Insight Kindling

by Chess Desalls

  “WHAT DO we do now?” I asked over a meal of raw fish and seaweed salad. “How will we know whether the Uproar has been destroyed?”

  Valcas swallowed the bits of raw fish he’d been chewing. From the way his face contorted, I gathered that sushi was not his favorite food.

  “For now, we wait,” he said. “We may run into dangers of our own here on this side. If anyone lives in the caves, I expect that they’ll need to come out here for food and water sooner or later.”

  I looked at Valcas with raised eyebrows, and then quickly looked away. He’d stopped wearing his dark glasses since our transformations. I tried not to stare at him for embarrassingly long periods of time, but it wasn’t easy.

  His most recent comment awakened something in me that I’d nearly forgotten since entering the Falls—that my father could be in here somewhere, hiding from the Uproar.

  “How long should we wait until we start actively looking for him, Valcas?” I asked, bubbling with anticipation and longing. I was a bundle of nerves. The thought that my father could be at the end of one of the tunnels had me in a panic. Would he be as excited about meeting me? Reconnecting with Mom back at TSTA Headquarters had gone smoother than I’d thought it would. She’d welcomed me, embraced me, as if she were happy to see me and genuinely sorry for staying away for so long. How would my father react when I showed up? Was he looking forward to meeting me too?

  Valcas chuckled as he awkwardly reached for me. “You sound eager to meet your father. It’s endearing, and I completely understand, but right now the most important thing is to be safe.”

  Part of me cringed inside; yet, some other part of me reacted as if I wanted to give in to a different longing, one that I was certain involved the lonely version of Valcas I’d left back at the White Tower. I inhaled, remembering that Valcas was the same person deep inside regardless of whatever life-changing and hope-jading events he’d experienced. I let him place an arm around me and pull me closer to him.

  “In here,” he said. “We’re safe from the Uproar. We just need to make sure there’s nothing else, here on the other side, that would compromise that safety. As for Plaka, I can’t imagine him being in any more danger now than he was before we arrived.”

  I sighed, disappointed, and then rolled my eyes. It wasn’t like I could wander off without him. Not now. Noticing that Valcas was not just watching me, but smiling, I smiled back. He was right. Something definitely felt different.

  I rinsed my hands in the pool of water and dried them on my jeans. Scooting closer to Valcas, I rested my head on his shoulder. “Thank you for being here with me and for keeping me safe, not just now, but for all of it.”

  He tensed, leaving me to wonder whether I’d gone too far. Just because he’d tried to comfort me didn’t mean that he was all head-over-heels for me again. But he’d expressed interest in me before, even when I hadn’t done anything to encourage him. If anything, I’d pushed him away. But, he’d said that he would prove himself to me. I wondered what that meant.

  His arm curled tightly around me. “Of course,” he said. “I try not to break my promises.”

  I DOZED next to the waterfall, having been lulled in and out of sleep by the sound of running water.

  Valcas kept watch for a while, and then alternated between exploring the caves and checking on me. It became increasingly darker near the waterfall each time he returned, which surprised me. I’d thought the glow of the fire on the outside of the Fire Falls would be continuous, and that we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between day and night. But the light faded as the day went on, as if the inside of the Falls were affected by the rising and setting of a sun. I couldn’t remember seeing a sun on the outside of the Falls. Not that it mattered. Had I not thought about that puzzle, my mind would have just raced on about something else. I squeezed my eyes, tightly, as if it would still my thoughts, so I could get some rest.

  Eventually, Valcas gave up his watch for the night, covered me with his jacket, and then stretched himself out in the backmost part of the cave. There, anyone passing through would jolt him awake.

  The next morning came and went. Nothing exciting happened other than finding something that was absolutely necessary: a latrine. It’s amazing how exciting such things become when your only source of water is the same one you count on for food and drink. We’d found a rocky room in one of the east branches of the caves with a stream that ran not into, but out of, the freshwater pool beneath the interior Falls. We figured that would work until something or someone else presented a better solution.

