The Journeyman

by Michael Alan Peck

  “Why?”

  “How else was I to know whether you really are what you appear to be?” He waited again. “You really aren’t aware, are you?” A professionally placed laugh. “You’re Nistarim, and you don’t even know it.”

  Paul tried to buy time with silence of his own. He didn’t have Mr. Brill’s knack.

  “The Lamed Vav,” Mr. Brill continued. “I know you know. Your Envoy, slow as he was, told you about them. The fact that I know, and why I know, is another part of the story. But we’ll get to that.”

  The big man squared his shoulders and the screens around him came to life. They were filled with horror, with abomination. Hanging bodies in webbed cocoons. Sodden people in a swamp. Wasted leavings of humanity, terrified, clinging to a cliff in a cold wind, toes out over the lip of an inadequate ledge. Ravagers truncheoned new arrivals, beat them down with rifle butts.

  “The Thirty-Six Righteous Ones.” Mr. Brill said. “Their power is yours, Paul. You’ve proven that. You couldn’t manipulate the Essence of The Commons if it weren’t.”

  “You’re lying. The Nistarim can’t know who they are.”

  Mr. Brill sighed. “I never should have killed so many Envoys. Maybe you would have gotten one with sense.” He looked around at the screens, enthralled by the power that was his—the people, the Essence. “Use your head. The Nistarim lose their power as soon as they know of it? Does that add up?”

  Paul was listening for the lie, but couldn’t hear it. He looked to Rain for help.

  She kept her cold stare on Mr. Brill.

  “You were able to do what you did because of your place among the Thirty-Six, and you know I speak true. You defeated a thing of my creation—a part of me. You are what you are.”

  “Our friend died killing your monster,” Rain said.

  Mr. Brill shrugged. Ken’s death was inconsequential. And he still didn’t bother to look at her. “How can I tell what you are?” he said to Paul. “How have I been able to achieve what I have?” He folded his arms, and his suit rippled with the muscle beneath. “I think you know.”

  No. Paul didn’t.

  Rain tried to raise her shotgun again. She failed.

  “Paul.” The big man smirked. “You’re Nistarim.”

  She tried one more time. Nothing.

  “Only here’s the thing.” Mr. Brill’s face was once again that of a pleased carnivore. “So am I.”

  Her son’s life depended on a little plastic man in overalls. The farmer spun and pointed with an enthusiastic, “Egress!”

  Zach wasted no time. He jumped.

  Annie saw his foot leave the rock, but her mind was on the dragon fish. She knew it was properly called a mosasaur, but a child’s name made it seem just that much less deadly—and only just. The monsters could easily breach the waves and pluck Zach from the air. She’d seen videos of flying great whites. That didn’t seem to be in the rules here, thank God.

  He landed with a yelp. It was Annie who’d made the sound. The rock was real. She’d chosen correctly.

  The second hand wouldn’t stop to throw her a party, and she had no idea why one o’clock had been the right answer again. There was no safety here.

  With that knowledge came even more knowledge, an expanded awareness well beyond hers. The knowledge of the nautilus.

  There were other things in the water, which wasn’t water at all. It was Essence expressed.

  When Annie let down her guard, it came together. The water, The Commons, shared borders with other realms—with the “real” world that she came from and beyond.

  Infinity was an inadequate term. Essence was so much bigger than Brill and The Commons. It was too much for her mind to hold. To remain tapped in, she had to keep the information that didn’t fit the current situation at bay.

  One notion moved forward to present itself. The water monsters were not all alike. There was one far below—much larger and blackberry-colored in contrast to the greenish-brown of the others. It remained in the deep, blocking her out completely. Whether it was Brill himself or merely a servant there to rule the others, she didn’t know. It was walled off, and that scared the hell out of her.

  The hand had nearly completed its revolution. She was almost out of time again, and she had no more an idea of what to choose than she’d had before. Clocks showed no mercy.

