by TS Ward
I slid out from under Percy and tried to set him down carefully with the jacket wrapped around him. He stirred the moment I let go and grabbed for my hand, his eyes widened as he tried to see in the dark and felt the movement of the Sailer. Panic was clear in his suddenly laboured breaths.
“Sorry!” He cried, loud in the silent night. “What’s happening?”
“Quiet!” Pucks hissed.
I pulled my hand away from him and ducked under the sail to run to Roam’s side.
The boat gained speed and the Talon soldiers ran alongside it. Jack jumped and grabbed the rungs of the rail as his feet tried to find a hold on the edge of the sheet metal. Roam and I reached down at the same time, and both of us grabbed an arm to haul him up until he was able to pull himself over. He sat on the deck for a moment and grinned in the indigo light.
I turned just as Fitz caught the railing and slammed into the side of the Sailer with a thud. He ignored my offered hand and tugged himself up with a grunt and an elbow hooked over the rail. He ignored me, but when Jack came to help him he didn’t hesitate to accept it.
I stepped back from them, back to Roam, who set her hand against my back. I froze, my muscles tight at her touch. Pluto stood in the hall outside the training room, a woman with graying hair standing next to him, her hand on his back and a warm smile on her face.
“Thanks, Soren,” she said softly.
“What’s going on?” I asked, unsteady on my feet and a little motion sick.
“Nothing.” She was quick in her answer, but her eyes drifted beyond the Sailer as she nudged me, her chin lifted slightly. A spark of light glimmered across the dunes. “It’s just that your father has a way of getting what he wants, doesn’t he?”
I stepped away from her and let her hand fall to her side, crossed my arms over my chest, and looked out at the horizon that swayed against the movement of the boat.
The impossible boat. There were so many impossible things.
What my father and Astra wanted. The things Pilot was capable of. Yet here I was with a child from my mind on a dream boat and with a plane crash laid out in the sand of the Wastes—a plane that went down with the Emperor’s daughter on board and the value in my blood as if I ate diamonds for breakfast.
And it was real. It was happening. It wasn’t impossible.
The single Lumen was unusually silver rather than black, as if he wanted it to be seen. As if he wanted to make sure these rebels left for the sanctuary of their rebel camp.
He had to have known.
My father had to know that this plan would fail barely an hour after it began, and the fact that the silver Lumen kept its distance and there wasn’t an army already surrounding us when we had the targets of the mission right here… No. He knew.
He knew, and he made a different plan, and he risked Pilot’s vague predictions for… for what?
What would happen out here in the Wastes with two rogue soldiers, a woman with my mother’s name, an old man on an impossible boat, a child from my dreams, and a desert that housed the heart of the rebellion?
“What does he want?” Jack asked. He looked between me and Roam.
“Don’t worry about it,” she waved a hand to deter him. “It’s just what they think her Sceptre abilities are and what they’ll do to Percy—”
“They aren’t doing anything to him!” I snapped, and I crossed the boat to sink down next to the boy who was wrapped in a jacket bigger than he was, his eyes wet. “It’s all bullshit anyway.”
Roam took a step forward and then steadied herself with a hand on Jack’s shoulder. She shook her head, exasperation and desperation mingling together in her words. “You don’t even remember us, Soren, and he was too young to remember you when they took you away from us. Look at the two of you. You’re holding him like you were never gone and he talks about you like you never left, so don’t you dare say that there isn’t something. We both know there is.”
Percy wrapped his arms around me as best as he could, so that his fingers could just barely touch, his face tucked against my stomach.
I pressed my hand to the back of his head and squeezed my eyes shut and wished that I was dreaming but when I looked again a small amount of relief rushed through me to find that he was still there. Still real. I dreamed him, and he dreamed me, and that was what they wanted.
They wanted a dreamer, to go along with their fortune teller.
A dreamer, like the first Sceptre, like my ancestor, one halfway between reality and a strange unreality. What they knew about her came from stories, and what they knew was too difficult to believe.
“What the hell are the two of you on about?” Fitz stepped between us, his hands held out to the sides as he sought an answer.
“Nothing!” My voice rang sharp.
Roam shook her head and sighed. “You might know something about it, Fitz. They call it the Genesis—”
“Shut up,” I growled. Fire burned under my skin. “Don’t you dare.”
She tilted her head and looked at me with worry in her brow and pity in her eyes. “What’s the point in hiding it? What’s the point in denying it? Soren, honestly, it could help us here.”
I laughed softly. “You sound just like him.”
“I’m not trying to. I just think it might be time for you to embrace it rather than run from it. We can’t keep running for the rest of our lives.” She moved forward and softened the tone of her voice. “One little stumble and they catch up, they catch us, and then we’re back where we started and worse. You can’t want to risk that.”
Percy sniffled and curled his fingers around the fabric of my shirt, his little hands stuck out from the bunched-up arms of the much too big jacket. An army jacket. One that Jack wasn’t wearing.
I brushed his hair around his ear and counted the freckles on his cheeks like stars across the night sky as my mind drifted to that dream of him inside the dark room. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—
The never-ending darkness not held back by the dim glow of fluorescent lights and the cold water that rose up faster and faster until it wrapped around my legs and threatened to fill our lungs.
