In Dawn and Darkness

by Kate Avery Ellison

  The door to Annah’s house was open when we reached it. Vandals had looted the rooms. Glass littered the floor, and furniture lay tipped over and torn apart. The only light came from the windows that overlooked the sea, and a strange rippling blue blanketed the silent scene. It felt like a ruin of a place long dead.

  A sudden foreboding gripped me.

  “Where are the paintings?” Tallyn asked, his voice a break in the quiet.

  “Upstairs,” I said, leading the way up the curving main staircase.

  As we ascended the steps, I remembered words Annah had spoken about my father to me once.

  “Primus was not what your father expected. He found it too vast, too political, and too status-oriented. He had plans, hopes...none of which came to fruition. He and your mother had many disagreements, which didn’t help. He used painting as a means to express his emotions.”

  Apparently, unbeknownst to her, he’d used it to express much more.

  We reached the hall on the second floor where she kept the paintings. Purple carpet. Chandelier. Observatory at the end.

  I almost sagged in relief as I saw the paintings still remained untouched by looters, illuminated by the light from the sea.

  Myo scanned them one by one. I ran my hands over the closest canvas.

  “See anything?”

  His expression didn’t waver, but his mouth tightened. He hummed a bit under his breath, and looked at me. I shook my head, as nothing he did was affecting my memories.

  “No. Nothing that makes any kind of sense,” he admitted.

  “Are these all the paintings?” Nol asked.

  I paused.

  “No. There is a mural called Perilous. Do you think—?”

  “Let’s go,” Tallyn said.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Art District was unmarred by the damage that had marred so much of the city. The walls and homes were still standing, and still splashed with every shade imaginable. A dizzying array of colors on the walls, ceilings, and floors assaulted my eyes as we ran between twisted, striped columns, past seashell mosaics and murals of fish and sea, through a plaza lined with arches. Chimes jingled as Nol brushed against them with his arm, but no one emerged from the doorways. The streets were empty, probably thanks to the curfews. No one else ventured from the doorways, although occasionally I spotted a whisper of movement from a window as we passed.

  New paintings covered much of the floors, stylized depictions of violence, war, fire. Slowly, I saw that despite the vivid colors, the Art District had changed. It had become a living testament to the things that must have been going on in Primus since we left.

  I stopped in the middle of the plaza and turned a circle, scanning the houses and shops around me.

  Blue doors. We were looking for blue doors.

  I spotted them—a clutter of doors the color of sky. Beyond them, I found the mural of the octopus, but it had been changed, painted over with streaks of red like blood. I descended the ladder that I remembered, landing in a half-crouch at the bottom. The doorway at the end of the corridor was covered with a strip of cloth.

  “Krank,” I called out, hope half-strangled in my chest.

  No answer. I drew the curtain aside and stepped inside, my pulse beating fast. “Krank?”

  The shop was empty, and the air smelled like dust and neglect.

  She wasn’t here. Some of the art was missing, and the furniture turned over as if upset while someone fled in a hurry.

  She’d taken me to the mural before. But...

  The others lingered in the hall, poised to continue, watchful as they scanned the walls and doors around us.

  I remembered the way. I could find it alone.

  I hoped I could.

  “This way.” I scaled the ladder set in the wall that led to a street above this one. The colors of the district faded to grays and coppers as we ducked beneath pipes and around jets of steam coming from vents in the floors and walls. My heart beat in the throat and hands, matching the pace of our hurried footsteps.

  Was it this turn? That hall? I whirled, looking, straining to see.

  There.

  A bit of green, a splash of blue.

  “The mural,” I said, pointing.

  The pipes all but obscured it. Determination rose in me like a wave, and I wrapped both hands around the closest one.

  “Let’s tear these down.”

  “I don’t think we’ll have to,” Tallyn said, pointing at what appeared to be a keyhole in one of the pipes. “I think it’s a false front meant to hide the mural. Do you still have that glass key?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  NOL, MYO, AND Tallyn together wrenched one of the pipes from the wall after I inserted the key and heard a pop. The whole thing came away with a screech and then a groan, as if we’d torn something vital from a living creature. Steam blasted across my skin, hot enough to burn, and I stepped back with a hiss of pain.

