Life in the Landship Daring was dull for three-year-old Alexander. He spent most of his time locked up in the nursery, eaten alive by his energy and curiosity. The moments when the door to the nursery opened and he came outside were scarce and gave him a chance to experience something new, "a first."
Back in confinement, Alexander liked to relive and categorize "his firsts."
The first smell. Once his dad returned to the nursery soaked in something and the air thickened with a heavy scent. His dad grabbed a box off the shelf and left shortly after, but not before a few drops of red liquid streamed off his clothes and splattered on the floor. As soon as the door shut, Alexander approached the red splatters and dipped his hand in one. He knew not to eat anything without permission, so he smelled it instead. He did not like it. It made him feel scared. It also made an ugly image flash in his mind – a mangled face hitting the ground next to him, droplets flying in his face. Alexander quickly wiped his hand on the blanket, folded it so the spot was not visible, and backed off. Later, his mother somehow figured out what he did and scolded him.
The first escape. His mother opened the door and lingered there for a minute, talking to someone. Alexander needed no invitation. He quietly walked behind her and disappeared in the first nook of the landship he could find. This was the best day ever! He climbed and walked everywhere for hours, saw all sorts of weird stuff, touched everything, pulled the levers, pressed the buttons, and unplugged the wires. Every time he did something - the landship reacted! Either a red lap went on, or water fell from the ceiling, or the whole machine jolted! However, once his father caught him, his day turned for the worst. It was the first time he saw his mother's face red with anger. Also, it was the first time his uncle hurt him... Alexander did not like to remember it. He was not allowed to leave the room for two weeks after that!
The first time he hated something. The door. The stupid door that would open for anyone but him! It would let his dad, mom, and uncle through with no problem, but as soon as he tried to pass, it refused to slide to the side. Alexander tried many things. He threw every object in the room at it. He tried to push it aside with his small useless hands. He even charged at it and hit it with his shoulder. His shoulder ached for days after.
The first people he knew — his mother Sophia, his father Sam, and his uncle Magnar. Seeing any of them was welcome. Each offered a unique experience.
Alexander's mother was a gentle and kind woman. She had the most beautiful smile in the world. Alexander would do anything to make her smile, even if it meant staying bored for days on end. She spent most of the time with him and taught him sign language, letters, and numbers. It was fun! She was patient with him, far more patient than dad and especially his uncle. However, mom had a flip side. It was hard to push her over the edge, but if somehow he managed... She never hurt him, yet she had a way of making him feel incredibly bad for what he did. Also, her angry face was the most terrifying thing in the world.
Alexander's dad was great, too, although Alexander did not see him very often. Dad always brought in new trinkets and then studied them at his bench. Alexander tiptoed on the bed behind his back, doing his own research, thorough yet fruitless. The best days ever were when dad allowed him to touch the artifacts and tried to explain what they were: new types of guns developed by Cursed who he was yet to meet, never-seen-before rocks and minerals sparking in the light of the hologram and surprisingly warm to touch, broken devices of the old world of all shapes and sizes with their purpose lost to time.
Lastly, there was the boy's uncle - Magnar. Alexander did not know what to think about him. If his mother was kind most days and only occasionally mad when he provoked her, his uncle seemed to split the two extremes right down the middle. The boy never knew what version of Magnar would walk through the door – nice or mean. This uncertainty scared him. He feared Magnar. Also, Magnar was the only one of the three who ever hurt him. That happened after Alexander's forbidden walk across the landship. He remembered being lifted by one arm and then disorientation and pain. His buttocks ached for a while, and his hand ended up bruised. His mother seemed to be more upset about it than he. Even though Alexander was never punished like that since, the memory made him tense up every time his uncle laid eyes on him.
At the same time, Magnar had one important benefit that neither of his parents had – he let him do anything he wanted as long as he was around. Press the trigger on the gun and see it jolt? Sure! Look at the dead body in the corner? Go ahead. Touch it? Why not! Whatever Alexander had in mind, Magnar always let him. The only thing that was off-limits, he learned, was the landship itself – he was not allowed to push any buttons or pull anything, as it could hurt people.
"I hurt you, so you knew what your actions could do to others," Magnar signed in sign language. "Trust me, compared to what could happen to us, I went lightly on you."
Even so, Magnar once took him to a room full of buttons and levers, and he was allowed to press and pull, but only something specific. He then stopped the landship for the first time! This was amazing!
When Alexander learned numbers, he kept track of fun and dull days. Fun days were just a few dozen. The dull were over two hundred and some. The only solace in his dull days was his very first memory that was still with him – the True Sky.
The hologram of it played in his room non-stop: the clouds, the blue, the sun, the star, and the galaxy. He could never grow tired of it as it always seemed fresh and different every time.
His mother told him the legend of the True Sky. It turned out that all these things he looked at daily were real! They were just hidden somewhere beyond Mirror Sky.
