by Naomi Fraser
Constance sits across the room on a stool, swinging one leg while taking notes on a pocketbook computer. She films short clips of the blue aura rippling across my fingers. I almost feel I’m back on Echyion. But now I realise that was never truly my home. I never realised how lonely I’d been.
It’s a school, a place of transition and learning and held me for so long, it’s strange to be free. If this is what you’d call freedom. From what I’ve seen on Detera and Altiosn, what I think of as freedom, is more like contained control. An invisible cage. I just can’t go, and do what I want, even when my actions don’t hurt others. I’ll be captured and brought back in line. My captivity in Oshiro has shown me that governments are willing to do anything to maintain their power, even to the detriment of their citizens.
I shuffle to the next wilted tomato seedling. Blue waves surround my hands, sinking into the soil and root system. The cells inside the plant accept my water. The seedling lifts and opens large green water leaves, straightening toward the light emitting diodes. “Hydration ends in two hundred and forty hours,” I say, moving to the next seedling.
“That’s so beautiful,” Constance whispers. Her soft footsteps draw near, and I switch my gaze to the pocketbook instead of her face. “Have you ever been wrong about the length of time?”
“At the start of my training,” I acknowledge. “Not anymore.”
“You’re almost finished fixing this entire garden. What else do you want to say to the camera?”
I hesitate, then glance back at the tiny green plant. “Life in all its forms is the miracle. Giving life is the greatest blessing. It’s worth everything I go through to be able to touch a plant’s stem,” I reach for the stalk with my index finger, “and rehydrate it. Healing makes me feel complete.”
Constance presses the notebook’s screen and then flips the cover closed. She shoves the device into the breast pocket of her long-sleeved white shirt and crouches to my level. “I get this feeling the last two days I’ve been filming you . . . a sense of urgency because you want to heal everything. You’re going to take me places I’ve never been to before.” Her face turns serious, and she pushes her glasses up her nose, the lenses magnifying the keen intelligence in her eyes. “You’re a fascinating study. Don’t hold back because I’m pure human, and you think I won’t understand or can’t take it. I’m behind you one hundred percent.”
I raise my eyebrows at her and grin. “Except when your vast knowledge tells you differently, like when you knew the trade was wrong on Altiosn.”
She laughs. “Yeah, except then. Like I said—” She taps her head and stands. “—smart. Well, I’m going to upload the information to the database. You’re welcome to come along.”
“That’s all right.” I survey the remaining seedlings. “I’m going to stay here a while. I need to use the water, and it’s fun.”
“Need?”
I smile up at her. “Oh, okay, take the pocketbook out again,” I say, hoping to satisfy her curiosity. “Record this.”
She nods and opens the device. “Go.”
“If I don’t use my water, it will become overwhelming. I could accidentally flood a room while I’m sleeping. I’d survive but others wouldn’t.”
“What?” Her rounded eyes peek over the top of the pocketbook.
“Keep recording,” I say. “Focus in on this. My nana could manipulate fire, but she needed a way to use the flame before it consumed or alerted others. She set up a pottery business to hide her gift. My water is the same. Astrakhan used to open the door to my abode and be swept away in the flood. The older I get, the more I need to use the water. A human would have drowned many times over.” I flick the soil at my fingernails. “Another reason a synthetic human was necessary.”
“How often do you need to use it now?” Constance asks, obviously trying to keep her voice clinical.
“Every day is best. My water is a part of me. The two cannot be separated. Ever.” I stare into the tiny camera and say, “It’s like holding your breath. Let it build for too long, and it will burst out in one big whoosh. I dumped a lot in Oshiro, so I had better control in the desert.”
“Is that what happens with your emotions as well?” Constance prods. “How your water-healing ability seems to merge with them? You let them build up, then when they’re let loose . . .”
“All those academics are going to wet their pressed little panties when they see this.”
I blow out a breath and turn to look up at April, thankful her interruption means I don’t have to answer Constance’s question. None of the crew have talked about my emotions at all since I told them in the kitchen. And it’s not a subject I want to dwell on, since I don’t like thinking about my weaknesses. I rub my soiled hands on my pants. “Hi.”
