Flicker and Mist

by Mary G. Thompson

  “What matters is the test,” my father said. “If they don’t know you have the Ability, then you are safe.”

  “I can’t even do it,” I said. “If I wanted to spy, if I wanted to hurt anyone, I couldn’t.”

  “Of course you can’t flicker,” my father said. “It was only a fluke. You’re only the tiniest bit Flickerkin. We will keep practicing, and you’ll be fine.” But his grip on my shoulders was too tight, his voice too controlled. He knew as well as I did that the Ability was not something that came and went like a child’s obstinate refusal to eat anything but cheese sandwiches. I had been scared many times since that day eleven years ago, and I had screamed and shouted and cried and laughed for eleven years without triggering a single episode—​but it all meant nothing in the face of the Deputy’s test. Those children my mother spoke of who had never flickered in their lives had not been tortured.

  My father turned me around and pushed me into their bedroom, where a chair was set up. My mother had practiced here, I realized. She must have done it after she tested me. I had been so angry with her that I hadn’t thought about that, about what she must have suffered. He reached into the closet and removed a box designed to hold a men’s pocket timepiece. I had seen the box many times and never known what it held.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as he took out the cuffs.

  I sat down in the chair. My mother had endured this seventeen times at full strength. I had no right to complain. I set my hands on the chair’s arms. “It’s all right,” I said.

  “You’ve never flickered,” said my father, holding the triggering rod in his left hand.

  “I know,” I said. But even if I never flickered, with too many shocks I might confess. We both knew that although I might be physically strong enough to win the ride, I would never be as mentally strong as my mother.

  Each time my father touched the rod to the cuffs, I took the shock. I took it four times, five, six. I didn’t flicker, but I screamed. I would never be able to sit there and endure it with only a fake scream or two. Seven. We took a short break. Eight. I held my scream. Nine.

  “Stop,” I whispered. Tears rolled down my face. I had made it to nine, but that was all I could take.

  My father wiped his own tears away, then ripped the cuffs off of my arms. “I should have stopped before now,” he said. “What kind of a father—”

  “No,” I said. “No, this is right.”

  He attempted to put the cuffs back in their box, but the chain between them wouldn’t fold correctly, and he threw the cuffs and the box onto the bed. “You haven’t flickered. Perhaps you can’t.”

  I said nothing. I just wanted to sleep.

  “Perhaps they will stop early. They’ll see that you’re more like me than like her.”

  “Poppa . . .” I was so weak that I could no longer sit up straight. He turned, saw me slumping, and caught me before I fell out of the chair. He lifted me up and set me down on the bed, brushing the cuffs and the box away. I curled around my mother’s pillow, a huge green thing with lace ruffles. The lace was made by Nolan’s parents, I thought suddenly. Who were in jail for nothing except hiding their ancestry, as we had hidden ours. “I should have done what he did,” I said. “Nolan. I should have flickered and run.” Except I didn’t know how to flicker. I couldn’t have done it to save my life.

  “No,” said my father. “You won’t run. To attempt to leave the city now would be damning. We’ll get your mother released. She poses no danger to anyone. The rest of the Council will see that.”

  I didn’t have the strength to think about the politics, to guess what would happen in the future. But I couldn’t believe that he was right, that freeing my mother could be as easy as waiting. “Poppa, why did you even go there?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, sweetheart?”

  “The Left Eye,” I said. “Nobody goes there except the Guard.”

  “Somebody had to,” he said. “How can we maintain the prezine mines if we don’t have an ambassador?” He kissed my cheek. “Besides, I thought the girls were pretty.” I tried to imagine what it must have been like for him to see all those pale people, to see my mother for the first time, stepping out of the Left Eye mist. She must have seemed so exotic.

  She had lied. From the beginning, she had claimed to be as human as he was.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What do you have to be sorry for?” he asked.

  “I’m not human. I can’t pass.”

