Zaphia

Zaphia dug her hands in the gritty, burning sand, casting nervous glances left and right. The sun was still high and scorching. Everyone was sleeping, she reassured herself before fishing the chipped green rocks out of her tunic and shoving them into the disappearing hole she had created. She turned her pockets inside out, shaking out the last bits of incriminating green powder. Then she piled sand back into the hole and smoothed it out.

“Whatcha doing, Zaphy?”

Zaphia nearly body tackled Ario. How had he managed to sneak up right behind her?

“Nothing, Ari,” she half screamed, shaking sand out of her loose clothing. No, nothing suspicious here. She tried to slow her heartbeat and lower her volume. “What are you doing awake?”

“Iketa and Dalor dropped off a new prisoner,” the boy announced, his tone not at all matching the gravity of his words.

“In the middle of the day?”

He nodded, proud of himself for being the bearer of such important information. He was a good watchdog, Ario. It was very tempting to pat his red, peach fuzz head, but she resisted.

“Did you get a good look?”

“Terran woman,” he answered.

“The one from before?” Zaphia was hopeful that poor Sorceress was still alive. Zaphia wanted to do something when she was dragged in before, but Dalor and Ocery had been too obsessed to leave her for a moment. Zaphia couldn’t risk being caught.

“No, older.”

“Hear who it was?”

“Nope.” Ario bounced from one foot to another while he spoke. “Came to get you first.”

“They’re bringing her in now?”

Ario nearly shook his head off nodding. Zaphia slipped on her sandals and headed straight for the temple. She thought the shortcut was safe with the sun this high in the sky, but she quickly wished she had gone around. Everybody was up late today, it seemed.

“There are more cracks,” the new supervisor was complaining to Dalor under the cracked doorway to the divination room. He had taken over after Ocery disappeared. Word was Ocery was not coming back. Ever. “If we power the room with any cracks, we’ll blow the whole thing again.”

“Why is it taking so long?” asked a grumpy Dalor. “We’ve been blind for too long, and this should already be done.”

“Hrmph,” the supervisor growled. What was his name? Marius? Bariyu? Zaphia had been too nervous at work yesterday to keep such a thing in her head. “There are more cracks every time I check. I mean, see here?” He gestured to a crack near the doorway. “I could have sworn I filled in this split myself before I left last night.”

Dalor bent into the room, fingers tracing the crack in the rock. He stood, rubbing his fingers together. Green flecks of sealing powder fell through his fingers. “We might have a saboteur.”

Zaphia tried to tiptoe past, but the supervisor saw her. He waved her over.

“Ario, keep going,” she hissed. “I’ll meet you by the prison.” Hopefully outside and not inside.

Ario and his peach fuzz head dashed off. He was an obnoxious kid, but he was sure great at having his nose in everybody’s business. Zaphia was tempted to tell him more about what was going on, but she hardly knew herself, and knowing would be dangerous for Ario. Luckily, nobody paid attention to kids on Flifary Island. Zaphia scurried over as casually as a person could scurry, trying not to move too fast or too slow.

“Zephyn,” the supervisor addressed her, indicating she had been as unmemorable to him as he had been to her. “You were helping with sealing on the last shift.”

“Yes,” Zaphia squeaked. “Yes, sir?”

“See anything suspicious?”

She exhaled half a nervous breath. “No, sir. Mave used the last of the patch powder, so we left early so she could make more.” Or they were all supposed to leave early. Zaphia picked at her sandy fingernails behind her back, hoping there was no incriminating powder trapped underneath.

“Ah,” said Dalor, nodding. “The divination room was unguarded. Seer Loyalists must have managed to sneak in. I’ll double the day patrols.”

So Zaphia was safe for now—a relief—but extra patrols were no good. That room was so close to finished. They would be done by tomorrow at their pace. Although, at the rate they kept bringing in prisoners, nobody would be left to stop them despite Zaphia’s stalling.

She trailed Dalor from the temple, pretending like she was headed home before circling back to follow him to the prison. All her covert sneaking was unnecessary in reality. He paid no mind to her, and the sandy streets made the trip to the palace a quiet one. She was glad for her sandals. She could feel the burning sand through the soles. Normal people were asleep at home next to their frosty ice furnaces. She grimaced to herself. She had forgotten to load up the furnace with freeze berries. Her family was set to wake up blistering hot in a few hours. Keeping secrets was hard work—so many balls to juggle. And she had always been terrible at juggling.

