by Adam Holt
The Lord Ascendant clapped his hands together and the red force field around the stadium disappeared. It wasn’t immediately clear to me what any of this meant, but my dad seemed to know. He launched himself into the air toward the Lord Ascendant, who saw him coming.
“Dad!” I screamed. The Lord Ascendant launched a fireball at my dad but it never reached him. I dove through a portal and met the fire-ball head on. The pain smoldered on my skin, but I advanced through it nonetheless. The Lord Ascendant vanished, and before I could recover I felt his presence behind me. He placed his hand on my chest. My heart seemed to stop beating. I lost my breath. Then my heart and breath came back to me in one painful gasp. Something felt icy and broken inside me.
“A gift from me to you,” he said, “for however long you live.”
Then he disappeared into a red mist just as my dad arrived to fight him.
“No,” I gasped. “He can’t escape.”
“He’s done worse than that,” my dad said, looking upward.
Between that icy feeling, the burns, and the broken arm, I sunk to the ground, exhausted. My dad yelled for Icarus and Adéle. The three of them stood beside me and stared at the sky.
And then she was holding me, hugging me, kissing my forehead. Tabitha Tirelli. She was Tabitha as I remembered her. Tabitha the true. Tabitha the friend. Tabitha I loved. There was a rip in the fabric of time where all of the madness stopped and the universe fell into complete harmony, and she was there with me, far from the Rathmore Chaos.
I’ve thought back on that moment many times since then, and it’s always the same, not polluted by the madness that preceded or followed it: I could not hear the dome shattering above our heads; I felt nothing but her breath on my neck and one word on her lips. “Always. Always. Always.” It was our moment and no one else in the universe could steal it, see it, share it. I wondered how many moments like that come in a lifetime. I would be happy with just that one. The Lord Ascendant escaped, the dome shattered, but we were no longer apart.
Sound and feeling returned. A tinkling noise. Cries nearby. Above us, the dome of Rathmore crumbled into a thousand icy daggers, headed straight for us.
“Adèle, protect us!” my dad said. “Shield the arena.”
“No, seal the dome,” yelled Icarus. “Without the dome we will suffocate and freeze.”
“I can’t do that from here,” she said to Icarus, and they understood what must be done. Icarus grabbed her around the waist.
“Stop the ice,” he told me. “We’ll seal the dome.”
“You’ll be cut to shreds,” I said.
“We are Ascendant. We always rise,” he said, his blue eyes shining. They launched into the air on their way toward a sea of falling daggers.
My friends, my father looked toward me and waited to see what I would do. I couldn’t look up. I looked at the one portal I had left open and pictured an exit point on the next step, and then another and another, all the way to the submarine that awaited us in the ocean below. The portal held for a moment and then flickered. My broken arm throbbed, and the burns on my face and hands felt like needle pricks. My chest was worse.
“I can’t save them all,” I whispered to Tabitha. “I can’t even hold a portal open right now.”
“I have faith,” she said.
“We can complete our mission though. We came to save you.”
“You did,” she said. “We’ll save them, too.”
“And if I can’t stop this, if it kills us, if we die…”
“…Then we die together, like it should be.”
Far above us, Icarus and Adèle flitted their way toward the dome. The Firsters cheered as they passed through the ice until they disappeared out of sight. I watched them go with a prayer on my lips as the crowd grew silent. Tabitha tugged my sleeve.
“Tully, look around you.”
Hope.
The Firsters no longer looked to the sky. They looked toward me and lifted their palms to the sky. The Ascendant salute. They needed something from me. I would show them mercy, even if it killed me.
I focused on the task. Only a river of fire would stop the falling ice. How much power do I have left, Mom? I can’t have enough to stop that. Tabitha helped me unstrap my broken arm, and I brought it over my head using my good hand. Everyone backed away as my hands grew hotter. The hotter my hands became, the colder my chest grew. If I die like this will you be proud, Mom? If I try and don’t succeed? I closed my eyes and pictured all the Firsters in the arena, and the ice falling toward us all. Each one had a name. Mom, someone named every one of them. Just like you named me. Whatever they deserved, I would give them mercy. I pictured the boy in the stands, reaching out toward me to save him.
