The Desert (Song of Dawn Trilogy Book 1)

by Liv Daniels

  Sasha’s voice had remained calm and melodious throughout the discussion, but now, exasperated, she raised it. “And when we’re gone, Max? Who will continue our work?”

  “You think it’s gonna be them? Not a chance. Not. A. Chance.”

  At the same moment, both Sasha and Max became aware of Leina’s presence. They whirled around to look at her.

  “I’m sorry, Leina,” Sasha said gently. “You’ve come at a difficult time for us. You can see that we are working out some…issues.”

  Max only grunted sullenly to acknowledge her. Leina smiled sheepishly, her hands still folded on her desk.

  “Max…” Sasha lowered her voice, so Leina couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  Max looked like he was going to explode again, but instead he turned back to Leina. With a strained smile on his face, he said, “Can you leave us alone for a while, kid?”

  Leina obeyed, quietly slipping out the door of the classroom. She met Ruby, who was smiling brightly, in the hall. “How did it go?”

  Leina shrugged, trying not to look gloomy. “Not very well, I think.”

  Chapter 19

  “It’s so easy to think about doing things, but when you actually try to do them they don’t often turn out like you expected. I had such a strong desire to help the Agency, but I think I’ve only made it worse for them.”

  Leina and Ruby had gone out to the beach bordering the cove. They sat on a stony outcrop, letting their feet dangle in the cove’s crystalline water as they talked.

  “Oh, don’t worry. Father has always been like that. We’re all used to it. It’s just… I think he and Sasha are worried about the future. Since everyone came here years and years ago, before I was born, they’ve been training younger generations to help them. But now, when I think they need it most, the trainees aren’t interested anymore. I don’t see why they don’t want to train you, though.”

  “I would probably be more of a burden anyways. I’ll never be like them. I’m just happy to be here at all. If Max’s students had been where I have, I think they would be more interested. People are funny that way; no matter how many times they are told, they never realize how fortunate they are until they lose it all.”

  “Sasha said you met Sam in the Desert. Isn’t he nice?”

  Leina laughed out loud. “You could say that. At least, once you get to know him. So, can you tell me more about the Agency? I still don’t know much.”

  Ruby hesitated. “Don’t tell my dad about this, okay? He’d be mad. I think he’s afraid I’ll meet some wanderer from Estlebey and tell them everything, and if they found out about us it would be bad.”

  “It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “I’ve heard that the Agency started in Estlebey, a long time ago. Sasha and Father were kids then, and their parents were in charge. They got kicked out for some reason, and so they and those who were loyal to them came here. Everyone forgot about us, and I think most other people think we are only a myth.”

  “And what does the Agency do?”

  “The job description is something like: fight the forces of evil, keep the darkness at bay, that kind of thing.” Ruby was imitating her father’s voice, and Leina giggled. Ruby did too, and then continued, “Mostly I think they’re trying to figure out what Dangerman is up to. And there’s some kind of trouble in Estlebey, but no one will tell me what it is. You’re lucky you got to sit in on a class at all. I’m too young, and Father doesn’t think I’m serious enough for it.”

  Leina was silent for a long time. Finally she changed the subject. “Does it have a name? The cove, I mean?” she asked.

  “Mmhmm. It’s called Rockwater.”

  “Why? That’s a strange name.”

  “I don’t know. There’s the rocks, and there’s the water, I guess.”

  Leina laughed. “I suppose whoever named it wanted to be very literal about it.”

  “Literal? What’s that?”

  “Rockwater. They were only thinking about what they saw, not how they saw it.”

  “Oh. Then I’m sure Father was the one who named it.” They both laughed until their stomachs ached. “You’re smart,” Ruby said.

  “I’ve just read a lot of books is all.” Leina tried not to smile too much. “I used to have plenty of time for that, a long time ago.” Her voice took on a faraway, dreamy tone. “That was before I went to the Desert.”

  “The books around here are always being used by someone more important than me,” Ruby said, kicking the water. “When I’m older, Sasha says I can go into training, and then I can read the books. After they teach me how to read, that is.”

  “What, you don’t know how to read?”

  “No.”

  “That we can fix. I’ll teach you. I brought a book that we can use. It’s a good story.”

  “Really?“

  “Of course. I’ll go get it.”

  When Leina got up, she saw Sasha coming down the path from the direction of the outpost town. Ruby saw her, too, and waved.

  When Sasha approached the two girls, she addressed Leina. “I’m terribly sorry about earlier. You must understand this is a difficult time for us.”

  “It’s okay,” said Leina. “I don’t want to burden you.”

  “Right now you can help us. Some of my agents have been analyzing the documents that you delivered, and we’ve decided to call an emergency meeting. I’d like you to be there in case we need information from you.”

  Leina nodded eagerly and followed Sasha back to the Agency.

  Chapter 20

  When Sasha and Leina arrived at the Agency’s meeting room, Max and four people who Leina guessed were agents were already sitting around the table in the middle. They were intently examining the papers that Leina had delivered, and none of them looked up to acknowledge the new arrivals. Sasha sat down, clearing her throat, and motioned for Leina to do the same.

