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by Jaymin Eve
“Shiny,” I drooled, causing Emmy to laugh again.
The man must have heard Emmy, because he glanced our way, his smile growing for a moment, as he nodded in greeting. He knew where we were going. It was pretty obvious. We were dwellers, sitting in a cart bearing the Creator’s insignia. We were going to Blesswood, to serve the future gods.
“He smiled at me,” I tried to tell Emmy, speaking out of the side of my mouth, trying not to make it look like I was talking about him.
“I know, dummy,” she replied blandly.
The cart veered a little then, probably dodging a crack in the pavers, and the wheel hit a puddle, spraying dirty street water all over the shiny couple.
“Whoops.” I jerked back in my seat, fixing my eyes firmly in front of me, as though I had somehow done it deliberately.
The man wasn’t smiling anymore—he was now loudly cursing poor Jerath, who either couldn’t hear, or didn’t care. I suspected that Jerath was another dweller, albeit one important enough to serve the sols of Blesswood. Did that give him a certain amount of status? And was the status high enough that he could accidently spray some sols with street water? Apparently.
Things were looking up.
“Remember what I told you, Will?” Emmy was watching me. I could feel the weight of her stare.
I had no damn idea what she was talking about, but she already knew that. I was supposed to say ‘what?’ and cue preventative lecture about safety in Blesswood.
“Don’t sleep with a knife in the bed for safety?” I asked instead, a smirk lifting my mouth.
She narrowed her eyes on me, trying to convey that it was serious time. “Not that.”
“Don’t make out with Teacher Hardy’s son? He probably has a disease because he’s always itching his crotch?”
“Not th—”
“Don’t leave the curtains open while I’m dancing naked? Don’t eat everything that’s put in front of me—especially if I was the one who put it in front of me? Don’t—”
“Will—”
“Don’t sew all the holes shut while I’m mending shirts, because then where do the arms go?”
“Will—”
“Don’t drink pond water; don’t believe everything I read; don’t say no to everything; don’t say yes to everything; don’t—”
“Don’t talk over me while I’m trying to lecture you!”
My smirk melted into laughter, seeing how red her face had turned, and I settled back into my seat, wiggling around a little bit to get comfortable.
“Okay, fine,” I eventually said. “Bring it on. Lay it on me. Lecture away. I’m ready. I’m waiting. Let’s do this.”
She was getting frustrated. The smoke coming out of her ears was almost visible—but to be honest, I was trying to put off the serious-talk. I had been since we left the village. Emmy had been preparing for the possibility of eventually ending up in Blesswood, but I hadn’t been. I didn’t know anything, and I was terrified of what she was going to tell me.
“Are you done?” she finally asked, arching a single, silver eyebrow.
“No, wait …” I reached into my pack, pulling out one of the honey sandwiches that she had packed to last the journey. “Okay, go,” I allowed, freeing the bread from its canvas wrapping and stuffing as much into my mouth as possible.
Maybe I was being immature, but it would be easier to turn this into a one-way lecture.
Emmy didn’t mind. She launched straight into it. “You have no idea what’s going to happen when you get there, Will, but the rest of us do. They spent a lot of time going over this in the last moon-cycle at school, because two of us were going to get picked. It’s important that we’re prepared.”
“Oghay,” I managed around a mouthful of bread.
“Our sun-cycles will be split between the classrooms and the dormitories—we’ll be given a timetable just like all the sols, but we don’t get to actually attend classes with them. We’ll be attending to the classes. Each classroom is assigned five dwellers to be at the disposal of the sols and the professors. When academy classes are over, we’ll each have an assigned dormitory room, and it’ll be our job to service the room and the sols assigned to the room. I don’t know when we’re going to have time to eat … they never explained that.”
“What about sleep?” I quipped, swallowing what was in my mouth. “Will we have time for that? Or the other essentials, like breathing?”
“Bathing?”
“No. Breathing.”
“You can multitask, can’t you?”