Dalor stomped through the arch of vines leading to the palace entryway while Zaphia scanned for Ario. Surely he was here by now.

A banana pelted her on the head. She resisted the urge to cry out, rubbed her head, and searched. Ario waved down from the lofty green leaves of an overgrown banana tree. He pointed to…somewhere. He sort of jabbed his finger to the right and then hooked it and pointed up. She threw her hands in the air and shot him a glare, so he slid down the banana tree and grabbed her hand, dragging her to the side of the palace prison. He pointed to a coconut palm tree and leaped up himself, scaling the fat palm like he was half monkey.

The elders may have considered her still a child, but she was well too old to be climbing trees. By the time she reached Ario’s height in the hidden green canopy, she had a number of scrapes from her poor choice of footholds. Scaling coconut palms was an art best left to new-chis.

Ario pointed again, but this direction was more straightforward than his last—unnecessary, even. Zaphia could easily see the commotion in the grand room with the open balcony.

“Give it up, Seer,” Iketa sneered to the woman out of Zaphia’s view. “We have your partner.”

“Who?” responded the voice of a woman Zaphia had never seen herself but had known since she was a new-chi.

“You know who,” Iketa snapped.

Zaphia was annoyed by this whole conversation. Name names, she wanted to scream. What if Ario was wrong and they had grabbed the Naxturaen Queen? There would be no stopping Iketa and Dalor then.

“Oh?” came the dispassionate answer. “Since you have everything you need, seems odd you’d rather brief me on your successes than bring the world to its knees with your colossal, unstoppable power.”

For years, Zaphia had heard how aloof and cruel the Seer was, forbidding anyone else from using their powers so she could hoard them for herself, but after weeks of spying, Zaphia was realizing how many lies Iketa, Dalor, and Ocery had been feeding the people. When the Seer destroyed the temple, Zaphia had believed in her selfishness along with everyone else. It looked like their tyrannical Seer was denying them their rights to use their magic—ancient magic they had been born with. Zaphia cheered when the liberation force captured the Seer and imprisoned her. They had won. After that, it was just a matter of rebuilding and slowly learning how to use their abilities, rusty after hundreds of years of disuse.

Except Iketa had told them they needed to take action now or the Naxturaen Queen would stop them. That seemed fishy to begin with, even more so after the trio in charge shifted all their resources to rebuilding the temple and tracking down anyone powerful enough to stop them. They locked up Terrans from Crystal Palace and magical horses like any kind of magic was a threat to their plans. Isn’t that the opposite of what they were fighting for? Weren’t they fighting to free magic?

Zaphia started listening in on conversations after that. The Seer’s story remained the same—she had destroyed the temple to stop the rebellion from hurting people. The Seer had given up her own great power to prevent harm, not so nobody else could use it. Zaphia had not believed at first. Everybody knew the Seer set herself apart, thought she was so much better than all of them. But none of those everybodys had ever talked to the Seer in person, and in person the Seer seemed to be something else. The Seer seemed afraid of what would happen if Iketa, Dalor, and Ocery got that much power for themselves.

Everything changed when the Sorceress arrived. Something was undeniably wrong. Zaphia wished she could have talked to her, but she disappeared so quickly. Zaphia was worried, but Dalor had been searching for her ever since. Hopefully that meant she was still alive. Zaphia wanted to talk to the Seer in person, but even though the palace looked open and scalable, it was a fortress—layer upon layer of magical protection. So, Zaphia did what she could to slow down the rebellion while she figured out how to quell her doubts. Now, those efforts were starting to be noticed, and she had accomplished nothing. She had to do something else—something big.

“Can we see the new prisoner?” Zaphia whispered to Ario.

The boy shook his head. “Nah, she’s inside for questioning or something.”

Zaphia needed to hear that questioning. She needed answers now.

“I’m going in,” she insisted, sliding down the tree with much less finesse than desired.

She picked up a dried palm leaf and a split coconut from the base of the tree, brushing off the sand. Zipping back around to the front of the palace, she grabbed the banana Ario had pelted at her and set it on her makeshift leaf tray. She shot a glance behind her. Ario was already back up the banana tree. He shot her two hooked pinkies for good luck. She streaked for the entrance before she could second-guess herself. Now or never.

