by Matt Ryan
“Just take me to her and she can tell you herself.”
As he pondered that, the moonlight danced through the nearby trees, giving me enough light to see the scruff on the man’s face. He might have been in his mid-forties, a bit on the heavy side, and chock-full of skepticism.
“Can I lower my arms? They’re freaking killing me,” Jackie whined.
“No,” he growled.
She huffed and lowered them anyway. “Just shoot me if you want. I wasn’t blessed with arm strength.”
The man with the gun blew two sharp whistles and two other men came running over from the campfire with stones in hand.
“Caught these kids back where Gwen should have returned.”
I searched the faces of the two men in the dark. Each of them looked as rough as the one with the gun. They sneered at us and raised their hands as if to throw their stones.
“What happened to Gwen?” one of them asked.
“She’s fine. She sent us here once she found out I was the daughter of Cathy Norton.”
That stunned the two of them as much as a stun stone might have. They exchanged glances and then turned back to me.
“She doesn’t have a daughter,” one of them said.
“You two say too much. Shut up and let me do the talking.” The man with the gun moved around us. In the firelight I could see the dark steel of his multi-barreled gun and his grizzled face. It looked softer in the light, though, as if his harsh tone didn’t match his true demeanor.
“Just take me to her, please,” I said.
“Yeah, let’s get this over with,” Jackie added.
“They could be spies,” one of the other men said. I took a closer look at their faces. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I could see that they were identical twins.
“They could have killed Gwen and taken the stone.” Their stone-throwing hands twitched.
“Settle down. This is Boyd and Roy, and I’m Niles,” the man with the gun said. “I think if you kids are lying about who you are, Cathy will be more than happy to have you dealt with. So I’ll give you one more chance to tell your story straight.”
I took a deep breath and thought about my mom standing on the other side of the hub at the Dark Academy. She had seen me, recognized me; she had to have come for me. The coincidence of our being at the same place at the same time was inconceivable. These men probably hadn’t gotten the true information; they acted on rumors and speculations. Once I saw my mom and she saw me, there wouldn’t be any more discussion of who I was.
“No,” I said.
“Fine, but there are certain requirements we have to follow when bringing in prisoners,” the guard said. He hefted the large gun onto his shoulder, tapping the trigger with his finger. “We have to bring you in cold.”
“What does that mean?” Mark asked.
“It means we put you down with a sleep stone,” Boyd began to say.
“And then we take you in blind,” Roy finished.
“No, that isn’t going to happen. We have no idea who these people are.” Mark glared at me. “Allie, we can’t trust them. We’ll be at their total mercy. They could do anything to us when we’re in that state.”
“Yeah.” Jackie sounded unconvinced. “I bet we can find your mom on our own.”
They didn’t get it. “You two can go back to the Academy. I have to do this, and if it requires me to be out while they take me to her, fine. My first waking memory will be my mom hovering over me and the sound of them whimpering in fear of the retaliation my mom will be bringing down on their heads.”
The twins shifted their feet and seemed unsure of themselves. Good. Some fear in them might make my suspended trip safer.
“This is stupid, but all for one, right?” Jackie said, and put her hands on her hips.
“I won’t leave you either, Allie,” Mark said, and in the dancing firelight, his eyes looked full of rage. His jaw muscles were bulging. Jackie seemed indifferent and took her time looking into the nearby swaying trees.
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s get it started.”
The twins lowered their hands and stuffed them into their jacket pockets.
Niles hung his gun on his belt. “Take off your gloves and hold out your hands.”
I took a deep breath and put my faith in the situation. Jackie’s voice rattled in my head, telling me this was stupid, telling me we should be using the stones we had and fighting our way out of this.
Niles pulled a stone from his pocket, blue with yellow swirls.
I pulled off my glove and held out my hand. Staring into Niles’ eyes, I searched for some sincerity and kindness but was coming up short. He seemed nervous more than anything else. I hoped it came from dealing with the daughter of Cathy Norton. He met my eyes as he lifted his hand with the stone. As soon as that stone touched me, I’d be immobilized and these men could do whatever they wanted with me. They could give me to Axiom or they could simply kill a weak target. It wouldn’t be hard to dispose of us.
My hand shook and I glanced over to Mark.
“Hell, no,” Mark said, and in a blur of a motion he kicked Niles’ hand and flung a stone at his face.
Niles was just as fast and blocked the stone with his shoulder. Mark jumped into Niles, tackling him to the ground.
“Mark, no,” I said.
Jackie threw a stone and it whizzed by and hit Boyd in the face. He screamed and flung his arms about as if he was falling. Roy was a split second behind Jackie and struck her with a blue stone. She collapsed to the ground as if someone had flipped a switch.
Anger flooded me and I lunged for Roy with my fists. I got two steps before I felt a stone touch my bare hand. I lost all control of my body as I plummeted to the ground.
“You think she’s the one?” a voice said in the fog of my mind.
“I hope so. Hurry up, we don’t have much time,” another voice said.
The sounds faded and I slipped away again.
“Allie?”
