Evan Burl and the Falling

by Justin Blaney

  "The letter from your father."

  "It says I'm going to become a monster."

  "What do you think?"

  "My father left me because he believed what he wrote in that letter. Mazol believes it. I'm pretty sure Henri believes it too."

  "I asked what you think."

  "I think they're right. Look at the terrible things I've done. I hurt Henri. I hurt Pearl. I destroyed everything I cared about in my elusian. I couldn't save Pike or you or anyone else."

  "Yes, that's true. You can't change any of that."

  My stomach sank. She was right.

  But maybe that's not what she was trying to tell me. Maybe she was saying what matters isn't what I've done, but what I do next. And yet, it wasn't Little Sae telling me these things. It was myself.

  I realized I had been thinking almost these same words just minutes earlier. When I was laying on my back thinking about how I couldn't fly and how I couldn't save Pike the night we fell from the tower, I knew I couldn't change it. I got up and tried to find another way out. I knew all I could do was worry about my next choice. Somehow it was in me the whole time, but I never realized it.

  Maybe it doesn't matter what my father thinks about me. What the letters says I'll become. Maybe I don't have to become a monster. Maybe I can choose my own path.

  I looked back into the mirror. "Little Sae—"

  But she was gone.

  "Little Sae!"

  There was no answer. Then I realized where she went. I was getting control of my own mind. I knew it wasn't possible to talk to her anymore and she disappeared.

  I stared at myself in the mirror. I had a choice: give up and sit in this room forever or do what I can to save the fallings.

  I jumped to my feet.

  I didn't know what I was going to become in three hours, maybe I could stop myself from becoming a monster or maybe I couldn't. But I still had time. As long as I could help it, I wasn't going to give up. I had to save them from... Henri? My chest tightened into a knot. But it was true. I had to save them from Henri and Mazol and the others. They were all the same to me now.

  I limped across the room, thinking again through my options for escaping the room. I noticed a small embroidered rug in the center of the room and thought it strange I hadn't seen it before. It seemed out of place with everything else that was in the room.

  Stooping down, I pulled the corner back slowly, as if worried some trap might spring if I moved to fast. At first, there were only more grey stones, but then I found something strange. A smooth black circle, flush with the floor, was under the very center of the rug. I reached out to touch it, but stopped. I didn't want to trigger another trap door and fall even further into some other hidden room below me, but it was too strange to ignore. I braced myself for a fall and pushed my first finger to the black circle.

  The skin under my finger nail went red from pressure as I held my breath, then the floor began to shake. A thin circle of light shot from the floor, about two feet around the black stone, like tiny lanterns were buried below. Jumping back, a rock pillar began to rise from the floor.

  As the rock platform rose, the black metal circle floated into the air above the surface of the stone. It began to transform, like melted iron in a forge. With a thunk, the stone platform stopped rising. Sparkles of light floated above it's surface, dripping from the molten metal, like slow moving drops of water. The metal disc soon took the shape of a short spear handle carved from gnarled heartwood, about the length of my forearm. It's color too changed from black as night to an alternating light and dark wood grain.

  When it was done, everything in the room went silent, like even the air had been sucked from the room. I felt strongly that touching this object would be a mistake, but there was no chance I could leave without trying.

  As soon as I placed my fingers around it, I felt a pulse of energy ripple through my body, yet it seemed to be fixed in place by some invisible force. I grabbed with both hands and the power inside me increased. Bracing my hip against the stone platform for leverage, I heaved with all my strength, but still it didn't move.

  I sighed and let go, my fingers slipping slowly one by one away. Perhaps I would come back for it, if I could manage to save the others. I had to turn my mind to escaping. I stood directly beneath the hole in the ceiling and, looking up, wondered how I could manage to reach.

  But it was no use, I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't stop myself from looking at the staff, obsessed with the desire to take it. My chest began to pound as an idea formed in my mind. This staff was made for a sapient. Perhaps only a sapient could take it.

  I held out my right hand, slowly, and focused. Then I beckoned the staff to me with my mind. Nothing happened. I tried again, stronger, angrier. This time, something changed.

  With a pulsing sound, the staff transformed back into black metal, but not like before. Rather than changing into a disc, it kept it's shape. The metal it transformed into was somehow even darker than black; like what little light in the room was being sucked inside of it. The dark material made me think of the rubrics; I wondered if they were forged from the same stuff. Fine lines of silvery-light began to wind around the circumference of the staff in patterns and letters I didn't understand. The light grew until it blinded me. As I lifted my hand to shield my eyes, the metal staff disappeared from the case. I looked around the room desperately for it, but then I saw it flying through the air. It landed in my hand.

  I grasped it, unsure whether to believe if it was real or not. I sliced the air, making sounds like a machete tearing through shoots of fresh bamboo. Spinning around, I struck a table, shattering it's heavy timbers like glass. Instinctively, I held out my free hand and froze the shards of wood in the air. They hovered, thick in the room, like fireflies on a summer night.

  I didn't even know how I was doing it.

  I was holding all these little splinters and chunks of wood in the air. I had broken gravity's rubber cords.

  I was making them fly.

