by Ted Sanders
Suddenly she whipped her head around, spotting Joshua. Her expression didn’t change. “Greetings,” she said.
“What are you doing?”
She looked down at Arthur. She flapped her arms again, going nowhere. The raven cocked his head at her. “Just showing him how it’s done. You know.”
Arthur plucked at the sheets and snapped his bill at Neptune. He was probably missing April. Neptune was fine—as far as he knew—but she was no April. Did Neptune know to give him dog food, or beef jerky? Not knowing the answer made Joshua feel like he might cry.
“Um, hello?” Neptune said. “Is the plan to stand there? Because let’s not.”
Joshua went in shyly, the Laithe drifting in after him. Arthur croaked at him in a friendly way, fluffing his feathers.
“To what do I owe this . . . visit?” said Neptune.
“I don’t know.”
“You just randomly wandered over here.”
“Well, I was randomly wandering, and then I guess it stopped being random when I heard you talking to Arthur.”
“I see. You weren’t really going toward anything, then. You must have been going away from something.”
“I guess.”
Neptune eyed the Laithe. “Is it your new little friend here?”
Joshua bowed his head, ashamed.
“It is, isn’t it?” Neptune teased.
“Well, I thought I wanted to be alone with the Laithe, but then when I was alone with it, I . . .” He shrugged.
“Oh, I see. Shotgun wedding. Buyer’s remorse.”
“I don’t know what those things are.”
“Lots of doubt and awkwardness between the two of you. Long silences over dinner, that sort of thing. It’s tragic, really.”
Joshua frowned at her. Her eyes were wide open and there was no expression on her face at all. “I think you’re making a joke,” he said.
“I think I am too. I appreciate you noticing.”
“Are you mad at me?”
Now her face did change. She sighed. She produced a piece of dog food from somewhere and slipped it to Arthur. He gulped it down. “Not at you,” she said. “Not really. I’m mad at Isabel. I’m a little mad at Brian. I’m worried about Gabriel—and the others, of course.”
Joshua burst into a flood of tears.
“Oh, god,” said Neptune, waving her hands. “Oh, no. Let’s not do that.”
But Joshua couldn’t stop. She was worried. Everyone was worried, and Joshua was supposed to fix it.
“Hey, come on.” Neptune floated over to him and patted him awkwardly on the back. “Honestly, if you start crying, then I’m gonna start leaving, and soon I’ll be complaining about you behind your back, and that’s how I get my reputation for being heartless.”
Joshua laughed. Snot came out his nose. “You’re not heartless,” he said as he wiped it away. “You love Gabriel.”
“Wow. Still working on your filters, I see.” She scratched her forehead, maybe to hide her reddening cheeks, and then she gave up and shrugged. “I was the same way when I was a kid.”
He sniffled and looked up at her. “You used to be a kid?”
She narrowed her eyes. “I think you’re making a joke.”
“I think I am too.”
She smiled. “I am not going to ask you why you started crying just now, because I’m afraid you’ll start crying again.”
Joshua understood that this was her way of asking. And it was maybe the only way she could have asked that didn’t make him want to cry. He went over to the bed and flopped down on it without asking, which maybe was rude. The Laithe came with him. Arthur flapped his big wings and rose into the air briefly as it came near, but then settled again.
“The others are trapped,” Joshua said into the sheets. “April and Gabriel and Horace and Chloe. And I’m supposed to save them. With the Laithe.”
He expected Neptune to feel bad for him, but instead she just said, “That’s the general idea, yeah.”
“But when I try, I just . . .” He rolled over. He didn’t know how to describe the smudges he’d seen. “It’s just not working right.”
Neptune leaned back, reclining in midair, her long hair and her cloak dangling to the ground. She looked like a magic trick. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “You can open portals already. Just open a portal and bring them back.”
Joshua was getting angry. “Okay, well, what’s the big deal for you? Just fly to the moon already. I can open a portal fine, but if I can’t find the others it doesn’t matter.”
