The Pulse

by A. E. Shaw

  And eventually, she stole her way through the cities, travelling up from the south of the land where the fervour for San Huo was at its highest, where great and vast palaces stood - holiday homes for the family, once - empty and grand amongst the landless hordes, scrabbling for cover when the nights grew cold but never daring to breach the buildings.

  Eliza dared. The first such palace she arrived at, broad sandstone, fortified, all around. It looked quiet, and cool, and there was only the smallest of fences around it. People swelled on one side of that fence, but none crossed it. And when she simply hopped over, it was as if she’d become invisible. Only the children saw her go, and even they turned away, refusing to watch, disgusted. She wondered if there might be something preventative, expecting at least that there would be guards. But there weren’t. The palace was bare, fine ornaments gone, only the murals remaining on the walls, showing an age where the culture was celebrated. She walked through the hall, carrying a small flame, just enough to light the way.

  Having travelled through such zig-zagging fervent desolation, to rest even for a night in this space seemed bizarre. Resentment festered inside her. Who decides to abandon something like this? How can you leave such space and grandeur, amidst such misery?

  It seemed to Eliza as if she were the only one able to see an obvious truth. Early on she would ask, how can you follow this? How can you live this way?

  Selina knows things, has access to things, Eliza is sure of it, and she’ll be damned if she’s going to let this opportunity pass.

  But, before she can go further, knot the conversation together with everything else, before she can get to the point, the door opens, and Ali comes in.

  Eliza sighs, and sits back, running her hands through her hair, and Selina can tell immediately that something was spoilt between them in that moment. She tries to join the dots, to work out where Eliza was taking her with her words, where she wanted to drive her with her anger and resentment, but it doesn’t click for her. Not yet.

  “Morning!” Ali says, cheerily. “Busy here?”

  Eliza smiles, thin and a little resentful. Ali chooses to ignore this.

  “Any tea?” she asks.

  “Only if you make some,” Eliza says, and, observing that Ali isn’t going to do the sensible thing and bow out, she gets up, brushing the creases out of her tunic viciously. “We’ll continue this conversation later?” she asks of Selina, the answer already implied.

  Selina nods, silently. The way Eliza narrows her eyes a little as she leaves the room sends an unpleasant quiver across Selina’s skin. Whether it’s dread, anticipation, or both, she is not sure.

  Once she’s gone, Ali turns to her. “You know,” he says, his voice low, and measured, “you should take everything she says with a grain. She has some very strange ideas, does Eliza.”

  “And your ideas?” Selina asks. Whilst Ali has been nothing less than good and kind to her, after everything Eliza has just told her, she feels as if, actually, the woman has much more in common with her than she’d thought. And her anger makes a lot more sense, considering. For the first time, Selina wonders why it would be that Ali and Kit aren’t angry too. Surely they’ve lived long enough in this desolate world to understand that this is not how things are supposed to be?

  How things are supposed to be. It sounds like something Aiden would talk with her about. For another moment, she misses his grand ideas, his eloquent stories, and the memory of her plush, dark, cosy little castle room, with Aiden there, draped pale and elegant, is painful.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Truth

  Our family planned this well. Three, four generations before, when the Empire was at its largest, when the first signs that the world was rejecting our volume grew too great to ignore, we established our complex and our castle. We honed our technical brilliance and justified our superiority in the development of the Pulse. We took the castle’s windows and bricked them up for the safety of body and mind, and we began to give our best child the gift of space and knowledge, the correct upbringing to develop them for great inheritance.

  To the complex, we brought families from all areas, all fields of excellence. We chose Our People, those who could, and would, love, and serve, for time everlasting, the best and brightest and most beautiful, the wisest and the most gifted, and we secured them with us, and they gave themselves and their families willingly. Two generations ago, we closed the doors, but even as my father sat at the helm of what remained, in charge of the masses, we still had yet to clear the Outside. The seas were rising. The ground beneath our feet was rumbling. Dust came where it had been green, and the stench of humanity grew ever more foul, pervading even our complex itself. My charges proved their worth with the development of the great and powerful Pulse, and on the day itself, its effect was complete and absolute.

  Aiden neither knows nor cares what the Pulse might be; he’s hungry once more, is tired all over again. What is this book for? He recognises this idea of keeping the children in the castle, yes, the best children, of course, but surely that was only practice for keeping him in the castle? He hasn’t been told precisely what he’s to ‘know and understand’. He reads these paragraphs again. There’s that us once more. That’s the prevailing understanding Aiden takes, against everything contained here, the stories of massacre and hope, all Aiden sees is us and we where he wants to see You or even Aiden. Isn’t this all about, and for him? Wasn’t that the point? All of life, such as he knows it, has been told to him only through the pages of books, so it is all the better that he would come to find his true destiny in the reading of another book. If he could only get to the point at which that destiny is revealed…

  The remainder of the words, skimmed through, say nothing he wants to hear. Nothing of substance; no unveiling of Aiden’s true self and purpose.. The references to you, to my son seem few and worthless. Soon after this self-congratulatory waffle about a plan and a pulse, the words simply stop.

