by TS Ward
I didn’t care.
He was what kept me sane. He was the seed of hope that was buried and watered in my chest, squirreled away for safe keeping. He kept me holding on. If the Embassy was a ledge that I stood on the cusp of, his small hand that tugged at one of mine was the only thing that kept me from falling.
I was in the darkened den of a band of rebels and rogue soldiers and in front of me was this child, real and here, and a bolt of terror sliced through me.
The Emma Genesis was real.
This strange ability, the dreams, being able to cut through the fabric of reality—it was insane, but he was here, real, clutching a carved wooden plane in his hand. It was insane, but was it me, or was it him?
Percy wrapped his arms around my legs, head leaned back so that his curls fell away from his face. Bright eyed, freckled, missing some tiny teeth. “Are you really here? Really for real, really?”
I barely moved, except to nod, cautiously.
He didn’t let go. He buried his face against me and squeezed tighter, a delighted laugh muffled, and then a soft sob. I felt my heart break with it, felt my reluctance vanish entirely. I pressed a hand to his hair and another to his back. He was so small against me. So small and fragile.
He would break if they ever got their hands on him.
“Moon. What the hell is this?” On another couch, the one-eyed soldier sat with his elbows on his knees as he searched through a backpack. He held a white envelope close to the lantern on the table.
My heart kicked hard against my ribs. Arden. “Don’t touch that.”
“And why not, princess?” He found the edge of the seal and worked his finger under it. The paper started to rip.
I pushed Percy back, lunged forward past Jack where he leaned against the wall, and grabbed at the envelope. Arden’s face flashed through my mind.
Fitz stood up too fast. He grabbed my wrist just as my fingers grazed the paper and squeezed tight. I twisted my arm down and forced my other hand into the side of his elbow, not hard enough to break it but just enough to make him hiss and let go.
James’ voice was in my head, loud and insistent.
Quick strikes, here, here, here, and here—
The knee, the groin, the throat, the back of the neck, and the soldier was on the ground with a groan. I started forward again—don’t let them get the chance to recover, don’t hesitate—but arms wrapped tightly around my chest, pinned mine to my body, and lifted me from the man. I slammed my head backwards and caught a nose.
“Soren!” Romana shouted.
Jack let me go and I walked over, chest heaving, and snatched the letter to tuck it into my jacket pocket.
The thing had been hidden in a slit in the lining of my dark room walls. The fact that it was packed away, with clothes and food packets, told me more than my father had.
This mission was planned—everything. The plane crashing, the rogue soldiers, the rebel leader. There was an end goal for my father in this. And every minor setback was included.
Everything according to plan. I formed the words with my mouth as I put distance between everyone in the room and the static that grew uneasy in me.
“Soren Ayda Beckett,” Romana hissed, her hands clutched around Percy’s arms. “You apologize to Jack and Fitz right now or I swear I’ll send you right back where you came from.”
My little bear was wide eyed and stood perfectly still, his hands closed tight around the little toy plane as his lip quivered. I don’t want to be your monster.
“It’s okay, Roam,” Jack said, his voice strange. I looked at him, startled to see his hand pressed to a bleeding nose, head tilted. “Fitz deserved it.”
“You didn’t,” she insisted.
“I did. She—do you want to tell them?” He looked at me, smiling even as blood dripped over his lip, even if that smile didn’t reach his eyes or his voice. He waited for me to answer but I was a marble statue crumbling. “She has no idea who we are. She thinks Roam died.”
I sat on my heels with my back pressed to the wall as I watched Fitz climb back to his feet, my muscles taut just in case. His lip was curled up in a snarl as he sat back on the couch. Sparks of pale blue static ruptured in the air around me.
“Woah,” Percy whispered in awe.
The rest of the room was silent but still all too loud with the friction rising off them.
I closed my eyes and tried to calm the noise, breathed in and out in slow circles, stilled my heart and felt the sparks shrink back to my bones. I pressed a hand over the letter in my pocket, over the scar on my side from a different Pluto Sceptre—Arden was only the second one, Pluto Two, the daughter of Moon.
Promise me. Promise me you’ll get out of here. Promise me you’ll find him. Promise me you’ll tell him I wasn’t afraid.
“What happened, Soren? When they took you away, what did they do?” Roam’s voice held the croak of an ancient worry, fear keeping it quiet. She didn’t want to hear the answer, but she wanted to know.
I looked Fitz in the eye. “You said Moon Rabbit before. Like the Sceptre Moon?”
“I mean the rebel leader,” he said sharply.
“He’s Sceptre,” the old man corrected. The man who looked like my grandfather. “Not to say it’s anything very useful to him now.”
I nodded, that promise tucked like a smooth stone under my tongue as I looked to him instead. He had answers, if the soldier wouldn’t give me them, and it was answers I needed. It was trust that I needed. “Where is he?”
Fitz aimed a finger and a narrowed eye to the man. “Don’t answer that. You don’t want to tell the Empire where to find a city full of rebels.”
“They already know,” I muttered.
He stood up, turned, looked to his nephew, and then back to me. “What does that mean, Scep?”
