The Forgotten World

by Robin D. Mahle

  “All right, then. Tell me something happy.” She attempted a smile of her own.

  Her mother’s green eyes lit up, and she pressed a button on her armband. She disappeared and reappeared seconds later, carrying a tiny, excited, tan-colored puppy.

  BeLa’s eyes went wide, and she took it, gasping. She had wanted a puppy for years, but her mother said she wasn’t old enough to look after it. However, she was nine years old, now. A perfectly respectable age for a puppy.

  Her mother’s grin widened, and she kissed BeLa’s forehead.

  “See, you’ll be so preoccupied training him, you won’t even notice I’m gone.”

  That might have been true, if everything hadn’t changed after her mother left.

  Chapter Five

  Adelaide

  After a brief debate about how much to tell the other Levelians and when, I headed back to my cabin. Not to sleep. There would be none of that now, not when I knew one strong gale could topple the whole ship.

  I laid in my bed and shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold. I deliberately did not think about strong arms wrapping around me, a warm solid chest, and a body I seemed to fit perfectly against.

  I didn’t think about how we may not live to see next week, or how someone who had convinced me to stay married to them only days ago didn’t bother to be in the same room with me for what could be our final hours together.

  No, I was alone. And I should have been used to it, but I had stupidly let myself be lulled into a sense of comfort, of family, aboard a tiny ship with three very different boys. It had been months now, since we had absconded across the sea on the prince’s yacht. Months that seemed like a lifetime.

  My breathing was coming faster, and even Shensi’s fluffy presence was doing little to help. I squeezed Amelie’s locket until the gears cut into my skin, and forced a deep, shaky breath.

  Five. There is nothing I can do to change any of this.

  Four. Clark is entitled to his grief, to his emotions changing.

  Three. I have been through worse than this, and I have survived.

  Two. Each Levelian on this ship signed up for this life. They lived as warriors, and they died that way, too.

  One. I am not responsible for their deaths. I’m not.

  I’m not.

  My mind stuck in a loop on that last thought, not quite convinced it was true. I had stared into SeRavi’s cold face, and it didn’t look like she was sleeping or at peace or any of those lies people tell you.

  She looked dead. Lifeless. Empty.

  Not at all how she had looked when she was teaching me to use my dagger. No, then her face had shone with pride and grit and sometimes ire. But always something, always feeling.

  A knock sounded at my door. My treacherous heart leapt with hope, but I knew it wasn’t Clark. For one thing, he rarely knocked, and if he did, it was solid, steady. This one was lighter and impatient. Nell.

  I rose to open the door, and sure enough, there she was. The Queen of Levelia, her emerald eyes managing to look wrecked and guilty and accusatory and sad all at once.

  “I know you hate me right now,” I told her.

  “I hate everything right now.” That was probably the most honesty I had ever gotten in one statement from my enigmatic friend. “What kills me,” she began, but tears choked her voice. She stopped to compose herself, then started again.

  “What kills me isn’t that we lost some of them. That’s the life of a warrior, the death any of them would have chosen. What kills me is that it was all for nothing.” She sank down into the bed opposite mine, head in her hands, broad shoulders shaking with sobs.

  Nell and I had never been close in the way of many best friends, but I did love her. And right now, I hurt for her as much as I did myself.

  I went to her side, tentatively putting an arm around her, and she laid her head in my lap. I ran my fingers through her ebony tresses like my sister had done for me so many times.

  “Some queen I’m making,” she said tiredly when her tears ebbed.

  “This is being Queen, Nell.” I shook my head. “Why do you think I never wanted this life?”

  “Why do you think I didn’t?” she countered, but there was no real wrath in her voice.

  There was nothing to say to that. After a moment of silence, I gently removed her head from my lap and moved toward the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  I smiled, a tired, wan thing.

  “If this is our last night, don’t we at least have the luxury of a stiff drink?”

  A tiny spark of the girl Nell had been on Central Island shone through her eyes.

  “HiLa’s Memory, yes.”

  The store room wasn’t empty when I got there. Clark’s perfect form was outlined in the moonlight. He was facing away from me, so I could clearly see his muscular, broad back tapering into a narrow, toned waist. I blinked hard.

  He turned at the sound of my footsteps. Stormy ocean eyes took in everything from my bare feet to my loose, flowing cotton pajamas.

  “If I know you, you’re here for the same reason I am.” A smirk flitted across his face.

  For a brief second, I could see the Clark I had fallen in love with, but it left as quickly as it had come. His face sobered.

  “I’ll just get out of your way, then.” He brushed past me, setting every neuron in my pathetic body on fire, and then he was gone.

  I grabbed more of the strong brew than I had intended. I was going to need it.

  The Analyst

  BeLa never thought her father was a saint, but she could remember vividly the day she realized he was a monster.

  She had been trapped in her room last night, listening to screams and battle cries be cut short, one after another. Her comms went unanswered. Her door refused to open.

  Had it not been for JoJo’s trembling warmth in her arms, she might have gone insane from the fear of it.

