Mud, Page 7

  Eventually he stops again to dig through his pack, pulls out a canteen and a folded cloth filled with crackers and dried meats. He counts out a few of them and hands them to me, along with his canteen.

  He hardly has enough for himself.

  I shake my head.

  He frowns. “You must need it.”

  “No,” I tell him. “You eat.”

  His eyes are hesitant, but he sips from the water a few times and tucks it back into the pack with most of the food. The crackers and meat he set aside he nibbles at as we walk.

  Ahead of us, the sun sinks away. It is not long before the boy’s steps begin to stumble, and the bruises under his eyes darken with weariness. But before he will let me take him into my arms to sleep, he lights another small fire and utters an evening prayer. He stomps out the flame and bursts into sudden movement.

  “What are you doing? Stop!”

  Every inch of me is overtaken with a shudder of confusion and I flinch away—don’t let him touch the box.

  But he doesn’t come at me. I look back. It’s not an attack for the box, only series of pushups, jumps, and combat exercises. I try to take a breath.

  He stands, panting. “These are my drills.”

  Another slow breath out. Drills? He’s only a child.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself.” He’s still weak from the fall and the Silencer’s beating.

  He peers up at me over the dark bruises that streak his face. “I always do my drills. No matter what. That’s just how war is.”

  He’s not making sense. It jumbles my brain and anger leaks out the cracks. Already he’s dropped back to the ground and is huffing away.

  “What war?”

  “Don’t know,” he pants. “That’s just what my mother always said.”

  “Your mother had you doing this?”

  “Yeah.” A sharp breath. “And then my sister. It’s important that I’m ready.”

  “But,” I bend over and grab his arm, make him be still. “Why? Ready for what?”

  He forces his breathing to slow a little and looks up to me. “I don’t know. She hadn’t told me yet,” he says. His brow pulls together and he looks away. “I guess now I won’t know until it’s here.”

  My fault. Guilt knocks away my words. Jordan may not believe it, but that doesn’t stop it from being true. I watch silently until he finishes.

  After, once his body quiets again, I take him cautiously in my arms and walk for both of us. His head slowly sags until it is resting on my shoulder, his hair tickling at my neck.

  The sky is wide and crisp with clarity tonight, speckled with stars well beyond what could be seen in Epoh. Well beyond what I could ever remember. Crickets chirp in chorus all around—at least one thing has survived out here.

  In the dark, in the quiet like this, thoughts start to push their way to the surface of my mind. Doubts.

  Ceil. He was trying to tell me something. Something I needed to know before my quest. Why would Kythiel stop him?

  But the more I mull on it, the more tangled the knots get.

  “She’s still alive.”

  I jump at Jordan’s voice. I thought surely that he was sleeping by now. All my other worries dissolve for the moment.

  “We can’t know that,” I tell him. “Perhaps if she is lucky, she is at rest.”

  His head nods against my shoulder. “I do know.”

  “No. You couldn’t,” I say.

  “But I do,” he insists. “I can feel her. Everyone has an energy. It’s all connected. If she was gone, I would know.”

  His certainty unsettles me, prickles in my spine. But he couldn’t know. Could he? I hope his mind isn’t where mine is, considering the tortures she is likely facing even this minute.

  “What is your name?” he asks.

  The question gives me a chill—how long as it been since anyone asked me this?

  “Adem.”

  “Adem,” he repeats. His words are starting to get lazy with sleep. “I’m Jordan.”

  Soon after, his breathing slows and deepens and it is only the wasteland, the night, and me.

  Chapter 10

  I WALK THROUGH the night. As we move west, the cold eases, the sun gets stronger.

  Jordan sleeps and sleeps and sleeps. He lies still as a rock, collapsed into me all through the night. He’s taken a lot for so short a time. But the swelling of his bruises show the earliest signs of healing under his skin, easing away into purples and blues and yellows.

  Finally he wakes, squinting into the day’s brightness, and slides to the ground. The first thing he does is kneel down, bend his body to the earth. He pulls his hands in and folds them under his chin. A morning prayer.

  Then the drills. The questions rush through my mind again. But I stay quiet—he’s been through enough for a small boy these past few days. And I’ve already done enough to contribute to it, leaving his sister behind. With a painful twinge, I wonder where she is right now. How much she’s suffering. If she’s still alive.

  When he is done with his drills, we push on.

  The farther we get from Epoh, the more we leave behind the ruin. Plants have started to regrow out here, healing amidst the destruction from the War. As we walk, Jordan studies them, pulling leaves from some and storing them in his pack. It makes it easy to keep him a safe distance from me. When he stops to ration out more of his crackers and dried meat, he eats some of the plant leaves too. Again, he offers some to me.

  “Why don’t you eat?” he asks.

  “I have no need,” I tell him. I quicken my pace, moving a little past him. I’m exposing myself.

  “And you do not tire. You walked all through the night.” He starts skipping to match my pace.

  I say nothing. Tension is clenching up my chest. He sees too much. For a moment, we trudge on in silence. What can I say to him?