“Does Mr. Meister seem to think you can find them?”
“Yes.”
“Then you can. He’s the Chief Taxonomer. He’s sees things we don’t.”
“Maybe he wants to do it for me, then.”
“You know he doesn’t. And can’t.” Neptune just hung there awhile, then rolled over to look at him. “This is all pretty new for you, I guess. This Keeper business.”
“Yes.”
“But I see you’ve officially been made a member.” She pointed to Joshua’s chest. He looked down at the jithandra that hung there, a long, azure blue crystal in mounted in a metal flower. He’d nearly forgotten. Brian, unable to sleep after their return from the meadow, had busied himself all morning making jithandras for Joshua and April. All the Wardens had one of the strange crystals, in their own particular colors according to their talents—red for Chloe, purple for Neptune, silver for Gabriel. April’s, fittingly, was a beautiful forest green. Tears started to well up again as Joshua wondered if she’d ever see it.
“What do your parents think about all this?” Neptune asked.
Joshua froze, all thoughts of April swept aside. It was the first time anyone had asked him about his parents, besides Isabel. “They don’t know. I mean, I don’t even have a dad.”
“Everyone has a dad, technically.” Neptune paused and frowned. “Don’t they?”
“I mean I don’t know my dad. And my mom has . . . problems. I lived with a foster family.”
Neptune just looked at him warily.
“They didn’t pay very much attention to me,” Joshua went on. “I spent a lot of time at the library.”
“Here in Chicago?”
“Minneapolis.”
“And you ran away?”
“Some Mordin came to the house. A bunch of times. They talked to me. They wanted me to come with them. They did something to my foster parents, I think. Made them sick or something.” The memories were hazy, memories he didn’t really want to have. Neptune mumbled something—“Malkund,” she said. Joshua didn’t ask what she meant.
“Anyway, I didn’t really know them very well. But then one day Isabel was there. She told me what I was.” He glanced at the Laithe. “Or I guess she told me what I would be someday. A Keeper. She took me away.”
Neptune was staring at him so hard he thought her big eyes would pop out. “Have you told Mr. Meister this story?” she demanded.
“No.”
“I’ve never heard of that happening before. I think you must have been putting off pretty big sparks. It means you were really ripe for the Find. Overripe, probably.”
“Okay.”
“That’s good. That’s good for you and the Laithe.” She dug around in her mouth with her tongue thoughtfully for a minute, and then stretched a long leg to the floor. She pushed herself toward the bed. She drifted closer, digging around in her pocket as she came. “Let me show you something.”
She reached the bed and dropped down onto it. Arthur rasped and lifted off, fluttering heavily over to the table. He began to strut back and forth, clucking softly to himself.
Neptune held out her palm, revealing a shiny black stone about the size of her thumb. It looked sort of like a dinosaur tooth, but it was chiseled smooth on all sides. Somehow Joshua knew, just by looking at it, that it was Tan’ji. “This is the Devlin tourminda,” Neptune said. “That’s my last name. Devlin, not tourminda.”
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�Why is it named after you?”
“I’m a legacy. That means it’s been in my family for a long time. My great-grandfather was its last Keeper. I took over after he died. I was younger than you.”
A legacy. Joshua didn’t even know that was possible. “So, they just gave it to you?”
“No, I had to have a proper Find. Mr. Meister arranged it. I was six, and I had only seen glimpses of the tourminda. He put out a bunch of similar-looking stones, but I went right to the real thing.” She held her Tan’ji up like a prize.
“And so . . . you already knew what it did. You didn’t have to figure it out.”
“That’s the point of my story. I knew what it did, yes, but I didn’t know how to make it do what it did. I was leaping around the yard, jumping off little things. I hurt myself a lot. Months later, I still couldn’t do it. Not a hover, not even a slow fall, nothing.”
“Did someone finally teach you?”