  She used the second of her three clues to ask for the number. She said it out loud, her training keeping the quaver from her voice in case Zach could hear. With just one clue left now, the clock’s two glowed green.

  “Power is not about morals—not about ethics,” Mr. Brill said. “It’s about wisdom. It’s wise to use it, stupid not to. Power has no right or wrong. It’s yours, or it’s not.” He nodded with satisfaction. “And it’s ours, Paul. We are Nistarim—two of the Thirty-Six.”

  The big man stood, relaxed, as if talking to friends. Rain, of course, would have had him staring down a barrel by now if he’d let her.

  Despite the many questions still to be asked, though, Paul knew this: Mr. Brill was no friend.

  “I’ll put this to you and let you mull it over,” Mr. Brill continued. “Consider that you and I share a power—an astounding ability possessed by only thirty-four others. Who are they? I don’t know. I don’t care. By myself, I have harnessed the power of The Commons. Imagine what two of us might do together.”

  The earlier silence had been unnerving. This was worse.

  “One more thing. What was your Journey?” Mr. Brill didn’t wait for Paul to admit that he had no idea. “What if the challenge was the Journey itself, to prove that you are what so many before you appeared to be, but weren’t—a fellow Nistar? All you’d have to do now to decide your fate is agree to change the world—all of the worlds—with me. Think of it.”

  He sat back down. Even in his chair, he remained above them. The smile returned.

  If Paul put his feelings aside, what Mr. Brill said had a logic to it. But he was wrong. Power and the decision to use it were absolutely a question of morality. Pop Mike had taught him that.

  Yet Mr. Brill was right in the sense that it was about wisdom, too. Combining Paul’s morality and Mr. Brill’s experience might work. The power obeyed both of them. Could Paul influence Mr. Brill—apply a fairness to Mr. Brill’s domain?

  Maybe fighting the Mr. Brills, blazing it out with them, was not the way to go. That was their game. Lose, and you squander your chance to make a difference. Win, and you become like them for your victory. So how was that better? If Paul were to ask Mr. Brill whether he could make a promise and honor it, the answer might tell him all he needed to know.

  “Don’t.” Rain never took her eyes off Mr. Brill. “You’ll be done before you start. He can’t take it from you. Don’t give it to him.”

  Mr. Brill’s face betrayed nothing. But his eyes darkened, deepened.

  “Ask yourself one thing if you don’t ask anything else,” she said. “He tried to kill you. He tried to kill all of us. Without Ken, he might have done it. But he failed. Why?”

  Paul could feel the shadow rising up in the big man.

  “He’s afraid of you. He can’t beat you without your help. And everything he puts into fighting you makes it harder to keep the Essence he’s stolen under his control. So how about asking him something? Ask him to show you where your new home will be after he’s suckered you.”

  Paul heard what she said. It rang true. But it also led to other more pressing questions: How did Rain know that Mr. Brill would put him anywhere? How did she know what it was to cut a deal with him?

  With a speed that rivaled Po’s, Mr. Brill backhanded the air in front of him, as if ridding it of a pest. Without his hand getting anywhere near Rain, he smacked her with sickening force. She flew one way, her gun another.

  Mr. Brill turned to Paul.

  40

  Unus Pro Omnibus

  Zach landed on a patch of algae slime and almost slid off the number-two rock. Somehow, he managed to catch himself.

>   That was the brutal rule set of this game. Annie could buy information but not guarantees. After her last clue was gone, either she figured out the logic behind the sequence—and she prayed there was one—or she continued guessing with one-in-twelve odds, a ninety-two percent chance on every attempt that she’d point her son toward his death.

  The second hand continued its revolution. Was it speeding up, or was it the terror that made it seem that way? How much time had she just wasted wondering that?

  The Humboldt squid returned. In ones and twos at first. Then the layer of them grew in the surrounding water, swirling at the edge of her vision, plucking at her thoughts.

