The Lighthouse between the Worlds

by Melanie Crowder

  “Philip never said any different?”

  “I think he tried to, after that alarm.” Griffin’s breath slowed as questions nudged the grief back to the lonely corner of his mind where it stayed, most days. “We have to find my dad before it’s too late.”

  Liv drew her lower lip through her teeth. “We would need to move quickly if we want to get to him in time. And going after him would mean the end of our time as spies.”

  Eb nodded. “Maybe it’s time for the resistance to step out of the shadows and fight.”

  Fi’s jaw dropped. She knew about the Fenns, of course, but she’d never even considered that a broken alliance with Earth might be the reason the Vinean spy network was stuck in a holding pattern, always gathering information but never using what they learned to attack.

  And that story Liv told? Fi had never heard any of it.

  She looked at Griffin with new respect, shaking her head slowly. She’d thought he was going to ruin everything, stumbling around in the rectory, just begging to get caught. But maybe his sudden arrival was the push the resistance needed to finally act. Fi didn’t care what got things moving. Whatever it took, she was ready. She’d been ready for twenty-seven months.

  For this? She’d been waiting her whole life.

  16

  THE HUNDRED-YEAR WAR

  Ireached out to my contact,” Liv said the minute she crossed back over the threshold, closing the door behind her and leaning her weight against it.

  Griffin scrambled to his feet. “Who is it? Are you sure you can trust him?”

  “You’ll see, soon enough. Eb, Fi, it’s time to alert the resistance. You know what to do.”

  Eb nodded, his hand resting protectively on Fi’s shoulder as the two of them slipped out the door, joining the rest of the servants on the path leading to the amphitheater.

  Griffin crossed to the window and watched the steady stream of people flow by. The day’s heat had baked into the bricks, and now that the light outdoors was fading, the warmth seeped into the room. Griffin laid his cheek against the wall. “Where is everybody going?”

  Liv pulled stiff curtains over the resin windows. “To the ceremony.” The weight of the decision she’d just made clung to her in shadows beneath the hard lines of brow, cheekbone, and jaw.

  “What ceremony?”

  “Hmmm?”

  Griffin could feel the heat rising into his cheeks. He’d always hated the way his face flushed so easily, announcing his feelings to anyone watching. He turned back to the bricks so Liv couldn’t see the blotches of red spotting his cheekbones. “How am I supposed to do anything without giving myself away? I don’t have any idea what ceremony you’re talking about. And I don’t get how Earth is any different from the rest of the worlds Somni colonized. Or why you have green veins—”

  Liv threw back her head and laughed. The green lines angling across her neck seemed to pulse with the rhythm of her laughter. Griffin turned back to face her, sheepish. “Sorry.”

  But she only waved him off. “Griffin, this is a war we’re fighting. A hundred-year war. You don’t need to apologize for asking questions. And anyway, Vineans are proud to carry the heart of our green world within us, even here, in this lifeless world. It’s the one thing the priests can’t take away from us, at least not while we’re alive.”

  “Okay. So the ceremony is . . . ?”

  “How the priests keep everyone under their control. The citizens collect their food rations for the following day while the priests prattle on about how the temple and the stolen dreamers are the Somnites’ divine right. What’s really happening, though, is that the priests keep the heartstones of the sjel trees they drained set like jewels into rings on their fingers. When they hold their palms against the heartstones, the heat from their skin releases the oils inside. The priests breathe in the trees’ stolen magic, and it gives them power over others’ minds. Each priest is assigned a segment of the population, and as long as he lives, the people he magicks are trapped under his control.”

  Griffin closed his eyes, and it was right there—the dream world the way he had imagined it the first time his mom had told him the story of the benevolent trees and their dreamers. Griffin liked that Somni so much better than this one, and it made him wonder about all those people at the ceremony—what it must be like for them to have lost so much, to be left with only this barren world without even the freedom of their own thoughts in their heads.