“Of course not. If someone teaches you too much, you get stuck. And things are never quite right.”
“How did you learn, then?”
“My dad is pretty old-fashioned. He took me to the Aon Center—that’s a skyscraper, used to be the old Standard Oil building.”
“Big Stan,” said Joshua. “I know what it is.”
“Of course you do. You know what it looks like, then—a thousand feet high, straight up and down. Well, my dad had a friend who could get us out on the roof of Big Stan. We went up there with the tourminda one night, and . . .” With a thrust of one leg, she launched herself high into the air, then began to drift slowly back down. “My dad threw me off.”
Joshua’s mouth fell open. “He threw you . . . But you could have died!”
“Could’ve. Didn’t. Instead I learned the one thing I hadn’t been able to figure out on my own. I can’t wish for the tourminda to work. I have to know it will work.”
“But what if you hadn’t figured it out?”
“Then splat. Neptune sauce. But I actually only fell about a hundred feet. I wasn’t even afraid. I still remember what my dad said to me right before he threw me off. He said, ‘There won’t be any regrets, and no apologies either. I’ll see you in a minute.’ And as I was falling, I knew. I just knew. And then I floated.”
Joshua couldn’t even begin to imagine it. “That’s not a good story.”
“Yes it is. But anyway, it’s not the story that matters. It’s the moral.”
“What’s the moral?”
She pointed at the Laithe. “You have to need it to work. You have to know it will work. And then it will work.”
“But there are these smudges, and—”
“I don’t want the details. I’m giving you general advice about being a Keeper, not about the Laithe. But if something seems wrong, you need to ask yourself: is it a bug or a feature?”
“I don’t understand those words.”
“What I’m saying is, believe that your Tan’ji works for you, even when it seems like it’s not. For example?” She closed her eyes. She pointed at him. “Get up. Move around the room.”
“Why?”
“For example, I said. Move. Quietly.”
Joshua slid off the bed. He moved quietly away. Neptune’s finger followed him as he went several steps left, and then back right.
“How are you doing that?”
She opened her eyes. “My secondary power, unique to the Devlin tourminda. I can sense the gravity of objects around me. It even works in the humour. But when I first started becoming aware of this power, I thought I was going to puke.”
“Why?”
She patted her belly. “Because I feel it here. It’s like car sickness. But back in the day, I just told myself to believe it was something working, not something going wrong. And it was.”
The Laithe floated patiently. Joshua could feel it waiting for him, slow and blue and breathing. Somewhere on that tiny earth, April and the others were waiting too.
“If I believe it will work, it will work,” he said. “You promise?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t throw you off a building, but how wrong could I be?”
“I’m going to try, then.”
“So try. Do you want privacy?”
“No,” said Joshua. Neptune was comforting. She was honest. He liked honest. “But don’t talk to me.”
“No promises there either. I’m a talker. I’ll try not to be judgy.”
Joshua nodded, and bent over the Laithe. He wasn’t surprised at all to discover that it was already centered where he needed it to go—where he needed to be himself, right over northern Illinois. That was what the Laithe did. He zoomed in quickly, zeroing in on April’s town. Over on the table, Arthur let out a series of sweet trills. They sounded like encouragement.
In no time at all, the meadow loomed, and April’s house, too. Joshua almost cried out. The smudges were everywhere—little black worms crawling over his view, a dozen of them. He almost pulled away, but stopped himself. He told himself the Laithe was working. He was its Keeper, and he was doing it right.
Still the worms didn’t disappear.
He went in closer. Not away from the smudges, but toward them. There were more of them over April’s house. As he zoomed in, the collapsed barn a half mile away slid over the horizon, out of sight. The question he’d asked Mr. Meister earlier came back to him.
“How does the Laithe know?” he whispered again now.
“How does it know what?” Neptune asked.
“Everything,” said Joshua.
She scoffed. “Nobody knows everything.”
