Naomi

Down in the town center, everyone was talking about what had happened, the progress that they had or hadn’t made in getting things working again, speculating about the causes and really, it couldn’t be a coincidence that this had happened right after that poor boy went into the Ocean. Nobody blamed him for it. They thought that Adrin Remyer was probably dead, just like Raen before him, and wondered what that forebode. Naomi bit her lip to keep herself from blurting out that Adrin was, in fact, alive.

Or was he? It could have just been a regular dream. It had seemed so real while she was dreaming, but dreams were always like that when you were in the middle of them. Everything that had seemed specific and concrete while she slept now slid into haziness, and she couldn’t trust her memory. So she said nothing. For now, at least.

It was a cozy little town, the architecture much like what she’d seen in Norana, but on a smaller scale. More of those scalloped tile roofs hung out over the sidewalk, with poles to support them. Those broad overhangs sheltered tables at restaurants, where a few people still ate and talked. Esar and Kelsam selected one of those restaurants for them to stop and eat lunch.

The restaurants were eager to unload their stores of food, it seemed, because it was going to go bad without refrigeration. No, not refrigeration, preservation. They used preservers instead of refrigerators—big boxes that kept food from spoiling without making it cold. Naomi guessed that they put the food in stasis, somehow?

“So what would you two like to eat?” Kelsam asked, after they’d taken seats in the shade.

“Uh . . .” Naomi looked up at the board propped up next to the door. She figured that was the menu, but she had no clue what any of those symbols on it meant.

“Food,” Jason said, aiming a deadpan stare at Kelsam.

“Right . . .” Kelsam said.

“I’ll go get them something.” Esar jumped up again scarcely a moment after he’d sat down.

They ended up with a platter full of steamed buns, each with a little sheet of what looked like black paper or nori wrapped around one side. Esar started by taking a couple of the buns, picking them up by the paper and placing them on his plate. He then produced a vial of orangish liquid.

“Esar . . . you’re not . . . in a restaurant?” Kelsam said.

“Pardon me for wanting my food to taste like something.” Esar proceeded to drizzle the orange sauce all over his plate.

Kelsam buried his face in his hands. “It does taste like something. Just because your taste buds are all too dead to appreciate it . . .”

Naomi picked up one of the buns by the wrapper and took a bite. The bread was sticky and doughy, and the filling tasted kind of like sweet potatoes with some sort of subtle, unfamiliar spice. Not bad.

“Are you supposed to eat this, too?” she asked, pointing at the wrapper. Kelsam nodded, and Naomi took another bite. The papery part tasted like . . . paper.

“Can I try some of that stuff?” Jason asked, pointing to Esar’s orange sauce.

Esar was busy chewing, so Kelsam answered for him. “That’s chili oil from Thaliron. It will incinerate your tongue with the fury of a thousand suns.”

Esar rolled his eyes and pushed the vial towards Jason. He let a couple of the oily drops drip onto one of his buns and took a bite.

“Not bad,” he said nonchalantly, and poured some more over the rest of his buns. “Want some, Naomi?”

He waved it at her, and just the smell of the stuff made her nostrils burn. She pushed it away.

“No, thanks.”

“Come on, I thought you were all about being adventurous now,” Jason said.

“Not with food. I don’t do spicy.”

Kelsam shook his head. “At least one of you is sane.”

Jason sputtered. “Hang on—you’re calling her the sane one?”

Naomi had some questions about her own sanity, though they had nothing to do with how spicy her food was. While the others talked about food, she turned things over in her head, trying to recall as much as she could about the dream. Esar had been in such a hurry to get on the road that morning, and then there had been so many things to see and think about. But now that they were all sitting down, she realized she probably should have said something earlier. Well, there was no point putting it off any further.

“You know that boy, Adrin? Who went into the Ocean yesterday? I, um, I think I talked to him last night.”

Everyone else at the table fell silent. Esar had just picked the last bun up off the platter, and now it fell from his fingers as he froze, staring at her.

“I mean, in my dream. I’m not totally sure, but . . .”

Esar was still sitting perfectly still except for his hand, still outstretched, which had begun to shake.

“You met him . . . in a dream . . . last night,” he repeated mechanically.

“You told me to tell you if I dreamed about my father again, and I haven’t!” Naomi blurted out, then shrank back. She’d raised her voice too much, attracting attention from other tables. Now she lowered it to a near-whisper. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, but I wasn’t sure if it was a regular dream or not and I kind of forgot about it until now.”

