Rise: Paths (Future Worlds Book 2)

by Brian Guthrie

  He frowned. "What if there is nothing more to know?"

  "Then we'd already know what was found in the water."

  "But why do you care to know?" he persisted. "What do you hope to find?"

  I shrugged again. "I don't know. The truth?"

  He fell silent, eyes contemplating me.

  "The truth is a fickle thing," he finally whispered. "And it depends greatly on your point of view."

  "No, that's opinion." I countered. "Truth is truth. The perception of truth and opinion of what is found depend on your point of view."

  "And what will you do if you find there's nothing to be found?"

  I shook my head. "There's always something to be found."

  "And if there isn't this time?"

  "Then, we've wasted our time asking a silly question," I retorted, waving a hand at him. "I don't know what you're looking for, but I know what I am."

  "And that is?"

  "I told you already, the truth of what happened up there. There's more to it than just two ships sinking. Something else is going on here and the loss of those two ships, I think, is just another step in something much bigger."

  Suyef stood silent for a moment, then sighed and shook his head. "Truth is not what I seek."

  I gazed at him. "Answers?"

  "Vengeance." His eyes flared, locking on mine. "Pure, simple vengeance."

  #

  We left that night, escorted across the landscape to another Nomad outpost near the shell's topmost edge. Before we left, the elder and my father visited us one last time. Suyef received a padd from the elder, who bid us farewell. My companion tucked the device away and moved off so I could say goodbye to my father.

  "I'm not sure what you hope to find, doing this," he said, shaking his head. "Trouble. That's all I got from this whole mess." He shifted inside his cloak. "That and your belt. Do you still have it on you?"

  I pulled the belt off.

  "I never told you where I got it," he continued. "I took that from someone on that ship."

  "Who?" I interrupted him.

  He shook his head again. "I don't know. But I can tell you this. If you're so set on figuring out what happened, figure out what that thing is and where it came from." He put a hand on my shoulder. "I know you've tried before to find out about the belt. Do it again. Maybe on Colberra you'll have better luck. I suspect the guy I took it from was from there. That's all I can tell you. The rest is classified."

  I frowned at him. "That's just to protect the Seekers."

  "Maybe," he stated, shrugging. "It's not my place to decide that." He pointed at the belt with his other hand. "But this, no one knows about. The Nomads I think suspect it, but as I had it when they found me, the belt belonged to me."

  I held the belt up. "It looks Ancient."

  My father nodded. "And that's all I know about it." He paused and looked around. "Oh, and I think the guy who had it on him was a Seeker." He shrugged. "But that's just my guess."

  He bid me farewell and left. I joined Suyef and we made our way to the shell's edge, the belt now wrapped securely around my waist. There, we were secreted aboard a Nomad transport ship lifting off and heading for Colberra that core-night. With the shells this close to each other, ships were able to travel more freely between the land masses, using their gravity tethers to push and pull their way from one shell to the other. These vessels differed greatly from the variants sent to the water shield so long ago, as these depended greatly on the relative proximity to land masses, whereas the ships sent to the water had been propelled with Ancient technology that allowed free travel into the atmosphere. Much like Seeker speeders, the ship we travelled on needed something to latch on to with gravity beams and push or pull on to move.

  The ship departed that evening with us locked away in our quarters far below deck, only the captain aware of our presence. Despite their fall from grace, which I began to learn about that very evening, the family name still carried a lot of sway among the Nomads, and Suyef used that to his advantage. We had a spacious cargo room all to ourselves, complete with hammocks, washing basin and food, and, most importantly, a door lockable from the inside. The elder's words had proven true: Suyef proved to be a hard nut to crack, making me feel like a chatterbox trying to get him speak. Eventually, he relented and started sharing some of his people's history and culture with me. He taught me in short order how many cultural blunders I'd made during my visit to the council. Suyef expressed in blunt terms he'd been shocked they'd even granted me permission to accompany him, considering how rudely I'd behaved before the council.