Everything, everything, everything, I thought. Hope is everything, Mom. I know now. I know. The burst of energy from my hands knocked me to my knees. It was like holding a boulder above my head. The strain was terrible, and just when I wanted to give up, it intensified. A roar of flames. A stabbing pain in my chest. A flash of red light. I could hold it no longer. Then all at once the flames stopped, and by the time my body fell to the arena floor, I was unconscious.
DREAM
Alush garden appeared before me, shrouded in red mist, with a stone bench at its center—the place where I first spoke to the Sacred. It seemed like a long time ago, and I did not see any figure now, but I heard a voice.
“Why are you here now?” it asked.
“I did the best I could,” I said. “I fought, but I did not hate.”
“Then it is not time for us to meet again,” said the voice. “Not yet.”
“When?” I asked.
“Not when, but where,” it said. “Icarus will tell you before he passes into the mist. Go to him now.”
Why is the sand so hard and wet? I thought as I awoke, realizing that I lay in a pool of boiling water. The sand around me had become so hot that it turned to glass, and I dragged myself out of the shallow pool. Several people helped me the rest of the way and laid me down.
To my right there was a chunk of sharp ice lodged in the ground. In fact, all around me were splinters of ice. I did not stop them all.
In the stands around us the Ascendant treated their injured. The placed the critical patients in the arena, and an Ascendant doctor cared for them. He was a Fourther, but he must have stayed or been left behind. Maybe he had known of the Lord Ascendant’s plan to leave the lower Steps on Europa. He ran toward me, pushed everyone else aside, and produced a gray cartridge from his pocket. He latched the cartridge onto my broken arm, and I felt a needle prick. The cartridge emptied of its gray contents and I felt something under my skin moving. He grabbed my head in his hands.
“This will hurt,” he said. “Breathe.” It felt like ants were crawling under my skin, stinging me all over. I tried to breathe, wanted to scream. My arm shifted, straightened with a pop, and then ached. The same sensation crawled up to my shoulder. I put my head back down and it landed in someone’s lap.
“You did it, Tully. You did all that you could.” Tabitha stroked my hair.
“I tried,” I said. “We couldn’t stop him. At least we have you. At least we survived.”
“No one could have done more,” she said.
On my left I felt a hand grasp mine. Icarus. There was a weakness in his eyes; he blinked heavily. Beside him lay Adèle, unconscious.
“It is not your fault,” he said.
“I failed you,” I said, looking up. “I couldn’t stop the ice or the Lord Ascendant. But you fixed the dome.”
A glowing shield replaced the clear dome.
“Adèle did that,” he said. “Her work will last forever. She will be happy to know this. I must tell her soon.”
“But you made it through the ice,” I said. “What happened?”
“It is not your fault. We began to return and saw, we saw a great fire melting the falling ice, and…what you did was right—”
I understood immediately, and the weight of the thoug
ht almost crushed me. I looked at his body, burned and broken.
“No,” I said, “I burned you both.”
“You saved so many,” he whispered. “Look around you. Look at them. They are beautiful. Beautiful and free and alive.”
The Firsters gathered in small groups, weeping with joy and sadness. Icarus grimaced in pain for a moment, and when he opened his eyes again, he squeezed my hand.
“Adèle?” I asked.
“She left us already,” he whispered. His breath was uneven, and his eyes were too heavy to stay open. “I am going to her now. I can feel it. My time is at an end, my little brother, but yours will continue.”
“You have to guide your people,” I said, “like you guided me.”
“There will be others to do that. Now you must listen. The Lord Ascendant froze something inside you. He left a wound that will not heal, an ice that will not thaw. It will spread.”
There was truth in his words. I could still feel where he had placed each finger on my chest.
“Return to the boy in the Outlands,” he continued. “The Sacred told me. Here on my last day the Sacred spoke to me at last. What a glorious thing. What a glorious thing was life.”
