The three of them made their way to the elevator in silence. Jacob walked between the two men, trying to steal glances at both. Xander’s momentary anger back in the suite had been replaced with his customary dispassionate look. The giant’s face was blank as well. They reached the elevator and still no one spoke. Jacob felt tense and oddly guilty. He’d done nothing wrong, but the huge man’s presence made him feel like a criminal. An image of the two listeners escorting him from school to the council house flashed through his mind. He moved a little closer to Xander.
The door of the elevator opened and the three entered. Again, Jacob was between them, but now the two men faced each other. Jacob shrank against the wall as the pair’s faces hardened into a mutual glare. Hurry up, Jacob thought, wishing he could boost the speed of the falling elevator. He didn’t want to be in this tiny room another second with these two men.
Jacob took a sharp breath as the pair stepped toward each other, their faces now only an inch apart. Before Jacob could say anything, both men broke into a laugh and joined in a rugged, brief embrace.
“Damn, Xander, it’s good to see you,” Karl said, still gripping Xander’s shoulder. Xander lightly slapped the giant’s cheek in return.
“Good to see you too,” he said.
“You two know each other?” Jacob cried.
“Karl and I,” Xander said, pausing, “we worked together.”
“Worked together, huh? That’s a pretty way of putting it,” Karl snorted. “So how are you doing, anyway? Haven’t seen you in ages. Since you got done, I guess.”
“I’m fine, Karl. I’m here on Nova Campi now. Got a little place on the plains.”
“No kidding. Doesn’t surprise me.”
“Yeah, question is—what’re you doing here? Don’t tell me you like working for that girl’s handler.”
Karl shrugged. “I work for Mixel, he works for Mixel—that’s how that is. It pays well, and it beats risking your neck for God-knows-what.”
“I suppose. But that suit. He’s the kind we used to hate.”
“Come on, Xander, give me a break,” Karl said. “Besides, we all have our different ways of dealing, right? Look at you, after all, living in the bush.”
Xander’s grin faded just as the elevator door opened. Karl gestured toward the lobby. Xander took Jacob by the shoulder and the two of them walked out.
“Xander!” Karl shouted as they started walking away. They turned back to where he stood, holding open the door. “I am sorry,” he said. “I never got a chance to tell you. I just wanted you to know.”
Xander nodded and started to walk away, when Karl called out a second time.
“What is it?” Xander asked.
“Better not come back here again. Okay?”
“We’ll see,” Xander replied.
* * *
Jacob looked back to find Melville’s skyscrapers shrunken by distance. Even Mixel Tower had diminished somewhat, though the black monolith still dominated the city’s skyline. Plugging his ears to block out the roar of the cruiser, he turned back around. To the left and right the grass was a blur of bluish green, consolidated into a single wave flowing away from him as they ripped across the land. Though the sun still shone behind him in the west, ahead, over Xander’s shoulder, he could see the purple moon breaking the surface of the horizon. Its great rings rose at an angle, giving the swollen orb a tilted look, as if some great hand were lifting it by one end. Xander looked back as he had from time to time on the journey in, but now he wasn’t smiling. Jacob was glad. He didn’t feel like smiling either.
After leaving Mixel, Xander still had to pick up some supplies and Jacob tagged along, trying not to get in his way. The man had fallen into a foul mood, and by now Jacob knew not to say anything that might draw his anger to the surface. Still, he wanted to know what Karl had been talking about. What was he sorry for? And he was troubled by his warning not to come back.
But Karl’s comments—and Xander’s reaction to them—weren’t what really ate at Jacob. He had forgotten them almost entirely by the time they started out from the city as a larger anxiety rose within, like the purple moon before him.
It was Delaney.
Ever since leaving Mixel Tower, a knot in Jacob’s stomach had been growing. Nothing had turned out the way he’d hoped. First, to see Delaney so . . . different. And it wasn’t just the eyes. Something about her wasn’t right. It didn’t feel like he was talking to the same person. But what had changed? Maybe it was just because she was happy. He’d been so used to her misery back in Harmony, especially at the very end, that he must have forgotten what it was like to see her happy. Or to see her at all. Maybe that was it. Maybe the shock of seeing this person he’d known for so long in his blindness made it impossible for him not to feel strange at their meeting. He tried to think back to the first moments he saw his mother, his father, his best friend, Egan. Then it was strange too, but that wasn’t quite it—there was something else. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the vibrating seat, and sighed. Maybe it was him—maybe he had changed so much that nothing would ever be the same.
All he knew was that something wasn’t right. Delaney claimed she was happy, but he couldn’t help wondering if she was faking it. In fact, none of it seemed real—from her eyes, to the suite, to the man she claimed had given her so much.
“I don’t like that man,” Jacob said later that night. He was leaning against the railing of the deck, having come out after dinner for some air. Xander had joined him and the two now looked out toward Melville. From here it was nothing more than a few meager lights, and even they were nearly drowned by the brightness of the purple moon falling fast before them, dropping toward the city.
“Karl’s a good guy,” Xander said. “Tough. I can’t remember how many times we saved each other’s skin.”
“Not Karl,” Jacob said. “The other one.”
“LaPerle? You probably shouldn’t like him. Handlers are slick. They’re supposed to be.”
Jacob thought back to his first encounter with the Seers at the lake. “He looked like Garrett and his friends, but somehow he reminded me of Turner.”
