The Keeper still appeared to be feeling somewhat self-conscious, her arms locked around her torso, but she did relax a little.
“See? You know that we wouldn’t be lying to you, even to preserve your feelings.” Francis assured her. “Now come closer and let me get a better look at you, then tell me why exactly you felt it necessary to hole yourself up in your room for days.”
Sarah stopped laughing.
Fiona grimaced and reluctantly approached him. She slowly dropped her arms as she went, and twisted away from him as much as she could will herself to. When she was standing directly in front of him, she followed his second command.
“I didn’t want anyone to see me. Everything was happening so fast, but some things seemed to be changing faster than others. It wasn’t pretty. It was downright disgusting at times, and there were even moments where I was...lop-sided.”
A flicker of pain flashed across her features, and she did not try to hide that she despised Francis for getting her to tell him this. Sam had to bite his tongue not to laugh at the dramatics over something he thought was ridiculously silly. Sarah noticed his expression of restrained mirth and elbowed him hard in the ribs. He quickly lost any suggestion that he had been tempted to laugh as he groaned inwardly and clutched at his side.
“Any more of that, and I stomp on your foot, too,” she warned, under her breath. “That part wasn’t funny. Many girls are very sensitive about those kinds of things, and Fiona happens to be one of them.”
“Oh come on Sarah,” he whispered to her mentally, temporarily pulling her outside of Nathan’s walls. “We’re all family here. Whatever she was going through, we could have helped her through it. We weren’t about to judge her. Nobody would have cared if her transformation wasn’t...balanced.” He wanted to laugh again, but the ache in his side was enough to convince him otherwise.
“Don’t be cruel, Sam,” Sarah hissed inside his head. “You may not judge her, but you can’t speak for everyone. Plus, I don’t think it’s your opinion that she was all that worried about. Francis made enough fuss about all of this on his own. He embarrassed her, and she already hates him. He doesn’t care about her feelings, especially when he decides he knows better than she does. He won’t even give her the opportunity to do what he would like her to do of her own accord. He doesn’t even bother asking anymore. He just tells.”
“Now Sarah, she does overreact at times, and when was the last time that she obliged him when he was asking, hunh? I don’t like the way he orders her around anymore than you do, and he may abuse the situation at times, but she hasn’t left him any choice when it comes to the important things.”
Francis and Nathan had returned to their seats and Fiona had used the excuse of helping Elliot to prepare a meal as a means of escaping Francis’s direct and discomforting scrutiny. That did not stop him from watching her as she worked, and Sam wondered if she could feel the young man’s pale eyes on her. If it was making Sam half as uncomfortable as it was probably making her, she more than likely wanted desperately to return to her room – only, thanks to Francis, she could not.
It was a horribly awkward evening. The underlying tension between Elliot and Francis still remained, the Teller viewing the technician as a threat to what he believed to be his rightful authority within the house, and the technician seeing the young man as trying to wrest more power than his years and his knowledge should merit, merely because he possessed the unnatural ability to do so. Sam was starting to actually think that it was a good idea for Francis not to leave Fervor with them, if only to avoid more of this kind of conflict once they were on the run.
There was also a second tension because of Fiona’s presence. Fiona spent her first time out of her room in days completely on edge. As long as she was forced to remain in the kitchen with them— listening to Sam, Sarah, and Elliot discuss repairs to the hover for the most part—then she had to endure Francis’s predatory eyes and occasional orders. Sam felt bad for her, but he knew that he was not capable of dissuading the Teller, who had seemed possessed by various impulses since Fiona had emerged from her room.
As an offshoot of that uncomfortable situation, Nathan, who had appeared to be quite joyous at Fiona’s return to mixing with the rest of the family, eventually picked up on the overall sense of discord in the kitchen that night, even though he only got a subtle glimpse of it when he let more than just Fiona in past his reinforced walls. As the evening progressed, he did this less and less often, since he found the upkeep of those walls while including multiple minds inside greatly fatiguing. As a result, he mostly reserved that privilege to just sharing with Fiona, especially since he did not really feel like he was a part of anything that was happening with the hover. When he did finally become aware of the unease involving Elliot, Francis, and Fiona, he became disturbed as well.
Sam was happy to finally excuse himself and head for his bed, but he was the first to leave. Sarah had been flitting about the kitchen like a nervous little animal when he had made his exit, trying, and failing, to play mediator and to bring a better sense of peace to those there. Being an adult seemed to be a very complicated affair, and Sam was grateful that he was not there yet. On the other hand, he was starting to see some of what was bothering Sarah so much about Francis lately. There had been times after Fiona had joined them that the Teller had definitely not seemed himself. Instead there had been something disjointed about Francis, something out of place. Sam tried to remember the friendly boy who had helped him counter the fears caused by the connection, and found the memory shallow and short-lived, since none of that person appeared to remain in the transformed Francis. Tossed around by these thoughts, sleep did not come easy for Sam that night.
