The Faarian Chronicles: Exile

by Karen Harris Tully

Through the gaps in the crowd, I saw two of my mother’s elite warriors facing off in the middle of the circle, impressively fighting hand-to-hand with no protective pads, to the beat of the drums. A good kick to the gut sent one woman sprawling. The crowd cheered.

  Thankfully nobody noticed me except the twins, who gave me a standing O. I tried to ignore them and resisted the urge to send them rude hand signals.

  My mother had waylaid Sensei and Ethem on their way back into the great hall. They were talking at the edge of the crowd. Myrihn was there too, gesturing wildly and pantomiming holding her breath and panicking; talking about me, of course. Lovely. I made my way over and stopped near the wall several yards away, trying to be unobtrusive.

  “What is the girl supposed to do here, Vaeda?” I picked out Great-Aunt Nico’s voice through the din. “Why bring her here when she’s just going to be stuck inside all the time?”

  “She won’t be stuck inside, Nico,” my mother replied, glaring at her aunt. “She’s going to go through warrior training like any other girl.”

  “Warrior training?” Nico scoffed. “If you wanted her to be a warrior, you should have brought her with you when you returned from Earth. She’s too old to begin training now.”

  “She’s had the first levels on Earth,” my mother replied.

  “How could she have learned what she needed growing up outside the Kindred, with only her father for support?” Nico asked.

  “That’s why I sent Qian to her.” She gestured exasperatedly to Sensei, who looked back and forth between them like she was blearily following a tennis match. “I know it’s not the same as growing up in the Kindred, but it was the only choice, if you’ll remember. We couldn’t bring her here without knowing for sure that she could survive.”

  “Well, you must be very proud then; she’s still breathing,” Aunt Nico sneered. “But, she’ll never be a warrior.”

  “She will,” my mother ground out.

  “No, Mom’s right,” Myrihn put in from Nico’s side. “She can’t fight for anything. I saw the video of her last competition. She-”

  “Don’t interrupt, child,” Nico admonished her. Myrihn glared sullenly down at the table. “What world are you living in, Vaeda?” Nico continued, ignoring Myrihn as she got up to leave. “Did you see her hair? She’ll be lucky if she doesn’t pass out within half an hour on patrol.” Myrihn spotted me trying to blend into the wall and sent me a glare that would’ve frozen lava, before stomping off.

  “It’s jusht dye, she’ll be…,” Sensei started to slur when Nico interrupted again.

  “You’d better make sure to send extra oxygen with her if you send her out.”

  “Thank you, Aunt Nico,” my mother replied with a deadpan expression. “Your advice has been noted.” Having heard enough, I turned away to leave. She wasn’t even defending me. No one was. I’d just gotten here, and I could too fight! Not that I wanted to. I didn’t want to be a warrior anyway, but if I did, it would be my choice, not theirs!

  “Ah, Veridian,” my mother’s voice called. “You’re up next.”

  “No thanks,” I replied. “I’d really prefer not.”

  “Yes, you will.” She gave me a steely look. “This is how we will judge your skill level, Veridian. You will fight. That’s an order.”

  I bristled and felt that familiar flash of anger go through my eyes.

  “Veridian! Veridian! Veridian!” the crowd chanted. The previous combatants were both breathing hard and tending minor wounds off to one side. Several people grabbed my arms and pushed me through to the center ring.

  “No, no, I don’t need to go,” I protested, but no one listened.

  “Who will challenge my daughter in her first Kindred trial?” my mother’s voice boomed out. Several people stepped forward immediately.

  I saw Myrihn shove one of the twins forward. “Yes, Lyta. You should be a good challenge for Veridian.”

  One of the twins eagerly stepped into the circle. I glared at her and my mother in turn. As much as I wanted to show this girl up for getting me lost earlier, knock her around, and bloody her up a bit maybe, I couldn’t do that. This was my chance to make a statement to my mother. Though she’d been able to make me come here, I wasn’t going to be her puppet.

  A musician struck the largest of the golden pipes and a gong-like sound reverberated through the hall, signaling the start of the match. Drums beat out a slow rhythm as Lyta and I crouched and began to circle one another.