He saw the so-called great oppressor in his few and far-between outdoor outings. At first, he was too excited to notice the suffocating Twilight and grim landscapes above and below him. He just enjoyed the wind on his face, the chance to run in any direction until he was short of breath, and the seeming absence of any walls and limits.
However, once he let some of his energy out, he stopped and took it all in. In the end, the outdoors were not that different from his room. The limits were set further away, but they were there, waiting for him to discover them. He did not know but rather felt that he would have to confront those limits one day. He would hate Mirror Sky just as much as he hated the locked door out of his room.
***
One day, Alexander's mother rushed into his room. She ignored that he was busy categorizing the contents of the forbidden-to-touch backpack she had left behind. She scooped him up, gave him a smooch, and carried him out.
There was lots of excitement in the air. Everyone was cheering, hugging, and high-fiving one another. Alexander and his mom arrived at the small dining room crammed with celebrating people. A large sleek device lied on the table, and everyone gave it loving glances.
"We found it!" his mother signed to him.
"What is it?" asked Alexander.
"A replacement part for something at Skydream," mother signed. "It is godstech from the old world, not made anymore because everyone forgot how to. We are coming back home, son. You won't have to be locked in your room for days. I guarantee you that the number of your fun days will break into triple digits!"
Alexander joined the celebration. He clapped with the rest and handed a few high-fives. He was sure that all festivities were about the end of his confinement and was very appreciative that all these people felt so happy for him, even though he did not know half of them.
Bottles were passed around, and everyone drank. Then, everyone started to make some bizarre synchronized moves. Alexander had no idea what was happening, and his mother was too distracted to answer. He tried to sync with the rest, but their moves always went in unexpected ways. How did they keep track of one another across the room? His mother would teach him, no doubt.
***
Their landship took a course on Skydream. Alexander helped Magnar to lay out some of the paths. According to his mother, the boy was the most impatient passenger on board. He asked his mother, father, and uncle every time he met them:
"How much further?"
His mother and father told him the shortening numbers: about sixty days, about fifty days, about forty. Magnar kept telling him they had to stop here, then there, then turn and go back in the opposite direction because they forgot one of the passengers or saw pretty lakes. It kept adding up weeks! Mother told him not to listen to Magnar, which was silly: Magnar was the captain! Who else was there to listen to about the landship's course and operations?
Nevertheless, his parent's estimation turned out to be more accurate. They arrived at Skydream in just over two months. The boy remembered this moment in vivid detail.
He was four years old at this time. He stood on top of the advancing Landship Daring and saw a mountain ahead. It boldly reached Mirror Sky and dominated the landscape. It seemed to be the thing holding the Sky in place, more so than the shy God Pillars it swallowed.
The mountain missed a sizable slice. The vertical flat surfaces went as high as the Sky and looked perfect and unnerving compared to the jagged mountain edges. At the deepest part of the cut was a dark rectangle – the Gates of Skydream, big enough to let through five landships side by side.
Skydream. Alexander never gave this name a proper thought. It was so promising! Inside the mountain, there could only be an infinite dreamy blue sky and millions of twinkling stars. The first moments in the city gave him just that – there were lights everywhere! They were big and small, up and down, and in all the colors he could think of. However, the lights did not fly freely through the endless space but were trapped in the cold concrete and steel walls that stretched for miles in all directions. It was impressive and breathtaking, but a bit of a letdown since he expected to see the True Sky there.
However, the city quickly charmed the boy. He could not make one step in Skydream without seeing a mural of a galaxy, a lamp shaped like a sun, a garland glittering like stars, or a ceiling painted blue. The city did not have the True Sky, but it had a dream to bring it back. Nobody could take it away, not even a hundred generations of cynics who buried their ambitions under a lifetime of pain and disappointment, to quote his uncle. The Mirror was yet to show the boy who ruled the world, so he took in the dream of the True Sky with an open heart.
He soon received a present – a metal necklace shaped like a galaxy. It glowed yellow when he rubbed it with his thumb! The boy felt special to have it until he saw that everyone in the city had one. Regardless, he wore the galaxy, a small piece of the city's dream, with pride. He felt like he was a part of something bigger than himself.
His family spent a week in the Slums of Skydream. They waited to see the Blind Queen and gift her the device they found. His mother hated the wait in the Slums, but he loved it. There was always something new to see: metal pots, stacked beds, stone stairs, rusty ladders, old curtains, weathered crates, and plenty of space to run around. Also, there was light everywhere: oil lamps, TV screens, flashlights, and projectors! Such a difference from the grim interiors of the Landship Daring and the strictly enforced darkness of the Twilight. What was not to love about this place?
He wanted to explore, touch everything, and meet every passerby. He had never seen so many people before. They all wore unique clothes, carried weird objects and bags, worked different jobs, took apart, fixed, and built everything. Later he found out that there were two hundred million people in the Slums, spread out across eight hundred floors on just one and a half square miles of land! The Slums even went all the way up to the Sky! This fantastic world demanded a thorough exploration. He kept escaping his mother's hawkish supervision to learn more about it. The further away he was recaptured, the angrier she was.
