by S. M. Beiko
Phae didn’t know what to make of the speech, nor what to say in response to it. It was so grave, so final. “So the world itself is sick?” She glanced round to Natti, who had lowered her arms down to her lap. “How are we supposed to stop it if it’s . . . everywhere?”
“The Empress,” Siku sighed, air fluttering his huge black mouth.
“What can this Empress do, then?” Phae, as usual, felt behind in the lore. That had become Barton’s bag, and she’d absorbed everything he’d discovered in his research. He’d loved sharing it with her. They’d stay up, some nights, almost until sunrise . . . A lump formed suddenly and stiffly in her throat.
“All I know,” Natti said, “is that the Seal’s stone, the Abyssal Sapphire . . . it’s kept at the bottom of the sea. The Seals figured a long time ago that the stones were better left hidden and unused, because even in the ‘right’ hands with the best intentions, it was a risk. The other Families disagreed, and that’s why the Seals are reclusive. Don’t get into many conflicts unless absolutely necessary.” Natti was squeezing her fists, staring at them. “These stones are the souls of these Matriarchs. When the stones attach themselves to a Denizen, the Denizen takes on the Matriarch’s power. Becomes their legs in the world, right? I have a feeling they’re gonna want me for it. Or else they wouldn’t have come clear across the continent to drag me into this.”
Phae edged closer to Natti, which wasn’t hard in such a close space. “And? Are you going to say no?”
In the light of her glowing hand, Phae saw Natti’s mouth curl. “You don’t say no to these things. You have to know that by now. They pick you and that’s it. There go your dreams of a normal life, whatever that is.”
Natti looked over at Aunty, whose snoring had been exchanged for the wheezing, rattling cough. “But if I can help Aunty . . . maybe stop other people from getting sick or, well, the entire planet getting sick, I guess I have to.” Natti looked up at Phae. “I think you know what I mean.”
Phae sniffed, nodded. When Roan had dragged her down this road to save a boy she hadn’t even met, her already big desire to be of help stretched wider, as if it had been waiting for the space to grow. All it did was make her think of Barton again, so she changed the subject, pulling a stray strand of hair behind her ear, which licked back up to braid around the other glowing prongs.
“I have to ask,” she said. “Is she really your aunt? Like . . .” Phae didn’t finish because she’d seen something skip across Natti’s face. Natti had never mentioned anything about her and Aivik’s parents — if they were alive, where they were. But they had been Denizens . . .
“We’re not related by blood if that’s what you’re asking.” Natti shrugged like it didn’t mean anything, like she hardened at Phae’s question. “We just always called her Aunty and she always did right by us. I’ve lived with her my whole life. I thought maybe she was my granny, but I don’t think that ever suited her.” Natti pulled the emergency blanket Aivik had supplied from the truck’s cab up to Aunty’s chin. “Our mom went missing when I was seven. She was walking home from her restaurant job. Never made it back. She was really strong — a Seal from one of the old tribes. Whoever took her had to be a Denizen, too. Not much could overpower her.”
Phae just nodded, listening, afraid if she asked any more questions, Natti’s usual prickliness would rise again and the door on these admissions would slam shut.
“I haven’t seen her in ten years,” Natti went on. “I can still remember what she was wearing when she went to her shift. After she disappeared, Aunty was pretty diligent in our training, our upbringing. She wanted us to know we could all be strong, even when things were at their worst. I still believe that, but . . . how can you be strong when everything you drew on for strength is fading around you?”
Phae brought her arms around her knees. “Yeah,” she said. “But you’re one of the strongest people I know, Natti. You took that strength and you made it a part of you. For other people to draw from. People like me.”
Natti was momentarily speechless. “Oh,” she said. “Well . . . you’re not as wilty as I keep making you out to be. I still can’t believe you’re here at all.”
