by J. K. Holt
“No,” Loren said. “I’ll find it. I promise.”
A hand, vice-like in its grip, settled on Loren’s shoulder, while the other rested along the nape of his neck, stroking at the wisps of hair there. “I know you will,” the voice said. “Because you have to.”
The hands detached, the figure gone, and Loren was left on the floor, still searching, searching.
Tess retreated as slowly as she’d entered, withdrawing her tendrils of connection until she again was aware of the wooden boards beneath her knees, her hand still upon Loren’s shoulder. His eyes still flitted back and forth beneath his eyelids, trapped in the dream that Tess had escaped from.
She’d done it. A brief smile of self-satisfaction flitted across her face, but as she turned it dropped just as quickly.
Rosie was crouched a foot to her right, eyes glinting in the dark as her aura swam around her, hostile and pulsing. “What,” she said, her voice low and even, “in the name of the Maker are you doing?”
∞ ∞ ∞
Tess woke Fish as Rosie crept behind, motioning with her hand for him to follow as she slipped wordlessly down the ladder to the stables below. The trio wound their way past dark figures of sleeping horses until they were out of earshot of the rafters above. Tess sat on the cold floor, indicating that the others do the same. Once they’d found their places, she pitched her voice low. “We can talk here without fear of waking Loren.”
“What is it?” Fish asked, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Tess here is just about to explain to us why I found her crouched over Loren’s body a moment ago,” Rosie answered. “Aren’t you?”
Fish turned, confusion writ across his face. “Tess?”
“It isn’t what it looked like,” Tess said to Rosie.
“And just what do you think it looked like?” Rosie said, eyes slanted. “I don’t even know what it looked like. I woke up, looked over and there you were, perfectly still. I thought you were maybe checking his ropes, but then I got closer and… you were just sitting there, like in a trance,” Rosie said. “You were holding his arm like… like he was your lover or something.”
Fish sucked in his breath at the word. Fury burned in his eyes like a flash in a pan, gone as soon as it had arrived. In its place, suspicion settled.
“Listen,” Tess said, desperate to reduce the tension. “I’ll tell you everything, but just know that I’m still on your side. I’ll explain, but I can’t start there, or it won’t make sense.” She shook her head. “I meant to tell you in another way, at the right time.”
“Tell us what?” Fish said.
“The whole story. It takes some time, and a fair amount of convincing.”
Fish and Rosie spared a look at each other, engaging in silent conversation. Finally, they both turned back to her. Rosie settled herself into a cross-legged position while Fish pushed his back against the barn wall, setting his elbows to rest upon his knees. “Ready, then,” he said.
“We’ve got the time,” Rosie added. “And we’ve nowhere else to go at the moment. But this had better be a good story, because you’ll only get one shot.”
Tess shook her head. “Sorry, but I’m getting a strange sense of déjà vu.”
“Déjà what?” Rosie asked.
“Nothing. It just means that I feel like this has happened before. Which, of course, it has, with Gowan and Tulla.”
“So, you’ve told them this story as well,” Rosie said.
“Yes.”
“Then you’ve had practice,” she replied. “So quit stalling.”
∞ ∞ ∞
Tess began at the beginning, the only way she knew how. She started with the most unbelievable part- that she was from another place, in another time, best as she could tell. As a child, she had been normal, and she had been loved. Then her mother died, and in one extreme moment of pain, Tess had somehow transported herself here, though she wasn’t sure precisely how, and had not been able to replicate the event since them. She told them how she’d come to lying on the beach beneath the pier and ventured into town, only to find that everyone in this strange new land glowed with auras they were not themselves aware of.
The two of them listened, slack jawed and eyebrows raised, but offered no counters to her narrative, so she continued.
She skimmed over the non-essential parts, like Gowan taking her in, and her befriending of first Emma, then Ashe, and then the rest of them. She slowed to recount the first person she’d seen who had been blurred, the fisherman Tom Engles.
