excellent. Now that just leaves a few more things in order to put this community back together. Mr. Frank, I understand you have a strong relationship with the Tinkerer community as well as with some of our leading, shall we say…technical professionals here on the Skyboard Hill.” President DeAngelis offers a raised eyebrow and a knowing smile.
“Ah…that I do, sir.”
“Good. Would you do us the great service of choosing a team and coordinating efforts with my office to standardize a port-carnate technology system for global distribution?”
“Wait, what?” Azeris flinches.
“Dad!” Zoe squeezes the words through her teeth as she elbows Azeris in the chest. He clears his throat.
“I mean, yes. Absolutely can do, sir,” he finally says, still in disbelief.
“Wonderful.” President DeAngelis laughs. “Finally, we’ll need expert agricultural and botanical experience after this water recedes. Mrs. Ripley, I understand you ran the very successful greenbeds for the community before this tragedy struck?”
“Yes, sir,” my mother says. “But of course, they wouldn’t have been possible without our hard-working interns.”
“I was hoping you would say that. I would like to send a few representatives from our Department of Natural Resources to coordinate the immediate materials and labor needed to move forward. They could use a project advisor, and we would greatly appreciate your help in overseeing these endeavors, plus land quality inspections as we move forward with reconstruction. What do you say?”
Jazz’s mom beams, which, aside from the last few days, I haven’t seen happen in five years. “It would be my pleasure, sir,” she says, clasping Jack’s hand.
“Excellent…then this is the beginning! I’ll have all the contracts drawn up for dispersal. Today, we will roll up our sleeves and start leading the world to a bright tomorrow,” he says with a wide smile to us all. “Your nation thanks you, and we are in your debt.”
Everyone stands shaking their heads in disbelief as he nods and turns to leave.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” I say abruptly before he makes his way out the door.
“Thank you, for your leadership, Mr. Hart.”
CHAPTER 51
The Beginning
Jazz
I sit next to Arco with my head on his shoulder watching Vox’s clan get acquainted with the Vishan, all of them either laughing or crying, or just marveling at each other. I haven’t seen Vox or Liam or Liddick yet, and I can’t seem to make contact with Vox or Liddick telepathically either.
He knows you’re here, Lyden thinks, approaching us with Arwyn supporting his arm and his parents on his other side. Mine are just a few steps behind.
“Lyden!” I say out loud, startling Arco. We get up and cross to them.
“You’re discharged already?” Arco says, noticing the way Lyden is holding his torso with his other arm.
“Not permanently, but I wasn’t about to miss tonight. It’s not every day my little brothers get to introduce an entire lost society to the whole watching world.” He laughs as my parents approach and stand with us.
“Jazwyn, Arco…” Lyden’s mother says, glancing at my mom and dad. She’s tall and thin with swept-up dark hair and clear blue eyes just like Liddick’s. “I can’t begin to—“ she starts, but then is overcome with emotion. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry,” she says, trying to regain her composure.
Lyden’s dad wraps his arm around his wife and puts a hand on my shoulder. He’s also tall with dark hair that’s gray at the tips and temples, his long, blue tunic setting off the blue of his eyes under thick, dark brows.
“We can’t begin to thank you for everything you did to get our boys back,” he says, gripping my shoulder, and then offering a hand to Arco.
He takes it and nods respectfully. “We all helped each other out there.”
Lyden’s mom abandons her struggle with her composure and hugs Arco, kissing his cheek, and then doing the same to me.
“We owe you everything…everything,” she says, dabbing at her tears as her husband nods his agreement, then signals to Lyden where they’re going to be seated.
Liddick will be here soon, Lyden thinks. He’s been asking about you in my head since they surfaced.
I can’t find him…or he’s just not answering me? I think.
Lyden just smiles quietly at me as he and Arwyn go to sit with their parents, and I understand without him having to answer my question. Liddick hasn’t figured out what to say to me any more than I’ve figured out what to say to him…now that it’s all really done. We’re home, and we can start over.
We all watch the Wrights take their seats, their absence leaving a kind of ravine between my parents and me...empty with all the years we’ve been apart in one way or another. There are so many things to say that it’s hard to know where to begin, so I’m surprised when my mother moves toward me and puts her hands on my face. She looks into my eyes and takes a long, slow breath as a smile moves quietly over her face.
“You changed my world when you were born, Jazwyn,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. All the breath is pushed out of my lungs as a sea of my own tears rise up in my chest. “And now, you’ve changed everyone’s.”
I swallow hard to prevent the deluge threatening tears, but it’s useless as I feel them run down my face. She folds her arms around me and pulls me close, which fills the distance between us. All five years.
She smiles brightly at me when she lowers her arms to look at me again, and I can’t help but smile too. Arco puts a hand on my back, and I’m finally able to take a deep breath.