I didn’t want that to happen to him.
He was too young to be so scared and so alone, too young to be at the mercy of the Embassy and Mercury and Astra and her Vulta. I barely lived. I barely made it out. Percy wouldn’t stand a chance, and they wouldn’t hold back as much as they did for me.
She was right. I didn’t want to risk him like that.
I looked down at the grains of sand that rolled over the wooden planks. Watched them like the hourglass that was set on the shelf behind my father’s desk. There was already a single Lumen on our tail. I didn’t want to imagine what time would bring to that.
“What are you proposing instead?”
I didn’t see it before. The way that Roam stood, spine straight and shoulders back, a head trained to hold a crown—it was this regality and this strength despite the thinness of her. The form of an Empress. The shape of a woman who stood beside my father for thirty years.
She lifted her chin. “I am proposing the plan that you suggested in the first place. We turn and face them head on.”
“You mean fight that Lumen?” Fitz scoffed.
“I mean fight the Empire,” she said.
By the stars. I brushed a hand over my little bear’s hair again, closed my eyes, and imagined the sweet grass that swayed like gentle waves and the dark green of the leaves on trees thick with age. A clear sky and a quiet meadow where we were alone and safe. I wanted that so badly that it twisted a knot into my guts. Fighting the Empire would tear that away. Or…
Fighting the Empire could clear the way.
8
Sand spat out in a wide tail of dark orange and left a long and winding trail through the dunes.
Every so often the boat crashed over one of the black effigies with a screaming, grating sound and left it broken and crushed in the wake.
The Saile
r groaned with every move it made. It was unstable, and the constant noise of the wind and the sand that scraped against the flat metal skids that lined the bottom of it made my ears itch.
It didn’t take long before I noticed the way the wind shifted with us, always perfectly in line with the sail, always stronger going up the dunes. The way it hardly stirred up the sand. Pucks was a Sceptre. In a small, meek way that left him leaning against the boat’s console in exhaustion barely an hour in, but a Sceptre nonetheless.
The blue of the static that ran through him was pale, the surge subtle, and I wondered if any of the others knew. It seemed to me that only Fitz would care about it.
I stood and watched the horizon for that spark of the silver Lumen.
A star that twinkled in the midday blue of the sky that wasn’t meant to be there. The Lumen flew and then vanished in the dunes, flew and then vanished. It kept pace without gaining or losing too much distance. It stayed perfectly on the edge of its tracking capability and perfectly on the edge of where I noticed the smallest tingle of electricity.
It was a faint itch that came and went.
Pucks looked over at me with a thick white eyebrow raised. He nodded over his shoulder. “What do you reckon can be done about this tin can on our trail?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me what your Sceptre blood does again?” He chuckled.
“Again? You don’t even know in the first place.” I bit the words off my tongue.
Pucks was unfazed by my words. “I know that you deal in electricity.”
“And?”
“Can’t you just… shut it off? Or drain its power? Screw with its system? Make it allied with us instead?” He spit ideas onto the deck of the boat and my mind mopped them up as fast as they came.
It wasn’t that simple. Nothing was ever simple with Vulta’s tech.
I shook my head. “Doubt it. I don’t read code.”
“Lightning bolt?”
“I don’t have enough strength for that right now.”
He was silent for a moment as he looked back for that star. It wasn’t there anymore. A shadow cast over his eyes. “Would it hurt to give it a shot? For Percy. We trust you even if you don’t trust us, so if there’s something you think you can do, we’ll stand behind you.”
My eyes fell on Jack where he leaned against the taut line of the sail’s guide rope. Percy was trying to help him.
He said something similar. There was something magnetic that kept my gaze lingering on them but I couldn’t properly explain it to myself. There was something different in the way Percy wrapped his arms around his leg with a wide grin and a bubbly giggle as he attempted to make him fall. Jack stood firm with a similar smile.
I doubted the Lumen was alone.
“I could… I could try something,” I called over a sudden uncontrolled gust of wind, blinked against the sand that bounced off my skin. My voice carried to the soldiers, too. Jack looked at me and squinted against the sun as he tugged the sail to right our course again. “You’ll just have to trust me to go alone.”
Pucks chuckled quietly. “I can tell you what Fitz will say to that. That you’ll tell them you’ve infiltrated the rebellion, that you’ve gained our trust and want to stick around to figure out our next moves. He’s already been talking like that.”
“I don’t doubt they already know your next moves,” I muttered.
I looked at Percy, stuck to the soldier like glue. His hand stretched out to grab the rope while he wasn’t watching, and then that laugh of his loud in the air when Jack pushed him back.
Am I really awake? I must have been dreaming to have that kid so many feet away from me, under the same desert sun, on the same dream of a boat, on the same copper sand.
If this was a dream it was not one that I wanted to wake from. If this was a dream, then we could find that green meadow and the honeyed touch of the golden sun, and we could be safe there.
He looked up at me, his cheeks plumped from his smiles. He waved and wobbled as the Sailer crested another dune and laughed when I waved back and the calm that wrapped around my heart then was all I needed to know.
