Fervor

by Chantal Boudreau

  All of that was about to change. Once they actually left the island, they would be able to learn anything that others would be willing to teach them. Someday, Sam promised himself, he would know what every single item in that laboratory was for.

  There was nothing more in either of those rooms to tell Sam succinctly what this place was, but Sam had already formulated his theories. Since it seemed to him that Francis had known about this place, Sam concluded that this might be the location where the minders and teachers had brought the Tellers and Controls to instruct them on the Directives, and where the Tellers had trained for two years with the connection prior to the second exodus. It would make sense that they would choose a secluded place where other children on Fervor would not stray. That way, there was little chance that the truth of their existence would be discovered. That explained why no one but the Tellers and the Controls had had any idea what was going on. This was all part of their secret.

  Before Sam could approach the third door, Sarah was with him again.

  “We’re done, Sam. The hover is ready. I have all the time in the world to talk to you now. Elliot will be preoccupied with showing Fiona and Nathan how it works, but there isn’t enough room there for me to see what he is doing, too. I wish you were home so I didn’t feel so left out. If we had a Finder with us, we could take the hover out to fetch you.”

  She seemed a little more like her regular self. Not that she had recovered entirely from the loss of Francis, but her excitement at reaching one of their objectives softened the blow a little for the moment.

  “That’s okay, Sarah. I can make my own way home, and then it won’t be long before we can finally leave Fervor,” he assured her.

  “Did you figure out what it was that you found?”

  He shone the light on the glass of the third door. There was a familiarity to the room beyond, too. It looked like the garage in the school where they had fetched the tools for Elliot, only much bigger. Aside from tools, it appeared, at first, to be empty. Then he saw something gleaming at the far end of the room. He turned his torch on it and could make out a surprising bullet-like form—partially disassembled—with its pieces scattered about on the floor. Sam gasped.

  “What? What is it?” Sarah demanded.

  “I found a hover here – a long distance one like Elliot’s. It looks like they had been in the process of repairing it and they must have had to leave it behind. I can’t believe it. It has been here this entire time, and none of us knew.”

  Not that they could have taken it and fled Fervor any sooner, he considered. Only Fiona could have gotten anywhere near it until Elliot had arrived with the Languorite, and none of them would have known how to operate it.

  “Where’s here?” Sarah asked. “I thought you had gone to the High Barrens?”

  “That’s where I am, only inside,” he answered.

  “Inside?”

  It was hard to explain with words. It had been several days since he had tried the trick, but he realized that the easiest way was to show her…just the way he used to do when she was blind. He scrambled back where he had started outside, and then gave her a brief tour, projecting images to her from each area, as he went. He could sense her bewilderment.

  “That was there,” she thought with an edge of awe. “That was there and none of us had a clue.”

  “I think Francis knew,” Sam suggested, “And possibly Royce. I’m not positive, but I suspect that this is where they trained the Tellers in the use of the connection. I think this might be where they instructed them on the Directives as well.”

  “Do you think...do you think Francis wanted you to find it?”

  “I don’t know. You were right about Francis being broken, Sarah. I don’t believe that you could have fixed him by the time Elliot took away his gift. I think he was beyond saving. You can’t blame yourself for that. You know that, right?”

  This time, it was Sarah’s turn not to answer. Sam decided that he needed a distraction. He was not in the right frame of mind to deal with this.

  “There’s one more door, Sarah – one that I haven’t investigated yet. Did you want me to take a look and show you what’s there?”

  Sam could not imagine what he would find. Maybe this was where the technicians and scholars once lived, out of sight of the rest of Fervor, except when they went out to test the Bigs.

  “Okay, Sam. I can’t believe that they kept all of this underground. It must have been built right into the cliffs,” she hypothesized.

  Sam did not doubt that they had the capability. These were the same people, after all, who had built the Hub. Anyone who had the wherewithal to build that monstrosity likely had the knowledge and resources to construct an underground training and research facility.

  He took a few steps forward and shone the glow torch on the last door. Beyond the glass, there was a network of hallways and doors, like some sort of residential area. Perhaps he had guessed right, he thought triumphantly. Perhaps this had been where the other adults had lived. That was when he caught a glimpse of movement and heard a sudden noise. Sarah got a taste of his anxiety.

  “What’s the matter?” she questioned.

  “There’s someone else here. There’s someone in the building.”

  Sam practically jumped out of his skin as that same something slammed up abruptly against the door. Sam actually heard the glass crack. There was a figure on the other side, but he was not so sure that he would call it a “someone”. The misshapen form looked like it had been intended to be human, but its legs were gnarled and tree-like, and its skin didn’t seem to be properly conformed to its body, hanging loose in some places and stretched taut in others. One arm seemed to end in a proper hand, albeit a somewhat talon-like one, but the other ended in a lumpy nub.

  The worst part for Sam, however, was the face, or more like the lack of one. It was like someone had pressed a person’s face against the glass and smeared it out of shape: the eyes awkwardly placed at odd angles, no ears to speak of, the nose squashed flat and pointed upwards towards the right, and a gaping maw with a sprinkling of crooked teeth jutting out in all directions. But this face was not actually pressed against the glass.