  I felt a buzz build inside me as I looked around the room. Something was missing. Why were there no stairs and no ladder in this room? Because it was built for people like me. Sapients.

  Maybe sapients don't need stairs.

  As the debris floated in the air around me, I began to change my focus. I couldn't think too hard about it, I was beginning to understand that about sapience. It relied on instinct, not planning. It was more like breathing; less like building a castle of sand.

  I directed my power at my own body, trying not to think about how I would rip myself into pieces if I messed up. I had never felt the power of sapience in this way. It was like thousands of little fingers grasping every fiber of my flesh at once. I imagined myself lifting in the air and then, with a gasp, I felt my feet leave the ground. I staggered in the air, throwing my hands out for balance, like I was standing on top of the peak of the tower's roof. Then I began to relax. Slowly, I rose. I looked up; I was getting closer to the hole in the ceiling.

  Now it was 20 feet away.

  My arms began to throb with pain and I realized I was stretching them apart. I relaxed my hold on them and focused on lifting my chest.

  I was 15 feet away.

  I winced as a nerve pinched. My guts were pushing against my ribs and I adjusted my hold so I was only lifting my bones. That was better.

  10 feet.

  I pushed myself to the left a little so I wouldn't collide with the ceiling.

  Then I was passing through.

  My head came out first, my eyes were level with the floor itself. My pulse was pounding. I thought I heard something and looked to my left. Then my whole body lurched and slammed sideways. I gasped and felt the sapience release my bones. Suddenly I became aware that there was nothing below my feet to hold me up. With a lurch in my gut, I fell. My hands shot to the edge of the hold, grasping at the floor. I slipped a few inches then found a grip on the sharp edge of a stone.

  I dangled from the hole, most of my body in th
e room below, just my fingers holding me to the floor of the Caldroen. Grunting, I flexed my arms and managed to pull myself up. I pulled my whole body through and collapsed on the floor.

  After allowing myself a few seconds to catch my breath, I ran up the stairs and tried to remember where I had placed my hand to open the trap door. I leaned out over the opening in the floor of the platform and pushed my fingers against the stone. Thin beams of light begin to shine beneath my skin; the trap doors slammed shut and the six Caldroen blast doors clanked, then swung open in unison.

  Dashing through the door, I ran straight into Ballard's chest. We each took a few steps back, he looked just as shocked as me.

  "Are you going to kill me?" he said. I couldn't help but laugh out loud. The thought of this huge man towering over me afraid of anything was absurd.

  I acted like I was thinking about it, then said, "Not yet."

  I realized he wasn't just afraid. He was upset about something. I wondered whether he really didn't like the idea of killing off the fallings. Maybe there was a chance I could turn things in my favor.

  "Are you going to kill Mazol and Yesler?" he said. I almost detected a hopeful tone to his voice.

  "Not if I can't help it."

  He sighed.

  "What are you going to do then?"

  "I need your help."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Anastasia

  Friday

  8:13 pm

  2 hours, 36 minutes until the Falling

  Everyone left me alone in the graveyard.

  I tried to read the book, but the stories were gone. It was just blank pages and the two letters about Evan Burl now. After a while, it started to rain so I tucked the book away and walked back to my house.

  I wasn't in the mood to have a birthday party anymore. The rain started as a sprinkle, but it was getting harder. I hated the rain. To make it worse, my family had gone away without telling me where they were going. Mother probably convinced them to leave me behind. She was always mad at me about something.

  I took one look inside the house and stomped my foot. It was a disaster. Furniture was broken, food was thrown everywhere, some of the rugs were torn. Even one of the windows was broken. The worse of it was, the whole estate smelled like some kind of strange burning I couldn't place. I held my breath, but there was no escaping the stench. It was shaping up to be the worst birthday ever. I thought about staying outside, but I was already drenched and I didn't want to catch a cold so I stepped inside and slammed the door shut behind me.

  I slumped down against the wall and sulked for a while.

  "Hello!" I yelled.

  "Hello!" said a voice back at me and my heart jumped, but then I realized it was just my echo. I stood and headed to my father's study—my favorite room in the house—to sit on his huge overstuffed chair, but I could barely get through the door. There was trash and debris everywhere. I don't know why it made me lose my temper, I hardly ever lost my temper, but the trash and everything else just set me off. All I wanted to do was sit in my father's chair and I couldn't even do that for all the junk in my way.

  I picked up a fireplace mantle—what was a fireplace mantle doing in the middle of my father's study?—and threw it out the window with a crash of broken glass. As I did, something very odd happened. About ten other objects flew out the window all on their own. The strangeness of all those things floating through the air was so odd I didn't even think at the time how it was also odd that I, a twelve-year-old girl, was able to throw an entire mantlepiece fifty feet as easily as tossing a pillow across the room.

  I picked up a giant old chandelier, the one I hated that used to hang in the ballroom, and noticed this time that as I lifted it several other objects rose up into the air at the same time. I tossed it out the window and made an enormous clanking boom as it shattered on the cobble stone pavement outside followed obediently by a pile of other broken things.

