The Journeyman

  He pulled hard with both hands. It came free, but he fell over when it did. He got up and carried the tool back to the door.

  Zach tried to decide where to hit the thumb button with the tool. He didn’t want to break it. He tried the thumb buttons on the other doors. None of them moved, either.

  He was back to figuring out which button to hit and where to hit it when he remembered the big-boy power he hadn’t tried yet. It was the one he never used—not because he couldn’t, but because everyone told him he had to.

  “Please,” Zach told the doors. His voice disturbed the air around him. He’d forgotten what it sounded like.

  When he again pushed the button on the first door he’d tried, he opened it with only one thumb. It moved easily.

  Inside was a wide hallway with a cement floor. Metal gates protected storefronts on both sides of him. It looked like a cross between the New York streets Zach’s mother sometimes walked him down at night when everything was closed and one of the malls they used to go to.

  This place was older than the malls, like the place by the ocean that Zach and Zach’s mother went to when she’d wanted to show him the ringing and beeping games last summer. It had the same light-up tubes buzzing overhead. It even had the same wooden walls—the kind with the straight black lines you could run your fingernail up and down.

  He didn’t do that to these walls. They looked like they’d be bad to touch.

  Zach didn’t linger in front of the dark stores with the closed gates. He couldn’t see what was in them because the lights were off inside and not all of the overhead hallway tubes worked. He saw comic books and magazines in one store with working tubes, walls made of keys in another, and a big racetrack full of silent little cars on a table in a third.

  Zach’s mother’s voice talked to him, even though the play button wasn’t pressed down. That made no sense. But neither did the fact that the recorder played without any batteries in it. He had checked, and the battery place was empty except for white and green powder and dried brown gunk.

  She told him to keep moving. There were places he needed to go before other things happened, or it would be too late.

  A smart boy. A brave boy.

  A fast boy.

  Overhead was a hanging sign with the pictures of the pretzel, the circle with the hole, and the tape that went into his machine. Zach followed the arrow on it, which pointed to the ceiling. It meant he should go straight, not up.

  The lights buzzed as he walked. Zach’s mother’s voice was silent.

  He passed side hallways. Light spilled from tubes at the far end of them, as did the sounds of laughing, talking, and songs about dancing in the moonlight and Chicago dying at night.

  Those were songs for other people and other times, not him. He hoped that the people singing the songs were happy, that they were okay. He hoped that for people a lot, but no one knew it because he didn’t tell them.

  He came to an open gate. The sign over it had the same letters and pictures as the one out front. Zach mother’s voice told him where to walk when he went into the store. He passed walls displaying the black circles with the holes in them and racks with pictures of long-haired men.

  One picture had a pair of jeans with a real zipper on it. Another had a birthday cake, and another had a banana. Zach still wasn’t hungry.

  He turned right, then left. No one realized it, but he knew his directions.

  In front of him, a wall held several rows of the kind of tapes that went into the tape recorder. They all hung in multi-pack plastic sleeves. Now Zach’s mother’s voice spoke to him slowly, like the real Zach’s mother and the teachers at his school when they thought he didn’t understand something, but it was really just that he knew it wasn’t worth listening to.

  Zach’s mother’s voice told him the rows of hanging tapes were like a board for checkers. Each tape was a square on the board. That was easy.

  She said to start in square one, all the way at the top and all the way to the left. That was easy, too, though Zach’s teachers thought he couldn’t do it because he never wanted to do it in front of them.

  The game was to count one over, one down, two over, and then three down. Zach counted very carefully.

  He took the long pack from the hook it was hanging on and tore open the top. Zach’s mother’s voice told him he needed the fifth tape in the sleeve.

  Outside the store, one of the voices he’d heard before was getting closer. Zach’s mother’s voice said he needed to go faster. The guard had started his rounds.

  That was the first Zach heard of any guard. He counted his way down the package until he had the right tape, took it out, and replaced the one in the machine with it.

  Before he could hit play, the sound of a lady crying came out of the recorder.

  Not loud.

  Worse than loud.

  It was the crying that the real Zach’s mother did when she didn’t want him to hear her.

  He had the wrong tape. He had to hurry.

  He counted down the pack again and realized he’d gone too fast the first time because Zach’s mother’s voice had scared him by talking about the guard. He’d put the number-six tape in. He yanked it out and popped number five into place.

  “Hello, Zach,” the unknown woman, who’d been so faint on the previous tape, said from the recorder.

  He pulled number five out and put the Zach’s-mother’s-voice tape back in so that Zach’s mother’s voice could tell him if he had the right one this time.

  Nothing happened. The Zach’s-mother’s-voice tape was at its end.

  He put the number-five tape in again. The unknown woman came back.

  Out in the hallway, keys jingled from around the corner. Or maybe a couple of corners. Zach hoped it was a couple.

  “You need to move, sweetie,” the woman said. There was something about her voice that Zach knew. Something from the bus—from the boy he gave his marble to. “Go to the back of the store.”

  The rear door to the store stood open. Beyond it, in the warm night of the parking lot, was Zach’s mother. She didn’t see him because she was facing the other way, but it was her hair.