Esar planted his forehead on his palm, making a visible effort to collect himself. Naomi braced herself for an outburst, but instead of exploding at her, Esar turned to Kelsam.

“What, may I ask, is so funny?”

Naomi had been so focused on Esar that she hadn’t even noticed that Kelsam was shaking with suppressed laughter, trying to hide a smile behind his hand.

“It’s just—you do that to me all the time. You say the strangest thing out of nowhere, like it’s nothing, and then you have no idea why I’m so shocked. Then she did it to you—and your face—”

“Anyway,” Esar said, turning pointedly back to Naomi, “if you were, in fact, speaking to this Adrin in a dream, that implies that he was chosen as Prince Ethereal.”

“Yes, I think he said that,” Naomi said.

“And what else, dare I ask, did he say to you?”

Naomi closed her eyes and scraped her memory. “He said . . . someone attacked, and there were some kind of shock waves and when he came out of the Ocean nothing worked any more.”

“Someone attacked? Or something? A construct?” Esar asked.

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Naomi shook her head. “Someone. I . . . think it was my father.”

“So according to this person your father is responsible for the catastrophic failure of every ambient device, as far as we know, in Elorhe?” Esar stared at her like he was a hawk, and her story was a mouse that he wanted to pick apart.

“I think so.” She didn’t like to admit that, even though she knew she didn’t share guilt with her father just because she was related to him.

“Why? How?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t understand, and it’s hard to remember it all clearly. It was—he wanted something. My father did, I mean. I don’t know what. I don’t think Adrin knew what, either, he just knew that the Ocean wanted him to protect it. And stop him. And Adrin tried, he really tried, but he couldn’t. But the king could—the king captured my father in some sort of maze, I think, only now the king’s trapped there with him.”

Naomi knew that she’d made a muddle of it, but it was so hard to explain. And not just because of the twisted dream-logic of it all.

“I don’t like this,” Esar said.

“It’s not all bad news,” Kelsam said. “If Naomi really can talk directly to someone in Thaliron, relay messages and so on, that could be very useful.”

“The same Ocean that chose that boy drowned my brother. Tell me why I should be pleased that he’s talking to Naomi inside her head? We can’t trust him.”

“I don’t think he’s a bad person,” Naomi said.

“You can’t trust him, Naomi,” Esar thundered. The tables around them fell silent at the sound of his voice. Esar clenched his fist and drew in his breath as Kelsam placed a hand on his arm.

Naomi looked down at her plate. She still had half a bun left, but couldn’t find any appetite for it.

“You don’t understand,” she said.

“But you do understand?” Esar asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I understand enough. He was sad, and scared, and all he wanted to do was what was right.” She couldn’t remember the specifics of her dream very well, but the impressions were clear as day. She knew that what she said was true.

“I hope you will forgive me for being skeptical of your capability to judge the character of the men you meet in your dreams,” Esar said.

Naomi clenched her teeth and glared at him. “You’re not being fair.”

“What did you tell him?”

Naom didn’t answer. Why should she give him an answer, when he obviously didn’t care to listen to what she had to say?

“Maybe we should get back on the road,” Kelsam said.

Esar jumped up, bumping the table. An empty glass fell over and rolled towards the edge, but he caught it, placed it back right-side up in the middle of the table, and strode towards the exit without another word.

The end of the meal was not the end of the interrogation. Once they’d gotten away from town and no one else was in earshot, Esar resumed grilling Naomi about Adrin and the dream until he’d extracted every bit of information that she could remember. It wasn’t enough to satisfy him.

“You are going to start keeping a dream journal,” he said.

“Seriously?”

“If you must wander around meeting people in the unconscious sea, we need to keep a record of it. Preferably when the memories are fresh.”

“I wasn’t wandering. He was just there.”

“Grant me patience, I am not cut out for this,” Esar said under his breath. “Do you understand that what you’re doing is not just dreaming, but venturing into the collective unconscious?”

“The what?” Naomi jumped up to walk along the top of a log that was lying next to the path.

“You are swimming in a sea of minds, and it is incredibly dangerous. That was the only thing the few sources that I was able to find on the subject made perfectly clear. You see, the scholars of Vas who attempted to study the subject by exploring the unconscious sea themselves had an unfortunate tendency to lose their minds.”

Naomi hopped down, and the landing jarred her.

“Now, the Ocean only lets her chosen ones in, and forbids them to speak about it. You, on the other hand, were able to relay to me almost everything that your friend said, limited only by the failings of your memory. We need to improve that memory. And you”—he sighed heavily—“need to be much more careful.”

