Intrepid (18 page)

“You’ll see. Just enjoy this moment.”
 

“Do you really need to keep any more secrets from me? It’d be better if you ripped off everything like a bandaid.” I wanted answers, and every revelation only carried with it more questions. It was making me greedy because I needed more information to turn all my confusion into understanding.

Before he could answer, my eyes caught something through the crowd. The mop of dark, brown hair. The broad shoulders.

“Texi, what’s wrong?” Iago asked, sitting straight up.
 

I had to be imagining it. There was no way it could have been…

No way.
 

But then he looked up and those brown eyes locked onto mine.
 

I grabbed Iago’s hand and dragged him up. “We have to go! How do we activate this thing?” I tugged at my bracelet, but the screen wouldn’t come up.
 

“What?”
 

Iago wasn’t getting the picture, and we were wasting time. I pulled him towards the crowd. Maybe we could hide in the people bustling back and forth until Iago could enter new coordinates for us. We didn’t get far. I crashed into a chest and looked up into a face I’d seen a million times before, but when I looked up into his eyes, all I could feel were his hands around my throat and the fear of getting sucked unexpectedly into the Nothing.
 

“Sully!” Iago said.
 

“Texi, let me explain.” Sully said, as if Iago didn’t exist.

I tried to back away, but only bumped into Iago’s chest. I sidestepped them both, and took off running into the crowd, hoping Iago would follow.
 

“Texi! Wait!” Iago screamed. Even though his voice floated behind me, I knew he was at least trying to follow. I dodged elbows, I ignored curses from people I bumped into, I wove through and found a path through the stream. I prayed for an escape, but instead I ran into another chest. Sully was in front of me again before I could blink. I backed up and turned to run towards my left, but he was there again. Sully seemed to exist everywhere I wanted to go within the crowd of people. Why wasn’t Iago getting us out of here?
 

“Texi,” Iago said from behind me. I turned to see that I had nowhere else to run except in Iago’s direction. That was when a new thought occurred to me—one that made me feel epically stupid. Iago? Was he working with my ex-best friend who had tried to kill me? Iago brought me here, where Sully was, after all.

The park was full of hurrying elbows and distracted viewing, and my claustrophobic heart made me burn in all kinds of ways. I wanted out. My eyes began to swirl, and I took a deep breath to steady myself so I could think.

But I couldn’t think standing between Iago and Sully. I could only feel stuck.
 

Liam
 

“…if someone should demonstrate that I am one thing and many, what’s astonishing about that? He will say, when he wants to show that I’m many, that my right side is different from my left, and my front from my back, and likewise with my upper and lower parts—since I take it I do partake of multitude. But when he wants to show that I’m one, he will say I’m one person among the seven of us, because I also partake in oneness. Thus he shows that both are true.”
 

-Socrates speaking to Parmenides
 

-S-1000, V-3234333-L987689875, Stag.
 

Chapter Twenty-Three

When you don’t know something, go back to what you do know. It’s what Saltadors are trained to do. There was so much I thought I understood that I’d let myself grow complacent with assumption. I needed to redirect my beliefs, and in order to do that, I needed to return to their origins. I needed to remember why I thought what I thought and why I believed what I believed.

Nobu told me plenty before he left, but he still wasn’t telling me something—something big.
 

I thought about Texi and all the lies she was learning truths to. How could I have known we’d have so much in common? But then again, what did I
know
? There were plenty of other people better equipped for this job than me, and yet, I was expected to help teach her about her role in the Multiverse. In a way, I was moving up the Watcher hierarchy. Only Level Three Watchers were allowed to train Saltadors, but this was not the promotion I’d been hoping for.
 

I looked out into the skyline, trying to stretch my vision far out into the horizon. Maybe I’d see Nobu’s pterodactyls in flight—tiny dots in the distance that looked like sea-eagles back on
Geeta
. But there was nothing out there but clouds and sunshine.
 

