Silverworld

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Sami’s eyes had adjusted enough to the gloom that she could make out Dorsom’s face, lost in thought, while Natala stared at the ground—both of them silent and brooding.

  “Stay or go—to me, it makes no difference whether you let the Bleak Fairy capture you or dash you into the cosmos,” the Shadow bat said. “I care about Samara and Silverworld. If she wishes to do it, I will help her make this journey.”

  Sami realized then that the Flickers had stopped listening. Natala’s dark purple head was lifted; Natala was tuned in to something happening outside the hut. The Flicker looked up toward the curved roof and slowly rose out of a crouch. “They’ve spotted us,” she whispered.

  “It is so,” Dorsom hissed.

  “I must decoy.” Natala squatted as if she was gathering her strength, then leapt. In midair, the Flicker appeared to dissolve before Sami’s stunned eyes, so her body turned into a stream of purple dust. It whooshed up through a tiny crack in the thatch overhead like a genie escaping a magic lantern.

  Dorsom grabbed Sami’s arm. “Nixie’s soldiers have scented us. We may come under fire. Sami—it’s best if you wait here!” Without waiting for an answer, he also squatted, then jumped into a stream of powder, pouring upward and out of the tiny opening.

  Sami got to her feet and pushed at the rough walls, but they only shifted and moved around. It was like being trapped inside a woven basket. “I’ve got to help them!” She pushed on the top of the hut with all her might but couldn’t find the opening. “How did I get in here?” she cried. “How do I get out?”

  They brought you through the top opening. The bat’s voice scraped into her thoughts. But Shadow huts reweave and tighten their openings after you come inside.

  The suffocation seemed to close in around her. Sami pounded on the rough, bristling thatch with her hands. “Let me out! I NEED TO GET OUT!”

  Wait, Samara. Breathe. The bat’s thought cut into her mind. Stand. Allow.

  The bat’s words repeated: Breathe. Stand. They slowly worked into her consciousness. Allow. Did she know how to do that? Sami wasn’t sure if she should even listen. This was a Shadow creature, after all—could she trust it? Still, the words circled her own thoughts, splitting them open, making her imagination feel bigger and freer. She realized she didn’t have to trust the voice—she could feel the strength of the words herself. Slumped against the thatch, her fists scratched up from the rough edges, Sami put the side of one hand in her mouth and tasted blood. Slowly, her anger and fear subsided. Bit by bit, she grew focused and resolved. She sent her thought to the Shadow bat: Please, help me. I want to join the others.

  Then stand beneath my voice, it responded.

  Sami stood directly beneath one of the tiny slivers of light. About two feet over her head, it looked about the size of a dime.

  Now a deep breath. Close the eyes. Steady yourself. Allow yourself to atomize.

  Sami frowned. To—what? Her shoulders fell. She searched the gloom for the bat. “But I don’t know how!”

  Its voice returned: Focus, Samara. Again.

  Sami took another deep breath. She imagined atoms, powder, releasing herself into this form she didn’t understand.

  Atomize. The image of Dorsom dissolving and whisking up the opening played through her mind, over and over. Atomize!

  Nothing happened.

  She dropped her hands. “It’s not working. I can’t.”

  “You will,” the bat promised. “If you let yourself.” Again! Focus. Close the eyes. Lift the palms. Breathe. Breathe. Rise, Samara. Rise.

  Shaking her head, Sami screwed her eyes shut again. Breathe, she told herself. She could hear her own pulse pounding in her head. It wasn’t going to work, she just knew it. Rise. This was dumb, totally pointless. Breathe. Just totally…

  Just at the moment of giving up, she realized something actually was happening inside her body. Her hands and feet tingled and a weird scrambling, sparkling feeling began moving from a point within her chest throughout her whole body. Her eyes flew open in alarm. Everything seemed to be turning to powder. The gloomy interior looked like it was covered in fine ash. Her skin looked like ashes. She felt an intense, uncomfortable weight pressing in on every inch of her, her toes and fingers about to pop. Then, all at once, there was delicious, wild release: light air streamed through her skin, her fingers, every part of her.

