Glow

by Joss Stirling

  Meri was pleased she had remembered to wear this before leaving her room. She twisted the stone back into place and rested her hand on the arm of the chair so Rio could see it glinting. ‘Good, then we should move on to the second part of the test. What kind of practical do you have in mind?’

  ‘One moment.’ Dr Severn rang a small bell that stood on a side table. A door in the wall behind the throne opened and two guys who looked like nightclub bouncers entered, a thin boy of about fifteen sandwiched between them. They lifted him onto the podium in the centre. He was blindfolded and obviously scared out of his wits.

  ‘What the heck is going on?’ exclaimed Meri, jumping to her feet.

  ‘We’ve caught a Perilous for you to demonstrate your powers,’ said Dr Severn as if this was the most natural thing in the world.

  The poor kid was shaking so hard Meri was certain he would collapse if the guards let go of him.

  ‘This is inhuman! Let him go, at once. Return him to his family.’

  ‘You don’t need to worry about that. He’s an orphan, just gone through the skin change. We caught him begging in Jerez.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then! It’s OK to torture an orphan and not someone who is well connected, is it?’

  Dr Severn looked puzzled. ‘But he’s Perilous.’

  ‘He’s a child!’

  Rio got up and walked across the circle. He’d been waiting for this moment. ‘I told you all that she doesn’t have the guts for the role. Let’s end this farce. She’s a Perilous-lover, the last person fit to be our ruler. Her reaction to the boy proves it.’

  ‘If being your ruler means I have to terrify innocents, then yeah, I’m so not the person you’re looking for.’ Meri thrust the file at Dr Severn. ‘And I thought you were a nice guy.’

  The prime minister took her elbow. ‘Where do you think you’re going, Miss Marlowe?’

  ‘I’m taking this kid out of here and leaving. You people are crazy if you think what you’re doing here is the least bit acceptable. You should all be locked up.’

  ‘I’m afraid he can’t leave—and neither can you, not now you know where we are.’

  ‘You don’t get to tell me what I may and may not do. I’m quitting. I quit being a Tean if tests like this are what it means.’

  ‘You don’t get to quit your genetics,’ snarled Rio.

  ‘Watch me.’ Meri marched up to the bouncers. ‘Let go, or I’ll fry you.’ The two men looked in alarm to the prime minister. ‘Oh, didn’t she tell you? Apparently my touch works just as well on all flesh, the only difference being you don’t get to show pretty patterns before you die. Now I don’t want to hurt anyone, but if it’s a choice between you and the kid, the kid wins.’ Meri prayed they’d not call her bluff just in case she decided it wasn’t a bluff and she’d have to follow through.

  They took a step back and Meri reached for the boy. He squealed as she took his hand. ‘Oh come on! I’m not going to hurt you—I just made that really, really clear!’

  He said something in Spanish. Oh, way to go, Meri, get angry with the victim because he doesn’t speak English. She repeated the same thing in her school-level Spanish and he quietened.

  ‘Right, show me the way out,’ Meri said firmly, looking to the council members. Rio smirked. The worst thing for Meri about this course of action was that he was getting his wish.

  Rayne stood in her path. ‘Miss Marlowe, stop a moment. I think we have a massive misunderstanding going on here. Francis Frobisher said that you had willingly showed him your power by using it on a Perilous volunteer, am I right?’

  ‘Yes. I showed them Kel’s markings.’

  ‘We just wanted you to do the same thing again. We don’t want you to harm the boy.’

  ‘Problem is with that little word “volunteer”. I don’t see a volunteer here.’

  ‘You’re pushing us into a place we really don’t want to go if you refuse.’

  ‘Hey, don’t hang this one on me. I’m not the child-snatching villain of the piece.’

  Rio sat down in her chair. ‘Forget it, Dr Caspian, she’s not ruler material. Get rid of the boy and keep the girl on ice until she can be useful.’

  ‘Excuse me: put me on ice? You know where you can put that ice, Rio? You’re sitting right on it. And what exactly do you mean by “get rid”?’

