by Beca Lewis
“Nothing?” Zeid asked, looking as puzzled as I felt. I wasn’t surprised to see that Aki smiled and looked away. I had a feeling she had something to do with my memory loss, and perhaps my continual waking up in bed without clothes.
I was grateful for that part. Clean clothes every morning was a true luxury, and one that I didn’t expect again for some time.
“Nothing.”
“Well, do you feel different?” Zeid asked.
It was the right question to ask because I did. It was hard to put my finger on it, but perhaps my intention of not being the poor maiden in the story turned the tide.
“If you are asking if I feel any more magical than I did before, the answer is no. If you are asking if I feel better about myself, the answer is yes,” I said.
We had packed our backpacks and were headed to the workroom to pick up our real shields. The shields that could kill the wrong people if not used correctly. The ones that the day before had terrified me. But not anymore. At least it wasn’t the same. The terror was still there, but instead of feeling like a lid pressing down on me, it felt like a match. If lit it could start a fire. I was ready for it.
That was something I couldn’t or wouldn’t explain, so I answered Zeid with a grunt. He laughed and jogged over to where the rest of the team was waiting. Everyone was ready. Even the Priscillas looked more alert than they had the last few days. Perhaps the nap on my shoulder was enough for them.
Standing on the little blue circles that glowed in the practice space and waiting to be lifted to the surface made me think of Star Trek. “Beam me up, Scotty,” I said, and everyone laughed.
A second later they were all gone, including the Priscillas who had attached themselves to Aki instead of me. Didn’t occur to me how weird that was until that moment. I was still standing there by myself. “Sorry about that, Princess Kara Beth,” Teddy said, coming over to where I stood.
“No nickname this time, Teddy?” I scoffed and then saw his face.
“What is it?”
“I had to give you this,” Teddy said, holding up a little circle as small as a button. He placed it on my skin under the neck of my shirt on the left-hand side. The side with the two bracelets. My shield side. The pin was so light I wouldn’t have known that it was there if he hadn’t told me what he was doing.
“What is it?”
“A safety button. If something happens and you are trapped, press it, and you will be rescued.”
“What will happen then? And why not give it to everyone?”
“Because it’s you that has to survive.”
We stared at each other for what felt like an eternity. It was my choice what to do with what Teddy had just said. Was it a curse, or was it a blessing that I would live even if my friends died?
Teddy pushed the answer to my question into my mind, where it would stay. “If you live, you have a chance to save them. If you die, they will die too.”
“What will you do if I am trapped?”
“Best you don’t know,” Teddy said.
The next second I was above ground where the team was waiting for me. No one looked worried. Well, Zeid did. But everyone else was calm. Did they know what happened with Teddy and me, or was that just the way that they were?
Above ground I hadn’t realized how much I had missed the sun, the air, the top part of the trees. It was glorious. I spun around, arms open, face to the sun. I wanted to remember how good this felt when we faced the Shrieks. They wanted to take away all this beauty from everyone.
Well, they probably didn’t want anything. Shrieks were mindless robots doing the bidding of Abbadon. Someday, I didn’t know how, or when, I will stop Abbadon. Kill him if I have to, I vowed to myself,
“That was different,” Zeid said coming up beside me.
“What?”
“That feeling. The depth of it. It was scary. Maybe the Oracle did something after all.”
“Perhaps,” I acknowledged to Zeid. To myself it wasn’t a perhaps, it was a certainty. I was ready for whatever magic I had to show itself.
“No matter what?” Link asked.
I had forgotten about Professor Link and his open channel.
“Have you been there all along?” I asked, a little pissed. No, a lot pissed. This was ridiculous. People always in my mind.
“Then shut it off, Hannah. You have the power to do so. On the other hand, do you have the time to reopen it in an emergency?”
I knew I didn’t, so I sighed, and pushed the thought back to him. “Be polite, please. Don’t snoop.”
“As if! Never!” Link said, in a Valley girl voice.
We both laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Zeid asked.
“Link, impersonating a Valley girl,” I answered.
“Oh, yea. Link does that sometimes. Not just Valley girls, but characters throughout human history in Earth. Probably keeps his mind from freaking out with all that he has to do to keep us safe.”
I nodded and pushed to Link, “Have I said thank you?”
A picture of a sad little puppy floated by in my head. I laughed again.
“Link?” Zeid asked.
I didn’t have time to answer because Niko made a hand circle for all of us to gather close to him.
“Are you ready? All of you?” He asked glancing around the circle.
Zeid, Aki, Beru, Ruta, the five Ginete brothers, James and the four other men from Kinver all nodded grimly. The Priscillas had returned to me and tittered their answer of “yes.”
Cahir was waiting in the woods. I could see him watching, wary. Suzanne had shapeshifted to Lady and was flying above us. A black, white, and red dragon. Guarding and protecting.
Niko stopped and rested his gaze on me. I answered with as much assurance as I could muster, “Ready.”
With one last glance around to take in our surroundings, we once again followed Ruta through the woods.