Phae shrugged. “Me either. Even though I don’t know what I can do to help.” She passed a hand over Aunty, who had nearly woken herself up from her choking, but as the prickling blue light left Phae’s fingertips and snuck down Aunty’s mouth, the older woman breathed easier.
“You’ve really got a handle on your own power.” Natti nodded. “Even if you weren’t born with it.”
“Yeah . . .” It really was something beautiful, something that went down to Phae’s core any time she could lay her hand over pain and make it evaporate, feel the cells themselves multiplying and regaining health. She’d often wondered — could someone live forever with that kind of power?
“I just wish I had someone else to talk to about it. You know, another Deer.” She touched a prong of her antler that had let out a spark. “But I haven’t met one. I don’t know if I ever will. Barton says that the last of them lived like monks in mountain sanctuaries, but even they haven’t been heard from in decades. It’s like they could sense something was going to happen to the world. That maybe their own power might be sought out or eliminated. In the lore, the Deer were sort of revered and hated for what they could do.”
“Lot of wars in those stories,” Natti sighed. “Seems like there’s always another one coming around the corner.”
“War? You really think that’s what’s coming?”
Natti shrugged. “Nothing would surprise me anymore.”
The truck seemed to be braking a lot more the further their conversation had carried. It was moving slowly, taking wide turns — they must be in a city by now. Phae reached for her bag to find her phone, see if maybe the GPS signal would be a little better so she could follow their progress. “Hey, when you mentioned the Sapphire, and all the other stones . . . that got me to thinking. About the Deer’s stone. What’s it called again?”
“The Horned Quartz,” said a voice that wasn’t Natti’s. It was Maujaq. They hadn’t even heard him rise, but he had moved very close to them, sniffing, much more alert.
“Right . . .” Phae dug further in her bag, bringing out the pack of jerky she’d stuffed in there. Maujaq took the entire thing from her open hand and settled in. “So if there aren’t any Deer in the world, or very few, do they have a Paramount at all? Who has the stone now?”
“Fia has the stone,” Maujaq answered between morsels. “The Deer sent it to the Glen. Because of what it can do.”
Phae found her phone, but it was dead. She started checking her bag’s side pockets for the charger. “Oh, is it a pretty powerful one? Though I gather they’re all equally powerful in their own ways.” But it had already planted an idea in her mind — what if the Quartz could cure this illness the world seemed to have? Could stop the Cinder Plague altogether? The Deer, after all, were healers. Surely their stone had the power to heal a darkling curse.
“The stones are all sisters, true.” Maujaq licked his great maw. “But the Quartz is more than a power source. It is a key.”
“To what?”
Just as Phae plugged her phone into the charger and it booted up, the entire truck jolted and the bears and the girls plus Aunty slammed into each other as if they’d come to a very sudden, unplanned stop. Or they would have, had Phae not encased them all in their own flashing bubbles, bears included.
The forcefields shuddered and vanished when the truck braked completely. Phae held her head, which was throbbing, and lit herself back to rights. The group of them had been contained in another automatic bubble of silver that Phae seemed to have conjured without thinking. “Is everyone okay?”
Aunty groaned, hacking. “I could use a smoke, but an Aspirin would do.”
Phae wished she could ease the woman’s obvious pain further, but she’d don
e all she could. Natti helped Aunty up, and the bears swivelled their huge heads.
“You feel it, too?” Natti asked them.
“What?” Phae led them towards the back of the trailer, the sound of Aivik’s cab door slamming behind them as he climbed out.
“The water.” Something seemed different about Aunty’s eyes as she grunted. “Black . . . water.”
When the trailer doors swung open, the sunlight was a knife in their eyes, and they all winced.
“Come on,” Aivik said, helping Natti down. Aunty stayed behind, leaning up against a crate and taking in the rush of fresh air on her face. Aivik flinched as the bears leapt down, into the side of the road, scenting.
Phae had expected them to be pulled over somewhere bustling, metropolitan — but the blank space surrounding the highway on either side coincided neatly with her phone as she zoomed in on the map.