“I’m so proud of you two,” my dad says, beaming at us.
“Dad, you’re going to make me cry again.” I try to laugh. “Apparently, I have an inexhaustible supply of tears, so...”
“As any good Empath would,” my mom says with a wink and a glancing smile that lasts a second too long. Wait a minute...
Mom, can you hear me? I think. Her smile just widens as she grips Arco’s other hand for a second, then turns toward the seating area. I laugh under my breath and shake my head, watching them sit with Fraya and her parents. Jax is with them holding Nann on his lap. Since we left the hospital, she’s been draped all over him listening to stories about life-sized mosquitoes and giant, mutant manta rays who roam the ocean helping people, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. I scan the crowd for Avis and Ellis and find them sitting with their parents, not far from mine, but Quinn and Sarin are not with their parents.
“Do you know where they are?” I ask Arco, raising my chin. Arco follows my eyes.
“Quinn and Sarin? Major Reynolt said they were on the ship with Rheen and Styx when it was seized, but they sent them to psych evals instead of criminal holding,” he answers, trying not to look at their parents for
too long. “They won’t be released until they’re cleared, though, and only then after the trials since they’re testifying.”
“Psych evals?” I ask. “The State really thinks it was brainwashing? Because I bet Sarin wouldn’t have thought twice about getting on that ship under the Rush and leaving everyone here behind to deal with the end of the world.”
“I’d bet the same thing, but I guess that’s why they were so easy to manipulate.” He laughs.
“What’s so funny?”
“I just remembered your go-around with her in class at Gaia Sur,” he says, touching four fingers to his thumb to make a hole. “Crawl in a hole and die?” He cracks up all over again. I roll my eyes and nudge him.
“Hey, she started it.”
His laughter trails off as he looks at me seriously again, the hard lines of his face even sharper now, making him look older.
“That seems like a lifetime ago,” he says, shaking his head as he chuffs a laugh. “I guess it was.”
“I’ve thought that so many times over the last few months.”
We stand there without talking for another several seconds before he leans down.
“And now?” he asks through my hair. “What do you think happens now?”
I lean my head back on his chest to think about it. I’ve been trying to answer that question since we found out Gaia wasn’t what it appeared to be. That the life we planned was never there waiting for us.
“I don’t know…” I finally answer, and am a little surprised that not knowing actually feels OK now.
“Jazwyn Ripley doesn’t know her next step?” he asks, poking me in the side. I squirm and nudge him again.
“I really don’t…aside from I don’t see how we can pass up the opportunity to finish school at the new topside Gaia. I just want to learn how to use what we can do to help people. And there are plenty of people who need help now.”
“We?” he asks in the quiet voice again, this time so closely that I can feel his warm breath next to my ear. I settle back against him, and he wraps his arms around me.
“I mean, unless you wanted to figure out how to brain-fly all the ships you see from now through trial and nosebleed?”
“Definitely not.” He laughs, combing my hair back with his fingers and leaning close to my ear again.
“What do you want?” I ask, turning my head a little toward him.
“You know what’s funny?” he asks after a long pause. “Even though everything is gone—I mean everything we knew—I still want the same thing.”
“A base career where you can come home at night?” I ask, remembering what he told me that night after he first kissed me by the moon pool at Gaia Sur. He chuckles.
“Exactly,” he says, kissing my temple. He’s quiet for a few more seconds before he takes in deep breath and starts again. “And I think I want to see what I could really do out there, you know? I guess I’ve never really pushed too many limits before now. Tark made me see that.”
“He’d be proud of you.”
Arco doesn’t say anything else in response to this. I feel a hollow start in my chest, but it’s quickly filled with a spreading warmth when he pulls me closer to him. Grief…and love.
“You two just going to sit back here and pet each other all night then?” Vox says from nowhere.
I whip around and see her standing right next to us. “Vox!” I almost scream. “How do you even do that?”
“Do what? Do you think I have the time to plan out a special, silent route whenever I approach you just so you never see me coming?”
“Yes!” Arco and I both say at the same time, which makes her genuinely smile instead of giving her trademark smirk. She cocks an eyebrow and shrugs one shoulder.
“I mean…it’s not every time.” She hooks my arm in hers. “Come on.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “Why?”
“Because I’m actually going to roarf in a hard, straight line if I have to watch you two breathing all over each other anymore. Crite, go find sunken treasure or something,” she adds, cocking another eyebrow at Arco and trying not to smile.
“Copy that, Vox,” he says, giving her a two-finger salute like the Badlanders. He gets about five steps from us when she calls out to him.
“Hey,” she says, and he turns back to us. “Thank you…for bringing us home.”
He takes a long, deep breath at that and nods, pressing his lips into a hard-lined smile before he turns and walks over to his family.
