by TS Ward
A sudden burst of electric shock exploded from the nerve endings between that shadow and the shadow of me. A small shock. A small shock that connected, and when it connected realization washed the murky water of dread through my porous soul.
James is not here. James is not small.
Small.
I caught my breath between my teeth and did not let it go.
My spine was stiff, my palms pressed hard to the deck of the Sailer. I tried my best to breathe this energy back into my core, to crush it into silence again.
My skin danced with little blue sparks, and sprawled at the feet of Pucks there was a little bear cub boy. He struggled to catch his breath.
He was a mirror of me.
Eyes widened in shock and terror, heavy with the saltwater of tears that wet dark eyelashes. Mouth agape and not drawing breath past the teeth. Stiff and frozen on the deck of the Sailer. Too scared and panicked to try to move.
I didn’t want to hurt him. He didn’t want to be hurt.
We sat and we stared at each other. Nothing else was in the world except for him and the monster reflected in his big eyes.
“Percy!” Someone shouted.
I didn’t know who. All of these other voices were washed out and pale in comparison to those blue eyes and these blue sparks.
“Hell, Roam!”
The Sailer jerked wildly to the side as the wheel was set loose and the sail was let go to tear against the wind. Everyone stumbled in the sudden shift, but I was stuck against the wood.
I wanted to become a part of it. I wanted to become the carved mermaid at the nose of a pirate’s ship, ignored and forgotten and unable to hurt.
No! My mind screamed. I don’t want to be your monster.
I saw James. I saw James, not Percy.
I didn’t mean to hurt you, I wanted to hold him and tell him over and over again. I’m sorry, little bear, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.
My heart was hot glass dropped into frigid water, shattered into a million particles of dust to mix with this hellish desert.
In our dreams I held him and never worried about shocking him. In our dreams we played like there was nothing sinister that turned my blood black and thick.
His tears shone under the honeyed sun.
I remembered that time I tripped and sent us both sprawling. I tripped on a root and then we buried it under the soil together so we would never trip again. Was that a dream, or a memory?
“What the fuck did you do?” A pair of hands gripped what was left of me, hauled me halfway to my feet with fingers dug into the muscles of my arms. Fitz. Fitz growled like a grizzly bear protective of this little cub. “He’s a child!”
Do you think I don’t know? Do you think I would look at a child who was nearly half of myself and want to hurt him?
The rail of the boat pressed against my spine and my hands searched out his elbows. The static that lingered passed between our skin to raise every small hair on his arms and mine.
I wanted to whisper the sincerity of an apology into his nervous system, to send it straight to his mind, to make him understand that I didn’t mean it.
I could send an army of signals up his arms and to the spinal cord and into the brain.
Let him be angry, that whispered voice showed itself again. Let him be angry and if they call you a monster, show them regret. Show them that you are the opposite of it.
“You could have killed him!” The soldier spat at me. The rage turned his sunburn a darker shade of fire. Yes, yes, I know that. “You could have killed him. Just like that kid in the Embassy. You’re just like the rest of them, Scep.”
Just like that kid in the Embassy. They watched me train, they saw what happened to Pluto Seven. The static felt like poison under my skin.
He stepped back and let me collapse back to the deck in a heavy thump as he paced away. His hands roughed up his hair. He stopped where Jack sat with Percy cradled in his arms.
A vein jumped in Fitz’s temple. “You see, Jack? You see what I mean? I told you so—I told you this would happen.”
“Take a walk, Fitz,” Jack mumbled. He didn’t look up from Percy.
“What…? What happened?” Roam knelt down next to him and my little bear, stretched a hand out to his curly hair, singed with the scent of electric fire.
For a moment, there was concern, and for a moment, she looked at me with that same expression, but then the moment was over and I saw her mind run through the facts of what she knew. I saw the change in her face when she realized what happened.
“Soren, you didn’t.”
But I did.
I did.
I did.
I wanted to tear this curse from my blood.
I’m sorry, I formed the shape of the words with my mouth, and this child—in the middle of tears and pain that rattled his small frame—this child had the nerve to giggle. He laid in Jack’s arms, barely able to move or breathe, with everyone on this ship crowded around him, and there was still forgiveness in his smile.
I don’t deserve you, Perseus.
It must have been some cruel and monstrous trick, to give me this creature who calmed and grounded me only to make me hurt him and have him be okay with it.
I didn’t deserve him. I didn’t deserve to be near him.
“Do it again,” he wheezed.
How could I? Fitz told Jack I told you so and I should have said the same.
They gathered around Percy and I was alone, as I should have been, as was right. I wanted to run but I was scared.
That I would run and run and not get anywhere. I was scared that I would keep looking back to see them all huddled there with looks of hatred and disgust cast across their faces for this monster that I was.
But if I didn’t try—if I didn’t try, I was going to see that anyway.
I dragged myself away like some wounded animal.
It took a moment to fight through the sharp needle pain that pierced every bone and nerve, but then I was a hobbling mess of a monster using stilts and crutches to walk. I slunk back into the shadows of the dark room just when I thought I might leave, slipped over the side of the Sailer and dropped like a stone into the sand.