I huffed, stuffing the rest of my sandwich into my mouth. “Hard-ass,” I muttered, almost unintelligibly.
“What was that?” she asked, snatching the rest of the sandwiches out of my lap.
“Love you,” I amended quickly, causing her to laugh.
Emmy held off on lecturing me any further, even when we passed through Dvadel and into Soldel, which was the first ring after Blesswood. This city was different to the other sol settlements. It was actually stepping up into a gradual incline, with several lower tiers of what seemed to be general housing, below several higher tiers of … what the hell was that? It looked like they had taken a bunch of stone houses and stacked them on top of each other. There were buildings like this scattered all around, towering into the sky. How could they do that? How did it stay up so high in the air? Emmy noticed my slack jaw, wide eyes, and metaphorically drooling chin, and quickly leaned over to follow my line of sight.
“Wow!” Her voice got all breathy. “I’ve wanted to see skyreachers my entire life. Did you know that hundreds of sols can live in one building? It’s ingenious.”
All I heard was ‘did you know that hundreds of sols can all die in one go?’ Ingenious clearly equalled insane in Emmy-talk. No way would I ever step foot into something like that. Temptation for my clumsy curse was exactly what that was.
“If sols are so blessed—you know, with all the shininess, and the gifts, and the chance to kiss-ass the gods of Topia—then why do they live all stacked up on top of each other like the Minateurs are waiting to sort them out properly later?”
It didn’t make sense to me. I dreamed of living in my own home, surrounded by all my stuff. I’d have medical kits in the exact spot I last left them. You know, the little things. Emmy had her sol-worshipping eyes on, the deep brown colour as rich as the soil beneath the roots of the trees that we passed. She clearly loved the skyreachers.
“They’re supposed to be so fancy, Will. Like fancy fancy. Only the wealthiest of the sols are able to afford a skyreacher home. Can you imagine? Being so much closer to the gods?”
“Do we know that the gods live in the sky, though? I never really believed Teacher Hardy’s theory. He ate sardines for lunch. It’s never good to trust a person who eats sardines.”
Emmy shrugged. “Maybe they don’t, but I doubt they live in the ground, and whenever anyone talks about the gods coming to Blesswood every moon-cycle, they say that the gods are coming down.”
“Okay, but back to the skyreachers just real quick. How do they even pee? I mean a hole in the floor is going to be a real problem for the sols below.”
Even Jerath chuckled at that one, and he’d been a tough crowd so far. “They have indoor piping and proper bathrooms,” he informed us, a broad grin strong across his fair cheeks. “They can even bathe inside, and the pipes make sure no one gets a pee shower.”
Inside. Inside? Where did the water come from? Where did it go? Would my mind explode from all of the questions currently fighting for dominance? The higher we climbed, the more of the towering buildings surrounded us. Speckled intermittently between them were these huge, gated stone buildings. I had no idea why they needed gates. Sols were probably so badass they kept wild bullsen around their dwellings. Just for kicks.
It seemed that Soldel was coming to its peak; from our current vantage point we could see right out to the second ring, Dvadel. At the junction of this peak was another massive building, and it alone was almo
st the size of our entire village back home. It wasn’t a dark grey stone like most of the other structures, but instead, something white and pretty with sparkling stones embedded into the walls. That was the leader of the buildings, the one which was all ‘look at me, look at me,’ making every other building in Soldel feel like crap about itself.
“Let me guess, that’s Soldel’s academy?” I pointed toward the show-pony.
Emmy shook her head. “Nope. Good guess, but that’s the Minateurs’ council chambers and training facility. They recruit sols during their graduation life-cycle at the academies. After that, it’s another four life-cycles of training, and then they either become council members dealing with the disputes of the gods and the nine rings, or else they go into patrols. The patrols walk the streets, respond to distress calls, and keep the peace. It’s a very honourable life-path and only the best of the best get to be a Minateur.”
