The End and Other Beginnings Page 17

  He looked away, and walked up the stairs to his fluency exam.

  Before, he had lived in a village by the water called Shretva, just down the road from the library. He found his feet taking him there almost without his say-so after the exam, and so he followed them across the narrow, broken road and up the tree-lined hill to the familiar cluster of houses. They were painted, as before, in an array of colors. Rumor had it the practice had started because so many Zoldans were colorblind they just picked whatever paint was available. But there was something appealing about the array of blues, yellows, and pinks nestled in the thinning forest.

  Up near the top of the hill, the houses were closer together, and more run-down. That was where he had lived, in a little green house that stuck out an arm’s length farther than the others on that side of the street.

  He saw from a distance that it wasn’t green anymore, but pale yellow, and the windows were lit up from within. Curtains embroidered in bright colors covered them, so he couldn’t peek in. There were cheery fake flowers out on the porch in knee-high vases. A green ball had rolled onto the little patch of grass that made up the lawn. A family lived there.

  He looked up, to the tallest house on the street, painted white with black shutters. Jove’s house.

  Perfectly positioned to see too much. And he had—the curtains fluttering at some of the worst moments of Otho’s life.

  Otho didn’t know what possessed him, but he was marching toward that white house, leaving the fake flowers and the green ball behind him. He was knocking on the door, and waiting. The wind tickled at the back of his neck, making him shiver. He was still damp from the rain earlier.

  Jove answered the door, his hair sticking up in the middle like he had just tangled his fingers in it. He was tall, compared to most boys their age, but he wasn’t like Otho, who had become too long and too broad all of a sudden, and now looked ungainly no matter how hard he tried to stand up straight and move with purpose. His hands—huge, bulging at the knuckle—shook.

  “Hello,” Jove said finally.

  “It was you,” Otho said.

  “What?”

  “You testified at my appeal,” Otho said. “You’re underage. You’re not one of them. It could only be you.”

  “Not one of them—you mean the Transformationists?” Jove stepped onto the porch, holding out placating hands. “Otho, are you all right?”

  Otho’s teeth chattered a little as he said, “Answer me.”

  “Yes.” Jove dropped his hands. “It was me.”

  Mist dusted Otho’s face. It was getting dark; Auly would expect him home soon, might be angry if he wasn’t back for dinner. Otho didn’t know and he was reluctant to test it.

  “I should have done it sooner,” Jove said. He swallowed, hard, which Otho knew because he followed the labored bob of his Adam’s apple with his eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t.”

  “What did you even tell them?” Otho snapped. “I was guilty. I am guilty. There’s nothing else to say.”

  “Why are you angry?” Jove said. He didn’t sound frustrated—just sad. Somehow that made it worse.

  Otho felt frozen to the bone.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’m going. I have to go.”

  He turned, and he was walking away, resolved never to come back here, never to risk seeing his old house made warm by some new family with its damn fake flowers and—

  “I didn’t tell them anything,” Jove said, sounding angry now. He grabbed Otho’s arm, pulling him back. “Let me show you.”

  The hill, the street, the houses, they stayed the same. What he could see of the ocean through the trees was dark and choppy. The wind pulled daudid buds away from their branches and sent them, whirling, into the road. And a young man—too far away now to see his features—limped through them.

  He was a head shorter than Otho was now, and his dark curly hair wasn’t as long, hanging in his face. His feet were bare, his toes swollen and red from prolonged exposure to the cold, like they might burst. His hands were in his armpits.

  “I don’t need to see this,” Otho said to Jove. “I don’t need—”

  “I think you do,” Jove said.

  His young self tripped up the steps to his old front door. The house had been green when this happened, and the porch had been buried in snow, with a path cleared by foot traffic. Otho remembered.

  Young Otho fell to his knees.

  “Please,” he called, smacking the heel of his hand against the door. His voice was weak. He sounded so young. “Let me in, please.” A desperate kind of moan, almost more animal than man. He thumped the door again with the heel of his hand. “Mom, please, just let me in, it’s been hours. . . .”

