12

ELAERIAN

 

SILENCE FALLS INSIDE the Barrier as her words end.

In that construct cave, I realize I have never heard the Myth before, not like this, and I can only stand there for a few seconds as lines continue to reverberate through my aleimi like shivers of live current. The words themselves hold a kind of light that doesn’t look like light to me; I feel it as presence laced with emotion and images. I let them wash over me, waiting for some kind of...I don’t know.

Understanding, maybe.

Something that makes me feel like I know something I hadn’t before.

It’s not there...not in a way that makes sense to my mind.

Tarsi breaks the solemnity and chuckles.

You see? she says. Female. In the old myths, the Bridge is always ‘she,’ never ‘he.’

But I’m going over specific words now, in my head.

The myth, I say. It kind of implies that I’m not, I mean, that I’m not actually—

You are not Sark, she agrees.

Her words are matter of fact, as if she were relaying a fact of little consequence.

...Not second race. You are first race. All intermediary beings are first race. We call them Elaerian. Second race is Sarhacienne, “Second”...Sark. The third calls itself human. The old names for them are immaterial now...

I hear only part of this. I repeat her words back to her, like a myna bird...as if hearing them again might change her mind about what she’d said.

I’m first race, I send. Like actually a different species? Biologically?

At Tarsi’s raised light eyebrow, I see red and orange sparks course through the veins in my aleimi.

I ask her again, Not only am I not human...I’m not even Sark?

She smiles. You were aware you had differences from us. The light in your eyes...it is visible to humans. Your blood is not like ours. There are other things. You are telekinetic...that is not a Sark trait. You came to physical maturity much too fast to be Sark. You were able to adapt your early growth cycle to that of humans, to pass...Sarhaciennes cannot change their biology to accommodate their environment. Raised among humans, they continue to resemble very young human children until well past their twentieth year.

She gauges my eyes.

It strikes me that she has converted our appearances to match those of our physical bodies. It happened so seamlessly that I barely noticed.

She adds, You likely have other differences we are not aware of. Much of our knowledge of your race has been lost...

But I am stuck in a mental loop that I can’t seem to escape.

Something Revik said to me once repeats in my head.

...It is illogical to have an opinion about what species one is.

Of course, when he said it, I thought he was talking about his own species.

But who gave birth to me? I ask.

She shrugs with one hand, seer-fashion.

Isn’t that kind of an important detail? I say.

It is said that Elaerian reproduce differently than Sarks and humans...that they are able to manifest their offspring inside the physical embryos of other beings...from the Barrier. It is also said that some always live among us, but keep their presence unknown. Some say they are able to appear here just long enough to breed and then expire. It is possible your parents did any one of these things. It is equally possible you birthed yourself from the Barrier...or were born of a Sark, and the difference is in your aleimi.

That makes absolutely no sense, I send, fighting anger.

She shrugs again. I cannot tell you what I do not know.

Wait, I say, holding up a hand. Revik said my blood is a ‘type’ among Sarhaciennes. He said it’s rare, but that it does occur...

Her smile is patient.

Is it so important, to be the same race as us? She quirks an innocent eyebrow. Or is it to him you are so determined to be alike to?

Averting my gaze from those rock-still eyes, I force myself to pause, to think.

Maybe, I concede. Or maybe it’s just a little much, thinking I knew what I was...twice...only to find out I was wrong both times. Is this how the elders came to think I was the Bridge? Those biology things?

She makes another of the ‘more or less’ gestures.

The markers in your aleimi are even more telling, she sends. If you were more accustomed to looking at people by their aleimi, rather than by physical appearance, you would realize there are some distinct differences in yours.

So Revik knew?

She gestures affirmative. Most certainly he knows. He conducted the final confirmation.

Confirmation? Meaning what?

Tests of your aleimi, she sends, waving dismissively with one hand. You would not have noticed these tests, not then...but it is partly why you were able to bond with him so easily. She smiled. In a sense, you already knew one another. Far more than you probably realize...

I feel like I am back on the ship, discovering all over again what he’d done to me behind my back. Even now, he keeps me in the dark about how much he knows.

I found out on the ship, after practically prying it out of him at gunpoint, that he’d invaded my privacy numerous times while protecting me for the Seven. He’d been through every room of my apartment in San Francisco, as well as my mom’s house, my brother’s, my friends’. He’d had weapons stashed at my place...and at mom’s. He’d created a hiding place in my ceiling for in case he ever had to get me out of there without using the door. He’d read my mind and the minds of just about everyone with whom I came in contact regularly.

