by D. S. Murphy
I bit my lip to keep my jaw from dropping, and wiped my palms on my jeans. This kid was way smarter than he looked. I’d have to be careful around him.
“You are a poet,” I said finally.
He smiled and jumped down from the window.
“Let’s go see Stephanie,” he said. “If you really can see the future, we’d better learn to use it. A gifted seer makes a powerful ally… or a dangerous enemy.”
Stephanie opened the door when Sam knocked. She was wearing a simple blue dress that accentuated her petite figure.
“Sorry about dinner last night,” she said. She was wearing work gloves and filling a vase up with roses. “Please don’t be too angry with Mist. She has had to deal with great tragedies.”
“As have I,” Sam said. “And Kaidance is no stranger to suffering. It shouldn’t be an excuse for bad behavior.”
I felt like hugging him. “It’s fine. I understand,” I said.
I stood there awkwardly for a few moments, before Stephanie finished her arrangement and looked me over. I was wearing dark jeans again, the black all-stars, and a black tank top under a light jacket—plus of course the gloves Able had given me. Alice cleaned the blood off them, and they were good as new, apart from a tear from where the arrow had cut me. It was amazing how light they were—I could barely feel them.
“Sam, I think we should give Kaidance a break today. Why don’t you play a game with her?” she leaned over and whispered in his ear. He smiled. Then he picked up a few tangerines that had been sitting in a silver dish on the table and started juggling them.
“Outside, please,” Stephanie said, then she turned back to her flowers. Sam led the way downstairs and out a side door to a grassy patio on the side of the house.
“Catch!” he yelled as soon as we were outside. He tossed one of the tangerines over his shoulder. I caught it, but I didn’t see the second one coming—he threw it like a baseball straight into my stomach. It didn’t hurt much, but it took me by surprise. I wanted to yell at him but his playful look made me laugh instead. I threw the tangerines back at him, and he tossed me several more. It started out fun at first, but soon grew tiresome. My back ached, and I fumbled the oranges half the time. Soon I stank of citrus. Every few throws he would hit me square in the face, and make my black eye start pounding again.
I wondered what Sitri and Able were doing. Was this seriously the best use of my time? They brought me here but were too busy to teach me anything? Maybe Able had already given up on me and was just waiting for my time to run out so he could send me home. Even Stephanie’s flowers were more important than me, apparently, so she’d passed me off to Sam as some kind of temporary babysitter.
After thirty minutes, Sam ran into the house to get a wine bottle, and told me to hold still as he balanced it on my head. I was supposed to catch the tangerines and throw them back without letting it fall.
“Some game,” I muttered.
“It’s not really a game,” Sam said. “We’re trying to help you.”
“Seriously? How is this going to help?”
“Awareness. Discipline. Balance. Reflexes. Repetitive, focused action. It’s better than meditation, and teaches you poise and balance at the same time. Everybody does it when they first come here. There’s another game we play, where everybody has one orange, and we have to knock the bottles off other people’s heads. Last one standing wins.”
That made me feel a little better. Maybe this wasn’t a waste of time. I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and decided to try harder.
“Well, I think I’m getting better at this,” I said.
“No, you totally suck at it,” he smirked. “Want to do something cooler?”
We walked out behind the house, past the ruins and up over the top of the theater. Surrounding the theater was a forest, and in the center was a wide dirt path, almost a road. There were two large sphinx statues on either side, marking some kind of entrance. Beyond the gate, we came to rows of…not tents exactly. They looked like a combination of a yurt and a log cabin. But bigger. As we kept walking, I saw that they extended in every direction. Hundreds of them.
There were even some built into the trees, suspended between branches. Groups of them were connected by long, hanging rope bridges. As we went deeper into the woods, there were more and more people. Kids mostly. Few of them could be older than twenty, though I was seriously doubting my age-meter here. In the middle of the woods was a little town, with a sprawling central garden, and what looked like Robin Hood’s shopping mall. There were restaurants, coffee shops and stores. Some boys were playing Frisbee in a wide grassy area. It smelled like pine sap and burnt coffee grounds.
