by Lev AC Rosen
Severkin nods. “I know how that feels,” he says.
“Do you?” Reunne asks. “How?”
Severkin pauses, his mind briefly blank. “I was raised by a human,” he says. “I had to find my own identity and build it from books and assumptions and things taught to me. But being here for the first time, among my own people…I feel like I can just be myself—as though I don’t need to know what it is to be a gray elf, because there are nothing but gray elves, and each one is different.”
“I can see that,” Reunne says.
“So,” Severkin asks, leaning in, “do you think there are people in the Tower who don’t want to be there? Maybe under some enchantment, and we need to break it somehow?”
“You sound tired,” Reunne says. “And I know I’m tired. I’m to my bed.”
“All right,” Severkin says, disappointed. “I’ll go up, too.” They leave their empty mugs and head upstairs, each taking one of the rooms, which have braziers in them, making the rooms warm and smoky. Severkin unpacks his things and hangs his clothes to dry and gets into bed. His door opens suddenly and he sits up, seeing only a silhouette beyond the threshhold.
Reunne walks in, still in her armor, but her spear is gone. She sits down at the edge of his bed, reaches out and takes his shoulder, then covers him with the blankets.
“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I just wanted to say…before, when you asked me who my family was, I said I was both and neither, and that’s true. My father was taken when I was young. By the Sword and Shield, the guards I mentioned who work in the shadows. My father wanted peace with the overworld—this was nearly a century ago. And then he vanished. Before she died, my mother raised me to be quiet and obedient to the dwarves. So I was an outcast even down there. I was the daughter of the disappeared, and I tried to show them I could be obedient, but they never really accepted me.
“So I wanted you to know I still know you’re my family. More than the gray elves of the overcity or the dwarves and elves of the undercity. Neither of them accept me—but you do. I can’t explain it, but I feel a kinship with you. Maybe it’s because you’re an elf without the prejudices from either city. Maybe you’re the first of my kind who I don’t feel judged by.” She walks a few steps away from him, looks out the small window. “I’m sorry. I just felt I had to say that. Good night.” She turns and walks toward the door without looking back.
“Good night,” Severkin says. He watches Reunne leave, closing the door behind her, and then shuts his eyes and lets sleep overtake him.
NICK TURNS off the game. It’s late. He has school tomorrow and he knows he should sleep, but instead he thinks about what Reunne—Mom—just told him. Reunne’s father was disappeared. Captured by the Sword and Shield—a similar group, Nick thinks, to the Stasi, East Berlin’s secret police. He’s done his research. But he thinks now he hasn’t done enough. He goes to his computer, ignoring the checklist, and starts Googling “Stasi Alzheimer’s” and “East Berlin prison Alzheimer’s,” but nothing comes up that actually relates to East Berlin. Just people with the last name Stasi, or ads for Alzheimer’s treatments on pages about East Berlin. He doesn’t understand what Mom is trying to tell him.
If her father was disappeared, shouldn’t she have been less willing to go into the home? Wouldn’t she know what it was like to have a parent just vanish? Why would she want that for him?
He googles some more, researches East German prison camps, “the disappeared,” “the imprisoned,” his fingers growing numb with the typing, his eyes dim against the bright light of the screen. Nothing, though. Maybe it’s a clue to something else. Maybe she’s the imprisoned, disappeared one and he needs to break her out, like Reunne would break out her father. He’ll have to ask Reunne more. He doesn’t have enough. He knows she’s trying to tell him something, but he doesn’t know what.
The clock on his computer screen says its 1 a.m., which on a school night is hours past when he should be in bed. He’s surprised Dad hasn’t come and checked on him. He turns off the computer and lies down in bed, wondering how Reunne would break into a prison and steal a prisoner and, then, how she’d help the prisoner escape her own fear and climb out of the fog she’s drowning in.
