Expert marksman Lieutenant Quintus Stone squinted, marking, even in darkness, the surveillant spy in the near distance.
"Go back to bed, son."
A sleepy-eyed Nexius peered at him from behind the kitchen door.
Razor sharp vision or no, Stone was blind to the need, shining baldly from his son's eyes.
Nexius didn't retreat an inch, but let the door swing wide, exposing his small, nine-year-old frame, standing barefoot in sleep-rumpled pajamas. "Why are you on duty today?"
A chorus from the bullfrogs in the small pond outside emitted a guttural rumble. Nexius felt like a bullfrog now, as if something bad was gathering up in his diaphragm and any second, would erupt from his mouth.
He watched his father--deaf to questions--resume lacing his boots.
So the military leadership had tapped him for duty after all. They’d tapped him when he had promised Nexius they wouldn’t, though the boy didn’t quite trust his father not to volunteer. Widowers could volunteer, as long as their child had another caregiver, and no one inside the Guard would strictly enforce that condition. The Grater Barren Military Guard would always get her volunteers.
Stone pushed his beret forward on his head. “It’s only a drill, Son. I’ll be back by tomorrow afternoon.”
This was much more than a drill. Every Grater Barren child knew it, and they were hunkering down, bracing themselves for the impact.
“Today is the day.”
“A day like any other,” Stone denied, eyes veiling deceit. “And tomorrow night we'll laugh about our foolish superstitions.”
A lie. His father never laughed, with or without him, on or off-duty. “Stay. Please.”
Stone crouched down to his son’s level, but he was still too tall for a good eye-to-eye with him. “Son, we practiced. Follow your training. Listen to the broadcast and if there’s a warning, run to the shelter until I come.”
Nexius nodded through his tears.
“Shake?” Stone held up his massive hand.
The boy threw his arms around his father’s thick neck. More like a tree than a man. His legs were as big around as twin oaks, his shoulders spread broad as branches, and he held his son with as little warmth.
Nexius watched his father stalk off toward the city wall and he felt something. A touch of pride, though it didn’t fit with the breathlessness in his lungs, and the rapid palpitation of his heart, and the certainty that his father was marked for death. He fixed the memory in his mind, while his nightmares hollowed out his insides.
*
Months earlier, Nexius had sat at the kitchen table across from Aunt Sara, who sipped hot tea and told him of a dream, narrating as though it were something out of a story book—only it was a bad story, with no kind ending. His aunt spoke, only reluctantly, because she knew he would hear it from other sources, and she wanted him to ask her the questions. She wanted to absorb the shock of the tale’s impact.
Set down bluntly, the story was this: a prophetess of high rank and family had seen the city destroyed in a vision. That might be meaningless, but she’d prophesied truly before. That was enough for some citizens to pack up their belongings and venture into the desert.
Nexius sensed his aunt's eagerness to go as well. She said nothing of the sort, but couldn't quite hide her fear from him. And she was in good company. He'd noticed the unseasonable departure of the birds. The flight of the city's strays. In rural outskirt’s, cattle bawled in fenced fields, desperate to get out. But most people stayed. Even the prophetess who’d warned all to flee, remained behind to see it through.
*
Nexius spent the day measuring out breaths as he listened to the public broadcast. And when the warning alarm sounded its blistering whistle, it unlocked all the pent-up anticipation in his little body with a seismic jolt.
His aunt emerged from within rooms, her olive face washed pale as a vapor. The water in his cup trembled almost imperceptibly. Somewhere, a meteor had struck. His aunt slung him under her arm like a piece of baggage and hauled him to the shelter.
It was strange. The tremors from above ground were nothing to the rumbling beneath them. The shaking! And the sound! Thousands of screams called out, not in space, but in earth and through mud, stone and sand, all along the contours of the leylines. And the Earth trembled, and protracted, and smothered the cries, eclipsing the horror with protests all her own. Stamping out the voices with furious mass.
The Earth had her own score, and within minutes, she had settled it.
