8 - REMY

Winter 36, Sector Annum 106, 01h39

Gregorian Calendar: January 25

 

 

Where is she? The thought rushes through my head over and over again as I run through the darkened tunnels of Thermopylae. The air smells of smoke. There’s no one here. Where is Tai? I hear her laughter echoing through the halls, the sound like crystal shattering, growing more and more shrill with every passing moment. Her footsteps, always just around the corner, always just a breath ahead of me. Smoke envelopes me. I can't see. Tai! I scream, my voice hoarse, shallow. Where are you?

I wake up, gasping for air, drenched as if I’d been swimming in Lake Okaria. A dream. I’m in my bunk at Normandy. It’s dark, but not the choking, sweltering dark of the dream. The air is clean. There’s no smoke. Tai is gone, and no amount of chasing her through empty hallways will change that.

I clutch the flannel blankets in my fists, glance at the pillow to my side. I realize I’d been holding it over my head, presumably to drown out the sound of Zoe snoring loudly above me. I remember now—she’d been making noises like an airship with a faulty engine silencer. She’d insisted at dinner that she didn’t snore, and then she’d traded bunks with the older woman I’d been bunking with so we could chat as we fell asleep. Then I learned the truth: Zoe can out-snore Miah on a bad day.

I roll out of bed, claustrophobic. The prospect of lying awake, drowning in my pillow, as Zoe rumbles on through the night, doesn’t appeal to me. Nor does the thought of chasing Tai, or my mother, through the burning streets and tunnels of our old city in my dreams.

The old wooden bedframe creaks a little as I stand, but Zoe doesn’t move. I open the door to the hallway, lit only by intermittent biolights to conserve energy. Without a destination in mind, I find myself heading toward the mess hall. There are noises in one of the meeting rooms, but the Director had mentioned she’d be up late tonight, working with some of Normandy’s members to map Sector distribution lines. The sounds don’t bother me.

I turn into the mess hall to see my father, a cup of tea in hand, staring down at a piece of paper.

Paper?

“Dad?” I say, quietly, from the doorway, hoping not to startle him. He glances up, and a smile fills his face as he looks at me. His shoulders melt back as he opens up a space next to him, and I can see how much tension he’d been holding in his body.

“Can’t sleep either?” He asks rhetorically. I walk over and sit down next to him. “The dreams again?” He wraps his arms around me.

“The dreams again,” I affirm. “And it turns out Zoe really does snore.”

He laughs, but the sound dissipates quickly, and I almost wonder if it even happened.

“Alas.” After a sip from a cup of tea, he continues. “I’ve been trying to compose a new poem. But, my muse is gone.”

“Oh, dad.” Like a breaking wave, his shoulders heave and his heart thunders against my ear. I hug him tight, but this time, I don’t have any tears of my own. I’ve cried enough, with him, with Eli, in the seclusion of my own bunk, that right now I don’t need it. I hold him to me and wrap my arms around his shoulders. Were they always so frail?

He quiets after a few moments, finally sitting up to look at me, his eyes red and desolate. His eyes flicker down to my hands and then back to me.

“Remy, have you been drawing?” When I nod, he drops my hands and bends down to his side. When he comes back up, he has a whole sheaf of paper in his hands, good paper, thin and light and made for drawing.

“Dad,” I whisper, “where did you get this?”

He smiles, and the laugh lines materialize, the old happiness. I pull a piece of paper off the pages, none of them uniformly sized, and run my fingers over it. It’s a little rough, not as clean as the stuff we were allotted at the Academy. But it’ll do.

“Adrienne gave it to me. There’s an old paper mill nearby, she said, and they scavenged some when Normandy was first set up.”

“I haven’t used really good paper in three years.”

My father turns to face me dead-on, taking my hands and holding my gaze. “We need your talents, Little Bird. We need your art to bring our message to the people.” He sighs, staring at the blank page in front of him, the graphite pencil lying without having made a mark. “My words as Poet Laureate have been turned against me. We need a new artist to carry our message.”

“Where do I start?”

“Every revolution has its artists, Remy. You start with what you know to be true, the pain and grief and anger, and you create from there. You speak truth to power. With your pen. With your brush. With your heart.”

I nod, trying to visualize this, trying to imagine what I could draw or paint that would express or somehow communicate everything the Resistance stands for, what I stand for. But the only images that come to my mind are the dreams that have been haunting me for the last month.

“Dad,” I say, casting around for ideas, “what did you do at the Farms? When you and Mom….” I trail off. I can’t finish.

He shrugs.

“Your mother did most of the work. She had to help people, first, before they would listen to us. While she was helping them medically, I would sit and talk to them. I would ask them questions. ‘Do you like what you do?’ ‘Were you born on this Farm?’ ‘Do you have many friends?’ We bribed them, a lot of the time, to get them coming back to us—the Director gave us extra rations of chocolate and honey so we could hand them out.”

“But what did you say to them?” I ask. “To try to convince them to work with us?”

