Rise: Paths (Future Worlds Book 2)

by Brian Guthrie

  Suyef nodded but said nothing. He joined me in staring at the fire.

  "I tried to pretend nothing happened," I went on. "Tried to act like nothing was wrong. I didn't know what to feel. I needed something to latch on to. Something to . . ."

  "-to protect yourself," Suyef finished my trailed off sentence.

  "Maybe that, too. I was thinking more that I needed people to notice me." I ran a hand over my short cropped hair. "If people noticed me, he'd stay away. But at first, it was just desperation; something to make him fear me. Something to make him stop. If I could Script, he would be scared of me. That was my thought process, when alone, at least." I slumped down, the memories weighing heavy on me. "Then he'd come and I couldn't do anything. I couldn't think, didn't know what to say or do. I'd go numb inside, do whatever he said, hoping he'd stop and go away."

  I pushed myself to my feet and stepped away from the fire, staring off into the distance. Suyef remained sitting, and I could feel his eyes on me. What he must he have thought of that revelation? In part, he was uncomfortable, no doubt, and not because of the subject. Nomads tend to keep problems like this inside their close family circles. To have what amounted to a complete stranger sharing such secrets must have crossed so many cultural taboos. It's a knack of mine, despite my best efforts to the contrary. This moment was no different.

  Whatever he thought, Suyef stood and joined me. Silence remained our companion for a time as we watched the low-growing bushes shift in the wind, dust clouds dancing up among them as core-night passed. High overhead, the moon, hidden from sight behind the water shield, passed by. The tell-tale tug of her gravitational force bent the water upward toward her. The ingenious design of the core-night shield the Ancients crafted never ceased to amaze. It blocked out almost all light from what remained of the planet's core, yet let you see beyond the shield to the world around and above. Colberra orbited so close to the water shield, it was perpetually visible. I stared up at the shifting water, imagining what it must look like up close. I'd seen pictures of it in news articles and even some ancient imagery of what history called oceans. White-capped waves danced across those images, and sometimes I imagined they still did up there.

  Shaking myself from my reverie, I looked at Suyef. "Sorry."

  He waved a hand at me. "You needed a moment. It's understandable, considering the topic."

  I stared down at the fire as he spoke, watching its rhythmic dance, longing to touch it. A cough from the Nomad drew my attention.

  "You seem overly fascinated by fire," he commented, nodding at the flames.

  I smiled and took a chance. Reaching into the fire, I grasped a handful and muttered the words, breathing life into a new Script. The fire danced onto and around my hand, but did not burn. I held the fire out to Suyef, letting him feel the heat. The stoic Nomad face cracked into a look of astonishment.

  "Now, that's an impressive bit of Altering," he whispered. "Do you shield your hand?"

  "In a manner," I said, shifting the fire to my other hand. "The Coding of the fire's been changed to not burn me or anything touching me."

  "Save your clothing," he commented, nodding. "Smart."

  I laughed. "Yeah, wish that thought had come sooner," I muttered, half of my mouth splitting into a grin . "Incident number two." I held my hand out over the fire and mimicked dropping, Scripting the necessary Code in my mind and seeing it act. In response, the flames fell in a ball to rejoin their mates below. "I'm not sure why it's fire that drew me in. It may have chosen me. Who knows. I just needed something to feed my feelings into, and fire fit."

  Suyef pointed at the fire. "No words, not even mouthing." He eyed me, one arm tucked across his torso, his other hand brushing a finger across the opposite cheek. "Have you always been able to do it that way?"

  I shook my head. "That took a lot of practice. All those years studying Coding." I spread my hands and grinned. "My mother's handiwork paid off. Still, I have issues when it's simple or singular tasks. Except with fire."

  "Can you make fire without some around?"

  "It's harder, but yes," I answered. "Not that I go around lighting things on fire like that for show." I grimaced, looking down at the ground again. "Well, not anymore."

  Suyef moved past the fire and took his seat again. I squatted across from him, staring into the dancing flames.

