Happenstance Found (Books of Umber #1)
Page 22
“Happenstance, the only thing that matters is this: Are you willing to try? As your skills arise, will you master them? Will you become everything you are meant to be? You can trust me to help you however I can—it will be you and me together. But will you try?”
Hap didn’t say anything for a long time. With his hands over his face, he thought about what Umber was asking him to do. It sounded like madness. And if he hadn’t just seen the astonishing machine, he wouldn’t have believed the existence of another world was even possible.
The question awed and frightened him. He wished the idea of it would simply go away. But he knew that ideas could never do such a thing. It was as Umber had said many days before: Once an idea is out and about, it can’t be called back, silenced, or erased. You can’t contain it, any more than you could put the head of a dandelion back together after the wind has scattered its seeds.
Hap thought about his life. It may have been brief, but it was surely eventful. Balfour was right when he’d said that memory is like a book. Already, Hap’s existence bound many pages. Now those pages added up to something: an identity. I was nobody when it started, but I’m somebody now, Hap realized, and his heart swelled to think of it.
He flipped back to the first pages of his remembrance, when he became conscious in an underground city. Strangers found him. But they weren’t strangers anymore. They had helped one another, saved one another. There were words for such people, he knew, and words rich with meaning sprang into his mind:
Family. Friends.
He heard Umber take a breath, and remembered the question: Will you try? He slid his hands down to his chin, revealing his bright green eyes.
A billion lives. A world in jeopardy. It was a flawed and crazy world, a civilization with a capacity for astonishing achievements and cruel destruction. But it was a place that Lord Umber—his friend Umber—thought was worth saving.
Will you try?
What else could he say?