World Warden, page 10
He tried to focus on doing something useful when that happened, and as a result he started sleeping less and less. When morning would finally come, Oscar would help his father during the hours he worked with him at the telecommunications array, trying to learn as much as he could. Then it was off to school, or off to whatever his duty was for that day. But being around other people meant enduring looks. It meant biting his tongue whenever someone whispered “murderer,” just loud enough that Oscar could hear.
Counselor Kamogawa had listened to everything when Oscar had finally opened up to him. He had shown Oscar a way to deal with what was going on, and he had taught Oscar ways to diffuse the oppressive feeling in his chest when he felt as though nothing he did would ever make things right.
With Kamogawa’s help, Oscar came to a conclusion after many weeks: being angry did nothing but drag him down. It was like having a big rock strapped to his back that he willingly chose to keep carrying because he couldn’t let go of his bitterness and the self-pitying sense of having been wronged. But anger was heavy, and there was no need to drag it around. He could be freer if he simply let it go whenever it came.
Slowly, Oscar had learned to control the anger somewhat. He had returned to being a little bit more like he’d been before Elias left. One of his teachers, Marlene MacLeod, had even said so in his report card for the spring term. She’d written that she was glad Oscar was getting better notes again and that he was back to being the gentle boy she’d always known.
Shortly thereafter Oscar had learned that Elias was alive. The world awoke to true spring like it hadn’t done in living memory, and everything in Oscar’s life seemed to return to normal—or better than normal. His mother was feeling better, his father smiled more. Oscar became hopeful that Elias would return soon and everything would be like it was.
And now I’m here, Oscar told himself, sitting on the hot floor of his prison. I’m here and I’m trapped, but Eli is coming. He’s coming.
The thought gave him strength. He told himself that he’d been through worse. He stood up resolutely, and when Samantha finally came, nearly three hours after she normally visited him, Oscar had managed to calm down.
The heavy door opened with its usual loud creaking, and Samantha stepped into the cell. She was sweating and panting.
“I apologize for the delay,” she said. “You may… go out,” she gestured at the open door. It looked like she was having trouble catching her breath.
“Thanks,” Oscar replied. He went outside, relieved himself, and returned.
“I do not have any food today,” she told him. “But I do bring news.”
“What is it?”
“Come outside with me.”
“Um, okay,” Oscar replied, wary. “What’s going on?”
The two of them stepped onto the soft grass outside the prison building. The air was fragrant with the heavy scent of summertime flowers. Insects buzzed in the air, and the cloudless sky appeared suffused by the light of the sun, radiating energy onto the world.
Samantha crossed her arms in front of her chest. Oscar realized, with a little start, that her left arm was bruised. A long, narrow welt on her smooth chestnut skin was already turning black and blue.
“What happened?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
“What?”
“Your arm. Did someone hit you?”
“I spoke with Dresde,” she said instead of answering. “We discussed your… situation.”
“And?”
“She has agreed that keeping you in the cell is a waste of potential labor we can use in foraging for food while your brother comes for you. Feeding you while you do nothing is not useful to anyone.”
“Okay. What does that mean?”
“As of now, you are free to come and go as you please. You will work to earn your keep of course. I will be responsible for you until such a time as Dresde requires you.”
“You’re… you’re serious? I’m free?” Oscar asked, trying to suppress the note of elation in his voice but being completely unable to.
“Yes,” Samantha confirmed. She still frowned, but less deeply than usual. “Dresde was hesitant at first, but I… merely pointed out that it is physically impossible for you to escape. There is an ocean standing in the way of you and your home.”
“And you convinced her?” Oscar asked, remembering the crushing power of Dresde’s full attention. When she had focused on him, he had felt naked, as if she could read his every thought. He couldn’t imagine actually arguing with her. “Wow!”
“It took some time for her to agree,” Samantha admitted, touching her bruised arm gingerly, “but in the end she listened.”
“Thank you! Samantha, thank you. I mean it!” Oscar beamed. “I’ll be glad to work. Just tell me what you want me to do. Anything is better than staying in that tiny, horrible cell.”
She nodded stiffly, as if satisfied at his response. “Very good. For now, go wash in the stream. Make sure to be thorough—you stink. I will be there shortly with some soap and spare clothes for you to wear. Make yourself as presentable as possible.”
“Presentable? For what?”
“For lunch. I will take you to meet the others.”
Chapter 7. Doubt
WHEN MORNING came, the overcast summer sky appeared to want to trap the stifling heat of a tropical day close to the surface, adding it to the ever-present humidity that made Elias feel as though he would never be dry again.
He had woken up before everyone else and now stood silent at the edge of the water, watching the river flow past. First he closed his eyes and thought about Oscar, as he did every morning.
Be strong, Oscar, Elias thought, hoping against hope that his little brother would be able to hear him across the distance. I’m coming.
He opened his eyes. In the light of day, he could see that the river was massive, much wider than he had first estimated the night before. He could not see the other shore from where he stood, and the water flowed swiftly from left to right. It was impossible to determine the depth of the river from where he was, but based on how the Singer wurl had been able to simply disappear beneath the surface with his prey the previous night, he guessed that the river was very deep. The scale of the torrent was hard to comprehend. He had heard of big rivers and had seen videos of them, but even the mighty Amazon would be dwarfed by what he was seeing here.
