The Dark Talent

  “How crazy?”

  “Way crazy.”

  “I’m sold. What is it?”

  “I need you to dive down the hole we made into the Highbrary,” I said. “Himalaya and Folsom are in here with a team of soldiers, and they’re trapped. I want you to land Penguinator, pick them up, then escape.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “That is crazy. I’ll do it.”

  “Once they’re aboard, retreat.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ve got another way out,” I lied.

  I didn’t want more people dying because of the stupid things I’d said to the monarchs. Grandpa, Dif, and I would have to find our own way out. Smedrys always escaped from these kinds of scrapes, right?

  “Any news on bringing the Talents back?” Kaz asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Pity. I keep feeling like I can almost get my Talent working.…” He signed off, and I texted him Himalaya’s number, then sent a text to Himalaya too, telling her to prepare for Kaz’s arrival. Using technology again was pretty weird; I kept expecting the phone to melt in my fingers or talk back to me or something.

  My mother and Dif slowed ahead of me. Could they power glass too? I wanted to test the theory, but I dithered, wondering what would happen if I gave Mother this information.

  The authenticator, I thought. It was going haywire in her hands, without me touching it. She might be interfering with the glass that runs it.

  More questions. Feeling exhausted and confused, I joined the other two at a set of metal doors. The lights on the sides of the entrance glowed green. We could enter.

  If we really wanted to. That was questionable, since as the doors opened, I could see that most of the floor inside was missing.

  Yes, missing. The only thing resembling a floor was the long walkway leading from our doorway to a platform in the center of the room. That platform had a hut on it, like the archives out in the main chamber. I could see bookshelves within.

  Other than that, the room was a pit. A familiar wub-wub-wub came from below. There was no ceiling, just a long dark opening like there had been in the other ventilation shaft. Wind rushed from the open tunnel above, getting sucked downward by those fans to be pushed throughout the entire Highbrary.

  “Fans,” I said. “They built the Forgotten Language archive above a pit of doom?”

  “Librarians,” my mother said, “share more with Smedrys than either would like to admit. Both will bend over backward to accommodate sheer dramatic effect.”

  I shivered, but there was nothing to do but cross that walkway. At least it looked more sturdy than the rope bridge had been. My mother led, with me next, and Dif in the rear. There weren’t any handrails, and though the walkway was a good four or five feet wide, I felt like it was a tightrope—wind tossing my hair and clothing, each step threatening to topple me down into those fan blades.

  Never was I so happy to enter a library as I was to step off that walkway and into the room of that little hut, where—fortunately—the wind was far less severe. The place seemed empty of people. It was lit by electric lights on the walls and stocked with hundreds of texts in the Forgotten Language, many of which were scrolls.

  “Empty,” Dif said, hands on his hips. “Weren’t we supposed to find your father here?”

  “Oh, he’s here,” I said.

  “Where?” my mother asked.

  “He has Disguiser’s Lenses on.”

  “Haven’t you been paying attention?” my mother demanded. “The Highbrary has precautions in place against things like that. Anyone using Lenses to imitate someone else will glow.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said. “Attica is counting on that, as it helps the disguise. Isn’t that right, Father?”

  Something moved beside a bookcase, coming out from a hiding place. A ghostly figure, glowing, spectral clothing hanging in tatters. It was wearing a monocle.

  One of the undead Curators, the Librarians who haunted Alexandria. Or someone dressed like one.

  “How did you guess?” the ghost said, using my father’s voice.

  Chapter

  18

  “The Librarians are afraid of a ghost,” I said to him. “Specifically one of the Alexandrian types. And who better to imitate one of them than the only man who joined their ranks, then escaped? Besides, if Librarian defenses are going to make you glow, why not incorporate that into your disguise?” I shrugged. Made sense to me.