  “Every single person on Somni has to attend the ceremony—all the priests, soldiers, citizens, and servants. It takes all of the priests to magick the population, and they are so afraid of losing control that they don’t allow anyone to miss even one night.” Liv leaned close to the coarse bricks so she wouldn’t be seen from outside, and she peered at the yellow skyline.

  Griffin frowned. “But you’re not there. Won’t they notice you’re missing?”

  Liv chewed on the corner of her lip, considering her next words carefully. “It’s what the resistance does best—move and shift beneath their notice. The priests think they have us catalogued in tidy lists, but over the years, we’ve slipped people in, one at a time, until our numbers are double what they think. Of course, the priests don’t suspect because they think their magic makes us powerless to resist them.”

  Liv turned away from the window. She twisted her hands in front of her. “We have to be careful who we trust. We’ve been betrayed before. Think about it, Griffin. Three years ago, Somni was laying the groundwork for a massive attack on Earth. Your people had no defense against the priests’ mind control. Your world could have been an easy conquest. There is no reason why Somni would stop short. But they did. Right after the priests caught your mother. Why would they do that, unless Dr. Hibbert offered them something so tempting it was worth scrapping their plans to colonize Earth?”

  Griffin ran a finger along the vein the malva vine had dissolved into, thinking.

  Liv pushed off the wall and came to stand beside him. She reached out and gripped his hand. “I’m sure some would call Dr. Hibbert a hero, saving her entire world from attack. But at what cost? We think she made a deal with the priests, and part of that deal was betraying Katherine.”

  Anger seared through Griffin.

  “Your mother put herself in danger over and over again to help us. We owe it to her to keep you safe, and to help Philip, if we can.”

  Griffin hadn’t known how badly he needed to hear just that. Relief coursed through him like floodwaters cutting away at a riverbank. He wanted to believe Liv. But he wasn’t sure, not yet.

  “Griffin, I need you to tell me everything you can about Dr. Hibbert. What is she doing here? Why is she back on Somni now, after being gone for years?”

  His shoulders lifted and slumped again. “I heard her say they were going to kill all the dreamers to cut the tether between Somni and Earth. But that doesn’t make sense. If that’s all they wanted, Dr. Hibbert could have killed them right there in the temple, jumped back through the portal, and been done with Somni forever.”

  “Except that you’re here. And Philip,” Liv explained. “To cut the tether between worlds, every single person from that world has to either go back through the portal or be killed. Maybe that’s why Dr. Hibbert sent Fergus and Sykes after you.”

  It was one thing to fit together all the pieces himself, and another to hear the thing he was most afraid of spoken out loud, plain and simple.

  Griffin swallowed. “That’s why she went straight for the rectory? To kill my father?” He sat up a little straighter, bracing himself for her answer.

  “Possibly. But that can’t be all it is.” Liv began pacing the round room, her hands clasped behind her back. “There has to be more. Somni wouldn’t give up on a potential colony for one person. And until we know what Dr. Hibbert offered the priests, we’re in the dark.”

  It was quiet, with Eb and Fi gone and the neighborhood empty. Yet even the silence seemed to tug at Griffin, waiting for him to somehow find the answer
everyone seemed to be so sure he had.

  “That alarm meant Somni was getting ready to come back to Earth, didn’t it? And that’s why Dad went to help the Keepers, because he was afraid Somni was going to invade?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  It made everything both better and worse, knowing his dad hadn’t planned to leave—that he wouldn’t have risked getting so close to an open portal for anything less than to save the whole world.

  Liv handed Griffin a blanket and placed a fresh stola and a new pair of sandals beside the bed. “It’s been a long day, and it’s going to be an even longer night. Get some sleep.”

  ANOTHER STORY? CLIMB UNDER THE covers, then, and let me think.

  Remember that morning when we all woke up before the sun, pulled on our galoshes, and threw a bucket and those skinny little shovels in the back of the pickup? We drove down to the bay and walked out on the flats, the mud sucking at our feet and the gulls circling above, begging us to share our catch? Remember? It smelled like three-day-old fish out there.

