Fervor

by Chantal Boudreau

  By that point, Sam was starting to feel a little isolated. Elliot had returned to Sarah’s room, in need of more rest, and the Fixer sat outside of Francis’s room waiting for him to come out again. The whole house-family seemed to be in an unnatural state of disorder, and Sam didn’t like it at all.

  Realizing that everyone had forgotten about Nathan, dealing with their own problems, Sam decided that he had better check in on their Watcher. Francis seemed fairly convinced that Nathan would manage just fine, but the Finder wanted to make sure of that himself.

  Sam suspected that, where Francis was concerned, there was a little bit of bias when it came to Nathan. He didn’t understand this, because Nathan had always respected Francis’s authority, had never resisted the Teller’s instructions, and hadn’t held him at fault the way that Fiona had. The only suggestion of defiance from Nathan that Sam had ever seen had been a matter of compulsion, when the Watcher felt that the safety of one of his family members had been somehow placed in jeopardy. In fact, of anyone one in the house, Nathan had always been the most carefree, the most kind, and the most forgiving. Any tension between the two of them clearly originated from Francis, and without any obvious explanation.

  Sam could sense that Nathan’s walls were unusually thick that day when he reached for him through the connection. Francis had indeed succeeded in helping the Watcher compensate for any distraction caused by his painful transformation. Sam knocked really hard, and after a few moments Nathan let him in.

  How are things going, Nathan? You looked pretty bad when you headed out this morning. I’m sorry about all of this, especially the lack of warning. We wanted to tell you what was going on, but under the circumstances, we couldn’t.”

  “It’s okay, little buddy – I guess I can still call you that can’t I? You’re not so little anymore, but you are still smaller than me.” Nathan chuckled a little internally, with a bit of a mental groan. “It still hurts, a lot, but I’ll get by. And I understand you not telling me anything about your ‘new friend’. It only makes sense considering everything that Francis told me. How are the rest of you handling all of this? Are you and Sarah okay? What about Fiona? I know that she was still asleep when I left. The last couple of times I took a break, when it got to be too much, I tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t answer me. Did I do something to make her angry with me?” There was a hint of anxiety in the Watcher’s question.

  “No, Nathan – it’s nothing like that. She’s shutting everyone out right now. She spoke for a little while with Sarah and Elliot but...” Sam began.

  “Don’t use his name when you speak to me, Sam,” Nathan interrupted. “Francis warned me not to. You never know when they might be listening in.”

  “They won’t be able to hear anything. Your walls are rock solid. I tested them myself,” Sam assured him.

  “That may be so right now, but you never know when I might let them slip, especially with all of this pain. It’s like someone’s trying to stretch me from the inside out. And places are itching too – places that shouldn’t be itching. I never missed any of the pain or itching over the last few years. I didn’t mind giving that up,” the young man admitted.

  Sam counted himself fortunate. The discomfort that he was enduring was much less severe than Nathan’s.

  “So why is she shutting everyone out?” Nathan demanded, returning to the original topic at hand. “That’s not like Fiona. She has always been willing to talk to me in the past. Going through this would be a lot easier if she would just let me in. She usually knows what to say to make me feel better.”

  Sam shrugged mentally. “She doesn’t seem to be all that happy with the way things are changing for her. I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but she spent quite a bit of time in direct contact with the Languorite last night...”

  “Don’t mention that by name either,” the Watcher insisted, interrupting for a second time. “Just call it the ‘new find,’ just like you have your ‘new friend.’ I’ll know what you mean.”

  “Fine,” Sam sighed. “Anyway, until we get a chance to discuss all of this with my ‘new friend’ we’ll have no idea how fast everything is happening. We know why, but we don’t know all of the ‘what’ and we don’t know exactly how. Sarah finished fixing him, but he’s still resting – recovering. He’ll probably be up to talking this evening, although I’m not sure that we can get Fiona to participate. Maybe then we can get some answers.”

