God, everything is so messed up.
“Is it?” Weston asked, pausing in his stride as though my sudden thought had shocked him.
I ripped my hand away from his arm, stalking the rest of the way to the door alone.
“I’m here of my own will,” I told the door. In reality, I had no idea how to act, but it had seemed like a good idea to declare my intentions.
It opened at my gentle nudge and I passed through into the musty interior with Weston close on my heel. He grabbed my shoulder, spinning me around.
“I heard your thoughts.” His voice was no longer controlled, but almost vicious.
His fingers were digging into my skin again, and I frowned at him, saying what I had to say before he launched another attack on my mind. “Would you like to experience another flashback? I can show you what happens when Gerald gets really excited, if you want. You deserve to see it, after all.”
He dropped his hand from my shoulder, his skin turning so suddenly white that for a moment, he looked sickly. Threatening a grown man with the sensation of being molested by another grown man was turning out to be one of my most valuable weapons. Jayden cleared his throat, reminding us of his presence, and Weston visibly collected himself.
“Step into the boat, Miss Black.” He motioned the only boat that seemed to still be in one piece, resting on a small ramp that slipped into the water and disappeared out of sight.
I didn’t particularly want to obey him, but I wanted even less for him to lay his hands on me again under the guise of ‘helping me’, so I stepped into the boat and then quickly grabbed the sides as it rocked unsteadily.
“Yas disguised this place herself.” Weston was speaking, but he was no longer visible, because my vision seemed to be suddenly faltering. “She’s one of our most powerful Atmás; you’re about to see why…”
I had turned back to the lake on instinct, feeling as though some small movement had caught my eye despite how my eyes weren’t being very reliable. It wasn’t a small movement, however. It was the rising of a mini-community from the depths of the swamp that seemed to be shrinking away before my improving sight. A bridge was the first to manifest, beginning at the end of the boat that I clutched to for balance and ending on man-made platform. I rose from the boat as small stilt-houses rose from the water, connected to each other by stone bridges just like the one that my feet were now carrying me across. Everything seemed to be made of stone except for the houses themselves: they were wood and glass; making the most of the privacy afforded their hidden location with high windows and some open rooms. Mosquito nets curtained off the open spaces, looking like wisps of cloud as they caught the breeze and rippled inside their wooden enclosures.
I ended up on the first platform, my eyes darting from one coloured stone to the next. Jayden was beside me and Weston some way behind me, so I looked to Jayden for direction and he smiled slightly, leading me toward the stone bridge on our right. There was some activity within the nearest house—I could hear the shuffling of feet and the quiet medley of men and women at discussion. Jayden pulled one of the mosquito nets aside and I passed through a hallway and into the connected room beyond, which immediately fell silent.
I had expected the members of the Klovoda to be sitting straight-backed at a round table, not relaxing as they were. The furniture inside the room was definitely expensive: plenty of hand-carved wood and antique fabrics; crystal decoration pieces and huge, ornate frames hugging some of the most exquisite artworks that I had ever set my eyes upon. The people, however, seemed normal. There was a woman around Weston’s age, with beautiful brown hair and serious brown eyes, her features cut from the ideal of a Grecian beauty. She smiled at me as I walked in, hardly surprised to see me, though the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.
There was another woman close by—seemingly older than the others in the room, though it was her eyes that gave her away as opposed to her appearance. She had distinctly Japanese features: her face as delicate as her body, her dark hair speckled with ash and pulled into a neat bun atop her head. She was dressed more casually than the first woman, though she held herself in such a way that the simple dress was made almost exquisite. The two men standing on either side of her were close enough for me to suppose that she might be an Atmá and they her pair. One was also Japanese, with dark hair and heavy black eyes; the other, however… I halted in my steps for a moment, running my surprised eyes over the three of them. The second man wasn’t Asian: he had bright red hair and was one of the tallest men I had ever laid eyes upon. He was a giant. His blue eyes glittered down at me in amusement. I quickly turned away to observe the others.