  I knew you’d remember the smell. That’s right—it was the one and only time we ever went clamming.

  Can you picture that mist? How it hovered an inch above the mud and smothered the water so you couldn’t see it at all—you could only hear it slurping in and out of all the little critters’ hidey holes?

  Now I want you to imagine a world exactly like that—only there’s no mud. No rocks or dirt, and no rivers or oceans—no ground of any kind. Just mist.

  Close your eyes. Can you see the mist? There’s a city floating in the distance.

  Funny little skim boats drift between buildings. Birds as big as dragons and as tiny as bees fly all around; they disappear behind one curtain of mist and pop out from another like blinking fireflies.

  Can you feel the mist pooling around your ankles and lifting you up? Are you there right now in your mind—standing on a pillow of soggy air? If you’re feeling brave (you are, aren’t you, Griffin?) take a walk on the mist with me.

  No? Not yet?

  It’s okay. It can be hard for a person who has always felt solid ground beneath his feet to step out onto nothing, because if you walk on mist, surely you’ll fall through. Won’t you?

  Not on Caligo.

  So what keeps you from falling? Ah. The question is not what, my love, but who.

  Look beyond the city, to the aerie high above. The Levitator and his fleet are there, sitting in their nest and casting their magic out, before and below them. They hold up every living thing in their whole world, from humans like you and me, to the buildings that poke out of the mist like floating islands. Bugs and birds, of course, can hold themselves aloft for a time, but even the flying lizards whose wings stretch from the curve of the rising moon to the ball of the setting sun must rest sometimes.

  It’s a beautiful thing to watch the Levitator and his fleet—men and women, and children in training, too—working together to hold up their whole world.

  Close your eyes—can’t you see them? Almost?

  Are you ready now? Take a breath, sweet Griffin, and let go.

  17

  THE CEREMONY

  Eb and Fi lined up in the sprawling amphitheater with all the servants and citizens of Somni, just as they did every evening. The crowd was separated into portions of eight, and everyone, from the elderly to the very young and every age in between, faced precisely in the same direction. The soldiers stood in a human wall around the amphitheater while a hundred priests worked their magic from the stage above.

  Fi squinted her eyes and scrunched up her nose. The magic tickled—way at the back, like a big sneeze was coming. Only it never did.

  She stood, straight but quivery, acting like the priests’ mind control worked on her. All the servants had to pretend. They had to if they were going to guard the secret that a handful of greenwitches had survived the invasion and were passing malva vine to the resistance. So, much as it galled Fi to stand in formation, mimicking the brainwashed, listless citizens of Somni, she did her part like a good spy.

  Besides, she had a message to deliver.

  It wasn’t that the resistance wanted to use children to do their work. But Vinea had been under siege for so long that the rule of war, brutal as it was, came to feel almost ordinary. Somni took people of all ages into their service, and the resistance couldn’t afford to overlook a potential recruit, no matter how young.

  Vinea had fallen in the time of Fi’s great-great-great aunts and uncles. One terrible night, soldiers had marched out of the tower in droves, cutting down anything and anyone standing in their way. Vinea had had no defense—the greenwitches had never considered using their magic for violence. It had seemed too cruel, sacrificing the green so that humans could live.

  The strongest among them had done what she could. She’d grabbed on to the tree nearest her, one with a taproot that dove deep, deep into the soil. With everything she had, she reached through the ground across the whole world, root system to root system. She wrapped her whole being around the tree’s trunk and asked for a warning to be sent to her people. And the trees obliged. They turned their leaves in unison to block out the moon in a blinking alarm signal that stretched around the globe.

  The soldiers had pressed until they reached the edges of habitable land, and there they stopped. What had been a vibrant city of living architecture became an impassable fort built from the bones of felled trees. Prisoners were massed and shackled, awaiting transport to Somni. Vineans who hadn’t been captured escaped into the wildlands, where the trees and vines and even the ground cover did what it could to hide the refugees. There, after wounds were tended to and the grieving season allowed for, the resistance was born.

