by Devon Taylor
“Well … good night,” Rhett said awkwardly.
“Good night, mate.” Basil had his hands stuffed in his pockets, continuing down the hall toward Mak’s room.
Rhett couldn’t help himself.
“What’s the deal with you two, anyway?” he called, knowing that Basil would understand what he meant.
Basil turned and started walking backward, his hands spread at his sides.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he called back, and then turned and ducked through Mak’s door without even knocking.
Rhett got out of there as quickly as he could. Whatever was going to happen behind the door of room number 1026, he definitely did not want to hear any of it.
He went back down to the main room, where all the corridors branched away like struts on a wheel. He looked down the hall to where his own cabin was. The idea of going back there and sitting alone, with nothing to do, made him sad and uneasy. But where would he go?
There were probably other syllektors who were still up, hanging out in the rec area. But the idea of mingling with members of other teams wasn’t very appealing, either. That would mean having to introduce himself, having to try and integrate himself into another melting pot of personalities, which just seemed exhausting. Plus, he’d finally seemed to gain Mak’s trust—sort of. He didn’t want to risk losing it.
What, then?
As he stood there contemplating, his brain already leaning toward the inevitable decision of trudging back to his room and listening to the ocean for the rest of the night, he heard something else—dripping water. It was coming from behind him, the same sound from his first night on board, like big, globular raindrops smacking onto the hard floor.
Rhett turned around … to nothing. The floor behind him was completely dry. He glanced around, peering down some of the other corridors. There had to be a leak somewhere. The sound must have been echoing down the halls. How ancient was this ship that it could not have a single leak?
With that thought still fresh in his mind, Rhett realized where he wanted to go and who he wanted to talk to.
He made his way back up to the top deck of the Column, where he’d first come in with Basil. As he went, he passed others who were heading down to their quarters for the night. Nobody looked tired physically or seemed worn out from the day. But they all gave him serious, questioning looks. Their eyes said enough, and again Rhett thought of the little boy in Brazil, of the waitress in Arizona. He thought about what Mak had said coming back from the steam room. This was heartbreak, day in and day out. The ending of lives, over and over and over. And even if the syllektors weren’t responsible for causing those deaths, how much of that could one person realistically take?
He was suddenly glad for the knowledge that he wouldn’t have to do it every day.
When he made it to the top of the Column, Rhett stood and stared at the spiral staircase leading up to the bridge. Basil had told him that he would want to check it out sometime.
He went over to it and looked up. It circled up into the ceiling, disappearing into darkness.
“Come on up, Mr. Snyder!” It was Captain Trier’s voice.
Rhett took an instinctive step back. Had the captain seen him? He shook his head. His nerves were still jangled from yesterday and he was starting to get paranoid.
He climbed the steps, listening to them creak and whine with age. There were a lot of them. At the top, he realized why. He stepped out into a wide, circular room with walls that were made entirely of glass. The room sat on top of a short tower—from the window, Rhett could see the steep drop down to the Harbinger’s uppermost deck. He had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the choppy gray ocean and black, boiling sky. Ahead, the front of the Harbinger jutted out and came to a point, the length of at least a few city blocks, covering up the waves in a dark mass and pointing ahead with immense purpose. Behind, the rest of the ship stretched away, with the smokestacks looming over the bridge like behemoth cigars stuck into the ship’s hull, always smoldering. Everywhere else, the ocean ran away with the clouds.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” the captain said. He was standing at the starboard side, hands behind his back as always, staring at the fuzzy line of the horizon.
“More than impressive,” Rhett said. “It’s unbelievable.”
“You’ve probably seen a lot of that the past couple of days.” Trier turned and looked at Rhett, who could only nod. “It’s a lot to take in.”
Rhett stepped farther into the room, noticing for the first time the steering wheel and the lever near it that must have controlled the ship’s speed. The steering wheel was almost as big as Rhett, made from a dark wood, with handles dotting the outside. In front of it was something else—a lantern set on a pedestal, with a single flame burning inside it, the orange point leaning toward the front of the ship.
Trier caught him staring at the lantern.
“That’s my compass,” he said. “The flame tells me which direction we should be traveling in. Without it … well, there wouldn’t be much point to all this, would there?”
“Do you know where it’s taking us?” Rhett asked.
The captain smiled. “If any of us knew that, we might not be so inclined to do our jobs. We would just go there and let someone else do it. Someone who’s supposed to be in charge.”
“You’re not in charge?”
To that, Trier simply laughed.
Rhett looked out at the waves dancing in jagged formation like saw blades coming through the far side of a tree.
“Is it all just ocean?” he asked.
“Actually, it’s a river,” Trier replied. “And if you’ve read any mythology, you’ll know why that makes sense.”
“I’ve read the stories,” Rhett said, a touch of impatience leaking into his voice. “But is any of this really supposed to make sense? I’m on a giant ship that, apparently, is kind of alive, sailing on what you’re telling me is a river that’s so big, it looks like an ocean. Oh, and I watched someone inhale another person’s soul yesterday. So there’s that.”
