The Orphans of New Lur

by Blake Vanier

  The Woman lets her hand fall to the table. “All objects―living or inert, rocks, water, people―are made of energy, and by sensing this connection between energy and matter, we can manipulate the object. In order for you to interact with the peel, you need to impose your essence on the world.”

  “My essence?”

  “Yes, your essence,” the Woman says. “Assuming you can use Aether, your essence is what does it. Can you feel it?”

  Nero thinks about the tightness to his full stomach and the hardness of his seat. “I don’t know. What’s it supposed to feel like?”

  “It’s like a sixth sense. I’m not sure how to describe it; it’s just there. Like, how would you explain smell?” She thinks for a moment. “Probably like eating with your nose, but through air. Hmmm. In that case… you could describe it like another body you probe the world with using Aether. Like little feelers. Does that make sense?”

  “No.”

  “It’s like another part of your body. It’s throughout your body, but it’s different. When you get the hang of it, you can move it just as easily as moving your arm. You must’ve felt something like it.”

  “I haven’t. Are you sure you know what you’re talking about? Maybe I can’t use Aether.”

  “That’s not an option. You’ll be next to worthless to me if you can’t. So, figure it out! You need to feel it. I can’t do everything for you.”

  He snaps. “Yeah, but you can at least help. Figure out a better way to explain it and maybe I will!” Again, he forces himself to take a breath. Where’d that come from?

  “Wow. You have some fight in you after all. I like it, but if you use that tone with me again, I’m going to cut out your tongue and feed it to the fish. Understand?”

  Is she serious? Nero uses his fear to beat down the hostility raging within him until it is a gentle simmer in the back of his mind. He nods.

  She smiles, an evil glint to her eye. “Good. Now give me your hands. I have an idea.”

  “What are you going to do?” he asks.

  “I’m going to use Aether on you and see if I can tickle your essence a bit.”

  “Are you sure it’s safe?”

  The Woman reaches out both hands. “Almost entirely.”

  Nero reluctantly takes her hands. He feels a tingling in her skin and looks up.

  “Can you feel that?” The Woman asks.

  “I can feel it tingling in my hands.”

  The Woman’s gaze intensifies and the tingling crawls up his arms into his body. A sudden chill begins to grip him, numbing his fingertips. There are goose bumps all over his arms. He looks up at the Woman in alarm and she lets go. The tingling withdraws immediately, dragging through his body from his core to his hands. Just as it disappears, something rebounds inside of him and oscillates for just a moment before fading away, something with substance but not of his body. He pokes at it with his thoughts and he feels something respond.

  “I think I can feel it!” Nero says.

  “That’s more like it,” she says with a hint of a smile.

  “What did you do? It was freezing.”

  “I can use Aether that controls the flow of energy, so I was pulling heat from you, though it wasn’t nearly as easy as I expected. You definitely have a high Aethersotto, which should make you interesting to work with,” she says. “Now, let’s get this job started. You felt your essence, that’s the first step. Now we need to get you to exercise it. In order to move something, you need to probe the world with your essence and build a mental picture of the object you’re interested in. This helps solidify a connection. When you feel like you have a firm grasp on an object, you can exert your essence on it through Aether and move it. Just keep in mind, your ability to move something is only limited by how well you focus your essence. Aether is unhindered by distance and has many more freedoms than our normal experience of the world.” She picks up the peel, rolling it over in her hand. “Now, typically when you want to interact with something, it has little to no Aether in it, but because Aether will react better with Aether, interacting with something like this peel will be easier. Especially because the Katashne’n tree reacts well with all types of Aether. Does that make sense?”

  Nero looks at her blankly. “Umm…”

  “Okay, moving forward.” She hands him the peel. “Tell me what you feel from the peel.”

  “Strange. Like I just licked a battery. Same as when you used Aether on me.”

  “Yes, good. The peel poorly contains Aether now that it’s been opened, so you’re feeling the Aether spilling off. Now try to use your essence and feel for the presence of the peel.”

