by Gwynn White
"You asked if Willo's spoken to me. When I was swimming across the river, I went somewhere else. Like, far more real than a day-dream, but I don't know what else to call it. There was a woman who showed me a picture of Schaefer. Said he hadn't told her about me, and that if he had, she would've tried not to fall in love... and then warned me not to let him trick us, that he only cares for himself. She said he's here."
Their terrain leveled out, but the undergrowth continued to blind them beyond a few meters. Insects hummed a vibrating drone, and birds squawked and chirped their incessant calls. If maras were on their trail, he didn't hear or see them. That could be how having a telepath might help out... her son does ride wolverines. "I know this is all as clear as an upside-down mud bath, but beyond the weird day-dream, have you noticed any new abilities—telepathic or otherwise?"
Ehli wasn't sure if what she'd done to the mara charges was repeatable, or what it meant for how she'd been changed without her permission.
Beside her, a snake hung like an overlapping rope in the crook of a branch. Its smooth lime green skin was circled in red and yellow. It watched her with bulging yellow eyes.
Ehli thought of her son and his wolverine. She stopped and looked deep into the snake's eyes. "Do you mean, like can I charm this snake to ride on my shoulders?"
Cullen gently stepped back, rifle ready, eyes on the snake. "I'd need some solid evidence before suggesting that gamble. Do you feel anything—like a connection with it?"
She might. The sensation was like an itch under her scalp, but that could be the simple terror of standing this close to a lethal reptile.
"Touch it."
Willo. What do you want?
"I want you to run your finger between the eyes of that alden snake. You'll never know until you try."
"Ehli, are you okay?" Cullen asked.
No. Ehli ducked under the branch and nodded forward. "Let's go." I'm not a pet for you to teach tricks, she thought.
"I'm not the one who kept you in a cage for six years."
The barb hurt, but she wouldn't take the bait. If she and her son were really both telepaths, she should be able to find him. Emmit, can you hear me? Where are you, Son?
13
When Emmit reached the mossy overhang on the other side of the river, he lifted it to the surprise of a crawl space tunnel inside. I've been here before.... This leads to... he struggled to picture the details, but below and inside this hill was a man-made bunker where he'd be safe and able to rest.
"In here, you will find the real muscle to our growth. And our need for you."
Dad?
"Come in, Son. I'll show you."
He obeyed without telling Adi anything. He crawled blind. He crawled because for too many years he'd been stuck where progress existed in a different plane—there was never a point to trying. He went through the motions and didn't care if his heart stopped in his sleep or while hefting stone up desert mountains. When pain in his knees and back drove him to stretch, he reached up and found open air. Enough to stand. He crawled through the pain in his knees, palms, shoulders, and hips.
He walked until his hands planted on a cold metal surface, sticky with grit. He found a hole at waist height, and inside, the loop of a handle. He pulled, but it didn't give. A memory sprang of the need to turn it. He rotated the handle clockwise until it clicked into a new groove, then pulled. The door was heavy, but he managed to open it wide enough to walk inside.
"Emmit?" Adi's scream was distant and strained by terror.
Emmit had forgotten about him. How long was I walking? "Over here! I found a door."
"Emmit!"
A bright white light forced Emmit to shield his face and close his eyes. He squinted them open and let his sight adjust as he realized that, somehow, he'd left the tunnel and was now in his old room. His sight rose from panel wood floors to his single bed with the faded blue sheets, untucked and bunched on the end from last night's sleep.
He turned around to see his window overlooking the grass-covered valley and tree-bordered cliff's edge—not the tunnel he'd just walked through. "Dad?"
"I'm here, Son."
Emmit whipped around, saw his dad, and lunged into his chest. He wrapped his arms tight enough to squeeze the life out of the taller, stronger man—the father he thought was taken away, stolen from the years that mattered most.
Emmit's eyes burned. His body took on the weight of ten men, all wanting to lie down and hope for the moment to pass before the strength needed to endure took him with it and left him for dead.
"Dad... how?" Emmit wiped a snot-ridden nostril on the man's button down front. "Why?"
His dad responded with a tighter hug, and it sounded like he too was crying. Their moment of weakness lasted ten more breaths, but Emmit still couldn't believe it. His father eased back and gently separated Emmit to get a good look at him. His glossy eyes bore down on him in their reddened sadness. "I've been trying to figure how and why for a long time. I hoped at least to have this moment to give you an answer, and yet looking down on you—" sobs choked his words. He wiped a sleeve across his face. "How you've grown...." His face puckered against the need to break down again. Emmit's face pinched with the same strain. "I don't know that any answer could justify what I've taken from you—what I took from myself. And your mother."
Anger grew inside Emmit, an unwelcome presence, but a reminder of an argument long held silent. Before he could give it speech, his father cut him off with another embrace.
"I'm so sorry, Son."
Emmit let him have two breaths before he pushed back. "You're sorry? Is that supposed to go back and save me from being alone, from sleepless nights and weary days fearing what someone might do to me or Mom? Days and nights clouded together in questions of why you weren't there and if I should be mad at you, or if not, then who? What part are you sorry for?"