“You look comfortable down there.” April grins and leans against a dark green passion fruit vine twisting up a white pillar. “Got some good news. The cap’n wants to see you in the clinic with the doc. Better hustle. Your sister’s healed, and she’s out of the Med Gen—”
A cry rips from my lips as I lurch to my feet and then sprint out the door. The walkway shudders and creaks beneath my feet as I fly along, and my heart pumps furiously. Everything blurs with my tears until I see her beautiful, pale face inside the clinic door, staring up at Chester who crouches beside her.
I scrub at my tears and shout, “May.”
“Sis!” she cries as she looks up at me and smiles so wide my heart cannot stand it.
I open my arms and widen my stance, and then she flies into my arms. I clutch her to me, swinging her around. I dot her tiny face with kisses and then bury my face in her small neck. She smells of warmth and family.
“Let me look at you,” I mutter, lifting her paper gown to check the wound on her abdomen. It’s gone except for a slight scar. “Oh, thank heavens.” My hands shake, and I still can’t catch my breath. I smile at Marcus, Chester, April—all of them—they helped me. “Thank you,” I say, my voice breaking, “thank you, thank you. Oh, May, bub, it’s so good to see your face.”
I gaze into her eyes, and I’m not ready for the blue when it comes. I cry out, and my toes tingle, then energy sweeps my body, encasing us both in ripples of water. I have to let it come, allowing the wave to move through me as I ride the crest. My hair streams out above me, and the blue forms a winding loop, lifting us clear off our feet. Her skin shimmers in my vision, and then my water seeps into her scar tissue to heal the skin. Forcing her cells to go plump. Finally, the water drops us with a huge splash to the floor, and my feet land back on the ground.
“Your scar is healed,” I say in a liquid tone.
“Tori,” Maybelle begins in a bewildered voice, her soft, tiny arms tight around my neck, “where are we?”
I laugh, tears of happiness in my eyes.
Chapter Twelve
The ambient noises from the ship’s engines do their best to drive me crazy at first. I wrap a pillow around my ears, glaring up at the cream-coloured ceiling. The hum vibrates in my muscles, and I groan, shifting face down on my narrow cabin bed.
I’m too sensitive to have a restful sleep with constant sound. But eventually exhaustion makes my muscles loosen, and my lids droop over stinging eyes. The dark, metallic colours of the cupboards and walls fade inside the cabin. May cuddles my arm, and I hold her hand. Sleep claims her all at once, and I turn off the lamp with a smile, because the feel of her tiny, warm hand in mine is wonderful.
A terrified scream pierces the room, and my eyes open instantly. I jack-knife into a sitting position, panting and then switch on the bedside lamp. May’s legs twist beneath the covers, tugging them around her. Her head tosses against the hard pillow.
She moans. “Nooo . . . Nooo . . .” Sweat slicks her forehead, and she kicks me in the side. Hard.
I grab her foot and then touch her face with my other hand. Her skin glistens in the cast of golden light. “May? Bub, wake up. You’re having a nightmare. It’s okay.”
A long, pitif
ul moan slips from her lips. “Tori?” She turns her head to face me and blinks. “I had one of those dreams again.” Her voice catches, and tears glitter on the skin beneath her eyes.
“I heard,” I murmur, pulling her close. “Nothing can hurt you here.” I rub my hand down her small back and then sing the lullaby I remember from a nursery rhyme book in the facility, my voice lilting with the tune. Over and over, I sing, keeping my voice low and soft to soothe her back to sleep. I think of how in this universe all we have is each other, and how I’ve longed for someone to love. Now our mother is dead, I fill that role for May. I can give her all my pent-up joy and love, and she’ll soak it up like a tiny flower.
Her head falls onto my neck, and although her breathing slows, she doesn’t fall asleep. “I don’t want to go back to sleep again,” she whimpers. “When I do, those men will be there. They always are.”
My heart pinches. “Come on, May. They have powdered chocolate in the kitchen. I’ll see if they have marshmallows. Would you like a hot chocolate?”
She nods, her blonde hair lank about her shoulders. She grabs hold of my neck, squeezing my hips between her knees so hard I don’t have to hold her at all when I stand. I exit our cabin and follow the walkway to the kitchen as quietly as I can, but a soft, clanking noise alerts me someone else is in the kitchen.
