by Tom Abrahams
Without further explanation, the operator pressed his lips into a flat line. He smirked and spun around to face the display again. He adjusted the image to the overhead view of the boat racing through the water.
Barach motioned toward the aisle they’d used to reach the terminal. Li took the hint and retraced her steps, moving toward the distant exit. She slowed and Barach walked alongside her. She caught glimpses of the countless screens as she passed them: a futuristic city of glass and steel, a snowy mountaintop, a rain-soaked conflict along a vast plain, men with guns and heavily armored vehicles fighting each other to the death. There was as much blood as mud on the battlefield.
No two displays were the same. All of them revealed some horror. None of them offered a positive, hopeful view of what the world might be.
She looked away from them and glanced at Barach with a raised eyebrow. “A sword?”
Barach chuckled. “The mission is what the mission is. We can’t choose what—”
“That’s not what I mean.”
They reached the exit door and Barach shouldered it opened. He waited for Li to step through and she did.
The warmer, dense air hit her like a wave. It made her feel heavier. She put a hand on the balustrade to her right and ran her palm along the dusty wood. The door shut behind her and silenced the hum and hiss of Mission Control, replaced by clinking glasses and jukebox music from the bar below.
Li smelled the dust in the air and leaned into the balustrade. Barach eased next to her, overlooking the bar.
“What did you mean back there about a sword?” he asked.
Facing him, she tried to explain. “Why are they hunting for a sword? What does that have to do with the balance of things?”
“It belonged to a Watcher. If a mortal gets control of it, it makes things wobbly. Add to it that Lucius Mander’s daughter needs rescuing and you’ve got a pretty important mission.”
She motioned toward the door to Mission Control. “How many of those missions are rescue missions? How many of them involve missing weapons or missing Watchers? How many involve war?”
Barach tilted his head to the left and right, considering the question. He more tightly gripped the railing and leaned back on his heels, falling away from the balustrade. When his arms extended, he pulled himself up, standing straight again. He did this three times before he answered.
“If you take all four possibilities, I’d say you’re close to one hundred percent. Every mission I can think of has at least one of those elements, if not two or more.”
She thought about what she’d seen, what Barach was telling her. Part of her wished Zeke had never rescued her. It might have been better if she’d stayed alive, if she’d continued her life as a spy for an oppressive government. How was this any better?
“It seems to me,” she said, “you Watchers spend as much time trying to fix your own errors as you do those of other people. So many of you go rogue, lose your weapons, incite war. Maybe the balance of things would be better if you stayed out of it. If you shut down all of those missions and just let things happen without interference.”
Barach smiled. “I’ve said the same thing. I’ve heard others say it too. Sometimes our work seems counterproductive. Sometimes we’re on the wrong side of things. But as Pedro explained to me, it has to be that way.”
Li glanced down at the bar. Pedro was behind it. He poured whiskey into a glass and slid it across the varnished wood to a waiting customer.
“Why is that?” she asked, fixated on the barkeep.
“If we truly believe in the balance of things, of redemption for past sins, then it makes sense that we have to clean up our own mess.”
“How so?”
“If there are good Watchers, there must be bad ones. If there are those who play by the rules, there must also be rogue participants. Light and dark. Without evil, you can’t know good. That old chestnut.”
She motioned toward Mission Control. “But what I saw in there was all bad. Fires, floods, dystopian versions of Earth. None of it was peaceful. None of it was good.”
Barach laughed.
Li stiffened. “What?” she asked defensively. “I didn’t think any of that was funny. Especially seeing Zeke. The worry. The concern. He looked like he’s aged a decade dealing with all of you.”
Her chin quivered. A knot swelled in her throat.
The expression on Barach’s face softened. “I’m not laughing at you, Adaliah. Not at all. It’s more than I’m laughing at what you’re missing. It’s obvious. It’s right there in front of you.”
She swallowed past the knot. Her voice quaked. “What?”
