The Pulse

by A. E. Shaw

  Looking at Aiden, here, folded into a chair that holds itself so grand and old and leathery-organic that it might consume him at any moment, he sees none of the assured precision he would expect from one who has just come from the castle. The boy looks so young, and soft. So pale. He has his mother’s calm innocence, and his father’s strict, long-limbed posture, but both are displayed without content, gravitas, or assurance. This might sound strange given all we’ve heard from Aiden about his absolute confidence in his own importance, but the key here is that it does not look like the confidence Juan knows and expects. It does not look like it at all.

  Juan had hoped, when he heard that the boy had arrived from the castle, that he might hear glowing tales of his own son. He had an excitement he had not expected of himself, for knowledge of any details of the person his flesh and blood had evolved into. He has kept it silent, buried beneath respect for Den Huo. Still. He had been keen to know that his legacy would, too, have its place in the shape and structure and wisdom of the future. But it seems that Alej has, through whatever fate remains in this cauterised world, turned his back on their plan and organisation. And because he is faithful, then Juan must act in kind and turn his back on those hopes and thoughts he had, too.

  The rap-tap-tap on the door disturbs Juan’s thoughtful quiet, although it does not break up Aiden’s pin-and-needle-forming pose.

  Juan opens the leftmost of the double doors to reveal Katya, who visibly shivers, as if she had not expected him to be there. She curtseys to him, and offers up her best smile.

  “If you please, Sir. His Excellency requests his son join him for the second meal. The food is already at the table. I would ask that he does not delay.”

  Juan nods to Katya, and gestures her out. Katya tries to make eye contact with Aiden as she leaves, to convey to him her concern that his father is in a strong mood, to somehow impart that care and discretion might be wise. In all her life, she has not known His Excellency to be displeased, much less to be angry, and he is emitting a fearful aura of potential fury, the sort she only recognises from storytelling, from acting. In reality, it feels quite distressing. But Aiden won’t look up. He looks quite different from the way he did just yesterday. Than he did this morning, even. Closed in. Private.

  A part of her wonders what the story behind this is, is sad to see his appealing openness silenced. The rest of her is simply grateful that the servitude part of this cycle will end at any moment, and that she can go back to her lessons in the calligraphy of the old language of the West, the discipline in which her parents are the only remaining experts.

  Juan closes the door once more.

  Aiden feels him approaching, and he isn’t prepared at all for the hand that yanks his whole body from the chair, forcing his legs to scrabble for the floor, fawnishly. No-one ever fought this boy and called it playing when he was young, Juan thinks, and he snips off the thought there, lest he begin a habit of wondering about his own son, who and how he might be.

  “Listen to me,” he says, fingers of one hand dug deep and hard into Aiden’s shoulder, “listen, because you seem to have missed the point somehow.”

  Aiden is very close to laughter at that, but the bright and brutal sensation in his shoulder holds him back from it. He adjusts his focus to the man in front of him, unused to such…near eye contact and the intensity that comes with it, but interested in the experience of it all the same. He listens, as he was told. Juan is silent for a few moments longer than someone who has important information to impart ought to be, Aiden thinks.

  Finally, he comes out with, “You should know that your father is the very greatest, most exceptional man that has ever been.”

  Aiden experiences a wave of chill, followed by an unpleasantly feverish flush. This sounds wrong; there is a darkness to those words that he cannot place, and Juan’s voice takes on a resonance that reminds him of something horrible (the dream, for the record, that he had at the beginning of the whole story, but he doesn’t put two and two together, because he’s busy listening).

  “Things seem obvious to him that do not, to you. Our world rests at the apex of his brilliance, and it is fragile. He believed that it was, nonetheless, ready to bring you back to. He did not take that decision lightly. He made it with all the knowledge and wisdom he has. So, understand. If anything about your arrival has disrupted this state of affairs, it puts us all at risk, but not only that, it shows that his decision was in some way flawed. If you’ve any of your father to you at all, you’ll know that that is an exceptionally unlikely situation. So, show him he was right. Or, well. Who knows? Not even I can imagine the displeasure you could cause him.”

  He lets Aiden go, swipes the door back open again, and ushers him out. At the door to the dining room, he gives Aiden a look intended to act as a reminder of what he’s just said. Aiden assumes he is waiting for some kind of servile gratitude, and so he thanks him eloquently, and makes his own way into the dining room.

  His Excellency stalks the floor, the length of the windowed wall and back again, gaze chasing raindrops as they come into vision and pool out of existence. It is a necessity of the complex, this he understands, for Juan has perfected the manipulation of the cloudbursts which gather and descend upon the complex, maintaining the local environment and encouraging the growth of the crops deemed most efficient and essential to the sustenance of their society’s needs. Everything here works perfectly. Everything.

  He hopes in a way that he never has before that things are not as they seem. Or, if they must be thus, that the unscheduled Pulse he has ordered will see to the extinction of the uncontrolled. It is, perhaps, a waste of two who ought to be as tested and analysed as his own companions once were, but there’s nothing he can do about that.