"All of it, Son. Every second." He reached out as Emmit backed away. "Please let me explain."
"I don't...." Emmit glanced around the room. This room had been located above the explosion that had killed—supposedly—his father and destroyed the mountain-facing side of their house. "Where are we? Is this real? Are you even here?"
"You're on Kaimerus." As he spoke, the room shifted from one reality to another, transporting them without their taking a step to another room, one that overlooked a tree-shielded village of huts. The pace of those he could see walking around exhibited a calm atmosphere, though none that Emmit saw wore smiles. Some were children—none without an adult. Their place overlooking the village was a cooled office, equipped with action screens and a solitary desk that faced the door behind them.
"This is where I've been stuck for years," his father continued. "Nowhere near the cell I hate that you shared with your mother, but a cell none the less."
"Why?" Emmit asked. "How? Mom said she saw you enter the kitchen before it exploded. She told me you were dead."
His dad turned his back on the long window and sat on the shelf, folding his arms. A gulp passed down his throat. "They found me. I—"
"Who?"
"The Osuna. They found out about my research into bubble transportation, and the link between memory and that which guides the wormhole's exit."
His mom had told him some of this in explaining how important his dad was to the war, and why they would have picked their home to send six pelinth ships. She'd never given specifics on what advances his father had made in his research, or where it was going. Emmit was eager to find out now.
"What if you'd killed Mom in the explosion? What if I'd have been upstairs when they broke in?"
"I knew they'd arrived, and had known they would arrive days before. I sent you on the errand to fix our fence that morning. I had cameras and multiple options of where to set off the explosion so that your mother would not be hur—"
"She was hurt," Emmit shouted. "Have you seen the scars on her face? Her left ear? You did that!"
His father looked at the floor for a moment, befo
re returning his reflective gaze to his son. "I am sorry, but they did that. The people or things that lead their empire. Every day they continue their enslavement of our galaxy, leaving us with two choices, to bow down and let them, or risk our lives for the future of our children and a hope that someday their terror will be cut down at the knees and buried in their skulls."
Emmit didn't know what to say. He hated the Osuna, and possibly more than he hated his father for leaving them, even with this new information. It still hurt to think that his dad had let the explosion go off that had scarred his mother's face, and failed to keep them out of prison for the next six years.
"If there was any other way," his father started. "If I—"
"How did you know for days before and not rescue us? You made it out somehow."
"Em—"
"You said you had cameras? Mom said she saw you run into the kitchen. How did you survive? How did you escape? Why'd you leave us?" Emmit's face burned as anger tightened his jaw muscles. He felt he could bite through bone if given the chance.
His father held his hands up in placation. He exhaled. "I wasn't there."
That put Emmit on his heels. "What?"
"I wasn't there." His father paused. "I was at the lab. One only I knew about. Fifty meters underground. It had to be. If the Osuna—"
"If Mom said she saw you, how weren't you there?" Emmit had to sit, and took advantage of the low shelf by the window.
"Hoppers access the wormhole through memory and the Ancients' technology. The Osuna's control of transportation is the root of their hold on our galaxy. They control the hoppers and, in turn, our ability to travel without generation ships. But what if we could capture memory and the link that activates bubble travel?" His fingers connected in a circle between his hands. "If we could take that, and plant it in the minds of our pilots, we could travel without their knowing. We could start a colony." He spread a palm toward the window, smiling. "But that would only be the start."
He rose from his seat on the window sill and snapped his fingers, pointing at a newly-opened holo screen rising above and spreading the width of his desk. An image of a spiral constellation system Emmit had never seen appeared, with a heavy concentration of yellow dots. "Those yellow dots are Osuna ships searching for the Rucien homeworld. They're close, but space is big. They're smart, those Rucien. They figured out how to erase memories linked to their home, and in doing so have prevented the Osuna that captured their explorers from using them to trace the location of Vijil."
Emmit knew some of this, as his mother had explained it was a reason why the Rucien at Setuk were tortured. For those memories. And never to any result other than shells for their broken minds, useful only for the simplest of manual labor. "What does this have to do with why you weren't there for us when the Osuna arrived at our door? If you found a way to get here, why couldn't you take us with you?"
His father looked him in the eye and didn't blink. "I had to create a scenario that prevented them from digging deeper. If it looked like I made it out with my family, it would indicate that I made it off with the research they were looking for. If it looked like I'd killed myself to take a few of them with me, while being unable to save my family from capture, it made me look like less of a threat—just one more rebel without a worthy enough plan to do any real damage."
Emmit opened his mouth.
"Their raid was based on a vague tip. My name was part of a list of people associated with Julian Handl, a trader they'd captured two days before with a stash of levitor rifles in the undercarriage of his ship. They had no idea who I was or what I was researching, only that I was part of Julian's customer base, which the idiot failed to code well enough to hide in the event he got caught. If they had come for us and we were somehow able to skip planet without a trace, it would have triggered a deeper investigation."
Emmit didn't like that justification. "You couldn't think of any other way to save us? Your research couldn't be stashed or whatever so that you could protect us?" War held some importance, and Emmit understood the value of overthrowing the Osuna, but that dream wasn't as close as the ache that was his and his mother's imprisonment.
