by Sophie Davis
“Is this true?” the father asked. “Can you change forms?”
I nodded. “Emma is right. I did fly here as a bird. Well, I was aiming for England, but got a little of course with the storm.”
“A lot of course,” Ross snorted.
I was about to ask just how far off I’d veered, when the father spoke again.
“What else can you do?” Suspicion poured off of him, but the accusatory tone was gone. “If I’m going to have you in my house with my children I need to know what all you’re cable of.”
I caught Emma’s gaze out of the corner of my eye. She was shaking her head subtly.
“Nothing. I’m just a Morpher,” I said. Seeing three confused expressions, I explained, “That’s what we call people who can shape shift where I come from.”
The father nodded slowly. “Okay. Then I suppose you can stay with us for the time being.”
“Wait, what? No. I don’t want to stay here. I need to…”
Needed to what? Hurry up and get back to civilization where I was wanted by an international organization? Make a mad dash for London to meet up with another fugitive? Return to the world so that I could die?
Be with Erik.
That was what I truly wanted. But as long as UNITED had their tentacles wrapped around Erik, that wasn’t a viable option.
“I need to get to London,” I finished lamely. “My friend is expecting me.”
The lie wasn’t even convincing to my own ears.
Jeb stared at me thoughtfully for several moments past comfortable. I thought maybe he expected me to cower, or at least look away under his scrutinizing gaze. If so, he’d misjudged me.
“Storms are bad this time of year. Another one is just around the corner.” He shrugged noncommittally. “Once it passes, you might have a few days window where you could fly out. Now, why don’t you get dressed and Emma and Ross can show you around, help you get the lay of the land.”
A few days? I couldn’t stay in the frozen tundra for a few days.
Why not? A voice inside my head wanted to know. An iceberg in the middle of nowhere was probably the safest hiding place possible.
“You can borrow some of my clothes,” Emma added quickly, pulling me from my mental debate.
Ross, who was both younger and significantly shorter than his sister, was more likely to have clothes that fit me, but he didn’t offer.
“Sure, thanks,” I said, forcing myself to return Emma’s dazzling smile.
Though I had no intention of staying longer than absolutely necessary, I figured a tour of my temporary digs was as good a way to pass the time as any. Besides, I was incredibly curious about the island. At least, I assumed I was on an island.
Twenty minutes later, body sore and achy, I was dressed in the odd assortment of garments Emma had pulled from her closet. Between the mismatched and heavily patched thermal leggings and shirt, fur-lined brown leather pants and vest, and down-filled overcoat, I was roasting as I laced up well-worn boots and slipped my hands into soft gloves.
“Ready?” Emma asked once I was dressed.
“If the temperature outside is thirty below, then yes, I’m ready,” I replied.
Ross grinned. “Closer to fifty below.”
When we exited the tent, I quickly learned that he wasn’t joking. Maybe exaggerating slightly. But it really was frigid.
It turned out the place I’d been recovering was a medical hut—sort of. The woman, Andromeda, who had cared for me wasn’t a doctor or nurse, but rather one of the village healers.
“She can cure any illness, mend all broken bones, and fix any ailment. She’s truly a genius,” Emma told me as we departed on our tour. “It’s thanks to her that you still have all of your fingers and toes. Frostbite was starting to set in when I found you.”
A genius? Or Talented? I wondered. Healing wasn’t a modern ability, but the first generation of Talented children born after the Great Contamination had exhibited a much wider range of talents than those of us living now.
I decided not to voice my question just yet. I wanted to get a better read on the situation first, just in case Emma and her family were part of some anti-Talent cult. Jeb had repeatedly demanded to know my ‘tribe’ after all.
Outside the healing cabin, snow covered the ground in a fluffy white blanket that glimmered prettily in the sunlight. Icicles were suspended from bare tree branches, dripping frigid water from their spiky ends.
“It’s so beautiful here,” I said honestly.
Ross and Emma exchanged knowing grins.
“What?” I asked. “You don’t agree?”
“Mainlanders always think snow is pretty,” Emma explained.