  Sam could not help himself. He screamed.

  That was when the second figure appeared next to the first, slamming up against the door with equal gusto. Sam could not bear to stay there long enough to get a good look at this one. He turned and ran as fast as his legs would carry him.

  Uncontrolled

  Sam finally came to a stop quite a distance from the High Barrens, curling over and gagging as he tried to catch his breath. He felt like he had been running full tilt for hours, driven by fear and disgust. Sarah had been calling to him the entire time that he had been barrelling away from his latest find, trying to get him to slow down and share with her what had upset him so much. He had not taken the time to project the images from the final door to her in his panic, so all Sarah knew was that Sam had left in a hurry, and that he had been running scared.

  When he had calmed himself enough to finally respond to her, she was starting to become anxious that maybe he had been physically hurt in some way. He assured the fretful girl that he had not been harmed, just frightened out of his wits.

  “I think it was them,” he thought, trying to shake the memory of their misshapen forms from his head. “Why did I have to see that?”

  “Them? Who, Sam?”

  “The ones Royce talked about – the Littles that didn’t turn out quite right. Elliot was right. Some of them did survive. I saw two of them, but there could have been more. They left them here, Sarah. The scholars just left them, like they did with the rest of us. They were holed up down there, underneath the High Barrens, and who knows what those villains left them with?”

  Sam wondered if the scholars had provided the odd ones with a proper supply of food and access to water. They clearly had some resources, or they would not have survived the years since the second exodus. Sam was also sure that they
did not have access to the connection, but he was still unsure if that was because they lacked the capability, or because that capability still remained suppressed for them. The odd ones had not tried to open the door that had stood between him and them using traditional means, so he had to conclude that it was barred in some way to prevent their escape. They were prisoners on Fervor, too, with even less freedom than the other Littles.

  “You’re positive it was them?” Sarah asked, finding all of this difficult to accept.

  “If what Royce and Elliot suggested is true – I have no doubt. Sarah, I want to get off this island, now more than ever. I don’t want to be a pawn in the scholars’ games anymore. I want to know what it means to be a real person, not manipulated by outside forces.”

  Sam felt really tired all of a sudden, and there was so far for him to travel to get home. It seemed like it would take him forever to get back.

  “Hurry home then. We’ll be leaving soon. We’ll be free, and we can find somewhere to start over,” Sarah offered soothingly.

  But Sam knew better. They would not be free just because they left Fervor. They might always be on the run. On the positive side, though, they would no longer be under the scholars’ thumbs. In fact, with Francis gone and Nathan’s gift eliminated, they were already almost there.

  “I’ll get back as quickly as I can,” he responded. “Be watchful – they may come looking to see what happened to Nathan soon. If it comes down to it, Sarah, and it’s leave without me or be caught, don’t let Nathan or Fiona be stubborn about it. Just go.”

  He broke off the link with her, as anxious as ever to get home and wanting to concentrate on making his way back there.

  They made contact a few more times during the day, mainly just so that Sarah could check in on Sam and could confirm that all was well. As twilight was approaching, Sam arrived in the area by his old school where Royce was hiding out. He was relieved that this was a sign that he did not have much farther to go. He was less than comfortable, however, with the fact that he had to pass through these parts at near dark. The woods that surrounded him were frighteningly shadowed, making his imagination run wild, and the memory of his encounter with the odd ones was still very fresh in his mind. He found himself glancing over his shoulder every few moments, and he had that prickly sensation a person gets on the back of their neck when they suspect that they are being watched or followed.

  Sam told himself that there was no way that they would have succeeded in forcing their way through the door in as little time as they would have needed to take in order to pursue him. Still, that did not stop the less rational part of him from conjuring up various scenarios of how they might ambush him. The thoughts did manage to spur him onward more quickly.

  As Sam finally neared his own home territory, he detected something unusual in the connection, faint at first, but growing gradually in intensity. It reminded him of a wounded animal languishing in pain. He tried to remember the last time he had encountered anything like it. The closest thing that he could recall was when Elliot had first come to them. There was a similar sense of disorientation, confusion, and panic, but there was an odd agony to this presence. Also, Elliot had started and stayed faint, never becoming more than a shadow within the connection. What Sam felt now was different. Like someone waking up, achieving new awareness of the connection… and screaming. He remembered that feeling. What astounded the Finder even more was that there was something eerily familiar to this presence.

  Sam could not help himself. His curiosity stirred, he had to find this thing – this person – wherever or whoever they were. He plunged through the brush, searching, and soon the shrill screams that he heard with his ears were as loud as the ones in his head. He could also hear the swish and crackle of foliage as the person in question thrashed about on the forest floor, rolling about in obvious pain. Sam approached, still skittish because of the morning’s encounter, and cautiously crouched by the dimly lit figure, unable to make out the person’s features in the near-darkness.