“Quick question.” I leaned forward, trying to stretch out the ache in my back. It was taking forever to get to Blesswood. “How did we become friends? I’ve spent my life cycles trying not to become the great disaster of this era, and you’ve spent yours overachieving and learning way too much about the nine rings. They never specifically taught us this in school, so explain how you know everything?”
For most dwellers, there was absolutely no point learning about the inner workings of any rings except the one you lived in. There was no time off to travel; we weren’t even allowed to travel without a tonne of tokens, thirty-five permits, special permission, and a sacrifice to the gods, or some crap. We weren’t sols. We had no rights, and therefore, no need to learn anything more than the basics.
The basics being how to stay the hell out of the way of the sols, unless we were called upon for service.
“The information is there if you want it,” Emmy told me. “I’ve been preparing for Blesswood my entire life. Did you know Teacher Howard was a former Blesswood recruit?”
Teacher Howard? Oh, right, he’d stopped by for one cold season in our sixth school cycle. We’d had a lot of teachers actually, when I thought about it.
“Six stitches and a mild concussion?” I double-checked that I was thinking of the right dweller.
Emmy was trying not to roll her eyes, which was fair considering I’d just summarised an incident that could have occurred with one of at least three other teachers.
I continued. “He loved yellow pants, wore the same socks over and over—despite the fact we could smell his feet even out in the snow—told crazy stories, learned the hard way to never take a weaving class with me. Or at least learned the hard way to never hand me cutters and belts at the same time?”
Still no eye roll. She was practising super-dweller patience.
“Yes, Will, that’s him. He did something to annoy an important sol in Blesswood and as a punishment, he was directed to teach throughout the nine rings. A position of honour, but one which took him far from the blessed capital that he had been working his whole life to get to. He took a liking to me, said I reminded him of his sister, who now serves one of the most gifted of the sol families. He taught me so much. It’s because of him that I worked so hard, studied, and made it my goal to be recruited.”
“And somehow your clumsy-ass best friend got herself invited along on the journey. Very little work and at least one almost-world-ending-disaster per sun-cycle her only claim to fame.”
“I don’t think deliberately altering your records is a somehow thing, Will.” Even as she said it, she was hugging me, hard. “At eight life-cycles I didn’t love you like I do now.” Her voice was muffled against my shirt. “Nope, at eight I was determined to go no matter what. Then you happened, and I knew that one sun-cycle I would have to leave you. It broke my heart. Every morning when I woke up, I questioned whether it was worth it. I would start off wanting to turn it down, and then I wouldn’t be sure. No matter my doubts, I never stopped trying my hardest to be chosen. It was like I had to prove I could be the best, and then if I turned it down I’d know it was my choice.” She pulled back to face me. “You getting chosen with me was the best thing that could ever have happened. For once your clumsy curse was a true gift.”
A gift.
Those weren’t words which had been used to describe my curse before. Nobody would have dared, even to make me feel better. Only sols had gifts, and my curse was enough of a slap-in-the-face-of-the-people as it was.
“Did you ever consider turning it down, Will?” The question from Emmy was a little hesitant, like she had been thinking about it but was afraid to ask. “I mean … I know things have happened so fast, but … did you consider turning it down?”
I hadn’t. Not even once, actually. Which was odd because I was pretty certain I would die there. Although, the certainty of death was something I lived with every day, so it was understandable that it didn’t have me in a panic. Well, not that much of a panic.
“Never even crossed my mind,” I finally said to her. “This was meant to be, our friendship and journey was fated by the gods.” I blew her a kiss, and when she was distracted by my sappy face, I reached out and snatched up the container of purple gaja berries she’d picked in the fourth ring. There were only half a dozen left, and she was being so stingy with her sharing.
