The Black Rose

by James Bartholomeusz

  Jack’s laugh was lost as another house smashed into the hull.

  “So what happened to you, then?” he called into Ruth’s ear having righted himself.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “And who are all these people?”

  “That’s also a long story. Do you think I could explain when we’re not facing imminent death?”

  “Fair enough.”

  A final slab of stone crashed off the top of the ship, and they were clear of the city. That did nothing to quell Jack’s anxiety, however. The Aterosa was ripping apart the planet bit by bit. Before them, the sea had risen into an impossibly high tidal wave, drawn, like everything else, to the center of the Cathedral. The sky swiftly vanished as they hurtled towards the immense wall.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Adâ screamed over the increasingly deafening noise of rushing water.

  “The only way out is through,” Vince yelled. “We’re about to test the definition of submarine. Everyone, hold on!”

  Ruth slipped her hand into Jack’s and squeezed. He returned the gesture, his knuckles white.

  They were close enough to see the froth.

  The Golden Turtle blasted into the tidal wave, and everything went black.

  The early summer sunshine warmed the grass of the orchard, and a slight breeze rustled the branches of the trees by the side of the road. A few cars passed, and a dog roamed around the base of some bushes, its owner strolling behind. Two teenage girls in school uniforms sat on the green, their legs outstretched.

  “Here they come,” Lucy said, nodding ahead. Two figures were strolling towards them: the tall, prematurely muscular figure of Alex and the shorter, skinnier one of Jack.

  “Oh God, that kid’s tagged along too,” the other replied exasperatedly. “I thought this was meant to be just the two of you?”

  “We didn’t say. And don’t be mean.”

  Her friend gasped dramatically. “Come on, Lucy. He just doesn’t leave Alex alone. I know they live together, but still…”

  “He’s really sweet. He’s a bit shy, but he’s really nice once you get to know him. Are you sure you don’t want to stick around?”

  Her friend got to her feet and, dusting the grass off her skirt, pulled the strap of her bag over her shoulder. “Definitely don’t want to now. If you and Alex get close, then I’m going to be left with the other one.”

  “He’s not the other one. His name’s Jack.”

  “Whatever.” Her friend rolled her eyes and walked towards the road, her bag bobbing at her side.

  Lucy composed herself, brushing her fingers through her fringe and smoothing her shirt. In another couple of moments, the boys had reached her. Alex had changed out of his school uniform into a Topman T-shirt and jeans—his hair looked as if it had been recrafted since the morning as well. Jack had remained in his flannel trousers and blazer, tie still on and top button still done up.

  They spent the remainder of the afternoon sitting in the orchard. Lucy did most of the talking, with Alex intermittently laughing. Jack barely spoke at all, occupying his time pulling up the grass bit by bit. When the sun dipped over the trees and shadows slipped over the grass, Lucy excused herself on account of dinner. She hugged Alex, said good-bye to Jack, and headed off towards the road.

  Alex and Jack hung around a little longer. Alex lit a cigarette, the end fizzling orange in the darkness, and Jack had a couple of puffs. He hadn’t yet got the hang of it. It took all his effort to not break out into an embarrassing splutter.

  “She seems nice,” he managed eventually.

  Alex nodded noncommittally and stubbed the cigarette out in one of the dirt patches Jack had cleared. The two hauled themselves to their feet.

  “Do you think there’s anything there?”

  “Maybe. By the way, try and talk more when girls are around. They’re not monsters.”

  Jack shrugged as the two of them sauntered back towards the orphanage.

  Less than a year later, Alex had disappeared.

  Chapter IX

  the new world

  One day later, The Golden Turtle broke into the sunlight.

  The impact of the tidal wave had tossed the ship sideways, and a considerable amount of the navigational equipment had gone down. They had been lost in a matrix of water, foam blasting all around them. Vince had piloted them onwards blindly. When it had become clear nothing drastic was about to happen, they had relaxed a little.

