Armand would be an ancient relic then. Its beliefs, its civilization, all of it just a fragment from history.
But, until then, I had to follow its command. I could not tell anyone what happened. I had to keep it a secret from security. No one would ever know Armand had been here. No one would ever know where Armand went.
After I vested and had free will once more, maybe I could then make a side trip to Purth-Anaget again and be waiting for Armand when it landed. I had the resources of a full share, after all.
Then we would have a very different conversation, Armand and I.
PROBABLY STILL THE CHOSEN ONE
Kelly Barnhill
Kelly Barnhill (www.kellybarnhill.com) is the author of the Newbery Medal winning novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, and the World Fantasy winning novella, The Unlicensed Magician, as well as other novels and short stories. She is the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Loft. Her new collection of short stories, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories, will be published by Algonquin Books in February 2018.
“YOU MUST WAIT here,” the Highest of the High Priests told her. “We will return and bring you back to the Land of Nibiru once we have found the circlet to place upon your head.” The very mention of the circlet made the High Priest tremble with joy. Though the journey through the portal had been brief, the Land of Nibiru was many universes away from where Corrina now stood—in her own small kitchen, in her own small house. The priest looked strange, she realized, with his headdress and robe and flowing beard, next to the magnet-encrusted refrigerator and grimy cabinets and microwave that always smelled of cheese. She had not noticed the priests’ strangeness back in Nibiru. Everything was strange there. “You are the Chosen One. We are certain of it. And you will sit on the High Throne and your Rule will be benevolent and long.” He bowed low, and his long beard draped across the vinyl floor. It needed to have been swept days ago. And mopped. Cheerios clung to the long, gray strands.
“Okay,” Corrina said. She was barefoot and filthy and was likely leaving foot-shaped stains on the floor from the juice of an unknown berry, oozing now off her feet. She was eleven years old. The High Priest told her this was the normal age for a Chosen One. He had read all the history books, so he knew.
Corrina knew that she didn’t feel like the Chosen One. She had spent the last year and a day in the Land of Nibiru. She had learned to wield a sword and defend herself with a shield and make camp using only pine boughs and moss and the sustenance of the forest. She learned how to read a map and form a battle plan and howl over the dead. She was also very good at math—or she was before she left. She looked around. Her parents surely must have worried while she was gone.
“I won’t be long,” the High Priest promised. “Only a week at the very most. But the Zonniers are hungry for your blood, I’m afraid, so I must seal the Portal behind me. You will not be able to follow. You must wait for us to come and get you. You must not wander away.”
Corrina looked around. She never cared much for the kitchen. “What if I go a little bit away? Like to the next room.”
“We would prefer that you remain right here.”
“What if my mother is here when you come?” Corrina asked.
“We shall slay any that stand in the way of the Chosen One.”
“I’d rather you didn’t slay my mother.”
“All right, then,” the High Priest said. “We will simply bind her hands and feet, and then we will take you with us.”
“That is probably not a good idea either,” Corrina said. “My dad is usually gone for two weeks at a time on his truck. What if no one comes for her? She’ll die.”
“Fine.” The High Priest seemed annoyed. “We will give her a quick knock to the head and she will fall unconscious.”
Corrina shrugged. She and her mother were not particularly close—her mother wished for a girl who shared her love of shoes. Instead she had Corrina, with her scabby knees and her filthy feet and her love of T-shirts with pictures of skulls on them. Still. It’s not as though she wanted anything bad to happen to her mother. She was her mother, after all.
“That’ll be okay,” she said at last. “But not too hard.”
“It is imperative, Princess, that you remain here. You mustn’t move. You mustn’t stray. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Corrina said. “But what if I have to use the restroom?”
“What’s a restroom?”
“The privy.”
He sighed. “If you must. Just don’t go far. No journeys, if you take my meaning.”
She did, and she promised. And she wasn’t interested in journeying anywhere, anyway. She had been in the Land of Nibiru for longer than she planned, ever since she discovered that strange metal door in the cupboard under the sink—the door that only she could see. And then the Resistance needed her. And it felt good to be needed. After the hardships and worry and travel she had done—usually without sleep—she felt as though she could lie in her bed for another month. How astonished her mother would be to see her!
The High Priest’s eyes swelled with tears. He fell to his knees and embraced the girl, sobbing as he did so. “May the gods protect you while I’m away. And may the days be short between now and when you return to us. My precious princess.”
And with that, he lowered himself—all creaking joints—to the floor and caterpillar-crawled into the cupboard under the sink, wriggling into the portal and out of sight. Once the metal door closed, it vanished.
For now.
It was only a matter of time.
A week, he had said.
And then she would leave her home and her family and her world forever. And be the Chosen One. Corrina had never been special before. She did well in her studies, but she had few friends and usually simply blended in with the crowd. In Nibiru, there were flags with her face on them and songs in her honor. There was something to that, she decided.
Corrina looked at the time. 11:43. Funny, she thought. That’s the same time as when I left a year ago. It’s quite the coincidence.
