by A. E. Shaw
Eliza works hard, of this there can be no question, and as Selina faces the reality of the situation, that she is, of necessity, being buried alive, she tries with all she has to accept that and keep herself calm, and still. As Selina has spent a lot of her life accepting strange situation, contorting herself however life requires her to, this is not as hard for her as it might be for some. Still. She would do anything to slow her furious, protesting heartbeat. Taking deep breaths of all the air she can doesn’t seem to be working.
The weight of the earth on her back is a comfort as it amasses like a blanket. It’s tucked in over her shoulders, and around her sides - she folds her arms in front of herself, trying to trap air any which place it’ll stay. The piercing fury of the Pulse grows, and the more immersed in the ground Selina is, the more she can feel it, rather than hear it.
Eliza works faster and faster, shoving and packing the dirt in, as Selina fight to quell the rising panic in her lungs in the fear that the little air she has won’t be enough.
It will be enough. It will be fine. It won’t last long.
But it seems to go on, and on. And it intensifies and swells and even with however much earth there is clapped about her ears and self her skin is tingling with the fear of it, the sense of it, it’s coming, and the wave just won’t break.
Another weight pushes over her; she braces herself, how that’ll help she’s no idea, and then there’s no scrabbling any more.
Eliza is lying over her, arms braced over her head and neck, body relaxed, for she isn’t afraid for herself. Her instinct to protect Selina surprises her somewhat, but there isn’t time to dwell on that, not now.
As with every Pulse, the greater the noise gets, the more she is reminded of the time before, the sounds in her ears, the terrible, mesmerising words, and the hideous set piece playing out in front of her eyes.
She doesn’t fight it any more, trusts it as a reminder of why she’s making this trip, lets herself be angry that it’s taken so long to get her, that she stopped, that she let herself be distracted and use her legs and wits to feed worthless people who aren’t, when it comes down to it, of here anyway. She settled because she’d never been needed, but now she’s out here with a purpose, going somewhere, enduring the Pulse and not going ‘home’ afterwards, forget the faux family, isn’t this just the point? There’s no point saving a family that isn’t, people that don’t matter, not when the damage is long, long done.
It’s time for payment.
Through her misting visor she sees the air begin to collect and shift, the coming dawn bubbling together with the dust to make visible waves, distortions in long-range vision. She feels her suit adjust to the change in pressure, tightening to body, and although her hearing is protected, the sound is still…tactile, as it gathers. The wave is about to break.
Aiden sits on his bed, dressed only in his blue silk shorts. His shirt and trousers sit in part of the hall where water falls from the ceiling, if you put enough weight on the floor. They’ve been soaking for so long that the white shirt is entirely see-through, and the trousers are gleaming golden-saturated and reflecting the walls around them.
He wishes he had something to read, anything to read but that ridiculous book. It taunted him from the bedside table, so he hid it behind the racks of fresh shirts.
No-one has disturbed him. It’s been an age since he came up here. Darkness has long since shrouded his window and prevented him from any kind of watching, wondering, about the ants that wander back and forth, completing their cycles of servitude, and filling the remainder of their waking times with whatever inconsequential matters they can.
In the far distance (still something Aiden struggles to translate into meaning), streaks of day are even now infiltrating the sky, a blue here, a yellow there, the idea of the sun rising, but it isn’t half as exciting as it was out there on the mountainside.
This kind of half-life - so near, yet so far from that wet, dry, soft, hard swathe of contradictions that Outside revealed itself to be - is not something Aiden relishes at this moment. This room is grand, yes, but without a fire, the gold and jewels don’t come alive, and each breath is just a means to an end.
He is intensely bothered by the lack of interest in him, the fact that no-one has come up to bring him food, nor even wine. Surely someone here is concerned for his wellbeing? After his father’s display of petty jealousy, of rank stupidity, aren’t they worried for his son, who has not once been honoured as he ought to have been?
He sits with his tiny pocket of jewels in front of him, counting them out and back, out and back, each time noting the curves and facets that define them as keenly as if they were features on his own child. They are all he has of his old life, apart from all of that wonderful knowledge and excellence that makes up the brilliance which sets him apart from others.
At least he still has the jewels, has his collar. He sees the Aiden he has always been and the one he has become, reflected in their tiny sides, memories of playing with them as a child, of wondering at them in the gloaming of his damp old room. In the deep of those memories, he is enveloped by the sense that he would give anything, anything at all, to be back there in those memories, in his castle, where everything was so clear and certain, where he was all, and always, and forever.
Forever is gone. The world has thrown you forwards, Aiden. You can’t go back.
Can’t I?
No.
Alej feels it before he hears it. He’s lying flat on his back beneath the Caracaras, broad shoulderblades pressed bare and comfortable into the damp white moss that lines the ground, easy as a cushion.