“There was no one thing, Remy. There are no magic words. I read them my poetry, sometimes. Verses about freedom, and beauty, and about you and Tai. That hit home with a lot of them. But there was no one thing that I said that had any effect. We couldn’t risk them telling any of the Enforcers about us, so we had to be very subtle, to work very slowly, and to keep quiet most of the time and listen to what they said.”

The words from our meeting yesterday echo in my head. We don’t have time for that. And it’s true. We don’t have time to take it slow, not anymore. The Sector—Philip and Corine Orleán—are coming after us like a fever, to sweat us out and destroy us. If we’re going to have any hope of fighting back, any action we take has to be decisive.

Anything I create, artistically or otherwise, must be big, important. Game-changing. Slow isn’t good enough anymore.

I hear dim voices out in the hallway, echoing and grow steadily louder, raucous, almost celebratory. My father and I turn to look at each other in the dim light.

“Who’s making all that noise at this time of night?” he asks. I shake my head.

As the sounds grow closer, I can hear Eli shouting something about uncovering some of Normandy’s old spirits, and someone—is that Firestone?—demanding it had better be stiffer than the wind outside. I leap to my feet, knocking my chair over backwards. My heart accelerates to flight speed as Eli rounds the corner, his arm over Jahnu’s shoulder, who has his hand firmly ensconced in Kenzie’s. Water from Firestone’s dark hair drips down into his face as he follows them all in, and Eli stops and beams down at me and my father.

“We’ve got company!” he announces, proudly, but I’m confused. I smile but I’m frozen in place, unsure, my heart sinking into my gut, because where is Vale?

Jahnu breaks rank and runs over to me, picking me up and swinging me around like a five-year-old, and I thump his back and kiss him on the cheek and try to laugh when Kenzie pulls me away for a hug of her own. But the sound comes out less like a laugh and more like a sob, and it’s only when Jahnu pulls me in close a second time and whispers in my ear that I truly relax.

“He’s here, Remy. It’s okay. He's with the Director.”

Swirls of bright-colored happiness engulf me. Jahnu and my father embrace like a parent with a lost child. Kenzie and Firestone aren’t exempt from the parental wash of love, though Firestone growls and favors his shoulder. After a few minutes Eli returns with a bottle of some rust-red liquid in hand. Firestone eyes it with trepidation.

“You sure that shit won’t make me blind?”

“Already tested it scientifically,” Eli responds, sporting a grin so wide a small dimple forms. “Drank about a fifth myself first night after we got here. Totally safe!”

“That explains the foul mood the next morning,” I say with a laugh.

“I love you, too, Remy Alexander,” he says and flashes me a rude gesture behind my father’s back.

“You'll be starving, I imagine,” my father says. I'll get some leftovers ready.” He heads to the icebox as Eli pries the stopper out of the bottle.

“You gonna drink out the bottle or pour some for all of us?” I say, grabbing a set of ceramic tumblers. Eli pours out a round of the whiskey—or whatever it is.

“To the harvest!” he says, holding up his glass in a toast.

“To the whiskey,” Firestone mutters and tosses back the entire contents of his glass. I wrap my arm around Jahnu and offer my own glass up.

“To the revolution.”

Jahnu looks at me sideways, his eyebrows raised in a question, but I just smile at him.

We toast, and drink, and the warm, fiery liquid blazes down my throat. I’ve spent enough late nights with Eli and Firestone to have learned not to cough, but I can't stop my eyes from watering. Through blurry eyes, I watch as another figure appears in the doorway. I blink the haze out, still smiling, and find myself looking across the room into the green eyes of Valerian Orleán.

Neither of us move. Jahnu and Kenzie are laughing at Firestone, who seems to be already on his third drink, but the noises have faded to a distant static. Vale watches me, cautious, hesitant, but not afraid like he was just a few weeks ago. His gaze is steady. Our eyes are connected as though by a wire—any pull in the wrong direction and we will break the circuit, the current will dissipate. I feel, rather than see, the tentative smile work its way onto his face, eventually touching his eyes as he continues to look at me.

“Vale,” my father says, breaking what’s seemed to be an age of silence. He’s come up next to him, and I can almost see sparks fly as Vale drags his eyes away from mine and the connection is broken. Vale’s face clouds, looking at my dad with the same hesitation.

As if recognizing this, my father says, “No one should be held accountable for the sins of their fathers—or mothers.” His voice strong with the melody and cadence of a practiced speaker. The room has gone silent. “I will never forget how you fought for Brinn. How you put your life on the line for hers. Please, don’t ever feel unwelcome where I am.”

He steps up to Vale and puts his arms around him, embracing him like a long-lost son. Vale stands a moment, frozen, staring over my father’s shoulder, and once again, his eyes flicker to mine. It takes a moment before he gives in, wraps his arms around my father and presses his body into the embrace. He closes his eyes, squeezing them shut, but he can’t stop tears from escaping, trailing a wet path down his cheeks.

One hug will not solve everything. But maybe a couple rounds of whiskey with my best friends will make the new day break brighter.