Archon (4 page)

Holding the image of what he desired in his mind, he gave the command:
Be it so!

And the pain was gone.

No, not just the pain, he realized. His shoulder was numb. It was an odd sensation, but infinitely better than the blinding pain.

He felt his body unclench and relax.

“What happened?” Amma asked. “I don’t see the arrowhead.”

“I had to leave it in there for now, but I figured out how to dull the pain.”

Amma looked worried. “You really shouldn’t do that. Nerves are very complex things, Taemon, and you could cause a lot of damage if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Nothing the healers can’t fix, I’m sure,” he assured her. “At least I can drive. That’s what’s important.”

Amma didn’t look convinced, but another moan from Mam distracted her. “Let’s get you both to the healers as quickly as possible.”

About a mile away from the colony, Amma pointed to the side of the road. “Pull over and park the quadrider there. We can walk the rest of the way.”

“What? Why?” Taemon asked. “That will take too long.”

“It’s a good idea,” Drigg said, leaning forward and rubbing sleep from his eyes.

Amma looked pointedly at Taemon. “Think about it. How are we going to explain you driving this quadrider? I don’t think you should tell people about your psi. Not unless you have a way to bring it back for everyone. . . .”

“No! I can’t do that.” The Heart of the Earth had made it clear his decision was permanent. But Amma was right. She was terribly right. People would despise the one person who still had psi. What would they do? Imprison him?
Execute
him?

“We can rest a while if you need to,” Amma said. “Until you’re ready to walk.”

“I’m ready now.” Taemon opened the doors with psi. “Mam needs a healer.”

They arrived at the colony twenty minutes later, on foot. Drigg carried Mam, and Taemon tried to appear normal as he walked beside Amma. But the numbness in his shoulder was starting to worry him. He could barely feel the fingers on his left hand, and when he tried to make a fist, his fingers would curl only partway. What if Amma was right, and he had been foolish to mess with his nerves?

They headed straight to the healing house.

Urland, one of the healers, came out and met them. Taemon tried to explain about Mam, but suddenly realized that he was incredibly exhausted.

On the edge of consciousness, Taemon heard Amma explain who Mam was and what had happened to her, and about the arrow in Taemon’s shoulder. His only goal now was to reach the bed at the far side of the room before he fell asleep.

He couldn’t tell if he made it or not. All he knew is that when he woke up the next morning, his aunt, Challis, was in the room with him.

And she was crying.

Challis was crying. Did that mean Mam was gone?

Taemon tried to reach forward and touch Challis, to comfort her somehow, but he found he couldn’t lift his injured arm from the bed. “Is it Mam?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper. “Is she . . . ?”

“She’s alive,” said Challis. “She’s still unconscious, but she’s alive. She’s in the next room.”

Taemon held his aunt’s gaze. There was something Challis wasn’t telling him. “What else?”

Before the Fall, Challis used to have two very rare types of psi: precognition, which meant seeing things before they happened, and remote viewing, or seeing events that happened far away. Her visions of the future weren’t always clear or easy to interpret, which had frustrated her and made her mix up the present and the past, but back then, just like now, Taemon constantly felt like she knew more than she was saying.

In the four months since the Fall, though, Challis seemed a bit more with it, as though losing her abilities had been a blessing rather than a curse, as others saw it.

Her gaze was clear and steady when she finally looked up at him.

“The healers don’t know if she’ll ever wake up.”

“What do you mean they don’t know? It’s their job to know.” The anger he heard in his own words surprised him. He wasn’t sure where it had come from.

Challis shook her head. “There’s no way to know.”

“Ah, you’re awake.” Urland stood in the doorway. He turned to Challis. “Does he know about the extent of the damage yet?”

Challis hesitated. “No, he just now woke —”

“How bad is it?” Taemon tried to push himself up into a sitting position, but his left elbow buckled and he lurched to one side.

Challis sprang forward to steady him. His shoulder no longer hurt, but it didn’t seem to work very well, either.

“Just tell me what’s wrong with Mam,” Taemon said.

The healer frowned. “I’m afraid we’re not entirely sure what’s wrong with your mother. As long as she remains unconscious, we’re quite limited in what tests we can run,” he said. “I was talking about the damage to your shoulder. There’s some nerve damage that I can’t explain. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s almost as if . . .”

Urland’s words were drowned out by voices from the hall.

Hannova, the leader of the colony, came into the small room, which was starting to feel crowded.

“I’m glad to see you’re awake,” she said. “You gave us quite a scare.”

“I’m fine,” Taemon assured her. He lifted his blanket with his good hand and swung his feet to the side of the bed. “But I’d like to go check on my mother.”

Urland started to object, but Challis cut him short. “I’ll take you to her,” she said.

“Come see me in my office when you can,” said Hannova. “I want to hear about what happened.”

“He should be resting,” Urland said.

“When you can,” Hannova repeated, then left the room while Taemon, waving off assistance, hauled himself out of bed.

The homespun cotton tunic Taemon wore felt more than a little drafty as he padded down the hall. Luckily, he didn’t have far to go.

As much as he wanted to see Mam, he held back just outside her door.
Unconscious. Might never wake up.
Surely someone could figure out how to help her. If not the doctors, then maybe
he
could heal her — or at least figure out what was wrong with her. Maybe that’s why his psi had come back, so he could heal Mam. Da had always said psi was for helping people. With psi he could see what was going on inside her body just as he’d done with his shoulder wound.

And look how great that turned out,
he thought, clutching his useless left arm.

Challis beckoned him, and Taemon walked in. A frail Mam lay in a bed identical to the one he’d just left. Her cheekbones stuck out, her eyelids looked gray, and her arms lay still as stone. But beneath the covers, her chest rose and fell. Mam was alive.

