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JADE CAME OUT OF HER trailer with a soft smile and sat beside Micah on his log, her head resting on his bicep. The easy affection of her action made his heart contract in his chest. With a heavy internal sigh, he started draining her. He shouldn’t regret doing his job, but he simply wanted to enjoy her company without the mission looming over him.
The urge to bare himself to her hadn’t faded when they got back to camp. If anything, it deepened while she put her purchases away.
He’d spent so long keeping people at arm’s length. Now that he’d let Jade in, he wanted to let her all the way in. But there was still so much she didn’t know, might not accept.
He sighed into the dark.
Jade’s head popped up from where she’d rested it, halting the flow of power from her to him. “Are you okay, Micah?”
He shrugged, afraid to open his mouth to lie, in the fear that a truth he couldn’t take back would come out instead.
Jade put her hand over his, squeezed. Reluctantly, he started draining her again.
“Is there something wrong?”
To keep holding her hand, to keep the drain going, he would have to talk to her. If he said he was fine, said it was nothing, she might get up and leave. And... he couldn’t tell her everything he wanted to yet, but maybe he could share the specters of his past. He’d been alone with them for so long.
She was waiting expectantly, quietly, for him to tell her what was wrong.
But nothing was ‘wrong’, it just was.
“My first assignment was on an island in the Pacific.” Surprise silenced him for a moment. He hadn’t meant to say that, hadn’t meant to share the truth. But now she looked at him, silent, waiting for him to speak without rushing him or filling the silence herself.
And that patient silence, the comfort of her touch, compelled him to continue.
“My first assignment was on an island in the Pacific,” he said, beginning again. She didn’t need to know he meant his first assignment on Earth, right? He would tell his story, and gloss over all the parts she wouldn’t understand. “It was a beautiful place. A peaceful place.” Instead of the night, he saw lush green forests, steep black cliffs, and sunlight-soaked seas. Chaos had not touched it yet when he first arrived.
“I was supposed to be assigned to the Chief in order to protect him in a subtle way.” And to drain him. The Chief was an Earth Erratic, and the entire mission was orchestrated so he could drain the Chief’s Earth powers to keep him and his island safe from Chaos. “To my surprise, he assigned me to his son instead. Tokoni. I was to keep him safe, discipline him, prepare him for his eventual role as Chief while his father was busy with the day-to-day requirements of the position.” Another Warrior was assigned to the chieftain. “I think the boy felt inadequate next to his father, who was a very powerful and respected man.” He glanced at Jade. “See, our culture believes heavily in mana, a sacred supernatural force existing in the universe, a form of spiritual energy. Chiefs were elected by bloodline, and by mana.”
What his people didn’t know, is that what they thought of as mana was actually the Elemental energy inside them. Every person on the island in a position of power had been an Erratic of some type. Every chieftain extending back for centuries had been one as well.
The young man was an Earth Erratic, too, but he only felt inadequate because his own mana, his Elemental power, had not manifested yet due to his age. “I have great Warrior mana, so the boy looked up to me a bit.” He was created as a Warrior in his world, Elementium, so it was only natural that humans would sense that here as well.
“There was a woman...” Micah’s cheeks heated at Jade’s expression, but he needed her to know... “We were not close. I was young, exploring. She was... available.” He didn’t understand why it was so important for Jade to know that, but it was. Tense with discomfort, he continued. “We met just outside the village one day.”
He could remember her face but not her name, these many years later. “We were lying in the grass when I heard thunder.” Unsettled, he’d sat up, eyes searching the blue sky for the source.
“There was no storm; the sound hadn’t been thunder.” Was it Chaolt? He’d sniffed the air, the slightest trace of a foul burning smell reaching his nose. So slight, he could have imagined it instead. “A bit of rising dust caught my eye, and I heard the sound again.”
But this new rumble, more sensation than sound, made the air throb and the ground shake beneath them. The burning smell got stronger. He stood, turning in a circle to try to find the threat— “There was another massive shudder that knocked us to our knees, and the side of the mountain to our left slid away from the rest of the peak. Just separated, as if it had been sheared off.”
A great black cloud at its leading edge, it flowed over and between the trees with a sound so loud, it deafened them. The sea of stone stopped when it reached the beach, the boulders coming to rest with a splash.
“It went through the village.” There were only a few seconds from the beginning to the end. No time to react, no time for him to try to stop it.
He ran toward the huts, the woman behind him, an earthquake in his soul. “When I got there...” His throat closed, the memory of the devastation choking him. Most structures were damaged, many destroyed. Some were buried.
The space inside him, where his thoughts lived, had been suddenly empty and blank.
Micah navigated around the rocks, trying to orientate himself. “It was hard to tell where I was in the village. Nothing looked the same.”
There were wailing and cries for help, but he couldn’t see anything through the dust. Some villagers had survived, and that gave him hope as he crawled over boulders and rubble, threw them out of the way looking for his people.