  “You can count me out too, little buddy,” Nathan responded. “I’m already exhausted, and I’m only about half way through my circuit. It will take everything I have just to drag my sorry butt the rest of the way through this thing and collapse into my bed when I’m done. Besides, I would have to drop my walls to have a conversation with the lot of you, and I can’t do that right now. Francis made sure of that. I’m surprised he left me with the ability to talk to anyone but him.”

  “I’ll admit Francis is a bit of a control freak,” the Finder conceded. “But he’s not outright cruel. I’m sure he wouldn’t have done this if he didn’t think that it was necessary. The rest of us didn’t know what to do.”

  “I realize that. I just wish that there were some other way. Sam, you said that Fiona let Sarah talk to her. If she lets Sarah in again, can you ask our Fixer friend to put in a good word for me?” Nathan asked. “I’d really like to talk to Fiona. It would make me feel a whole lot better about all of this if I could. I’m not used to her blocking me out like this.”

  “Sure thing, Nathan,” Sam agreed. “And I’ll brief you on whatever Eh—um…my ‘new friend’ has to say. I’ll be in touch again tomorrow.”

  “I really hope that you guys can make this work, Sam. I don’t know how much longer that I can keep this up. I’m not as good with my walls as you and Sarah are. But I understand what this means for us if you can make it happen. I’m sure that I want it as much as you do. Like what’s going on right now. I may have to suffer for a little while, but in the end, it will be worth it. I’ll put up with whatever I have to, if it means more freedom and a normal life for us all in the end.” Sam could feel Nathan’s excitement as their minds made contact, and the Watcher was not usually an excitable fellow. It gave Sam some renewed hope.

  Satisfied that Nathan was coping reasonably well, Sam broke their link. Glancing around the room, he saw Sarah getting to her feet.

  “I talked to Nathan,” he informed her. “Francis was right. He’s managing okay. He’d like to talk to Fiona, if you can convince her to let him in.”

  Sarah gave him a dubious look.

  “She was reluctant enough to talk to me and Elliot. And I don’t know if we’ll hear or see her again until she’s good and ready. She won’t stay in there forever. She can’t. She still has the compulsions of a Keeper and eventually they’ll override whatever sense of self-consciousness she has that is keeping her in there, but it may be a couple of days, you know. I think, for the moment, this business with Elliot and the Languorite will have to fall on yours, mine, and Francis’s shoulders. We can’t wait for Fiona, and we can’t include Nathan.”

  “Self-consciousness? It can’t be all that bad, can it?” Sam laughed.

  Sarah chose not to answer that question.

  “She’s still changing, Sam. We’ll have to wait and see when she’s actually done. I don’t think that I should say anything more than that. She wouldn’t want me to.”

  Sam tried to quell his imagination, but he could not seem to prevent the series of grotesque images of potential mutations of the pretty girl from flitting through his mind. He threw up his walls before Sarah could get a glimpse and, with a quick good-bye, set off to do some finding for the day.

  Sam still felt the constant throbbing ache in his bones, joints, and muscles, but it wasn’t enough to reduce his compulsion to go looking for something useful, nor dampen his thrill at actually being able to hear things en route. He paused briefly at points to reorient himself and to pinpoint where his finding was directing him
. It gave him a chance to just listen and enjoy the sounds of the birds singing and the wind blowing through the trees. He was sure that he would never take that for granted again.

  His finding drew him to the beach, not a big surprise considering the severity of the storm that they had been through the last couple of days. Sam knelt by the place where he had found Elliot and glanced up and down the shoreline. The urge to head towards Royce’s “territory” on the beach was overwhelming. Sam had not had a single run-in with their Control since he had been exiled from the house, but he had also avoided that section of the beach completely. He fought with himself at that moment, struggling to resist the desire to search for the thing that he knew lay somewhere in that area. He couldn’t even be sure that Royce still spent any amount of time in the house-family terrain, but he did not want to risk a confrontation, not with the Bigs all functioning at minimal capacity. Sam did not even consider the fact that, as things stood, Royce would no longer have the same size advantage over him as he had had in the past.

