Fervor

by Chantal Boudreau

  Sarah glanced over at Sam warily. His role in this would be simple. He did not have to get close to any of the hovers to help the technician. He would just have to guide Elliot to the places where the things he sought were contained, and then leave it up to the man to retrieve them, the same way that he had with Fiona. Finding everything they needed might take them a fair amount of time, and they might have to venture into the spaces of the other house-families, but it would not be that great of a challenge. Sam did not mind the notion in the slightest. He was not even afraid of running into Royce or the other Controls as long as Elliot was present. Royce would not dare try anything that the hulking man might consider a threat. It was like travelling with his own personal bodyguard.

  Poor Sarah, however, was expected to approach the hover immediately. This was no simple feat. Unless they returned to the house and they tried using the Languorite on her, which Sam figured Elliot would be reluctant to do at this point, then she would have to fight the compulsion to avoid the hover for the entire time that she would be assisting him.

  Elliot gestured for the Fixer to follow him back to the hover, and she tried to obey. She gritted her teeth and took a few trembling steps towards it before her will failed her. Then she stood there looking helpless until the technician returned for her. His massive form, larger than that of the average man, dwarfed her petite one, small for a girl her age even with the additional growth that the Languorite had provided. He reached down, hoisted her up and carried her over. Once there, he kept an iron grip on her delicate wrist to prevent her from attempting to put greater distance between her and the hover. Sam was thankful that physical forces could still prove to overpower some of the psychological ones.

  It was soon obvious that this process was going to take some time, and his own urges to do some finding started to become unbearable. After several minutes of fidgeting where he stood and watched his two companions discussing exactly what needed to be done, Sam gave in and headed down the beach in the other direction. He was surprised to come across Francis there. He figured that maybe the young man had followed them down to the ocean, wanting to steal a glimpse at the wreck himself. He was not looking in the direction that Sam was approaching from, however. Instead, he was sitting on a rock and staring out at the water, running the fingers of one hand through the sand.

  “Elliot says that the repairs on the hover will likely take longer than he had anticipated,” Sam informed him.

  “That’s a shame,” Francis stated, his face looking rather vacant. “The longer it takes him, the more likely it will be that your friend will be caught. If you hope to get off of Fervor, you’ll have to try and speed things up. Nathan won’t be able to hide all of this forever. They’ll figure things out eventually.”

  Sam noticed that the Teller had said “you” instead of “we.” He recognized what that implied.

  “You’re not coming with us?” he remarked with some surprise.

  Francis shook his head.

  “I belong on Fervor. Besides, you said yourself that you don’t trust me. It wouldn’t make any sense to take me with you. I’ll stay here and take whatever punishment they decide that I deserve for hiding this from them. I’d rather face a situation with a known outcome then blunder off into the unknown future that you are creating for yourselves.”

  “Sarah won’t be happy about that,” Sam suggested. “She has always trusted you. She won’t want to leave you behind.” Even though she knows just how much you were hiding from us, Sam considered, blocking this thought from the Teller. “And Nathan considers you family.”

  Francis gave a small smirk, the first offering of any sentiment that the young man had made since Sam had found him on the beach. However, the blank stare in his pale green eyes did not change any.

  “She’ll cope without me, and Nathan won’t miss me, no matter what he has been telling you. Believe me, it is best this way.”

  He paused, twisting and stretching, still tormented by aching muscles, tender skin and painful joints. He closed his eyes and shrugged.

  “Fiona has always viewed me as the bad guy. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I was a coward. Well, I won’t be one anymore. I’ll keep helping you to see this through to its conclusion, and then I’ll take whatever’s coming to me.”

  Sam was disappointed, and he knew Sarah would be even more so. Perhaps trust was lacking for the Teller, and perhaps there were unresolved personality issues, but Sam did not want Francis playing the part of the sacrificial lamb. His outlook seemed much more defeatist than it had been before Elliot had come, and Sam could not help but wonder what exactly had caused this change. There was an element of shame to his attitude, a hint of guilt, one that did not seem to have anything to do with the scholars and their despicable experiment.

  Leaving Francis to his thoughts, Sam scoped out the remainder of the other end of his beach, but found nothing of interest other than a water-proofed sealed package of wafers, that might have been washed free from Elliot’s hover, and a small wooden puzzle involving cups, balls, and string. Tucking his find under one arm, he headed back for the house. Francis had already left his perch, and Sarah and Elliot were nowhere in sight.

  Everyone was seated in the kitchen when he arrived at the house, while Elliot was making supper yet again. Nathan had already made his way home and was sitting in a corner of the kitchen staring up at the ceiling, apparently lost in thought, his walls as thick as ever.

  “He has finally gotten Fiona to talk to him again,” Sarah said quietly, gesturing for Sam to sit, too. “He’s been like that since he got back. She still won’t come out, but if she’s letting Nathan in, that’s progress. I doubt we’ll hear from him until she stops talking. They have a lot to catch up on.”