• • •
“That was awesome,” Nat says as she sits next to him in history class. It’s the second class, but there’s a ten-minute break, so not everyone has come in yet. “You’re really good. I was afraid you were gonna suck, y’know. I mean, I’d still play with you, but I didn’t want to be held back. I think I might be holding you back, though.”
“Nah,” Nick says. “You’re really good, too.” Nick has been wondering all morning if he should tell Nat who Reunne is—who she could be. He’s afraid she might think he’s crazy, though. If she doesn’t think he’s a freak just for having a mom everyone thinks is sick. Maybe she’ll think both. Probably both.
Having a parent who everyone thinks is going crazy is akin to going crazy yourself, Nick thinks. He’s paranoid that everyone knows, afraid of what they’ll feel about him—pity, fear, hate—and he’s afraid of the day he loses his keys. Then they’ll lock him away, too. Maybe this is what living in East Germany was like.
“I really loved the part where Reunne showed up with those firesnaps. I wonder if she can teach me the explosives skill. That would be good. And I guess I should try to learn a better lightning spell. I bet they’ll be selling one at the Tower, right?”
Nick glances up at Ms. Knight, who is writing on the board. Other students are filing in.
“We can’t talk about it too loudly,” Nick says. “We don’t want to spoil it for Ms. Knight.”
“You mean she plays?” Nat asks, her eyes going wide. Nick nods. “You’re my favorite, Ms. Knight!” Nat shouts. Some other students giggle. Ms. Knight turns around with a perplexed look on her face.
“Thank you?” she says. “Everyone take your seats; class starts…” She points at the corner of the room as if expecting the bell there to ring, but several seconds go by before it does, after which Ms. Knight looks pleased with herself anyway.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ve gone over your questionnaires, and I think we’re going to have an excellent term and cover a lot of important events. I’m going to put you in pairs and groups where you have similar backgrounds so you can share research and talk about what you’ve learned from your families. You won’t be presenting together, but you will have twenty minutes each week to report to each other what you’ve learned. So, let’s see. Emma Angelov, you’re with Nick Reeves.” Ms. Knight points at Nick and Emma—a different Emma from the one he met at the bookstore, one whom Nick doesn’t know. She’s aggressively blond.
“I think you mean Emma Clarke, Ms. Knight,” Emma says. “My family wasn’t near Africa.” Nick looks at Nat, and they roll their eyes together.
“Nick’s family is from Germany, actually,” Ms. Knight says. “So pair up.”
Emma shrugs, and moves over to sit by Nick. Ms. Knight reads out the rest of the names, and Nat goes over to the other side of the room to sit with her group.
“So, Germany?” Emma asks. She tilts her head at him as if expecting the punch line of a joke she won’t really think is funny, so she has to prepare a fake laugh.
Nick nods. “My mom, East Berlin.”
“Oh,” Emma says, leaning back and pulling her hair behind her ears. “I get it. My grandpa grew up in Bulgaria under communism. I wanted to focus on life under communism.”
“My mom was there when the wall fell, so I’m doing that.”
“That’s cool,” Emma says. She tilts her head again. “Sorry if I was out of line with that Africa comment. I guess you don’t look that black.”
“It’s fine,” Nick says, looking at his desk. It’s not fine, but he doesn’t want to start in with it. And he knows protesting that there are different ways to be black is just going to get this white girl feeling all defensive. In his sixth-grade class there was one other black kid—
Don Robinson—who everyone referred to as “the real black kid” because he played basketball and listened to rap and wore baseball hats with the brims ironed flat. Nick knew there were other ways to be black—he just had to look at his father for that. No one could doubt Dad’s blackness. But the white kids his age always seem to expect the one thing—that pop-culture, edgy-celebrity thing that white suburban kids think of as black—that Nick couldn’t provide. He should be used to it by now. But he’s just tired of it instead. It bores him. He stares down at his desk, which has TWO RIVERS carved choppily into it. Someone has crossed out RIVERS with a knife and carved smaller, more elegant letters above it: SLIVERS. He runs his hands over the words, feeling the rough edges knives made years ago cut freshly into his fingers.
