Fervor (26 page)

“
I can’t see what you could have possibly done. Our ‘new friend’ claims that she just needs time, and Sarah said that her compulsions will force her out soon enough. Just have a little patience, Nathan. She’ll come around and start acting like her old self again before you know it.”
Sam hoped that what he was saying was right, and that he was not just riding on Sarah’s hopefulness.

“
So this ‘new friend’ of yours says that he can take away our gifts with that thing? I can understand why you or Sarah or Francis might object to this, but look at what I have to put up with, and what do I really have to show for it? Why can’t he just take it away so that I don’t have to run my circuit anymore, or put up my walls like this? Do you know how frustrating it is, not being allowed to look at all of you? What if something goes wrong? How am I supposed to be there for you if I can’t even see what’s going on?”
Nathan asked.

“
Francis and I talked about this, because I suggested the same thing, but he said that that would be a terrible idea. It might make things easier on you, but the scholars will definitely send someone to investigate if they stop being able to see through you. They’ll assume that you’re dead, and they’ll want to know what happened to you,”
Sam replied.

After their talk with Elliot, he had been as quick to come to the same conclusion as Nathan had, but the Teller had been equally quick to naysay his idea.

“
Besides, our ‘new friend’ has to activate that function, and he has never actually used it on anyone before. You would be playing guinea pig, and where would it leave us if things went wrong?”

Sam did not mean to prey on Nathan’s protective impulse to dissuade him from this line of thought, but the Finder didn’t like the notion of the young man being the test subject for the Languorite’s untried functions, not until they were all ready to commit to the same thing.

“
I’m not worried about me. I’d rather play guinea pig than let one of you suffer that fate. I can handle whatever he throws at me, but I don’t want to get us all in trouble. On the other hand, Francis said that they would be coming because of Royce. It has been almost a year since I threw him out of the house, Sam, and Francis reported the incident at the next Teller meeting. Where are they? I still see signs that Royce and his friends are out there. While we may have been the only house-family to exile our Control, the fact that Royce has allies suggests that we were not the only ones to have problems with our Control. What about their house-families? The scholars never came. I doubt they even care that we sent him packing. Francis can’t be sure that they’d come if I did this either,”
Nathan remarked forcefully.

Sam had been thinking the same thing, too, at one point. When Royce had first left, Sam had been constantly watching over his shoulder, prepared to make himself scarce should the scholars make an appearance. After a while, the threat had become decidedly less likely, and until just recently it had been mostly forgotten.

“
When Royce left the house, Francis said that they
might
come. He wasn’t sure,”
Sam argued.
“The scholars only valued the Controls so much, and it was possible that Royce had already served the better part of his function. But if you stop watching for them, if you get Elliot to take your gift away, Francis is sure that they will come. They’ll be blind without you. They’ll have no choice but to come and observe us first hand. What you do is much more important than anything Royce had to offer.”

Sam believed that for the most part, at least as far as the scholars were concerned. He was not so sure, on the other hand, that this was as true for their house-family’s situation in general. He was becoming more and more convinced that Francis required boundaries – boundaries that he no longer had with Royce gone.

Nathan went silent. Sam knew that he was frustrated and not quite himself. Things were chaotic enough in Nathan’s head to make Sam uncomfortable, and that had never happened before. The Watcher, for the most part, had a peaceful mind, and even when he was upset, his thoughts tended to be focussed on the particular thing that was bothering him. Sam was almost regretting that Elliot had come in some ways.

Eventually, the Watcher did think at him again.

“
What about that hover? Did you need me to come down to that section of the beach, after I’m done my circuit? I don’t know how much good I can do you like this, but I’ll help in any way that I can,”
he offered quietly.

“
Not yet. We’ll be heading down to the shore with him, Sarah and me. We need to figure out what exactly has to be done first—what I may need to find and what Sarah might have to do to help him fix it. We’ll need your help only when it is time to right it, and we’ll let you know when that time comes. He may as well make the repairs that need to be made on the bottom of it, before we turn it over. It only makes sense,”
Sam replied.

There was another pause from Nathan.

“
Do you think that this is going to work, Sam, or are we crazy for even trying? What happens if we pull this off and get away from here? We’ve never known any other life, and if we do get away, will we always be running from them? What will we be running to? Maybe we should just forget this and stick with what we know. It hasn’t really been that bad has it? Aside from what happened with Royce, I liked the way that things were. I was happy. I thought we made a good family, and at least then Fiona would talk to me,”
Nathan sighed.

“
We’ve set things in motion that can’t be reversed, Nathan. You were happy, but the rest of us weren’t. I haven’t had a day without fear since Maria left, Sarah’s been in the dark until our ‘new friend’ came, and you can’t pretend that Fiona liked the way that things were. Francis had his off days, and even Royce had good reason for feeling cheated. He shouldn’t have taken it out on the rest of us, but they did rob him of something that they should have given back. If you would prefer to stay on Fervor, you don’t have to come with us when we go, but I want off this island, and I can almost guarantee that Sarah and Fiona will be coming with us.”

Sam was watching Sarah readying herself to go out with him and Elliot while he spoke with Nathan, and he could see Fiona’s closed door as well. She would be coming with them when they left, he thought, if she would ever come out of her room.

