Fervor (4 page)

“
I’m hungry,”
she declared in a subdued way, directing her thoughts at Sam. There was nothing left in his backpack.

Francis groaned inwardly. This would slow their progress further, but he knew that they could not continue travelling on the mere desire to get to the Hub. This slip of a girl was little more than skin and bones to begin with. If she claimed that she was in need of sustenance, then they would have to oblige her.

“
Leave off on seeking out the Hub for the moment,”
the blond boy instructed Sam,
“Time to test some of your other skills as a Finder. We need food and drink. We’ll stop for lunch and replenish our supplies.”

Sam regarded him with puzzlement, but he stopped tracing Bryan immediately – responding as always to Francis’s commands with unflinching subordination.

“
How?”
the younger boy questioned.
“Maria always fetched us food if we needed it while I was at school.”

“
There are storehouses across Fervor. There may be one nearby. Otherwise, we’ll just have to break into one of the houses...one that clearly won’t be used as one of the family-houses. I’m not asking, Sam, I’m telling. Find us food and drink.”
Francis’s good-natured thoughts steeled slightly, and Sam was willed to obey. He paused, curiously, as things seemed to shift inside him.

One day at school, several months ago, Sam had seen magical projections of bloodhounds at work. What he was experiencing now reminded him of that day. At Francis’s prompting, some magic deep within him latched onto an awareness of where food and drink could be found, and Sam was compelled to follow this trail, like scratching at some terrible psychic itch. He scrambled off in that direction, rushing along the most accessible hover paths, and it was all Francis could do to keep up with the smaller boy, especially with blind Sarah in tow.

A few moments later, Sam found himself standing in front of a strange, industrial-looking grey building, unlike any of the houses and schools or community centres that existed on Fervor. He could feel Francis’s pleasure embedded in the older boy’s thoughts as he and Sarah approached him from behind.

“
Excellent! You found one of the storehouses, and quite quickly, too. Your talent is strong,”
the blond boy exclaimed.

Just as with Bryan, Sam could pick up on the mental murmurings just below the surface ones – the ones he believed Francis had not intended him to hear.
“I told them the Littles would prove themselves useful. They are better at this than the rest of us. We lucked into it, but they were made that way.”

Made that way
. Sam wished that he had not picked up on any of that. Every time that he heard something in the connection he believed to which he was not intended to be privy, it spawned new insecurities, created new anxieties, and led to even more unanswered questions. Why was Francis hiding so much from him and Sarah? Why did he refuse to let them know exactly what was going on?

In the shade of a large pine, they sat and ate without saying much to one another. Sam was just enjoying the relief of not having that pressing feeling that came with Francis’s instructions, particularly the compulsion to find things that they were looking for. That drive was irresistible, and Sam had felt trapped by it each time the older boy had demanded that he go looking for something else.

He and Francis were both a little surprised when Sarah, from out of the blue, started asking her own questions part way through the meal. There was always such power behind her mental touch, but at the same time, always so much reserve, perhaps because of her shyness. It took effort for Francis to push his thoughts at Sam, the younger boy was sure of it, but for Sarah it seemed to be second-nature. If the petite girl let go, her push would be a force to be reckoned with.

“
What happens when we get to the Hub? Where do we go from there?”
she said, nervous and mildly inquisitive.

“
Well, first we have to find the Controls,”
Francis admitted. It was odd, continuing their conversation without having to stop eating, Sam considered. There would be no more concern about speaking with your mouth full.
“Sam won’t be able to find them in his usual way, so we’ll have to look for where they will be grouped the old-fashioned way in order to locate Royce. Nathan and Fiona will be somewhere in the mix. Sam will be able to lead us to them.”

“
What about testing
their
gifts,”
Sam added, with a hint of resentment. It did not seem fair that he would have to suffer the pain and embarrassment of playing the victim in Francis’s tests if the others in their anticipated “house-family” would not have to suffer the same fate. The blond boy’s pale green eyes flashed with momentary regret before he turned away from them, looking off towards the direction in which they had been moving before they’d stopped to eat.

“
The Directives say that we all have to be tested. Fiona’s a Keeper. She’ll be difficult to test. Her talent is not that straight forward; it is more passive than yours or Sarah’s. Nathan’s a Watcher. That won’t be easy to test either. His is mostly passive as well and only reactive to very specific situations that will be difficult to simulate,”
their Teller insisted. The smaller boy did not like the sound of that. It suggested that he might once again end up the pawn in Francis’s experimental game.

“
What about this Royce boy?”
Sam grumbled, his thoughts reflecting some of his displeasure. Francis frowned again, still not facing him.

“
Controls can’t be tested, and there’s no need to. They aren’t part of a talent-group in the same sense as the rest of us. They are different.”
Francis’s thoughts wavered slightly in response to the notion of Royce and the other Controls. There was something about them that made Francis uncomfortable, something that he was not sharing with Sam and Sarah.

Francis was evasive again after that, and conversation dwindled. They finished their meal, packed up their new provisions, and Sam reached out to find Bryan again. After getting the expected curt response to his prodding, the small boy re-established his lines of direction and the three set out towards the Hub again.

