The Azureans

by R Gene Curtis

  30 Intervention

  Lydia

  Everything is happening so quickly.

  First, the soldier’s attack, and then Karl didn’t make it to Wynn.

  The world moves in slow motion as he flies off the side of the cliff. The plan failed. We’re all going to die. A sword slices through my right shoulder, and the pain resurrects the survival instincts I have left. I force Karl and despair out of my mind. I will keep fighting until I’m dead.

  And then I see Ler hit Wynn. A flash of blue light and they disappear.

  Goluken rushes by me, and I hear screams from the cave. Soldiers surround me, grabbing my limbs, picking me up. My legs ache from my fall off the ledge, and I’m bleeding profusely from my shoulder. My hands are covered in dirt.

  A stab of pain rockets through me as a man breaks my shin with a rock. I scream. I have to fight these men.

  I break a man’s wrist. His grip on me falters. Pain in my neck. I can’t reach my neck, but I dislocate another man’s shoulder.

  I can’t breathe.

  My left hand is free; it flies up to my neck. As soon as it touches the hand there, I snap that wrist. I gasp for air as the pressure abates. I stay inside the man and break his femur. He falls. I fall, too, hard on the ground and hit my head on a rock.

  There are too many of them. A man kicks at my head, and I take the blow on the side of my face. I see stars, my vision goes fuzzy, and my nose bleeds. Somrusee’s scream behind me keeps me conscious.

  A knife lodges into my abdomen. Pain. A lot of it. I can barely think or feel anything but pain. Hands grab my feet and drag me across the rocks.

  I’m about to die. I’m being dragged to the cliff, aware of nothing but pain. Rocks scrape my back. My head aches, and my body is giving out from the loss of blood. I can’t reach the men who are dragging me.

  I put my one good hand into my shirt and find the last of my blue dirt. I fling it at the men holding my feet and break both of their necks.

  Another knife into my abdomen, another blow to the head. I roll and touch the foot that kicked me as it retracts. The man dies.

  Only one man is still standing. He has a knife and a dislocated shoulder. He looks at me warily. I’m bleeding heavily from my shoulder and my arms, but I will kill this man if he comes close to me. It might be the last thing I do.

  He turns and runs away.

  I’m alone, left to die.

  Somrusee screams again. I want to help her, but I can’t move. My head aches, my leg is broken, my body is dying.

  Another scream. I can’t help my friends. Not now. I have to save myself before I pass out. Fighting with every ounce of energy I have, I start working on my body. I deal with the abdomen wounds first, since the knives are out and the cuts deep. Any minute, I expect Goluken or the soldier who ran away to kill me. But no one comes.

  After what feels like forever, the bleeding stops from my abdomen. I close the wound from my shoulder and regenerate new blood cells. I try to address my aching head, but I can’t find any obvious tissue to repair. I leave my head and fix the break in my leg.

  My head throbs, but I’m no longer on the verge of death. I limp into the cave. A dead body sits just outside the cave. Tran. Tran is dead. I keep going. Arujan is nowhere to be seen, and Goluken is dead. Somrusee is crumpled on the floor next to his body. Her chest rises and falls slowly, though her blood is all over the floor of the cave.

  She did it; she killed him. I walk up to her unconscious body and stop her bleeding. I haven’t been nice to Somrusee. Every time I’ve seen her, I’ve felt jealous. But not now. As I put her back together, I weep. She was so brave. She fought when there was no hope of winning. When her breathing becomes regular, I put my hand on the side of her head. She’s beautiful.

  Then I see the K carved into her cheek.

  Karl.

  She loves him. He’s a good man and may be dead.

  Despite my headache and my fatigue, I’m going to find out if he’s alive—maybe for me, maybe for her.

  “Mara?” I call.

  “Lydia?”

  “We did it,” I say. “Can you sit by Somrusee? I want to help Karl.”

  She holds Jarra tightly so he doesn’t play in the blood, but she does come and sit by Somrusee.