  “Well done,” my father said, the ghostly image vanishing—replaced by his normal form. Attica Smedry was a tall, handsome man with too much smile to him. He wore a pair of Lenses and had on a stylish Free Kingdoms outfit that—in my opinion—looked a lot like pajamas.

  When my father and I had been together in Nalhalla, he’d been quick to endear himself to everyone he considered important.

  I hadn’t been included.

  Perhaps that’s the fable of these books. You, reader, may have a beef* with your parents, but chances are they’re not anywhere near as bad as mine. At least your mother doesn’t belong to an evil cult that has conquered half the world, and at least your father isn’t inadvertently trying to destroy the other half.

  “It … is a good disguise, Attica,” my mother said. “Librarians who saw it would wonder, ‘Why is one of the Curators of Alexandria floating around our halls?’ instead of wondering if you’re a spy. They spent their time trying to solve the wrong puzzle. By standing out, your true motives became invisible. It’s brilliant, as usual.”

  “Thank you,” my father said.

  Mother reached into the pocket of her jacket and took out a handgun.

  “Mother!” I cried out. “The rules! Your promise!”

  “Promises mean nothing,” she said, “when the fate of a planet is on the line.”

  “This is an old argument, Shasta,” my father said, raising his hands to the sides. “One I’m bored of hearing. It won’t destroy the world; it will simply destroy the Librarians.”

  “Smedry Talents?” she said. “In the hands of everyone?”

  “Equality,” my father said.

  “Fame for you.”

  “Don’t be petty,” my father snapped. “This will break Biblioden’s control. The Librarians want to pretend the world is ‘normal’ and ‘straightforward’? They want to ignore the Free Kingdoms? Well, let them ignore this. A Talent for every person!”

  “Insanity.”

  “Inevitability,” he said. “You can’t stop it, not even if you kill me. Someone will crack this eventually. It might as well be me.”

  “It always comes back to your ego,” she said, raising the gun. I felt a spike of alarm. “Everything always comes down to that.”

  My father met her eyes. “He’s returned, you know.”

  My mother didn’t speak.

  “Biblioden,” my father said. “He has reappeared. I suspect he knew his plots needed centuries to grow, and so he found a way to put himself to sleep and wait, giving his kingdom time to expand. Now that the victory is within his grasp—the end of the Free Kingdoms—he has returned to deliver the killing blow. Well, I’ll give the people a weapon to fight against him. Let’s see how the Librarians do when every person they try to dominate has the Breaking Talent!”

  “You’re mad,” my mother whispered. Though she held the gun steady, I could see a tear on her cheek.

  “Mother!” I repeated. “Mother!”

  She glanced at me.

  “You promised,” I said. “I talk to him first.”

  “He won’t change, Alcatraz. He never changes.”

  “But do you really want to pull that trigger without knowing?” I asked. “Without giving him one more chance?”

  My mother hesitated, then sighed and lowered her gun.

  A beam of light shot from my father’s right eye and smashed into her, tossing her backward. She hit the floor, unconscious, and the gun skidded from her fingers toward the doorway.

  “Mother!” I screamed, rushing to her side.


  “Oh, don’t worry,” my father said, chuckling. “It’s only a Concussor’s Lens. She’ll wake up with a headache in a few hours, knowing I bested her yet again. She’s used to that by now, I do suspect.”

  I turned my mother onto her back. Indeed she was breathing, but the side of her face was bright red, as if she’d been hit really hard.

  “Hmmm,” my father said. “The Lens is acting up again. I didn’t realize I’d put so much power through it. Well, good job getting her to put down the gun, my boy! That was some solid teamwork there.”

  Now I was “my boy”?

  “Dif,” I said. “Go out in front of the hut here and watch for Grandfather. He said he was coming. Give me warning if Librarians come instead.”

  “Sure thing,” Dif said, slipping out of the hut’s front.

