Esar, Age 19

19 Years Ago

The alarm clanged as sunlight streamed in through the window of the laboratory. Morning at last. Esar tore the symbic apparatus from his head before he launched into his description of the last dream. He couldn’t bear to have the thing on for another moment.

Yanset recorded his dream in shorthand, her pencil moving swiftly across the page as she kept pace with the flow of words. She never showed excitement or disappointment at what she transcribed, but her lips always pulled into a thin, satisfied smile as she wrote.

“It’s data,” she told Esar once, when he asked her what she thought. “All valid data is good data.”

Once there was nothing left to tell, Yanset left the room so he could dress. Just dragging his sluggish body into a sitting position, legs dangling off the side of the bed, took all the effort he could muster. Esar sat there for a moment, rubbing the cold spot that the symbic apparatus always left on his forehead and trying to pull himself back into the daylight world.

It had taken some time for Dacrine Wyess and Etherret Maisk to untangle the mysteries of the symbic apparatus Alzyn had discovered buried in Norana. Meanwhile, Yanset Bharsalli and her team focused on untangling the mysteries of Esar himself. At first they’d just observed him as he slept. The first discovery was that Esar didn’t wake up every time he dreamed. Ever since then, an alarm woke him every time his eye movements indicated that a dream was ending, so the dream could be recorded and no precious data would be lost.

Esar hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in almost two years.

Fleeting days and long nights blurred together in a never-ending cycle. He never felt fully rested, but he got along all right in spite of that, even achieving high marks in his university classes. Sleep was even less restful now that he was wearing the Bhadrati symbic apparatus every other night, as Dacrine made adjustments based on Yanset’s notes for reasons that Esar didn’t have the education or energy to fathom.

Was it doing anything? Was it making a difference? Yanset said it was too soon to draw any conclusions. They were still collecting the data.

All that data inside Esar weighed down his limbs as he changed his clothes. He felt marginally less data-laden after he splashed water on his face in the bathroom attached to the lab, but he was still groggy enough when he left that it took a moment to figure out who the young woman waiting outside the door was, and why she had just engulfed him in an enthusiastic hug.

“Esar,” she said, her tone scolding but her eyes dancing with a suppressed smile. You told me you weren’t interested in women, but now I find out you’re sleeping with one every night? How dare you!”

Esar knew that Meliand Caidry was in Thaliron. He’d been meaning to get around to seeing her for . . . weeks? Months? Yet the surprise of seeing her now shook him loose a bit, and he replied before he could think better of it.

“It’s not even always the same woman,” Esar said. “Graduate students, men and women, coming and going at all hours and sticking weird things on my head. You’re not jealous, are you?”

“I’m terribly jealous.” Meliand smiled broadly. “How do I get in on that action?”

Esar shook his head, but he returned her smile. Meliand had changed since he last saw her four years ago. She hadn’t grown any taller—Esar had a few inches on her, now—but she had grown up. The long braid was gone. Her dark brown hair hung straight to her chin, with a heavy bang cut straight across her forehead. More notably, she was dressed in a red soldier’s tunic and black leggings, the uniform of a candidate for the Ethereal Guard. Add two gold stripes and it would have been identical to the outfit Esar’s stepfather wore.

“So, congratulations,” Meliand said. There was a spring in her step as they walked down the hall.

“Huh?” Esar had to struggle to keep up, both with her pace and with her train of thought.

“Well, you’re a big brother now, aren’t you?”

“Why are you congratulating me for that? I had nothing to do with it.”

Meliand laughed. “I . . . I suppose you didn’t.”

“Anyway, I ought to be congratulating you,” Esar added quickly. “You’re where you always wanted to be, aren’t you?”

“Not yet,” Meliand said. “Still just a trainee.”

“Not officially, but it’s only a matter of time. You’re just waiting until they make an arrow that can scramble a construct.”