  If you yank a growing thing out of the ground, if you pull it up, roots and all, you can be reasonably sure it won’t come back. But if the root is snapped just below the surface, only some plants will wither and die. Others will toughen, sinking their roots deeper into the ground. And the next time the tender green shoots taste the air? They won’t be nearly so easy to uproot.

  After the invasion, Fi’s ancestors lived in a cave hollowed out of a softstone cliff. Her great-great-great-aunt, a powerful greenwitch, had called up a curtain of creeping willow to disguise the cave’s entrance. And after her death, Fi’s great-aunt Una, equally powerful, had nurtured the willow until it was nearly impenetrable. The family was safe and might have been forever if they’d only ever ventured out for food and water and a little sunlight.

  But that would have meant surrendering their beautiful green world to the invaders. After all, it wasn’t just the people of Vinea they fought for. It was the plants, too. And the green magic. In the end, it was their devotion to the resistance that made Fi’s family vulnerable.

  She was four when the soldiers came.

  The willow shrieked, burning in a wall of flame. Smoke filled Fi’s nostrils, and screams rang in her ears. Soldiers waited at the entrance for anyone who tried to escape. Fi’s aunt Ada scooped the little girl up and carried her to the back of the cave. She pushed Fi ahead of her into the escape tunnel, and they crawled on their bellies for what seemed like days. The last thing Fi’s great-aunt Una ever did was to call up the ground cover to conceal the tunnel entrance.

  When they emerged again into the sunlight, Fi’s face was black as a bog. The only place her skin showed through was in the cracks her tears had carved into the mud. A dozen people had lived in that cave—Fi’s whole family.

  Two escaped.

  Fi took her aunt’s hand in hers, and together they dove even deeper into the wildlands. The next five years were lonely ones, for both of them. But they had each other and the green all around them.

  Then, on Fi’s ninth birthday, Aunt Ada asked how Fi wanted to honor their family’s memory—to live in defiance of those who wished them dead or to fight back, but risk dying. Both options took bravery and resilience, she said.

  Fi was surprised it was even a question.

  She was a lo
gical girl. She knew the rest of her family was probably dead. But Fi wouldn’t have left Aunt Ada behind and traveled all the way to Somni if she’d really believed it. And she wouldn’t have spent twenty-seven months as a servant, biting her tongue and working until she collapsed into bed every night if she didn’t believe she’d find them one day.

  It was why she was there, in the amphitheater, pretending it didn’t make her skin burn just as hot as that curtain of willow to stand meek and biddable, while the priests gloried in their conquest.

  At last the heartstones were released, and the ceremony ended. Fi and Eb split up, each searching for their contacts. It’s the necessary nature of a spy network—each person only knows a handful of others. Fi had never met the people Eb and Liv reported to, and she had no idea who reported to them in turn. It was safer that way.

  Fi wove through the crowd, watching for a stout woman with hair the color of a mustard seed and veins so pale they were almost white. When she spotted her across the crowd, Fi altered her course until they fell into step together. She looked once into the woman’s face and then back to the path in front of her feet. “The thistle opens tonight,” she whispered. “Be ready for the bloom.”

  The woman responded in a low voice, thick with emotion. “It will be soon?” Her hands gripped the edges of her stola.

  “Very soon,” Fi repeated. She didn’t know the reason for the delay—why the message was for a diversion tonight and to stand ready for the full-scale revolt later. Liv didn’t tell her everything, only what she needed to know to do her job.

  The two separated, Fi to deliver her message twice more, and the woman to seek out the first of her three contacts. Fi raised her eyes to the darkening sky, imagining her message spreading through the crowd like water seeping into a dense root ball and dispersing until every last Vinean was alerted and ready to fight. She imagined the words finding her aunts and uncles on the raze crews, the news quenching what had been too many thirsty years.