Fervor (40 page)

“
You can’t lie to me anymore. It won’t work. You are part of the connection now. You may be able to lie with your mouth, but not with your thoughts, Royce.”

Sam had experienced the attempt once from Fiona. She had tried to convince him that she was feeling sick when she had decided that she was not interested in going with him to retrieve a find that he could not access. This had been before they had become proper friends. Her mouth had made the claim, and there was a veil of thought containing the deception that bordered the truth – the truth which reverberated more loudly beneath that veil. He had called her on it, explaining how transparent her thoughts actually were, and that was when she had confessed the fact that she had been trying to mislead him. In a way, it had been that incident, as well as Sam’s willingness to forgive the lie, that had helped initiate their friendship to begin with.

Royce clenched his eyes shut as he cringed and whimpered. He released Sam, dropping back down to the ground, where he writhed in discomfort.

“
The truth, Royce,” Sam requested softly.

“
I-I wanted to see what Fiona looked like after what you had told me at the school. My curiosity got the best of me, and I snuck over here. I was scared…I was scared that Nathan would catch me, and I figured he must be really big now. He must look like a proper man.”

Royce paused as he was gripped by a particularly severe wave of pain. Sam nodded.

“
I waited until it was starting to get dark, so that he’d be finished his circuit and it would be easier to hide. I was nearing the bottom of the front steps when…when…ahhh! Why does it hurt like this?”

“
Nathan doesn’t run his circuit anymore, and this hurt even worse for him because he hadn’t felt pain in years when it happened. What came next?”

Sam reached over and started to hook his shoulder underneath the larger boy’s arm. Considering how tired he was from his travels over the last couple of days, Sam hoped that Royce could support his own weight to some degree once he was standing again. Otherwise, getting him back to the house and Sarah was going to be an extreme struggle.

That was when it struck him. The effects of the Languorite had taken several hours to completely kick in when he, Sarah, Francis, and Fiona had been exposed directly to it. The changes in Royce would not have been immediate either.

“
Wait. You came out here more than one night running, didn’t you? Was this your second night out here?”

“
Third,” the Control admitted, before biting his lip. Tears of pain streamed down his cheeks. “How did Nathan get out of his circuit? I thought that he couldn’t avoid it?”

Sam hoisted him up from the ground. The larger boy was trying to brace himself and not force Sam to lift him on his own, but Royce was extremely unsteady. Sam thought back to the positions that they had been in about a year ago. He never would have imagined that they would end up like this someday. Sam felt his own muscles begin to shake a little from the strain and fatigue.

“
He was exposed to the Languorite just like you, and Elliot used it to strip his ‘gift’ away so that the scholars couldn’t use him as their eyes anymore. We expect they’ll come looking for him at any time now,” Sam explained.

Royce’s eyes widened.

“
You’ve got to be kidding! Francis must have blown a gasket!”

“
It’s complicated,” was all that Sam was willing to say. He took a few very wobbly steps with Royce in tow, and then hesitated.

“
You have to put a little more into this, or I’m going to have to call Nathan out to help us. Maybe if I was fresh I could do this on my own, but I just travelled all the way to the High Barrens and back.”

“
No…no, not Nathan. He said he would kill me, and he meant it. Besides, as soon as Francis sees me, he’ll just be all over me for ditching you and abandoning the Directives.” He cocked an eyebrow, trying to ignore the pain and bear some more of his own weight. “Did you say the High Barrens?”

“
I don’t think Nathan will kill you, especially once he understands what you’re going through. He’ll probably be pissed that you were creeping over to sneak a peek at Fiona, but he’ll get over it. And as for Francis, that won’t be an issue. Francis is gone,” Sam muttered, already panting from the effort.

“
Gone? Where did he go? Is that why you went to the High Barrens? Did you follow him there?” Royce sputtered incredulously. Sam sighed.

“
You could say that. Never mind Francis. He’s not coming back,” the Finder replied solemnly.

Royce frowned a little, puzzled at first, but then the look in his eyes changed to that of sudden comprehension.

“
How did it happen?” he asked, his customary sneer having long vanished.

“
I’m not sure exactly, but Sarah claimed that he was broken and that he wouldn’t let her fix him. There was an incident, involving Fiona, and Nathan would have throttled the life out of him if he’d had the chance, but Francis left instead. I would suggest that you not bring up Francis at all once we get back to the house. He’s a sore point with everyone right now.”

They were getting closer to the house and Sam was just hoping that his strength would hold out until they got there. Royce struggled to make things easier on him, but he was not being very successful. The larger boy went quiet for a few moments; all that could be heard was their laboured breathing and peeper frogs.

“
Were you trying to tell me that all this is happening because I got too close to the house?” he inquired.

Sam nodded.

“
Not the house
per se
, but the device Elliot brought with him from the mainland, the Languorite, which happens to be inside the house right now.”

“
Then there’s a possibility that I won’t be alone in this,” Royce suggested with dejection.

“
What do you mean?” Sam grunted, the sweat trickling down his face.

