Children of Zero

by Andrew Calhoun

  For three days, Janx had been weighing her options as a method of taking her mind off the torment. The first option was to just kill herself and be done with it. Despite now being a cripple stranded on a deserted island, she had almost immediately rejected the suicide option.

  Beneath the pain seethed hatred for Saeliko and a pure desire for revenge. She was going to dig that woman’s cursed heart right out of her chest with a rusted fisherwoman’s knife.

  Janx very keenly understood what most romanticists had for millennia failed to appreciate, that if you were able to measure the motivational power of love and hate in their purest forms, hate would always triumph. To think otherwise was to both deceive yourself and make yourself vulnerable.

  Therefore, despite her injury, Janx had found within herself the motivation to not only live, but to get off this cursed fleck of sand and jungle on the outskirts of the Sollian.

  Of course, from Janx’s perspective, Butterfly Island wasn’t truly uninhabited. There was one other unlucky soul they had left behind: the one-handed man in the orange suit. At first, she had just ignored him. He was irrelevant and would probably do just fine wasting away here on the island without her assistance. However, it was on this third day that she had come to realize that he was as equally motivated as she was to (a) survive and (b) change locales.

  This realization stemmed from the fact that his actions had thus far mirrored her own. During the first two days, once they had both overcome the physical shock of having gone through hand removal and the subsequent surgery, they had both focused on finding fresh water and something to eat. Fortunately, that wasn’t nearly as hard as it would have been on other islands in the region. However, on the third day, both Janx and the stranger had begun pulling pieces of wood and vine out of the jungle and onto the beach, revealing to one another that they had both come to the conclusion that unless they were willing to wait for the boundaries of civilization to expand and absorb Butterfly Island into its circumference, a raft would have to be constructed if they ever wanted to get back in the swing of things.

  Without a word spoken, they had begun to cooperate, piling their wood in the same spot on the beach. And while this was going on, Janx saw that this man had a fire lit under his ass. He rarely stopped to take a rest despite the agony that he must have been feeling.

  He must really hate someone, Janx thought.

  It was now the afternoon of the third day, and the two of them were taking a brief respite back in the shade of the windmark tree where they had originally been deposited. Janx took a closer look at the man, her interest levels rising.

  He was a tall man, though she had seen much taller. He had taken off the orange suit and was now just wearing a funny-looking pair of light-fabric pants. His body wasn’t overly skinny – he was somewhat barrel-chested and his shoulders were wide enough – but there wasn’t any fat on him. She saw muscle rippling on top of bone, and little else. In Janx’s estimation, this was a man who was obsessed with his hatred to such an extent that he had long since lost an appreciation for food and alcohol. As men went, this made him a dangerous one.

  His hair was just silly, all twisted up in long, funny-looking coils that flopped about his head like a dead animal. However, his face was anything but funny. He had a hawkish nose that hooked downward at the end, and the pale skin on his cheeks and brow was blemished with pock marks. Most of all, it was his eyes that conveyed the fact that he was not a man who would laugh easily; there was wrath within those light brown eyes.

  Eventually, Janx finally decided that she would talk to him.

  “Do you speak Maelian?” she asked him.

  “Yes, I do.” His voice imparted an inner strength that masked the pain he must have felt in his body as a result of the past few days.

  Well, that’s a pleasant surprise, she thought. “What is your name?”

  “Seventy-two,” he responded. She would have thought he were joking had she not already thoroughly gauged his character from his appearance.

  “That is not a name.”

  “I was not given a name in the same way that you were.”

  “Why not?”

  He paused, apparently considering how to respond. He looked at her and wiped away the sweat from his pocked brow. “It would be difficult for you to understand,” he eventually told her.

  “Try me.”

  “I don’t think you would like my explanation, even were I to give it to you.”

  Again, she pushed aside the urge to hurt this man. “That makes no sense. Why would I not like an explanation of your name?”

  “Well,” he said, pausing briefly to consider his words, “because the truth of my name and the truth of who I am must necessarily deny some of what you think is the truth.”

  “The sun is going to your head,” she surmised.

  “My mind is clear.”

  “Well, go on then,” she urged. “We’ve got the time.”

  The man picked up a handful of sand in his right hand – his only hand – and let the grains slowly slip through his fingers, sending four trickling showers back down onto the beach. He tilted his head at an awkward angle so he could better watch the mini-cascades tumbling down, his eyes scanning for something, some hidden meaning.

  “In this place,” he finally began, eyes returning to her and then scanning the scenery around them, “you believe in twenty-nine different goddesses and gods.”

  “The Five and Twenty-four,” she stated. “The separation is important.”

  “It’s not important, actually.”

  “Why is that?” she asked, half amused and half annoyed.

  “Because they don’t exist.”

  “Ah, I can see where this is going already. You’re an apostate.”