“It knows things that happened in the meadow. The barn collapsed in real life, and it’s collapsed on the Laithe too.”
“Whoa. Can it see cars moving? What about people?”
“No, no people. Maybe the Laithe can’t—”
“The Laithe is alive,” Mr. Meister had said. “As we know it, as we walk it, as we breathe it.”
Joshua was right above April’s house now, looking down. The black trails were everywhere, maybe eight or ten altogether. Some were shorter, moving slow. Some longer, faster. A few, he saw now, were simply dots—barely moving at all. He sucked in a deep breath. The Laithe was working. He knew it worked. He understood these smoking black spots.
The Riven.
He came in closer. They had surrounded the house. There was only one reason to do a thing like that.
And then he saw them. Two little dots like water stains on paper, inside the house.
One silver.
One green.
“People,” he said to Neptune, coming in closer still with the Laithe. “But not just any people.”
“What are you saying? What people?”
Joshua went all the way to the ground, to the driveway at the front of the house. He would open a portal. He would see what he could see. And maybe it would be enough. He looked up at Neptune, fear and thrill filling him. The silver dot and the green.
“Keepers,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sharks Circling
IT WAS NOON, AND THE HOUSE WAS UNDER SIEGE. THE STRANGEST siege imaginable. April stood at her bedroom window with Gabriel, peering out into the woods. She could have seen—and smelled and heard—much more by using the vine, but she didn’t dare do that now.
The Riven were here.
Or almost here, anyway.
It was Isabel who’d spotted the first one, just before dawn, a Mordin striding through the woods on the south side of the house, twenty yards back from the property line. It had been searching, sniffing the air. April had run quietly out onto the back porch, startling Baron out of a nap and shooing him inside. They couldn’t afford to have the dog barking now. Not with the leestone’s powers hanging by a thread.
Because the leestone was working, but not as well as they had hoped. As Gabriel had immediately pointed out, the Mordin in the woods this morning had seemed unaware that the house was less than a hundred feet away. Something had drawn it near, but
it couldn’t quite find the place. The Mordin had wandered off blindly. April hoped that would be the end of it.
But it wasn’t.
Twenty minutes later, another Mordin, on the north side. And ten minutes after that, a pair of them, pausing in the corner of the backyard, looking right past the house with no recognition at all. They’d wandered off, and not long after that, she and Gabriel and Isabel had heard the rumble of the golem, somewhere up along April’s long driveway, moving briefly closer before sliding away. All morning it had gone on like this, giving them no chance to slip away.
“Explain to me again how a leestone works?” April whispered to Gabriel now. “Is the house invisible?”
“No, not invisible. A leestone absorbs unwanted attention. The Mordin may see the house, but the house won’t have any meaning. It won’t register, won’t seem any more important than a tree or a rock.”
“So we’re safe, then,” said April.
Gabriel shrugged. “A leestone is not a guarantee. Certain things can break the bubble, draw unwanted attention. Using our Tan’ji, for example, or indicating to the Mordin that we’ve seen them.”
“But why aren’t they wandering away?”
“I don’t know. The Riven won’t normally hunt like this, especially during the day.”
“It is a bubble,” Isabel said suddenly.
April looked over at her. Isabel was gazing out the other window, nose against the glass. “What do you mean?” April asked.
“You didn’t give the Riven enough time to forget this place. Bad things happened to them here. They have memories of this house, memories connected to the both of you. They can’t help but come looking. But your leestone, under your pillow there—it’s very strong.”
April blushed. She wasn’t surprised that Isabel knew where the leestone was, but she was embarrassed she’d bothered trying to hide it, much less in such a childish place.
Isabel craned her neck, turning her eyes to the sky. “The leestone is pushing out blankness, insisting on it just as hard as the Riven are insisting there’s something to be found here. The two forces are pressing against each other. I can feel it. Like the skin of a bubble. It’s quivering. And the Riven are circling.”