The Azureans

by R Gene Curtis

  I imagine myself that time I talked to Andrea sitting on the porch. I just took a breath and went for it.

  I take a breath. Wipe my hands on my pants, and open my mouth.

  “Have you always been from Seattle?” I ask in English.

  There is a short intake of breath, a shuffle of blankets. Then her voice whispers back.

  “I guess so. I was found in a park when I was a baby, and I was adopted by my parents soon after.”

  “You were adopted?” It seems like something I should have known about her.

  “How about you?”

  “No, I wasn’t adopted.”

  She laughs a little, “No, were you always from Pittsburgh?”

  Duh. Of course, that’s what she meant. “No, I grew up out west, too. In Arizona.”

  She laughs. “Arizona might be out west, but it’s a world away from Seattle. Is it as hot and sunny there as they say?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So graduate school took you to Pittsburgh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I bet your family is proud of you—getting to graduate school is pretty awesome.”

  How do I explain to Lydia that Dad hated my going to graduate school? If her parents adopted her, she probably has a perfect family situation.

  “Or, maybe not?” Lydia asks, reading the silence correctly.

  The tone of her voice is so sincere that I answer honestly. “My dad was upset. My mom died a few months before I left, and he wanted me to stay home with the family. I abandoned them.”

  “Abandoned them by going to graduate school?”

  “Yeah.”

  She’s quiet this time, and my heart sinks. I wanted to get our minds off Wynn, and I did that, but instead turned our focus to my failures as a decent human being. Chalk this up to another failure in the woman department.

  “I don’t think following your dreams and pursuing a career should be construed as abandoning your family,” Lydia says quietly.

  “What? But, I left them.”

  “Yeah, but so do thousands of other adults every year. I get it—having a death in the family is hard. My mom died in a car accident six years ago, and my dad went off the deep end after that. But, that didn’t stop me from going after my dreams.”

  Her words are so unexpected that I have to think about them for a while before I speak again. “I’m not sure my dreams had anything to do with it. Once I got to school, I was so determined to show my father that leaving was right. I worked harder than anyone else. I never talked to anyone or did anything social unless it would advance my career. I was a pretty big jerk.”

  “I saw you down in Arches,” Lydia says. “So, what’s with that? Was that a girlfriend you were with?”

  “My sister.”

  “I’m confused. You just said you abandoned her.”

  “That was a special situation. I was running from a girl, and I needed a trip to clear my head. That was the first time I’d talked to my sister in over four years. After that, she tried to keep in contact, but I ignored her.”

  “Oh.”

  “I told you, I was a jerk. My biggest regret is that I won’t see her again. She’ll always wonder what happened to me—if she thinks of me at all.”

  I should stop talking, but I can’t. I’ve held all this inside of me for so long, hating myself and the things I’ve done. We’re both going to die in this fight against Wynn, and I will feel better dying after my death-bed confession.

  “What is your sister’s name?” Lydia asks. I jump as her hand touches mine. I didn’t hear her get out of bed, but she’s holding my hand now, close enough to me that I can hear her breathing.

  “Pearl.”

  I see Pearl’s face in my mind as I say her name and start to cry. Lydia squeezes my hand, and the tears keep coming. I don’t stop for what seems like a long time. I cry because I was more focused on a career than my family. Now that I’ve lost both, it isn’t the career that I miss.

  ✽✽✽

  “Okay.” Lydia screws up her face. “Here goes.”

  She tries to spit on a copper deposit. Spittle flies in all directions.

  I laugh.

  “What?” She blushes in a way that makes me want to give her a hug, but I ignore the urge and keep things light. “You spit like a girl. Didn’t you have a brother?”

  “I was an only child.”

  As I explain to her the art of spitting, she crinkles her nose.

  “Hey!” I say. “It’s what guys have been doing for centuries.”

  “If you’re so good at it, you do it.”

  She glares at me as a large blob of saliva lands on the ore.

  She turns her back to me and spits a few more times. Eventually some of the ore starts to get hot.

