by Sofia Vargas
“You will need to see and listen to her to understand why I say she’s not one of them,” Oak said. “Caden, tell her. You were there when she was Enlightened.”
“I—I’d rather you guys worked this out on your own,” said the male voice from the night before.
“Did you say Enlightened?” the woman asked.
“Arrgh,” Oak growled. He stomped around a little, too.
I had heard enough. I stepped out of the room and walked down the hall. I smoothed out my clothes as best I could and patted my hair. I felt the loosened scarf, pulled it off my head and stuffed it in my pocket.
“What do you mean Enlightened?” the woman said, just as I stepped into the sunlit room.
I had entered a kitchen. Oak was standing in front of a stove, the man I now recognized as the one sitting at Oak’s stand while I ate dinner was leaning against the counter, and there was a woman standing in the middle of the room near a table with food on it. Her back was to me when I entered but as soon as she saw their eyes, she turned.
“Oh, my.” She stared at me in disbelief.
Her face moved from a state of shock to that of anger. She turned to face Oak again. The man against the counter edged further away from her glare.
“Is this what you meant by her not being one of them?” the woman all but shrieked at them. “She’s not even an Aetherian?”
“No, no,” Oak said, taking the few steps to me and grabbing my hand. He pulled me further into the room. “She is Aetherian.”
“Are you kidding me?” she said, keeping her voice just as loud. “Look at her hair. Look at those eyes.”
“She’s the Dragonfly,” Oak said.
He put so much emphasis on the last word I thought we’d see it explode right before our eyes. The woman seemed to stop breathing.
“She isn’t,” she said in a voice that was barely audible.
“She is,” the man against the counter said.
He edged his way back to the group now that the woman had calmed down.
“I hadn’t heard that they had found her,” she said.
She pulled out the closest chair from the table and sat in it.
“They pulled her out of the water three nights ago,” Oak said.
She put her elbows on her knees and held her head in her hands. A few moments passed in silence.
“Well, she can’t stay here,” the woman said to the floor. “No,” she looked up again and rose out of her chair. “They’re going to go even more ballistic looking for her if she is who you say she is.”
“That’s why we need to move fast,” Oak said. He pulled out the chair closest to me and gestured for me to sit in it. “She’s Enlightened and they want her to take up a military post and lead them into war.”
I had a seat. The woman sank back down into her chair.
“So war it truly is then?”
“Not if we can help it,” Oak said. He sat in the chair across from her. “With her here she can see. She can help us.”
“Which is what I want to do,” I said.
They looked at me.
“I don’t want to go to war any more than you do.”
Oak looked at the woman again. “Kaia, if she sees what we have here, if we explain what we want to do, she can have a hand in it. They’ll listen to her. She can help us accomplish what we would never be able to on our own.”
She looked at him then back at me. “You’re really the Enlightened Dragonfly?”
I nodded my head. She inhaled a lungful of air then exhaled.
“Okay,” she said.
On her face I could see that she was wondering how much she was going to regret her decision.
“Okay," she said again. "Let’s see what we can do about all of this.”
“Thank you, Kaia,” Oak said. “We didn’t like keeping you in the dark about this. With you here things may go much more smoothly.”
“Fine,” she said. “So let’s get things started already. Exactly what did you guys have planned?”
Oak motioned for me to help myself to the food on the table. I picked up a bunch of grapes while making sure to listen carefully.
“We really didn’t have much of a plan,” Oak said. “I met Emma only two days ago while working at the campsite. I was skeptical at first, but I found that she is exactly the kind of person we need. I talked it over with Caden and he said that if I believed she could help then we needed to start taking action.”
“Was all of this in talks before she was Enlightened?” Kaia said, giving me a sideways look. “All your judgment was made before you knew the person she would become?”
“It wasn’t a matter of who she would become,” Oak said with a wave of his hand. “I knew the kind of person she was and would continue to be when I met her.”
I smiled at him.
“Right,” Caden said, having a seat at the table with us. “It was pretty much dumb luck that she walked up to us in the middle of discussing our plan and had her Enlightenment right before our eyes.”
“And what do we do now?” Kaia said.
“We figured we’d show her what we have going on here,” Oak said. “And explain why we are doing these things.”
“Show her everything?” she said.
“Show her everything that the South is today,” he said. “She was given a brief history run-through so she knows how things have been. But things are changing.” My ears perked at that word. “And she needs to know what they are becoming.”
“Ms. Riley and Professor Elias said that things were changing,” I said. “Or at least they said that things needed to change.”
“See?” Oak said. “She needs to see what things are evolving into, who we are now, and why the old way of life is no longer pertinent.”
Kaia sighed again. I could see the war raging within her.
“All right then. Let’s start making some introductions.”
* * *
“This place is huge,” I said during the tour they gave me.
The hallway I walked through was only one wing of the cabin. Two more hallways branched out from the kitchen with as many rooms down the walls as the first one. On one side of the kitchen was a general living area before coming to the front door.
