Chasing Shadows (Saving Galerance, Book 1) (2 page)

Vera hung her head and glanced back inside her house. “I’m
sorry; I have work I need to do.”

Norabel nodded quickly in understanding.

“Iris, come inside,” her mother ordered tiredly, waving her
hand as she turned to go in herself.

Iris took a step away from Norabel, about to obey, when she
turned back and looked up at her with pleading eyes.

“You can get it back for me, can’t you?” she asked.

“Iris,” she said, apologetically shaking her head.

“I know you can!” she insisted. “You’re with the Harbingers!
You can get anything back!”

“Iris, you can’t…” she started to scold her, taking a quick
look around to make sure no one had heard. Then, seeing that no harm had been
done, she crouched down so she was eyelevel with her. “You can never say that
out-loud,” she reminded her gently. “Or we’ll both get into a lot of trouble.”

“But…” Iris started to argue, pouting out her bottom lip.

“Go on inside like your mother asked,” she said, motioning
to the open door.

“I’m sorry I let them take it,” Iris squeaked, her eyes
squinting in tears.

Norabel quickly wrapped her up in a hug, whispering, “It’s
alright. It’s going to be alright.” From the doorway, she could see Vera
picking up the pieces of a pot that had been knocked over during the raid.
Before she let Iris go, she whispered in her ear, “I’m not promising anything,
but I’ll see what I can do. Okay? How does that sound?”

Iris gave a small squeal of delight and hugged her even
tighter. “Thank you!” she peeped out, before breaking away and running inside
her house to help her mother clean up.

Though her words had made Iris happy again, they made
Norabel feel worse. Yes, she was a Harbinger, but there wasn’t one job she
pulled off where her stomach hadn’t been twisting into knots over the anxiety
of it all. The weight of what she had promised to do sunk heavily on her
shoulders as she walked back to work.

For the rest of the work day, she was heavily burdened by thoughts
of what she would have to do come quitting time. Normally bowl making was a
soothing, fulfilling task, but today she hardly found any enjoyment in it. She
moved slower than normal, and a couple times had to start over because she had
made a mistake in carelessness. However, her overseer, a man named Braj, would
have hardly noticed if she had given him goblets instead of bowls. He didn’t
care about the quality of her work, just as long as there was enough of it to
fill the Pax’s demands.

When it was finally time to leave, instead of heading west
towards her home, she had to turn north east. If she really was going to pull
off a Harbinger job, then she would need to talk to Mason, the leader of their
team. He and his older brother Logan both worked in the north-east commons
section, in a building that had literally been cut into the side of a rock
wall. It was there the city’s steal was manufactured. It was one of the hardest
jobs a villager could be assigned. She felt bad every time she thought about
them laboring away in that dark building like an army of underground ants.

She spotted Mason’s dark mop of hair when she just passed
the checkpoint into the north-eastern commons. Mason’s raven-black hair was
always unkempt and sticking up in all angles, especially after a hard day’s
work. His pale face was smeared in patches with black soot, and his blue eyes
were as sharp and piercing as if they had been cut from a gem in the heart of
the mountain.

His brother Logan, though older than him, did not have quite
as commanding an appearance. His hair was a common dark brown, and his eyes
were the same. While Mason’s expression usually held some burning source of
passion inside, Logan’s was more relaxed and neutral.

It was Logan that spotted Norabel first, standing off to the
side of the road, twisting her hands in front of her in nervous apprehension.
The corner of his mouth flicked up in the barest hint of a smile. Then he
turned to his brother and whispered something in his ear. Soon Mason’s gaze
settled on her. He said something back to Logan while staring intently at where
she was waiting. A moment later, Logan broke away from his brother, heading
towards the road that led south. Mason flicked his head towards the nearby rock
cliff, and Norabel nodded in understanding, quietly making her way down the
road towards the trail that led into the mountains.

