Insight Kindling

by Chess Desalls

  Pangs of surprise and regret tingled inside my chest, leaving me feeling both warmed and ice cold. “What happened when the silhouettes faded away?” I asked. “Didn’t that make the loneliness worse?”

  “Yes and no,” Valcas answered. “Plaka had an extraordinary sense of what was helping and what was not. He called it insight. There were times when he would transport silhouettes over and over again until the person was healed. If, after several times, the presence of the silhouettes agitated the broken person, he found other ways to soothe them.”

  “Did it work?” Was that even possible?

  Valcas gave me a funny look. “Yes. Everything you said about Edgar earlier, about being accepting and like family… Plaka was more than that to me. He was a friend and a healer…”

  Valcas paused, as if he were searching for the right words to continue his explanation. Then, in a soft voice he added, “I was one of his patients.” He swallowed. “But he was taken from me before my treatment was complete.”

  I sat there staring at Valcas. My mouth hung open as I tried to process all the new information he’d dumped on me. Today’s lesson was about more than slicing. That alone was, like my father and Valcas described it, fascinating. But this? What was all this about Valcas being my father’s patient? Had he just admitted to me that he needed healing?

  I gulped back the lump that had been forming in my throat. “Back at the White Tower,” I said. “When Mom called to tell me to wait for you—that you were on your way to come get me, I asked her something about you.”

  “Yes?”

  “She’d said that Edgar had become lost, and that if I didn’t stop moving, I would become lost too.”

  Valcas nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “I asked her whether you were lost.” I caught Valcas raising his eyebrows before I continued on. “She said that you weren’t lost, but that you’d come close a couple of times. Is that why my father was treating you?”

  Valcas shook his head. “No.”

  “Oh.”

  How lonely and depressed had he become? What had happened to him? I already knew how much of a hot mess green-eyed Valcas had been at the White Tower. I had only the smallest idea of how much of an ego blow he’d sustained after the girl his parents wanted him to marry laughed him out of the White Tower. The recordings he’d later captured in the travel glasses Edgar had invented weren’t exactly a beacon of hope either. How much more was there to his story?

  I sighed. I’d never received an apology quite like this before—even if Valcas didn’t want to admit it was apology, or was unaware that was what he was doing. Once again, pity overshadowed whatever fears I had of Valcas and the bitterness I felt toward him for his past actions. Was that what he wanted? My pity? I doubted it.

  Valcas had shown me a great deal of vulnerability. I believed his story; at least I wanted to since it meant that my father was a good person, a healer who traveled Everywhere and Everywhen to help others who were lonely and lost. I wondered what that would be like—traveling alone, seeing others’ happiness when they reunited with one another.

  A jolt of feeling warmed my stomach. I already knew what that felt like. I’d seen it when I transported Romaso from Venice to Folkstone, bringing his past self—his silhouette—into a different place and time. Shirlyn was overjoyed.

  Like my father, I was a Remnant Transporter. Could it be that I was a healer too? As much as I wanted to ask Valcas this question, I hesitated. Our conversation was getting too uncomfortable. “Thanks for telling me all this,” I said.

  Feeling kind of embarrassed for him, I kept my eyes down. I didn’t see or hear any reaction from him. Instead, I noticed a crack, a line splintering the solid water-ground.

  Just then I realized that there had been no impact from our arrival. “We are in a real place right now, right?”

  Valcas leapt to his feet. “Yes. You felt that too?”

  “Felt what?”

  “We need to get out of here!”

  I stood up, pointing to the ground. “The water is breaking,” I said. “Is the impact of our arrival starting? Is everything here going to get broken? Is that why we need to leave?”

  Valcas shook his head. He had a strange look on his face, as if he were confused. Suddenly, he started.

  “How much time has passed?” He ran to me. “If there was going to be an impact it would have happened already.”

  I shuddered, remembering what Enta had told me about other beings with the ability to absorb the impact of arrival. I spun around, searching for the presence of a bright white light. The Uproar. Was it here too?