  He bounces high toward me in another skip, and swings out his hand to me. It flies up near the box in my pocket, and I can feel it, the box, it’s restless, crying to be held, stretching for him, always, always hungry to be discovered, to find someone to lure in. Someone for me to kill. Jordan’s skin brushes my arm, and I jump away, a shudder overtaking my whole body, a loud gasp escaping me.

  His face scrunches, surprised and sad.

  “What’s wrong?” he whimpers.

  Anxiety pounds through me. “What were you doing?”

  He cautiously steps toward me, his eyes wide and cautious, carefully studying my face. In the sun small flecks of orange glow in them like sparks. He slips his hand into mine.

  This is all? My ears rush with heat and shame. Of course, he is not trying to take the box. How could he even know of it?

  “Okay?” He still watches me, brows pushed together.

  “Okay.”

  I close my eyes and tighten my hands into fists, then relax my muscles and feel the tension break way. When I open my eyes again, he is watching me, his eyes wary. A small, careful smile spreads over his lips. We walk.

  He forgets the moment quickly, and soon our quiet is comfortable again. He kicks a pebble along as we go.

  Night eventually falls. Jordan carefully counts out his crackers, leaves, and strips of meat. He sips from his water. He does not offer me any this time. Then he bends to the earth again, folding his palms together under his chin. Evening prayer.

  “Where did you learn that? The prayers?” This time my questions won’t stay in me.

  He finishes his prayer before answering.

  “My mother taught us. We’ve always done it.”

  “In Epoh?” It doesn’t make sense.

  “Yeah. Lots of us did.”

  But that doesn’t make sense.

  “But Zevach banned anything to do with the Three.”

  He shrugs. “We did it anyway. Just not where they could see.”

  Suddenly my confusion hardens into a tight seed of anger. Why are they endangering themselves over something so pointless?

  “But the Three are gone
. They left.”

  He just shrugs. “Some say that. But I don’t think so. I feel Them sometimes.”

  “No. They’re gone,” The words come out of me in hard, bitter shards, like something settled so deep in me I forgot it was there. “After the Second Realm War, they left.”

  The remorse doesn’t come until I look at Jordan’s face, somber and flat. He doesn’t say anything. He just reaches up and takes my hand.

  The dark settles in, his eyes begin to droop and his steps begin to drag. Again, I take him in my arms, and he curls against my shoulder and stretches his arms around my neck, pressing against my chest. His warmth seeps into me and the angst, the tension begins to disperse in response. I hold on to just a little of it, a tight knot in the middle of my back. I can’t afford to become too comfortable. That’s when it all goes wrong.

  “Why is your skin so cold?” He pulls his head up to look at me. “I’ve never met anyone so cold.”

  He knows, he knows, he knows. My shoulders tighten with discomfort. What will he do? Will he leave me? Maybe he should.

  “I told you. I am not like you.” I swallow the great lump in my throat before adding, “You should fear me.” He needs to know.

  “Fear you?” he frowns. “You saved me.”

  It’s no use. He almost sees me for what I am, but he doesn’t understand.

  I hold him to me in my arms and say a pointless prayer to whoever might listen. I pray for somewhere safe for him.

  Then as his breathing slows and the dark stillness settles in, the questions start to creep back into my mind. The fears.

  What was Ceil trying to say? That look in his eyes as he spoke, trying to pour it all into me. Their glazed-over iciness when Kythiel overtook him—so angry. Why?

  The strangeness of it, the inconsistency of it with the desperate beautiful creature I met in the cellar, it nags at me.

  If only I could understand what Ceil was trying to tell me, maybe it would make sense. I roll it over and over with each step through the night, but it is useless.

  ****

  By morning, we have come far enough that most of the chill has left the air.

  Jordan wakes early. I place him on the ground and he eats, prays, does his drills, and we get moving again. It is not long before he stuffs his cloak into his pack. He runs circles around me, trails behind me, and leaps between my footprints.

  His speech is as active as his body, a rapid flow like the crackling of a fire. He covers everything from his friends in Epoh to the plants we come across.

  And later, more questions.

  “Were you part of Epoh? I mean. I know you lived there. But were you part of it?”

  Knots squirm inside me. He’s looking at me as he looked at me in the tower. Studying.

  “What do you mean?” I know what he means.

  “I just … I never saw you out before that night.” We both know which night. The last night. The night I failed Miriam. “Why did I never see you?”

  “Epoh is large.”

  “Epoh is small,” he counters. “And I would notice you. You are so big. You look… ” He squints up at me. “ You’re just different.”

  We go on in silence for a time, the only sound the crunching dirt below our feet.

  Until he starts again.

  “You killed that Silencer.”

  The words slam into me as if I’d walked into a wall, and I stop in my tracks. I thought after the fall maybe he’d forgotten.

  I turn to him. Remember the panic that stretched over his face, the way he gaped up at me after, when I turned back and scooped him into my arms.

  “What you did saved me. It almost saved us both.”

  The guilt rises and spreads within me like hot air trapped in a tight space. I remember the rage that took over as I squeezed at the Silencer’s neck, and I am not so sure saved is the right word.