  The ship was indeed full to the breaking point with refugees from Nexus, many of them wounded. Ruth and Quentin had organized for all the medical resources on board to be brought out and administered, but there were still far too few to go around. Jack had been horrified by some of the injuries: limbs were missing, some people couldn’t walk, and in some places such damage had been caused that faces were barely recognizable.

  He had seen little of the Apollonians once they had dispersed around the ship. For once, Sardâr’s wounds hadn’t been the most pressing, so he’d been swept up in the tide of people requiring medical attention. The others had set to work distributing food and blankets and working on the injuries they could manage. To his quiet satisfaction, Jack had managed to mend several broken bones with alchemy and even reset someone’s dislocated jaw. He had left the more serious problems to Quentin and the other trained medics.

  He had worked in silence mostly. He’d never been good at meeting new people and could not begin to think what he might say to these inhabitants of Nexus who seemed to have almost accidently been picked up.

  He’d also been conscious that he still hadn’t managed to properly see Lucy, but they both had more pressing matters to attend to, and the mere thought of trying to find her amongst the crowd had been daunting.

  There were also far too few cabins for the number of passengers. Jack, like the others, had volunteered to sleep in the corridor, huddled in a blanket on the thin carpet. With the ordinary ship routines suspended because of lack of space, there had been no semblance of day or night. He had awoken several times, trying to find a comfortable position, and lapsed back into uneasy sleep before he’d given up and gone to keep Vince company.

  He was on the command deck when they finally broke through the water. They had glimpsed a glow in the distance a few hours earlier and steered towards it. It had grown steadily brighter until their view through the glass dome had been filled with churning waves shot through with amber. Only minutes after shapes had swum into vision beyond, with a frothing that vibrated the ship like a gigantic mobile phone, they burst out of the waves and into bright air.

  Jack had to blink several times to check that his eyes were still working. What he saw made so little sense in relation to where they had been. They were soaring through the air, sky expanding upwards and beyond them. The earth was not far below. His instant thought was of a documentary he had once seen about the African savannah: grasslands of yellow and green rolled out below them, shrubs and trees scattered around, blue hills rising into the clouds in the distance. Herds of figures were shifting on the ground—they could have been antelope or something similar.

  Jack and Vince exchanged looks of incomprehension.

  “I suppose you don’t have any more idea of what’s going on than I do?”

  “Not at all.”

  The next few minutes were a flurry of activity. As they arrived on deck, each Apollonian’s expression changed from identical exhaustion to varied ones of shock. There was no question as to whether or not they would land. All of them were dispatched to spread the word around the ship, whilst Vince piloted The Golden Turtle onto the grass. Moments later, they began a mass exodus, the passengers clambering or being hoisted one by one out of the top hatch and to the ground.

  Jack’s first reaction was that this place and Nexus could not be more different. It was warm—hot, actually—and the air was fresh and unpolluted. From what he could see, the passengers were having a similar reaction. Astounded as they were, he caught his first glimpses
of smiles amongst those who had already disembarked. He wondered when any of them had last smiled: something he took for granted almost every day must have been an extreme scarcity in the dark metropolis of Nexus.

  It took almost an hour to get everyone off the ship, by which time the sun had risen higher in the sky and the air had become oppressively heavy. As there seemed to be no people or settlements anywhere around them, on Hakim’s suggestion they began constructing some shelters.

  Even with the aid of alchemy, Jack was still hopeless at this. He had once put up a tent on a camping trip and failed so badly as to not only render his own unusable but also impale someone else’s canvas with a metal pole. This wasn’t much better.

  Adâ located a spot between five trees, and she and Hakim set to work. As gently as possible, they removed the current occupants of the space—what turned out to be several hare-like creatures and something that looked a little too much like an anaconda for Jack’s liking. Adâ and Hakim formed a pile of grass between them, arms outstretched, working in tandem. The grass blades rose off the ground in concert. Within minutes, something like a roof had been bound into the top of the trees, rendering an area of precious shade under which everyone took refuge.

