TRAVELLER (Book 1 in the Brass Pendant Trilogy)

by Amanda May Bell

  “Okay, Livia,” he said, recovering quickly, and I smiled at his use of the local language. His accent was perfect.

  “You speak just like the locals,” I said. He grinned.

  “I like this Synthetic Era language. It sounds carefree and irresponsible just like the people here,” he said, and this time, he was telling the truth.

  “You like this time segment,” I guessed, and he nodded.

  “Education is highly inaccurate, but very simple, there are no hard chores to do, and everything is convenient and fast. The people here don’t have to grow up until they’re all of thirty turns of a marker, and even then it’s optional…….What’s not to like?” he asked me. I smiled.

  “I don’t know about any of that, but I like the music here,” I confessed.

  “You do?” he said, and from the doubtful look on his face, I could tell I was alone on that one.

  “Yes…It’s carefree and irresponsible,” I said, as I realised he’d managed to identify exactly, the elusive quality that had attracted me to the music of this era. I frowned. “You do know all the convenience, chemicals and waste finally caught up with them don’t you?” I asked him mildly, and he shook his head.

  “You’d think they would have realised Mother Nature just doesn’t tolerate that many signals in her atmosphere and all those poisons in her land and sea,” he said wryly. “But, we have a long while yet until the Meltdown. You and I could live out our lives here if we chose to. If I’ve been studying my history correctly, the marker in the park will be safe for about the next two hundred years or so,” he added cheerfully.

  “Are you taking history at this school?” I asked him. He nodded and rolled his eyes.

  “I don’t know why we have to go to school here. Almost everything taught in this era is completely wrong,” he said, and I smiled again.

  “Do you notice how every era thinks they’re far superior to those in the past and they all think they have everything right? They look back on eras past and say, how could they have been so stupid? None of them realise, the next era says exactly the same thing about them,” I said. The boy grinned and shook his head.

  “The people of the Synthetic Era are stupid. They pay for electricity and water, both of which are all around us and could be had for free,” he said. I smiled.

  “We shouldn’t be too quick to judge them. Someone will probably say we were stupid one day in our future,” I said, and the boy looked at me with a very strange expression on his face before he hid it quickly behind another grin.

  “It’s Morgan…..my name,” he said. I smiled and stopped walking.

  “May the gifts of the River Zahar remain among us through time, Morgan,” I said solemnly, and I spoke in the old language again. Such was the manner of our people.

  “And may time never be lost between us, Livia,” said Morgan, as he looked into my eyes. I stared back at him for a moment, transfixed by the expression in his bright, blue eyes.

  “Evangeline was driven to school. You don’t have to walk, you know,” I said suddenly, before I began to walk again. It was the first thing that had come into my head and I’d felt compelled to fill the awkward moment of silence between us.

  “You don’t have to walk either, so why do you walk?” Morgan asked me, and I shrugged self-consciously.

  “I like being outside by myself. That doesn’t happen often for me,” I said awkwardly, and Morgan looked surprised again.

  “Just you; all alone with your six guards,” he said dryly. I frowned at him.

  “I think six is an exaggeration. I’m sure there’s only……”

  “The man behind us on the bicycle, those two men jogging on the other side of the street, the woman just ahead of us pushing the baby carriage, which by the way doesn’t contain an actual baby, and that man in the Synthetic Era business suit; they’re all Aldiris guards,” he said, without pausing to take a breath. I looked at each of the people he’d spoken of and, when I looked closely, I could tell he was right. They were definitely Aldirite guards. I even recognised one or two of them who drove me to classes, and I saw a guard who ran with Mirren and I in the park. I folded my arms.

  “That’s only five,” I said smugly, as we walked past exclusive shops and joined more walkers who hurried beside us towards office towers and train stations.