  “I shouldn’t have. I should have… ” But I don’t know what I should have done. I should have kept the rage in check. “And even so, it was not enough.”

  “It was. It was enough for what the Three have in store.”

  “The Three are gone.” The words are out of me before I can ask myself if I should start this again.

  “They’re here,” Jordan says.

  “You have not seen what I have over the years.” The suffering, pain, and violence. My voice is a feral snarl, but it doesn’t faze him.

  “I can feel Them.”

  He said that yesterday, something about feeling the Gods. “What does that mean?”

  He shrugs. “I just feel Them. I’ve always been able to. It’s like… it’s like heat. The same way I can feel Miriam is still alive. The same way I can feel the magic in you.” My ears perk at the words. He stretches his hands out toward me; his head tilts to the side, pensive and curious. “There’s so much of it.”

  How does he know, how could he possibly know?

  His hands drop. But he is still watching me.

  “Adem, what are you?”

  I stop in my tracks. Stare at down to my feet. Dirt sticks between my toes. I grope for words, anything to say, just not the truth.

  “I’m not like you.”

  Pieces of each word stick in my throat like splintered wood.

  “I know you’re not.” He steps up next to me. “You’re…” for the first time he pulls his eyes away, the first time in our three days, and scuffs the ground.

  My ears burn. It was wrong to bring him with me. He sees too much. When he flees from me in fear out here, there will be nowhere for him to run to in the wasteland.

  “You’re a golem. Aren’t you?” he asks again.

  Golem. It digs into me like a shovel forced into packed earth.

  “What do you know of such things? A small child like you.”

  The full bitterness of my words hits me as soon as they are out, pungent and awful, a taste that seeps into my tongue and won’t leave.

  His soft serious face and wide eyes don’t waver.

  “Just what’s in the Texts.”

  The Texts. It’s not much. The first mention I found, I’d thought I’d finally found my answers. But what the Texts had for me was less than a handful of dust. Just what I already knew, and myths of men who had created them, men who may or may not have been anything more than stories. No matter how many times I read them, I could not get anything more from them. It was like trying to squeeze blood from stones.

  Jordan keeps talking. “There was one man a long time ago. The Forger. He made a whole army of them, making them over and over until the magic drove him mad. He made more golems than anyone else, ever.”

  I know it. “That’s just a story. It’s not in the Texts.”

  Just empty words. Lies. If so many golems were created, where did they all go? I’ve never found another in all my ages of being.

  “Did the Forger make you, Adem?”

  “He is not real,” I growl.

  Quiet.

  “But someone made you. Who is your maker?”

  My cheeks grow hot. “I don’t know.”

  “Oh.”

  Jordan’s eyes dart away. But he’s not done asking questions.

  “How… how is that possible?”

  How can I explain what I don’t know? “It was many ages ago. Everything that far back is blurry. Whoever it was, I don’t think he wanted me to find him. He sent me away.”

  Jordan stares at his steps through the dirt. “So you’ve just always been alone?”

  “Yes.”

  The word hangs there, empty. Bare.

  “It is better that way,” I add.

  He looks back up to me, frowning. “Why were you in Epoh? Why did you leave?”

  So many questions. They build up like a wall around me, pin me in. My mind is weary with them. Loud. It is crowded and crammed with this new information.

  “Adem?”

  No more. Not now. I can’t. I don’t look back to him. I keep my gaze locked on the ground in front of me.

 
“Adem?”

  Suddenly pressure bursts inside me and I turn on him. “Why didn’t you run like the others?” I roar.

  I feel a twinge of remorse at the way his curious expression flickers out, but the pounding anger quickly drowns it out. “What?”

  “In the temple. You were with the boys that found me in the tower. They ran. Why didn’t you run?”

  Jordan’s eyes stay on me a moment before dropping away.

  “You were so sad. I just wanted to understand why.”

  My rage flattens out, swallowed up into itself. Sad? I suppose I am. I stumble through my mind for something to say, but it’s like fumbling through the dark. Finally, I turn away and trudge on ahead.

  It’s a moment before I hear his soft steps rustling behind me.

  We push on in silence.

  But all he said is trapped in my mind. With each step I pick it apart, examine each piece. A quiet anger simmers over my skin.

  We walk on like this until the sun drops.

  “Adem?”

  Jordan’s voice is soft in the twilight, but it jolts me out of myself. I’m still not used to hearing my name.

  His face is creased with caution. I was too harsh to him before.

  I grunt reluctant acknowledgement.

  “What were you made for?”

  My foundation lurches as if the ground has dropped out from under me.

  “What?”

  He retreats half a step, looks down. I hear how my voice sounds too late. Rough. A snarl.

  “Golems. They’re made for a purpose. What were you made for? Do you… do you know?”

  The box. The curse always on me, clouds around me, a constant fog of inescapable burden.

  “I do.”

  Its charge bursts out from my pocket in waves. It cries to be let free, to be held, to be known and used.

  Jordan skips with excitement, pulls in close to my side. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His nose crinkles as he tilts his head in confusion.

  “Whatever it is, my maker hid it even from me. It’s locked away in a box that will not open.”