31. THIRTY-ONE #2
Damn it all. How could she expect to put their relationship back together when she’d started off by breaking it?
Then again, who was she kidding? Regardless of whatever he’d intended, Calver had left her.
You couldn’t break something that had never been whole in the first place.
She slung herself back into the hammock and closed her eyes, hoping the steady rocking of the sea might bring her solace where nothing else could.
Her dreams were strange, shifting from one to the next before she could settle into them. A sky on fire. Drogus cutting up melons in the galley with Calver’s blood-soaked dowaga. A sea that opened into oblivion.
Fankalo woke to whimpering.
A beam of light lanced the darkness, slashing across Calver’s hardened face. A vein bulged in his temple. His hands clawed at his hair.
“Calver?” she whispered. She still couldn’t sense him with her Luck.
He moaned, bare feet sliding across the floor as if trying to find purchase. Fates help her. The Shadewalker was neck-deep in a psychotic breakdown three feet from her. The funerals of the day before hung sashimi-fresh in her mind: she too was about to become fish food.
“It’s me. The little slumling you left behind to go chase the Red Wing?” She approached him at a crouch, speaking like she was convincing a wild animal not to sink its teeth into her. “I sailed the ocean ten times to find you.”
She reached to lay a hand on his arm. The Tera’thian numerals branded there churned her stomach, inspiring the thought of hot iron sizzling against flesh. She flinched before setting her hand on him.
He roared, exploding from his fetal position into a defensive stance. Fankalo scrambled away, heart beating so hard she could feel it in her knees.
Calver looked at her, his expression returning to blankness like a slow-sinking stone.
His back slid down the door until he huddled, clutching his hair all over again.
This wasn’t the same Calver who’d left her.
But it was him. He’d saved her. He’d obeyed her.
Somewhere in there, he knew who she was.
“Do you even remember me?”
Calver’s head lolled—a nod? He moaned again, but the noise changed, forming the clear resonations of vowels interspersed with the turbulence of ill-fitting consonants. The same sounds, over and over before she could comprehend them as words: “Arleena, help me.”
Fresh tears flooded her cheeks. Fresh hate formed in her chest.
“I’m trying, Cal. I just don’t know how.” She ran her fingers across her brow. “Do you still remember your letters?”
Another nod: slow, as if he wasn’t really sure.
Fankalo moved to her father’s desk, thrust open the drawer, and retrieved a charcoal stick and notebook.
Seeing her father’s handwriting—a name beside something he’d written about used distortion cores—brought a fresh stab of grief.
She ripped away the front page and crumpled it, setting the notebook and charcoal at Calver’s feet.
The charcoal twitched as Calver scrawled. Stopped. Crossed out. Started. Stopped again, and ultimately shook the notebook at her. She squinted at the line of script, a web of syllables so tangled it was almost as if he were learning to write all over again.
Talk. Don’t stop talking.
All thought vanished from her mind. “Right. Ahhhm…”
Calver cringed on the floor, waiting. Six years to fill him in on. Six years, and all she could spout was—
“A recent study conducted by the scholars at Tennca'Pui dated human remains with the same cognitive capacity as our own to more than one hundred and fifty thousand years ago.” She stuffed her hands into her pockets at the cringeworthiness of her clinical speech.
“They estimate that, in that time, there have been eight cataclysms, as indicated in the geological record, with the same level of devastation as the most recent one.”
She’d read it just the ten-day before in a scientific journal her father had gifted her in Chira’na. Her eyes welled. She pushed through, worried that if she didn’t keep the words coming out, she might choke on them.
“And it got me thinking that—well—maybe Creation is an artist. And every now and then, she looks at the thing she has painted, decides she doesn’t like it, and whitewashes the whole thing.”
This wasn’t working. Now Calver was rocking, his breath coming in short gasps.
“The researchers have theorized that there have been other civilizations, ahm, like ours. That we’ve blipped in and out of existence many times before like—like twinkling stars. And that reminded me of that silly song Mother used to sing.”
The upbeat tune rose from the ashes of memory like a phoenix. Fankalo’s voice lifted into the melody, so awkward and jaunty that her shoulders lifted towards her ears with it:
“Two stars orbit one another
Lost in a void, but they have each other.”
Calver’s eyes opened. His shoulders relaxed. And then his spark returned in her mind, like it had so many times before. Fankalo kept going, voice warbling.
“Like the Kaidechi moon makes cintas bloom
They pull the other where they’re meant to be.”
She even added in the ridiculous claps. This was actually working.
“The universe flows through me,
The universe flows through me,
The universe flows through me,
And I flow through the universe.”
Calver’s quill scratched over the notebook. Thank the Fates she could stop singing. He turned it towards her. I won’t let it hurt you.
Her eyes narrowed. “Won’t let what hurt me?”
It’s a voice in my head.
Fankalo’s lip quivered. Her skin itched. She resisted the impulse to run—to put as much distance as possible between her and this brother she couldn’t talk to and couldn’t touch. If she couldn’t brave her own blood, what hope for her was there? “Thank you.”
Calver’s brown eyes stared a thousand leagues beneath the floor.
“What did they do to you?”