Those Who Shatter

Do you remember how those words tumbled from old Mariamne’s weathered lips and exploded right into us? They left a crater, and I tried to jump the divide like the game of hopscotch we would play in the Orbs Hall. One time, you drew the chalked boxes too big, and I rolled my ankle trying to force my legs to grow as long as yours so that I could make the leap. We nearly destroyed all of those lives on the shelf that day.

But I forgave you.

And I’m trying to forgive Mariamne for placing that testament grenade into your hands.

I was twelve, and you were fourteen; she called us children. You hated that. You would flick your neatly cut blond hair from your forehead as if that was the thing that irritated you.

“Come, child,” she whispered, wringing our hands between her darker ones. You wrinkled your nose when her iron curls tickled the palm of your hand. She leaned closer.

“Children,” she persisted; her words smelled like spiced licorice and coffee, “do you wish to hear what has been foretold?”

Both of us knew a Diviner’s prophecy was not to be trusted; that the only truths we were taught to accept are the ones read in the Orbs. That is our truth: only Seers can read the Orbs. Diviners only read minds, and minds are liars of emotions. Still, that daring glint flashed in the depths of your amber eyes as you tilted your head and wordlessly challenged my apprehension.

“Ready or not?” I mouthed, thankful that Mariamne’s warm hand hid my shaking one.

Your reply was instantaneous, filled with the promise we had made two years earlier. “I come.”

Together, we turned to look back up into the old Diviner’s toothy, sagging smile. Your fingers brushed the back of my hand, drawing familiar patterns there: ‘Lies,’ you wrote into my skin, ‘only fun lies.’

Out loud, you said, “Go on and tell us then, Diviner.”

The impact of her prophecy still rocks me backwards, causes my outstretched hand to recoil into emptiness, a tangible nothing that acts as a barrier, and I’m caught between the empty wall at my back and the unknown that lies outstretched beyond my fingertips.

Back then, there had always been something behind me that I could grab onto.

You.

Mariamne’s eyes met mine, her pupils blown out in proportion, and her prophecy became spiders that crawled down my spine. “There lives within you a secret you know not,” she said, her words slow like molasses, but her stare burned with the explosions of stars when she turned to face you.

“My child, your past is a ghost that haunts your steps, but a power rumbles the very bones of you that will fracture this skeleton.”

I think you laughed.

We were young, and we did not know. I had never met a Diviner before, had never even witnessed one within the Orbs Hall. They had always been cloaked figures, an absence in the Shelves that always exhaled their presence in voiceless whispers and enticing mysteries.

It’s a mystery I wish we had never unmasked.

When I look into the eyes of others, their secrets crumble into my hands, and I squeeze them into fists, forcing them to bleed into me.

Hidden in the depths of their pupils are words left unsaid. Mysteries. Hushed murmurs that drift through the clogs and wheels of their minds: she’s our threat? but her arms are so thin—weak girl—looks nothing like her mother except those eyes— hasn’t been Settling for months. They are chinks wedged into the gears, halting the thoughts from forming. From taking shape completely.

But they’re still there, seeping outward from their pupils into colored irises, and I can’t help but wonder what they read in me.

“Guinevere James,” the woman in front of me begins as if my name itself were the equivalent of a ’Hello,” or a “How do you do?” or a “Please sit down so that this inquisition can begin.”

Serah Mallory’s spine remains stiff and straight against the royal blue velvet backing of her chair. It is slightly raised on a marble platform from where I slouch. Her position marks her as the Over-Seer of the Orb’s Conclave. A bun of coiled, copper hair sits on top of her angular head, pulled so tightly that it makes her lips pucker like lemon zest.

“Miss James, you are here to account for your recent failure to respond to the calls made to your ring.”

The simple, silver band gives a start on my scarred, left hand like it heard its name. I clamp my fingers over the slight burn of the metal, twirling it around and around and around—“Perhaps it is broken,” I suggest.

Ewan Maccabee offers a grunt. His mouth sags into a sloppy frown as he leans forward on his meaty elbows. Though he’s one of the Seer Elders, he hardly ever speaks up. At least, I’ve never heard him during one of my consuls before. Maybe that explains why his voice grates as he says, “If the ring has broken, then it shows there are no bounds to your negligence, Miss James.”

“She must be Shelved,” hushes a voice from the back of the chamber, “if the prophecy is true.”

As if on cue, whispers erupt around me, each of the conclave members falling into the recitation: “Each shard of these orbs are numbered...the souls inside screaming for two…shelves will fall around the pair who are left…the era of Seers come to pass.”

I shiver.

“It is not.” The statement snaps so hard that the securely-spun knot on top of Serah’s head jolts another inch down her forehead. “It is not truth.”

The room shifts, a collective breath inhaled and held for a second. Air presses outwards, expanding the marble walls, and then it releases in a rush of objections.

