Yet a breath away, on the other side of that simple, solid wall, wait my stars. When will I ever see the stars again? Just thinking of it, fear tries to cut off my air supply. Closing my eyes, I imagine the other side of that barrier. The breeze reaches out its hand to me, and the sand longs for the feel of my bare feet. When I see the earth again, when I have sold all that they have given me to these criminals for cheap, will I still be greeted as a friend? Why should I be? A friend who walks about your house and robs you of one treasured thing after another is no friend at all. I was trusted. I was allowed into a quiet, sacred world only to have lowered the drawbridge to those who would destroy it.
Stepping into my vision, she tilts her head toward the door. “Let’s go.” She gives a soft smile. “Don’t make me throw you over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes.” Her petite form and strappy shoes on stilts could never manage that, but I don’t miss the threat behind it. All it would take would be her summoning the musclemen from the kidnapping with their sleeping darts and I would be easily moved. Yet I don’t budge.
“You ask too much. I told you my story, as you asked. But more than that . . . no. I can’t help your kind. I won’t.” I try to make my words firm, not at all the voice of the prisoner I am.
“Let me tell you something, Joanna.” She leans in. “Can I call you Jo? How about Anna?”
I shoot daggers at her unbearably beautiful face.
She just chuckles. “Joanna it is, then. Your loved ones—they are not ‘more than’ dead. They are still steps away from being truly dead. When someone truly dies, there is an absoluteness to it. A finality. You will never make another memory with that person again. The rest of us in the world just have to face that fact.” Her eyes flutter down for the briefest moment, then are back on me. “All deaths are like this—except in your case. You can be with them again.”
I don’t answer, but I do turn to face her.
“Sometimes you just have to take the best option you’ve got, and let’s face it—you only have a couple. Keep your knowledge to yourself—fine, whatever. But then you will never see them again. Never use your magic again. Until you die, the Academy will be the only home you know.
“Or . . . or you can open up to us. No matter what you think of us, we aren’t devil worshippers, we aren’t spawn of the underworld. We are researchers. With unconventional methods, I’ll give ya that. But all we want is to learn from Magic Ones like yourself. Tell us how you do magic. Let us study you as you transform, put your feathers and fur under a microscope to look at how the DNA shifts. Give us everything we need to know about how the earth does it and how science can replicate it, and that’s it. Go home. I want you to make it home.”
There is no comfort in her words, no spark of hope lit inside me. I have never felt more empty in body, mind, and soul. Every part of me is silent and chilled, fragile autumn leaves coated in frost. There is no “best option” here. Only the one I can live with. I have to find my way home. What’s the point of having a beating heart if I never again see those who matter most to me? I miss Mama and Leo and every other face I’ve ever known so fiercely, the missing seems palpable, as if I could lift a hand and feel it encasing my heart, coating my skin. Life without them isn’t an option. So it is that the road to heaven leads me straight through hell.
I nod once and let my gaze fall to the ground. She leads the way toward the door, and as I follow her, my eyes pull back to the wall that was just a window. To where my stars wait. “I am so sorry,” I mouth through dry lips to the earth out there somewhere. Each breath, rather than calming me, only raises my grief higher and higher until on the inside, I’m on tiptoes with chin up, gasping to keep from being completely submerged in it.
Yet I know I won’t stop. I’ll tell them what they need to know. I will let them record every memory and lock those moments away to dissect. It may leave me with a half-life, no longer to be able to soar and run with animal speed, for I’m certain that for my betrayal, I will lose magic forever. But an entire lifetime spent within these walls is hardly a life worth fighting for. I have to get out of here—I have to get home. If this is what it takes, I will do it.
I will see the stars again.
A single tear slides down my cheek and catches in the edge of my lip. Softly, I find my voice. “At home, they didn’t call us ‘Magic Ones,’ as you do.” I pause and pull my gaze away from the wall. She stands at the doorway, waiting for me. Meeting her eyes, I continue, a rock settling on my chest. “Shaman. They called us Shaman.”
