Intrepid Page 12

  I was morphing still, into something new entirely. In the moments between having and losing, I kept changing. My skin kept tingling, and my eyes focused into a sharpness that allowed me to see colors that weren’t supposed to exist. Smells coagulated into new experiences entirely, and even my tongue felt heavy like it was learning new ways to shape itself. And then I felt the cold fingers of insanity itself while my heart sent beats to bounce around my chest cavity like pingpong balls.

  I closed my eyes and let out a scream that rang against the walls and pulled out tears. The pain within that scream tore my body to shreds as if my existence had never been contained by my body in the first place.

  The door flew open, and Iago cupped my face with his hands. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s the last part of the Change. It’ll only hurt a minute.” But it hurt beyond the minute, because minutes no longer existed. I felt the swirling around my irises, and I opened my eyes to let in every ounce of faded light. Apparently, the swirling was not a normal part of the Change. Apparently, I had freakazoid genes and the eyes were an unexplained side-effect. There was another apparently hidden in all the things he told me, because apparently, I wasn’t supposed to survive whatever experiment they’d done to me. Apparently, there was a chance I wouldn’t.

  Maybe this was dying?

  No. Dying would have been kinder than this.

  “Don’t Jump,” Iago warned. “We don’t know what can happen if you do it during the Change.” He placed his hands on my shoulders to steady me to the ground I sat on and to him. “Stay with me, okay? Just. Stay.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I pressed each round into the spring of the magazine and listened to the satisfying click when it stayed put. Sounds took on new vibrations to my ear, and I had trouble not being mesmerized by all the changes and nuances of the world around me.

  Iago sat across from me at the table and did the same. “Remember when we were first learning? You weren’t worth a lick. Couldn’t even pull the chamber,” he said.

  “You’re one to talk.” I picked up the magazine and examined its smooth walls. It was simply made for a not-so-simple job. “Remember how many times he had to tell you this wasn’t a clip?”

  “‘Guns are only dangerous in the hands of imbeciles, boy!’ I thought he would explode every time!” Iago laughed as he nailed his Ringo impression.

  The change in his voice was audible, and if words could shimmer, his did. I could rip apart each letter to understand the heartbeats of every vowel and the pulse of every consonant. Punctuation? They were lightly struck xylophone keys singing loudly out into the void.

  I laughed, and the clarity in my own sound surprised me as I asked, “Well, how many times did he explain the difference between a clip and a magazine? But you always had cement in your ears back then, didn’t you?”

  “I always knew the difference. I just liked getting to him, is all.” He picked up his magazine and examined his reflection in the metal.

  “I guess this was part of the training too?” I nodded towards the cartridges on the table and frowned. “What a load of horse manure.”

  “Awe, Tex. Don’t be offended. Everyone is trained from the moment they are born. You don’t complain that Ringo potty trained you, do you?”

  Ever since Iago brought up the idea that I’d been trained my entire life, I kept trying to trace the motives behind everything Ringo and Papa ever taught me to see if there were any hidden agendas behind the lessons. Gun safety and target practice? Those definitely had to fall into the category of training.

  Even though he wasn’t there, Ringo flooded the space between Iago and me. When Ringo first started teaching us gun safety, he spread out several pistols on the Ortizes’ kitchen table. “Which one’s the Springfield XD-357?” He’d ask, and I’d point to it. Each piece of metal streamlined into the next so that black bled into black, but I knew it wasn’t a toy so I didn’t touch it until he said I could.

  “Good. How do you check to see if it’s loaded?”

  And I’d release the magazine, by clicking the small, round button so that silver metal escaped from all the black. Within the magazine, bullets layered upon each other and stacked against tiny holes so that copper and brass marked how many rounds existed.

  “Are you done now?”

  I wasn’t. I needed to check the chamber, and I tried to pull it back. It was heavy and sluggish, and I only got it back part of the way to see there was a cartridge in it.

  “Pull it like you’re mad at it,” Ringo coached.