  Everything she was, everything she believed herself to be, poured into smoke, curling into powder, and all was new, ripe, flowing.

  Streaming. Seeing and not seeing the world flatten into a corkscrewing ribbon of dark blue. Sami shot forward, through a minute opening in the hut. From that tiny distilled point, her substance returned, arms and head and legs reknitting, growing solid against the ground.

  She was almost sorry to feel herself whole again—so heavy and earthbound. But she also felt stronger than before and her mind was clear and sparkling, as if she’d washed it through the sky.

  Perhaps she had.

  After a moment of making sure she was still in one piece, Sami scanned her surroundings. The sun was setting and cast long shadows. But these shadows glittered like opals, so the patterns of palm fronds and rooftops and buildings had a pale bluish glitter. She was standing in an open field, much like the fields around Sami’s middle school. She spotted Dorsom first—he was running toward a stand of palm trees and bushes. Natala followed close behind, trailing sparks on the grass.

  They weren’t running away, she realized. They were trying to attract the attention of something—or someone—to distract it from the hut. The place where her Flicker friends believed she was still hidden.

  Sami’s eyes felt unusually sharp and her mind blazed through thoughts. She felt as if she were seeing everything at once, the Flickers running, the trees blowing. The nearby roll of the ocean was a saffron-yellow blur with white flecks. The tang of salt air looked lemon yellow, and a gardenia flower glistened like crystals.

  There was also, overhead, a kind of motion in the wind and clouds, as if they’d taken on an almost muscular shape. She hadn’t noticed before, but it was clear now, growing like a body in the sky, hovering and bending over the Flickers.

  Air rushed into her lungs and she started running after the others. “Guys!” she shouted. “I’m out!” She could run faster than before, her feet pounding over the grass. She cried again, “I’m coming!”

  Dorsom looked over his shoulder, shock on his face. “How—how on earth did you—?”

  “We’ve gotta get out—it isn’t safe here,” she shouted.

  The clouds rumbled and a bolt of lightning struck the ground. For an instant, brilliance lit everything. But this bolt was illuminated emptiness. Like something tearing the sky.

  Natala whirled and held out her hand to Sami.

  “Don’t stop!” Sami panted. She switched from speaking to thinking without pausing, too breathless to speak: This way. In her peripheral vision she saw Dorsom and Natala follow her.

  They were in a stretch of open field and sandy rubble and distant houses, and she believed if they could get out of the open area they’d be safer. But before Sami could say anything, another empty bolt slammed the ground behind them. She felt the earth vibrate and she smelled smoke and old rust.

  Dorsom caught up to her. How did you release yourself from the hut?

  I atomized! she thought-shouted. It was totally cool. I stood under the opening and— At that moment, another huge bolt struck just in front of them. So close the superdark hurt her eyes. They fell to their knees, ears ringing, ground trembling. Natala, who was just behind, crashed into them.

  Sami saw it before she tumbled into it: a second bolt. This one, she knew, hit its target. Every particle inside her body seemed to squeeze and harden, as if she had turned into a gigantic knot. The world disappeared and in its place was a sizzling river. It spun, pulling her in and
down, flattening her body, the way she’d flattened when she first went through the mirror. Her mind was gone: instead, there was only a searching intelligence, a spotlight of thought and question, swallowing her whole, sucking her down.

  Something trickled across her consciousness. A pale swipe of something. She twisted toward it and felt her spirit rekindle and flame outward.

  Gathering herself, Sami focused every bit of her mind. She felt wisps of Natala and Dorsom’s voices inside of her. She reached toward those wisps and felt herself gaining energy. Concentrating, giving it everything she didn’t know she had, she pushed back, with her thoughts and emotions and will. The memory of her father returned—as powerful and alive as the thought of her mother and grandmother and brother. Everyone she knew and loved was inside of her, fighting with her, gathering within her bones and flesh, all of them helping her to push back.