The captain thought about it, then said, “I don’t expect it to feel real, Rhett. Not yet, anyway. Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense to me, either. It makes as much sense as a boy and his family dying suddenly and violently on the side of a New York highway.” His eyes bore into Rhett, and Rhett could do nothing but look away. He found a darker-than-dark spot in the clouds and focused on it. Lightning zapped the water below it, illuminating the toothy grin of another one of those massive sea creatures. Or maybe it was the same one.
“What am I supposed to say?” Rhett finally muttered.
“Tell me about them. Roger and Ilene,” Trier said after a pause. “Your parents.”
The words stabbed at the emotions trapped inside Rhett’s mind without any outlet through his body.
“What do you need to know?” he asked bitterly. “You know their names. You probably know everything else.”
“Their names I just picked up off your consciousness,” Trier replied. “You were obviously thinking about them when you first came on board. Worried about them. It was easy for me to see them in your mind. That’s a … quirk of mine.”
Rhett raised his eyebrows. “Like a special power?”
The captain chuckled. “Not at all,” he said. “I had a touch of clairvoyance when I was alive. Death just seems to have amplified it. I can only pick up little bits here and there. But it’s the reason I became captain of this ship—I always know when someone’s lying to me.”
“So—”
“Yes.” Trier cut him off. “I know about Mak and Basil. That’s an ongoing drama that I prefer to avoid. Much like you, it seems, with the subject of your parents.”
“Yeah, well…”
“Tell me about them,” Trier repeated.
Rhett brushed one of the handles on the steering wheel with his finger, feeling its smoothness, letting it help anchor his thoughts.
“What’s there to tell?” he said. �
��Now that they’re … now that they’re gone.” He opened his mouth to go on, closed it. The devastation hadn’t even had time to break within him yet. The idea that his parents were dead, killed by his own recklessness, hadn’t even really hit him. Was now the time to let that happen? Here? In front of the man who used their deaths to keep him on board?
Why not?
“My dad, Roger, used to be a surgeon,” Rhett said. “One of the best in the country, I guess. When … when we died, he was working in the stock market, but there was a box of awards out in the garage, all kinds of medical stuff. They didn’t talk about it much. Mom was … uh, she made candles. Calling her a candlemaker makes it sound like she lived in the eighteen hundreds. She just made them at home, mixing scents and colors and wax and stuff, coming up with different smells. Ilene’s Illuminations. That’s what she called her company, which was really just an Etsy page and her sitting on the living room floor for hours, trying to get the mixtures right. She was always happy doing it, though.”
“They sound lovely,” Trier said gently.
Rhett continued to stare out at the unhinged world. “You have no idea. There couldn’t have been two people who were more different in the entire world. My dad was all facts and numbers and precision. Mom used to say that he had steel-reinforced hands but a heart with a cracked foundation. She was so carefree. She didn’t mind being late if it meant getting to spend a few extra minutes with me and Dad. They had things in common, sure. They loved to read. They loved movies. They loved me. But it was all those fundamental differences that made them love each other more. Those things balanced them out. Dad learned that it was okay to be a little late sometimes, and Mom learned that being two whole hours late was a bit much.”
A startling yip of laughter escaped Rhett’s throat, and he heard the captain chuckling with him.
“Go on,” the captain said when the laughter had passed and the bridge had gone quiet again.
“To really understand what they were like as parents, you have to understand one thing,” Rhett continued. “I shouldn’t have been born in the first place.”
Trier came and stood next to Rhett, hands still behind his back, and gave him a curious look.
“When Mom was still pregnant with me,” Rhett went on, “they found a tumor. Right here.” He put a finger on his abdomen. “It was going to kill me. My parents had the damn thing in a jar somewhere for the longest time, but I haven’t seen it in a while.”
“So, the tumor was removed?” Trier asked.
Rhett nodded. “My dad took it out. He came up with this ridiculous procedure. Something the board of medical gurus or whatever they are wouldn’t let him touch with a ten-foot pole. He had no backing. But he did it anyway.” He stopped, his hand subconsciously caressing the spot where, before birth, a malignant growth had threatened to end his life before it ever started. “He cut me out of Mom’s womb. Before I’d even gotten all the way through the second trimester. He said I wasn’t even as big as the palm of his hand. They removed the tumor, patched me up, and then put me back inside my mom’s uterus and patched her up. Which makes it sound supereasy, but Dad said it was a fourteen-hour-long procedure. I had to kind of be born once first before I could be born for real. My dad got fired from the hospital he was working at. He lost his medical license. That procedure was … not a good idea, to say the least. Right before … before the crash, I had seen a couple of news stories about similar procedures. But back then it was unheard of.”
The captain whispered something that Rhett didn’t quite catch.
“Huh?” Rhett said.
“A Twice-Born Son,” Trier said.
“What’s that?”
“That’s you. It used to refer to reincarnation. But in your case the term seems to be a bit more literal.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. It’s legend, mostly. Bits of lore that you can find in some of the oldest books in the ship’s library. Regardless of what it means to me, what it means to you is that your life was very precious.”