“We’re not even in Fort McMurray —” she started, but the longer she stared, the less it mattered.
They were in the middle of nowhere — one of those prairie spaces along a stretch of highway where only a few trucks passing counted as a population. They were still fairly far from Fort MacMurray’s city limits, which was more a company town than a city, made up of those who worked the far-reaching oil sands on what was possibly the last great Canadian frontier. Phae pulled her jacket closer. There was something about this place she didn’t like.
The bears didn’t like it, either. “Yes,” grumbled Siku. “This is the place.”
“The place for what?” Phae was confused. “I thought we were just going north. Why was it so important we take this detour?” Aside from the fact that they couldn’t move the bears unchecked without the cover of Aivik’s delivery run, the bears had seemed, from the beginning, like they thought this route was ideal, however roundabout.
Siku levelled her with a look she couldn’t parse. “So you could see it for yourself.” He looked to the horizon.
Phae squinted. Natti had shut her eyes, and Aivik was watching her. “We’re near a river, aren’t we?” Natti said.
Phae nodded, checking her phone. “We’re close to the Hangingstone River, which connects up to the Athabasca. That flows through Fort McMurray and the tar sands . . .”
That’s when Phae heard it. The mad chittering, the hungry, keening wail like laughter and furious clamping teeth. No. There’s no way.
“Are those . . . river hunters?” Every bone in her body was still, but Natti was already grabbing Aivik by his heavy jacket, dragging him back to the truck. The bears were two rumbling tanks as they leapt back into the trailer.
“Something’s happening,” she said. “We need to get into the city.” Aivik didn’t need telling twice; he was already jogging, swinging back into his cab and starting the engine.
“What’s happening?” Phae asked as Natti grabbed her hand and helped to haul her back in and shut the doors tight. In the dark, Phae lit up like a nightlight, more out of the rising panic than the need to see Natti’s expression.
“There’s something in the water. Even this far removed from it, I can feel it.” Natti turned to Maujaq and Siku. “Is this what you were talking about?”
The truck moved back onto the highway, speed increasing. Siku pressed his face against the steel, as if he was listening for something. “Tiny cracks in the world. The drills go deep. The oil comes up, gets into the water and the land. Kills everything in its path. It is the perfect entry point for the slaves of the darklings, making the way clear for their masters.”
“Black water . . .” Natti repeated, grasping tight to a steel crate. All Phae could do was cling to her phone, watching the tiny blue dot that was them make a painful crawl to Fort McMurray, and the source of the dread in the polar bears’ eyes.
~
On the other side of the world, the tree did not want Eli awake.
Each time he tried to resurface to consciousness, it fought him. Fought harder to make him a part of it, until flesh and mind were bonded, the soul fled, and the stone squeezed off him like a blister.
The tree knew it would be a trial. But it was a single-minded entity, bent on one thing: takeover. The tree dug deeper into the earth, stretched higher, grew tighter around Eli, but the stone had roots, too, and they went down into the heart of him. It was taking such a great effort, all of the tree’s resources, to sever those roots.
Then something happened the tree did not expect: as its bark cinched inward, it felt Eli cry out in his dream, and the tremor went out from his mind and into the soil.
It shook the world.
When the quake subsided, the tree felt something shift. The stone, though awake, was coming loose.
Soon.
~
Aivik dropped Phae, Natti, and the bears at the edge of town and then took the truck to the depot. He’d decided to keep Aunty with him, so that receiving would unload faster — either out of pity for the woman’s ailing health or because Aunty would probably yell at them to speed it up.
“For the love of god, keep out of sight,” Aivik begged. “I’ll be back to deal with whatever is going down with you. But do not go there without me. You got it?” They all stared at him as he drove off.
But Natti wasn’t interested in staying put.