  "Here I thought that was being polite," I muttered after his describing how my quiet shuffling looked.

  "Never take your eyes from an elder when he is speaking," he said, holding a single finger up. "To do such a thing is to tell them what they say matters as much to you as the air shifting around the room."

  "Elders put far too much importance on younger people listening to them with undivided attention," I retorted. "Maybe if they said things that interested me, it'd be easier to pay attention."

  Suyef chuckled. "That's why I'm surprised we are here. Colberrans, in general, are considered among the rudest people we Nomads have ever encountered. None of you can maintain eye contact for more than a few heartbeats. Is it any wonder you are all so argumentative and distrustful of each other?" He jabbed a finger at me. "Even now, knowing what you know, you've avoided looking directly at me."

  "Hey, you said that was for elders," I countered.

  He shook his head. "No, I said among elders it's required. Among Nomads as a whole, it's highly encouraged to the point of being required."

  I snorted. "Yeah, well, in Colberra, I suggest you break that habit. People there think you're getting too pushy or in their face if you look them in the eye too much."

  We spent the better part of the first leg of the flight discussing the many cultural nuances of Colberran society. On the whole, Suyef left me with the impression he found the entire experience discomfiting. The two cultures, Nomad and Colberran, are as different as one will find. To this day, it stuns me how well he did at figuring out how to blend in so well. A master of disguise, that's the only explanation. That, and he was highly motivated. He sat through many questions once I got him talking about his father and his family's fall from grace after the tragedy on the water. For the most part, Suyef answered my questions with as few words as possible, carefully guarding what remained of his family's honor. He walked a fine line with me on that trip, between giving me just enough information that I wasn't blind and keeping me far enough in the dark that the discussion didn't encroach on things that were none of my business.

  "I'm still puzzled," Suyef said chrons later, "what it is you are looking for that you couldn't find just by asking your father?"

  I shook my head. "My father refused to discuss the incident with me. Partly because he doesn't know some of the answers. Partly because of how Colberra views the entire incident. They classified it all, sealing off the information on the network. What's public knowledge is as basic as it comes, and my father refused to confirm or deny anything I ventured to guess beyond that record. It's possible he hoped it would stay my curiosity a bit." I chuckled. "It had the opposite effect."

  "But what do you hope to gain from this?" Suyef asked. "Even if you find there is more to the official record, what do you gain by finding it?"

  I shook my head again. "Don't know. It's not a secret that I'm just curious about it. Plus, it's my opinion there's more to that event then we're being told."

  Suyef pulled out the padd the elder had given him. He keyed it on and held it up to me.

  "This seems to confirm that statement."

  The padd held a simple message from the elder. It instructed Suyef to do what he could to discover why the network was beginning to degrade and see if the Colberrans, specifically the Seekers, had anything to do with it.

  "The network is degrading?" I asked, looking up at my companion.


  He nodded. "In parts. It's becoming less accessible, slower to respond." He looked up at me. "Water supplies are dwindling along the outer edges."

  "In regions not destroyed?"

  He shrugged. "The system still sends water to the broken pipes. How else do you think your outpost gets water?"

  "Isn't the station being fed by the one line that wasn't broken?"

  "The water still has to traverse a myriad of broken piping networks to get to your outpost," he stated. "Anyway, your theory seems to be correct. So, what will you do with the information you do find?"

  "I don't know, share it?" I shrugged. "Hadn't thought that far ahead. For now, it's sufficient we have something to look for. If the answers are there, we'll cross that expanse then."

  Suyef sighed. "It's very clear why the elders thought it best someone go with you. A ship without a direction is just lost."

  "Apparently, they think there might be something to this whole thing."

  "That, or they think you're wasting your time and are just trying to get rid of you," Suyef retorted, tossing me a nutrient pack.

  "If that's the case, why send you along?"

  The look that crossed his face would have stopped anyone's heart. I didn't need him to answer to know his thought.

  "To get you out of the way, too," I whispered.

