Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy)

by Jonathan R. Stanley

  The gates were closed. They could never go back, and try as Alex did to bring himself into the present, to make the enormity of the situation into something his mind could grasp, it kept slipping away into the surreal. Over and over again, Alex went through the events which led him to this moment, to prove to himself that this moment really existed. Because, until it did, the moment could not pass and he was stuck.

  For nearly an hour, he and his mother sat in the hover car, just beyond the end of the bridge, where the concrete disappeared into dirt, staring at the sunset on the clay horizon, trying to make the moment real. Alex knew that his sister was dead and that he too would die. Unlike his sister however, his death would be an arduous and prolonged ordeal. But it was still only a thought now, and far from being real.

  Suddenly Olesianna found time again and they were no longer lost in life.

  A sound ignited the air with emotions. Alex had heard it only a one time before. It was the day before last - but it had been different then. The sound had been soft and agonized then. Now it was frantic and hysterical.

  Olesianna, Alex’s mother, was crying.

  It was a laborious effort. Doubling over and clutching her heart with both hands, Olesianna slouched against the window of the passenger’s side. Her hoarse groan continued until she had expelled every last bit of breath, then after a huge, shuddering gasp of air, it resumed.

  Somewhere deep inside of Alex, he knew that if they were going to live – at least for a while – he had to be strong at that moment, and so when he felt his own tears begin to well up inside of him, an involuntary instinct clotted the emotion, stifling it before it could reach the surface. An odd reversal then took place as a paternal instinct filled the fifteen-year-old, giving him the strength to do for his mother what she could not do for him.

  Taking off his seat belt, Alex leaned across the arm rest dividing the two seats and slowly rolled his mother into him, wrapping his arms around her and cradling her as she wept. And he stroked her hair as he imagined she would do for him, and he told her that everything would be okay. And uncaring of other criminals possibly watching them, eyeing them hungrily from a distance, they passed the evening.

  At some point, after darkness overtook the car, and after Olesianna had fallen asleep, Alex lay half awake, looking out into the distant blackness. Moonlight Sonata played on his headphones, though only through one ear, the other side was broken. Still visible behind him was the faint glow of Teleopolis’ lights and with a hint of comfort taken from their presence, Alex fell asleep. In the hours that followed, Alex did not fight with demons, or armies, or monsters as he usually did in his dreams, but instead confronted a much simpler fear.

  Alex’s sister, though older, had never experienced the school system of Teleopolis. She was sickly and chronically plagued by illness as well as the side effects of her medicines. Deemed too sick to go to school by Olesianna, she had remained bedridden from a young age. For this reason, she could offer no advice to her younger brother about what school would be like. On the contrary, she was eager to live vicariously through his experiences. And so, what seemed to Alex like a lifetime ago, he left the house for his first day of firstschool, filled with trembling trepidation.

  Although his mother had assured him that everyone would be feeling just as nervous as he was, his bus ride seemed to particularly disprove her notion. Everyone else seemed to be alive in shouts, laughter and excitement and when they arrived at the new school, they all knew where to go. In this confusion, with all his peers surging around him, Alex simply stood still, choking back tears.

  Alex sat up in the hover car and looked around. It was dawn. He had second guessed himself, expecting to have woken up in his room at home. With a sickening sensation in his stomach, he felt cold isolation close in around him all over again. Alex looked to his right, across the hover car’s cabin. His mother was sleeping, her head resting awkwardly on the window ledge. Her cheeks were puffy and spotted with little red freckles that come after hours and hours of crying.

  After a moment’s pause, Alex opened the door and walked a short distance away from the car to a small ditch in the ground. He knew exactly where it was and exactly how to open the container buried beneath a thin layer of clay. He had been here, what, three days ago? It had been the beginning of it all, the fire, the trial. What he pulled from the chest, his backpack from school had been the cause of it all. He pushed it out of his mind and lugged the bag back to the car where he got in, and pushed the ignition button on the dashboard. With a soft electrical hum, the car slowly rose into the air and began to inch forward.

