Our transport coasted into High City, the most urban area in the province of Vallara—although nowhere near so populous as what our ancestors had left on Earth-One. We passed several multistory buildings of concrete, metal, and glass. A few other structures were wooden, but larger than anything in my home cluster. Here, the wooden exteriors had been stripped and stained, while most of the houses in my cluster still wore the bark of the trees that had made them.
People milled through the streets; some on foot, a few in wheeled black vehicles. We whizzed past so quickly that I didn’t have time to study them. It had been years since I’d been inside a city. We had few of them on Earth-Two, and no others as big as this.
We entered a green oasis, surrounded by a circle of manicured trees isolating the space from the rest of High City. A paved road led up to the Council building, cutting through concentric circles of gardens. The building sat by itself in the middle of the oasis.
The transport slowed and stopped. Outside was the stark-white rectangular structure that headquartered the Council.
I stared up at the three-story building. My fingers curled around the armrest. At a knock on the window, I jumped in my seat. Rey stared at me from outside the transport, his hand poised to rap on the window a second time. I loosened my white-knuckle grip and slid the door open.
Despite the warmth of the two suns shining just above the horizon, I shivered in the shadow of the Council. A light breeze lifted my ponytail off my neck. Rey nudged me from behind, and I realized I was dragging my feet. As much as I wanted to run screaming in the opposite direction, I pushed forward.
A crowd of around fifty people clustered in front of the steel fence that circled the building. From their clothing, I could tell they were Believers. They wore their full ceremonial garb, some in red robes and some in yellow. The robes represented the red sun Ra and the bright yellow Solaris, which they worshiped as gods.
Believers didn’t spend much time in High City, since it represented everything they found wrong with Nonbelievers. If there was any place in the world that rejected their gods more, or relied more completely on technology, it was High City. Mostly, we Nonbelievers stayed in our towns, and they stayed elsewhere in theirs.
It didn’t take long to figure out what the Believers were doing here. Most of them held signs: “Let the Gods Decide,” “We Welcome the End,” “Know Your Place.”
A redheaded teenager, probably only a couple years younger than Rey and me, held a sign that read, “Leave Our Planet.” I shook my head at that one. This was almost as much our planet as it was theirs. The Believers’ ancestors had been the first to leave Earth-One for Earth-Two. They’d been the immensely rich few who were willing to give up their earthly possessions for an interplanetary adventure. Upon arrival, they’d immediately adopted the two suns as their gods.
The ancestors I shared with Rey had followed only fifty years later, in the group that had won the lottery to come here. Fifty years hardly gave the Believers full rights to an entire planet.
Rey shoved people aside and muscled us through the crowd to the gate. I thought he might have pushed the redheaded teenager a little harder than necessary. The kid stumbled out of our way as we pressed forward. I wrapped my hands around the vertical rungs of the gate and peered inside. The crowd of Believers closed in behind us.
The double glass doors to the Council building opened. A tall man with dirty-blond hair stepped out. From twenty yards away, his eyes met mine.
Loken.
For only about the hundredth time that day, I fought to maintain control of my emotions. Loken’s lips pressed into a tight line as he approached, stern as usual. Instinctively, I stepped backward, crushing the toes of a small woman standing behind me.
“No respect for anything, you people,” she shot at me with a glare.
I glared right back at her.
“You know,” the woman grumbled, crossing her arms over her chest, “the whole point of coming to this planet was to get away from all the unnecessary tech on Earth-One. All the smog. All the fumes. Get back to nature.” Her voice rose to a shout. “But you people care nothing about the gods or the land! You destroy. You control. You . . .”
She continued her rant, but I tuned her out.
When Loken reached the gate, the latch popped open. The gate rolled to the left, leaving just enough room for one person at a time to enter. I slipped through, followed by Rey. The volume of the Believers’ mutters and occasional shouts increased. But many of them shuffled backward under Loken’s hard stare.
“Rey. Good to see you,” Loken said, his voice flat.
He and Rey shook hands and exchanged grim-looking smiles.
