Fervor

by Chantal Boudreau

  Royce did not seem to care much that Fiona felt this way since he spent little time at the house and generally kept to himself when he was there. In fact, Royce did not seem to care much about anything at all. Francis, on the other hand, found her persistent disapproval disturbing. He spent as much time in their home as Fiona did and, much to his displeasure, he found himself resorting to having to order Fiona to do things more than he did with anyone else. Everything she did for Francis, she did begrudgingly, and Sam knew that this made the Teller very uncomfortable. In fact, the more she spurned him, the more Francis seemed to want to try to find some other way of pleasing her, like some forlorn puppy trying to please its master. Sam felt bad for the Teller. He knew that Francis always had good intentions, and felt trapped between a rock and a hard place. Sarah knew that, too, so they both tried to be extra nice to their Teller to make up for the way that Fiona treated him.

  Francis was a secretive person, and while he did associate with the others much more than Royce did, he also spent a lot of his time avoiding them as well, particularly on those days when he came across as seeming more melancholic. He did occasionally leave the house for short stretches at a time, too, but he did not head out on daily outings like Sam, Nathan and Royce. Francis had meetings with the other Tellers once every few months.

  Sam hated those times the most, because that left Royce in charge of the house. The smaller boy made a point of following Nathan on his rounds on those days, when he could. Sometimes it was difficult to do if his own obligations to the house-family took him in a completely different direction. After all, it was up to the Finder to make sure they had enough food, clothing, and any other supplies that they happened to need. If there were nothing specific that he was required to look for, he was expected to see if he could find something that would in some way improve their current lifestyle.

  That was something that Sam actually liked about his gift. His life was now something of an adventure; his searches taking him to places he had never been before on Fervor. It let him lead a fairly solitary existence, and Sam was quite happy with that. If he had not been directed to find something specific, he would often spend his days scouring the beach or tracking through the backwoods, looking for anything new and spectacular that he might be able to bring home to his house-family. On those days, he often came home empty-handed and somewhat disappointed. But on other rare days, he would stumble upon something unanticipated, like a small cabin filled with canned goods that offered more variety than the storehouses’ usual fare, and he would become the temporary hero, once Fiona had helped him retrieve his find and everyone was in the process of enjoying it.

  He liked those days best, when they would be sitting around their kitchen happily and talking like a real family – not that Sam had ever known what a real family was like. Nathan would reach over and muss his hair, Sarah and Fiona would smile in his general direction, and Francis would give him the occasional approving look. Even Royce seemed to hate him a little less on those days.

  Aside from that, the Control’s antagonism towards him had not seemed to ease off at all as Sam hoped that it might with time. If anything, it appeared to get worse as the days passed. On a better note, Sam did not have to tolerate his cold hard stares and occasional, although no doubt purposeful, jostling as often as he used to. Royce made himself scarce on a regular basis, and Sam had to wonder why and where the black-haired boy was going. Then again, Sam was not clear on what the Control’s full purpose was exactly. There had been no reason so far for him to step in and mediate between Francis and any of the others.

  Francis was in no way heavy handed, and as far as Sam could tell, the Teller had not made any attempt to abuse his power. He seemed to respect everyone, and if anything, he appeared to dislike the sway that he had over the others. He certainly was loath to use it, and Sam could tell that Francis felt guilty, or perhaps ashamed, when he was forced to actually tell someone to do something because they were hesitant to stick to the Directives. Sam was thankful that he had not found himself in the Teller’s shoes.

  Of everyone in the house, Francis was the one who displayed the greatest sense of unhappiness because of his position. He had a natural charisma to him, which might have been why he had been chosen to be a Teller, if they had been selected partially based on personality, Sam surmised. But Francis also displayed the symptoms of a more fragile ego than his housemates – and a stronger tie to his conscience – which Sam assumed was why he seemed to sink into a quiet misery on a regular basis. Their situation appeared to be harder on Francis than on everyone else, when it should have perhaps been the easiest. He was missing almost nothing as far as sensory stimuli went, he had a link with the connection, unlike Royce, and he had an enviable gift. On top of it all, he had some idea of what exactly was going on, even though he could not share it.

  By their third month together the six children had fallen into their new routines. There was no more school, but they had other obligations, and Francis spent part of the day teaching them what he could. On that particular morning, Royce and Nathan had already left. Sam was about to head out when Fiona informed him she needed supplies from the storehouse and that she wanted his help fetching them. With a shrug, the small boy agreed. They left Sarah with Francis and headed out together.

  As they walked, Sam worked at his walls. He spent all of his free time trying to build on them, but they were still fairly weak and they fell easily to Sarah’s most powerful pushes. Fiona still had the courtesy to push gently before speaking to him since Francis had not yet instructed them on doors and knocking, giving the smaller boy the opportunity to drop them rather than have her push her way through them.

  “Are you getting used to all of this?” she asked him quietly.

  “Starting to,” he answered. “I still miss Maria. I even miss school, and Royce scares me.”