  A flicker of movement. A face in the window beside the door, strict nose, graying hair pulled back tightly, eyes bright as sky. Otho’s mother.

  Older Otho gasped at the sight of her, but not with pain, and not with guilt—with fear.

  He was still afraid of her.

  She stared down at her young son through the window. For a moment, it looked as if she might undo the bolt keeping him out. But then she turned and walked away from the glass.

  Young Otho slammed his hands against the door again. “Let me in!”

  And again. “Please, Mom!”

  He bent his head, and sobbed.

  And then he disappeared completely, leaving only one Otho on the side of the road with Jove’s hand on his arm.

  “It was so cold that day, we weren’t allowed to walk to school,” Jove said fiercely. “I didn’t know what had happened, for the longest time. I thought maybe you had done something horrible and she had turned you out of the house . . . that maybe you were dangerous or had lost your mind and she was calling the patrols to have them pick you up.” Jove’s face crumpled. “And then I realized it was—a ritual. That repulsive . . . cult . . . That whole ‘prove your mettle, survive, transformation through destruction, self-immolate and then come to life again in the flames’ Transformationist bullshit—”

  Transformation will destroy you. It will unmake you.

  Otho turned away and began walking down the hill. Stumbling a little, his feet unsteady, as they had been that day he almost lost them to the frost.

  And you must let it.

  “Otho!” Jove called, but Otho didn’t stop.

  God, he so hated to be cold.

  Zold was home to all manner of religious ascetics, who eschewed basic comforts in favor of meditation and prayer; or lived simple, unadorned lives; or even ones who wandered to remote areas alone and fasted for long periods, returning dusty and thin and in search of bread.

  But there were none quite like the Transformationists. They believed not in emptiness, but in what his mother had called “unmaking.” Self-annihilation. Even water, they reasoned, must boil before it is pure.

  Do not worship at the altar of comfort, his mother had said. Or your life will be one of waste, and your character unworthy of the kingdom that follows death. She had been their teacher, his and Catho’s, their guide, their sanctifier. Responsible for the enduring strength of their immortal souls.

  Catho had taken to it more than Otho had. Otho had never learned, always giving in to his weakness too soon. She had to be harder on him, to shape him as she was supposed to. She never laid a hand on him; that would have been too simple, and simple methods brought about simple results. No, she had needed to alter the core of what he was, and to do that required innovation. She had tested him, over and over again, from the moment he was old enough to comprehend her teachings.

  And for the last test she would give him, she had noted what he loved as a child: crouching by the fire on cold nights, wrapping himself in blankets, standing in the sun in the heat of summer. And she had used it as a weapon against him, when the time came for him to transition from child to adult. She had forced him into the cold. Survive for one day, she said, and you will become a calamita.

  He had lasted six hours.

  Otho walked the w
inding, confusing streets of Aunoch for hours, his thoughts scattered and incoherent. He heard echoes of his own voice begging his mother to let him in, and chills washed over him each time, until his body trembled.

  Auly was playing the little instrument in the corner of the living room when Otho returned to the apartment, his fingers dancing over the line of metal tubes and sending out airy notes. It was not a song, exactly, but a mood. He didn’t stop when Otho came in, and Otho was glad of it. He stood and listened for a few minutes, his clothes still damp.

  Catho came home in the middle of his reverie, throwing his keys on the table by the door and shrugging off his jacket like he was angry with it. Otho didn’t have to guess where his anger was really directed.

  “I was just at the midweek meeting,” Catho said hotly.

  Auly’s music petered out.

  The midweek meeting was only for adult Transformationists, so Otho had never been allowed to attend. All he knew was that his mother had often come back from it in a wild state, full of new ideas that usually meant Otho would suffer some kind of deprivation.

  It was no accident that he had grown a head taller in juvenile detention, where there was legally mandated access to regular meals.

  “Apparently the Zoldan government is investigating us,” Catho said. “And do you know why?”