The fog started lifting from my mind and consciousness regained its foothold. Why had I trusted those men with our lives? Was I so delusional in my pursuit to find my mom that I put everyone at risk?
A hand brushed the hair back on the side of my head.
“Allie.”
I turned my head on the soft pillow and saw her, kneeling next to my bed. “Mom?”
She smiled, and many childhood memories crashed down hard. If this wasn’t real, it was the cruelest and best dream ever. I lunged for an embrace, something I’d wanted since the moment I’d seen her in the Dark Academy.
I patted her back and touched her long brown hair. She smelled of fire and dirt. I tried to speak, but my lips shook uncontrollably. The first tear fell from my eye and streamed down my face.
“Shh, it’s okay.” She patted the back of my head and brushed my hair with her fingers.
I cleared my throat and leaned back. I wanted to see her face. I saw myself in some of the features around her face but she had aged, and the brightness in her eyes that I remembered was gone. Behind her smiling face and those teary eyes was something made of stone.
My mother. She was real and she was alive. The idea of it all still seemed implausible. “I thought you were dead.”
She gazed into my eyes. “I’m alive, and I’m so happy you’re here.”
“But we buried you.”
She brushed my hair back and looked to the bedroom door and then back to me. “Your father buried me.”
“Dad?” I felt the tears building again. I’d never actually seen my mom’s body, but this wasn’t something you’d think to question. Hearing that my dad had orchestrated the lie made it hurt all that much more.
“I’m sure he thought it was for the best. I think I was dead to him.”
“I don’t understand. Why did you leave?”
She pursed her lips and looked to the door again. “There are things in this world that need to be protected. I had to make a decision.” She sighed. “If I had know
n you’d already turned seventeen, I would have come for you. I really should have when I heard about your father.”
“You forgot my birthday?”
She stood and reached for my hand, then pulled me up off the bed. My legs wobbled for a second but she held me firm.
“I never for one moment forgot about you, Allie. But what we’re doing here is dangerous and all-encompassing. I couldn’t raise a little girl in this environment. I did check in on you from time to time, from a distance.” She touched the side of my face. “You are so beautiful.”
I thought of Jackie and her encounter with her mom.
“Where are Jackie and Mark?” I blurted out.
“They’re locked up at the moment,” she said.
“Where? Why?”
“They attacked Niles and the twins.” She laughed. “Niles said the boy gave him a run for his money, and Niles is one tough son of a bitch.”
I’d never heard my mother cuss before. I shook my head and stared. Was this my new mother? What had happened to the mother who’d played with me in the snow and read stories to me at night?
Her smile faded and she cleared her throat. “We didn’t know if they could be trusted. We’ve had a few infiltrations recently. They can be very cunning. Are you sure they are who they say they are?”
“Without a doubt. They’ve both saved my life numerous times and I’ve saved theirs. They’re my friends.” And maybe a bit more than friends, but I didn’t feel like discussing my love life with my mom at the moment.
“Come with me. We can get them out, and you can tell me all about this Dark Academy.”
“Did you come to that academy to rescue me?”
She squinted at the question. “Of course. The moment I heard you were in there.” She led me to the door and opened it.
The smell of burning wood and cooked meat wafted in. I looked back at the room, simple but elegant compared to the outside. Across the dirt road, a person was standing in front of a small house that looked as run-down as the heavily trodden road. More houses, which looked more like temporary FEMA housing, lined the dirt road in both directions, maybe twenty on each side.. I looked back at the little house I’d been sleeping in and the outside looked as shoddy as the rest.
“This way,” my mom said, and started walking slowly down the street.
“Mom?” Just saying the word felt weird. It sent chills down my arms.
She looked over to me. I could have sworn she’d been much taller before. In reality, she and I were about the same height. “Yes, Allie.”
“We left a bunch of friends back at the Dark Academy. We even lost one at the real Alchemist Academy. I have to get back there and get my friends out.”
“We plan to. I didn’t know you were at the Academy.”
“We’d been there for a day.” I laughed. “Talk about night and day between the two.”
She chuckled. “Yes, but at least I know about that one. I went there. I want to hear about this other one. In the brief moment I was there, I saw a very interesting statue. Can you tell me about that?”
The statue of Clymene. I shuddered at the thought of its purpose. When I first saw it, I became inspired by a woman holding the Earth on her shoulders but when I finally realized that it was used to extinguish students to create a stone, I hoped to never see it again. My last memory of it was Ira going into it and never coming back out. Well, at least as nothing more than a stone Verity had plucked from the boot of the statue.
My mom’s pace slowed to a crawl as I told her my story. I didn’t leave out much except for the heated encounters with Mark and the more awkward moments with Jackie and Bridget.
She listened intently, asking a few questions about the different classes. And she became especially interested in the class I’d had with Verity. “Do you think you could draw me a map of the place?”
“Yeah, but Jackie was there longer than I was. I bet she could do a better job. Are we close to them?”
