An Unexpected Ally

Chapter Eight, Summer 2037

Pretty woke up in an unfamiliar bed and stirred.

The bunk underneath him stirred as well and Pretty remembered where he was and that Blink was sleeping just below him. The Leader lifted his head and looked across the room at Eve who was already awake and sitting at one of the two desks in the room holding a with a map open. She was focused, but said: “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”

Pretty almost said ‘no,’ but then simply shook his head to test her prophecy powers.

Without turning her head or appearing to break focus, she said, “That’s good to hear.”

“How do your powers work? Can you hear peoples’ thoughts through walls?” Pretty asked.

“Only if I focus. It’s really only distance that stops me.”

“No signal interference?” Blink said as he threw his feet off the side of the bed and rubbed his eyes. Eve picked up his glasses which were folded on the edge of the desk and rolled her chair over to him. Pretty watched looked at her in the eye for a second and then became distracted by the robes she was wearing. They were blue with a gold trim and had a hood hanging at ease on her upper back.

Blink put on his glasses and said, “I’m kind of hungry. What do you eat here?”

Eve sat up straight and took a breath before speaking. “You need water. You’re severely dehydrated and are going to start feeling the altitude sickness pretty soon. I forgot to give you two water yesterday; sorry about that.”

“What’s altitude sickness?” Pretty asked. He hoped it didn’t have to do with throwing up.

“It’s like a cold,” Even said. “Your throat hurts and you get headaches. Worst-case scenario: you won’t want to move from your bed and you’ll have trouble eating anything that isn’t salty, especially water.”

“Then by all means let’s get some water,” Pretty said, rising from his bed which was simply a few towels on the wood slats that usually hold a mattress. He was told they didn’t outfit bed that weren’t being used unless they absolutely had to because the humidity from rain and dew would rot unused mattresses. At least he had a pillow and a blanket on top; the nighttime was cold and there was no heater to keep the resort warm.

“Stay here,” Eve said. “I’ll bring you a pitcher. Before you eat anything, the pitcher should be finished.”

After Eve left, Pretty and Blink stood and started inspecting the room. There were about as many books in this room as their own, but the ones Eve kept around were much different.

The room had two beds, two desks, two chairs, a round coffee table in the center and at the foot of Eve’s bed there was another station. Blink was wondering about that other station at the foot of her bed and cautiously began to inspect it. There was a vanity desk without a mirror, but on the wall next to it was a mirror. Blink straightened his glasses as he looked at himself in the mirror and gave himself a small smile. He could see Pretty looking at some of the books on the bookshelf next to the other desk Eve wasn’t sitting at this morning.

Pretty said, “A few books by a guy named Neal Stevenson. Hey look! Stephen King. The Tommyknockers. That sounds hella suggestive. I’ll show Stevie my knockers.”

Blink smiled and opened one of the draws in the vanity. There were bunch of small tubes in a paper wrapping. He picked one up. “The hell are these?”

Pretty looked over and then took a few steps over before saying: “Oh, shit, that’s a tampon! Put that back, quick.”

Blink cocked his head, but trusted Pretty and put it back. “What is it?”

“It catches all the blood when a girl’s on her cycle,” Pretty said. “But those aren’t used ones.”

“How do you know?”

Pretty shrugged. “When my mom gave me the talk a few years ago… damn, I guess technically decades ago… she figured she’d cover that part too. So fucking awkward… but hell, I guess you gotta have that conversation at some point, you know?”

Blink nodded like he understood, but his dad hadn’t taken him aside for a conversation like that. He just had to learn by intuition, by piecing together certain comments. One of the most stark examples was when he was playing Winton’s Junior Golf. He was a shit player, but he just liked to hear the other competitive kids complain about their excellent shots and make extremely dumb comments. Once on an adjacent fairway a different young golfer was loudly explaining in borderline grisly detail how sixty-nining worked to his foursome and that was how he learned about that.

There were books scattered at the foot of Blink’s bed which used to be on the bed before he took over. Eve had hastily relocated them off the bed. Most of them were weathered map books. They were flat and large. One caught Blink’s eye and he picked it up. Stephen Biesty’s Cross-Sections Man-of-War. Blink opened it. The first page was ripped out, but the rest of the book had little wear aside from some dog-earing on the pages that had been carefully straightened out. He learned that the meals on these ships consisted of a lot of salted meat and butter or cheese. Blink didn’t think he would make a good sailor after reading this.

Pretty put his hands behind his back and leaned over Eve’s desk at the book she was reading. The Andromeda Strain by the author of Jurassic Park. Pretty was taken aback. “Jurassic Park was a book?” He picked up The Andromeda Strain hoping to find out more about the Jurassic Park book.

Blink stayed fixed to his own book.

Pretty was reading the back of this book when Eve returned through the open bedroom door. He placed it back on the desk exactly where it had been and said, “Hiya.”

Eve placed two clear plastic cups on the desk next to her book and put the pitcher on a different book titled Rockwell’s America with a diner scene on the torn-up cover.
“Drink up,” Eve instructed them.

