The Secrets of Solace

by Jaleigh Johnson

  But why did she feel so strange? The loneliness that had cloaked her was temporarily pushed aside, replaced by fear and anger so strong that it made Lina dizzy. The feelings seemed to be directed at her and Ozben, as if shouting: Not welcome! Intruders! Trouble!

  The feelings crowded Lina’s heart, making it difficult for her to concentrate. What’s happening to me? Her mind raced. These aren’t my emotions. But if the feelings didn’t belong to her, then who was in her head?

  And was this really a dream?

  Then an awareness started to creep into Lina’s mind. She tried to look down at herself, to assure herself she was still Lina, with two hands, two feet, and all her other parts. But when she looked down, all she saw was the ship. She looked left and right, but there was only the ship’s metal walls surrounding her. Everything that was familiar was the ship. The unfamiliar faces, the intruders, were Lina and Ozben, who were at that moment walking toward the bridge. They walked up to her and passed right through as if she were a phantom.

  No, not a phantom. She wasn’t a ghost.

  She was the ship.

  With that realization, Lina knew she wasn’t dreaming, at least not in the usual way she did when she fell asleep in her bed. She remembered now: Ozben had wanted to leave the ship. She’d agreed, but her fear had overwhelmed her, and she’d passed out. The ship was doing something to her, making some kind of connection with her mind and heart. When she and Ozben had come aboard, the ship had been afraid. It had wanted them to leave, and somehow those emotions had seeped into the two of them. And what Lina was feeling now—the loneliness—that emotion was coming from the Merlin too. But how could a machine communicate emotion? That was impossible. Unless…

  Lina couldn’t finish the thought. No, it can’t be. That’s crazy. And yet she saw no other explanation.

  The Merlin was alive.

  Lina closed her eyes to cut off the visions she was seeing of herself and Ozben walking through the ship, and tried to stay calm as emotions that were hers and not hers waged a battle inside her. At this point, she didn’t know who was more afraid: her or the ship that was now connected to her thoughts. Lina took a deep breath and tried to remember her training. Her parents and Zara used to say there came a time when every archivist was confronted with an artifact that was so far outside his or her understanding that it seemed impossible to figure out.

  But Lina was certain none of them had ever encountered anything like the Merlin. A sentient ship. There were no books to help her with this, no advisors. Even Ozben was lost to her right now. She was all alone, with only her instincts to guide her.

  The Merlin is all alone too, she reminded herself.

  “Well, at least we have something in common,” she said. Hearing the sound of her own voice was soothing. It helped remind her that no matter what other emotions crowded into her head, she was still herself. Lina only.

  “Lina only,” she repeated, as if the words protected her. “But if I’m Lina, then who are you?” she asked, her eyes still closed, hoping that the ship would know she was addressing it. “Where did you come from?”

  In response, words flowed wildly into her mind, but the language was one that Lina had never heard before. Accompanying the words were clickity-clacks, metallic whirring, and hissing like steam from a pipe. The cacophony swamped her—she wanted to press her fingers to her temples and drown out the nonsensical sounds. Thankfully, the storm passed after a moment, and the ship quieted.

  “I don’t know your language,” Lina said, trying to stay calm. “I’m sorry.” The ship seemed able to understand and respond to her, but if she couldn’t understand the ship, that could be a huge obstacle. Yet she’d had no trouble interpreting how the ship was feeling. The fear, anger, and loneliness had come through loud and clear. “If you want to communicate, we can’t do it with words,” Lina said. “I have to know what you’re feeling, so I guess I have to see through your eyes.”

  As soon as she said it, a stroke of white-hot pain slammed into Lina’s head, blinding her. No! No! What was the ship doing to her? She didn’t think she’d said anything to make it turn hostile.

  But after a moment, the pain abated, and Lina cautiously opened her eyes.

  If she was unprepared a few minutes ago to see her own face staring back at her on the ship, she was completely undone when she realized she was now suspended in midair, with the mountains sailing by thousands of feet below her.