"Emmit, I couldn't. But Ocia, he was my way of protecting you. He—"
"Mom was almost raped our first night on Setuk." Emmit hadn't known the exact nature of the attempt at the time—he'd been too young—but he'd heard things, rumblings about Nassib and what he'd done to other female prisoners before the night his mother broke the guard's nose. "If she hadn't defended herself, then that would have been on you. Ocia wasn't around that night. It was just the two of us."
His father swallowed, accepting his son's right to speak out about that night. "I never said my plan was perfect. No plan is in war. Each piece and person must recognize the need to stand up for itself in order to remain standing for another day and chance. Your mother—and you—are both strong willed. You've both fought for every day and chance to fight again."
"I hate you."
Emmit's words seemed to push his father back, to drive the force of ten drawn back punches into the man's heart, and yet they weren't even a fraction of what the man deserved.
"I understand that," his father said, "and will bear it until I finally lose this fight. But I'm not done yet, and neither are the two of you. I hate what has had to happen to you and your mother, but in the cold carcass dealer that is war, you both have survived and grew the necessary grit that you'll need to succeed in this new mission."
"New...." Emmit couldn't believe his father was trying to wipe the last six years under their bunk in the name of some glorious new mission—that he was trying to redirect the conversation with such a pathetic attempt at owning the pain that he'd caused them since they'd seen him last.
Again, his father raised a hand to calm him. "Do you know how much I wish I could have the last six years back? That there could be an easier, safer way to achieve the greatness that the Ancients have offered?"
"And that's just it. Ugh, who cares? You're the only one who believes in that crap. And it cost me and Mom way worse than you, as usual." Emmit looked around at the well-fitted office, with its technology and organized space set above a village as though his father were its king. No matter how tired he looked, he hadn't been a prisoner like Emmit and his mom had these past six years. "In all the time it took to set this up, there was never a time you could have gotten us sooner—never an opportunity to tell us you were alive and that you'd come rescue us? I've had no hope."
His rage broke his vocal ability to continue.
His dad watched him. Some anger, but mostly sadness. "There was never a time. I don't know for sure that this is the time—I pray to the Ancients it is—but I had no choice." Something chimed on his dad's wristcom. He looked at it and scowled. "I have to go. The trial set before you, just like the one behind, is absolutely necessary." The room blinked, and he returned to the dark room where he'd entered the neuronet. A panel on the floor closed behind a thin pole that dropped beneath it. The floors were bare, and the musty smell of the underground returned.
A deep click sounded behind Emmit. He spun around to face a door that lacked a handle and was flush with the wall. He pounded on it with his fists, but it didn't budge.
"You're locking me back up in a cell?" Emmit drew back a fist, but harnessed his anger before driving it into the metal door. Mom, where are you? If you're going to her next, you better not lock her up too. Sprinkles, go save her.
"You need to trust me."
Emmit pounded the door. Trusting his father was everything he'd ever wanted. And now, more than ever, he feared that would be impossible.
You let us sit in prison for six years….
14
Emmit's anger melted into tears and a confused longing for his Dad to take it all back. What if that wasn't even him? What if this place is just messing with my head? I haven't seen Dad, just whatever that thing was, he thought, watching the panel in the floor that had remained shut since the pole went b
ack inside and his father, or whatever, had locked him in this room.
Hunger turned his mind toward his backpack. He unzipped the front compartment and dug past a machete, a compass, sealed packets with flat discs inside.... Underneath those, he found a pouch with a cut off edge that he tore open to a citrus-orange scent. The warm juice was full of tiny seeds, but went down smoothly enough to quench his thirst and give him a nice boost of energy. Deeper inside the front compartment, he found another vacuum sealed packet—this one a thin brick that he bit off to the taste of oatmeal and honey.
As he sat and chewed, he thought of Adi, and wondered if his friend was okay, fallen in a hole, off on his own neuronet trip, being eat by a large snake.... Emmit couldn't do a thing for him. Adi'd followed him here, had trusted him, and now he was as alone as Emmit had been when his father had left.
He paused on that thought. Okay, just to entertain his claim, if he really is my dad, things happened the way he said.... He hadn't wanted to be separated from me and Mom, so he says. He gave us up so they wouldn't dig deeper into his secrets. They were always more important than we were, and now he wants me to thank him for the opportunity to mold under fire?
I didn't bring Adi here to force him to survive on his own.
Emmit thought back to the excitement of hopping onto his wolverine, of how his obedience to memory created reality and linked him to a future dangling hope on the end of its line. He'd invited Adi, not because of a memory of the two riding off together, but because he wanted his friend to enjoy the moment... whether for Adi's sake or for his own, he wasn't sure.
Emmit adjusted his floor seat, his tailbone aching from the pressure on the hard floor, and stretched his back against the wall. Father of the year didn't even give me a chair.
Emmit stood, took another bite of his oat bar, and paced.
Adi sometimes spoke of how he had his father's curly brown hair, how they had the same laugh, and how he hoped to someday escape Setuk, join an Esune fleet and show his dad how he could carry on the lineage as a hopper, too.
