In the Rooting Valleys

  Firven 18, 1294:

  My home. My beautiful home . . . they have burned it to the ground. I can scarce believe it. I know not the whereabouts of Mother and Father, and I’m trying my best to be strong and not panic. The Anier attacked us two days back. They shot out the windows and door with their new . . . muskets? They shot Father, and he wasn’t moving, but I know he’ll be all right. Mother was still there, and I know she must have gotten him out and taken him to safety and be nursing him at this moment. But the house, it’s gone, burnt to cinders! They torched the whole thing after desecrating it with their horrible weapons. I feel miserable and scared because I don’t know why they want me or where I am being taken.

  — From Lhinde’s Diary

  In the end, we decided to camp for the night. In the middle of a foggy, creepy valley. (Trust me, it was creepy at night.)

  Zent and Ccal tried for hours to send coded radio signals, but none seemed to be getting through. We even discussed making some smoke signals in the morning to see if the rebels’ satellites would pick them up, but that was far too risky. The Gaean League knew roughly where we were; the Red Horizon did not.

  So we holed up in a cavern on one side of the valley, whose roof overhung just enough to give us shelter from the rain, should it decide to pour down upon us. Zent said that it was common in this area. We sat around a fire that I’d helped Bddo to make, listening to the chirping of the bog crickets and tree frogs. Bddo had enlightened me as to their identities. And no, they were apparently not good to eat.

  The sack had indeed contained food, but precious little else in regards to comfort. There was a spare suit in there that they’d brought along for me, for which I was very grateful. I took it, searching around for the best place to change despite their blank looks. Idiots. They didn’t even know what a woman was, much less how to treat one modestly. Finally, I went a short hike outside the cave into the fog and put the suit on. It was composed of elastic black pants, a shirt and a long-sleeved jacket, all of which were probably made to fit the smallest of Hellebes, in other words someone bigger than me. Oh well. I stuffed my prison clothes behind a tree and walked back to the fire, frowning as I tested the fit. I’d never worn anything so stretchy in my life, let alone halfway formfitting. We’d brought sheets of moss up from the boggy areas to dry by the fire, and I plopped myself down on my own sheet. It would be comfortable enough for my tired back after this hectic day. Not to mention I was used to prison comforts, or lack thereof.

  “So, mate,” Bddo said at one point. “What’s it like being female?”

  The question took me by surprise so much that I gave a sputtering laugh. “Where did that come from?”

  The lanky Hellebes shrugged. “Just thought I’d ask. Seeing as, y’know, you’re the only one alive.”

  Oh. Right. I nodded. “I try to forget about that. I guess you’ve got a point, huh?” I tried to think of an answer to give him, but I couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t exceedingly awkward. “I don’t know. I suppose I mostly just feel like an outsider here. Like—like I’m home, but I don’t belong.”

  Bddo looked like he wanted to say more, but he gave a pursed-lip nod that said, Fair enough.

  He started to say something more, but Ccal grabbed his arm. “Just stop, man. She’s obviously overwhelmed.”

  I smiled despite myself. With a grunt, I leaned back against the moss I’d dragged up. “How do you guys manage living here? With the heavy gravity?”

  Three heads swiveled my way. “We’re raised with it,” Bddo said. “Not much we can do about it. To us, this just feels normal.”

  “You’re from off-planet,” Zent said. “It’s going to take time to get used to. We’ll get you acclimated eventually. As a female, you’re naturally weaker, and as a half-blood, you’re at an even bigger physical disadvantage. But once you learn to control your Geokinetic powers, you’ll be unstoppable.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Because female Hellebes are supposed to be crazy strong,” Ccal said. “No limits.”

  “No limits, huh?” I raised a hand up, turning my forearm and clenching my fingers. “Sounds nice. I don’t know, I feel pretty exhausted.”

  “Once you master Geokinesis, it will keep you going for days,” Zent explained. “I’ll bet you’re pretty hungry already, too.”

  “What, you aren’t?”

  “Here,” he said, handing me a decidedly sketchy foil-packaged snack. Not as sketchy as the ones I’d eaten in the Haccolces facility, of course, so I took it gratefully. “Now, before you eat that, I want you to focus. You already know how to use Geokinesis a little bit instinctively. Focus on that energy beneath your feet and just sort of feel it.”

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  Instinctively? How could he know that? I eyed the captain silently, trying to do as he instructed. I could feel it like a rushing river far below, flowing in every direction. I’d sensed it in Haccolces, but I’d taken it for granted as another strange feature of Gaea. “All right, now what?”

  “Pull from it. Slowly, just a bit. Don’t use it; just pull.”

