by Natalie Reid
“Shoot.”
He gulped and looked to the far wall. “You see that shadow spider?”
Jessie let her eyes flick to it briefly before returning her gaze to Tom. “It’s a little dimmer now, but yeah.”
He leaned forward, quicker at first, but then slowed as he lined up their faces. Jessie felt like fast-melting snow as he kissed her, warm and satisfied, with nothing else in the world but her and the man that held the power of the sun.
“And now,” he breathed out heavy as he pulled away.
Jessie didn’t feel like looking at anything except for his face, but she obliged. “It’s just you in this room with me.”
He smiled, lovingly stroking the line of her hair. “I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”
She closed her eyes and was about to rest her forehead against his, when suddenly a piercing scream filled the house. Jessie’s eyes flew open, and she was up to her feet in an instant. That scream had come from Nel.
Both of them bounded down the hallway towards the barracks. Everyone else was gathering there as well, having heard the scream. Peaking inside the room, she found Nel kneeling on the ground, crying. The pine tree was lying discarded on the floor in front of her, the water from its base spilling out onto the floor like a pool of blood. Ritter stood in the corner of the room, holding a broken branch of the tree like a smoking gun.
“He…” Nel warbled through her crying. She pointed over at Ritter, a slender, shaking finger. “He tried to kill it!”
“Nel, sweetheart.” Ritter rushed over to her and kneeled at her side. “I swear to the skies that isn’t what happened!”
She shifted so that her face was turned away. Ritter looked desperate as he turned to the crowd gathered above.
“I was just going to dump out the old water and put some fresh in. But it fell when I was going to pick it up.” He looked to his daughter. “I swear, I was not trying to hurt your tree.”
Nel kept her back to her father as she dug her hand inside the pocket of her skirt. When she pulled it out, she was holding a small vial of Harebells. They couldn’t have been the ones that Ritter had given Jessie to give to her. Those had broken. Nel must have had them from before she had been taken by the Resistance. She didn’t know that she had kept them with her all this time.
Clenching them in her fist, she thrust it in front of Ritter. “Take them! I don’t want them!”
Ritter stared at the Harebells, a clear expression of devastation set in his features.
“Please Nel. I can make it right. It’s still fine.”
He reached out for the tree, attempting to stand it upright, but Nel shouted out, “No! Don’t touch it!”
Ritter instantly dropped it, a small shower of pine needles falling to the ground. Nel dropped the bottle of Harebells, discarding it to the floor, and rushed out of the room. Jessie briefly glanced at Ritter, feeling something close to pity for the man, before going after Nel.
Though it took her only a few minutes to cheer the young girl up again, Jessie knew that it would take a lot more than some comforting words and a few silly faces to repair her relationship with her father. They had been reunited for nearly a month now, and things between them were certainly not getting better. Jessie wasn’t sure if Ritter even deserved a second chance with her. Yet one fact she couldn’t ignore; it wasn’t the fallen tree that had made Nel so upset, it was her father. And if he held that much power over her, then he had to mean something to her still.
That night at dinner, Nel refused to eat with the others, instead choosing to take a little bread to the barracks and eat with the door closed. At the dinner table, Ritter hardly touched his food, despite having worked hard on their ship that day with Carver and Denneck. Jessie found herself growing hungry just looking at him. Behind his shoulder, a shadow began to creep up, like a tangling vine of ivy. It draped over his arms, and Jessie wondered if it had been there for some time. Was the Black trying to take him? Did Ritter even realize it was there?
At the head of the table, Carver put his fork down, drawing everyone’s attention. “Denneck and I will be heading back to the air-base tonight. Now that the ship’s pretty much finished, we should make the effort to be present in our duties before we implement our plan. We probably won’t return until the 23rd. Hopefully, by that night, we’ll be ready to infiltrate The Fulcrum.”
Ritter nodded blankly at his food. “The 23rd is a good night to go.”
Jessie felt her throat going dry at this news. “So you’ll be gone the whole day tomorrow?” she asked Carver, sounding very much like a young Potentian.
He gave a stiff nod of his head.
“Both of us are really behind on a lot of our duties,” Denneck offered, seeing Jessie’s stricken face. “It would be best if we stayed.”
Jessie nodded but sunk further down in her chair. Her eyes swam on her plate, dark little worms charging up over the side and leaching onto her food. She didn’t know why it should bother her so much. Unlike Nel, she didn’t care one way or the other for her father. He didn’t mean anything. She had never really known him, never really cherished him like Nel had once cherished Ritter. But…tomorrow was her birthday. If Carver was going to at least try and connect with her, she thought he would have done it then. Yet all he was doing was running away again. The worst part was that she didn’t know why. Why didn’t he want her as a daughter?
* * *
Katherine blindly stumbled up the attic steps, groping for anything inside that would help give her leverage up. She could feel the Black on the stairs below her, watching in amusement at her mad scrambling. Clawing herself over the lip of the entryway, she grabbed the attic door and slammed it shut.
Moonlight streamed in through the rafter beams. Dust and white powder drifted in the light, and behind, the shadow stood, not dissuaded from its final prize. No door would keep it out, no winding staircase could save her.
