Infused (Book 2 of The Pioneers Saga)

by William Stadler

  He flicked through the papers and scanned the diagrams. She must have written the note quickly so that she could prevent Wex from sensing her emotions about it all. She had obviously wanted to betray him all the time, so perhaps if she could have kept that feeling to a minimum, then she could have lived. How much pressure could that woman have endured?

  Tossing the drawings to the side, he stared up at the ceiling. What could he have done differently? Probably nothing, he assumed. Vanessa was great at secrets, and she loved him too much. Those two things combined made it impossible for him to have intervened. Still, he wished he could have done something. Analyzing the drawings again he slid them back into the box and covered them with the lid. If only he could have done something.

  He thought of the message on the outside of the envelope: “I love you more than you will ever know.” Why would she have written that to him, knowing that she was the one doing the research? Vanessa was so mysterious sometimes.

  Then it hit him. What if she was trying to tell him something? What if she had left these here hoping he would find them? He shook the papers out of the box onto the floor and rummaged through them looking for answers, hastily organizing everything. The compounds should have been first, and then the emblems, and then the designs, and then the Breathless Bramble. This was not just a letter. These were instructions. Vanessa had figured out how to create a Domination serum! But he needed to cipher through the drawings to discover her secret.

  If only he could do something different. This was his chance! He could perpetuate her legacy. He could help to stop the Polarist Domination of Broughtonhaven if he just followed these drawings and these designs. But first he needed to get things in order. He picked up the laboratory table, and he gathered up all the glass. He used special formulas to remove the Anaerobia from the walls. In just a few hours of frantic cleaning, the lab was back up and running smoothly, minus a few flasks and beakers.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE DETOUR

  The winds of Narwine slowly picked up, but the warmth of the breeze was inviting. Caleb walked alongside of Sarai and Gardiv east towards the town of Shalar. Caleb couldn’t figure out why Jensen was being so difficult. Why was he resisting to help the Spiritualists? He knew he couldn’t ask much more from Jensen. The man had lost his wife, and he didn’t have anything else. Caleb sighed and trudged along through the rocky trail, grasping his bow and squinting as they headed towards the horizon.

  Caleb looked behind him at Gardiv who was carrying a slip of paper in both hands. It was the letter from his sister. “What’s going on, Gardiv?” Caleb asked.

  Gardiv folded the letter and stuffed it into his pocket to hide it from them. “Nothing. Just thinking.”

  “You miss her don’t you?” asked Sarai.

  “I’ll manage,” he replied, clearing his throat.

  “Managing isn't living,” she said. “We’re not far from Bahoil where she lives.”

  “I know.” Gardiv’s words were abrupt, almost like he was holding back the pain.

  “We could skip over Shalar and head North to Bahoil. We’d only lose about two days. It seems worth it to me,” Sarai said.

  “I couldn’t ask you to do that. Besides, we’ve got a mission to run, and that’s way more important.” He pushed ahead of them, and Caleb grabbed him by the shoulder to turn him around.

  “We’re going to Bahoil,” Caleb said. “You no longer have any say in the matter. If your sister wants to see you, then you need to go to her.”

  They all stopped walking. Gardiv grunted and looked at the ground. “Asking you to abandon the mission for a couple of days just because I can’t think straight. It doesn’t feel right.” He looked towards the sky and put his hands on his hips. The wind brushed by him in spurts. “I know she wants to see me, but so much time has passed. She could wait a few more months until this is all over.”

  Caleb bobbed his head back and forth as if he were weighing out what Gardiv was saying. “Maybe she can. But you can’t. You’ve been thinking about her for years. You even said that you've been asking about her all this time, and she's never responded. But now here is the chance that you wanted, and you’re going to give it up because of the invasion?” Caleb paused, waiting for a reply.

  Gardiv closed his eyes, clenching his teeth as if he were warding off his indecision. “I don't think that—”

  Caleb interrupted him. “I didn’t like what Jensen had to say, but he was right about one thing. As we fight, we can't forget about the individuals we are fighting for. That’s the Pioneers’ way. And you, Pioneer Baroq, need to go see Natasha. If your family needs you, then you need to be there. Our mission should never go before that.”

  Gardiv sighed, rubbing the sides of his head. “It’s easier to say all this to someone else than to have to do it myself. If it were one of you, I’d have no problem with you visiting a family member. I wouldn’t even think twice about it. Rescuing Shauna was different because that would have put us all in danger, but going to visit a loved one wouldn’t have bothered me much at all. I'm not sure I can handle doing this.”

  Sarai grabbed Gardiv's arm, pulling him. “We’re all the way up here. There isn’t a better time to go than now.”

  He stumbled forward as she yanked him over the rocks that crunched beneath his feet. “I guess I’m goin’ then,” he laughed.

  “I suppose you are,” Sarai said, still yanking his arm.

  The journey was not as easy as they would have liked. The mountains had steep inclines that rose high out of the ground. The valleys were low, and the trails were few. The day gradually disappeared from them, and they set up camp near the road. Caleb started the fire using the Materialist Anaerobia and a few drops from the blood canister. The blaze muttered softly between them. They sat underneath a few trees, but the environment was not as daunting as the canopy in Broughtonhaven. This was relaxing.