  Nero closes his eyes and pushes on his essence. It responds in his leg. No, not there. He pushes it again. This time he feels it in his other leg.

  “Sometimes it helps to focus if you slow your breathing and let everything else go. Try to relax with each breath.”

  Nero collects himself and takes a few breaths, again pushing the strange hostility inside of him to the back of his mind. He notices an odd tension about this newfound essence of his. What’s this about? It is a tension that runs through his whole body, a tension resisting something, some external pull. He examines the tension then with a breath, lets it go.

  A whole new world of light explodes in his mind’s eye. The table, the path, the buildings off in the distance, and most of the people in the area are etched with a white light. The Woman in front of him is a bright mass of swirling red light. Her features are all but impossible to determine. Wow. He looks down at the white table and then at his hand, which looks exactly how he would see it if his eyes were open. The peel on his hand emits a gentle pulsing violet light.

  Nero twitches. He suddenly notices his body being stretched in every direction. His hand begins to dissolve. The light from the world starts to collapse in on him. It turns into an avalanche. His body continues to fly apart. He instinctively clenches his body and resists the pull, creating the same tension he felt earlier. The cascade of the world stops, the light retreating. His mind is once again void of light.

  “What are you doing?” The Woman asks.

  Nero opens his eyes. To his relief, everything is normal. He is on his back and the Woman is standing over him.

  “Will you stop messing around?” she asks. She pulls him up, sitting him back at the table. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I was relaxing and then suddenly I saw all this light. It started crashing in on me.”

  “Hmmm, maybe you should try to breathe a little more. You were probably just holding your breath.”

  I don’t think I was… What happened?

  “Now try again, while breathing. We don’t have all day.” She puts the peel back on his hand.

  I don’t want to do that again. He closes his eyes once more, but this time he lets himself maintain the tension in his body. He pushes with his essence and feels it respond in his hand, bumping against the peel. Cool. He probes the peel, building a mental picture as if he were feeling the shape of a rock in the dark with his fingers. In his mind, the peel begins to feel tangible. He pushes directly against it, causing it to jump off his hand.

  The Woman is smiling at him when he opens his eyes. “Good job. I wasn’t expecting you to make it jump.” She sets the peel at the end of the table. “Okay, now knock it off the table.”

  Nero closes his eyes and pushes out with his essence, extending it to his surroundings. His essence crawls over the table, feeling the cracks along its length, but as it reaches out further it becomes harder for him to control and maintain. His essence snags on the peel. He struggles to home in on it. It is easy to separate from the table, but it takes him some time before he can fully grasp it and when he does, he forces it away. The peel jumps off the table.

  “Excellent,” the Woman says. “You’re catching on quick.” She holds the peel on her hand. “Now, knock it off my hand.”

  Nero pushes out his essence, struggling to distinguish the Aether from the Wo
man and the Aether from the peel. He probes the peel from every direction and worms his way between it and the Woman’s hand, which he then probes in detail as well. Slowly he is able to discern the difference. When he does, the separation of the two is quick, and he is able to knock the peel out of her hand.

  “And I was really dreading this whole thing, but now that you seem semi-capable you might just have a chance of not getting taken as a slave with the rest,” she says with a smile. “Just remember, forces balance, so anything you push or pull on with your essence will affect your body, just as if you were pushing or pulling with your arms. If you practice, you could hold yourself up with your essence.” The Woman collects all of their trash. “Follow me.”

  Nero hops up. “What are we doing now?”

  “I’m going to teach you something else. Pay attention. What do you think is more powerful than any amount of Aether in the world?”

  “Umm… Havityns―”

  “No, the brain! Do you have a good brain?”

  Nero shrugs. “It seems to work. I think.”

  “Confidence helps too… Anyway, what I’m trying to say is if you use your brain, you don’t have to work so hard. Being lazy can be incredibly powerful.”