  Sam resisted the pull, but could not avoid it altogether. He started to drift unwittingly towards the place where he feared to tread, and was thankful when, in addition to not actually encountering their Control along that stretch, he also caught sight of what had attracted him. The urge to continue farther down the beach began to subside, as one compulsion countered the other. The object that had captured Sam’s attention was a very unusual looking hover, badly damaged and lying upside-down on a series of seaweed covered rocks. Most likely, he assumed, Elliot’s hover.

  The average hover was shorter and stouter, not meant for high speeds or travelling great distances. The island hovers were also fabricated from fairly light-weight and flexible metal, meant for ease of use, for regular outings, where as the one perched haphazardly on the rocks appeared to be a much sturdier construct, intended for longer journeys over greater distances and to be made at higher speeds. He wondered how fast Elliot had been able to make that hover go, when it was in proper working condition.

  The other thing that Sam noticed about the magical device, even from a distance, was that it was much larger than the regular hovers on Fervor. The snub nosed vehicles that he had ridden in, in what now felt like ages past, were designed to carry four people, at most, and that had been the maximum combination of minder and children per household before the second exodus. This beast of a hover, on the other hand, looked like it could carry at least twice that. It could easily hold Elliot as well as the five young people remaining in Sam’s house-family, with room to spare.

  Sam wanted to get closer to the hover, and he knew that there were supplies somewhere within its metallic shell. It was those supplies that had attracted him and not the hover itself. The magical device actually repulsed him, because of the embedding of the Directives during the Gathering at the Hub. Hovers were strictly off limits for Finders. That worried Sam. Elliot had talked about offering them solutions to their shackled existence, including, possibly, a way off of Fervor. If they could not get close to a hover, let alone enter one, how were they ever supposed to make their way to proper civilization? He hoped Elliot would be able to offer an answer to this dilemma as well.

  Of course, all of that might be a moot point to begin with. In its current condition, Sam was quite certain Elliot’s hover would be going nowhere. It would need some extensive repairs, and considering that they had no parts available to them, such repairs might prove impossible. Elliot was a technician, however. It was possible that some of the standard hovers could offer something that could be adapted for use in the special one, and if that were the case, Elliot might be able to find a way to fix it. In fact, if Sarah could manage to get close enough to the flying device, she might even be able to offer him some assistance in doing so.

  Sam peered at it a little longer. At some point, they would need to get the hover right-side up, and it looked exceptionally heavy. Even if Elliot could somehow offer them a way of overcoming the compulsion to avoid the hover, Sam doubted the six of them could flip it on their own. The only ones with any real physical strength were Elliot and Nathan, and Nathan wasn’t in a position where he would want to look at it. His effort would be an awkward one at best. For the first time since Royce had left their house, Sam actually wished the black-haired boy were still around. Better yet, he wished he were around and free of the stasis, in order to lend a helping hand.

  Sam’s other finds were not all that rewarding that day, once he had pulled himself away from the sight of the hover. He returned home mostly empty-handed, having only gathered some slightly frayed heavy rope after scouring the friendlier parts of the beach. Still, just being able to report finding the strange hover, even in its less than favourable state, seemed like a prize to the Finder.

  When he trundled through the door, dropping the rope on the floor beside it, Sam noticed that Sarah had returned to her spot in front of Francis’s room.

  “Elliot’s up,” she reported. “He’s in the kitchen waiting to talk to us, and Nathan made it back a few minutes ago, but he’s already in his room, asleep. Fiona is still refusing to come out of her room, and Francis was just waiting for you to get home so we could join Elliot.”

  “Why aren’t you both with him then? You knew that I would be home soon,” Sam asked, curious.

