Aerovoyant

by P L Tavormina

  Even in the cool of the room, Ephraim’s shirt clung to his back, a moist spot growing in the middle. A shudder passed through the man’s frame. He kept tapping the window like a drumbeat.

  “What did your supervisor say?”

  Ephraim whipped his head around and belted, “He said our only goal was to expand operations.” Ephraim pushed his hand against his face and sank down onto the sill. “And every action fit that framework perfectly. I left.”

  The anguish on the man’s face was plain, a page of his life laid out for Alphonse to see.

  “Al,” Ephraim said quietly, “where exactly are you from?”

  Alphonse exhaled heavily, the weight of Ephraim’s confession pulling him to answer. He could still refuse. He’d lose the job, wash a few bedpans, pay off his bill that way. But he planned to return to Sangal anyway, set things right with his mother, and there wasn’t much Ephraim could do that would change any of that.

  “I’m from Sangal.” His chest relaxed.

  Ephraim looked up. “Your mother’s a funder in Sangal?” The man’s expression lit with realization. He stood and crossed back to the chair. “There are only three women who raise political funds in any serious way in Sangal. One never married.”

  Miere. Ephraim was right.

  “One is the dearest soul a person could hope to meet.”

  I made a mistake.

  “And the third—your name is Najiwe.”

  Autore. He’s fast.

  “You . . . Al, Autore. You come from a long line of influence.” Shaking his head, Ephraim began to pace. “Good heavens. I had the grandson of Gustavo di Gust fixing our roof.”

  “Look, I had to get away from all that.”

  “Stavo di Gust’s grandson almost fell off my roof and died,” Ephraim said, again to himself.

  “I didn’t fall.” Alphonse dug his knuckles into his leg.

  “I hired Councilor di Gust’s grandson and paid him below minimum wage.”

  No, the foothills didn’t have a minimum wage, and Ephraim knew that. The roaring in Alphonse’s ears grew louder. It was too late to take the admission back.

  “And the reason he didn’t say anything, is because he didn’t need to know the wage.”

  Panicking, and at some level aware of the irrelevance of his words, he said, “Collimais doesn’t fall under provincial law.” It was a meaningless statement, noise, nothing. He’d just laid his entire history out for this man. His chest seized.

  “This changes everything. Your mother moves money for the industry. She supported di Vern. She’s lined up candidates for the courts.”

  “Drop it,” Alphonse managed, now pounding his fist onto his thigh. He was standing. “She’s not someone you’d want to work with. Everything . . . her deceit . . .” he pulled in a breath, a whisper of air.

  “I wouldn’t work with her.” A glint lit Ephraim’s eyes. “You left something very powerful back in Sangal. If you’re running from Ivette Najiwe, if you oppose her goals, then you certainly have a place here.”

  Alphonse straightened to his full height. “Don’t look at me like that. Drop it.”

  “You have leverage with her.” Then Ephraim smacked his forehead. “You have leverage with Councilor di Vern. We can craft your words, tell you what to say. You can shift his votes!”

  Alphonse’s chest seized again. “No. I won’t go back. I’m not ready. No.”

  “Why in heavens’ name not?” the older man cried.

  Alphonse gripped the arm of the sofa with one hand. He dug into his thigh with the other and gulped for air. “I can’t . . . I refuse.” Autore. “No!” He fell to his knees and his hands hit the floor. He was gasping, couldn’t get air. What had he done? Why had he thought he could share with this man? This old man with ideas of revolution? His body was near convulsing. He couldn’t get air.

  Ephraim’s hands were on him, and he was murmuring, “Autore, what’s wrong with me. Forgive me, son.”

  Alphonse panted, “What matters, the only thing that matters, is restoring the Council.” Somehow through the torture of saying it out loud, he added in a whisper, “And I’d give anything to have Mother see it that way too.”

  The breath that came from Ephraim was long and slow. “Oh, dear boy. I see.” He helped Alphonse to stand. “Son. You need rest. But I promise you, I see what you’re saying, and if you’re looking for some way to make things better, I promise you we share a vision.”