There were two women standing together on the other side of the room, looking about as opposite in appearance as two women could possibly look. The one on the right had golden-blond hair and a slender, sporty look about her; energy sparked in her crystal blue eyes and despite the light tone of her skin, there was a flush about her, a kind of healthy glow that made me think she spent most of her time outdoors. The woman on the left was dark-skinned, dark-haired, and impossibly beautiful; her eyes shimmered in a knowing sort of way, her full lips lifted in a friendly smirk.
After I got past the initial shock of seeing two such polar-opposite women side-by-side, I realised that they had one thing, at least, in common. Both sported a pale white mark on their foreheads, directly in the center and an inch or so above the line of their brow. Another pair. I scanned around for the man standing closest to them in proximity, but it was hard to distinguish which of the three remaining men was closer. The three of them glanced from the pair to me, evidently intelligent enough to figure out what had momentarily captured my attention. One of them smirked, and I focussed on him. He was sandy-haired, with brilliant blue eyes and permanent laugh lines; his skin was a deep tan-colour, and he was built so solidly for a man his age that it drew on my admiration almost begrudgingly. It wasn’t that I found him attractive—he was easily a couple of decades older than me, but I was impressed with the youthful vitality that seemed to emanate from him. I had never seen a person look more capable, and I didn’t even know what I assumed him to be capable of. I smiled, and he grinned back, something like approval flashing in his eyes.
Yeah, he was the Atmá.
The other two men were both dark-skinned, though in a different way to the dark-skinned woman: where she had been a deep bronze, one of the men had an ashy-undertone to his skin, and the other, a yellow undertone. They both nodded solemnly to me from the couch backed up against one of the glass walls.
Since the people within had yet to utter a single word, I shuffled further into the room. It was strange, but I sensed no threat from them. They were nothing like Weston. I found myself gravitating toward the female pair, my eyes riveted to a piece of artwork behind them. They parted easily as I approached, turning on either side of me to inspect the image with me.
It depicted five men standing side by side, detailed with such unerring precision, it sent a feeling of dreaded familiarity skittering down my spine.
A forecasting.
“The five original Atmás,” a voice to my left spoke, a slight accent rolling her words. Brazilian, I thought. “This one…” she pointed to the first man, who was dressed in a delicate cloak of gold, no stitching to be seen, as though the cloak itself had been carved straight from its golden source. “He was the Materialist.”
She pointed to each of his hands, showing me two small spheres of matter that seemed to hover over his bared palms. One was forming into glistening spikes, and I reached up to brush my fingers against the painting.
Glass… I couldn’t even reach the canvas through the framing that protected it, but it was still speaking to me, the way all of my own forecastings seemed to. I could feel the cool slide of glass against my own palm, and I instantly slid my fingers to the man’s other palm, my eyes wide and my breath stilting in my chest. Sand. I could feel the grains slipping through my fingers, and I traced the faint waterfall that fell fr
om his palm, forming a small pile of sand at his feet. When I was done examining him, I turned back to the Brazilian woman and she smiled, revealing deep dimples in each of her bronzed cheeks. She pointed to the second man, who was cloaked all in white, a crystal globe clasped between his paper-white hands.
“The Seer,” she whispered, with a note of reverence to her voice.
I was hesitant to touch the crystal globe, especially under the weight of so much scrutiny, but I was unable to curb the burning thirst for knowledge that sparked in my stomach. I laid my fingers over the glass that separated me from the painting, reaching into the globe with my eyes and experiencing the endless fall of the world mapped out beneath me. The globe was eternity: past, present, and future. It was knowledge, fortune, destiny, and death.
I quickly pulled my hand away, trying to hide the shake that now seized my wrist. This time it was the woman on my right who spoke, her tone made somewhat more casual by an Australian accent.
“The Elementalist,” she pointed at the third man, who was dressed in a cloak of flames, with water dripping from his fingers.