  She leads Nero down a side alley and jiggles the locked handle of an old, metal door. “If we wanted to get into this door, how do you think we would do that?”

  “Use a key?”

  “Well, yes, Master of the Obvious. But, if we didn’t have a key, we would either have to bust the door down or pick the lock. Busting the door down takes a lot of work, so let’s avoid that for now. If we wanted to use Aether to pick the lock, we would have to manipulate the tumblers in the lock just like someone with a pick set, which takes a good amount of skill. But what do we know about a door?” She pauses for a fraction of a second. “When we turn the handle, it retracts a latch that lets the door open. When we close the door, the latch gets pushed in. Do you get what I’m trying to say?”

  “To open the door, all we need to do is push the latch in?”

  “Yes! And since we can do that easily with Aether, it’s possible to open the door without a great effort. Unfortunately, most people know about this trick, so it isn’t terribly useful. Nonetheless, a good example of how to use your brain. Let’s give it a try.” She focuses on the door and after a moment turns the handle, swinging it open. “I had to pick this lock, since it specifically locks the latch in place, but we can still practice execution even if it’s unlocked.”

  “How do you know all of this? About Aether and stuff. I thought you were just a hobo,” Nero says.

  The Woman’s eyebrows rise as she looks at Nero. “I had another life at one point. I’m not going to share it with you, but what I will say is it required a large array of unconventional skills.”

  “If you know so much, then why can’t you just teach me to pick the lock?”

  “The fine skill to manipulate several different objects simultaneously is a bit out of our time budget.” She reaches over to the latch on the door and pushes it in. “Now that the door is unlocked, the latch moves. I want you to try to push the latch in using Aether. We’ll keep the door open to see how you’re doing. Close your eyes if it helps”

  Nero looks around. “Are we going to get in trouble?”

  She glares at him.

  He closes his eyes and pushes his essence into the world, feeling the edge of the door. The latch is apparent, though not nearly as substantial as the Aether in the peel. No matter how hard he tries to form a connection with it, the latch remains unmoved. After a long while, he looks at the woman. “I can’t do it. It’s not the same as the peel.”

  “You can’t?” she asks venomously. “You give up after only a few tries because it’s hard? You poor thing, you must have had such an easy life growing up. Well, wake up!” She pokes him in the chest. “LIFE IS HARD, Nero, and the only way you’ll get anything out of it is if you take it. Your friends’ freedom depends on you and you alone. I’d rather throw myself off a cliff than play mommy with you, so if you want to save them, figure it out. But let me warn you now, if I ever hear you say, ‘I can’t’ again, you’ll regret it.” She looks down at Nero. His eyes are brimming with tears. “Do you want to save your friends?”

  Yes. He nods.

  “Good. Now remember, it’s all the same. It’s all energy. It’s just a little different. Figure it out.”

  Nero wipes the tears from his eyes, setting his jaw. A fury swirls inside of him. Stupid woman. I’ll show her. I CAN save my friends. He jabs aggressively at the latch with his essence. No success.

  “Stop and breathe. Don’t let your anger control you. Collect your emotions, accept them, and then let them go, or you’ll never save your friends.”

  My friends. Nero breathes and lets his anger go. He struggles to bring his thoughts back to the task. He pushes out his essence once again, feeling the latch. It is still insubstantial. It sure doesn’t feel the same… but if it’s different… He pushes against it gently and with constant pressure. A hint of a different substance shimmers at his touch. He bears down on this new feeling and it grows more solid. It is just different! He grasps the latch and pushes it in.

  “Good!” The Woman’s voice startles Nero. “You keep pulling through! Now again.”

  She has him push the latch in several more times until she closes the door. “Now let’s see if you can push the latch in while it’s closed. It’s the same thing, you’ll just have to sort through more material. Remember, the only resistance your essence feels is the resistance you make. If you ignore the door frame, it’s no different than what you were just doing.”

