When the mines explode they change the air, and the wind smells sweet, like burning sugar. There are the tiny pansy bombs that only maim, but can be fairly easily scattered; crater-making tulip bombs that ruin foundations and kill more people via cave-in and collapsing walls; impressive dandelion bombs that cannot be hidden, but when set off propel a hundred small grenades in every direction; rose bombs so violent they splatter blood in a huge radius; and the intricate, special orchid bombs nearly impossible to defuse.
Another kind of world building is expository. You just present the necessary information factually (within narrative voice restraints, of course).
We weren’t expecting firepower like that. The desert gives off a magnetism that ruins mechanics and gunpowder projectiles, forcing even a sophisticated army such as ours to rely only on our sabers and bows. The war might’ve ended a year sooner without the flowers mined along every road, in forts and cities, oasis camps, even dry riverbeds where we dug for water. They gave a generation of furious young star clan girls and boys a powerful encouragement, taught them we empires could be defeated.
Sometimes expository world building can lead to too much information or terminology overload. That’s what CPs and editors are for: to let you know when you’re not taking care of your readers while you’re challenging them. I cut out and simplified a lot of my original language throughout here.
That was a lie, too. We beat them still, with special service fireteams like mine.
#theme
• • •
I want to—
If I could—
• • •
I want to write about being a pacer. Meeting her. The honesty of sweeping for mines and aiding the star clan mages in defusing mines. It was my second tour, and no matter what else, destroying bombs is a good thing to do.
But.
My first tour I wasn’t concerned with good thing to do.
I was a natural at killing in the desert. I was vicious and artful, but patient and precise. Skills I’d not had an opportunity to realize in the luxury of my mother’s home in An Riel. Though the soldiers in my team were older, I proved quickly that I had the drive as well as the talent to find any rebel hideaways. They say I’m especially observant or particularly subtle, but I know it was that peculiar desert hum. I always found what I was looking for by listening to it, letting it pull me one direction or warn me away. My fireteam confirmed more kills and cleared more walls and lost fewer lives to flower mines than any other. They named me the Gardener, not for how successful I was at pruning the weeds of insurgency, at identifying the mines, at stalking targets through ruinous adobe houses and cracked, dry riverbeds; I was the Gardener because when we found rebels, my men and I sliced them to pieces with our sabers and marked the locations with blood-spattered flags torn from the colorful robes of the dead. When mortuary services arrived, they found a rainbow garden of streamers and pennants.
I did it the first time on instinct: to leave a clear mark so my fireteam could move on.
It wasn’t until Aniv asked me that I could say the real reason I continued the tradition: because it made me feel better, in a terrible, slick way, to create something new out of those dead bodies. Like art, I told her, quiet as a confession.
• • •
The Sweet was declared rebel-free three months after the treaty with the Eruse Confederacy and six weeks after my seventeenth birthday. The war was over, and I came home to commendations enough they weighted down my dress reds.
They’d told us not to think about what we were doing. Death and killing, heat and backbreaking work; it was just our job, and we should save our consciences for when we got home. Easy for me and some of the others. At first I thought it would all be easy.
Except I hummed.
I did it under my breath, tunelessly, and hardly noticed myself. When my mother complained, I struggled to explain and said only that An Riel was too quiet, not like the constant noise of the Sweet. (What an irony that is to me now.)
Mother said the crashing ocean was louder than any desert could ever be, and Aunt Lusha peered at me as if I’d offended her. She said the desert was stuck in my brain.
But if I didn’t fall asleep humming, I didn’t fall asleep at all.
• • •
I dreamed of the flower mines.
They weren’t nightmares. I never woke sweating or angry, choking on tension trapped in my subconscious. In my dreams the mines were beautiful, like the desert. They exploded slowly, in great waves of color, layers of death like petals spiraling out from the zero point.
I would wake, stare at the stucco ceiling of my childhood bedroom, and imagine painting tulips or roses there. I’d realize I was humming.
• • •
The mines were in the news every week, even though the war was over. They killed the native star clans flooding back from Eruse, exploding sometimes immediately, sometimes not for days and days because the triggers could be so specific. I read about murdered children and grandmothers missing limbs, blindness and burned skin. The star clans stopped coming home; their numbers trickled to almost nothing. It made me vaguely sad, and it made Aunt Lusha apoplectic.
Then a massive wreath exploded at the Irisu Dam, loosing the power of its river onto the red adobe city of New Spring. The entire place flooded, water setting off more bombs until it took a triplet of star clan mages to put up a barrier spell locking the water inside. One of them died in the casting.
They’d never recover New Spring, the center of star clan sacred ritual for generations.
Because of us.
I felt a sting of anger for the first time. At the rebels who kept planting those bombs, who didn’t destroy them when they’d lost finally and for good. At my own An Riel for creating the desperate situation in the first place. At the Eruse Confederacy, who’d been our enemy for generations, but now I wasn’t sure if we weren’t our own worst enemy. At strangers minding their own business in Mother’s market square. At my aunts.