  Now he hurried, running across the store. His foot caught on the edge of a loose tile, and he dropped the recorder before he got to the door.

  Zach’s mother was right out there. The jingling keys were closer. He kept going.

  He jumped through the doorway.

  And then everything went wrong.

  Everything.

  When he landed outside, Zach’s mother was gone. He looked around for her, but she was not there.

  And it was worse than that. Much worse.

  There was no parking lot.

  In its place was a big lake of dark water with big rocks sticking up out of it.

  He turned to go back—to get the tape recorder. Dropping it had been stupid. He needed the woman on the tape.

  The door was gone, too.

  Behind him was nothing but more lake. He was surrounded by water, standing on a rock of his own. The rock was a little larger than the others, about the size of the rug that his bed sat on in the apartment in New York.

  “A smart boy. A brave boy,” the woman on the tape said in his head, but with a hiss, as if her voice were still coming from the machine.

  He tried to ask her for help, but nothing came out. It was like one of his bad dreams, where he couldn’t talk, even when he wanted to.

  “Egress,” the woman on the tape said. “Egress.”

  More hiss. And something that sounded like, “Mind the Moses.” She said she was sorry.

  Then the stop button clicked on its own, and she said nothing more.

  Zach stood alone on a rock, trapped in the middle of the big water on a starless night.

  26

  Austen's Nightlights

  Porter passed out in mid-step. He pitched forward, and Po caught him before he could fall on his face. Ken picked him up and carried him as if he were a child. That had been
some distance back, miles after they got off the bus in the dark and watched its red taillights fade into faraway flares they could still see after the sound of its engine faded.

  They left the road and walked in the direction Porter indicated, through overgrown farm fields and woods thick as a crowd, crossing streams of black along the way. Paul didn’t mind getting wet. It meant putting water between him and the Ravagers. He had no idea what Brill was using to track them, nor did he know if a running creek had any effect on it. He was comforted all the same, a fox outsmarting the pursuing hounds.

  Then Porter had fainted, spent after saving them from the Ravagers on the bus. Paul had doubted him before, but not now. The gray man was giving his all.

  Po agreed with Porter’s choice of route, signing to Ken that they were headed in the direction Paul needed to go. Paul asked where that was.

  “If he knows, he won’t tell me,” Ken said.

  “How would he know?”

  “He declines to share that. He has said that in such situations, he applies the story that fits best, and Po knows many a tale. It’s then a question of whether the tale of Paul ends the same as the story Po deems to be a good match. It is an art.”

  Paul glanced at Rain to see if she was listening. He couldn’t tell. “What’s my tale?”

  “Only you can know for certain,” Ken said. “Po is making his best guess.”

  They walked on, crossing a field of thigh-high grass. The moonless sky was an inverted bowl of glistening dust.

  “We are the stories we tell ourselves,” Porter said from the cradle of Ken’s arms. Ken stopped, apparently to see if the Envoy would rather continue on his own. Porter’s jaw sagged. He was out again.

  “I don’t get it,” Paul said.

  “It is an old saying to explain the Journey and the mythicals encountered along the path—both those who help and those who seek to hinder.”

  A warm breeze rustled the grass and the branches of a line of tall trees up ahead. A thick windbreak separated their field from the next. The land they crossed was yet another abandoned farm.

  “I still don’t get it,” Paul said.

  Rain gave him a playful whack on the shoulder. Paul hadn’t realized she’d drawn so close.

  “I am who I say I am—the story I tell myself—just as you are who you say you are or said you were in life,” Ken explained. “Your Journey determines whether that tale is valid. You are also the stories that others tell of you. The truth of who you were, are, and will be lies somewhere among those tales.”

  Po signed. “The mythicals,” Ken said for him, “began as the creations of others—as invented stories told of them. Yet once created, mythicals continue their tales themselves. If someone once said Po was a warrior monk, then that was all he was until he began to fashion his own story—to live. Now he is more. Now he is angry.”

  The monk shot Ken a look. “That last point was mine,” Ken said. They entered the trees, which were woodlands, not a mere windbreak. “Simply put, you are your idea of you. And you are others’ ideas of you, whether you wish to be or not.”

  They walked along in near-total darkness, following Ken and Po, who had no trouble seeing where they were going.

  “But you can’t tell me what IMUURS means,” said Paul.

  “No.”

  “What about the other thing? Unus omnibus…”

  “Unus pro omnibus. Omnes pro uno. It’s Latin. One for all, all for one. A more accurate translation, I believe, is, ‘One among many, many among one.’ All things are joined and cannot be made separate. Though Brill is trying, and he has to work very hard to do so.”

  “Get it?” Rain said.

  “I’m not sure. I tell the story of me. Other people tell the story of me. Which is stronger?”

  “That is what your Journey determines,” Ken said.

  “That’s what Brill steals,” said Rain.

  “Indeed,” said Ken. “Brill has convinced all under his control that their story is the story he tells of them, not that which they tell of themselves. They don’t even know there is a difference. Reality is what he says it is, the power his. However, all things are one. If the many ever choose to leave him, he cannot stop them, so long as it’s the power of all, acting for all, freely exercised.”