  Rayne shot the regent an exasperated look. It had to be tough trying to calm the waters when he kept making waves. ‘Sir, your attitude really isn’t helpful. Look, Miss Marlowe, I understand that your close friendship with a Perilous might make you feel differently about them and we underestimated how serious you are about this. But since you stepped ashore, your choices have narrowed.’

  Meri’s mood was travelling express from red rage to bleak despair. They weren’t going to let her just walk out, were they? She had to at least save the boy. ‘I was hoping that anyone with any human decency would feel the same about child torture.’

  ‘I repeat: we don’t want you to harm him, just to use him to show us your skill.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then we’ll drive him somewhere far away and drop him off so he can’t find his way back. He doesn’t understand English so he won’t know what is being discussed here; he’s blindfolded so he won’t see.’

  ‘That’s not acceptable. I don’t trust you to do that and he’s an orphan: you can’t just dump him like a puppy left on a highway for the first juggernaut to knock down.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  What could she do? She had no back up, only herself, so he was her problem now. ‘We keep him here. Does he know he’s Perilous?’

  ‘No. One of our more skilled operatives saw the patterns. We are fairly sure he’s been on his own for a long time. He’s one of the No-Homers.’

  ‘Then find him a job in the palace or grounds. He can live with the ordinary staff. I know you employ those because my maid is from a family with no Tean blood.’

  Rayne tapped her briefing papers irritably. ‘But he’s Perilous.’

  ‘He’s a lost boy needing a home. If I’m going to lead you all, you’ve got to be prepared to do things differently. Rio, get out of my chair.’ Meri snapped her fingers at him. The regent really knew how to rile her.

  ‘So you’re staying now, are you? Until the next time you throw a tantrum?’ said Rio.

  ‘Only you could belittle a protest at a human rights violation as a tantrum.’ Meri turned back to the boy. ‘What’s your name, kid?’ she asked in Spanish.

  ‘Daro,’ the boy replied. ‘I didn’t do nothing. So why have you blindfolded me?’

  ‘Because these guys are really ugly. Believe me, you’re not missing anything. Would you let me hold your hand a moment longer? I just want to test your temperature, see if you’re OK?’

  The boy pulled away. ‘Are you a doctor? You sound too young.’

  ‘I’m the expert here, best you are going to get. May I?’

  He nodded. Meri really didn’t like tricking him like this but she couldn’t see an alternative that would get him out of the room safely. Daro must’ve seen his skin markings when he first flared out. Hopefully he thought he had been feverish and dismissed them as a hallucination—Kel had had those symptoms. She needed more time to break Daro into the idea that he was different from everyone else here and come up with a better plan for him.

  ‘It might feel a little warm.’ She released a tiny trickle of power into his palm. The patterns on his arm began to light up. So pretty. She’d not seen this pattern before; it looked like cobwebs. She kept her eyes lowered in case they were doing that glow thing again and thanked her lucky stars that her shirt had long sleeves. From the prickling sensation on her forearm, she would put money on there now being cobwebs stringing their way up to her elbow. ‘Everyone see that? Daro here is in good health.’ She said in Spanish so the boy could follow, then let go of his hand. ‘The guys who brought you up here are now going to take you to the kitchens, Daro. They will take off that cloth an
d make sure you get a good meal. Then you are going to be given a job, a chance to go to school, and a safe place to stay. How does that sound?’

  ‘Sounds good.’ His trusting smile was heartbreaking, like the lamb smiling up at the wolves.

  Meri switched to English. ‘You two guards, escort our guest out and treat him exactly as I said. I’m going to be checking on Daro each day so don’t try to fool me by “forgetting” what you did with him. I want to know where he is at all times, OK? No one hurts him: that’s an order.’

  ‘Yes, your highness.’ One of the guards placed a gentle hand on Daro’s back and steered him away.

  ‘Satisfied?’ said Meri, glaring at the council.