  I slip in the blood as I push myself up. Despite the cold, I’m grateful for the rain that washes blood off of me as I hobble over to the ledge. It’s almost dark, but I can see him.

  Karl.

  His body lies broken at the bottom of the cliff. I can’t tell if he’s breathing.

  I’m out of blue dirt. I can’t throw my consciousness down there.

  It would take me more than an hour to follow the trail down to him, with a good leg. I don’t know if he has an hour, and I certainly don’t have that much daylight. If I jump down after him, I will probably hurt myself so badly that I won’t be able to do anything for him.

  “You were supposed to go home,” I whisper. Tears run down my face and fall off the cliff with the rain. “You were supposed to go free.”

  In the chaos, I saw Wynn break both of Karl’s legs before sending him flying over the edge. I was so distracted by everything else, but it looked like Karl hadn’t planned to go through the portal. He had thought through what I hadn’t, that Wynn was quick and his attention would have to be diverted for any kind of subterfuge to work.

  He sacrificed himself. He left me. He left Somrusee. I’m not going to save him. I don’t have any blue blood left, and no blue dirt. I step away from the ledge and curl into a ball on the ground. I think of the K on Somrusee’s cheek. I think of the night Karl kissed me.

  The raindrops soak my clothes. The tears roll off my face and land on the flowers around me. My body shakes with sobs. I sit up and wipe at my eyes.

  “Karl! You weren’t supposed to die!” My words echo through the night, answered only by the sound of falling rain.

  I push myself onto my knees. I’ve been resting on a patch of blue flowers. The blue flowers that match my “blue heart” as Ziru called it.

  My tunic is torn across my right shoulder, leaving my tattoo exposed. I hate that flower. I reach down and grab the flower closest to me. I rip it out of the ground and break it. Let it die. The stem shatters and liquid squirts out of the stem and runs down my wrist.

  Blue liquid. And it smells like blood.

  How is there blue liquid in the flower?

  I bend over, and in the dim light, I see that the flowers closest to me, the ones I’ve cried on, have changed color. The stems are a deeper, darker blue.

  I pick another flower and snap its stem. Blue liquid drips out of it onto the ground.

  Blue liquid that smells like blood.

  Did Togan give me the tattoo as a clue to the secret?

  I rub my hands in the dirt and put my arm next to another flower. I break it and puncture my skin with the stem so that the substance from the flower goes into my veins. The blood goes into me, and it feels good. It feels like the feeling I had the first time I stepped into this world. Belonging.

  In spite of everything, I laugh. I laugh and I grab dirt, bleed onto it to make it blue, and throw my consciousness down to Karl.

  He’s alive. Barely.

  The rain stops falling and the moon comes out, shining on my bare shoulder and Karl’s broken frame below.

  I stay on the ledge for most of the night. The moon reflects on the wet rocks as it moves across the sky. The wind dries my clothes. I put Karl’s legs back together, pulling the muscles back into the right places, admiring their strength. I pull a rib out of his lungs, patch the hole, and his breathing becomes more regular.

  His arms are no longer broken. The scrapes on his hands are mended. I stay with him longer than I need to. His body is strong and gorgeous, and I like feeling it, being aware of it. He will probably never be mine, but for tonight he is. He saved us all. He saved me. I gave him a chance to go home, and although the little girl inside of me wishes that it was because of me he staye
d, I know why he did it. Duty. And maybe Somrusee, too. She lies in the cave, still in pain, but she will be happy when she wakes up.

  Karl is still with us.

  ✽✽✽

  I wake up with my head throbbing. I look at the ground below me, but Karl is gone. I cry out and sit up.

  Someone grabs my shoulder.

  It’s Karl. “I thought you were out of blood. How did you save me?”

  “Togan’s secret.”

  “I thought I was dead.”

  “So did I.”

  He helps me stand. My leg isn’t strong enough to hold my weight, and I lean against him. He puts his arm around my shoulders and smiles at me. “You didn’t heal yourself?” He looks into my eyes, but I don’t know what I see there.

  “I did,” I say. “I was in worse shape than you were.”