  “So Gardiv, you said you used to be a vagabond. What made you run away?” Caleb asked.

  Gardiv looked up at the leaves above him, smiling in reminiscent disappointment. “Run away? That surely would have been the easy route.” The smoke floated into the sky, and the fire shifted the shadows on his face.

  “I thought you told me you ran away,” said Sarai.

  “I did, but not like you meant it. My parents forced me. He stretched out his legs and crossed one foot over the other as he leaned back onto his hands. “You may not believe this, but I was never a fighter like you two.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” said Caleb. He positioned himself like Gardiv with his hands behind him.

  “I bet it is. But it's true. Just like the other provinces, I was expected to go into the military before I turned eighteen. I refused. Killing another man just wasn’t in me. Or at least I didn’t think it was at the time. My dad used to say all kinds of nasty things to me about it.”

  “Like what?” asked Caleb.

  “Can’t say that I’m too much over it now. But he’d call me weak-knees, and sometimes when he was out joking with his friends, he’d refer to me as a Wanderer – as if I didn't even have an emblem.”

  “Seems pretty cruel,” said Sarai. Her legs were crossed underneath her, and she sat with her elbows on her knees and her chin against her fists.

  “Felt like it too. But joining the military was just what you were supposed to do, I guess. My mother wouldn’t talk to me. Said we was too well-known not to have their child join up with the fight.”

  “What about your sister?” Sarai asked.

  “Natasha? She was different. They always figured she would join, especially because I wasn’t around, and she said she was going to join up on her eighteenth birthday.”

  “Was that why you were going home to see her before you got extracted?” Caleb asked.

  “Mostly. I wanted to surprise my parents, too though. My father and I had since started talking again through letters here and there. I didn’t ever have a home for him to send the letters to, so he sent them to the N
arwine border, and I’d go and pick them up and send one back whenever I needed to. He said he wanted to see me, so I figured I’d surprise both him and my sister by showing up.”

  “They obviously weren’t happy to see you,” Caleb said, disappointed.

  “Course not. I burned down their house, and according to them, it was because of my anger. They visited me in prison after the extraction, but they didn’t stay long. They didn’t care about me saving my sister from the beating that she was getting from her boyfriend Malto. They just complained about the estate the whole time. Sad thing is that Natasha wasn’t going to join the military either.”

  “Why did they not treat her like they treated you?” Caleb asked.

  “Because they didn’t know. She never told them, but she used to tell me that she was going to run away with Malto and that they was going to have a life together out west, far away from Bahoil. If our parents had known that...hmph...no tellin’ what they would’ve done.”

  Sarai pushed a line of pebbles through the dirt with the tip of her finger. “What do you think would have happened?”

  “Their money and their emblems was all that they cared about. You wouldn’t have known that if you had seen them in the streets though. They were always putting on faces, acting like they loved us and that money didn’t matter. They even tried to act like their emblems were just a part of them, like they were better than everyone else because they didn’t need the stones.” He chuckled to himself, shaking his head.

  “What’s funny about that?” Caleb asked.

  Gardiv’s eyes widened as he stared into the flame. “It was the one thing that made them who they were. That’s why they wanted us in the military. All of Narwine would have shunned them otherwise. And what do you think it did to them to have a son who had become a Wanderer?”

  “It must have destroyed their reputation,” Sarai said.

  “Ha!” He laughed sarcastically. “Not even close. They used that as an opportunity to rub my face in the dirt. They told all these lies about me. About how I used to bad talk the Narwine Council and how I hated my emblem and how I would never fight for our province. They went as far as to tell people that I was unstable in the head, kissed by the moon, they said. Whenever people would say, ‘Your son did this or that,’ they’d respond by saying, ‘Son, we did not give birth to a son. We only have a daughter, Natasha.’” Gardiv mocked their sophisticated voices.

  “So what happened to Natasha?” Caleb asked. “Did she ever join the military?”

  “She didn’t have to at that point. My trial was public. All the cities of Narwine knew at least a few of the details about it. They accused me of beating my sister to a bloody pulp. And as far as her boyfriend, Malto, the people all had sympathy for him. In the end, they treated me like a dog-faced scum.”

  “If you didn’t join the military, how did you learn to train with your emblem? I mean there aren’t too many of the Common who can,” said Caleb.

  “Before the trial and the extraction, my parents kicked me out of the house. So yes, I did run away, but it was because they told me to. I got hooked up with some travelers, and that’s how we lived.”

  “Did you learn to use your emblem because of them?” asked Caleb.

  Gardiv squinted and looked to the side. “Not really,” he said, shaking his head. “I taught myself way before I was kicked out. I just used to feel the life forms around me, and with a few pulls and tugs, I could pull out hydrogen and create a few sparks. That got me excited, so I used to go on long walks through the mountains by myself and just practice. Sometimes I’d tell my parents that I was staying at a friend’s place, but I’d just go and train. By the time I found the travelers, I was much more powerful than they were. They taught me how to survive, and I taught them how to use their emblems. I needed them, and they needed me.”