  “You have my blood and your mother’s strength,” he said. “You can take a beast over the high wall and back through the moat. You are capable of winning the ride. You can do this, too.”

  “I don’t have her strength,” I said.

  “You will find it.”

  I don’t know if he said anything else, because I fell asleep there on my parents’ bed, cradling my mother’s pillow. I dreamed of riding my beast through the grain fields of the Neck, golden spires waving over my head, my cheek pressed against Hoof’s back.

  The summons came in the morning: a cold call on the voicebox from the Captain of the Guard. They let my father accompany me to the Deputy’s chamber, a last nod to his position as a Council Member. But they made him leave me at the door to the outer chamber, and I passed alone between two guardsmen, the same two who had attempted to take Nolan. They both looked more severe now, hardened by the day that had gone by. They wouldn’t be so foolish as to let another target escape. I didn’t fail to notice the sensors above the door. They appeared as small, bronze-colored prezine eyes, complete with black pupils. Perhaps that was where the invisible beam of light came from.

  My father gave me a practiced, nonchalant smile. “See you in a few minutes,” he said from the hall.

  “Of course,” I said. This was all just a terrible inconvenience. It meant nothing to me that my mother had been taken away to jail. I had nothing to do with any of it. I stepped forward of my own accord into the Deputy’s office, because I wouldn’t let myself be pushed by anyone. I could feel them following me, though, their shadows hanging over my head, their boots heavy on the lush carpet.

  The Deputy sat behind his desk, reading a paper that I recognized as the daily State Complex report. It was a briefing for all the Council Members that contained word of the crops in the Neck, the mining in the Eye, the condition of the ranches and roads through the back country of the Head, the commerce in the market. He was reading it as if this were a day like any other. Or he was hiding, unwilling to look my father in the eye.

  You have played cards with my mother, I wanted to say. You have eaten at our table. You have ridden throughout the Upland with my father for weeks at a time, sharing a campsite. You have sat on the Council together for ten years. Instead I looked down at him and said, “Good morning, Your Excellency. May the Waters hear me.” I nearly choked on the words. I no longer believed in the slightest that I could speak to the Waters through this man.

  He set down his paper and stood up slowly, easily, as if this were nothing. He was barely shorter than his son, and he had the same deep brown eyes and sharp jawline, the same straight, narrow nose. “Ah, Miss Hailfast. Thank you for coming,” he said. He smiled, and the resemblance to Caster shattered. The Deputy’s smile was not easy and disarming, though perhaps that was what he intended. Because of the intention behind it, the smile was lifeless, as were the eyes.

  “Shall I sit here?” I asked, inclining my head toward the chair on my side of the desk. Without waiting for an answer, I sat.

  “Of course,” said the Deputy. “We’ll get this unpleasant business taken care of.”

  “My mother never told either of us,” I said. This was technically true, since my father had learned the truth by failing to see me.

  “Must have been quite a shock,” the Deputy said. He took a pair of prezine cuffs from a box on the edge of his fine desk. A shock indeed.

  The guardsmen stood straight and silent on either side of the door to the office, between the outside
and me. More sensors lined the doorway.

  “Yes,” I said, forcing emotion into my voice. “I can’t believe she lied to me.”

  “Terrible,” he said. “Hold still.” He clamped one of the cuffs around my left wrist. It was smoother than the contraband cuffs I’d practiced with. I could only feel the slightest cold against my skin, and that low buzz, which I was sure someone who was not a Flickerkin would not feel.

  I looked up at him, tears filling my eyes. “I’m not like her,” I said. “I would know, wouldn’t I? It would have happened sometime?”

  Let him believe you are scared not of failing the test but of being one of these horrible things, my father had said.

  Horrible things? I’d asked.

  The way he sees it, my father said.

  But he hadn’t known about my mother. If he had, he wouldn’t have brought her back to New Heart City. He wouldn’t have married her, and I would never have been born.