  “Nathan won’t let him hurt you,” Fiona assured him.

  “He won’t if he can help it. It feels like Nathan really is family, like he’s my minder in some ways, but he isn’t always around. Like right now, I could walk around the next corner and find Royce there. If he wanted to take his anger out on me, it’s not like you could stop him.”

  “Why...because I’m a girl?” Fiona thought, with a hint of disgust. “Nathan may be able to out-muscle Royce, but I have my own ways of dealing with him. You have a lot to learn, little boy. You only learned what the minders and teachers chose for you to know. They left out a lot, believe me. Like a real family? To you, a real family is a minder and one or more children. That’s not a real family, Sam. You’ve never experienced one of those. Most of the children on this island either never did, or they don’t remember what it’s like. The only ones who could possibly recall what proper life was like are the Bigs, and for the most part, their mind doesn’t allow them to go that far back. I’m one of the exceptions. We weren’t supposed to remember, you know. We were too little ourselves at the time. They did that on purpose, I think, because they wanted us to be too young to remember. I was only two when they brought us over to Fervor. I remember anyway. The place that they brought us from, most children had parents, a mother and a father, and some children had siblings, brothers and sisters. I had parents, too, but something bad had happened to them. That’s why I ended up with the people who brought us to Fervor. They did some testing on children like us, who had lost our family and who were young enough. The ones that had whatever it was that they were looking for ended up here. I still recall the very long hover trip that it took to get here.”

  “You remember? But that must have been more than ten years ago!” Sam exclaimed. “How could you possibly remember?”

  “You have your gift, and I have mine, Sam. I remember things that I shouldn’t. I always have. I’ve never forgotten anything that anyone ever told me, and I can leaf through my memories like paging through a book. Of course, it got even better after I became Connected. Now I can touch on other people’s memories from time to time and add them t
o my own collection,” she admitted.

  “Wow. So that’s what it means to be a Keeper. That explains why they chose you to maintain the buildings and to work the things that need magic. You remember any magic that the minders and teachers used in front of you. What about the hovers? Shouldn’t you be able to use them?” he questioned. She firmed up her walls a little at this, becoming somewhat resistant to his prying. He had touched on something that she didn’t like, another morsel of evidence suggesting that they had been manipulated towards this event from the very start.

  “We lived within walking distance of the school. The few times that I ever rode in one, Martha, my minder, made sure that I was distracted when she got it going. Not that it really matters. I couldn’t use that magic even if I did remember it, Sam. Francis made it clear to me that using the hovers was forbidden by the Directives. Whoever did this to us, whoever brought us here, they don’t want us leaving Fervor. At least, they intend on keeping us here as long as it suits their purposes, whatever those happen to be.”

  Fiona grimaced as she mentioned the Teller’s name, her animosity towards him completely undisguised. It was not the same as Royce’s anger towards Sam. It was more on the basis of the girl’s perspective of an ethical stance on the Teller’s part. She didn’t fault Francis for her current circumstances, but she did see him as being cruel for withholding information.

  “You can’t keep blaming Francis for all of this, Fiona. He’s just as stuck as we are. They’ve forced him to do the things that he does just as much as they have the rest of us. They just happened to have chosen the Tellers as their mouthpieces,” Sam argued in Francis’s defence. “None of us volunteered for this, it was thrust upon him just as much as upon you and me. They didn’t bring all of us here either. The Littles – they made us for this.”

  “Made you? What do you mean, they made you? You can’t make people...well you can, but you need two adults, and it’s not like assembling a hover or stacking building blocks. You don’t get to pick and choose what you get, and it doesn’t always work.”

  She paused, giving him a funny look.

  “I know that you seem smarter than you should for your age, and that you use words that I don’t even understand sometimes, but it’s not something someone your age would know. I’m not a woman yet, so while I do have an idea of how it’s supposed to work from what the teachers told us, it’s not something that I could ever do. It’s not something that I’ve ever attempted either. The idea still seems kind of...icky. Maybe in a year or two, when I start changing into a woman, I might feel differently, but right now it wouldn’t be something that I would want.”

  Sam tried to ignore these last comments. Even though he really didn’t understand what Fiona was talking about, because of the connection he did know that it made her feel uncomfortable, and one side-effect of the connection was that you got to share in the feelings of the person that you were speaking with, so it was making him uncomfortable, too.

  “Francis said that this last time wasn’t the only time people had left Fervor,” the smaller boy informed her, changing the subject. “He claimed that there had been another exodus, but that I would have been too young to remember it. Do you have that one stored away in your memories?”

  Fiona nodded.

  “It’s not something that I’d forget, because in those days there were usually only one or two children for each minder. We were all very close in age. Then one day they said that we had to reorganize. For some reason, they decided that each of you Littles needed a minder of your own. You were special, more so than the rest of us. They pulled fifty minders out of their homes and redistributed the children that they had kept to other families. It was a great upheaval, and when it was done, that’s when the others left, the other adults who weren’t minders or teachers. They had already started preparing for this that long ago. I think...I’m not sure, but maybe they had planned to do this sooner. They had to wait until you Littles were old enough. I’m also not certain, but I think they might have even wanted to wait longer to see to it that you would be ready for what was going to happen, but they didn’t want the Bigs getting too big. They used to test us regularly, weigh us, and even check our blood. Did they do that to you?”