“There’s balance. For every one of those awful images you saw, there’s another one where the sun shines, the seas sparkle, there is peace. And every single one of those missions you saw in there? Every one of them will have a happy ending.”
She blinked. “All of them?”
He equivocated. “Almost all of them.”
“It would stand to reason that if there’s balance, then half of them will fail.”
“Okay. Half of them.”
She again looked at Pedro, incredulous. “Half?”
He said nothing. The dimples were gone. He leaned back and forth on the balustrade as if buying time.
She wasn’t sure why Pedro wanted her to see Mission Control. It was unnerving. To know there were that many iterations of a world gone astray. These were dark versions of the planet, of civilizations, throughout its histories. For every success, there was failure. For every era of peace and prosperity, there was a dynasty of pestilence and war.
Knowing this was an overwhelming burden. Li tightened her hold on the balustrade, worried that if she let go, the heaviness in her chest would sink her to the floor.
Another customer bellied up to the bar. Pedro spun around to pull a bottle from the shelf to the left of the large mirror. Li watched him pour amber liquid into a leaded glass over a pair of chipped ice chunks.
She suddenly found herself thirsty. Her mouth watered at the thought of tasting the chilled bourbon. Her mind drifted to the bar at which she’d worked as a server. She remembered the first time she’d seen Zeke. How different he’d looked from the man she’d just seen in the display. Now she understood.
“Pedro wanted me to see Mission Control because he wanted me to understand where I am,” she said. “The scope of this. He wanted to show me that Zeke’s intentions were good. That he brought me here for selfless reasons.”
Barach’s face eased into a sly grin. “Could be.”
They stood quietly for a moment. The din of the bar washed over them, filling the space between them. Then Barach released the balustrade and put a hand on her shoulder.
“It could also be that he has big plans for you, Adaliah Bancroft,” he said. “That your presence here is more important than you or Zeke could know.”
She stepped back from him but maintained her grip on the railing.“Big plans,” she said. Then she asked, “Is that good?”
As soon as she spoke, she knew the answer. It was obvious. Everything in this place was two sides of the same coin. All light and dark. It had to be.
Barach shrugged, his gaze fixed upon her. “Both.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sleep was a luxury Anaxi Mander didn’t have. She couldn’t borrow it either. The sun taunted her as it rose to the east, its brilliant orange hue reflected off the water. She stared toward it, disappointed the night had evaporated with little more than the twilight doze in which her subconscious fought with her waking mind.
Through the night, she’d heard Branch’s men laughing and drinking.
Men were odd creatures, prone to boasting about things they’d never done to people they’d never met. It wasn’t only the pirates who held her now on this secret island. She recalled the puff-chested bravado of the men in her own village.
A wizened neighbor whose face was leathered with age and experience once told her it was their animalistic
nature. Men were genetically predisposed to inflate themselves beyond the truth of their lives. It was so they could earn stature among other men and, as a result, gain favor with women.
Anaxi always thought this ridiculous. Her father wasn’t that way. He’d won the affection of her mother, hadn’t he? Her mother, Josephine, who’d abandoned them both when Anaxi was a week old.
Had she left because her father wasn’t outwardly strong enough? Had Josephine learned about her father’s frailties, whatever they might be, and left him because of them?
Lucius was always underneath the surface of Anaxi’s thoughts. Details of him were already fading: the details of his brow, how his teeth fit together in his mouth, the texture of his hands. It was only days or weeks since his body sank to the bottom of the endless sea. How long before she couldn’t remember him at all?
These were her thoughts as she groggily watched the sun rise. Her stomach churned and a tingling sensation spread through her body from her gut. It was the uneasiness that comes with lack of sleep.
Other than being knocked unconscious by her host, Desmond Branch, Anaxi couldn’t remember the last time she’d truly slept. Good, restorative sleep was as distant a memory as her father.
Were his eyes blue or green? Were they brown or hazel?