In the morning, he, Sarah, and Elliot gathered the remainder of the items on Elliot’s list, much simpler now that they had the appropriate tools, and then they set off for the beach so that Elliot and Sarah could start work on the hover. Sam sat and watched as the two stripped off the siding in places, planning on repairing any internal damage first. He tried to observe quietly, but his curiosity continued to get the best of him, and he found himself asking one question after another about what they were doing. After the first few minutes of this, Elliot sat up with a grunt, bristling with annoyance.
“Why don’t you make yourself useful and go find something,” he grumbled. “This is going to take us days to finish. I’m sure that you’ll be bored beyond belief.”
“We did enough finding this morning to fulfil that urge,” Sam assured him. “And this is plenty interesting. I didn’t really know anything about hovers when we started. I’m learning a lot. Of course, if you are getting tired of my questions, I can change the subject. We could talk about the argument that you had with Francis last night. You really shouldn’t be challenging him like that. He’s right, you know. You are part of the connection now, and you are a weak part at that. Our Teller’s showing quite a bit of restraint presently, and he could pin you down like a little bug if he chose to subvert your will. At the moment he views you as floundering and ignorant, so he excuses any missteps on your part, but if you fight him too much, that will change. We’ve had years to get used to the idea that we only get to refuse Francis’s wishes if he is willing to let us. As long as we don’t resist him on a regular basis, he doesn’t tend to push us around.”
“Unlike Fiona,” Sarah muttered, trying to reshape a standard hover part slightly so that it could be used to replace a damaged one in Elliot’s vehicle.
“So…what?” Elliot growled as he rummaged through the grouping of tools that he had laid out on the sand. “Am I supposed to be grateful that the tyrant has spared me?”
“You don’t understand,” Sarah sighed. “He was better when Royce was around. Nobody realizes how hard this is on Francis. He’s all alone in this.”
She paused.
“I think this is done.”
She held the part that she had been working on out to him. He took it from her and started to examine it carefully, turning it
over in his hand.
“Is it true, what he said about you two messing in his thoughts, and being able to sift through mine?” the technician said, without looking up.
“We only did it with Francis in the beginning, and only because we had no clue what was going on since he wouldn’t give us any proper answers,” Sam remarked defensively. “It wasn’t personal, it was survival.”
Sarah nodded in agreement.
“We won’t do that to you. You’ve done nothing but help us. I’m sure you’ll tell us everything eventually. Francis wasn’t about to do that. He figured the less that we knew, the better...at the time. I don’t know if he feels that way now. He’s never shared much with us, and that much hasn’t changed.”
Elliot looked at Sam contemplatively.
“Maybe I judged you wrong then,” he murmured. “Maybe you are more mature than I originally thought. Maybe you are ready.”
“You’re going to tell us about our parents then? Are they still alive? Will you be able to return us to them when we leave Fervor?” Sarah suggested hopefully.
The technician glanced at her with a pained expression.
“Don’t…don’t think like that. If I’m going to tell you this, I want you to keep an open mind and try not to see everything that I have to say in a negative light. I don’t think you’ll be able to predict what I have to say, so don’t try. It will just make things worse. And yes, you could say that your parents are still alive.”
He hesitated, scratching at the back of his neck and searching for words. “Did they teach you anything in school about genetic manipulation?”
“You mean the scholars using magic for selective breeding like you said they did with the Bigs’ parents? Not much. We did talk a little about genetics and how various traits are determined by your genetic make-up, but nobody said anything about purposefully trying to influence the outcome,” Sam replied.
“And cloning,” Sarah added. “Don’t forget about that. They talked about identical twins and how it is possible to duplicate a living thing if you know its genetic coding. There are no identical twins on Fervor, however.”
“With good cause,” Elliot stated, playing absent-mindedly with the tool he held loosely in his hand. “The scholars did manipulate the genetics of the Bigs, selecting a variety of traits in their parents to see how they would combine. Theirs was not a natural conception, guided by magic so there were no natural anomalies like identical twins. But...but that wasn’t enough for the scholars. They decided that the traits hadn’t been combined appropriately, and that their Fixers and Finders needed to be stronger. They would replace the hundred children that they had slated for the positions, keep half of them as Controls, and send the other half back to the mainland with the minders and teachers.”
“But the Bigs’ parents were dead. Where would they find the people with the right traits to produce that kind of telepathic strength in their children?” Sarah admonished. Her words triggered a response from Sam, who was suddenly starting to see where Elliot was possibly going with this.
“The Bigs,” the Finder answered coolly. “It was the only stock that they had left to work with. But there are only fifty Littles, not a hundred. There were no children who left with the minders and the teachers. This has something to do with what Royce told us, doesn’t it?”
“The Bigs can’t be our parents. They were only around five years old when we were born,” Sarah protested, unhappy with where this was going.
Elliot shook his head.
“The scholars used genetic material from the Bigs and surrogates, Sarah, but they didn’t use a simple method of merely two donors. They wanted as much strength as possible, a predominance of ability with the connection. They wanted to cheat evolution, so they pulled genetic coding from multiple Bigs. You don’t have two parents, you have many, and they happened to be scattered around Fervor. You could have genes from any of them, even from Fiona, or Nathan, or Francis. Even from Royce. The Controls did carry some of the traits they were looking for, just in a less concentrated way. So you see, I can’t take you to your parents, because in a way, you are already with them.”
