Dawnbreaker: Legends of the Duskwalker - Book 3 (7 page)

“Actually, I think I’d like to lie down for a while,” he answered. “If that’s all right with you, Miss Mol.” Her smile trembled at that; Three had always called her “Miss Mol”, and Wren realized she too must be feeling the weight of sorrow anew.

“Of course, you must be exhausted,” she said. “Just be quiet as you can, Gracie’s sleeping back there.”

Wren nodded and started towards the back room, where jCharles and Mol had made a pallet for him in an alcove off their bedroom.

“Wren,” Haiku called. Wren turned back. “Thank you again.” Wren nodded, but he had no more words to give. He silently slipped into the back room and crept to his alcove. It was his intent just to lie there, to get away from everyone else, to let his mind swirl and hopefully settle. Instead, sleep came, swift and heavy.

I
n the dream
, and he knew it was a dream while he dreamed, Wren saw Mama, alone, crouched in a strange place. It was Morningside, or rather, was supposed to be Morningside, though the look of it was wrong and was no part of the city he recognized; no part of the city he once ostensibly ruled over. The sky above was dark with clouds. Or smoke, perhaps, oily and thick, swirling with strange currents and lit from within by a sickly pale light. She seemed to be searching for something amongst the tall and twisted buildings. Her movements were hurried; not frantic, but urgent, and always her head turned this way and that, as if she feared discovery as much as she sought to discover.

Wren tried to call her name, but try as he might, he could not force open his mouth, and as he grunted through clenched jaw, he knew that his voice was sounding in the real world and threatened to chase the dream away. He ceased his struggle, willing himself to stay asleep, to continue the dream, to see his mother for a few seconds more. She saw him, then; her face showed it plainly, joy radiant. She left her place and rushed towards him, and in the final moments, as the dream slipped from him and consciousness arose, the sky shifted with sickening speed. A great black hand of ash and shadow writhed into being from above and swept towards her, and Wren’s eyes flashed open, his heart pounding so hard he could feel its beat against the floor beneath him. He didn’t stir when he awoke. Mama had long ago taught him to wake in stillness as a safety measure, and he had never lost the ability.

He lay with his eyes open in the darkling room, letting the dream slide away into memory. Seeing his Mama in that dreamscape left him hollow in the middle, reminded him afresh of his loss. And the hand descending from the sky. Asher’s reach was long; not even in sleep could Wren escape it. He shivered, though not from cold.

It was a warning, perhaps. His subconscious reminding him of the great risk posed if he tried contacting his mother, or she him. Asher was out there, somehow, with thousands of eyes and ears now, always watching, always listening. If Mama was still alive, and Wren could not yet believe otherwise, pinging her through the digital could expose her and ultimately be her doom. As desperate as Wren was for her voice, to know for certain that she was alive, she had trained him well to suppress those impulses when danger was at hand. Surely she would reach out to him as soon as it was safe.

Outside the sun had sunk below the horizon. The last traces of natural light were bleeding from the room to be replaced by the gaudy artificial light of the neighboring buildings. For a time, Wren just laid there, giving his heart time to settle and his nerves time to remember the real world. With some irritation, he realized his hand was asleep. He lifted it and waved it around, feeling the electric prickling as the dead fingers flopped about. Had today been the day that he’d told Haiku his story? It seemed like a different time to him now.

Muffled voices in the other room told him everyone else was still up, though to his ears it sounded like they were trying to keep the noise down. He considered trying to go back to sleep, but the image of the hand still lingered strong in his mind. And he was actually pretty hungry. With a deep breath, he rolled himself up on his pallet, shook his hand out some more, and then went into the main room.

jCharles and Haiku were standing near the dining table, while Mol was in the kitchen. jCharles was in the middle of some story, which he had to tell with frequent pauses since he was holding Grace and she kept trying to grab his teeth as he talked. Haiku was setting silverware out for everyone, and listened intently, offering the occasional quiet comment that Wren couldn’t quite make out from across the room. Chapel was sitting in a chair in a darkened corner, fully removed from the proceedings despite his proximity to them. Surely Chapel knew Wren was there, even though he made no sign that revealed it.

jCharles had to stop for a moment to pull Grace’s hand out of his mouth again, and in doing so he noticed Wren.

