{Author's Note: 1. Yes, I know that 12 year olds are in 7th grade, and no, putting a 7th grade class in an elementary school is not a mistake - in some school systems (mine, for example), there are no middle schools, and elementary schools are K-7.
2. There are some contradictions in this chapter; the most glaring of which is that Tucker Manning is now officially IN Trade School, rather than being a year away from attending. Edits have been made in the previous chapter.}
It was strange, not being able to feel. Kael wondered vaguely if other creatures were even aware of the energies that the Datra could feel, could manipulate. The heat, the life, the subtle currents that allowed every living thing to function; Kael had barely noticed it as a child. It simply… was. And now it was gone.
His temporary inability to fly only slightly hindered him—before, his wings had been a means of transportation during the hunt; now they were nothing but a rather heavy nuisance. The loss of his tongue was different—once the pain had completely faded, he felt as if his mouth were always hanging open. Luckily, the Elder had only cut off the front half, so he could still taste (somewhat) and make the always-important “k” sound. But the little food he managed to find felt bland, formless; he barely knew it was in his mouth at all. Having once been a great lover of eating, this seemed the greatest tragedy, far surpassing the awkward feel of his mouth or newfound incapacity for most speech.
For any other Datra, losing the ability to access energies would have been the most terrible fate imaginable. Even though the power of the Datra race had long since diminished from its former glory, they were still dependant on it. As the female Elder had said, it was used primarily in the hunt. An experienced hunter could detect the unique energy patterns of prey up to a hundred yards away. An even more experienced hunter could manipulate that pattern, could force his prey to remain still, even as its throat was being slit. The only downside to this was that even the most skilled manipulators couldn’t command more than one creature at a time. A downside that Kael’s father had succumbed to, for all his expertise.
Pier Pemei had died two years ago, when Kael had been sixteen. A Datra reached adulthood at the age of fifteen; by the age of seventeen, they were expected to have both selected and been properly trained in a craft (usually that of one of their parents). Kael had been in his final year of training to become a hunter when his father had died. More specifically, he had been taking a break from training and playing Bones with his friends when his father had died.
Bones was the Datra’s gambling game of choice. One was to place a small prize on each playing piece, and as you captured the pieces of the other players, you in turn captured their prizes. As the hunters were returning with Pier’s body in tow, Kael was capturing the final—and largest—prize. He never forgot that moment; the moment he snatched his friend Loch’s double-edged knife from the playing field with a wild whoop; the moment he turned, grinning, to face his opponents, only to catch sight of his father’s corpse being carried into the village. His grin faded. His boasts died on his lips. The double-edged knife dropped into the dirt with a dull thud. And Kael’s world began to fall apart at the seams.
“What happened?” Kael had demanded hoarsely, trying to swallow the lump in his throat. His eyes stung with the promise of tears, but he bit them back as well. His father had long-since taught him to be strong; there was no place for the weak among the hunters’ rank. To cry would be the ultimate show of vulnerability.
“Wolves,” Aeron Tewit, his shoulders shaking with grief, had replied. “I… I was supposed to take the left flank… but I had to protect our kill! The wolves would’ve torn that elk to pieces. Pier, he… a wolf broke free… your father, Kael; he killed that wolf, but the rest… I’m—I’m so sorry, Kael,” Aeron had given a great, growling sob. “I couldn’t save him. It was my fault!”
It would be weeks before anyone in the village dared look Aeron in the eye. Most, still adhering to the old traditions, did it out of pity—an old Datra myth painted Pain as an entity, a shadow that clouds the eyes of the afflicted. The Elders (and many of the villagers) believed that to look a mourner in the eye was to show disrespect to Pain, and to invite it into your life instead.
Kael belonged to the rare few who cared nothing for tradition—he avoided Aeron’s eye out of pure, unbridled fury. He had begun to toy with the idea of challenging the old warrior then; but what would it accomplish? Besting Aeron in combat wouldn’t raise the dead. A few bloody wounds inflicted by a young hothead would do no damage to Aeron’s pride. It wasn’t until a year had passed—until Kael had joined the hunters’ ranks, like his father before him—that he found reason to duel Pier Pemei’s indirect murderer.
Morwen, Kael’s mother, was too kind for her own good. She took pity on Aeron, even as he offered her his life in exchange for her husband’s—Kael had watched as the old hunter had prostrated himself before her in the doorway of their home.
“I cannot return Pier to you,” Aeron had said flatly. “But I can give you the satisfaction of ending my life. I’ve gotten permission, Morwen; the Elders will count my death as a ritual killing. Please…” here his voice trembled and broke, “I want to be rid of this guilt.”
Morwen had swallowed her own tears and helped him to his feet. “No,” she said firmly. “I refuse to spill any more blood.” She had held Aeron’s face in her hands; Kael had had to turn away, fury for his father’s sake burning in the pit of his stomach.