  Otho just stared at his brother.

  “Oh, could it be that someone reported one of our sacred practices as ‘criminal misconduct’?” Catho said. “The accused, by the way, was Anisae Judacre.”

  Ani, their father had called her, when he was still alive. Ani, tell me a story. She had always been a good storyteller, with a low, throaty voice and delicate gestures that created shapes in the air.

  “It’s not enough that you took her from me,” Catho all but growled at Otho, his eyes bright with tears. “You had to take her reputation, too? And now, maybe even the only place I’ve ever belonged, the only people I’ve ever belonged to?”

  That it had not been Otho’s choice to appeal his sentence, or for Jove to testify about what he had seen, didn’t matter, he knew. Otho had taken so much from Catho he had no right to answer, no right even to apologize. Their mother. What greater theft was possible?

  “What your mother did, or didn’t do”—Auly spoke up from the corner where he still sat with his hands on the instrument—“is not your brother’s fault, Catho.”

  “You know nothing about it, Auly,” Catho snapped.

  “I know enough,” Auly said. “I have never asked you to be kind to Otho, or to forgive him, but at the very least, you will leave him alone, or you will leave this apartment.”

  “Do you even have anything to say?” Catho had turned back to Otho, and he was close to Otho’s face, spitting his rage like a cat. “Or are you just going to stand there staring at me?”

  Otho’s voice was gone, his being pulsing only with wordless feeling.

  “We should have her named a prophet,” Catho said, quiet now. “She certainly saw into your future.”

  I fear for you, Otho. I fear you are the kind of soft that will never harden.

  Catho grabbed his keys from the table and left the apartment.

  Otho met Auly’s eyes.

  “I want you to know,” Auly said, “that I am the one who told your lawyer to appeal your sentence. Whether you testify on your own behalf or not is up to you—but I wanted you to know that I’d like you to.”

  He lifted his hands from the instrument just high enough to begin again, tapping at the little metal tubes so they sang. Otho listened for a moment, until the feeling returned to his legs, and then went into his little room to change his clothes.

  That night, he woke after an hour of sleep, shivering violently, and crawled to the heater to lay in front of it, curled in a ball.

  In the morning, there was a heavy blanket on top of him and a pillow clutched in his arms. Auly must have given them to him as he slept.

  Otho stood in the sunroom, considering a plant. It was on the desk—a shola bush, a native Zoldan plant that would grow anywhere. It was largely considered a weed, but it bloomed monthly, little blue flowers the color of the sky around the rising moon.

  Auly had put it there for him, he was sure. A way of saying that Otho was here to stay—or could be, if he wanted to be. Which meant that Otho wasn’t sure that he wanted to water it, as if watering it would be taken as a sign that he had made some kind of decision.

  He had just decided not to water it when a knock came at the door. For a moment he went rigid, remembering. The patrols had knocked on his door, after it happened. But it was over now, he told himself. They would not come again.

  He forced himself to open the door. Jove stood in the run-down hallway, by the short row of shoes. He was twisting his fingers together in front of him.

  “Hi,” Jove said. “Sorry to intrude, I just—”

  “Come in,” Otho said, holding the door open for him.

  Jove looked taken aback, like he had not expected it to be that easy. But he slipped his shoes off and came in.

  “I had your uncle’s address from the whole appeal thing,” Jove explained. “And . . . is that a dadsh?”

  He wandered over to the instrument in the corner, and stood over it for a moment, his fingers splayed above it, as if desperate for a song. Then they tapped out a rhythm on the dainty metal, one hand finding a rhythm and the other a melody. It was more of a song than the ambient music Auly had played the night before, but Otho was taken in by it all the same. There had never been much music in his life before.

  “My parents were into traditional Zoldan instruments. Well, my dad is dead, but my mom still is,” Jove said as he played. “You might say they were the opposite of the Egress Generation. They stuffed our lives—me and my sister—with everything Zoldan from the moment we could walk. She takes Zoldan folk dance lessons at the community center every week.”