“Well,” said Oak, “we have quite a few people living here. We made it as big as we could so everyone would have space. Not all the rooms are occupied at this time, but we didn’t know how long this war would last, nor how many people we’d have to house by the end of it.”
“Who is being housed here?”
“That’s who you’re about to meet,” he said.
He turned the knob on the front door and pushed it open.
Noise met my ears when it opened. The four of us walked out the door and I blinked in the sunlight.
“Oh, my God,” I said.
There were close to a dozen kids running around the yard.
The surprising thing wasn’t the fact that they were kids; it was the fact that these kids had abilities that they technically shouldn’t have had. Three boys chased after each other with different colored Bee wings attached to their backs. I saw almost identical quintuplets practice molding various parts of their bodies together. A little girl ran by and threw fire she had conjured at a boy chasing after her. The little boy laughed and put out the fireballs being thrown at him with balls of his self-made water.
“All these kids…” I said, finding it hard to talk while staring out over the yard. “They have…”
“The high priority abilities Southerners have never believed they could have,” Oak said.
“How is this possible?” I said. I turned around to look at the group. “The North lost it when they found out you had one person with an ability like that. What’s going to happen when they find out that you have ten of them?”
“That’s what we’re worried about,” Oak said. “That’s why they’re gathered here; so we can protect them and keep them out of the North’s sight.”
“But it o
nly took us a night to get here,” I said. “Are we already on Southern lands?”
“No,” he said. “We’re still in the North. We figured it would be safer to keep them in the North since it’s monitored less than the South is right now.”
“Oh,” I said. Something clicked in my mind. “Do you know what you have here? You guys have the makings of your own ruling class. Find a Southerner with a pair of Butterfly wings and you guys can form your own kingdom separate from the North. You can be ruled by your own king or queen.”
“But that’s exactly what we don’t want,” Kaia said. “We already have a working council and army; we don’t want to be ruled over. We want to be self-governed.”
I looked at them, taken aback. “You guys want a democracy?”
“Yes,” she said. “We’re tired of being ruled by the Northern monarchy that, quite frankly, doesn’t give a damn about us. Ever since we broke off from the North and formed South Aetheria we have been governing ourselves without a king. We have a council that common people can talk to and help make decisions that matter to them. It has worked beautifully for quite a number of years, but for some reason we now have a generation of royalty. It’s as if we can’t escape having someone rule over us.”
“Then don’t let it happen,” I said with a shrug.
I turned back around and looked at the surrounding area. I had been right when I thought I had seen mountains the previous night. The cabin was placed in a small valley. I saw a narrow road lead away from us and create a path through the low slopes between two mountains. I walked down the wooden steps and toward the little girl that was throwing fire at the little boy. She was taking a rest in the grass.
I knelt beside her. “Hi.”
She looked at me with her turquoise eyes. “Hi.”
“What’s your name?”
“Adeline,” she said.
I smiled. “I’m Emma. It’s nice to meet you, Adeline.”
“It’s nice to meet you, too.”
“That’s a very special ability you have,” I said.
Her hand gave a nervous twitch and a couple of sparks flew out of it.
“It got me in trouble and made my family sad,” she said.
I could hear my heart break in my chest. I nodded at her. “I hear there has been quite a fuss about you.”
“They want to take me away,” she said, looking toward the road that ran between the mountains.
“We won’t let that happen,” I said.
She looked back at me. “You’re going to help Daddy protect me?”
I didn’t know who her daddy was, but I knew the answer to her question.
“Yes, I will.”
We smiled at each other. I patted the top of her head and got back up to walk back to Oak and Kaia. Caden was walking over to a stable where the horses were probably being kept.
“I’m in,” I said when I reached them. “What’s the plan that you guys do have set?”
The three of us took a seat on the front steps of the cabin.
“Gather all people the North would want to get their hands on in one place and keep them safe and secret for as long as possible?”
“That’s pretty much it right now,” Oak said. “We don’t want to do anything irrational and accidentally trigger the war.”
“Just lying low for now,” I nodded, watching a small bird flying in the sky. “Sounds like as good of a plan as any for now. But things won’t stay at a stalemate forever.”
“We’re trying to keep everything at ease until something can be done,” Kaia said.
“What kind of guard do you guys have?” I said. The bird grew bigger in the sky. “I know you have … one of those light people,” I wished I had asked about the terms used for certain abilities during lessons. “They were part of the Bust-Out Brigade last night.”
Oak laughed. “Yes, that was Lavianna our Illuminator riding on the back of Caden’s horse. But she really isn’t a permanent part of our guard. She’s having some … issues—”
“We have a Revealer watching the road before it enters the mountains,” Kaia said.
“What’s a Revealer?”
“A Revealer can see what ability a person has,” Oak said. “Bristan joined to make us invisible, but Sayley can see through a person’s ability so she was the one that gave the okay to let us through.”
