by Greg Dragon
I skip a shower, because I’m really not in the mood to be naked in front of a bunch of other girls—there are no private showers in this hotel. Plus, we run out of hot water in about two minutes, so unless you’re the first one in, you have to shiver under the cold, drippy showerhead. Needless to say, I’ve reduced my standards on hygiene to about two showers a week, and quick ones at that. No one really notices the smell, though, because we all smell equally nasty. Freshly showered, smelling like soap, you’d actually stick out like a clown at a funeral.
I go to find Tawni, or Cole, or both.
I guess that they’ll be hungry, like me. I find them before I make it to the cafeteria. As I push through the crowds of kids, all zigzagging in different directions, I spot Tawni’s white hair next to Cole’s dark skin. The contrast is stark.
They’re slightly apart from the mob of bodies, against the wall, leaning in close to each other. Their heads are together and their lips are moving, like they’re whispering. It seems like such a funny place to have a secret conversation, but no one seems to notice. I remember something my dad used to say about how sometimes it’s best to hide in plain sight. It’s like that now. If they were further away from the crowds, crouching behind some rock in the Yard, or tucked away behind a door, they probably would’ve drawn everyone’s attention. Instead, they’re invisible.
I move closer, staying behind a really big guy who’s lumbering along in front of me. Next to Tawni is a janitor’s closet. The door is slightly ajar and I manage to slip from behind the big guy and into the closet. Out of the crowded hallway I can hear much better and, because they’re next to the wall, their voices are amplified and projected into my hiding place. I push my hair away from my ear and listen intently, trying to pick up every word.
Tawni says, “I know what I saw. He looked at her—no, it was more than that: he stared at her, right at her. You should’ve seen the way she screamed out in pain.”
Cole’s deep voice grumbles through the door. “What the hell does that even mean? That he’s got some sort of mental powers? Hurts people with his mind?”
“I don’t know,” Tawni says.
“What difference would it make? He’s a creep anyway. Just like his father. He comes down here and parades himself around, flaunts his power, allows his ugly mug to be put on every Sun Dweller magazine.” My nostrils flare suddenly and I feel my face go red, heating up. It’s anger. Directed at Cole for the things he’s saying about Tristan. They haven’t said any names but it’s obvious who they’re talking about. Me and Tristan. I take a deep breath, surprised at wanting to defend a random celebrity.
“He’s not a creep,” Tawni says. “I’ve heard things…”
“Yeah, right.”
“How long have we known each other?” Tawni asks.
There’s a pause, like Cole is trying to remember, or count the days or something. Then he says, “Five years.” Five years? I’m shocked. I expected him to say three months, or maybe six at the most. They’ve known each other since before the Pen. They must’ve met in school. That changes everything. The deepness of their relationship; what level of friendship I can have with them; what I can share with either of them.
“Yeah, five years, Cole. And how many times have I lied to you?”
“Never. At least not that I know of.” Cole sniggers to himself.
“Never—that’s right.”
“You might’ve just misheard, or misunderstood something.”
Tawni’s voice is rising. She’s getting emotional. “No. No, I didn’t. I heard both my mother and father say it before I ran away. I wouldn’t have left if I wasn’t certain. They’re spies for the freaking president. They know things. All I really needed to hear was that they were working for the Sun Dwellers, and then I was ready to leave, run away forever. But they kept talking. They said how Tristan’s different from his father. How they didn’t think he’d carry on the traditions if he became president. They were worried about that. I always wondered why we had so much more money than everyone else. I mean, I went to the same school as you. You couldn’t afford to eat, and I was eating with a silver spoon. Kickbacks for their dirty work. They were afraid the money would stop if Tristan took over. That’s how I know, Cole. That’s how I know!”
She almost shrieks the last bit and I hear Cole shush her, trying to get her to calm down. “Okay, okay,” he says. “I believe you. Maybe Tristan’s all right, but I still don’t get what that has to do with us, with Adele. Just because he looked at her funny…”
“Not funny. Intently, seriously, the way you look at someone you might try to track down at some point in the future. Particularly if you have the resources, which he obviously does.”
