The Pulse

by A. E. Shaw

  “I need…” he says, and promptly passes out on everything, Alej catching him just in time to stop him rolling down the slope.

  He picks up the bag Aiden was struggling with, strokes the leather with his thumb and then tumbles the stones out into his palm.

  “What are these?” he asks Selina.

  “Jewels. Stones.”

  “They’re beautiful,” he says, turning them over in his palm, pieces of jade and ruby and all. They feel crafted and smooth and made, and Alej likes the sensation of skill they have to them.

  “They suit Aiden,” Selina says, sounding less convinced.

  Aiden comes around, stares at the sky a bit more, sleeps a little, drinks some water.

  Alej collects more grass and a small selection of leaves he recognises. Not enough, but better than nothing.

  Selina sits and thinks about what to do and what to tell the others about who she is (to the extent that she knows, which isn’t as much as she thinks right now) and where she came from.

  As night falls, things come into closer focus for all of them. Selina talks about trying to go back inside, and Alej tells her they can’t, he’s checked all around, it isn’t safe, and he can’t find anything worth salvaging.

  The ruins of the building loom over them, oozing wisps of smoke here and there now, white in the twilight.

  Aiden realises that he has no idea what day of the cycle this is so he can’t even know what he ought to be doing. He still feels sick, utterly unsettled, just as unsettled as his first few flails against unstable, muddy ground.

  Alej and Selina sleep as night falls, but Aiden, having missed most of the last two days, is no longer tired. He is many things, but he is not tired.

  He spends some time getting himself back together, making a conscious effort to be better. Being sick was not as it was in the books, no whirl of silver trays and special sweets and magical herbs. Suffering out here in the open is even more exhausting than simply getting on with things, he decides.

  He searches his brain for tales of those who’ve risen up in spite of their injuries and gone on to win great battles and achieve great feats of sporting excellence or similar. Alej and Selina have been waiting for him to lead, he decides, and now, it is time for him to do just that.

  Alej and Selina have been waiting for Aiden to be well enough to move, more to the point, but Aiden is no more or less well than he has been for the last couple of days, it’s just that he’s bored of the nothingness.

  Balance takes time to perfect for him, baby steps, buffeted by the winds that curl around the mountaintop.

  It’s a shame that things have turned the way they have. The library, oh, the books, parchments read and unread, so much knowledge he’ll never have. It’s the books he mourns, not the elders, not the people who raised and guided and waited on him for all these years. They’ve passed on, purposes served, and for all he’s read of death and dying, Aiden has no reality to it - they are only absent. They were part of the building. The building is gone; so are they. He and Alej and Selina clearly have more to give, they’ve been raised this way because they deserved the best. They’re special.

  Perhaps they are the only people left in the world, which it seems, continues at least beyond the boundaries he knew.

  One step, two steps. A short walk. This way, says the wind, and Aiden listens. It takes him to the edge - to the hedge - and then, there, beyond that a little, there is a creak. And a bang. And a whistle, the whistle of the wind through a gap that’s appeared, then closed. Again; all that again. An irregular pause. Then once more.

  Puzzle pieces come together in Aiden’s head. The Gate. In the darkness, here, behind the knots and the thorns and the place where they’ve been parted, here is a gap towards a void. In this clouded dark, it’s open only to yet more darkness.

  The wind picks up still further, and the gate bangs again. Aiden sees movement now, a shape coming close to the wall and snap, bang, again, again. Aiden covers his ears, which still echo with the roar of the fire.

  There is a wrenching then, a terrible severance in sound, and the gate is ripped from its hinges by a wind unnaturally high and it falls away, way past the edge of Aiden’s world. He stumbles, kneels on the ground, and stares, for all he can through whipping branches and dust and leaves, but there’s still only nothing. His ears ring louder and louder with a fear and a beat that comes from deep inside him, and he retracts into a ball on the ground, gripping his body tight to itself, a tiny, sheer curl of nerves and visceral experience.

  Alej and Selina, wakened by the commotion, are at his side and trying to unravel and hold him all at once, but Aiden isn’t quite ready to share this with them, holds tighter to himself.

  Neither Selina nor Alej notice the gaping space at first, and then the wind seems to direct them to it. At last they stare, as Aiden did, into blank space.

  No-one speaks, but they understand this is the only way forwards. If they wait, if it gets light, then they’ll be able to see the other side, and then, then, it’ll be time to leave the ruins of their past behind.

  Eventually, as morning shows itself, still pale, rippled grey cloud, so Aiden finally asks Alej, “Have you been outside before?”

  “I work outside,” Alej answers, a semitone from robotic. Ignoring tenses, he adds, “I help Michael grow the food, and cut it, and keep it.”

  Aiden nods.

  “And you?” he turns to Selina. “Have you been outside before?”