“Yeah, just wait ‘til you’ve been here awhile. It gets old fast,” Ross added.
I didn’t bother correcting his assumption that I’d be there for awhile. As soon as the next storm passed, I was off.
“Do you get a lot of, um, mainlanders?” I asked Emma as we followed a stone path through a small group of huts similar to the one where Andromeda had nursed me back to health.
She shrugged her shoulders. “A few.” Then, as if picking up on the nervous energy swirling inside of me, she added, “Never this time of year, though. Ocean is too rough for boat travel, and the storms are too bad for a hover to fly anywhere close to here.”
“Even so, hovers can’t fly over Pelia,” Ross interjected, echoing a statement his father had made earlier.
“Why is that exactly?” I asked.
Ross was walking several steps in front of me and turned so that I could see his ruddy red cheeks peeking out from the circle of white fur lining his coat’s hood.
No wonder I thought Emma was an animal, I thought. Even knowing better, it was hard to believe Ross was entirely human beneath all of the leather and fur.
“Too much energy, it screws with the dials and stuff. Pilots used to crash here all the time. I guess they wised up though, ‘cause we only get a few idiots a year now who attempt it. This is the marketplace,” Ross said, abruptly changing the subject before I could ask what he meant by too much energy.
The path ended in a town square sort of area. More of the huts lined the perimeter, each one with a painted sign swinging above the entrance. The snow had been cleared away, leaving carved wooden benches, a gazebo, and two small frozen ponds visible. And in the very center of the square was an enormous octopus. Chiseled from the world’s largest ice cube, the statute stood over fifteen feet tall with ten-foot tentacles extending from the creature’s bulbous head and lazily draping over a sea rock with flowers etched into the face.
“Mr. Robb does a new one every year,” Emma informed me.
“Yeah, last winter he did a mermaid. That was my favorite so far,” Ross added.
“Only because she was topless.” Emma smiled indulgently at her younger brother. “Come on, let’s make a quick round of the shops, warm up a bit. Then we can see the rest of the village.”
Even though we’d been outside less than twenty minutes, my cheeks and lips were numb and talking was becoming a chore.
“Sure, sounds great,” I replied, glad Emma had been the one to suggest going in out of the cold.
The square was fairly quiet, only a handful of villagers wandering about. This, Emma informed me, was because most people were working. She assured me the foot traffic would increase steadily as the day went on.
First we visited one of two restaurants in the entire village, a place called simply Pattie’s. The interior reminded me of a rustic tavern, quaint and cozy with fires burning in two hearths at either end of the dining room.
The aroma wafting out from the kitchen made my mouth water and my stomach grumble. I was famished. The flight from Vault had cost me a lot of calories, and I was suddenly desperate to replenish them.
“You must be starving,” Emma noted. “Shifting—or, rather morphing—for such a long period of time must have drained you.”
“It did,” I agreed, once again curious abou
t Emma’s extensive knowledge of the Talented and how our gifts worked.
She must be Talented, I decided.
We stayed only long enough to devour some sort of meat on an edible stick, which was surprisingly delicious. Though I refrained from asking what type of meat it was and what the stick was actually made of. Then, we took steaming mugs of fragrant, extremely sweet lilac tea to go.
From there, Ross and Emma showed me the butcher shop, the bookstore, the jewelry boutique, the bakery, and, finally, the toy store. Emma seemed to want to linger in the toy store, so I perused the selection of handcrafted wooden games and beautiful dolls with dried and dyed sea kelp for hair and iridescent pearls for eyes.
Alex would love this stuff, I thought with a heavy heart.
My longing to see Alex was nearly as great as my desire to see Erik. The little boy had experienced so much upheaval in such a short amount of time. He’d become attached to me so quickly that I felt guilty being away from him. No matter how many times I tried to tell myself the separation was not by choice, I couldn’t ignore the voice inside my head that insisted it was. After all, I had chosen to break the rules and knew, or should have known, the consequences. So, really, in a way, I had elected to take a sabbatical from my duty to care for Alex.
