TWO HUNDRED TEN: Sun

210

******

How did I get here?

The tall, yellow grass surrounded him in every direction.

How is it happening again?

No wind. If he held still—and he was holding still, his feet planted by uncertainty and horror—then nothing moved. Even the clouds, hanging low overhead and dimming the day, appeared motionless.

Why?

It was so quiet.

During a storm on Anesidora, facing a raging sea, he’d told Stuart about this. About how he hated it.

“Even before the Contract failed, it sucked….That place felt like death even before it turned into death.”

That conversation had happened. Once upon a time. When had it been?

Something’s gone wrong.

Alden turned slowly in place, straining his eyes.

I have to get back.

He looked for any sign of life, anywhere, and he didn’t find it.

Home. Earth. Now.

“System!” he shouted. “Contract! Are you there?”

The wizards with Alis-art’h were supposed to be building a new one. A better one. If this was the bad side of the moon, and the grass had had time to grow back, shouldn’t it be here?

Please, not again.

“Contract!”

The answer that came wasn’t the one he wanted.

He felt a pressure that had once been so unfamiliar he’d clumsily identified it as a privacy violation. Being spied upon.

Eventually, it had become a very familiar enemy. That thing you had to assert yourself against all the time, that would wear away at your edges and leave you slightly askew—chaos.

No.

Alden told himself it wasn’t too much. He wasn’t worn down. It didn’t feel as bad. He tried to be calm.

But a speck of black drifted lazily up from the ground a few inches in front of him, and as it floated upward, it skimmed a single blade of grass. The vegetation withered and curled.

Alden’s breath caught, a feeling like a knot tightening painfully in the middle of his chest.

Sometimes, they change direction suddenly.

He backed away from the demon bug, and when backing away wasn’t enough to control his fear, he turned and ran.

More black specks were rising. A buzz was filling the air.

It was happening everywhere he could see as he fled. He thought the swarm was a little thinner in the direction he’d chosen, but he still had to slow to a walk to dodge the bugs.

And it was so much like it had been last time. Only worse. He didn’t have the lab coat for protection. He didn’t have an object preserved, so he didn’t have his trait.

The corrupted zone must have an edge, he thought frantically. What if I’ve picked the wrong direction? Am I moving toward the center of the problem or away from it?

Beneath his right foot, the ground gave way, and he stumbled.

Careful. Slower, he commanded himself, staring at the crumbling edges of the hole that had tripped him. Keep walking. Stay alive until help comes.

Stay safe. That’s the most important thing.

As if that thought had summoned it, a sound other than the buzzing reached him. It was so quiet he believed he’d imagined it at first. But then, as he realized it was real and as he recognized what it was, that tiny, silver chiiirrrr-chirrrpp of noise became as loud in his heart as anything he’d ever heard.

“Kibby.” Her name knifed its way out of him on a breath. Not you. You’re not supposed to be here. You’re never supposed to go through this again.

“Kibby, I’m coming to find you!” He screamed the words. She had to hear him. She had to know she wasn’t alone. “Kibby, keep whistling! I’m coming!”

He rushed—cautiously enough that he wouldn’t break his neck in a fall and leave her here in this hell by herself, but fast enough that it was only a matter of steps before he was struck by a demon. It had zigged toward him when he had expected it to travel past him. Both of them were moving too quickly for him to dodge it.

The grasshopper demon smashed into his chest on the upper left side, and he looked down, registering the hole left in his Hawaiian shirt, bracing for that feeling he’d gotten the very first time one of them had touched him.

It would be a hurt that wasn’t physical. An intense, violating confusion of a sensation that he hadn’t had the ability to truly understand.

But now, the mote of concentrated chaos had hit him. And though it was a bad feeling, it was a milder blow than the one he’d anticipated. The demons were less they had been…or Alden was more.

Who cares? Keep going. He started moving again. I have to get to her. Can she hear me calling out to her? What if she stops whistling?

The thought gripped him like a fist, and he sped up.

I can’t lose her. Where is she?

Realization burst inside him a second later, and it was a wonderful realization.

What am I doing? This isn’t before. I know now that I can do it without a System’s help. If she’s close enough for me to hear the whistle, I can…

Alden had his skill. He was his skill.

The very first, most basic part of what he could do with his bound authority was something he was still learning about. In gym class with tennis balls flying toward him, in an intake apartment with Hadiza handing him a beautified ice cream cone, and also in his room at Celena North, imagining his affixation in a way that was a little kinder. Not the confining chains and the machine he’d pictured so many times in the weeks after he’d finally grasped what his species wasn’t supposed to be able to, but something else.

Targeting my entruster. Choosing the person I want to serve with my power.