  Just like a match back home, I thought. Dodge and weave, dodge and weave. Except now, disqualification for not engaging my opponent was the goal.

  I gave my mother a sarcastic two-fingered salute right before Lyta leapt at me. It was odd to be fighting a girl who was taller than me for a change. Like a lot of bigger people, she relied on her strength to win, but to be perfectly honest, the last girl I’d sparred at the tournament fought better. Lyta lacked finesse. I dodged to the side and did a couple of fast back handsprings away from her, making her avoid my tennis shoes as they whipped up toward her face. She responded by throwing a high kick at me with her ugly combat boots, but I ducked under it and gave her a quick jab to the calf, giving her a charley horse for a few seconds. The crowd booed. Lyta roared her outrage and charged me like a lumbering bull. I dodged out of her way at the last second, and we both collided with the crowd circled around us. They shoved us back in, not allowing for out of bounds.

  “Fight, you coward!” Lyta taunted. I felt anger boil through my veins, but remembered at the last second why I was doing this. A few more minutes of blocking her punches and flipping away from her kicks and I got what I wanted: a piercing whistle stopped the so-called fight.

  “That’s enough,” my mother said, lowering her fingers from her mouth. “Lyta wins by default, but will get another opportunity if she wishes. Apparently my daughter values evasion over actual fighting skill.” She favored me with a hard stare. “She remains an unranked novice. Perhaps some experience in the real world will show her what’s important. Next pair.”

  The disapproving crowd parted to let me pass as I exited the ring. Well good, I thought, I made my point. So why did I feel so lousy?

  It was time to get out of here. I hoped I could find my way back to my room again.

  “Hey, Sunny,” Thal said, coming up beside me and patting my shoulder with a pitying look. “Come over here and watch how it’s done,” he said, trying to pull me through the crowd again to a spot in the front.

  “I know how to do it,” I snapped, then shook my head. “I’m done in, Thal. Do you think you could show me the way to my room again?”

  “Well, sure, okay.” He gave one longing look back at the crowd and led me out the door.

  Great-Aunt Nico was right about one thing. Why had my mother brought me here? First she abandoned me on Earth as a baby, never even visiting. Then she couldn’t be bothered to pick me up herself, or even to meet me at the port. And she couldn’t claim to want to get to know me, since after we finally met, she didn’t seem excited to have me here, didn’t defend me, and ordered me to take part in some kind of fight club!

  And then, there were the twins who got me lost on purpose, Nico who thought bringing me here was a pointless waste, and Myrihn who disliked me as soon as she stepped off the hippie bus-slash-spaceship. Gah! I’m supposed to give up an incredibly important year of gymnastics for this? I had to contact Dad. When he heard how I was being treated, he would have to bring me home.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Thal asked as he led me on a fairly straightforward route back to my mother’s apartment.

  The only people who’d been nice to me were Ethem and Thal. I gave him a weak smile. “Yeah.” No! I had to get out of here! I ran my hands into my hair and balled them into fists at the roots, then glanced at Thal from the corner of my eye. He was looking at me worriedly.

  “You don’t really look okay,” he said.

  “I… I don’t even know why she brought me here!” I exploded. All my feelings came rushing
out as I explained about my mother. “Parents shouldn’t do that! They shouldn’t abandon their kids and then suddenly drag them away from everything they know into a whole other world where nothing makes sense!”

  “Well, when you say it like that, it doesn’t seem very fair,” he said, tilting his head to the side.

  “It’s not.” I ground out the words, unable to believe there could be another way of looking at the situation.

  “But your mom’s a good person, you’ll see. She’s just… the General. She’s used to people doing what she says.” He shrugged. “She’s bound to be preoccupied since she’s in charge of the whole Kindred. Plus, with this whole water rights thing going on right now… she’s our National Council representative. You know, the planetary government?” I nodded. “That’s the meeting she had today. If we lose our water, the Kindred’s dead. We’d all have to move to who-knows-where.”

  “Oh.” Well I guess maybe that was understandable, but couldn’t she have gotten someone to cover for her? I sighed.