“I knew he was different, though, before I spoke to him or saw how he acted,” Tess said.
“How?” Fish asked.
“His aura was gone.”
“His aura? This thing you claim we all have?” Rosie asked.
“Yes. Yours swirls with a red tint when you’re angry or suspicious, like it is now. And Fish, yours turns just the slightest bit green sometimes. I think it’s when you’re at your loneliest. But mostly, they’re just a constant thrumming light, as if you have candles burning inside you.”
“And have you met other people without these… auras?” Rosie asked, voice dry.
“Other than myself? No, except for people who have been blurred, like Tom, and Silas Reed. And… I’ve seen a person lose theirs, once.” Tess had been hoping to avoid this, but realized now it was impossible. “Russ. When he was blurred, I watched it swirl out of him.”
At the mention of his name, Rosie came swiftly to her knees. “What did you say?” she hissed.
“The machine Loren used, I think they called it an opprimer. And when the ball, or marble or whatever it is, is inserted, and the machine is used, it pulls the aura off of a person and into the object. Somehow, your auras are connected to what makes you… you. Though I’m not sure how. And the marble can only be used once before it needs to be replaced. They’re collecting the old ones. Loren had a bag full of them in his desk onboard the Blackbirder.”
Rosie looked stricken. “You’re saying our auras detach from us when we’ve been blurred?”
“Yes. I think, as best I can tell, that they’re some essential part of you. When you lose them, it’s like your soul has been pulled from you, or something close to that. I don’t know any other way of putting it,” Tess said, frustrated with her inability to articulate the point better.
“Wait,” Fish said, holding up a hand as if it would stop the madness coming at him from all angles. “Even if we believed you, Tess, which is a big if, how on earth would you know this information about the balls only being used once? And knowing where Loren is keeping them? Did you see it while you were on the ship? I thought you were in the captain’s quarters the whole time.”
“I was,” Tess said. “That’s not how I know what I do about the balls, or only using them once.” She winced. “There’s more, and this part is almost as difficult to believe as what I’ve already told you. I hadn’t told it to Tulla or Gowan, mostly because it didn’t seem my story to tell at the time, though I know I need to share it with you now, and that Dray would understand.”
“Dray?” said Rosie and Fish in unison.
“Yes. Two things happened right after I was kidnapped that I need to tell you, and the second has to do with Dray.”
“Start with the first, then,” Fish sighed.
“Fine. That night, after they’d pulled whatever information they could from me about you all and what you’d been up to, Loren convinced Mr. Winslow that it was too much trouble to blur me and return me to shore,” Tess said.
“So he decided to weigh you down and drop you overboard,” Rosie said, impatient. “You’ve said as much already.”
“Yes, I have. But, first, he blurred me,” Tess said.
“He what?” Fish said.
“Well, he tried to. He put the machine up to the back of my head, and I heard the buzzing noise that it had made before, and then, well, I passed out. But when I woke back up, I was still me. And Loren came back into the roo
m, and it was obvious that he believed I’d been blurred. So, I played the part, which saved my life. He left me alone with Bram, thinking that I was just a shell to dispose of.”
“And then what happened?” Fish was leaning forward, morbid curiosity coloring his features.
Tess shrugged. “You know what happened. Dray showed up. Or, should I say, the both of you did. We jumped off the ship, climbed into the Della, and started for shore.”
“Should I assume that this Bram fellow was left there, dead, on the ship?” Rosie asked.
“Yes,” Tess answered, attempting to ignore the visual image that accompanied her question of his lifeless eyes as his life flowed out of him.
“Wouldn’t it have been best to throw him overboard as well? It might make it a little less clear what happened,” Rosie said. “I mean, if what you’re saying is true, leaving behind a dead lamprey is going to make it pretty clear that you weren’t blurred.”