  ‘Yes, your highness,’ said Rayne. ‘I’m sorry for any distress we may have caused.’

  ‘It’s Daro you should be apologizing to, not me. OK, let’s get one thing straight: as your sovereign, this country obeys international human rights law. Everyone, Perilous, Tean, or little green people from Mars, gets treated with respect. People aren’t pawns. Is that understood?’

  Rio snorted and whispered as he passed her. ‘You’ve got a lot to learn, little girl.’

  ‘Cut the snide comments, Rio, or you’re off the team,’ she hissed back.

  He sat back in his original chair and crossed his legs. ‘Oh, hasn’t anyone explained? Even with you on the throne, I’m still next in line if anything should happen to you. Under the Tean constitution, that makes me part of the council, like it or not.’

  Meri made a note to get hold of a written copy of that constitution as soon as possible. People kept blindsiding her with the knowledge she didn’t have but needed if she was to rule effectively. ‘In that case, you will find yourself given the crappy jobs if you can’t dig deep and find a little more cooperation and respect for your leader. I take it the constitution requires you to be loyal to the Crown?’

  ‘The Crown—yes.’ Meaning not to her personally.

  Meri took her seat again, feeling this day couldn’t get worse. Driving test? This was more like running a gauntlet of unsheathed swords. ‘What’s next on the agenda? The rights and wrongs of cannibalism?’

  Rayne looked relieved to get off the subject of the fractious relationship between ruler and regent. ‘Your coronation. We were thinking some time in the autumn to give as many of our scattered communities the chance to get here in time.’

  ‘Fine. Agreed. Set the date.’ It would also give her time to decide if she was going through with this.

  ‘Secondly, we need to debate how quickly to strike back at the Perilous.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They know of your existence, ma’am, they held you captive and threatened you. Not to retaliate would be weak,’ said Tegel.

  ‘No, it would be sensible. I’m not going to restart a war.’

  ‘Restart?’ interjected Rio. ‘Chica, look around you at the Tean graves in every country where they found us. It never ended.’

  9

  Meri declined the invitation to have lunch with her council, needing the space alone to gather her thoughts. She drifted back to her room in a daze. Is this what a new rodeo rider felt like mounting a bucking horse for the first time? Every new revelation was a jolt that almost unsaddled her. They had talked about corporate warfare and actual combat against the Perilous as if it were all totally normal. She’d managed to stave off any action by saying she needed time to decide but that excuse was going to get old very quickly.

  ‘You have to understand, your highness, we don’t want to do any of this,’ Rayne had said in reply to her protest, ‘but we are forced into this position by the belligerence of the Perilous. Unless we keep them weaker than us, then we will lose the last scraps of our culture and last of our bloodline.’

  The prime minister went on to explain that the wealth of the Waters family, Ade and his uncle Osun, was only a tenth of that the Teans had amassed over the years. The former slave-race had tried to play catch-up but never managed it. The Teans had manipulated banks and the stock market to keep them down, retaining Tean financial advantage even as their pure blood population dwindled. They had always been numerically in the minority while owning the majority of Atlantean wealth. Not much had changed from this basic picture over the centuries.

  ‘But I thought my land was just this little island? Where is the money if not here?’ Meri had asked, finding it impossible to imagine such riches.

  ‘You need to think of this as the centre, similar to the way the Vatican is the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, but we function with a cultural, not religious, purpose. Like the Church, we are spread out across the world. Or in more prosaic terms, we don’t put all our eggs in one basket.’

  ‘So what does the Crown own?’

  ‘You have properties across the world, including a large tract of land in New York occupied by profitable businesses, part of Mayfair in London, fortunately above flood levels, a square in St Germain, Paris, farmland in China.… I could go on but I think it quicker if you looked at your portfolio after the meeting.’

  That thick document was lying on the coffee table in her suite. Back in her room, Meri had flicked through and found a dizzying array of addresses in every country she knew and some that she had never heard of before. There were factories, mines, farmland and tracts of pristine wilderness that brought in grant money for being kept as carbon capture units. She reminded herself that this inheritance wasn’t hers in the true sense of the word: it belonged to the Crown and her role was to be the custodian to pass it on to future generations.