  My father continued chuckling to himself as he removed a stack of hidden notebooks from behind a bookshelf. “Shasta really should have guessed that I was wearing two different Lenses,” he said. “Disguiser’s Lens in one eye, Concussor’s in the other. One of the oldest tricks in the book, even if it is challenging to wear two different Lenses at once.”

  I reluctantly left Shasta on the ground. She was a bad mother, but not a bad person—at least she was trying to do what was right. I didn’t have the same confidence about my father.

  “Here, my boy, let me show you what I’ve discovered!” Attica sat down at a table, swapping his Lenses for a different pair. I recognized these new ones. Translator’s Lenses. Those were the first type of Lenses I’d ever owned—at least, if you counted the bag of sand that arrived for me on my birthday.

  “We really can do this,” my father said, flipping through his notes, pushing aside a stack of Forgotten Language texts. To my unaided eyes, they just looked like scribbles on a page—and not even in a “this is a language I don’t know” way. It resembled the squiggles and loops a toddler might draw.

  “Father, I’m not convinced we want to give everyone Talents,” I said, looking over his shoulder at his notes. “What if Mother’s right? What if this will cause a disaster?”

  “Nonsense,” Father said. “Son, you have to understand. Your mother is a Librarian. In her heart she’s terrified of change—not to mention frightened of the idea of common people being outside her control. I mean, look what she did to you during your youth.”

  And you were any better? I thought. At least she’d kept an eye on me. Who knows where Attica had been for most of that time?

  “What I’ve discovered here is revolutionary,” my father said. “It changes everything.”

  “What do you mean?” I needed to get him talking, to stall long enough for Grandfather to arrive. I felt completely incapable when dealing with my father, but Grandpa … he’d know what to do.

  “It’s all here,” my father said, spreading out his hands. “The history of the Incarna. How they went about bringing Smedry Talents into the world.”

  “Those Talents destroyed them,” I said, shivering.

  “No, they didn’t.” Attica turned to me, eyes twinkling. He looked like his father at that moment. “That’s the secret, Son. That’s what everyone’s been wrong about. The Talents weren’t responsible for the destruction of Incarna.”

  “Alcatraz the First thought they were,” I said. “He left a warning about the Breaking Talent. He called it … what, the ‘Bane of Incarna’?”

  “Alcatraz the First was a fool,” my father said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “He hated the Talent, said it had betrayed him. These records claim that it was not because his Talent destroyed his people—they insist his anger was because his Talent failed to save his people.”

  “Failed to … Huh?”

  “I’m not sure what it means,” my father said, voice growing softer as he flipped through his notes. “But these books are clear. The Talents were created to stop the destruction of Incarna, after the place was already in danger. I don’t know how they were supposed to help. But I do know that they didn’t destroy the Incarna—what really brought the civilization down was power. Energy.”

  He opened to a page and tapped it with the back of his fingers before continuing. “Energy drives the world, Son. Oil, coal, brightsand. The Incarna invented all kinds of glass, but their means of powering these discoveries was limited. Brightsand was so hard for them to mine. Oculators were extremely rare, and could only use specific, specialized types of Lenses. They wanted something else, something more. And they found it. A source of power so vast, it could charge all the glass they wanted it to.”

  “What was it?” I asked, growing genuinely interested.

  “Something dangerous,” my father whispered. “I don’t know yet what it was. But they were determined to use it. They found it unfair that there were so few Oculators. They all wanted to be like Oculators and have glass to use however they wanted. But this power they discovered, they couldn’t control it. It was too much for them.”

  And suddenly I understood.

  The destruction of Incarna.

  The column of light.

  The reason I could power glass with a touch.

  And the truth behind the Talents. The reason they acted out so much, when we didn’t want them to.

  “It’s us,” I whispered. “We’re the power source.”

  “What’s that?” my father said.

  “They did something to our family line,” I said.

  The pillar of light in my vision—it was like the column of destruction from a Firebringer’s Lens.