  “Merlin!” Lina cried, her stomach threatening a revolt. “I take it back! I don’t want to see this! Oh, it’s way too high, way too high!”

  Panic flooded Lina, making it impossible to breathe as she stared at the rolling landscape. At any moment, she was going to fall. She was certain of it. She tried to close her eyes, but that made the feeling of weightlessness worse, so she forced them open, staring down and waiting to tumble to her death.

  Minutes passed, and still Lina hung in the air, unmoving. Pushing through the wall of panic, she reminded herself that she wasn’t actually hovering thousands of feet in the air. This was the ship. She was seeing through its eyes, just as she’d wanted. The landscape below her—it had to be a memory. The Merlin was trying to communicate with her by showing her its memories.

  But did they ever hurt.

  Above her, the sun shone on the snow’s unbroken surface, creating a thousand tiny sparkles of light. The beauty of it, and the vast expanse of chiseled mountains stretching in all directions, was breathtaking. It made Lina pause and forget her panic for a moment as she drank in the view.

  “Oh…wow,” she whispered. “So this is what it’s like to fly.” To see the world as only a bird—or a living airship—could see it.

  Gradually, her body relaxed, and Lina let herself be carried along with the vision. As she watched, a day passed by in a moment, and judging by the position of the sun, the ship was traveling east, making a steady course over the Hiterian Mountains. In the distance, she could see the bridges and the outline of the three archivist strongholds.

  But if the ship was flying through the Hiterian Mountains, and the scrap towns were nowhere in sight, did that mean it hadn’t been found in the scrap fields? The idea sent Lina’s thoughts spinning in a dozen different directions, but they all led back to the same conclusion.

  “You didn’t come to Solace in a meteor storm, did you?” she asked excitedly. She dreaded the shot of pain when the ship tried to show her something, but she was dying to know. “Where did you come from?”

  Sure enough, fresh agony crawled through Lina’s forehead, causing a whimper to escape her lips. In response to her cry of distress, a rush of emotion came from the ship: concern, and a question. Lina interpreted it loosely as Are you all right?

  “I’m…f-fine,” Lina said. “Keep going, please. Show me.”

  The scene sped up, only this time they were traveling in reverse. Days passed by in seconds as the ship headed west, hundreds of miles from the archivists’ strongholds, over mountain peaks that scraped the sky and sheets of blue ice more beautiful than anything Lina had ever seen. They moved faster and faster, then suddenly the ship stopped and Lina’s vision went dark.

  “What is it?” Lina asked. “What’s wrong?”

  The ship didn’t answer, but she sensed its uncertainty. The longer she stayed connected to it, the easier it was to separate the ship’s emotions from her own. The Merlin was holding back, reluctant to show her what was beyond the mountains.

  Beyond the mountains—a place no one in Solace had ever been.

  “You came from the west,” Lina said as the truth dawned on her, “from the uncharted lands of Solace.”

  Of course. Why hadn’t she ever considered it before? She’d assumed that the ship’s technology came from another world, but she’d never thought of the possibility that it might have come from an unknown part of Solace. And why not? King Aron of the Dragonfly territories had wanted to build an airship that could explore past the Hiterian Mountains. It appeared that someone on the other side
had beaten him to it.

  “But why were you all alone?” Lina said. She could sense that too: the ship had come by itself. She remembered the pristine crew cabins. No pilot, no people—it was no wonder the ship had been lonely. Far from home, in an unknown country—it had to have been afraid. “How did you end up in the cave?” she asked. “What happened?”

  The scene changed again, and the pain was scalding. Lina squeezed her eyes shut and drew in a shuddering breath as she waited for it to pass. Instinctively, she knew she couldn’t take many more visions. They hurt too much. But she wanted to see, to understand what the ship had gone through to get here.

  When she opened her eyes, she bit back a scream. The ship was losing altitude fast. She felt the Merlin straining, frantically trying to pull itself up, but it was no use. It had been aloft for too long. Lina sensed its confusion and despair. It hadn’t expected the mountains to be so vast and for the journey to take so long. Its energy was waning.