  They amused themselves by trying to distract her. And when she reached out with her mind to push them away, one responded.

  With a slip of its clawed tentacle, it reached into her, the Essence of its brethren coming with it. She stifled the urge to cry out, afraid that Wrangler John might break the connection if she did.

  It wasn’t an attack. There was no pain. It was a bonding, not a piercing, and it brought the consciousness of lives uncounted with it. The squid throttled back for her sake, just as the reef had. They were trying to help.

  She was down to one clue. She let them.

  Her mind bloomed into dream. Charlene on the table. Annie had no sense of herself on the table next to her, as she had been when the doctors, via the protocol of triage, had abandoned Char to her fate. Here, the light remained in her friend’s eyes.

  “That’s an order,” Charlene told her.

  Neither Annie nor Char had been much for chain-of-command. Char was carrying out the routine they used whenever they needed to violate a rule. One would order the other to do the forbidden thing, creating an excuse to cross the line. It was never delivered with serious intent, but Charlene wasn’t kidding now.

  “What is?”

  “The order,” Char said.

  The second hand drew near. The hand. The monsters. The immense mosasaur so far below—dwarfing the others, blue now when it had been purple. And the doctors who let Charlene Moseley die because triage determined the order.

  Annie would have to use her last clue. One, two, three clues in order. The deadline approached, the point of doom after two right answers—one, two.

  In order. The order.

  “Three,” Annie said.

  The little farmer spun and pointed. “Egress,” he said.

  Zach got whatever running start he could on the too-small stone and leapt.

  The Humboldt’s tentacle flexed. Data flowed. For no reason Annie could discern, with her little boy in the air, death below, and the decision made, she thought of the skinny boy on the bus.

  Paul.

  It always came down to a fight.

  Paul used to think that only happened in his world—the world of kids with nothing but taking if you won and losing if you lost. Later, he learned that it was the same everywhere.

  Some fights had rules that were broken once they got going, but most had none from the start. Paul was used to that, just as he was accustomed to the luck of it. Sometimes you had it on your side, and sometimes it was with the other guy. And you needed to appreciate it when you caught a break.

  Paul’s break came right after Mr. Brill leapt over the desk and presented himself, daring Paul to take a swing at him. Paul missed, distances being deceptive in the office. But he was nearly as grateful as he was surprised when he pulled off the same no-contact trick Mr. Brill had used against Rain. The big man went sailing back across the space.

  Rain struggled to her hands and knees, shaking her head to clear it. Paul hurried over to her.

  From behind them, Mr. Brill laughed.

  A moment later, the office became a vast, empty warehouse with an endless expanse of concrete floor. He gave them just long enough for the change to register before he introduced another.

  The portion of the floor beneath Paul, as well as the surrounding area, became a thin sheet of glass, which shattered under his weight. He plummeted for long seconds into a shaft as deep as a well before hitting sand at the bottom of it. The impact knocked the wind out of him. Broken glass bit into his palms as he pushed himself upright.

  Sand began to pour down onto him from above.

  Mr. Brill was going to bury him.

  He made the mistake of looking up as he got to his feet. Grit coated his eyes and the inside of his mouth, but not before he spied the stamp-sized square of the pit’s opening far above.

  The sand around his legs rose, encasing them, squeezing.

  Soon enough, it was to his waist.

  It wasn’t as easy as one-two-three. It couldn’t be. Yet Zach landed safely on the next stone, and the second hand made its way onward with stomach-fluttering speed.

  It seemed simple enough. The order had held for three moves in a row, so Annie should have felt pretty good about four being next.

  But it couldn’t be that easy.

  The Humboldt were restless. The tentacle pushed deeper into her consciousness, turning as it did so.

  She was swamped with knowledge that was of no use to her at the moment. Paul was on the outer reaches of her thinking. Charlene remained, but Annie couldn’t focus enough to ask her friend for help in choosing.

  Doubt was at its worst in a hot situation. You questioned yourself when you needed to make decisive moves. It was a problem of will.