  “Elliot makes Francis nervous. So does the Languorite. I can’t blame him exactly. We’ve had time to get used to the idea that Elliot might be coming, and that he might be bringing changes with him. We dumped this all in Francis’s lap pretty abruptly. Considering how Fiona reacted, I think he’s taking all of this quite well,” she replied.

  “Then why are you still planted outside his door? You could be in the kitchen, waiting with Elliot yourself,” Sam demanded.

  “I was hoping I might get to fix Francis some more, but he wouldn’t let me.”

  There was an edginess to Sarah’s response, and that intrigued the Finder even more. Sam had watched her do as much for the Teller as she had for Nathan earlier. He wondered what more there could be for her to do. That was when Francis opened his door.

  “Come on,” he said to his two younger house-mates. “Let’s see what Elliot has to say about all of this.”

  Sam noted that, while Francis was still moving like someone who was in pain, he was standing straighter and more upright than he had been earlier in the day. Whatever stress there was on his system appeared to be starting to ease a little. Francis was nowhere near as tall as Elliot, but he was definitely several inches taller than he had been. The Teller glanced towards Fiona’s closed door. He shook his head.

  “I don’t want to order her to come out,” he sighed. “But she is our Keeper. How are we supposed to keep things functioning around here without her? If it’s necessary...”

  “It’s not necessary,” Elliot interrupted, standing in the entranceway to the kitchen.

  His presence in the connection was still a mere shadow, but his physical stature made up for it. He was similar to Nathan in that aspect. None of the minders or teachers had been imposing in any way, and Sam could see why Elliot made Francis nervous. With his shaggy light brown hair and beard, he reminded Sam of pictures that he had seen in school of lions.

  “If she needs more time to adjust, let her have it. I can work anything that can be found in this house and then some. You don’t need her for that while I’m here. She can listen in on what I have to say from her room. Why don’t you three join me, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions with the information that I managed to gather for you. I won’t have all the answers, mind you, but I’ll do my best.”

  They walked into the kitchen where the Languorite was sitting atop the table. Francis frowned somewhat, and then glanced at Sam and Sarah with his familiar slightly melancholic expression, a hint of fear in his pale green eyes. He did not advance any closer.

  “I guess that we start with that,” the Teller said, gesturing towards the magical device. “It can bring down the stasis, as we’ve seen firsth
and. What more can you tell us about that?”

  “As a passive function, it can bring down any magic in effect that is in place for the purpose of suppression of natural influences. That would include the stasis, which the scholars had put in place to suppress natural aging. If any of you were not Connected, it would change that, too. The Bigs were all chosen because you were telepathically stronger than the latents. Your parents were all first generation offspring of purposefully interbred latents. The scholars considered you the next step in the evolution of our race. Magic runs strong in you, too,” Elliot explained.

  “The Bigs? Do you mean the Controls as well?” Sam asked. He knew that Francis had unintentionally suggested Royce had been slated to be a Finder, until the Littles had been introduced into the mix. The gifts of the Talent Groups were seemingly interwoven with the connection – such as the Tellers only being able to influence other Connected. Was Royce deaf to the connection because this had been suppressed in him? If that were the case, all of the Controls had a legitimate reason to be angry.

  “There wasn’t a child on Fervor that began life without the potential to be linked to the connection,” Elliot admitted, turning to face the Finder. “You should have all had that from day one. They suppressed it until they were prepared to commence their experiment, and then lifted the magic on all of you but the Controls. They didn’t realize that suppressing it for so long would cause damage.”

  “The sensory damage?” Sarah concluded.

  “Not in the way that you might think, based on what happened to you. It damaged the nerves actually used for the connection, so the scholars had that newest sense rerouted through another existing channel, one that best matched your potential strength. You had already been organized into groups using the diversity of your potential strength, your house-families, which is why you had had the mixture of resulting loss of senses. The restoration of your senses was another function of the Languorite that works on a passive level. It repaired that damage and returned the senses to their appropriate channels,” the technician acknowledged.