Katherine shook as she got to her feet. She forced herself to ignore the shadow, ignore how it cocked its head from side to side as if trying to figure out what she was doing.
“Where are you?” she whispered, looking up at the maze of light and rafters.
Slipping her hand inside her tattered dress pocket, she came away with a small scrap of bread. She threw it gently to the corner of the room and stared up at the sloping ceiling for any sign of movement.
“Please,” she begged. “I just want to see you.”
The shadow moved, its shoulders shaking in laughter.
“Please! Just once more!”
She threw out another scrap of bread, but the rafters were still. They no longer housed the sweet-singing red bird that her son admired so much. The only thing stirred into motion was the creeping Bandit in the corner, giddy with elation at the futile efforts of a broken woman.
Chapter 12
So Much to be Consoled
As the sun rose that morning, Jessie was waiting outside for it. She had awoken extra early so that, when the sun finally surfaced behind the rocky guardians in the distance, she faced it knowing exactly what day it was. It was December 22nd, and it had been exactly ten years since she had seen her mother.
Returning back to the cabin, she saw that the fires in the fireplaces had gone out. Carver and Denneck weren’t there to keep them going. The thought somehow made her feel heavier. She knew that it was necessary that they maintain a presence up at the air-base, but she couldn’t shake the irrational hope that Carver might have stayed down for her birthday. Or at the very least, acknowledged it in some way. He hadn’t made any effort to speak with her, to give her an explanation as to why he left her and her mother alone. For some reason, she thought that might have changed on her birthday.
She tried to put those heavy thoughts out of her mind as she walked into the kitchen. Before anyone else woke up, she got to work preparing the breakfast, keeping it hot, and starting the fires. There were clouds outside, meaning that it might snow later on, so she made a trip to the shed to brin
g more wood inside in case they couldn’t go out later.
When she came back in, she was surprised to find Griffin sitting at the kitchen table. His dark hair stuck out in all directions, and his shirt was ruffled with sleep.
“You’re up early,” she commented, laying the wood on the ground.
He yawned into his hand. “Yeah. I have a lot on my mind.”
Jessie went to the stove and poured him a bowl of hot cereal. Placing it in front of him, she asked, “You want to talk about it?”
He smiled down at the food. “I guess that’s what cousins do. Make you breakfast and listen to your troubles.”
“Only the cool ones,” she joked, taking a seat across from him.
Griffin laughed, but a blank stare soon returned to his face. “I had a talk with your dad before he left yesterday. I had asked him to tell me about my dad, how he…you know.” He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “I guess you and me aren’t that different from each other. Both of our parents worked for the government. Both of them were punished for having a child. I just…” He lifted his head to look up at her. “I had lived for so long hearing another story. I thought his death had been an accident. Then I find out that it’s… that it’s my fault he’s…”
“Griffin, that’s not true.”
He sniffed and cradled the bowl of cereal in his hands. “Yeah, that’s what your dad said. He told me that my dad knew what he was getting into. That he had wanted a son more than anything. He even gave me a book that my dad had left for me.”
“Carver did that?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, stirring his spoon around his bowl. “I was surprised too. Apparently your dad’s not as tough as nails under there.” He shrugged and took a bite. “But what am I saying? You must already know that.”
Jessie’s eyes moved to the chair that Carver normally sat at. She couldn’t believe that he had shared all that with Griffin when he never even made the effort to try and talk with her. She was his daughter, and aside from a few commands, he had hardly said a word to her.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Griffin said, swallowing down a mouthful of cereal. “Why do you call him Carver? Is it a military thing? Were you not allowed to call him dad or something?”
She stared blankly at the chair as she answered in a dazed voice, “I guess you could say that.”
Soon the rest of them joined them for breakfast, and she sat in silence as she listened to Harper recounting a particularly harrowing dream about scaling up Division Bank while it was being attacked by Bandits. Several times Jessie caught Tom’s gaze, and she felt fainter and happier for having done so. Then her eyes would drift to Carver’s empty seat, and she would feel disheartened again.
When breakfast was finished, they all went about their duties like it was any other day. However, they could all feel that the time for going up to The Fulcrum was drawing nearer and nearer with the December 25th cut-off date fast approaching. If they didn’t go before then, the ship would change positions, and they would have no clue where to find it again.
Jessie made sure to stay busy all throughout the day, working on the finishing touches to the ship and trying to search her brain for any hint of the codes to the Bank of Social Numbers. At one point she thought she might have remembered the first number, but it was virtually useless without the others.
Tom sought her out a few times, bringing her a snack to eat while she was working, or at one point stealing a kiss from behind the wing of the ship when Ritter had turned away. A strange sort of happiness kept her feelings at bay, but when the sun began to descend in the sky, she grew charged and anxious. She told herself that it was stupid, that she was being selfish for wanting Carver to take the risk to come down here for her birthday. Yet, as the minutes ticked by and she stared out at the darkening skyline for any sight of their ship, disappointment weighed down on her like a suffocating blanket of thick smoke.
The sound of footsteps crunched in the snow from behind her post outside, and Ritter’s smug voice called out, “You keeping a look out for daddy?”