“Hey, buddy,” he said, his voice raised to a normal tone. “Did you sleep?”

Wren nodded.

“Did we wake you?”

Wren shook his head. Mol appeared at the open entrance to the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

“Do you feel up to eating something?” she asked.

“I could eat,” Wren answered.

“Then you’re just in time. Come on in here and help me carry the food to the table, would you?”

“Sure.”

Wren followed Mol back into the kitchen where dishes sat filled with steaming vegetables, rice, and some kind of meat with an amber-colored glaze. They weren’t
real
vegetables, Wren knew. They were the manufactured kind, not like the ones he’d seen growing straight up out of the ground at Chapel’s compound so long ago. The compound that lay in ruins, now. The hand from his dream had laid waste to it, as it had Morningside.

“Hey,” Mol said, crouching in front of him. “You OK?”

The dream lingered at the edges of his wakefulness, tinted everything like a thin veil of fog. Wren blinked a few times, and then nodded.

“Still waking up?”

Wren shrugged. Mol made a face like she wanted to say something but didn’t know what it was.

“I’m OK, Miss Mol,” Wren said. “Just had a weird dream is all.” He gave her a smile, though he could tell by the way it felt that it probably looked weak and fake. He picked up the bowl of meat and carried it into the other room. He’d seen Mol carry as many as five dishes before, all at once, so he knew she didn’t really need the help, but he was glad to do it anyway. He set it in the middle of the table. Mol followed after him and arranged the rest of the bowls and serving spoons. She said grace over the meal as was her way, and then they all sat down to eat.

“Chapel,” Mol called. “Care to join us?”

“Thank you,” Chapel answered. “But no.”

Mol nodded and started serving out portions. It wasn’t a surprise that Chapel remained where he was. With each day that had passed, he’d seemed more withdrawn. He’d gone out several times, for increasingly longer stretches of time. Wren wondered what that all might mean, but he was too worn out to think about it just then, and it didn’t really seem like a good time to bring it up.

Over the meal conversation was light and carefully balanced; Wren could sense it in the words and the glances. Haiku asked about Greenstone and jCharles’s livelihood. In turn, jCharles prompted Haiku for some history of his travels. No one wanted to venture too far into potentially painful topics after the earlier emotional work of the day. And it seemed like maybe neither jCharles nor Haiku wanted to reveal too much about either of their histories. Wren ate quietly, and though Mol kept glancing over at him to check on him, mostly the adults carried on, content to let him participate when and how he chose.

Try as they might, however, the gravitational pull of their strangely connected history was too great to escape for long, and gradually, inevitably, conversation worked its way towards the unavoidable. There was a pause in the talk that grew longer than the usual break, almost to the point of awkward silence. Finally, jCharles wiped his mouth with his hand and dropped his napkin on the table, and leaned back shaking his head and smiling sadly.

“You know it’s weird, though,” jCharles said. He looked hard at Haiku then. “I knew Three a long time, and I don’t recall him ever mentioning he had a brother. And you really don’t look all that much alike, either. But I’m jiggered if you don’t
feel
like his own twin.”

“I should clarify,” Haiku said. “He is not... was not... my brother in the traditional sense. We share no parent, at least that we know. We are not related by blood, but rather by a bond much deeper. He
is
my brother nonetheless. We were raised in the same House.”

He put a curious emphasis on the word house when he said it, like it was more than a building.

“Three used to mention it sometimes,” Mol said, her voice quiet and still tinged with sorrow. “His House. Only ever in passing, though. What was it?”

Haiku’s expression changed then, a slight shift. A cloud passing briefly across the sun.

“Once a place of honor,” Haiku said. Then he inclined his head towards his book, lying on a side table nearby. “Now, little more than words on a page.”

“Sounds pretty,” jCharles said. “For a non-answer.” Mol gave him a mildly scolding look, which he shrugged off.

Haiku smiled and offered his own shrug. “It’s difficult to explain. The world was so different when House mattered. Much was lost in the falling.” The smile faded, his expression darkened; a hardness came into his eyes as he looked off somewhere into his own past. “And much given.”