“What?” I hear myself say out loud. I mean for it to be a thought, confined to the safety of my own mind, but my wayward lips betray me.
Silence. I slap a hand over my mouth, hold my breath, listen to my heartbeat crunch in my chest like a miner’s axe on a slab of ore.
The door flies open and Cole’s face is silhouetted against the lights in the corridor. Some of the light sneaks past his large frame and spills across my face. One of his eyes is swollen shut, his cheek marbled with black, blue, and greenish yellow.
“Are you spying on us?” he says accusingly.
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, I just saw you talking and wanted to hear what you were saying.” Insert foot in mouth. Translation: Yes, I am spying. Bye-bye, new friends. Hello, loneliness.
Cole looks like he wants to hit me.
“Why didn’t you just ask us?” The question comes from Tawni, who wedges her way between us.
“Ask you?” Again, the words pop from my mouth before I have a chance to stop them. They sound stupid. Like, Duh, asking would’ve been far easier than sneaking into a broom closet and listening through a door. I try to recover. “I, uh, I just thought you wouldn’t, uh, tell me these kinds of things,” I finish lamely.
“What kinds of things exactly?” Cole says.
Tawni pushes Cole back a bit with one arm. I’m surprised she can move him at all. Her arm looks like a toothpick compared to his armor-like chest. I guess she has hidden strength.
To my surprise, she says, “Cole, we need some girl time. We’ll catch up with you later.” Despite the evenness of her tone, her words sound like a command, and a powerful one at that.
Cole stares at me with one eye for a second, and then melts into the stream of bodies, disappearing in the mob.
When Tawni turns back to me, I say, “Thanks.”
Tawni offers me a hand and I take it. Unlike the previous day in the Yard, her hand is warm. Without another word, she pulls me out of the closet and leads me against the flow of human traffic. Where I’d normally bump and knock into a dozen kids if I tried such a maneuver, Tawni is graceful, able to find the path of least resistance. I stay in her wake, protected. I haven’t felt protected in a long time.
Soon the crowds thin and we are walking alone. I’m surprised to find myself still holding her hand. I feel like I should shake it free, but it feels so good—wonderful actually. I guess I need it. Human contact, that is. Having been deprived of human touch for so long, my body is craving it.
We reach a cell door. Not mine but the one next to it. Tawni’s. Funny that I never knew her and the whole time she was sleeping right next to me, just a rock wall between us. Not that it matters. I’ve lost Cole’s brief friendship and I’m about to lose Tawni’s slightly longer friendship. It’s time for my last-ditch effort to save it.
“Look, Tawni, I’m really sor—”
“It’s okay,” Tawni interrupts.
Huh? This time I manage to keep my stupid remark inside my head, but I’m sure my confusion is written all over my face. I can feel one cheek lifted weirdly, the opposite eyebrow raised, and my mouth contorted beneath my flaring nostrils. If Tawni and I are the lead characters in a magical fairy tale, it’s obvious who the ugly stepsister is. Not Tawni.
I realize Tawni’s back is to
me; she’s facing the bed. Thank God, I think. Using my fingers, I manage to mold my face back into what I think is close to its normal shape. Just in time, too. She turns around.
Her eyes blaze with a sort of fire. Not real fire, but determination. It’s unexpected. She just looks so thin, so frail. Although she towers above me, I feel so much bigger than her. At least normally I do. But now she looks strong, like maybe her bones are made of a tougher material than I thought. I wait for her to speak.
“Your father is alive,” she says.
Chapter Six
Tristan
I like calling the Tri-Realms the underworld. For to me, that’s what it is. At times it feels more hellish than if I were at a barbecue with a bunch of demons and zombies, roasting the undead on a fiery spit.
I long to feel the wind tousle my hair, the sunlight on my face. Not the fake sun my father’s engineers have created, but the real thing. There’s nothing like it.