“Listen, you two.” Natti stood proud and straight, addressing Siku and Maujaq as if they were little kids. “Phae and I are going into that gas station down there.” She pointed down the hill towards the big-box plaza beyond their well-treed hiding place. “We’ll be right back. But we have to find out what’s going on, or if we’re all flipping our lids for nothing.” They’d all felt a shift in the air, and it had only gotten worse the closer they got to Fort McMurray and the Athabasca tar sands that were just in view. There also seemed to be a suspicious volume of trucks going into the tar pits and not coming back out, and the smoke they headed for seemed a bit more pernicious than the usual environmental blight. Par for the course.
“Do what you must,” Maujaq sneered. “We know that to be caught is to fail before we have even reached the north.” He was prickly again, the dark stain on the front of him having spread to his shoulder since they’d been out in the open air. “That place down there is cursed.”
He meant the tar sands. Natti didn’t argue. “Yeah, it’s a horror show. And it’s the small towns that suffer from oil spills while the big companies count the money.” She scowled, grabbing hold of Phae’s forearm. “No time for politics, though. Let’s go. I need to pee.”
They crossed three massive parking lots to the plaza, and they learned more in that journey than they’d expected. People weren’t in the stores — they were crowding around cars, rushing into them, slamming doors, and skidding off. The exits onto the main thoroughfares were bottlenecking. “What the hell?” Natti muttered. There also seemed to be quite a few people rushing into the gas station, which was also a truck-stop restaurant.
When Phae opened the door, she was nearly bowled over by a family hustling to get past her. “Hey!” Natti shouted at them, but they were too intent for their cars.
“There’s a TV,” Phae motioned, and they took their place at the back of a growing crowd.
“Turn it up!” someone called, and the guy behind the convenience counter jumped to obey, fiddling with the buttons until the sound was blaring from the news anchor on the screen.
“— outbreak of fires at Fort McMurray in the areas surrounding the tar sand. People in the city proper are advised to evacuate, though the cause of the fires is yet to be determined.”
“More fires?” a man blurted. “That’s just business as usual, ain’t it?”
Natti assumed he was a Mundane, because some other people were exchanging glances, pointing for the door, pushing past them. If they were Denizens, they must have felt it, too.
“Forest fires aren’t that big of a thing around here,” Natti mused to
Phae. “There has to be something else.”
They went to the washroom, tried to eavesdrop on the agitated conversation floating in the snack aisles as people loaded up and head out. “Something in the water,” they heard. “Creatures like . . . I don’t know . . . Mundanes can’t see them, but Denizens are reporting them everywhere . . .” Hushed tones. Whispered asides. Natti and Phae exchanged looks of their own and headed back outside.
“The fires have to be a cover,” Phae guessed, “for whatever is happening on the tar sands site. It’d be the perfect breeding ground for . . . anything. I’m guessing the powers-that-be are just trying to get the Mundanes out. Maybe there are even Owls here right now making it seem like a forest fire. But what can we do?” She was twisting the strap of her camera, eyes darting around the parking lot.
“We fight.” Natti shrugged. “That’s pretty much my autopilot since joining up with you guys.” She kept her eyes on the hill and the trees where Siku and Maujaq were hiding. The bears had directed them here for a reason, even though it was off the beaten path to reuniting them with their Empress. This must be why.
“Hey!” A beanpole of a guy came rushing into their path, and Natti came up short, throwing an arm in front of Phae, even though the guy seemed like he could be knocked over by a shockingly bad joke.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, holding up his hands and removing his ball cap. “Look, I just wanted to ask — are either of you two a Seal?”
Natti narrowed her eyes, cutting a glance back up the hill, though she didn’t see the bears. “Who’s asking?”
“Relax,” he said, and he conjured a breeze to cool his extremely reddened face. An Owl. “I overheard you two talking. I’m just trying to get some crews together to head into the sands. We need as many water-bearers as we can find, and, well, they’re thin on the ground.”
Phae stepped forward, hands clasped. “Can you tell us what’s really happening?” She was so guileless, there wasn’t anyone who could say no to that face.