It’s too big. The world… it’s too big.
For the first time since he had set out, his determination faltered. He was beginning to get a true sense of the scale of the planet he was exploring, and he found it overwhelming. There were too many unknowns, and the distances were vast. Unseen dangers lurked everywhere, and each ecosystem they had crossed so far had presented deadly challenges. If it had not been for Narev, Siv, and Vanor, Elias was certain that Tristan and he would have never made it as far as they had.
And now there was another threat in the form of those creatures that could approach unseen and paralyze them all with a beat that was barely a song.
He tried to pierce the surface of the water with his gaze, striving to sense beneath and expand his consciousness into the river, but he could not. Something was different about the watery domain. It felt as if the river were not there.
Elias shook his head.
“Rough night?” a voice nearby said.
“Morning,” he replied without turning around. He kept staring at the water.
Tristan walked up to him and hugged him from behind, wrapping his arms around Elias’s waist. “You sound worried,” Tristan observed. “And you were tossing and turning all night.”
Elias sighed. “Yesterday, when it attacked? I didn’t know it was there. I didn’t feel it there.”
“You mean the….”
“The Singer wurl. I usually get at least a fleeting sense of the creatures around us. Well, not the Flyers. And I suppose it stands to reason that I wouldn’t be able to sense the Singers either. It’s just weird, and I can’t really explain it very well. Over these last few days, I’ve gotten used to… sort of used to perceiving the world around me with my mind or whatever. The trees. The insects. The plants. But when I look at this river, I don’t see anything. It’s like it’s part of a different realm.”
Tristan allowed a few moments to go by, as if he was digesting the information. “Do you think it’ll be back?”
Elias shook his head. “I’ve been watching since I woke up, and there’s nothing in the water. He’s gone, probably back to the ocean where he came from.”
“Did you know they were like that? So… so alien?”
A few months ago, Elias would have been quick to point out with pedantic insistence that humans were the aliens on New Skye. Now he merely shrugged. “Not really. I have Sizzra’s memories, and those are relatively clear. Some of them anyway. Sizzra in turn had the memories of her mothers, but it’s hard for me to remember those. They are faint, fuzzy. Hard to understand. And I think that Sizzra herself never fought one of these Singers, although she did see them in the distance from time to time.”
“I thought the wurl queens were always at war.”
“Yeah. I don’t know what’s going on. Sizzra must have never had a reason to fight them, or maybe she wasn’t interested because she hated Dresde so much. Sizzra’s memories do suggest that what we saw last night was only a juvenile, though.”
“That… that was a juvenile? Elias, you saw what that thing did. He incapacitated everybody. Our wurl couldn’t move. I couldn’t move. The Flyers dropped down like flies.”
“I know,” Elias replied. He could not stop going over the events from the night before. In particular, the image of luminescing tentacles erupting from the water had bound itself to his nightmares over the long hours of his attempts at sleep.
“Do you think it’s going to come after us now?” Tristan asked, his tone alarmed. “Can that thing walk on land? What if it’s invisible again? What’s going to happen when we get to the coast? Are there going to be hundreds of those things waiting for us? What are we going to do?”
Nearby, off to the left, Elias caught a glimpse of Narev as he walked up to the river’s edge and drank from the water, apparently unworried. Elias received nothing from Narev except mindful awareness of his surroundings. There was no anxiety there. No fear.
He decided to take inspiration from the wurl. They were natives to this planet. They knew where they were going, and they understood the nature of their mission. Despite what Sizzra had thought about males and what she had believed to be their negligible intelligence, Elias was certain that Narev, Vanor, and Siv were smarter than the Spine queen had been willing to admit. If Narev still wanted to keep going despite everything, then Elias decided that so would he.
“I think it’s no use asking all of those questions,” Elias responded, turning around to embrace Tristan and look into his eyes. “I think all we can do is keep going. Let’s stay away from the water if we can, but we should still follow the river. It will lead us to the ocean.”
“Right. Do you think Flyers are going to ambush us again today? Maybe I can, I don’t know, climb a tree or something? I think there are binoculars in my pack. I could scout, check if I can see any Flyers approaching.”
Elias looked up at the gray sky. “I don’t think it would be too helpful. You know how Flyers are. They’d simply wait for darkness or a storm or whatever to approach unseen. I think all we can do is remain alert as we go.”
“Yeah. You’re right. Sorry, it’s just…. It’s been a lot of close calls lately. I’m trying to process it, is all.” Tristan ran his fingers through his hair. His hand trembled slightly. The insect bite on his forehead from the day before was not as swollen, but it still looked painful. His skin was taking on the same weathered tan that Elias’s had from being out in the wilderness so much. His clothes were caked with dirt and unidentified muck from their brief expedition through the rain forest, and there was a cut on Tristan’s left cheek, which Elias only now noticed.
He realized there was something he needed to say. “Come, Tristan. Let’s sit down for a minute.”