“How will you know what fraiser thing we are? What superpower we get?” Blink asked as he grabbed one of the cups.

Eve shrugged. “I’ve been wondering the same thing all night and morning. There are ways to boost it, but the Shepherd would have to approve any of those methods.”

“How old are you?” Pretty asked, filling Blink’s cup first and then his own.

“I’m not certain, but I think I’m about sixteen. I’ve been with the Shepherd for almost seven or eight years now.”

“When did you meet him?” Pretty said.

Eve murmured and just shook her head. “Maybe ask him.”

“The Shepherd?”

“Yes.”

Pretty knew not to probe, but Blink didn’t and said, “Why?”

“I’d rather not talk about that part,” Eve answered.

“Oh,” Blink said.

The boys downed the rest of the water in a wordless race and Blink smiled, wishing he had an older brother more like Pretty.

“Let’s go eat; everyone else has probably eaten already. I know I have,” Eve said.

“How long have you been awake?” Pretty asked as they followed her out of the room.

“An hour and a half,” Eve said. “The Shepherd keeps the clock out for everyone to see so we know what time it is and we use the stars to gage what time zone and season we’re in.”

“How efficient,” Pretty said. “You make it sound like you only have one clock.”

“The ‘Grandfather Clock’ goes off every hour. We keep it clean, dry, and wound all the time. But if you’re from before the rise, there were probably clocks everywhere, hm?”

“Yeah, I got one on my wrist,” Blink said, pushing back his sleeve and revealing his green and orange Casio.

Eve tilted her head and inspected the wristwatch with her hands behind her back like Pretty had when he was inspecting her desk.

“It’s on a screen, like a television,” Eve said.

“Digital.” Blink nodded.

“Digital,” Eve repeated the word with reverence.

Pretty found her fascination cute. Not an attractive cute, but the cute you feel when you see a baby. An innocent cute.

The continued into the main room of the cabin where the large wood table sat. The same one at which they had been questioned. There was a kitchen with a sink and behind it was a large fridge and next to it was a huge open wooden door leading into the pantry. For a moment, Pretty and Blink felt they hadn’t traveled into an apocalyptic future world. It vanished when they looked overhead and saw a few shuffling hammocks.

“Flying fraisers,” Pretty said to Blink. “Crazy. I wonder if any of the Astronomers are fliers.”

“Hangers,” Eve said as she left the kitchen. “I’ll be right back.”

“Hangers… nah, they’re fliers,” Pretty said. He wanted to see one of them fly around the spacious main room.

Eve returned with a tray carrying a wrapped half-loaf of bread, more water, and something like orange noodles in a bowl.

She placed the tray on the counter and opened a drawer and removed a serrated knife. She started cutting the bread. “Ever tried fucaccia bread? Horribly simple to make. The only thing hard to come by is yeast, but another fraiser, Hannah, has become good at harvesting her own yeast. She and I are really the only ones who read.”

“How did you bake it?” Pretty asked.

“The Shepherd had a stone oven built outside and whenever we dock we usually stock up on wood if we are running low,” Eve said.

The boys ate slowly and realized the water they had drank plus their lack of eating had shrunk their appetites. They were finished in ten minutes.

“Are you ready for the next part of the tour?” Eve asked, her robes swishing just past her knees. Blink noticed her shins were whiter than her face and she wore small, hand-tailored cloth shoes.

“I didn’t know we were on a tour,” Pretty said. “I’m ready.”

Eve led them outside behind the ski resort. “This resort used to be on a mountain, but with a lot of minders’ help they fused together a flat surface and reinforced the bottom with big steel girders. It’s one of the strongest boats to float.”

“How much did this cost the Shepherd?”

“A lot,” Eve said, leaning into the last word with pride. “The most expensive transaction he has made in his life. I was there for it.”

Blink wanted to ask how she met the Shepherd again, but then he remembered it was a sensitive topic. Then he wondered if she could read his mind and know what he was wanting to ask.

Eve hadn’t been paying attention to Blink’s thinking and failed to hear his internal question. She was leading them across the pasture. “This is the Mansion Pasture. It’s where all the traveling mansions return. The Shepherd calls them ‘free-range novis’. He tried raising a couple of other fraiserbanes, but he really connected with the novis and decided to exclusively raise them.”

“What other fraiserbanes are there?” Pretty said.

Eve took a breath and said, “Caywords, barrygangs, those swirly-headed guys… the Quaker eats fraisers… uh… there are a couple of others, but I can’t remember them. Oh, there are those tree-perching ones. I don’t know their names. I’ve never seen one in person; I’ve only heard about them.”

“How do mansions travel?” Blink said before Pretty could ask what the swirly-headed guys were.

“The Shepherd calls it ‘folding’ because when they leave, they start folding up and sliding into themselves until they are gone. Like when a piece of paper folds up and gets smaller? But in this case the houses are also unfolding somewhere else entirely. This spot,” Eve pointed to a large, rectangular hole in the ground surrounded by more rectangles intermixing into themselves as if a large house used to reside here, “is where one of the mansions left. Look, there’s some of the man-made rock left behind.”