People kept stopping to look at us. I wondered if they were looking at me or Sam. One of the larger buildings looked like a ski lodge, with big glass panels in the front. Sam pushed the door open and I followed him inside. Sitri and Alice were sitting at a table, laughing about something.
“Thought you might be here,” Sam said to Alice. For a fleeting second she looked guilty, as if he were chastising her. I wondered why. “Could you take out Kai’s stitches?”
“Oh, sure!” she said. The building had high ceilings and a wide, comfortable living area. The interior was sleek and modern, which contrasted with the panorama forest view through the floor-to-ceiling windows. I watched Alice open cupboards to pull out equipment, and realized this was a hospital or health center of some kind.
“You’ve got all your tools here?” I asked, as she prepared a sterilization pad and a pair of surgical scissors.
“The other one is my home office. This is my day job,” she said.
“There are other healers in town,” Sam said. He was being weird. Something was definitely going on between him and Alice. Was she not supposed to be here?
“I’d go crazy if I couldn’t help out. There’s nothing to do at the house,” Alice said. “And I don’t care for the company.”
“You can’t choose your family,” Sam said.
Alice led me into a smaller room that looked more like a traditional doctor’s office. She had me sit on the narrow bed in the middle of the room and started removing the stitches in my ear.
“Aren’t stitches supposed to stay in for a couple weeks?” I asked. “Does that mean I’m healing quickly?”
“Unfortunately, probably not,” Alice said. “It’s probably just an incidental side effect of staying at Nevah. There’s a lot of energy here, the place is full of it. The house especially. It has a restorative effect on all of us.”
I took off my gloves so Alice could work on my finger. She took the stitches out one by one with a pair of tweezers.
“Is everything okay between you and Sam?” I asked, as she cleaned the wound and added a fresh bandage.
“Caught that did you?” Alice said with a strained smile. “Some members of my family don’t approve of me spending so much time down here.”
“Why would they care?” I asked.
“Immortals and heirs aren’t really that different. I mean we differ by degrees. We’re all special according to the amount of energy in our bloods. The ones in the house have purer blood. They’re a thousand times more powerful than anyone out here. A few of them feel superior, so they think they should remain separate. But some of the people in this camp are pretty old too, and they’re fascinating. And they’re a lot more fun to be around. Even though they’re my family, it’s lonely and isolating up there. Down here, there’s life. There’s love.”
There was a funny look in her eye, and I wondered who she was talking about. Alice checked my bandages. I pulled my gloves back on, then we joined the boys in the main area.
“Sitri,” Sam said, “Kai needs a new challenge. When’s the last time you did the gauntlet?”
“Is that what you came here for?” Alice said, putting her hands on her hips. “I just took out her stitches!”
“She’s here to learn,” Sitri said, shrugging. “It’s better than sitting around all day.”
The four of us walked through the woods until we came to a tree with blocks of wood nailed to the trunk in a makeshift ladder. I looked up in awe at the sprawling ropes course above us. Sam climbed the ladder and jumped out onto a tightwire, with no safety wire or helmet. He didn’t even stick his arms out, like they do in the movies. I wanted to yell at him to be careful, but it looked like he knew what he was doing.
“This one tests balance,” he called.
He strolled down the wire casually, with his arms behind his back. He stopped, pretended to sniff a flower, then skipped to the next platform. My heart was pounding and I felt dizzy just watching him. Next there was a series of logs with large gaps between them, hanging like a wobbly bridge. Sam took these in long strides, sticking to the swinging pieces of wood like he had magnets under his feet.
“That one tests agility,” he said when he’d reached the next platform safely. “But this one is my favorite. Heph whipped it up.” Sitri hit a button on a panel at the base of a tree, and sections of the trees started spinning around. The trees were mechanized somehow—they looked like that part of a car wash with those spinning rags. But on a massive scale, with giant, old growth redwoods.