  As if in answer to my question, the crack deepened and the ground split between us. Shards of salted glass sprayed up from the crack. I tried to step over it, toward Valcas, but my foot landed and got caught in another crack.

  My body lunged forward. I fell down hard on my hands.

  I tried to scream, but nothing came out. All at the same time, I heard, saw and felt the blow of a flash of bright white light.

  Blinded, I reached out in front of me, feeling for the air, the ground and for Valcas. The sound of rushing winds filled my ears. My eyes felt as if they were on fire. I squeezed them shut. The light wasn’t as penetrating as it was during travel, but it burned brightly, making the backs of my eyelids glow pink, with flecks of spidery red lines.

  I pulled my foot free from the crack and pressed myself up with my knee and opposite foot. A hand caught mine and pulled me forward. Startled, I tripped again. I opened my eyes just before I was blinded by another flash of bright white light.

  I gritted my teeth and stood up, bending my knees to steady myself and regain my balance.

  “Can you run?” Valcas yelled over the rush of the wind and the cracking and popping of the water around us.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I yelled back. I couldn’t see where the water broke, but I could hear it being ripped and torn apart. I squinted and kept my head down, not wanting to see whether the same level of destruction was happening to the Pipette, to Romaso and Shirlyn’s silhouettes and—I shuddered—to the past versions of Valcas and me.

  Valcas squeezed my hand tightly. “I see a path that we can run through,” he said.

  I nodded, realizing that he could see much better than I could since he was still wearing his travel glasses. “Okay, point me in the right direction!”

  Valcas quickly, but gently, pulled me around, turning me to my right. With my hand in his, we ran until we were headed toward, and surrounded by, a different source of blinding white light.

  DESPITE ALL the fear and all the action, a separate disturbing thought prickled the back of my mind: The Uproar only attacked me when Valcas was present—at the dock when Valcas and I first met, later that day during our dinner “date” at Lake Winston, and now at a slice in time at Folkestone Harbor.

  Would trusting Valcas ever be easy?

  Edgar hadn’t trusted Valcas, but Enta did. According to Enta, the Uproar could have been present at any time and place where I hadn’t felt the impact of my arrival, because there were ethereal beings out there that could absorb the impact. I shuddered, wondering how long the Uproar had been nearby, waiting and listening.

  VALCAS AND I landed with a thud. The first thing I noticed was that we were no longer standing hand-in-hand or side-by-side. I was in his arms, seated on his lap.

  “Well don’t you two look cozy?”

  Ivory stood there staring at us, her body frozen mid-punch in some kind of kickboxing move. I would have thought we’d entered another slice in time had it not been for her recent comment and the fact that her lips were twitching.

  “That must have been some incredibly close one-on-one training.” Ivory’s voice oozed amusement. Then, to my horror, she winked.

  Blood rushed to my cheeks. I pulled free from Valcas, brushed myself off and stood up. He lingered on the ground for a few seconds before standing up to join me.

  My face crumpled. We’d been in real danger. Now we
were safe again, in Aboreal, and from Ivory’s reaction I guessed we were in the present. I was so relieved that I thought I might cry, but I couldn’t do that—not in front of Valcas and definitely not in front of Ivory.

  “Where’s Ray?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  Ivory grinned and relaxed her stance. “He went back down to the conference room to work on brain puzzles or something,” she said. “Oh, and thanks for tearing open my training place right in the middle of my workout.”

  Valcas sniffed. I was glad someone could make him laugh. Ivory had a way of lifting his spirits, a healer in her own way.

  “We just had a quick escape,” I said, flexing my foot, the one that had caught in the cracked water. “I hadn’t prepared for an actual Uproar sighting during training.”

  Ivory’s jaw dropped. “Are you for real?” she asked, snapping her dark eyes at Valcas.

  He nodded. “The chase begins.”