She stood on the rocks, watching the others stir. She envied their sleep and their absent moral compass. The latter enabled the former.
Anaxi exhaled. It was more of a sigh. She couldn’t get enough air in her lungs, it seemed. The deeper she tried to inhale, the more suffocating her surroundings.
In one hand, she clutched her boots. They’d worn blisters on her heels and calluses across the tops of her big toes. It was more comfortable to carry them and traverse the rocks barefoot. She could feel the smooth edges with her soles, navigate the rough parts with feeling.
From among the stirring men, Desmond Branch emerged, hands set proudly upon his hips and feet shoulder width apart. Branch was always trying to make himself appear larger than he was. He scanned his surroundings like a lord surveying his kingdom, and stopped at Anaxi. A jut of his chin acknowledged her.
She didn’t return the recognition. Instead, she turned her back on him, her soft feet rubbing against the rocks as she pivoted toward the peaks they would soon climb.
Why hadn’t she killed him when she had the chance? He’d given her the knife. What had stopped her? At any time, she could have ended his life or, at the very least, maimed him such that his journey couldn’t continue.
Why hadn’t she killed herself? Jumped into the ocean and let exhaustion take her beneath the surface, pulling her toward a watery grave like her father’s?
Both options, killing herself or Branch, would stop the pirate from finding the sword. The Kalevanmiekka would stay hidden, remaining the thing of legend. A mythical object spoken of at bedtime and whispered about amongst the wisps of husky smoke and dying embers of a campfire.
Anaxi knew why she did neither of those things. If she was truthful with herself, which she’d long ago learned was the hardest kind of truth to tell, she wanted to see the Kalevanmiekka. She wanted to hold it, wield it. She wanted to see the sunlight fleck on its steel blade. To feel the delicious puncture of that blade piercing Desmond Branch’s chest. To see the look of shock and pained resignation his face as his life drained from him and she claimed what he’d dedicated his entire worthless life to finding.
That was why she played along and aided his quest. Anaxi couldn’t imagine this ending any other way, and she was a girl with a strong imagination. She had to be, growing up with a ghost of a mother in the middle of an endless ocean.
Now, the long daydreams of daring adventures were coming true. Even if they weren’t what she’d envisioned during solo outings into the thicket of palms populating the interior of her village’s island, these were adventures.
The crunch of rocks underfoot lifted her from the fog of her daydream. Then Desmond Branch clearing his throat brought her entirely back to the present. The man had a way of interrupting her thoughts.
“Up early, I see,” he said. “Good. Get yourself some food before we start the climb. It will be a long day.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
“I didn’t ask you to eat. I’m telling you. I don’t need some malnourished, dehydrated waif collapsing on the hike and slowing our progress. We’re close enough now, I can taste it.”
She glowered at him over her shoulder but didn’t face him. “Is that what you had for breakfast?”
He furrowed his brow in confusion. “What?”
“Your ambition? You said you could taste it.”
The rocks shifted under his weight. He came closer, rank with sweat and spirits. He chortled. The laugh was laced with pity.
“You can joke at my expense all you want, little girl. I can take it. Your insults are like your father. Pitiful. Weak. Lifeless.”
He paused in between each of the three adjectives. The pity dissolved into venom.
Anaxi clenched her jaw. It took everything in her not to spin around and attack him like a feral monkey.
She’d seen one gouge out the eyes of a would-be hunter once. It was gruesome and riveting all at once. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the bloody carnage no matter how much she didn’t want to see it.
This is my life, she thought as she opened her eyes. It was gruesome and riveting. As much as she wanted to crawl into a hole and pretend none of this adventure was real, she couldn’t pry herself from the chaos yet to come.
“You like to talk a lot, Anaxi Mander,” Branch said. “You like to act as though you have all the answers, the wisdom of the pre-melt sages and philosophers. You can have that.”