She went down the hall to the bathroom and took a long shower, half-expecting her mother to come bursting through the door and plucking her naked self out of the stall, hugging her tight after being gone so long. But she didn’t.
Well, Corrina thought. It’s not as though we are close.
She dried off and went to bed.
The next day, her mother ate breakfast and poured coffee.
“Do you want cereal or pancakes?” her mother said. As though it was a regular day. And it was. When Corrina looked at the newspaper, she saw that the date was not a year and a day after she was last in this kitchen, but just a day. The next day. And no time at all had passed while she was in Nibiru.
So, she thought. Time works differently there. That could be a problem.
THE HIGH PRIEST had told her to stay near the kitchen, and so she stayed.
She stopped going to school. She’d make a show of walking to the bus, but would hide in the bushes until her mother went to work, and then called herself in sick once the house was empty. After punishments and phone calls and meetings that she did not always attend, Corrina and her mother decided to try home-schooling, provided that Corrina do it herself while her mother left every day to go work at the hair salon.
“I expect you to do it right,” her mother said while lighting her fourth cigarette of the day. “Don’t embarrass me when you take those state exams.”
Corrina didn’t. She got the highest score in the whole state that year. Her old school put her picture on the front page of their newspaper, calling her their star student and taking all the credit, even though she was no longer enrolled. She didn’t care. She took books out of the library on mathematics and astronomy, as well as gardening, martial arts, hunting, weapon maintenance, and survivalist memoirs.
When her dad came home from his long hauls, she taught him some basic mo
ves so that he could spar with her in the back yard.
“Where did you learn this stuff?” her father said, red-faced and panting. He clutched at his heart, but claimed the exercise was doing him good.
Corrina shrugged. “Books,” she said.
She didn’t tell him about the ruined temple and the bearded priests, and the youngest one who handed her a staff and said, “Now. Defend yourself,” and then he attacked her. She didn’t tell him how proud the priests were when she was finally able to swipe his feet, sidekick his belly, and send him pinwheeling to the stone floor with a tremendous thud. She didn’t tell him about the thrill she felt when she first held a sword in her hand, first felt that honed edge slice the air in front of her. She didn’t tell him how good—how very, very good—it felt to be dangerous.
“Books, eh?” Her father chuckled. “Well, that’s something. I had no idea books were so dangerous.”
The word thrilled her to the core. She had half a mind to sucker punch her dad, but his breathing was ragged and raw. She helped him inside instead.
A YEAR PASSED. The High Priest didn’t come back.
THE SUMMER BEFORE Corrina turned thirteen, her parents split up. They called her into their bedroom. They had been screaming at each other all day. Corrina had spent the day sitting on the kitchen floor right next to the cupboard under the sink, trying to will the High Priest to return. When she was called into their room, her parents sat at the edge of the bed, holding hands. Their eyes were red.
They explained what a divorce was, as though it was a brand new concept that Corrina had never heard of before.
“Which parent would you like to live with, honey?” her dad said gently, as though it was a foregone conclusion. It was no secret that she preferred her father. Her mother checked her nails.
“Which one of you is keeping the house?” Corrina asked slowly.
“Your mother is,” her dad said. “I found a nice apartment right next to the library.”
“I’ll stay with mom,” Corrina said. Corrina’s mother’s head snapped up and her father instantly began to cry.
“Are you sure?” he faltered.
How could she explain it to her dad? Though the memory of her time in the Land of Nibiru—the metal door, the near-constant rain, the Zonnier Hordes howling for her blood, the band of resisters and rebels who were bound to one another by something bigger than incidental family status or belief or anger, but by love, camaraderie, and brotherhood—was as fresh to her now as it had been the day she returned, there was a part of her that had begun to wonder if it was nothing more than a dream. They hadn’t come back. They promised to come back. They promised to return for her. They called her Princess, after all. The Chosen One. But she was no longer eleven. And she was growing by the day.
“I’m very sure,” she said. “I can’t move. I just can’t.”
And she didn’t.
ANOTHER YEAR PASSED. The High Priest still hadn’t come back.
CORRINA KEPT A stack of sketch notebooks filled with her memories of Nibiru. Drawings of people, ruined buildings, landscapes. Drawings of plants, flowers, animals. When she sat at the kitchen table and closed her eyes while facing the cupboard under the sink, she could see all of Nibiru in her mind’s eye as clearly as if she was there.
But she noticed something else, too.
As she aged, she began to notice things about the landscape and the Resistance that she had not noticed when she was eleven. For example, while the High Priests and the Resistance were both ostensibly fighting the same enemy, they didn’t seem to be talking to one another. Indeed, after she had warned the Resistance and helped them ready themselves for the battle, the High Priests were nowhere to be seen. She only was brought to them later, after a High Priest had found her out in the forest gathering berries, and told her that the best berries were over here, next to the old abbey.
And later, when she returned to the Resistance, there had been a party.
She had a friend in the Resistance, a boy named Cairn, who was a few years older than she was, who spat on the ground whenever the High Priests were mentioned.