  “Great,” Ivory said. “I’d start running, but we need to brace ourselves for the impact of your arrival first.”

  I looked back and forth between Valcas and Ivory, wondering whether there was a proper way to brace one’s self for an impact. In my brief experience traveling to real places, the impact either knocked me around or I hid under a table. The most vivid impact-memory had been when the force of my arrival jutted me off a shelf on a mountainside. I pressed my hands to my sides to keep them from trembling.

  Ivory must have noticed my unease. “It’s called grounding,” she said. “And I suppose I will tell you about it, given that your Grade A travel trainer here isn’t piping up.”

  “Grounding?”

  “Yeah, come here.” Ivory knelt down on the ground on one knee and placed both of her palms flat on the ground out in front of her. She looked like a runner getting ready to start a race.

  “Is that all?” I asked.

  Valcas knelt down in a similar position and motioned for me to do the same.

  While waiting for the impact to hit I asked, “So, how do you know when the impact will happen?”

  “You don’t, really,” said Ivory. “But you can feel it coming, and you should always be prepared for it when traveling to a real place.”

  I waited there quietly, concentrating, trying to feel it, but I couldn’t. “What does it feel—”

  Just like at Uncle Al’s cottage, the impact hit suddenly, out of nowhere. The ground shook and the wind blew, making my teeth chatter. Fortunately, we weren’t near glass or any other breakable substance.

  The moment passed. It would have been far more exciting if Valcas and I hadn’t just escaped the Uproar.

  “Invigorating, no?” Ivory said when all was still again. “We might as well go get Ray and travel to our next destination. I think we’ve had enough training for one day.”

  I raised my eyebrows as we all stood up out of our grounding positions. “We’re really not staying the night here in Aboreal?” I remembered Valcas telling his mother that we’d be leaving that night after training, but what was the rush?

  “Nope,” said Ivory. “We’ve stayed here long enough already.” She glanced at Valcas. “We don’t want to overstay our welcome now, do we?”

  “No,” Valcas said. “We certainly wouldn’t want to do that.”

  DURING OUR walk back to the jet, I wondered more about whether or not Valcas knew Sable would be in Aboreal, waiting for us, and what Ivory meant about us overstaying our welcome. Aboreal was weird, way weird, but I didn’t see why we had to leave so soon.

  Valcas and I followed behind Ray and Ivory, leaving a short distance between us and them, as we passed through the Aborealian streets and their black- and white-haired inhabitants. As we walked, Valcas kept glancing over at me and quickly looking away again. I raised an eyebrow at him, and then, when I couldn’t take it anymore, I gave up and took his bait.

  “What, Valcas? What do you want to know?”

  He grinned. “I was about to ask you the same question.”

  “I was just wondering whether you knew your mother would be here in this world when we arrived.”

  To my surprise, he told me he’d previously reunited with both of his parents and explained to them that he’d been charged with Plaka’s last request, to protect Mom and me in his absence.

  Valcas kept his voice low as he explained further. “My father hadn’t seemed to mind so much, presumably unaware of the dangers involved. My mother, however, was skeptical and indignant enough for both of them; but, since I’d already been on my own for a long time, there wasn’t much she could do. I apologize for her treatment of you.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I shrugged.

  I wondered just how recently Valcas had this discussion with his parents—whether it was when I was still a child, around the time I met Valcas at the dock, or at some point in between.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t get the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity because Ivory chose that moment to stop walking and single us out.

  With her fists resting on her hips, she said, “Didn’t you two have enough alone time today? I don’t know how much more private our little jet could be, and there will be absolutely no kissing onboard. I have no tolerance for that sort of thing.”

  Valcas, seemingly stunned, kept his mouth pressed shut. I wondered whether Ivory intimidated him. He had a habit of not resisting her plans, and even though he accepted her teasing and laughed at her smart remarks, he tended not to tease her back the same way he sometimes did with me. Lucky me.