  I let out a big grunt and yanked back on the chamber so that the bullet popped out. It used to be so difficult back then.

  Back then… I never thought I’d need to know the skill for any other purpose than target practice. Ringo used to take us out to shoot all the time, and I loved the feeling of earplugs as I walked through the caliche. The volume of the world always turned down, but other things were amplified, like my footsteps. Every step in the gravel and crunch of dirt under my boots exploded in noise and movement. It ricocheted off my body and into my ears so that I could only hear what was going on inside of me and not outside of me. The earplugs drowned out the impatience in my head as much as they drowned out the POP POP POP of the gun when I’d fire.

  Now, as I loaded the magazine with my freakishly altered sense of hearing, every nuance of every click amplified into new meanings. I sniffed back the urge to cry as I realized I’d give anything to go back to when Ringo was just a father teaching his daughter to shoot. Instead, Iago and I sat at the kitchen table in a dusty cabin in some distant universe loading magazines.

  “Seems a bit ill-prepared of you to not have these ready to go already,” I said.

  “Thought it’d be nice for you to have something normal to do after the Change,” he said.

  I laughed. “Normal. Riiiiight.” I picked up a round in my hand, and felt the smoothness of metal on my skin. “Ringo’d be proud,” I said with a grimace. Ringo. Who cared if he was proud? Who cared what he thought anymore? He was gone… I thought about the letter, and although I didn’t have it with me, I could trace the words in my memory. ‘I’m sorry that you have to go through this alone… You Stand on the Shoulders of Giants…’

  “Yeah. Normal. I guess we both need to get used to letting that word go, huh?” He laughed his oldest laugh—one I heard a million times when we were kids. Except now it sounded ancient with traces of sadness wrapped up in it. This heightened hearing was letting me hear new truths about Iago. How long had he been this unhappy?

  “Why didn’t Ringo stay with me?” I asked.

  Iago’s laugher dissipated, and I hated the look of pity that crossed his face.

  I didn’t want pity.

  I wanted answers.

  “There are things you know but won’t understand right away. Your entire life, Ringo has been your father, until suddenly he wasn’t. For most of my life, Mami and Papi were my parents, until I was thirteen and suddenly they weren’t. You have a false understanding about what they really are to you, and you hold onto truths that prevent you from seeing the bigger picture. Let go of those truths, so you can recognize the bigger gifts they’ve given us. Letting us go doesn’t mean they don’t love us. It just means they have faith in us, and this faith is proof that they love us more than they can tell us. It means they trust us to take what we’ve learned from them and do right by humanity. Give it time. You’ll see.”

  For the first time, I thought about Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz, and what it meant for Iago to know he’d be leaving them. I thought back to the ranting he did in the truck the night before, about finding out when he was thirteen what he was. That’s a little over five years of knowing he’d one day be leaving his parents behind. That was five years of a long, cancerous goodbye. I didn’t know what was worse: a long goodbye or no goodbye at all? Pity for Iago replaced any I may have felt for myself. Discovering you’ve been born and raised for the soul purpose of protecting a snot-nosed kid was bound to disintegrate the
patience of a saint, and Iago was just a boy at the time. No wonder he said such hurtful things back then.

  At the dance, he said he was going through things. That he thought it was my fault. Turns out that it was. If I didn’t exist… but that wouldn’t have saved him from his goodbyes either. Iago was still a Saltador, and if I wasn’t his mission, he would have had a different one instead.

  I took in a gulp of air and felt the freeing feeling of complete forgiveness. It was a forgiveness I’d been trying so hard to force into my head—one that used to feel so impossible. Now that it was the only thing left to feel, I could un-cloud my heart. There was no reason to hang onto my anger at Iago. In fact, there was probably no reason to hold onto anything from the past—including these ridiculous memories involving Ringo.

  I pushed the magazine back into the pistol and stood up.

  Iago tossed a flannel shirt at me. “I know it’s a bit baggy, but what you’re wearing isn’t exactly practical for toting a gun across the Multiverse. We won’t hold onto them too long. We just need them until we get to the rendezvous point and you get better at Hopping and Jumping.”