  Yet, before the car had moved more than a few feet in this way, Olesianna bolted upright and, with wild eyes, latched onto the steering wheel with both hands like she was about to be pulled out of the car. Alex recoiled, stepping a little too hard on the break and jostling them both in their seats. Olesianna’s eyes were focused intently on the horizon and her white knuckles squeezed and twisted the rubber grip of the wheel, ringing it in her grip.

  “Mom,” Alex said, trying to snap her out of her trance.

  Her brown eyes locked onto Alex’s face but she did not let go of the wheel. At the sides of her head, near her temples, Alex could see veins ticking in rhythm with her heart. He grew frightened as she continued to stare at him, or, as he began to realize after shifting in his seat, beyond him.

  Olesianna knew what was going on. Someone was trying to steal the car, or break into it. The police? Coming to take her infant daughter and her unborn son away. She had to get out of there, to drive to another providence, and avoid the homes at all costs. But how would she get through the checkpoints again?

  “Xavieric,” she whispered. It was Alex’s father’s name.

  “Mom.” Alex was surer in his tone this time, softly trying to bring her back. Her eyes fluttered and focused on him, this time, her expression was surprised and confused. It took her nearly half a minute to reconcile Alex’s presence in the car. What was he doing there? He hadn’t even been born yet.

  “Mom, do you know where we are?” Alex asked her. He understood what it was like to wake from a dream without realizing, and he saw it on her face.

  Olesianna sat back in the passenger seat and sheltered her eyes with the edge of her hand. “I thought I was back in Teleopolis… before you were born.” Alex briefly recalled the stories of his mother’s stubborn survival after the death of his father. She had spent nearly three months living around the streets of Teleopolis in a car not too dissimilar from the one they currently inhabited.

  “Alex, we can’t leave,” Olesianna finally said.

  “Can’t leave what?” Alex asked, looking around at the clay flats. “We’ve been banished. They’re not letting us back in.” Why did he have to tell her this? Didn’t she understand that they had gotten off easy? Didn’t she understand what lay ahead of them? She had always been so strong and composed.

  “I’m sorry Alex. I’m so sorry,” she said tearing, her mouth trembling.

  Alex didn’t know how to respond and so he simply eased down on the accelerator pedal and let them slowly drift away from the crevasse.

  “No!” Olesianna shrieked, reaching out into the air, trying to hold back the horizon as it crept towards her. Alex once again slammed on the breaks. “What?” he yelled impatiently at her. He was frustrated at his inability to feel or think and staying a spitting-distance outside of the city was just making it worse. He wanted it to be gone, to be out of sight.

  “I can’t stay here,” he yelled when she gave no response.

  “We can’t go any further.” Then, grasping for a reason she spat, “What about the dunomads?”

  “We can outrun them.” Alex said.

  She searched again, and as soon as the thought entered her mind she quickly spoke. “Maybe we can sneak back in.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “You crossed the crevasse, didn’t you? When you were only twelve. You said it had a bottom!”

 
“I don’t want to go back!” Alex yelled. “If they opened the gates right now, I wouldn’t go.”

  “But we can fight them, Alex. We can fight their decision.”

  “That’s all you’ve ever done is fight their decisions! Now you have to fight against that.” He pointed out to the horizon, but Olesianna couldn’t bear to follow his gesture. “We have to fight against that.” Alex received no response from his mother. She simply stared at the console. “There has to be something out there,” he continued. “Who do you think left the time capsule? The dunomads? No way. There has to be something other than sand out there.” Olesianna was silent. Alex shook his head and then with an anger building in him, raised his foot, about to stomp down on the accelerator pedal.

  “Wait,” Olesianna said. “What if the dunomads catch us?”