“I’d pulled several from the rubble, some alive, some not, before I thought of Tokoni.”
His powers manifested the day before, on his fourteenth birthday, and Micah had drained him. The boy had still been sleeping off the effects when Micah left the village that morning.
Please let Tokoni be safe.
The Chief’s hut, it should have been this way. He turned in that direction, checking under debris as he went for people.
Please let him be in the coconut grove, or out tending the animals. Please let him be netting fish, or swimming in the cove. Please let him be anywhere but in his hut.
When he got close, it was like the rocks seemed to suck at his bare feet, to stop him from seeing what he was about to see. Somehow, he knew Tokoni was in trouble.
And he was right.
“There he lay under on a pile of rocks; pale, gray. Great dark bruises blooming over his body. I lifted the rocks off of him and took him in my arms.” He’d cradled the limp boy among the rubble and tried to fix his bones, to manipulate the minerals to fuse them back together. And he could, for a while. Until it was clear it would make no difference.
There were more than bones broken inside him, and he could do nothing about those softer things that bled.
Micah looked further down into the village, half of it buried under tons of rock and dirt.
“I needed to go help them, to move the stones and look for survivors, see who I could help. But I couldn’t leave Tokoni alone while he still drew breath.” He’d settled back against a rock, the boy in his arms, and began to sing. “I sang to him. It was all I could do to let him know that he was not alone as he passed into the afterlife.” But he hadn’t had a suitable song, a song for the feeling that had sat upon his heart with the weight of a mountain.
Voice and spirit raw, he sang until he felt Tokoni’s spirit depart, his life force drain. His last breath was like a spear through Micah’s chest. The ground under him shifted, shook, with his grief.
Micah stood with Tokoni's body in his arms, and then used his powers to part the soil. He stepped down into the hole and laid the boy gently on the softest soil. Crossing Tokoni's arms over his chest, Micah held them both for a second while everything in his field of vision blurred.
He staggered to his feet, heart heavy, and then struggled to step up onto the surface. He turned toward the rest of the village and made his way down to it. He kept his eyes ahead even as he used his powers behind him, returning the dirt to the hole he had made, unable to watch Tokoni being buried in his grave.
Jade put her hand over his, bringing him back to the present, and he turned his over to grip hers for strength. The memory, as distant as it was, still tore at him.
“I’m sorry.” Jade laid her other hand on his as well. “I know that was really tough. Losing someone you care about always is.”
She understood, and yet she didn’t.
“I lost many people that day. Many since then.” So many. Tokoni was the face of all the losses, just because he’d been closest to him, but he was certain he could remember each one if he tried. Jade turned and he felt her gaze, but he couldn’t meet her eyes.
Later, he would find out that the enemy attacked the Chieftain, caused him to self-destruct and destroy his own island, kill his own people. His own son. It was probably best he died rather than face being responsible for that.
Micah, on the other hand... had to live with his guilt.
“Maybe if I’d been there, I could have saved them. Could have saved him.”
Instead, he’d considered his job done, his mission complete, and had been unwinding with a willing woman.
Jade put her arm around his shoulder. “You couldn’t be there every moment,” she said, voice thick, “It’s not your fault.”
Oh, but it was. He was Elemental, he was Warrior. He was strength and protection for human Erratics.
And he’d failed at all of it.
Micah closed his eyes and shook his head, guilt crushing him. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t watch Tokoni day and night, it only mattered that he wasn’t watching him better at that precise moment. It only mattered that his mishandling of his duties resulted in the boy’s death. Micah had drained him and then abandoned him. Maybe the loss of the village wasn’t entirely his fault, but Tokoni’s death was.
“Did you talk to anyone after that? Maybe that would help.”
Micah shook his head. “When I got back to my then-commander, I tried... But he only wanted mission-relevant details, nothing else.” He hadn’t wanted to know how it felt to lose the boy, to lose the mortals he’d spent so much time with. Who he’d lived among since he’d come to Earth. His tribe. His family.
His commander had told him to take a breath and move on, which it seemed like all the other Warriors did much more easily than him, at least until recently.
Shortly after, a new commander needed Warriors, and he was reassigned to Walker. He’d left behind his island and his people and Tokoni, forever.
But they had not left him. They showed up in his dreams, rare as they were, and randomly in his thoughts.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, eyes shiny in the firelight, “about all of it.”
He was sorry, too.
Jade leaned against him, head on his biceps, her hand still in his. It was such a small gesture, but abruptly he felt his own eyes burning, his chest tightening. She couldn’t know what her understanding and comfort meant to him. And he couldn’t tell her, didn’t have the words, but that hidden, raw part of him he’d kept inside felt just a little lighter. The deaths of his people had been painful, but his life among them hadn’t been, and it helped to remember those times.
Suddenly, Tokoni and the others felt closer, more real, than they had in decades. So too, did the peace that had long eluded him.