___
“There’s the ability to dissolve language barriers, making everyone in the room speak and understand the same language no matter their nationality. Think of how this would broaden the business world! How it could simplify politics!
“There is ‘blinking,’ which is transporting in the blink of an eye short distances along wind currents. Our reliance on vehicles would evaporate!
“Then there is the most enticing one of all—healing, which in a matter of hours can restore an individual riddled with disease to full health.”
At those words, my thoughts go immediately to my father. As our meeting commences, hospice nurses attend to him, for when someone is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, you can pray for a miracle all you want, but that person is going to die.
Or so I had believed.
Smothering my first impression, I slightly nod. Perhaps this is the miracle we hadn’t dared pray for.
“And how exactly, Dr. Richardson,” I hear myself asking, “do you propose we do this?”
ELEVEN
The Californian Remains, July 2048 A.D.
“I know you must feel like you’ll lose your mind cooped up here, but I can’t imagine a lovelier place to go crazy,” Azure says as she opens the door.
My next breath steals away from me. I’m impulsively drawn forward into a ballroom of sorts, every bit of it filled with royalty. One look, and their elegant clothing tell me that I am in the presence of kings and queens from every reach of the world. “Exquisite” doesn’t begin to cover it, and “fancy” is a ridiculous understatement. Each mill about, most with bubbling glasses of different hues in their hands, their eyes half closed in a way that makes them seem asleep even though they are awake. Their skin varies in more shades than I knew skin came in, and their clothing announces where they are from, all obviously very far from the Tuscan home I had always known. The cloth boasts the richest hues—crimsons like the close of day, jades like mountain pools, sapphires like the sky of a peaceful morning. I can’t help but think of the earth as I look at them, and as breathtaking as the imitation is, it only makes my soul ache for the genuine original. If anything takes my breath from me, it’s the paralyzing thought that no matter what they promise, I may never see those genuine originals again.
Spotted among the nobility, like drops of dark ink on a bright tapestry, it is easy to pick out Them. Our kidnappers. Like Azure’s clothes, their garb fits as perfectly as skin, in differing shades of dirty snow. It is as if any color, along with the rest of their humanity, has been leached away. They chat with the nobility, but something about how they stand, how their eyes flit about, how chiseled their smiles seem, tells me that they are on the peripheral of the conversations surrounding them.
“Go on. Check it out.” Azure gestures with her head, hand on hip, then lingers behind me as I step closer, unable to resist taking it all in. The immense room in front of me could easily fit the Duomo di Firenze from home inside it. We are standing upon a middle balcony, and on either side of me, two enormous stairways waterfall in a spiral from an upper floor. They touch down here, each step suspended in the air and lit with a white luster, then continue flowing onto the ground floor. I walk to the balcony’s edge, and looking so high up that my chestnut waves cascade down the length of my back, I see a crisscross of intricate arches cover the ceiling. Where the arches intersect, stupendous lights swoop low, large enough that a child would enjoy playing upon them. They looked like magnificent g
olden dandelions that traded in their white puffs for the light of a single star at each end. It’s strange to me that as far as these people would like to take us from the earth, they can’t seem to create their own beauty without using it to inspire them.
As I look down to the floor below, Azure steps beside me. She motions to the throngs of people lounging in lush chairs or basking around tables of splashy, vibrant foods. It strikes me how young everyone is in the room. I don’t see anyone even as old as Mama. Perhaps, it occurs me to me, this is why they took me and Alessio, but left Cristoforo.
“We call this room the Forum.” Azure’s voice interrupts my thoughts. “A term inspired by Italians such as yourself. We come here to discuss and learn from each other. See any ball-and-chains here, Joanna? Anyone look starved and deprived to you?” I don’t respond because the feeling of light gaiety hanging sweetly in the air, like overripe fruit on a vine, answers for itself. “So many of these people came from poverty in their country. The clothes we supply each person with is the finest in their country so they can feel at ease, but also immensely valued. We want to treat you the finest you’ve ever been treated in hopes that you will put your time-traveling prejudices aside and see that we are just people. Like you. Then we can work together in harmony. Can’t you just feel the camaraderie?”