I glanced back and forth from the Seer to the Elementalist as my fingers brushed over the cool evidence of water and shied away from the heat of the flames. My forecasting had evidently come from the Seer, and my valcrick from the Elementalist. It was strange for me to gaze upon the two and feel the brush of their power as though it still lived. It dwarfed what was inside me.
“And the Reader,” the Australian woman added with a note of finality, as though the fifth man didn’t exist inside the painting.
I passed my eyes over the fourth man: he looked remarkably normal, his cloak threadbare and his lips tilted in a knowing way. He seemed mischievous, unlike the others. I heard the whisperings of voices when I touched above the folds of his cloak. That was where Jayden and Weston got their powers from. I imagined that in modern times, they might have called this man the Mentalist.
“What about him?” I asked nobody in particular, pointing to the last man. His skin had a blueish sheen, the veins visible beneath the surface. His eyes were dark, too dark, and there was blood dripping from his fingers the same way the water had dripped from the fingers of the Elementalist.
“The Dead Man,” a male voice said from directly behind me. Another Australian accent. I turned to find the smiling Atmá of the two women. Now that he was standing closer, I could see the faint mark that marred his forehead beneath his tan. He nodded toward the fifth man. “Other than the Seer,” he said, “the power of the Dead Man is the least common manifestation of Atmá magic. It’s the power over life and death.”
“But more often death,” the Japanese man corrected, his tone deep and final. Clearly, he didn’t want the subject discussed any more than the Australian woman did.
“Welcome to the Komnata, Lela,” the man still standing behind me bowed lightly, sweeping his hand toward an empty chair. “Thank you for accepting our invitation. My name is Jack. Why don’t you join us for tea?”
“My name is Seraph. Er, Seraph Black. It’s the name my mother gave me.” I walked toward the chair numbly, my eyes swinging back to the portrait even after I had taken a seat. Jayden moved to sit on the arm of my chair, and Weston lingered in the open doorway, his arms crossed over his broad chest, the mosquito net buffering against his back.
“It has taken substantial effort to get you here, Seraph.” The woman who was close to Weston’s age spoke, sitting back into her chair and crossing her legs as she regarded me, brushing a silky strand of brown hair from her face.
Some of the others also took or re-took their seats, leaving only the paired women standing together, and the Japanese Atmá standing against the wall to my side, her pair at her back.
I merely nodded, unsure how much I could trust these people. Nobody had actually ever said anything negative to me about the Klovoda—only it’s Director, and Weston. Now Kingsling was gone, and only his council remained. Still, the guys had put themselves at risk again and again to keep me from this meeting.
Not forever, I reminded myself. Just until I was ready.
“Well…” The brunette spoke up again, casting a glance toward Weston. “We’re glad that you’re finally here. My name is Yas. This is Alice,” she indicated the Japanese woman, “and her pair, Takeo and Adie.”
Adie—the giant red-headed man—bared his teeth in a grin as wide as he was when his name was spoken.
“You’ve met Jack,” she pointed to the Australian man, “and his pair, Sophie and Sophia.”
I snapped my eyes to the two different women, trying to hold back my amusement at their names. The Brazilian one rolled her eyes at me.
“They call us the Sophies,” she said.
“These two gentlemen,” Yas continued, indicating the two dark-skinned men and saving me from a reply, “are Nahab and Obasi. Of course, you’ve met Jayden, we should have known that he would be the one to bring you in. He is the oldest of the test subjects, after all, and you are the youngest. I’m surprised your twin hasn’t made contact with you yet: the two of you were very close when you were younger.”
“We were?” I asked tonelessly. If anything proved that the Klovoda was naive to the messenger’s true identity, it was Yas’s casual mention of him, which meant that the messenger didn’t trust them.
Did that make them my allies? I wasn’t sure.
“You certainly were,” Yas confirmed with a smile, apparently overjoyed to know this simple fact about me. “Never went anywhere without each other. No matter how big of a room we gave him, we’d always find him in a sleeping bag on the floor beside your bed every morning. Have those memories been returned to you yet?”