It was strangely easy and clear to him right now. An unfolding of a small but important part of himself, a turning toward and an acceptance of…a personal sun.

Kibby. There you are.

In that moment, Alden thought he could have found her from a whole world away.

******

******

“The dream that troubles Alden is filled with fears that muffle his reason and hide truths from him. To help him, I don’t tell his mind what is reasonable or truthful. I only present the challenges and alterations he has discussed with me, and I watch over him as he experiences them.”

Yenu-pezth’s eyes were closed, but her bare feet moved unerringly along an oval path laid out on the floor in the white smoke from a yosha plant. The leaves smoldered in a shallow bowl placed on Alden Thorn’s chest, and Stu-art’h watched the steady rise and fall of it from where he stood in the corner of the room.

“His walk with me earlier enhanced his ability to make connections between present questions and past experiences,” the healer continued. “You are familiar with that effect of the path yourself.

“Now, I help him maintain that openness of thought beyond what would normally be possible in a state of heightened stress. When the fear becomes so strong that he is in danger of becoming trapped by it, I sweep some of it away. I interpret the tone of his confusion, as well as the threads of his satisfaction, confidence, and loss. In this way, I know when he has found what he hoped for. Sometimes, I check in with him by reminding him of what we are doing, but most of the time, he is unaware that he’s dreaming.”

Stu-art’h waited for her to finish another turn around the sleeping human before he spoke. “He should have disliked me after our first meeting, even if he did accept my apology. When I learned he was lost, I contemplated his behavior and his sufferings. I admired him. I wished that I could have a chance to meet him again, but I didn’t think he would want to meet me.”

Yenu-pezth didn’t reply. She had just stepped closer to Alden and bent over to prick one of his fingertips with her long pin.

“The Mother brought him to our house for reasons I understand. But then she allowed him to stay without announcing his presence to anyone. He came to see me. He seemed happy to meet me after all, but when he left, I thought perhaps that had been out of politeness.” He took a couple of steps toward the center of the room. “Later, he sent me videos from Earth of things he likes. Musicians marching in formations and black and white animals called panda…”

“Stop sneaking away from your corner,” said Yenu-pezth. “Nothing bad is going to happen to the human you’ve discovered such a fondness for.”

******

******

“There are too many demons. What if your human brain is distracted trying to see them all, and you don’t notice bad ground? The car will roll over.”

They had spent the past two Earth days packing the car and preparing to survive a long trip. Alden had stopped being baffled that they were both here again. For some reason, it had happened. For some reason, most of the lab had been rebuilt. For some reason, the universe wanted Alden Thorn and Kivb-ee dead.

And the why just didn’t matter to him. It had stopped mattering the moment he’d found her there in the grass, put his arms around her, and told her not to be afraid.

The universe could go fuck itself. Alden was going to make sure Kibby got out of here and lived forever.

“My human brain is good,” he said, looking down at the plate of food on the table in front of her while his fingers finished braiding her soft brown hair.

Since he’d started hairdressing, she’d pointed out fifteen different reasons why leaving today might result in disaster, but half of the scrambled curds he’d made her were gone and all of the marleck berries. So whatever was making her nervous wasn’t bad enough to kill her appetite.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

And she’d seemed fine when they were picking the berries. Where one of the greenhouses had been before, there were marleck bushes now, irrigated by the same sprinklers that the Elepta farm had used.

Formerly irrigated, actually, since Alden had taken every single sprinkler. They were loaded into the car with a thousand other things.

He wrapped the piece of string she wanted as a hair tie around the bottom of the braid. It matched the auriad around her neck. It almost perfectly matched his own. He wore his casting tool openly on his wrist right now, and he’d caught his little instructor looking at it smugly a couple of times. She was proud of her contribution. Proud they matched.

“My human brain is even better than the last time we were together, and it got us out of here then, didn’t it?” He leaned over to see her face. “Why do you look so doubtful? Are you being funny-mean to me with that expression?”

When Kibby didn’t answer, he tried to guess what might be making her more hesitant to go this time than she had been before.

The lack of necessity could be it.

When they’d fled the lab in the past, there had been no other choice. She’d been weakening. Salvation had been too many days away. Now, this new lab looked like a fortress. And it didn’t help that the land surrounding it was still swarming with tiny demons that hadn’t yet lost their grip on existence and dispersed into the general spreading chaos. Some of them were powerful enough to put holes in the old car.

Or maybe it was less about power and more about the chaos around some demon bugs having exactly the wrong effect on the wrong part of the enchantments that protected the vehicle. Whatever the case, he was telling her they were going to drive through miles of the things.

And we’ve both seen those trails in the grass again. Something bigger is—

A buzzing caught his attention, and he looked up to see one of the stray demons that sometimes made it into the lab drifting around over the microwave.