by Jeff Hirsch
“Decker is with Kevin now. He’s giving him medicine. Praying.”
Glenn made a soft sound of disgust. “Praying.”
“You’re not home anymore,” Aamon said. “Things are …
different here.”
Glenn sucked back her tears, forced herself to her feet, and turned to see Aamon towered behind her. He was a massive shadow, dim firelight brushing his shoulders. Glenn swallowed her fear. Whatever he was, he was there. It was a fact she had to deal with. Right now there was more she wanted to know.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“Haymarket. A town of the Magisterium.”
“How far does it go, the Magisterium? How far past the border?”
“To the western ocean and beyond.”
“That’s not — ” Glenn protested. “Everything beyond the border is a wasteland.”
“Glenn — ”
“All of this was destroyed over a hundred years ago! I’ve seen the pictures! We learn about it in school.”
“Here, children learn that a haunted forest lies on your side of the border. Scary stories dissuade the curious better than stone walls.
Glenn …”
Aamon took a step closer but Glenn scrambled away.
“How do you know my name?”
Aamon held up his hands, palms out.
“Please,” he said. “You don’t have to be afraid. The way I was earlier, in the woods, with those men …”
Glenn saw the agent again, prostrate and bleeding in the snow.
“They were trying to hurt you. I had to stop them. I had no choice.
That’s not … it’s not what I am.”
There was a strange delicate quality to his voice, tremulous, like someone trying to convince themself of something they hardly believed.
“Then what are you?” Glenn asked.
“A friend,” he said. “You should try to get some rest. We’ll have to leave here tomorrow morning. If Garen Tom returns and sees what you have — ”
“I don’t have anything.”
“You know that isn’t true.”
Glenn rubbed at her wrist where the bracelet pressed into her skin.
She looked over Aamon’s shoulder to the glow of the house where Kevin lay.
“Where will we go?”
There was a creaking of wood as one of the town’s watchmen
approached on the wall above. Aamon tracked him as he went by, staying silent until he was out of sight.
“Somewhere safe,” Aamon said. “Someplace where we can
figure out how to get you two home.”
Aamon turned to go.
“How did you know my name?” Glenn called out.
Aamon stopped, studying the dusty road at his feet, then turned until their eyes met. There was something about them, and something about the way he tilted his head to watch her that was familiar. Glenn couldn’t place what it was, but the moment she saw it, a strange calm descended on her. How was that possible? What — who — was he?
The door to Garen Tom’s house opened. Calloway stood in the doorway, framed in firelight, head down. There was a large serving tray in his hands.
“Come,” Aamon said as he turned to go.
“No, wait. How — ”
But Aamon was already stepping up into the house. After he
passed through the doorway, Calloway stood there waiting for her, but Glenn turned her back to him and soon the door closed and she was alone again.
All around the empty street moonlight glinted off the silver-tipped feathers that hung from every door and danced in the wind.
11
Late that night, Glenn lay on the floor next to Kevin’s pallet, covered in a heavy quilt Decker Calloway had brought. He insisted there was a free room and a bed down the hall, but Glenn refused them.
Kevin was still unconscious. His chest rose and fell weakly. Glenn peeled back the poultice that Aamon had set over his stitching. The flesh around the wound was puckered and wan but the bleeding had stopped and there was no sign of an infection yet.
There was a rustle as, behind her, stretched out before the embers of the fire, Aamon turned over. Decker had offered him a room too — Garen Tom’s own — but Aamon had refused it. He slept at the foot of the hearth, his brutal face slack.
Glenn sat up, letting the blanket roll off and pool at her feet. The house was quiet except for the crackle from the fire and the deep vibration of Aamon’s breathing. He lay on his side with his back to her, a nearly seven-foot mass of muscle, his long tail curled behind him like a viper. Again, Glenn was overcome by the feeling that, despite the overwhelming strangeness, there was something familiar about him.
