Fervor (38 page)

Sam paused, and crouched, brushing his fingertips along the caked and crusty earth. He had a good idea what Francis had been running from. His brief glimpse through the holes in his walls had allowed him to see that the turmoil beyond included an intense feeling of shame and sense of mourning. He had realized that there would be no returning to the house for him. But there had also been some purpose there as well. He had not been just running from something, he had also been running to something as well.

He neared the edge of the cliffs with great trepidation. He had promised Sarah that he would be careful, and the soil was loose and dusty in places, making it somewhat slippery. There were also several rocks that wobbled dangerously when they were trod upon, enough of a warning to Sam to keep him from venturing too close to the brink. Following Francis’s tracks, however, made keeping a safe distance difficult. It was clear that the ex-Teller had cared little about the risks involved, despite being here in the dark and the rain.

Sam was contemplating this thought when he came to the point where the footprints suddenly stopped. There was a break in the soil at the cliff’s edge…there…an indentation. Sam had two theories about this. The cliff-side may have given way to Francis’s weight, weakened by erosion from the weather, and collapsed beneath him. That would explain why the footprints had come to an abrupt end, and why Francis had just disappeared from the connection without any forewarning.

Lowering himself to his hands and knees, Sam crawled cautiously towards the slight gap. His second theory as to why it existed was that Francis might have actually seated himself here for a moment, staring off into the rain or the ocean. Sam ran his hand over it. There was a roughness to it that suggested it was not formed from one man’s weight compacting the mud there. If he had sat there, then the loose soil suggested that he had slid off of it, and the only place to go from there was down.

Sam leaned forward, his stomach tightening, as he prepared to peer over the edge. He braced himself carefully, making sure that none of his weight was centred in the dip. If that happened, and part of the cliff had given way beneath Francis, Sam would be placing himself in jeopardy of succumbing to the same fate. He did not want to look, but his finding instincts would not let him have it any other way. He held his breath, and then he stared at the water far below.

Sam scrabbled backwards as quickly as he had inched forward slowly. He had spotted exactly what he had been hoping not to see. He wished that he could convince himself that the bloated and mangled body that he had seen bobbing amongst the rocks and seaweed could somehow be someone else. He sat for a moment, staring up at the sky, his breath coming in small gasps as his heart pounded in his chest and his stomach threatened to rebel against him. He had been hoping that he would be able to give Sarah different news, and finding Francis like this did not provide him with the answers that he had been searching for, and now presented him with a newer question – one that he likely would not be able to answer. Had Francis’s fatal fall from the cliffs been accidental or intentional? There was little chance that Sam would ever know.

Sam sat for a few more moments seeking calm. He struggled with his own feelings of guilt and shame before the most prominent question rose to the surface of his thoughts. Why had Francis come here in the first place?

Sam’s eyes searched his surroundings. Francis had left no signs, no clues for Sam to find. Had the tormented man come for one very simple purpose, or had there been some other reason? Sam shrugged, gave a slight shiver, and glanced over his shoulder farther along the High Barrens. He wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

And then there was the glint.

Sam blinked, rubbed his eyes, and blinked again. A few more seconds passed, and a second glint followed. His Finder instincts went wild. Driven by a fierce curiosity, Sam got to his feet.

He did not see the glint a third time, but he was fairly certain that he could target the spot that it had come from. He could not resist. He started forward.

When Sam arrived at the point where the glint had originated, he could see that the soil there was cracked and that some had collapsed in a little, leaving a slight hole. Without concern for the consequences, Sam shoved his fingers into the hole. Within, he felt a cold hard metal edge. Sam began to dig.

A few minutes later, he had cleared the area of dirt and was staring at a metal lever. He hesitated a little, a million ideas of what it could be for racing through his head.

“
Sam?”

It was Sarah again.

“
We’re at the beach. We should be able to finish the hover today.”

“
I’ll try to be back by tonight, but I can’t guarantee it. I found something unusual here, and I’m not sure how long it will take me to investigate it, or where exactly it might lead me,”
he informed her. He was not able to hide his excitement.

“
No hurry, Sam. Elliot decided that since you were gone and nobody was willing to leave without you, he plans on teaching Fiona and Nathan how to activate the hover when it is ready. He said there was no point in wasting good time, and that it’s best to have more than one person around who can run the hover anyway.”

Sarah paused, her mind growing still.

“
Sam,”
she thought quietly.
“Did you find Francis?”

He could not bring himself to reply, but that was answer enough for the girl.

“
I’ll check back with you later,”
she murmured.
“Hopefully, by then, you’ll be on your way home.”

Sam suspected that this little exchange may have set off another round of tears from the Fixer, but he would be little consolation to her with such a distance between them and he had other things to deal with. He broke the link and turned back to the lever.