*
Giving birth was the most prosaic of all of the brave acts. Shea Serrated had dived in deep water for pearls. She'd raised a jaguar from a cub. Been honored for valor under fire. She was the kind of woman to tempt danger with a smile, while fleecing its valuables with sleight-of-hand. And though she could taunt Danger all she liked, Death had no such sense of humor. Death's payback would ensure her exit from life would be the least romantic possible, particularly for a woman of her talents.
A sharp cry of pain mingled with the desperate bawl of a newborn girl. The midwife caught the infant and held her up like a prize, proclaiming, “Small, but she cries big, I’ll say that for her.” But while she checked the baby over, a sense of dread clutched at her throat. Warm amber flashed, and the midwife gasped, then tossed the infant on the table as though she had burned her fingertips. “Admiral!"
Admiral Serrated Edge pushed into the sterile birth room; his eyes glassy with the wakefulness of three days. He took the warm lump in his hands, and with one sinking glance perceived. His accusing gaze found his wife—was she his wife? Words dropped from his tongue, coarse, and bitter. “How could you?”
His wife couldn’t answer. In that brief moment of neglect, Death took her.
*
Two full days lapsed before the Admiral's housekeeper dared speak a word to him. At last, she found him in the basement, behind a barricade of national label liquor bottles. She peeked through the barely cracked door--a pathetic approach the Admiral could only despise--but she coughed and got out a timid, “Sir--"
At last he sighed and conceded, “What?”
Instantly, Mrs. Cleaver’s mind failed her, but she’d rehearsed her speech enough to stutter it out. “You’ve had a terrible time—just, terrible. I loved your lady and I know what a shock her loss must be for you. And then there’s everything else with the uh....um, the…”
The Admiral applied pressure to the stinging sensation behind his eyes with his index finger and thumb. “Get to the point, Cleaver. What do you want?”
“I’m so very sorry, but I have to ask you to do something about the child. She’s ill.”
The Admiral exhaled a breath from his lungs. “Don’t attend to it too closely. If it dies; it dies.”
Mrs. Cleaver flinched against her master’s sentence for the child, and she couldn’t allow that to be the final word. Master or no master, a woman from Arrow’s countryside was a woman of tradition. She couldn’t silence the voices of her ancestors calling her attention, and pointing out things wrong. The death of any child would weigh heavy upon her conscience, but under the circumstances, conscience was the least of her worries. “It’s not for me to say, but I know the stories about Barronites. How they desecrate the leylines and invent abominations of creation—I don’t know what she’s capable of, being so young, but I don’t like to provoke anything from this kind of child. Your lady was powerful in her own right, and those eyes…I worry that you are housing a great risk.”
The Admiral’s right eye began to twitch. “Lies. War stories told and retold until they corrupt into complete rubbish. Mrs. Cleaver, you’re perfectly safe, and like I say, it looks as though it won’t live. Don’t interfere.”
These were false assurances, but the Admiral couldn’t risk losing his staff at this particular juncture. Better to offer her falsehoods than to chase her away with her tongue wagging. If it survived, he planned to move the child, and he would need Mrs. Cleaver to handle it. And the sooner the better.
He had to keep Shea’s baby out of sight, or his wife’s crimes would more than likely circle around to incriminate him. It would be a mercy, in a way, if it simply died of natural causes, but he wouldn’t lift his hand to harm it. If it lived, chances were good it would grow into an extraordinarily powerful ally.
“Ahem," Mrs. Cleaver stuck her head in once more. "It’s bad luck not to name a newborn, Sir. Whatever happens, she must not go unnamed. A nameless ghost is a terror! She’ll haunt you until you give her one!”
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The Admiral set down his tumbler. “Name it yourself if you want to keep demons at bay. I forbid you to speak to me again about for the remainder of the day.”
Mrs. Cleaver named the baby Sonia, after her own grandmother, who she remembered having also been small, frail, and despised.
*
The child Sonia, became an enemy of the State in one blink. Her treason was simple and elegant:
She opened her eyes.
To the entire State of Arrow, amber eye color was not merely that of an unfavored minority race, it was the distinct trait of as contemptible an enemy as any son or daughter of Arrow ever met with. Amber eyes, with perhaps the slight curve of the nose, belonged to a Barronite, a southern enemy now well beyond Arrow’s reach. There were no Barronites in Arrow, unless ingeniously disguised.
