by C. A. Bryers
“Let’s talk about you now.” She pushed aside the small square keypad with which she had entered his answers and flipped open another file. “All this information is pooled from various sources and assembled quickly, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m bouncing around your life a bit.”
“So long as I don’t have to answer any more questions like whether I think trees get sad, I think I’ll survive.”
Delflore began. She started at the beginning, reciting Salla’s childhood as if she were reading a drily written textbook.
“Father, Jiann Saar, known scrapper of Kingfisher status, also known as Grimmer Jiann. Mother, Vanas Saar, performed for twelve years as an illusionist and escape artist. Now deceased…” Delflore droned on. “You served on an exploration team headed by one Natke Orino until you left to join your father’s profession, by the looks of it. Interesting choice.”
Salla let his head flop back in his chair.
“You captained a scrapping ship for six years, the Mayla Rose, before your path started to intersect with ours, I see. The crew received pardons for their actions after questioning at Tempusalist, but I don’t recall seeing your name on that list of crewmen.” She flipped the page, reading. “Your account of what happened there sounds rather incredible.”
“Thank you,” he said, head springing upright again.
Her sharp stare shot over the top of her eyewear again. “I meant it sounds unbelievable.”
“Ah.”
“It says here you had a relationship with a member of the crew of the Mayla Rose, a woman known most recently as Kitayne but who has a rather dauntingly long list of aliases. She was not among those pardoned, and in fact was indicated as the architect of the kidnapping of the late Gran Senji Eleskar.” Delflore’s lips pursed. “Do you have anything to add to that?”
“Where you say ‘architect,’ I say she got an idea and ran with it.”
“Do you have an idea of her whereabouts?”
Salla shook his head. “Last I saw her, she had a gun pointed at me. Haven’t really felt the urge to catch up on old times since then.”
“Do you know her real name, surname or anything to help narrow our search?”
He shook his head again. “It wasn’t that kind of relationship.”
Delflore’s brows bunched as she looked at the file again. “The account of one Dao Zhan says you were in a relationship with her for around two years, and you didn’t know her full name?”
Salla snorted. “I was taught that giving a girl some privacy every now and then was the key to a healthy relationship.”
Delflore pulled her eyewear off, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. “I thought you agreed to cooperate. You’re being difficult.”
“I’m being difficult? Can’t think of any reason I would do that. Nope, not one. Well, maybe the fact I’ve been hounded every second of the day by Majdi or Odyssan Watch on instruction from the Majdi for months.”
She sighed, one eyebrow rising. “It shows here you went directly from Tempusalist to a resort island called—”
“Fine, not every second, if you want to nitpick,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “But most of them.”
“This is getting us nowhere. You need to accept I am trying to help you. I need to reconcile your history leading up to your contact with the Eyes of the One, and yes, we do need to find this Kitayne person. But if you’re going to be obstinate instead, I can put all of this away and let whatever is killing you simply go through with its process until it reaches that foregone conclusion.” Her brown eyes were cold and flat as she stared at him. “What’s it going to be?”
Salla rubbed at his temple. “How’d you know I was at that resort island?”
“I told you this information comes from multiple sources.”
He nodded, gnashing his teeth. “Rainne. I told her. She told you.”
“Not me specifically, but let’s move on. The Eyes of the One—tell me about them. How you acquired the power, and how those powers manifested once you regained consciousness.”
Salla glanced meaningfully down at the file on the desk. “Isn’t it in there? I told Rainne about it, so it stands to reason you know all about it too. You sure you even need me here?”
“And now you’re being petulant.”
He folded his arms. “Is that right? Well, your hair looks heavy.”
Delflore closed her eyes with a faint shake of her head. “I’d say we’re done here for now. You’ll be taken to a detention cell for the time being. When you feel like doing something other than wasting my time, ask the guard to send for me. I might even decide to show up. With any luck, you’ll have decided to be smart before one of your attacks finally does the job.”
With that she stepped out of the office, gave a parting word to the guard standing outside the door, and vanished from sight. The ensuing silence enfolded Salla, leaving him with nothing to contemplate but how exactly he wanted to spend his remaining days. Would he comply with his captors and perhaps spend a prolonged existence in some form of internment or another, or would he shut down and let the broken power of the Eyes of the One simply take its course?
Neither side of the equation offered a compelling solution, he had to admit. Yet in his mind, the former was already winning the argument. A chance to live meant perhaps a chance to one day escape.
Salla flinched when the door opened again. Delflore strode back inside, long dress swishing with every step, and resumed her place behind the desk.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she said without so much as a glance up as she scrawled down additional notes in his file. “It doesn’t take tephic mind-reading or whatever you people think it is we do to figure out that you don’t really want to die. You may have wished it once or twice, but you aren’t ready yet.”
After taking a deep breath, Salla nodded.
“Good. Let’s begin. Tell me your version of the circumstances leading up to your contact with the Eyes of the One.”