  "So, what happened to the . . . guy?"

  I looked up at Suyef. "I didn't light him on fire, if that's what you're thinking."

  He shrugged. "I'm not thinking anything, although that thought does amuse me."

  "It did me, as well. For years." I shifted to rest my weight on my left foot, arms wrapped around the other leg. "But I never could bring myself to show this side of me to him."

  "Fear?"

  I shook my head. "Pride. I didn't want him to know about it."

  "You were afraid he'd make you do things for him?"

  I shrugged. "Maybe, but I never thought that consciously. It was more that part of me was special, different. He didn't deserve to have any part of it."

  "But you told your parents?"

  I looked down at the ground and shook my head, the shame returning in my gut. "No, I didn't even show it to them. Not at first," I said. "Part of me blamed them. They should have kept me safe, after all. Should have made sure it didn't happen." I looked up at Suyef. "That's what parents are for, right? And they failed, so when I figured this out, keeping it secret from them seemed okay."

  Suyef held up a hand to stop me. "Wait, you kept both secrets from them?" he asked. "Your Altering and what that guy did to you?"

  "I was afraid to tell them," I confessed, looking back down at the ground and fiddling with a rock. "In my mind, it was my fault, I had done something to get his attention, to make him think I wanted that ... stuff to happen. Part of me believed him when he said it was natural for kids to do that sort of thing for adults. The other part of me just went dead when it happened, and when it was over I rushed to bury it. Hide it."

  "Pretend it never happened," Suyef stated, his voice quiet.

  "Why bring it up to someone else? I've never done that." I looked over at him. "Until now."

  Suyef bowed his head. "I'm not sure what has earned me your trust, but thank you."

  I shrugged and threw the rock off into the distance. "I'm not sure what made me tell you."

  We fell silent for a few moments, then Suyef asked, "So, what did you first try to Alter?"

  I remained silent for a long time, pondering how best to answer his question. Several possibilities came to mind. I chose the most direct.

  "I tried to change my memory."

  #

  "You can understand my motivation," I went on. "I didn't want to remember what had happened; I wanted to pretend it hadn't happened. So, one night, resting alone in my room, unable to sleep for fear of my dreams, I snuck out of the house. I made my way to a secluded area near the shell's edge. It was a popular place for kids our age to sneak off to. Inside the settlement lines, but a bit isolated by a rock outcropping jutting up near the edge. That time of night, it was almost always abandoned, most decent people asleep.

  "I sat there, staring off over the edge for what seemed like hours. The idea of finding out what was below did occur to me at least once, but I just laughed it off. Even in my depressed state, my mind was able to grasp that ending my own life was just a punishment of me and my family, not the real guilty party."

  I stopped for a moment, finding another rock to fiddle with while composing my thoughts. Suyef waited, quiet, eyes on me.

  "Still, no part of me wanted to think about it," I continued. "That memory needed to be gone. The feelings, too, and the more time my mind dwelt on it, the angrier I got. One reason we found that place such a good place to go was because we thought no one could see us beyond the outcropping. What happened next ended that illusion."

  I held up the rock for Suyef to examine. "It's a simple thing, this rock. Most people just ignore them until they trip on
them or turn an ankle on them or throw them. If you look closely enough, you can see that even this simple rock is a complex piece of geological Coding."

  Suyef nodded, looking at the rock. "It has to be. The Code is paired with the elements of existence."

  "You mean the elemental table, yes?" I asked and he nodded. "So, a complex piece of Coding.

  "That night, I wasn't looking closely enough. My instinct pushed me to just grab rocks and throw them as hard as possible at the outcropping. When that didn't satisfy my anger, flinging them off the edge became my next course of action, seeing how far they would soar before dropping out of sight. I threw rocks until my arm hurt, then started kicking at them. I did that until my foot struck one rock that wasn't a rock. When my foot collided with it, the piece of ground didn't move."

  Suyef smirked at the thought, earning a chuckle from me.