  By midafternoon the novelty of the caves and my hopes of finding my father began to fade.

  Valcas found me brooding while I attempted to weave baskets out of dried seaweed, so we wouldn’t have to eat and drink everything straight out of our hands. It was a poor attempt.

  “Shouldn’t someone have found us by now?” I asked, wrapping a thin band of gnarled seaweed around a seaweed-basket drinking cup, as if that would keep it from falling apart. My question sounded about as pathetic as my drinking cup looked.

  Valcas raised his shoulders into a shrug. “I thought I would have stumbled upon someone by now.”

  I sighed and dipped my cup in the pool to test it out. Instead of praising my resourcefulness, Valcas laughed.

  “What? Think you can do better?”

  “Let me guess,” he said. “You haven’t camped outdoors much before meeting me.”

  He was right. Despite all the time I’d spent during the summers near Lake Winston, I’d always stayed indoors in a house or hotel. Since meeting Valcas, I’d spent one night in a sod hut and another in Ivory’s cabin, the closest I’d ever come to camping.

  I shrugged. “Is it that obvious?”

  He grinned and nodded toward my seaweed drinking cup. The cup held the water well enough, but had become soft and squishy in my hand, threatening to form a gelatinous pile of goo. I drank the water out of it quickly, choking on globs of seaweed that had already softened and loosened. Then I tossed it in the pool. Stupid cup.

  “So when did you become Mr. Wilderness? I didn’t see any campsites at the White Tower.” I stood up with my hands on my hips, looking Valcas straight in the eyes, imagining how proud Ivory would be of me in that moment.

  Valcas smiled and crossed his arms. “Did you look behind all of the doors in the hallway?”

  My ego deflated. He had a good point. Each of the doors in the hallway inside the tower—the Grand Entrance—led to all kinds of different places, including lakes, seas, vineyards, hiking trails, living quarters… The list went on and on. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that there were also campgrounds somewhere behind one of the doors.

  But I wasn’t going to let him off that easily.

  “You went camping inside the White Tower?” I shrugged, unimpressed. “What did you do, order a servant to pack you a picnic lunch, walk across the hallway and then open another door into a picture-perfect wilderness, complete with a fire ready for roasting marshmallows?”

  Valcas’ eyes crinkled at the corners. His mouth opened in mock surprise. “How did you know?”

  “Wait—you did that?” I furrowed a brow. Even I thought he hadn’t learned that easily. Was I missing something?

  “Yes, when I was about eight years old.” He bent down and reached into the pool. “Since then I’ve gained a lot more experience. But you’re right. I didn’t learn all that I know now at the White Tower.”

  I watched as Valcas pulled several long, muddy leaves out of the water and rinsed them one by one. When he was finished, he laid them out next to the pool to dry.

  “We can prepare our food and eat off these,” he said. “Also, if you bend them properly, you can use them to scoop up water to drink.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Where did you learn that? Somewhere outside of the White Tower?”

  Valcas nodded. “I had no choice but to learn. I’d run away from home several times since the age of eleven.”

  �
�How did you get out of the White Tower? The security there is intense.” My eyes widened. “Had you already learned how to travel with an unofficial object?”

  “Yes and no,” he said. “I didn’t realize that I was traveling back then—I was too young to understand the system. And I didn’t use any type of object, which of course bewildered the TSTA. They still charged me with an infraction, though—for underage self-transportation without a license.”

  I winced. I had no idea what he was talking about, but the fact that the TSTA would charge a child who didn’t know what he was doing with an infraction was just plain cruel. I could relate.

  I pressed my fingertips to my eyelids. “So, wait. The TSTA charged you with your first infraction when you were eleven years old?”

  “Yes. My parents were able to pay the fine, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.” He shrugged.

  “How much was the fine?”