***
One day, his family dressed nicely and went to see the Blind Queen. To Alexander's amazement, he was invited. He was never invited to adult activities!
The Blind Queen lived in a diamond-shaped palace levitating in the middle of the city, surrounded by tall glowing green skyscrapers - the Gardens of Skydream. They walked through the gardens as the palace loomed ahead.
Alexander saw trees for the first time - huge, weird, and very complicated things. He almost got spooked at first, but, encouraged by the calmness of his family, he boldly observed the trees and touched some of them. Trees were all different: tall and short, slender and thick, deep green, red, and yellow. Even if they were the same type - no two were the same. Alexander felt that he could look at them forever.
Soon, they reached the palace. It was so big that it almost touched both Mirror Sky and the ground! His mother directed his attention at the giant letters on the palace. They were written in a strange old language and loosely read as HR-5-AEON.
"Heavy Researcher - mark five - Eternity," his mother signed. "It is a starship. Do you know how landships go on land? Where do you think this ship goes?"
"Among the stars!" Alexander guessed, his mouth open in awe. "Did you build it?"
"No," signed the mother. "It is godstech, ancient. Nobody knows how to build starships. We don't even know how to maintain them. Luckily, they are tough and rarely break."
"What happens when they break?" asked Alexander.
"We must find replacement parts in Twilight, outside Skydream," the mother signed. "There is still debris from the old world, but getting to them is incredibly dangerous, and finding something there is even more unlikely."
"Is that what we did?" asked Alexander. "We found a spare part for the starship?"
"We sure did," she signed and kissed him on the forehead. "We fixed something that was broken for over five hundred years."
"Does it mean we can now fly it to the stars?" asked Alexander.
"I wish," she signed. "Our find will help millions of people, and that is great. But if we want to help everyone inside and outside the city, if we want to lift their hardship forever, if we want to take this ship to the stars - we'd have to shutter the Mirror Sky first."
She looked up.
"One day," she signed. "We will."
Alexander also looked up, the huge mass of starship looming over him. The ship reflected in Mirror Sky, and the boy saw all the gardens surrounding it. It seemed trapped by the green. Alexander imagined it soaring freely in the infinite expanse of space from the Legend of True Sky. What would it take to get it there?
As they crossed the drawbridge to the Starship, Alexander saw perfect steel plates of the outer armor on the ship's surface and rare light shining here and there. What wonders hid underneath? He had explored the now tiny by comparison Landship Daring, and ever there he did not uncover all the mysteries. How many rooms hid within the starship? How well were they guarded? Alexander was already building plans on how and when to sneak in here.
The drawbridge ended, and they entered the dim interiors of the starship. It was an immediate dead end. Their path was growing steeper until it went up the wall. However, their group did not slow down. They confidently and effortlessly marched on, ignoring the incline. They were tilting back more and more. Alexander expected them to fall back. He grabbed his mother's shoulders tighter. However, before he knew what had happened, they were walking on the wall as if it was a floor.
"I'll teach you what gravity is later," signed the mother and smiled. "In short, it helps you stick to Earth. And if you get off Earth, you'll need to have your own gravity with you."
It would be unfair to mark that day as just one exciting day. It deserved at least ten marks.
***
Sadly, mother revealed no other secrets about the starship. The starship itself also shared nothing. They walked by many tightly shut doors. Behind each door, undoubtedly, was a treasure trove of mysteries. Alexander wished they would walk through one of the doors and see cool mechanisms, like on Daring, only bigger.
However, he had one surprise waiting for him - the Throne Room. When they first walked in, he thought they somehow stepped beyond the Mirror Sky and looked at the galaxy. Both floor and ceiling were laced with swooping spiral ramps, some submerged in deep shadow, some glittering with millions of tiny lights. All the curves collected in the middle of the room, high above, where lights gathered in an intense glow, outlining the Throne of Skydream.
On the Throne sat a younger woman, who could only be the Blind Queen. It was hard to take a good look at her. The lights behind her hurt Alexander's eyes, and she was hidden by the shadow. He looked away for the time being, allowing his eyes to adjust.
As they walked the ramps to the Throne, Alexander noticed that all shadows in the room had armed people hiding in them. They stood motionless, gripping their weapons. They did nothing threatening, but Alexander felt nervous about their presence. One wrong move, and they would all pounce on him! He tried to move as little as possible, just in case.
He looked at the Blind Queen again. He struggled to distinguish any details of her appearance in the shadows, yet he did little by little. The Queen wore a long black dress. Her inky hair was falling on her shoulder and down her chest. The shadow hid her face, and only her kind smile was visible. When they got close, the Blind Queen leaned in, and the light climbed up her face. Alexander shuddered - she had no eyes, only smooth skin under her black eyebrows.