“You’ve drugged them.” It’s the only way people who have been ripped from all they love could be so calm.
She shakes her head. “No, this is just what being carefree looks like. Don’t worry—you’ll get there,” she says, as if this will comfort me. “At The Academy no one goes around looking like someone spat in their Cheerios for forever.”
I’m not sure what she meant, but I’m fairly certain it was a taunt. I pinch my lips and look away.
“This way,” she instructs, a tilt of a song in her voice. There are no doors in sight, only arches leading down hallways, and I start to follow her toward one. A few drones hover above the heads of the people, many lowering trays of fresh glasses when the people’s drinks become empty or zipping out of sight without ever spilling their loads of food until only the rich scents linger behind.
Stepping amongst the throng, I feel the boney grip of loneliness about my neck, but it’s different than at home. In Italy, it was the lack of people who truly knew me that left the sharp ache in my chest. Here, everyone understands magic on some level, but as I walk through them, no one looks at me, no one lifts their eyes to connect with mine, no one wants to remember how it felt to be in my shoes. I walk amongst them, gaze down and clothing dull, and it seems to me that at home, I might have been utterly invisible, but here I am completely visible and utterly ignored. The fingers of loneliness dig their nails into my throat until only tiny gasps are escaping.
As we walk, I notice Azure’s eyes halt upon one woman with skin a honeyed brown and hair in two braids of pure ebony. She is not quite old, though undoubtedly older than anyone else here, and dark sunspots that the young do not have dot her skin. Though she is dressed lavishly like all the others, on her the clothes don’t seem grand at all, but like an adult being forced to play a child’s costume game—and she is not entertained. An unusual number of mentors linger around the woman, eyes untrusting. It strikes me that while the other mentors in the room stand with a boldness of someone totally in command and certain of their abilities, something about this woman strips those near her of that confidence. They move too much, overly aware of what their hands are doing, the composure the others oozed now evaporated. Perhaps she feels the weight of my gaze like a hand upon her, for she turns her head and looks straight at me.
The seriousness of her stare unnerves me, or perhaps her eyes always look this way. Yet after a moment, she sends me a smile—the opposite of all the other smiles here. She shows no teeth—in fact, her face barely changes at all except for her eyes, which turn to little half-moons. I like it better than all the bubbly grins surrounding me on all sides. I smile back, my first smile in days, and feel loneliness loosen its grasp on my neck. Here, I am certain, is someone who understands me. But then glancing at Azure, I see that she has not slowed, and I must look away and pick up my pace to catch up.
Coming close, I hear Azure speaking, and realize she hadn’t noticed I’d fallen behind.
“. . .Great California Earthquake of 2032, which sank most of the state of California into the ocean. It was horrible—millions of people died. Seems like everyone knew someone affected by it. The entire country was shaken up and grieving. But in its wake, Dr. Gadian Richardson began the Academy. At first, it only recruited modern-day Magic Ones, and it soon became apparent that almost every single one had something to contribute to our research. In only a couple of years, using what we learned from Magic Ones, the Academy had found a cure for the common cold, which in my book is one of the greatest breakthroughs in western civilization right up there with the printing press and disposable diapers. It was their cure for HIV, however, that won Dr. Richardson the Pulitzer. Take my word for it—that’s a big deal. Even our ability to scientifically harness the powers of time travel has come, in part, from the research the Academy did upon Magic Ones who were in the act of time traveling through the earth.”
“You forced Shaman to time travel? Just so you could study them?” My mouth turns dry as dust. The cost of a soul means nothing to these people, though I can only believe that the earth would not punish them if they were forced.
“Not me. That research was conducted a few years before I came here,” she defends casually. The hallway we come to is lined with doors, and Azure stops suddenly and motions for me to go first.