  Valcas’ lips pulled down into a small frown. “In your currency, it would have been about twenty million dollars.”

  “Whoa. Just for being underage without a license?”

  A grin of pride and amusement played across his lips. “That warranted only about two million. The remaining amount was the penalty for the particular method of travel, something that is kept under tight control and for which special permissions are required.”

  “How did you do it? What was your method of travel?”

  “It just happened one day—the first time I decided to run away. That was when I learned my travel talent.” His jeweled green eyes looked into mine. “Like my parents, I’m a World Builder.”

  A WHAT?

  “Valcas, what does that mean? What’s a World Builder?”

  “It’s difficult to explain,” he said, squeezing his eyebrows together. “I was upset about something my mother wouldn’t let me do. I can’t remember what that was anymore, but I remember being angry. I ran down the hallway in the White Tower and started turning doorknobs at random.”

  I nodded, remembering the white hallway inside the White Tower, lined with doors with bright silver doorknobs.

  “Most of the doors were locked,” Valcas continued. “And probably for good reason. Some of them, I suspect, were locked because they hadn’t been put to use for a long time and needed maintenance. Others were locked to protect whatever was inside. Eventually, I turned the knob of a door that had been left unlocked. I was shocked at what I found there.”

  “What was it?”

  “Absolutely nothing. The room was as white and blank as the hallway. My parents hadn’t found a use for it yet, but I didn’t know that then.”

  “Okay,” I said, shifting my weight from one leg to the next, and then eventually giving up and sitting down. As much as I wanted to know what happened, this was starting to sound like a long story. Like Edgar, Valcas was good at taking a long time to answer when I thought I’d asked for a straightforward definition.

  “Curious,” Valcas continued, “I closed the door behind me and began walking. Still, there was nothing there to see. It was the most ridiculous and the most frustrating thing I’d experienced. Surely there was something, I thought, having never seen an empty room in the White Tower. I ran until my legs were sore and my breath was short. Eventually, I accepted that there was nothing there and turned around to walk back.”

  Valcas dipped his shoulders and sat down next to me. “When I got back to the door I’d entered, I couldn’t open it. The door was locked. I pounded on the door and yelled and screamed, certain that one of the security guards would hear me and let me out. But they didn’t.”

  “Was it a Nowhere?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It was just undeveloped, empty space. But it was more than empty. It was blank.”

  “So how did you get the door open?”

  “I didn’t. As I sat there, trapped and waiting for guards that never came, I began to think about places where I’d like to be—faraway places that weren’t anywhere inside the tower: playgrounds filled with children my age; tropical rainforests with brightly colored plants and animals; desert trails that sat warm and dry beneath boiling suns; worlds with stars that shone night and day; and enchanted woods inhabited with fairies, imps and gnomes.

  “The mixture from my imagination slowly came to life in the blank room. First, I noticed that the ground grew darker and earthier underneath me. Vines sprouted up and around the white door until it was completely obliterated. I stood up, surprised at what was happening, assuming that my parents had designed an enchanted room. I soon learned that wasn’t what it was.”

  Valcas frowned. “For the next two weeks, I stayed in that place, that world, and learned how to survive.”

  “You were there all alone for two weeks?” I scowled. “Your parents didn’t search for you?”

  “I’m not sure how much they noticed my absence. The TSTA noticed it, though. I found that out when TSTA officials showed up in the new place I’d created to arrest me and take me to TSTA Headquarters.” He winced. “And that’s how I learned I could travel to new places and times by creating them, by being a World Builder.”

  My jaw dropped. “You can go anywhere you want to go by dreaming it up?”

  “Not anywhere. World building creates new places and times, expanding both the Everywhere and Everywhen. As I said, the talent is tightly controlled.”

  “What’s the TSTA worried about?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, but after that fiasco my parents kept an even tighter rein on me. Apparently, they’d had to fill out mountains-worth of paperwork to apply for the permissions they’d needed to create their own world, the White Tower, and to populate it with all of the places inside. The world I’d created behind that door wasn’t part of their plans, so it hadn’t been approved.”