  Once again she felt unbearable pressure—almost as if she were trapped back inside the ground hut, compressing, about to atomize. This time it was even worse. It didn’t stop. It was going to kill her.

  Then she felt something shimmer under her push.

  The glassiness fractured. A million hairline cracks and slivers seemed to fill the air. With a roaring explosion, the pressure shattered, sailing outward in a trillion tiny shards. In its place was the natural darkness of the Silverworld night, nearly bright as day. The sun had set, and the sky was filled with liquid stars and a crescent moon, and Sami was lying flat on her back, staring up at them.

  She couldn’t hear anything, not the wind or the crickets or the distant thunder. It was silence almost more than silence because, for the first time since she’d gotten to Silverworld, she couldn’t hear the thoughts of the Flickers.

  The last time she’d heard silence like that was at her father’s funeral.

  She was four years old, and even though people said you couldn’t remember things that happened at such a young age, she remembered that day. The faces of friends and relatives loomed into her vision. Words and sounds bubbled from their mouths, then floated away before they reached her. Tony held her hand tightly while they were swept up in rain clouds of arms and faces and tears. She didn’t remember much beyond the impossible strangeness of knowing that her father was inside of the shiny box, that and the wet muffled quiet that surrounded everything, including her own feelings. Only a few words dribbled through and even these were quiet as thoughts: car; terrible accident; so sudden; so young.

  He was a doctor. He used to say: “A son, a daughter, a doctor, a lawyer, and a grandma! The perfect family.” Her father fixed people. Only, for some reason—Sami learned—he couldn’t fix himself.

  She pieced it together slowly as she got older: He’d been walking across the medical campus, on his way to his office. It was an early morning in the fall—a beautiful time of year in Ithaca. He wasn’t paying much attention as he approached the street. He rarely did, Sami knew—her mother said he was the original absentminded professor. But then he saw one of his students walk in front of a car. She was looking down at her phone, texting with friends about a late paper. Joe pushed her out of the way, but he wasn’t fast enough to save himself. He died on impact, the ambulance driver said.

  The student’s parents sent them an enormous wreath and the girl sent them a long tearful letter, telling them how grateful and how sorry she was. She dropped out of school and didn’t come to the funeral.

  In the end, though, really, it was all a dumb accident. And there was no way to get him back.

  When Teta told stories of crossing the desert, she often wove in a mention of a young shaman—a tall, good-looking man, who could heal people with his herbs. In these stories, the young shaman would talk about bravery and determination, about how sometimes you’ve got to do what you know is right—even when it doesn’t feel good at all.

  Without the photographs, Sami couldn’t quite remember her father’s face, but she remembered his smile, the warmth of his arms, and she knew that no matter what, she was never alone.

  The sky still rumbled and crackled but the lightning appeared to be fading, retreating into a far bank of clouds over the ocean. Shaking and wobbly, Sami sat up. So she was still alive, after all. Her vision seemed clear and her hearing was restored. In fact, her senses were still sharper than ever. She could smell the ocean salt and hear the grass moving in the breeze.

  She rolled to her knees, steadied herself, then got to her feet. The fields around her were dark and empty and she experienced a moment of fear that she fought to keep down. Where were the others? She began to slowly scan the scene around her, her eyes taking in every subtle contour and nuance.

  Then she noticed something—a glint like a flake of light. Then another. She hurried toward it. There was a series of these flecks and as she approached, she watched them take on the shape of a boy-man lying on his side. It was an outline in dotted light, like a child had traced around him with a gel pen. Heart pounding, Sami squatted next to the dotted outline and put her hand on his. “Dorsom? Oh, please. Please come back. Oh, this is my fault!”

  Her eyes filled with tears and the world seemed to tilt. When she noticed a burst of color spreading under her hand, she thought she was seeing things. Then she watched that color swirl forward into his arm, filling in the dotted outline, until Dorsom was lying there, fully formed and solid as ever. A transparent wave seemed to wash through his body and he took a deep breath. His eyes fluttered open, round and luminous in the Silverworld night, and they rested on Sami. He frowned and sat up. “What happened?”