  Alex looked back at the horizon and some loose sand whipped up into a corkscrew. Without a response Alex pushed his foot down and sent the hover car soaring forward, Teleopolis slowly disappearing behind.

  They drove into the dead land for nearly an hour before Alex started crying. There was no more warning other than his suddenly sunken head and a sniffle, followed by uncontrolled sobs. His sister was dead and he could still feel her charcoal hand under the blanket before they took her body away. She was dead and he would never see her frail little form again. He would never hear her laugh or know that gleaming smile she had when Alex returned home from school and sat on her bed, careful not to disconnect any wires or tubes from the machines nearby. She was dead now – and it was his fault.

  The hover car slowly drifted off course, sliding sideways along the flat landscape. Taking his hands off the wheel, Alex slumped over towards the window, feeling another indescribable loss that his first inclination was not to lean towards his mother for comfort.

  Olesianna stared at him, her hands gripping the interior of the car as it eventually spun around in a lazy circle facing back towards the horizon. But she couldn’t bring herself to take the wheel or slow the vehicle down. There was no real danger of course, they could have drifted like that for hours and never so much as gone over a bump, and any approaching persons could be seen for miles. But that wasn’t what scared Olesianna.

  The hover car finally came to a stop and Alex looked over at his mother with reddened eyes.

  “I’m sorry Alex,” she said to her son, apologizing for what she knew he was angry about. And Alex nodded. He didn’t yet understand the guilt Olesianna carried, only that she couldn’t be there for him. So he sucked back his tears and accepted her apology. She is suffering too, he thought. After a short conversation, one that seemed to punctuate the hopelessness of their situation, they decided to turn off the hover car and remain there till night time when resting would be too dangerous and travel would be best.

  My name is Alexavier Ganithala and I am a former citizen of the Nine Providence City: Teleopolis. My mother and I have been banished from that place. Before I was banished I found a sealed capsule beyond the outskirts of the city and a collection of things inside. Most of them were considered illegal in Teleopolis and they are partly the reason I was banished... The items were:

  ○ A Compact Disk Player with an assortment of AA Batteries to power it.

  ○ A removable Compact Disk inside, labeled “Classical Music Legacy.”

  ○ A pair of headphones made for the CD Player.

  ○ A round glass bottle with a liquid inside. (I haven’t opened it yet because I don’t know what the gold lettering says. It’s in another language.)

  ○ An assortment of books entitled: “This Global World: Political Science and Government Policy,” “Deciphering Today: An Anthropological Look into World Religions,” and “the USSF Survival Handbook.”

  ○ A locket with a picture in it. (It’s a picture of a man and woman standing on a green hillside with a gigantic red bridge in the background. On the back is engraved, “James and Marguerite Aulico.”) I wear it around my neck for luck.

  I am writing this because I think one day I will leave behind a sealed container for others to find. Even though terrible things happened because of the time capsule, I believe I was meant to find it. If I was back in Teleopolis I would say: the will meant for me to find it… but I’m not back there, and I don’t know what I think anymore.

  I guess I should start a little earlier for you to understand…

  “What are you writing?” Olesianna asked.

  “A journal,” Alex replied. Then, feeling suddenly self-conscious, he closed the note-book and slipped off the hood of the hover car and returned to the driver’s seat. It would be getting dark soon and without the glow of Teleopolis, Alex worried about what the night would bring. Olesianna worried even more.

  Twenty-One

  They traveled through the night, but slowly. Alex wasn’t convinced there weren’t more crevasses, regardless of what he had been taught, and he didn’t want to suddenly drive into one. Every now and then he would get spooked at nothing in particular chasing them and go a little bit faster. Olesianna didn’t help the tension as she was always scanning, looking around and leaning against the glass as if only a moment ago, she had heard something and was trying to spot it.

  At daybreak, Alex was exhausted and with the rapidly brightening landscape, he convinced his mother to let him sleep for a little bit. She would stay awake, she said, and judging by the look in her eyes, Alex had no doubt.

