by Jason Letts
“You know we’d never have gotten here if it weren’t for you. Mira’s parents were probably right. They would’ve found a way to screw us somehow, and I don’t even think we’d be alive. But because of you we took it to them, ripped the root of it all right out of their hands, and now you’re cleaning up after the baby,” she said, never looking away from his dark eyes.
“You don’t think I know that? Look, I didn’t come out here to clean up after a baby or go on a wild goose chase. I came to settle the score with Mira, and I still haven’t done it. Why we didn’t kill them when we had the chance, I’ll never know. And then things got out of control and crazy. I’d say they must be dead already, but I can’t be that lucky,” he snarled, and Gloria shot up to her feet so she could look down on him.
“Don’t try to lie to me! I know you want the carafe for yourself. Who wouldn’t? But right now neither of us can get to the one who has it, and that means we should be working together. He said things would be fair, but they’re not. It’s just somebody else’s thumb pressing down on us. But soon it will be my thumb and my fingers doing the pressing,” she glowered.
The deep resentment and veracity in her voice made Jeremy wonder how she had gotten to be so obsessed with the carafe. He had spoken truthfully and couldn’t figure out how Gloria had forgotten about her mortal grudge so suddenly. Did her memories of Mira, Will, and Roselyn seep out through her hands? It didn’t make sense, and if he were alone he would’ve said something to himself about how stupid girls can be, but he checked himself and avoided Gloria’s rage.
“You want to kill him, don’t you?” Jeremy asked, point blank. Gloria put her hand to her forehead and turned away, pained.
“It’s been so long. I’m starting to wonder what I’m good for anymore,” she said.
“You feel bad about yourself because you haven’t killed anyone in a while,” Jeremy said, disturbed.
“When that’s what you’re here to do, you do it,” she explained, and then turned back to him suddenly. “I’m going to find a way to do it to Neeko. If he thinks he can keep me away from it, if he thinks I don’t want to know if it could help fix me, then he doesn’t know me at all.”
But Jeremy scoffed at her ill intent.
“And what’s stopping me from running to tell him right now. I’m sure you’d be saying the same thing to him if it were me over there, and you’ll probably still have the same ends for me even if you do manage to get it,” he argued.
Gloria cocked her head one way and looked at him sideways. He knew it was her way of analyzing something, and he always wondered what exactly fell into place when she did that. Clearly, something was loose inside to require such a motion for it to work.
“I guess you’ll have to make sure I’m never on the bottom. Because it seems like the only thing the person on the bottom ever does is try to get themselves up to the top. So if I get you under me, that’s what I’ll be expecting, and if I’m under you, you won’t have to guess. But for right now, we are both down here and he is up there and this is what we have to do. So let’s do it.”
Life for Mira and her friends was only slightly more comfortable. At sundown, when the brilliant web stitched its way across the sky, they stopped for the night at a high embankment and busied themselves with making camp. The cold sank in whenever they had an idle moment, so the first thing they did was build a fire. Melting snow, they washed themselves, though the slimy residue from the cave still managed to have a deep hold on their skin.
As darkness gradually set in and the twinkling web came to full prominence in the sun’s absence, there was one area where an abundance of light still shielded it. Across a deep valley and behind the next mountain over, a huge ball of brightness fought away the dark. Everyone watched it as they washed. It was so far away, and yet they still had to find a way to get to it. The mountains were too dangerous to traverse at night, so they had to pick a direction, follow it, and judge their progress at nightfall.
Mira looked longingly at the miniature sunrise taunting her in the distance. She had been thinking about Knoll and the danger he was in. She felt terrible about losing him, and in her darkest moments she shuddered to think of how she would explain herself to Vika if she couldn’t return him to her. Saying things got out of control wouldn’t cut it. This was her child, her family.
“Can you help me find firewood, Mira?” Aoi asked her.