Her face was simultaneously pretty and creepy. He was so stunned by this strange duality that it took him a second to notice that she was not alone up there. On either side of the Throne, on the steps, sat a dozen people obscured by darkness. They charted the signs on the Queen's hands and forearms with their swift fingers.
Alexander could not fathom how the Queen understood the dozens of signs on her skin at once. He made a few signs with his right hand and pressed them against his forearm. They all felt the same. Yet the Queen was eerily perceptive. She followed their approach and turned her head to each of them in turn. When she faced him, Alexander shrank as if under the stern gaze of his mother. In a way, the Queen was not blind at all. She had twenty-four eyes, all seeing through him.
They reached the Throne and stopped. The Queen, without standing up, elegantly freed her hands from many tale-telling fingers and greeted them in sign language. Her signs were so smooth and graceful that Alexander's own signs seemed like angry gesticulation by comparison. When she was done, she gave her hands back to the interpreters, who swarmed them and froze, ready to narrate.
The meeting had begun, and fingers grabbing the Queen's hands and forearms sprung to life.
Unfortunately, mom, dad, and uncle spoke. The speech was a weird and complicated way to communicate that the adults sometimes used. Alexander guessed that it worked by reading each other's lips. He was yet to muster speech, and the adults were not in a hurry to teach him. Since his parents did not use signs and the Queen did not comment on anything, Alexander was left out of the conversation. He tried to read the signs of the Queen's interpreters, but it was like trying to make the ins and outs of a hopelessly tangled wire. All the signs were unfamiliar, getting in each other's way and further blurred by the darkness.
Frustrated, Alexander zoned out and studied the interiors of the room. The star-like light everywhere captivated him. He lost track of time, imagining what the real stars would look like if the Mirror Sky was not there. Would they be brighter or dimmer? Would they be of different sizes and colors? The Legend of the True Sky did not go into specifics about it, all the depictions contradicted one another, and Alexander longed to know the truth like he longed to understand the conversations the adults were having.
Suddenly, he felt his mother tense up, which made him anxiously look around and pay attention. The mood in the room changed. The Queen no longer smiled. Uncle's face contorted in livid expressions that he knew meant yelling in speech. Magnar looked terrifying, like on his worst days. Then, his anger spilled over.
It happened too fast. For one mad moment, Alexander thought the uncle would attack and hurt him again. He sought his mother's protection, only to see Magnar punch dad in the face instead. Dad fell on the floor, and Magnar got on top of him. Alexander tried to wriggle out of the mother's embrace and help his dad.
Mother held him firm. The guards rushed from all sides and pinned uncle and dad to the floor. His dad's nose was bleeding, and so were Magnar's knuckles. Even restrained, Magnar would not stop yelling, his face red, pressed against the floor by the guard's knee.
"What is happening?" Alexander signed to his mother. "Why is he so angry?"
Instead of answering, she turned around and walked down the ramp out of the room. The Blind Queen's eyeless gaze followed them all the way.
The mother left the Throne Room and entered the dark and plain waiting area. She handed him to some woman he did not know and went back inside. He got ejected from the ongoing situation again! Every time something went down, he was taken away and locked someplace safe! He hated this word - safe. He wanted to be in the middle of whatever unsafe stuff his family tried to hide from him!
He attempted to come back to the Throne Room. Unfortunately, his temporary caretaker had none of it. He tried to convince her, but she only signed him to sit down and be patient. It had never been harder to comply with the adults' orders. It was as if he sat on a hot frying pan. The entrance to the Throne Room was right there, casting a rectangle of light on the floor, and he was not allowed to peek around the corner.
Minutes went by. Then half an hour. Then an hour. The wait was torture. He asked his caretaker to take him to the bathroom. He wanted to use this opportunity to escape and catch a glimpse of the Throne Room. Alas, her supervision proved too tight: she immediately cracked and canceled his plans. Two hours passed. He was offered food, but he was not hungry. Three hours passed. He started to get worried about the safety of his family. Where were they? Have they forgotten about him? Have the guards hurt them? He was on the brink of fighting his caretaker with physical force and was amping himself up for it.
Finally, after four hours of waiting and mere minutes before he was ready to punch his caretaker in the nose and make a run for it, his family came back. Magnar stormed past him without slowing down. Mom and dad lingered behind and picked him up. They both looked morbid and did not drop one bit of information all the way back to Landship Daring.
What in the world happened?
***
By then, Alexander knew a decent amount of sign language, which empowered him to play detective, pull fragments of the story out of reluctant adults, and piece it all together. He had done it routinely before and tried to do it this time too, but the adults stonewalled him. Whatever happened was bad enough to even give him a hint. He decided to give them some time to cool off. No secret could live long. They would drop pieces of information eventually.
