I place my hand over hers and squeeze it gently. “I’m sorry.”
“It didn’t work. Then everything played out in a similar way with your sister, Saqqara. That’s how your father—” Her voice catches in a silence that explains his death, and she shoves her knuckles against her mouth as she gasps a sob.
“I’m sorry that I never had the opportunity to meet him.” My voice cracks on the words and when her sad eyes meet mine, I lean forward to hug her.
She rubs the tears away. “The king protected your sister against the Chosen, just long enough for me to hide her away. The Chosen didn’t fulfill the prophecy, obviously, but did manage to help the Grand Master by stealing aqua vitae.”
My head is spinning with all I’m learning, to the point a headache starts to form at the base of my skull. So I lift my hand to rub my neck, and ask, “I’m confused. What does all this mean?”
“It means that since I’ve been drinking this water—and if I continue to drink it—I cannot die. Several have tried, but have failed.”
I think of how she died in my true time, but she must have stopped drinking the water, leaving herself vulnerable. “You should know that in the future—”
“No, please don’t tell me any more.” She holds up her palm. “I know what you’re going to tell me, and I don’t wish to hear of my death. I recall our words from yesterday.”
I told her I thought she was dead, so she knows. I look down at my hands, my fingers entwined so tightly that my knuckles are white. She knows that it happens, that it’s in her future. I can only hope that makes her take all the necessary precautions. “But how were they able to hurt my brother and the king? Didn’t you let them drink from the fountain?”
“Of course I did.” She stiffens and frowns at me. “I bathed the children in it, let them play in it, and it was the only source of water for the king and me, the only water I allowed.”
“Then how?”
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but apparently the children were not protected until they matured and received their Wandering gifts. Nor did I know that the king was immune since he was a Normal.” She grabs my hands. “But what I discovered is that it’s not I or the king who needs to die to fulfill the prophecy. It’s the selfless act of their Wandering child that will set everyone free.”
Someone pure of heart, just like the tattoo says. Miss Swift and the Society scholars were wrong. Mom’s explanation makes perfect sense.
“Like me?” I sit up straight, placing a hand over my chest. My heart beats rapidly at the thought that I’m at the root of the reason we’re so wrong, so impure and imperfect, unlike the original people of Gibeon. I’m unsure if I’ll ever be pure enough or selfless enough to set us free, to prove to the Masters that we’re worthy. I’ve been everything but worthy my entire life.
“It’s okay, now that you’re here. You’re safe.” She runs a hand over my cheek and her fingers caress my hair. “You can stay here in this time to have access to the water and no one will ever harm you, like they did your brother and father.”
I jump to my feet. “But what about everyone else? Ray, Macey, Bishop, Sam, Mona, and Charlotte! I need to save them, I need to change things.” My skin begins to heat with the fear and anger that is growing inside me. I suck in a deep breath, and another, then the next comes too quickly and before another second passes, I’m nearly hyperventilating.
“Seraphina.” She stands up and rubs my shoulder, trying to soothe me, then grasps my chin and locks her gaze with mine. “You’re my child, and I can’t allow anyone to hurt you.” She grabs a bag. From it, she pulls out the king’s crown and places it on my head. “I wanted to break this crown apart, dispersing all the pieces after your father’s death, keeping a part for you. But now that you’re here, I want you to have it for yourself. You, like this crown, belong here. You’re the princess of this kingdom and you’ll stay here. Your kingdom will protect you and your sister when I leave.”
“No.” I remove the crown and throw it to the ground.
She rushes to pick it up and hands it back. “Please don’t argue.” Her eyes plead.
“I love you, Mom.” Tears prick at my eyes, blurring my vision. “But I can’t let my friends, my family, or my team die. I just can’t.”
Because I have nothing else to say, and I don’t want to argue, I take off running down the long hall. She comes after me, but I’ve already activated the relic in my hand, asking the crown to send me back to my true time. When I’ve gained enough speed, the wormhole opens in a blast of light, and I jump through.
::40::
An Artist
I’m in the wormhole, hoping to make it back to my true time, but a spasm explodes through my body, causing me to lose the keyword from my concentration. The pain rushes from my fingertips and toes, leading to the core of my body, settling in my back.
The wormhole loses solidity; it flexes and tears, crumbling like dirt. Still fighting the pain, I struggle and reach for the walls but they disintegrate, sifting through my fingers like sand. The crown drops from my hand, and I slide out, falling into limbo. With the wormhole broken in the transition, my body convulses and I crash-land into mud, spread-eagle on my stomach, my location and my time unknown.
Rain pours over me in a deluge that should pound away the painful prickling that runs over my Chosen mark, but it doesn’t. That, along with the deep rumbling boom of thunder and the crack of lightning striking nearby, confuses me even further.
I shriek and wail from the misery, stretching my arms out from my sides, grabbing for anyone that can help. Unexpectedly, my fingers graze the crown. Somehow through my agony I can see it’s broken. The green gem hangs barely affixed to the golden setting. Yes, the relic pulled through with me, but somehow in its fragmented state it must have collapsed the wormhole, hurting me in the process. Or maybe this is part of being a Chosen? Maybe it’s from the special water I drank? Whatever it is, I wish the torture would stop.