New Spring was always the set piece for the finale: a flooded city. I mentioned it here as the point at which the Queen sent her soldiers back to the desert because it needed to be immediately relevant to Rafel’s character arc. During revisions I connected this early shift in Rafel’s feelings to New Spring so it changed not only his political landscape, but him as well.
What a mess of politics and death. I’d never been to New Spring, but I could imagine what it would be like to never go home again.
• • •
My mother’s household became a center for debate between government parties; my aunts didn’t even agree on what the Queen should do. Lusha argued violently on behalf of aiding the star clans because without the An Riel–Eruse War, the Sweet would not be scattered with mines in the first place. Mother argued just as viciously that it was the star clan rebels themselves, trying to force An Riel and Eruse out of the desert, who planted the flower mines, and so An Riel bore no responsibility for getting rid of them. Let the star clans erase star clan magic. Eruse certainly would not divert resources to it; why should the Queen?
The Queen ordered a vote in her parliament, which she had done rarely since coming to power. Lusha whispered that her mother wished to pass any blame onto parliament, should they vote one way and it go wrong, but Mother insisted the Queen genuinely did not know what was best: she had never been to the desert and only could rely upon the words and advice of others.
Nobody asked me for my opinion. Gardener or no, in my mother’s house I was still only a second son.
If they had asked, none of them would’ve been as surprised as they were that, when the Queen and parliament ordered the special service to coordinate with the provisional star clan counsel and render aid in a venture called the Restoration Campaign, I immediately presented myself at the quarter house to volunteer again.
Anything to get back to the desert. To the hum.
This section could be cut entirely without affecting the story, because it’s alm
ost 100 percent world building. BUT I wanted this political background because that’s part of my theme: the messy politics that create situations like this. I did my best to make it reflective of Rafel, too, and reaffirm his place in An Riel culture and his world.
• • •
When I set foot in the Sweet again, I terrified the translator who greeted me first in camp. A star clan expat who somehow got swept into service, he shied away from my teeth: it was a thing I’d forgotten, that baring teeth is an intimate gesture there, of either aggression or heartfelt smiles. I could not help it. The hum was in my teeth again and my mouth could not contain it.
• • •
I’d been recommissioned as a pacer, partnered with one of the star clan mages to find and disarm as many flower mines as possible. There were five disposal teams of fifteen men and women with our group, each led by a mage-and-pacer pairing. We worked three teams at a time, moving slowly through the winding, narrow streets of Shivers.
I rewrote this section based on editorial feedback asking me to clarify and refine the explanation of what a pacer does. A lot of this was peppered throughout the next four pages instead of in one simple, informative place. Sometimes it’s best to just hand the information over. It worked as a better transition between sections, too.
Mage and pacer went first, eyes peeled for potholes or rubble or shadows that most likely hid bombs.
Behind us came the snails—An Riel special services explosive-arms disposal teams—to clean up and make sure nothing remained that any rebels could use to rebuild bombs, and to collect pieces for evidence and study at home. They were called snails because ordinarily they moved oh-so-slowly and wore heavy blast armor like shells. If these had been regular bombs from a regular war, the snail teams would’ve hunted and destroyed them in controlled detonations. Unfortunately, when detonated, the flower mines disrupted all the magic in a place, so we were forced to disarm them instead of blowing them up.
This is here because in real life most IEDs are dealt with in controlled detonations, not disarming. I needed disarming for story purposes, hence this explanation gave me more chances for world building.
After the snails, star clan natives brought up the rear, carrying desert-made shields and some supplies the mage might need in her work. They were there to be our guards and also as proof that An Riel and the star clans were working together on this even beyond the mage-pacer pairing.
When anyone spotted a potential threat, everything stopped. Only a mage could verify the presence of an armed flower without setting it off, and it was her pacer’s job to go with her, create a perimeter, and identify any signs of wreathing or additional triggers. Once he cleared the area, the shield rows and snails spread out, shields facing the blast site, protecting it and themselves. Only the mage and pacer were exposed and defenseless while she disarmed the bomb.
I suppose they assumed I’d excel at pacing because I’d been so skilled at finding hidden rebels.
I’ve heard other pacers say it was a job that required calculation, dissociation, patience, and a command over fear—or ignorance of it. Truly, all it requires is a reliable coping mechanism.
The pacers I knew—Belen, Sars, Leonor, and especially my friend Jarair Man AnGraya—all had their ways. Jarair would clap you on the shoulder and jerk his handsome chin and say, “Think of the aunts and daughters back home who’ll fall to their knees for such stories!” Leonor began every mission by saying, “No luck today,” an old An Riel blessing that hoped for things to go so well luck became unnecessary. Belen would return to camp buzzing with tension, dive straight for his bunk, and bury himself in blankets too hot for the desert until the sun set. He emerged quiet, but having shed the thrum of anxiety.
For me, it was total immersion. If I kept my distance from the air and mud, if I let my mind alone do the detecting, I would have been dead too quick.