  “I know this all has to be a huge change for you, but don’t you think you could give the Kindred a chance – give your mom a chance?” I squinted at him dubiously. "Okay, okay,” he laughed. “Maybe that’s too much to ask right now. I guess everything must be really different from what you’re used to.”

  “It is, Thal, it really is. Don’t take this the wrong way, but this place is really weird.”

  “In what way?” he asked curiously.

  “Well, people on Earth aren’t ordered to fight each other after dinner, first of all. And this compound is huge! It takes forever to walk from one side to the other. And all these people! How do you live with them all, and how many people are actually here?”

  “Oh, about four hundred right now. People always stick around for a feast.” That was a feast? There was enough for everyone, I supposed, but the food hadn’t seemed that special or anything.

  “Only about two hundred actually live here. Some people came to visit from other Kindreds and the rest live in the nearby villages and come here to work. The farm is like, the biggest employer around. Just about the only employer, too.”

  “Huh. Two hundred,” I repeated faintly. I digested that, then continued with my list. “And the air is so thin, and you have thumbprint security just to get water! And don’t even get me started on the bizarro toilet.” I made a face.

  “Really? How else would a toilet be?” he asked. I explained how they worked back home.

  “Wow,” he said again. “I’d love to see Earth someday. It sounds like you have so much of everything. Trees, water, oxygen. It must be amazing.” I was starting to see that it was.

  “It used to be that way here,” he continued, “years and years ago, before we were born. But then the haratchi came, and the fires….” He trailed off and shook his head sadly. “Things aren’t as easy as they used to be. But they’re getting better.” He brightened. “It rained here twice this summer and even snowed once last winter. A whole inch! It was great.” I thought of the mountains back home with their hundred-inch snow packs and felt incredibly sorry for this place.

  “Do they keep track? Of the water, I mean. What happens if you use too much?”

  “Oh yeah. If you use more than the limit per week, you get cut off. When we were little, they had contests for the kids to see who could use the least. It worked pretty well until some stopped showering altogether.” He wrinkled his nose. “Be glad you weren’t here. Mom had to make a rule.

  “Oooh, these outer apartments are so cool,” he said as we entered. “You get windows and a fish tank.” He misinterpreted the look I gave him. “Don’t worry, they’re all coated on the outside so it doesn’t get too glary in here from the suns,” he assured me.

  “Oh. Great,” I replied and changed the subject. “So, do I need you to tell me how the shower works, then?”

  He cocked his head. “Maybe. I’ll show you. So, there’s a thumb pad here, like over the sink.” He pointed to the wall of the mini shower stall. “You just stick your thumb there and tell it the amount of time and temperature you want.”

  “Does it ding like a microwave when you’re done?” I asked.

  “What’s a microwave?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Never mind. So I tell it say, ten minutes and the water turns on?”

  “Ten minutes! That’s like three whole days worth of your water allowance!” He shook his head in amazement. “Try ten seconds at first to wet down. Plug the drain so you can reuse the water as you soap up. Then, twenty seconds to rinse. That’s what I do.” Fabulous. So much for having that long, hot shower.

  “But, doesn’t it need time to warm up?”

  “No.” He looked confused. “It comes on whatever temperature you ask for. The heater’s nice,” he added, “if you’re cold at night.” He flipped a normal old wall switch and a fan whirred to life overhead.

  “What,” I said, “don’t we have to give it our thumbprint to conserve electricity, too?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “We have solar panels!” Of course. “Get a good night’s sleep. This will all look better tomorrow, you’ll see. You just have to get used to the way things are here.” He patted my shoulder encouragingly. “I’ll see you at breakfast,” he said on his way out the door.

  “See you,” I replied. I grabbed Meowman and my iPhone and flopped onto the bed without bothering to unpack. A few seconds later I yanked my ear buds out and ran back to the hallway.

  “Hey, Thal?” I yelled, but he was already gone. I slapped the doorjamb and returned to my austere new room, putting my ear buds back in. First thing tomorrow, I had to ask him how to email home.