  “There’s five on ground level one, but there’s another one on the balcony of that building at the end of the street,” said Morgan smugly, and he nodded towards a woman who stood on the fourth floor balcony of a Discovery Era building. This guard had a view of my walk all the way down the main street, and her balcony was opposite the paved, public courtyard I crossed each morning. From her vantage point, she’d be able to see me until I was at the top of the concrete steps. I shook my head.

  “And that makes six, so you were right,” I said sourly, and Morgan grinned.

  We passed the entrance to the underground train station and I’d completely forgotten to look for the man with the hopeful eyes this morning. When I looked for him now though, he wasn’t in his usual spot and I glanced at Morgan instead. As we continued on our way, I asked him about his life thus far and he answered my questions mainly with questions of his own. By the time we reached the school gate, I’d told Morgan about my tutor, and about Jonah, and about the school we were heading to, and I’d also told him I knew virtually no other questers, other than Evangeline. I’d explained to him that I’d been kept mostly isolated as a child for security reasons and I’d told him how I’d been in private tutoring for all of my quest training. I’d also told him I couldn’t wait for my finals to begin, and he knew I was counting the days until I could arise to join the Quest, but the only thing I knew about him was that his mother worked as a servant in the Palace, and that he’d been in group training for most of the last six turns. He did tell me I was his fourth finals partner though, and, because of this and his group training, he knew quite a few of the other questers in our year.

  When we entered our school building, Morgan had to go to the school office to collect his timetable and to finalise some of the pages of paperwork that were typically needed for early twenty first century school enrolment. He insisted I go to class rather than wait for him though, because he didn’t know how long he’d be, and he assured me he’d be able to find his own way around the school when he was done.

  When he was gone, I walked slowly to my first class, oblivious to the noise and the hurried pace of the students who walked impatiently around me. I wondered whether Morgan would be taking the same classes as Evangeline had taken. If he was, it meant we’d be together for most of the day.

  “Class will be over by the time you get there,” said a voice beside me, and I was roused from my thoughts to find Josh grinning beside me. I smiled at him a little guiltily. I’d completely forgotten he took the first class with me today. I looked at Josh closely.

  “Where’s your school tie?” I asked him.

  “There was an accident in my lab this morning and I found another shirt, but I couldn’t find another tie,” he said, as he glanced down at his tieless shirt and shrugged. I frowned.

  “What kind of accident?” I asked him, as we paused outside the door to our classroom. He looked to be unharmed, but I was still concerned. Some of his experiments sounded dangerous. He looked at me and grinned.

  “I’d just added another element into a compound I’d manufactured but, unfortunately, it ended up being unstable in that ratio, as well as incompatible. When the compound exploded, it knocked my breakfast bowl off the bench and most of the contents landed on me,” he said cheerfully. I was still frowning.

  “You eat breakfast in your lab?” I asked him. Eating around things that were exploding didn’t sound very hygienic.

  “Not this morning. I think that was yesterday’s breakfast. I can’t be sure. I don’t record any data about breakfast cereal,” he said seriously. I shook my head and laughed.

  “Well, at least do up your shirt button so it’s
less noticeable that you don’t have your tie,” I said, and I reached out to fastened his button for him.

  He grinned before he looked past me.

  “Hey man, are you lost?” he said, and I turned around to find Morgan standing behind us in the middle of the hallway. He had a timetable in his hand, but he wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at me with an unreadable expression on his face, and I glanced at Josh before I looked back at Morgan defiantly. It was probably better that he found out sooner, rather than later, that I’d made a friend here.

  “No, this is the room right here, but thanks anyway,” said Morgan politely, in his perfect Synthetic Era language. He glanced at his timetable again before he looked from Josh back to me. “I probably should have told you we’re taking the same classes,” he said to me dryly, before he walked past me into the classroom.

  “You two know each other?” Josh asked me in surprise. I nodded slowly as I watched Morgan disappear through the door.

  “He’s my neighbour,” I said, and I followed Josh into the classroom to find Morgan was already seated. He’d found a seat in the middle of the room and I followed Josh to the back of the classroom and sat down beside him.