She pointed to another house with the same basic front and a single door. The white paint held on to the memory of how the house had once looked. Mostly, the gray wood showed through. I leaned to the side, looking down the space between houses, and saw that this particular house was much longer than the others.
My mom walked up to the front door and pulled a stone from her pocket. She pressed it onto the door handle and it dissolved into the metal. She looked back at me with a smile. “We discovered a locking stone with a matching opening stone. If Verity knew about this, you’d never have gotten into that cabinet.”
Two men were standing in the empty room, each with a large gun holstered on their side. The guns seemed almost cartoonish with their large barrels, but I knew what they held, or at least I knew they held stones. I wasn’t sure what the stones were, but my imagination ran wild thinking about the possibilities. Would they use a suspended animation stone? I hated the idea that I had actually made one and it had been used on another person.
“Open up, boys,” my mom said, but her tone had changed from motherly to a stern command, leaving no room for any discussions. Once the door was open, she marched past them. The men glared at me as I rushed through, following her into the next room.
The smell hit me first—human waste and body odor. I reached for my nose and gagged.
“It’s something you never get used to,” my mom said.
“Who would want to?”
“They would.” She pointed to the cells on each side of us.
If the smell had hit me hard, then the sight of people in the cells struck me with the force of a train. The man in the closest cell—I wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive until he moved. I jerked and backpedaled until I hit the cell behind me.
“Whoa, don’t get close to them.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me into the center of the aisle.
I spun around at the sight of a woman in tattered clothes lying on the floor, if you could call it a floor. It was more of a combination of metal bars and chicken wire. Under that was a metal funnel, streaked with brown and crusted with a dark yellow residue.
I covered my mouth, thinking I would hurl right there, but I fought it back down. When I glanced back at the woman, she sat up and with some struggle got to her feet. Her skin was stretched tightly over her face, without a speck of fat to contour the bony edges.
She reached the edge of her metal mesh cage and touched the bars. I couldn’t look at her any longer, but I heard her moan, “Kill me,” in a mere whisper.
“You’re keeping Mark and Jackie in here?” It came out as more of a scream than a question.
“Allie!” Mark called from the end of the hall of terrors.
I ran down the hall, passing horror after horror, until I finally reached Mark’s outstretched fingers.
“Allie,” he said. I touched his fingers and wanted badly to pull him out of that cage and hold him. The smell of him might mask the other horrible odors surrounding us.
“Get us the hell out of here,” Jackie said from the cell next to Mark.
“Jackie,” I said. They both looked fine. I wondered how long I’d been out and how long they’d been in these cells. Minutes would be too long. I turned to my mother as she approached.
“You’re sure about these two? This one’s mother has a history of working both sides.” She pointed to Mark and then turned to Jackie. “And she’s a ghost. No lineage I can find.” She squinted at her. “Strange.”
“I told you, I have absolutely no doubt. Now, how do I open this thing?” I shook the door and pulled on the handle.
“Here, let me.” She moved next to me, pulled a key from her pocket and opened the door of Mark’s cell, then went over to Jackie’s to open hers.
Mark ran out of the cell and picked me up in a hug. “I didn’t know if we’d ever see you again. We woke up in these cells and you weren’t here.”
“More like we woke up to a friggin’ nightmare,” Jackie said. “How can you keep these people in here like this? Screaming Bob over the
re was squawking for six hours straight. I’m amazed his voice box still functions.”
I turned to the man in the cell across the hall. He stirred awake, looked around and started screaming. This noise stirred the place awake and more people joined in, some telling Bob to shut up and many more just moaning and making crying sounds.
“I can’t get out of here fast enough.” Jackie pushed past us and nudged my mom as she did.
My mom’s eye twitched. She caught me staring at her and she smiled. “Let’s get you guys out of here. I hope you two understand I had to protect Allie.”
“I get it,” Mark said, and walked next to me on the way out of there.
We walked past the two guards and out of the building. I took a deep breath of fresh air and looked back at the house of horrors. It looked just like the rest of the houses, and I wondered if any of the other non-assuming houses held something as atrocious. Was the whole town a façade?
“Did you tell her about the other place?” Mark whispered as my mom secured the house door. Jackie moved in close to hear my answer.
“Yeah, I told her everything.”
“Hey, Allie’s mom?” Jackie called out.
She turned and took a deep breath and blew out a response. “Yes?”
“You can’t just imprison people like this. It isn’t right.” Jackie pointed to the house.
“And who exactly are you to be telling me how to handle my prisoners?” That stern tone came back with a commanding volume. Mom seemed taller and fiercer as she approached Jackie.
“I….” Jackie stumbled over her words.
“If you knew who those people were and what they’ve done, you’d think differently.”
“The lady next to me said she couldn’t even remember why she was there.”
“We use memory stones on the more dangerous ones. If you want to know, the woman next to you is Janice Eggers. She intentionally created a stone that killed a large group of people in the Middle East, in an attempt to destabilize the region. And you know what? It worked. In the end, tens of thousands died because of her actions.”
I looked back at the door. Each one of those people had done horrible things, and that was why my mom kept them in there. The world would be safer thanks to her.