“There was blood all over the floor, and Bram would have been missing either way,” Tess countered. “But I think we both just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible- there was no telling when Loren, or anyone else, would come into that room next. We were just hoping they’d assume I’d somehow overpowered Bram and jumped. But the water that night was horribly cold, and to try to swim to shore would have been nearly impossible. We’d hoped they would just think I drowned.”
“I can attest to that,” said Fish. “It was frigid that night. It was close just getting them both into Della before they sank from the cold.” He offered Tess a thin smile, and she knew he was reliving the ordeal again. She reached out quickly to grasp his knee in a squeeze, and was surprised when he caught her hand.
Rosie rolled her eyes at their encounter. “You weren’t so lucky, though, were you? Since Loren had enough doubts about you drowning that he was there waiting by the time you returned to the bakery.”
Tess bit back a snarky reply. She gave one last squeeze to Fish’s hand and released it, realizing that their hand-holding would look like Fish was taking sides. Tess couldn’t have Rosie feeling alone in this. She nodded. “Clearly, it didn’t work that neatly. Which leads to the second thing that happened.”
“During the fight, you mean?” Fish asked.
“Yes. At the end, when Dray… well, you remember,” Tess said, turning to Rosie.
Rosie squinted, recalling, and then her eyes widened. “Loren blurred him. Or, at least, it looked that way.”
Reluctant to connect the dots for her, Tess raised an eyebrow quizzically at Rosie. “Do you remember what happened between you knowing that he’d been blurred and then realizing he hadn’t been?”
Rosie considered. “You’d gotten there first, and you were…I think, holding his head? Leaning in. It just looked like you were grieving. I remember it made me right upset in that moment, that you thought you had the right when you’d known him all of a few weeks,” she muttered. “Then you pulled away, and Dray… he was still Dray. Somehow.” She looked at Tess. “You were just sitting there, quiet, even with everything else still happening around you.”
“That’s because I wasn’t there,” Tess said softly.
“What?” Fish asked.
“My body was, but my mind…. When I knew he was blurred, I don’t know. I was desperate, and somehow, I managed to jump into his head. I joined him in the in-between, and I helped him grab ahold and clear the memories that were starting to blur. Together, we kept the machine from working. We kept him Dray. But when I came back to myself, he wasn’t all the way back yet. That’s when I smashed the device,” Tess said. “Remember?”
“That’s right,” Fish said, nodding. “I thought it was in anger, at the time.”
“No,” Tess said. “It was to release the aura that was still swirling in the ball. When the ball broke, the energy, or whatever you want to call it, went back to him. He sucked it up like a sponge. And then he was himself again.”
Fish looked nauseous, Rosie off-kilter. She kept shaking her head back and forth, one corner of her lip turned down as if she smelled something concerning. Neither of them spoke.
Tess knew it had been right to share with them, and that her story was her truth, but it didn’t stop her from feeling like an imposter. For lying as long as she had, and now for what she was asking them to believe.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this seems impossible. I’m almost done.”
“No,” Rosie said, her voice emotionless. “We are done. At least for now.” She stood. “It’s late, and we need to get some sleep before the morning comes. And I need time to think this all through. We can pick up where we left off tomorrow. It can keep.”
Fish looked to Tess for confirmation. She nodded. “Fine, alright.”
Fish stood, giving Tess a hand up. They climbed the ladder in silence, careful not to disturb the still sleeping Loren, and slipped back into the sleeping blankets. Fish cast Tess one last perplexed look before turning over.
Tess assumed she’d never sleep, but it had been cathartic to unburden herself of her secret to the others, and she was exhausted. She slipped off almost immediately.
Chapter Seven
The day started as normally as any of them had since they’d begun their isolated trek across the countryside. Rosie readied the horses while Fish fetched some hard tack for breakfast, and they ate quickly. Fish was, as usual, genial and steady, Rosie curt and aloof.
It was utterly strange. Tess wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but no change in the behaviors of her companions hadn’t been it.