  Despite their new locale, the rest of the day passed much like the previous one. The medical and food stores on board hadn’t been completely exhausted, so the Apollonians, besides Sardâr, continued their work. Jack even chatted with some of the refugees, learning names and lightly speculating about where they might be. Though no one seemed to have the slightest idea what it was or how they’d got there, there was something about this new place that lifted his spirits. For the first time since before they had reached Albion, he was beginning to feel cautiously optimistic about their situation.

  It was only when the sun dropped to dye the sky rich ochre and crimson, when the shadows of the trees lengthened and star-scattered blue began to emerge above them, that the Apollonians finished their work for the day and had a chance to talk to each other.

  Jack had just collected his allocated meal from The Golden Turtle when he heard a cry of happy surprise from the shelter. Craning his neck to see where it had come from, he caught sight of Ruth and an elderly refugee pulling her into an embrace. She appeared as nonplussed as Jack was.

  “I thought I knew your face,” the man exclaimed, pulling away but maintaining a grip on her shoulder as if she was likely to run off at any moment. “How many years can it have been?”

  “I don’t think I know…” Ruth began, but then trailed off as she clapped her hand to her mouth in recognition. “Hang on, I do remember. You were at my parents’ house, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” the man replied, tears seeping into the corners of his wrinkled eyes. “Little Ruth, look how much you’ve grown!”

  Still not having any clue what was going on, Jack lost the thread of the conversation. He had just spotted Lucy, who sat with her back against a tree. Brushing the dirt off his trousers to little effect, he shuffled over. She didn’t seem to see him until he was very close, and he even had to greet her to shake her out of her reverie.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Oh, Jack. I’m, I’m okay…” She scooted over to make room for him.

  He slumped onto the grass next to her. He could tell why she’d chosen this spot: the view clear of the silhouetted Turtle, the full fabric of the sky opened out before them across the plains.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment, just listening to the noises of the evening savannah.

  “Where do you think this place is?” Jack ventured.

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so.” Her voice remained flat, and she didn’t look at him.

  This was very unlike Lucy, he thought, but then, he had not seen her for what must have been about a month now. She had gone to two other worlds in that time and been captured. Snatching a glance at her now, he realized her injuries were not insignificant: bruises and cuts covered her exposed skin, and blood was dried into the back of her tunic. When he had left her back in Thorin Salr, she had been so confident, just finding her feet in a place so unlike her home. That confidence now seemed to have entirely evaporated.

  “Is everything okay? Do you want to talk about anything?”

  She took a moment to answer him. “No. Not now. Thanks, though.” After another pause, she hauled herself to her feet. “I think I’ll try and get some sleep.”

  “Okay, well, good…” She was out of earshot before he could finish his sentence.

  He remained under the tree, watching the sunset whilst he ate his dinner alone, and allowed his mind to wander.

  The last time he could remember doing this was the day all these events had been set in motion: the day he had first glimpsed Inari on the edge of the orchard. He had gone home and sat in his room to eat burnt baked beans. He’d thought he’d been exhausted then, but now he really knew the meaning of the word. And yet, though he was concerned about Lucy and the others injured, and though he knew nothing about the world they were in or how they had got there, he felt strangely peaceful. In this state of mental tiredness, he couldn’t even begin to start thinking through the implications of what had happened in the last few days. For now, he was just content to relax and let sleep come to him.

  The last rays descended over the horizon, leaving a faint amber haze along the line of the distant ground. As though the sun had pulled with it a veiling from the sky, stars began to appear in the dome overhead. Jack had heard that, in entirely uninhabited places with no kind of light pollution, the night sky was like this—and he wasn’t disappointed. Thousands if not millions of jewels glimmered in the gloom, arranged in wreaths and plumes of constellations, each one a slightly different brightness to all the others. To describe the night as dark or black would have been a huge simplification: it was alight with subtle shades of blue and purple.