  Instead of blushing I grinned. Then I responded in Ivory’s own language, irony and sarcasm, in which I was quite fluent.

  “Who needs a jet?” I said, pulling my travel glasses out of my backpack and propping them on top of my head. “Valcas and I can unofficially travel wherever and whenever we want without it. We can find all the privacy we need.”

  Valcas coughed once and Ray stopped scanning everything around him long enough for his eyes to bug out of his head. Ivory stood there, tight-lipped, looking me up and down. But there was a gleam in her eye.

  “You—” she said to me, “You keep talking like that and I’ll have to promote you to vice-captain.”

  Turning to Valcas, she winked. “Keep your eye on this one. You might learn something.”

  ONCE SETTLED in the jet with Ray at my side and Valcas sitting in our direct line of sight, Ivory announced that she was prepared for flight.

  I sat back in my seat and placed a hand above my head, on top of my glasses, ready for Valcas to tell me when to slip them over my eyes, the way he had during our last takeoff.

  While waiting, I closed my eyes and inhaled. The interior of the jet smelled stale, like old plastic. Funny how I hadn’t noticed that when we’d left TSTA Headquarters. Maybe it had something to do with how the materials inside the jet mixed with Aborealian air. Maybe I was just loopy from spending too much time in a world without a sun. Either way, my stomach fluttered with the anticipation of arriving at a new destination, in a new world. I could hardly wait to see where Ivory would take us next.

  We smoothly ascended in the air, but Valcas’ instruction to put on the travel glasses never came. I gripped the glasses tightly as the world around us turned white. My mouth went dry, but my eyes stayed open.

  At first, the white light wasn’t bright enough to force me to close my eyes. Seconds ticked by. The cabin of the jet began shaking. Even I—the only member of our team who seemed unable to feel the presence of the Uproar or the upcoming impact of travel (without getting smacked down to the ground first)—could sense that something had gone terribly wrong.

  I gripped the travel glasses more tightly, pulling them to my chest. A small, dense object dropped nearby and landed with a thud. My backpack, I thought, guessing it had fallen out of the overhead compartment.

  After two more thuds I heard the metallic snap of seat belts unbuckling and the shuffling of feet. Two pairs of arms closed in around me. I tensed, then realized that the arms were protecting me—Val
cas’ arms. And Ray’s.

  “Ivory?” I called out. “What’s happening?”

  “It’s the Uproar,” Ray yelled, his lips so close to my ear that the sound of his voice stung my eardrums. “I can feel it—see it—attacking the jet. It’s trying to prevent us from traveling through space and time.”

  The jet’s loudspeaker buzzed and crackled. “Hold on. I’m redirecting our route.”

  Whew, I thought. At least we still had our captain. I breathed in and out, trying to calm down. Even if I had known what to do in that situation, being pinned down by two sets of arms kept me from being able to move. The air smelled of Valcas and Ray and another heady, sweaty scent that I didn’t recognize. I wondered whether that was what fear smelled like.

  Unable to see anything other than bright white light through the shadows of arms around me, I imagined Ivory pressing, pulling and tapping at a series of controls.

  My head pounded as the jet lurched forward, shoving me, Ray and Valcas to the left. My seat belt bit at my side as it strained against my weight, along with that of the boys who were trying desperately to protect me.

  “Ouch!” I screamed.

  The arms fell away, allowing me to straighten myself in my seat. I tried to rub out the pain in my side, pain that would likely result in a large purple bruise. As I did this, the jet steadied and the white light intensified.

  I closed my eyes.

  I opened them again after the jet stopped moving, then quickly unbuckled my seat belt and turned to look out the window.

  The jet sat on top of a bridge over a river that was as still and lifeless as a pond. A river of silver water.

  Ivory had brought us to a Nowhere.

  I WANTED to thank Ray and Valcas for trying to protect me during the Uproar’s attack on the jet. But by the time I turned around from looking out the window, Valcas had already gone outside.