“Yes, waiting and waiting, because there’s some other project that’s been eating up all of Dacrine’s time,” Meliand said. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

“Sorry. I can’t imagine what would be more important than that.”

They bought dosas from Esar’s favorite vendor in the university commons. The cook knew his order by heart, but aimed a quizzical look his way when Meliand ordered hers plain. The university was full of southerners with fragile palates, but they rarely ordered anything from her stall.

It was still early enough in the morning that the air was pleasant. A Thaliron summer could be brutal, especially if you weren’t used to it, but the mornings were mild enough. Esar and Meliand sat on a bench shaded by the history building and ate their breakfasts, talking between bites, just a little bit about everything without going too deep into any one subject. Meliand asked if he was seeing anyone, and Esar laughed.

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“You know who I’m seeing. The entire vitricial research department.”

“Ooh, sounds like it’s getting serious,” Meliand said.

“Very,” Esar said.

“Seriously, though—I was kind of worried about you. Danthan told me—well, I know you’re doing a lot right now. Are you all right?”

Was he? Things weren’t so bad. Not living under the same roof as his mother helped, and doing something useful with his power helped, too. He’d also gotten better at pretending things were fine and normal in the past few years, so even when things weren’t “fine,” he could act more or less as if they were.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Esar said.

Meliand updated him on some of their old friends and acquaintances from Norana. Kelsam’s name came up, but Esar moved the conversation past him as quickly as possible. It was almost time for his first class of the day. Besides, he already knew everything about Kelsam’s life from his letters, which arrived with steadfast regularity once a week or so. Esar kept expecting them to lapse, but Kelsam was a devoted correspondent, and had kept up the pace of letters with few interruptions over the past four years.

There wasn’t anything momentous in those letters. Kelsam wrote about whatever was foremost in his mind, which usually involved gardening. He could write a whole page about a single seedling he was cultivating, illustrated with tiny, precise drawings in the margins. Esar wasn’t particularly interested in plants but he savored every word of Kelsam’s letters, reading them over and over again, because they were what brought him closest to feeling at peace.

Esar wasn’t as diligent about writing back regularly, but whenever Kelsam commented about how busy Esar must be, it stung more than a straightforward rebuke. Every month or so, then, Esar poured everything out in a letter that ran on for pages and pages, and when he sent it off, some of the weight seemed to lift from his shoulders.

He’d seen Kelsam only once since leaving Norana. Two years ago Kelsam came to Thaliron to visit his sister Thady, and made time in the trip to see Esar, but he hadn’t traveled alone. His girlfriend had accompanied him, and the visit had been excruciating. Oh, Esar did his best not to show it, to pretend that he was moving on and everything was fine, but he felt a fierce satisfaction months later when her name stopped appearing in Kelsam’s letters. When a male name started appearing instead, it came as a fresh blow that Esar hadn’t anticipated—for some reason, there had been a comfort in knowing he was the only man Kelsam had cared for—but the name soon lost its sting. Kelsam never wrote about his loves in any great detail, and the occasional sour note didn’t spoil the missives. Esar was glad, at least, that Kelsam didn’t seem to be suffering in his absence.

More than two weeks had passed since Esar last received a letter from Kelsam. It wasn’t the first time Kelsam had gone so long without writing, but it was unusual. There had been no reply since Esar wrote to tell him about the birth of his brother Raen. Had he said something wrong? Misinterpreted something? Should he send another letter?

***

Nightfall came again all too soon. Yanset applied the four sensors to Esar’s head, then signaled to the student at the console to start the recorder. A reel whirred softly, unrolling a wide strip of white paper tape for two tiny styluses to trace lines across it. One line was red, one blue, and on the paper, the ambient currents and Esar’s own vitricity intertwined. Cutting-edge technology, developed by some of the greatest minds of his time, just to be hooked up to Esar’s head.

“Again?” Esar had been looking forward to a night without the symbic device, but Yanset had it out and ready to place on his head. It was a haphazard-looking thing now, with pieces and wires added by Dacrine to the sleek circlet they had found beneath the ground in Norana.