  “I’m sure you would know,” the Deputy said. “This is only a formality.” He clamped the other cuff closed. Then he stepped to one side, and for the first time I saw the photobox, standing in front of the office window. There was no sign to indicate whether it was recording. “Now, this will hurt, but only for a second.” He tapped the side of one cuff with his triggering rod.

  The shock flowed through me, and I screamed a little. But that was the fake scream, the scream of a girl who hadn’t practiced.

  “Very good.” He tapped me again.

  I gasped.

  Again.

  Again.

  It was easier than it had been last night. Either my father had turned up the intensity to prepare me, or the Deputy was going easy.

  Again.

  No, he was not going easy. The shock resonated when it was gone, shaking itself free from my body. Was this what it felt like to have one’s molecular structure rearranged? Was this the beginning?

  Again.

  I could endure this.

  Again.

  Tears rolled down my face, and my hands gripped the chair. My mother had not given in to the pain this way. She had endured. I pressed the tip of my pinky finger into the chair’s wood. The finger that had betrayed her was still visible.

  Again.

  More tears. I couldn’t wipe my face, so they ran down my cheeks onto my blouse.

  “Ah, Myra, don’t cry,” said the Deputy. “It’s all over. We need only review the film.”

  Over? He had shocked me only eight times. I didn’t dare to say anything that might change his mind. I simply let the tears flow. Maybe there was some sympathy, after all, behind those cold eyes.

  The Deputy waved Brach over. Together, they stood behind the photobox and looked at something I couldn’t see.

  I closed my eyes, unable to watch. My chest heaved. If emotion could cause me to flicker, then I was done for. I couldn’t control myself to save my life. How could I be so weak?

  One cuff clicked open, then the other.

  “Thank you for coming, Myra,” said the Deputy.

  I opened my eyes. He was gazing down at me, his expression calculatingly pleasant. Was he letting me go?

  “You’re a brave girl,” he said.

  I gripped the chair as I stood up, then raised a hand to wipe my face. I need to say something, I thought. But all my calm platitudes, my nonchalant small talk, had disappeared with my resolve not to feel pain.

  “It looks as if my son was right,” said the Deputy. “He swore up and down that Miss Hailfast could never be a Flickerkin or a liar.”

  “Tell him thank you,” I said. “And have a good day.” I lifted my head, wiped my face one more time, and moved slowly, carefully, between the guardsmen. I left the Deputy’s office and passed out in my father’s arms.

  From THE REGULATIONS OF NEW HEART CITY:

  PARTICULAR TO THOSE PEOPLE OF THE UPLAND WHO RESIDE THEREIN

  All residents of New Heart City ages nineteen and older shall pay, as tax, one-sixth of their production to the Council, to be used for the benefit of all. Except that people of the Left Eye, being noncitizens, shall pay, as tax, one-half of their production.

  Ten

  I SLEPT ALL THAT DAY AND NIGHT, DRAINED FROM MY ENCOUNTERS with the cuffs. I dreamed of my mother, as she was when I was young. Once we were alone in our apartment, just the three of us, she would take down her hair and let the blond corkscrew curls fall around her shoulders. My father always said he saw those curls before he saw the rest of her, that he was already in love before he saw her face. In the dream, she was straightening my long dress, telling me to hold still while she pinned it for alterations.

  You’re a true Leftie, she said, smiling around the pins in her mouth. We’d all rather wear pants. Then she said something in the Leftie language that I couldn’t understand.

  I woke in my own bed to find my father sitting by my side. As soon as I opened my eyes, he broke into a smile.

  “You passed,” he said.

  “Yes.” I tried to smile back at him. I should have been ecstatic, or at least relieved. I truly had not believed that I would pass. I had believed that I would be taken away. But now that I was out of danger, my mother’s situation weighed on me. It had been two nights and a day since they had taken her, and we had heard nothing. We had done nothing. “Poppa, how are we going to get her out?”