It burned. It burned my skin like fire but that was a small price to pay for what I did.
I crawled on my hands and knees as tears streamed down my cheeks in white-capped rapids, until my body screamed from the pain, until I crumpled as a paper umbrella would in the rain.
I folded over my knees. I tasted the copper sand in my mouth as a sob ripped into my ribcage with violent force.
Take it. Take this from me—take it, I don’t want it, I don’t want it!
My head was a beggar to a long-forgotten god who had long forgotten us.
I could have killed him. I could have killed him. I could have killed him. I could have—I could have stopped his too big heart—I could have killed him the way I killed the Pluto Sceptres. Pluto Seven—Pluto Seven left the room smelling of burnt flesh. He begged for it the way I begged some unseen force to tear this Sceptre blood from my body.
“Hey, Sparky,” Jack’s voice, the soft whisper of sweet grass under a soft breeze and a honeyed sun, gently and carefully brought a murmured hum against me. “Hey. Shhhh. You’re alright. He’s alright. Everyone’s alright.”
A guttural cry escaped me.
“Come here. Come here, come…”
His hands caught me and pulled me into a hug that tried to keep me together, but I felt a part of this sand and you can’t hold dust like me. I curled on the dune and he leaned over me with soft words whispered in my ear that I had never heard before then.
“I know. I know you didn’t mean to. I know you would never do that on purpose. It’s alright. He’s alright. He’s as tough and as stubborn as you. You did nothing wrong.”
“I—I ki… I killed…” I remembered the girl with the gun who came in the dark.
The sand swallowed me a part of it. Jack only comforted the earth. “He’s okay.”
&n
bsp; My hands tore into my hair, pressed to this stone skull that ached and weighed a tonne. I kept my tongue held in a prison between my teeth but there was a monster inside my chest that gnawed at the iron bars until they were thin enough for its frail body to squeeze through. It was a wolf howling in rage that clawed up my throat on the back of a guttural scream.
Shhhh, Jack murmured. The way the ocean whispered to the tremulous shore.
I am a monster. I am a vicious creature. I am a cruel daughter of a cruel king.
I didn’t know what they’d done to me.
In that place, I liked to imagine that it was good and true work, that there was a purpose and a reason but those were the things I couldn’t remember and these were the things I did not want to remember:
The Pluto soldiers and their deaths at my hands.
Astra.
James Carson’s hands and the sickness they left behind.
Arden in the pool.
The fire of electric charge wired in my body.
The pain of a little boy.
My name. My name.
“When I was younger,” Jack spoke so softly as his hands kept tune against my hair and my back as he leaned close. “If I was upset, or scared, or angry, I went outside and I walked between the two fields until I was far enough from the house, and I laid down in the grass. I pressed my ear to the earth and listened to it speak. If you listen, you can hear the rumble and the roar and the creak of an old world. It calmed me down, slowed my heart to match its. You can feel the warmth and the smallest vibrations and tremors—just listen, and breathe.”
There was a gentle rumble in his words and a tremor in his hands. I wanted to lie there for centuries and become a part of the earth, but shame wrapped around my throat like a rope for being held like a child like this. Shame for being touched kindly—why?
I clamped my teeth together. My muscles grew stiff.
“Calm down, Sparky, it’s alright.” Jack’s voice was the earth. It was the crack in the surface that vibrated with a distant hum—or maybe it was the earth that held his voice. He tapped my shoulder and pulled the hair away from the dampness of tears on my face. “Look. Look up, Soren. Percy wanted to tell you—we’re here. We made it. Warren is here. Can you see the lights?”
I pushed myself up bit by bit and let this anger drip from me like salt water.
I saw it. That strange dream-like vision I had, the lines in the near-plateau of orange sand, it was here in front of us. And those dark cracks and chasms that I saw, they glowed in the fading light of afternoon. The surrounding desert was held at bay around the edges of this lava field that I thought was only a dream.
My heart dropped through my feet as the realization dawned.
We were on top of a city. The swell of an ocean of sand formed a crater of it. Skyscrapers and ancient buildings were hidden by the devastation of the Fraxinus War.
Warren was truly a warren under the earth and Percy was so excited to show me this vibrant and thrumming hidden sanctuary in the Wastes.
“Welcome to the great, shining jewel of the wasteland,” Jack said.
Part Two — The Glowing Embers
14
Embers rose into the dark, burning and burning out. They became frail ash to drift down again. They met with stars.
The arm of the Milky Way wrapped overhead, bright enough that the smoke hardly obscured it. A cosmic embrace that only made this strangeness in me worse. I was floating. Everything in me drifted in zero g, yet still, somehow, this force weighed me down.
“Do you only eat spaceman food now or something?”
I looked across the fire at Jack, on his second bowl of the stew Roam had cooked.
My voice was still raw as I stared into my own bowl. “Spaceman? Alien or astronaut?”
“Both?” He answered uncertainly.
I shrugged. “Depends. Astronauts are gamey.”
“You—” he choked on a mouthful of stew, forced it down, and laughed before he said anything else. He looked at Roam when he spoke. “Can you believe her? Spends four years in Sceptre school and she’s cracking jokes like eggs.”