  Lina blinked, and suddenly she was seeing inside the ship to the bridge. But something was different this time. Where earlier she’d seen a gaping hole in the center console, there was now a sphere of golden light that was somehow connected to the wires and fastened into the control panel of the ship. It illuminated the bridge, leaving spots in Lina’s vision.

  “The light!” Lina gasped. “That was your power source, wasn’t it?” Something had happened to it. Yet she remembered that one of the gauges on the bridge had still been functioning, and she’d felt vibrations in the ship’s wings after she’d briefly activated the steam engine. Where had that power come from since the light was gone? It must have been part of a reserve supply that was all but depleted now.

  But Lina sensed confusion and resistance from the ship, as if she’d used the wrong word or a word that wasn’t strong enough to describe the light. What was a stronger word than “power?” Lina wondered. Her thoughts raced as she tried to come up with the answer. The light filled the bridge and expanded, curling around Lina like an embrace. Her heart warmed at its touch.

  And then Lina knew. Her heart. Of course. The ship was alive. Its power source was much more than something mechanical. The golden light was its heart.

  But as she watched, that light sputtered and dimmed. Seconds later, a great roar filled her ears, and this time Lina did scream as she and the ship plummeted to the ground.

  —

  When Lina screamed, Ozben’s heart leapt into his throat. He’d watched for the last half hour as she had twitched and gasped as if she were in the throes of a nightmare. For a while, he hadn’t wanted to touch her in case she was injured, but when she had whimpered, he’d given in and tried shaking her shoulders, calling her name over and over to try to wake her up. Nothing had worked.

  Now all he could do was hold on to her as her scream died away and she grew calm again. Her breathing was still labored, and sweat stood out on her forehead, but she lay quietly. He carefully wiped the sweat away with his sleeve. Was it his imagination, or did she have a fever? If only he could get her out of the ship. But even if he could, he’d never get her back through the narrow passages up to the medical wing while she was unconscious, not without the risk of hurting her more.

  “Lina, whatever’s happening to you, you have to snap out of it,” Ozben pleaded. He took her hand. It was icy cold, yet she was sweating. She definitely had a fever. He’d thought something on the ship was affecting her, but if that was true, why wasn’t it still affecting him as well?

  He searched for the emotions that had been swirling in him earlier, the fear that was so intense it had almost driven him to run off the ship and leave Lina behind. But there was nothing. He was afraid, yes, for Lina’s safety and his own, but it wasn’t the same as he’d felt before. If this was all part of some security system within the ship, it seemed it was only targeting Lina now.

  “Why are you doing this?” Ozben said aloud. Maybe there was someone hidden in one of the cabins, secretly controlling the ship’s security system. “We didn’t mean any harm,” he continued, his voice rising into panic. “You’re hurting her!” His shout echoed off the walls.

  He watched Lina twitch and squirm for a few more minutes, but then he couldn’t take it any longer. They were getting out of there, even if he had to bash the door open.

  He started to gather Lina up in his arms, when suddenly she jerked, her whole body convulsing as her eyes flew open and fixed blankly on his.

  “Lina!” he cried, relieved. When she still looked at him as if he were a stranger, he added tentatively, “Do you know who I am?”

  “Oz…ben?” She blinked several times, and then seemed to come back to herself. Carefully, she sat up and looked around. “How long was I unconscious?”

  “A while,” Ozben said. “I was so worried. You were twitching and breathing so hard, like you were caught in a nightmare but you wouldn’t wake up.”

  Lina looked at him and abruptly she laughed. “Something like that,” she said.

  And then she told him what had happened.

  When she finished, Ozben sat back against the wall, staring at the ship around him as if seeing it for the first time. “Lina, are you sure?” he asked. “I mean, a living ship? It sounds crazy.”

  “I know,” Lina said, “but no one’s ever been to the uncharted lands. Who knows what it’s like there, what the people are like? For all we know, there could be organic technology all over the place. Maybe they use it as readily as we use steam engines!” Her eyes were bright with excitement and the vestiges of her fever.