  He patted my hand. “I have a meeting with the Council now. There’s no evidence that your mother has done anything with her Ability. I’m hopeful that they will release her, to leave for the Eye if nothing else. Now that you are cleared, we can leave without betraying anything.”

  “To leave for the Eye?” Yes, it was better than jail. But I still didn’t want to go.

  “A last resort,” my father said. “We won’t leave until the Games are over; after all this, we owe you that.”

  “Do you really think he’ll let her go?” I asked, pushing myself up in bed. My father spoke of the Council, but it was the Deputy who had the power. My mother had been right.

  “She has done nothing except falsely swear her ancestry upon entry,” he said. “There is no reason for the Waters not to show mercy.”

  “Not the Waters,” I said, “the Deputy.”

  “He is the Deputy to the Waters,” my father said. “They speak through him.” He could not still believe that, I thought. But I didn’t feel like challenging the entire foundation of our culture. I only cared about what would happen to us.

  “The radio said that the clothmakers could get the dip,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” my father said. “They’ll be expelled too. It’s only the boy who’s in trouble because he has fled.”

  “If it’s nonsense, why am I hiding?” I asked. “Should I go turn myself in?”

  “Perhaps it isn’t total nonsense,” my father admitted. “Nothing in this world is certain. There is even still a chance that you can have your life here, that they will let her come home—​if not now, then once the panic has died down.”

  The Council would have to change the law for that to happen, to repeal the total ban on Flickerkin outside the Eye. But I didn’t say that to him. He was clinging to hope.

  “Oh, Myra,” he said. He wrapped his arms around me. “I went to Ripkin and asked him not to test you. I told him I’d do anything to spare you from this.”

  “You did?” I wiped my face.

  “While you were sleeping the night before last, I went to him. I told him that you don’t have the Ability, that I would have seen it in you.”

  And he had tested me anyway. This man who had known me my whole life, who had shared our table and much else. Perhaps he had gone easy on me because of Caster, but he had still tortured me. He had put my father through the humiliation of begging.

  My father looked down at the ground, no doubt thinking the same thing. And now he would have to go to the full Council and do more begging, as if he were not one of them but a poor supplicant from the upper Head.

  “Go to your meeting,” I said. “
See if you can help Momma. If nothing else, we need to see her.”

  “I will,” he said, patting my hand. “You get your rest.”

  “I’d rather go to the stables,” I said. “Even with all this, I mean to win. I am cleared of suspicion now,” I added, in case he wished to stop me.

  “Don’t push yourself too hard,” he said. “You don’t want to be worn out for competition tomorrow.”

  I nodded, grateful that he was letting me go. The Games were tomorrow. I had much training to catch up on.

  “I’ll come find you if I learn anything.” He kissed my forehead and then left the room.

  I got out of bed slowly, sore and tired from the shocks. But I still meant to win. Now it was not only to make my mother proud, but to prove that there was nothing wrong with being half Leftie. And if the truth ever came out, all Plats would know that a dreaded Flickerkin had beaten them.

  I moped my way down to the stables, pondering our situation. Why did the Deputy and, it seemed, most of the people, hate Flickerkin? Few of them had been alive in the days when the Flicker Men still lived among the Lefties, when they had secretly infiltrated the old Heart City. If anyone related to them had been killed in the Leftie uprising (or as my mother called it, the war), it would have been their grandparents or great-grandparents. The Eye had been integrated back into the Upland government as a dependent state for more than sixty years. The Flicker Men had left, and the Eye had been quiet. Lefties were farmers and miners, regular people who did nothing to offend anyone.

  Certainly my mother had done nothing. I had done nothing. I had never even been to the Eye since I was a baby. I couldn’t have told you the name of the Leftie leader or how he was chosen or what he stood for. I wasn’t connected to the Lefties except by my unique physical characteristics.

  I stewed on all this until I reached the stables, where I found Hoof chewing on hay and stomping, restless from the break in training.