“How far away is the Riff, Zeid?” I asked.
Zeid inclined his head to Niko, so I turned my gaze to him.
“It moves closer. A day or less.”
“You know I never asked what the Riff looks like. How will I know that we are there?”
“Besides the green blobs screaming with their entire bodies? On one side will be life, on the other side will be death. There will be no mistaking it.”
Shatterskin Forty-One
The morning walk was peaceful. Especially considering where we were going. Even though the practice time had been intense, a few days of a good night’s sleep, clean clothes and bodies, had lifted everyone’s spirits in spite of the danger that lay ahead.
The Priscillas seemed to have recovered from their nightly excursions and were flitting ahead of us on the trail. It was unusual. Since the ceremony, they had spent most of their time in my coat pocket or riding on my shoulder. I was a little hurt that they didn’t appear to need me anymore. Yes, it was petty. Still, I sulked.
So when Pris came back and rested on my shoulder, I decided to be direct and ask her what was going on. Why weren’t they riding with me? Where had they been every night?
What was I thinking? That I had a right to ask? Apparently not, because Pris got angry. Fast. I had forgotten how intense she could be. The first thing she did was fly to my face and beat her little fists on my forehead. “Ow, ow,” I said trying to keep from hurting her as I attempted to brush her away, or hold her still.
It was interesting that in spite of my frantic efforts to get her to stop pounding on me, no one looked my way, or even showed a glimmer of interest. No one except Link who I could hear laughing in the background.
Ignoring him, I tried to tell Pris that I was sorry, not sure what I was sorry for, but her little fists were like tiny battering rams. Hearing the n
oise, Cil and La came flying out of the woods like tiny bees ready for a fight. I was in deep trouble.
Except they didn’t attack me. Instead, Cil and La grabbed Pris and pulled her away and put her on my shoulder. They were careful not to put her close enough so she could pull my ear. Once Pris had settled down, La flew up into a tree and brought back what turned out to be a dab of honey on her fingertip which she rubbed on my red forehead. It immediately felt better.
“What did you say to her anyway?” Cil asked.
“I just asked where you all went at night and why you weren’t riding with me as much anymore.”
“Oh,” La said.“The Oracle didn’t tell you?”
When I gave her a blank look, Cil added, “That explains it.”
“Yep, it does,” La agreed.
I was lying in a way because what the Oracle told me was starting to seep back into my mind. But something told me to keep quiet about it for now. Besides, I had asked Pris a perfectly reasonable question because I didn’t know where they were going at night. As far as I knew, the Oracle had not told me that.
But I still didn’t understand what made Pris so mad. “Is it a bad thing to wonder where you went at night? You know where I am all the time.”
“True,” Cil said. “We do. I suppose we trust that you will remember more about us soon. So, we might as well tell you, since you are a sister and all, what we have been up to.”
A sister? Cil must have picked up that phrase from somewhere, but I went with it.
Pris piped up, “If someone is going to tell her, it’s going to be me.”
She had just opened her mouth to tell me when we all heard it. A shriek. Not as loud as we had heard them before, but it was definitely a shriek. If we weren’t sure what it was, it didn’t take long to confirm our fears. Within seconds birds and animals started coming our way, fleeing as fast as they could from something behind them.
“That’s our cue,” Niko called and started running. Not away, but towards the shrieking. We followed him with our shields ready to be switched on. Within a few minutes, we were dodging every animal I had ever seen in the woods and more that were new to me. Maybe in the future, I would have a chance to get to know them.
A pack of wolves headed towards Cahir. They stopped for a brief moment and then continued on past us. I heard Cahir’s thoughts. Hearing Cahir in my mind was another thing I hadn’t told anyone yet. After I woke up from seeing the Oracle, I could feel Cahir in my mind, and with a bit of concentration, I could see through his eyes. Although I knew I would only be able to do that when he let me. He controlled the switch that showed me what he was seeing. It was like a camera in his head, or back in Earth like a Go Pro. He turned it on or off.
It was another example of how Erda and Earth were different. In Erda, they didn’t need a piece of equipment to do things. They didn’t need cars, computers, phones, or cameras. Somehow in Erda, they knew the source and tapped into it.
I was getting closer to feeling it in the same way. I only hoped it would be in time.
“There are only a few Shrieks up ahead. Cahir thinks that somehow they were separated from the pack, or perhaps they are scouts,” I yelled to the group.
No one asked how I knew that. Everyone just accepted it. I realized that Princess Kara Beth must have always talked with wolves, or at least Cahir. That I remembered was probably wonderful news for them, but what was happening was more critical.
“It could also be a trap,” Link said to all of us. “We haven’t heard of individual Shrieks separating from the group before, so be careful.”
We were already closer than anyone had been to a Shriek without being incapacitated. But we had to get close enough to see the Shrieks to blast their sound back to them.
Teddy and his friends had given us each one more thing before we beamed up: specially made noise-canceling headphones that they called earmuffs.
