Chapter 13
Ryan:
The cheers from above were audible even before we passed through the doorway. And when we let the light in, all our teachers were there, pounding us on the back, shouting congratulations. I led us around the corner to the main dining hall, where all of our classmates, the guard and search parties, everyone was on their feet. The stones of the Sun Tower were ringing with excitement.
“Tell us who you are, and how you will keep the Sun Tower standing tall,” Sensei shouted to us.
I felt my chest puff out with pride. Carried away in the moment, my gestures were broad and elaborate. “Citizens of the Sun Tower, we are pleased to accept our commission from Sensei as Elementals!”
Another loud cheer. “I am especially honored to have been selected by my fellow Elementals as leader. If Sensei approves, we will proceed as such,” I said.
Sensei seemed to be raising himself higher as well. His arms, tucked away in their sleeves, bobbed as he nodded. “So be it,” he said. “Give the citizenry your names, so they know their protectors, and you know your responsibility to them.”
“I am R—" I stopped myself short. “Call me Whisper. I am the Wind Elemental, leader of the Elementals.”
Erin was next. Beaming, she stepped forward. I gestured toward her, saying “It is my honor to be joined by Bl—no,” I gave her a sheepish grin, “Flare, the Fire Elemental.”
Flare touched her hand to her lips, as if to blow a kiss, but it was a burst of fire that came from her mouth, filling the massive hall with bright light. She bowed, and the crowd applauded before she stepped back.
Kris took her place. “And my good friend Torrent, the Water Elemental.” Torrent smiled and offered a humble wave of her hand. More applause.
“And finally, a great man... I am honored to present to you Blunt, the Stone Elemental, who removed the gravity field.”
Jason just stood there with a satisfied half grin as two full-figured girls presented him with flowers. The applause was wild. Some students were standing on benches, clapping and cheering their hearts out. Sensei came to the center of the raised dais and gestured us away. He began speaking to the crowd, but the words didn’t really register. A woozy feeling had suddenly swept over me, a feeling that was disturbingly close to the one I had after first awakening in the Forbidden Forest Valley.
With my speech finished, I realized that the community, the family I had joined here, who was embracing and congratulating us so heartily now, would be gone before the sun rose. We were forced once again to bid farewell to the good and familiar in favor of the uncertain and dangerous, all because of Devidis. Too much, too fast. As Jason gave away his flowers to the youngest girl trainees amid whoops and hollers, I set my mouth into a grim line.
Fortunately, I didn’t have a lot of time for self-pity. What followed was a blur of activity. We were seated with the senior teachers and scouts, who immediately began making hurried plans for an escape, pointing at different areas of a map of the Forbidden Forest Valley. But we were quickly pulled away from the arguments of our elders. Those who had joined us most recently were called upon to brief us on the state of the wider world. The empire outside seemed to be at least as alien as the Forbidden Forest had first been.
“Devidisian soldiers serve everywhere as police, market overseers, tax collectors, on streets and highways… every significant aspect of public life is liable to be monitored,” one woman said as she stuffed a length of rope into my pack.
“The safest way to survive,” she concluded, “is to be forgettable, Whisper.”
“Most of the Devidisian enforcers are human, armed with automatic weapons that blast hot bullets,” a grizzled old soldier told me as he handed me a freshly sharpened survival knife. “You’ll know them when you see them, in black uniforms bearing the silver insignia known as the claw-fist, and walking with a sense of entitlement, the blaggards. There are more goblin and ogre enforcers in the south, but you won’t see mixing like you do here. “
“Did you mention the Dark?” a younger man with a missing eye asked, pushing his way into the crowd about us four. “The Devidisian golem, humanoid in shape, made of metal, but bent, not fully formed, in an imperfect smelting process. Some say they are reanimated corpses, but I’ve seen the insides of ’em.” He shook his head. “Those robots are best avoided, but, if you meet them, their dull wits are usually satisfied with short, simple answers, as long as they don’t catch you doing anything outright illicit.”