  Aiden walks in without knocking, interrupting the pacing train of thought. He stands square in the entrance. His Excellency waves him to be seated.

  Juan follows him in, prepared to take his stance as servant, but Den Huo leans back and speaks quietly to him, and he leaves.

  “I think we are best served alone.”

  “I don’t understand.” How can this be best? And how can it be that his father is so…ridiculous?

  “I imagine you rarely understand things.”

  Aiden understands that flat response so little that he accepts it with silence.

  The table between them is, once more, heaped and weighted with food, mostly similar to the breakfast, but with a grand enamelled tray of steaming, bleeding meat at its centre. Aiden observes it for a moment, and is surprised that his stomach reacts to this examination with an audible growl for food.

  “I have tough choices to make, thanks to your carelessness,” his father begins, leaning his full height across the table. He takes up a utensil that looks like a poker, stabs it through three slices of meat, and hoists them, dripping, across to land with a splat on the platter that sits before Aiden. A spot of bloody juice flicks onto Aiden’s shirt, wrecking its perfect cleanliness. Aiden looks up, accusingly, at his father, who completely ignores him, instead serving himself a grand helping of meat.

  “Have you no apology for me?” His Excellency continues. “Will you make no attempt to right this error of yours? To prove to me that you are the son I dreamt of all this time?”

  “I don’t know what error you are referring to. Certainly, I only ever acted in the best possible way available to me. It is the only possible way for me to act. You speak as if this would be obvious to you, but it seems that it is not. I don’t know why you burned everything, I don’t know how that fits into your world, but my world, my books, my everything was in that castle. You chose to destroy that, and so it is that you will not hold against me the fact that I did not match your expectations, that, that I cannot be held accountable for.”

  Aiden would sorely like to be eating the meat in front of him, for it is all but literally calling his name, but his tirade is strong and there is a drama to this moment that cannot be interrupted for something as inconseq
uential as food.

  His Excellency, in a movement so slow and deliberate, so graceful and delicate that its consequences seem utterly impossible, rips the tablecloth from the massive slab of a table and the water jug goes first, on its side, then swept to the floor, smashing with a volume and a speed that belies imagining. Plates fly through the air for a time and cutlery dives scratching into the perfectly laid wooden flooring.

  Aiden opens his mouth in confusion, and closes it in recognition of the fact that he has nothing to say. Of all he has just said, that his father fixates on that word is as incomprehensible to him as everything else. He looks down, about him, at the devastation. Steak rests in his lap, seeping hot against his thigh. Without even thinking, he picks it up, searing as it is against his fingertips, and takes a bite from it.

  It is as exquisitely delicious as it appears. But His Excellency hasn’t finished his tantrum, and Aiden’s casual, disregarding behaviour only exacerbates his fury.

  “Get away from my table! Get back to your room. Stay there. I’ll have the doors guarded, and if you so much as stand near them I’ll have you dissected for an explanation before you can catch your last breath. A score of generations and more created your lineage, but it took me to perfect things, and I will not see this world fall away from us on my watch.”

  This is the tipping point. Aiden truly does not understand why he is taking such atrocious fury sitting down. His father is committing the eternal sin of wasting words, repeating things that are senseless, moreover, Aiden has had enough of such a lack of respect.

  Imitating his father’s initial, frightening quietness, Aiden tries his best to draw himself up tall. He forces his eyes to fixate on the point right between his father’s (rather than on his father’s own eyes, so the effect is particularly unnerving). He clears his throat, as one does, when bound to make their matchpoint.

  “You do not have the right to speak to me in this way. You clearly have no idea who you’re talking to.”

  This bravado does not go down well. “No idea?” No-one has ever spoken back to His Excellency. Juan might have teased him from time to time, but he remained ever aware of the line between them, and wouldn’t dream of pushing it, never mind crossing it.

  “I made you, you ungrateful little…” His Excellency gasps a much-needed breath, and holds it in, broadening his chest and shoulders, increasing his already dominant presence in the room to the point where a sense of being crushed comes over Aiden.

  “I made you in my image, I gave you everything I had, everything that made me the great and powerful representative of our family that I am, everything that would create you, the perfect successor to our empire…”

  “And yet…” Aiden says, carefully, emboldened by something - fear? - and certain that he really must be allowed to speak, that he has to get the strange crawling sensations that wrap themselves about his bones outside before they completely consume him, and that he really must find the point of this most ungainly sequence of events “and yet, I can’t see what you want me to do. Or be. I don’t understand why you had me brought down from the castle. Why didn’t you check who I was, before you had me brought to you? Why did you put me through so much?”

  “I won’t have this conversation with you. I won’t have you question me like this. Get away, go to your quarters, or I’ll have you dragged.”

  And for one moment Aiden is about to argue this further, he can feel it rising in him, hot defiance more than ready to come out, but instead of giving in to it he searches for instinct to guide him; in his father’s eyes, in his own mind, in his very veins. It is essential that he recall the conviction that he’s on a path to something, that he is destined for something, for it is that which took him through the fire, and around the mountain, and brought him here. Is that conviction still there?