Despite the mysterious incident in front of the Blind Queen, his family achieved what they wanted and were allowed to move into the Gardens. His mother described it as the best place there is. It was beautiful: glowing glass skyscrapers, tall trees, fascinating plants, green grass, and ample space. However, it was not as fun as the Slums looming in the background. The Gardens were too clean, too uniformed. There were hardly any people. They wore the same white clothes and seemed to slowly walk around all day without any purpose.
At first, he assumed that life in the Gardens disappointed his family too. Uncle Magnar was in a foul mood all the time instead of half the time, ignored him, refused to speak to his parents, and attempted to punch his dad in the face again, prompting another interference by the guards. His mother told him that uncle Magnar would come around, and he did. In a few months, he was his old self with him, although a bit short, talked to his mother, but kept pretending that his father did not exist.
Alexander kept asking why they did not like each other anymore. What happened when they met the Blind Queen? Even many months later, they were annoyingly vague in their responses. He deduced that it was not their dislike for the Gardens – they loved the place. It was something related to lying. His mother taught him that lying was wrong, but he never imagined it could break a family apart.
***
The boy went to school every day since his arrival in the Gardens. He studied side-by-side with other children: boys and girls of his age. He tirelessly absorbed any subject: math, sign language, legends of the old world, and reading reflections in Twilight, among others. His vocabulary of signs grew, and he spent hours chatting with his classmates. He was the only "kid from the Twilight" among them and the only one who had been there. He gladly described what the outside world felt like, unaware that he would have to return to it very soon.
A few short months after their arrival in Skydream, he and his family suddenly left the city. In a day, they packed all their things, moved back to the Landship Daring, and drove out of the gates. This time they were not alone – two hundred other landships drove alongside them.
His life changed for the worse. Twilight felt extra miserable after the Gardens of Skydream and the Slums. His confinement was back. His dull days were back. He still studied, but there were no children to accompany him. There was nothing to explore, only the five levels of the thoroughly-explored landship. His mother took pity on him, and he was allowed to scout the landship top to bottom any time he wanted, even the previously off-limits places. Occasionally, he was taken outside, but he always saw the same thing: dark rocky terrain, Mirror Sky, God Pillars, Dark Horizon, and dozens of other wheeled landships around. He was not allowed to use any lights outside, which made his longing for Skydream even worse.
"Where are we going?" he asked his mother in signs.
"To the City of Libra. We need to talk to the Patriarch there."
"Why do we need all these landships?"
She went vague with her answers again. When one adult did not share, usually the other one did.
"We bring them for..." his uncle flipped through the dictionary. "Contingency. We need them just in case."
Uncle Magnar did not specify what "case" he meant. This was all his family told him about their mission. He tried to ask others, but they only shook their heads. Perhaps the most jarring change from the Gardens of Skydream was that no one aside from his immediate family signed. His family used sign language with him, but they talked to others and among each other. Why was that?
Alexander assumed that talking was the mode of communication used only by adults to pass forbidden knowledge to one another while he was around. After all, every kid he came across in the Gardens could sign and could not talk, just like him.
Kids in Slums were another matter. They could talk like adults. However, his mother told him that Slums forced everyone to grow up fast. Thus, Alexander concluded, the kids mastered the language of adults. Everything fell in place in his theory, and he let it be.
Today, knowing how to talk seemed instrumental. Alexander could already scout the forbidden areas of the barrack. Surely he could learn the forbidden language? So few people could sign around here, and he craved interaction!
When he pressed his mother and father on it, they got weird and did not give him any helpful information. Magnar, however, did.
"Secret language of adults?" he signed, then laughed for three minutes straight at Alexander's theory as the boy patiently waited for him to finish. "Kids are so entertaining. No, it's not a secret language. Most people here don't sign because they can talk."
"Can you teach me how to talk?"
"Nope," he signed, then thought it over. "Well, I guess you could talk. But what's the point if you can't hear?
Alexander had to look up the sign for "hear" in the dictionary. Reading the description did not help. The sense in his ears? What? The only thing he could feel in his ears was embarrassment.
"Can you teach me how to hear then?" he asked.
"That you can't learn," said Magnar. "Consider yourself lucky. I wish I couldn't hear."
That made zero sense. Lucky? There is something he could not learn, and it made him lucky? He was confused. He nagged his family about it. His mother and father told him to be patient and that he would learn everything soon enough.
"Everything except hearing?" inquired Alexander.
He has not seen his parents this uncomfortable since the Blind Queen incident. Pressing them further was pointless. Fair enough, they could keep their secrets then! Besides, uncle Magnar proved to be the most promising source of forbidden knowledge thus far, so the child focused his nagging on him. He pulled on his uncle's pants, got in his way, climbed on the table when he tried to eat, and woke him up when he tried to sleep. He did so every day until Magnar snapped:
"Ok, you know what? Fine! Want the truth? You got it! Time for you to see Landship Sixteen from the inside."