  Until Lydia’s spit lands on top of my spit. Instantly, the heat from the copper dissipates, and the red glow from the ore turns blue.

  “What was that?” Lydia asks, startled.

  “I think your saliva mixed with mine, and the reaction changed.”

  Lydia bends over and tentatively touches the glowing copper. It moves beneath her fingers. She grabs it and pulls, and it comes out of the ground as if it were silly putty. In a matter of seconds, my bucket is filled with glowing blue copper.

  “Can I touch it?”

  Lydia tears off a piece the size of a baseball. I reach out to take it, but as soon as my fingers hit it, it stops glowing blue and turns into hot liquid metal. We yell and leap back as the copper splatters on the ground, little droplets burning our legs like hot fire bullets.

  It takes Lydia a while to heal all our burns. By the time she finishes, the copper in the bucket has stopped glowing and reformed into a solid chunk of pure copper.

  “I’m really sorry,” Lydia says. “I should have thought about what might happen before you touched that copper.”

  “You didn’t know.”

  She frowns and shakes her head. “I was so close to throwing the copper ball to you. I keep playing what would have happened to you in my mind. Hot copper would have splattered all over your face, your eyes, your hands. I wouldn’t have been able to fix all that.”

  I shudder. “Well, you didn’t throw it,” I finally say stupidly.

  “It was okay this time, but I’ve made mistakes with hemazury before, a lot of them.”

  “Mistakes are part of life. You can’t stop trying because that would be the greatest mistake of all.”

  Lydia smiles. “My mom always said that.”

  “So did mine.”

  We stare at each other. The wind blows through Lydia’s curly hair. She steps closer to me, and I take her hand. My skin tingles where her fingers touch mine. The wind keeps blowing around us as the copper cools in the bucket. She smiles, and I see acceptance in her eyes as she stares into mine. She knows what a loser I am, but she looks at me like she doesn’t care. My eyes move down to her lips and then back up to her eyes.

  Lydia takes a step back, letting my hand drop. “We better look for that dwelling.”

  “I’ll go that way,” I say. “Meet back here around lunch time?”

  Lydia nods and jogs off. I watch her until she’s out of sight. Then I turn and jog another way with a smile on my face. I may never see Pearl again. I won’t have a chance to go back and fix all my mistakes, but maybe that’s okay. They’re a part of me, but so are all the good things I’ve done. Just like Lydia caught herself before doing something that would have killed me, I’ve learned from my mistakes. And someone like Lydia can see those mistakes and still like me.

  ✽✽✽

  The day ends, and so does our hope of finding anything here. There might be hundreds of hills, but we’ve searched almost all of them. This mission was a long shot from the beginning, but it’s time to admit defeat. We need to move on before Wynn gets here. If we can buy more time, we need to figure out how to do that before we’re dead.

  Mylus sits on the trail just outside the village. He’s drinking, but conscious enough to stop us
from escaping the city.

  “You’re out late.” He laughs. “I guess you’re behind, eh? Tomorrow morning you need to deliver, or you’ll get your whipping. Are you sure you want to come in already?”

  “There will be no whipping.” I show him the copper-filled bucket.

  As soon as he looks into the bucket at the copper, his entire demeanor changes. Fire dances in his eyes, and his breathing gets shallow and his fists clench. I set the bucket down and back up uncertainly.

  “Where did you get that?” he yells.

  “We mined it,” Lydia says. “No thanks to you stealing our ore and teaching us primitive methods.”

  She steps up next to me, and I catch a glimpse of her moving her fingers. She must have dirt in her hand.

  “You two will pay for this,” Mylus says. “I should have realized what you were doing.”

  With one more look at the copper, he walks away. I throw a confused look at Lydia, but she doesn’t know what he’s talking about either. Our interest is piqued enough that we decide not to leave just yet. Instead, we find dinner and eat on a rock at the edge of the village, watching the sun set. Lydia sits close to me, and her shoulder touches mine. I lean into her, and she leans back.