He went through my drawings, medical records, school records, police records, all of my online accounts. He had open access to anything I did on the net, any VR portals I visited...any porn I looked at or read. He’d conducted surveillance on my work and school, my bosses, my family...

Why didn’t he tell me? I say finally.

She sighs. You wish me to decipher the intricacies of my nephew’s mind?

Feeling my anger rise, she clicks again, softer.

...There are many possible reasons, she says. To avoid frightening you. To avoid losing your trust so early in your relationship. Disclosures of this type tend to operate better in stages. That you are the only known living representative of your species...and that you did not realize because you can shape-shift to match your environment...is not comfortable information, either to give or to receive.

Thinking further, she made a dismissive motion with one hand.

...And, yes, the telekinesis alarmed him a bit.

At my silence, her amusement returns.

...He also did not expect to find himself married to you within a week of having awakened you. She chuckles, her humor sending ripples through the Barrier space.

...I imagine a lot more of his attention was consumed with determining how to relay that particular piece of information to you, Bridge Alyson.

Still smiling, she studies my eyes.

I feel a faint worry under her humor, though. Like Chandre, she’s concerned she’s harmed my view of Revik. This irritates me, too.

Alyson, she sends, before I can say anything. ...We are simply aware that, given your current condition, you are likely to overreact to any information about your mate. In this case, it is completely unwarranted. He was under strict guidelines on approach and disclosure. He asked us, many times, for permission to approach you directly so that he might start training you. He was refused, repeatedly...mainly because we did not know how violent your awakening would be. Blinded, you were safe...relatively speaking.

I pause on this.

So why didn’t Vash tell me? I ask. Once I got here?

I am telling you, she says.

Fighting to keep my temper in check, I pull a childhood trick I used when I got angry at my mother.

Holding up my hand, I stare at the reconstructed flesh.

It works, in part. I am amazed at the detail...down to a cut I got that morning on the helicopter door, bruises on my knuckles from the fight with Maygar.

I wonder if I added those details, of if she did.

You did, she says. You see? It is one of your gifts...to become like those around you. You have only been partially successful at this in the human world.

Again, I remember something Revik said to me.

Like blood on a white sheet. They notice you, then make up a reason why...

Thinking aloud, I say, Mom said I stared too much. Later it was that I flirted, or that I said the wrong things...but honestly, it didn’t seem to make any difference what I did or didn’t do.

At Tarsi’s smile, I look up at the painting on the rock wall, focusing on the figures painstakingly drawn there. I count twenty-five, maybe thirty forms in the painting other than the two she’s already said were the Bridge.

They’re all intermediary beings? I say. All Elaerian?

She points at particular images.

The first stands below the image of the sword bisecting the sun. He is a boy, holding the blue sun in his arms and laughing. His eyes are kind, startlingly innocent.

Death, she says. You know him as ‘Sword’ or ‘Sword of the gods’...Syrimne d’ gaos.

Her finger moves to another of the forms, a female figure in all red, woven into and standing behind the image of the sword and sun.

War, she says. Also cataclysm. Her finger moves again, to a figure made of bones, but in the shape of a crow-like bird.

Rook, she says. He is also called famine...the starver of souls. She glances at me. These are imperfect translations, of course...but your knowledge of old Prexci is insufficient at this time, so I am providing the English. It is only roughly equivalent—

I know those names, I say, interrupting her.

Looking around a little uneasily, I remember a conversation Revik and I had, what seemed a million years ago now, about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the Bridge.

He didn’t call them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, of course. That had been my sarcastic contribution to the conversation.

I’d blown him off at the time, thinking he was nuts. But in the cave, I am pretty sure Tarsi just listed off three of their names, one after the other: Death, War, Famine. The fourth was their leader, who rode a white horse...that was the one no one could agree if it was supposed to be evil or some kind of force for good. I looked at the images of the Bridge.

In both, the figure was dressed in all white.

Great. That was perfect.

When I look at Tarsi again, she is smiling, but her eyes are watching mine.

It is not so simple as the humans portray it, she sends gently. Let us simply say for now that much was lost in the translation. She gestures towards the painting with one hand. What else do you see here, Alyson?

I re-focus on the images in front of me.

It’s like chess, I say. I point to the image of a centaur in a helmet, carrying a sword. He wears chain mail, his face fierce. Knight? I say.

She nods. Warrior...Knight is also good.

I point to an image of an older, Saint Nicholas-looking man wearing a crown. King? I ask. When she gestures ‘more or less,’ I point to his female counterpart. ...Queen?

Again, she makes the ‘more or less’ gesture with her hand.