She glared as I popped the first tart bite of goodness into my mouth. Berries didn’t grow in the seventh ring, but we occasionally got some in trade. Emmy leaned across, but before things escalated into a girl-fight, the cart slowed, and our attentions were diverted to a huge fence across our current path, just to the side of the Minateurs’ building. Standing spread out across the front of the tall barrier were six sols. I was assuming they were sols because they had the same dazzling thing going on, not to mention that one appeared to be holding a naked flame in his palm, and as far as I could tell, he wasn’t in excruciating, screaming pain as his hand burnt down to a stub. Dwellers were great at lots of things: toiling from sunup to sundown; turning three figs into a pie for the entire village; and even dancing around a fire after copious amounts of liquor. But one thing we could not do was control the elements. Gifts of the sols. Lucky bastards.
Jerath pulled the bullsen to a complete halt and got off the cart. He crossed to the closest sol, a female who stood a foot taller than me, had better hair than me, and was altogether much more beautiful and intimidating than me. Not that I was comparing. Words were exchanged—words we couldn’t hear—and then Jerath handed over some papers.
“Why are these sols eyeballing us?” I asked Emmy, trying not to move my mouth too much.
“Standard security checks before entering Blesswood.” She spoke normally, so my stealthy whispers were clearly not required.
They spent a few clicks examining our cart, checking the back sleeping area, and zapping me with sparks of energy which seemed to emit from their bodies as they crossed close by. Eventually, we were cleared to enter, and I found myself sneakily popping gaja berries in one by one as the gates opened. I had to do something to stem the rising tide of nerves which were threatening to erupt from me. Emmy had given up trying to get her snacks back, instead placing a hand on my knee to stop me bouncing it right out of the cart.
The gates took at least eighty-five life-cycles to open. By the time they did, I was over the nerves. Dragging things out helped no one. Bad power play, sols, bad power play.
The bullsen seemed hesitant to cross the final threshold of Soldel into Blesswood. Jerath had to be extra convincing, his belts flying through the air as he encouraged them along. The sols continued to watch us as we wheeled past. None of them smiled, or said anything, but I could feel their judgement.
You shouldn’t be here.
You don’t belong here.
You’re not one of us.
The gate closed behind us. And suddenly … the nerves were back. I twisted my hands in my lap as I tried to take in everything on this side of the barrier. We were still at the very top of the hill we’d climbed and now it seemed it was time to start d
escending. To the right of our path was a long waterfall, which trickled down into the valley we were heading for. Yes, you heard that right—water just trickling out in the open for all to see. And everything was green. The land was covered in a vibrant green carpet of grass, which was almost too bright to stare at directly. The cart picked up speed and with a rapid warning from Jerath, Emmy and I had to hold on tight to the rails besides us.
After a brief dip, the land levelled out, and despite my need to appear unfazed, there might have been loud gasp slippage. Either that, or the air was thin here and I was having to work harder to breathe.
I knew Blesswood was the very centre of the nine rings and that there were multiple villages in each ring. Those were the things I knew. What I hadn’t known was that Blesswood was pretty much an island. An island? The very concept was like a myth wrapped in a fable shot through with some sparkling magic. Ever since the great rivers and lakes had dried up—since the outer rings of Minatsol had turned into the land of dust and despair—we had no true islands. But Blesswood was doing its very best to come close.
“We’ll need to cross on the barges now,” Jerath said, halting his cart next to a bunch of other carts.
There were other carts! I’d been so caught up in the visage of the centre ring—a mass of land which went further than the eye could see and which seemed to be surrounded by a body of water that was connected to a series of waterfalls, like the one we had passed moments before—that I’d failed to notice the other carts, just like ours, all lined up in rows beside us. It looked as though all the recruits from the nine rings were converging there. They were all waiting for this barge thing to take us across the water.
“What’s a barge?” I asked Emmy.
We were both off now, trying to balance on our half-dead legs. We were being punished for too many sun-cycles of too little use.
“I have no idea,” she answered, as Jerath handed us both our bags. Emmy frowned down at mine, and I knew she was still trying to figure out how I got the pans and rock salt in there, plus enough changes of clothing for a week. If she was so worried about it, she should have packed for me. It was her own fault.