Pretty and Blink followed her to the edge of the hole and saw some concrete residue that used to be attached to the house.

“It still doesn’t make sense,” Blink said. “Wouldn’t this mean the house could leave behind all of the house at some point? It’s leaving these little bits of concrete? How does the house decide what goes with it and what stays?”

Eve shrugged. “I don’t know about it too much. It’s just something that happens and sometimes they leave behind little bits of the house. Sometimes a plank or two, or maybe some of those roof tiles. There’s a name for them, but I forget.”

“Shingles,” Pretty said.

“Shingles,” Eve said. “It’s also a disease that some of us got a few winters ago.” She let those words fade as she said them. “Next part… my favorite part too. I had some of the minders dig it out.”

They were still walking through the mansion pasture for several minutes and the two Astronomers were watching the mansions around them, wondering if they would move, wondering if something would pop out of them and attack.

Pretty drew in a large, rattling breath. “We were in one of those. God, there were some times I thought we were going to die.”

“We made it, though,” Blink said.

Pretty appreciated Blink’s simple, forward thinking.

The edge of the boat was approaching and Pretty and Blink slowed.

Eve kept walking and said, “There are hangars on duty. It means even if you fall, they’re ready to dive after you and bring you back. The Shepherd uses the hangars for more than one reason. Nobody has ever fallen to their death on one of his boats.”

“Doesn’t mean I want to fall, though. Why are we on this side of the boat?” Pretty said.

Eve led them to another smaller rectangular hole in the ground. This one was outfitted with stone steps that led into the ground.

“Whoa, a secret hideout!” Blink said and followed her down. Pretty wordlessly did the same.

The walls were also stone and supported the dirt overhead. The wind stopped like someone had turned it off as they were submerged into the earth. The wind-chill was traded for the cool, underground feeling and impartial stone. Two-dozen steps later, they made it into a room with a large opening with a metal fence. The opening was cut into the side of the Stone Compass and offered a large window out the back of the boat. Here you could look over the fence and see the water below. Blink kept his footing as far back as possible and leaned to steal a large look at the water. It looked like soft, blue, consistent marble.

Pretty noticed Eve’s face was as stony as the walls. Is she planning on killing us here?

Eve turned her head and looked at Pretty and shook her head. “The Shepherd can’t hear us here.”

Pretty and Blink faced Eve. What didn’t she want the Shepherd to hear?

“You know Atlas Black?”

“No, but you mentioned him last night,” Pretty said.

“I haven’t spoken to him in a little while. I tried to last night, but wasn’t able to reach him,” Eve said.

“How can you talk to him?”

“Dreamscoping,” Eve said. “But he said if the Shepherd came across any fraisers from out-of-time, he needed them. He said he was looking for one Myles Willis, but neither of you are named that. But I thought perhaps he made a mistake and needs you anyway.”

“You know Myles?!” Pretty said. “Where did you see him?”

“I didn’t! I don’t even know what he looks like,” Eve answered.

“Is he in the city we’re going to?” Pretty took a step closer to Eve.

“I only know his name.”

“How does Atlas know Myles? And does Myles know Atlas? What has Myles been holding back?” Pretty said.

Eve inhaled and exhaled, considering her answer. Then she said, “The Shepherd’s staff. It’s called Auric and while he has it, he will likely be able to overcome Atlas. Atlas needed someone to steal it.”

“So why don’t we do that? Jump him while he’s asleep?”

Eve shook her head. “You don’t know what a Maxim Staff is, do you?”

Pretty and Blink shook their heads.

“Auric can’t be claimed by just anyone. They need to have a high-enough legacy bond.”

“What’s a legacy bond?” Pretty said.

“Oh, heavens,” Eve sighed. “You’re not quite stupid, but you are incredibly far behind.”

Pretty narrowed his eyes, wondering if he should be offended.

“Myles Willis, according to Atlas Black, has a high-enough legacy bond to claim Auric. Nobody else has a high enough legacy bond that is readily available.”

Pretty understood the words, but the situation behind them was where he was confused. “How… did Atlas find Myles of all people? He’s not even on the same planet as him. And the timing? How the hell did all of that work?”

Eve shook her head. “You’d have to ask him. But we need to get Myles onto the Stone Compass along with Atlas.”

“Wait, you said Atlas promised you something. That’s why you’re helping him at all, right?” Blink said. “What did he promise you?”

“I want to leave the Compass. But I don’t want to be sold. I want to go to Veldur and leave this planet.”

“What’s Veldur?” Blink asked.

Eve just waved her hand and shook her head to dismiss him. “I’ve been here seven years. I’ve seen some horrible things and I want to leave them behind now.”

When Pretty and Blink thought about that comment paired with their own experience, they knew what she was talking about and said nothing in understanding. Eve’s stance and decisiveness made her seem like a woman instead of a girl.

Pretty folded his arms and said, “What do you need us to do?”

What are Pretty, Blink, and Eve discussing? How did the Shepherd claim Auric? Maybe Eve has grown close to the shepherd? And when do we hear the backstory, if at all? Maybe Eve tells them?