“Diviners are nothing but heresy…”

“Since we lost Adelaide, the Void appears in the orbs—”

“…a heresy that will divide us all—”

“Serah, that Crosse boy took his life—”

I flinch my fingers inward, the tips of my fingernails marking crescent moons into the palm of my hand. My ring constricts once more around my middle finger, and while the council exhausts themselves with the argument that I’ve heard them debate for the past six months, I unfurl my hand from the ring to glance at it. Engravings dance like flames as they carve themselves into the silver of the thick band. Letters. A name. The next disturbed, shaking orb that I’m meant to take care of for the sake of the Seers. I only have time to catch the first few letters—Jam—before my skin burns for another reason entirely.

Serah watches me, but my ring has already cooled and fits loosely once more. I can’t shake the feeling that Serah was able to read the whole damned name before I could even read a fraction of its part.

She tips her pointed chin down. “Show it to me.”

By the time I thrust out my hand, the carvings have all but disappeared. Unfortunately, fooling Serah Malloy is hardly easy; the black of her eyes is a leech that feeds on subtle glances, nervous ticks, and apparently fading names carved into silver. Something flashes in the dark clouds of her gaze.

“Well, so you have it, Consuls,” she announces with a sharp clap of her hands. “Her ring functions properly.”

Ewan grumbles once more but sinks backwards into his chair, dissolving back into silence. In contrast, Serah’s head doesn’t even twitch a millimeter. “What was the name, Guinevere?”

“I don’t know.” I pull my wrist back into my chest, flipping my dark curls over my shoulder. “I didn’t read it.”

A beat of silence hovers between us. She wonders if she can force it out of me; I wonder how much she expects to learn from the extraction: Jam. It reminds me of perfectly browned toast, of eating brunch on the Malibu coast as waves crashed pleasantly in the background, the salt from the ocean sticking to my hair and frizzing it in a way that was wonderfully peaceful.

Unlike here.

“The orbs have been growing restless,” Serah begins instead, resting her forearms on the edges of her chair as she leans over and down to me. “These past six months have been hard on all of us, not just you.”

My chest pinches, and my derisive snort turns into a scream as it squeezes into my esophagus. The pressure releases itself in half-choked words. “He’s gone—”

“Neglecting the orbs in your Providence will not bring him back, Vera.”

Vera. The bringer of truth. That name has the potential to shatter my bones until I am nothing but a floppy, uncontrollable sack sewn together with regrets and stuffed with anger that will pull at my seams until I limp.

My voice cracks. “Don’t call me that!”

For a moment, Serah simply stares, her fingers tapping against the polished wood of the throne’s arms. The tap, tap, tap sounds more like a snap of a stick in the silence of an undisturbed path. And I can hear her backtracking, pedaling backward with a small, sad smile that reveals itself in her voice as it lowers.

“You are a Settler, and we cannot afford to lose another one.”

What she doesn’t realize is I cannot be lost because I haven’t been given the privacy to even try to run.

Her heavy sigh is contemplative. “What do you aspire to be, Miss James?”

The answer is nothing but robotic now. “A Seer.”

She nods, and I focus on her bun as it bobs in the aftermath of her head’s sympathetic destruction. Someone mutters an objection; I place a vague guess on Ewan.

“That name will appear again,” Serah continues with a pointed gesture to my hand. “The orb will not settle on its own. Catch it before it breaks.”

It is clear that my time is up. Here I come, the tight line of her mouth seems to say.

But I’m not ready.

That first time we met, you broke my fall.

I had been sitting in my backyard, toeing meaningless names into the drought dirt that spread out around the one tree on my block—Billy Clive, Sophie Dee, Jesse Roes. I was imagining how those words would look on the hibernating ring on my finger. They would carve themselves into the silver, a burning hand of some god, and I would spin it twice counter-clockwise, just like my mom. She had been training me for two years with stories of the Seers, of the shelved orbs of the Hall, of the glittering lives that Settlers protect.

Of the Orbs Hall: the ethereal dwelling of the Seers, who read the orbs, and the orbs themselves that hold the past, present, and the future of every living soul in the Peripherals.

Of the Peripherals: the earthly world of humans. The world from which Seers are barred but in which Settlers protectively reside. Settlers are the only ones who can dip a toe into both the mystical and real, the ones who are charged with keeping back the Shades who threaten the humans with shattering orbs and dragging them to the Void.

Of the Void: a place of chaos and pain and suffering. It exists in the empty space between the Hall and the Peripherals. A black area of nothing, crawling with Shades, the faceless demonic creatures capable of tearing about a human’s mind. It is the complete antithesis of what I believed the Orbs Hall to be.

In all of my lessons, my mom had described the Orbs Hall as a stained glass window tilting just over a precipice, clinging onto the balance with a clumsy grip.

For me, I forged the hall in my head into the world’s greatest library. A building of glass that breathed life in the silence of the aisles where orbs sat like stars in a galaxy of astronomical gazers.