  Then, the next morning, an unfamiliar servant had come bearing breakfast.

  “What happened?” BeLa demanded.

  The woman looked to the ground, but not before BeLa saw tears in her eyes.

  “I cannot say, Duchess.”

  “Is my family all right?”

  When the woman refused to answer again, BeLa’s heart began to beat frantically, the blood rushing from her limbs so fast it made her dizzy. She pushed past the servant.

  “You don’t want to go out there,” the woman called.

  Later, when the nightmares crept in and even JoJo couldn’t keep them at bay, BeLa would go back to that moment and beg herself to listen.

  But she had ignored the servant. She’d made it all the way into the hall only to stop dead in her tracks at the sight of blood.

  Red, thick, viscous, and shining. It was dripping down the shimmering golden walls like one of those macabre abstract paintings she had never been able to understand. It was in pools on the floor, streaking away from where they had clearly dragged...bodies.

  Whose bodies?

  Nell lived down this hallway.

  Whatever fear BeLa had felt last night paled to the icy terror that swept over her now. She ran down the halls, past the servants who were choking back sobs while they were forced to scrub the blood from the walls. Past the new guards — the male guards — standing in sloppy formation near every doorway, to the ballroom where she knew her family would be in a time of crisis.

  For the first time in her life, BeLa couldn’t resort to a shred of logic, couldn’t even begin to analyze the situation enough to have the sense to be afraid for her own life, nor to care that she ran the halls in nothing but her sheer nightclothes. The only thing driving her now was blind panic.

  The guards outside the ballroom did nothing to stop her from bursting through the main doors.

  And what she saw made her freeze for the second time that morning.

  A room full of courtiers, clad similarly in their own pajamas.

  The body of her queen, more than that, her auntie, swinging li
stlessly from a noose in the center of the room.

  And her father seated proudly on his sister’s throne.

  Chapter Six

  Clark

  Twenty-six hours. That’s all we got before another storm hit.

  The Levelians weren’t panicking, though they must have known what was coming. There was no land in sight, and we were in a sea full of monsters. If the ship didn’t hold, this was it for us.

  Above the sound of whipping wind and the deafening roar of thunder, a sharp crack of lightning rang out, and then the distinct, horrifying sound of wood being rent apart.

  The hull was splitting beneath our feet. I scrambled out of the way, searching desperately for Addie, but I couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear anything beyond a few shouted orders from the captain and Locke and the torrential storm around us.

  I moved closer to SuEllen, who was yelling and frantically gesturing at Nell.

  “We have no choice!”

  “He will kill us,” Nell yelled back over the deafening thunder.

  “Not if this storm beats him to it,” SuEllen called.

  Xavier stumbled next to me, sheets of rain streaming down his face. I finally spotted Addie, several paces from her bodyguard. An enormous swell was coming over the deck. Her expression was masked by the torrent of rain falling between us, but she stumbled backward just before it hit.

  I was so far from where I should have been at her side, and even Locke wouldn’t make it to her in time.

  “Addie!” I screamed her name, for all the good it would do.

  Beside me, the Queen’s face was pale with terror, but resolve coated her features as she looked around at her scrambling subjects. She closed her eyes and pressed her hand to her bracelet.

  I had seen her use the teleportation crystals before, usually with a single touch, but this was different.

  With lightning speed, she alternated touching each of the different colored crystals in an intricate pattern. Her fingers froze, hovering above one of the crystals.

  The wave crashed over Addie, and I felt like I was drowning, too.

  Nell exchanged a last panicked glance with her aunt before pressing her pointer finger to the final button.

  Then, the world went black.

  My eyes popped open before I was even aware of being awake. Xavier was just as alert next to me, but the rest of our group was groaning, still drearily forcing their eyes open.

  I had a headache from hell, but I pushed away the pain to assess our surroundings. We were in a forest, of sorts, but it looked nothing like the ones back home. It was mind-boggling to think we were miles above everything we had ever known.

  The trees were so tall, I could barely see the tops, held up by skinny white trunks that hardly looked as though they could support the weight. Bright red and orange leaves budding with yellow flowers topped them.

  It might have been pretty, if it didn’t so strongly remind me of the foreignness of the land we were in. I knew nothing about anything here, not what plants or animals were deadly, not about local weaponry or the mindset of the people.

  I exchanged a look with Xavier and Locke, and knew they were thinking along similar lines.

  How would we protect anyone here? How will I protect Addie?

  On that last thought, I looked around frantically for her. Everyone else seemed to have teleported more or less where they had been standing, but she had been right in my line of sight.

  Nell and SuEllen were already speaking in low tones, speculating about where we could be.

  “Why would it have taken us here?” Nell looked around, confused. “All these years, I avoided it…”

  “Avoided what?” Locke asked, his eyes taking in our surroundings. “What did you do? Where are we?”

  “It’s an emergency setting,” Nell told him. “My mother gave one of these to each of her children.” She held up her bracelet. “She embedded a code that she said would bring us back to her if we ever got separated.”