  Suyef nodded and swallowed part of his nutrient pack. "I'm a constant reminder to them of my father's failure, of the loss of all those lives on his watch."

  "Sending you on this quest gets you out of sight."

  "And out of mind," Suyef added. "Now, they've sent me off babysitting some foolish Colberran on his quest for knowledge. And on a different shell. The perfect excuse to remove me from the picture."

  "That's why you came anyway, though, isn't it?" I asked. "You knew they were getting rid of you. You came just to spite them?"

  "No, I came because my father is still dead and we don't know who killed him," Suyef whispered, his voice icy and quiet. "And you're going to help me find whoever did this."

  #

  Being privy to that information put a damper on conversation for several hours. Suyef, for one, seemed content to let it lie, and the topic had left me in no mood to talk. My feelings on helping him with his quest for vengeance were mixed. On one hand, he deserved what justice he could find. On the other, something felt wrong about a blind quest for revenge. Add that with the fact that we had no clue what we were looking for, and it left me feeling very morose when the ship deposited us on the uppermost edge of the Colberran shell.

  I did manage to show the belt to Suyef before we settled down that night. He was able to confirm its origins in Ancient technology, but nothing more. He was very curious why the Nomads had returned it to my father considering that information.

  "Our laws on possession are clear, so in that they simply followed the rule," he explained as he examined it. "Still, most things of Ancient origin are exempt because of their power. A device such as this, as unknown as it is, the elders would have wanted to keep secure."

  "Tied in knots by their own rules?" I asked.

  Suyef nodded. "That must be it." He handed the belt back to me. "Whatever it is, it seems dead. Or at least inactive." He eyed the belt warily in my hand. "Still, be mindful of it. Even an inactive Ancient device can be dangerous."

  That conversation dominated my thoughts the rest of our trip to Colberra.

  While most of the shell is flat, surrounding a large mountainous center, one peninsula off the far edge of Colberraopposite where Micaela calls home, has a mountain range all to itself. Reaching out like an appendage toward the water, the peninsula juts up closer to the water shield than any other place on the shell save for the central citadel. As such, it is much colder and harsher. Just beyond the edge, you can glimpse several satellite shells floating in sight, remnants of a longer peninsula that had broken off some time in the past and formed the Northern Isles, the only part of Colberra I'd been to prior to that. No one knows where that name came from, as they aren't in the north the way the Colberrans see north and they aren't really islands. Still, the name stuck and the people that clung to life there were of the most stubborn type one could find. One would have to be to live in a place where the only source of water came from a ship sent out once a month to deliver the precious lifeblood of the shell. While not numerous, they are a hardy folk, big, thickheaded, and brash. They like to be left alone and, for the most part, Colberra is content to leave them be. The Nomads took a liking to them almost immediately, thus allowing us a drop-off point when their ship made its way to the isle nearest to the mainland.

  Some time into core-night on the second night out from the Nomad shell, the ship's captain signaled us that he'd be making a pit stop just before swinging out toward the isles. He suggested we disembark then, if we were so inclined. We took his offer and, in the dead of core-night, I found myself ducking over the side of the ship and leaping onto mainland Colberra for the first time in my life. The air was brisk and the wind strong. Far overhead, the water shield rippled in detail for the first time that I could recall. Waves swept across the expanse as the water felt the draw of the world's now invisible moon pulling on it. Just ahead lay the shell's edge and, just barely visible through the artificial shield the citadel provided to create the illusion we called core-night, the closest isle and destination for our captain. He waved once, Suyef returning the wave, then we moved away into the night.

  "If you'd asked me how my first trip to the mainland would go, a slightly different arrival would have been on the report," I whispered as we slunk our way into the settlement on the shell's edge.

  "Expected a bit of fanfare, maybe? The welcoming greetings of your fellow citizens?" Suyef asked.

  "More like a bit more clothing, a bed—you know—the simple stuff."

  Suyef chuckled. "That can be arranged."