Rhett looked back out at the water clashing with the ship, with the sky. He could feel the emotions inside his head, bottled up, held back by the dam of his body’s numbness. He had the power to let them run through him, and so he did. Rhett switched on his body like someone fumbling in a dark basement for the chain that clicks on the hanging lightbulb. He found it and pulled.
His arms and legs tingled, sore from all the training. His eyes burned from the pressure behind them. He could smell burning coal and hot metal. He tasted copper. His stomach tumbled and clenched. It was awful and relieving at the same time.
He nodded in response to Trier. “It was precious because they made it that way. They loved each other until it was gross to look at, but the way they loved me…” The pressure became too much, and he felt the warm touch of tears running down his face.
“Tell me about the crash,” Trier prodded gently.
Rhett hitched in a shuddering breath. “They made me wait a year to get my driver’s license,” he said. “We lived in the city, they said. It wasn’t that important for me to have it. But I pushed for it. I pushed hard. And then, when they finally let me get it—just a few months ago—I was such an ass about it. I started insisting that I drive any time we needed to take the car somewhere. Mom always let me, but Dad usually wouldn’t. I don’t know if he was afraid of me growing up too fast or just afraid of my driving. Probably both.” He laughed to himself. “We were going upstate. Some sort of party. The company that Dad worked for was having some kind of swanky thing at a country club. Dad didn’t want to go, but Mom made him. To make a good impression, you know?”
Trier nodded. Behind him, the sky lit up with a stutter of blue lightning.
“Anyway,” Rhett said, “I made them let me drive. Dad said I definitely wasn’t ready for that kind of a trip. Mom … she always defended me against him. She always fought him off when he was being too … fatherly.”
“They let you drive,” Trier said.
“She let me drive. Dad sat in the backseat with his arms crossed and stared out the window the whole time. He was wearing a new suit. Cornflower-blue tie. I kept trying to tell him he looked nice. He just kept telling me to keep my eyes on the road. I did keep my eyes on the road … but it didn’t matter.” His throat clicked and his voice caught.
“I think I understand, Rhett,” Trier said. “You don’t have to—”
“Yes I do,” Rhett snapped. “You wanted to hear it. I have to tell it to the end.”
“Okay,” Trier replied quietly.
Rhett took barely a second to pick up the thread again. “We kept driving, and I kept trying to lighten the mood. Dad wouldn’t have it. Every time I tried to talk about something else—baseball or something—he’d just bark at me to watch the road. And he’d mumble something about how I shouldn’t be driving that far. Mom was irritated, I was irritated. He was just cranky because he didn’t want to go to that stupid goddamn party. It got so tense that Mom finally told me to pull over so Dad could drive. I told her no. I was angry at him. Not because he had tried to keep me from driving, but because he was being such a damn baby about it. I was just being a brat.”
Rhett stopped. He tore his eyes away from the horizon and forced them to find Captain Trier’s face. Rhett wasn’t angry at him for guilting him into staying on the ship, not anymore. The souls of his parents were on board, just a few decks below where he stood right now, trapped in a box with probably a trillion other souls. But they were there. He was closer to his parents than he might ever have gotten the chance to be. Short of being trapped in the box with them.
“I don’t know what happened,” Rhett went on. “I honestly don’t. I got so angry at both of them. We were in the left lane, and I just … I swerved as hard and fast as I could into the right lane. I think I was trying to get to the shoulder so I could pull over like they asked me to, but … I don’t know,” he repeated. “I didn’t check my mirrors befor
e I swerved … and there was this big FedEx truck right there. It was right there when I pulled into the right lane. I didn’t see it until our back end smashed against it. I heard the truck’s horn going off, and I could kind of see the truck jackknifing behind us. We were going almost eighty. The car spun in front of the truck and then, I don’t know how, but we were in the air. We flipped a couple of times. It was so fast, but it was so slow. All I remember seeing is that cornflower-blue tie snapping back and forth in the rearview mirror.”
Tears were spilling down his face now. His lower lip shuddered, but Rhett kept talking. “There was all this glass and screeching metal. I could see the sky, and then the ground, and then the sky again. Then we hit the ground, and we finally stopped moving. I … I was already dead. I could see myself still in the car. The car was crumpled in around me, and my parents…” He choked on the words, his body giving in to the sobs that he’d allowed it to have. He sucked in a ragged breath. “My parents were gone. They are gone. They saved my life before I was even born. Both of them. They risked everything for me before I was even really theirs. And the second their lives were in my hands … the second…”
His words broke down. Sobs overtook him, and he put his back against the window and slid down until he was sitting with his knees up against his chest. The gentle lift and fall of the ship as it cut through the waves soothed him while he cried. He could feel Trier watching him, but he didn’t care. He was content to just be there with his sorrow. It was a strange thing to have missed about being alive, but he missed it just the same.
“Tell me what I’m thinking,” Rhett said after the worst of the tears had gone through him. “Tell me what you see.”
“I can’t read your mind,” the captain said. “I can only pick up on certain things. Images, mostly.”
“What are you picking up right now, then?”