“We—Natke and I—we found research belonging to another explorer who had been obsessed with Tempusalist. That research led us to a series of caves in the Kanejungdara jungle. Natke and I had been there years earlier on an expedition that supposedly had some flimsy connection to something called ‘the place that cannot be found.’ Natke had heard that name before, but she didn’t believe in it much. I forgot about it by the time that expedition ended. Everyone on the team died in that cave, except me and Natke.” To his surprise, the story flowed with few emotional hiccups impeding its telling. He had confronted the ghosts of his dead teammates when they had returned to the Kanejungdara, and he was now the stronger for it. “Six years later, we went back. Deep inside the caves was an Esmusaric temple which housed a crystal statue holding the actual gemstones that were the Eyes of the One. I went up alone, and looking into the Eyes paralyzed me. If Natke hadn’t broken my connection, I would have died there.”
Delflore’s hand moved fast over the file entry, scribbling out the details Salla laid forth. “Once you left, how did the power of the Eyes of the One manifest itself?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know exactly how. I blacked out, apparently, and just—I don’t know, muttered the answer to whatever problem was hanging us up. That’s how it happened most of the time, but there were other things that didn’t add up.”
“Such as?”
“Well, this goes into the part you don’t believe. After the Magsem reached—”
“You saw the Magsem?” Delflore interrupted, eyes darting up from her work.
“Yes,” Salla said, his impatience returning, “I did. The spectral manifestation or whatever you people call it—the ghost that’s in that city. After it reached inside of me, your big rock guardian killed the Thirteenth Paragon, and took the whole suspended walkway we were on down with it.” He drew in a long breath, struggling to believe the story himself. “As we were falling, I…I suppose I wished for someone to save us. Kind of the thing you do when you’re about to die, I guess.
Next thing that happens, the guardian catches us. Plucks us right out of the air.”
“And you think the Eyes of the One compelled the guardian to do that?” asked Delflore with a critical eye.
“I hardly believe it either, sometimes. In the research notes we had, there were lines like a verse, telling us in annoyingly vague terms what the Eyes did. The Eyes find lost things, living or dead, answer questions, and that seems to be it.” He shrugged, his gaze drifting to some unimportant object elsewhere in the room. “I don’t know why it saved us. Thing had no reason to. I mean, it was a rock. But…it did.”
“And when did you start to feel like something was wrong? When did the attacks begin?”
“I had the first one within a week. Small. Didn’t think much of it.” He rubbed at his eyes, phantom pains streaking through his mind, triggered by the memories. “The next one came about a week later. Thought it might have something to do with the Eyes, so I came up with a question. I wanted to know what happened to a toy I lost when I was a kid, this wooden seagull that would flap its wings when you pulled a string, you know? Well, it didn’t work. No blackout, nothing. Since then, the attacks just started coming faster. Hitting harder.”
Delflore removed her eyewear, offering a frank expression. “I don’t pretend to know much about the Eyes of the One. I don’t know any who do, actually. These things get buried over the centuries, and the knowledge about them that does get passed on does so through a very narrow funnel, if you get my meaning. What information we have about them is likely to be found in well-protected books, rather than some scholar we might have wandering around the city. When we’re finished here, retrieving that information will come first before we can even discuss your release.”
“What happens until then? Where do I go?”
“The details of that are being arranged as we speak. You’ll be taken to a facility at the edge of the city for the extent of your stay here. There’s a small population active in the facility, but where you’ll be kept is in a restricted area. In the meantime, what my evaluation might reveal will decide whether you’ll be taken to a more secure location for a longer duration, or if your detainment will come to an end.” She slipped her eyewear back on as she flipped another page of the file. “Just a couple more questions and we’ll be done for the time being.”
“Before we do that, I have a question. Do you have a number in mind for how much jiro I’d need for you to send the guard out there home and for you to leave the door open on your way out?” he asked with a weak laugh.
Unsurprisingly, Delflore found the joke equally humorless. “The questions are pretty standard. Since you already know you’ll probably die from whatever is happening to you, I’d say you consider this power a threat to you.”
“Not a big leap of logic to come to that conclusion,” Salla said with a grunt.
Delflore nodded. “Would you consider this power, or the effects it is having on you, a threat to others?”
His response was immediate. “No.”
The Majdi eyed him, an almost imperceptible furrow in her brows showing. “No?”
“Pretty sure I said no.”
Her stare did not falter. “Then maybe you can explain why you left Kijikalae?”
Salla hesitated before speaking. “Why I left had nothing—”
“You left because of Natke, Salla Saar. You were afraid you were going to hurt—”
“Wait, wait, wait. No. You can’t know that. I didn’t tell Rainne anything about why I left Kijikalae.” He felt his nerves flare hot, muscles tensing. His stare turned flat and dangerous. “Who got into my head? You? When I was in that green soup?”
Delflore closed the file. “Let me tell you something, Salla. I’m the one who is in charge of what happens from here on out. If we are to find some way to stabilize what’s happening inside of you, I need your trust. That’s why I’m going to tell you the truth. The girl, Rainne, she read you.”