  Chapter 13: A Second Tour

  “Get a good night’s sleep,” I mocked my reflection the next morning as I rubbed my puffy, raccoon eyes with makeup remover in the mirror. Yeah, right. My subconscious had had me tossing and turning from a series of increasingly strange dreams about people I’d never seen before in my life. People who wanted to meet me, reporters who wanted to interview me, and scientists who wanted to run experiments on my Earthan DNA. The past couple of days were catching up to me.

  My mother had opened my door as I was falling asleep again between dreams. I laid there, watched her through half-closed eyes in the light from the doorway, and waited for her to say something. Anything. She sighed and rubbed her forehead before closing the door again. Like she couldn’t figure out what to say to me. Like I was giving her a headache.

  I mean sure, the light was off, but couldn’t she have come in, taken a seat and talked for a few minutes? Said goodnight and kissed me on the forehead? Or attempted to anyway? I’m not sure I would’ve let her. But I’d waited fifteen years for this woman to tuck me in (okay, well maybe only the first ten) and now here we were and… nothing.

  She couldn’t even say, “Sorry for taking you away from gymnastics, from everything and everyone you know, but I’m really glad you’re here.” Or, “Now we finally get the chance to get to know each other.” Or even just, “I’ve missed you all these years.”

  I wanted to shout at her, “WHY DID YOU BRING ME HERE?” But if she didn’t have anything to say, well then, neither did I.

  My mother was already up and gone by the time I woke to the tingle of the red sun streaming through the window, giving everything a weird pink glow. There was no sleeping through that.

  I got up and took a quick shower (though not lightning-fast like Thal), slathered on sunscreen, dressed, defiantly reapplied my black eyeliner and mascara, and went down to breakfast.

  Sensei said goodbye first thing, having to get going to her new teaching job at some warrior boarding school called The Point. I walked her out to the Tony the Tiger jet where she showed me how to call her on my link if I needed to talk.

  “So, have you decided on a goal to work on while you’re here?” she asked.

  “Goal? Um, get through my time here and go home?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “That needs work. What’s our
mantra?”

  “Anything worth doing is worth doing well,” I repeated for the millionth time, rolling my eyes.

  “Right. And don’t roll your eyes at the General or her warriors. They won’t be as tolerant as I am,” she said. I snorted. Sensei, tolerant. Riiiight. “You’ll need to prove yourself here, Sunny, but if you do your best, I know you’ll be fine.” She patted me on the shoulder and climbed the stairs to the door of the jet.

  “And choose a goal!” she yelled from the doorway, and then she was gone. The engines roared, dust blew, and I was alone. Separated from my last connection to my life on Earth.

  Half an hour later in the great hall, I returned my plate and utensils to the kitchen with one last grimace of disgust at the crusty mush in my bowl. Disappointingly, that seemed to be the only menu choice this morning, some cross between refried beans and grits I think, and some sweet, turquoise melon. After getting over the color, I liked the melon, but a few bites had been enough of the mush.

  “Thalestris,” my mother said with her lips pressed into a thin line across from me. What was her problem this morning? “Why don’t you finish showing Veridian around the compound? Then I think she’ll be ready to go out on patrol.” So, she still wasn’t going to show me around herself. Humph. Why should I put my life on hold only to be treated like so much disappointing, unwanted baggage? I deserved better than this, to have some say in my own life!

  Choose a goal, choose a goal, Sensei’s words rang in my head. She was right, but the only goal I’d ever had was to be an Olympic gymnast, and that shining gold medal was still everything I wanted, everything I’d ever worked for. How could I work towards that, stuck here for a year, with no equipment? I had to get Dad to bring me home. It was that simple. I’d only just arrived, but this was not what I’d signed up for. And until then, I couldn’t let her derail me from my training. I had to find ways to get better, faster, stronger, here - in exile-land.

  So I had to contact Dad today, and maybe scout some workout locations now with Thal.

  “Sure Aunt Vaeda. I’m done anyway,” Thal (never call me Thalestris) replied with an obliging smile and stood up. “Are you ready?” I tried to pull my eyebrows down out of my hairline at the “Aunt,” nodded, and got up from the bench too. Probably best to wait to ask Thal how to contact Earth until we were out of my mother’s earshot anyway.