Sam dove headfirst between the swinging branches, swung himself off one and did a somersault in midair, before landing nimbly on a moving branch and launching himself off it like a trampoline. My mouth was hanging open by the time he landed on the next platform. I’d seriously underestimated Sam. I realized I’d been treating him like a little kid. A little brother. He grabbed one of several metal hooks with a handle and a leather strap attached to it, and swung down on an angled wire.
“Your turn,” he said with smirk, after landing in a roll and popping up just in front of us.
“Seriously?” I looked at Sitri and Alice. “There’s no way I could do that.”
“There are dozens of different paths through the course. People who attempt that last one usually break a few bones. Except ninja boy here,” he said. “You can just do the easy ones.”
“What if I fall?” I asked.
“Better to break your leg here, under our supervision, than in a real fight,” Alice said.
“But I don’t want to break my leg,” I said, wishing I’d stayed in the library. “And I hate fighting.”
Sitri put his hand on the small of my back and guided me towards the ladder. My arms were already shaking as I climbed the wooden blocks. I took a deep breath and stepped onto the wire, reaching my hands out on either side. I flailed back and forth, then tried to move my foot forward. I took two steps before slipping. I yelped as the ground rushed up at me. Something warm and hard broke my fall—Sitri.
“I can’t believe you caught me,” I said, breathless.
“I’d never let you fall,” Sitri whispered. His blue eyes sparkled and I could feel his warm breath on my cheek.
The forest quickly fell into shadow as the sun went down. People lit lamps along the path and in front of the shops. The addition of glowing fireflies, which I’d never seen in the Northwest, made the setting magical, like a fairy village. I smelled meat cooking and realized I hadn’t eaten all day. My stomach rumbled.
“I suppose that means it’s dinner time,” Sam said. “Let’s go find Chandler.”
We entered a wide clearing with multiple fire-pits. The sky was clear, and I could already see a scattering of stars in the deep purple tapestry. People gathered around the fires, cooking in pots and pans.
“Do you eat every meal like this?” I asked. “Isn’t it a lot of work?”
“What takes more effort,” a voice boomed from behind me, “a billion dollar infrastructure, with tens of thousands of workers, to make a plastic spoon and then melt it down to make another one? Or washing your damn spoon?”
I turned around to see the speaker—he was older than most people I’d met at Nevah, maybe Able’s age. He was holding a stick over his shoulder with half a dozen wild hares hanging from it. He stopped at one of the fire pits just ahead, and we filed in after him.
“That’s Chandler,” Alice whispered as we sat on one of the logs surrounding the fire. “He’s kind of the unofficial leader out here.” Chandler dressed the hares efficiently. Then he added the fresh hares to the homemade spit, while removing a few that were done cooking. He pulled chunks of meat off the bone and onto a large plate, which he offered to us. I took my gloves off so I wouldn’t get them greasy.
“This is Matt and Curt,” Sitri said, nodding at our nearest neighbors.
Matt had a nose ring and thin eyes that almost looked Asian—but I think they just looked like that because he was so beefy. He held a hand out to greet me. I held a gloved hand out towards his and shook. “I’m Kaidance.”
Curt looked small sitting next to him, but actual he was about Sitri’s size. He had long brown hair that he kept pushing out of his face as he was eating. His fingers were greasy from a piece of meat so he just nodded towards me with an apologetic shrug.
“So you’re the new girl, hanging out with the royals?” said a girl with tightly braided hair, reaching down and grabbing a chunk of meat off Matt’s plate, before sitting between Matt and Curt. She was wearing boots and some kind of leather bodice.
“I guess so,” I said.
“You must be pretty special if they’re keeping you in the house,” Matt said.
“Special at getting my ass kicked,” I said.
“She fought Mist her first day here. Slapped her in the face,” Sitri said, grinning.
Matt whistled slowly, and I saw more than one set of raised eyebrows.
