by Ward, Tracey
“Vivienne!”
My mother’s panicked cry cuts through my brain like a hot knife through fresh butter. It severs all my control, all of my concentration. I feel my right foot slip first, then my left loses its tenuous grip on the smooth beam. I begin to topple sideways. There’s nothing to grab onto.
“No!” she screams.
My last coherent thought as I begin the rapid plunge toward the crystal clear waters below is that my mother has got to stop screaming. It’s getting embarrassing.
A strong hand grabs onto mine, the grip like an iron shackle around my wrist. I instinctively wrap my hand around the wrist attached to it to sturdy our connection. My body stops falling and begins swinging instead, my face heading straight for the hull at the bow of the ship. I don’t fight it. I curl into a ball as much as I can and I take the brunt of the hit with my shoulder. My body makes a hard thunk sound as it connects with the wood and I suppress a cry of pain. I’ll be bruised there for sure but at least it wasn’t my head or a bone easily broken. This I can hide.
Gabrielle holds onto me as I swing slowly, waiting for my sideways momentum to die out. I feel cold, salty wisps of sea spray peppering my bare skin, reminding me of how close I came to falling into its grasp. I’m a strong swimmer but it wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t come back for me. Even I, a council member’s daughter, would be left behind. Left for dead. No one can swim forever.
Eventually Gabriel begins to pull me up. I can hear him grunting and grumbling above me. I use my other arm to grab onto whatever I can to help him hoist me up until finally I’m flopping over the railing, landing in a panting heap on the ground. I stare up at the sky, my sight going fuzzy around the edges as adrenaline spikes my heart rate way too high. My shoulder aches, my pride is destroyed and my gut is clenched by the darkness of the sky. I know it’s not possible at this hour, but I swear I can see stars poking out through the perfect dusky blue. We need to speed up at least an hour before I’ll feel safe again.
My mother’s face appears over mine, blocking out the sky with her blond curls and tense gray eyes.
“What were you thinking?!” she hisses loudly.
She’s desperate to yell at me but she knows she’s done too much of that already. This will no doubt get back to my father and he’ll be angry at all of us. I feel a small sense of guilt for bringing his wrath down on them.
“I’m sorry,” I say weakly, the words bitter on my tongue.
She shakes her head. “Not this time. You’re always sorry but you never stop. You need to think, do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you?” she insists.
I roll my eyes. “I said ‘yes’ didn’t I?”
“Vi,” Gabriel warns.
“I’m sorry, both of you. I really am,” I tell them.
It’s true, I’m very sorry. I’m sorry I got caught. I’m sorry my mother literally almost scared me to death. I’m sorry we’re having this conversation. I’m sorry it will spur a conversation with my father. I’m sorry for a lot of things, just probably not what they want me to be sorry for but I can’t help that.
“See,” Gabriel says amiably, “she’s sorry.”
My mother’s mouth is a sharp, thin line painted on her face. “She doesn’t mean a word of it.”
“No, but she did say it. That’s a start.”
“I am so…” my mother begins, but words fail her. She stares down at me where I continue to lay on my back just waiting for the lecture to start so it can end. “You know what, it’s fine. I’m not going to waste my breath.”
“Thank you,” I mutter, sitting up and feeling infinitely relieved.
I cannot take another lecture about acting like a lady and representing the family with decorum. I don’t especially feel like my father was acting with decorum last year when he whipped a teenaged boy to within an inch of his life right in front of me. All for one kiss.
There’s a crack of lightning followed by a rumble of thunder in the distance far ahead of us. Not far enough though. I exchange an uneasy glance with Gabriel before he turns to our mother. We both know the truth. We know the danger.
The fleet of six ships that makes up our tribe has been sailing for the last three hundred and thirty five years inside the Seventh Hour. It’s safe there. Warm, but not so hot your eyes burn from their sockets and your skin melts down your face like wax. Cool, but not so cold that your extremities freeze and crack, fingers and toes breaking off like chips of ice. We strive to remain forever just outside the dusk. Just a few minutes ahead of the sunset where the world is golden and perfect.
