by Joseph Calev
Raynee and I both looked at each other with helplessness. How would we force someone as powerful as Algard to tell us? He’d already dismissed us once.
The mountains far away were now sinking, and all around us the sands blew, consuming every building and plant in existence.
“One last question,” I shouted over the roar. “What’s your name?”
The Khan beamed at me.
“Here, I am the Khan. But I was modeled after another.”
The edges of the world were disappearing, and the Khan herself was barely visible.
“Her name was Sa’ira,” she shouted.
Only her face was left now.
“She was your mother.”
25
So that was what my mother had looked like, and already I couldn’t remember her. There was a face and a name. That’s all I had. I closed my eyes and struggled to remember anything, but it had all happened too fast.
“Lean down,” Sareya said.
She placed her hand on my forehead and whistled a soft tune. I was back in the desert, talking with the Khan again. She looked tired from her years. Was that how she really was? And yet, there was love in her eyes. Sareya orasated me back to our first meeting. Yes, she had been harsh, but I never noticed the excitement in her face when I finally succeeded. This copy had received the same love from my original mother.
Sareya released her hand and we were back in the forest.
“You can always visit your memories,” she said quietly.
“Orasance,” Raynee said out loud. “That’s the only way.”
“The only way to what?” I asked.
“Algard.” She looked away. “We’re going to have to orasate him. Your mother said he won’t give it up willingly.”
“But he won’t like that, right?” Sareya said.
“No,” Raynee replied somberly. “Not at all.”
She began to pace while Sareya and I looked on.
“I could orasate him,” Sareya offered after a few minutes. “If you hold him down.”
I began to shake my head, but Raynee perked up. “That might work.”
“Are you crazy?” I replied. “How—”
“She knows enough orasance. It’s not that complicated.” She looked at me. “But how’s your resonance?”
Without waiting for an answer, Raynee constructed two large foam barriers in a nearby field while I nervously looked on. How was I supposed to attack someone with resonance? I had no idea.
“These are for sparring. When we hit them, it won’t hurt. You just need to push me against one.”
“Shove you with resonance?”
“Yes.” She stood motionless.
Back in school, I’d been drilled to never hit a girl, but in this case, I felt more like a mouse trying to smack Godzilla. Even without Raynee trying, this wasn’t a fair fight.
“Come on!” she said while I just stood there. “It’s impossible to harm yourself with resonance, and don’t worry about hurting me.”
That was the least of my thoughts. The counterattack concerned me far more. Nevertheless, I closed my eyes and visualized her body, then regrettably forged a blast at her. I never even saw if it hit.
There was a whishing sound from the foam barrier that I was now embedded inside. Every joint ached from the blow, while Raynee hadn’t budged. When I tried moving my arms, they were stuck. Raynee had hit me so hard that the foam had enveloped me.
She groaned, then waved her hand to push me out.
“You keep thinking like you’re on Earth. Don’t try to punch me. It’s a battle of wills.”
Again, I tried to match her, and again I was tossed deep into the foam. Raynee fumed and we set up again. This time she waited until my strongest attempt had lightly brushed her hair, then promptly sent me flying.
Raynee screamed. “I can’t take down Algard myself! I need your help.”
Between pummelings, an idea had formed. I crawled out of the cave she’d placed me in, then held out my palm in surrender.
“What if I find someone else? Someone even better than you.”
She held back her assault. “And who would that be?”
“Darstan.”
“Are you insane? He’s more likely to help him.”
Without warning, she pounded me back into the foam. And then it hit me. Algard had made a mistake.
“Heskera!” I shouted while struggling to get out. “Algard was there.”
“What?”
“Remember that day I was stuck at school because Revis destroyed my wormhole?”
“You weren’t stuck. You were just stupid.”
“Regardless, I met Algard that night. He said he was going to Heskera.”
I tiptoed toward her while she thought. I could be embedded in foam again at any moment.
“Darstan will help us. I spent most of the night with him. He lost his family to Mordriss. He’ll be pissed that Algard was covering things up.”
Raynee sighed. “If he joins us, then we stand a chance. If he doesn’t, then we’ll be expelled before class begins.”
“He’s our only shot.”
Raynee avalated a ship, we setup our wormholes, and the three of us headed to Oreca Gifted. Every outcome here would end in expulsion. I’d spent so much effort getting in, it felt sad that this would be my last trip. Algard had said I would receive no mercy, but never did he imagine what was in store.
We arrived an hour before classes, and found Darstan reading in his office. He stood when we entered, and gave us a broad smile. “To what do I owe the honor?” He then noticed Sareya. “Come on, you know it’s forbidden to bring non-students.”
“We need your help,” I said.
He backed away slightly from my serious stare. “Why am I not getting a warm fuzzy feeling about this?” he said, while looking at Sareya.
“We need to orasate Algard,” Sareya said.
Darstan glared at us for a moment, then burst into laughter. “Holy shit!” He slapped his desk. “You had me going. That has to be the all-time funniest thing—”
“We’re not joking,” Raynee said. “Algard sent us to find Jason’s father, and we found out that he’s been hiding him this entire time. Jason’s Earth was just a copy. We need the original, and only Algard knows where it is.”