Glenn’s knees shook as she made her way across the room. To her, the fall of her bare feet on the wood floor sounded like a hammer crashing onto stone. Her heart pounded as she anticipated Aamon’s smallest twitch, the slightest movement, but none came.
Once she reached Aamon the heat from the fire washed over her, blazing hot despite its size. Sweat formed on her forehead and ran along the length of her arms.
What if he woke right now? Would the last thing I felt be those claws?
Glenn marshaled her fear and knelt down beside him. Being so close brought the sheer impossibility of him into bold relief. She searched along the fur that covered his head and the surprisingly delicate lines of his mouth, examining, cataloging like a good scientist.
But she couldn’t find the root of the familiarity she felt. He was completely alien to her. She tried to draw together a plausible theory.
Radiation was tempting, but the mutations it produced made creatures deformed and sickly. There was no way a random genetic defect could produce something so extreme. Genetic engineering? As far along as Colloquium science was, even they hadn’t achieved anything close to this level of bioengineering. And if the Magisterium was capable of such a thing, why did their people still live in walled towns and use bows and arrows for weapons? None of it made sense.
Aamon shifted again. Glenn jerked away, but he didn’t wake. He simply turned over, exposing the thick fur at his throat.
That’s when Glenn saw it.
It was as if the entire room tilted on some invisible axis and a wild, sick feeling welled up inside her. Was this what her father felt like that night in his workshop when he explained the Rift and her mother’s disappearance to her? Was this what it was like to go suddenly and irretrievably mad?
Glenn forced herself to look again and sure enough, at the base of Aamon’s throat, his gray fur stopped and formed the border around a circular patch of perfect, snowy white.
Feeling as if she was in a dream, Glenn reached out, anticipating the patch’s downy softness. The sound of her six-year-old voice rang in her ears, the sound of a princess knighting her bravest soldier.
Gerard Manley -
Aamon’s eyes snapped opened. Glenn snatched her hand back
with a gasp, but Aamon made no move toward her. She sat back, wary, and for a second their eyes were locked. Aamon’s head was tilted to the side and in the glow of the fire the warm green of his eyes bloomed.
“You know who I am,” he said.
“No, I don’t. I …”
Aamon drew himself up so he sat across from her, his clawed hands poised on his knees.
“When you were eight years old,” he said, “we sat on your bed and you whispered to me the chronicles of the great explorer Glenn Morgan and her faithful cat, Hopkins. Together they explored the red canyons of Mars. Did you ever tell anyone else that story?”
Suddenly the fire felt hot on Glenn’s face. Aamon was right. She had never told that story to anyone else. She looked again at the patch of white and then up to the arrow-shaped nick in his right ear.
“But that’s not …” She was about to say “possible” but the word fell flat in her mouth. Glenn muscled impossibility aside for a moment and forced herself to look at it all like the scientist she was, as if the events of the last
two days were the scattered bones of a long-extinct animal. She couldn’t deny them. She could only try to assemble them into something recognizable.
“The thermals in Kevin’s clothes stopped working as soon as we passed the border lights,” Glenn said slowly. “And the agents’ guns didn’t work either.”
“None of your technology works on our side of the border, just as Affinity doesn’t work on your side.”
“Affinity?”
“What you’d call magic.”
“I don’t believe in magic.”
The smallest glimmer of a smile creased Aamon’s lips. “And yet, here I am.”
Glenn churned through theory after theory, trying to construct a rational framework to hang all of this on, but no matter where she went she arrived at the same place — the unthinkable, undeniable reality of Aamon Marta and the words of her father.
Reality is a set of rules … a game of cards …
Glenn ran her fingers over the gray metal on her wrist. Was it possible that he wasn’t mad? That the years her father had spent lying half buried beneath The Project had actually come to something? Had he figured out how to bend the rules? Everything around her, everything she’d seen, said that he had. And yet still the idea seemed stuck at the edge of her mind, there but not there.