Though she’d been in deep thought, she still noted her friend’s meek manner of asking. She assented and left the other five behind to enjoy what comfort the fire could provide. The darkness and the snow would make it difficult to find good logs to use, and standing in the snow in thin shoes wouldn’t be much fun either. Mira followed Aoi along the mountainside’s inclines and past a perfect-looking fallen tree that was still within earshot of the others.
“We’re not looking for firewood, are we?” Mira asked Aoi’s backside.
“Can’t we just go for a walk?” Aoi posed, and Mira wanted to know how she wore her face, but she never turned around.
Her path gradually took them up and around the embankment. It didn’t lead to the mountain’s peak, but it did take them to a high point that offered the same sense of insignificance within such a vast space. For a second, Mira wished she had found this place with Chucky. Why hadn’t he thought to bring her here? She could see their fire’s amber hue below on one side.
Aoi stepped onto the point’s bare rock, tapping the front of her shoe against it. Though Mira crossed her arms in front of her to fight off the cold, Aoi didn’t seem to feel it. Instead, she shook her head and then turned back abruptly to Mira, who wondered if she was too busy holding back tears to feel the cold.
“I’m sorry. It’s so hard to talk to anyone when we’re always together all the time,” she said.
“What? What is it?” Mira asked, but she only received a stern look for her questions. “Is this about what the bald men said? I thought you would be thrilled. Isn’t this what everyone wants?”
Aoi pursed her lips, though it was not with displeasure. It looked like so many things were grinding in her head, making Mira remember when she first touched the carafe and saw how hard Aoi had to fight to keep her head above water and hold herself together.
“It isn’t anymore! I guess when I was young I always thought being the strongest meant you could just beat away all your problems, but now the stronger I am the worse they get.”
“What do you mean?” Mira asked, lost. She came closer to her friend and put out her hand. Aoi bit her lip and then took it. She was shorter than Mira, and so she tilted her head back to look up at her.
“What…what do you think Vern thinks about all this?” she mumbled.
“Is that what this is about? Why are you worried about him? You know he cares for you,” Mira said, but Aoi shook her head.
“I know deep down he resents me for being stronger than him. That’s why we had that fight at the seaside camp. And now this only makes it worse. He would never say it out loud, but I know that’s how he felt even before all this happened. How am I supposed to act to make things OK for him?” she said.
It surprised Mira to hear how important Vern’s opinion had become for Aoi. She used to be so fiercely independent, then she had become so tranquil and calm, and from there she had let herself get attached to him. Mira tried to compare it to her own affections and wondered if both Chucky and Aoi had similar troubles but for the opposite reasons.
“You should be yourself. That’s the only way otherwise you’ll never be happy. And if you do that, you’ll be giving Vern a chance to get over any issue he might have and appreciate who you really are. Isn’t that what you want?” Mira advised.
“Yes,” Aoi jerked. “But being yourself seems so hard when you don’t know what you’re meant for. Sometimes I wish I could see it all clearly from the end and be able to look back and know what I’m supposed to do now.”
Mira tugged her hand and together they sat down on the rock. She pulle
d her legs in close and wrapped her arms around them. The web and the stars cast their mysterious light down on the dim peaks. Mira looked over at Aoi and smiled.
“That’s always the trick, isn’t it? We’ll never know how it all turns out until we get there, and it’ll never all turn out unless we make it.”
Though Mira had spun the phrase out of thin air, Aoi must’ve found some relief in it. She shook the hair out of her eyes and appeared calm, only for the concern to return a moment later.
“I’m sorry,” Aoi mumbled. “This must be making you feel bad. I’ve been so thoughtless lately. To be complaining about my gift when you haven’t got one, it’s got to be hard to take. But believe me, I’d just as soon do without being a Special and having this lineage from the beginning of time if I could.”
Taken aback, Mira hadn’t even thought of it that way, and she rushed to reassure her friend that it was no trouble at all.