Xander snorted. “That’s not far off. But I wouldn’t worry too much about Delaney. She may be miserable, but I don’t think she’s in any real danger.”
“You don’t think she’s happy?”
The man shrugged. “You know her. Couldn’t you tell?”
“Not really,” Jacob said, then hesitated. “Maybe. All I know is that today wasn’t good. I wanted it to be good, and it wasn’t.” He sighed. “I guess I had this idea that she needed me.”
“She probably does,” Xander offered.
“It didn’t seem like it,” Jacob murmured. If she doesn’t, he thought, then where does that leave me? “Maybe I just needed her instead,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I can’t help it. Back in Harmony, all I knew was a sad girl. She didn’t fit in. She talked about leaving. I even heard her say she wanted to see. And now she’s got that, just like me. Everything that’s happened to me has happened to her, just in a different way.”
“Do you think she’s better off than you?”
“I don’t know. I guess. She wanted to leave Harmony. She chose to. I didn’t. And now she’s a part of something. She has a new family, people who adore her.”
Xander sighed. “First of all, Blinder, she may be a part of Mixel, but it isn’t as cozy as you might think. They may be taking care of her, but they really only care about one thing—what they can get from her. That’s how they are with everyone. I’m not saying it’s bad. After all, it goes both ways. But in the end, it’s just business to them. Trust me, I’ve been there. They’re getting something from her, and I don’t think she even knows it.”
“Delaney’s pretty smart,” Jacob replied.
“Then she may have already figured it out. Or soon will. The point is, just because she’s a part of something doesn’t make her better off. Both of you were part of something back in Harmony and look how that turned out.”
“But at least she has a future. I don’t even know where I belong, or what’s going to happen to me.”
“Don’t need to, Jacob. Not right now. And who knows what Delaney’s future will be. She might need you someday. No one can see what lies ahead.”
Jacob closed his eyes and shuddered as he recalled the sensation of déjà vu he’d felt seeing Delaney this afternoon. At least maybe now, having seen her at last and knowing she was all right, the recurring nightmare would stop.
Opening his eyes again, he looked up to see the moon now slipping into the black land, dragged down by its tilted rings. It was night, but the moonset cast a faint glow over everything, aided by the dimmer light of the cratered pink moon now at its zenith above them.
“It’s bright out tonight,” Jacob said.
“Once your eyes adjust, there’s nothing nicer.”
Jacob pointed to the horizon. “Why is that moon so much bigger than the one above us?” he asked. “And so fast—it only rose a few hours ago and it’s already sinking down.”
“You mean Duna?”
“That’s what it’s called?”
“Yeah. The other’s Drake. Well,” Xander said. “Duna’s not a moon. It’s a planet. We’re the moon. Nova Campi orbits Duna, just like Drake does. People still call it a moon, though. We like to think of ourselves as the center of things, I guess.”
“I didn’t know,” Jacob said. “They never taught us that. They said there were two moons, but they never told us their names. Maybe they didn’t know.”
“It doesn’t really matter. Whatever you call them—whether you even know they’re there—they still do what they do. Knowing changes nothing.”
Jacob realized on one level Xander was right. But his own ignorance about this basic truth, about this fundamental part of the world in which he lived, bothered him. Still, why should he be surprised? Everything about the world was different from what he’d thought it was.
“Don’t worry about Delaney,” Xander said. “We’ll see her again soon, and things will be better. It was your first trip into the city. You were just overwhelmed by everything today.”
“But what if we don’t? What if we can’t? You heard what Karl said as we were leaving. He may be a friend of yours, but he sounded serious. I might never see her again.”
“Don’t be foolish, Blinder. Of course you will.”
“How?”
“Let me take care of that,” Xander replied. He turned to go inside, stopping at the door. “I spent my whole life taking orders,” he called back to Jacob. “When I left the army, I promised myself I’d never let anybody tell me what I can or can’t do again. Even Mixel. Especially Mixel.”
“When do we go?”
“We’ll wait awhile. We’ll let them forget about us. It won’t take long.”
* * *
It took about a week. Jacob emerged from his familiar nightmare one dawn to find Xander standing over him, a dark shadow in the thin early light.
“You keep calling out her name,” the man said.
“I know,” Jacob said. “It always wakes me up.”
“It wakes me up too. In fact, it creeps me out, the way your voice sounds. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Jacob murmured. His brain was a murky mix of sleep and fear, and he didn’t want to talk. Seeing Delaney had not put an end to the dreams. If anything, they had grown more intense. More real. There were other changes too. Each night new details, a slight shift of when things happened, of what was said. One development in particular disturbed him. The dream had always ended with his hands around her throat, with the two of them face-to-face, though he could never see her visage through the blaze. But the last few nights the finale had altered. It still ended with him choking her, but he now found himself outside himself, standing to the side watching the struggle unfold, zooming in on the hands tightening around the white neck. And then, in this last dream just moments ago, the latest twist—feeling himself shrink the tighter he squeezed, seeing her grow larger and larger until her head loomed over him, her features cold, indifferent, in spite of the blazing from her eyes.
“Nothing’s wrong, huh?” Xander said. “All right. But nothing or not, we’re doing something about it.”
“What do you mean?” Jacob asked.
“Time we paid Delaney another visit,” he said.
“But Karl’s warning—” Jacob began.
“Like I said before, no one tells me what to do,” Xander snapped. He paused. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “Besides, it seems clear enough. Until you figure this out, you’ll have no peace. And neither will I,” he added, looking away.