“Yours is the one on the left. And this . . .” She lifts a necklace from her palm that I hadn’t noticed her carrying. “. . .is your key.” It shines as if a jewel, though no call of the earth comes from it, of course. They’ve made it appear like delicate jade roughly the size of my thumbnail. “It unlocks your door and any room you are permitted to go into, and is your ticket to get food and drinks. Keep it on you at all times.”
“And if I lose it?”
She shrugs. “Feel free to sleep on the hallway floor and go hungry.” At my shocked face, she laughs. “Oh, don’t you worry! Just keep it around your neck and you won’t lose it. No one does.”
With a yellow churning in my stomach, I obediently clasp it around my neck, knowing full well the control this gives Them, but unsure what else to do. Azure beckons me toward the door, and as I draw near, I hear a distinct click as it unlocks. It has no handle, and Azure pushes the door back so I can walk in first.
As I step forward, it occurs to me that never before, not for a single moment, have I personally known such abundance. The room is domed, cupping us in its palm. Across the high ceiling, indigo swirls dance and curtsy to their gold diamond partners in stunning formation. We stand on a main landing with a lush sofa and table laden with a bottle of wine and a huge platter of food. I can see slices of bread and cheeses, colorful sweets, and a meat of sorts that begs to be dipped in the sauce sitting next to it. White wisps etch themselves into the air above the meat, sending its scent to caress my senses. At home, this much food would be expected to feed Mama and me for several days at least.
All my life, when I would enter a room, the earth’s voice would call to me from the wooden tables and chairs, the stone hearths, the water boiling in a pot. To see all this and yet not to hear one note of its song calling to me is like losing a sense.
To our left and right, two more landings bubble off the first, each containing an immense bed with chifferobe and vanity.
“Come look at this.” Azure walks toward one landing and opens the chifferobe. “The way to a man’s heart may be food, but the way to a woman’s is . . . clothes!” With each hand, she grabs a ball gown and drapes them onto the bed next to her. “Tailor-made just for you, my dear.” As I come closer, I can see that several more hang in the chifferobe, each arrayed with the exquisite beauty of wildflowers. “Here, feel how soft.” Azure lifts the skirt of on
e until it’s under my fingers, breaking the barrier that had always separated me from those elect few who could enjoy such luxuries.
“These are mine?” I can’t keep the astonishment from my voice, and Azure grins.
“All yours. Here, check these out.” She steps back so I can take in the remaining hanging gowns. There are laces as delicate as spider webs, vivid hues of mock jewels, fabrics as soft and sensual as a kiss.
I run my fingers over them, but it’s like touching a harp and hearing no sound. For all the extravagance, the entire room can’t get me distracted enough not to notice how it lays in front of me like a queen in a casket. It may be flawlessly beautiful, but everything about it is cold and silent. “Why did you bring me here?” I whisper.
Azure just looks up from the dresses.
“If you have Shaman in your time, why did you kidnap me?”
Azure sighs, sitting on the bed, splaying the skirt of one gown over her lap. “Every single Magic One seemed to have something to contribute, but the problem was there were so few Magic Ones left. They were nearly extinct.”
“Why would the Earth give its abilities any less often?”
“Well . . .” She leans back and rubs her lip. “My thinking is that the magical abilities are still out there, but the belief in them is really what went extinct. Why work to cultivate a trait that has been believed to be mythical? You look like a crazy person. You may as well believe you’re a grapefruit or live on Jupiter.”
“But it is real.”
She just nods before continuing. “There were only a few hundred Magic Ones at the Academy at first. We learned all we could from them, and it was the morale booster our country needed. The government wanted the work to continue, but there were only so many individuals to study. When a time machine was invented, the government of the United States of America—the country you are in now—bought it and granted its use to the Academy. We were instructed to retrieve more subjects throughout time. I know it seems unfair, but look at the bigger picture. Our end game is to eradicate all disease and illness from the world. Just think of that. There are suffering third-world countries where every day, people face the possibility of death. To relieve them of that burden? That’s a freedom that was never before even dreamed of.”
They Called Us Shaman Page 7
