by TS Ward
I took his hand, kissed it, and held him close.
I’ll find him, James said to me once, that boy.
“Next time you dream something like that, call for me. Promise me that.” Panic shook my words.
Percy wrapped his arms around my neck. “And you’ll come? In the dream?”
“Promise me something else,” I whispered to him. “Promise that you won’t tell anyone about these dreams. It’s a secret between you and me, no one else. Understood? You don’t tell Ma, and you don’t tell Pucks, and you don’t tell Jack or Fitz. You don’t even tell Rabbit. And especially, most of all, you don’t tell the scary man. Do you understand? It’s a secret, Percy, our secret. Promise me you won’t tell anyone.”
“But why—”
“Just—” My hand gripped the back of his head and pressed our foreheads together. “Just promise me, okay? If you don’t… Percy, if you don’t, and the scary man finds out about these dreams he’ll take us away from each other forever. And where he’ll take us there will be scarier people, and they’ll—and they’ll want to hurt us. Understand? We won’t be together if you tell anyone.”
“Okay!” He cried, and burrowed against my neck with his small arms tight around my throat. He shook with new fear instilled in him, fear that I put there. “I promise. I promise!”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
If James walked into this camp while my back was turned—no, he did. He walked in here while I watched that Lumen, while I wasn’t watching my little bear, while a soldier meant to hold watch over the rest of us fell asleep.
He walked into the tent where he slept and pricked his finger and left with the DNA.
I burned with a rage that was white hot and stronger than anything he could come up with.
The kid was heavier than he looked and walking down the side of a sandy dune was harder with him wrapped around me, but he was stuck like glue and I was afraid to let him out of my sight again. Even with everyone waking up, even with all of these eyes to watch him, my knees were weak and my arms shook.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to him, “I just want you to be safe.”
“You said dreams are safe,” he mumbled.
I sank to a knee and set him down.
He let go reluctantly, but when he did, I took my thumbs to his cheeks and wiped the tears from them as best as I could.
I leaned close. “When? When did I say that? I don’t remember.”
Everything’s alright, little bear. I cradled him when he fell into that dream in tears. Everything’s alright. You’re safe here, with me. We’re both here, we’re both safe in these dreams.
I remembered. I remembered it clear and crisp like cold water to shock my skin. He told me about the soldiers that he hid from, how they tried to take his friend and took her mother instead. He was scared they would come back for them.
“You said… in a dream. You said we were safe in dreams.” He looked like a sad little bear cub with his lip jutted out and his eyes puffy and red. It broke my heart.
“Percy,” I whispered.
I took his chin with a finger to make him look at me. Tears pricked at my own eyes. I didn’t want to lie to him. I didn’t want to hurt him.
“Dreams are yours. Only yours. They happen in your head where no one else can see them. Do you get that? The dreams that you have are made inside this adorable head of yours, and the dreams that I have are made in mine. As much as anyone will tell you differently. If the scary man tells you, or if the Emperor tells you, or a woman in a blue dress—they want it to be real, and they might hurt you if they think it is, so you have to believe that it’s not. Because it’s not real. Do you understand?”
He frowned at me and crossed his arms tight across his chest. “No.”
I bit my tongue. “Please, kid.”
“That’s not what Ma said.” His voice was barely a whisper. “Ma says babies don’t remember anything and I was only a baby when they took you away. She says it’s because I dream about you.”
He still looked like a baby, with his doughy cheeks with a sea of freckles and the missing tooth and the little button nose. I dreamed about him when he was younger and smaller and watched him grow in my head at night when falling asleep and waking up was a gamble of fear. He grew so fast, in that sweet grass field, playing with the yellow wildflowers. I dreamed his curly hair got longer and then was cut short and then grew long again.
I wanted it to be real. It is. It is, it is real, Soren—
I wanted to tell him that it was. I wanted him to know that I was there, distant but there. I wanted him to know that all of those little fleeting moments were as real as him waking up to Roam and Pucks and telling them about his dreams of me.
Mercury’s voice was in my head. Save us both the trouble and tell them you dream right.
I shook my head slowly, my cheek caught in a nervous bite between my teeth.
They knew.
James knew about him and he touched him and now they knew.
I didn’t want to imagine the things that they would do but it was already in my head, the images flashing across my vision. It was Percy I saw in that dark room, not me this time, alone and small and terrified. It was Percy on the training room floor with cuts and bruises and Mercury who stood over him with a sickening smile and a Pluto—by the stars, he wouldn’t even be able to fight one of them off.
And Astra.
Everything about her was so… so clinical, so cold and detached.
“Percy, I can’t explain it, it’s just—it isn’t real—”
He narrowed his eyes and twisted away from me, out of my grasp, as I tried to hold him until he understood.
He sprinted across the sand and shouted back at me as he climbed up the side of the Sailer. “Go away! Go be gone again!”
I breathed out slow and sank back onto my heels.
I stood up again as I searched the dunes that surrounded the camp for footprints. He was supposed to take that Lumen and leave, to stay back, but he came into this camp and he put his hands on that kid and I didn’t know.