“Everyone dies,” I told him, “but only a few truly live. You said that.”
His tattoos fluttered and his tunic flickered between all the colors of the Seven Steps. He gripped my hand to his chest.
“Yes, I said this, but now only one thing remains. One word. Now, love, Tully. I can see it now—see it in its glory, see him standing beside the throne. Love. Was I a faithful servant? Then it all mattered after all and where is the sting? Where is the sting? All is glory. Love. All is love. Love…”
With that, Icarus released my hand. Tabitha knelt beside us. I placed Icarus’s hands on his chest. His tattoos fluttered and turned from feathers into scales. They hissed furiously. He became the tattoo artist again that I had met on the Third Step, but the snakes swirled and morphed into other forms that I did not know. Other disguises from other times. Finally they settled in a way that I knew him best—wings, feathers that looked soft and real, and those feathers rose from his skin.
One of the feathers brushed against my cheek on its way up into the bright sky above us. Then they gathered together to form the shape of a winged creature, who looked down on us from high above. The image hovered over us, then spread its wings and ascended into the sky. The arena, still packed with hundreds of thousands of Ascendant, fell to their knees. That is how the spirit of Icarus left Rathmore.
I could not mourn for him or Adèle after seeing that: I mourned for the rest of us, for our loss. The Firsters looked at me again, and I looked to my dad. Icarus had given me a mission, but first his people needed help.
Tabitha helped me to my feet, which felt steadier than I expected. My dad walked toward me from across the arena with a black staff still in his hands. He knelt beside me and tousled my hair. He wiped away tears from his eyes and then mine.
“I’m going to be okay, Dad,” I said.
“You’re more than okay,” he said. “You always were, but you’re hurt. We have to get you home.”
Home. Where is that anymore?
“Somewhere else,” I said. “There’s something I have to do.”
We left the stadium, walking around shards of melting ice, down the Steps with Tabitha supporting me, and a thousand Ascendant lining the streets in silence, this time reaching out to touch me.
Bernard and his followers met us along the way. A great number of Firsters followed him, those that had joined his peace march. He wanted to know where Adèle and Icarus were. None of us had the heart to tell him. “Go to the stadium,” my dad said.
“It is what I feared,” he said. “I am the last.” Bernard led them on. They would need him. They had seen the dome smashed and magically repaired, and many saw an angel ascend into the sky.
Who knows what they thought about it all? I didn’t care. I knew that Tabitha was at my side. We found the submarine pulled up to the shore, with Buckshot and Janice there to help us aboard.
“Boy, you look like you’ve been ridden hard and put away wet,” said Buckshot. “Me and Carpool got this sub ship-shape. Time to rock and roll. And Tabitha!” He gave her a big bear hug.
When Buckshot went to hug me, he realized how bad things had been. Bewildered, he shook his head and said a thousand times, “I shoulda been with you, kids, I shoulda been up there…” I told him where we needed to go. He agreed. I crumpled up into a ball in the back and fell asleep. The Sacred was nowhere to be seen.
HOPE AND DISTANCE
The muffled voices of two girls reached my ears. I had fallen into such a deep sleep that my body would not respond to my requests to wake up. I gave up and listened to those two voices as they put together the pieces of the Ascendant puzzle.
“…if that’s not true, then what really happened?” Tabitha asked. There was a rustling of papers.
“It says here that the Ascendant wanted to go into space with the Nameless Ones. Yeah, that’s the only name I can find for the aliens. But some big fight broke out between the Ascendant and the aliens. It’s not very clear but it says here, ‘So, in the course of time, we had our revenge. We overthrew the Nameless Ones and took their treasures, their ships, their empire. And thence came we to establish Europa.’”
“Propaganda overdrive,” said Tabitha. “You learned more about the Ascendant from those scrolls than I did in months.”
“I doubt that,” said Janice. “You lived with them. It’s like a different knowledge.”