“Talia? Can…me? Talia…tell…you’re okay? Are…safe?” Even though the thoughts were broken and sounded as though they were coming from an ancient radio, tears sprang to my eyes. Erik. I’d have known his voice anywhere.
“Erik? I’m here. I’m safe. I’m so sorry I ran.”
His reply didn’t come immediately. And when Erik’s voice spoke in my mind a second time, the reception was even worse. “Tal…shit show. Frederick says…fur…animal. Hurt? Crane…safe. Asylum.”
“You’re breaking up, Erik. I can’t really hear you. The reception is off or something.”
“Just…are, Tals.” And then, there was only dead air.
Even though I knew the connection was lost, I still screamed his name in my head. I couldn’t help it. It didn’t matter if I only received every third word he sent, I just wanted to hear his voice.
“Emma only likes to come here so she can she her boyfriend,” Ross sang as he sidled up next to me.
I jumped, caught off guard by his sudden appearance.
“Daydreaming of the mainland?” Ross asked.
“Something like that,” I muttered.
“What’s it like? Dad says mainlanders are heathens. That it’s not safe to visit.” He studied me with open curiosity. “You don’t look like a heathen. What’s your home like? Is it big? Oh, and what do your parents do? Are they like lawyers or something? Dad says there are a lot of lawyers on the mainland, and that’s why the justice system is so screwed up.”
I opened my mouth, but had no idea how to answer. Opting for the path that invited the least amount of new questions about myself, I asked, “Emma has a boyfriend?”
“Yep.” Ross pointed across the store. “That’s Mr. Smoochy. I call him that because that’s what they like to do—smooch.”
I glanced over towards the counter. Sure enough, Emma was chatting animatedly with a good-looking boy behind the register. Both Emma and the boy wore identical dopey expressions and giggled coquettishly at anything the other said. The scene was as adorable as a newborn puppy and as sickeningly sweet as confections made by a heavy-handed baker. I had to look away after a moment. Watching them, on their own little island where the population never exceeded two, gazing longingly at one another reminded me too much of the way I felt with Erik.
What have I done? How could I have been so freaking stupid? Would I ever learn my lesson? Was I ever going to grow up and start thinking before leaping?
Not for the first time since fleeing Vault, these and many other unanswerable questions flooded my thoughts.
I half-expected Erik to send a response. But the voices inside my head were all my own. I tried calling out to him.
“Erik? Can you hear me?”
The words echoed inside my skull. Silence followed. Erik wasn’t blocking me—that much I was sure of. My thoughts weren’t even reaching him. It was the weirdest thing. Were my talents broken? Was that even possible?
Just to be sure, I tried moving several of the dolls on the shelf in front of me. They stood on their tiny feet and saluted me.
Nope, not broken, I thought, frustrated.
“His name’s Kip, and he’s eighteen. Dad says Emma’s too young to date, so she has to come here if she wants to see him,” Ross was saying beside me, not bothering to keep his voice down. “Sometimes they sneak off together at night. I followed them once. They went to Freedom Beach and kissed for like hours. It was sort of boring to watch after the first couple of minutes. This other time…”
Freedom Beach—that was where Emma had told her father that she and Ross found me.
“Ross, what’s Freedom Beach?” I asked, interrupting his diatribe about Emma and Kip and their affinity for feeding each other ‘like babies’ as Ross put it.
Before Ross could answer, the front door to the toy shop opened and gaggle of children poured inside, followed closely by two wizened and harried looking caretakers who seemed unable to control their charges.
With one last baleful glance at Kip, Emma turned to Ross and me and nodded towards the door.
“We had better get going, this place will be a zoo for the rest of the afternoon with those children on the loose,” Emma muttered under her breath as we departed the toy store.
At Ross’s insistence, the siblings showed me the frozen ponds before heading out to explore the rest of the village.
“Cool, huh?” Ross asked excitedly when we reached the edge of the nearest pond.
“Cool,” I echoed, staring down at the neon shapes zooming back and forth beneath a thick layer of ice.