His stench strengthened as he moved to her side. He put a hand on her shoulder and pushed, forcing her to face him. He stared down his nose at her. Then he held out his hand and used it to imitate a flapping mouth.
“Talk. Talk. Talk. That’s all you do,” he said. “It’s fine. I once heard a saying from a man. I think it was right before I killed him and took his woman. Or maybe I took his woman and then killed him. I can’t remember.”
He pouted in faux consideration, as if trying to retrieve a muddy memory and wipe it clean. Then a broad grin spread across his wan features.
Branch lowered his hands and laced his fingers in front of him. He glanced toward the peaks, his gaze lingering there before again eyeing Anaxi. This was all for effect. A pirate was as much wind as he was sail. She’d learned this.
“Regardless,” he said, “the man told me, ‘You can’t listen if you are speaking. If you can’t listen, you can’t learn.’” He licked his cracked lips. “I listen. I learn. I didn’t have a daddy who told me bedtime stories or relayed ancient pearls of wisdom.”
Anaxi glowered at him. She tried to remain unfazed, unwilling to give him the benefit of anything other than her attention.
Branch unlaced his fingers and tapped his temple. “I’ve got my own wisdom. I taught myself. A lifetime on the sea. A lifetime reading people. Understanding them. Ending them. And I know what you’re about, little Anaxi Mander.”
A breeze blew at her back from the ocean behind her. The morning and the sea chilled it. It swirled around her before rustling the fronds that marked the beginnings of the thickly vegetative path leading toward the peaks. It was as if it whispered to her, but she couldn’t understand what it told her. She did hear Desmond Branch, however. His voice was low now, like a growl.
“You think you can outsmart me,” he said. “You think we’ll find the Kalevanmiekka and you’ll undo me with it. That’s why you haven’t tried to escape. It’s why you keep spouting those rhymes, giving me clues and guiding me toward the power that will make me god of this forsaken planet. It won’t happen. Do your job. Make yourself useful. And maybe I’ll let you live. Maybe.”
How did he know? Was she that transparent? She thought she’d done well to hide her plan, her ultimate revenge. Her eye twitched. It was a tell
she hoped he didn’t see.
The sinister grin curling at the edge of his lips told her he had. She’d not noticed the disgusting grayish-brown color of his teeth before. But now, as his pallor advanced, the decay inside his mouth was clearer. Maybe it was his breath that reeked as much as his pores.
“Get your breakfast,” he ordered. “Do it now. We leave soon.”
Anaxi didn’t argue. She said nothing. Instead, boots in hand, she nudged past Branch and traversed the rocks toward the encampment. Refusing to look back at her tormenter, she walked to the tendrils of smoke lifting from a spot where men dipped a ladle into a pot boiling over a renewed fire.
She approached the pot as Le Grand carried away his portion. He blew on the wooden bowl, steam pouring over the edge opposite his face.
“Fish stew,” he said.
Again, Anaxi thought. It was the diet on which they’d lived for days, having run out of greens and fruit.
Le Grand moved past her and she stepped to the pot. A grisly, one-eyed cook grunted and shoved her a bowl. The stew slopped over the edge and splattered onto her top. It burned through the fabric onto her skin and she winced.
Biting the inside of her cheek, her eyes watered. Her face reddened. “Thank you,” she muttered to the smirking cook.
The stew looked thick and unappetizing. She’d as soon eat the sand shifting under her feet and between her toes if she had a choice, but Branch was right about one thing. She had to eat. Her body needed fuel. Especially lacking sleep, every bit of energy she could muster was crucial to surviving the day.
Anaxi distanced herself from the clusters of pirates and found a large rock on which to sit alone. She cupped the bowl and held it close so the steam warmed her face. The cod was especially pungent.
She brought the bowl to her lips. The hot stew, little more than fish, seaweed, and boiled seawater, was bitter. The salty taste overwhelmed the broth as it slid past her tongue and down her throat.
