“Oh, honey, I don’t mean they caused you pain. They hurt you in here.” She points to her heart.
“What does that mean? You don’t even know them.”
“I know…” Sena gathers her thoughts carefully. “I’ve known of people like them. I know their rituals seemed harmless to you, but you’re too young to understand. They are an invitation to the spirits of Fire. They are very dangerous.”
Jeneth shakes her head, confused. “What rituals? What are you talking about?”
“You know what happened to the world, right? It burned. It burned because they were sick—because they wanted it to burn. And your people were sick, too. Did they want to see everything ruined this time? The whole world and everything in it?” Her voice waivers and she mists over with tears. “I have… two babies at home… and when I look a them… their little faces… I just want them to be safe…”
She puts her face in her hands, overtaken.
The girls sit in bewildered silence and watch nervously as Sena weeps long into the night.
“I was brought here when I was seven,” says Quinlan. The boys sit cross-legged on their bunks and listen. “I don’t remember much about my old family. We lived in a cave near the coast, somewhere north of here.”
“Did they burn your parents?” asks Aiden, far too simply, as if this were a normal question.
“Of course. They had no choice.”
“But why? Didn’t it hurt you?”
“I know I cried a lot at first. I understand, though. They were set in their ways. They wouldn’t fit in here. But I promise you, it gets easier. I have a good life here now. Better than I would have had living in a dirty cave.” Quinlan is looking at them, but not. There is something missing behind his eyes. “As for worrying about your old family, they were given to savagery and the sooner you put all that behind you the better. We’re civilized here.”
“Do we look like savages to you?” asks Jack.
Quinlan raises his eyebrows innocently. “You did when they brought you in.” Jack starts to form a reply to this absurdity and Quinlan cuts him off. “You can have a life so much happier than you would have had living like animals in the forest.”
“I was happy before,” says William, slumping his shoulders and staring at the floor.
“You’re going to be fine. It just takes time. Nisaq says it’s like training wild horses. It takes time and patience, and sometimes it seems cruel, but in the end they’re a lot better off.”
This peculiar analogy evades the boys and they say nothing.
“Well,” says Quinlan, scooting to the edge of his bunk, “I think it’s time to get some sleep.”
He moves around the chamber and extinguishes the sconces, plunging them into darkness.
The whole night has seemed like a prolonged hallucination. Jack curls up on his mattress, worn to the core from the evening’s bizarre convocation. As he lies there gazing at the ceiling, he falls asleep. Deeply.
He dreams.
He is back in his village, flames rising around him. He sees his mother at the end of the promenade and she is shimmering. His father is standing behind her, his face blurred, a veiled memory from his early childhood. He walks toward his mother but she does not get any closer. She looks so warm and comforting, such safe refuge, and Jack runs to her. As he runs the promenade stretches impossibly below his feet, new stones appearing out of thin air and widening the chasm that separates them. He runs harder and faster, and the stone avenue stretches farther and wider until his mother is just a speck on the horizon, shimmering and flickering like some mystical apparition. Suddenly the concourse shrinks and Jack is rocketing toward her at breakneck speed, the light twinkle of her hazel eyes, her beautiful soft face coming into view, closer and closer. Just as he should reach her, just as he is extending his arms and anticipating her tight embrace, he jerks rigidly awake, drenched in cold sweat. He looks around at his dormitory and lies flatly back on his mattress, tears bursting from the corners of his eyes, realizing with dread that he has only traded one nightmare for another.
Chapter Four
Jack stands at the head of the reflecting pool, in a loose cluster with the rest of the boys, and breathes deeply the salty ocean air. It is pristine and fresh, humid from the wall