It was all I needed to know that I wasn’t going back. I wasn’t letting them near him. I wasn’t going to leave him. I had to get him away from this any way possible.
I pushed off from the console and crossed the deck, my arms crossed over my chest as I looked up at the soldier.
“Do you trust me?” I asked him, quiet with Fitz in the shade of the sail.
He nodded slowly, but hesitated. “I do. But I’m not sure the uncle is willing to go along with whatever you’re planning, Sparky.”
“But he trusts you,” I told him, and I watched the confusion flood his face as the wind messed with his hair the way his hands did every so often, leaving it in a carefully placed mess. “So help me out. For Percy. Please.”
9
The sun was an inferno.
It rested on the horizon’s edge, brilliant and blazing, a halo of fire on the cusp of the world. A sea of flames sat between me and it. An ocean of gold that rolled in stormy waves in a slowly drifting tableau, the wind the only reminder that this moment wasn’t infinite.
I wished it was.
I wished I stood forever on the top of the dune and basked in the warmth of a neon glow. I wished I knelt in the sand and held it in my palms and crushed it into a clay world to live in. The sun, and the intensity of the colours that bled across the sky, and these people as they laughed together—I wanted to paint these things. I wanted to paint them on the clay of a world caught in an endless sunset.
Breathe.
The murkiness of hot air filled my lungs and I was lifted from the roots my feet had grown, a hot air balloon that drifted between sky and glowing sea.
He was waiting. The shining hull of a fallen star a beacon in the distance. He stopped because we stopped, parked on the top of a dune, knelt in the sand.
Prometheus awaited the eagle.
The sun dropped and to the east the indigo and the cold of night overtook the day. I moved fast, and faster, until my breath came ragged and my blood pumped quick. I dug my heels into the sand and ran as if I didn’t have time. Somewhere, an hourglass sat on a shelf and a pair of blue eyes watched with steepled fingers, waiting. The last grain would fall soon.
At the foot of Prometheus’ Mountain, I rested.
Breathe, I told myself, breathe. In, and out, in, and out. I had run in sand before. It was pale, bleached, a fine powder that had a slight crunch underfoot. But it was sand and it covered the track. I guess they heard we like long walks on the beach, Arden joked.
My hands gripped my knees as I doubled over and huffed out some guttural noise.
I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again but the image was still there. The white walls. The white sand. The white lights.
Everything was so goddamn bright.
Everything but the training uniforms and the black beetle shells of the Lumen. I saw the fabric of it covering my knees, my arms, my hands, and I wanted to rip it off and tear it to shreds if it could be torn but I knew I wasn’t wearing it.
The orange sun was not the fluorescence of the Embassy. I breathed those words into my head and hiked up the dune, foot after foot, bare hands dug into the warmth of the sharp grains, and I climbed the mountain as the wingless eagle to tear into Prometheus’ entrails. I could only pray that the chains didn’t break.
I forgot that this thing was larger than a man. It was shaped like one, just a metal and electric version of the real thing. Carved from metal sheets and polished and put together over the inner workings of some mechanical creature.
“Lumen,” I breathed, and then cleared my throat. “Lumen!”
The robot didn’t move. It remained still, metallic hands rested against its knees, locked in standby as it charged. Solar panels stretched nimbly from its back to soak up the last rays of the nuclear sunlight. It looked more like an Egyptian mythos.
I stretched
my hand out, rested my fingertips against the top of its head. I closed my eyes and breathed in the fog of heat, breathed in the static through my bones, and felt it race up under my skin and tip the small hairs of my arms on end. The machination before me coursed with electric current that ebbed and flowed in strangely organic patterns. It glowed in ethereal light behind my eyelids.
“Wake up,” I told it.
Wake up, I commanded it.
Something flashed in the auditory sensors and spiked inside its chest. It heard me. It recognized me. In the heart of the Lumen it thought my name, it identified Ganymede, and it processed. It chewed up the simple information. It spat it out.
It didn’t wake up.
Ganymede says wake up. Listen to Ganymede. I searched through its impulses, followed the trail of pale blue light with a finger across the shining metal hull. From the ear, down the neck, to the chest.
A spark of static danced between my fingers and rippled across him like fire catching an accelerant. It heard me, but it didn’t listen.
The shadow of the world crept up on me. We were half blue and half orange and half hot and half cold.
I swung the toe of my boot into its stomach and stumbled at the resistance. My voice was an irritated growl. I hated these things and their stupid programming. “Wake up, you bloody fucking tin can! Are you full of tuna?”
“Good one, sweetie.” James’ condescending voice sounded close in the sunny side of the dune and hollow in the dark, but either way a fist closed around my lungs and squeezed tight.
He lounged lazily on the side of the dune, just out of sight. He basked in the sun like a well-fed cat, his hands twined behind his head and one leg crossed over the other, and smiled. He was in the full sun and I was in the full blue of night and he was smiling.
“He won’t do what you tell him to. He’ll only listen to this. This ring.” He held his hand out to me, showed me the dark mark of it on his hand. It ran on electrical impulses, read them the way I read them. “Bet dear old dad didn’t mention that. Why don’t you come sit with me?”