“Aye,” the older man continued. “The gun-toting golem spread along with the radio towers. Communications are improving. Devidis’ fist is tightening. The enslaved elves keep churning out the minerals from the mountains of the north, and the numbers of the Dark keep growing.”
“Show them your fingers, old man,” the younger nudged the elder.
Shoved up next to me by the press of people helping us get ready, Erin tensed uncomfortably. The older man, we saw, was missing both pointer fingers, the nubs covered with purplish scar tissue. “Get caught too many times? You’ll get fingerprinted, and bounty hunters will be after you. I was fortunate, I suppose; usually they’ll cut ’em off after you’re dead... but my associates were... sentimental.” He shook his head.
“Thanks to you, though,” he continued, “I might be able to get out and get revenge... With my connections, I might be able to register as a bounty hunter myself and collect on some Devidisian trigger fingers.”
On the other side of me, Kris’s groan was audible. Our grizzled adviser caught onto it quickly. “I’m grateful to you, Torrent, and so I will give you my straight advice. You’d do well to prepare your tender heart,” he said to her sternly. “The outside isn’t much better than it is in here, truth be told, ’n’ thanks to our great Sensei… but it might comfort you to know that they will give you money for the wolf eyes, for example. Dangerous animals are a threat to everyone, politics aside.”
Fain appeared, and slipped the four of us each a small vial of light red water. “Keep yourselves healthy, well-rested, and fed, and your talent won’t fail you. But if you find your talent exhausted, tonics like this can help refresh your supernatural abilities. Cor knows how to make these, but on the outside, don’t just casually go looking for them. Being talented itself is dangerous out there. Devidisians are always recruiting talents, and being talented one of the best ways to make a living, it seems, in the empire. So those talented who are recognized and aren’t anxious for the opportunity to serve the emperor... They will undoubtedly be viewed with suspicion.”
“It’s true. Your talents themselves will be suspicious enough. I had never seen nor met a talent before I found myself here,” the younger one-eyed man said.
I swallowed hard. We would have to be very careful not only of avoiding conflict in general, but of limiting the use of our talent in particular.
Though I did my best to pay attention to all the advice thrown at us, amid the din of excitement, I found myself distracted by an argument that erupted suddenly among Sensei’s planning council.
“How will we get the elderly and crippled over the walls?” one asked.
“The Forbidden Forest is no longer a prison,” one senior watchman said. “We can fend off the worst things. They won’t be so violent now that they can escape as well. Why should we abandon our home?”
After a while, it was Sensei who ended the argument, saying, “I will give up the tower with the last of us, and not before. Those of us who evacuate will do so in gradual waves...”
As the night deepened and torches were lit, the search parties prepared to formally assess the reaction of the Devidisian guard and the other groups who occupied the Forbidden Forest. One worry that plagued us all: How quickly would Devidis find out? How vicious would his response be?
Soon enough, our bags had been packed, and the advice had abated, from a flood to a trickle. I made my way through rushing knots of people and asked Sensei for permission to join the reconnaissance team. I was surprised whe
n he refused absolutely. “There are other talents who can scout the way for you. You will need your strength. You four will be the first to leave this prison of a canyon.”
I was surprised to see that Jason had followed behind me. “What about the guns in the basement?”
“Unfortunately, we have few true firearms experts,” Sensei said, “and all of them are occupied, so it is too late for you to learn. Your talents and the methods for gathering information and avoiding detection that you learned here will serve you better than any automatic weapon.”
“My father, my family, was in law enforcement... in the old world,” Jason insisted. “I bet I know as much about those weapons as some of your experts.”
Sensei waved us away as a council member shouted for his attention. “You have my permission. I’m sure the guards at the door will give way for you. Take your pick.”
Jason’s eyes lit up. He was a kid on Christmas morning. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me toward the basement door, stopping briefly to collect Kris and Erin on the way. The two sentries at the ancient portal parted, smiling, as we approached. Erin snapped her light to life as Jason turned the handle. His luminous smile was infectious.