  In those off hours that begin the day Alex dreamt of Teleopolis. But this is only to say he dreamt, and his dream took place in the only world he had ever known: the nine providences of the city, each its own town but part of the whole. He dreamt again of his first years in school. This time though, it was no particular day or even a particular memory, but a jumbled amalgamation of a life spent in classrooms, being instructed.

  Alex stood in the back of a nondescript classroom and watched the teacher lecture on the geography of Teleopolis. “And the nine providences form what shape?” The teacher gestured at a pull down map of Teleopolis. It was an orderly and consistently laid out city with clear parallels in streets, blocks, buildings, parks, factories, store houses, and schools for each providence.

  The class droned the answer to the teacher’s question, “An octagon.” Like a wagon wheel, the borders between each providence led inwards to the center.

  “Correct, with First Providence in the center.” The teacher pointed to the central providence which acted as a hub to all the rest. Drawn into some of the large central buildings were words like city hall, hospital, and an assortment of acronyms for agency headquarters. “And what lies beyond our city to the west?” the teacher asked next.

  An eager student towards the front of his class raised his hand.

  “Yes, Alexavier?” the teacher said, pointing to him.

  From the back of the class, Alex watched his younger self, feet not yet touching the floor as he sat in his desk, answer the question. “An ocean.”

  “Not just an ocean…” said the teacher and immediately several other hands shot up including Alex’s, eager to redeem his oversight. The teacher called on another child.

  “The Endless Ocean,” the girl said emphatically. It had long been determined that the ocean was too dangerous and uncertain to be worth exploring and instead should only be utilized for food, drinking, and power. In fact, only a select few professionals from the seventh providence were allowed to learn how to swim. It was a needless skill for anyone else.

  “Correct,” the teacher continued. “And what lies to our east?”

  Alex, standing in the back of the classroom, winced. He was vaguely aware that he was dreaming, and the mention of this place hurt him to hear.

  This time a torrent of answers erupted, the urge to answer too great for raising hands.

  “The dunomads!”

  “The great fissure!”

  “The wasteland!”

  After calming the students the teacher said. “Those are all fine answers. The great fissure–” the tea
cher pointed to the black rift in the map which ran in along the eastern edge of the city, “which was opened up by the will, protects us from the evil dunomads…” In response to the mention of these creatures, the children all made the scariest faces they could and growled at the teacher as was customary in the younger grades. “…who live in the wasteland. Now, who can tell me about the will?”

  “Well, I’ll be.” Alex stammered. It was hardly the discovery he was hoping to find, but it nevertheless seemed to offer some degree of reassurance. Not more than a day’s drive eastward from Teleopolis was the horizon they had been staring at all this time, the highest ridge visible. And now, cresting it, they could see what lay beyond: a field of parched shrubbery, brittle and wiry, much of it in skeletal bulbs or prickly green trunks.

  “What?” Olesianna asked, peering fearfully over the dashboard to see. “Where are they?”

  “Plants, Mom. They’re plants.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said absently, her eyes still searching for a threat.

  “It means this isn’t a total wasteland.” While Alex had optimistically taken this as a good sign – he had always known that Teleopolis lied to its people, but here was proof – Olesianna took it to mean that the dunomads would be feasting on their flesh before the sun set.

  “Alex we have to go around.”

  “Around what? It’s everywhere.”

  Undaunted, Alex pressed on into the valley, and Olesianna resumed her watchful gaze. Before long, the sparse foliage began to thicken, and soon plots of yellow grass and large bushes emerged from the ground.

  “Stop Alex,” Olesianna said in that subtle but forceful tone of hers. Immediately Alex began to decelerate. It was the tone she had used when Alexavier was a child and Olesianna needed him to be close while crossing the street or walking in a busy parking lot. Somewhere beneath the jolt it gave Alex, a glimpse of her former authority had shown through, and it was reassuring to him.