Sonia’s mother Shea died, which was just as well for her. Unfortunately for everyone else, she lived—surviving a difficult birth, jaundice, pneumonia, Cleaver’s punishments and the Admiral’s neglect. She survived all of this in a remote corner of the country where the Admiral owned a tumble down house on a stretch of fallow land. When he removed the child there, full knowing Sonia was not his, he commissioned the building of a large stone wall around the property. The stone fence was a heavy expense, but a necessary one. It had needed doing for a long time—not only to hide a state enemy. The Admiral had, or rather, his late wife had, discovered other things upon the property worth guarding.
*
Serrated Edge had grown almost to adulthood in the wild meadows of the countryside, on a subsistence farm owned by the Edges for nine generations, and many, many miles from Arrow City. A mixed affection, both cold and warm, bound the Edges to the land for hundreds of years, but to Serrated—the sentiment was uncomplicated loathing.
Serrated could and would not remain and live the blistered existence of his ancestors, and his father could not make him do it. Not yet a man, Serrated abandoned the farm with only the shirt on his back, and promptly enlisted in Arrow’s Navy.
When at last, Old Man Edge died, he bequeathed the entire tract of land to his only son Serrated, more from spite than for love of either his farm or his son. Serrated rarely visited the poisonous acreage and its crumbling house, but his wife Shea had dragged him out to the property against his own will, for their honeymoon, no less. And they’d spent a month cleaning out the old ruin and riding out over the acreage.
Shea had loved it—and perhaps for that reason alone, the land had opened to her its secrets. It was one of the few really good memories he had of her—that first expedition they had taken together across the homestead, on a cold clear afternoon in early spring.
“Your ancestors were smarter than you knew, Serrated,” she said, leaving the hard packed footpath. “Can’t you feel it?”
Smiling despite himself at her challenge, he said, “Feel what?”
“Don’t be dense. Look at this. Burial mounds. Mounds from before the foundation of Arrow, even, I’d bet, based on how much they’ve subsided. Flowing water from not one but two sources meeting just a few hundred feet away. The capital is due northeast of here, which means that this has to be on some kind of tributary to the Delta meridian. And what does all of this add up to, Edge?”
Now she had his attention. “All right, so I’m slow. They built mounds here because there’s a minor nexus somewhere close.”
“Tributaries of Delta and Alpha, I would guess,” she said. “I felt it as soon as we crossed the stream. I’ll bet the true nexus is somewhere within fifty feet of us.”
“Well, since we came from the southwest…” Serrated leapt lightly to the top of the stone, tumulus? and looked around. “The streams meet there, the oldest mounds are to the left so the nexus is probably drifting right…northeast is that way, so…”
Shea was already moving to where his finger pointed, only a few dozen feet to the east. “Yes, you’re right, I can…oh! Wow. Wow. Serrated, get over here.”
Scrambling down, he trotted to her. Her hair had already begun to rise from her back as she took in the leyline energy.
“It’s a very narrow vent,” she whispered. “No wonder the army survey missed it, but it’s pure.”
Now, just a few feet away, he could feel it too—the pure cold surge of a leyline vent, energy seeping from the lines of water and earth and fire into the air.
Shea’s discovery shook Serrated—not for the sake of his ancestral history, but for the sake of the lines. Arrowites soldiers—and even naval officers—recognized the significance of the lines. When both wind and coal failed, he’d powered his ships by their energy, and some of his best men had learned to internalize that power to their fighting prowess. Serrated, personally, had small talent for leyline adaptation, with the exception of wakefulness. He’d served more than one sleepless campaign at the helm of his ship. Arrowites used the power internally, but every nation differed in their means and application of ley energy. Those differences had fomented many a territorial dispute.