  Suddenly, the person lurched forward, clutching at Sam’s shoulders. The startled Finder fell backwards into a layer of dried leaves, the other person falling somewhat on top of him. Sam looked up into Royce’s face, the other boy’s eyes filled with terror and agony. Then there was a flicker of emotion there that surprised Sam even more. He thought he had seen relief.

  “What’s happening to me? What’s happening to me?” Royce pleaded, still gripping Sam’s shoulders with an unshakable grip. Despite the strength in his hands, the Control’s fingers were trembling violently. Sam could feel Royce clawing at him internally almost as vigorously as he was physically.

  Fortunately, Sam had some experience at dealing with this before. He cloaked Royce with his walls, shielding him from the rest of the connection. Royce relaxed somewhat in an instant, but he did not let Sam go, and the Finder knew that the remainder of the black-haired boy’s tenseness was due to the fact that he was still in terrible pain. He recognized that pain. He had seen it before in Nathan and in Francis.

  “I’ll help you to get back to Sarah. It would seem that you aren’t subject to the stasis anymore, and this is how we get to pay for delaying the aging process for several years. One of the good parts to all of this is that Sarah will be able to fix you now. It won’t cure everything that ails you, but it will help a little,” Sam told him, trying to keep his thoughts subdued in order to limit their impact on the Control. “I need you to tell me something. Did you go anywhere near the house?”

  Royce shook his head in denial, but there was no response through the connection. Sam was sure that he was not being truthful.

  “You can’t lie to me anymore. It won’t work. You are part of the connection now. You may be able to lie with your mouth, but not with your thoughts, Royce.”

  Sam had experienced the attempt once from Fiona. She had tried to convince him that she was feeling sick when she had decided that she was not interested in going with him to retrieve a find that he could not access. This had been before they had become proper friends. Her mouth had made the claim, and there was a veil of thought containing the deception that bordered the truth – the truth which reverberated more loudly beneath that veil. He had called her on it, explaining how transparent her thoughts actually were, and that was when she had confessed the fact that she had been trying to mislead him. In a way, it had been that incident, as well as Sam’s willingness to forgive the lie, that had helped initiate their friendship to begin with.

  Royce clenched his eyes shut as he cringed and whimpered. He released Sam, dropping back down to the ground, where he writhed in discomfort.

  “The truth, Royce,” Sam requested softly.

  “I-I wanted to see what Fiona looked like after what you had told me at the school. My curiosity got the best of me, and I snuck over here. I was scared…I was scared that Nathan would catch me, and I figured he must be really big now. He must look like a proper man.”

  Royce paused as he was gripped by a particularly severe wave of pain. Sam nodded.

  “I waited until it was starting to get dark, so that he’d be finished his circuit and it would be easier to hide. I was nearing the bottom of the front steps when…when…ahhh! Why does it hurt like this?”

  “Nathan doesn’t run his circuit anymore, and this hurt even worse for him because he hadn’t felt pain in years when it happened. What came next?”

  Sam reached over and started to hook his shoulder underneath the larger boy’s arm. Considering how tired he was from his travels over the last couple of days, Sam hoped that Royce could support his own weight to some degree once he was standing again. Otherwise, getting him back to the house and Sarah was going to be an extreme struggle.

  That was when it struck him. The effects of the Languorite had taken several hours to completely kick in when he, Sarah, Francis, and Fiona had been exposed directly to it. The changes in Royce would not have been immediate either.

  “Wait. You came out here more than
one night running, didn’t you? Was this your second night out here?”

  “Third,” the Control admitted, before biting his lip. Tears of pain streamed down his cheeks. “How did Nathan get out of his circuit? I thought that he couldn’t avoid it?”

  Sam hoisted him up from the ground. The larger boy was trying to brace himself and not force Sam to lift him on his own, but Royce was extremely unsteady. Sam thought back to the positions that they had been in about a year ago. He never would have imagined that they would end up like this someday. Sam felt his own muscles begin to shake a little from the strain and fatigue.

  “He was exposed to the Languorite just like you, and Elliot used it to strip his ‘gift’ away so that the scholars couldn’t use him as their eyes anymore. We expect they’ll come looking for him at any time now,” Sam explained.

  Royce’s eyes widened.

  “You’ve got to be kidding! Francis must have blown a gasket!”

  “It’s complicated,” was all that Sam was willing to say. He took a few very wobbly steps with Royce in tow, and then hesitated.

  “You have to put a little more into this, or I’m going to have to call Nathan out to help us. Maybe if I was fresh I could do this on my own, but I just travelled all the way to the High Barrens and back.”

  “No…no, not Nathan. He said he would kill me, and he meant it. Besides, as soon as Francis sees me, he’ll just be all over me for ditching you and abandoning the Directives.” He cocked an eyebrow, trying to ignore the pain and bear some more of his own weight. “Did you say the High Barrens?”

  “I don’t think Nathan will kill you, especially once he understands what you’re going through. He’ll probably be pissed that you were creeping over to sneak a peek at Fiona, but he’ll get over it. And as for Francis, that won’t be an issue. Francis is gone,” Sam muttered, already panting from the effort.