Chapter 2
Farah
Everything was cold. I didn’t understand that because I lived in Arizona, Phoenix, it was always warm.
I hadn’t had frozen toes like this in so long that I struggled to even interpret the sensations.
Had I dipped my feet in a tub of cold water to cool down after a long day at work?
Had I spilled my glass of iced tea and its abundance of ice cubes in there? What was going on?
The last I remembered was that meeting with little Abe’s parents at the daycare I worked at.
Had I managed to bring up my concerns about his temper and inability to share or play together?
I was sure I had, but now I couldn’t remember how the talk had gone.
A vague sense of disquiet started to fill my mind and I knew; something had gone very, very wrong.
A room flashed before my eyes, which made me realize that I’d been in complete darkness before that.
How had I not noticed? This room was dreary and gray, utilitarian.
It wasn’t a room at the daycare, because those were all painted in cheerful but calming colors to promote a calm and safe environment for the kids.
No, this room was somewhere else. Jail. Fudge, where had that word come from? Why was I thinking of a jail? I was a good, law-abiding citizen. There was no reason to think I’d ended up in jail somehow, but once that thought had filled me, I couldn’t shake it.
There was only a single table in the room, with a chair on either side.
When I glanced at the table, I realized immediately that my hands were cuffed to a metal ring at the center of the metal surface.
My stomach swooped into my shoes, bile rose in my throat, and panic clawed at my chest. I was right, this was jail.
I recalled it then, the reason. It swept away the fear and panic to make place for furious anger.
How could they do this to me? They had no proof!
I was innocent. Abe’s parents, they were to blame for this, when all I’d wanted to do was get them the help they needed to care for their atypical but wonderful child.
My colleagues had been right to warn me not to do it, that those rich parents wouldn’t take kindly to being told their child could be considered less than perfect.
Not that I thought so, Abe was cute and sweet, he just needed better care than a busy daycare like ours could offer.
Those parents had thrown me to the wolves, rather than face reality.
Or maybe they were facing it, but they were doing it in secret and making sure no one could ever know the truth by shutting me up for good.
That’s how it worked, I should have remembered that.
Guess you could call that my fatal flaw, the desire to believe that everyone acted out of the goodness of their heart. The ultimate optimist, that’s what my father used to call me before he’d passed away. Farah with her heart on her sleeve.
My thoughts spun from that jail room and into a warmer, fonder memory: My father laughing as he talked to me on his front porch, just weeks before he’d died in an accident at the factory where he worked.
“I never had to comfort you over your physical aches and pains, you know,” he’d said to me.
“Though there were plenty of those too.” He’d turned his withered face to me to wink with one deep brown eye.
“So many strays you wanted to adopt, strangers you wanted to care for. Such a big heart, my girl.”
Yeah, and look what it had gotten me. A freaking one-way ticket to heaven or wherever this stinking cold place was, it sure as heck wasn’t Arizona.
The memory of my dad’s front porch faded, pulling with it the warmth and the love I felt in his presence.
This wasn’t right, where was I? I tried to pierce the darkness that surrounded me, a new wave of panic cresting over me.
I’d take the jail cell over this dark. What was going on?
Why couldn’t I see anything? I was sick and tired of the coldness in my limbs, my body felt heavy, sluggish.
I couldn’t move so much as a muscle no matter how hard I tried.
I wondered if this is what it felt like for people with sleep paralysis. If so, it freaking sucked.
The jail cell spun back into my mind’s eye and now I was certain that I was dreaming. Maybe I wasn’t so far off with the sleep paralysis thing. I should consider myself lucky that I wasn’t imagining shadowy creepy crawlies sitting on my chest yet. That would really freak me out.
The gloomy room felt more familiar this time, I could even feel the cool bite of the metal cuffs around my wrists.
Funny how cold and heat felt so similar that my brain struggled to tell the difference for a second.
I was in this room while I waited for my trial, but sitting there I’d known already. I was doomed.
The government on earth had a zero-tolerance policy, and they considered prison inhumane so you were either fined or executed.
There were no appeals like I knew had been the norm a few hundred years ago, there was just the hearing, and sentencing, and then you either got it or were free to go.
Everyone knew that the chances that you walked out of a hearing room alive were slim to none.
Drawing in a shuddering breath, I wished I could raise my hands to feel the pounding of my heart in my chest. It was so cold in here, I didn’t remember that from before.
I couldn’t recall the face of my guard either, so when he came to pick me up not long after, all I saw was a shadowy blur where his face should have been. It was creepy, but I had other worries.
My stomach tied itself up in knots about the next part; the crowd of reporters I was about to be thrust into.
A whole horde of people who were shouting for my blood, accusing me of the worst and most heinous crimes.
Asking me questions but never for the truth, never to know if I was innocent.
Nobody dared to question the system, because they would be in my shoes as soon as they tried.
The United Alliance of Races was a tyranny masquerading as a benevolent democracy. It was all a farce.
My memories blurred together, one after another, of the crowd, and the hearing.
I still vividly remembered the judge sneering down at me from where he was enthroned.
A silver wig on his head, a wooden gavel in hand which he slammed down with impudence whenever he felt like it. It was all so cold, so cruel.