“My father’s name is Avarus. He and Algard had a falling out. Our only hope to stop Mordriss is to find my father, but Algard will never let that happen.”
“You’ll be expelled immediately.”
“We understand,” Raynee said. “This is our last option. We can’t take Algard ourselves.”
“No shit,” Darstan replied.
“And he was at Heskera,” I added. “That night when I stayed here, he told me he was going there.”
“Are you messing with me?” Darstan shouted.
“No.” I walked forward and leaned my forehead over his desk. I prepared both my short discussion with Algard, and with the Khan. After some hesitation, he placed his hand over it, then collapsed onto his chair.
Darstan sat in silence while we waited, then wiped the sweat from his head. “I’m not going to attack our headmaster myself. This is my home, and I can’t . . . go back. But I can give you advice.”
Raynee, who was at her wit’s end with hints, groaned.
“Jason here is the best cenosator I’ve ever seen. He’s also the worst resonator. But, you can use cenosance as a weapon.” He stood, waved his arms, and a spiral galaxy emerged from his hand and knocked us back. “If you concentrate, you can make one big enough. The power from the expansion is extreme. Even someone like Algard will have trouble.
“Second, it’s not the location of Earth that’s his best kept secret. It’s whatever that universe is hiding. That’s the secret he may think you want, and you may catch him by surprise by taking something else.
“The best time is right after classes begin. Any teacher will help him, but we’ll all be in lessons. You’ll have him alone. Jason, you blast him w
ith cenosance. He’ll need a lot of energy to resist that. So Raynee, you hold him down, and I assume you, little girl, orasate him.”
We looked between each other. While we’d hoped for his help, this plan was workable.
“And finally, I do have to say this is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
After Darstan bid us farewell, Raynee and I both paced madly across the hallway. Were we really going to do this? Sareya only shook her head.
“How about we just ask him?” she suggested. “Easy peasy.”
“If we ask him,” Raynee said, “then he’ll know what we want. But we could ask him about Avarus.”
It was worth a shot. We hid while the other students filed in, then, once the lessons began, we searched for Algard. My heart was racing, and he was way too easy to be found. His normally disheveled hair was straight, and his mustache was recently thinned. He seemed unfazed by our approach.
“What’s she doing here?” He pointed to Sareya.
“What did Avarus find?” Sareya asked.
Algard smirked, then frowned after a long silence.
“Go home, little girl. As for you two, minus three hundred points for disrespect.”
“Did Avarus have anything to do with Heskera?” I knew the question would likely mean the end of my points and a subsequent expulsion. “You visited it before Mordriss.”
“A coincidence, and I don’t like your tone.”
“We searched for Avarus,” Raynee said. “But you already knew his name, didn’t you? You never planned for us to actually find anything.”
“I will have nothing of this sort! You are both expelled—”
Since he’d stated the inevitable, I felt it necessary to deserve it. Raynee was next to me. I took a deep sigh, and knew I could do it. There would be no more questions.
The entire hallway split apart, and the blast from my universe threw the stunned Algard into the foyer. A whirlwind of planets and small supernovas spun before me, taking out everything from the floor tiles to the occasional sofa. Just when he stood, I slammed him back down with it.
He reached a hand out, but Raynee was on him. She resonated him upward, then threw him against the wall while he screamed. With every bit of strength, I pressed my spinning mass of darkness against him. A supernova crashed into him, while Raynee cried as she desperately held him down.
Sareya didn’t need the call. She walked nimbly across the ceiling and reached for his forehead.
The headmaster roared, and the wall behind him cracked. “Enough!” he bellowed and the wall crumbled.
Two sudden blasts sent Raynee and me down in succession. In one gesture of his hand, my universe smashed through the opposite wall and disintegrated.
Students were now pouring in around us.
“How dare you!”
“No!” I replied. “How dare you! You knew all along how to stop Mordriss. You let him murder everyone. You, the one person who knew the secret to destroying him, let us down.”
“I did nothing of the sort. You have no idea. Now get the hell out of here. I never want to see any of you in this school again.”
“No,” Raynee replied. “My mother, my father, my brother, my entire town died because you wouldn’t take a stand. You knew Avarus was the key to Mordriss, but you were too chickenshit to get him.”
“Avarus was pursuing something that should never be touched! I’m sorry for your family, I really am, but there are worse evils.”
“You bastard!” I added. “You probably set Heskera up. You knew he would attack there.”
There were a hundred students around us now, along with all of the professors. The wall to Darstan’s classroom had been destroyed.
“And what was so bad that you let that creature murder everyone?” Raynee asked, then pointed at Sareya. “You see this little girl? He tried to kill her yesterday. How do you explain that to her? How is her life not important?”
“You have no idea of the consequences—” he began, but never finished.
A tremendous blast of resonance lifted Algard in the air and pummeled him through three successive walls.
“My wife, my daughter, died!” Darstan screamed at the top of his lungs. “And you did nothing!”
