Chapter 6 #2
What was going to happen to it—our home?
What would happen to us if, for some reason, we couldn’t return to it?
I hoped the gas would clear soon enough so we could resume our lives…
but really, how could we resume our lives after what happened yesterday?
How could we ever go back to living the same way?
What would be stopping more nomads from coming for us?
Would there even be a jungle to return to?
I tried to pause the questions flooding my head, but it felt near impossible.
One step at a time. One step at a time.
“Yes, backup arrived,” Anna replied. “According to the last report, everyone’s in flight now. The other two ships are an hour or so behind us, so we’ll all arrive at close to the same time.”
“Arrive where?” I asked. My eyes fell on the silver “FI” emblem on her uniform.
She lifted off the wall and gestured to the door at the opposite end of the room. “Why don’t you come with me and you can see for yourself?”
Anna led me through a series of rooms and stopped when we reached a tall white door.
“This is the cockpit,” she explained.
She rapped her knuckles against the door. It swung open and she stepped inside, gesturing for me to follow.
My breath caught as I took in the broad, panoramic windshield that made up the ‘cockpit’s’ walls.
If I had thought the windows back there had been overwhelming, this was…
off the scale. If I focused my eyes on the distance, ignoring the myriad of glowing buttons on the control panels, and the two blue-capped men sitting before them, it felt like I was truly flying without wings, the churning depths an endless gangway.
I felt sick and staggered backward.
Anna caught my arm and guided me to a spare seat behind the men. “There you go,” she said, chuckling. “This is normal for your first time flying. And you must be hungry, right?”
I frowned, considering the question. I had woken up with a blaring headache, which had prevented me from noticing my appetite. And my stomach still felt tied up in knots. But it would probably do me good to eat something.
I nodded.
She stooped down beside a small cabinet and pulled out a glass bottle of water, along with something square wrapped in tinfoil. She handed them both to me and took the seat next to me.
I peeled open the foil. It contained a sandwich filled with a thick, brown paste.
I took a bite, the salty paste squishing pleasantly between my teeth, and decided that it wasn’t bad.
When the food hit my stomach, it grumbled for more.
I finished the whole thing. The bread was different from what we made back home; it was light and fluffy, rather than dense and grainy.
It was tastier, but not as filling, so I requested another sandwich—which Anna brought over, along with a banana.
I consumed them along with the water, which also had a strangely different taste than what I was used to.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” she replied.
I held her gaze for a moment. “And thanks for helping us back there. I… I don’t know what would’ve happened to us if you hadn’t arrived when you did.”
Well, I did know. The “Falcons” would’ve won the battle, plundered our resources, and left us to suffocate in the gas.
What kind of human being could do that to another?
I just couldn’t fathom what their mindset was.
Even if I were desperate, I didn’t think I could stoop to such a vile act.
And who knew, if they’d asked nicely, we might have even willingly shared some food with them!
“Oh, it’s what we do,” she replied, waving a dismissive hand, as if what they’d just done was nothing, before casually cracking open a bottle of water and taking a long swig.
I noticed then the thick, golden ring on her right thumb.
It was oddly shaped for a ring; like half a circle.
It curved around her outer thumb, and the edge that was closest to her palm was flattish.
The curved part was etched with delicate letters that formed short words I didn’t understand: “Veni, vidi, vici.”
“Right,” I said, distracted as I watched her drink. “Well, again, we appreciate it.”
“Appreciation appreciated,” she replied, swallowing her last gulp of water before aiming the bottle at a trashcan.
There was a pause as she leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands together with a sigh.
And then she spoke again in a lower tone, and with an odd kind of glimmer in her eyes, “We’re actually the only organization that I know of that engages in outreach the way we do, FYI.
So, yeah—you are super lucky that we found you.
It’s not like we have unlimited people out there.
Plus, these kinds of excursions are a risk to our lives—we can never be sure how each mission will turn out, and some of us have even lost our lives for the sake of helping strangers.