While most of the cliffs and mountains that surrounded the
north and west sides of Breccan were harsh and unclimbable, there was one section
in which a small, narrow meadow had formed at the base and led to several
naturally-occurring caves in the rock wall. This was where their Harbinger team
agreed to meet should the opportunity arise. It was the only place of privacy
in the whole village, and they didn’t need to pass through another checkpoint
in order to get to it.

However, Norabel had been coming here long before she was
ever recruited as a Harbinger. When she had been forced to move to Breccan when
she was eight-years old, she had found this place on accident while playing
with a young boy. There they had spent every minute of their free time, playing
in the meadow and trying to hit targets on the rocks with small little pebbles.
Norabel’s favorite thing to do was to sneak into a cave and draw a pair of
Albatross wings on the walls with a piece of charcoal. Then she and the boy
would light a fire and try to get their shadows to line up with the pair of
wings on the wall.

It was something that Norabel’s grandfather used to do. He
would tell her that each person was born with an Albatross that was sent to
guard them. They were always invisible, but sometimes the shadow of their wings
could be seen poking out of a human’s shadow. He promised her that, if she was
patient and diligent enough, she might one day see them framing her own shadow.

Then Guardian Amias had their house burned down, and her
grandfather had died in the fire, and all talk about the Albatross had become
outlawed. The only way she could keep the myth alive was to come to these caves
and call to her Guardian Albatross in secret.

She and the boy had turned it into something fun and
mysterious and honorable, almost like a sacred ritual. Then the little boy grew
up. Now Mason didn’t want to hear talk of anything to do with Albatrosses or
shadows or wings. Now all this beautiful place was to him was a strategic point
for meeting in secret. He did not want to remember, as she so often did, how
they would have fun here as children.

As Norabel walked through the village towards the mountain,
she could tell that Mason was following behind her. He did not speed up to walk
alongside her, and she knew she shouldn’t look back at him. He would scold her
if she did, telling her that it would look like they were conspiring. She wasn’t
sure if he was right or not, but she did not want to make him angry. It wasn’t
until they were already on the small dirt path, hidden away from the sight of
the village, that Mason came up from behind her and fell in step by her side.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

Norabel looked up at him and found that his gaze was fixed
firmly on the path in front of them. A small twinge of pain crept up in her
chest. While Mason was her friend and leader, it sometimes seemed as if he
didn’t want to look at her, as if the sight of her face brought up something
that he didn’t like, something that she would never be able to change.

“My neighbor’s house was raided today,” she explained,
studying the profile of his face silhouetted by gray rock. “They took something
from a little girl that lived there.”

Mason stopped walking and finally looked down at her. “And
you’d like us to get it back?” he guessed.

Her gaze shifted down to her boots. She felt embarrassed for
asking. Normally the guys had a tough time convincing her that they should do
any job. She had never before been the one to ask
them
to act.

“Well, that’s a surprise,” Mason commented.

She continued to stare down at her boots. She could just
picture the smirk on his face and the raised eyebrows that he was giving her
right now.

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” she said, braving
the knot in her stomach and tilting her head up to face him. Though she had
wanted to sound courageous and firm, her voice came out sounding like the small
pleadings of a child. She inwardly winced, wanting for once in her life to
sound as old as she really was.

Mason regarded her for a moment before he asked, “Have you
been kissing bowls? You’ve got clay on your lips.”

Norabel’s face reddened slightly, but she tried to control
her blush as she turned away and wiped at her lips.

“Try spitting on your fingers,” he offered, stuffing his
hands in his pockets as he watched her.

She looked down to her fingers, which were dully stained in
clay, and raised them to her lips, trying to spit on them without looking exceedingly
gross and callow in the process. She could taste the earthy flavor of dirt as
she rubbed at her mouth, feeling the hot squish of saliva against her lips. She
didn’t know how it was possible that nearly every time she was around Mason, he
could make her feel like this—flustered and childish.

Judging that she had probably gotten most of the clay off,
she turned back to him and looked him firmly in the eye.