  “Now that everyone is here,” said Max, giving Leina a cursory glance, “can you share your findings with us, Clarkson?”

  Clarkson, a middle-aged man who moved and spoke with an apt quickness, held up one of the papers that he had been studying. “Certainly. As you can see, this paper is simply a list of dates and locations: February 4th, Cavlin; June 21st, Vahkley; and so on. Given that it was found in a stack of papers from the year 3065, the current year, that is, we can assume that this is the year the dates are referring to. We have been researching what was going on in each of the listed cities on the respective dates. And get this. According to our records, each entry correlates with a monster raid. Not only that, this list includes every monster raid that we have on record this year.”

  The woman sitting next to Clarkson spoke up. “This suggests that Dangerman is behind all of the monster raids.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Max. “Maybe he was just keeping tabs on them, like us.”

  Clarkson shook his head and held out the paper again. “Look at the last entry. November 16th, Estlebey. That’s in three weeks.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.” Max ripped the paper from Clarkson and stared at it, then dropped it to the table in disgust. He glared at Clarkson as if he was responsible for the paradox. “The monster raids have been going on since before Dangerman was born. He can’t be the source.”

  “He’s the only source that we’ve been able to identify,” said Sasha calmly. “We’ve known for years that he was responsible for at least some of them. This only confirms our suspicions.”

  Max grunted. “That doesn’t explain where the darkness came from. He couldn’t possibly have been involved in the beginning—he’s too young. So why should he be its sole wielder now, or even be wielding it at all?”

  “But all of the evidence points to him,” said another one of the agents. “Every act of destruction and deception that we’ve come to associate with the present darkness points back to him. Those we’ve identified, anyways. This is big. We couldn’t even prove that the darkness was organized before. Maybe it wasn
’t, before he got involved.”

  “How a seventeen-year-old boy managed to become so powerful remains one of the greatest mysteries of our time,” said Sasha. “The only thing we know about his past is that he never talks about it. There is something strange about him, and as such we can’t underestimate him. Whether or not he is the source of our problems remains hidden, but it is clear that he is deeply involved. It follows that finding out more about him is very important. Agreed, Max?”

  Max pursed his lips, pacified for the moment. “We’re at a stalemate in that regard, Sasha. This is the first significant piece of information we’ve found about him in years. Sam is at more of a stalemate than ever. If we’re going to go on focusing on him, we have to change our approach or we might as well be doing nothing.”

  “And if we decided not to focus on him,” said Clarkson, “then who or what would we focus on instead?”

  “If there is anyone or anything else involved, which I am beginning to doubt,” someone put in, “then it is very good at covering up its tracks.”

  “So we keep focusing on Dangerman,” said Sasha. “I believe that he will lead us to the answer. But I do agree, Max; we need a new approach.”

  Leina had wanted to speak for some time, but someone else had always started talking before she summoned the courage. Now there was a sufficient pause in the conversation, and she began to speak quietly. “Why don’t you go to Estlebey when he raids it?” Immediately there were six sets of eyes on her.

  Max shook his head and seemed about to laugh. “We can’t go to Estlebey! They’re oblivious to our existence, and to reveal ourselves to them now would be disastrous. We can’t risk that.”

  “No, wait,” said Sasha. “Leina may be right. I think we’ve been too tentative.”

  “How would that help us?” The woman agent asked before Max could speak. “We send someone to Estlebey in the middle of the night, they witness monsters pillaging the town, so what? We all know how that goes.”

  “If Dangerman truly is behind the raids,” Leina said, “they wouldn’t come at night. He would stage them in the middle of the day, at times when there are a lot of people around to witness it and be afraid. Probably his name would be plastered all over it, too, if that’s possible.”

  Max looked about to burst. “That’s ridiculous—“

  Clarkson cut him off. “Actually, that was something else that we noticed. All of the raids that we had information on took place during the day, and with a little research we discovered that most of them also happened during important festivals and celebrations. We thought that was odd.”

  “That is odd,” said Sasha. “I was sure that they used to come at night. They did when I was a child.” Ignoring Max’s glowering, she continued, “How did you know that, Leina?”

  Leina shrugged in an effort to deflect the attention. “I had the, um, opportunity to work rather closely with Dangerman. He didn’t like me and frankly I didn’t like him any better. You get to know people that way. Often, I think, friends must try to impress each other all of the time, so they can’t really see past the surface of one another. But enemies don’t care; they know each other well, and at their worst.”

  Sasha was intrigued. “You are full of surprises, Leina Skyvola.”

  To Leina’s relief, Clarkson cleared his throat and the tide of the conversation shifted. “Clearly the nature of the raids has changed since Dangerman became their exclusive perpetrator, and we may learn something from witnessing one more closely. Surely knowing when one will occur before the fact is a rare opportunity,” he said in the clipped tones that appeared to be customary for him. “So who do we send to Estlebey?”

  An odd smile came over Sasha’s face. “What we need is a very capable person, but one who no one would suspect to be involved with us. An eighteen-year-old who looks sixteen, perhaps?”

  Leina felt all of their eyes on her again.