We call the King ‘Shield,’ she says. The queen is ‘Arrow.’ But essentially you are right. They are stabilizing forces. They provide structure when it is needed...

Shield? I stare up at the kingly form. Galaith then, right?

She gestures assent. That is correct.

So he was good?

She gestures dismissively. Good, bad...at base he was neither. He aligned with the Dreng, Alyson, so no, he was not good. Her light eyes focused on mine, and their complexity made me stare. ...As with Syrimne, she added. It did not have to be that way. And he still served his purpose...more or less. There were darker consequences to that stability than were strictly necessary. But he did help to thwart that early attempt at bringing the Displacement...prior to his recruitment by the Dreng.

I stare up at the face of the being there, and imagine I can almost see him in it.

He, too, is your brother, Bridge Alyson, she added. It is part of why you were tasked with curbing his excesses...

I gave a wry smile. If by ‘curbing his excesses’ you mean bringing about his death, well I guess I fulfilled my task well enough...

The old seer merely shrugged, her eyes focusing back on the mural.

Not all of your brothers and sisters made it to the human chessboard, she says. But many make their appearances in other places...

She points to the image of a dancing rabbit.

Fool, she says. Trickster.

I point to the image of a turtle, under the earth. That one looks familiar, too...what is he?

Wisdom, Tarsi says. And traditionally, it is she. She points to a being I hadn’t seen, woven into the fabric of the oceans. ‘Dragon’ would be close in English. Not quite that...not quite fish. Perhaps it is more accurate to call him ‘Birth.’ They are male and female, creation...closer to the Chinese meaning of dragon than that of European humans. Some of these beings do not incarnate down here in an individualized form, Bridge Alyson...

I look around at the other images. We haven’t covered a third of them.

Do you understand now? she says.

Understand? I look at her. Understand what?

She smiles, and her smile is patient.

Why Death is your responsibility, she says.

I DIDN’T SLEEP well that night.

Piled high in furs, mostly yak and llama, I didn’t want for warmth, and the bed wasn’t too hard.

It was him. The separation pain came back as soon as I closed my eyes.

Mixed with that came a paranoia I hadn’t experienced since he first left for Egypt. I knew it was irrational. Whatever Revik did to skirt the truth when it inconvenienced him, I’d never known him to lie to me outright. He’d made it pretty clear he expected monogamy from me, and that he had a fairly all-encompassing definition of what that meant. Besides, if he wanted some before I got back, he was smart enough to do it somewhere other than Seertown.

That train of thought didn’t help my mood much, though...nor did the realization that I’d left him with a hell of a hard on, not unlike both times he’d turned to others in the past.

Somewhere in all my worrying, I did fall asleep though.

I know this, because I was awakened by the girl the next morning.

I finally got a name out of her—Hannah, of all things—right before she handed me a cup of that steaming brown drink. I dragged myself out of the pile of furs only to be handed another mug, this one holding the requisite yak-butter tea. That, and the freezing cold air coming through the open windows didn’t improve my mood much. One lovely thing about seers in Seertown was that most were Westernized enough to have a healthy appreciation for espresso.

Tarsi didn’t waste time.

After I stretched and sluggishly pulled on clothes, I felt a nudge in my mind. She sat on the same rug that lay on the flagstones by the fireplace. Looking down, I noticed the rug was a significantly smaller and less elaborate version of what I’d seen in the Pamir cave.

She patted the wool, her eyes pointed.

Dragging myself to my feet, I walked over to sit cross-legged beside her.

I tried to ignore the tendrils of light I felt encircling me tentatively from somewhere else.

He was in bed. I felt him lying there, staring up at a whitewashed ceiling...and it struck me suddenly, it didn’t feel like Seertown. I felt a whisper of panic in my chest, but backed off before it fully blossomed, trying to keep it from him.

I glanced at Tarsi, still feeling him in the edges of my light. I knew he wasn’t asleep, and that was enough to make it difficult to keep my focus.

I watched Tarsi motion to Hannah, who crouched by the stone fireplace, stirring something in a hanging iron pot. Hannah smiled at me shyly with those white, straight teeth as she handed me a second bowl of the coffee-like drink.

“So where do we start?” I asked Tarsi.

Tarsi held up her hand. As soon as she unfurled her fingers, I...

 

...am someplace else.

I stand in a field.

It is so still and peaceful I am startled, almost overwhelmed by the tranquil beauty of its isolation. I had expected violence, I guess...scenes of war, people shouting or screaming.

Instead, a shockingly bright sun pierces the clouds, nearly blue-white in color.