“Glenn,” Aamon began. “Maybe it doesn’t matter what you do or don’t believe about me. Michael Sturges and his men nearly killed Kevin for that bracelet. He was ready to kill you. And I swear to you, if Garen Tom learns of it he’ll be just as willing to do the same.”
Glenn looked up from the face of the bracelet. “Why?”
Behind Aamon, the fire hit a pocket of air in one of the logs and it snapped loudly, sending a rain of coppery sparks onto the brick hearth.
“For over a hundred years, the Magisterium and the Colloquium have stayed separate and at peace. The reason that’s been possible is that each side knows that any army that tried to cross over to the other’s territory would be helpless. Your weapons don’t work here. Our Affinity doesn’t work there. But this bracelet changes that. If Sturges possessed the technology that’s inside of it he could fill the sky with drones and take the Magisterium for himself. And if Garen Tom had it, or the Magistra? Then your home would be invaded by legions far stranger and more deadly than me.”
Glenn tensed as Aamon reached out to her, but then she felt the warmth in his fingertips and the gray softness of his coat.
“Believe or don’t,” he said. “But the bracelet has to be
destroyed.”
When Aamon drew his hand away, Glenn lifted the bracelet to catch the fire’s glow. It was beautiful in a way, sleek and simple like all of her father’s work. A wave of sadness came over her as she thought of her father, locked away in some Colloquium prison, his last memory of his daughter a betrayal. How could she take his greatest triumph and wipe it away?
But Aamon was right. Given the option, the Colloquium would do anything to take back the land lost in the Rift. All their technology couldn’t fix the basic problem of overpopulation that came when almost half the world had been swept away.
If destroying it left nothing for Sturges to pursue, then maybe it could get Dad his freedom. Maybe it could get Kevin and me our lives back.
The bracelet’s metal was light for its size, a mottled gray.
Materials were one of her father’s specialties and he used to lecture about them to her at length. Glenn guessed the shell was a mix of carbon fibers woven with titanium or even beryllium.
“Simple tools couldn’t break it,” she said, and then glanced into the fire. “It could be melted down but it would take a fire a thousand times as hot as that.”
“Perhaps …”
“What?”
“Bethany,” Aamon said. “It’s a blacksmithing town past the
mountains. There are forges there that burn like you say.”
“Fine,” Glenn said. “Kevin and I will go back. We’ll get him to a hospital. You can take this.”
She dug her fingers beneath the bracelet and started to pull.
“No!” Aamon’s hand shot out and clamped down on the bracelet before Glenn could strip it off, his claws pressing into her wrist. She felt like her hand had been bound in concrete.
Glenn’s heart pounded as Aamon looked from the bracelet up to her. His expression was strange, frightening in a way she didn’t understand.
“You can’t cross the border here,” he said. “Sturges will be watching. Bethany is farther north. Remote. It will be safer if you cross there. We’ll travel together. Once we arrive, I’ll take you both back across the border, then return with the bracelet and destroy it.”
Aamon let Glenn go and moved away from her, back toward the fire. She drew her wrist to her chest. It was streaked with red and ached from where he held her.
“Glenn,” he said. “I’m sorry I …”
Behind her, Kevin moaned, tossing and turning on his wood
pallet. Glenn took a damp cloth from the clay bowl next to him and wiped the sweat from his face and forehead. She could feel his fever through the thin fabric. His eyes flickered behind his lids.
“Will he be well enough to travel?”
“Kirzal willing.”
Glenn was about to ask what he meant, but then she realized, Of course. They still have gods here.
Glenn lay on her side next to Kevin, her back to Aamon, and drew the blanket over her. She tried to sleep but it was as if a nest of snakes was twisting and turning in her stomach.
Aamon was lying by the fire, eyes closed. She felt his claws on her wrist and remembered as he looked from the bracelet to her face and back again — that strange expression in his eyes that she couldn’t place.