Roam didn’t look at me. She hadn’t looked at me since the boat. Since Percy. She hadn’t said a word. Her eyes were cast to the fire to mold daggers of the embers, daggers that she would sharpen and use against me when she finally lost that tightness in her jaw.
I looked at the bowl again. The fire created heavy shadows across me.
“Four years?” I said quietly. “Four years, that’s… all.”
“Six,” Jack corrected, and then cleared his throat and tried to clarify. “Two for… before. The time between Redbird and the Embassy.”
“What happened then?”
I stood up and stepped closer to the heat of the flames and set my bowl down on the crate next to Percy for him to finish off. The boy was already reaching for the pot.
I looked at the soldier. He glowed orange on the opposite side of the fire. He didn’t look back, just ran a hand through his hair and stared at the sand around his boots.
The night was made of silence then, stitched and hemmed in it, and no one made eye contact.
I looked up at the sky instead of them and watched the blinking, twinkling stars where they rested peacefully in the endless vacuum of space. It looked flat. It looked like I could cast a net and reel in stars smaller than cut diamonds, but it wasn’t, and everything was far away and unreachable in a single lifetime and the world was so incredibly small.
I looked down at Percy and hesitated with words held carefully between my teeth. He had been quiet since Pucks and Fitz went into the city, upset that he couldn’t go with them.
I crouched down a bit away from him and asked quietly, “How old are you, little bear?”
He looked at me, startled almost, his eyes wide like a doe confronted by a hunter. He turned back to the embers.
“Six. My birthday is August third, and Jack’s is August second. Him and Fitz came to Warren on my birthday. You didn’t, ever.”
I know. I know.
He spoke so matter-of-factly, his words sharp as if he and Roam had been sharing those daggers in the shadows behind my back. Roam never shocked him, but Roam never smiled at me and joked to do it again like he did, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to fix the chasm that grew between us.
Jack stood up suddenly, returned to the Sailer, and started up the ladder.
“Oh, Jack,” Roam called. She stood up and following after him. “I was wondering if you could give me a hand finding something in this mess…”
I watched him steady her as she climbed over the rail onto the tilted boat. He ducked his head down as he listened to her.
Somebody always wants something, that’s what he said, and there he was helping someone else with something small and trivial without a backwards glance.
A meteor burned bright across the sky and was gone before I even realized it was there.
I spent the last few years dreaming of a little boy who kept me sane in the dark, and here he was. Real. Warm. Gentle. Just as I wanted him to be. But my mind kept flashing back to that look in his glacier blue eyes when he was sprawled on the deck of the Sailer.
Arden once stood in front of me and screamed loud enough to freeze the room: if you want change, doing nothing will not achieve that. If you want something, you have to fight for it until there is no fight left.
What I wanted was this child to be happy, safe, protected at all costs.
What I wanted was to be with him in a sunlit meadow, to sit down and braid the long grass together, to have him curled up in a cradle of roots or picking yellow wildflowers to stick in our hair, as if that small place was all we ever needed to make it.
It could be, if I was their Genesis. We wouldn’t need to leave if I could bring everything that we needed to us. But I knew how it ended for Emma. It was written in the journal.
Getting there was a difficult road, but Moon Rabbit, the rebels, they had safe houses. The
y had people like Pucks to ferry other rebels and refugees through places like the Wastes. The Empire didn’t know every single one, but he might, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to face down thousands of Lumen and soldiers and Sceptres.
I crouched down next to Percy as a plan churned my stomach.
“Hey. You wanted me to meet your friend. What was her name again?” I reached a hand out to him but I caught my breath in my throat and rested it against the edge of the crate instead. You keep me sane, I’ll keep you safe. That’s the deal, kid.
He turned his wide eyes to me. A sudden light burned in them. “Tiger.”
I cast a look to the Sailer and the flashlight that pierced the cracks from its belly. I kept my voice a whisper between us. “Tiger. That’s a cool name. What if I wanted to meet her right now?”
“But…” he started, worry for the consequences of disobedience settling in, and then it was wiped away with a mischievous smile that I was both proud and scared of. “A secret?”
“We have to go quick—”
He grabbed my hand without a second thought.
I was shaking as a nightmare danced before my eyes.
He pulled me after him. We were walking into Warren, into the dead city, into a hive of rebels who would sooner kill me than hear what I had to say, and Percy was walking into danger because of me.
I felt guilt drag at my heels, but—I had to. I had to.
The descent into the city was through a barely marked concrete stairwell. The skyscrapers were linked together at the top by wooden boards that were treacherous to cross, without railings and without warning, but they sat sturdy. The entry to the stairwell used to have a roof and a door, but now it was just worn-down cement walls that were barely half a foot tall.
The stairwell itself was dark and unlit and supported by rebar that seemed like it should collapse, but for some unnatural reason it was as solid as true ground.
A rusted rail wound its way around the inside of the twisted stairs, and looking down the center of it was like looking into a sky without stars.
I swallowed the uneasy feeling that rose up my throat and took the steps as if I wasn’t stories up in an ancient building buried in an impossible desert. One at a time. Step after step.