Perils of Questions

“Help me.” I said those words, or something like them. I don’t remember.

One moment there was a jungle. The next another place, and another. I think I spoke like I did to Jia, on a world I crashed on. Spoke in a way that couldn’t be ignored. Survived a crash I shouldn’t have, survived her weapon firing point-blank at me.

I think my parents lied to me. Their sixteenth child. The one they took to Home, away from all galactic technology, the one they said had one minor talent for knowing when I was being lied to. I think they lied to everyone. They made me into a weapon. But I don’t understand what kind.

Four steps. Four steps, and I stumble through climates. Fall to my feet in tundra. I have no idea where I am. There is ice, a sky devoid of visible stars, my breath turning into crystals in the air. I should be freezing to death, perhaps already dead, but there is warmth about me. Brought from another place? Drawn from this one? I don’t know.

I don’t know how to know.

I should be dead. This should not be possible.

You don’t leave worlds by wishing about it. Only that’s how I left home. Because the boy who was sixteen and not from Home helped me save Home from desruction, said he could offer a way out if I had to go. I said yes, in the end. Ended up standing in a space station without ID, escaped a prison, stole a spacecraft, crashed it. It happened. It makes no sense. But it happened.

“What is happening to me?” I scream. I must have screamed before, perhaps when I was a child. If so, I don’t remember doing it. I say the words again, with more force. And on the third time, my voice isn’t quite my own: “What is happening to me?” booms out of me, not a request, not a cry but a demand.

I drop to my knees, feeling as though I’d run between two villages from Home at a full sprint. There is silence. I am slumped on frozen ice, and the wind has fallen silent about me. Even the stars have gone silent. The thought comes to me, but makes no sense. The sky here has no visible stars. For one thing.

“Oh.” There is a voice behind me. Soft.

I stand, spin. The nameless boy I met at Home is standing behind me, one hand raised up toward me in a warding gesture. He’s the one I knew was sixteen. The first knowing what led to – to this?

“Sixteen.” There is no question in his naming of me. There is a sadness in his eyes I have no words for.

“What have you done to me?” My voice begins like it did, but the power – the force – falls apart against him.

“I didn’t mean to do anything.” His voice is very soft. His eyes are too old for sixteen, but somehow for a moment his face is too young. “I think –.” He walks closer, circles me. “It has been a very long time, Sixteen, but I think this was an accident.”

“What?”

“My name is Jay. Jayseltosche, to some.”

I don’t move. There are stories. About something so old and wonderful and terrible that my parents thought such word the name of a weapon in some forgotten war. That there exists nothing that could, for example, cut a galaxy in half in a hurry to get to places. Destroy entire hyperlane systems. Prevent the Verkonis war. There were too many stories, and no one believed any of them. Not really. But we didn’t disbelieve either, I think.

There are holes in the historical records where all the galactic datanets and intergalactic weaves record one word: jaysome. That, and nothing else.

“I don’t understand.”

He smiles. The smile is so gentle it almost makes me doubt every story. “I am old, Sixteen. I do not age as humans do, and it has been a very long time since I could let myself cause an accident, let alone an oops. To not be in control, no matter how terrible or angry I was, was not a luxury I could offer myself.” He lets out a breath. “But I think I did. It has been a long time since the universe has needed magicians. And now you are here.”

The word magician stops the silence. The world becomes just the world again about us. But I fee cenered, somehow. More myself. “What does that mean?”

“It used to mean many things. Now, I am not certain?”

“What does it mean for you?”

Jay laughs softly. There is no cold at all; and I think that is more his laugh than anything else now. “I think it means I needed a friend.”

I have no idea what I am. Less idea what he did. But there is a yearning in him deeper than anything I have known.

“Oh.”

“I know,” he says, softer. “I’m sorry.”

“For needing a friend?”

“I have put this burden on you.”

And words come. There is a part of me that goes deeper than I understand. “Is friendship a burden to you?”

He steps back. There is shock on his face. “No,” he says finally.

“Good.”

And I don’t have any other words, not against his grin. I don’t know what will come of this, but I think it will be a peril unlike anything I can understand.

And I find myself looking forward to it, without understanding why at all.