The earmuffs deadened the decibels of the shrieking, but we could still hear each other talking. However, once we got close enough to shoot, the shrieking would be almost intolerable.
But the earmuffs would deaden the sound enough to aim the shield and shoot. That was the plan anyway.
Shatterskin Forty-Two
“Something about this doesn’t feel right to me,” James said. For the past hour, James and his men from the village had been traveling through the woods on the outskirts of the core group.
But almost as soon as Niko told us to move forward after hearing the Shrieks in the distance, James had taken up a position on my left side with Zeid on my right. I was not going to protest their protection. Beru was directly in front of me, and Aki was behind me with John, Kit, Mark, and Thomas. Niko and Ruta were leading us.
I couldn’t see Pita and his brothers, but I never could. All I knew is that they were there somewhere.
The Priscillas had flown off into the woods. I was terrified for them. They had no protection. But I couldn’t call them back. They weren’t listening to me. Why had they gone? Did I make them that mad? When they returned, I was going to have to apologize profusely to Pris. I held the word “when” to myself as tightly as I could. Not if. When.
“What do you mean?” I asked James.
We had slowed our running to a fast stealth walk, trying not to make any noise and alert the Shrieks. We didn’t have any idea what they could hear. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. We had so little knowledge about what the shrieks could do it was terrifying.
“Something. Can’t put my finger on it,” James replied.
I thought about what I could do if I could see more all the time and then asked a question that I had been pondering since the first time I pressed the star on my necklace.
“James,” I asked, “you know what happens when I press your daughter’s star, don’t you?”
“She has told me.”
“Can you see that way, too. Can everyone?”
“No, I can’t. And no, not everyone can. It’s a talent, a gift. Some people have that one, but not many. You are one. My daughter knew that you have it. She also knew that you didn’t remember, so she gave you the necklace.”
“Doesn’t she need it anymore?”
“If she gave it to you, it’s either because she can see without it, or because Liza wants you to be safe.”
“She wants to make sure you are safe too, James.”
“Agreed. And I still feel there is something wrong.”
I jogged ahead a little and told Niko what James had said. Without a second thought, Niko raised his hand, and we all stopped. It felt as if everything paused, as if even the trees were holding their breaths.
We could hear the Shrieks in the distance. They were closer than before, but not yet loud enough to stun. We looked at each other, waiting.
Then nothing. The forest became silent as a tomb. Nothing moved. As we stood there, frozen, it felt as if we were the only ones left in the woods. All the animals, birds, and insects that could get away had gone behind us. They were counting on us to stop the noise.
But the noise had stopped without us doing anything. There were no more shrieking sounds. Had the Shrieks turned away? Gone back? Why would they do that? Where had they gone?
Professor Link was quiet. There was nothing to do but wait.
Suzanne, as Lady, was flying high above us, staying away from the Shrieks that could bring her down in a second. Still, she could see what we couldn’t see. Lady and her friends were our eyes in the air. She circled lower and lower, looking. On our common channel, Suzanne told us that she could see nothing other than the mass movement of forest life behind us. They were all waiting too. Probably wondering if they could return.
Suzanne said she could see the Riff in the distance, but no Shrieks. Not even the few we thought we had heard. Yes, she agreed, something was wrong.
There were Shrieks, and now there weren’t. What were we missing?
I switched my thought to Cahir, and he showed me what he saw. Trees and plants, but nothing that could move. He was circling us, widening the circle and he still saw nothing. I asked him to stop. Even though he was so quiet no one could hear him, I was worried. He might be moving into a trap. I tried not to think about the Priscillas.
There was no sound, only the rush of air in and out of our noses, although we did our best to muffle even that. Standing absolutely still was hard. My muscles started trembling, and I wondered how much longer I would be able not to move.
“Stay still,” Link commanded.
And then we all heard it. Something so quiet an insect crawling on the ground would have been louder.
We moved in a circle, our backs to each other, looking for what was out there, and seeing nothing.
Niko motioned for us to make sure our earmuffs were on and raise our shields. I pressed the star on my neck and almost screamed at what I saw.
A split second later the forest exploded with sound, and shrieking green mouths surrounded us.
If I had ever been afraid before, it couldn’t match what I felt in that moment. I held the match of anger to my terror, flipped the mirror switch, and fired.
Shatterskin Forty-Three
It got worse. The Shrieking. We reflected their shrieks back at them, and they screamed louder. I swear they grew bigger too. It became harder and harder to stay conscious. The noise was excruciating.
We were invisible behind our shields, but I had no idea how long the shields would hold up, or keep firing. This was different then our practicing underground. Besides, having the mirrors on this long was dangerous. What was Abbadon seeing?
The only positive effect that I could see from our effort was that the Shrieks were not advancing. Our tight circle held. Back to back, we shuffled sideways together. Each shuffle gave us a chance to re-trigger and fire at a new target. Plus moving helped us stay conscious. I could feel James’ shoulder attached to me on the left, and Zeid’s on the right. We held each other up. Feeling them there kept me firing, hoping that the next shot would stop the Shrieks.