Rolling from side to side on my stomach, I try to turn onto my hip so I can curl into a ball, thinking that if I could change position, this all-encompassing burning would lessen. But this doesn’t happen, because I have the sensation that I’m spitting in half, right down the middle of my back, cracking open like the shell of an egg.
No amount of tears will make it stop. No amount of screaming will make the pain go away because it’s alive, somehow birthed from my soul, ripping though my body. Long fingers of agony crawl inside, pulling, dragging, scraping, and knocking on my bones. The pain rips through my skin and tears my tunic, seeming to extricate itself from me. This sensation brings a release, but just for a fleeting moment. The intensity builds again, erupting twice more, allowing an excruciating pain to roll over me, smashing what little life I have left.
I sense that someone’s found me, or perhaps it is they who are harming me, ripping my clothes away and slicing open my back. Dark figures move around me, their silhouettes fleeting in the flash of the lightning. Their forms cause a flickering strobe of brightness and dark. Then their dog growls. He sniffs at my face, pressing his muzzle to my cheek, and I stiffen in fear. The animal’s pointed teeth snap at me and it snarls. If the pain in my body doesn’t kill me, surely this wild beast will.
I close my eyes and pray that they’ll leave me, stop this torture, and allow me to die. At the moment that I think the words, the figures miraculously move away.
Exhausted and completely confused about what’s happened, I let my eyes slowly close. No person, Normal or Wanderer, could withstand being ripped to shreds in this way without dying.
And at this point, I think dying might be okay.
•
Sometime later, something wriggles through my consciousness, jerking me awake. Through low-lidded eyes, I see a person cautiously approach. They pick up a nearby stick and poke me, and I moan at the sharp pain, but have no energy for words. If they want to hurt me, I’m done. I have no idea who I’m dealing with or what time in history I’ve fallen
into. It could be a hostile war territory, the jungle, or the mountains of Peru. The only fact I know for sure is that I’m somewhere between my true time and our Wandering beginnings in Egypt.
The person does not turn me on my back; instead, they grasp my shoulders and haul me onto a blanket. I scream from the movement, still wailing as the person wraps me carefully. Slowly, one foot at a time, the person drags me across thick mud.
Swinging in and out of consciousness as I’m being so crudely transported, I finally relax when I hear a door creak open, and soon I find myself inside a dry structure. The sounds of the rain and storm are muffled now and the blanket falls away, allowing me to see across the floor. A fire warms the room, and the person who moves around me speaks in what sounds like Italian. It’s different, much older than the modern language Bishop and I heard spoken in Venice, but it’s familiar nonetheless. Then I make out a few words that worry me: blood, much blood.
•
I awake on my side, lying in a bed. The mattress is lumpy, perhaps filled with hay. The feather pillow beneath my head smells of body odor, so I lift myself in order to mumble, “Save them.” Though my limbs are stiff, I attempt to sit up. When I do, someone rushes to my side and rubs my head. “Sleep,” the voice urges in Italian.
Still in pain, I’m in no position to argue. I close my eyes.
•
Water drips over my parted lips and I choke until I open my eyes. Light floods my eyes, and I blink several times to clear my groggy vision. An older man stands above me, drizzling water into my mouth with a wet rag. His faded eyes are enclosed within wrinkled folds above a long curtain of salt and pepper facial hair.
“Drink,” he says in Italian. Reaching behind me, he lifts my head to a bowl. The taste of the water makes me realize how dehydrated I am.
“Grazie,” I manage through cracked, dry lips. He gently settles my head back on the pillow.
Though I know some Italian, he talks as if he assumes I speak the language well. When I glance around, I see that I’m in a studio. Paintings stand on easels, rest in stacks on the floor, or lean against the walls. Miniature flying contraptions hang on rough cords from the ceiling, and papers and books teeter high in unsteady stacks on a wooden desk. From my history studies, I place myself in early sixteenth century Italy, and in the company of a very important man—Leonardo da Vinci.
Remembering that I should be on my way back to my true time to save everyone, I quickly push myself up on my elbows and swing my legs over the edge until I’m sitting upright. Sharp pains shoot up my back and through my head, and I grab my temples.
The pain that afflicted me in the broken wormhole still exists, but now it’s a dull emptiness that consumes me. There’s a void, and I don’t feel like myself. My only answer is that it must be the aftereffects of becoming the Chosen.
I shift my body slightly, working the kinks out of my limbs. Strangely, the skin on my back feels too tight across the ridge of my spine. I reach a hand to my back, allowing my fingertips to follow a short way along the long line of woven stitches over rippled skin, which, from what I can feel, extends from my tailbone to my neck.
My stomach rolls with nausea and I look up to my host to ask bleakly, “What happened?”
He’s been watching me, so even though he may not understand my words, he’ll hopefully understand my shock by reading my reaction.
“You had quite a large gash in your skin that needed a proper stitch,” he says slowly, enunciating each syllable with care.
“You speak English, but they said you only spoke Italian.”
His bushy gray eyebrows rise an inch. “Whom says these things?”