The moss vibrates imperceptibly to begin with, but it moves closer to his skin, drawing in, surrounding. That’s the first of it he notices. Then it wavers, and quivers, gentle as if a wind were stirring it, but there’s no wind at all. Indeed, the air is hanging, waiting, palpably warm and close.
Alej has no time to lose, skids out from beneath the Caracaras the moment the sense intensifies. This is it, this is perfect, it’s as if everything about this time was carefully planned. As far at Alej’s concerned, it has been.
Everything is ready, it’s all about checking, double-checking, and knowing with everything he has, that something magnificent is about to happen.
He pushes the splayed ends of the fibrous plants deeper into the ground, their fronds mushing and merging with the moss and dirt. He heaps stray matter about them. He follows them up, clenching his fists about their stems. They yield gelatinously to his touch with a faint spininess all around them. Thus squashed, checked, contained, he is satisfied.
The noise follows as he knew instinctively, rather than experientially, that it would. He isn’t frightened. It doesn’t hurt, not yet. It gathers and grows, and he checks everything everywhere one last time before hopping into the Caracaras, its doors and hinges slipping and clicking like they’re butter-greased, for Alej has squeezed an oily sap from the mosses and run it about every part that looks to him like it might do anything.
The machine gleams and shines and it knows, it does, that’s the feeling Alej gets as he settles down in seats which are so much more welcoming and enveloping than their appearance suggests, this thing itself knows.
The bare skin of Alej’s arms prickles as the air inside the Caracaras’s nest-like centre flips from muggy as outside is to something cooler, fresher. Alej opens his mouth and tastes, tests it with his tongue. It’s just like the greenhouse at the castle, it’s everything he’d hoped.
This is working.
And the Pulse comes.
Selina feels the soil contract, Eliza’s weight bearing down above her. She focuses on her inside, hears her mother’s voice in her ears, find your balance, and hold it, be it, be your balance, nothing else, let your body do the work, let your mind keep you still, and she relaxes, completely, aware, and unafraid, even buried alive, with rocks sticking into her thighs and stuck right in at her ribs. The calm stops her from wasting the little oxygen she has, kee
ps her from passing out in panic. She waits, easily, and thinks of long ago.
Kit kicks Ali awake. She surfaces, blearily, amongst a nest of blankets.
“What is it?” she asks, but she feels its rumbling about the walls, through the bed, before Kit can reply. “Urgh,” he says, eventually. “I hope everyone is safe.At least Alej’s with the Caracaras,”
“As long as he remembers to get in it.”
Kit frowns, as he scans their own confines, checking, as he always does, for any cracks in the walls, or other signs that the Pulse might yet find its way down here. There are no such signs. “Eh? Why wouldn’t he?”
“He’s so…placid. He seems like someone who’d have the world end about him and he’d still be wide-eyeing anything and everything.”
“Seems to me like someone who does as he’s told.”
“Maybe. And I’m worried about Selina, too.”
“Eliza’ll keep her safe.”
“You really think so?”
“Of course.”
But Ali isn’t so sure.
Really, it goes to show how little they understand of this world, and its odd collection of inhabitants. They need not worry. Not about the Pulse. That’s of the past. It’s done its worst. They’d be best saving their worry for tomorrow, or the next day.
Alej is more than safe. He’s in his truest element, hands exploring the controls of the machine that he’s not just fixed, but, with the help of this timely intervention, started. Hand-worn golden controls are warm beneath his fingertips, ruby buttons suggest they could be pressed, rather than just admired. As the Pulse swells into its final boom, so the machine clunkclunkclunkclicks its way into action, thrumming and delighting in its potential.
The window of the Caracaras is clear, tinged with a white light at its edges, fissures of energy snaking their way over the nose of the creature in front of him, over the wings, at the sides. There’s not a hint of the screaming that shrouds everything outside, no suggestion that this power was intended to be Alej’s end, not his beginning.
He pets everything about him, notes how the seat has shaped itself to accommodate his body like no fabric he’s ever worn, made, skinned or seen.
The air takes on the taste of home now, purified and circulating. It’s the taste of work, of good health and good days, of things done and things to come.
He doesn’t rush this. Like all powered objects, it must need to charge. It’s been broken for a long time. Alej only sits, and waits, and accumulates his own charge, his own power and gratification.
The crux of the Pulse comes and goes, and, as outside settles, so the Caracaras grows stronger still. Alej identifies the purposes of the various controls, this way, that way, finding lift and pull and balance, and then…then the sun rises, and light parts the last of the darkness.
It’s time.
His thumb flicks at a sliding switch, pushes it all the way to the right. The noise intensifies. Alej tests things this way, that way, connections.
“They’re ready.
“Come on then,” he says, softly, with more care than he’s ever spoken to another person with. “Let’s see what you can do.”