  “Apostate?”

  “Truth deniers,” she explained. “You refuse to believe in the Five and Twenty-four, which is actually fairly ironic given where you came from.”

  “You know where I came from?”

  “You came from that thing in the sky. I saw it fall into the sea. You were inside of it, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was, but I don’t see how that makes me ironic.”

  “Of course you don’t, because you’re an apostate. The reason your denial of the Five and Twenty-four is ironic is because they are the only beings who could have created a machine that roars through the skies with people inside. You were a passenger on a machine built by divine entities that you refuse to believe in. That is the epitome of irony.”

  He laughed. “Yes, I see it now. I hadn’t considered how it would look from your point of view.”

  “I pity you,” she said.

  “Oh? Why do you pity me?” He was still smiling, an effect that Janx found discomforting. Smiling really didn’t suit this man. It felt like he was putting on a mask to distract people from the seriousness that resonated from his persona.

  “Your lack of faith.”

  “My lack of faith? No, I think you misunderstand me,” he rebutted. “I don’t lack faith.” The smile was gone now, replaced with the previous intensity. “On the contrary, I am a man of deep faith, a faith that you would not be able to comprehend.”

  “Oh,” she said. She now realized she had been wrong in calling him an apostate. “You’re a cultist. Maybe even one of those one-god wretches. I’ve met people like you before.” She decided to prod him a bit, just to see how he would react. “In fact, I’ve killed your kind before.”

  “Yes, you’re a Saffisheen, aren’t you? Your tattoo. I was told about your people. A military caste from the Concord of Mael. Tell me, is it true that when Saffisheen are selected as babies from the orphanages, they’re left outside in the snow for a night to see if they can survive?”

  “It’s true.”

  “Barbaric.” His condemnation wasn’t emotional; his voice wasn’t tainted by disgust. He said it as if stating a mundane fact.

  “Are you going to try to win me over to your faith?” she wondered. “Save me from my barba
rism?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Aren’t you supposed to try to win over as many converts as you can?”

  He smiled a gentle smile. “In the oceans of fire of the last hours of the unfastening, transcendence will alight on the Lord’s chosen children; children of the cloth and children of the lost.”

  “That sounds like scripture.”

  “It is.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means that whether or not I convince you of the truth has no bearing on whether or not your soul transcends.”

  “Transcends?”

  He then saw her uncertainty. “It would be very difficult for you to understand the meaning of the term.”

  “Because I’m not in your cult?”

  “No.” He didn’t seem to take offense at the word cult. “It would be difficult for you to understand because you and your people are too primitive. You lack the technology, and you lack the scientific knowledge to even begin to understand how transcendence might work.”

  She chuckled again. “Barbaric and primitive, am I?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is it this religion of yours that gave you the name Seventy-two?”

  “Yes. My order uses numbers rather than names as a reminder that individualism is abhorrent.”

  “How barbaric.”

  A return chuckle.

  “Where is this place you come from?” she asked, changing the direction of the conversation.

  “I’m not from your world.”

  What kind of statement is that? He wasn’t joking. It would have been obvious to anyone with a fraction of a working brain that this man, Seventy-two, wasn’t the type to reel off wisecracks for his own personal amusement. She scanned his face for more answers, but there were none to be had.

  “I’m not from this world,” he said again. “But you don’t understand that, do you?”

  “I’m not sure that I do,” she admitted.

  “You want to understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but with a caveat.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A caveat? It’s a . . .”

  “I know perfectly well what a caveat is,” he told her. There was that insolence again. “I meant, what is your particular caveat?”

  “My caveat is that I’m still fairly certain that you’re not a sane man, so yes, I do want to know what you think you understand, but no, I don’t necessarily want to believe it myself.”

  “I see.” He slowly stood up and brushed the sand off his pants. He then looked over to their nearby pile of raft-building materials. Janx watched him, trying to guess what he was thinking, but he was a hard man to read. Somewhere a circling bird squawked, the sound of its call breaking the monopoly on beach sounds otherwise held by the lapping of the waves on the beach. “You know,” he started again, “I think we can reach an agreement that would benefit both of us.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I couldn’t help but notice that you want to get off this island as quickly as possible.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And I presume that at least some of your haste can be explained by the anger you are feeling toward whoever did that to you.” He was pointing toward her missing hand.

  “Right again.”

  “And since you are Saffisheen, I would also guess that you were not merely a simple sailor onboard that vessel. You were of a high rank.”

  “Harker.”

  His eyebrows raised toward his stupid hair. “Ah. Mutiny, was it?”

  “Yes.” She hated to admit it, but there didn’t seem any point in denying it.

  “And you’re going to kill the person or persons responsible for the insurrection.”

  “Plus anyone who gets in my way,” she added.

