Unbound

A born leader, he’d overheard the new soothsayer, Tekla, claim of him, and while he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be leading—a parade like the one they’d seen earlier today? Maybe a band like the one with the drums that’d rumbled down the street? — he’d liked the sound of it.

So while his parents sipped from plastic cups, making small talk with the mortals gathered on the highest green of the SandStone golf course, JJ waved a rope he’d found lying in the asphalt parking lot, and pretended it was his mother’s barbed whip. He would inherit the conduit when it was time, and he’d wield it as deftly as she did, unfurling it in the air to strike at fleeing Shadows and their vicious canine wardens.

JJ became so entrenched in these imaginary battles that he had threaded two bunkers and a green by the time the first rocket shot into the sky. Amid the distant laughter and clapping of the hillside audience, he froze under that pulsing sky, the rope slipping from his palms. He felt the same sort of wonder as when his father blocked a thirty-foot dunk in skyball, or when his mother made a concrete wall appear out of nowhere with the mere flick of her wrist. Who knew mortals were capable of something both beautiful and explosive? Each detonated flare thrummed inside his chest like a second, irregular heartbeat.

He jolted when his father’s hand dropped to his shoulder. At some point, as light had carved whorls into the sky, they’d found him. “This is what we’re preserving for everyone else,” his father told him, his characteristic passion making each word sharp. “Every person has a right to the small things, you see? The little happinesses. After all, those are the ones that make life most worth living. It’s what we’re fighting for.”

He touched his wife’s hand as he said it.

And JJ saw that it was good. Cotton candy and popcorn and sticky fingers, and a slightly sick stomach when it was all over. JJ only realized he’d fallen asleep when he felt himself being lifted, then settled again in the car they’d borrowed for the occasion. Outside of their troop’s sanctuary, his parents were believed to be too hard-strapped to afford their own vehicle. They took the bus when posing as mortals, but most often, they ran with a speed that would make a cheetah envious.

And this was JJ’s dream as they drove back to the hotel where they’d spend the night before returning to their subterranean lair at dawn—he was outrunning a big cat, legs wheeling so fast that the beast eventually slowed, and bowed to him as the superior athlete. JJ climbed atop the animal, his right as the competition’s victor, and was carried at breakneck speed along the neon-slicked streets, whizzing past the giant hotels his parents had pointed out to him hours before.

He startled awake when the cat reared suddenly, though they would tell him later that the animal’s awful cry was really the screeching of brakes. He opened his eyes to see his mother’s face, eyes fierce and burning into his. But it was her lighted chest that riveted him. Normally dormant beneath her skin, her glyph was fired, warning of danger, and her right hand curled tightly around her whip.

“Stay,” she said, and then she was gone.

“On the floor,” his father snapped, and like the sparklers JJ had waved only hours before, he, too, was only a bright trail for the eye to follow in the night.

JJ’s heart thrummed inside his small frame, chest tight, as if his Arien glyph wished to burst to life as well. Danger! screamed some primal voice inside him. Flee!

But his father had said to stay on the floor.

It will be even safer beneath the car.

He didn’t know why he’d listen to some unfamiliar voice over his own father’s, but if he was outside he could see his parents, and as long as he could see them, he’d be okay.

Of course, even as he clambered over the front seat, even before the first battle cry ripped the hot, velvet sky—probably even before he’d been tossed from the back of the dream cheetah—he knew they were at war. These were Shadows. Rotted sulphur and smoke pooled in the night sky, stinging his eyes just as in his ward mother’s bedtime stories.

Still, he blinked away the burn, searching for his parents along the rocky desert vista, every outcropping a bumpy threat. Inching forward beneath the car’s chassis, he settled in time to see his mother’s whip unfurl, barbed tips sparking off the light from her chest, which also threw her drawn porcelain features into stark relief. She was feral.

The Shadow she fought was a charred skeleton.

“Mama!” The word squeaked from him. His strong mother, his laughing and vibrant mother, couldn’t be injured by that demon! Tears welled and he blinked them away—keep them in sight! — so he saw when the Shadow’s head swiveled his way.

“No!”