Adrin

Adrin didn’t remember falling asleep, but he knew he was dreaming. All his senses were muted, and he felt no gravity, nothing to give him any sense of orientation in this expanse of nothingness. Darkness still clouded his mind and stretched out around him as far as he could see. The only light came from the bright thread that extended from his chest. Even here, he remained connected to the Ocean.

That didn’t help him to feel any less alone.

“Is someone there?” said a voice.

Adrin looked around for its source. All he could see was a glimmer of violet light, but he reoriented himself to follow it. He remembered how it felt to have a body and to walk, and recreated the experience imperfectly in the dream, but with each step felt a bit more like himself.

He wasn’t sure how far he’d traveled when he walked through a gate and into a courtyard filled with bright sunlight and warmth. He’d never seen the place before, but it reminded him of Vas before its fall. His steps clicked softly on the tile mosaic floor. All around him, vines draped from a pergola overhead, laden with buds that had yet to blossom.

And he wasn’t alone here.

A girl about the same age as Adrin was sitting on a bench on the opposite side of the yard. Her straight black hair was just barely long enough to brush her shoulders, her skin a medium olive tone. The girl looked at him with unconcealed curiosity, leaning forward with her head tilted slightly.

“This isn’t a normal dream, is it?” she asked. A lock of hair fell into her face, and she tucked it back behind her ear.

“I don’t know. It feels different,” Adrin said. He still felt disconnected, somehow, but far more lucid than he usually was in dreams. He could think, but the horrible emptiness couldn’t engulf him here.

“Are you real?” the girl asked.

“I think I am. What about you?”

She laughed. “If I say that I am, that doesn’t really tell us anything, does it? You could say you were real even if you were just part of my imagination. And if I didn’t exist, I could tell you the same thing.”

“I don’t understand.” Adrin took a seat across from her on a second bench, almost able to feel the smooth, cool stone beneath him in spite of his muffled senses.

“Neither do I. None of it makes any sense.” She sighed, leaning back against her bench. “I thought I was about to figure everything out. Now I’m just more confused. I’m starting to think I made a terrible mistake.”

“Me too,” Adrin replied quietly.

“And I’m scared.”

“Me too.”

“At least I’m not the only one,” the girl said. “What happened?”

“I was called upon to do something very important, but I screwed it up.” Adrin told her all of it, starting with the dream that called him to the Ocean. The words came easier than he had expected. The pain was still there, but it was dull and distant. And the girl just let him speak, nodding when he paused, and letting the silence stretch for a moment after he finished.

“So that’s why everything stopped working,” she said. “And that’s why the train crashed.”

“What crashed?” Something like alarm stirred in Adrin, but the feeling was so distant it barely registered.

The girl held up her hands and shook her head, eyes wide. “It wasn’t your fault! None of it is your fault. You did everything that you could.”

Adrin clenched his hands into fists at his side. “It wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. And don’t believe the things Kaethar said. He’s the one who—” She stopped suddenly and looked around. “You said he’s gone?”

“Trapped,” Adrin said. “What did you say happened? A crash?”

The girl looked down at her hands, her hair falling in her face again. “The—well, I think you call it a linecar? It was coming into the station but it stopped working when everything else did. And . . . ” As she described the scene, Adrin saw it in flickering glimpses, and his faraway ache intensified.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. Four lives had been lost because he failed. Four people that he knew about. How many more had died because of him?

“It wasn’t your fault,” the girl insisted again.

It was a kind thing to say, and in the dream, Adrin could almost believe it. But he dreaded waking up, knowing that his pain would all become real again.

“What can I do? I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know if it’s even something that can be fixed.”

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The girl took a long time to think before she answered. “I don’t know . . . but I know there has to be something. Something small, even, that you can do. You just have to take one little step, and the next will follow.”

One little step? Even that was hard to imagine. The path he thought he’d been on—the path from the University to Dacrine Wyess’s workshop—had vanished from beneath his feet. It seemed to belong to someone else, someone he didn’t know any more. But that person had been good at fixing things, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he been the one everyone came to and asked for help when their appliances weren’t working right?

Some problems might be too big for him to fix. He didn’t know how to help the king, or how to manage the kingdom. But he did know how to fix things that ran on ambient current. And right now, the kingdom was full of things that needed to be fixed.

It wasn’t much, but it was a glimmer of light in the yawning darkness. One little step that he could take.

Adrin wanted to tell the girl about his idea, to ask her more questions, to thank her for her help. But when he looked up, she was gone, along with the courtyard, the sunlight, and everything else. He was back in the darkness, all alone. And when he woke, he wondered whether she’d really been there at all.

***

By the time an attendant arrived to call Adrin for breakfast, all the lights in his chambers were shining.

Fixing them had been a simple matter—surprisingly simple. The moment he awoke and set eyes on the nearest lamp, the problem was obvious. It had lost its connection to the ambient field, and repairing it was just a matter of reinitializing the channels with an appropriate current.

