by Joseph Calev
“Then it’s hopeless?”
“You disappoint me. There are other ways.”
She put particular emphasis on the word “other,” and I was beginning to not like this. After all, how many had died so I could learn avalance? The Khan motioned for me to join her, and the mass of horse warriors spread to create a straight path before us.
“Oreca gifted has very formidable defenses. Because they change constantly, I cannot help you there.”
Well, this was starting to sound useless.
“But, if you do happen to defeat them, the final challenge is so insurmountable that you will only pass it if Algard himself wishes. He is the headmaster of Oreca Gifted, and even though you won’t see him, he’ll hear anything you say.”
“So, do I tell him a joke, then?”
She gave me a look that would’ve been accompanied by a slap had that been dimensionally possible.
“There’s something Algard desperately wants. He lost it long ago, and that may be enough for admission.”
“What is it?” I leaned forward.
“I have no idea. But if you do happen to find it, show it when all hope is lost.”
I nodded. Well, that was a wasted effort. All I had to do was pass defenses that even a smart person from here couldn’t manage, then find something without a description or place. She’d answered none of my questions. All the time reaching here was wasted. I’d learned nothing, and it was time to go.
“One last question,” I asked just before I avalated home. “Who built this place?”
She smiled. “The same person who placed you on Earth.”
16
It had been obvious since I arrived in the paramount dimension that someone was responsible for placing me on Earth, the validation of that fact still gave me the chills. Who was this person? Was he or she my mother or father? Why? The Khan had none of the answers.
I considered staying there longer to learn more about avalance, but too many thoughts were racing across my head. There was a reason why I was placed on Earth. That was for sure. I had to discover the truth, and that would require help.
“So, who taught you to avalate?” a squeaky voice said when I returned.
Sareya, with her blue eyes brighter than ever, was standing directly above me. My neck ached when I looked directly up at her.
“I figured you wouldn’t be allowed to talk to me.”
Raynee was already pissed beyond relief at me. Turnip or not, she was still capable of killing me.
“My question first.” She folded her arms.
“It’s a bit of a strange story. I wound up in this desert. A woman there taught me.”
“A turnip?” She continued with the folded arms.
“Now my question.”
“Fine,” she said with a whine. “Yeah, Raynee forbade me from talking to you. When you disappeared, I was scared you would die.”
It was becoming difficult chatting to someone directly over me. I was cracking my neck, so she gave a disgruntled sigh and resonated in front of me. Her arms were still crossed, and I knew it was my turn.
“Listen, I’m sorry about leaving you. I shouldn’t have done that. You were only trying to help me.”
“Agreed. But that wasn’t my question.”
I laughed. “Yes. She was a turnip. No. I have no idea how a turnip would know that, but it was really strange. She knew my name.”
We stood there staring at each other uneasily for a few moments.
“So, if Raynee forbade you . . .?”
“She’s not my mother. And I was curious. Now, how much avalation do you know?”
“Well, I know how to avalate back from a portal.”
“Yes.” She groaned. “Everyone knows how to do that.”
Again, I had to remember that this six-year-old was likely more brilliant than the best of Earth’s physicists.
“I didn’t learn too much. All I did was shake hands and hug a turnip . . . And I put out a fire.”
Her face lit up. “That’s more than I know. Could you teach me?”
In a world where people could walk upside down, go through walls, create wormholes, and travel to other dimensions, the idea that this little girl would actually ask me to teach her something was almost ridiculous. There was no way I knew something she didn’t.
“We could trade,” she added, noticing my hesitation. “I could teach you orasance.”
I jumped back. “I thought they only teach that in the fifth level.”
“Yeah. But not because it’s complicated. You just need to be mature. That’s why they wait, but I kept waking Raynee up at night until she taught me.”
“I’m not much of a teacher.” I paused. “Why doesn’t Raynee teach you?”
“Well”—she kicked up some dirt—“she’s kind of worried. With avalance, if you’re not careful, turnips can die.”
That was just great. I didn’t have the heart to admit that I’d already killed about a hundred of them. Then again, since they kept reappearing, did they ever actually die? But there was the real possibility that Raynee would murder me herself when she discovered I’d taught Sareya avalation.
“But I won’t kill any! I promise! I only want to meet some turnips, like she met you.”
Visions popped into my head of entire civilizations wiped out due to her mistakes, their leaders ruing this very day, when I taught her incomplete avalance. If I was going to do this, I’d have to raise the stakes.
“How about I teach you what I know about avalance, and you help me with Raynee?”
She shook her head. “You’re beyond hope with her. Stick to the possible.”
The reality that it was simpler to teach me to communicate with the dead than to put a few nice words in to Raynee crushed my soul. “Very well.” I bowed. “You have a deal.”