  “You said the ship crashed in the mountains,” Ozben said. “But how did it end up here, then, in the stronghold?”

  Lina’s excitement dimmed. “The ship showed me an image in its memory of three men and two women. I think they were archivists. They spoke our language, and they wore work aprons as we do, but their clothing underneath was a different style—older. They must have found the ship a long time ago.”

  “But how?” Ozben asked. “The mountains are enormous. It’d be like looking for a needle in twenty haystacks.”

  “One of the men saw the ship in the sky just before it crashed,” Lina said, “and he brought the others to help him salvage it.” She shuddered. “I heard bits of their conversations. The ship recorded them. The five of them decided not to tell the rest of the archivists what they’d found. They wanted to keep the discovery to themselves. So they scouted the area and found this cave. They were the ones who built the door mechanism you found.”

  “But what happened to the archivists after they brought the ship here?” Ozben asked.

  “They studied it,” Lina said. “The Merlin’s heart was exhausted after the long journey over the mountains, and that’s what caused the ship to crash. As a result, the heart was damaged, so the archivists removed it to fix it. The ship didn’t try to stop them, because it thought the archivists intended to return it.” Lina’s face creased with sadness. “By the time it realized that the archivists were only interested in keeping the power source for themselves, it was too late. And then the cave-in happened.”

  A sick feeling churned in Ozben’s stomach. “What happened to the archivists?”

  “They all died,” Lina said quietly. “The cave-in buried them, and the ship was left alone without its heart. It’s been here ever since.”

  They sat in silence while Ozben tried to digest everything Lina had told him. As amazed and awed as he was by the idea of the living ship, he couldn’t get past the fact that they were still stuck inside it. And Lina looked pale and weak, as if she’d had all the energy drained out of her. The ship had done that to her. In his mind, that meant the Merlin was dangerous and not to be trusted.

  “What happens now?” he asked, and he wondered as he said it if he was talking to Lina or to the Merlin. “What does the ship want?”

  “It doesn’t want to hurt us,” Lina said, as if reading his mind. She put her hand against the ship’s hull. “It was just scared when we came aboard, and I can u
nderstand why. The last time people were inside the Merlin, they took its heart.” Her voice wavered. “The ship wants it back. It asked for our help.”

  “But you said its power source is gone,” Ozben said, “buried in the cave-in.”

  Lina shook her head. “No, it wasn’t.” Something about her expression made the hairs on Ozben’s arms stand up.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I know where the power source is,” Lina said. “I didn’t recognize it in the vision until after the crash, when it had dimmed to just a single flame burning inside a metal sphere.”

  A flame inside a sphere—why was that familiar? Then it hit Ozben like a bolt of lightning, and he gasped. “The Special Collections wing!” he cried. “The Sun Sphere! It’s in the museum!”

  “And we need to get it back.” Lina stood up, taking a second to steady herself, and then walked over to the gangplank. “We need to leave now, please,” she said, addressing her request to the empty air.

  A low groan hummed through the ship, and slowly the gangplank lowered to the ground. Ozben gaped at it. “Yeah, I don’t know if I can get used to the idea that the ship’s alive,” he said, then turned his attention to Lina. “And you were…connected to it? How does that work?”

  Lina shrugged. “I don’t know that either. I wanted to ask more questions, but all of a sudden, the visions stopped, and I woke up. I don’t know what happened.”

  “It could’ve realized it was hurting you,” Ozben said. But he wondered if the ship had listened when he’d said to leave Lina alone. The idea reassured him. Maybe the Merlin wasn’t as dangerous as he’d first thought. And if it was intelligent, that could work to their advantage.

  Maybe if they helped the ship get back its heart, it would help him in return by flying him home. The Merlin was still the best way to get there. His family needed him more than ever, especially now that Ozben knew assassins were still after him. They would likely still be after his family too.

  He stood and followed Lina down the gangplank, grateful to get back out into the cavern. Aethon was asleep beneath Lina’s worktable. He hadn’t even noticed they were gone. “Listen, we need a plan,” Ozben said.