  A vision? No. In this moment he felt only despair.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The kitchen light shone warm and inviting through the back window. Myrta arched her back and sighed in relief, done at last with bumps and jostles and bounces and ruts and rocks; done with the limp cushion that had done nothing to protect her rear side. Celeste asked her to wait with the horses. Her mama asked her to do that. The only mama she’d ever known.

  Truth be told, Myrta was nervous more than anything.

  A moment later, Ardelle ran out. Her aunt, or her mama. She hadn’t made sense of it yet.

  Ardelle grabbed her and hugged. “Sweet, sweet Myrta. I’m so sorry.”

  She didn’t hug back. She was in a closed-off place and it didn’t seem to matter, because Ardelle had enough squeeze for both of them.

  “I’m . . . hello, Aunt Ardelle.”

  “Let’s get you inside. No, don’t worry about the horses. Ephraim will see to them.”

  In the kitchen, a cobbler steamed on the counter. Her uncle, or her papa, was speaking to Celeste. He stopped midsentence and met her eyes. His were moist. “Sweetheart. It’s very, very good to see you.”

  “Hello.”

  “She’s overwhelmed,” Ardelle said quietly.

  “Of course.”

  Ardelle hovered about. “Would you like something to eat? A glass of water? Anything, what can I get you?”

  “I’m okay.” The dessert on the counter smelled like plum. It was probably a plum cobbler.

  “Myrta and I have had a long day, and all of it in the carriage. We’re tired.”

  Ardelle and Ephraim kept looking back and forth between them, and the way Ardelle fluttered about, like she wanted to hug Myrta again, touch her, make sure she was real, that part at least made sense. They both looked older than Myrta remembered, their faces more lined, their eyes pulling down, the skin on their necks loose. Like Celeste and Terrence. In her memory they were younger.

  It was mostly Ephraim who took her attention though, because he was crying, without making a sound; his tears simply falling. He stood there, stock still. But now he took her hand, and his was warm and strong. The way he held hers was like a hug, a kind one, one that refused to impose upon her.

  She squeezed.

  In a troubled voice, he said to Celeste, “We should discuss—”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He exhaled softly and nodded. “Of course.”

  * * *

  Myrta woke to the sound of laughter from downstairs and stretched, creaking her muscles into limberness. She held the moment of newly-waken clarity, the moment of welcoming the morning light before the day’s work settled into view.

  The same lace curtains from childhood hung in the window. The walls had once been white and now were blue, and they blended into the sky outside, where the mountains sat. Bigger than she remembered, and without a single field or silo in sight.

  She dressed and found the others downstairs in the office. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning, sweetheart.” Ardelle poured her a glass of juice.

  Odile was sitting next to Celeste. Their cheekbones were the same, and their hair. Myrta stared. Odile was in the wrong family too. She wasn’t laughing.

  “Hello, Myrta.”

  Maybe she should apologize. She felt she’d ought, because none of this was right, but before she could, Odile t
urned and started talking with Celeste again.

  Ephraim came in and shut the door. “Al’s cleaning the stable. That’ll keep him busy for a while. Myrta, Celeste told us about market, and Mel’s aut, and that you saw the air in color.”

  Odile and Celeste looked over. Everyone was staring at her, and no one was speaking. She hadn’t expected this. She thought they’d have breakfast. “No. I imagined that.”

  “You didn’t. You absolutely did not. You saw colors in the air. Each of those is a different chemical.”

  All eight eyes were planted squarely on her. She sat suddenly, realizing that she hadn’t had supper yesterday either.

  “Your ability to see gases is a genetic trait. It’s been written into our DNA since before Turaset’s founding.”

  Myrta was hungry. She tipped her head down, where four parallel grooves were gouged into the surface of the table like little trenches, filled with brown gunk. She wrinkled her nose.