  "Yes, after the pain subsided, I laughed, too," I said. "But, what happened next while I was lying there on the ground, that's what's important. My head was mere inches from the rock that wasn't a rock, and I saw the Coding for the first time. My eyes finally looked closely enough, and I could see it. To this day it's unclear to me if it was the anger or the laughter, but something clicked."

  Suyef nodded. "It was neither, actually," he interjected. "According to our teachers, it's the release you feel after a strong emotional moment that brings you to that point. A letting go of something that allows you to grasp the Coding and see the Code language in everything. If you know what you're looking for, that is."

  "And all that knowledge was in my head because of my mother and her insistence we learn the computer code." I arched my eyebrows at Suyef. "Even then, it was just a bit of a shocker. To suddenly see a rock break down into its base Coding language right before my eyes. To see the mottled, brown edges of the rock suddenly painted in the swirls of Coding stacked around each other.

  "And, just as I was beginning to recognize and read the Coding, it all vanished," I said, mimicking something disappearing with my hands. "At first, my mind was convinced it had imagined it. So, I looked again, concentrating, but nothing happened. Still, something had happened, and I wanted to find out what. This new mystery gave me something to distract myself with."

  Suyef picked up his own rock and tossed it into the air, catching it when it came back down. "Did you tell your mother?"

  I shook my head. "I wanted to be sure before saying anything," I replied. "The next several weeks were spent trying to see the Coding again, with no luck. Getting angry again didn't work for me, and neither did working myself into fits of laughter. I'm quite sure my mother feared for my sanity or something. She must have spent many nights lying awake worried something was wrong with me, but not knowing what. Since the answer about what happened continued to elude me, I wasn't about to tell her. Seems silly, considering she'd taught me to read the Coding, but no one ever accused teenagers of being intelligent. We think we are, think we know everything or at least can figure it out without any help. I was no different." I sighed, resting my hands on my lap, rock still grasped between them. "Maybe that's why I messed it up.

  "About two months after that night near the edge, I'd begun to give up hope of duplicating the event," I continued. "You see, it hadn't occurred to me yet that I hadn't actually seen Coding in the rock. It would take me several months of studying before figuring that out. Still, I trudged on, struggling to find something that would help me break through. You'd also think accessing the network to see what was there would have occurred to me, but that was even more useless. Scripting isn't something they just let people learn on their own, especially on Colberra. And you Nomads kept that bit of your network shielded from us.

  "So I had to figure it out on my own. I went back to the basics of working with the network code, like I did to learn to read Colberra's network."

  Suyef raised a hand to stop me. "I had a question about that. You say your parents came back to Colberra for a time before you returned to my shell. Did you not learn the Colberran code then?"

  I shook my head. "We lived on the isles. The network doesn't exist out there. They have devices and stuff, but they’re all of Seeker design, or they just built what they needed on their own. They're a very isolated people. Plus, I was very young. I barely remember it. My mother may have started teaching us the basics of Coding, but we didn't really get into it until much later when we went back to your shell."

  Suyef waved for me to continue.

  "So, I stumbled my way around, trying to create the Code language of the network outside of the network," I said, shifting to get some feeling to return to my posterior. "Most of my time was spent wandering the settlement alone, wearing a headpiece to convince people to leave me alone. I pumped a lot of music into my head, trying to coax the creative juices from my brain. I'd find isolated places in the settlement which, you can imagine, is hard to do on that peninsula the thing is built on. Anyway, I'd waste hours of time there reading coding out loud, trying to find a way to see it again.

  "Then, one afternoon almost a year after that night with the rock, I figured it out. I still remember feeling very stupid upon realizing what had happened." I held up the rock, grinning at him. "It isn't the actual Coding that makes the rock into a rock. The Coding is superimposed over it. I felt profoundly stupid at that point, but the feeling was fleeting. Teenage pride took over, and soon the Coding was appearing to me everywhere, so much so that I wasn't really paying attention to anything else. And then it would vanish."