  She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, finding a spot of sunlight coming through the balcony doors to warm her. At no point during the meeting had she escaped the feeling that they were only humouring her. There was no genuine respect for her views. They thought they could manage her, young and inexperienced as she was. She knew that her main value to them was as a potential mother of more Teans who could be raised to continue the struggle, but who would want to bring children into a life like that? Teans and Perilous had gone crazy fighting each other for so long. They’d spent all that time squabbling over what separated them and none on what they had in common. She had to reverse this mad fight to the death.

  ‘I need you, Kel,’ Meri whispered. By leaving he had shown that he thought she couldn’t do this with him hampering her; the truth was she couldn’t manage it alone.

  ‘Your highness, do you want something?’ asked Leah who was clearing away the dishes from lunch.

  Highness now was it? She supposed her claim being verified had cleared the way to the full panoply of titles. ‘No…actually, yes. This morning I sent a boy down to the kitchens. His name is Daro. Can you please find out what happened to him?’

  ‘The Perilous kid?’

  So the grapevine in the palace worked just fine. ‘His name is Daro. He doesn’t know what he is and I’d like it to stay that way for as long as possible. He needs to be kept calm so his markings don’t flare out again. You said you had family serving in the palace?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Then I would regard it as a great personal favour to me if one of them would look after him.’

  Leah paused. ‘You want to shelter a Perilous, here in the palace?’

  ‘That is what I just said.’

  ‘It’s going to cause trouble.’

  ‘I think it might soon be the least of the troubles I’m going to cause.’

  ‘This means so much to you?’

  ‘Leah, I have to start somewhere changing things, and what was done to that boy, bringing him here, was just wrong. We created this situation; it is our responsibility to get him out of it and leave him better off than he was before.’

  The maid nodded. ‘In that case, I’ll look after him. He can help me with my duties.’

  ‘You’ll do that?’

  ‘Yes, your highness. If I don’t, no one else is going to step forward and offer. It’s better I do it willingly than someone does it because you orde
r them.’

  Meri kneaded her forehead, headache lurking. ‘The kid’s going to think we’re mad. We blindfold him, terrorize him, then give him a weird “health check”. He has to suspect we aren’t what we say we are.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. Lots of people forgive any eccentric behaviour from the super-rich. I’ll keep him busy, and keep him out of the way. Will there be anything else?’ Leah was standing at the door with the loaded tray.

  ‘No, thanks—really, thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’ Leah backed out.

  ‘Make sure he goes to school!’ Meri called as an after-thought.

  School. Meri was very aware that she had been forced to leave at the start of her last year, abandoning her studies in Art, History and Spanish. It didn’t help her self-confidence. Over the last few weeks, she had kept bumping up against her ignorance. She had so many questions but, if she was too obvious in how she went about asking them, some of the things about herself she wished to keep secret would be revealed. She needed to appear to be a normal student following logical enquiries about her inheritance so no alarms were tripped. An added consideration was that she needed to improve her Spanish and quickly if she wanted to keep up with Rio.

  Dr Severn had mentioned he had students.

  Meri went to the coffee table book of photographs of the Jerez region. Checking the index, she found reference to the local university, specializing in ancient history and underwater archeology. It made sense for the Teans to colonize the local places of learning once they decided their headquarters was going to be located here. The unusually well-equipped faculties of the university were likely to be the result of Crown donations so surely they could find a place for her? She leafed to the right page and came across the pictures of the young people gathering in old cloisters in the shadow of the cathedral, listening to lectures in new-built halls, or sitting in front of computers in tech centres and libraries. It looked so normal, and Meri was desperate for something ordinary in what had become an extraordinary existence. If she enrolled, there was the possibility of a secondary bonus: she might even make some friends of her own age who didn’t feel obliged to bow to her.