He turned his attention to me. It had been nine months since Loken had broken up with me after almost a year of dating. His duties came first, he’d said at the time. His hair had grown since then. It fell to the nape of his neck now and was shaggier than he used to keep it. I liked it.
For the most part, Loken’s face looked the same now as it had when we’d dated. Same defined cheekbones, same wide-set gray eyes, same full mouth. He used to smile with that mouth a lot, but not now.
“Hello, Ashara,” he said.
I grunted instead of responding. It stung to hear him call me by my formal name, instead of “Ash” or “Asha.”
“I didn’t expect things to go this way,” he added, shaking his head.
“What way?”
Loken waved for Rey and I to follow him toward the building. “I expected you to be out of danger during this whole thing. It kind of defeats the purpose of . . . other choices we made.”
“You mean choices you made.”
Sunlight glinted off something on the right side of Loken’s face. I looked closer. A thread of metal, a couple millimeters wide, made a swirl design at his temple. The metal tattoo inched down the side of his face and neck and disappeared into his shirt collar.
I grabbed his arm to hold him in place, and touched the side of his face. My light-brown skin contrasted with the soft tan of his. His cool skin chilled my fingertips—even cooler than I remembered.
“What have you done to yourself?” I asked.
He removed my hand from his face. As he did, light reflected off his forearm. I grabbed his wrist before he could pull it back. Turning the forearm over in my hands, I traced the metal tattoo with my fingertips. It swirled and twisted over his arms after emerging from his shirtsleeves. On the back of his hands, it matched the lines of his most prominent veins. On the front, it followed the creases in his palms.
Loken was a Bender, a metal-manipulator, and he felt more whole with metal nearby. He’d told me so a hundred times. I knew he took his practice seriously, but this seemed a bit extreme.
He let me examine him at first, just stared at me with gray eyes that were like the sky during a storm. Something fluttered in my chest. Loken yanked his arm back and resumed his walk toward the front of the building, this time at a faster pace.
“It was necessary,” he said.
When we reached the door, he held it open for me. “I’m going to lead your task force, Ashara. The others will be led by elders, but Elder Ethereal is otherwise occupied. The elders thought it would be best if I took an active role in your training, since I have some knowledge of how you think and what learning styles might work for you.”
“They couldn’t find an Ethereal to lead the group?”
“All members of the Bender task force are well trained, since they came into their abilities when they were kids. They don’t need me for training, and they have Elder Bender to lead them. You, on the other hand, need the best trainer the Council can give you.” He gave me a pointed look and then led us down a long hall, around a corner, and toward a back corner of the building.
I squinted until my eyes adjusted to the glaring white lights overhead. My nose wrinkled at the overpowering smell of cleaning supplies in the hallway. Not a scuff marred the white walls. I made a point to walk down the dead center of the hall, careful not to touch anything in this eerily clean building.
In soft tones, a female voice emanated from the walls, barely audible: “Please stay calm. Remain calm. Please stay calm. Remain calm.” I suspected it was meant to be reassuring, but it made me want to bolt back to my home cluster. People only ever told me stay calm when there was a legitimate reason not to be.
“So I’m an Ethereal?” I dreaded the answer in the pit of my stomach.
“Why else would you be here?”
“I told you,” Rey whispered.
“Shh.” I jabbed him with my elbow. “How is that possible? The ability would have manifested by now. And none of my ancestors were practitioners.”
“Maybe some were, and they just didn’t know,” Loken said. “If one or two generations never showed an elemental ability, the knowledge that you had practitioners in your bloodline might have gotten lost.”
“Or it was your biological father,” Rey suggested. “Was he a practitioner?”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. So what will I be doing in this task force?”
“I don’t have all the details yet.” Loken’s mouth twisted to the side in a look that shouted disapproval. “So far, all I’ve heard is that I’m to retrieve you from the gate and be your team leader.”
“What happened last timeline? What—”
“Here we are,” Loken said, pushing open a door at the end of the hall. I hesitated. Rey shoved me into the room.