  I frowned. “Your past version told me that the hallway and the rooms inside it expanded with necessity. I took that to mean that the rooms magically appeared as needed.”

  Valcas sniffed. “When necessity demanded it, my parents had to apply to the TSTA. And then, yes, there would be an expansion. The White Tower has no abilities of its own.”

  I nodded. “Totally weird, but I suppose it makes sense,” I said, thinking about Valcas’ other palace—the one I’d escaped by taking off with the travel glasses. I didn’t know whether he’d built it or if it had already existed. But if he’d built it… I wondered whether, after having gone through all of the trouble of applying to the TSTA and getting the necessary permissions, he’d built it and his plans backfired when he failed to live there according to its rules—rules that he himself may have created. Rules that involved my posing as his betrothed. How ironically delicious… and sad.

  “So,” Valcas said, brightening up again. “Are you impressed by my travel talent?”

  I balked, wondering what type of reaction he wanted from me. Yeah, sure, it was cool, but why would he care what I think?

  “Of course it’s nothing like being a Remnant Transporter,” he said. “But it’s nearly as rare. Since both of my parents had the talent, it didn’t come as a huge surprise to them that I’d inherited it. I just wish they would have told me about it instead of letting me find out for myself.”

  I ran my hand through the pool of water. “Sure,” I said. “It’s an amazing talent, one I could never have imagined possible, but I’m more worried about the TSTA’s reaction.” I truly was impressed. Valcas could create new places and times just by dreaming them up. I only had the ability to move around the people inside the Everywhere and Everywhen, like chess pieces on a game board of limitless dimensions.

  Valcas nodded. “Yes, well… I’d always suspected that Enta and Edgar were World Builders, but as far as I know it was never publicly discovered because they hadn’t been charged with infractions.”

  “Why would you suspect that?”

  “Because the World Builder talent is common among inventors.”

  VALCAS’ WORDS reminded me of Edgar and his life spent away from his wife Elizabeth
and daughter Shirlyn. I couldn’t picture Edgar appearing before a TSTA Commissioner. He played by the rules, even if he had messed up his family life by inventing a life-extending elixir and getting lost.

  Shirlyn, however, had inserted a daily reminder into Romaso’s past. While at the White Tower I’d learned how she’d visited Romaso in seventeenth-century Venice and presented him with a locket, a good-bye gift that included a photograph of her that she’d signed with her name. The gift was a daily reminder, a writing on a physical object that was left in another’s past.

  I cringed. “Valcas?”

  “Yes?” he said, looking up from the pool of water.

  “When I was at the White Tower, your younger self reprimanded Shirlyn for having left a daily reminder in Romaso’s past. But you also told her not to worry about it because the TSTA can’t charge silhouettes. Does that mean she was never charged?”

  Valcas shook his head, sadly. “No,” he said. “You’re right about Shirlyn’s silhouette having immunity from breaking TSTA rules.” He frowned. “Her present version wasn’t as fortunate.”

  “You mean she’s still alive—that TSTA caught up with her?”

  He nodded.

  I trembled. Shirlyn was alive when I’d known Edgar? He’d had no idea. I could have helped reunite them before he died, but I hadn’t known she was still alive. I’d been afraid to ask Edgar about her. I was sure that topic would have thrown him into a fit of spaced-out staring.

  “What’s wrong, Calla?”

  “I assumed Shirlyn was dead—that she and Elizabeth were gone because Edgar had outlived them.”

  “No,” said Valcas. “I was present for Shirlyn’s TSTA hearing. And there wasn’t anything I could do about it.”

  “So what happened” I asked, nudging closer. “Did her family pay the fine?” I’d seen firsthand just how wealthy the Halls were. Edgar’s estate in Folkestone had been massive and luxurious.