  He places the book aside, dull disillusionment sinking deep down inside his lungs and spine, then he starts as he notices that the room is bathed in a rich yellow light. It cascades through the window. It suggests all things good and golden. It is new, and magnificent. In that moment the misery of the book is overlaid with the glory of this light, and he breathes deep, wishing that this air tasted as good as it looks.

  He pads across the floor, bare feet sinking into soft, soft fabric that begs each pace to stop still and allow itself to be embraced. He goes to the window and looks out, the first time he’s ever done such a thing.

  Houses, real houses lie well below him. He sees people, going about things he has no understanding of, and some things he does have an understanding of, hurrying this way and that way, conversing in groups, preparing food, throwing things at other things…so many different people doing so many different things.

  And then above that, the sky is another new colour, dark grey, but there is still the yellow everywhere too. This is a magical light, and it makes the people look golden. Perhaps they are made of gold. Perhaps they are made from all of the jewels and the treasures of the earth. He stares at them, does not try to comprehend them, nor to fit them into the categories about which he has learned, from the book. He simply watches, and is glad to be above them, where he belongs.

  When the knock comes at his door, Aiden has managed to get himself dressed, just the same outfit he’s always worn, although these fresh clothes are sharper, more becoming. His body is far better than it ought to be, given the fire and the bruises coming and the wounds he sustained that are still on the clotting side of healing. He feels a little larger, after his magnificent feast the night before, yet is covered in hunger. The book has left parts of his mind swirling with unresolved contemplations and simmering discontent, but the sunshine has muted its importance.

  “Aiden?” Katya asks, letting herself into his room when no answer meets her knock. She nods an approval at the fact that he is ready, and his name, Aiden thinks, sounds go
od in her strong accent. It gives a curious weight and poise that it does not have in the mouths of, say, Selina, or Alej.

  “Yes?” replies Aiden, with a veritable skip and bounce towards her, more than ready to see where all this is taking him.

  Aiden follows Katya back the way he came yesterday, through that hall where he was freed from his casing, through again into another corridor, down and around, a long, stone corridor, and then, finally, into a room the like of which he’s never imagined.

  It’s, essentially, a conservatory. Made of what might well be a thousand panels of glass, it looks very much like the Outside, but inside. There is water all over the glass, spattering onto it and running down it. Aiden listens, awed by the new sound. A storm has broken out in the time it took them to journey across the complex, and it’s pouring that same incredible rain that Alej and Selina were caught in before. Aiden has never seen rain, nor, indeed, even heard it. Had read about it, certainly, but still could not have imagined the colours and depth of it when coupled with deep sunshine in the background. It’s as well that the rainbow such conditions cause is behind them, invisible at this angle, or Aiden might well have keeled over in awe and appreciation.

  He is so fascinated by water cascading down from the sky, thumping on the glass insistently and without rest, he doesn’t even have the space to take in his surroundings, to display his manners, for he neither sees, nor offers any kind of greeting to His Excellency, sat as he is at a great round table in the centre of this conservatory. A great round table, marvellously laden with food. His Excellency, unimpressed at the complete lack of reception, clears his throat.

  Aiden starts, and finds himself present in the room at last. “Why, I didn’t see you.”

  His Excellency Den Huo would have liked something more formal. A boy who walks in and stares mindlessly at the roof, missing the finery laid out explicitly for him, is less than perfect.

  “Indeed,” Den Huo replies, eventually, his tone already dry and chastising. “You’ll hear me known as His Excellency, and that is as best befits me, for, as I hope you understand, I have done many excellent things. But you, you may refer to me as Father.”

  “Father,” Aiden repeats, tasting the word and all its uncommon textures on his tongue.

  His Excellency smiles such a warm smile. Aiden basks in the joy of such a smile; it is the kind of expression that he knows to contain delight, and envy, and respect, yes.

  “Come,” says the man, standing, and opening his arms wide, spreading his robe, displaying sleek, embroidered clothes that fit his solid form closely, furthering the look of his having been carved from heavy wood. “I am thrilled,” he continues, walking around the table to Aiden, “to have you here. I have waited so, so very long to see you again.”

  The embrace is warm - magnificent, you could say, the robes folded around the great man’s shoulders comforting and cosy and exactly the kind of thing Aiden wishes for for himself. His Excellency smells of the pungent oils Michael used to rub into the staircases and bookshelves, and his arms are strong and broad, stronger and broader than Alej’s, at least, Aiden’s best reference for a strong and grand physique. Aiden thinks that, if he must have a father, this man is undoubtedly the right one for him.