She switched her attention to Jayden with that last question, but I spoke before Jayden could answer, giving a definitive “no” that echoed about the room sharply.
“Of course.” By Yas’s tone, I would assume that she was trying to soothe over my agitation, but I wouldn’t be soothed.
I stood, moving away from Jayden, away from Weston, away from Yas—who kept sneaking glances at Weston as though she needed approval for each question. The female pair melted away as I walked back to the painting, and I stared up at it, touching my fingers against the plain man. The Reader.
“Jayden was the one to take my memories?” I asked without looking away from the painting.
“Yes.” Jayden surprised me by being the one to answer. “I was only learning my powers at that age, as were you. Frankly, I’m surprised it worked.”
It worked better than it should have. Maybe that was because I wanted to believe in what he had given me. A real family; a mother and father; a house instead of wherever they had been keeping me.
“Will my memories be returned to me?” I asked, my eyes still on the painting, my tone still sharp.
“Yes, yes, of course—” Yas hastened to smooth the way again, but I quickly cut across her.
“How can I trust what he puts inside my head? I know who he is. People outside of the Klovoda call him the hypnotist—he couldn’t sound any less trustworthy if he tried. If he wanted to, he could seriously mess with my mind. I’ve seen the result of his hypnotism. It’s convincing. How can I trust him to touch my head and fill it with the truth?”
I chose not to mention that he had already returned some of my memories to me. The last thing I needed was to announce to Weston and the Klovoda that I was the Voda heir.
“I’ll order him to return the truth to you,” Weston said lazily. He seemed to be bored of the meeting already, which was odd, since he had been the one to insist on it. Hadn’t he? “That’s my power, after all.”
I rolled my eyes, glad that nobody could see my face. I wondered what Weston would do if he realised that his power didn’t work on Jayden. He seemed to trust Jayden—certainly more than he trusted his own sons. Although Jayden had proved remarkably good at collecting information and locking it away.
“Fine,” I said, turning away from the painting. “Go ahead.”
Jayden laughed, his mismatched eyes sparkling in genuine amusement. “Come here, sit. I’m sorry if there are gaps in what I can give back to you… I was so young.”
Gaps… I could only guess which parts would be blacked out, and I highly doubted that they were due to a lack of skill-refinement. I ground my teeth together, moving to sit back on the chair. Jayden turned his torso slightly, laying his hand over the top of my head, making me feel like an errant child.
“I want you to remember…” he murmured.
And I did.
I remembered my own young reflection, and the pink-painted walls of my room in the hospital. Hollow Ground Medical Centre. One day I needed to question one of the Zevs about the significance of ‘Hollow Ground,’ since they kept naming all of their institutions after it.
I remembered the sound of Jayden’s laugh as he ran down a corridor out of my sight, my favourite toy clutched to his chest; and the beautiful face of a red-headed girl, Eva. The fourth test subject. I remembered my twin, too. I remembered him with a warm, tender feeling in my chest. I loved him; he protected me and kept me company. He was the only one who didn’t look at me as though I were a lab experiment. Wonderkid, Jayden had called me. Eva had called me the same thing. Wonderkid. They were test subjects, and I was Wonderkid. But my brother, my twin… he just called me Lela. I remembered everything but his face and name, and that didn’t surprise me in the least, because Jayden hadn’t kept his identity from me all this time just to reveal everything now.
“Can I sleep in here, Lela?”
I felt a tug on the leg of my pajama pants and I rolled over groggily, seeing my brother by my bedside. I couldn’t seem to focus properly on his face, but I could see his small fingers clutched around the flannel cloth of my pants. I nodded sleepily, and I knew that he smiled, though I couldn’t make it out behind the fuzzy details of his face. He bent and pulled out the sleeping bag that was stored under my bed just for him, rolling it out on the floor and settling comfortably into it.
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