  “It’s that strong?”

  “It is all.”

  As they neared the far edge of the woods, the blue glow of dawn peeked through the trees. Paul was shocked by how quickly the night had gone, at the way time passed differently in The Commons. The light washed Porter’s exhaustion in blue. He was a phantom, no life apparent.

  “Can’t we take him somewhere?”

  “We are,” Ken said. “Where he wishes to go—with you.”

  “Maybe we can just stop for a second.”

  Ken showed no sign of hearing. Paul planted himself in the mummy’s way, hand out to halt his progress. The big mummy could easily have plowed Paul under, but he stopped.

  “I just want him to be okay,” Paul said. Rain and Po stopped, too. “What isn’t Porter telling me, Ken?”

  “He withholds what he does not know. The Commons in the open, where the Journey occurs, has changed a great deal while Porter was forced to wait. It is far more chaotic now, as he has told you. Bona fides and mythicals mix in ways that were not seen the last time he led a Journey. He is aware of this gap in his knowledge. Yet you could not be in more capable hands.”

  “That covers the things he can’t tell me. There’s more.”

  “Yes.”

  “Things he won’t tell me.”

  “Yes.” Po signed to Ken, but the mummy kept his eyes on Paul. “I am prudent, but Po and I will say what Porter will not. With your defeat of the Ravagers, you’ve displayed a power that we have not witnessed before, and we have seen much. Whether you’ll use it again, whether you’ll learn how, I do not know. But I believe your Journey could be one that upsets the current balance of power in The Commons. I believe Brill realizes this after your victory, and I believe he is worried. What worries Brill gives us hope, and we have not had that for a long time. Thus, nothing is as important as getting you to Journey’s End. Not myself. Not Po, not Rain, not Porter. So we walk.”

  With that, the mummy got moving, as did Po. “I trust you know what I meant,” Ken said to Rain as he passed her.

  She nodded and waited for Paul to continue on. When he didn’t, she took him by the hand and led him through the trees.

  And even after he needed no leading, she held on.

  They emerged from the trees to find that the blue glow was not a coming dawn at all. The sky above was still powdered with stars, but the hill in front of them was backlit by an azure corona—the source of the light.

  Po ran at the hill and was swallowed by its blackness. The little monk wasn’t slowed in the least by the climb. A short time later, his silhouette popped up at the top, a nub on an eclipse that exhaled the sweet smell of grass on the wind.

  The others followed.

  Near the zenith, they looked up to see Po leaping about like a puppy. Framed in cerulean, he signed at Ken, who squinted to read what his friend was trying to tell him.

  “That cannot be,” the mummy said. He climbed faster, as if Porter were now weightless.

  “What?” said Paul.

  At the top of the hill, Porter began to stir. Ken set him down.

  The Envoy, still drained but now on his own two feet, looked down the other side of the hill at whatever was giving off the light. Despite his fatigue, he let out a cry, amazed.

  Paul and Rain closed the distance and crested the hill.

  The sight before them was magic in the night. The slope of the next hill was dotted with hundreds of pale blue fires set in intricate spirals that joined one another, separated, and joined again.

  The entire hillside and the surrounding darkness were riddled with dancing flame.

  “Wow,” Rain said.

  “What is it?” said Paul.

  “Something I
never thought I’d see,” Porter replied. “Austen’s Nightlights. A safe haven.”

  Po turned to Paul with a grin. His fingers were a blur of rapid-fire signing. Any faster, and he might well have floated over to the next hill.

  “What’s he saying?”

  Glee crept into Ken’s normally measured tone as his friend’s joy became contagious. “He’s saying, ‘Do you see, Paul? Paul, do you see?’”

  The monk’s smile grew wider still. He turned and ran down the hill in a descent just shy of a controlled fall, straight at the fiery swirls, laughter trailing behind him.

  Porter refused to be carried, but Ken helped him along as the group hiked up the hill and into the blue flame.

  Each fire burned in a stone brazier set on stubby legs. Rugs woven with complex whorls ran between the fires in paths of gold and crimson that morphed into other hues when stared at.

  “Who’s Austen?” Paul said.

  “Merely a legend—I thought,” said Porter. “As the story goes, he was a Journeyman whose Envoy was killed. He created this from a dream as a neutral zone to protect himself from whatever it was that attacked them.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Unknown. For us, it will—for tonight. It’ll be gone come morning, but until then, nothing else can get in now that we’ve laid claim to it.”

  Po signed to Ken. “Why is it here at all?” the mummy said for him. “Why now?”

  “Any answer I give is speculation. I never believed this existed, and I’ve never known anyone who’s seen it in person. It’s said that the Nightlights come from a place of mercy.” The Envoy turned to Paul. “That they’re here now says something good about your Journey and you, I think.” He looked at Rain. “And maybe not just you.”

  Rain eyed the ground shyly. In the blue glow, her hair shone like raven feathers.

  Porter eased himself down onto one of the rugs, close to its fire. “Perhaps you’re more than guns and monsters after all.” He laid back to look up at the stars.

  Ken and Po each took a rug, too, sitting down to take in the view and serenity.