I was awake, I was watching, and I didn’t even know that he was here. But that goddamn soldier should have seen him, parked at the top of the opposite dune.
I looked up at him over the tops of the tents, where he startled awake when someone chucked something at him.
“Morning, Fitz!” Pucks laughed, and his voice was an echo across the small valley.
My hands were fists tucked under crossed arms.
He fell asleep on duty and let the enemy into camp—the enemy.
The Empire isn’t the enemy, I tried to tell myself, but I still felt its damage and seeing these people living in the Wastes, that was damage, too.
James isn’t the Empire, I tried to tell myself again. But he was sworn to it, and he would do anything for Astra’s approval. He did what my father told him to but it was her boots he kissed, even if it was the Empire he wanted.
“You look how I look when I want to punch Fitz in the throat.” Jack stood in the tent next to me. The back of his hand held the fabric up while the other ran through his hair. He leaned out and looked around me. “Did I hear Percy?”
He was so, so close to not hearing him again. He wasn’t safe anymore. He never was.
“Everything okay?”
I looked at him and held his gaze for a minute. Green as that goddamn meadow. “We’ve been sitting in the same spot for too long and that Lumen isn’t connected to the rest of the aluminum army. It’s connected to Mercury, who, as you heard, knows about Percy, which is just another reason to keep moving. Alright, soldier? Let’s pack and go.”
“Good morning to you, too, Your Grace,” he chuckled.
His mouth formed a half-smile and his brow dipped down into a frown, but despite the confusion written across his face he offered a quick salute and slipped back into the tent without another word.
The sky cast orange on orange and painted the colour over the silver linings of the pale clou
ds that broiled on the horizon.
My skin itched with the urge to run, to stop standing still, to stay ahead of those clouds and James and the Empire and to get on that weird little boat and ride the dunes to the sea—but I closed my eyes for a moment and breathed the itch out, breathed in the static of the air to fill up my lungs with the sharp sting of it.
I walked up to the soldier’s tent, pulled open the canvas, and stepped inside. It was still a little cool in the shade of it, after night brought a drastic drop in temperature, but warmth flushed my cheeks in spite of it.
“You’re blushing, Sparky,” Jack laughed.
“I am not—you aren’t even looking at me,” I bit back and crossed my arms as I watched him pour water from a canteen onto a rag and run it over his arms. The stain of the Wastes came off but left behind the touch of the sun. The bruises he had looked a little more vibrant, too. “Hey, princess, you know you’re going to get dirty as soon as you step outside, right?”
He cast a look over his shoulder at me. “Once upon a time you used to be nice to me.”
“That doesn’t sound like me,” I muttered, but I was trying to be nice.
I always tried, but there was something in me that was cold and cruel and too much like a Beckett, and that something always showed itself after the words had already fallen from my mouth.
“Well, you were. Don’t know what that says about either of us.” He laughed again and grabbed a shirt from his pack and tugged it on. “Did you come in here to watch me get dressed or was there something you wanted?”
A breeze blew warmth into the tent. A sharp line of bright white cut across the dimness inside. It burned into my eyes as I nodded slowly. There was something, but I didn’t know what. There was a reason I followed him in here but it was completely gone from my mind and vertigo was in its place.
“I—I don’t remember, it was…” I pinched the bridge of my nose and squeezed my eyes shut as I wavered.
For a moment, I saw the Manor behind the dark of my eyelids. The fountain nestled into the start of the hedge maze with the family statues carved from marble that circled the outside and the soldiers who took a break from their routines and the heat, the soldiers who dipped hands and heads and bootless feet into the chill of the fountain’s water with rolled up pant legs and sleeves.
Soren? A voice spoke my name.
I turned toward the sound.
“Soren?” Jack asked. He stepped close as he reached a hand out to me.
I took a few steps backwards until I felt the door of the tent, and then I twisted out into the warmed air and the morning sunlight, and I walked away.
I didn’t remember that. I didn’t remember that. I didn’t remember that. I didn’t remember them away from the green of the training field where they marched under command and under the watch of the Lumen and my father from his office. From either office, whether it was the dark wooden space in the Manor or the bright white, marble floored space in the tower, rising high above the long pond at its base.
There was something clear and solid about the image that stirred unease into the pit of my stomach.
The soldiers stood on the green field. On the field, not away from it. It seemed so wrong, but it burst in my mind with vibrant colour that was as hard to deny as this sand.
My heart yanked against its chains and tried to break free, beat against the bars so forcefully that I was sure they might break, but I wouldn’t let it escape. I couldn’t.
I breathed in deep against the ache that gripped my chest so suddenly and breathed it out into a shaky, uneven mess.
I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why but I couldn’t catch my breath again and that voice in my ear—oh god, my limbs were weak but I couldn’t stop moving.
Soren?
The sand ran quick. Wet cement that grabbed at my boots.
Soren? Do you remember me? No. No, stop, stop it, stop, stop—
I’m your aunt. Astra.
The ghost of an electric baton haunted my ribs. Her white gloves, her Beckett blue eyes and blue uniform of pantsuits and long coats that trailed behind her, the sharp click of her heels on the marble floors and that same click muffled by the dark room—
When I was young, I leaned over the edge of that fountain and fell in.