  “They created us,” I said, “to power their glass and give their culture energy. They created us too strong though, and glass started to go crazy around us. Like it’s doing now. They made us all Oculators—no, not just Oculators, but some type of super-Oculators, capable of charging all kinds of glass.”

  “Interesting,” my father said.

  “Most of the Talents mimic the powers of Lenses,” I said. “What if the Talents are an outgrowth of what happened when the Incarna created us? Or … no, Father, you said they were intended to help somehow. Perhaps they bestowed the Talents as a way to stop the destruction. A way to funnel off the energy.

  “That makes sense.… It’s starting to happen to Kaz and Himalaya too. It’s stronger in Grandpa, me, and you because we’re also Oculators. Naturally born ones, magnifying the power the Incarna gave us. Alcatraz the First was one too. And now that the Talents are gone, the power source has nowhere to go. It’s building up, and releasing when we touch glass—any of us. But how did they give us the Talents in the first place?”

  “Interesting,” my father said.

  I looked at him. He wasn’t even paying attention to me! He was reading another page, nodding absently, but didn’t seem to have heard what I’d told him.

  “Father, how did the Incarna give us the Talents?”

  “Hmm?”

  “The Talents,” I said. “How did the Incarna bring them to us?”

  “Oh, well, it has to do with something they called the ‘dark powers.’ I think I can replicate what they did, though I’ll need to go to the Worldspire. It’s connected to every living being, you see, and so if I perform the ceremony correctly, I can use that connection to send the Talents to the world. Perfect, I’d say. So elegant.”

  “The … dark powers. That term doesn’t bother you?”

  “Should it?” he asked absently.

  I stepped back. Ignoring me, as always. I sighed, moving to go wait for Grandfather, but then I stopped.

  There was something I needed to know. I fished in my pocket and brought out my Shaper’s Lens. It was warm to the touch; I was powering it without wanting to. We were the energy source the Incarna had created, somehow. Always before, the Talents had been there to take our excess energy and do something with it, like a drainage pipe used to shunt away excess rainfall.

  I held up the Lens, looking at my father. Grandpa had warned me about this, had said it could give me too much information. Unfair information.

&
nbsp; I used it anyway, and I started to glow.

  Through it I saw what my father wanted most in life. I saw him standing atop a pillar, surrounded by a sea of people looking at him with adoring eyes. Some shouted to him with excitement; others tossed gifts. He was idolized, loved by all.

  That was exactly what I’d expected. But in the vision, I stood at his right, and Shasta stood at his left. Sure, it was an idealized version of each of us—I was more like a kid from an old ’50s television show, with overalls and freckles. Mom wore a cheery dress and was smiling sweetly. But we were there.

  I pulled the Lens away. Somehow it would have all been easier if his version of a perfect world hadn’t included us. He did want a family. He wanted me, at least kind of.

  “Here, Alcatraz, come look at this,” my father said. “You’ve got to read what Plato said about his visit to the Incarna. It’s remarkable.”

  I remained in place. Suddenly I wished I’d never been given this Shaper’s Lens. What good was it doing me? I shoved it into my pocket. “Father,” I said, “we don’t know what effect the Talents will have on ordinary people.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Listen to me for once,” I said, taking him by the arm. “Our family line is the power source. We are what the Incarna created. The Talents work because we power them. So what will it do to common people to gain them?”

  “We … are the power source.…” My father’s eyes opened wide. “Why yes, of course.”

  “We can’t proceed,” I said, “until we know what the Talents will do to ordinary people. We have to learn from what our ancestors did. We can study, but we can’t just barrel into this without thinking! Like … like…”

  Like a Smedry?

  My father’s face fell. He yanked his arm out of my grip. “You sound like her. Well, you’ll both see sense once I’m done. You’ll admit that this was an incredible discovery.”

  There really was no changing him, was there?

  “Son?” a voice asked.

  Finally. I turned with relief as Grandpa Smedry and Draulin entered, Dif walking beside them.