“No, no, I’m not offended. It’s fine you all have something reaching back through history like that. I’ve got something too, but instead of the web, it’s my family. They are out here somewhere too. And even though I can’t see them or hear them, I can feel them urging me on. One day we’re going to be reunited again after so awfully very long, and I’ll never stop fighting to make that happen.”
Down by the fire below, Will let his arm go numb as Roselyn’s resting head pinched away the blood flow. She seemed content to watch the fire beside him, and he liked having her near, so he didn’t care about the feeling of pins and needles. Beside the others, they sat in a circle around the fire, watching the flames dance and the embers crackle.
But not everyone was content, and Mary in particular kept scratching her head and looking over her shoulder to where Aoi and Mira had gone. The darkness made it hard to tell the edge of the mountain from the vast, empty sky. Looking quickly at Chucky next to her, Mary raised her hand to her mouth to cover a cough. She then got up and shuffled around the fire until she sat next to Vern.
“The smoke was blowing in my face. Don’t you hate that?” Mary said.
Will looked over to Chucky who had been in nearly the same spot, but he didn’t seem to be troubled by any smoke. Instead of questioning her, Chucky was only flicking little balls of oily sweat into the fire to hear them sizzle. Will wasn’t sure if Roselyn was asleep, and that left himself alone with suspicions of why she moved.
“Yeah, I don’t think anybody likes getting smoke in the face,” Vern agreed.
Mary swiveled on her stone seat to face him a little more. She tried to catch his eyes, but he was still gazing into the fire.
“You know, I would love to hear more about what happened in the seaside camp. We missed out on so much time together. Who knows what would’ve happened if we hadn’t been separated?” she said.
The question was innocent enough, but something still struck Will as strange. Vern leaned back to think, and Chucky answered in that silence.
“Well, we were on the verge of starving, but I was working out on the farm and had to figure out a way to steal food for us to survive. There was this old man, the farm master, who could sniff even a speck of anything edible. They used to beat people all the time for trying to steal. But by accident one hot day I covered a strawberry with my sweat and was able to sneak it right out! Things got a lot easier from there,” he said.
“Wow, that’s fascinating,” Mary noted, though her face didn’t seem to carry much excitement at all. Instead, she looked out along the mountainside where the girls had gone. “So I heard Jeremy traveled to your camp too when he wasn’t at ours. He’d always cause so many problems for us, and he was why we couldn’t communicate with you through Clara. He didn’t give you too much trouble though, did he?”
Over the course of their journey, Will had heard tidbits of a fight between Aoi and Vern, something to do with Jeremy, whose actions at the camp would come up and Aoi would quickly change the topic of conversation. But for Mary to bring this up removed the last possibility of doubt. She was trying to spark something while Aoi was gone.
“I think Roselyn’s out cold. We should all probably be getting to sleep,” Will suggested, but Roselyn sat up straight, wide awake. Mary jerked her head to him and gave him an icy look.
“We never get to stay up anymore. It’s always walk and sleep, walk and sleep. It’s not going to kill us to spend some time talking, at least till Mira gets back.”
Though her words sounded carefree and playful, her eyes sent a much firmer message to Will. She knew what he knew about her, and she challenged him to expose her. In addition to the pins and needles in his arms, the dreadful turn their discussion was taking made him uneasy.
“Jeremy came by the camp a couple times a month,” Vern started, and Mary had her eyes on him in an instant. “And there was this one time when he showed up right as I was working at the aqueduct filtering the water. He demanded to have some but kept saying the water was too salty. Finally I brought him some and splashed it right on his face!”
Mary’s laughter might’ve carried all the way over to Jeremy at that moment. She reveled in the story, basking in it with the biggest smile she could muster.
“He should’ve known better than to mess with you. I’m glad somebody finally got the courage to give him what he deserved,” she said, and Vern took on a gratified and flattered smugness. “So what happened next?”