  “Are they that necessary? Can’t we just Jump away if we’re in danger?” I stuck my arms through the shirt and felt every fiber of the scratchy fabric. It made my arm hairs stand up and my skin prickle as I felt the rage of a thousand nails being dragged across a chalkboard.

  “Sure. We can. But so can they. So we have these.” He holstered his gun under his jacket. “We don’t aim to kill, but we do aim to stop. A bullet can be dug out, and a Saltador can heal. But if they are injured just badly enough, they won’t dare follow us. Jumping with a severe injury can—“

  I gasped before he could finish, and he paused to let me understand. Papa’s condition took on entirely new meanings, and I asked, “So it wasn’t Alzheimers?”

  “No.”

  I felt a surge of sadness pull through me. “How’d it happen?” I asked.

  “Corbin had other duties besides us, and he often traveled between worlds to take care of them. He’d always jumble his trail back to us in case he was being tracked, but one day, the Calvary found him. They tortured him, nearly to death, before he escaped. He beaconed to Ringo at their safety-verse, and by the time Ringo brought him back to Geronimo, his mind was addled. The thing is, if you have extensive injuries and you Jump before they heal, it can severely injure or kill you.”

  “So the Calvary—?”

  “Wants to find you as much as the Shadow Boxers do.”

  “And Papa risked hurting himself to save me?” I looked up to the ceiling. I wished I could talk to Papa. I wished I could have him explain it all to me, but he was gone in ways I was just starting to understand. But Papa always said, “Wish in one hand, shit in the other. See which one fills up first,” and he was right. Wishing wouldn’t change anything.

  “Corbin knew what he was doing,” Iago said. It was starting to get annoying how easily he read my thoughts, but I guess he’d spent years studying just how to do that. “Texi. It’ll be easy for you to disregard compassion for those who want you dead, but you need to remember that a snake strikes out of fear just as much as it does out of hunger. People do not understand you, and that causes fear. No matter what political agendas factions have, remember they are still a part of us. The life of a Saltador is sacred, and taking any life should give reason to pause. Those who caught Corbin remembered this. They only injured him enough to keep him with them. He would have healed had he not Jumped. It was Corbin’s decision to Jump because we all do crazy things to protect the people we believe in.”

  Iago reached out to grab my wrist, and when his skin touched mine, I could feel every crack of every wrinkle and every fingerprint swirl. When he pulled up the screen, the green was a newer shade of lime, and when he entered the numbers, there were no blurred edges. I could read it clearly despite the shapes beyond it.

  “You’re gonna be okay. You know that, right?” Iago asked.

  I nodded. “I’m always okay… This is nothing a good cup of coffee can’t fix.”

  Iago laughed his old laugh again, and I realized I could get used the sound of it. When we were kids, he used to be funny. He’d invent all kinds of ridiculous rules to the worlds we made up in our heads, and he always knew just what to say to make everyone explode around him. He even knew how to talk Mrs. Ortiz out of any punishment with a perfectly timed joke.

  “Texi, can I ask you something?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “It should have been impossible for you to Hop without the Planck Activation Bracelet activated. Was there anything that triggered it to happen? Any stress? Trauma? Other then the unfortunate dance fiasco?”

  “No.” The last person I wanted to tell about Sully trying to kill me was Iago. I reached back with my other hand to holster the gun underneath the flannel shirt. “I guess what you said makes sense now, about those rumors meaning absolutely nothing.”

  “I’m not gonna lie. I’m glad we get to avoid them.” His smile grew soft on his face. “We have to do an Interim Jump first. It’s easier to get to different Veins directly from a Strand,” he explained as he pointed to the numbers he’d just entered. I didn’t force him with anymore questions. It almost felt like by opening my mouth, my entire soul would pour out of it. How was I supposed to accept it? Me, of all people, able to travel the Multiverse? Everything he explained remained in manageable, bite-sized pieces in the form of repetition. As he explained the basics of Strands and Veins, I didn’t worry when I didn’t completely understand because I knew he’d go over it again until I did. But then he saw the confusion on my face and grinned. “It’s okay to admit you didn’t get it. I can try to explain again.”

