Chapter 26 – The Icy Grasp
I can only stare dumfounded at the man I thought I had murdered. I feel so insanely stupid. I’ve come all this way and now I’m going to be captured again by Brother Willow? I’d made a bloody mesh of his chest! I have to be seeing things.
“What are you doing here?” I ask timidly.
It’s clear this Brother Willow is the same as the one I’d killed, and not an illusion. There is dried blood on his neck and the top of his jacket is shredded and covered in blood, too. Yet I can’t see any wounds or even a scar to indicate that he’s been injured. Even his hand has grown back! I just can’t get my head around this.
I prod him with my little finger, just to make sure he’s real and I haven’t gone totally insane.
“How is this possible?” I ask him. “It’s not possible.”
“I was just as surprised as you were to wake up alive after you brutally murdered me,” Brother Willow confesses. He shivers in the cold. “Do you have any idea what’s going on here?”
“No!” I shout. “Why should I?”
“You are the child of this body,” says Brother Willow.
“I don’t know anything.”
Brother Willow tries to step towards me, but I pull back. I’m almost teetering on the edge of the cliff. The drop behind me isn’t far, but I could brake several bones and be at this mad man’s mercy if I did fall.
“I woke up and you and Brother Pine were gone and I didn’t know where to go or what to do.” Brother Willow is confused, in a panic, like a man on the verge of a breakdown. “I decided to go to the cave garden and that’s when I saw the smudges of dried blood in the lift and on the grass.”
I glance at my boot and see the blood on them. How could I have not noticed what I’d done?
“I put two and two together and realized that you must have escaped through the crack in the cave wall into the mineshaft,” Brother Willow explains slowly. “It was so dark in there.”
I’m surprised. “You knew about that?”
“Obviously I knew about it, but I didn’t think you did, otherwise I would never have allowed you in the cave garden in the first place.”
The hammering continues loudly in the background. From our current position I’m sure that the man down there can see us, but I can’t count on him to save me. For all I know he’s with the Order of Power. He certainly lives near enough to them.
I swallow. “Are you taking me back?”
“What do you think?”
“Your crusade is cursed!” I snarl. “I’ve destroyed your repurposing machine and anyone who can fix it is dead. You don’t need me or anyone else anymore!”
Brother Willow looks at his hand, the one that had grown back, and says, “Who do you think taught those people how to fix the machine? The Grand Father has been training hundreds of Brothers and Sisters in the use of his new technology, a portable device that can repurpose people on the spot.”
“You’re lying!”
“According to Sister Faun the devices are ready for beta testing. You will be part of the experiment!”
I tense, ready for anything, and Brother Willow lunges for me, his face melting into a snarl. I pull my fist back and punch him in the face so hard I see a tooth covered in blood slither out and fall onto the grass. The back of his hand hits my cheek, causing me to stagger back near the edge of the cliff. I automatically reach out to grab him. I use his body to pull myself forward and I gave him a head butt directly under his chin. .
“That hurt,” Brother Willow groans. He uses his middle finger to poke about at his missing tooth. I watch in astonishment as the tooth starts to slowly grow back.
“What are you?” I hiss, knowing full well I should be running but unable to look away. I have to know what’s wrong with him.
“It’s not genetic, otherwise when you had that broken arm it would’ve healed quickly.” Brother Willow’s face lights up in a malevolent smile. “It seems that Zachary Casper might not actually be your father.”
“He is my father!” I rave.
“Are you sure about that?” says Brother Willow, the tooth now fully grown in his mouth again. “What a revelation.”
I scream as I go for him, my hands out like claws. I want to gouge his eyes out or pull his heart out, but instead he grabs my arm and tries to pull me into a neck hold. I struggle against him. He’s very strong but I scream again and kick him in the groin. Brother Willow roars and lets me go. I turn and run.
Lies! Mayor Zach was my father. How could he not be? We looked the same! We even acted the same sometimes! How could he not be my father? It was just impossible.
Something hits my thigh; something sharp and very painful. I’m propelled forward by my own momentum and crash headfirst into the hillside. The pain that shoots through my head is immense, but still I try to pick myself up and go on. It’s then that I see the tiny dagger sticking into my left thigh.