After a moment, Mol offered, “It’s OK if you don’t want to talk about it.”

His eyes shifted to her and cleared but didn’t soften. The intensity of the look made Wren’s breath catch; he’d seen it before in another man. Then, as if he remembered himself, Haiku smiled again and the look was gone.

“I apologize for my rudeness,” he said, dipping his head in an apologetic bow. And then he repeated, “It’s... difficult to explain.”

“You’re like Three,” Wren said, drawing all eyes to him. It was the first he’d spoken. Then, realizing what he’d said, and what he’d meant by it, he wondered if he was betraying some secret Haiku did not want known. “I mean...”

Haiku gazed at him for a time, and then dipped his head forward, as if he knew what Wren meant and was giving his permission to speak it aloud.

“I mean,” Wren continued, “you’re not connected either. Like Three.”

Haiku inclined his head to one side. “What makes you think that?”

“I can feel it,” Wren answered. He looked back down at his plate. There was still a fair amount of food left. He’d felt a lot hungrier than he’d actually been.

“Feel it?” Haiku said.

“Yeah. I, um...” Wren said. He poked a piece of meat with his fork, pushed it back and forth across the plate, painting a meaningless design with its thin trail of amber glaze. “Well...” he said, then looked up at Haiku and smiled. “It’s kind of difficult to explain.”

At the far end of the table, jCharles suppressed a chuckle.

“You’re correct, Wren,” Haiku said. “I am not connected.”

“Is that what House Eight was?” Wren asked. “What made it special?”

“No,” said Haiku. “No, that’s not what made it special. Not that alone. But the House was the first to recognize the value of disconnection in the old world. Some others followed after, though none ever embraced it as truly and fully as House Eight.”

The room fell quiet for a span, except for Grace smacking her hands on the tray in front of her. Wren got the impression that Haiku might continue if prompted but likely wasn’t going to offer much more on his own. Mol and jCharles both seemed to be waiting, maybe uncertain of how far back to draw the veil. Haiku’s past was Three’s past, and as much as Wren longed to know, he remembered well how closely Three had guarded himself. It almost felt wrong to dig much deeper.

“And what of you, Wren?” Haiku asked, breaking the silence and taking the opportunity to change the subject. “What brought you back to Greenstone from Morningside?”

The question shocked Wren so violently he actually physically flinched. Mol reflexively shot a look at jCharles, and Haiku, though he had no idea what he had just done, immediately tensed up and searched the faces of the others for some clue. It hadn’t occurred to Wren that Haiku might not know of Morningside’s fate, but then he couldn’t understand why he would have assumed otherwise. News didn’t much travel across the Strand. Certainly not quickly. And Wren’s own story as he’d told it had ended with Three; he’d had neither the energy nor a reason to tell more.

“I apologize,” Haiku said. “Please forgive my ignorance, and my rudeness.” Even without knowing why he’d provoked such a response, it was apparent he hoped to undo any hurt he’d caused.

“No, it’s uh,” jCharles said, “it’s my fault, I should’ve... It’s just, you know, we got to talking about Three, and uh...”

Wren didn’t really hear whatever else it was that jCharles said. Haiku’s question had threatened to bring with it a storm of fresh, raw emotions and Wren thought for certain that all the past days’ terror and pain and loss would overwhelm him at any second. But instead, he found himself strangely calm; still and centered. The emotions were there, just beyond him, as if he could reach out and activate them, embrace them, if he so chose. Yet, the decision was his, and in his own stillness he found a small measure of courage.

“Morningside’s gone,” Wren said. He heard himself say the words, understood what they meant, understood all that those two words didn’t say and yet knew the full measure of the loss they implied. But the storm didn’t reach him. The quiet calm remained his. “Morningside’s gone now,” he said again, and for the first time he thought maybe he could talk about it without feeling like he was going to throw up. Whether his subconscious had somehow finally accepted this new reality and adapted, or he was simply too emotionally exhausted to feel anything anymore, Wren didn’t know. Nor did it seem to matter for the moment. He took a breath and nodded to himself.

“It fell,” he said. “To the Weir.”

Haiku blinked back at him, with no sign of understanding, as if Wren were speaking some made up language.