I am alone. Mountains rise in high walls on all sides of where I stand. Tall grasses wave at my thighs, floating down a hill and around a lake so pale it appears to be made of ice. Above the lake, more jagged, snow-covered peaks cut the horizon.

The world feels different...more alive. Or maybe less broken somehow, and grief fills me as I realize the version of Earth I live in now is dying.

Cries break the silence and the wind fills with the dark stutter of birds’ wings, more than I’ve ever seen in one place. I shield my eyes so I can watch them bank and wheel overhead.

Bees pollinate wildflowers around grasses that brush my thighs. I see those scruffy, donkey-like horses that the old humans call Kiang standing in clusters, heads bowed against the breeze. Then, in the midst of all of this peace and tranquility...

...I hear a shout.

I drop to a crouch.

I am somewhere else, deep inside a dark-green forest. Dense trees close in around me, blocking light, leaving it cathedral dim. Moss-covered rocks litter the sloped earth, and water clings to the air, breathing life. I feel I might be in Asia still, possibly even close to where I stood before, but the stillness in the air is broken by another yell.

“Get him!”

A lithe form sprints past me down the forest floor, whooping as he leaps a fallen trunk. More figures bound by; they fan the hill in a jagged line, rushing headlong down it, shouting.

They are children.

“Head him off, Stami! Don’t let him get too far ahead!”

The owner of the voice stands above me on the hill, closer than I know until his words bring my eyes abruptly to where he perches above. His rounded cheeks and pink lips belong to someone maybe twelve years of age, but his chest is already barrel-shaped, his hands large enough to cover my face. Although his eyes and bone structure are vaguely Asian in appearance, his hair is as white as chalk, his irises a deep black.

He is too large for his age, I think. There is something wrong with him.

He’s not quite right...

“Head him off!” he shouts. “Stami! Don’t let him get to those thorns!”

I see their prey as I follow his stare. Darker than the trees, the smaller form moves swiftly, flicking between trees like a deer. He runs silently but all-out, his entire being focused, an inhaled breath. Unlike the other children’s, his feet are bare. His skin is dark. Black hair sticks to his head with sweat.

I let my eyes follow his winding trail through the trees, and after the barest pause I am seeing through him, through his eyes...then his mind.

He knows these woods. If he can shake Stami, the fastest of his pursuers, he might get away in the thicket at the other side of a small stream...if he has even a few seconds’ lead on him…he might make it. He has done it before.

I think of Brer Rabbit and his briar patch...when a tall boy slants out from behind a cluster of brush and leaps, catching the smaller boy’s shirt. He drags at him, flinging him sideways and into the dirt, tripping his legs like a wolf bringing down a deer. They tumble in pine needles and moss and mud by the edge of the stream.

They struggle. The black-haired boy fights to get up, but the taller boy grabs his hair, clothes, his ankle...slowing him down until the others close the gap. A few jump into the fray with abandon, flattening the black-haired boy in the mud just a yard from the stream.

I hear a cry from him. It is heartbreaking...a defeated cry.

They jerk him upright.

He reaches his feet, panting, alone. He wears the aloneness like a cloak, and it pulls at me, resonating with my separation pain. I cannot help but feel for him. I want to intervene, to pull him from the hands of these other children, who feel like animals to me, randomly cruel, endlessly hungry. I want to protect him, but I can’t reach him through the time that stands between us.

I am beside them now. My light feet disappear inside a cheerful stream filled with colorful stones. The place is so beautiful that the fear vibrating the air doesn’t compute...it doesn’t belong in this cathedral of sun and leaves.

The dark-haired boy stands unsteadily, his leg hurt. Three larger boys hold him while he struggles, each a head taller or more. Almond eyes look out from behind his shaggy, black hair. His face is round and bruised, his skin tanned from long exposure to sun. He looks tougher somehow than the others, like he’s spent more nights outdoors...like he’s gone longer without food. The boy who first tackled him cocks his fist and punches him inexpertly in the mouth. The same boy, who I know is called Stami, hits him again.

Then, the white-haired giant arrives.

He does the talking. I don’t know what language they speak, only that, if I wasn’t in the Barrier, I wouldn’t understand them.

“Lesson one, Nenz.” He clicks his tongue in feigned sympathy. “What happens when shitblood worm-fuckers break rules?”

The dark-haired boy stares at Stami, then at the giant kid with the white hair. My vision flickers back and forth, from his to my own. Again, I want to stand between him and this strange, albino boy with the cruel, deep-black eyes. But this has already happened. It already exists out there, as a recording in time.

Gerwix, my mind whispers. This is the giant’s name.

Gerwix, laughs. “Nenz! Is it my birthday? Are you giving me an excuse to beat you until you piss blood? Do you love me so much, runt?”