The shockwaves yesterday must have disturbed the ambient field—the invisible, omnipresent currents that powered everything from lamps to the linecar. He’d always had a knack for figuring out ambient patterns, but his understanding had deepened into instinct overnight.

Normally one needed a meter to detect the currents. Adrin’s was miles away, back in his room at the university. Fortunately he didn’t seem to need it any longer. He blinked and his vision shifted, and he had to sit down before he collapsed. All around him, the room scintillated, distorted like the air over a heater, as ambient currents wove through each other in all directions. There were more threads of current than Adrin had ever imagined when he’d depended on his meter to find them. Everywhere he looked he saw that network of currents, flowing through the walls, the furniture, even through Adrin himself. When he moved, he made tiny eddies in the current that swirled out for a moment before settling once more into their established paths.

He spent some time watching the chaotic motion, marveling at it as he adjusted to this new dimension of his vision. Even as it made him dizzy and disoriented, it filled him with wonder. Science had barely scratched the surface of ambient energy, Adrin realized. There was potential here for amazing things.

He came out of his reverie when someone knocked on his door.

“My name is Sefoni,” she said. Adrin guessed she was at least a decade older than he was, and she spoke with a strange accent he couldn’t place. She must have had some Namaian blood for her skin to be so fair, but her short, wavy hair was dark brown. “The queen assigned me to assist you. I’m to bring you down to the family breakfast chamber.”

Adrin didn’t know whether she referred to Queen Irezan or the Queen Mother Zafrys, but it didn’t make much difference. He mumbled thanks and let Sefoni lead the way.

“How’d you get your lights working?” she asked.

“They just needed to be reinitialized,” Adrin replied absently, wondering whether or not it was true that a linecar had crashed somewhere, leaving four people dead. He hoped the dream had been a product of his imagination.

“Reinitialized?” she repeated.

“It just takes a spark of vitricity,” Adrin said. The hallway was still dim, though a few windows let in enough sunlight that it wasn’t completely dark. He stopped to demonstrate with one of the square lamps mounted on the wall. It only took a moment to find an appropriate current and make the connection. Light burst forth through the decorative grate, casting shadowed lines across the floor.

“Amazing!” Sefoni clapped her hands together and smiled broadly.

The word “amazing” didn’t sit well with Adrin. “You could do it too, you just need a meter—”

“No, I couldn’t,” she interrupted. “I’m Blighted.”

Adrin winced. “I’m sorry.”

“It is what it is. Nothing to apologize for,” she said with a shrug. She must work for Queen Irezan, Adrin thought. The queen had taken an interest in the welfare of those who shared her affliction and had been Blighted at a young age. “And here we are.”

She opened the door for Adrin, and light spilled out from the breakfast room. The source of the light was an incand bracelet worn by Princess Jocyanë, and she was pouring so much vitricity into it that it shone like a miniature sun.

The room wasn’t large or ostentatious—it was about the size of his parents’ dining room back home, without much more space than was needed to accommodate a table and six chairs. Only one of those chairs was occupied, though, and Sefoni had gone, leaving Adrin alone with his betrothed.

Jocyanë was dressed in stylish but subdued fashion, her calf-length tunic a gradient from gray to violet, accented by black embroidery. Her hair was cut even with her chin, and the freckles sprinkled across her nose and cheeks might have been whimsical on someone else. They did nothing to soften the gaze she’d leveled on him when he came in the door, staring at him with the blue-green eyes she must have inherited from her grandmother. That was where the resemblance ended, though; Jocyanë was clearly her father’s daughter, with the same brilliant red hair, pale skin, and Namaian cast to her features.

Disdain radiated from her, almost as powerful as her light. Could he blame her for hating him? He was a stranger, an interloper in her home, and because of him, her father was . . . Adrin had to look away. He turned to the wall sconce to the left of the doorway and reinitialized it, then did the same to the lamp on the other side.

“Who do you think you are, the repairman?” Jocyanë asked.

Adrin froze, closing his eyes. He wasn’t ready to face her. He shouldn’t have come. But he couldn’t run away now.

“Do you think this is going to impress me? Going to make up for what happened yesterday?”

“I’m sorry,” Adrin said quietly.

“Sorry is nothing,” Jocyanë said. “I’ve been holding my breath waiting to see if my father would make it through the night, and you’re—fixing lamps!?”

Adrin turned to face her, feeling ridiculous and ashamed. “I just wanted to do something,” he said, disappointed by the words as soon as they left his mouth. He didn’t have anything better to offer. He couldn’t fix this.

“Haven’t you done enough?” Jocyanë’s voice wavered, but she held her head high as she swept past him and out the door. She seemed like the sort of person who wouldn’t allow anyone to see her cry. The food on the plate she left behind looked like it hadn’t been touched.