  He led us through the night to the settlement's only inn, a small two-story building with bunk beds in each room and a small hearth that I found myself gratefully hovering over while chewing on a bit of bread and slurping a mug of cocoa.

  "Better?" Suyef asked, joining me.

  "Welcome home to me." I grinned, finishing off the bread and washing it down with a swig of cocoa. "Well, sort of home." I waved my mug at the wall facing south. "Home's out there on those isles. Still, it feels like home."

  "Tomorrow we head inland," Suyef muttered, holding his hands out to the fire. "We need to find a point for you to access the network uninterrupted."

  "Had a thought on that," I said. "You know these water towers all have control stations in them. We could find an unoccupied one of those to start."

  The Nomad nodded, eyes on the fire. "It'll do, for a start. Let's rest. Shops open early tomorrow and we have some supplies to purchase."

  I slept fairly well that night, all things considered. Suyef is many things, but a restful sleeper is not one of them. He tossed and turned enough on the bunk below me to give me the feeling of being back aboard the ship. We both managed to conk out some time later. I came to as the core-night lifted and found Suyef already up and gone. I hurried out, grabbed a quick bite in the inn's kitchen and found him outside waiting for me. He tossed me a sack and waved for me to follow.

  "You'll find most of what you need in there: nutrient and hydration packs. Warm blanket. A change of underclothing." He shrugged at me. "I guessed on your size for that part."

  I nodded my thanks, donning the sack and moving closer. "Have you thought about how we'll travel? Seekers tend to roam these parts, as do bandits."

  Suyef grinned and waved me into an alley near the settlement's edge. "That won't be an issue. Go ahead and pull out your cloak."

  I did so, curiosity building. The pack's contents left me stunned.

  "You stole Seekers' cloaks?"

  "How else did you think we'd keep them off our backs?"

  I blinked at him. "You know it's a capital offense on Colberra to impersonate a Seeker, right?"

 
"It's a capital offense to think on Colberra." Suyef pulled his cloak on and shrugged, using the motion to shift the cloak over his broad torso. "I'm not from Colberra, so it doesn't matter to me."

  "I'm Colberran, so it matters to me," I hissed. "And the first time you meet a Seeker squad, it will matter to you, too."

  He chuckled. "Seeker squads don't scare me. And they won't you either. We'll avoid them as best we can and only use these where necessary."

  "And you think it's necessary right now?"

  He nodded. "How else do you intend to get some Seeker speeder bikes? Borrow them?"

  With that, he strolled out from the alley and marched toward a Seeker outpost. If I'd been a cursing man, a few might have slipped out right then as I hurriedly donned the cloak and raced after him.

  Chapter 6 - Complications

  Not every interruption to Quentin's story was dramatic. Several times, he would just stop talking. Other times, he'd just state he was done and leave. I tried following him on those occasions. It amazed me how easily he could hide in a place that seemed to not have that many places to go. As I said before, a lot of higher-level Scripting seemed to be going on under my nose.

  On one such occasion, Quentin left me sitting alone in his room. The ever-present eyes of Micaela stared at me. Trying to concentrate and find the telltale markers left behind when someone altered reality by Scripting left me at a loss. The symbols eluded me, and my failure to find the clues left my mind to wander back to Suyef's words. The meaning he'd implied hung heavily on my mind. As I sat there, ignoring the sketches and trying to make sense of the Nomad's curious words, I realized my hand rested on something smooth and solid. Looking down revealed the unopened box jutting out from my travel sack. Pulling it out, I held the full length of it before me. The magnetic clasp lay closed and my eyes locked on it. What lay hidden behind that clasp? What secret lay hidden in my hands? What secret would so affect the Queen that she would send me off on this quest? And, ultimately, what secret role did this object play in this whole story?

  My thumb brushed the edge of the clasp, my curiosity driving me to peek inside. Just as my fingertip hooked the lower edge of the seal, lifting it slightly, Suyef's words echoed in my memory.