Zach sits at the table, bent over the assortment of guns placed on the surface in perfect alignment. He rubs a soft cloth over the metal parts and looks up when we enter. “Thought I heard a scream.”
I set May on the floor. “She gets nightmares from Oshiro,” I mutter, looking at my sister then the weapons on the table, unsure if I’ve ever seen so many guns in one place. “Ah . . . maybe you should sit at the counter,” I suggest to May, catching her hand. “Come on.”
“Oh, there’s room here,” Zach says, clearing a spot near a chair. “Take a seat.”
My little sister no longer trembles but stands and stares at Zach. Finally, she steps closer to him. “Why do you have marks on your face?”
I groan, wishing for some kind of filter between her brain and mouth, but Zach laughs. At the sound, I open my eyes to find him half-turned toward her.
“Because men hurt my family a while ago. I lost my wife and children. I managed to escape but not before this.” He gestures to both his cheeks. “Does it bother you?”
May shakes her head and steps closer to the table, her gaze moving over the guns. “My daddy and mummy were killed, too. Then my nana.” She pulls out the chair and sits down, perching her tiny frame on the edge. “I miss them every day. Why do you have so many guns?”
Zach’s brow lowers, but he answers, “They’re not all mine. I’m cleaning them. I’m one of the captain’s gun hands. It’s my job this month to take care of the weapons.” He smiles. “And, you know what? I have nightmares, too.”
May tips her head up, her eyes wide and shining as she twists the over-sized shirt in her thin fingers. “You do? Tori’s making me a hot chocolate. Do you want one?”
Zach chuckles, his teeth a flash of white against his obsidian skin. “It’s okay. I have my water.”
I shrug and head for the cupboards, then set a cup and the powdered chocolate on the bench. At least, there are no more tears in May’s eyes, and she’s distracted from her nightmare. I wait over the kettle until it boils, the steam warming my face. After getting everything ready, I set the hot chocolate before her, far enough away from the edge so she can’t spill it.
“No marshmallows, I’m afraid.” I sit down at another clear spot opposite her. “Try your drink. I didn’t make it too hot.”
Instead, her hand sneaks for the gun closest to her.
Zach and I warn at the same time, “Careful.”
She draws back her hand with a small pout.
Zach laughs again. “I’m sure your sister doesn’t want you touching a weapon like that.”
“I have before,” May protests. “My dad said something was going to happen when Tori got old enough to leave the facility. She’s too powerful. He showed me how to hold one. He was scared they’d hurt me.”
A deep sadness wells within me, and I nod. “When Oshiro’s acting president was trying to grab me, she shot them, and they lasered her. She used a gun when they came for my mother and step-father on Echyion. I think it saved her life.”
“Right.” Zach looks up at me, as if asking permission. I nod, because Zach has shown me trustworthy behaviour, and what he teaches her can save her life. I rest my elbows on the table, cheek in palm, pleased when a slow smile animates May’s face.
Zach scratches the skin near his eye, then asks, “Do you know all the safety precautions?”
She shakes her head, and then takes a sip of her hot chocolate.
His lips press in a thin line. “It’s a sad world when a child needs to learn this for her protection.” He pushes back his chair to rise. “But what the hell . . . Just let me get another water.”
I casually reach out for his tin cup, and the blue winds from my hand to the pad of my fingertip. The skin tingles, and water rushes into the glass. When I look back up at him, his skin shimmers, and the first layer disappears. I tilt my head, seeing into his dermis and hypodermis to the cross-section of injured skin on his face. Not a knife wound, because the gashes would have been too wide. The collagen proteins align in one direction. “I can heal your scars,” I say. “My water can break down some of the collagen, and new proteins will replace it. It might take a few sessions.”
Silence falls, and I rub my eyes, blinking. When my vision goes back to normal, I glance up at him, waiting for his answer.
“That’s all right.” His face is still, but he swallows, rubbing his chin. “I reached a turning point in my life when I got these scars. They made me fight, and now they remind me of the family I lost and the challenges I won. They remind me to never give up.”
Chapter Thirteen
My first impression of Marcus’s home planet is of blistering heat.