  Ephraim was still talking. “Ardelle and Celeste’s grandfather had the trait. He could measure gas concentrations by sight.”

  She ran her finger back and forth over the grooves. Someone should clean this table. It was disgusting.

  Ephraim kept talking and talking, and with a sinking feeling, she stared at her lap and wondered if the horses might like a visit.

  “Nitrogen, oxygen, he could measure those of course, and others too, argon, nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide, all of them.”

  She folded her hands and studied her left thumb. Her nails needed filing.

  “Transition metals, inversion layers—”

  “Ephraim,” Celeste said at last, quietly. “You might try a different approach.”

  The room grew still, and after a moment, Myrta risked a glance. Ardelle was resting her forehead on the back of her hand and had closed her eyes. Celeste pulled out a handkerchief and passed it over. “Delle . . .”

  Ardelle took it, sniffled into it, and looked out the window. “I wish . . .”

  Odile said stiffly, “You’re very calm, Celeste.”

  “We had no choice. The only way to keep you both safe was to exchange you.”

  “You had a choice! At least Ardelle sees it. Excuse me.” Odile stood and crossed the room, stopping in front of Myrta. “Whatever you want to know about what they did, you need to demand it from them.” She left.

  Myrta looked up at Ardelle, who had blanched. A moment later the back door of the inn slammed, and outside, Odile crossed to the stable. Celeste, too, followed her with her eyes.

  Odile had one thing right—Ardelle and Ephraim had been asking questions instead of the other way around. Myrta said, “I don’t know anything about what’s happening, and you do. All of you do. You’re staring at me like I was born wrong. What is this thing I have?”

  Celeste came and sat next to her, and Ephraim closed the door again. His gaze fell on the desk, on one of the drawers.

  “The last thing you need right now is a drink.”

  Surprised, Myrta looked at Celeste. She didn’t remember Ephraim as a drinker, but apparently Celeste did.

  He nodded and walked to the window, facing away. “Let’s start at the other end. We sent you to the belt to keep you safe, and Celeste is right—we had no good alternative.”

  Ardelle took a shuddering breath. Myrta reached over and took her aunt’s free hand in her own. Ardelle looked at her with hollow eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  “The Elige trait, it’s natural.” Ephraim rested his hand flat against the pane. “And no one has it in the cities. For years now, it’s not there at all; it’s been culled out of the population. There are still plenty of cases out here.”

  Alarmed, she said, “Do they want to ‘cull’ me?”

  He turned back. “First things first. We sent you to the stead. We knew you’d have normal vision for years. Celeste suggested the exercises. What was it Celeste, turkeys? In little pens, to stay weak?”

  Celeste reached across the table to add her own hand to the other women’s. “Does it make the slightest difference where the idea came from? Look at your daughter. Look at your wife.”

  He did, and his face froze. He blinked, went to the desk, and opened the top drawer.

  Fraught, Ardelle said, “Don’t start on the whiskey.”

  At the same time Celeste said, “It’s not even mid-day.”

  Jamming his hands into his pockets, he began to rock back and forth on his feet. “Your ability is a gift.”

  Myrta looked away. The air was too still; the room too much a receipts-and-books kind of place. Nothing about this moment felt like a gift.

  “We expected your vision to change when you were ten, maybe eleven. It didn’t, and we thought those exercises had kept everything dormant. We hoped your secondary tissues wouldn’t develop at all.”

  “To protect you,” Ardelle whispered, her face red and puffy. “To protect her,” she insisted to Ephraim.

  By sending her to a farm and not telling her about her eyes or her parentage? That wasn’t protection. She’d been isolated and living with the wrong family.

  Ardelle’s voice broke. “If we’d had the courage to tell you, you would have known before the discerners found you.”

  Myrta pulled her hands back, staring at this group of people who by their own words knew the danger they’d put her in. “I don’t understand. Why is the belt safe? Why did Odile grow up here? What exactly do you mean by culling?”

  “Mechanation. The combustion industry—”

  “I have nothing to do with that!”