  “Well, that is where our paths intersect,” he told her. This time he did not try to force a smile. “You see, I wasn’t the only one to fall into the ocean. There were others.”

  “And you want to kill them?” she asked.

  “Not all of them.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “Why didn’t you kill them when you were on that thing?”

  “Their identities were hidden from me. I didn’t know who I was searching for at the time.”

  “How do you know their identities now?”

  “After the shark took my hand, the people from your ship hauled me out of the water, put me in a boat and took me to this beach right here. I was in a bad state, but I saw the other survivors and two of them had a decoder.”

  “What’s a decoder?”

  “It’s a strip of material that gets attached to the back of a person’s neck. It connects itself to the brain and facilitates translation.”

  “That’s absurd,” she stated. “You’re insane.”

  “I told you,” he admonished her with a raised finger on his remaining hand. “You don’t have the ability yet to understand the technology that other worlds have developed. Look, let me explain it to you this way. Imagine going back in time a thousand years, or even ten thousand years. Now imagine finding a person who lived during that time and imagine that they were simple hunters who had only just developed simple tools. And finally, imagine trying to explain to that person how a pocket watch worked. He simply wouldn’t be capable of understanding what a watch is or how it works. It is the same with what I am telling you right now, so I’m afraid you’re just going to have to take my word for it.”

  Janx shook her head, but wasn’t about to stop him while he was opening up like this. “And I suppose that’s how you speak Maelian? If I lift the back of your hair up, will I find one of these decoders?”

  “No. Mine is internal. It’s a more sophisticated model, embedded at the base of the medulla oblongata.” He saw her questioning look. “I underwent surgery. My decoder is at the bottom of my brain.”

  “How convenient,” she said. He ignored her, so she went on. “So you want to get off this island so you can hunt down two people?”

  “Yes.”

  “I still don’t see how any of what you just said could be the least bit of help to me.”

  “It’s quite clear,” Seventy-two said. “All of this helps you because I know where those two people are going.”

  “Sorry?”

  “It helps you because the people who mutinied against you and chopped off your right hand will most likely take them there.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Because when your ex-crew realizes what’s at stake, they’ll be compelled to go there. They won’t be able to resist.”

  “Wait. Where are they going?”

  “I’m not going to tell you just yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I want something in exchange for that information.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your help tracking them down and killing them.”

  “You’re not a very peaceful religious man.”

  “The Lord commands that mankind must not enter into compact with sin or walk the path of immoral animals. But he also teaches us that immoral acts shall be condoned when, and only when, they are carried out in true service to Him.” He looked at Janx, checking to see if she had caught the point.

  “Sticking a knife in someone is a no-no, but if you do it to benefit your almighty Lord, you’re not breaking any rules.”

  “Quite right.”

  “Well, you’re not alone in that regard. People from my religion are usually quite happy to kill people too.”

  He shrugged and said “Do we have an agreement then?”

  “We have an agreement,” she said.

  2.8 KETTLE

  Kettle now understood that having one less finger on your left hand was not actually as bad as one might think. Had it been his thumb, he would have probably felt a lot differently on the matter. Thumbs were very handy things, as any animal with an opposable digit would no doubt attest. Pinky fingers, on the other ha
nd, were quite useful for typing words with q and a and z and p, but they were otherwise not that essential to daily living, even on a pirate ship.

  Kettle had been doing pretty well thus far with only nine fingers. It had been a week since he had been subjected to Brenna’s sudden and violent surgery, and although the pain had made him cry and throw up a few times on the first day, he was getting used to being one digit down with surprising speed. He got regular visits and check-ups from Lofi. He liked Lofi. She had funny, round spectacles that hung just on the tip of a short nose, and she had a face that he learned was a bit smallish by Maelian standards. Kettle liked how her hair fell low over her forehead and only just parted above her eyebrows, but more than anything else, he liked her bedside manner. As doctors went, she was a lot friendlier and more fun to chat with than the vast majority of doctors he had ever encountered, an odd circumstance given that Lofi was a pirate doctor.

  He wanted to ask her what Radovan Mozik Maglipan meant. However, Haley had made it abundantly clear what would happen to them if they spoke those words to the crew.

  By engaging in pleasant conversations with Lofi, he had learned that the surgeon had once had a very promising career back in Mael. Unfortunately, she had developed something of a gambling habit while living the high life in the nation’s capital. Things took a frightful turn for the worse one night when she lost her house playing a Lavic board game called Chasing the Shark.

  Not one to dwell on misfortune, Lofi had packed her remaining belongings – some surgical tools and a book of Maelian poetry – and left the capital in search of adventure. Fast forward nearly a decade, and here she was, the Epoch’s happy-go-lucky surgeon.

  It was on this seventh day of owning just one pinky finger rather than two that Lofi made an interesting comment to him while she changed his bandage. She said “I’ve never seen a wound heal this quickly before.”