“Why me?” I asked out loud. I wasn’t asking the question to whine. I’d already come to terms that things were going to change, but there had to be a reason for misdirecting me all this time.
 

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. I’d always had big plans for myself. Saltadors honor our parents’ donation by doing whatever we can to strengthen our Familial Generational Line.
 
When we are old enough, we learn the major accomplishments and failures of our matriarchal line, and we are taught to add only great deeds to the list of things our ancestors have done. Through this, we Stand on the Shoulders of our familial Giants, and encourage future generations to aspire to the same level of greatness. This is why, for the Martinezes, I wanted to become the youngest Grande Master in the history of Watchers. So far, in my line, we had eight Grande Masters (none of them appointed before the age of thirty-three), two Presidents of the Gaian Order, and one Director of Operations for the Calvary. To reach Grande Master by the age of twenty-five was to be my great addition.
 

Now, this would never happen. I’d need to readjust my own expectations of what great deeds I could actually accomplish to honor my line.
 

I remember wondering about what types of deeds existed on my patriarchal side when Nobu first explained how it worked. When I asked, he responded with a joke, “Don’t worry. If you ever find a girl you like, just take the genetic test before anything romantic happens. Obviously, if she shares your last name, you don’t want to go there, but if you’re not sure, always check that you’re not related. One time, I almost made out with my second cousin, and I was so thankful I tested him before. That would have been
way
too
awkward
.” Nobu always had the most ridiculous stories.
 

“That’s not what I’m concerned about,” I said.
 

“I know, dork-wad. Grow a sense of humor, why don’t you.”
 

“Sorry. Humor doesn’t grow on trees,” I retorted.
 

When Texi was nine she gouged a huge scratch on the left side of Corbin’s truck from driving too close to a cluster of mesquite trees. He lost his patience for once, and when he said, “Money doesn’t grow on trees, child,” Nobu and I nearly died of laughter. Apparently, for the old man, nothing grew on trees, not even leaves, and it became a timeless joke between the two of us.
 

“Clever,” Nobu said.
 

“So? My father’s line?”

“Using one familial line is just a clean way of classifying. You have your Familial Generational Line, which is how many generations of Saltadors within your specific family exist. Then you have the Saltador Generational Line, which is how many generations of Saltadors exist after the first Explorers. So, the Martinezes have sixty-three Familial Generations, and the Saltadors have eighty-one. You, my friend, are a sixty-two, eighty. Congrats. In terms of greatness on your patriarch’s side, you have no legal claim to it, just like they have no legal claim to the greatness you will one day find. However, you do have access to all good deeds through the collective Saltador experience. You don’t have to limit where you find inspiration, Liam.”

In the end, my name was just a scientific classification rather than a familial tie. The Gaian Order does, for the Generational Familial Line purposes, attempt to place children with Watchers in the same line, but that isn’t always the case. In terms of a loving family, I had Nobu for a implied brother and Corbin for a sometimes-present father, but neither shared my last name.
 

Texi? Her Generational Familial Line was a mystery, and for all I knew, she was born out of a petri dish. She wore the Nicholson name but was not a part of the Nicholson Familial Generational Line. They gave her the nomenclature, because they didn’t know what else to call her.
 

Even with her naming, she was a problem without a solution.
 

Helping Texi through all of this was not something I felt equipped to do. How was I supposed to remain objective when I had direct contact with the subject? That same damn question kept tugging at me. Why me?
 

Maybe I needed to look some place else besides my memory.
 

I stood up and brushed the sand from my legs. There was a large, white rock under a palm tree behind me, and I walked over to it to sit down with my legs in a pretzel in front of it. I pulled up the forums and commanded the bracelet to, “Project on rock.” I ran my fingers through the air, swiping the screen to the speech I wanted to hear. It was the ultimate spark of inspiration for the Calvary, and I pulled it up to watch the video feed of Dr. Maxina Planck. She stood at a podium with her stern nose and crisp words. Even when the woman was smiling, she looked like she was perpetually frowning. She was speaking at the Planck Activation Bracelet Revelation Party for Gaia Corp, and it was the staple speech to play when a Saltador forgot what a Giant was.
 