  "The Coding?" he asked.

  I nodded. "Concentrating too hard on it made it vanish for me. It took a lot of trial and error before it dawned on me to passively pay attention to it." I tapped my ears. "Music provided the key. It would distract part of my brain, allowing me to focus just enough on the Code and start grasping it. I started to imagine what would happen if changes were made to the Code, altering it just slightly so."

  I sighed, a deep long sigh. "If only I'd known what I was messing with, maybe my first attempts would have been different."

  Suyef shifted a bit, propping a leg up on the rock he was sitting on. "So, the first time you tried something, what did you do?"

  I hung my head. "Well, the first few attempts don't count, in my book. Those were simple things, like making rocks move. Being full of teenage hubris, something bigger was all that would suffice. Something that would get everyone's attention."

  I paused, suppressing memories rising up to the forefront.

  "Then he returned."

  #

  Quentin stumbled to a halt, the last words he spoke hanging heavy in the air.

  "How old were you?" I asked.

  "Thirteen cycles, maybe fourteen." He shrugged. "I think I was twelve when it started."

  I motioned for Quentin to stop. A raging storm of emotions crested inside me. Anger and disgust for the man who had done this. Thoughts of what would happen if I ever met him boiled to the surface. Pity and sadness rose up for Quentin, and part of me wanted to reach out and take his hand, to squeeze it, to let him know someone cared. I saw a sketch in his hand.

  "Does she know?" I asked before giving the question a second thought.

  He held it up and nodded. A tear crept down his face.

  "She blames it for what I've become," he whispered, more tears pouring down. "Oh, God, what have I become?"

  He curled into a ball, arms wrapped around his head, and silent cries crept out. Suyef entered the room and beckoned me to leave. We left Quentin, still crying, on his bed. The sketch of Micaela remained gripped between two fingers, his clenching fist not having damaged it.

  "He blames himself for what that man did to him?" I asked, stepping in to the living area. "Worse, she does?"

  Suyef shook his head. "I can't speak for her. I can only surmise." He pointed at the room. "What I do know is what he thinks she thinks of him. He can only base that on how she reacts to him." He lowered his hand and looked away. "Rather, how she reacts to what he's become."

/>   "A broken man? Insane? Heartbroken?"

  The Nomad's eyes flashed and his features twisted, brow furrowing, jaw setting.

  "He's also become a rage-induced maniac that lashes out with powers that are out of his control," he whispered. "Once angered, he wrecks everything and everyone that comes near him."

  I opened my mouth to reply, only to shut it again abruptly. "Everyone? So why are you still here?"

  "Because what he needs is at least one person in this world to stand by him. Since she's too damaged emotionally by what he did to her the last time they saw each other, it falls to me."

  I watched the Nomad for several heartbeats before asking my next question.

  "What has he done to earn such devotion?"

  Suyef shook his head. "No wings yet." He held up a hand to forestall my response. "Give him some time. What you two are discussing is still, after all that has happened, a very raw subject for him. He never dealt with it, not properly. He's discussed it with me and her. But never to a point of truly understanding what it did to him." He looked me square in the eyes. "Until maybe now. He may just finally be coming to a point of realization."

  I looked down at my notes and the padd, both gripped in my hands. "That's what this is about, isn't it?"

  He didn't answer. That response was wearing on me so I returned to the previous topic.

  "Suyef, surely you can give me something these two did to earn this kind of loyalty from you?" I asked. "Even a hint, without telling me what happened?"

  He contemplated my words, lips pursed.

  "They taught me that justice isn't found in retribution, but in forgiveness."

  Chapter 13 - Fiery Emotions

  "It wasn't like he'd left the settlement or anything." I continued my story. "He'd just not been around my everyday life. Then he came back, and it all started again. I so wanted to stop it, but ..."

  My voice trailed off, and I looked at the ground. Suyef shifted as the wind whipped around us.

  "You said you tried to change your memory?" the Nomad asked, prompting me.