“She…that…” The quickness with which Salla’s anger rose to a fiery crescendo surprised even him. At first, the words were flying through his mind in such a blinding frenzy, he couldn’t form a coherent sentence. “So…so she knew all along. She pretended to be mad that I wouldn’t tell her anything about what I’ve gone through. And here she knew it all anyway.”
The Majdi across the desk from him shook her head. “She didn’t know from the beginning, from what I understand. But yes, she did read you a few days before bringing you to us. The reason I tell you this is because whether you trust her or not is irrelevant. Her status is listed as uhreht’sa, so it’s likely you’ll never see her again in any case.”
“And that would be a bad thing?”
“You feel betrayed. I understand. But in order for you to get through what you’re dealing with now, I need you to trust me. As I’ve told you, I know nothing about the Eyes of the One, so I have no idea how long it might take to undo the damage they’ve done or if that’s even possible.” She glanced up to the guard standing by the door. “He’ll take you now to a holding cell in the facility I mentioned until a more livable residence in that facility is prepared.”
“How did she do it? You said before that people thought you Majdi were all mind-readers, like it wasn’t true.” He leaned forward, watching even the slightest changes in posture and expression. “I need to know.”
She gave a sigh that spoke of her reluctance to tell him. “Not all of us can read people. That’s true. The better part of our numbers can do so on a limited basis. Most of what we can detect is someone’s intent, or fluctuations in emotions that can give us some insight as to what might be going on in someone’s head. Certainly, there are some who can read anyone, at any given time.”
“So she’s one of them?”
“No, she isn’t.” She opened the file again, leafing back several pages. “It appears that she read you while you were asleep.”
The statement hit him like a hammer blow to the sternum. He sank back into the chair, deflated. “That’s why she invited me to stay with her. To sleep in her bed.”
“You see, when we sleep, the mind opens up. Our defenses go down because we generally feel safe, otherwise sleeping would be difficult, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You’re not making what she did sound any better,” he grumbled with a fold of his arms.
“The truth is I don’t fault her for what she did. If what you say is true, that you told her nothing about yourself, that makes you an unknown to a Majdi. I made a joke when we first came here, that our Order is not universally loved. There is truth in that. Majdi are attacked and Majdi die and it’s not always from the people who are still clinging to past governments we’ve dismantled. Sometimes it’s just regular people who don’t like our presence here. They don’t like the fact that we’ve installed ourselves here to bring peace and oversee the continuation of that peace despite the fact it was a majority vote of the people themselves who called upon us to do precisely that.” Resting her elbows on the table, Delflore leveled her gaze more directly at Salla. “We had two Majdi go missing this month alone. We have abilities, but that doesn’t make us invulnerable. It doesn’t mean we can change the hearts and minds of everyone we’ve undertaken the charge of keeping safe. Rainne Zehava had a responsibility to herself and to her grandfather. And, she had the ability to know whether you could be trusted. Can you truly fault her for using it?”
11
Out across the endless black of the ocean, the night sky flashed and glowed in warning of the storm that approached. With the heat of the day gone, the stiff wind that peeled whitecaps off the surface of the boundless waters felt cool and invigorating. Accompanied by the Majdi guardsman who had watched over him during his time with Delflore, Salla walked the long stone stretch of the bridge that jutted like a knife into the breast of the sea.
He saw their destination in brief flashes of lightning, a vague silhouette standing far ahead at the end of this weathered, interminable causeway. With each step taken and each dazzl
ing burst of white light from the heavens, the building began to take shape. It was small in comparison to the bulk of the structures and monuments he’d passed within the borders of Empyrion Prime, a squat, domed building that appeared to bulge up from the blackened waves ahead like the vast, arched back of a breaching whale.
“Isn’t this nice and foreboding,” he said to himself, the words scarcely louder than the tides rolling in half a dozen feet beneath him.
The guard said nothing, his stern countenance focused on the path ahead. One by one, the bridge lights hanging from arched hooks overhead came alive upon their approach, and dimmed just as quickly in their wake. By the time they arrived outside the building, a steady drizzle was blowing down upon them.
The Majdi put a halting hand on Salla’s chest, bowing his head. “We’re outside.” A pause followed. “Is the foyer clear?”
“What’s going on?” Salla asked, squinting up into the rain, relishing the feel of it pattering against his face as if he might never experience it again.
“We wait. Shouldn’t be long.”
In the darkness, Salla couldn’t see much of the structure before him. It appeared to be old and weather-beaten like the bridge itself, the walls of the single-story complex cracked and discolored. There was a starkly different style of architecture at work here that, when coupled with the facility’s obvious age, led Salla to believe this place had existed long before Empyrion Prime had been constructed.
The complex’s main entryway granted passage through a set of steel doors, patched with rust and mottled black, yellow and green. The building spread out from there, its tall stone walls featuring mere vertical slits for windows. None were large enough for a man to fit through, and its roofline more closely resembled the jagged ramparts of a fortress. Staring upward, Salla could picture guardsmen in days gone by slowly sauntering in regimented patterns around the roof’s central dome as they conducted their patrols, watching for escapees.