  Francis was equally silent, although much more present than Nathan. He was leaning over the table with his hands clasped together, examining the Languorite closely, although occasionally shooting a glance over his shoulder at Nathan.

  The meal prepared, Elliot ungracefully thrust plates on the table in front of his young companions and sat with a grunt. Sarah stared at him as they ate, her dark eyes displaying more appetite than her stomach. Without warning, she paused in mid-bite and spoke.

  “What happened to the Bigs’ parents? You said that they were the first generation from interbred latents. I’m assuming they did that in an attempt to strengthen their abilities with the connection. How come they weren’t here with their children?”

  Elliot halted almost as abruptly as she had, and nearly choked on his current mouthful. He gazed at her for a moment without answering, his eyebrows raised.

  “I suppose I did promise you more answers,” he finally conceded. “I’ll answer a few of your questions, but I get to decide when enough is enough – and there will be no protests when I say that we’re done. I also get to save anything for a later date if I feel it’s something that you aren’t ready to know just yet.”

  Sarah smiled and nodded, satisfied with the fact that he would yield a little more to their curiosity.

  “Fiona remembered something about that,” Sam offered. “She said her parents were victims of some sort of accident.”

  Now Elliot looked extremely startled. “How could she possibly...?”

  “Keeper,” Francis mumbled. Sam noted that he looked even more dejected than he had on the beach.

  “Oh – I suppose,” the technician acknowledged, scratching at his beard. “Well, she was probably only repeating what she had heard said around her at the time. I’m sure the scholars considered it an accident. As I mentioned before, they had tested the connection on a smaller scale with adults, and there were problems with grave consequences. It wouldn’t have been so bad, had they managed to keep the damage contained to the location where they were performing the experiment. The main complication was that, when a greater portion of those adults did lose all reason and sanity, they became either terribly despondent, which resulted in them taking their own lives, or very aggressively violent. A
fter killing those who had resisted the psychological strain of the connection, the violent ones broke free from that area and ran rampant through the entire facility, killing anyone that they could find before security was able to take them down. The nursery where the next generation was located was preserved, and the Bigs protected as a result. The entire tragedy was horrific, and I would hope that you won’t dwell on it and that you will try to put the idea out of your mind.”

  “I don’t understand. These people were stronger telepaths than the latents, and you said that they never suffered damage from suppression of access to the connection,” Sam commented. “Why weren’t they Connected from birth, like the Bigs would have been? Why was it an abrupt exposure to the connection?”

  “They were stronger than latents, but weaker than the Bigs, Sam,” Elliot explained. He shuffled his feet under the table and fiddled with his fork, convinced that, by him telling these young people the terrible truth, he would be somehow scarring them for life. “They would have had a weak connection of sorts had they been raised in close proximity to one another. For testing purposes, the scholars wanted to keep them ‘pure’, so they raised them scattered about the mainland. There were a few smaller groups of some of the stronger telepaths in the bunch that had made contact with one another as children. They may have been some of the ones that did not react violently – that wasn’t clear from the scholars’ notes. Anyway, the scholars did suppress their ability to connect briefly, when they did bring them together as adults, after they had already made sure that there would be an even stronger second generation. They wanted everything prepared for monitoring when they lifted the magic that suppressed their telepathic skills. They weren’t prepared for what happened, however.”

  Sam took everything in stride, not shaken by Elliot’s revelations, but the same could not be said for everyone. Sarah had put her fork down and had pushed herself away from the table. She had not been expecting Elliot’s brutal honesty, reinforced by his faint echo in the connection, and she had to block him out briefly to keep from losing everything she had just eaten. Perhaps, at first, the scholars had not realized just how much they would be playing with the lives of their subjects, but once they were aware of the possible side-effects, they had made a conscious decision to ignore the potential impact and do what they wanted despite it.

  “So what about us?” Sam questioned. “What about the Littles?”

  Elliot hesitated with the look of a deer caught in the headlights. Sam had brought up this topic before, and the technician had balked then as well. The large man dropped his gaze, staring into his food, and shook his head.

  “No, not ready,” he stated without any real sentiment.

  “That’s why they put us on Fervor,” Sarah concluded. “In case things got out of hand – it was damage control. That’s why they decided to observe from afar. That’s why everyone else left before they removed the suppression.”

  “Not exactly,” Francis murmured, not offering to expand on this further.

  “That’s right,” Sam agreed. “They introduced the Tellers to the connection long before the rest of us, so they would be ready when the time came to bring in the others. That’s when they discovered the sensory damage, right? Is that why the Tellers aren’t amongst the strongest of us? Is that why none of the Tellers are Littles?”

  Francis got up quickly, his chair scraping noisily across the floor, and left the kitchen. He was not pleased where the line of questioning was going. Sarah rushed after him. Elliot watched them go, a flicker of concern briefly altering his expression.