Qelia’s double suns glare overhead, and humidity boils in the dusky blue sky. No white clouds scud across the upper atmosphere. Sarah piloted the ship to land on one of lesser known docking yards to the north of Flioqe where a plateau of sun-baked terrain stretches toward a shimmering horizon.
I stand on the bottom of the ship’s ramp, breathing in the scent of dirt and dust, and my shoulders droop in my Old Order clothes. They’re the most formal ones I own. Sultry heat ripples in endless waves from the ground, turning the air into a thick wall of warmth. I frown as my gaze sweeps from the blinding morning sunshine beyond the bay door to the dim, metallic interior of the ship.
My journey will lead me from air-conditioned comfort into a searing oven—a circumbinary planet. Hotter than the Oshiro desert, for certain, but I may be biased because of my eagerness to see Qelia after breakfast. I had been bouncing on tiptoes until the ship’s door lowered.
Now sweat dots my upper lip, and my fringe frizzes. No birds fly or caw; there’s no breeze or animals at all. A land bereft of trees spans all the way to the horizon. Worse, I can’t discern any water vibrations—nothing.
I turn to Marcus and swallow hard. The suns’ white rays cook the hairs on my head. The easyreader visor never mentioned the type of planetary system, and this is the first time I realise the gravity of the situation. “Oh.”
He halts his progress on my left, staring at me with raised eyebrows. “Oh?”
“Mm.” I step off the ramp and then tread across the parched, sunburnt ground to the edge of a small slope, which leads to the vast emptiness of the plateau. Again, I close my eyes, trying to find water, because I have never been anywhere I can’t scout the vibration. My stomach rolls in dread. “I just . . . can’t feel anything but those suns,” I say in a quiet voice. Hydration ends in . . . no . . . that can’t be right. It’s not possible.
Yet, I haven’t been wrong since I hit thirteen. The suns are the clue. Qelia’s leaders are not going to be happy with what I may have to do.
I open my eyes, bend my neck and then rub the sweat from my nape.
“Nothing?” He sighs heavily and slips down the small bank, pebbles rolling and crunching under his leather boots. “Is that going to be a problem?”
I dig my fingers into the dust, looking beneath the ground, not seeing with my physical eyes but with my mind. The gypsum gives way until there’s nothing but bedrock. I grimace, tipping my face up to the sky. “Double suns. One of the rare, circumbinary planet systems. No aquifers, water tables, or ground water of any kind, and my reach goes for miles. This is far worse than the desert on Oshiro. I guess the visor recordings never spoke of this because they assumed everyone knew.” My heartbeat thuds sluggish and heavy.
“What can you do?” he asks, frowning. “We’re not a lost cause, are we?”
“It might not be what I can do,” I say carefully, “but rather what your leaders allow me to do.” I blink, unable to meet his eyes, fearing he will see right through me. “The landscape will need to change somewhat.” I almost choke on the understatement. “It would be wonderful to have a land elemental. But in the meantime, it’s all going to depend on the technology your planet has to store water. I need to talk to your scientists and engineers.”
“Land elemental,” he says, a smile tugging at his lips. “Let’s put that one on the list, shall we?” The sleeves on his brown shirt roll all the way up to his biceps, and the hairs on his strong forearms shine in the light. He rests his hands on his lean hips, spins and then saunters toward the hovercraft.
His taut buttock muscles flex beneath the pale trousers. My mouth dries, and the back of my hand swipes the sweat my forehead as a sneaky grin curves my mouth. I bite my bottom lip, trying to concentrate on the water problem, not Marcus. Focus, Tori. My cotton corset grows too heavy and scratchy, and then water circles my arms.
“Wait.” I hurry toward the hovercraft because I need to get out of this sun before—too late. Ripples of water surge over my body, filling my boots and dripping from my fingertips to splash in the dust. Great, I’ll appear as if I’ve been dunked underwater and make squishing sounds when I meet Qelia’s leaders. If I attempt to skim the water off my body, I’ll just reproduce more. The sodden white lace blouse sticks to my skin as I try to peel the fabric from my breasts. I sigh, saying a silent apology to Astrakhan, as I’ve yet to be able to heed his advice to make a good first impression.