“I also…,” Emma starts, then pauses and tilts her head forward, her eyes big, like she’s about to tell him his puppy died. “I want to say I’m sorry about your mom….”
Nick’s body flash-freezes. He can feel the bones in his jaw start to crack from the cold.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” Emma continues, seeing the look on his face. “It’s just something I heard, and I was, like, ‘He seems so normal.’ It must be hard having a mom who’s…off.” She looks at him as if expecting a response.
Nick opens his mouth, and, and takes a gulp of air too fast, so it feels like he’s choking, and suddenly he’s boiling now, sweating.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says softly.
Emma reaches out and pats his hand. There’s no warmth in the gesture; it’s like she’s petting the ugly dog of a friend.
“Is that why you and Natalie are so close?” She draws out the vowels in Natalie’s name when she asks this.
“What do you mean?” Nick asks.
“Oh,” Emma says, and looks down at her desk. “If you don’t know, I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Okay,” Nick says. He’s too exhausted to be curious. Emma purses her lips, and Nick gets the impression she’s disappointed that he’s not prying.
“So, let’s talk about communism,” she says. “Apparently they were totally shut off from the rest of the world, so they didn’t know anything. That must have sucked.”
• • •
“Have fun with Emma Angel-Love?” Nat asks at lunch, a few periods later.
“Angel-Love?” Nick asks, peeling a banana.
“That’s the nickname she gave herself in second grade. She say anything interesting?” Nick carefully peels the banana, picking at all the threads of peel left behind. “I only ask ’cause she’s a huge gossip.” Nick nods and continues to stare at his banana. There’s a dark brown spot about halfway down, but he likes those spots—they always taste sickly sweet to him, like caramel. “A broch,” Nat says after a moment of silence. “She told you about my dad, didn’t she?”
Nick looks up at Nat.
“No,” he says. “I think she wanted to…She said—” He stops. How can he say what Emma said without revealing what she said about Mom?
“What?” Nat says. She starts tapping her fingers on the table one after the other, like falling dominoes, or the tide. “Look, my dad is better now. He went to rehab. He doesn’t drink anymore.” She says it all quickly, but the words are stale, something she’s said over and over. Nick has never explained Mom’s situation to anyone. He doesn’t know how to make those words stale.
“That’s not what she said,” Nick says.
Nat turns bright red, but it fades in a flash, and she shrugs. “Well, that’s my story,” she says. “My dad was a drunk; some friends and I found him passed out on the floor when we came home one day. Now he’s better. If you don’t want to be my friend anymore, then screw you.” She stops tapping her fingers and waits for a moment and Nick thinks about reaching out and putting his hand on hers but doesn’t.
“I still want to be your friend,” he says. “I don’t care about that.” He stares at her, and she’s smiling. He tries to process this new information: Her dad was an alcoholic. Her dad is better now. It doesn’t change his opinion of her. Her dad is a different person from Nat. Just like Mom is different from him.
“She asked if we were friends because she thinks my mom is crazy.” Natalie’s eyes widen, there’s a delay before she speaks. It’s her turn now to stare at her bottle of orange juice, the tape off, pulp clustering around the rim like moss. “You knew,” Nick says.
“I’d heard something,” Nat confesses. “But I didn’t believe it. I figured if it was true, you’d tell me.”
“It’s not true,” Nick says. Nat smiles, looks up at him, thinks that’s the end of the story. “But I’m the only one who knows that,” he finishes.
He forgets to eat lunch as he explains about Mom’s supposed illness, about what Alzheimer’s is, and how he knows she doesn’t have it because of the checklist, how she has something else, about how she’s in a home. It feels so good to say it, like his body has been all knotted up before now, and as he talks, the knots untie themselves one by one and he can feel his blood flow, his muscles stretch, his whole body strong enough now to take down a giant. It feels like freedom. He doesn’t even notice how Nat’s expression has changed until he’s done with his story. Till he’s told her about Mom’s paintings of Wellhall, and that Reunne is Mom. But then he finishes, and looks at her, and she’s wearing PityFace, her head cocked to the side, her eyes wide and her shoulders back, her lips pressed into a straight line except for at the corners, which go up, but only slightly—not a smile, just an expression saying “I’m here for you.”