“Anyone might have died that day,” his mother said softly. “That it happened to be Pier is my misfortune. Not yours. I must bear his loss bravely, as any widow must… I know you feel guilty, Aeron, but we cannot fall prey to Pain. Pain is temporary—fleeting. Like any wound, if we leave it alone, it will heal in time. Remember; if there was no darkness in our lives… there would be no place for the light.”
Kael had grit his teeth, still out of sight of Aeron and Morwen. Jealousy and anger had all but taken him over; Morwen had done little to console him since Pier’s death; and there she was, comforting a grown man—a grown warrior—as if he were a little boy. Kael bit back his tears. He wouldn’t have dared admit it to anyone... but at his father’s funeral, he had wanted nothing more than to fall into his mother’s arms and never come out. Even as he had imagined it, he had felt ashamed, weak—but now his mother was taking Aeron into her arms like a second son… like a second husband. It was too much for him to bear.
But he had swallowed his anger—he hadn’t shown any grief when Aeron began to sit by Morwen at village meetings. He hadn’t betrayed himself when the hunter had started staying at their house for breakfast… for dinner… overnight. He held it in until the day that Aeron Tewit asked Morwen Pemei to marry him. Then he had let his fury loose… and suffered the consequences.
⥈
Presently, Kael was making his way, slowly but surely, through the forest’s underbrush. He had been doing so with little rest for the past three days.
When he had been able to detect energies, navigating and hunting had been easy—he had been a poor manipulator, but that had mattered little; his talents lay (or had lain) in the realms of tracking. Before the female Elder had robbed him of the ability, Kael had been able to recognize the patterns of any living thing, and distinguish them from one another with ease.
Once, he could’ve mapped the area around him in his mind’s eye in a matter of moments, with every possible detail accounted for—now, despite his quick and careful movements (as is the hunter’s way), it took him five minutes to determine whether or not a patch of fungus was edible. He was only lucky that his village had been so close to the border between the human and Datra territories.
The forest itself was a no-man’s land; both the Datra and the humans used it, though it was technically on Datra soil. A human road ran through it, though it was rarely used; according to the Elders, there were abandoned campsites on the other side of the road, where humans had once enjoyed vacations during the summer months. Kael had always thought the idea absurd, even more so once he had a chance to stay a few days in the forest himself. Why anyone would choose to spend a vacation in such a primitive, hostile place was beyond him.
By the time he reached the road, Kael was cut up and weak—without his magic, he had relied on lichen, mosses, and fungi (the only sort of flora the Datra can digest) to sustain him. He was nothing but skin and bones as he walked along the concrete, avoiding the few vehicles that bothered to use the all-but abandoned road.
The vehicles didn’t particularly frighten Kael, with their dull rumbling and clouds of purified exhaust, though they did unnerve him. He remembered stories told to him in his childhood, of the smog-spewing, roaring monsters the humans had driven several hundred years before. He was relieved to see that their technology had improved.
He walked the road for two hours before passing beyond the forest—he came to a bridge, and what looked to be some sort of tollhouse. A strip of yellow-and-black-striped metal blocked all access to the bridge; it was attached to a blue-painted box next to the tollhouse. A thick ribbon of water, wider than any Kael had ever seen, cut across the land, below the bridge. On the other side, he saw a sprawling city—the glass of its towers reflected the sunlight, like sky-high mirrors. Kael was utterly breathless, and, for a moment, he forgot all about the broken life he had left behind—all he wanted was to cross the bridge and enter the city of glass towers.
When he reached the tollhouse, however, the yellow-black metal strip was not lifted—a uniformed man spoke to Kael from behind a window in the tollhouse. “Hullo, there, ‘Tra. You have a VP?”
Kael didn’t understand him. Panic seized him—he should have known that the humans wouldn’t be speaking his native tongue. As a child, he had been friends with a Datra girl, Una, whose father was a trader; she had taught him a few phrases in human speech, but he didn’t think that the man would be able to understand him without the benefit of a tongue.
The man tapped the glass of his window. “Hey, ‘Tra! VP—Voucher’s Pass! You got one? If you don’t, you can apply for one right here—it’s real easy, ‘Tra. What d’you say?”
He sounds like he wants something. Kael, deciding to give speaking a try, attempted to force out the words, “My name is Kael”. Crawling pathetically forth from his mangled mouth, it sounded more like “Ma gnang ih Kair”. The man behind the window raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t want none of your Datra babble,” he said, irritated. “D’you want a Voucher’s Pass, or not?”
I do not understand you. “Ah hoo-gnah uh-her-hang you.”
“Ah, screw it.” The man waved him away. “Learn how to talk straight or bugger off, ‘Tra.”
Kael hadn’t understood the man’s words, but his meaning was clear. Dejected, he slunk off to the side of the road—without working wings, a quick escape was impossible; there was nowhere to hide on the ground, nothing to use as potential cover, if he were to sneak past the tollhouse. And incapacitating the man in the tollhouse would be foolish; not having seen the local uniforms before, Kael didn’t know whether or not the man was a human law-keeper. If he was, Kael didn’t much fancy being caught knocking him out.
He sat down on a stump a few feet from the edge of the road and wondered gloomily how he was to go on from here.