  Footsteps crunch behind us and we turn to see an old man hurrying toward us.

  “You’ve been to the cave?” he whispers. His eyes are big, excited.

  “Cave?” We shake our heads.

  He nods at the copper in the bucket.

  “What cave?” Lydia asks.

  “Mylus’s cave. The reason he has so much power. He gets all his copper collected on the first day. They say he’s found a secret stash in a cave somewhere.” He shrugs. “I heard Mylus ranting and dared to hope. If someone can show the rest of us where the cave is, we can undermine that monster.”

  I stand up. “We want to find the cave, too,” I tell him. “That’s why we came here.”

  He looks into my eyes and gives me a strange look. I quickly realize my mistake. No one chooses in Wynn’s society. “Well” —he shrugs—“if you chose to come here, you’re crazy. You better watch out for Mylus, and the rest of us who think you’ve really found the cave.”

  “We can handle ourselves,” Lydia says.

  The older man raises his eyebrows and shakes his head sadly. He walks away swearing to himself.

  As soon as he’s gone, Lydia jumps up to stand next to me. “We need to find Mylus.”

  I never thought I would be seeking out that man’s company, but I leave my food on the rock and follow Lydia as we hurry through the village. We don’t find Mylus anywhere.

  “He’ll find us tomorrow,” I tell Lydia. “It’s too dark now. We should spend tonight in the cabin, it’s as safe a place as any.”

  She bites her lip and scans the horizon one more time. Neither of us can see anything. Finally, she nods. After she scoops up more dirt, we hurry back to the outskirts of the village. We don’t see or hear anyone. Still, the old man’s threat makes us both a little jumpy.

  We go into our cabin and close the door. It’s empty, as usual. We both head to our beds.

  “Karl,” Lydia says. “I have something I need to tell you.”

  “Shoot.” I lie on the cold floor next to the door.

  She takes a deep breath and then the words come out fast. “One reason I wanted to come here was to find out more about myself. When we were on the mountain, I saw a memory about Cylus, a woman named Reenah, and a man called Togan. I looked so much like them, Reenah and Togan, I mean. They could be my parents, but they lived more than two hundred years ago. At the time of the memory, Wynn was captured up here.”

  “Portals don’t do time travel,” I say. “At least not according to anything we’ve read.”

  She sighs. “I know.”

  “We had to do this trip anyway,” I say. “To buy ourselves time. I hope that you can find something out about yourself. As soon as we find Mylus and the cave.”

  “Thanks,” she says quietly.

  “For what?”

  “Understanding.”

  She rolls over and I hope she falls asleep quickly tonight. I’m not upset about her revelation, though it does make it clear that Wynn is not a real threat to her yet. How could he be? She’s never met him, never felt his slimy hands on her. What she has felt is years of loneliness wondering who she is and where she came from. That is real to her, even if it’s tangential.

  I roll onto my side, and the door hits me in the face.

  I scream and leap to my feet as six men run into the room. I push one as he passes me, and he falls hard, his lantern flying out of his hand. It bursts, and the cabin catches on fire. Four men surround me; Mylus is one of them.

  “You’re all done here, sissy boy,” he says with a look of triumph. “We don’t stand for your type.” He pulls out a large stick, and the other three men do the same. “But don’t worry, we’ll keep your wife around for a while.”

  I draw my sword, grateful I’ve been carrying it all this time.

  Mylus yells and swings. My sword meets his stick and the blade buries deep in the wood. So deep that neither of us can withdraw our weapons. The other men approach, and I duck from one blow only to feel another crash on my back. I cry out and struggle with my sword. Mylus and I face each other, a smile on his face and terror on mine.

  I hear screams from behind me. They aren’t Lydia’s.

  A blow against my ankle takes me to my knees. A stick hits me hard on the back of my head. Everything goes fuzzy, and I land hard on my hands, nearly letting my sword fall.

  Fighting the pain, I push myself up just in time to dodge a blow that was aimed right where my head was. Finally, I pull my sword free and stab the man. He falls into the burning wall.