Since I was doubtful that she’d enjoy ripping apart villagers, I made no offer to visit the Khan. Instead, she chose a simple universe that consisted of nothing but fruit trees. There were vast forests of them, billions of planets covered with every kind of fruit, none of which anyone would ever eat.
With the pressure on, I felt a bit nervous while she watched me pick what appeared to be a blue banana. Yet, dealing with an object that wasn’t human proved a much easier task. Its particles were simpler to control, and within a minute I was juggling it.
“So how do I do it?” she asked.
A good question. Only then did I realize why it took a little girl to teach me resonance. It was like telling someone how to walk. Several times I started to explain, only to stop because nothing was making sense. Soon, she was tapping her foot impatiently.
“So, you know how things are made of particles?”
She just gave me a “you’ve got to be serious” look. I might as well have been teaching playwriting to Shakespeare.
“You’ve got to visualize each particle. It’s kind of like seeing things with resonance, only once you see them that way, you can change them.”
For several minutes she held her hand out and stared at a fruit. When she finally grasped it, half went missing. Immediately, she shrieked, threw her hands up, and took out several more branches. Out of sympathy, I lifted the entire trunk from the ground with my mind and planted it elsewhere. Sareya’s eyes grew wide, and she stood mesmerized before me.
“How did you do that!”
“I just visualized down to the roots.” Yet the truth was I had no idea. For some reason, avalance just clicked with me. Essonance was still troubling, yet the Khan was right. My body just knew how to avalate.
“What do you mean by visualize? What’s the math?”
I had to think for a bit on that one, and again I sensed her frustration. Yet, somehow, I did know the math. I only didn’t know the terms. After some vague explanations, she started to understand, and even named the concepts. Somehow, my mind had accumulated a better mathematical acumen than I’d ever dreamed.
After she destroyed another dozen fruits, Sareya was again
on the verge of a tantrum.
“It’s like the fruit wants to die!”
“I needed a hundred.” I left out that they were people.
She wiped away a tear and tried again. Within minutes, the tree was bare. I grabbed her hand.
“Don’t rush things. Concentrate on each one.”
I was a bad student, and a far worse teacher. We went through nearly an orchard that day, but the best she managed was to convince a fruit to wobble before exploding. Had we been in the desert, there would have been no more villages.
“I know you’re saying the right stuff.” We were both exhausted. “But I don’t know how you make it so easy.”
“Like Raynee?” I grinned.
“No.” She gave me a serious look. “Don’t get too confident. She’s still way better.”
Sareya was certainly right about that. While I had moved a tree, she’d created entire armies from scratch. I still had no idea how to make things. I could only keep them from disintegrating.
We retired with the agreement for an orasance lesson the next day.
Annie joined me for dinner. She’d been a bit of a recluse since we’d discussed her son, but now for the first time her face wasn’t red with tears. Our table hung from the ceiling, which still gave me enough vertigo that, after a sigh, she moved it to the floor.
“I’ve learned a lot. Resonation is easy now. I can essonate portals. I can even avalate a tree out of the ground, and I’m going to learn to orasate soon.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “You’re moving along. If you learn to create a wormhole, maybe we can move you up a level.”
Not long ago, I would have jumped and danced at that prospect. Now I wanted far more, and there was still one force missing.
“What’s the last force?”
She looked away. “Cenosance.”
“When will I learn that?”
“Hard to say.” She continued to look elsewhere. “If you go to university, maybe there. I’ve heard the gifted students learn it in the last year. You have to be careful with that one. It can cause some real damage.”
“What does it do?” The thought of carnage interested me only more.
“To be honest, I never progressed far enough to learn it. The problem is, if you’re not careful it can consume you.” She turned her focus back to me. “But right now, you should worry more about wormholes. Without them, you can’t travel.”
I shook my head. It hadn’t dawned on me that there were other interesting places in this universe. Since the neighborhood had already blown my mind, I couldn’t imagine what lay in store beyond it.
“You know this entire universe is one big planet, right?”
My euphoria about not being an idiot was gone. Not only did I not know this, but I hadn’t even noticed that there were no stars in the sky.
“So, you can travel light years in any direction. But, of course, you know with the speed of light, what seems like a few minutes in a ship can turn into several years.”
This sounded like something simple enough to learn on Earth, but again I had no clue.
“The wormhole . . . It allows me to go back?”
“Yes.” She had a content look because I finally understood. “Back to your time.” She looked toward a nonexistent window. “Raynee has to create one every day. Her school is two light years away.”
The thought of her school brought back my plight. Given how intelligent Raynee was, her professors were probably the top geniuses of the universe. Perhaps one of them could help me find my parents? I only needed to locate it.
“Can anyone visit Oreca Gifted?”
She grinned and shook her head. “No. If you’re planning to surprise Raynee, it won’t work. The location is well known. Any craft can find it. But you’ll find it quite difficult to get inside. That school has . . . protections. Ordinary people like you or me would never get in.”