  “Can you see enough?” I called to Myo.

  He didn’t answer. He was gazing raptly at the painting, one hand outstretched with the fingers almost touching the wall, his lips moving slightly.

  “Got it,” he said. “Let’s get out of—”

  “Hold it,” a voice said pleasantly.

  We whirled.

  Grimulus, speaker for the senate, stood in the corridor behind us, a company of armed soldiers behind him. He wore an armored vest and carried a trusket. Blood streaked across his cheek.

  “Oh,” I said. “You made it.”

  “Yes.” Grimulus shifted his gaze to Tallyn and then back to me. “The soldiers of the Remnant are taking the city back as we speak.”

  “We’ve found the final key to Perilous,” I said.

  Grimulus smiled thinly, and a tendril of uneasiness curled in my belly.

  “Excellent,” he said, and then flicked his hand. The soldiers behind him raised their weapons.

  “Hold on,” Nol shouted. “What are you doing?”

  “Tying up loose ends,” Grimulus said.

  “You’re with Tempest,” I said.

  The knowledge descended on me with a wave of dread.

  He’d been intimately involved with our planning, with the alliance between the Dron and the Remnant.

  He knew everything.

  “My dear,” he said, “I am Tempest. I’m the very top.”

  “You’re the one who’s been trying to kill me!”

  “And you have been most provoking. We can’t have you ruining things just when we’re getting the republic back on its feet.” To the men behind him, he said, “Kill them all and destroy the mural. Make it look like Nautilus’s men did it, and then rejoin the others in the liberation effort.”

  Everything happened too quickly.

  One of the soldiers fired his trusket. Nol shoved me out of the way while Tallyn leaped in front of us both. He cried out as his body snapped back, and he hit the ground and rolled. Myo ducked behind the pipes, and Nol and I scrambled back to join him.

  Tallyn lay in the middle of the floor, bleeding heavily, a barb in his side. His eyes were shut.

  I stared at him, stiff with horror and disbelief.

  Get up, I wanted to shout. Get up, get up, GET UP.

  He didn’t move.

  The soldiers rushed toward us, and Nol picked up a broken piece of pipe. He looked at me. “I love you.”

  “STOP!”

  The soldiers advancing on us turned, aiming their weapons at the corridor to our right as another company double the size of Grimulus’s force came into view. My eyes widened as I saw Senator Jak at the front of the soldiers, his cloak swirling around his ankles as he stopped, legs spread wide, and surveyed the scene before him. His gaze crawled from Tallyn’s fallen form to Grimulus and his soldiers, to Nol, Myo, and me crouched behind the broken pipes.

  “Well,” he said. “Isn’t this interesting. And illuminating.”

  Surely we were doomed. Jak wouldn’t hesitate to see me ended.

  But to my shock, Jak poi
nted at Grimulus. “Arrest him.”

  Grimulus’s soldiers laid down their weapons, but Grimulus was not so easily taken. He pulled a black object from his belt and held it aloft. The soldiers scattered.

  “You won’t,” Jak said, not moving from where he stood.

  “I will!” Sweat shone on Grimulus’s forehead and cheeks. He swiped at it with his free hand while he kept the other raised, brandishing the explosive. “I’ve used them before.”

  The rail carriage. The package.

  “Lay down the explosive,” Jak said, his voice firm and solid.

  Nol stepped in front of me.

  Grimulus sneered at us all and pulled his arm back. He turned, looking toward us and then the mural behind us.

  He wanted to destroy the mural and me with it. He wanted to bury Perilous forever.

  I felt behind me for one of the broken pipes. I found one and snatched it up as Grimulus’s wrist curved, and the explosive left his hand. It spun as it sailed through the air. For a single thundering second, time seemed frozen.