  “None of you chose this,” the technician sighed. “Although the weakness of the Tellers is, to some extent, of their own making. As I mentioned before, your gifts were assigned to you based on personality traits that happened to coincide with your strength within the connection. The Tellers tend to have a desire to try and control their environment, including the people that surround them. It makes them a prime candidate for their gift, but it limits their strength in the connection. You can’t control what goes on there, and it is the freer spirits that do much better as one of the Connected.”

  Sam’s eyes lit up. “Oh! I understand now. Before they even had their gifts, the Tellers yearned for control, the Fixers didn’t like seeing people hurt, or things broken, the Watchers felt the need to protect others and keep a close eye on things, just like Nathan.”

  Elliot nodded. “Like I said, you were selected based on your personality profile. If your Control was originally slated to be a Finder, then he must be the curious sort, just like you – he just didn’t happen to have the potential strength as a telepath that the scholars decided that they needed in a Finder. If there hadn’t been the antagonism between the two of you, as Sarah described to me, you likely would have gotten along swimmingly.”

  Sam flinched a little at the burly man’s choice of words. There seemed to be some irony there considering past events.

  “And of course, that’s why your Keeper is still holed up in her room. She clings to the past, and always will, I suspect. This has been just another in a long line of changes that she has tried unsuccessfully to resist,” Elliot said, fidgeting and eying the exit.

  Sam suspected these kinds of discussions were easier for him when he was dealing with the entire house-family. One-on-one conversations seemed to make the man excessively self-conscious. It was time to give him an out.

  “You probably shouldn’t say much more without the others listening in.” Nathan and Fiona were walled up solid, as was Francis, and while Sarah had left herself open, she appeared to be quite distracted. “One of us would just have to repeat it to the others, so no point in wasting the effort. Besides, I may be dragging you halfway across the island tomorrow to find some of the things that you need. You may want to get some rest. I’ll clear away supper, and then I’ll be headed that way myself.”

  Elliot was not about to argue. He was not normally a domestic person and jumped at the opportunity to make his escape.

  As Sam stacked the plates away in the cleansing device for future activation, he glanced over at Nathan still seated silently in the corner. He had closed his eyes now, and wore a huge grin, his cheeks occasionally flushing. He looked more relaxed than he had in days. The Finder wished he were a fly on the inside of one of Nathan’s mental walls, so that he could listen in on his conversation with Fiona. Since Elliot had arrived and she had isolated herself, she had not spoken to Sam anymore than she had to Francis, and Sam actually missed her. He could understand why the Watcher had been anxious to speak with her after all this time.

  Sarah returned to the kitchen dragging her feet and looking morose. Sam put the last dish into the base of the device and turned to face her.

  “Why so glum?” he asked her.

  “Have you ever seen a chip in a hover windshield?” she countered, answering his question with one of her own.

  “Sure,” Sam replied. “It happened to our hover once. Maria took it to the school for one of the teachers to repair it. She told me that if you didn’t get it early, the strain on it would eventually make it grow. She also said that if you let that happen, the chip would become a small crack, or perhaps a series of small cracks. At that point, it would be even harder to fix, but if you didn’t, chances were, the crack or cracks would continue to spread until you had something that ran right across the entire windshield – some kind of divide or a network resembling a spider’s web. When that happened, it would be so weak that the slightest jolt or the smallest impact could make it shatter. Something that started as a minor blemish could turn into something ultimately dangerous.”

  Sarah nodded as he spoke, not meeting his gaze. There was almost a haunted look to her eyes.

  “We have a chip,” she insisted. “And it’s spreading.”

  At first he thought she was talking about Elliot’s hover, but with some prodding at her through the connection, he soon realized that she was not. She would not elaborate further, however. Sam tried vario
us tactics to cheer her up, including offering her his latest find, but nothing seemed to work. It was so unlike Sarah. Then he came up with an idea.

  “Will you come with me and Elliot finding tomorrow? You’ve been cooped up in this house for years. You must have enjoyed getting out today. How about we try that again? It will help you get your mind off things, not to mention who knows where we will be going. It’ll be an adventure, the kind that should be shared by special friends,” Sam said with a smile. Sarah’s expression softened a little and she responded with a half-smile of her own.

  “Sure, Sam. Maybe that would be best. I can’t fix what I can’t access. Maybe if I just leave it alone for a little while...”

  That was as much as Sam could hope for, and it was getting late. Leaving Nathan in the kitchen in his mirthful state, they both wandered off to bed.

  Finding

  When Sam came out of his room the next morning, he watched Nathan bound around the house with a level of enthusiasm that the young man had not displayed since Elliot had arrived. The last time that the Finder had seen him with this kind of energy, he had still been the size of a large boy. Now there was no denying that Nathan was an adult.

  It had been a few days since they had started their rapid growth, and from all appearances, it was finally coming to an end. The pain and irritation was subsiding, they were all noticeably taller, and the Bigs had lost anything childish to their look. If anyone outside of their house-family had caught a glimpse of Sarah or Sam, they would have just assumed that they were Bigs. But if anyone spotted Nathan or Francis, the change would have been undeniable and their reaction would be unpredictable.