“Shouldn’t we get going?”
“In a bit.”
Elias took Tristan’s hand and led him a few steps away from the river until he found a good spot next to a tree. They sat down.
“What’s going on?” Tristan asked. “Sorry if I sounded freaked out just now. I—”
“Thank you, Tristan,” Elias said, placing a hand on Tristan’s leg.
“What?”
“I want to say thank you.”
“O… kay? For what?”
Elias smiled. “For being here. For coming with me. You didn’t have to, but you never even hesitated. We’re hundreds of kilometers away from home, surrounded by hostile creatures everywhere we look. Our lives are in danger all the time, and you’re still here. I don’t have any other choice. I have to save Oscar, and I swore an oath to Sizzra. But you do have a choice. I understand that it’s getting to be too much. I was feeling like that a few minutes ago, thinking about how massive this world is. If you want, I can probably convince one of the wurl to take you back to Portree. I can—”
“No,” Tristan cut in forcefully. His voice was unusually deep.
“But—”
“Absolutely not. Elias, thank you for saying that. Thanks for offering, but I’m not going anywhere. I told you once already: I’m always going to be by your side.”
“But you’re hurt,” Elias argued, pointing at the cut on Tristan’s cheek. “And you have this big bump on your forehead that looks like a….”
Tristan did not say anything, but he raised one eyebrow and looked Elias straight in the eyes. The effect of his skeptical expression with that big welt from the insect bite was incongruously comical, and there was a brittle moment of tense silence between them.
Then both of them broke out laughing.
It started out small, but Elias was soon laughing at Tristan’s laughter, which was incredibly contagious. He couldn’t stop. They both laughed so hard that Elias was having trouble breathing after a few seconds, and all three wurl came over to see what the commotion was about.
“I… I don’t—” Elias tried to say, but Tristan snorted at that moment, and Elias guffawed, rolling around on the ground, trying to get himself to stop.
It was nearly a minute before they were able to reduce their laughter to mere chuckles. Elias was crying from laughter by then, and he wiped a tear from his right eye.
“By the generation ship, I needed that,” Elias said.
Tristan nodded enthusiastically. He was also wiping tears from his eyes. “Elias, you have the funniest laugh ever.”
Elias adopted a mock serious tone. “Hey, at least I don’t snort.”
They looked at each other again and tried to contain it, but the laughter came back. This time it didn’t last as long, but when it was over, Elias felt relieved.
“You mean that?” he asked. “About wanting to stay?”
“One hundred percent. You mean so much to me, Elias. I—” Tristan hesitated, as if he were about to say something but thought better of it. He stood up and offered his hand to Elias. “I mean, uh, I’m here for you. Okay? Let’s get going.”
Elias took the proffered hand and stood up as well. He wanted to say so much more about how meaningful it was for Tristan to be there, with him, when their mission was so dangerous and potentially deadly. Instead he simply nodded and walked over to Narev, who was standing close by and radiated concern about the laughter. Elias reassured the wurl with his mind and a brief touch on the creature’s forehead.
“All right,” he replied. “Let’s head out.”
They packed up their things and continued going east. After an hour the few remaining trees receded, and the landscape around them changed yet again. They were now walking over moist rocky terrain that stretched out into the distance. No grasses grew among the rocks, but the ground was crisscrossed with cracks left behind from some massive tectonic disturbance in the distant past. Between the cracks lay shallow pools of water, barely a few centimeters deep, and in the pools there grew algae and something that, to Elias, looked suspiciously like coral.
All around them the relatively flat terrain was speared by ancient-looking rocky mounds. They were maybe twice as tall as Elias but were narrow and looked like irregular pillars interspersed at random intervals over the land. Some of them were bulbous in shape, while others were more streamlined. A few were stunted, and others were somewhat thicker than the rest, but they all looked old and weathered. They watched over the land like silent sentries left behind from an ancient era.
The air around Elias smelled different, heavy with the scent of minerals and decomposing plant matter. Out in the open as they were, the heat of the sun was impossible to escape, but every now and then a cool, refreshing breeze would blow from the east. The breeze carried with it a salty scent that Elias had never perceived before but knew to be the smell of the ocean.
There were also fewer insects around, for which Elias was very thankful. He liked the serenity of the place, and its silence. Only the footsteps of the three wurl and the occasional squelch of their large paws on the water broke the peaceful stillness. Once again Elias got the distinct impression that the world was healing, returning to balance. His anxiety from the morning seemed far away now. The muted beauty of the place calmed him.
The river was still to their left, far enough away that they would have time to react to a threat coming from the water, but close enough that Elias knew they were on track to reach the ocean. The sky overhead had cleared, and it was a bright shade of blue, dotted with occasional white clouds.
Elias asked Narev and the other wurl to stop next to one of the mounds with a gentle mental nudge. Dead ahead, Vanor stopped as requested, and Tristan turned around on his makeshift saddle.
“What is it?” Tristan said.
“I wanted a closer look,” Elias explained, examining the mound nearby. It appeared to be made of rock, maybe three meters tall, but it was definitely organic in origin. The rock itself looked like fossilized coral.