* - * - *

Sam woke up to the sound of Sarah crying – inside of course, rather than outside. Francis was still asleep, and the younger boy noted a distinct lull in the connection. Most of the people on the island would be asleep at this point in time. That meant that he and Sarah could actually talk in private. The idea intrigued Sam. He had not had any real sense of privacy since he had awoken to the screams, no matter how badly he had wanted it. Francis had said that they would have a lot to learn, and that was the primary purpose for the Gathering. Sam was hoping that this included learning some way of blocking everyone else out, and letting only those desired in.

Truthfully, Sam wanted to run as far away from the other children on the island as possible, not make a conscious effort to move towards them, the way that they had been as they had advanced upon the Hub. The more distance he put between him and another Connected, the more tenuous their link.

“
What’s wrong?”
he said quietly, reaching out to touch her mind as gently as he could manage.

“
Oh...Sam. I had a dream. I dreamt that I could see again, and that Sasha was still with me. I miss those things so much. I don’t like all the noise in my head. I don’t like the way Francis makes me feel sometimes. I don’t like all of the changes. Why did this happen? Why didn’t things stay the way that they were?”
she murmured.

“
I miss Maria, too, Sarah. I miss being able to hear things. I think Francis knows a lot more about what’s going on here than he believes he can tell us. I don’t think that he’s holding out on us to be mean. I get the feeling that other people are keeping him from saying as much as he wants to, or that he’s convinced that by telling us it will hurt us somehow.”

Sam paused, letting his thoughts trickle out towards the blond haired boy to make sure that he was still asleep. There was only stillness there, so he continued.

“
I can hear some of his thoughts sometimes, ones that he doesn’t want me to hear. He was thinking something earlier that made me wonder if you and I are going to be different from the Bigs, the ones that we’ll be living with, other than just in age and size. He thought something about the Bigs being chosen for this, and about the Littles being made. I couldn’t understand what he meant, but I think it was important.”

“
Made...why would he be thinking something like that?”
Sarah whispered.

Her vacant stare looked out at the stars, and Sam felt a twinge of sympathy. He could not imagine how difficult this was for her. His issues seemed serious enough, and hers were worse.

“
While you were distracted with doing your finding, he and I talked a little as well,”
she confessed. “
He wouldn’t answer a lot of my questions. He said that we had to wait for the Gathering, that there were a lot of things that he couldn’t tell me. I could hear whispers of some of the things he was trying to hide. Someone won’t let him say everything he wants to say. He’s not bad, Sam. He’s nice. He doesn’t like the things he has to do. It makes him very sad sometimes.
It makes me want to help fix him. I can sense that it hurts him, and it feels wrong. The minders were involved with all this, and the other people we never knew, the ones that left before the times that you and I remember. I think Francis was almost as afraid as we are now when it happened the first time.”

Comparing notes, when there was no one else around to eavesdrop, was proving to be useful in Sam’s opinion. Francis would likely look upon this conversation with disapproval and order them to stop. Sam did not like being left in the dark. Someone had chosen to mess with who they were, their way of life, and the way that they experienced their world. No one had given them any warning or bothered to ask their permission to do the things that they had done. On the other hand, someone had clearly gone to great trouble to prepare the Tellers, to brief them, to give them some idea of what to expect. It was not fair, especially considering the amount of power that the Tellers had over the other children who had been left behind on Fervor.

“
There were a few other things that I picked up on while we were talking – things that still don’t make sense,”
Sarah revealed, her sadness dissipating a little in response to the distraction that talking to Sam offered.
“He thought something about ‘stasis’ and he wondered how long it would take before we would be ready for ‘the Coming.’ I don’t know which is worse, Sam – the not knowing, for us, or the knowing too much and not being able to share, for Francis.”

“
Well I know I don’t like feeling dumb, like we should have some idea of what’s happening to us, but we don’t. I hate needing Francis so much.”
The smaller boy did resent the older one for that element of dependency. He suspected that Sarah might feel that way even more, considering how bad off she would be without their help. It was at that moment that Francis started to stir.

“
He’s starting to wake up
,
”
Sarah observed softly.

“
Can you make me a promise, Sarah?”
Sam asked, trying to keep his thoughts quiet, so as not to awaken Francis more quickly. “
Whenever either of us wakes up like this, in the middle of the night, when almost everyone else is sleeping, we’ll swear to wake up the other person so we can talk, just you and me, with no one else listening in. Are you willing to do this?”

“
Like we’re special friends
,
”
she whispered, her thoughts starting to fade.

“
Exactly. I think we can trust each other. I’ve never felt like you were trying to hide anything. That, and everyone else in the house will be Bigs. Us Littles will need to stick together. Don’t you think?”
he offered.

The dark-haired, dark-eyed girl extended her hand towards him, since she had a general idea where he was, and he took it as an unspoken acknowledgement of their agreement. As they both lay down to go back to sleep again, the feeling that Francis was rousing intensifying, Sam gave her hand a squeeze and closed his eyes.

* - * - *

It was two more days of exhausting travel before Sam was finally able to stop tracking the Hub through his link in the connection to Bryan, and instead, focus his finding efforts directly on the massive building itself. It was a huge relief for the small boy to no longer have to disrupt the cantankerous youth by repeatedly making contact after any interruptions en route.