  Selina shrinks a little. This is not the way she’d planned to discuss her past with them, not with half of her words disappearing to the winds, but, she can’t lie. She would never lie. She inhales, as if to burst out an answer, then bites her tongue. Exhales, and looks down.

  “Selina?” It’s not curiosity that drives Aiden to be so uncharacteristically inquisitive, but a sense he must know, that the time for this knowledge is right now. With each moment Selina does anything but give the quiet No he expects, a fear and anxiety gathers pulse and pressure at his chest and around his heart, already confirming that, amidst all this chaos, there is something worse to come.

  She shakes her head, and edges backward. The gap where the gate lay is glaring at her now, daring her to return.

  “I come from…from out there.” She points through the space to illustrate her point. They clearly don’t understand.

  “I was brought here when I was reaching the end of childhood. I remember the world outside. You were here, they told me, they said I’d be your friend. I would be your friend, when we were older. And until then, I would practice.”

  “Practice what?” Alej has curiosity, so it seems, and an inability to curb his words, however much he’d aspired to.

  Selina ignores him. “They brought me a long way. A very long way. You don’t understand. You don’t know. You wouldn’t be trying to go back if you’d…please, it was so awful then, I can’t imagine what it’s like now…you don’t know how lucky we’ve been…”

  No, Aiden thinks, no, I know exactly how lucky I am. I know you aren’t like me, and you shouldn’t be telling me what I am or am not, because you don’t know…he is set, immediately, viscerally, on guard at the idea that Selina was brought here. It makes his skin prickle. It feels as if it means something very, very wrong.

  “Who brought you here?” he asks Selina, aggression creeping into his voice, suspicion into his mind. “The elders?”

  “No. My parents, my brothers, they came half the way, and at the bottom of the mountain I was given to guards. Soldiers, perhaps. They had a uniform. They took me up here.”

  “Guards? What were they guarding? Who were they guarding it for?” Now Aiden has found the knack to questioning, he’s on a roll, driven further and faster by the pace of his heartbeat.

  “I don’t know. We never…people didn’t…it wasn’t…” Selina is flustered, frightened, by the change in his face.

  She sounds weak. This is not the person Aiden has known her to be.

  But in this light, A
iden doesn’t look like the quiet, calm, clever boy Selina has known for so long, either.

  “Please,” she adds, “ I don’t think we should…”

  “We can’t stay here,” Alej says, looking, again, back at the settled, barely-smoking rubble. “There’s not enough food.”

  “No,” Aiden agrees, “we can’t stay here.”

  “But,” Selina insists, her voice harsh and nerved, “I’m sure we can salvage something, we can at least make a shelter…you don’t understand…if we…if we went down…”

  Aiden looks at her, and smiles. His smile is terrible, contemptuous. He is so cold, so shaken; he only wants to move forward, to hold onto the destiny he feels inside him, to find his point, his reason, or at least someone who will be grateful to see him.

  “I’m leaving,” he says, and he shakes himself from their company, grabs his pail and his little heap of belongs and throws himself at the tangled gap.

  A part of him imagines nothing beyond the void the gate has left; he’ll fall into an abyss, and that that will be the end of everything. Aiden would not only be okay with that, he’d relish it. The end of everything, and him there to savour it; that would be fulfilling enough.

  It is not the end.

  He doesn’t have the dexterity to get himself through the overgrowth without considerable squirming and thorn-impact; it’s an ungainly and less graceful procedure than he’d hoped for. Still, eventually, he manages…and Alej and Selina start at the sound of the oof of his body landing somewhere further down.

  Without question, reservation, or a word to Selina, and with a good deal more strength and grace than Aiden, Alej leaps after him.

  Selina approaches the gap, and stands there, branches now shoved clear. She can see it’s a long way down. She remembers climbing up so long ago, half hauling herself up, half pushed by strong hands, delivered to the castle like a parcel.

  She remembers the weight of the gate, far, far down below them now, where it’s fallen and splintered into its parts. It was quite beautiful, far more ornate than most things she’d ever seen, carved with pictures she didn’t have a chance to study. It seems strange it should have fallen; it was so sturdy and heavy and important. She finds a stub of wall with her toes, begins to edge herself down gently. Below, she thinks she can hear the boys’ voices; close enough that what she’s doing isn’t stupid; far away enough for it to be daunting.

  She remembers her last look out before she entered the castle, her last view across the world as it was. From up here everything looked so beautiful. That last look coloured her memories with a tinge of nostalgia, an ache of distance. She had been so sure she would never, ever return.

  They don’t understand what it’s like down there. Of course she’s never told them, but now, now it seems so real and likely again, she realises she never could. As the child she was, she didn’t have the vocabulary or the education to adequately describe the scenes she saw, nor the context to understand that the world had not always been so. And now…it would sound flippant to even try. If it was so hard, then, then now it must be worse, and she does not want, not with any part of her whatsoever, not even with that tiny, nostalgic shred of herself, to return. She can’t imagine what Aiden and Alej would do there, how they would be treated. They might even be murdered, or beaten, or eaten, come to that. Two boys - men, they’d be men, amongst those down there - in such condition, so privileged, so lucky…so used to their lives and their duties and their pleasantries…they have no idea.