  “Please,” His Excellency says, “be seated.”

  Aiden loses himself in a high-backed, richly-carved chair, and surveys the spread.

  Just as the trolley that was sent up to him last night was groaning with the weight of wondrous and delicious foods, so this table is set with still more things Aiden has never seen, some of which he can’t even identify. There are fruits of all and every kind, berries so rich and taut they threaten to explode at the brush of a fingertip. There are dishes of thick cream, speckled with spice or rippled with herbs, and there are saucers of toasted seeds of numerous kinds. There are tiny bundles of breads, rounded and soft and hard, spotted with fruits and spread with colourful pastes, and there’s a dish of a butter so full and yellow it’s like dandelions balled together, but Aiden wouldn’t know that.

  “A drink?” His Excellency asks.

  Aiden smiles, surrounded by a sense of adequate servitude once more. “Please.”

  “I take it you finished my book? Your demeanour suggests you’re unsure as to how to react.” Behind the words, as he pours out glasses of something Aiden can’t identify, His Excellency is hoping that it is a level of unsureness that he’s witnessing in his son, rather rank stupidity. After everything, it would be the least amusing of jokes for his chosen child to be any less than perfect.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Plan

  Selina retreats into Kit’s room to find Alej. Eliza’s truth is crawling up about her shoulders like a wet shroud. Alej is awake, sitting up on the bed knotting stray reeds together in a way that looks, to Selina, aimless, but, knowing him, is probably practical. The room is still hot, and the scent of, well, Alej, is prevalent, but not as unpleasant as it could be.

  “Good morning,” he says to her, kindly, but formally, as if he’d just knocked on her door and was ready to sweep her floor and clean out the fire and scrub her sink.

  She sits beside him on the bed without returning the greeting, and rests her head on his shoulder. It is not as comforting a feeling as she’d hoped it might be. This is perhaps because it seems to confuse him, for he stops knotting the reeds, and becomes fear-still.

  “Alej?” she says, quietly, not moving, in case comfort is forthcoming.

  “What are we doing here?” he asks, equally quietly, not wanting to be overheard.

  It takes a moment for Selina’s thoughts to circle around the really, is this really what I believe, but she gets on top of it and yes, it is what she believes, it is the way of things, “I don’t think there’s anything else…anyone else, Alej.”

  Alej bites his lip. His eyes stay fixed on his motionless hands, and Selina lifts her head, tries to look around him, to see him properly. It doesn’t help; the portrait of someone who isn’t sure that their feelings are welcome right now. When he speaks, his voice is gratingly low, halting, and coated in bland resentment.

  “Were you expecting other people?

  Selina cracks as she says, “I didn’t know, then. I didn’t know.”

  “What do you know now?”

  And Selina isn’t sure about the answer to that because, yes, she knows what Eliza has told her but that’s fluttering and stabbing about her heart and it’s so damn cruel and so far from anything she’s imagined; it gives such a terrible consequence and context to her life, how separate and protected she’s been, but she doesn’t know it for herself, and it doesn’t…

  …Selina doesn’t want it to be real. And by telling Alej about it, that’s what it would be, because he’d believe her without question.

  She sidesteps. “I don’t think Kit and Ali would hurt us. It seems we’re safer here than anywhere else we might be.”

  “I wish we’d never come down the mountain,” Alej replies, with the petulance of an irritating child. “If I’d known…if you’d told me…”

  “If I’d told you what?” Easy as that, Selina feels the anger rise inside her. There’s no way that this is my fault. After all, he was the one who’d insisted they mustn’t stay there.

  “About…everything.” His voice is sullen, accusatory, accidentally so, but so, so sad. It’s difficult to hear. Not least because Selina has had about enough of everyone else’s feelings and wants, all of which appear unfinished, disorganised, and contradictory.

  “Please Alej, don’t be this way. This isn’t what I’d hoped for. I don’t even know what it is. I saved my family; that turns out to have been for nothing. Everything I left behind is gone. Everything.” There doesn’t seem to be enough meaning in the word, however much she says it.

  Alej looks right into her eyes, and she can see he’s sorry. Not that he understands, but that he wishes he did. She wraps an arm around his shoulders, and draws herself to him, decisively taking what warmth comes wit
h the gesture as easily as if he’d offered it to her the other way around.

  “How do you feel,” Selina tries, “thinking about the fact that you’ll never see Michael again?”

  Alej screws up his face, as if the answer might come from doing that. “I don’t,” he says, after visibly forceful consideration.

  Selina lets go of him, sits back, gritting her teeth with the turn of listening yet again. She’d take another day of walking not to have to work her mind so hard.