“Are you sure she’s not really sick?” she asks, her voice low.
The bell rings, signaling the end of lunch, and it feels like the scream inside Nick’s head, the scream from a staff through his gut as blood runs everywhere. He gets up to leave without saying anything, walks away, deaf except for the echo of the bell in his ears.
NAT TRIES to talk to him in the parking lot after school—he sees her running for him, waving, but he gets on the bus quickly and ignores her. She starts calling him almost immediately, but he doesn’t pick up, and then the text messages start:
I’m sorry
Please call me I just want to apologize
I know what ur going thru
I believe you
This one comes as he’s getting off the bus, and Nick stares at it like Severkin would stare at a puzzle-lock on the door to a vault. Is it a lie told out of guilt? Truth? What does she believe, exactly?
He goes inside, but the house is empty, Dad still at work. He goes up to his room and turns on the game, then stares at his phone again. He doesn’t know if she really believes him. Maybe he didn’t explain it well enough. Maybe he should have told her about the things his mom used to do in the game. There was one quest he especially remembers, which started with a slip of paper on his pillow reading, “The Queen in Bluegarden who doesn’t sit on a throne.” Bluegarden was a huge city, overseen by Queen Delilah, but she was always on her throne. Severkin spent an hour exploring the city before he realized that one of the citizens’ pet cats was named Queenie. He’d pickpocketed the cat—something Nick didn’t even know was possible, but apparently his mom had figured it out—and found a note.
He recognized the note from another quest. It was a note between lovers, just a scrap of paper, but Nick saw it in a different context now. It said “We’ll meet where there is a tree that was once a woman.” In the original quest, they were talking about an overgrown statue in an abandoned city. But this wasn’t that quest. This was something Mom gave to him. He’d gone online, remembering Mom saying it was based on Greek mythology, and looked into Greek myths where women had been turned into trees. The big one was when the nymph Daphne was turned into a laurel tree. Nick had known what to do then. There was a gardener who ran the royal greenhouses in the city of Serelle, and her name was Laurel. Severkin searched every tree in Laurel’s greenhouse until he found an enchanted dagger.
In the game, when a player enchants an object, the p
layer can rename the item. The dagger was called the Golden Apple. This one took more puzzling out. He knew the myth of the golden apple, how it caused the Trojan War, but there was no golden apple in the game, no Trojan War. The war in the game was based on World War I. He turned the idea over and over in his head and examined the enchantments on the dagger—improved accuracy. And then he realized that a golden apple was the starting point of the Trojan War, so he should go to the starting point of the war in the game—a pastry shop in the city of Jevo where the assassin had been having coffee, not knowing his conspirators had failed to kill the prince. Like in World War I, a wrong turn had put the prince in the assassin’s sight. The assassin shot the prince, and war began. In the game, the pastry shop was still doing business, so Severkin snuck in one night after it had closed, and in the basement, amid the bags of flour and sugar, he’d found an amulet called Severkin’s Sight, which not only improved his accuracy but let him see people through walls. It had been an awesome quest.
He thinks maybe if Nat knew about that—and about the other quests like it—maybe she wouldn’t have been so skeptical. He looks down at the text messages again.
I believe you
He calls Nat’s number, and she picks up before the first ring is over.
“Thank you,” she says quickly. Her voice sounds sticky.
“What do you believe?” Nick asks. He keeps his voice cool.
“What?”
“You said you believe me. What do you believe?”
“That maybe your mom was misdiagnosed.”
Nick takes a deep breath, and it feels like the first breath he’s taken in a while. “Thank you,” he says. In the background, he can hear murmuring, people talking. “Where are you?”