Sarah’s face grew ashen, and she looked like she was going to be ill. Sam, on the other hand, was not satisfied with this alone. He felt the need to dig deeper.
“Why were there only fifty Littles, instead of a hundred, Elliot? What happened?” he demanded. “And why did Royce think that there was something wrong with us on the inside?”
“The scholars had never tried to splice while manipulating genetics before. They used questionable methods, and this yielded inconsistent results. Half the children were viable, resembling the Bigs that they were built from. The other half...” Elliot grimaced, unwilling to meet their stares.
“They died?” Sarah breathed, clutching at Sam’s hand.
“Some of them didn’t survive birth,” the technician conceded.
“But some did, didn’t they?” Sam pressed. “And some survived long enough that Royce got a look at one of them. They didn’t look human, that’s why he called them monsters. They must have had them hidden somewhere on Fervor, because none of the rest of us ever saw one. Royce did have those Finder instincts though. He probably saw something that stirred his curiosity, and followed those instincts until it led him there. What happened? Did they leave with the first exodus or the second? Or are they still hidden here somewhere? Would they have been able to be part of the connection like us, and that ability was magically suppressed in them too?”
“I don’t know, Sam,” Elliot insisted. “They considered that part of their experiment a failure, and while I’m sure that they had the details recorded somewhere, it wasn’t with their active research notes. That was all that I could get my hands on, and only because I was actually working on the Languorite for them.”
“So what you are saying,” Sarah summarized in a tremulous voice, “Is that our parents are not really our parents – that they are only five years older than we are, and that all of the Littles are siblings, in a way, only we aren’t? Royce was right. We are monsters.”
“Sarah, no,” Sam said with a frown. “Elliot’s right. You can’t think like that. This doesn’t change anything. This just gives us more insight as to what exactly those scholars are willing to do, in the name of their research. It doesn’t have any bearing on us.”
But Sarah wasn’t that easily consoled. She lurched to her feet looking horribly distraught and ran off down the beach. Elliot watched her go, and then hung his head and sighed.
“Not ready,” he mumbled with an edge of misery to his voice. “Should have gone with my first inclination, trusted my intuition.”
He threw the tool he held into the pile, with a ‘clank’.
“I need her if you want me to finish this.”
“I’ll fetch her back,” Sam offered, knowing he would have no problem finding her. “Do what you can without her for now. I won’t be long.”
He traced Sarah back to the house and found her sitting with Francis, clinging to him in her misery, and sniffling quietly. He was stroking her hair trying to soothe her, and eyed Sam with some distaste as the Finder entered.
“I told you that this was a bad idea. There were some things that you didn’t need to know – things that would only be hurtful. Elliot doesn’t really understand what life has been like for us, or how we think. I do. Take advantage of him and his hover if that is what you want, but stop digging,” the Teller stated.
Sam gritted his teeth as the sudden wave of compulsion hit him with the command. It did not have to be permanent. Elliot could easily remove it with the Languorite. It was the principal of it. Francis threw it out as casually as regular speech. He had never done that to Sam before.
“How about we discuss that later? We need to work on the hover while it is still light out. Elliot needs Sarah’s help.” Sam did not try to make excuses. There was no time for that.
Francis’s pale green eyes held the Finder for a few moments, a smal
l crease in his brow. Then he took Sarah by the shoulders and forced her to sit up.
“Fine. Sarah, go help Elliot with the hover. Forget about what he last told you for a little while, and focus on your fixing,” he murmured. She nodded, and got to her feet, making for the door.
That was two orders in the last few minutes, and Francis almost never told the Littles what to do.
A worried Sam returned to the beach, trailing after Sarah. She was right about Francis. Something, Sam feared, was wrong.
Abuse of Power
When they arrived back at the house that evening, Fiona had already prepared a meal and was sitting mutely across from Francis at the kitchen table. Sam could tell that she did not want to be there, and he suspected that Francis had not given her a choice. They were waiting there in silence for the others to return, with Fiona fidgeting and watching out the window trying to ignore the Teller. Francis, on the other hand, was just staring at her while wearing a contemplative expression.
That evening was even more tense than the one prior, but was thankfully much more short-lived. There was little conversation. Sarah, who had initiated talk on many of the occasions that the house-family had gathered in the past, was silent and moping. Francis seemed equally unyielding, his eyes glued to Fiona and rarely affording a glance for anyone else, clenching and unclenching his jaw from time to time. Elliot seemed to be imitating Nathan during most of the meal, averting his eyes and refraining from commenting on anything that had happened during the day. Fiona and Nathan basically kept to themselves, returning to the way things had been before Elliot’s arrival and shutting the others out in the process.
Sam found the quiet stifling, but it was decidedly better than yesterday’s heated debate. There would be no winners in the dispute between Francis and Elliot, and Sam was sure that if the technician pushed the Teller too much, the losers would include him, Sarah, Nathan, and Fiona. After he finished eating, Sam concluded that he had nothing to contribute to the situation that would help improve dampened spirits or mend broken fences, so he excused himself and went to his bedroom.
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