  “I’ve never seen Zoldan folk dance,” Otho remarked.

  “Yeah, I guess the Ts don’t go to the Heritage Festival, do they?” Jove lifted a shoulder.

  It was strange for Otho to hear them—his former religious community—spoken of so casually as “the Ts.” He had never stood outside them before. At ACYR, no one had been Zoldan, so no one had known who they were, and Otho had not been chatty enough to explain them. And before ACYR, he had been swallowed up in them all the time.

  “No,” he said.

  “Sorry, I should probably explain why I’m here,” Jove said, stepping away from the instrument. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “My mom wanted to invite you to dinner. Well—I mean—I wanted to invite you, too. But it’s her house.”

  Otho stared at him.

  “You don’t have to. Obviously.”

  “I know,” Otho said.

  “Yeah, sure.” Jove had never looked more uncomfortable in all the time Otho had known him. Which was all his life. They had attended the same school from year one on, always in different orbits, but Otho had noticed him. He had gone through too many awkward phases to be popular with their classmates, but he had an ease about him that meant he always had friends. He was, in many ways, Otho’s opposite.

  “Okay,” Otho said. “I’ll go.”

  Jove smiled, and a dimple appeared in one of his cheeks.

  Otho had never been inside Jove’s house. He had only seen it from the street as he walked down from the cliffs, the curtains with their warm glow, and, sometimes, he heard raucous laughter coming from inside. They hosted parties for the Heritage Festival, and floaters and grazers swarmed the street those nights, as did people in Zoldan folk costumes, intricately embroidered with native plants and lines of poetry and familiar cityscapes.

  He wasn’t sure what to expect when he stepped inside. Jove’s family was the wealthiest on the street, but that didn’t mean they were wealthy by any other standard. At first glance, the living room struck him as the same as any Zoldan living room, cushions stuffed into every corner, a long, low table taking up mos
t of the floor space, books lining the walls. But upon closer inspection, he saw that the table was made of off-world wood, and the fabric of the cushions was woven from natural fibers, not synthetic.

  There was a pile of wood shavings on the table, with a carving knife beside it, and a piece of delicate wood curled into a flower. Otho was leaning in to look at it when he heard laughter from somewhere deeper in the house, and he remembered to follow Jove to the kitchen.

  “Mom, this is Otho,” Jove said to the woman at the stove. She was small and trim, with black hair like Jove’s, and had a towel tossed over her shoulder. At Otho’s name, she looked up with a smile that was distinctly lopsided and forced a deep dimple into one of her cheeks.

  “Hi, Otho,” she said. “I would shake your hand, but I have grease all over my fingers.”

  “Um, hello? I, too, exist.” A small voice spoke from the corner of the room. A girl—not as small as her voice, though she couldn’t have been older than twelve—sat at the table on the other side of the room, a book propped up in front of her.

  “Sorry, Dash, I thought you were deep in it,” Jove said. “Otho, this is Dasha, also known as Dash.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you both,” Otho said.

  “Ooh, is he fancy?” Dash said.

  “No, he just has good manners.” Jove’s mom—who, Otho now remembered, was named Kiiva—jabbed the wooden spoon she was using to stir sauce at her daughter. “Take notes.”

  “It figures you’d immediately like Jove’s boyfriend more than me,” Dash said.

  The back of Otho’s neck warmed, and he knew he was likely getting splotchy, the way he often did when embarrassed. Not his favorite quality about himself.

  “Dasha!” Jove grabbed a dish towel and threw it at Dasha, who cackled and used her book as a shield.

  “Sorry,” Jove mumbled at Otho a moment later. He added, “Siblings,” with a sigh, as if it explained something. “Come on, I’ll give you the tour.”

  He showed Otho the bathroom—“You’re a guest, so you can use the little sparkly soap if you’re into that”—and pointed out Dasha’s bedroom, and his mother’s, before opening the door to a narrow passage with glass walls that led to his own room.