“Will you please do this for me?”

“Well that’s up to the rest of the guys.” He flicked his
head in the direction they had come, adding, “I’ve sent Logan to get Archer.
Let’s see what they say when they come.”

He was about to start forward on the path, but Norabel
reached out for his arm with two hands. “And what do
you
say?” she
asked.

He sighed and ran his free hand through his hair. His palm was
covered in the dirt of a hard day’s work, but his hair was so dark that she
couldn’t see if it left a mark.

“You know me, Norabel. What do you think?”

“That you’d never miss an opportunity to stick it to the
Pax,” she replied quickly.

“Well then there’s your answer,” he said, starting forward
once more.

She followed behind, and soon they reached the narrow meadow
that lied in between a gap in the rocks. Mason was quiet as he leaned against a
boulder, looking up at the sky above him and waiting for the rest of the guys
to get there.

He had been the one to first form their Harbinger team over
three years ago. He had heard about these groups operating in two of the other
main villages in Galerance, stealing back what was taken during house raids, and
he wanted Breccan to have a rebel Harbinger team as well. However, in order to
form a full team, you needed at least four members: two Lifters, one Point-Man,
and one Shadow.

He had quickly convinced his brother Logan to be one of his
Lifters, while he would head the team up as the Point-Man. Not much later, a
young fisherman named Archer volunteered to be their second Lifter. The three
of them trained for several months, growing stronger and figuring out the
proper technique to snatching a Pax basket from a moving cart. Yet, they still
needed to find a Shadow. Unfortunately, the Shadow position was the most
difficult one to fill. While the Point-Man was the leader of the team, the
Shadow had to be the most skilled, for they were placed in the most danger.

As Norabel sat down in the scratchy grass of the meadow, she
remembered the day that Mason had first approached her about joining their
team.

…It had been four years since she had spoken with him. The
last time they had really seen each other, she had been fourteen years old and
he had been fifteen. For those four years, he had avoided her at all costs. It
didn’t matter that they had been best friends since she was eight-years old; he
didn’t want to see her, and she wasn’t going to hurt him by trying. Of course,
she would speak to his brother Logan a few times, ask how Mason was doing and
even send him a gift on his birthday. Logan was always very polite and friendly
with her, but she got the feeling that even her small conversations with his
brother irked Mason.

And then one day he had finally sought her out. It was her
eighteenth birthday, and she was sitting in this very meadow, looking up at the
clouds, when his face appeared over hers. She thought he was going to scold
her, tell her to leave him and his brother alone for good. But he didn’t.
Instead he took a seat next to her, not even uttering a word. She had been so
nervous, she didn’t know what to do. She had wanted so badly to see him for
four years—to get to speak with him for just a few minutes—yet she couldn’t say
anything now.

A few painful moments went by before Mason had quietly
whispered out the words, “I need your help Norabel.”

She was exceptionally quiet and stiff as she listened to him
speak, telling her of his plans to create a rebel Harbinger team. And then he
started to talk about when they were kids and they would balance on wobbly
rocks, seeing who could keep their balance the longest, or when they would play
hide and seek inside of the caves nearby. She had been silently thrilled to
hear him talking of old times. She thought he was trying to rekindle their lost
friendship. It didn’t occur to her that he was only bringing it up because he
wanted her to be his Shadow.

“You could always sneak around better than me,” he had
admitted.

Four years of waiting, and that’s what she got. A request to
commit treason.

She didn’t say yes. At least, not right away. Logan had
promised her that he would look out for her should she decide to join, and that
was at least a little comfort. But the real reason she had eventually said yes
to him was because she realized this would be her only opportunity to be
Mason’s friend again. Treason or not, she felt it was worth it…

Back in the meadow, Norabel was taken out of her thoughts as
she heard the sound of laughter. Looking over to the dirt path, she saw Logan
and Archer walking over to them, sharing in some joke Logan had just said.