“Yeah, I was surprised by quite a few events last night.”
“Sorry about that,” Oak said. “There wasn’t any time to explain everything that was going to happen.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Okay, so since I know you’re telekinetic, Lavianna is the Illuminator, and Bristan is the one that made us invisible, which didn’t happen until a little way through the ride, I’m guessing that Caden is the one that covered up the sound?”
“Yes,” he said. “Caden’s a Silencer.”
“And what did the person on the fourth horse do?”
“Fourth horse?” Oak said. “There were only three.”
I looked at him. “Three … plus us?”
“No, three all together,” Kaia said. She looked at Oak. “That’s what you told me.”
“You and I were on one,” Oak said, holding up his index finger, “Caden and Lavianna were on another, and then Bristan joined us on one more,” he said, holding up two more fingers.
I smiled nervously. “But there was another horse. Lavianna lit up and I saw a horse ride to the side of us and another ride to the side of it.”
Kaia and Oak looked at each other. Their faces filled with concern.
She looked back at me. “You—you were tired last night. Are you sure you were seeing things correctly?”
I nodded. “I’m positive.”
“I—I must have missed that,” Oak said. “That horse you saw next us wasn’t supposed to be there.”
I looked over the yard realizing how quiet it had gotten within the last couple of seconds. A few of the kids were pointing at the bird I had been watching earlier. I didn’t have to look up for the fear that I was mistaken to set in.
“I’m… I’m guessing that’s not a bird,” I said. My heart plummeted.
Kaia and Oak looked over at the children, noticing the silence, too. They looked up to where the children were staring at the sky. Now it was so close that it passed under the sun and I could make out the shape of a person with a pair of red Bee wings.
Kaia jumped up and started yelling for the kids to get into the cabin.
“Hurry, get inside,” she said to the children running toward her.
“Who could it be?” I said, getting up and waving the children up the stairs.
“We don’t know anyone with red Bee wings,” said Oak. “We can only assume that it’s someone we don’t want around.”
I thought everyone had made it inside until I saw one last little boy in the field. It was the Elementist that had been playing with Adeline.
“There’s still one out there,” I said to Oak.
He looked over his shoulder. The boy was now following the intruder with his outstretched forefinger.
“Whelan, get inside,” Oak said, running to him.
“But I can get him,” Whelan said.
At that moment a jet of water shot from his finger and into the sky.
Oak scooped up the boy in his arms and ran back to the cabin. I looked up in time to see the jet puncture a hole in one of the Bee’s wings. I ran into the yard when I saw the wing break apart and the person start falling toward the ground.
“No, Emma,” Oak said when I streaked past him. “Where are you going?”
I jumped as high as I possibly could into the air and sent a pulse through my body. I felt the dirt, grass, and leaves I had summoned attach to my back. I had no idea if I was going to be able to actually fly with them. But I flexed them in the air anyway and they shot me straight toward him. I hooked my arms under the unconscious intruder’s arms as soon as his fall put him within my reach.
I strained my back to keep u
s in the air, but the material my wings were made of wasn’t strong enough to keep both of us airborne. The weight of his body pushed us through the air and back toward the ground. Using what strength I had left I flapped my wings as hard as I could to soften our impact with the ground. I felt them burst out of my back in protest. We broke through the small cushion of air that I had created and smashed into the ground with as much force as if it had not been there.
When everything stopped moving and my body had finally come to rest, I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t support my head and it rolled to the side. I looked toward my arms and my vision began to slide in and out of focus.
“Damn it, Dresden,” I murmured when I saw who I was holding.
Blood oozed from his nose and the corner of his mouth. Then everything went dark.
XI
A mission
Something tickled my back. It disturbed my relaxed state when I realized that it wasn’t my skin that was being tickled. It was my spinal cord. I arched my back to make it stop. That was successful and unsuccessful; the tickling stopped; now it felt like the feather running up and down my spine had turned into a thousand knives lodging themselves into every inch of my back. My eyes flew open and I let out the most ear piercing scream I had ever heard resonate through my vocal cords.
A door opened and a person ran into the room. I tried to turn my head to see who had done this to me only to have a thousand more knives stab every part of my neck. I let another earth shattering scream roll out of my throat.
“You might not want to move, love,” said the person that had entered the room. She stood next to me and tightened the various straps on my body. “The more you move the more pain you’ll put yourself in.”
I didn’t recognize the woman.
“Who are you?” I said, trying to see her through my watery eyes.
The woman let out a throaty laugh. “Ah, not only can you scream but you can talk, too. You’re coming around nicely, aren’t you?”
I looked down at the straps she was tightening. They were holding down an unrecognizable body covered in black and blue blossoms.
“What’ve you done to me?”
“I’m afraid you did this to yourself, love,” she said.
She rubbed a funny smelling ointment on the skin exposed under the straps. I winced when she touched the bruise that didn’t come to an end.