“
I suppose there’s no way to go back to the way that things were. I don’t want to stay behind by myself, Sam. You all are my family now. I can’t imagine going on without you.”
He hesitated.
“I had better get back to my circuit now. When I’m done, I’ll keep working on trying to get some response out of Fiona,”
the Watcher murmured.
“Maybe if I’m persistent, she’ll finally let me in. Thanks for keeping me in the loop, little buddy. I really appreciate it.”

Sam broke away from his link with Nathan, and he joined Sarah and Elliot who were making their way towards the door. The three trudged down to the beach without a single word passing amongst them. Sam found himself staring at the hulking figure of Elliot as they walked, wondering what exactly had possessed a man like him to help them, aside from the fact that he was a latent himself. It might have been some sort of attempt at self-preservation, perhaps anxious at what might happen to him if he were discovered. But the scholars didn’t know his secret, and doing what he was doing now was much more likely to expose him than just keeping mum. Sam also wondered how exactly the large man had managed to get around the security systems he had told them about in his messages. At one point he had seemed convinced that it would be something beyond his ability. The curiosity was eating away at Sam, but he felt almost as intimidated by the technician as Francis did, and he did not dare to start asking those kinds of questions.

Sarah gasped aloud as they reached the stretch of rocks and sand where Sam had found the hover. Nothing had changed— its silvery bullet-like form still upended precariously atop the rocks—but the dark-haired girl had not expected that it would look quite as mangled as it did. When Elliot saw it, his own expression fell as well. Viewing his reaction, Sam felt immediately disheartened.

“
You can’t fix it then? It’s that bad?”
the Finder mumbled.

Elliot advanced on the hover, leaving Sarah and Sam lingering at a distance. The pair wanted to follow him, but there was a greater discomfort in doing so than there was in hanging back and observing from afar. The technician knelt beside the damaged craft and started running his hands over its buckled sides, scrutinizing it intently. He groaned a little and frowned.

“
That’s not a good sign,” Sarah whispered.

After a few moments, Elliot rose again and returned to them. He looked unhappy, but not completely forlorn.

“
Should we forget leaving Fervor?”
Sam demanded.

“
Not yet, not without putting in a good attempt at repairing it,”
Elliot stated gruffly.
“It’s not impossible, just difficult without the proper tools or materials. A lot of the damage is cosmetic. That’s a good thing. As long as I can come up with a reasonable substitute for the siding, and find some basic tools, then I’m fairly certain that I can fix that. It’s the few areas where it has been damaged internally that worry me the most. Those will be harder to repair without the appropriate replacement parts. I might be able to alter standard hover parts to work, but these things can be finicky. This will probably take longer than I had originally anticipated. That is, if I can make it happen at all. I’m definitely going to need your help. Sarah, I know if we can make this work it will be because of your gift. We’ll have to get you close enough to the hover so that you can assist me in identifying everything that we need to fix this. Then we can make a list, and Sam and I can go out hunting for the parts, materials, and tools we need. If they are available, I know Sam will be able to help me find them.”

Sarah glanced over at Sam warily. His role in this would be simple. He did not have to get close to any of the hovers to help the technician. He would just have to guide Elliot to the places where the things he sought were contained, and then leave it up to the man to retrieve them, the same way that he had with Fiona. Finding everything they needed might take them a fair amount of time, and they might have to venture into the spaces of the other house-families, but it would not be that great of a challenge. Sam did not mind the notion in the slightest. He was not even afraid of running into Royce or the other Controls as long as Elliot was present. Royce would not dare try anything that the hulking man might consider a threat. It was like travelling with his own personal bodyguard.

Poor Sarah, however, was expected to approach the hover immediately. This was no simple feat. Unless they returned to the house and they tried using the Languorite on her, which Sam figured Elliot would be reluctant to do at this point, then she would have to fight the compulsion to avoid the hover for the entire time that she would be assisting him.

Elliot gestured for the Fixer to follow him back to the hover, and she tried to obey. She gritted her teeth and took a few trembling steps towards it before her will failed her. Then she stood there looking helpless until the technician returned for her. His massive form, larger than that of the average man, dwarfed her petite one, small for a girl her age even with the additional growth that the Languorite had provided. He reached down, hoisted her up and carried her over. Once there, he kept an iron grip on her delicate wrist to prevent her from attempting to put greater distance between her and the hover. Sam was thankful that physical forces could still prove to overpower some of the psychological ones.

It was soon obvious that this process was going to take some time, and his own urges to do some finding started to become unbearable. After several minutes of fidgeting where he stood and watched his two companions discussing exactly what needed to be done, Sam gave in and headed down the beach in the other direction. He was surprised to come across Francis there. He figured that maybe the young man had followed them down to the ocean, wanting to steal a glimpse at the wreck himself. He was not looking in the direction that Sam was approaching from, however. Instead, he was sitting on a rock and staring out at the water, running the fingers of one hand through the sand.

“
Elliot says that the repairs on the hover will likely take longer than he had anticipated,”
Sam informed him.

“
That’s a shame,”
Francis stated, his face looking rather vacant
. “The longer it takes him, the more likely it will be that your friend will be caught. If you hope to get off of Fervor, you’ll have to try and speed things up. Nathan won’t be able to hide all of this forever. They’ll figure things out eventually.”

Sam noticed that the Teller had said “you” instead of “we.” He recognized what that implied.