“Um,” I start, then I look around. History, I want to say, but after I think about it, it’s the Normals’ history that says this.
“What happened to my back?” As soon as I say the words, the memories rush back: fingernails scratching and ripping through my skin, the burning pain of being cracked open, and the growling beast that could have killed me. “Did you see the people that attacked me?”
He waves his hand as if to pluck the correct word from the air. “Because of your broken relic. A fragmentation.” He gestures to the table, where the crown sits. The emerald’s fallen off, just like I remember.
His explanation for the wound on my back doesn’t make sense, but whatever the reason, I can’t dwell on this. I can’t take the time to figure out what he means; I have to return to my true time. So I test my legs and stand. The old man watches, worry creasing his brow as I take a tentative step. I seem steady enough, so I walk away from the bed. A draft brushes against my bare legs, and I look down to see that he’s dressed me in a new tunic. This one looks like something a young boy would wear rather than a woman, but in the whole scheme of things, what I’m wearing is the least of my worries.
“I have to leave,” I say grimly, and stumble to the window to confirm my location. Renaissance Florence sits in the distance, just as I expected. I remember my teacher, Mr. Matchimus, telling us that Da Vinci had a studio outside of Florence in his later years.
When I face Da Vinci, he’s standing behind an easel, painting and watching me with the keen eye of an artist. Curious, I shuffle over. You’d think that meeting him is crazy enough, but to see the drawing on his canvas, what he’s working on at this moment, causes me to take a few steps away to compose myself.
“How? I mean—” For once I have no words because the painting he’s working on right now is of the Seraphina Angel. This is the exact painting that hangs on the wall in the main atrium at the Academy of Wanderers in my true time. The one that Bishop always told me looks exactly like me. The one that I realize only bears my name because it actually is me.
“The Seraphina,” I mumble.
Just like me, the painted angel has flowing dark hair, but she has three sets of wings. With one set she flies, with one set she hoods her face, and one covers her feet. Black words scroll across each set of wings, along with simple symbols. Each set of wings symbolizes one of the Master-given gifts—Wanderer, Seer, and Protector. But in this painting, the angel has all three gifts, just like me, just like the Chosen.
I step closer to admire the heavy-handed sketch on the canvas. He’s just begun filling in the loose shapes with long washes of sepia colors.
“Why did you paint me like this?” I ask. Only another Wanderer would understand the marks on my back, and it would take a high-ranking Wanderer to know what they actually mean.
“You are the Chosen, no?” He looks at me, raising a very bushy eyebrow.
“Yes.” I nod. There’s no point in denying it anymore.
“So then, you’re a Wanderer too?” He laughs at my expression, sets his brush down, and hobbles to the nearby desk. He picks up a large piece of paper, scribbled over with doodles of aircraft inventions. “Many think me brilliant, but it’s easy to invent when you’ve seen the future through your Wandering family. No?” He looks at me with a twinkle in his eye.
“You are brilliant, with or without help.”
The old man gives me a wink. “I knew I saved you for a reason.” He places a gnarled hand on my shoulder as he passes by and totters to a cabinet, pulling out a piece of fruit and a crust of bread. He turns and places them on the table.
“About that, thank you for helping me.”
He shakes his head. “It is I who am honored to be in the Chosen’s presence.”
As I flip through his drawings I find one of Unika’s crown—a simple charcoal study that he’s sketched. But in his drawing, the emerald is where it should be, mounted between the wings of the golden scarab.
I trace a finger over the loose lines, remembering a sketch just like this one, drawn by Stu a year ago. Stu explained that he found a book with the sketch of the crown. It must have been Da Vinci’s. I could never imagine every detail of my life folding around and meeting me again for a second time. Every instance in life, every path has a purpose, and this meeting is more proof of that.
Picking
up the green gem, I study it thoughtfully as it rests in my palm. “I have a favor to ask before I go. Can you set this gem into a bracelet and mail it through Gibeon to an address I give you?”
“Sì.” He looks up in question.
Good. I needed to verify that we could still send mail through to any time period via Gibeon, just like Turner sent Bishop’s photo to me on that day that now seems like a lifetime ago.
It’s imperative that the green gem makes it back through time to my sixteen-year-old self. I’m the only one who can reset my path, and send it on the proper course. So I remove the quill from the inkwell, lean over the desk, and quickly jot down instructions of when the item should arrive in the future, and to whom it should travel to.
Fit this gem within a sundial bracelet and send it through Gibeon mail to the future:
Mona Bishop
3838 Schiller Street
Chicago, IL 60611
Instructions:
Mona, please give this to Seraphina on her 16th birthday. A gift from her mother.
This is all I can do for now. I have no idea of the details of how this relic will travel to my sixteenth birthday in the future, what problems it will cause, or how it will be broken apart. What I do know is I’ve now ensured its life path will collide with my own, and all of history will play out as it should.
I look to Da Vinci and manage a smile. “Thank you.” As I hand him the note, I ask, “Now, can you tell me where my things are? I have to leave.”
::41::
Rome
“There.” Da Vinci points to a pile of clothing in the corner.
Seeing Light (The Seraphina Parrish Trilogy) Page 23