It’s the only way to truly live anymore. It has been since the time when the world began to slow in its rotation and the days became impossibly long. When the oceans were pulled to the poles, burying so much land in the north and south, unearthing new planes until all that was left was one supercontinent making a ring around the equator. The southern ocean is where we made our home. The Earth’s rotation has slowed, but its orbit around the sun continues. Because of this, the seasons have died and all that’s left is an almost perfect split of six months of frozen night followed by six months of burning day. And so my people took to the seas. We found the Seventh Hour, the golden space between the night and the day, and we’ve followed it ever since.
On land or sea, we all cling to the old ways. Time is still time. A day, whether the sun participates or not, is still twenty-four hours long, an hour is still sixty minutes and a minute is still either insufferably long or unbearably short depending on your mood. But the light and night, that we gave new focus. Once it slipped beyond the compass of a day, even a week, we found a need to re-measure it. That was the birth of the Solar Day.
One Solar Day is broken up into twenty four Hours, each Hour being roughly two weeks long. They’re sort of like our new seasons, each distinguished by how hot or cold, how bright or dark they are. Noon is a roiling, searing heat, the direct gaze of the sun bearing down on the earth and making it impossible to exist outside. Midnight is a dark, frozen tundra equally impossible to survive. The only way to live through a Solar Day is to hide from the harshest Hours underground or inside the mountains as the Gaians do. Or to sail the seas, moving with the sun as the earth orbits it, forever bathed in the gentle amber glow of the Seventh Hour as we do. As the Solarans always have.
But now we’re slipping slowly into the Eighth Hour, a place I’ve never been and never planned to go. I’ve never seen the stars strewn across a darkened sky. I’ve never known full night and I never want to. But the endless storms ahead of us have pushed us back, forced us to slow down for weeks and we’re losing daylight. It’s running away from us and I have the horrifying thought that if it gets away, we’ll never find it again. I don’t scare easily, but the night makes my blood run cold inside my veins.
“Mother,” Gabriel says sweetly, taking her arm as a gentleman should, “why don’t we go down below decks? We can play cards.” He flashes her his brilliant, charming smile. “I’ll even let you win.”
She can’t resist it. No woman can. Gabriel putting on the charm is a force to be reckoned with and my mother is no more immune than any of the silly, dim-witted girls on this ship. Most of the Solaran women are here on this vessel, the tail ship in our fleet. We’re meant to be kept safe here. Out of harm’s way. Out of the men’s way. But the gathering clouds in the distance that creep closer and closer to us despite the lateness of the Hour are making me wonder how safe any of us are.
“Vivienne,” my mother calls over her shoulder, “you’ll follow us down.”
She’s not asking. By sheer force of will, I keep my eyes from rolling. I stop myself from sighing. With all of the strength inside my soul and body, I smile kindly at her and nod my head. But I don’t speak because no power on this Earth can keep the chill of absolute Midnight out of my tone.
She frowns at me before she turns. That’s the last thing I see; my mother’s frown. It’s fitting in a way. My father’s frown was no doubt the
first thing I saw when I was born. Abject disappointment should be the last thing I know before I die.
The world explodes as lightning strikes the ship. It pierces the deck, digging deep into the hull where lives, breathes, bread and babies lie. That’s what occurs to me as I’m thrown backward, spiraling toward the water again with no hand to reach out for this time. I think of all the lives on the boat that are already lost. Of all of the lives that will be lost in the coming moments. I think of Gabriel; my life, my light, my sun that I’d follow to the ends of the earth.
As I hit the icy water, the world going black as death, I’m screaming his name.
About the Author
I was born in Eugene, Oregon and studied English Literature at the University of Oregon (Go Ducks!) It was there that I discovered why Latin is a dead language and that being an English teacher was not actually what I wanted to do with my life.
My husband, my son and my 80lbs pitbull who thinks he's a lapdog are my world.
Visit my website for more information on upcoming releases, Tracey Ward
Other Works by Tracey Ward
Until The End (Quarantined Series #1)
In the End (Quarantined Series #2)
Writing on the Wall (Survival Series #1)
Backs Against the Wall (Survival Series #2)
Sleepless (Bird of Stone Series #1)