Vern’s face lost some of its luster, and he skeptically looked over at Mary’s beaming face. Will wondered if he would realize what was going on, hoping he would brush away the question. Why hadn’t Mira and Aoi come back with the firewood by now?
“Well, Aoi was there too and we convinced Jeremy not to do anything about it,” he answered vaguely, contrasting Mary’s chipper response.
“I bet you could’ve taken care of him all by yourself. You know, I love Aoi. Who doesn’t, right? But a tiny teenie percentage of the time she can—what’s the best way to say it—get involved in things when she doesn’t exactly have to. Do you know what I mean? I’m not saying anything bad. We all have things to work on about ourselves. That just might be, you know, one of the things she could work on.”
Will wanted to slap Mary’s mouth shut. His temper was rising, and he was shocked no one else had caught on to her.
“Hard to say,” Vern stammered.
“Maybe Mira and Aoi could use some help finding firewood, Mary. Don’t you think you could give them a hand?” he suggested, and Mary laughed at him.
“Oh, I’d probably end up getting lost trying to find them, and then none of us would get any sleep tonight. But what were we talking about? Oh yeah, Jeremy. For all the years we were at academy together, could anyone have ever guessed he’d end up working so hard to thwart us?” she asked.
“He was always grumpy, and ornery too,” Chucky said. “But none of us had to deal with the worst of him like Will did.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I think we should get some sleep,” Will said, and Roselyn put her hand on his back as though she had finally noticed how much distaste he had for the conversation.
“I can’t say I’m too terribly surprised,” Vern added. “He wanted the class’s top spot and was willing to do anything to get it. Even though we were a small group, we were strong. It’s a shame he didn’t listen to Corey during The Synthesis and put it all behind him.”
“I guess he couldn’t stand having you at the top of the class for so long. He must’ve become jealous about your success and how much promise everyone said you had,” Mary said, and Will’s mouth dropped open at her gall.
“Thanks, Mary. That’s very nice of you to say,” Vern replied. They were looking into each other’s eyes at this point, reading each other. Will started to stand up when he heard something behind him.
“So what’s everybody doing?” Aoi asked, dropping an armful of logs on the ground. Mira stood by her side holding a few held in each arm. Startled, Mary and Vern looked back at them over the dying fire.
“We�
��ve been waiting and waiting for you to get back so we can finally get to sleep!” Mary returned.
“We can’t be going the right way!” Jeana complained, trying to see through the snow-covered pines to get some sense of direction. Next to her, Kevin was crouching beside an icy stream winding down the mountain, and Clara sat staring at the tiny chunks of ice floating by though her face didn’t betray the slightest hint of interest.
“We’re going northwest,” Kevin said. “That’s all we have to go on. I’m sure it’ll lead us to them eventually if we just keep going far enough.”
Clara could sense a great deal of frustration coming from her parents, but she wasn’t bothered by how long it was taking. After waiting in one place for so long, she had built up a great deal of patience. From the swaying currents in the flowing stream, which couldn’t have been more than six or seven feet wide, she turned her attention to the man and woman who were responsible for her being.
“It’s gonna all be over before you know it. Ain’t no need to rush or worry none. We’ll find ’em when we find ’em,” she muttered. Both Jeana and Kevin looked at the face she had formed in the water, but they quickly turned their attention to her actual self.
“That’s easy for you to say since you can talk to them whenever you want. Are they safe now? Can you see anything around them that would help us find them?” Jeana begged.
“They’re in the mountains going the same ways we are. A little tense maybe, but they holdin’ up alright,” she said.
“I hope they’re able to get the carafe back from those wormy kids. You were right, Clara. We should’ve kept our mouths shut and let them think they were in control. Instead we scared them into doing something that actually worked,” Kevin lamented.
“That’s just another log on the stack of things we have to apologize to Mira for,” Jeana agreed.
“Nothing we can do ’bout it now,” Clara shrugged.