  Chapter 21

  Leina still couldn’t believe that Max had accepted Sasha’s proposition.

  Most of his arguments, even, had centered around Leina’s own safety, which she wouldn’t have guessed he cared a fig about. And Sasha had won him over easily enough.

  Now Leina was to go to Estlebey in three weeks. You got what you asked for, she told herself. Why are you so scared, then? Maybe it was because Sasha had trusted her so quickly. Sasha hardly knows me. Surely she can’t think that I’m capable of this? And if she does, what if she’s wrong? It was so easy for Leina to believe herself capable enough when she had very little hope of getting what she wanted. But now? Now that it had been handed to her on a plate, she wasn’t sure if she could stomach it.

  With the rest of Max’s students gone, he now devoted almost all of his time to training Leina. Every morning she reported to the classroom that she had first met him in, but the training could take them anywhere from there. Max’s style of teaching was nothing like Leina had expected, and puzzlingly different from any of the spy stories that she had read, but she quickly discovered that it was very much to her taste.

  “For this particular mission,” Max told her, “you need to be trained just well enough to know what you’re doing, but not so much that you look like a professional. You’ll have no physical training whatsoever, so you will appear perfectly average in that regard. Later, if you don’t completely fail in Estlebey, that is, I will round you out better.”

  But by the end of the first week, Leina felt very well-rounded indeed. She had taken a mountain of tests in subjects such as math, science, languages, logic, and others, until finally Max despaired of finding one that she couldn’t pass and gave her a stack of books to read instead. Many of their topics seemed random and obscure, spanning everything from The Science of 21st-Century Cryptology to The Dying Standards of Ethics and Morality to ancient ballads about long-forgotten events, but Max would spend hours earnestly discussing them with Leina once she had finished. Sometimes he would take her out into the woods, and have her identify plants and animals, or follow the tracks of children who had been playing there all the way back to the homes where they lived, or identify the cardinal directions in different circumstances. Other times he would give her long impassioned speeches similar to the one that he had given when she had first arrived. After that, they would dive into an excruciating memory game. Then, suddenly, he would be asking her a question: “If you were locked in a room with two doors, one leading to certain death and the other to freedom, but you didn’t know which was which, what would you do?” or “If a murderer walked into a room with you and ten other people, and said he was going to kill you all, would it be right to kill him, that one person, in order to save the other ten?” and so on. Once he spent an entire hour asking her the same question, “What color is that wall?” over and over again, and demanding her to deny the truth, persisting, “are you sure it’s not red?” or “But you can’t be right. I can see very plainly that it is not white.” Leina insisted for the entire hour that the wall was white, as it clearly was, until finally Max agreed with her, but she came away from that interview exhausted and wondering what the point was.

  Max always seemed determined to challenge Leina. He had an uncanny way of knowing when she was not giving her all, and finding a way to extract it from her, or making her feel obligated to extract if from herself. Though Leina could not often see a direction to Max’s many unrelated lessons, she found great enjoyment in them. Max was still very much Max, uncompromising and often disagreeable, but Leina felt as if her mind was opening up under his instruction. There was a synergy between teacher and student, on one end an insatiable desire to know, and on the other a calculating mind that placed the truth at the very fringes of his student’s reach so she that had to work her utmost for it, and stretching that reach ever so slightly as a result.

  Leina would have been happy for the lessons to go on in this manner forever, but as the date of the raid in Estlebey drew nearer, she began to feel nervous. Would anything that Max had taught her so far be useful
in Estlebey? Would she even know what to do when she got there?

  So, one morning, when she could take the fear no longer, Leina put the question to Max. She set aside the difficult math problem that he had given her, and which she had been utterly unable to concentrate on, and said, “Max, you know that I love this kind of work, but, if you don’t mind my asking… why are you teaching me such things? That is, things that might not have many…” she trailed off.

  “Practical applications,” Max finished for her, as if he had expected the question a long time ago. “Our work here is very unique, Leina. Not like the spies that you have read about. Mostly they are shallow creatures, the creation of a mind that took only their immediate work, and the ‘practical applications’ of their work, into consideration.

  “We are not simply in the business of espionage. Our enemy is Evil itself, and to fight Evil requires more than even the most skilled spy has, for Evil’s assaults come in many forms. Our work requires a degree of knowledge, wisdom, and strength that few ever achieve. It is these things that I seek to foster, so that you will be prepared to meet Evil’s very face, whatever mask it may be wearing, and not waver.

  “I do not like to flatter my students, but I will say that it was these things that brought you here. You had no useful experience at all before you went to the Desert. Your unusual degree of knowledge, and your desire to know what is right, and to do what is right, are rather the things that brought you here. I seek to foster them, so that they can propel you further. If you do not have these things, all the practical knowledge in the world will not avail you.”

  Leina felt as if she should respond, but she could find no words. She had never heard Max speak in quite that way before. She nodded and resumed the math problem.

  Chapter 22

  When Leina reported to the classroom the next day, it was empty. She assumed that Max was late, so she took her regular place at a desk in the front row of the room. But it was Sasha that appeared, not Max.