“
I told you, I was scared of Nathan. I brought back-up with me in case he did decide that he wanted me dead. They were waiting in the woods, but they got fairly close to the house. They ran off when I started freaking out. We have to track them down. They could be going through this, too.”

There was legitimate concern in the Control’s voice. He may not have gotten along with his house-family, but he clearly cared about the other Control rebels.

“
We have to help them,” Royce said.

“
What we have to do is get you to Sarah. We have enough to handle with your situation for the moment, and I don’t know how many people I can shield from the connection at one time anyway. I’ve only ever blocked for one other person at a time before. You have what, four friends? I don’t think that I can do it. We’ll go after them, but not until Sarah’s helped you deal with some of the pain, and we’ve shown you how to set up your walls. Then she and I can go find the others one at a time,”
Sam thought.

They were now in view of the silhouette of the house and he was anxious to get there, finding it difficult to half drag the larger boy through the woods with what little light that still remained for them.

“
Maybe you can tell me their names and describe them for me a little while she fixes you. It will help me to find them.”

The front steps were not that far away now, but before they could reach them, Royce suddenly jerked and stumbled to his knees, his arm locking solidly around Sam’s neck as he was wracked by a rather intense pain. Sam was not able to escape the choking grip, and he realised that part of the problem was that his walls were not being as effective to shield the Control as they had been initially. That was partially because Royce’s presence in the connection kept shifting and growing slightly, like trying to wrap a handkerchief around a balloon that someone was still in the process of inflating. Sam was worried, in addition to the pain from the physical changes that Royce was going through, he had the psychological strain of being introduced to the connection for the first time. Experiencing one was shock enough to a person’s system, but both at the same time? Sam grabbed at Royce’s tensed and trembling arm, trying to free himself from its strangling hold in order to breathe again. Unsuccessful, he called out for Sarah through the connection.

Sarah picked up on his discomfort immediately and came rushing out of the house, concerned that Sam was injured in some way. When she saw Royce there, she immediately jumped to the faulty conclusion that for some reason the Control had chosen to assault Sam, despite months of avoiding one another. She cried out Sam’s name and rushed forward.

“
No, Sarah, no!”
Sam insisted, as she grabbed Royce’s arm and tried to pull him off the Finder.
“He needs your help.”

Sam also needed to breathe, but thankfully, Royce’s choking grip had started to ease off as the spasm from the sudden pain subsided.

The three sat on the steps and Sarah worked at bringing the Control some relief while Sam re-established the walls that shielded Royce from the rest of the connection. Sam was a little worried at first, wondering if Royce was at risk of the same devastating results as the Bigs’ parents because of the combined effects of the Languorite, but Royce was a fighter and seemed to be holding his own. Sam was also aware that there was gratitude there, and a display of trust that the Control had never demonstrated towards Sam or Sarah before. Any resentment that Royce had ever held towards them was gone.

Sam heard the door open.

“
What’s he doing here? He knows that he’s not welcome here.”

It was Nathan, and his reaction to the Control’s presence was instantly a hostile one.

“
I brought him here,”
Sam admitted, facing the Watcher.
“I found him in the woods. He had been exposed to the Languorite, and he was having twice the problems that any of the rest of us had. The stasis has dropped for him and he’s part of the connection now.”

“
Part of the connection?”

Nathan was surprised at that revelation, and Sam could feel him prodding at his walls tentatively, wanting to sense Royce there for himself to confirm the fact.

“
So Elliot was right. The Languorite removed that suppression as well. That still doesn’t answer my question though.
He wouldn’t have been exposed to the Languorite if he hadn’t been hanging around here. What was he doing here?”

Sam could already see the irritation in Nathan’s face in the light shining through the open door. He did not want to aggravate the situation, so he recognized that he had to choose his words carefully. It was true that Royce had specifically come to spy on Fiona, something that would surely rile Nathan, but Sam was aware that part of that could be attributed to something that he and Royce had in common.

“
He knew what was going on, because he had run into me, Sarah, and Elliot at the school. He was curious to know more. He was supposed to be a Finder, and he has Finder instincts just like me, Nathan – not the same compulsions with the same strengths as having the gift, but a driving force nonetheless. He wanted to see more, to see some of the changes for himself. I know what that’s like. I can’t fault him for it,”
Sam pointed out.

“
You seem pretty forgiving, considering how badly he treated you in the past,”
the young man retorted, crossing his arms over his chest.
“I would have expected you to be the least willing to see him come back here.”

Nathan apparently was not going to be as quick to accept the explanations and excuse past behaviours. Sarah looked up at him with sad eyes.

“
It hasn’t been that long since you went through this, Nathan. Have a heart. He’s suffering, and it’s worse in some ways because he has two things to contend with, not just the rapid aging. We’re all victims here. He just didn’t handle it as well as the rest of us. It will be different now that he’s a part of the connection. He won’t be able to hide behind some tough exterior or some false bravado. I think that he probably knows that, too, or he wouldn’t have been willing to let Sam help him, to let the person he considered his biggest rival see him at his most vulnerable. I’m willing to give him a second chance. We’ve lost enough already – they’ve beaten us down and stolen something from each of us. Why throw away the opportunity to gain something for a change?”