Her shoulders slumped, and she glanced back at him.
“He’s not coming, is he?” he asked, casually leaning against a tree.
She rested against the trunk of a nearby tree as well and ran her hands down her tired face.
“I know what today is, you know,” he stated, tearing a chunk of bark off the tree behind him. “It’s a red-letter day when you get a call that a newly evolved human just broke out of the Bank of Social Numbers.”
He ripped the bark in half and let it fall to the floor. She stared at it, feeling her chest tighten and her hands clench.
“And I thought I was bad,” he commented, folding his arms over his chest. He shook his head and whistled, causing a thin stream of crystalized air to escape from his mouth like a well-aimed bullet. “But Carver! Now there’s the racking father of the year for you!”
“Would you stop using that word!” Jessie exclaimed, gripping her head in her hands. She turned to him in anger. “You don’t know a thing about what it means! You don’t know the fear that goes behind it! You…you use it when you stub your toe or drop a pen, or whenever you just plain feel like it! You treat it like it’s a trivial thing! A cool word for you to curse at people with and feel tough. Well it’s not alright! It’s the single most worst word that we as humans have ever had to come up with. And you’re using it just to get a rise out of people!”
She turned from him and leaned back on the tree. Tilting her forehead up to the darkening sky, she concentrated on the rise and fall of her chest. When she finally looked back to where he stood, she was surprised to see him looking sullenly out at their ship through the trees.
She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth before she called out quietly, “I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”
“You apologizing?” he asked, stuffing his hands in his pockets and throwing her a skeptical look.
“No.” She turned her head away and added, “But it’s not you that I’m mad at.”
It was something about the date, she decided. The symbol of the birthday seemed so important, yet it was really nothing more than another day. She had realized that when each birthday she wished for her mother to come back or her father to come find her, and each birthday she was still without a family. This year wasn’t going to be any different, and she wished the day would end so she would stop feeling sorry for herself.
“The ship look right to you?” she asked Ritter with a flick of her head, trying to get her mind on something else.
“It’s as good as we can make it, I guess,” he mumbled.
She kicked at the snow underneath her, and cleared a dry patch for her to place her feet.
“Think it’ll fool th—”
“Don’t move!” he suddenly exclaimed.
She froze and looked at him suspiciously. “What is it?”
He walked over to her and crouched down. Close to the heel of her boot, sticking up between two roots of the pine tree, was a red flower. It had blossoms running up its thick stem that looked sturdy enough to survive the early winter cold. She stepped to the side as Ritter gently cleared the snow around it and made sure it hadn’t been damaged in any way. It was a strange sight to see a man so ruthless giving this much care to a flower. She felt a pang of pity in her chest as she watched him. Though he was incredibly difficult to live with, Ritter was teaching her that there was never just one side to someone, no matter how hard it was to believe.
“You should show her,” she told him once he stood back up and brushed the snow away from his knees.
“She wouldn’t come,” he muttered, giving his head a shake.
She jammed her hands in her pockets. “Yeah, well I’m sick of seeing you mope around all the time. I’m getting her.”
Jessie left him by the tree and returned a few moments later with Nel gripping tightly to her hand. She had told her to come see something, but when Nel found that Ritter was also outside, her hand
gripped more tightly onto Jessie’s.
“It’s okay,” she whispered to her. “Come see what your dad found.”
Ritter backed up a few paces as they came towards the tree with the red flower in its roots. When Nel saw it, she forgot all about her fear of her father and let go of Jessie’s hand to bend down and inspect it. Her small hand came up to gently poke one of the blossoms. Her blue eyes were wide at the spectacle of it.
“I… I found it buried in the snow,” Ritter said, carefully watching his daughter’s expression as he spoke. “It was protected by the roots of the tree. I think that’s why it survived this long.”
Nel’s eyes lifted to meet her father’s for a brief moment before hurrying back down towards the flower. “It’s beautiful,” she said, stroking one of the blossoms with a finger. “What’s it called?”
For a moment, Jessie thought she had been asking her, but Ritter surprised her by saying, “That’s called an Ice Plant. It was one of the sturdiest flowers even before the Contamination. They were always the first to appear at the end of winter, and the last to go in autumn.”
Jessie stared at Ritter in shock as he said this. He must have gotten his hands on a book about flowers in order to impress his daughter. She could even see him, sitting down with Nel when she was still a Potentian, flipping through the pages of the book and pointing to pictures of flowers. It was something that Sarah used to do with her on a book about birds.
Ritter bent down to squat a few feet away from Nel. Her eyes remained on the flower, but her shoulders stiffened for a moment, indicating that she knew he was there. However, the presence of the flower was enough to put her at ease, and a moment later she relaxed and continued her admiration of it.
A sinking feeling came over Jessie as she watched the exchange between father and daughter. In her mind she told herself that her own father was a good person; that Carver was stiff and silent and that was just his way. But having witnessed everything Ritter went through to see his daughter, watching him try so hard just to talk with her, Jessie’s resolve began to slip. She used to think that Ritter was the worst kind of man there was, yet here he was, trying so much harder to be a father than her own was.