Dr. Planck was a Giant all right.
 

I pressed play and sank back into the sand to watch.
 

“Are we sure that Energy can be neither created nor destroyed? We take this to be a truth, but we also take the following to be true:

“Everything has an Origin and every Origin is in some form the spawn of Creation.

“If this is true, wouldn’t Energy have an Origin and therefore have, at least once, been Created? I do not deny that the current act of creation we witness with our eyes is merely altering what already exists, because creation as we know it is just the shell of Creation as we have yet to understand it.
 

“What I wonder is, where did Energy initially come from, and beyond that, I wonder what would happen if we found the Origin of Energy?
 

“Think outside of what you think you know. Let your imagination consider what would then happen if we could harness it to Create an Energy that doesn’t currently exist?”

I paused the feed and thought on the words. This was the woman who made Gaians realize the difference between Multiversal Creation and creation. The second was the illusion of Creation—the feeling we get when we take what already exists and reform it to something else. When we
make
things. But the Calvary wanted to control real Creation—the Multiversal kind. They made Texi because they wanted to command the power of choice and the ability to orchestrate the Path. During the Humanitarian Project Trials, the Calvary quoted this speech. Their defense was they were simply attempting to do as Dr. Planck suggested: harness Energy to Create more. They believed that if this was possible, then the subjects could regenerate the Splicing of dying universes.
 

So I pulled up a forum about the Humanitarian Project Trials. There had to be a clue in there, and I clicked on the vid of Dr. Anastasia Einstein. She was in the Seventieth Generation from Dr. Alberta Einstein’s genetic line, and her role as the High Chancellor of the Shadow Boxers made her a voice that was always heard. Her face was plump, and her hair was so tightly pulled into a bun that it made it difficult for her to blink. Nobu was the one who pointed it out to me the first time I saw the vid. He of course waited for me to take a big gulp of orange juice before he said it, and I ended up feeling the acidic liquid torch through my nostrils.
 

 
But her tightly wound bun didn’t stop her from having a point.

“With knowledge comes responsibility. With responsibility comes the necessity to do that which we dislike.
 

“For the Calvary to believe in their right to redefine humanity is a crime against humanity itself. It is our duty to remember that these creations are not human. Even the Calvary’s scientists label them as subjects, and therefore we must look at them as such. Just as we would destroy rabid puppies that had been experimented on, as is the policy of any lab after the experiment is finished, we must do so in this case.
 

“Just because these subjects share our faces does not mean they share our humanity.
 

“In this, we must be Intrepid.
 

“It is our duty and responsibility to preserve what it means to be human, even if what I suggest seems inhumane. We must remember that things aren’t always as they seem. These are not children. They are failed experiments that are dangerous and therefore must be disposed of.”

This was the speech that almost swayed the Gaian Order to destroy the subjects. I hated to admit that the few times I listened to it, I was inclined to believe her.
 

Corbin never let us speak of her as Texi around him. “Subject, boy. She’s a subject,” he always said when I’d misstep. Whenever he was gone, Nobu and I tried our best to follow his reasoning.
These are not children
, but Texi was once. I witnessed nearly every painful moment of her childhood. It made me drift back and forth with what I ended up calling her. “Subject” on documents or in earshot of Corbin, and “Texi” in open conversations with Nobu. I could never understand how Corbin could act so scientific around us about Texi, only to go back to Geronimo and put her on his knee. I’d seen the past vids of Corbin wearing a tiara at a table of stuffed animals drinking invisible tea. I’d seen him teach her how to cast a line at the river and clean up a scraped knee. I’d watched him kiss her on the forehead with love in his eyes and kindness on his face. But when he was with us, he wore a sturdy mask of duty.