Sweet and smooth and silent from the outside, the Caracaras sucks all it can from its Pulse-struck surroundings, tethering vines wrenching free, waving sparking trails behind the machine as it begins to rise into the sunlit sky.
Aiden is sitting and waiting. He knows he is waiting because he has exhausted all other possible options for things he might be doing, and the world would not waste his time. He must be waiting, and it must be for a reason.
He finds himself sleeping for a moment, catches himself out in a dream in which he is at the head of a golden army, a swathe of armoured women and men as plentiful as blades of grass on the mountain, all of them looking up to him, waiting for him to speak. Each time he opens his mouth, only words he doesn’t know fall from it, and the army cheer them all, but, as they ride away, Aiden finds himself panicking that he himself did not understand what it was he’d instructed them to do.
As the thudding fear of the imaginary quietens, he sits and stares out of the window, where there are no crowds, no soldiers, nothing.
Shortly after the sun rises, he observes his father and the man Juan marching purposefully from an outbuilding back towards this castle. What could they be doing? They are not bringing him gifts, nor food. There are no more books for him. Aiden wonders exactly what it is that they have been doing here all this time whilst waiting for him to arrive.
His mind is a jumble of overthoughts. There is a definite atmosphere of something happening or about to happen, but, try as he might, Aiden cannot see what it might be. It is exciting, though. Perhaps he’ll get a crown, like those worn by the kings of old.
Then a lull again. The silence in Aiden’s room is broken by the growl of his stomach. He pokes it, confused. It has been too long, hasn’t it, since he had anything? Why would they leave him this long without food? Obviously they can’t have forgotten him…perhaps there’s a feast coming. That must be it.
Must be.
“Is it done?”
Juan nods.
“Full range?” His Excellency pressures.
“The furthest we’ve ever reached.”
“Thank you.”
Den Huo looks exhausted - unsurprising; he hasn’t slept in no-one-knows-how-long. He’s always needed a considerable amount of sleep, yet it’s the first thing he pushes aside when he thinks he needs to make a stand, or when times aren’t as he feels they ought to be, or when anything…anything displeases him
Credit to him, Juan thinks, even if Den Huo gets others to carry out his dirty work - for Juan understands, more than perhaps anyone else in this complex, that the work is filthy dirty - at least he doesn’t sleep through it. No, he just drinks cup after cup of old red wine, ignoring Juan’s reminders that they don’t have an infinity of that, that he’s drinking up the reserves twice as fast as they can make new bottles, however hard the greenhouses work.
Whilst he drinks he barks at anyone and everyone, demanding information, reports, updates, even when these things aren’t practical or available. Juan can get away with making things up, but the others, well, they’re more likely to end up in the Testing Centre if they fluff up the truth in the face of His Excellency’s incessant questioning. Even the most unique of skills and values don’t offer them protection from a sleepless wrath.
Juan has never slept much. He works best alone, and the best times to be alone are when everyone else is asleep. At the castle, he’d spend his nights experimenting with light, with power, with fire and water. He created so much when he had no duties to attend to, and he found he regenerated himself best just as the plants and the animals at the castle did: when surrounded by good air and energy. Thus, when His Excellency finds himself distracted from sleep by crisis, either of his imagination, or his creation, Juan is more than happy to sit with him, and listen to him explain.
Juan is also the only person Den Huo has ever allowed to offer him advice. He has an understanding, His Excellency thinks, of what is right and good that others cannot have, for Juan was chosen for him, chosen for his parentage and his born aptitudes to grow up as his lifelong companion. Of course it’s the case that Juan is everything Den Huo hasn’t the time to be.
“You understand,” His Excellency says, extending his long legs, and crossing them, neatly, “that this is only what must be done.”
Juan nods. “You can’t have people wandering.”
His Excellency sideshifts his gaze to catch Juan’s, hooking it to his. “Juan. I’m truly sorry we couldn’t give your son the opportunities you had.”
Juan shrugs, a long, exaggerated shrug that could be as much stretching out a discomfort as it is disregarding a concern. “If my son had the values I had, he would have known better than to abandon your son.”
“If my son had the values I have, he would not have permitted your son to escape.”
And they smile
at each other there, the sad smiles of men who tried to have worthy heirs, and failed.
It is unthinkable, impossible, that they, of all men remaining, should be in this position. The facts of the matter cannot be acknowledged outside this room, not to anyone else, not even hinted at. But these greatest concerns must be shared between them. Great leaders of the past have been ruined by thoughts far less terrible than these. This connection, these conversations, this honesty forms the purpose and backbone of the Huo family line. It’s what’s kept them at the head of this world for five generations. It’s what’s allowed Den Huo to become, in his mind, the greatest Excellency of his bloodline. And this…setback, this slip in the chain of succession must not be allowed to fester, to gather fear or foolishness to it, for that could jeopardise the security of everything Den Huo has achieved.