  Nell trailed off for a moment before continuing.

  “I always assumed it would take me back to the castle. That’s why I never used it.”

  “Perhaps she sensed something was off,” SuEllen said. “Your mother was always plotting, plans within plans.

  “And keeping secrets,” Nell added irritably.

  I was only half listening, still frantically looking around the vast space. I spotted the twenty or so of the remaining crew, and even Shensi wound her way around Nell’s feet. But my wife was nowhere to be seen.

  Panic surged in my chest and my heart beat faster, but it was Locke who finally voiced my fear aloud.

  “Where’s Addie?”

  Nell’s head snapped up, whatever words she had been about to speak frozen on her lips.

  “What do you mean? It should have transported every living thing within a hundred feet.” Sure enough, there were even a few sickly fish flopping around on the land around us. “That’s how I set it. She has to be here.” She looked around, widened eyes belying the insistence in her tone. “Auntie?” She sounded more like a child seeking reassurance than a queen just then.

  But I knew the feeling.

  We all looked to the captain, whose head was shaking in dismay.

  “She should have come. It doesn’t make sense. Unless...”

  Unless she hadn’t made it. Unless she was already...I couldn’t even finish the thought.

  “Is she still on that ship?” I lunged for Nell’s bracelet. “Zap me back, or whatever it is you do.” I gestured in the air around me.

  Tears filled her eyes.

  “I can’t. It doesn’t work that way.”

  I hardly heard her words over my heart beating a wild staccato in my eardrums.

  “Then make it work that way!”

  Xav put a hand on my shoulder, pulling me back to myself.

  “You know she would if she could. We will find her.”

  “You don’t know that.” I shook my head.

  Xav looked to Locke for back-up, but the bear of a man looked more lost than I had ever seen him. He took off into the trees as though she was hiding somewhere in the forest, and SuEllen went after him.

  “It doesn’t make sense that she would have been left there when the rest of us are here.” Xavier’s tone was soothing, in spite of myself. “We’ll find her, Brother. Let’s start with scoping the area.”

  I nodded because it was the only thing I could do. But it didn’t feel like we would find her. That didn’t seem to be the way my life worked.

  I had lost enough to know that, more often than not, people don’t come back.

  The Analyst

  JoJo was the only thing that kept BeLa going through the next weeks. She had thought she was lonely in the castle before, with her unique interests and the princesses busy in training.

  Now, she would give anything for those days.

  Every night, she fell asleep sobbing and woke up screaming in terror from nightmares, but JoJo was always there. Had her mother known she might not come back? BeLa thought back to that day, tried to analyze the expression on her mother’s face.

  But she had never been good at that, and she had no more answers than before. Only grief, deep and black and as fathomless as the chasm at the bottom of the Ever Falls.

  There had been no funeral, no respectful send-off. Only a brief announcement that the royal line had been eliminated, and that women had oppressed the men for too long based on a mere myth.

  Was that true? Had BeLa been too blind to notice, or merely born the wrong gender to care?

  Her father had said that in an equal world, as the eldest, he would have been the rightful monarch.

  But BeLa didn’t think this was what equality looked like. There had to have been another way.

  Then, her father said something that rocked her to her core. She knew she couldn’t have been the only person who knew the truth, but he had never let on. Not until now.

  “Levelia can live a lie no longer. HiLa brought th
e world to ruin when she meddled in things better left alone.”

  So, BeLa had been right. And if she had been brave enough to tell someone, maybe she could have prevented all of this.

  Chapter Seven

  Adelaide

  I tried to open my eyes but met resistance from eyelids too heavy to move.

  Where am I?

  There was a soft bed beneath me, and a weighty blanket that was doing nothing to dispel the chill that had seeped into my very core. And someone was talking. A lot.

  “This seems to be happening rather a lot these days. Of course, you don’t appear to be on the brink of death. I think you’ll wake up sooner than he did. My mother always did say interesting things come in threes. Or was that deaths? I can never remember. It’s been so long… Either way, of course, there’s no data to support such an outrageous theory.”

  A wet, warm tongue landed on my arm, far too large to be Shensi. That was all the incentive I needed to force an eyelid open.

  An enormous square snout was only inches from my face. I jerked back.

  “JoJo, stop that!” Familiar emerald eyes stared at me from a perfectly symmetrical face, topped off by shining blue-black locks.

  The thing — a dog, I supposed, though larger than any I’d seen — backed away to sit at her feet, its tongue lolling. It was kind of cute, in a massive way, with its white and chocolate coloring, its head reaching her elbows.

  “Nell?” I croaked out, but I knew that couldn’t be right. Nell’s voice was throatier and less accented than this one. Her eyes weren’t quite as wide, and she had a white streak in her hair.

  “Oh, are you awake?” The girl couldn’t have been much younger than I was, but there was a sort of innocence, an openness in her expression that instantly made me feel jaded, tainted.

  “Where?” I pushed the feeling aside. It was hardly relevant at the moment.