“No,” I whisper. I yank the dagger out of my flesh just as Brother Willow comes at me again. He pins me to the ground with his legs, straddling me. He puts his hands around my neck and squeezes.
“I thought you wanted me alive?” I yell.
“You’re too much trouble,” snarls Brother Willow.
He squeezes harder and harder and the pain in my thigh and from the music box in my pack sticking into my back is becoming unbearable, but I continue to struggle and kick and swing my arms at him. I push at him as hard as I can and find an opening. My left hand, the one with the dagger, nicks the side of his ear. Brother Willow screams in pain and, just for a millisecond, he lets off the tension around my neck. I take this advantage and swing my arm up and spear the small dagger through his eye and into his brain. He stops and looks down at me, all his struggles ceasing at once. Then he just flops back into the snow, dead.
I get up, my neck hurting, and look down at Brother Willow. Is he really dead this time? I’m not a doctor or anything but I’m pretty sure that a knife into the brain would kill anybody. Surely, even Brother Willow couldn’t live after having that done to him?
I’m about to kick him just to make sure, when I hear a shout. I turn around, feeling panic rising again. Had another Brother followed Willow, or is it someone else?
“Are you alight?” a voice asks.
I turn to find the tall man with curly blonde hair appraising me some distance away. He has his hammer in his hand and the expression he wears on his face is slightly hostile.
“Who are you?” I demand. “Do you work for the Order?”
“I suppose I do.”
I don’t listen to anything else. I mentally shut out his lies and deceptions and run as fast as I can through the snow. I would run and run until I could find somewhere to hide. Then I’d go about my search for Skye. I have to find her, even if it takes me forever.
A noise in the arctic silence catches me off guard and I look around and trip. I put my hands out to steady myself, and feel them touch something cold and brittle, ice. A second later the ice cracks and I plunge through into water so freezing it makes my bones shake.
My body starts to freeze. My feet kick out in the water, hoping I’m being silly and it isn’t deep, but it is, and pretty soon I start to gag as water slides into my mouth.
“You idiot!” someone shouts. “What are you doing?”
A hand grabs onto my backpack and drags me up out of the icy water. I cough water from my mouth as I’m pulled onto the bank. I can’t stop my teeth from chattering, I’m so bitterly cold and wet.
“Why do you go swimming if you can’t swim?” the voice mocks.
“I fell in by accident,” I shout.
Skye laughs. “It’s a good job you’ve got me around to save you then, isnt it?”
Epilogue – Rooster Says Hello
I can’t help but watch Skye as she stirs the soup in the cauldron on the hearth. She’s a little skinnier, and she has bags under her eyes that make her look ten years older, but other than that she?
??s the same old Skye.
“That smells good,” I comment. My stomach is gurgling away like a cat in heat.
“It’s chicken soup,” says Skye, stirring, humming. “The chicken didn’t mind because it was poorly and she was probably going to die soon anyway but she was still a friend so I hope the soup’s good.”
I shiver in my cocoon of warm blankets, which my body is completely naked under. I can see my clothes drying on a rack near the hearth. My teeth still chatter, but I’m slowly getting warmer. My dunk in the icy river had taken a lot out of me.
The tall blonde man is sitting on a wooden chair near the hearth, watching alternately myself and Skye. Albatross, the pig, is in his lap, loving the attention as the man's big hands stroke his back, and Rotter the parrot is perched on the back of the chair, half asleep. Everything appears so calm and serene, almost like they’re all one big happy family. It makes me kind of jealous, and a little ashamed. This man helped carry me back in here from the side of the river and he’d done his best to keep me warm and dry. He is a kind man and I had run from him like he was carrying the purple plague.
“Who are you?” I ask him. His cottage is warm and neat but I love it, even though it is small.
“I’m a blacksmith for the village of Fowl,” answers the man. His voice is gruff and tender at the same time. “We’re under jurisdiction of the Order; we make some of their clothes and food and stuff but generally we try to keep as far from them as possible. We just want to live our lives.”