I shrugged, Pilot’s name lodged behind my teeth, but instead I said, “They had a picture of Romana and Percy. I don’t imagine whoever took that didn’t also share the location. Unless, of course, it was a rogue soldier with some sort of vendetta against my family, but who knows?”
The idea hadn’t gone through my mind before I said it, but it came with claws that cut into my throat with a sharp pain and the taste of iron. Maybe it wasn’t Pilot. Maybe James’ testimony was only a coincidence.
Fitz stared at me with his jaw clamped tightly shut, his eye a cold dagger.
“Tell me you didn’t.” Jack ran a hand through his hair and then down the side of his face. He stepped away from the wall. “Fitz.”
The man shook his head and stalked out of the room. His boots were heavy on the floorboards, knocking sand down into the cracks.
I closed my eyes and resisted the urge to grab him around the ankles and knock him to the floor again, the first time for Arden and this time for Percy. He brought the Empire to my little bear. Why shouldn’t I hurt him for it?
“By the stars, Fitz,” Jack’s voice made my eyes snap open.
By the stars. I frowned as he followed his uncle down the hall and into a room near the stairs, his voice fading as the door slammed shut.
“I swear, if you put that kid in danger…”
By the stars. I formed the shape of the words with my lips. The words were mine, not his.
Roam cleared her throat. “Can you tell us what they did to you?”
“No.”
The word came short and sharp, a slice into the stale air under this dune. I pressed my fingers against the sandy floor and pushed myself up. The room was dark and the walls were close, too close, and it reminded me of my dark room. One dark room after another.
“What’s this—where’s this boat, little bear? Show me your boat.”
———
The room was hidden through a door beneath the stairs.
Small electric string lights highlighted dust particles in the air that swirled with every movement we made through the stacks of old crates and boxes. Percy’s fingers trailed lines in the sand that coated them as we passed.
> He was smaller than he seemed when I dreamt him.
“How do you use your boat in a desert, little bear?”
I squinted into the dim light as we came to a loft with a set of worn-out metal stairs. The building wasn’t a house—it was a warehouse, an old factory lost to the Wastes.
Percy shrugged as he started down the stairs. “Magic.”
I followed slowly behind him. My hand gripped the railing as I saw it.
The boat was parked by the large metal door, its patchwork sail wrapped around the mast, the mast bent at a clever hinge to stretch the length of the vessel so that it would fit inside the door.
“We call it the Sailer,” he said, grinning.
“The Sailer,” I breathed.
The bottom of its short railings came to just above my head. The entire thing looked like it was put together with scrap parts from throughout the Wastes, the orange colour clear in the dry stain of the wood and the patched sail. At the side was a ladder attached by roped. It rocked against the wood as Percy climbed up with ease.
“Come on, Sorry!” He called back to me.
I took a breath, hooked my hands around the rungs, and climbed slowly on board. The deck responded with a hollow sound that reverberated in the wood.
Percy was nowhere to be found and for a moment, for a long and heart-breaking moment, I was certain I only imagined him. But then his hushed giggles gave him away and he leapt up with a roar from behind the sail.
“Did I scare you?”
“Petrified,” I assured him.
“Does that mean scared?”
I nodded. “I thought I was only dreaming you.”
He grew quiet and leaned on the mast. He looked at his hands. “Are you really real?”
“As real as anyone.”
It made my chest tight to hear the same worry that I had come out of his mouth. I needed the reassurance, I needed to know I wasn’t crazy, and he barely looked me in the eye. Like he was afraid no one else could see me.
I held my hand out to him. “Here. See?”
He hesitated, and then he stretched his fingers out to cross the gap between us and touched mine gently. “Real.”
“Real,” I repeated.
He climbed over the mast and slid to the deck in front of me. He looked at me the way that he had in that dream. With his head craned back and his long curls falling just over his shoulders, his eyes wide and worried.
His voice was so small then. “Are you going to leave again?”
I sank to my knees and rested on my heels as I studied him. I memorized the shape of him in the golden light of a meadow. I memorized every little freckle that marked his nose and cheeks the way I memorized the stars.
All of those dark eyelashes ringed pale blue eyes. He was a dream come to life and I wasn’t sure how and that terrified me—was he a memory long forgotten? Or was he brought to life by wishful thinking?
It’s not possible.
And then another voice intruded in my mind: does it matter?
I shook my head slowly as a weak smile pulled at my mouth. “I’m not going anywhere without you. Ever.”
His lip quivered, and then he threw his arms around my neck. He fell against me as he shook. He was warm and real and so damn small like this, just a tiny little bear cub wrapped in my arms. Tears dampened my shirt where his face was tucked, as his hands gripped the fabric at my back tightly.
The words ran through my mind a million times over.
I’m not going anywhere without you. Ever.
6
I stood on nothing and waited for him to emerge from the darkness of the dream, but anticipation drew unease up my spine the longer I waited. My heart beat inside my hollow ribs. Fear bristled along my skin and pricked at my scalp.
James? My mouth formed the word but no sound was cut between my teeth.
Alone was the word that echoed back to me on the back of an absent breeze.