  “So then, what turned you into a fighter?” Caleb asked. “Something had to have made you kill the guard and the old man in the prison.”

  Gardiv looked away, leaned back on his hands, and spat off to his side. “Running with the travelers wasn’t easy. Survival meant you learned to live. And sometimes, for someone to live, someone had to die.”

  Caleb soaked in those last words. The fire crackled in front of him. It too, appeared to be lingering on those words. Caleb made a clearing on the rocky ground that was manageable enough to sleep on, then he put his satchel under his head and fell asleep.

  =====

  The morning sun approached them tenderly, and Caleb yawned as he prepared for the day. Bahoil was less than a day away, and they would be there by sunset if they kept a steady pace. He thought about his conversation with Gardiv the night before, and just knowing that Gardiv used to be so different was something that Caleb had not expected. The rough edges and the hard tone now felt out of place, almost like it was a shell that Gardiv lived in so that he could keep protecting himself, so that he could survive for another day. It wasn’t money that had changed his life. It certainly wasn’t poverty either. Life had changed him. The hard face and stony heart was a another set of clothing that he had to put on every morning. Those garbs probably weighed more than his bow, his quiver, and his dagger combined.

  Sarai was seated on the ground near the dying fire with her knees up to her chest. The flames had been extinguished through the night, and the chilly mountain air stirred at the camp with them. The sun was shining in her eyes, so she shaded her face with one hand and with the other, she reached up for Caleb so that he could help her to her feet. He hesitated because his heart was still hurting, but she had saved his life after all. This was the least he could do. He pulled her up, but he didn’t look at her, and he walked away as she dusted herself off.

  Several hours passed, and the night was gradually coming upon them. They arrived at Bahoil, and they approached Natasha’s house which was set off in the distance. It was smaller than what Caleb would have expected for the daughter of such a wealthy couple. Being that the house was located outside of the city, Caleb was sure that it still must have been quite expensive. There were no other houses around, but the mountain city was not far away. The road entered the town to the left of where Caleb was standing, and Natasha’s house was off to the right. The house sat at the top of the hill, and the road dipped into a steep valley between the house and the town.

  Gardiv wiped his sweaty hands on his pants. Caleb had never seen him so shaken. Even when Gardiv was fighting the Voids, there wasn’t this much anxiety seeping out of the man. Gardiv pulled out the letter again to make sure that he had read it correctly. Then he stuffed it back into his pocket and sighed.

  “How you making it?” Caleb asked.

  “I-I’ve had better days, that’s for sure.”

  “We can go with you if it’ll help,” said Sarai.

  Gardiv wiped his brow. Even though the night air was cool, he still perspired a bit. “I’d better go at this myself. She only invited me, and I don’t want to upset her anymore than I already have.”

  “If that’s what you want to do. Sarai and I will go to town and get some food for us, and then we’ll head back this way to catch up with you.”

  Gardiv nodded and hiked off towards his sister’s house. His footsteps were not as sure as they had been before, and his strides were much shorter. Caleb and Sarai headed down the steep hill towards the town. The rocks slid underneath their feet, and they leaned backwards to keep from slipping. The light of the moon glared down on the two of them, and the trees rustled in the howling winds. The smell of the crisp mountain air swooshed into their nostrils, uninvited but welcomed.

  “I can go ahead without you if that’s what you’d like,” Caleb said.

  “Why are you being like this?”

  “Being like what? The last real conversation that we had, you told me that you would rather run around the island than to have to deal with me. I think I’m acting just as you’d expect.”

  “What I’d expect is you’d understand what I meant.”

  �
�I did understand what you meant, and I’m giving you all the space you need, especially now that I’m Third Watch. I have more to be concerned with than whether or not you're satisfied with how I'm treating you. You won’t ever have to see me again except at the gatherings.”

  They eased down into the crest of the valley and started the ascent into the town. Going up was less challenging than going down. “What I’m saying is…”

  “Why did you even come to save me anyway?” he asked, interrupting her. “Why not just leave me in there to die. Then you would never have to see me again, which is what you wanted anyway, right?”

  “You’re being ridiculous. Under no circumstances would I want you to die. But it’s more than that.”

  “What is?”

  “I thought about our conversation and about when you kissed me.”

  “And?”

  “It was sweet.”

  Caleb threw his hands up, frustrated. “It was sweet? Thanks.”

  “No. Just listen.” She touched his shoulder. They stood still on a small piece of level ground on the hillside as the winds whistled through. “It was sweet. But that’s what Naturalists do.”

  “I’m not a Naturalist anymore,” he said sternly, readjusting his bow.

  “You still have some Naturalist tendencies, though.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve given up that old lifestyle.”

  “You did, but you haven’t wiped your hands of it.”

  “What?”

  Sarai reached down and grabbed a handful of dirt and rocks. The sharp edges poked into her palms, and she squeezed the clods as tightly as she could. Then she turned her hand over and poured the dirt and rocks back onto the ground. “Look at my hand.”

  Caleb leaned in, bracing his hand against this bow. “What am I looking at?”

  “Tell me what you see.”

  “I see your hand…” he said with a tone that seemed to be looking for the words. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”