For a span of several minutes, Tess wondered if she’d dreamt the whole confession. Had it just been the product of her exhausted and emotionally weary mind? The idea scared her, and not just because it intimated that she might have finally begun to break from reality, but also that once again she’d have to take up the mantle of anxiety that she’d been carrying alone by keeping her secret. She’d been so relieved to share it, in the end.
Loren, oddly, was the only one who seemed off-kilter. He seemed slightly unable to slip on his smooth, glassy stare and was irritable and sour with the others. His gloominess might have been annoying had it not been so out of character. Tess remembered the dream of his that she’d slipped into, and wondered if his sleep had been plagued by nightmares. That it would be enough to make Loren unsteady made him somewhat more human in Tess’s eyes. She wasn’t sure she liked the perspective shift.
They were now near on seventy miles north of Wharfton, and Rosie consulted a map briefly before they mounted up. She hissed a quiet summons to Tess, too low for the men to hear, and Tess drew nearer.
“We’re coming up on our first real populated area soon- Barrowville, likely tomorrow,” Rosie said, voice pitched low. “What’s worked for us this far isn’t likely to continue once we get into the town limits. Loren’s bound hands may not go unnoticed, and it’s also a good place for him to try and escape. It might be wisest to give it a wide berth. But if we do that, we might not be as likely to find a place to bed. These places we’ve stopped at understand that they’re the only stop for miles, so we haven’t raised suspicion. But being just a short way from proper inns, we’ll draw attention if we try to find lodging elsewhere, especially if we’ve got the coin to pay. They’ll wonder if we’re hiding something. And we do not want to draw attention to ourselves. Loren would use it against us it in a heartbeat.”
She tucked the map back into her saddlebag. “We’ll have to make a decision by tonight. I just wanted to give you time to think about it. I’ll mention it to Fish as well.”
Tess nodded. “Thanks for the heads up.”
Rosie glanced towards the men, frowning. “It’s also worth considering getting rid of Loren.”
Tess cocked her head. “Getting rid of him?”
“You know what I mean. He might become more of a liability soon than he’s worth.”
Tess’s stomach turned at the implication, and she shook her head. “I don’t think so. Not yet.”
Rosie glared at her. “I’m not asking you to do it. No need to worry about getting your hands dirty, I’ll do it myself. Remember you owe me that, Tess, before you get all high and mighty. You gave me your word before I ever agreed to this.”
“I do remember, but it’s not that. I still think Loren can be useful. I think he can lead us right to where we want to go. You have to trust me on this. At least until tonight.”
“Oh?” Rosie said. “And what happens tonight?”
“I’ll finish the story I started with you last night. And then you can make up your own mind.”
A shot of relief hit Tess at the flash of recognition in Rosie’s eyes. She laughed lightly. “I’d half convinced myself I’d imagined telling you. You’ve both been acting so normal.”
Rosie rolled her eyes. “Don’t be so comfortable. I’m not convinced you haven’t lost your mind entirely. But you can count on Fish and I to be discreet. The last thing Loren needs to see is us cracking. You said that, remember? I was listening.”
Tess couldn’t help but smile. “I’m glad.”
“Tonight, we talk,” Rosie said. “But if I do decide you’ve gone crazy, or worse, that you’re just lying…” she trailed off, narrowing her eyes. Tess understood the rest of the message.
I’ll kill you too.
∞ ∞ ∞
Dark, grey clouds burdened the horizon by mid-morning, riding the eastern winds until they loomed directly overhead. Tess could smell snow in the air, the crisp promise of fat white flakes and the magical transformation of the gloomy landscape they now traversed.
But when the clouds finally unburdened themselves, it wasn’t snow but sleet that fell in angry sheets, landing hard and cold on the company. It stung Tess’s face and froze in tiny crystals along her eyelashes and Tommy’s mane. The sound of it was all they heard, the hard tic tac of it hitting the ground and the trees around them.