  It almost made cleaning fun. In about three minutes I had most of the study cleared. Some of the things I tossed out the window were very odd indeed. A piece of a bed frame. A splintered beam. A crumpled icebox. Where had it all come from?

  I might have thought about it more, but I was too distracted with making things fly by just wishing for it to happen. I remembered how I caught my father making a piece of paper float in this very study a few months earlier. Clairȩ said it was magic, but mother never let us talk about anything like that. Maybe what father did really was magic. Maybe I had inherited my father's abilities. It all seemed strangely normal.

  When I was just about done cleaning the room I discovered something that was not trash at all—a poor little kitten, Clairȩ's kitten, curled up under a pile of newspapers. It wasn't moving and I thought it might be dead. At first I was sad, but then, I admit, I felt just a little happy. Clairȩ and I had both been given kittens and mine had died. Mother wouldn't let me get another and Clairȩ had been obnoxious about it. The thought that Clairȩ had now lost hers too made me feel better.

  But then I had a wonderful thought.

  Maybe I could convince Clairȩ that her kitten died and I had found this one, like it was just a stray. There were lots of stray cats in the town and Clairȩ wasn't around anyways, so the kitten might as well be mine. I crept forward on my hands and knees, hoping the little kitten was alive.

  It's fur was soft, at first cold, but then as I pet her small back the kitten stretched and opened her bright blue eyes. She was just sleeping! I picked her up and now she was warm against my chest, purring happily. I would keep her for myself, but I should give her a new name so Clairȩ wouldn't know it was her old kitten.

  I decided to call her Mother. My own mother wasn't around for me anyways—on my own birthday no less. I needed a new mother, a better mother. One that wouldn't boss me around all the time. One that would let her daughter get a new kitten when her old kitten had died.

  My birthday was starting to look up. I glanced around the room as I sat in father's great leather chair and my new kitten, Mother, purred on my lap. The leather smelled like my father—tool oil and fresh paper. I surveyed the room, but my eyes kept coming back to the massive fireplace that took up an entire wall of the study.

  One time, father hadn't closed the door properly and I peeked through it to see what he did in there all the time. Just a few minutes earlier, I watched him enter the room, but when I peeked inside, he was gone. As I watched, a panel at the back of the firebox slid open and father walked out like he was only taking a stroll in the courtyard.

  I always knew our house had secrets, but what they were hadn't ever been so important to me. Now it occurred to me that I might have to run things while father was away. The town would need me to make important decisions. I couldn't afford to not know my father's secrets anymore.

  I sighed. The thought of all that responsibility didn't make me very happy, but I supposed it was part of growing up. I stood and looked around, happy for something to take my mind off my family and servants abandoning me.

  I set Mother down in my chair who looked happy to take my place. As I gave her one last pet, the thought occurred to me that something was wrong with her. She felt cold and stiff, but I found a small blanket and tucked her in. I wondered if the blanket was enough. Perhaps she wasn't well. Who knows how long she had been under that pile of trash without food or water? But I had to shake off the feeling. There was important business to take care of.

  I walked over to the fireplace and stepped inside. The walls were smooth black stone, finely hewn with barely a crack between them. I got my hands all messy with soot as I felt around for a lever or something that would trigger the passage. After a few minutes of looking I was already growing tired of searching for secrets. I took a step back.

  It had to be simple. Papa would never make it so he had to get his hands dirty with soot every time he used the passage. Then I realized the secret. He didn't need to touch things to make them move. And neither did I.

  "Open," I said to the d
oor, but nothing happened. I tried to think really hard about the door moving, but still nothing happened. Moving things with my mind was harder than I had thought.

  "Slide."

  "Roll."

  "Open!"

  "Now!"

  I was so frustrated I kicked the stupid wall. I should have thought of that first because the entire fireplace blew apart with a huge crash. I thought all that stone was so strong and all it took was a little kick to knock it down. Mother would be livid when she saw the mess, but she was always angry about something. What difference did it make?

  I stepped carefully over the broken remains of the wall and found a platform hanging above a long dark pit that went straight down. As soon as I stepped onto it my feet dropped out from underneath me. My stomach lurched up into my throat for a moment and then I realized I was just descending into the pit on the platform. Eventually I got used to the speed.

  After what seemed like a very long time, considering how fast the wood-framed walls were rushing by, the platform eased to a stop. My legs felt shaky as I stepped off and I could feel my heart pounding in my finger tips. It was so dark I thought I had reached the end of the fun when suddenly there was a loud clunk nearby followed by a dusty glass ball above my head bursting to life. A moment later, another clunk came down the hall followed by another light flickering on and then another and another until a long hallway was lit before me.

  I followed the hallway for some distance until it opened up into a large room with low ceilings. There were cages lining one of the walls with huge old roots growing down from the ceiling that had long before entangled themselves in the bars. I wondered what kind of roots would grow so deep in the earth, they were so thick and I could have sworn they moved like fingers when I wasn't watching. But I shrugged, there were lots of things I couldn't explain.

  I walked slowly from cage to cage, half expecting to find one of them occupied. After a while, I made up my mind to go back, but then I saw something move in the very last cage. The glowing bulb wasn't working down there and it was too dark so I couldn't see exactly what was inside.