All landships were parked for the layover. The Sixteen stood apart from the rest and had a heavy guard by the entrance. One of the soldiers saluted Magnar as they approached, opened the doors, and stepped to the right. The boy was then carried inside and put on the floor. The dim oil lamps at the ceiling softly touched the thick steel bars of dark cages on either side. He looked up to his uncle, who nodded for him to go deeper.
Alexander gingerly made a dozen steps. The cages appeared empty. It was too dark to tell what was inside. The place was creepy, but he had seen worse. How did it all relate to his hearing questions? He failed to see why Magnar brought him here.
That was when he caught a movement in one of the cages and stopped dead. A woman was lying on the floor. Alexander could not see her face, but he knew she was watching him - her eyes were glittering in the dark.
They stared at each other for ten long seconds. Alexander was afraid to make a move or take a breath. When the woman moved again, he jolted but remained in place. He watched her rise from the floor, hair hanging loosely in long, tangled locks. She made two heavy steps forward and pressed her face against the bars.
Alexander felt his very skin shrink in fear. The woman's face was covered in scars from cuts and burns. Her mouth was cut, and her jaw hung low, exposing all her teeth reddened with blood.
There was movement in the cages on the left from her, then in the cages on the right. More people were coming from the shadows, their faces disfigured with injuries. One face was so mutilated that it looked like a skeleton with bare teeth and empty eye sockets.
Leon's death flashed before the boy's eyes as the prisoners suddenly went wild in their cages, shook the bars, and attempted to squeeze themselves through. They stretched their hands between the bars, trying to grab him. Even though he stood too far, he did not feel safe. The boy recoiled in fear and almost threw himself in the prisoner's hands, sticking on the other side of the room.
Magnar yanked him away from danger and held him tightly and painfully. He then kneeled in front of him and signed:
"Do you know what the five casts of Skydream are?" asked Magnar.
Alexander knew the answer but shook his head, trembling in fear. He kept glancing at the cages full of monsters, and Magnar grabbed his jaw and forced him to look into his eyes.
"The Blind Queen is a Prophet because she is both blind and deaf from birth," signed Magnar. "You are a Disciple because you are deaf from birth. Your parents are Blessed because they gave birth to you, but it's irrelevant. They are no different from me, Wayward, because we can both hear and see. One day, all but the Prophets will turn into those," he nodded at the cages over his shoulder. "The lowest and most miserable cast - Cursed. People with no souls. Some lose their souls quicker, some faster, but the end is inevitable."
"Who cut them?" Alexander signed with shaking hands. "Who burned them?"
"They did it to themselves. The voices told them. The visions guided them. Do you want to learn how to hear now? Do you want a quicker road to the visions? You fool. You don't even realize how lucky you are."
***
The boy should have heeded his parents. If he had been patient, he would have learned everything he wanted without getting scared to death. Still, the lessons he began to attend a week later were not a walk in the Gardens either.
"One day, I will begin acting weird," his mother signed to him. "One day, I will attack, chase, or try to hurt you. When this happens – you will have to run, hide, and fight back. If I corner you – you'll have to kill me."
Hearing that, Alexander felt sick. He tried to reject the idea of killing his mother, but she insisted it would no longer be her.
He tried to see the shadow of the sleeping monster in his mother's eyes. He tried to imagine her disfigured face pressed against the cold steel bars of her cage, her mouth opened in anger, her hand stretched out and trying to grab him.
No. He could not fathom killing her. Instead, he focused on protecting her from people like Leon in his final hour. It was easier to accept and live with.
He began learning all the usual skills for children of his age: how to tell friend from foe, how to memorize faces and habits of people around him, how to spot deviations in their behavior and who to notify about it, and how to hide from a person consumed by sudden madness. The only thing he did not learn was how to ignore the voices in his head. Deaf from birth and unfamiliar with the very concept of hearing, he did not have to worry about it.
When he studied enough about avoiding danger, he began learning how to confront it.
"Rule number one of fighting back," his uncle signed. "Don't screw up and get yourself in such a situation to begin with. But if you find yourself against the wall, you'll need this."
The boy received his first knife – a tiny dull thing that the adults would keep sharpening as he learned how to use it.
"I'll teach you how to handle it and where to stick it," Magnar continued. "Study hard and practice often. By the age of six, you should know how to kill a Cursed, even though they'll likely skin you alive up until your late teens."
Unnerved, the boy powered through Magnar's lessons. His uncle was an unfair and cruel teacher. He would attack him out of nowhere and expect him to run away, climb to high places, squeeze into tight holes, and fight back with his dull knife. The child was always on edge as he had to be ready for another learning session to start at any moment. His uncle insisted that "the real shit will go down without warning too."
The boy did not do well in lessons, but he got better every day with agility routines and knife drills. He got so good that he hid from his uncle's wisdom for two days. Magnar was not mad when he found him, but the boy could not repeat his success.
