Chapter 28
Emmalee
Here I go again. Holding back. Lying through my teeth.
I was as guilty as Barty’s-a-shit for not telling my own family the truth. That still didn’t mean I forgave him. Don’t count on me doing so anytime soon.
TOO MUCH TIME PASSED
Yes, I was lying. And I would keep lying because I wasn’t about to believe anything that Jake had said.
In the short time he’d been in my head, he’d revealed to me too much to comprehend. The chaos of the Far Beyond, the anger he felt toward my father, and his extraordinary devotion to Barty’s-a-shit. It was the fear and pain of seeing my brother Jam and sister Angie destroyed and betrayed by their own bodies that terrified me the most. They were both going to die. There was no stopping the canister effects.
“I saw, Jake, Em.”
Jam’s words scared me. I took a shallow breath and tried to swallow. “If you did, why are you asking me?”
I heard Jam let out an exasperated sigh. “Because I only saw a portion of what you did. Jake didn’t talk to me. I only saw him through you.”
“Me?”
“You weren’t sucking a bushberry.”
I didn’t understand what one of the berries Stevron carried around with him had to do with me. “A bushberry?”
“Never mind. Just tell me.”
My heart began to race. I shook my head.
Several moments passed and then Jam’s hushed voice reached my ears. “I don’t fear death, Em.”
I stiffened at his words. Horrifying imagines of the Far Beyond flashed through my head. “You should.”
“No,” Jam’s voice was now resigned. “The Larcore took away any hope of my fighting while alive, so I’ll fight when I’m dead.”
I felt my throat clog even tighter. It hurt to swallow. It hurt to breathe.
“Em, Jake may not have ever talked to me.” His voice was softer now. “That doesn’t mean I haven’t been witness to what’s happening.”
My heart stopped. Had the Far Beyond found another way to get to my brother?
“What is happening?” I whispered after a long pause. “Jake mentioned war.”
“It is war. The fabric of the Far Beyond, is being shred.”
“Shred? How?”
“Impatience. The natural order of the Far Beyond was disrupted the day the canisters fell.”
A chill ran through me. The Larcore had been threatening to take over the fyre wings trade for years. There had been thousands of small attacks and disturbances. Nothing major. Not until the canister attacks seven years ago.
“Everything changed, Em. The day the canisters fell and our ability to procreate was destroyed.”
Babies. The rumour Char had described flooded back into my head.
“Without us producing children, the Far Beyond have no way to get back to the physical plain. They’re trapped and as each day passes they become more impatient. They’re starting to resort to drastic measures.”
“What measures?”
“I’m not exactly sure, but I have a sense that they’re taking on a physical form.”
“Living people?”
“Yes.”
The chill running through me turned to ice. “Like body snatching us?”
“I believe so.”
Fear gripped my heart. Was the reason the fyre wings’ song sounded distorted and ugly because the Far Beyond had broken through the barrier and disrupted the natural order of the tiny creature’s rebirth process? Was the bloop, bloop sound I had begun to hear, a distress call? “How is that even possible? And how would we know if we’d been…inhabitied?”
I heard Jam sigh again. “Em. there’s so much we don’t understand about the Far Beyond. I don’t know much more than anyone else. Whose’s to say what’s going on up there. Has Jake been more forthcoming?”
I wet my dry lips. “Not really. There was no specfics to what he showed me. But, Jam, Calvin has been studying every aspect of the changes we’ve incurred. Wouldn’t he have come across this development?”
“I’m not sure, Em,” Jam’s voice faltered. “All I’m saying is that I’m seeing things that don’t make sense to me.”
“Seeing things?”
“Yes.”
“Things that are here…or?” I asked.
“From the Far Beyond? Yes.”
I tried to wrap my head around what my brother was suggesting. What exactly was he talking about? “How, how do you see things, if not by Jake?”
Jam was silent.
I felt my heart slam to another stop. I didn’t want to believe what Jam was implying.
“Are you part of the rumour?” I forced myself to ask. “Other than the fact that your’e ageing?”
“It looks that way.”
I sucked in a breath. “Can you see the future, too?”
“Yeah, but not in the way you would think.”
“Then how? How do you know what you know?”
I heard Jam shift in the sand. He must have placed the cloth over his face again because the one word I never thought I’d hear again escaped in a muffled rush.
“Mom.”
My heart started beating again. The image of my mother, before the canisters fell and I went blind, appeared in my mind’s eye. I gasped at the vividness of her eyes and smile.
She’d survived the canister attacks with no visible alteration, unlike the rest of my family. She seemed to be completely immune. That is until she’d suddenly died for no apparent reason over three years ago.
Was Jam telling me that he could talk to her, like Jake had talked to me? And since Jake had been able to talk to me, could I now talk to our mother? The thought made my heart sing. How I wanted to be able to talk to my Mom.
“Mom?”
“It’s not what you think, Em. She writes in my mind. Like script on a wall.”
“But you see her.”
I heard the disappointment in my brother’s tone. “No, just a vague sense of her.”
“Then how do you know it’s her?”
“It’s her, Em.”
“So your communications, are only one way?”
“Yes. There’s no conversation.”
I felt deflated and saddened.
“What does this mean? Where is this all going?”
Jam coughed and I heard the sound of him clearing his throat. His next words were raspy. “A child, Em. There’s going to be a child.”
I sucked in a breath. “So Char was right. The rumour is a child.”
“A Fyre Life Wings child, will save us all.”
“Mom wrote that?”
“Yes.”
“Who is this child? Who will be the mother? Is Char’s theory about the canister’s effects right? Are they beginning to wear off?”
“I have no idea.”
For the first time since the Prayers’ attack I felt optimistic. I smiled. There appeared to be hope.
©Legend of the Sapphyre Wings by Janet Merritt