After examining it from every direction possible, Sam’s curiosity overcame good sense and he reach over and pulled on it. There was a rumble and a shake, and Sam almost fell over as the ground began to shift beneath his feet. Startled, he leapt away from the space upon which he had been standing, and tumbled even farther out of reach. The earth fell away and Sam realized that he was now looking at a stairway that descended below ground. Was this what Francis had come for?

Sam wondered why this thing had been hidden so well from view, and then it struck him that it had not likely been accessed in years since the children had all been purposefully warned away from this place. Sam suspected, however, that Francis and the other Tellers had been in the know. Francis had never been one to break the rules, not until his house-family had required it of him.

This notion brought the first solid wave of sorrow over Francis’s loss to the surface for the Finder. He had to concede that Francis was gone now that he had seen the evidence of this first hand. And, while the Teller had mistreated Fiona, he had never, from all appearances, exposed the house-family’s transgressions to the scholars. Perhaps, he had even come here as a means of leading Sam to some of the answers that he had known the Finder had been looking for.

Sam found that he was tearing up a little now and struggled to choke it back. He was not Sarah. He would not fall victim to his emotions as quickly and as easily as she normally did.

Pulling his glow torch from his pack, Sam started down the stairway. He could see a door at the bottom of the steps. He hoped it was not locked, since he had no tools available to him to pick or break a lock, or to force the door open despite the lock. Much to Sam’s relief, the handle yielded to his touch and he found himself staring down a dark corridor. His glow torch revealed the spaces within, piece by piece. There were four glass doors. Without opening them, he lit up the rooms beyond them, scanning them one by one.

The first looked like a strange classroom, much larger than the small and intimate rooms at the school. Those rooms were only meant to accommodate a couple of dozen children. This one looked like it could easily hold a hundred.

The second room appeared to be a laboratory of some kind, approximately the same size as the giant classroom. It also was very different from the much smaller and sparsely equipped labs that were used by the teachers at the schools. Sam could not recognize half of the items that his glow torch illuminated beyond that glass door, but he suspected that Elliot would know what they were.

Sam began to realize just how isolated and sheltered that the children of Fervor had been – and still were. The scholars had orchestrated their education with the help of the minders and the teachers. Anything that they had learned had been deemed appropriate, or in some cases necessary, by the scholars, and everything else had been simply withheld from them – like learning how to activate most of the devices on Fervor to those who weren’t Keepers, or learning how to run and drive a hover.

All of that was about to change. Once they actually left the island, they would be able to learn anything that others would be willing to teach them. Someday, Sam promised himself, he would know what every single item in that laboratory was for.

There was nothing more in either of those rooms to tell Sam succinctly what this place was, but Sam had already formulated his theories. Since it seemed to him that Francis had known about this place, Sam concluded that this might be the location where the minders and teachers had brought the Tellers and Controls to instruct them on the Directives, and where the Tellers had trained for two years with the connection prior to the second exodus. It would make sense that they would choose a secluded place where other children on Fervor would not stray. That way, there was little chance that the truth of their existence would be discovered. That explained why no one but the Tellers and the Controls had had any idea what was going on. This was all part of their secret.

Before Sam could approach the third door, Sarah was with him again.

“
We’re done, Sam. The hover is ready. I have all the time in the world to talk to you now. Elliot will be preoccupied with showing Fiona and Nathan how it works, but there isn’t enough room there for me to see what he is doing, too. I wish you were home so I didn’t feel so left out. If we had a Finder with us, we could take the hover out to fetch you.”

She seemed a little more like her regular self. Not that she had recovered entirely from the loss of Francis, but her excitement at reaching one of their objectives softened the blow a little for the moment.

“
That’s okay, Sarah. I can make my own way home, and then it won’t be long before we can finally leave Fervor,”
he assured her.

“
Did you figure out what it was that you found?”

He shone the light on the glass of the third door. There was a familiarity to the room beyond, too. It looked like the garage in the school where they had fetched the tools for Elliot, only much bigger. Aside from tools, it appeared, at first, to be empty. Then he saw something gleaming at the far end of the room. He turned his torch on it and could make out a surprising bullet-like form—partially disassembled—with its pieces scattered about on the floor. Sam gasped.

“
What? What is it?”
Sarah demanded.

“
I found a hover here – a long distance one like Elliot’s. It looks like they had been in the process of repairing it and they must have had to leave it behind. I can’t believe it. It has been here this entire time, and none of us knew.”

Not that they could have taken it and fled Fervor any sooner, he considered. Only Fiona could have gotten anywhere near it until Elliot had arrived with the Languorite, and none of them would have known how to operate it.

“
Where’s here?”
Sarah asked.
“I thought you had gone to the High Barrens?”

“
That’s where I am, only inside,”
he answered.

“
Inside?”

It was hard to explain with words. It had been several days since he had tried the trick, but he realized that the easiest way was to show her…just the way he used to do when she was blind. He scrambled back where he had started outside, and then gave her a brief tour, projecting images to her from each area, as he went. He could sense her bewilderment.

“
That was there,”
she thought with an edge of awe.
“That was there and none of us had a clue.”