  Yes.

  And does it tell him that he should take this, this moment, this fury further? Ought he perhaps to attack his father, as he did Jere?

  …no.

  That thought is accompanied by a bolt of nausea so sharp Aiden clutches at his stomach.

  Then what?

  The moment he asks the question of himself, the answer is rich and resounding in his mind, clearly as if it were voiced by the stars themselves. Wait, Aiden. Wait. That time is coming close, but it isn’t here yet. Back down.

  And he does. Frees himself of his chair, and takes a couple of steps backwards to the corner. Instead of keeping his gaze at his father, he turns it to the outside, tips his head to the side, and contemplates the evenly-falling rain.

  Something in this action drives his father a step further still. His Excellency reaches his hands about the table edge and flings the whole solid entity aside.

  It’s so heavy it overturns in achingly slow motion, debris on it staying fixed as it shifts until it smashes itself against the flagstones so hard it bounces, then splits itself with a crack so loud that it echoes about the walls. Aiden is left sitting behind nothingness for a moment, and then his father lurches at him and his hand shoots out and looks as if it would maul his throat closed and his lungs airless, but before it can grasp sufficiently at him, an arm appears across His Excellency’s chest, restraining him.

  It is Juan: he burst through the door moments after the table-flinging. He’s speaking words Aiden chooses not to hear, for they are not for him, and they are almost certainly to the shame of his father, thwarted in his effort to strike his son.

  Aiden checks himself. He heeded Juan’s warning. He was careful. He tried to explain things, to assure his father that his decision to collect him from the castle was the right and good one, for he has done nothing that could possibly have caused the world the slightest of problems.

  As Den Huo and Juan they converse, rapidly, furiously, Aiden sidles his way past them. His Excellency notices him as he reaches the door, and gets as far as shouting “AI-” but Aiden cuts him off.

  “No need to shout. I’ll be in my quarters. I know the way. I think I will appreciate time to myself. I have a great deal to think upon.” He doesn’t. He just wants some quiet. Everything is a glowering, bloodstained disappointment.

  But he does still have a chunk of soft, rare meat in his hand. He nibbles at it, thoughtfully, as he makes his careful way back up the stairs and along all those corridors. It really is excellent.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The Journey II

  The first night is quiet. Silent, even. A light wind disturbing the dust, Eliza’s heavy breathing and the rustle of her suit. Selina isn’t sure why she expected otherwise, if she expected anything at all. Suddenly life is, yet again, very different. But Selina realises, as she opens her eyes to see dawn coming towards her across and short landscape, that she, too, is very different. She is no longer the girl who was taken, told who to be and what to do; she is not the girl who is doing what she must for her family. Now she is doing only what she thinks, with all the information available to her, she ought to. She has come because she can.

  Conveniently she ignores the way Eliza took her into this with an ultimatum. She feels she’s doing this out of choice even though the threat of some horror befalling her - or worse, Alej - if she did not go on this bizarre journey was clearly displayed.

  Selina slept well enough. They didn’t keep guard. Eliza asked her if she wanted to keep watch and when Selina nervously nodded, and looked about as if demonstrating she could do that, Eliza just laughed and told her if anything or anyone wanted them dead, they’d have little to no chance of stopping them.

  “Why did you ask?” Selina retorted, without a shred of embarrassment, and Eliza turned away and fussed with her waterskins.

  Selina found Eliza’s attitude curiously defeatist at times. It didn’t match her I’m such a tough survivalist thing. It was as if she hoped for crisis. Or assumed it would come anyway, and didn’t want to be surprised.

  The sky is now a fierce bronze. The green of the mountain seems like a faraway dream. It’s hard to believe this murky, incr
easingly yellow world could be connected to the fresh expanse and distance and clarity of before.

  Selina pushes herself carefully to her feet. She tries to stretch and contort the aches out of her body. Her back has a crick in it, and her shoulders are rubbed sore from the crossweight of the skins.

  Eliza is still sleeping, reverberating a soft growl with each breath. Selina finds herself just staring at her. Eliza is so different from everyone she’s ever known, even all the girls she knew before the castle.

  Selina can’t even remember those girls. Not their names, nor what they did. And she doesn’t remember why she doesn’t remember, either, for it isn’t as if she was deliberately kept away from them, nor as if they frightened her. They didn’t register. It’s as if she knew, from the start, that she wouldn’t have to integrate with the mass of people around her. Perhaps she was protected from them, perhaps. Most of her waking hours were spent either with her brothers, caring for the house as best she could, talking with her brothers about how they were, what they’d done, that they’d seen, sharing stories they’d heard. Her remaining time was spent with her mother, dancing, preparing herself to dance, or relaxing herself from dance. But even those times have become blurred and tired. The far past seems a different colour from everything in the castle, which was all over darker, richer, smokier than all that she’d known before. And now even the castle times seem so far from here, where everything is increasingly colourless, and the majority of her thoughts are based on an increasingly envy of her companion.