  Sam shook his head. All of this was news to him.

  “I thought not,” she murmured. “Like I said, you Littles were special. They raised you differently. They treated you differently. Many of us were aware of that, whether they were trying to hide it from us or not. Then again, some of us knew more than the rest of us did. Some of us like Francis and Royce. And now the bastards won’t tell us anything...”

  “Well, that just supports what Francis said. Maybe they really did make us just for this…whatever this is,” Sam offered. “Hating Francis and Royce isn’t going to change anything, Fiona. It’s just going to make life harder for everyone in the house. It’s like Royce hating me because he was supposed to be the Finder in the house-family, if it weren’t for me. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not my fault.”

  Fiona stopped walking in response to this declaration.

  “Royce was supposed to be the Finder? How did you know that? Did Francis tell you that? Is that something else he decided that he couldn’t share with the rest of us?”

  “I didn’t learn that from Francis – not firsthand anyway, and I don’t think that I was supposed to know it anymore than you were. Sarah picked it up from him, back when his walls were much weaker. He let it slip, and she heard it through the connection. If she hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have known,” he confessed.

  “See! That’s exactly what I mean!” she pushed at him with greater enthusiasm, the connection carrying her feelings of frustration loud and clear. “That’s something that you should have had the right to know from the very beginning. There’s so much that Francis is hiding from us. It’s wrong, and I don’t care what you think, he has some say in the matter.” She chewed absentmindedly at her lower lip like she always did when she was upset.

  They walked in silence for a few moments, with Sam still reeling a bit from her last fierce push. Fiona didn’t realize how much more receptive he and Sarah were to communication through the connection, and what felt like a firm mental statement to the older girl came across as a very loud shout to him. Eventually, when he had recovered from the experience, he started pressing her for more information.

  “So do you have any ideas on why they did this to us – anything that you may have seen or heard, and remembered? Why do we suddenly have access to the connection? Where do these gifts come from, and why do we have them? Why did we lose some of our senses? What’s with these Directives and the way things have been organized here? Why won’t they let us leave the island? Why do the Controls not share in all of this?”

  Sam didn’t mean to, but he bombarded the poor girl with one question after another, unable to control his curiosity. Since she seemed so bent on sharing anything that she did know, he was compelled to find any answers that might be hidden in the assortment of memories that she kept.

  Despite being overwhelmed by the sudden influx of his forceful thoughts, Fiona grinned down at him. She reached over and tussled his hair.

  “Ah, my funny little detective, I’m not sure exactly what treasures lie inside my head. I have to know what I’m looking for, or be lucky enough to stumble upon something by accident. I may have what you need, but it’s going to be up to you to find it. That is what you do, after all.”

  She had a pretty smile, Sam contemplated. One that he had noticed the older boys sometimes found disarming. He often wondered if that was why Nathan and Royce tried to avoid her, and Francis tried so hard to please her.

  Sam also suspected that she had invited him along on this errand for this very reason. She wanted to use him to ferret out any clues that her memories could offer, ones that she had not been able to recognize herself. He also knew that she, more than anyone else, felt cheated out of life the way that she believed that it should have been.r />
  “How about we sit down for a moment?” Fiona gestured at a cluster of large rocks by the side of the path. “Maybe we can address those questions one at a time.”

  They each perched atop a large boulder, and Sam considered what she had told him so far.

  “Do you recall anything about the adults that left the first time around? They weren’t teachers or minders, you said. Can you remember anything about them?” he asked.

  She sat back, staring off into space for a moment, and he could almost feel her delving back into her memories, looking for something – anything.

  “Wait!” she finally said, her eyes widening. “I do remember overhearing Martha say something to one of my teachers once. They were talking about scholars and technicians. I didn’t know what they meant at the time, but I’m pretty sure they were talking about the people who were about to leave. Martha said something about what they would do if any of the hovers or appliances stopped working after they were gone. She complained that they didn’t have to worry about having the magic to make them go, as long as they were in working order, but they would be in a fine mess if any of the parts wore out, or something just stopped working. She even made a point of mentioning that it wasn’t like they had any functioning Fixers yet. The teacher said that there were enough teachers who had a generally knowledge of how those things worked. And if necessary, people could bring those items in to the schools for repairs. I was puzzled when I heard that. None of it made any sense to me, but Martha seemed satisfied with his answer.”

  “That could prove to be useful knowledge,” Sam suggested. “At least it is one more piece to the puzzle.”

  “There’s probably more there, if we knew where to look for it. The problem is, I think Francis and Royce hold the keys, but they’ve made it clear that they won’t share.” Fiona frowned again, glancing back in the direction of their house. “They might have something to offer that could trigger more useful memories.”