“Like the truth,” said Tabitha. “The Lord Ascendant lied to them and told them that they were victims. But they keep overcoming crazy obstacles because they’re exceptional. He likes that word. Really they are exceptional in some ways. Their art, music, theater is all so amazing.”
“That play was pretty cool,” Sunjay said, “but you like them after all that they’ve done?”
“No,” said Janice, “Tabitha appreciates some things about them, that’s all.”
I finally pulled myself out of a stupor and lurched toward the front of the cabin. Everything outside me was bruised. Everything inside felt frozen. With each movement I made, the icy hand of the Lord Ascendant scraped across my chest. I shivered, but when I saw Tabitha, I tried to look strong. She and Janice leaned over some old scraps of paper.
“Hey, Spaceboy,” said Tabitha, “twelve hours of sleep don’t come cheap.”
“Oh, classic tabism,” I said. “Please explain.”
“You missed all this talk about ancient scrolls. Bernard gave them to Janice for safekeeping. They contain the true history of Rathmore. She started translating a little.”
“The myth of Europa makes sense now,” Janice told me. “I can’t believe we didn’t figure it out.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Trackman explained it to me.”
“And,” said Janice, “you missed all of Tabitha’s adventures. She did some acting, but even more spying. Trackman and the Lord Ascendant trusted her, so she learned all about the Ascendant plans for world domination.”
Tabitha looked at me with a hurt in her eyes. She felt terrible about what happened with Trackman, but I was starting to understand why she did it. She couldn’t have helped me, so she maintained her cover.
My dad cleared his throat and we turned toward him. He was in the pilot’s seat.
“First things first,” he said. “We get Tully to the cave to be healed.”
“Yeah, but after that—”
“We broadcast everything we know back to Earth. Between what we saw and what Tabitha knows, the Alliance can prepare for the attack. They can organize, fight back, and spread the truth.”
They must have already discussed this, but it was hard to swallow all at once. We could not stop the Ascendant, but we could disrupt them. In many ways, the mission was a success. We accomplished more than we planned. At the same time, the Earth was in peril. There was momentary relief, but no celebrat
ion.
A light popped on in the submarine. We were near Typhon’s lair.
When the submarine surfaced in the underwater dock, Typhon stood there with a black staff aimed at us. He looked imposing the first time I met him. Now he looked small and defenseless.
“I got this,” I said. I hoisted myself out of the top of the submarine and onto the landing. He wasted no time.
“Boy thief!” he screamed. “Stealer of submarines! Breaker of laws! I’ll be your justice giving!” Out of the black staff streamed an incinerator shot, but I caught it with my good hand and tossed it into the water, where it sizzled. I limped toward him. Typhon dropped the staff while everyone else gathered behind me.
“You—you—you really are him, the Red Thief, here before me standing,” he said, throwing himself at my feet.
“Oh, now you believe me,” I said. “Where is Jason?”
“No, take me, not him! It’s not his fault having. Blame me.”
“Call for him. I need his help.” Typhon stalled but then whistled. Jason entered and ran toward me as if he would hug me. Then he stopped short.
“You are changed,” he said. “You have been through shadow and flame.”
I thought back on it. If the shadow was my “crazy nothing moment” and the flame was the arena, then, yeah, pretty much.
“Oh, you found her! That is good, like the Misty Man said.” Jason took Tabitha’s hand. There was something both ancient and youthful about him. He had the face of a boy but the wrinkles of old age around his soft purple eyes. “And did you find Icarus? Is he real and good, too?”
“He was,” I said, my voice cracking. “Jason, we came back to thank you, and to ask a favor.”
“I know,” he said. “The Misty Man told me. The cave is this way. Just you and this girl should come. Bring your space suits, he says.”
“We will be back,” I said. “We won’t be long.”
“Take your time,” said Buckshot. “I’m sure Sunjay and Janice can find something to argue about to keep us entertained.”
Jason took us by the hand and escorted us through the maze of passages to his bedroom. His action figures were lined up in neat rows on his shelf. The last time I was there felt like a lifetime ago.