I was really cold, I felt like I was drowning, and my body was growing sluggish and heavier by the second. Was it even seconds? Or were they minutes, hours? Everything was so confusing, it felt like what was up was down and down was up. Why couldn’t I open my eyes?
Screaming inside my head was the most I could do, it exhausted me to rage against the nightmares in my head and the nightmare that surrounded me. Wait, how did I know that anything was surrounding me at all? Wasn’t I supposed to be dead?
Another memory. This one of the tiny square little box they marched me into.
It had vents that opened above my head as soon as the door shut behind me, fumes drifting down on me.
When I spun on wobbly, woozy legs, I could see the face of the guard grinning meanly at me through the door.
Funny how I remembered his face now, the two front teeth a bit crooked, his eyes glowing red in my mind.
That was probably not the truth, but he’d seemed wholly evil to me in that final moment.
I drifted then, caught up in the blackness the same way I had been inside that tiny little room.
That was supposed to be the end for me and yet…
I knew it wasn’t. I was still so cold; cold enough that I feared that I was losing my toes and my fingertips to frostbite.
The darkness that surrounded me was so black, and still, I started to think that I could see shapes.
Was I dead, awake and trapped, or was I dreaming?
Maybe this was like drowning. Sinking, always sinking further down to the bottom of a fathomless lake.
Yeah, that’s what this was. I was drowning.
Then the nightmares really started, the fight for air, the desperation that flooded me at the idea of all that water on top of me.
Fear, irrational though it might be, that something big and ancient was in that water with me, ready to swallow me whole.
If only I could feel my toes, then I’d know if something was nibbling on me or not. Please, anyone, something, save me! This wasn’t how I wanted to go, none of this was. This wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, and I sure as heck didn’t deserve this.
“Please,” I whispered hoarsely, the sound of my own, ragged voice loud in the confined space.
It wasn’t bubbles that escaped my throat, but that just added the fear of my air running out at any second.
“Someone, save me.” My plea was going to go unheard, there was nobody down here with me, no one at all. I was alone.
***
Zeidon
It had been days since the skyship came down.
I was not amused by how hard it had proven to be to get to the second location.
It was like Bitter Storm was out in droves, searching their hillsides and the mountain flank.
They were riled up like firesprites, chattering and zigzagging through the woods and across the slate hills.
Armed to the teeth and never alone, I was forced to hide or wait them out.
This was not the time to start a one-male war against the most numerous, hostile clan in all of Serant.
I stuck to the waterways as much as I could, swimming upriver for much of my route.
Much to Srazz’s displeasure, which he let me know all about with his sharp claws in my shoulder, especially when he got his rump wet.
More than once I wondered how I’d ended up with a pet that hated water. A Water Weaver Naga with a water-hating companion was absurd, the water was in my blood just like roaming the territory was. Today something else filled my veins too, a sense of urgency that I could not shake.
It wasn’t like before, when I’d been expectant and excited for that skyship to fall. It felt like I was running out of time. Like something extremely precious was slipping through my claws if I did not hurry.
Stuck in a narrow ravine after a long, arduous swim up an underground river, I was in a rush to locate the secret path out.
I had paths around the waterways everywhere I’d roamed, hidden exits out of a territory, or a secret path that connected one river or lake to the next.
Paths that my Clan brothers and I spoke about, sharing their secrets, whenever we met up.
Trident firmly in hand, I ignored Srazz as he leaped from my shoulder to scuttle away along the river bank.
He probably smelled an enticing female and was off to investigate, maybe there was a particularly juicy patch of Exar berries up ahead.
He could take care of himself, the Ayala was extremely good at hiding.
The small animal had only just disappeared ahead of me, out of sight, when I picked up the sounds of Naga behind me.
I was being followed. Flicking out my tongue, I drew their scents into my mouth and pressed them up against the scent receptacle.
Definitely Bitter Storm, but there were more unusual scents too, something that reminded me of the strange skybeings I had seen at the first part of the wreck.
I picked up my pace, heading up the river bank myself to eye the striations in the ravine walls.
Above me, a long slice of violet sky could be seen, bright and cloudless today.
I didn’t think more skyships would fall in my vicinity but I didn’t doubt that the Bitter Storm warriors in these hills were on the lookout.
I just hoped they hadn’t utterly destroyed what I was searching for.
There it was, my exit! I could faintly hear the voices of my red-scaled brethren at my back. Excited voices as they indicated that they’d found a trail, wetness on the shore where I’d exited the water. It wouldn’t last for more than a couple of dozen feet, and I was an expert at going unnoticed.
Before they could catch sight of me, I reached the narrow crevice.
It was hidden behind a long swatch of netted fabric, which had been covered by living, climbing vines.
Sliding the thick cover aside, I ducked through it and carefully tucked it all back in place.
Then I was slithering up the rocky, steep climb.
Out of the ravine, my head instinctively pointed toward the mountain slope above me.
I was so close now. That’s where the rest of that skyship had struck.
That’s where I needed to be. Vaguely, I could see the crater it had struck against the rock, and then more hopefully, the shimmer of water beyond that.
A lake. Maybe all wasn’t lost yet. Not for a Water Weaver such as me.