The dark-haired boy’s face flinches.

For him, I don’t get a name, not apart from what the giant calls him. Yet somehow, I know he is the one Tarsi and I have come for. It scares me that he is so real, so vulnerable.

“I didn’t break any rules,” he says sullenly.

“You were talking to her. We saw you.”

Stami jerks a knife from a sheath on his leg, holds it to the younger boy’s face, showing it to him. Gerwix, the white-haired giant, smiles.

“You want her, Nenz? Is that what you were doing? Trying to get into her clothes?”

Stami, the taller, handsome kid lays the knife on his bare arm.

Fear returns to the darker boy’s face. “No! No...I wasn’t doing anything!”

“Liar. She’s Stami’s girl. Leave her alone.”

“She talked to me!”

Stami presses down viciously with the knife and the dark-haired boy screams. Stami keeps cutting, twisting the blade up his arm and shoulder to his neck. The dark-haired boy screams again, struggling against their hands. Blood runs down his side, wetting the top of his pants.

A few others laugh, but their laughter is nervous now, tense.

Only Gerwix’s chuckle sounds real.

Stami’s voice is lower, and I hear real anger there.

“Your uncle pays girls to lie with you, freak. Stick with the unwillings, leave the real girls to us...”

The white-haired boy steps forward.

Still smiling a little, he motions for Stami to lay off with the knife.

Stami hesitates before pulling it off the darker skin. He makes a show of wiping the blade on his pants, as if he got it dirty skinning an animal.

Gerwix’s laugh is ugly; it belongs to someone much older.

“Don’t be greedy, Stami.” He motions them to turn the boy around, untying the front of his pants. “I think we can give Nenz what he wants...”

The laughter grows nervous again. But despite some shuffled feet, no one leaves. Two back off as they stare, fascinated as the white-haired boy grabs the smaller one by his hair, forcing him to his knees.

They are already ripping down his worn pants when my mind catches up with what is happening. I just have time to see the dark face grow resigned as he is forced prone over a log. Even with his head and arms bleeding from the knife, he fights them, his thin arms and legs jerking and writhing in a futile, animalistic panic. Despite his struggles, it is clear that this ritual is familiar, that it’s been played out already, that it will play out again, that he lost the moment Stami caught his shirt and dragged him into the mud...

 

I snapped out.

I sat cross-legged on the rug, fighting an overwhelming urge to cry, to beat at the old woman sitting across from me with my fists.

Instead, I sat without moving on the rug, trying to breathe, breathing too much, staring at her clear eyes until I finally had to look away.

It had been cruel, what she’d shown me, the kind of brutal animalism that always crushed some part of me...but it wasn’t only that. The grief coming off that boy, the awareness behind his eyes, had been more than I could feel...or even acknowledge all at once.

A part of me had been crushed inside his small frame, and I couldn’t get out.

That part held more feeling than I’d felt in every day I’d lived put together, even with my dad’s death to MS, my mom being murdered by Terian, losing Revik, thinking Jon and Cass were gone. It was enough emotion to break someone’s mind, if they lived in it long enough.

Tarsi studied me carefully.

“You see, Bridge?” she said. “Killing him not so easy as you think.”

I still fought to breathe. “That was him? Syrimne?”

“Long time ago, yes. When he was whole.”

“Whole.” I looked at her, fighting my way through emotion that still contorted my light in knots, causing spasms in my arms and neck. I was still trying to process it when, realizing I couldn’t, I let it run through me instead, like waiting for a storm to pass.

After another moment, my voice was almost normal.

“What does that mean?”

“He was broken, Bridge.” Her eyes still studied mine, her scrutiny on the surface. Death is just one facet...a role, traded from life to life, possibly even among different beings. Much like Bridge.

Her eyes sharpened, looking for understanding.

...The person moderates the role...keeps it in check. On its own, Death can be incredibly destructive. It is important that you remember that boy. He was whole once. He was a real person. Death is a hard path...the hardest of all.

A kind of dread washed over me as I took in her words.

We’d only just started. That glimpse of childhood brutality had been the prelude to our hunt, not the hunt itself. It was simply her way of introducing me to our quarry.

I could feel from her that it was also a test.

She wanted to know if I could handle this.

Thinking about how that one scene likely fit into the longer timeline of this being she called Death, I honestly didn’t know if I could.

Again, I remembered something Revik said to me.

To find anyone or anything in the Barrier, he’d said. You must become what you seek. The Barrier is resonance, Allie. It is what we seers do...we resonate with things. This is all we do.

To find him, I would have to become Syrimne.