  “Karu!?” Somrusee comes limping out of the cave. She runs to him, and I lean away so he can embrace her. For the first time, I see them hug and don’t feel jealous.

  “You’re okay, too,” he says gently.

  “Thanks to Lydia.”

  I force myself to smile. “I’m not done yet. I still have more to fix.”

  Karl nods, but he doesn’t smile. We stand next to the corpses of five men and our friend Tran. A terrible society just lost a dictator, and is probably on the brink of erupting into chaos.

  But we’re alive.

  Mara comes out of the cave holding Jarra. She made it through this unscathed, but she looks more tired than the rest of us. Being pregnant and up all night with Jarra might be more exhausting than winning a war.

  “Dynd may be still alive out there,” Karl says. “I may have heard him on my way up here.”

  It’s a painful walk with my partially healed leg. We wander around for a while before we finally are able to hear him. The sounds lead us to Dynd, who lies on the ground groaning.

  Karl stoops down and puts a hand on Dynd’s shoulder. “What happened?”

  Dynd groans. “Wynn left me here to die slowly, like I slowed his progress into the mountains.”

  I send my consciousness into his body. Strangely, I can only go down to the bottom of his torso. I can’t send the consciousness into his legs at all. I try to force my consciousness into them, to try and get any kind of reaction, but I can’t get anything at all.

  I return to the scene around me. Dynd lies on the ground with his eyes closed, with Karl holding his hand looking anxiously into Dynd’s face. Dynd has done so much for us! I open my mouth, but the words get caught in my throat. I send my consciousness back into his body, but with the same result. Since I left, there are more parts of his body that have died that I can’t touch.

  I leave him again and shake my head. “Dynd. I think I need to take your legs off. I can’t fix them, and I can feel the disease spreading.”

  Dynd closes his eyes and nods. “You’re sure?”

  “This is hemazury unlike anything I’ve seen,” I say. I think of Dynd going through life without legs and my eyes tear up. “If I had more time I could maybe do something, but the disease is spreading so fast…”

  Dynd smiles. “Don’t cry princess. Just save my life and that will be enough.” He reaches out and takes my hand. His touch is reassuring. He’s happy with me. He understands.

  I take a deep breath and send my consciousness back into him.

  ✽✽✽

  Everyone is exhausted, so we decide to go back to the cave for one more night.

  Ler is gone, Tran is dead, Karl carries Dynd, Mara stumbles along with Jarra and with the babies inside her, and I walk next to Somrusee. I put my arm around her shoulder, and she leans against me. We’re friends. It makes me sad to think of losing Karl to her, but I’m happy for her. She deserves him.

  “I’m amazed that you killed Goluken,” I say.

  “Me, too,” she says. “He was really angry when he saw me. He charged into the cave so fast that he ran right by me. I attacked him from behind and he hit his head on the cave ceiling. That gave me an advantage, which I needed because he was a lot stronger than me.”

  “That’s so scary.”

  She smiles. “At the time, you were held in the air by all four limbs, and I thought you were going over the edge like Karu. We were all going to die anyway, so I gave Goluken everything I had.”

  “I was too nice,” I say. “I didn’t go for the kill on some of those soldiers, not at first. That let them turn around and nearly kill me. I broke one man’s wrist only to have him stab me twice.”

  Somrusee squeezes my shoulder. “I don’t know if it’s possible to be too nice, Lydia. Even in war.”

  Have I been nice to Somrusee? I will be from now on.

  We get back to the cave and eat. Mara puts Jarra down and Karl rests Dynd just outside. I sit next to Somrusee out in front of the cave. The sun is warm on my legs, the day beautiful. Birds sing and grasshoppers buzz as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

  Karl joins us. I look at Somrusee, and she looks at me. I squeeze her hand. “Mind if I stay here?”

  She shakes her head. We’ve survived something big together; I don’t want to be rivals. Karl sits between us.

  A breeze cools my skin, which is still exposed. I haven’t fixed my tunic. Or my leg or my scars. I should probably take a nap, too. But before I go, I have some things I want to know.