Not to mention the expense! We’re a well-off nation, but it’s not cheap to run monsters like these, let alone several of them, and then there’s all the food, medical assistance, and sometimes even shelter that we provide.
Resources don’t just rain from the sky in times like these, do they?
” She laughed, then shifted in her chair, straightening her back as she glanced out through the windshield.
I swallowed, frowning slightly. It took me a minute to process not just her words, but her manner.
I’d caught a hint of it before, back in the clearing, but it was more blatant to me now—she was a woman with an ego.
She spoke with enough pride that she sounded almost smug, and while hers was certainly a noble line of work—one we’d all be dead without—her tone just struck me as…
a little off. I understood the notion of selfless service; it was something we were taught in our community from a young age, to be ready to serve not just our relatives, but anyone who needed help.
But it wasn’t something anyone ever thought to boast about.
If you took on a task, you just got on with the job and did it out of duty, not to feel puffed up about it.
Still, it wasn’t like I could fault her for it after what she’d done for us—and to be fair, I had just been thanking her. It just caught me off guard, because it wasn’t an attitude I could relate to.
“So, are you the manager on this airship, or…?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.
“I am Head of Operations of this expedition, yes,” she replied. “And, hey.” She glanced back at me. “I just realized I never caught your name.”
“Oh. Tanisha. Tanisha Lockwood. Everyone calls me Tani, though.”
She gave me a knowing grin. “I shall honor that request.”
“So, where are we heading?” I dared to look back out through the window.
She stood up and moved closer to the glass, squinting as she stared out into the distance.
“Yup!” she announced after a moment. “We’re close enough to see it now! Come here.” She tapped her side, beckoning me over.
I got up and moved next to her, staring straight ahead, trying to see what she saw—and then I spotted it, a black dot in the far distance, which was swiftly becoming larger.
“Is that an island?” I asked, squinting harder.
She dipped into a cabinet by her feet and pulled out a pair of binoculars: an object I recognized thanks to our museum having stocked a pair.
These were of course way more modern, with a smooth silver surface and thick rubber grips.
She handed them to me, and I pressed them to my eyes, refocusing on the black dot, which was now more like a black smudge.
“Welcome to Fairwell Island,” she announced proudly.
“Fairwell Island,” I murmured.
“Or just Fairwell, for short,” she added.
“That would explain the letters on your uniform?” I asked.
“That’s right. The entire island, and all of its peripheries, make up our great nation. It’s currently home to about sixty thousand Fairwellians.”
Sixty thousand. That sounded like a lot. And… “Fairwellians?” I repeated, finding the term odd. I momentarily lowered the binoculars to look at her.
She chuckled. “That’s the official, if rather antiquated, term for Fairwell’s citizens.
A bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? I prefer ‘Fairlanders,’ honestly, which is common use these days, anyway.
” She nodded back out of the windscreen.
“Keep your eyes out there. You’re about to get an even more spectacular view. ”
I did as instructed and turned back toward the window, refocusing the lenses. Sixty thousand really was a lot of people. This place had to be big.
“So Fairwell is where you all live—and it’s also the official base for your philanthropic organization?” I asked.
“That is correct,” Anna replied. “All of our lives and activities revolve around it.”
I went quiet, wanting to focus on the island as the view became clearer and clearer. After about five minutes, it was close enough for me to start making out actual details, and what I saw made my eyes bulge behind the lenses.
The main black smudge I had seen was a massive, mountainous island—and by mountainous, I meant practically the whole thing was one sprawling, multi-peaked mountain range.
It was flattish at the edges, with gradually rising slopes, until it branched out into five imperious peaks, with the highest one being at its center.
There was a lot of greenery, which was a welcome sight, and it seemed to grow around and among buildings that were built into the mountain’s slopes.
The settlements appeared thickest on the lower levels, and grew sparser as the slopes grew steeper—and then, right at the central peak was a grand construction that looked like some kind of epic, yet modern castle.
That was the only word I could think to give it.