  The pipe wasn’t a spear, but it was straight and it was light, and nearly as good. I almost saw the Training Rock around me, felt the wind in my hair as I aimed for my target.

  I let the pipe fly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I TASTED BLOOD. Colors danced before my eyes, and sound was muffled, as if I were deep underwater. The floor was hard against my cheek, my hands. I groped blindly for the wall and found flesh. A hand gripped mine. Nol? I blinked, trying to see past the spots filling my vision.

  Dimly, sound began to seep in. Shouting, the slap of feet on the ground, someone retching. The smell of charred flesh and smoke filled my nose, and I coughed and gagged.

  The pipe had collided with the explosive, and the world had exploded in a blinding flash.

  Sight returned. I struggled up onto my hands and knees.

  Tallyn.

  I turned my head.

  Through the haze I could see him lying there, arms slack.

  Bits of Grimulus were everywhere. I crawled forward gingerly, ears still ringing. My hands and arms were blistered. A few of the soldiers who’d been closest to the explosion lay on the ground, one of them still and silent, the other clutching his leg and screaming.

  “Seize them,” Jak was shouting, pointing at Grimulus’s men.

  I inched across the floor toward Tallyn as people ran around us. I kept my eyes on my friend, ignoring the confusion around me.

  When I reached him, I rolled him onto his back. His hands flopped as I moved him.

  “Tallyn,” I whispered as panic built inside me. “Tallyn?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “He’s dead, Aemi,” Nol said. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”

  Nol’s hands were on my shoulders, and he tugged at me. “Aemi,” he was saying in my ear. “We need to go. Nautilus’s soldiers...”

  “We can’t leave him.” I grabbed Tallyn’s arm and slung it over my neck. “We can’t.”

  Myo stood there, blood streaked down the side of his face. Nol’s forehead was blistered. They both looked exhausted.

  “Please,” I said, and they joined me, hoisting him up.

  Somehow, we made it back to an empty docking bay, where we opened the doors and leaped into the infinite blue. I kept moving, my insides numb, my heartbeat loud in my ears, my legs and hands moving automatically as I clung to the waiting dolphin. Tallyn’s lifeless body looked strange and wrong as Myo held onto him. His hair floated around his face, and his arms moved slowly. His mouth was slightly open, but his eyes were shut.

  I wanted to be sick.

  The others clustered around us when we came aboard. The silence was like a living, breathing thing.

  Tob was the first to speak.

  “We should make him more comfortable,” he blurted out.

  It was a ridiculous thing to say, but I found myself nodding.

  We laid Tallyn out on one of the benches in the common room, and I sat beside him, holding his hand, saying nothing as the others converged around us, talking in low voices. Tob announced that he was going to cook something for us to eat. My mother sat beside me, also saying nothing, and somehow I found comfort in her presence, because I knew she had experienced great loss too. In that moment, I felt that I understood her, and I felt kinship with the strange, cold woman who was such an enigma to me.

  “We need to bury him,” I found myself saying. “Do they bury people in Itlantis?”

  I’d already “died” and I didn’t even know the answer to this question.

  “I heard the Itlanteans feed their dead to the sharks,” Garren muttered morosely.

  “We would be taken to Verdus and embalmed,” my mother said softly. “Just as your father was.”

  “There isn’t time to do anything with his body,” Myo said. “We’ve got to get straight to Perilous.”

  Perilous. I swallowed a sob. The promise was like a beacon in the midst of my darkness. I looked at Myo, and he nodded once, almost imperceptibly.

  “Come to the control room,” he said. “You’ll remember the coordinates.”

  Together we stood looking through the glass at the sea as he hummed the melody he’d gleaned from the mural, and I shuddered as a memory tore itself from the depths of my mind. I reached with trembling fingers to enter the coordinates to take us to Perilous.

  “We have to use this exact path,” I said. The command stood out starkly amid an otherwise hazy memory. “I don’t know why, but we must.”

  Keli nodded solemnly.

  “How long?” Nol asked from his place at my side.