“Can you do it too, then? Your dreams aren’t normal either.”

“It’s not the same phenomenon,” Esar said.

“What else can I do there?” Naomi asked.

“What else—no. No. Forget that I said anything. Go ahead and do whatever you want, mess around in the unconscious sea, destroy your mind and spare me the difficulty of teaching you things that I only half-know myself.”

“Okay, fine, I’ll be careful!” Naomi said. “I get it, it’s dangerous, you’re worried about me. But you don’t need to worry so much about Adrin. I just . . . I really think we can trust him.”

“Is he that handsome, then? Oh, that reminds me, I never asked you what he looks like. Sorry, mother!” He shouted that off to one side. “Still always forget something, don’t I?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with that!” Naomi blushed, because it wasn’t something that she could explain. The dream had just given her a sense of him, like someone she’d known for years. “Besides, I was thinking, what if it wasn’t the Ocean who killed your brother? What if it was my father? He was trying to get something—if the Ocean asked your brother to protect it, the way she asked Adrin—”

“Then she sent my brother to his death, and there’s hardly any difference,” Esar said.

“There’s all the difference!” Naomi cried. “But you’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you? You refuse to listen to me, you won’t trust me, and you don’t care how I feel.”

“You’re a child with no idea what it is you’re getting into,” Esar snapped.

“Only because you refuse to tell me what I need to know!”

Kelsam stepped between her and Esar. “Can you please give this a rest for right now?” he said.

Naomi didn’t stick around to hear if he said anything else. She took off at a run.

Why couldn’t she make Esar understand? Why did he get to declare himself her teacher at all, when it was obvious that he didn’t want to do it, and he didn’t even know what he was talking about, anyway? Why did he keep treating her like a child who couldn’t handle the truth?

Yesterday morning, when she woke up in another world, she’d been filled with hope. Maybe this was why she had never seemed to fit in on Earth. Maybe this was where she was supposed to be, in the world her father came from, wasn’t her magic proof of that? She’d been ready to run off and meet her destiny, with no plan and no clue what she was getting into.

Naomi had tried to tell herself that all she’d wanted was answers, but that wasn’t true. What she wanted was to feel . . . no, not special . . . wanted. Like she wasn’t constantly out of step with everyone around her, putting her foot in the wrong place—or in her mouth. Like she actually belonged somewhere. Instead she’d made as much of a mess in this world as in the other, and she was still running away from everything.

A fork in the road brought her to a halt. The road split, and Naomi didn’t know which path she was supposed to take. There was a sign, with arms pointing in each direction, but it was of no help to someone who was functionally illiterate.

Did it even matter if she stayed on the right path? She could go anywhere she wanted, do anything she wanted. She didn’t have to listen to Esar or to anybody else. She was something more than human. She was powerful, she was perfect, she was

Scared.

Naomi flopped down in the grass beneath the road sign. Things weren’t so different in this world, after all. She was still Naomi the Screw-Up. Naomi who always said the wrong thing, who tried too hard and just made things worse.

No, better nip that in the bud. She had to pull herself together. Didn’t everybody say she had so much potential if she could just “pull herself together”? She could do it. She would do it.

She took out her incand again and cradled it in her hands, letting just enough vitricity flow through her to keep it at a dim, constant glow. The others would catch up with her soon. She couldn’t be that far ahead, could she?

It was about ten minutes before Kelsam came running down the road towards her.

“There you are,” he panted. “Thank goodness.” He let his pack slip from his shoulders and settled in the grass beside her to rest.

“Where are Esar and Jason?” Naomi asked.

“Well, there was no way that Jason was going to keep up that kind of pace, so Esar stayed with him and I ran on ahead. I was worried that I wasn’t going to catch up with you, either. I’m glad . . . I’m glad you stopped.” He still hadn’t quite caught his breath.

“I’m sorry.”

“Esar’s doing his best,” Kelsam said. “I know he’s difficult sometimes, and he says things he doesn’t mean. It’s hard for him . . . it’s hard to explain. Sometimes his mind betrays him, but his heart is in the right place. He’s been through a lot. So please, try to be patient with him.”

“I’ll try.” Naomi knew what it was like to have a mind that sometimes betrayed you. “I’m not trying to be difficult, I . . . are you afraid of me?”

She’d meant to ask more about Esar, what he’d been through, but there was a wariness in Kelsam’s posture that she didn’t like.

Kelsam sighed. “A little.”

But if he was only a little scared of her, why did he look so green?