“Is that unusual?” I asked.
“I don’t think anybody has laid a finger on Mist in a long, long time,” Sam said.
“She must have been going easy on you,” the girl said, digging into her food with her fingers. “I’m Priya, by the way.”
“Sure,” Sitri said, “if by ‘easy’ you mean shooting arrows at her, and then using her like a punching bag until she couldn’t stand up.”
“You know what I mean,” Priya said. “In a real fight she would have just taken you out. Slashed one of your arteries. Or put an arrow through your heart from a mile away. I mean, you’ve seen her in battle, right? No offence Kaidance, but she can take out a hundred warriors by herself. I don’t see how you could have offered her a real challenge.”
I was about to argue, but what was I going to say—that I really was capable of fighting? I was the least qualified here. Beatrice was probably right, it must have been a lucky hit.
“So did they figure out your powers yet?” Matt asked.
“Only if clumsiness is a superpower,” I said. If today was any indication of my skill level, I sucked.
“She lasted three seconds on the gauntlet,” Sam said. “Tomorrow, it’s back to oranges.”
“You won’t hear me complaining,” I smiled. “Oranges sounds about right.”
“It always starts like that,” Curt said. “They make you feel stupid, so you’ll know how much further you need to come. Strip out your pride and self-confidence. Then they train you right.”
“Train us, for what?” I asked.
“Hunters, remember?” Sitri said. “We’re safe here, but in the real world, someone is always trying to kill us. We have to learn to protect ourselves.”
“And each other,” Alice said.
“Because you’re different?” I asked.
“We are the truth that reveals his lie,” Chandler said suddenly. I thought he was going to say more, or explain himself, but he just went back to stirring a pot of stew. He seemed to like talking in riddles. It was getting warm by the fire, so I took my jacket off, leaving just my black tank-top on. After I’d finished eating I wiped my hands and put my gloves back on.
“Don’t worry,” Curt said, “I’m sure they’ll figure out your power soon. If not, you can move out here with the animals!”
Alice and Sam shifted uncomfortably.
“You know we don’t call you that,” Alice said.
“I’ve heard Mist say it,” Sitri grunted.
“Wait, why would they call you animals?” I asked.
Matt looked at Sitri, who nodded at him.
“Okay man, but you owe me another shirt.”
Matt set down his plate. Then his upper body stretched up and out like a balloon, until it had tripled in size. His hands became black hooves and a pair of sharp, curved horns grew from the sides of his head.
I stumbled backwards, as the beast put his nose inches from mine, and then grunted, snorting puffs of steam out of each nostril. The other kids laughed as Matt changed back, his shredded shirt now hanging off him in pieces. I picked myself up off the ground and wiped my hands. I tried to keep it cool as I took my seat, even though my heart was pounding.
“You’re half bull?” I said weakly.
“Minotaur,” Matt said. “I’m not really half anything. I’m a shifter. I can control what parts of me shift.”
“Check this out,” Curt said. As I watched, his ears grew long and pointy. Then his nose and jaw elongated until there was a horse’s head on Curt’s body.
“And don’t ask me why the long face,” Curt said, with his enormous teeth and round eyes. “You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that one.”
“A centaur? Who are you guys related to?”
“Zeus, most likely,” Alice said. “Pure bloods have so much energy, they can use it to transform their whole DNA. Zeus transformed into hundreds of different animals to seduce women.”
“I never understood why he didn’t just become human, if he wanted to sleep with a shepherd’s daughters,” Priya said. “It’s like he had some kind of bestiality fetish.”
“I think it was just a way to get past protective fathers,” Alice said. “He’d turn into an animal first, a swan, a bull, a tiger, a butterfly even. Even when fathers locked their daughters up in towers, Zeus would find a way to get to them. But then word would get out, and he’d have to find a new disguise. Anyway, the child of such a union would be a shifter, and be able to take on the shape Zeus used in his seduction.”