  I watched Morgan take out his paper bound books and a chemical filled pen, and I saw the girl who sat beside him lean over towards him. She spoke to him and, when Morgan answered her, he smiled. I gritted my teeth. Didn’t he know we weren’t supposed to make friends with locals? I folded my arms as he said something else to the girl, causing her to laugh out loud.

  “Sorry?” I said absently. I realised Josh was speaking to me and I turned to him as the teacher walked into the room.

  “I said, why is he starting school here this close to the end of term? Did he get expelled from his last school?” Josh asked me quietly.

  “Probably,” I said. I had no idea what being expelled meant, but it didn’t sound good. I watched Morgan speak to the local girl once again.

  “Impressive,” said Josh, as he watched Morgan speak to the girl too. I wasn’t quite sure what it was Josh was impressed by, but I only pretended to listen as the tutor at the front of the room started to speak. And, more than once, I tapped my chemical filled pen impatiently against my paper book while I waited for the class to come to an end.

  As soon as the class was over, I picked up my books as hastily as I could, and I managed to time my exit so I met Morgan at the door on his way out of the room.

  “I’ll show you to our next class if you like,” I offered, and he looked at me carefully.

  “Okay,” he said, and I tried not to look too pleased as I walked with him along the hall.

  “Hey man; it’s Josh. Livia said you live next door to her.”

  Josh had appeared beside us and Morgan glanced at me. I looked back at him innocently and he pressed his lips together.

  “Morgan,” he said to Josh reluctantly, and Josh grinned and told us he’d see us at lunch before he hurried past us to a different class. Morgan watched him go and frowned.

  “Do you regularly make friends with the locals?” he asked me, when Josh was gone.

  “No, not usually; do you?” I asked him bluntly, and he looked at me carefully again.

  “Not unless I have to,” he said dryly.

  I wanted to ask him why he’d spoken to the girl in our previous class, if that was the case….but, I didn’t. I decided to change the subject instead.

  I told him about the tutor of the next class and I suggested we sit at the back of the room because she was known for asking anyone who sat in the front row to answer random questions without warning………

  By the end of the day, Morgan had made friends with Josh too. He’d had to. Josh kept turning up beside me between classes and he sat with us at lunch as well. Morgan was suspicious of Josh as first, and he made that obvious, but Josh was stoically cheerful in any situation and his enthusiasm was universally infectious. It wasn’t long before Morgan was asking him about his experiments, and soon, Josh was telling him he thought there could definitely be life on other planets. When I came back from the girl’s bathroom though, and found Morgan and Josh laughing together while they looked at Josh’s computer, I wondered whether it had been a good idea to introduce them after all. They stifled their laughter quickly as soon as I sat down, and when Josh closed his computer and told me to hurry up and finish eating because he was hoping to leave the lunch room by the weekend, I looked at them both suspiciously and frowned. They were still trying not to laugh.

  Unfortunately, because we’d been sitting with Josh, Morgan had been forced to eat his lunch quickly too. He knew it would look suspicious if we both ate in Aldirite style, so he’d had to bolt down his food in the same manner Josh did, and he wasn’t very happy about it. He complained to me after lunch that it was my fault he had indigestion and I looked at him apologetically and smiled nicely as I reminded him he only had to attend this school for a few days.

  Morgan blended into the Synthetic Era school perfectly. Not only did he add just the right amount of local phrases to his perfectly accented Synthetic Era language, but he matched his pace to the students around him too. More than once, I had to almost run to keep up with him as I showed him the way to the rest of our classes. After that first class of the day though, Morgan didn’t speak to any more of the local girls. He spoke only to me and to Josh, and I didn’t stop to think too much about why I was very pleased about that.