  “This is the second time I’ve caught you stargazing.” He didn’t have to look up to know it was Ruth. “You’re a lot less apologetic this time.”

  He laughed a little. “There are loads more of them out tonight. Maybe it’s just where we are.” Then, reminded of the conversation he had overheard, he said, “What did that guy mean about recognizing you? And what was that about your parents?”

  “Of course, I haven’t had a chance to tell you.” She sat beside him in the spot Lucy had been occupying. She explained everything, from leaving the cell where they had all been captured to her sudden remembrance in the Precinct below.

  “And that man, Methuselah, knew my parents—knew me. He was able to tell me what this means.” She rolled up the sleeve on her right arm to expose the lion tattoo furling out from her bicep. “My parents were part of an underground revolutionary organization. They were trying to overthrow the Cult. This was their symbol so they could know who was and wasn’t involved.”

  “But the Cult got them?”

  She smiled sadly. “Yep. That’s what I remember from before. The Cult broke into our house, but I managed to escape. I think I must have fallen through some kind of portal, because I somehow ended up in the ocean where The Golden Turtle picked me up, with my memory gone.”

  Jack didn’t really know what to say. It was a lot to take in for him, let alone for Ruth. “So you’re still an orphan, then?”

  She broke into a giggle. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to desert you on that score. But it does mean I can’t really think of Ishmael as my dad, now that I remember my real parents.”

  Jack pondered this for a moment. “I think you can. I mean, you remember your biological parents now, but that doesn’t undo what Ishmael did for you. He’s still your dad, really, isn’t he?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Have we got any idea where we are yet?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but I’ve just spoken to Hakim and he says he’s got a theory. He’s going to get everyone together for a meeting tomorrow to talk about it
and what we do now. We’ve also got in contact with the other Apollonians. They’re going to be here tomorrow too.”

  “And the Cult?”

  “Nothing. No idea what’s happened to Nexus, either. Some of the crew have been trying to trace our journey, but we can’t make any sense of it. It’s literally vanished from all our readings.”

  Jack nodded. He felt as though he should be contemplating this conundrum, but he was too tired. The night was far from cold, yet Ruth moved a little closer to him. She leaned her head on his shoulder. They sat in silence for a few minutes, hearing only slight rustlings from the undergrowth and the shelter somewhere behind them.

  She shifted, and he glanced at her. She had turned her head to look up at him, and at that angle her eyes captured and twinned the myriad starlight. They held each other’s gaze a moment longer. Then her eyes closed as their lips pressed together in a kiss.

  Chapter X

  nduino

  It was the following morning, and as far as they knew everyone on the entire planet was clustered in the shelter. Lying, sitting, or standing, depending on each one’s injuries, they were arranged in a semicircle around Hakim. The only person not awake and attentive was Sardâr. Amongst all those wounded, only his case had seen no improvement. He was feverish, having lapsed in and out of sleep throughout the previous day and night, and now lay in pale unconsciousness behind Hakim, wrapped in a thin blanket. Standing between Ruth and Adâ near the back of the assembly, Jack couldn’t help thinking of a dissection demonstration: Hakim the doctor and Sardâr the unlucky cadaver.

  True to Ruth’s words, the dimension ships carrying other Apollonians had arrived just as the sun was coming up. Within half an hour, what seemed to be the whole cohort materialized in a series of light-infused sonic booms sending shock waves through the makeshift camp.

  Jack recognized a couple of faces but not all of them: Charles, his wheelchair strapped into one of the cargo areas, and the man who had been on the laptop back on Apollo Hill. He realized that, though he had pledged himself to the Apollonians’ cause, he had actually met very few of his fellow agents. There were dozens of them, and he was struck by just how diverse they were: a mixture of humans, elves, and dwarves, and now, with Dannie, a token fairy as well. One notable absence was King Thorin. Jack wondered whether he had heard the news of his nephew Bal’s fate and whether this lack of attendance was for that reason.