  “Ok.” I . . . supposed I did know how to do that on impulse. I drew from the planetary energy of Gaea, sucking it into my body through my palms, and my skin began to glow ever so faintly with wispy green light—a phenomenon I’d never observed back on Mani. There, I had hungered for this but never truly gotten it. It felt . . . good. Comforting.

  “There you go. That will tide you over for a while at a time, and if you draw just a bit all day, you can keep your metabolism going even without food.”

  I looked down at the pre-packaged meal in my hand. “So . . .”

  “Go ahead and eat it,” Ccal said. “You need whatever you can get until you’re up to speed.”

  I unwrapped the meal and ate the hard, brown bar inside. It was dry and crunchy, but didn’t taste any worse than it looked. Soon, my stomach no longer grumbled at all. I kept up the small intake of planetary energy as instructed. “So, Ccal, Bddo, what’s your story?” I asked. “How’d you end up with the rebels?”

  The two soldiers looked at one another. “Well,” Bddo said after a moment, “We’re in the Gaean Air Force, just like the captain here. Or . . . were, before that all went in the dumpster today. But we’re also Red Horizon.”

  I nodded. I had gathered that much already.

  “We joined the Red Horizon six years back after Cap took us into his confidence,” Ccal added. “I’m the one that convinced this idiot to join.”

  “That’s only ‘cos I’d never been a rebel before,” Bddo objected.

  “Sure it was.”

  “They are under my command in the Air Force,” Zent explained. “We all lead another life in the Red Horizon. Needless to say, we don’t actually get back to HQ often. With my military rank, I was able to get the three of us on gatewatch duty very often.”

  “Right,” Ccal said, “and Cap would just leave us there on that Mother-forsaken rock and head out for meetings with the Red Horizon.”

  “Doesn’t the Senate keep pretty close tabs on the island?” I asked.

  “You’d be surprised,” Zent said. “Technically, the Senate considers it a key location, but as long as they have someone guarding it, they don’t care too much. No cameras on the whole premises, no weaponry.”

  I frowned. Something about that seemed strange.

  That night as my body slept, I retreated to my Vault.

  Nobody has them back on Mani. It took me all the way up to my arrival on Gaea to come to grips with my ability. The Legaleians store memories in their brains just like us, only . . . we Hellebes don’t forget them. We never forget.

  It’s just that I was the only Hellebes who couldn’t access my Vault all the time. Only when asleep. I took it to be a side effect of being a half-breed.

  For me, the place was a dream world shrouded in mist. It looked slightly different each time, but tonight the floor was made of craggy rocks, possibly my mind subconsciously telling me that I should be sleeping in a more comfortable location. And, as always, there she was: White, my assistant figment who kept me sane. She appeared as a young girl, maybe ten years old, dressed in white and wearing her waist-length pearly hair straight like normal.

  “Hello, Lyn,” she greeted me warmly.

  “White, I want to know about that island, the one with the Gate of Gaea where I wound up after the explosion.”

  The girl looked up briefly. “Mmm, you’re out of luck, then. All you’ve got is what the guys said last night and a few comments from the background as you were escorted between labs. Gatewatch Isle doesn’t get talked about much.”

  I started to ask if she could play them when I suddenly heard the exact audio in my head from weeks past:

  “. . . That island is but a relic of the past now. More like a dead crime scene. No one expected the child to actually . . .” A snippet I’d caught from one of the doctors who had examined me on more than one occasion.

  “. . . Gatewatch Isle are all quarantined . . .” This one I had only caught as a tiny snippet.

  There were a couple more references, but no meaningful context or information to go along with them.

  “Anything else you want to see?” White asked, looking up at me patiently.

  I took a dream breath and began rattling off my list to my assistant. I basically just wanted to go back through all the early memories I had from my first year of life with my mother, when she used to tell me information to reference later in life. I could not say if she had predicted my inability to access my Vault by instinct.

  The first thing I did was run through all the Gaean terminology that would be useful to know, struggling through the harder words and paying close attention to the context. She had often gone out of her way to explain terms and topics, but sometimes she would get lost in her own familiarity with her world. After all, she had been almost like a . . . I really didn’t know what, other than the progenitor of all Hellebes in some capacity. They kept her in a lab where they harvested her eggs somehow? And, according to Haccolces scientists, she’d been kept alive for centuries and played a key role in the Gaean Elites’ control of the world. So surely she had far more knowledge than she was reasonably able to pass down to me.

  There was one thing, though, relating to that exact topic. She mentioned once that she had uploaded her own Vault to a data bank in the labs below Haccolces . . . the city that I had just fled. The Steel City, capital not only of North Terrol but of the entire Gaean League—and home of Emperor Lldsaor. How had I missed that before? I’d run through most of my mother’s words during the eighty-eight days spent in my cell alone.

  Her entire Vault . . . uploaded to a data center. You could do that?