The stone talent dashed down the stairs, rubbing his hands in anticipation as his bright eyes scanned the racks of weapons. My eyes were drawn to a rocket launcher, but before I had even placed a hand on it, I stopped with a little sigh. The thought of carrying a heavy, volatile explosive on my back that I didn’t know how to use was a quick and potent dissuasion.
“I know that feeling, man,” Jason told me. “I’d like to take one of these high-caliber automatics...” his hand stretched out to a particularly large and lethal looking gun, “but I realize that, even though the weight wouldn’t be a problem for me, personally... it’s not been maintained... and it would just be too much.” He shook his head and handed me a pistol. I wondered where to put my trigger finger, since I obviously wasn’t ready to shoot it.
“First and most important rule of gun safety,” he said, handing two more guns to the girls, “is don’t point it at anything you don’t want shot, regardless of whether you think the thing is loaded or not, and keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.”
“I’m more confident in a fist fight than a gun fight,” Erin said, holding the gun as if it were a rotten toad. “I say we stick with the plan of avoiding trouble. If it comes down to it, I’d rather make it a real fire fight.”
“Well,” Kris said, “if guns are common out there, we might as well have an idea about what kind of firepower we could be facing. Having some basic knowledge wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
Jason gave her a grateful smile. “There’s a bunch of these here,” he said, “so I guess it’s safe to assume these pistols are fairly common out there. And that should mean that ammunition should be plentiful.”
Turning toward the circle of soil, he put his hand in the dirt, and slowly there emerged a pillar of earth from the indentation left in the wake of the Stone Key. The Stone Elemental drew a rough bulls-eye on the mound with his finger before stepping back.
He deftly ejected the magazine of his pistol, apparently checking the bullets, before replacing the clip and cocking the weapon. A loud POP, then another POP echoed across the tight rock walls.
“It’s old,” he said, “and dirty, and I’m out of practice.”
I looked ahead at the target, and saw two impact points, both wide of the center. Jason waved us forward, and together we four each took a few practice shots. The stone talent went on to give us a basic understanding of the safety mechanism, and how to load and unload the weapons, but, amid the encroaching darkness of the basement, we found ourselves talking about what was more familiar.
Erin put her weapon back with the others on a shelf. “I think, as things stand, the gun and ammo are going to weigh me down more than anything else,” she said.
“Yeah, well, going back to what Kris was saying, shooting’s not so much the problem,” Jason said. “It’s getting shot. And aside from pulling up a stone wall, I’ve been working on a way to harden my skin and get rocks to stick to it… though I’m in no hurry to try it out against bullets.”
“And I can partially liquefy,” Kris said. “I’ve been thinking that the bullets are so fast that they just might pass right through me, and I can re-solidify a moment later with no damage… not that I’m in a hurry to experiment.” She held up her hands. Turning to Erin and I, she added, “It’s not like bullets would stop fire or air.”
“I don’t know how you two do it, but I don’t like the idea of trying to... vaporize myself,” I said. “It’s hard to concentrate, and the breezes I can normally brush off seem like they have the potential to scatter me. I hope my speed will keep situations like that to a minimum… and by ‘minimum’ I mean zero.” I formed the round number with my hand. “But I think keeping a gun on me isn’t a bad idea.”
“Yeah, heating my hands, sword and breath is about the closest I want to get to turning into fire,” Erin said, with a wave of the fireball suspended between her fingers, “Too easy to get snuffed out otherwise. Though I’ve been working on a fire-boosted jump...”
“Well, trying new things is our new way of life…” Kris said, almost accusingly, as she raised her pistol toward the bulls-eye. There was a POP, and an impact close to the center of the target.
“Nice shot,” Jason congratulated the Water Elemental.
“But let’s leave off for now,” I said. “Sensei wants us to get a good night’s sleep.”
“Whisper us off to bed, huh?” Jason said, as he collected a full magazine, and left his empty one on the shelf.
We ascended the stairs, sharing a little laugh.