“Got a request from Captain Halwer,” Yanset said. “It’s been seven months since the last seal broke, and we’re due for another construct yesterday. We need to do everything we can to improve your chances of seeing where it’ll break out.”

Esar groaned but made no further complaints. He placed the apparatus on his head, Yanset made some adjustments, then ticked something off on her clipboard.

“You’re feeling like a failure,” she said. “Don’t. We’ve collected invaluable data from you already. It will save more lives than your unreliable dreams.”

Esar didn’t answer. She had inferred his thoughts accurately enough. Halwer’s request felt more like an order, and it wouldn’t have been necessary if Esar had just dreamed what he was supposed to dream by now. They’d been lucky the last few times, between him and his mother, but depending on random dreams wasn’t enough. There could be no more surprises. No more Calbomines.

Yanset turned off the lamp and left, but her student remained at the console, illuminated by steady blue status lights, on call for the first dream. Tired as Esar was, it wasn’t easy to find sleep under this kind of pressure. He could never get used to the chill from the shisao cabochon against his forehead. For all that it was little bigger than his thumbnail, it was a priceless artifact that held mysteries generations of scientists had tried and failed to comprehend. The shisao never got any warmer, always sapping heat from his body but never absorbing it. He could ignore it for a while, but then he’d shift and change its position just enough that it sent a shiver through him all over again.

Esar had studied everything he could about the constructs. He ran through lists like mantras to focus his mind: the types of constructs, the nearest towns to where they’d been sealed, the landmarks to watch for in his dreams. Once he’d gone through them all, he started over again. He made it through a third round and started a fourth before he finally drifted off to sleep.

A woman in a blue tunic waded out into the lake, waving frantically at a fishing vessel that was sailing in toward the dock. Esar saw her face as clearly as if she were standing right in front of him. The woman was young, not much older than Esar, and she had striking eyes: golden yellow around the pupil, turning to green at the edge of the iris. Her hair must have been tied in a knot at some point, but the wind had torn half of it loose, and the strands whipped about wildly despite her best efforts to tuck them into place.

A man leapt from the boat that was coming into the harbor, apparently impatient to see the woman who was waving to him. When he reached her, they embraced, and Esar focused his attention elsewhere. He hated when his power made him an unintentional voyeur, but at least he had some degree of control over where he—

Something made a terrible grumbling sound. An animal? Esar had never heard anything like it. The couple in the lake heard it too, looking around for the source of the noise.

High on the cliff above them something terrible had awoken. Esar’s attention drew him closer to the beast—the construct—which was like none he’d seen before. He knew from his reading that it was called a tiger, but it didn’t look much like the mythical orange-and-black striped creature in storybooks.

The tiger was made of the same black iridescent material as all constructs. It had no eyes, but it swung its enormous head on a neck too long to belong to any real animal, as if it was looking for something. It paused at the edge of the cliff and stripes of lightning coursed down the sides of its sleek body. Its long tail swung around like a whip. Its gaze—if it had a gaze—seemed to settle on the couple, who were running away down the beach. The tiger leapt down from the cliff, claws digging deep furrows in the wet sand, and gave chase.

The movements of its legs didn’t seem to quite match up with how far or fast it traveled, and the way its legs bent made a mockery of nature. Esar wanted to scream, to redirect the construct’s attention from its targets, but he was a mere observer, disembodied and helpless. That’s enough, he thought. I’ve seen enough. He watched as the claws tore through the woman’s blue tunic, saw the blood, heard the screams.

Wake up, he willed himself. Wake up wake up wake up—

“Dhanlir!” Esar cried. He repeated the name, hoping that it made it through to the waking world.

The student attendant shook Esar awake, not bothering with the alarm. Esar met his wide, frightened eyes in the darkness.

“You were screaming—” the student began.

“Dhanlir,” Esar repeated. “We don’t have much time. The dream was so clear—”