What was it?
As soon as she asked herself the question the answer came to her.
Fear.
12
2 Despite the warmth of the fire, a chill moved through Glenn.
Aamon was afraid of removing the bracelet from her wrist. It seemed ludicrous. What could make someone like Aamon Marta afraid?
Glenn placed her hand on the warm metal. If what her father said was true, it was the only thing that separated her from the reality of the Magisterium. The Magisterium changed Hopkins into Aamon, Glenn thought. Maybe Aamon knows what it would do to me.
Glenn opened her eyes as the first rays of sunlight came in through the window. Aamon was gone. In his place sat a tray filled with a plate of bread and cheese and a pot of tea.
Kevin still slept beneath the pile of blankets. His green Mohawk was flattened against his skull, and his usually brown skin had a waxy gray cast to it. Glenn moved closer and pulled aside the blankets. He was shirtless underneath, and he smelled of old sweat. There was no blood or swelling around his wound and Glenn was surprised to see that the edges of the puncture were already knitting together.
“Knew you wouldn’t be able to resist a peek.”
Startled, Glenn looked up and found Kevin’s puffy eyes half open, a wry smile playing across his lips.
“Kapoor?!”
“In the fle-”
Glenn scooped him up in her arms.
“Ow!”
“Oh! Sorry!” Glenn eased him down and leaned over him. There was a hot rush in her chest. Her throat ached.
“It’s okay, Morgan,” he said. “I’m okay.”
Kevin’s hand rested on her back with a reassuring weight. Their faces were mere inches from each other. His eyes, warm and gleaming, settled on her.
“You must be hungry,” Glenn said, pulling the tray between them.
“It looks like there’s tea. I could — ”
“Thanks,” Kevin said. He grunted as he sat up, bracing himself against the wall. The blanket fell away and exposed his thin chest.
Glenn handed him a sandwich and then busied herself with the tea things on the tray.
“How does it feel?” she asked. “Your …”
“Gunshot wound?” Kevin asked brightly.
He dropped his
sandwich and pulled down the blanket to inspect the train track of stitches that curled upward from his waist to his rib cage. “It’s okay, I guess. That old guy — what’s his name? Decker? He came this morning and wiped some of that smelly crap off me. Guess that’s what made me all not dead and stuff.”
Glenn handed him a mug of tea and he took a deep drink.
“Thanks. So where are we, anyway?”
“Other side of the border,” she said. “A town called Haymarket.
It’s part of something they call the Magisterium.”
Kevin craned his neck around to survey the inside of the house.
In the light of morning it seemed warm and friendly, all pale wood and stone. He turned back to Glenn with a grin. “Well, Morgan, this certainly is one nicely appointed wasteland.”
Glenn ignored him. “Kevin, look, I’m really — ”
“Forget it.”
“Forget it? You were shot!”
“Exactly. And how many sixteen-year-olds can say they’ve been shot while fleeing Authority agents? In some ways this is the most awesome thing that’s ever happened to me. I should be thanking you for this experience!”
“Well, the experience is over.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re going back. Today.”
“Wait. What? I’m going back? What are you gonna do?”
“Aamon and I are going to take the bracelet and destroy it.”
“Destroy it? We’re destroying it? Why?”
Glenn couldn’t imagine where to begin. “It’s dangerous,” she said. “We have to make sure Sturges doesn’t get his hands on it.”
“Okay, fine. But I’m going with you.”
“No. Absolutely not. You’re in no condition — ”
“Look,” Kevin said. “If I go back now, what’s going to happen?
Authority is going to be after me just like they’d be after you. And you know me, I’m a wimp. I’ll crack under questioning in a second. I won’t be able to help myself.” Kevin tore the blankets off and reached to the floor for his shirt. “Ah! That hurts!”
He winced in pain and went pale. He started to tip forward, but Glenn’s palm found his bare chest and steadied him. His skin was hot.