⥈
Jen Manning, born Jen Piper, loved the drive from school to home. It was the only time she got to herself—in the mornings, she had to drop her son, Tucker, off at Brooks’ Vocational School. During the day, she taught a classroom full of twelve-year-olds at Kimberley Elementary. Her nights were spent grading homework and writing up lesson plans—Tucker brought home dinner, and they always made a point to eat it together. It was worth it, she told herself, but a nightmare to get through every day.
But for the forty minutes it took to drive from the Elementary School to the Manning’s residence halfway across town, Jen was free. Free to listen to the radio stations she wanted to listen to, free to talk to herself, free to sing at the top of her lungs and headbang to cheesy music… That was why she took the “‘Tra Road”; the nearly deserted highway that cut right through the Border Forest. It had exits into the city at two bridges; coincidentally, those bridges were each five minutes away from Jen’s points A and B. It took a little longer, but Jen didn’t care—since there were little to no cars that went that way, there was no stress, no jerks who thought they owned the road… none of the road-rage that plagued Jen when she actually had to deal with city traffic.
That particular day, Jen had the radio tuned to a station that specialized in her guilty pleasure; the subgenre of bad pop-rock—she had an open bag of tortilla chips in the driver’s seat—and she was more excited to get home then she had been in a long time. For the first time in nearly three months, Arthur would be home for dinner.
Jen had met Arthur at Banser-Graham when she had been in her mid-twenties—she had taken an internship there at her mother’s urging, but her interest in medicine had been as shallow as her interest in healthy eating. Arthur, who, being an analyst, had a similarly cynical view of doctors, quickly became her best work-friend; she hadn’t considered him a dating option until her internship was almost over.
Oddly enough, the thing that triggered her attraction to him was his nickname for her. For her whole life, everyone had called her Jennifer, Jenny, Jen... et cetera. Until, that is, the night that Arthur and James took her out to a karaoke bar after work—she had been dating James at that point, and the outing had been intended as a double-date with Arthur and another girl. Arthur, however, hadn’t been able to get another girl. Jen and James had teased him all the way to the bar, where, at the coaxing of her date and friend, Jen had gone up on stage.
The next day, none of them could remember what she had sung. But Arthur wouldn’t stop talking about it—“No, seriously, Jen, you were really good!” he had insisted.
“I know, Art, you’ve said so,” she had blushed, despite herself. “I couldn’t have been that good. I was drunk.”
“If that was you drunk, I gotta hear you sober,” he caught sight of his watch. “Crap! Is that the time? See ya around, Pipes; I’ve got important analyst duties to attend to.”
From that day forth, Pipes became another of Jen’s many nicknames, as well as her secret favourite. Looking back, she liked to think it was then that she began to fall in love with Arthur Manning (she told everyone else that their first kiss—a rather spontaneous sneak attack on Art’s part—had done her in).
They had been married two years later—Jen had been enrolled in university (going after a teaching degree) at the time. Before the year was out, Jen gave birth to their son, Tucker. Balancing work and school and raising a child had been difficult, but through a careful combination of long weekends off, creative time-tables, and retired grandparents, the newlyweds had made it work. Of course, that had been when the trouble started.
Arthur had always worked late, but around the time of Tuck’s third birthday, he was starting to spend even more time at the Clinic. By the time Tuck was thirteen, it had become a rarity to have him home at all. At Jen’s urging, Arthur had applied for a sabbatical—it hadn’t gone through, but the late-night work had ceased for about a year. After that… well, the rest was history.
Five years, Jen mused as she cruised along the ‘Tra road that afternoon, it’s been five years since Art's schedule had any time for me. And… she sighed sadly as the realization sunk in; it’s been five years since he’s called me Pipes.
It might have seemed trivial to anyone else, but after fifteen straight years of hearing “G’morning, Pipes” every day… Jen began to choke up.
“It’s not fair,” she told the tortilla chips. “I haven’t done anything wrong. Tuck hasn’t done anything wrong. What the hell is driving him away?”
Maybe the two of you have just drifted apart, the tortilla chips answered. Maybe it’s nothing but a natural shift.
“No. He’s coming home early tonight. If we had drifted apart, he wouldn’t be bothering.”
Unless he’s just trying to make you feel better about the whole thing.
Jen shook off her subconscious mutterings by turning up the radio. Where had her good mood gone? “I can’t let a few insecurities get me down, right boys?” she popped a chip into her mouth. “Artie’s coming home!”
No sooner had the words faded than Jen came to the bridge that led back into town. As she pulled up to the tollhouse, she caught sight of a dejected-looking young ‘Tra sitting on the side of the road. She felt inexplicably drawn to him—with his reptilian nose, round, dark eyes, and sharp, starved features, he looked for all the world like a homeless child. Jen’s heart went out to him; he probably didn’t have a Voucher’s Pass yet. And if a Datra didn’t have a VP, or a human citizen to buy one, they were stuck on this side of the bridge indefinitely…
Without a second thought, she pulled over and got out of the car.