  Again, Nero struggles for a long time to reach the latch. Every time he tries to ignore the frame, the latch disappears as well. When he focuses on the latch, the frame becomes distracting. Frustration builds with the sweat on his forehead. I will not give up! Finally, he separates the frame and the latch enough that he pushes the latch in.

  Nero throws his arms in the air. “I did it!”

  The Woman looks at him then at the door. “Did what?”

  “I pushed the latch in… I think.”

  “Did you now? But what was our intended goal?”

  Nero looks at the door. “To open it?”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “Okay.” Nero puts his hand on the doorknob, trying to push the latch in once more. It turns out to be exceedingly difficult to keep his concentration on the latch while pulling the door open. After he manages to open the door without turning the doorknob, the Woman has him do it again and again while she tries to distract him.

  On his tenth attempt, the Woman tickles his ear using a stick but he still succeeds. Nero’s stomach growls.

  The Woman looks at him, surprised. “Wow. Didn’t we just eat a couple of hours ago?”

  Nero fiddles with his feet. “I’m sorry, we can keep practicing.”

  “No, you’ve done well,” she says, patting him awkwardly on the back. “You’ve earned something to eat. It’ll be a good time to go over our plan.”

  *****

  Nero and the Woman sit at the edge of a walkway, their feet hanging over the water, eating banana bread.

  Nero kicks his legs. His strength and the comforting tingle that ran over his scalp earlier are gone. So is the uncomfortable hostility he could barely control. Was that always in me? He looks out at the water. I wish Thea were here. He looks up at the Woman. “Shouldn't we hurry up and try to rescue my friends?”

  “No. We'll wait. This is their last night in port, so the crew will try to get out and have some fun while they have the chance. They should be a touch more relaxed.”

  “Okay. How are we going to do this?”

  “I'm going to sell you as a slave.”

  Nero chokes on some bread. “What? I thought you were going to help!” She's going to sell me like the others!

  “Stop fussing. Do you have a better plan for getting inside?”

  “Uh…”

&nb
sp; “Precisely. Someone needs to free your friends from the inside and this seems like the easiest way. They’ll probably be locked up tight. If we convince your captors you’re sick and need to be quarantined, then you may have a little more room to escape.”

  Nero feels his pulse rise. “Couldn't we just sneak in together?”

  “Uh, no. You wouldn't be able to keep up with me. And who would create the diversion for the escape? Certainly not you by yourself.” She pauses. “We’re only doing this because you want to. So, let me know if it’s too much.”

  Nero looks down at the water, pushing away the panic. “Okay, so you sell me as a slave. Then what?”

  “Well, you'll have to escape and free your friends,” she says calmly.

  Nero's starts to panic. “How am I supposed to do that?”

  She sighs. “That's why I’ve been trying to teach you to use your brain. You'll have to figure it out on the fly. I'll make you a little poisonous blow dart so you can kill anyone that gets in your way.”

  “Kill!?”

  “You’re a piece of work, aren't you?” The Woman throws her hands in the air. “Fine, we can make it a non-lethal dart if it'll make you feel better, but that'll take longer to kick in. They're your friends, so if you’re willing to take the risk…”

  Nero smiles, nodding. “I'd like that better.”

  She shrugs. “Whatever suits you. So, once you have your friends, stay put until you get my signal. I’ll give you an hour from when we separate.” She pulls a small digital watch out of her pocket. “Put this on. The sailors shouldn’t care about it when they take you.”

  “What's the signal?”

  “Not sure yet… think on the fly, right? I'll be sure to make it so clear, even you wouldn’t miss it. Once you hear the signal, get to the main deck of the ship and head to the side opposite the pier. There’ll be a rope ladder with a small boat at the bottom. If they pursue you, they’re going to be pretty upset. So, don’t get caught. Get to shore as fast as you can and run like crazy to the Market. There should be enough people there that they’ll give up. If not, I hope at least someone will intervene. We’ll set up a hotel room you all can use after.”