  After school, Morgan walked home with me at a more Aldirite pace and, on the way, he asked me if I’d told Josh I wasn’t coming back to school after the holidays. I shook my head, but I didn’t want to talk about Josh. Instead, I asked Morgan if he’d heard anything about what we’d be doing at our quest finals orientation this weekend. He nodded.

  “About a turn ago, when I was still in group training, our group was in the Discovery Era on a physical challenge climbing exercise. We were half way up the mountain when we came across a team of questers gathering mountain variety textile seeds for sewing in Aldiris in the spring. It looked like boring, painstaking work, so the questers were happy to take a break and talk to us. I asked them about quest finals, and one of the questers told me the orientation is designed to introduce us to our team and to our Quest master or mistress. He said, on our orientation weekend, we’ll be sent to a Quest house which will be the base where we’ll live between challenges, and where we’ll keep our weapons and packs,” said Morgan, and I felt a tremor of excitement at his words. Orientation was only a day away now.

  “What kind of quests do you want to be included in?” I asked Morgan curiously.

  “Anything that doesn’t require the individual gathering of hundreds of tiny seeds,” he said with feeling, before he asked me which quests I wanted to join.

  “Discovery,” I said straight away, and Morgan smiled and nodded slowly. He didn’t look surprised, as most of my tutors had, when I’d told them of my desire.

  It took no time at all this afternoon to reach my front gate, and it was too soon when I wished Morgan ‘good set’ and left him, reluctantly, to go into my house.

  Mirren wasn’t home and I paused for a moment and leant against the back of the front door. Mirren’s rooms were on this level to my left and, to my right, was an open plan area popular in the house designs of this time segment. I walked through it and passed the dining table and an open kitchen before heading up the stairs to my rooms.

  I’d taken off my school blazer and washed my face and hands under the running water taps in my bathroom before I heard the sound. Today, I knew it was the sound of a ball hitting the back wall of the house next door. The repetitive, dull thud was the same sound I’d heard yesterday, and I had to control myself so I didn’t give in to temptation and glance out the window. Obviously, the glare from the afternoon sun didn’t render me invisible, and I didn’t intend to embarrass myself again. I sat on the end of my bed instead and I folded my arms restlessly while the ball continued to hit the back of Morgan’s house with rhythmical consiste
ntly. When the ball hit my window pane instead of the wall though, I got such a fright, it felt like my heart stopped. The loud bang was enough to rattle the pane in its frame, and I was surprised the thin layer of glass didn’t shatter with the impact. I stood up and went straight to my window with my arms still folded. What on earth was he doing?

  Morgan stood in his back garden and he was grinning up at me. He still wore his uniform, but he’d removed his school blazer and tie, and he’d rolled up his shirt sleeves. He started making hand signals to me, and he held the ball in his hand as he gestured to me. I frowned. He wanted me to come down to join him in his garden, and when I leant my hands against the window sill, he pointed towards the street and beckoned to me again.

  I was scheduled to have a tutoring session soon and I wondered what he was supposed to be doing right now. I was pretty sure playing games in the back garden didn’t usually feature in a quester’s demanding schedule.

  I pointed to the street too and left my window to run downstairs. Of course, I was going next door, despite my approaching tutoring session, but I told myself I was going because I needed to spend as much time as possible with my new partner. It was important for us to get to know each other in the short time we had left before the finals.

  Morgan was waiting at his front gate when I opened mine, and he grinned at me as he let me into his house. I smiled at him too and followed him into his back garden. There was a wrought iron chair by the back door and we walked past it to stand on a square patch of grass. Morgan immediately pointed to markings in the bricks on the back wall of his house but, when he started to tell me where certain scoring zones ended and began, I was forced to interrupt him.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve never played this game before,” I said awkwardly. Morgan stopped mid-sentence and stared at me in surprise.

  “Never?” he asked me in astonishment, and I shook my head apologetically. He looked at me for a moment. “Are you sure you’re from Aldiris?” he asked me, and he was teasing me now; I could tell. I smiled apologetically and he looked at the ball in his hand.