I erased the names in the dirt and started with a new one: Jericho Crosse. The Settler-in-training, an inheritor like me, who would become my Comrade, my oath sworn partner, once we both had awakened our rings and the duty had been passed down to us. I wrote your name in the dust and then turned the silver band around my finger. I had only just received it days earlier, a birthday present from my mother.

I spun it. Once. Twice—

An invisible hand grabbed a nonexistent rope attached to my navel and yanked. I fell through my backyard, through space itself, and onto a hard, twelve-year old body.

“Oomph,” you protested, face-first into the floor. You flipped your head sideways so one cheek was resting on the cool, wooden floor. “Must be an amateur.” You shoved at my shoulders and rolled my shocked body off of you.

The gasp stuck in my throat, and I coughed against the blockade, rubbing a hand over my lower stomach. Through my curtain of thick, ebony hair, I stared up at you. I had to look no further than the identical ring on your finger to know where I was. My surprise tore through me so sharply that it left my exclamation breathless.

“I’m here.”

“If you weren’t here, you would be nowhere, and then you’d be in the Void.” You distracted your smirk by brushing off any wrinkles our collision had made on your finely pressed slacks.

“Couldn’t I be there?”

You quirked an expression. “The Orbs Hall is both here and there. Everything else spirals to the Void.”

I scrambled onto my hands, but I couldn’t keep my eyes on you because they were too busy taking in everything else. My imagined glass library was actually made of cherry wood and marble, swirling together into a glorious chamber that smelled of something both beautiful and ancient, a wilted flower dried in between the pages of a book. It felt like something I would see in sleep, and the only thing real was you, so I answered you back to convince myself.

“Know it all,” I muttered. “And what about the Peripherals—Ouch!” I hissed, reaching for the stinging sensation that had abruptly swept around the circumference directly above my middle knuckle.

For the first time, the ring vibrated against my skin.

I wasn’t sure whether to scream in fear or excitement.

Your amber eyes followed the surprised sound of my pain, and then you stooped down and took my wrist in your slightly sweaty hand. “You’re getting a name.” You held my hand up to my face so I could see the glowing band. “Read it.”

The letters curved and shone, more radiating than I had ever imagined they would look against the olive complexion of my skin. In that second, twisting my wrist one way and then the other, I pretended that I resembled my mother so closely that everyone would mistake me as her.

Adelaide Paqad, they would call me.

With a hushed voice, I read off the words. “Robert James.”

Your grip slipped down my wrist, and you looked at me sideways. I saw the recognition in your overly analytical observance of my struck expression. They lingered on the light blue of my eyes.

“You’re Guinevere James, aren’t you?”

My name could have frozen clocks, and then Robert James snuck into the time between you and I before it had even strung its meaning between my ears. The name suspended there with a fist outstretched and then struck a cord that gave weight to the air going to my lungs. And, suddenly, I felt like I had been swallowing all of these events in fast-forward up until this point: my backyard was nothing but a blur of brown and green, a flash of the twisting ring around my finger, a split-second snapshot of your blond ego pushed into the floor, and there had been no time for the questions that had dizzied themselves in my head. No time to marvel at the Hall I had dreamed of seeing.

Because my speed broke to a halt with that name.

“Robert James,” you repeated. “You know him, then?”

Your question was a statement, like you were a Diviner who was able to pry into my mind. It was my response that was marked with hesitance, a terrifying question mark dipping off into an answer that I couldn’t foresee.

I traced his name with the tip of my fingernail and paused when I reached the last letter that was already fading.

“It’s my dad.”

Click, click, click.

Sharp heels on the floor punctuated my comprehension, and I glanced up, half-expecting to see my mom, her wavy, black hair shining down her shoulders. My father was within my mother’s Providence; my father’s orb shook more than others because his thoughts were always precarious and rickety, jumping from one idea to another. A prime soul for a Shade to attach itself to. It was the inventor in him, but it caused his name to appear on my mother’s ring often enough that she had to Settle him frequently, banishing the demonic energies that found him to be an easy target.

Depression, anxiety, uncertainty, fear. It was all a feast to a Shade.

So, if my father was unsettled, then my mom couldn’t be here because she would be there, in the Peripherals, saving my father.

But Robert James’s name had circled my ring, not my mom’s.

You gripped me tighter and pulled me to my feet as the click, click, click pumped quicker down the hall. More footsteps joined the percussion, and my heart sped up with the music until it was punching against my rib cage. That was when I realized the noise. Shouts, steps, crashes. A cacophony of signals that was as unfamiliar to the Orbs Hall as receiving a name was for me.

Your hand held my fingers tightly, and the name on my ring burned between us. “My name is Jericho Crosse,” you articulated, a tone much older than twelve, your deep ochre eyes shining far too astutely for your age, “and I will stay with you.”