The underworld is so different. Dark, gloomy—it feels dead to me. Like it isn’t natural that any form of life other than the spiders and snakes and bats should occupy it. Certainly not humans.
And if we live in the underworld, then my father is the Devil himself, shrewd, evil, self-serving. They say that blood creates an unbreakable bond. If there’s a bond between my father and me—created by blood, DNA, or something else entirely—it’s as brittle as talc, cracking and crumbling while I was still in my mother’s womb.
I see her face again—the Moon Dweller with the shimmering black hair—so beautiful, so strong, so sad, like she’s crying invisible tears. Just seeing her, the pain is back. My brain feels like it’s expanding outward, pushing against my skull, trying to crack it, break it. But still, I want to help her. Reaching out, I try to touch her, to comfort her. But each time I try, she seems further away, as if some unseen force is keeping us apart. I run, pumping my arms and legs harder and harder, trying to keep up with her, but never able to close the gap. Finally, when I think my legs will collapse beneath me, she stops. I approach, my heart fluttering, my head pounding. I hear a slight whirr and feel a whoosh of air as something flies just past my ear. A flaming arrow. No! Already a spot of blood is seeping through her white tunic where the arrowhead has pierced her breast. The flames are licking at her clothes, charring them. I try to run to her, to douse the flames, to pluck the arrow from her skin and stop the bleeding, but my feet won’t move. At first I think I’m in shock, that I’m simply too weak-minded to gain control of my body, but when I look at my feet, they’re encased in stone. He moves past me. The archer. I can’t see his face, but I’d recognize his gait anywhere. My creator. I scream at him to Stop, please stop! but he ignores me, instead blowing softly on the flames, fueling them until they spread. I have to turn away—God, how desperately I want to turn away—but I can’t. Can’t. Can’t even close my eyes. I watch her burn. She’s brave—doesn’t even cry out, but I can hear her screams anyway. When she dies, my head stops hurting.
I wake up sweating and yelling, thrashing about in my bed. And thinking about the underworld.
Roc is by my side. As always. “Shhh,” he says. “Someone will hear.”
My legs stop thrashing, my arms stop flailing. I’m breathing heavily but not screaming anymore. It was just a dream. I’m on my bed; Roc must have carried me.
“What happened?” I say.
“You fainted,” Roc says, his lips curling slightly.
“Does that give you some kind of pleasure?” I snap.
Roc continues grinning. “Given it was brought on by your battle with a ferocious warrior, namely me, I’d say yes, it does bring me a level of pleasure. Especially because it was in the midst of my stunning and heroic victory,” he adds.
Normally I’d laugh. But I feel anything but normal. I feel like I’ve lost someone special to me, someone close. Like my mother—but a different kind of close, a different kind of special. I grunt.
Roc seems to recognize that something is wrong and his smile fades. “Tristan, are you okay?” he asks.
I honestly don’t know. So I swing my legs over the side of the bed and tell him everything. About the girl in the Pen, the pain in my back and head, the big guy who was about to assault her, how I saw her face just before I fainted, and about my dream—what my father did to her. When I finish I look for his reaction. I think he might make fun of me. If the roles were reversed it’s what I might do.
Instead, his lips are tight, his eyes narrow. He says, “I think it means something.”
“You do?” I say, genuinely surprised.
“Yes. A storm is coming. I’ve felt it for some time now. I think you have, too. Why we’ve never spoken of it before, I don’t know. Perhaps we were scared.”
My first instinct is to contradict him. Not the stuff about the storm—whatever that means—but about being scared. He might be, but not me. I’m not scared of anything. Not even my father—not anymore—although I probably should be. But I know I’ve been too reactionary lately—too quick to fire back at Roc if I don’t like something he says. Like a good friend, he’s put up with it, shaking his head and ignoring my outbursts. So, for once, I don’t say the first thing that pops into my head. I actually think about what he said.