  The belief that life in the castle was forever was so easy for her to throw herself into; she feels guilty, alongside all her other contemplations, disgustingly guilty for having disowned everything and everyone behind her. She knows what she is losing, leaving this all but sacred area. But she has already made the decision. She has jumped, and is falling.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Mountain

  For a moment, she hopes she’ll never land. That she will bounce and splinter and shred all the way down, and never have to get up and begin to march to wherever. She’ll never have to face the world. The world will never have to know she had it all and threw it away. In spite of all these hopes she hits the ground hard.

  They regroup on a ledge. Aiden is winded, exhausted again, should surely not be doing anything at all for some time, but has, obviously, no opportunity for bedrest. This doesn’t matter. He’s excited. He has never been excited.

  He hurts. Everything hurts. But by now he’s decided that’s fine, he’s not going to die, so it’s nothing to fuss over. This is all new; everything from hereon must be new and exciting.

  He grins, a vast, terrifying grin in the darkness of early morning, and tries, with untrained feet, to find a way to keep moving.

  “Come on!” Aiden calls, and Alej is wary, but he follows, because there is no other option.

  The ground falls away beneath every step; his boots fight to keep themselves where they’re placed, and Aiden’s legs are shaking manically, but he continues. Nothing would stop him descending into nowhere. Destiny awaits!

  Alej would follow Aiden forever, because…because, is the best he can do, and is also enough.

  Selina lags behind. She is following, but slowly, cautiously.

  They continue their descent, and still the sun refuses to rise; the sky will not brighten. Alej wonders whether the sun will ever rise again. He chooses not to conclude this worrying thought but to switch his mind off, to allow his feet and hands to do all the thinking.

  After some time, infinite time, time and more time, Aiden is truly spent once more. Alej catches him up without any trouble.

  Light is still not forthcoming.

  They’ve stopped at a clearing, cleared purposefully, Alej realises, as he sits down. There is stone here, not grass. He crawls a little, feels it lead away from them, around a little, and then…there is a place. A square.

  “Look.”

  “Ooo,” Aiden offers, verging on delirium as he makes his way towards it, labouring, experiencing a new kind of pain, one that comes from stopping and starting.

  He puts his hands on the surface that rises up in front of him. Wood. Smooth, very smooth, as smooth as time. He leans onto it, inhales, hoping for a scent to match the newness of the feeling.

  “Are you going to open it?” Alej asks, less entranced by the touch of the inanimate than Aiden.

  Aiden runs his hands further down, around, trying to decipher ‘open’ with relation to this surface, which feels rather like vertical floorboards.

  “Use the handle,” Selina offers, appearing behind Alej, and knowing, without being close enough to see, what it is, where it is, that they are. “It’s a resting place,” she says, “there are others. We should stop. There are beds.”

  Selina had forgotten - chosen not to remember - the resting places. Small, cramped; the tall, strong soldiers that escorted her here struggled to fit into the bunks. She hardly slept, missing her family, her home, the crush of the familiar.

  Aiden opens the door, falls in. The floor crunches under the soles of his feet and the air has its own taste, musty and stiff. Old.

  Alej and Selina follow him in. A chill staleness rushes up to greet them.

  “We should have a fire,” Selina says. “There used to be a hearth on the back wall.”

  Aiden produces his sparkmaker. “I can start the fire,” he says, with a relief that overlays all his exhaustion and discomfort. He’s missed fire. It doesn’t even occur to him that the only reason he’s been separated from his beloved fire-lighting rituals and so on is because of fire itself.

  He scrabbles around, identifying a stone space filled with ancient ashes and half burnt chunks of wood. They seem dry enough for a second round.

  Alej and Selina sit in silence, gathering their breath and shivering as Aiden’s sparks fly.

  Finally, Aiden catches the sparks in a few silk threads frayed from his shirt cuff. A flame takes, and grows. As light floods the tiny room, it replaces every tension that had been
there before it.

  Aiden doesn’t move away from the fire, letting it grow and spread in front of him, pushing logs here and there with his bare hands. The warmth is welcome, necessary, something he tastes from the inside.

  “So,” says Alej to Selina, his voice firm and logical. “Tell us where we are.”

  Selina shakes her head. “I don’t know where we are, only where I was. Everything in between was only the journey.” She explains, from the beginning.

  Aiden is tired. He is sad, too, that Selina is not…as he and Alej. That she hasn’t grown up as he thought she had. This does, he is surprised to find, matter.

  That’s how it starts. With sadness. And then it flourishes into something more.