“No,” the quiet word tumbled from my lips like sand in an hourglass, the orange of it pooled around my feet in gritty pieces. It crunched between my molars with each letter that tried to fill the emptiness of the void space, that tried to fill the absence of the one who belonged here, who would warm this black hole, static air. “No. No. No. No!”
It was dark and empty and I was alone and none of it felt right.
I hated being near him, being close enough to him to hear his voice and to feel that humid warmth that emanated from him and his Sceptre blood, but still—he was something in the nothing. He was the ground that I clung to in the darkness just because he was there. He was always there.
I fell to my knees, only they connected with nothing. The sand rested on nothing, swirled around me in a wind I couldn’t feel, and the ruddy iron taste of it sat in the back of my throat.
I pressed my hands to it. This doesn’t belong here.
Where does it belong?
I flinched at the whisper that brushed against the hairs on the back of my neck.
The sand raced around me like an asteroid belt. The grains collided to form larger pieces that rolled into pebbles that grew into rocks and it happened so fast that I scrambled to catch them and mold them like clay between my palms.
I don’t want to be alone.
Orange stained the skin of my hands and the clay stuck deep in the lines of my palms.
My breath came in icy clouds.
I don’t want to be alone.
Shhh, a voice said, and its form came up behind me with tenderness in its teeth as it huffed warm breath over my shoulder, into my hands caked with clay. It’s alright. You aren’t alone. You aren’t alone.
I stilled my hands and let this planet formation come to a halt. It was cold and wet and rich in copper and iron and magnesium and I pressed it between my palms until it was warm, until the heat cooked itself, until the clay thing made from this orange hourglass sand burned like a red star between my fingers.
A solar flare burst between my pinky and ring fingers and lit up the stranger’s hands.
We aren’t alone, it whispered.
Never alone echoed back. The second word raced in waves that didn’t taste like salt and seaweed. A metallic taste with a hint of raspberry. Alone tasted sharply sweet with an aftertaste of a desert wasteland baked under a nuclear sun.
It was nice, at first, and then it was pain.
This clay crushed light burned white hot between my palms but the stranger didn’t let go. The stranger wrapped my hands tightly around the fire, welded together so that I couldn’t drop it, and the stranger leaned close to rest its head against my shoulder, to whisper, but we are. We are alone.
I was alone. I drifted with the scent of salt in this black sea, and this star born from clay between my palms rested brightly before me, suspended gently while it burned with white flares from its heart. Flares that shone in diamond strung lines like cracks in the endless void. They were the pale veins of some great beast’s heart that pulsed in angered rhythm.
My own heart raced violently.
“I want to wake up now,” my words spilled out in a murmur of desert sand. “Please.”
The star cast out a tendril of ghostly light, like a hand that stretched and grasped and searched for fuel to devour.
It blinded and mesmerised all at once.
The white of it burned into my eyes the longer I stared at it and the longer I stared the more it seemed to change into something with more shape than a spherical little star.
The light stretched long and thin.
I felt it, the friction that gathered in its belly. I felt it the way I felt it against my skin when someone stood too close.
It felt like a person. It felt alive.
7
I burst from sleep and gasped for breath, not entirely sure that my heart was still contained within my ribs. It was beating my chest open to crawl back inside and to sleep in a dark and familiar place. The world had been too much and it crawled back home with a limp.
My hands brushed
back hair tousled into knots by the wind, cold against the warmth in my head. The warmth of the air.
Everything was always so cold in the Embassy. I always woke up shivering, in a similar darkness but a darkness that was less indigo flavoured and less speckled with a handful of stars that were blotted out by smoke gray clouds.
They weren’t much, but they were more than I was used to seeing. They twinkled through the atmosphere. They set my heart at ease.
I dreamed of something… unusual.
A small, warm weight curled up against me and something heavy draped over me and for a moment I was calm. For a moment, I had stars above my head and warm air against my skin and a child with freckles and eyes like mine fast asleep and tucked under my arm and all was well.
All was well.
But moments were only fleeting and the Sailer creaked with careful footsteps and the sound of a rope released. An ungreased pulley squeaked against it and then the wind—the wind caught the fabric of the sail and jerked it harshly. The entire boat grated against the sand dunes.
A dark figure propped a foot up against the lip of the hatch to the belly of the ship, leaned back with a rope held by two hands. A red scarf wrapped around her head drifted with the breeze.
“Go on, boys,” a voice rumbled like distant thunder behind me.
I glanced up, twisted carefully under Percy to catch a glimpse of the old man’s white beard and the dark and weathered hands that gripped the wheel.
For a moment, everything was still.
The only sound was the wind and the soft breath of Percy and the quiet creak of the Sailer, and then the next moment was a scream of metal that slid over trillions and trillions of gritty little pieces of sand.
My stomach flipped as the entire thing shifted and started to slide down the dune.
“Come on, hurry now!” The man—Pucks—hissed. “Hurry, climb up!”
Roam darted across the boat on light feet and bent over the rail and reached a hand down. The sail rope was wrapped around a metal hook. “Here, Jack. Take my hand. I don’t want the fall for leaving you behind again.”
Leaving you behind. The words stuck, but I couldn’t think why.