A storm? I know he doesn’t mean a physical storm, like the ones that rage on the earth’s surface from time to time. Therefore, a metaphorical one. Like a conflict. A battle maybe. No, more specific than that: a rebellion. I have felt it, too. Have even commented on it. If not out loud, then in my head, to myself. How it’s a wonder that everyone puts up with my father’s tyrannical politics, his cruel and unfair treatment of the people that support his way of life. Not a wonder—a miracle. And miracles simply don’t happen these days. Not anymore. They’re a thing of the past, of legends, of stories. Which means it’s bound to happen eventually. From time to time we hear whisperings of secret groups of radicals, plotting and scheming in hidden caves, using secret handshakes and passwords. My father dismisses them as casually as he swats pesky flies from his shoulder.
I have felt it, too. So why haven’t we talked about it before? I try to open myself to the possibility that I’m scared, like Roc suggested. I know right away that isn’t it. It’s something else: I don’t believe my own feelings. And why would I? Things have been the same my whole life. Things will never change, can never change. Can they?
I feel Roc’s eyes on my face. I look at him. There’s a twinkle in his eye, like he knows I’ve worked it out.
I say, “I’m not scared.” You know, just to set the record straight.
“I know,” he says.
“You what?” I say. “Then why did you—”
“Because I am scared, and I wanted you to think about things seriously.”
I rise to my feet. “What? I do take things ser…What are you suggesting, that I’m not serious enough?” My face is starting to feel hot.
Roc puts his arms out, palms open. “No, I just think that ever since your mom…”—his eyes drift down—“…left, you’ve been in a funk, a haze, not really as engaged as you used to be. The only time I see light in your eyes is when we’re training.”
“What are you, my shrink or something?”
“There you go—not taking things seriously again.”
I grit my teeth. I’m determined not to make another light comment or joke for the rest of the conversation. I hope our talk won’t last too long.
“Fine,” I say. “Okay, so I’ve been in this haze, hating life, no light in my eyes except when I’m beating the snot out of you with a wooden sword…” Blast! A joke—I’ve failed already. Being serious is harder than I thought. Maybe Roc is right, but I’m certainly not going to say that out loud. Pausing, I try to gather my thoughts. Roc lets the joke pass without comment. “So I see this girl, this Moon Dweller. Roc, lemme tell ya, she was pretty hot. Beautiful. Even wearing her gray prisoner’s tunic she was stunning. Her hair fell like a black waterfall around her shoulders. Her eyes were intensely fascina
ting. And her curves, my God, Roc, were they ever—”
“Get to the point, Tristan,” Roc says.
Right. Serious. My point. What is my point anyway? Ahh, yes. “It’s like she was metal and I was a magnet, Roc. But at the same time it felt like someone had shoved an electric wire into my skin and was frying me from the inside. It hurt like hell. No, worse than hell, man. And yet, somehow across the distance, through the fence, over the mob of people, I felt a pull to her, even though I knew it would hurt me to be closer to her. I probably would’ve just let it go, chalked it up to male hormones, but then when she acted so strong, pushed that guy…I don’t know, since then I can’t get her out of my mind.”
“That’s called a crush, sir.”
Oh, damn you, Roc! He seems intent on making this more difficult than it has to be, even throwing a “sir” in there for good measure. I can feel the grit in my mouth as I shave the enamel off each tooth with my incessant grinding. Yeah, Roc’s like a brother to me, but also like a brother, I wish he’d just go away sometimes.
When I speak again, I’m proud of how even my voice is, pretending like I haven’t even heard Roc’s comment. “It’s weird. I know it’s not just a crush because of all the pain I felt. There’s something more to it. Like…like the pain was a sign. Yeah, maybe that’s what it was. A sign. Like our lives are tied together. Like our destinies are intertwined. I think I have to find her, Roc, if only to know that she survived, that her strength didn’t lead to her death.”
“Is this Moon Dweller girl the only reason you want to go?”
I raise my eyebrows. “I, uh, I think so…” I’m so unsure of my answer that I rub my head to try to think. Yes, I want to know what happened to the Moon Dweller. Yes, I want to meet her, if only to figure out why I feel so much pain when I’m near her, what it means. It hits me. “She’s only part of it,” I say.