  I nodded. “Do it then.”

  “So, pretend the Multiverse has a system of roads zipping through it. All these roads eventually lead back to Gaia, but they also stretch out into the unknown. Part of an Explorer’s job is to map these roads. A Strand is like an Interstate Highway, while Veins are like the country roads the branch off from the Strands. Veins get a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the gist.”

  “Now that makes sense.” He began entering numbers into the boxes labeled Strand and Vein, but then I noticed the box labeled Energy was filled in with the word “Stag.” I pointed to it and asked, “What about that guy?”

  “It goes back to what I’ve been trying to explain to you. The Veins fall into two categories. Last night, I told you about a Stagnation. The other category is a Producer. A Producer is a line that Explorers have not yet deemed Stagnate, and there’s still the possibility in finding the Optimal Path within that Vein. A Producer means it’s currently being explored, and when we enter coordinates, the Planck Activation Bracelet will tell us if there is a Saltador gathering intel on that Vein. If the Explorer eventually discovers that the Culture Pulse is Stagnate, they label it Stagnate to stop Explorers from waisting their time on a dying Vein. And, finally, if it’s a Vein that hasn’t been explored yet, you’ll see an X in the Energy box.”

  “Do Saltadors have any reason to go to Stagnate universes?”

  Iago nodded. “They are still useful. Watchers are placed on them to raise children. Others study them, trying to discover what is causing the Vein to die, or undertaking other types of research. Maybe a Saltador likes the atmosphere for Vacation Leave…”

  “Dude. Earth to Iago. You’re losing me again. What’s the Optimal Path?”

  Iago laughed. “Okay. Let’s say there’s a cluster of trees in some random forest—“

  “And if a tree falls in that forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” I couldn’t help myself. Snarky just had a way of exploding out of me. It made me think of every eye roll I couldn’t contain around Ringo. Iago explained things so much like him, that it brought out the worst in me.

  He laughed. “No, dorkus.”

  “Sorry. Trees. Forest. Continue.”

  “Well every year, they drop seed after see
d, but only when the situation is optimal, does the seed grow. But even then, sometimes it doesn’t survive. It doesn’t get enough sunlight, or its roots are too close to another’s and they tangle and strangle. There are always obstacles to growth. Yet when you compare a haphazard forest to a cultivated orchard, you notice that the trees in the orchard are healthier because they have plenty of room to grow and expand. They get plenty of sun and don’t have to compete for space. Saltadors are taught that there is a balance to nature. There is a time to help mold it and a time to set it free. Saltadors attempt to cultivate the exploration of the Multiverse like a farmer cultivates an orchard because we look for the Veins with the most potential for optimal growth.”

  I swallowed. “That’s a lot of responsibility.”

  “Don’t let it bog you down. There are other perks to this job.”

  “Okay… I think…”

  “We should get going. You’ll catch on sooner than later, so for now, just enjoy the ride.”

  I laughed. “I’m ready when you are,” I said, nodding towards the screens hovering between us, though I wasn’t sure I was ready for anything anymore.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  When we entered into the Nothing, escape flooded over my entire body. It felt different this time because I felt more connected to the Energy pushing me forward into the Something. I was like sugar being dissolved into hot tea until I became something else entirely. When we came back into reality, I recognized the park from pictures I’d seen in Mrs. Ortiz’s living room. Guell Park. The entire place reminded me of gingerbread house competitions during Christmas. Mrs. Ortiz always said Gaudi was a real-life Willie Wonka of art, because he created visions that were edible to the eyes. The mosaic benches looked like they were made of hard candy, and the roof of the cottage looked like whipped frosting, and people strolled in every possible direction, taking photos and pointing at things that inspired them.