In varying shades of blue, green, purple, and orange, the fish were so brightly colored it was like gazing into the sun. When I turned away, neon starbursts exploded before my eyes for several moments.
“You’re missing the best part,” Ross whined, tugging the sleeve of my coat to draw my attention back to the pond.
Reluctantly, I followed his finger to the spot he was indicating. For a moment, I had no idea what I was supposed to be seeing. Then, just beneath the top layer of ice, the words came into focus: Good afternoon.
“Whoa.” Surprised, I jumped back from the edge of the pond.
“Neat trick, huh?” Ross asked.
“It’s not a trick, stupid,” Emma said, smacking her brother lightly on the back of the head. “You really need to pay better attention in your lessons.”
I was with Ross. Glowing fish were one thing. Synchronized spelling fish, however, were a different story.
Though the Great Contamination had occurred nearly a century ago, rural and island communities such as this one still saw the lingering effects. The wildlife—animals, vegetation, and even insects—were often larger, stranger, and, in some people’s view, more deformed than in the areas surrounding major cities and landlocked states and countries. But working together to form a message, even a simple one, suggested these fish had superior intelligence and cognitive thought processes that far exceeded those of the ones I was accustomed to.
“Do the bears here talk, too?” I asked Emma, only half joking.
“Don’t be silly, there aren’t bears in the woods.” She grinned devilishly. “The shadow wolves, now they can be quite talkative.”
I wasn’t sure whether or not she was kidding.
The rest of the tour was sort of a letdown after the fish. Emma and Ross led me through the clusters of cabins where the villagers lived. We visited the school; a large barn-style structure that abutted a forest of snow covered trees.
“Mrs. Honeywell gets really angry if people mess around inside when we’re on holiday,” Ross informed me.
“Is it a holiday?” I asked, confused.
“Yeah, storm season. We always have these three months off, so
we can help with the snow removal, food gathering, and security,” Emma said.
“Security?” I asked. “From what?”
“Animals mostly. The storms drive them out of the woods; they get scared and attack villagers. So we set traps for them. Once caught, we either release them back into the wild or hand them over to the butcher. Just depends on their size and age.” Emma’s expression darkened. “Then there are the other tribes. The weather reduces visibility and the watchers aren’t able to see all the way to our borders from the towers. Other tribes take advantage of that and come into our territory to steal food and supplies.”
“How many tribes are there on—Pelia, right?” I asked, suddenly insanely fascinated by this primitive culture.
“Five. Ours is the largest. But the others are more vicious.”
“And then you have the free lands, too?” I asked, recalling bits and pieces of earlier conversations.
“Exactly. Anyone can go into the free lands to hunt or fish or whatever. But there is no law in the free lands. Anything goes. Usually it’s not a problem. I wander around there a lot.” Emma shrugged. “Every once in a while, though—well, it can get pretty dangerous. That’s why Dad doesn’t like it when I go there.”
“I see,” I replied, though I wasn’t really sure that I did.
Ross thought mainlanders were heathens. At least we didn’t have designated areas where anarchy reigned supreme.
“Up here is the fishing cove. Come on.” Emma waved me forward. “Let’s see what they’ve caught.”
We made our way down to a winding path cut through a particularly dense clump of trees to a bluff. Men and women in waist-high rubber pants, elbow-length rubber gloves, and woolen knit caps stood at the edge of the bluff reeling in an assortment of sea life with poles mounted into the rocky terrain. The fish weren’t quite as exotic looking as the ones in the pond had been, but most were vibrant oranges and yellows, and a few had patterned scales.
Behind the fishermen and fisherwomen, clusters of teenagers roughly Emma’s age stood around wooden barrels full of the caught fish. One girl had what looked like a crudely made wooden ruler, and was measuring the fish from nose tip to tail end. Every so often she would toss one back over the bluffs, presumably if it were too small to eat. A boy had his gloved hands around the head of a pretty turquoise squid. He stroked the sea creature with his thumbs, causing it to squirt a blue-black liquid into a pail held by another boy.