“I’m sorry I ran away like that,” I say. “It’s just that... Brother Willow! Is he still dead?”
“I buried him,” said the man. “There’s no need to worry.”
I’ve killed Brother Willow twice in one day and I still don’t feel anything. Now, though, at least father’s body is buried in the earth, just as it should be.
When Skye has finished heating the soup she serves it into three dishes. It’s not exactly the best meal I’ve ever had, but I’m desperately hungry and the warmth it fills me with is like a miracle to my cold bones.
For the next hour, we talk. Skye doesn’t tell me how she got here, no matter how many times I ask her, though she does relate a few anecdotes about people she’s met. She says she doesn’t want to talk about her quest to start her own House. She’s happy where she is now that Connor Bristol has taken her in as his apprentice.
“I know about what happened back home,” she mumbles. Albatross leaps into her lap to comfort her. She wipes away a tear. “Every House and village is talking about it and it’s gotten everyone scared.”
I nod. This is something I can’t talk about and I tell her so. She understands. I do tell her about Brian and Lottie. I know how she feels, having seen my father’s body worn by someone else. Being repurposed is indeed a fate worse than death.
“Is there no chance?” she asks me. She almost begs.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “When you’re repurposed you’re gone.”
“But Dylan...”
I shrug my shoulders. “I just don’t know.”
The truth is, I don’t know. Dylan hadn’t known why his repurposing had failed. Maybe there’d been a fault right at the beginning? We might never know.
“Brian was the only one who knew my secret,” Skye whispers. She looks at my confused look. What secret is she talking about? “He didn’t really believe me but that didn’t matter.”
She looks into my eyes. I think she sees the pain there, what we’ve both been through.
“I’ll tell you my secret later.”
Skye heads outside with the animals. I can hear her crying almost as soon as the door slams. I can’t help yawning, as tiredness finally kicks in. I don’t want to continue the conversation any further. All I want to do is sleep.
I wake up in the middle of the night to someone tugging at my arm. I lash out with my fist, only pulling away at the last second when I see Skye’s excited face hovering over me like a specter.
“Why are you so happy?” I ask groggily.
“I’m not happy, I’m as miserable as I’ve ever been,” she says, still smiling. “However, there is something I forgot to tell you that I just remembered! What with all the talking and nearly dying and stuff, it totally slipped my mind and, never mind, here you go.”
She slaps a folded piece of paper into my hands. It’s soggy and wet and I half wonder whether Skye has gone mad.
“What’s this?” I ask her.
“It fell out of your pocket when we were carrying you back to the hut,” says Skye. “Read it, go on!”
I sigh and do as I’m ordered, anything to shut her up.
The top of the letter reads Dear Ben...
“It’s from your Uncle Rooster,” says Skye excitedly. She grins. “I know, I read the ending.”
Before Father had killed him, Rooster had slipped something into my pocket. It must have been this note!
I read the letter out loud. “Dear Ben...Forgive my handwriting as I’m doing this in a hurry before any of you get back from getting firewood but I need you to know what Harold told me. You see, he wasn’t dead when I found him. He was near it but not in the grave just yet. He told me I had to continue his quest to find the God Cannon. Now that quest falls to you. You have to seek out Esther Queen in London. I know I can count on you. Love, Uncle Rooster.”
I read the letter three times to make the information stick in my head. Then I climb out of bed, ignoring the fact that I’m stark naked, and toss the letter in the burning hearth fire.
“What are you doing?” Skye cries.
“I don’t want a member of the Order to find it,” I say. I watch as the letter crumples into ash.
Skye sighs. “Oh, good idea. So when do we leave?”
I turn to her and say, “You really want to traverse the entire country all the way to London, chased by the Order of Power?”
“I suppose,” she says. “Not that I don’t love Connor to bits for taking me in but this is something I have to do.”
“I originally wanted to use the God Cannon to kill the gods in revenge for what they did to my family,” I tell her.
She looks at her feet and says, “What about now?”
“Nothing’s changed,” I state. “I want revenge.”
She walks up to me and shakes my hand.
The story of Ben Casper continues in The Sky Is Falling...