***
The Admiral should have surrendered his family’s land to the State with the lines’ first discovery. His silence was at best disloyal; at worst treasonous. But Serrated Edge had come of age at sea. Had learned to observe the change of the winds. Political winds had changed recently—had shifted against him. A key protector on the State Council had passed away, and was replaced by a personal opponent. This discovery on his father’s land might be enough to see him through many hazards if he could use it wisely enough. Shea had been an efficient manipulator of energy. And though his wife might not have cooperated with his borderline seditious scheme, her child would be different. Her child could be manipulated. And this child would share her mother’s gifts, and have other gifts besides.
The land which had been little better than a millstone around the Admiral’s neck would at last mean something to him. It would see him through the power reversals he had begun to fear. And Sonia would be the key to all of it.
*
A baby did not simply disappear. Sonia’s maternal grandmother, Mrs. Rhoda Wharncliffe, knew of the child—although she’d seen little of her daughter since her marriage, a hasty affair calling into question the baby's paternity, especially when considering the birth occurred only six months post nuptials.
Mrs. Wharncliffe hated the Admiral. Hate was a considered choice of words. And the emotion was mutual. (The Admiral had declined even to inform the old woman of her daughter’s hushed funeral.) For that, Mrs. Wharncliffe would never forgive him, and she wouldn’t let him get away with hiding her grandchild from her—not if it killed her.
She spent the following five years badgering Serrated. At last, he conceded to a secret meeting, probably rationalizing that she was on death’s door, and anyway, she'd threatened to hire a private investigator.
*
The three steep flights of stairs up to Sonia’s attic nursery should have been enough to finish Mrs. Wharncliffe by itself, but she was the stubborn kind, gripping her final strand of life with both hands. She had her reasons, and neither illness nor age was a match for an old woman with reasons. Mounting up the last stair, her heart thumping against her ribs, she muttered a silent oath on her dead husband’s grave and limped through the door Mrs. Cleaver held open for her.
Glancing around the spartan little closet, she found the child standing in the corner, clutching a threadbare blanket, eyes rounded in curiosity. The old woman had to stifle a gasp at the sight of those eyes. At last she spoke, “Come here, Sonia. That’s your name isn’t it? Come and let me look at you.”
The five-year-old approached cautiously, presenting herself with a composure not quite childlike. The woman hugged and kissed her on her forehead, though her late husband had been murdered by a man with those eyes. “Sonia, darling. I am your grandmother, your mother’s mother, Grandma Wharncliffe.”
The little girl simply stared at her, mercilessly unblinking, and the old woman couldn’t hold her gaze. “My dear, I’m permitted to visit you this once. So we have to make it count. I have something for you which may be a little help—though you must keep it a secret. Can you promise to do that for your grandmother?”
Sonia hesitated, but nodded.
From the pocket of her wool coat, the old woman produced an engraved gold bracelet, crude, and hand wrought.
Sonia turned it over and over between tender fingers, noting the tiny engraved words on its inside band. “What does it say?”
Her grandmother squinted at the bracelet. She couldn’t read it without her glasses. “As I recall, it says: Hold on. I’m coming. Kind of a crude work. Looks as though it was etched with a knife. Even so, I believe it had once been very precious charm for your mother. She gave it to me before she married the Admiral. I wasn’t sure why.” The old woman sighed heavily. “But it’s all I have of hers, and I think she would want you to keep it safe, and to be kept safe by it.”
“Who gave it to my mama?”
“I don’t really know, dear. She spoke very little about him.” In truth, she’d spoken nothing about him, but a mother knows when her daughter is in love with a man, and particularly when he’s the wrong man.
Sonia curled her fingers around the cold metal and cast a cynical glance at the old woman. “Much good it did her.”
Her grandmother sniffed. “Well now, your mother didn’t exactly hold onto it, did she? Maybe she breached her side of the contract when she gave it to me, but you mustn’t do that. You must not throw it away.”
“The Admiral will take it from me.”
The old woman gripped Sonia’s frail shoulders and this time, she met her unblinking gaze and held it. “Sonia. Dear. You must not let him take it from you.
Don’t ever let anyone take it from you. I believe it was meant for you. Can you hide it somewhere safe?”
Sonia blinked. “Yes.”
“Remember. Let the promise be true for you—that someone cares, and to hold onto life.”