When I was young, I walked along the edge of the pond with my hand in Astra’s. I slipped. She let go. I swallowed green stagnant water before she pulled me out again.
When I was young, my father brought me to a coast where there was nothing but jagged rock buttes and cliffs and black sand that stretched into an aquamarine sea and tall, dark green grass on the bluffs whipped by violent winds. When he left, he left me in a glass house, and when I broke a crystal cup that should not have been in the hands of a six-year-old, Astra took me to the black sand beach and made me stand there in the cold and the wet until the breach soaked into the toes of my shoes, until my father came back early and found me with the salt.
When I was young, a woman who had my same black hair and blue eyes and round cheeks came to the Manor, and she said, happy birthday, Soren! The woman gave me a telescope and helped me set it up behind the Manor—between the bricks and the fountain, under the numerous stars.
She showed me each constellation. She showed me every planet we could find. She explained how the sun was a star and how the planets orbited it in a certain order—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars—and we named as many of Jupiter’s moons as we could, and she took each name of each planet and gave their names stories and talked about the Roman and the Greek myths.
She told me that there were galaxies out there with planets like ours. Habitable. More habitable than ours will be when we’re done with it.
And when I was older than a child, a woman who had my same black hair and blue eyes and hollow cheeks came to the Embassy.
She walked into my dark room with a hand held behind her back and another outstretched to me. She walked into my dark room and the door shut behind her and all of the light and all of the stars and all of the planets were painted over with sticky black ink.
Soren? Do you remember me? I’m your aunt. Astra.
Her gloved hand found my arm in the darkness, slipped it down past my elbow, to my wrist. She stepped close and I stepped back and then—I screamed.
I screamed, and the sound didn’t leave my chest. The shock was an electric net cast around me, to catch the fish and kill it, too.
You’ve grown so much, she told me, and I saw her face in the light of the wired baton as the electricity jumped between the two thin prongs and my ribs. She acted like it was a gift. Like she brought me another telescope to see the stars—and in a way, in a way, it was.
When I was older than a child and curled into a corner in the dark, a woman stood over me and said—
“Breathe in,” I whispered to myself. I repeated her words with my eyes squeezed shut against the world. “Breathe out. Repeat. Close your eyes to the pain. Focus on what’s left. Drown in it. Let it wash over you. Let it soak into the hollows of your bones. Open your eyes, and be free.”
Good girl, I heard her voice in the back of my mind. I breathed out the memory of her.
I ran with my eyes closed. Ran blind, ran in the dark—I didn’t know where my feet had led me, but I was here and I breathed hard and sharp. My heart was angry but safe at the distance it was so anxious to get to.
Where I stood, a hollow valley stretched for miles between this dune and the next, where the sun rested just above the horizon. The nose of the Sailer pointed this way, and this way, strange shapes were carved into the desert floor. Even lines and perfect circles. The static burrowed in my bones was awake and alive and receiving.
Bursts of minor static tingled through the marrow.
Uneven, coming and going. It was faint electricity that danced in hidden lines.
I turned and searched the desert behind me for the others, for the mast of the Sailer poking above the dunes. I didn’t run for long, I didn’t feel the rise and fal
l of the ground below me, but there was nothing.
Nothing was behind me except for smooth sand—smooth, unmarred by running feet. And those clouds that were on the horizon. Those clouds were close over the far edge of the valley, darkness between the base and the sand.
Breathe!
The air was ripped from my lungs.
Breathe!
I stood on the edge of a sharp cliff over an aquamarine sea.
Breathe!
Vertigo gripped me around the ankles and pulled.
Breathe!
“Soren!” The world swayed underneath me.
Close your eyes.
“Soren, wake up!”
Sleep.
12
Cotton settled between my brain and my skull. It cushioned the ache of overthinking and overreaching from the sway of the Sailer. I wasn’t trying to—I don’t even know what I did, but I wasn’t trying to. I was just—
Panicked.
Everything felt fake.
The air and the sky and the grains of sand that rolled across the deck felt fake, and not simulated fake. It was like the world wasn’t real, or at least not the same as it was, and it was the strangest sensation. I knew it was real. I knew I was awake. I knew I wasn’t dreaming or wearing a graphene jumpsuit.
“Can we talk yet?” Jack’s voice murmured close by and I flinched at the sound. “Roam. I can’t help if I don’t know what’s going on.”
“There’s nothing for you to do.” Roam ran her hand over my hair as she brushed the knots and tangles out with gentle fingers. Her voice was just as gentle, her words placed with thought, careful with the porcelain girl curled next to her.
I watched the sand roll left, and then right, and then back and forward again.
Pucks was at the wheel and Percy stood behind him. Fitz was on the sail.
The orange particles moved from one place to another with a clear path that couldn’t be mapped. I couldn’t map how I ended up on the precipice of a dune over a strange valley, or briefly on the edge of a cliff that looked out over that violent sea. It was a dream, but it felt real. It felt so vividly real.
Jack leaned into view, just at the corner of my eye, as his voice hissed, “What do we tell Ellie then? If you won’t tell me, why tell a Carson?”