“What do you mean?” I was hoping for any hints. “Is there some resonation field around it?”
She laughed. “I really have no idea, honey. When I was little, the smartest boy in our school traveled there. Like you, I think, he wanted to enroll there. He’d heard a legend that one only has to walk through the door. When he came back, he said there was just a field. He couldn’t even see the school.”
This was a setback, but maybe not a permanent one. The Khan had said there would be obstacles. First, though, I had to learn wormholes.
“About wormholes, if you can go into the future, how . . .?”
“How do you not run into yourself? Sometimes you do. It happened to me once, and was a bit awkward. You never learn anything, though. That you is in an alternate timeline. What you learn from that you, won’t necessarily happen in your own life. In fact, it can be a lot worse. Sometimes people find out the future them died. So, most of us just try hard not to do it.”
The next day, I found myself the proud creator of a wormhole. The entire class clapped while I entered my side and came out the other. Even Alina was impressed, and after class she mentioned the possibility of moving up to level one after a few weeks. Only, I intended to move much quicker.
“Do you know what cenosance is?” I asked Sareya when we met. It was at a cemetery, so any small talk was worth it. The thought of entering the realm of the dead was unsettling enough.
“I asked Raynee that once. She didn’t know back then, but I think she’s going to learn soon.”
She resonated open a gate and we entered a vast yard of tombs. Other than being a bit more compact, it didn’t seem too different from those on Earth. The graves had almost identically-sized tombstones, about three feet high of polished stone. Each rectangular-shaped grave contained the name of the deceased, without a surname, and a list of loved ones below. The graves were close to each other, but each contained a small stepping stone before it. There was only one fundamental difference. On top of each gravestone was a bone.
Most were small, probably from the hand or a piece of the spine. According to Sareya, the size of the fragment didn’t matter. Orasance was always the same.
“So, who will it be?” she asked.
The question freaked me out a bit. Surrounded by their bones, I now fully realized that these were actual people. In a few moments, I would enter their most private moments. It didn’t seem right.
“Is any of your family in here?”
She stopped for a moment at the question, and I suddenly realized it was a bad one.
“My great-grandmother isn’t far from here. My parents and grandparents are in the restricted section now. After your friend in the essoball game . . . they resonated them closed. So, I just visit her now.”
“Mordriss?” I asked, though I didn’t want to.
“Yeah. I was a baby then. I was sleeping and my mother threw a blanket over me, so I guess he didn’t see me.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not like you did it. I just hope he’s gone now. Anyway, it’s time to freak you out.”
We picked someone she’d visited before, but didn’t know. She said his life had been relatively boring, which made orasation a bit easier.
Sareya had to explain the math to me five times before I grasped the basics. The trick was understanding the patterns of particle behavior, and then deconstructing them step-by-step. Once I had calculated where they should be at a particular time, it only required closing my eyes and visualizing where they must have been earlier. It was in truth less complex than the other forces, since there was no way to control orasance. One could only use it for a ride.
We both placed a hand on top of the bone, and I instantly latched onto each particle. It took some moments to calculate where each had been the moment before, but after a minute or two the math came more naturally, and not long after we were immersed in a world embedded in our imagination filled with places I’d never seen and people I would never meet. The effect was a bit like seeing someone with resonation, only from a different part of the brain.
Our subject, whose name was Turgen, had been so boring during his old age that Sareya cautioned me against going there. His childhood had been more interesting, and in moments we were in a bright field with twenty screaming kids. As we walked through the playground, various kids disappeared into dust and reappeared.
“We can only see what he saw. Orasance is weird that way.”
Sure enough, the entire landscape disintegrated and reanimated with each glance from Turgen. Suddenly, every kid fell from the view but one, a tiny girl with short, braided hair.
“Do you want to join me on the resoslide?” she asked.
Turgen remained still, but shaking. Finally, he returned a nervous nod and stepped forward.
“He eventually marries her,” Sareya said.
In a flash we were in a bright green field. There, a clean-shaven man with a broad smile was tossing a baby into the air. His wife lay next to them, with her long blond hair spread across the grass and her bright blue eyes admiring the pair.
“This isn’t right,” Sareya said with a stammer. “This is my head now.”
“How do I stop it?” I asked. We could speak to each other, but it was like talking through an intercom.
“That’s fine. I like this part. It’s how I remember them.”
The baby Sareya giggled each time she reached the air, but the longer we watched the more peculiar the scene became. I couldn’t narrow it down, but there was something odd about her eyes. I walked slowly over to her father, then stooped to see her face better. The scene changed to indoors.
We were in what seemed like a house. Sareya lay in a wide bed, while her mother frantically moved about the room. Her long blond hair was frazzled, and she started throwing clothes into a large suitcase she’d avalated, then she shook her head and in a snap everything in the room was gone.
“It’s too late,” her father said through quick breaths after resonating into the room. “He’s here.”