  “You didn’t take Wynn back.”

  Karl shrugs.

  “I thought that’s what you wanted. You have so much to do back at home—so much to contribute to your studies and to science and your family.”

  “No, I chose to come here with you, Lydia. You kept me here, but it was my choice to come. And, yes, you’re right that I love science, and I miss Pearl. But, I feel like I can do a lot of good here. It’s going to take a lot of work to put this world together. There is a lot here I love.”

  “But, why Ler?”

  “I don’t think he was ever the same after he lost Cadah. I thought a new start in a new world might be something he would want.”

  “But what is he going to do?”

  “We only had a few moments to plan, but Ler was able to memorize my sister Pearl’s phone number. Even if the paper he has doesn’t come through the portal, he’ll find her. She’ll know what to do for him. He can tell her how sorry I am, too. It won’t mean much, but it will be something. I’m hoping he’ll be able to speak English when he gets there. But, at the very least, he can say my name now. We practiced that a lot.”

  I put my hand on Karl’s knee. He puts his on mine.

  “It will mean more than you think,” I say. “To Pearl.”

  I catch Somrusee’s eye and she looks away awkwardly. It’s probably hard for her to see us this way. There are things we know about each other that she cannot understand. Just like there are experiences she and Karl had together in Wynn’s castle I can’t understand. Life is like that. You have experiences, and those experiences bond you to others. Memories form that keep you together.

  I’m not going back, either. How could I ever go back to playing soccer after all this? How could I leave the people I love?

  “We need to go to Wynn’s castle next,” Somrusee says.

  Karl and I both look at her.

  “It’s not his castle anymore,” she says. “It belonged to the great King Togan, who was an Azurean. You need to convince people you might be related to him.”

  “Lydia is Togan’s lost daughter Ria,” Karl says.

  “Even better, then. We need to stop calling her Lydia and take the palace. Get control of the palace guard and start making changes. We have to move quickly; other powers will be moving as soon as they know there is a void.”

  Do I really want to be a princess and spend my life deciding how to keep society in order?

  “Somrusee is right, Ria,” Karl says.

  I bristle at being told what to do. I don’t feel particularly altruistic at this moment; I’m exhausted and overwhelmed. And, a little offended that Karl is now calling me Ria w
ithout asking my thoughts about it.

  “Lydia,” Karl says, and I smile at the use of my name again. “When I was in Sattah I went out into the city every day. I saw people who were depressed and didn’t have hope. They did what they had to, but they were riddled with disease and they didn’t have much food. The people need us.” He pauses. “No, not us. They need you. They need Princess Ria to come back from the legends. They need someone they can adulate. They need you.”

  I shake my head, and tears run down my cheeks. Karl puts his arm around me on one side, and Somrusee moves over to put her arm around me on the other.

  “I can’t do it,” I say. And in that moment, I really do want to go home. And kick a soccer ball.

  Somrusee squeezes my shoulders. “All of us would have died today without you. None of us thought we’d ever live in a world without Wynn, and now we do. It’s the dream none of us dared to dream when we were children. You’re Princess Ria. You can do this.”

  My body relaxes, and I lean into the two of them.

  “I need you to help me.” I mean both of them, but I also mean Dynd and Mara. And anyone else we can find.

  “I’ll stay right by your side,” Karl says.

  “Me too,” Somrusee says. She looks at Karl and smiles.

  I nod. I’m tired.

  I stand to go. “I’m going to take a nap and work on my leg.”

  Karl and Somrusee follow me into the cave. We find Mara and Dynd curled up next to each other in the front. The sight makes me smile. Mara, pregnant with twins and Dynd without legs. I wonder if they would be good for each other.

  “Wait,” Somrusee says before I find a place not covered in blood to lie down. She gives me a hug, and I hug her back. She’s happy. Tired, but happy. “We did it. We won. Thank you.”

  “I never thought victory would make me feel so tired,” Karl says behind us, and his deep laugh fills the cave.

  “I feel like we lost,” I say. “If this is winning, I’d hate to feel what losing feels like.”