Taemon slid into the chair next to the bed and ran his hands along the wooden armrests. He felt like he should do something, but what? Challis’s hand squeezed his shoulder. He turned to look at her and noticed that she had a hand on each of his shoulders. But he could only feel it on his good side.

“Talk to her,” Challis said.

“Can she hear me?”

“It’s possible. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe you just need to talk.”

Emotions tossed and tumbled inside him. Sadness. Anger. Regret. And something more, something he couldn’t name. Maybe there was no word for it. Maybe no one had ever felt it before.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to Mam. “It was my fault you were sent to the asylum. My fault they took Da away. And it’s my fault people are starving. It’s all my fault, Mam. All of it!”

Calming his thoughts, he touched his mother’s hand and studied her face. Not a twitch. Not a flutter.

He closed his eyes and let his clairvoyance flow into Mam. Her heart was beating, blood circulating, lungs breathing, but there was little else. His awareness drifted into her brain. He had so little knowledge of what was supposed to happen there. But something was definitely wrong, very wrong. It was so complicated, so complex —

“Don’t.” Someone gripped his right shoulder forcefully.

Taemon released his psi and turned to see Challis peering at him. “How did you know —?”

“Amma told me what happened. But don’t.” She motioned with her eyes to the doorway, and Taemon saw Urland lingering there. He wasn’t sure how Challis knew that he’d been using psi just then, but he hoped that Urland hadn’t noticed, too.

The healer walked into Mam’s room.

“She hit her head pretty hard when she fell on the sidewalk,” Taemon said. “Is that what caused . . . ?” He couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence.

Urland looked at him and then at Challis. “I’m not sure how much you know about the asylums, but they were not good. The drugs the patients were given to suppress their psionic ability were brutal on the brain functions. It could be that your mother will wake up and fully recover. Or she might have permanent brain damage, the extent of which we won’t know until she wakes.”

“So you think she’ll wake up?” Taemon tried to focus on that rather than on the words “permanent brain damage.”

Urland frowned. “I’m afraid there’s just no way to know.”

Taemon took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Can we have some time alone with her?”

When the healer left the room, Taemon turned to Challis. “Do you know what’s going to happen to her? Did your precognition tell you anything before the Fall? Anything about Mam?”

Challis shook her head sadly. “I see bits and pieces of the future. I mean, saw. And I didn’t get to pick the things I saw. But I don’t have that power anymore, Taemon, and I’m glad of it. It’s a burden I can do without.”

It was still a bit odd to hear Challis call him by his real name. He’d gotten used to her calling him Thayer back before the Fall.

Challis settled into the other chair in the room. “Amma mentioned that your mam was raving when you found her — talking to the mops and brooms and muttering about the pills she was taking.”

Taemon nodded. “ ‘Two yellow. One blue. Three red.’ ”

“Did she say anything else to you before she lost consciousness? Anything that could be important — no matter how crazy it might have seemed?”

Taemon shook his head, thinking she was asking for medical reasons. But then he remembered: Mam
had
said something important!

Taemon opened his mouth to tell her but hesitated.

“Go on,” Challis urged. “What is it?”

He glanced at the doorway to make sure they were alone. “She also said . . . She said that they had taken Da to the Republik.”

“The Republik? That can’t be right.”

“Mam said I should go find him,” Taemon said.

“She wasn’t in her right mind, Taemon,” Challis warned. “She never would have suggested such a thing if she was. You’d do best to get that idea out of your head.”

Taemon knew better than to argue. But if there was a chance — however small — that his da was still alive and needed his help, how could he just forget about that?

“Besides,” said Challis, settling back into her chair, “how could you even hope to do that? No one’s made it across those mountains and lived to tell of it.”

No one yet,
thought Taemon.

Later, back in his room, Taemon ate the meal Urland had brought him and thought about what Mam had said.

The Republik. Why would Da be there? And how could he have made it over Mount Deliverance? Three hundred years earlier, when the prophet Nathan had brought his people here, he’d made sure they would be safe from the rest of the world. He’d used psi to pull up the ridge of mountains that cradled the city of Deliverance against the coast. But it wasn’t just the mountains that kept Deliverance separate from the Republik. There was also superstition and fear and a kind of pride in being set apart from the rest of the world. In some ways, these feelings made a stronger barrier than the mountains.

Da must have been taken there against his will. Taemon could think of no other explanation. “They took him. They took darling away.” Isn’t that what Mam had said? So someone in the Republik wanted Da. Why?

Just before the Fall, Elder Naseph had been talking about forging an alliance with the Republik and making psi weapons for them to use in a war they were fighting. Against whom? Taemon wondered. Was it a civil war or a war with another nation? There was so much Taemon didn’t understand, and there was no one to ask. The one thing Yens had said before he died was that he was going to be the one to trigger the weapons, since the Republikites were all powerless. That was why Taemon had decided to get rid of psi altogether — to prevent his brother and Naseph from using psi to commit unspeakable atrocities. But now psi was gone and Yens was dead. So what could the Republik want with a powerless man from the city?

But would the Republikites know that Deliverance was now powerless? News of the Republik never reached the people of Deliverance, so it was safe to assume that news of Deliverance didn’t reach the Republik. If the Republikites still believed the people of the city had psi, what would they make of Yens’s no-show? Would they think that Naseph had betrayed them?

Taemon’s mind spun. If the weapons were already in place in the Republik, would they have sent someone over Mount Deliverance to find a replacement trigger? It still didn’t explain how they’d selected Da, but perhaps it was a simple case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.