Vox blows out a breath and marshals me in the opposite direction.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Somewhere you need to go.”
“That doesn’t answer my question, though.”
“There’s something you need to see.”
“What?”
“Sand dollar, can you just stow it for, like, twenty seconds until we get there? Because you’re taking up all my poignant time.”
I actually almost choke on the laugh that lodges in my throat and raise my hand in surrender.
“OK, OK…” I finish choking.
She rolls her yellow-green eyes at me. “First of all, I’m glad you didn’t die,” she says, giving me a quick glance as we walk out the auditorium door toward the guard rail at the edge of Skyboard Mountain. I try to keep my expression neutral, but when the corner of her mouth tacks in a restrained smile, I know she feels the same closeness I do. “Second, I’m not going to the new Gaia.”
“Vox… Why?”
“Because you were right. I never wanted to go in the first place. And now that the Vishan are here… I just…”
“You have to help them find their way,” I say. “That’s what a boundary scout does.”
She slows her pace and watches our footsteps. Her lips quirk and her forehead wrinkles, but only for a second before she sniffs and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Ewww, I think.
She laughs out loud and lets go of my arm, shoving me a few steps to the side. “Cal’s never had to escape a stranglebush,” she says, cocking a knowing eyebrow at me. I laugh, and so does she. We walk a few more yards before we both trail off, and she takes in a big breath. “Here you go,” she says as we round the corner.
The sun is no more than thirty minutes from disappearing under the horizon, which makes the sky a wash of orange, pink, and purple. I gasp and stop cold where I stand.
“I never thought I’d see another one of these,” I say to Vox, but when I turn around, she’s gone.
“I know,” Liddick says from just a few steps more around the bend.
“Liddick…” I say his name with the rest of the breath in my lungs. The way he looks at me is almost unreadable—it’s everything all at once. But that’s how it always is with him. He sighs, slipping one hand in his pocket as he leans back against the railing, which he grips with the other hand.
“I’ve been in more virtue-cines than I can count, Rip,” he says with a smile and eyes that seem to flash just for a second. “But this…” He shakes his head and almost laughs “All this with you has been the best adventure of my life.” He holds out a hand to me, and I try as hard as I can not to breathe because I know that any space I make in my chest will just constrict and suffocate me right here on the cliff edge. “Come over and watch this with me.”
I move to his side, and we both lean forward on our forearms.
“I was so afraid I’d never see you again,” I say, threatening the control I have over my composure. I take a deep breath to try to stabilize, but it doesn’t really help.
“For a while there, I was too. But I felt you there. In the ship just before the trajectory reprogrammed itself, or, I guess I should say before Hart reprogrammed it.” His dark eyebrows dart together as he shakes his head, confused. “That’s when it all kind of hit me, I think…that you really do love him.”
“Liddick…”
“No, it’s OK,” he says, covering one of my hands with his as we watch the sunset. “I just mean I can accept it now after see
ing him through your lens…literally.”
“You could see me in his channel?”
Liddick nods. “In a way. I think the NET, or the ship relay, or something made it so you were connected to both of us at the same time, and because of that, I could see him, but only through you. You were like, a conduit. I could feel that he’s not as black and white as I thought he was,” he says, gripping my hand. “And…that you really do love him just as much as I love you.”
Tears burn my eyes despite my best efforts. They stream down my cheeks and instantly cool in the breeze. How can this be so painful but also so hopeful at the same time?
Because endings and beginnings are things that happen at the same time, Riptide, he thinks, eavesdropping on my thoughts. Or maybe this is one that I let him find in me.
“What will you do now?” I ask, almost afraid that no matter what he says, I won’t know how to feel about it.
“Well, there’s the Presidential Gaia 2.0 scholarship slot if I want it. And Dez’s family felt so bad about what her father did that they offered Lyden and me positions in the new cinematics industry they’re building in Admin City. Next generation virtuo-cines.” A flash of panic hits me at this, but I catch myself before I ask him the question he already knows I’m going to ask. He looks at me sideways and smiles. “Don’t worry, Rip. I’m never going back there again. I found what I went looking for in the cines.”
“So you’ll come to the new Gaia with us?”
“I don’t know. I think it’ll depend on the schedule.”
“What?” I ask, trying to keep the laugh out of my voice. Liddick shrugs, stifling his own laughter.
“Thanks to Hart, Ludwig Sprague is an unmarred man with wicked security clearances,” he says, nodding to the water. “Grisham and Tarriff are never getting out of Lima after this all goes to tribunal. Someone needs to watch your back out there.”
“Watch my back?”
“And everybody’s in the Badlands. Finn and I had plans to clean it up and make sure people got a fair shot. Grisham used to be on board with that until he got selfish.”
“So, you’d become the new Grisham?”