It was more like I became a walking piece of the city, of the brick walls and lighter limestone cobbles. I breathed the city; I felt its empty roads like dried-out channels of blood from my own body. It hummed. I listened.
Rafel doesn’t realize he’s talking about transformation here, about becoming something he is not. #theme
• • •
I saw my mage the first time from a distance and did not know I was to be hers. Her pacer. She stood alone in the blue shade of the canvas wall that marked the line between the An Riel service camp and the star clan refugee camp. On our side. It was dawn, and the watery red sun just peeked over the pinnacle of the city to our east, the walled, orange adobe fortress we’d been assigned to clear first.
I like this slip of his: it’s thematic in that he corrects himself into more exact honesty, but also a hint of his emotional confusion regarding Aniv.
Her black hair fell in two thick twists to her knees, waving slow as sun-warmed snakes in the morning breeze. Otherwise she was still. Her eyes were closed; one hand rested against the canvas as if she listened to something on the other side. She wore layers of striped robes: green, blue, cream, and the softest seashell pink, falling from her shoulders and waist like a waterfall, but leaving her muscular arms bare. I knew she was a mage because she wore none of the rings or bracelets the star clans were known for, nor had she painted her desert skin with the pale lines I’d seen on most of their women and children. Her feet were bare, toes reddened with desert dust. In her other hand a sheer white veil was bunched in a ball, the only sign she was ill at ease.
Repetition of language Rafel uses when talking about being the Gardener. Repetition of language in various contexts is a good world-building technique to draw comparisons.
“Dinah?” I said quietly, giving her a star clan honorific for their most esteemed mages.
This was originally her first appearance, before I added the earlier section of Rafel thinking of her haunting him. I needed to bring her introduction up more: she IS the second most important character to the story, and THE most important character to Rafel himself.
She turned to me in surprise. She had dark eyes, as do most of her people, and a long nose. She was not pretty, but striking and young—even younger than me, I thought—with thin lips and long lashes and bursts of color darkening her already desert-dark cheeks. Before she responded, she studied me as closely as I had her.
I took satisfaction in knowing I looked like a soldier: brooding, heavy eyebrows, scars from a childhood disease marring half my face, a thick nose. My first tour I’d still been as slender and boyish as a poplar but since had grown into a man’s frame. I have square shoulders and a square face, and my uneven reddish skin makes me more like a fortress of rough adobe bricks now. My hair was only long enough to tie back from my face and neck. The mage could not have known me for who I was, rank or family, for I only wore the dark red jacket of special services, with no sign of my rank nor any of my achievement medals because of how they amplify the hum in discordant ways.
This description was the first thing I EVER wrote down about Rafel. Before he had a name, when it was still in third person, this paragraph was the “birth” of Rafel. I wrote down “willow” instead of “poplar” originally in my notes because I didn’t have a setting or landscape yet.
Her first words to me were, “You pronounced it well.”
“Thank you,” I said, in the star tongue too, inexplicably pleased. I pronounced it again in my head, dee-NAH, glad to have remembered.
Vaguely cheating world-building technique, like that time in Goblet of Fire when Hermione told everybody how to pronounce her name.
She introduced herself in her language, and I knew many of the words. I picked out that her name was Aniv and admitted in Rielan, “I only know a small bit of your tongue, Dinah, that I learned during the war.”
Her expression tightened. “I can imagine what other phrases you must know.”
I glanced at the gravelly desert floor, not ashamed exactly, but hearing it all again.
Stop!
Where are the weapons?
> How many of you are there?
Burn them down.
I am sorry your daughter/son/father/grandmother is dead.
Come with us.
Keep back!
The Dinah continued, “You seem too young to be a veteran, but I did hear An Riel was sending children to murder children in the end.”
That snapped my eyes back to hers. Her brow rose in challenge, and I remembered suddenly the first time I slit the guts of a boy younger than myself. It had been terrible. But it was not his face or small limbs that stuck in my dreams, but the slick, calm, easy way I’d done it.
Until now, Rafel has been rather cool and distant from his violence, emotionally speaking. His moments of emotion are because he’s writing it all down from a later point. Linearly speaking, it takes Aniv to get Rafel to react emotionally in the moment.
The memory made me defensive. I said, “And now the clans have sent children to dismantle bombs too.”
She stepped nearer to me, and the morning sun set fire to the curve of her eyelashes. “It bothers you not at all,” she said. She was nearly as tall as me, and I smelled desert sweet tea on her breath. It was like the burned-sugar scent of an expended flower mine. I swallowed nausea.
“I am a soldier,” I managed to say, very low and quiet.
“I haven’t seen you in camp before. You’re the new pacer, aren’t you?”
The hum of the desert swelled in my ears, like rushing blood in a conch. I did not have to nod or acknowledge: she knew.
“I hope you’re better at it than my last: he missed a secondary device and the rebel waiting to trigger it.”
I held her dark gaze, imagining gardens of the men I’d hunted.
The Dinah said, “You are going to be magnificent at it, killer.”
Killer.
Even from the beginning, she threw me off-balance.
The Anatomy of Curiosity Page 10