  Force it. Proceed.

  Well, you couldn’t. Because the time you hammered the questions down and out of sight might be the time it was critical to ask them.

  The answer was in Char’s eyes. And Annie couldn’t read it.

  The hand was nearly at its zenith. She decided to go with four.

  But Char.

  Her last clue.

  She used it. The correct choice glowed green on the clock face.

  “Five!”

  “What?” said Wrangler John.

  Within a few years after his mother’s death, Paul had been in more scraps and beat-downs than he could recall—had faced kids he couldn’t name. He’d lost some and come out of others in better shape than his opponents.

  But that wasn’t always the same as winning.

  He watched people from regular homes on the bus and on the street. He wondered what the world might be like if they were all forced to learn what it meant to come out on top without victory because you’d had too much taken away before getting there.

  Paul hadn’t been in a really serious bang-up until a few days before Christmas the year he turned twelve. He’d made his way through a variety of shelters, an on-and-off official human bouncing from state to state, and was living in a Connecticut foster home with another system kid, a fifteen-year-old named Martha.

  Martha was the protector no boy had ever been for him. A beauty with sandy curls, a model’s smile, a contagious cheer, and leaf-green eyes, Martha was a better fighter than most guys.

  She’d proven it again just a month earlier, when a wrestler from the nearby private school was looking for his ex-girlfriend and found her at Martha’s bus stop. He got ugly. Martha intervened. The wrestler escalated.

  Martha won—and won big. The story made the local paper, and the wrestler went looking for her for payback, as did several of his friends.

  They found her when she and Paul were carrying donated gifts from a sporting-goods store to the shelter they’d lived in before their foster placement. They saw him and his three buddies across the ball field, but they didn’t want to leave the gifts and probably couldn’t have outrun their pursuers anyway.

  Had they known what was coming, they would have tried.

  Connecticut surprised Paul with two life-learnings. One was that beautifully groomed public space was seldom visited by adults and thus was an anything-goes zone, however awful that anything might be. So long as those doing the anything had the right name and family income, it could get really, really bad. The other was that privileged kids were quicker to go for blood and were more vicious than the meanest pe
ople Paul went up against in the shelters.

  Martha had humiliated the wrestler. She’d disrespected the caste.

  Paul happened to be with her—and tried to help.

  Too bad for him.

  Martha, for all her prowess, was outnumbered.

  Too bad for Martha.

  She carried a stack of wrapped gift boxes, which occupied both hands. Paul had a couple of bags and an aluminum bat with a bow around it.

  The last thing he saw clearly was that bow coming for his head. After that, his left eye wouldn’t work. He was on the ground, facing away from the action, and the fight was mostly sounds.

  Martha caught someone in the balls with a kick. Only that would prompt the noise made by whoever she got.

  Then it went all bad for her. Fists landed.

  Paul managed to pick himself up off the pitcher’s mound after hearing elastic give way with a snap. Fabric tore. Martha was a girl, and that could be used against her.

  “What’s in the box, Martha?” the wrestler kept asking after he’d booted the gifts aside. “What’s in the box?”

  The sounds got worse.

  Paul couldn’t say for sure what was in most of the boxes, but he knew what the bottom one held—a chain-and-lock combo destined for a group-home kid whose bike would never have been stolen again, had it been delivered. It never made it there.

  What stopped Paul from foolishly going for the bat was that he’d just been hit with it. It was hollow—too light. He was already on his feet, so it obviously wasn’t the tool for the job.

  “What’s in the box?” they said. Something else ripped.

  Paul made it to the dropped gifts while the wrestler and his pals were otherwise occupied. They made jokes about bases.

  Grabbing the bat, Paul flung it away as hard as he could so that they wouldn’t have a weapon. It clipped the top of the backstop on its way over it, ringing out with an aluminum peal.

  One of them looked up from what he was doing. Paul went for him first.