“Old windbags,” he said. “They aren’t fighting with us.”
“But they want the same thing. Don’t they?” Corrina was honestly confused.
He spat again. “Nah. They just want not to be slaughtered by the Zonnier Hordes. Of course, the reason why they are here in the first place is the High Priests’ fault. They convinced the King to attack. They said the Zonnier were weak. And it was us—my parents and my whole village—who were sent into the battle with no training and poor weapons. And now the Zonnier want revenge. They razed the Noble City, and I don’t blame them. But they have no call killing us. We just want to farm in peace.”
At the kitchen table, Corrina drew a picture of Cairn—his grown-out hair, his lopsided smile, the scar cut across his cheek. She had such a crush on him then! If she was honest with herself, she had a crush on him now. Even now. She drew his pet—a smallbeast named Ricu—perched on his shoulder. It looked like a largish rat with fluffy fur and very long ears. She loved Ricu, though Ricu did not love her back.
How old was Cairn now, she wondered? Does he wonder what happened to her? If she ever made it back to the Kingdom of Nibiru, she might be old. Or maybe he would. Would he even recognize her then?
She looked at the picture. It seemed so alive to her—as though Cairn and Ricu would come leaping out and the three of them would have their own adventure. She laid her hand on the page. It was just paper.
ANOTHER YEAR PASSED. The High Priests did not come.
WHEN SHE WAS fifteen, her mother floated the idea of the two of them moving in with her very rich boyfriend. Corrina dug in her heels. “Absolutely not,” she said. “You can move in with him, but I am staying.”
“But I thought—” her mother said.
“I can’t move,” Corrina said. “I just can’t.”
They fought and fumed, but eventually the rich boyfriend moved to Rio with his secretary.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Corrina said as her mother slammed her bedroom door. It wasn’t true, though. Corrina hadn’t warned anyone.
(She had warned the Resistance about the coming Hordes. She had seen them approach right when she tumbled out of the Portal. It was her first action that she took in the Land of Nibiru, and it saved a thousand lives. It wasn’t really a thousand, but that was the story they told after that. It was the reason they thought she was the Chosen One. Just dumb luck.)
ANOTHER YEAR PASSED. And another. The High Priest still hadn’t come back.
WHEN SHE WAS seventeen, her mother and father sat her down to discuss the possibility of going to college. She had gotten her provisional diploma from the State Homeschooling Office, and had knocked her college entrance exams out of the stratosphere.
“You can go anywhere you want,” her father had said.
“I’ve gotten emails from the professors you’ve done your MOOC courses with,” her mother said. “They’ve all highly encouraged me to have you apply to their programs. Especially the man from Oxford. Wouldn’t that be fancy! We could buy you new shoes!”
“I can’t move,” Corrina said, and her parents’ faces fell. “I just can’t.”
She explained to them about online college. She told them that she had already started—and look! Straight A’s. Library science. It was a real degree, she assured them.
But there was another reason why she couldn’t leave that had nothing to do with the Land of Nibiru. She met a boy who was using the computers at the library to look for jobs. He was new in town. “Needed a fresh start,” he had said. He grew up on a farm, and didn’t want to spend another day smelling the lake of pig shit that sat across the road from his parents’ house.
He would come over to the house while Corrina’s mother was gone at work. Corrina taught him how to box and how to spar and how to flip a man onto the floor when he wasn’t looking. And then he flipped her onto her bed when she
wasn’t looking, and taught her something else entirely. Within two months she was throwing up her breakfast. After four months, she was shopping online for new brassieres to accommodate her growing bustline and for pants with elastic panels at the belly.
“Grandparents?” her mother said, turning pale and beginning to fan her face.
Corrina sat quietly, looking at her hands. Frankly, she was shocked they hadn’t noticed. She had been showing for well over a month. Her parents just didn’t notice much.
“Oh, hell no,” her father said, storming out of the house.
The boy moved in the following week.
A little over a year later she was pregnant again, this time with twins.
Two years after that, she was pregnant yet again. A singleton, which was a relief. Her mother had moved to Florida with a man named Arnold who lived on a boat in the Keys. Her father had died. The boy—not a boy any longer—after learning about the new pregnancy, had decided to move back to the farm. There was money in pigs, he said. And there was a girl who had broken his heart before but wanted him now. He told Corrina that the children couldn’t come with him, but he would send checks every month. Surely she understood.
Corrina did. Sometimes people just don’t come back. She knew that now. She kissed his cheek and comforted the children as he got into his truck and drove away forever.
ANOTHER YEAR PASSED. The cupboard under the sink was just a cupboard.
BREAKFAST WAS LOUD. The baby yelled. The twins yelled. Her oldest yelled. Corrina never yelled. There was no point. She kept her eyes on the newspaper. There was a rattling sound. Like a cupboard door shaking back and forth. Corrina pressed her lips together and didn’t investigate. There was no door under the sink. She said this to herself over and over again. She knew now that there never had been. Or she was pretty sure.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12 Page 4