  Myo smiled as he gazed down at the chart spread across the glowing screen before us.

  “Not long. It was never as far away as we’d feared. In fact, it was nearly beneath our nose. Just a few miles from the site of the Dron-Itlantean alliance.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The whole ship was silent as we surfaced. My whole body pulsed with hope and fear. My mouth was dry and I could barely breathe. Memories surfaced and vanished like winking stars in a swirling mist. I couldn’t grasp any of them long enough to retrieve and process them, but at the moment, it didn’t matter.

  The ship shuddered as it docked.

  Perilous, at last.

  We had arrived.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE FIRST SOUND I heard was a strange thrumming. Above us, on the ladder, Myo opened the hatch. Brilliant light shone down, blinding me. The air smelled tangy, almost rotten.

  Nol ascended after Myo, and I followed at his heels. I grasped the hand that groped for mine, still blinking in the brightness despite my eye protection. Then I was in the open air, gasping like a fish out of water as the sound and smell rushed over me. I stepped sideways onto the hull of the ship, and Nol grabbed my elbow to steady me.

  My first impression was green, and dappled gold sunlight, and the sound of water. It was as the woman I’d called Mother had described. Emotion rushed over me.

  Gradually, my senses cleared. I raised my head to look around as the others emerged from the ship.

  The ship had surfaced in the center of a dark turquoise pool edged with rock. A sagging dock clambered up the side of the stone rim and disappeared into a forest of tangled trees. Dark orange moss stained the rocks, giving them a rusted appearance. The trees hung over the water, branches like twisted fingers dripping with pod-like orange fruits. Some of them lay in crushed piles on the dock, and I supposed that was what smelled so rotten. The branches seethed with birds that screamed and called to each other in a deafening cacophony. The thrumming sound. This pool, those rocks, the trees, and a patch of solid blue sky, was all I could see of Perilous.

  The path into the forest beckoned to me. I took a step for the edge of the ship and paused to gauge the best way to climb down to the dock when a blur of fins churned the water. I scrambled back as the ridged gray back sliced the water and then submerged beneath our vessel. Glowing stripes were half-visible in the water below as the
creature dove and vanished.

  Beside me, Nol exhaled. “That was as big as a whale.”

  “Did you see that sea monster?” Tob shouted, his head sticking out of the hatch.

  Nol joined me as I stepped from the ship to the dock. The wood creaked beneath my feet, and I staggered a moment as I regained my balance. The birds flapped above my head, and the ripples left by the sea creature lapped at the pilings of the dock. Behind us, Myo leaped from the ship to shore and turned to help my mother.

  Tob climbed out next and stepped onto the dock. He gazed up at the birds, and then reached down to pick up one of the fallen fruits. Orange juice dribbled down his hand, and he laughed with amazement. A swarm of purple insects rose lazily in a cloud as he dropped the fruit with a plop back among the rest that lay in juicy piles of decomposition.

  “I could make some amazing dishes with this,” he mused, bending down to scoop up several less damaged fruits and stuffing them in the pockets of his tunic.

  The promise of more beckoned to me, the dark shadows cast by the trees like a call. I walked a few steps into the forest. The wooden planks of the dock ended where a path mossy square stones began, curling and winding away among the trees, leading to the unknown.

  When the others had disembarked, they joined me at the edge of the forest. A wind scented with flowers blew through our hair, throwing strands across my face. Even Garren wore an expression of wistful amazement.

  My mother looked at me with a flash of gentleness, as if being here had transformed her, thawed her to her core in some small way. She said nothing as we all absorbed the beauty before us, as if letting us have a moment of peace, and then she sighed.

  “Shall we?” She nodded at the path.

  The journey into the secret green reduced us to silence. Trees with thick, purple trunks and curling branches formed a canopy of emerald. Thick undergrowth masked the sound of the birds, and the moss beneath our feet muffled our footsteps.

  “According to Trulliman’s journals,” Myo said, “we should find an outpost soon.”