***
Alexander weathered many punishments over his short life. He did not count them, but his curiosity got him in trouble at least a hundred times.
Every time he got punished, he knew what for. His mother made sure he did and felt bad about it. Once he was done with detention, usually a couple of days, he was back at it again. Why would he stop? He always got something interesting out of his illicit activities. He either learned a new bit of knowledge or saw something new. Besides, two days of detention? What a joke! He spent weeks locked up in the room before, without any punishment. He was hardened.
All of it soon changed.
One day, Alexander rolled out of bed and fell on the floor - Landship Daring unexpectedly halted. He opened the door and looked out. There was a lot of commotion. People ran up and down the hallway, looking worried.
Something was going down. Alexander knew he was supposed to stay "safe" but would be damned if he sat it out.
After he had observed everyone for a minute, he realized that the back door out of the landship was open and left unattended. Great, he thought, a free trip outside!
This was the last thing he remembered. He woke up in an unfamiliar bed, drenched in sweat, and shaking. A sickening stench was stuck in his nose. He was agitated. His legs were restless and commanded him to run somewhere.
His mom, dad, and uncle were in the room. Oh boy, were they pissed! Without explaining anything, they handed him detention and left. This was a record-breaking detention. One month. A whole month! Four weeks, twenty-eight days! What did he do to deserve this?
Alexander tried to ask, of course. Why wasn't he in his room? What happened? For days, his family was too angry for any communication, but they eventually softened. His mother talked to him first but gave him nothing to chew on. His dad followed soon after but was just as evasive. His uncle broke last. However, he was the only person who told him the whole truth.
"We spotted a Leviathan a week ago," Magnar signed slowly, sitting on his bed. He was not very fluent in signs and had to pause frequently to use a dictionary or write a word down. "It turned out to be either stubborn or a lucky one. We tried to lose him for days. Then, one of our wheels fell into a cave, and we got stuck. I ordered other landships to move on while we tried to dislodge ourselves. The Leviathan was gaining on us. The Call of Nought was getting louder. It was soon clear that we had to sit this one out, hoping he wouldn't smell any life in our rock-looking landship."
"So, we are in panic, running around," he continued signing, "When we saw you barreling down the ravine into oncoming darkness. The voices were screaming in our head, we were all close to being mad, and we all should've been sitting tight and poking ourselves with knives or some shit, keeping the voices at bay. Instead, a group of us had to run after you."
Magnar paused and leaned against the wall, looking into space.
"We practically snatched you from the Leviathan's mouth. It was too close, even for my daredevil soul. You, kid, stared death in the mouth. Smelled it, too, no doubt. You are lucky you don't remember it."
Magnar sighed.
"We ran back inside. The Leviathan threw the landship around like a damn toy. Ten thousand tons of rock, steel, and equipment flew and rolled about. It was a mess. We lured the monster away with a buggy, but the landship was totaled. We salvaged what we could, including Arachnid Limper, and relocated here - Landship Insolent."
He got up.
"Your actions have steep consequences. Always. Our world does not forgive. You get stupid, your get reckless – and you are done. You didn't pay with your life for this incident. But twenty-nine people did."
Alexander was mortified. He... killed people?
"Chill, it's not your fault," Magnar signed right away. "At first, I thought it was, but I gave it some thought and decided it wasn't. There was a breach in the landship after the crash, and the Leviathan could smell us. Still, your stunt could have been the reason."
Magnar opened the door and signed one last time before closing it:
"Think next time. It's never just your life you put in danger."
Thus concluded Alexander's worst adventure. He remembered nothing from it. He got nothing out of it but a hard lesson and guilt. He got the worst punishment ever that he had to tough out.
Even if he hated being safe himself, he could not let people die for it.
***
Days dragged by. Alexander's new room was about the same as before. It had a bed and a workbench. His crib was replaced with a kiddy bed since Skydream. However, it all lacked history. The patterns of the flaking-off paint were different, the light on the ceiling was mounted slightly more to the left, and the tally of dull and exciting days was missing.
Alexander kept polishing his survival skills for the danger that never came. Routines and lessons were the only things available to kill time. He learned about different foods, classes of machinery, kinds of guns, and types of ammo while continuing to advance in math, the Twilight reflection reading, and sign language. It was exciting and all, but it was lonely, and he seldom had practical lessons. After Skydream, it was almost unbearable to look at faded pictures, overused books, steel furniture, and flaking walls, all by himself.
However, he still had access to one amazing experience. Every night, he fell asleep to the holographic spectacle of the sky and stars. It was as fresh as the first time Alexander saw it.
Alexander did not see holograms anywhere else. His mother told him that their holographic projector was one of a kind. It could work in the Twilight, outside the Landship, where no other electronic device functioned.