  I hold my sword high, my head aching and dizzy, but no sticks threaten me now. Four men lay on the ground, moaning with broken appendages. Mylus is the only man standing, his eyes wide with surprise. Lydia steps in between us.

  “We’ve been looking for you,” she says as I run my hand over the bump on the back of my head. “We need you to take us to your cave.”

  “No,” he says, and his eyes dart back and forth between us, and then down to his fallen comrades. “Besides, you’ve already been there.”

  “We won’t take any copper,” she says.

  “Liar!” he shouts. His eyes are angry. “I’ll kill you first.” He yells and raises his stick to swing. Lydia flicks something at him and both his arms slide out of their sockets like freshly greased axles. His stick clatters to the floor and rolls to me.

  I pick it up and point it at him. “Take us to the cave.”

  Mylus looks at the men on the floor, at the remnants of the burning wall, and then at us. He shakes his head and coughs. “I’ll kill you both,” he says weakly.

  “Take us to the cave, and I’ll put your arms back in,” Lydia says.

  Mylus’s contorted face falls. “Okay,” he squeaks. Walking slightly bent over with arms hanging dumbly at his sides, he walks out of the burning cabin and down the trail that leads into the mountains.

  28 Interpretation

  Lydia

  I’m a bully.

  Mylus groans with each step. I remember the Stanford girl who hit my leg during the first few weeks of the soccer season and knocked me out into surgery and months of recovery. She didn't have to do that to me. And then Brit cried when she realized she had to play in my place.

  I wonder what Brit thinks happened to me.

  Am I that Stanford girl tonight? Is behavior in a soccer game comparable to this situation where lives are on the line? Mylus came with five other men to kill Karl and to rape me.

  Mylus moans and I shudder.

  He probably deserves it. I hope. I don’t want to be a bully. I don’t want to be that Stanford girl.

  Karl has been down the trail Mylus is taking us, and so have I. Multiple times. I’m not worried about him—his arms are hanging out of his sides, and his five lackeys are back in the burni
ng cabin—but I am confused. Our search was so thorough, how can we have missed something that was so close to the main trail?

  Suddenly, Mylus turns off the trail and pushes through two bushes. We follow and find a small, windy path.

  I walked by here at least a dozen times, but it is perfectly concealed behind the bushes. How much else did we miss in our mad search of these hills?

  The path winds down into a small ravine, which is also invisible from the main trail. At the end of the path we find a cave, which is almost completely concealed even when we’re standing right in front of it. Fallen rock and boards cover most of the opening.

  “Stay out here Mylus,” I say.

  “I don’t take orders from a woman,” he grumbles.

  “I don’t care if you do or not.” I stand up a little straighter. “But if you want me to put those shoulders back in for you, you’ll be here when I get back. I took them out carefully, so I didn’t do any damage. If you try to get them back in yourself, there will be damage. You make that decision, but I promise to leave you unharmed when we’re done.” Which is more than he deserves.

  “You’re an Azurean,” he says. “I thought Wynn was the only Azurean. And you’re with a Sapphiri.”

  “Many have believed Wynn’s lies,” I say.

  “The legend?” he asks.

  “What legend?”

  Mylus shakes his head and doesn’t say anything else. Karl has already lighted a candle and waits for me at the cave entrance. I pass Karl and lead the way into the cave as Mylus slumps onto a rock to wait. For all his talk and his cocky disrespect, he’s easy to control. If you’re an Azurean, that is.

  The cave is covered in what Mylus has enjoyed for so long—lots and lots of copper. Wynn apparently harvested copper during his stay here; I wonder what he thought he was going to do with it.

  But, we’re not here for the copper. We go deeper into the cave, and it gets darker and damper with each step. I wonder if anything could have survived in here for two hundred years.

  The cave ends abruptly in a small room. This last room doesn’t have any copper. It has what was once a bed, and a desk. Both have long since collapsed. This has to be where Wynn stayed when he was held captive. I can’t believe we found it.