  The lines in his face deepened. “Just give me a minute. When you were born, these devices weren’t popular out here. Renico—well, that’s how we bought the generator. There was nothing in the belt, no mechanation at all. It’s too far out, the roads too poor.”

  Celeste sounded closer to terrified than Myrta had ever heard before. “The crops will fail without irrigation, Myrta. The stead—Terrence’s whole life is that stead. Our family’s life is that stead. We can’t live without water. We need the irrigation to survive.”

  Ephraim sat. “We wanted your trait dormant. But by keeping it weak, we’ve created an obstacle.”

  The anxiety in his voice came close to matching Celeste’s. Myrta stared at him, then Ardelle, then Celeste. All of their faces were drawn in pain, more pain than she’d imagined any of them could feel, as though they were the weak ones.

  He was still speaking. “Your eyesight, when used properly, can protect you. You could be strong enough, with your trait, to follow the movement of anything you choose from a great distance. But, Renico knows about you now, and you don’t know anything about the danger they pose. You grew up in the belt! We need to reverse everything, absolutely everything, we’ve done.”

  “I must be safe here.”

  Glancing at the desk drawer he muttered, “They think you’re on the stead.”

  Celeste stood and went to the window, made to pull the curtain, but stopped and stared. In the yard, Odile was speaking with a tall man. They were laughing, easy, having a good time.

  Myrta inhaled the dead air of old books and dirty rug and thought she’d rather be outside, with them. “Odile knew all about this.” The way her cousin was behaving—so comfortable out there—the only explanation was that Odile had known.

  “Yes. She sorted through it.” Celeste closed the curtains and said to Ephraim, “You have four months until Caravan.”

  He leaned forward onto the table and looked intently at Myrta. “The discerners will try to find Terrence’s stead. You’re safe here for the time being. But, they’ll sweep the foothills when Caravan arrives. Our decision has stunted you—”

  “To keep her safe,” Ardelle cried. “To keep you safe. Oh sweetheart, what have we done?”

  “Done is done.”

  Ephraim said more forcefully, “Myrta, you m
ust learn to use your trait, and more than that, to fully control it.”

  Celeste said, “Four months.”

  * * *

  After supper, Celeste said she and Odile needed to discuss plans for Odile to return to the farm. Ephraim, Ardelle, and Myrta went down the hall to the back office. Myrta fiddled with a button on her blouse and braced herself. “Odile said I can see air pollution. Is that true?”

  Ephraim was closing the door and stopped mid-pull. “Yes.”

  “She said that’s why Mr. di Vaun’s so interested in me. Why he keeps saying I need to go with him. Is that true too?”

  Ephraim closed the door, crossed to the desk, and pulled a bottle of whiskey out. He poured a shot of liquor into a glass, sat, and drank it in one smooth action.

  “Is she right?”

  “Yes, she’s right.”

  Ardelle stood and took the shot glass.

  “Ardelle . . .”

  “Ephraim. I’m taking this to the kitchen.” She opened the door and Odile’s voice drifted in. “No. Not ever. I don’t belong on the stead, and I won’t ever go.” Ardelle pulled the door shut behind herself.

  Ephraim said, “Sweetheart. We’ve spent seventeen years pretending your trait doesn’t exist.”

  “I know.”

  He looked down. “All right. Yes, Myrta, it’s the pollution. Not from his point of view of course; Mel thinks he’s doing a great service, moving us as quickly as possible to a more advanced society.” Ephraim paused and said more quietly, “And there was a time when I shared that thinking, even admired his dedication to what I saw as a noble cause.”

  “You admired him?”

  Ephraim’s face grew contemplative. “He and I were friends once. And think, if Mel could be turned from the path he’s on, you’d be safer. He’d be more whole. Good all around. And not every lost cause is lost forever, after all.”

  She knew so little of Ephraim, this man who’d fathered her, only that he was from Narona. When they used to visit, he’d stare at her in a strange way. She didn’t know much else about him.