Once, his mother did a lesson for the Lanterns - the people of the Twilight. She borrowed the projector for it. She made the hologram bigger than usual for everyone to see. The spectacle blew away the Lanterns, kids and adults alike. They spent their whole life in the dark. Any light was a blessing to them, and to see billions of stars dancing around was a magical experience. Even Alexander, who had seen the holograms before, was taken aback.
It was surreal to see the stars, the galaxy, and the True Sky outside, beating down the Twilight and mocking Mirror Sky. Surreal but strangely fitting. Alexander kept trying to touch the stars drifting by him, but they passed through his hands, making him profoundly sad. His mother signed to him that he should count his blessings. The real stars would have burned his hands had he touched them. Alexander thought that it would have been worth it.
The lesson ended in disarray. Magnar showed up and got into an argument with his mother over the lights. After some pushback, the mother turned them off. Alexander saw the twinkle extinguish from all the Lanterns' eyes. Saddened, they got up and disappeared into the thicker shadows of the Twilight, one by one.
Alexander could not sleep that night, with the spectacle now playing just for him. He thought of the Lanterns. They suffered from the voices of Nought the most. He could not bear the thought of them living in the dark, going mad. The horrors of the Cursed Regiment in Landship Sixteen were fresh in his memory. He found out the cages got fuller since the Leviathan incident, as if that story and his guilt about it could get any worse. One day, his family would end up like these people. Everyone would. The end was inevitable.
Alexander firmly decided to do something about it. Save everyone: the Lanterns, his family, the people on all the landships. Save the world!
However, once he decided to take on this task, he got smothered by its weight and scale. He felt panic, like when he faced a confusing problem at school. Where to begin? What was the problem, precisely? The Call of Nought, its voices, sure, but what were the voices? Where did they come from? Alexander knew very little about the nature of the world's woes. He learned plenty about how to deal with them but not how to fight them. That was strange. Has everyone given up?
It was time to bug his experts on everything again. Fortunately, they all visited him in captivity every day. He pulled information out of them, piece by piece.
"The voices are silent only in Libra," his uncle signed. "Or so is the rumor. If we get to stay there – we will be saved."
"Who decides if we get to say?"
"The Patriarch of Libra," his dad signed in another conversation. "He's a good man. He wouldn't turn us around."
"And if he does," his uncle signed the next day, "I'll keep us there regardless. Don't you worry."
"But what about everybody else?" the boy asked his mother after. "What about people in Skydream? Can they all move to Libra?"
"I doubt it," she answered. "If we want to save everyone, we must break the Mirror Sky. It is the key to everything."
He was onto something! It did not make much sense to him why Mirror Sky was related to the voices, but he jumped onto this clue with all his heart. He thought about the outdoor lesson and imagined the True Sky stretching infinitely in all directions. The image was so inspiring that he vowed:
"I'll do it! I'll break the Mirror!"
"You sure will!" His mother supported him. "There will be blue sky and stars over our heads. The Gardens will blossom everywhere when the sun returns, not just in Skydream. The voices will be silent. Wouldn't that be nice?"
This sounded amazing! Also, it sounded like a solid plan - break Mirror Sky. Simple.
However, his uncle and dad were less excited about his bold endeavor.
"As far as we know, the Mirror is unbreakable," his father signed one morning. "And what if the situation worsens when we shatter the Mirror? It's nice to think that the sky and stars are hiding beyond, but there could be something sinister just as well."
"Don't waste your long life on this fantasy," signed his uncle in the evening. "Accept the truth. The water is wet. Fire burns. The Mirror can't be broken. Don't bother with what's beyond it. You can't make the world better. You can only be better off it."
Comply with Mirror Sky? The voices? How could he when he saw the image of the blue sky every night? It was impossibly cruel to keep this beauty confined in his bedroom or locked behind the Mirror. The world had to see what he saw every day, not just during his mother's lessons. The world had to fall asleep under the stars. His mother was right. His uncle and dad just gave up, but he never would!
How to begin doing something that has never been done before? He had no way to reach the Sky and try to shatter it. Maybe they would come back to Skydream one day, and he could climb the mountain or go to the top floor of the Slums? Regardless, for now, all he had available was the surface of God Pillar. He knew it was made of the same material as the Sky. Perfect place for an experiment!
When his punishment finally ended, the boy convinced his mother to bring him outside. There, he nonchalantly expressed his interest in God Pillar. As soon as he approached it, he picked up a rock and threw it at the Mirror. The rock bounced back and hit him in the forehead. The pain was blinding! The blood streamed across his face and into his eyes!
"You tried to break the Mirror with A ROCK?!" his uncle signed while his mother patched up the cut back at Landship Insolent. "That's brilliant! We tried everything, from bullets to nukes, but we never threw rocks at it!"
"Great!" the boy signed enthusiastically. "I'm on the right path! I have already tried something you haven't! What else haven't you tried? I was thinking about punching it in some funky ways. Maybe one of them would work."
That day, the boy learned what sarcasm was the hard way. Also, he became known as Skypuncher around Landship Insolent.