The entire wing of the school burst into cinders and Algard faced off against the fuming professor.
“Keep out of this, Darstan!”
They both fired at the same time, but Algard was a master for a reason. Darstan, against his best effort, flew through the back of Fantasa’s classroom.
I didn’t wait for him to turn to us.
This time I was the one who roared, then pounded Algard with a fifty-foot tornado of creation. Students dove for cover, while others were tossed aside by the twisting, pulsating mass of stars. Raynee resonated him down, then Darstan appeared from the rubble and added his own fury.
Algard was screaming, but against our combined forces was momentarily helpless. With a wink, Sareya leaped over my whirlwind of destruction and planted her palm on the headmaster’s forehead. He roared, but had no power left to resist her.
I felt my entire body weaken from holding up this bulging universe. Raynee, too, was straining.
“I can’t hold him much longer!” Darstan shouted. “She needs to find it. Now!”
Sareya lifted her palm from the reddening Algard, then proceeded to smack him hard across the face. The motion stunned him, more for its audacity than its strength. She then shoved her palm against his forehead, and closed her eyes again.
“I got it!” she yelled. Raynee resonated Sareya and me against her, then formed a portal to the meadow with the billion droplets just outside the school’s universe.
“It’s here,” Sareya said, then formed a portal a few feet away.
Seconds later, we were on Earth.
We stood outside what should have been my house. Gone was the jungle complete with tree kangaroo. A young boy and girl played in the front yard, while their parents looked on. Everything looked so familiar, yet so completely different.
“So, how do we find him?” Raynee asked.
There was no time for false leads now. Algard would certainly pursue us, once he dealt with Darstan. Luckily, I’d given this moment some thought.
“We need to find the Khan.”
Raynee groaned. “How many damn Khans do we need to find?”
“Just one more. My mother passed on the job to another, a turnip. He terrorized the world. His name was Temujin.”
“Do you mean Genghis Khan?” she asked.
“Ummm—”
“You’re hopeless, sometimes,” she added with her melting smile.
A man passed us while looking at his phone, and Raynee froze him in place for a moment, then released him.
“Your Khan is buried in an unknown location. To keep it secret, he killed everyone who carried his body there and constructed his burial site.”
“Well, he sucks,” Sareya said.
“We can find him,” Raynee added. “It’ll just be annoying.”
She essonated a portal, and immediately we were standing in the bitter cold, with endless green plains around us. A few inches of stone wall revealed what may have been a palace, long ago.
“Someone knew.” She closed her eyes to resonate around us. Within seconds, small bone fragments rose to midair. Sareya and I nodded, and we each took one.
It didn’t take long to orasate someone who had met the Khan, but a bit longer for someone alive during the funeral. When we’d located the date the party left, Raynee pulled us away.
“Been studying a bit. This’ll be pretty cool.”
Raynee reached down and grabbed a handful of dirt, then poured it slowly down. While the grains drained from her fingers, the ghostly mirage of an army appeared. They were mirror images of Sa’ira’s troops. There were grim but sad demeanors on each of the immaculately adorned warriors. They weren’t fools. This would be their last march.
We watched them march to the wilderness, then moved ahea
d. Raynee fast forwarded it, and within minutes we were witnessing a swarm of soldiers, a few digging the grave, with the rest laboring to redirect a river over it.
She dropped the remaining sand over the grave, and we stood in a nondescript spot on the edge of nowhere. The river had long ago meandered elsewhere, and there was now no sign that one of the most vicious men in Earth’s history was buried here.
Remembering my procedure on the school’s founder, I lifted the dried corpse from the dusty earth. Precious few fragments remained of the actual body, but it was enough. All three of us touched him at the same time.
Everything had been orasated blank, save one part near the end of his life. A thick, heavily armored man stood in a vast empty yurt. Not a single object, save the carpets used for floor decorations, adorned the interior. From outside, there was only wind.
“I am now fulfilling your wishes, oh Great One,” he said out loud with no one else in listening range. “You made me, on great pain, memorize this until today.”
He then proceeded to read out several numbers. When he finished, he calmly stood and walked from the tent. There was no one outside.
Just when I was ready to bang my head in after another useless clue, Raynee sighed in frustration at me.
“They’re coordinates.” She created another portal.
We were in some jungle. A kookaburra called in the distance, while before us was an endless maze of vines and twisted trunks. She knelt, then lifted a tiny marble. It was another universe.
A single familiar blue planet circled around a very particular sun. It was another Earth clone, but this time without the filler. There were no other galaxies or stars. Only one planet existed in this solar system, and on it was but a single straw hut, standing defiantly on a vast green plain, with empty blackness above it.
The door cracked open when we approached, and a strongly built, bearded man appeared from behind it. Raynee and Sareya both halted with me as I realized the next few steps would change my life forever.
This man had the same brown eyes as mine, but he wasn’t smiling. There was a weariness of years across his face. His grim demeanor revealed neither surprise nor anger, only penitence. He was my father.
“We can spare the reunion,” he said while I nervously walked forward. “There isn’t any time.”