  Sami knelt and threw her arms around him. “You’re alive.”

  He nodded as they released each other. “Thanks to you!”

  “And you. I felt you and Natala fighting to help me when I was struck.”

  He shook his head. “That is what rebalancers do. We tune in to energy. We used ours to help you amplify yours. We helped you narrow your focus to make it stronger.”

  She sat back, staring at him and the way he seemed to reflect her own expression—as if she were looking in a mirror. “Were we dead?”

  He smiled. “We don’t draw such clear lines in this World. Not like in yours. We have inside-of-time and outside-of-time. For a smallest while, we were outside-of-time.”

  “We got hit,” Sami muttered. “They zapped us good.”

  The soldiers. Dorsom nodded, rubbing the back of his neck. “Nixie’s army. Their powers grow and grow—exponentially. We’ve been fighting her Shadow soldiers for a long time, but I’ve never seen—or felt—any such thing as this. They’ve seized and channeled storm and electric currents.”

  Sami ran her hands over her arms, making sure she was still in one piece. Then something occurred to her. “But you know the weird thing? Somehow…I didn’t feel like they were trying to kill us. More like—like, trap us.”

  “You, Sami. She needs you. You’re the key to Crossing between Worlds.” Dorsom’s face was drawn and serious in the moonlight. “She needs a Silverwalker to open the door between Worlds.”

  Sami pushed herself up to stand. “Well, she can’t have me.”

  Dorsom studied her in the sparkling moonlight. It had an opal luster and made everything flutter with tiny pink and teal dots. He smiled and nodded. “No, she can’t.”

  They found the dotted outline of Natala in the grass, lying motionless on her side. Sami touched her arm and marveled at the way light and life flashed through her form. The two of them embraced.

  “Incredible, Sami! You brought me back.” Natala’s eyes shone. “You directed breath energies in through me. Your ions—your heat and water vibrations—they recharged me!”

  Dorsom nodded, his hands on his hips, and said to Sami, “You are ready.”

  Slipping from her embrace with Natala, Sami noticed something in the night sky. It looked like a bright speck of night breaking away. She stood slowly, alongside the Flickers,
staring.

  “What do you see?” Dorsom asked.

  It flapped again, and all at once, Sami remembered a moment, while trapped inside the Shadow lightning, when an image came to her of a silver string looping through darkness. She’d had no room to think, she’d merely turned in the direction of the string. It had helped her escape from the lightning blast, giving her a trail to follow. “I think it’s…” She started to walk toward the spiraling.

  The flapping moved closer and came into focus. Bobbing over branches, the Shadow bat appeared. “It’s you!” Sami rushed forward. “You were back there—inside the ground hut—with me. You showed me how to get out.”

  The creature was a blur of waxy light and flapping. It gave a series of soft screeches: And you escaped both hut and lightning beautifully. But now it’s time for your next movements. The Shadow creature grows.

  Dorsom nodded, responding, When Nixie’s soldiers struck us, they read us—our thoughts and intentions. Now she knows even more. If we really want to make it to the Castle Shadow, we’ll have to begin the journey right away.

  Sami must have time to rest, Natala protested. She just survived a Shadow blast. Can’t we give her a minute to recover?

  There are no extra seconds, the bat thought. Sami needs must go to the Bare Isles, and the time is now. There’s no other way. The Shadows may think they’ve destroyed you all, but soon they will sense your energies and come hunting again.

  Sami could feel the agitation in the Flickers beside her, a bit like bands of heat rising from the top of a flame. “What are the Bare Isles?” Sami’s voice was little more than a whisper.

  Dorsom pointed toward the horizon. “A chain of empty islands. They extend over the Eastern waters. Flickers never go there—both out of custom and fear. It’s Nixie’s domain.”

  Sami looked at Dorsom and Natala and shook her head. “There’s no need for either of you to go any farther. I came to Silverworld to help my grandmother. This is my trip to take. I’ll follow the bat as far as it will take me. I won’t ask either of you to risk more than you already have.”