Once she was through the vined arch, she was in the shaded courtyard entryway to the palace. A pair of guards spotted her and came to intercept. Her throat went dry while she tried not to focus on their sharp spear points or how imposing they were—all brown balls of muscle adorned with tattoos celebrating their accomplishments.

“I was sent to bring some food to the new prisoner,” Zaphia rushed into an explanation. Yep. A sandy, dry coconut and a bruised banana.

One of the guards with a bear inked on his leg poked at the pathetic food with his spear. The other asked, “In the middle of the day?”

Thinking fast, she replied, “That’s when she’s used to eating. Oh, and they’ve been questioning her, so of course she’s awake. And hungry. Can’t have her too weak to be answering questions.”

Yeesh, there was no way a lowly girl tasked with bringing food to a prisoner would know this much information. She needed to stop talking.

“Haven’t seen you before,” the poking guard argued.

“I’m just doing this as a favor for—” She mumbled something unintelligible around a coughing fit. Hopefully they would fill in the name of someone who actually had authorization to be here. “He didn’t want to walk all the way over here in the heat. Woo, is it hot today!”

Why did her mouth keep saying stupid things?

“So you don’t know where you’re going,” the first guard sighed.

“That is true,” Zaphia agreed, trying to be casual. She was just dropping off a tray of food. She was not on a covert mission to get information.

Guard Two tipped his spear toward a doorway. “I’ll take you,” he grumbled.

Zaphia needed to cut off the sounds coming from her body completely, so she just smiled and bobbed her head a little, following him through a labyrinth of columns and open hallways with sequestered stone spaces as well as rooms divided from each other with walls formed from thick, twisting vines. Zaphia’s class had taken a trip here once when she was a new-chi. King Pelgor had been such a wild king, humoring the whim of the moment. In his thousand year reign, he had built rooms of coconut fibers and stairways that were little more than vine hammocks. The palace was whimsical and insane and amazing. It had been a shock when the Seer had killed King Pelgor to take over. Zaphia’s heart sped up. Had she, really? What if that was a lie, too?

Lost in her thoughts, Zaphia ran straight into her guide. Her two-item meal went flying.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she mumbled, chasing after the rolling coconut.

The guard picked up the banana at his feet and plunked it in her hands after she retrieved her disgusting coconut half. “We’re here,” he grunted, tipping his spear toward an open doorway. No one was visible inside the waiting room, so the prisoner must have been in one of the rooms adjoining this one. Voices wafted outside, but Zaphia could not make out the words.

Zaphia peeked into the room. This one was standard stone, but she could feel a tingling. Some sort of powerful magic was at work, protecting this space. Iketa must have been afraid of this prisoner. In an open doorway at the back of this room with little more than a few chairs, Zaphia saw the dark, muscled back of a guard, a sentry keeping watch. He was busy supervising, and there were no tables.

“I guess I should wait until Dalor’s done in there,” Zaphia decided. That made sense, right?

“I’m going home in ten squawks,” her guide answered. “You stay as long as you want.” With that, he stomped back to his post.

Zaphia eased herself into the room. The guard was busy watching the activity in the next room like a circling vulture. She could get close enough to hear, but not to see.

“I am weary of all the trouble you bring,” Dalor snapped. “Tell us where you hid the children.”

Zaphia’s friends had all laughed when she had taken those advanced Terran lessons, but she knew in her heart she was meant to get off this island and see the whole world, not just this teeny corner of it. She did not have to see the future to know things were changing, she told them. Of course, she had hoped to use her skills at a Baysellian fish market or a Curi yarn shop, not to overhear covert plans to bring down the Naxturaen empire.

“What?” Dalor mocked. “You think you can get away with not talking? As soon as that divination room is up, we’ll see your past activities anyway.”

“Then why are you here?” answered the prisoner finally.

She was hard to understand. That probably meant the prisoner was not speaking Baysellian Terran. Zaphia was nowhere near advanced enough in her language studies to recognize regional accents, so that told her little.

“Choosing Arlana’s side is a stupid move,” Dalor said. “I would have expected more from you.”

A pause. The prisoner was not being cooperative.

“Who was that man you were traveling with? Where is the Sorceress and what do you have her doing?”

Another pause. Zaphia shuddered to think what would be happening in there if Iketa was questioning the prisoner. Some of the Seer’s interrogations had been ugly.

“I thought we gave her a dose of festerberry when she arrived.” Dalor was talking to the guard now. Zaphia considered ducking out of sight, but he was talking quietly, and if she moved any further away, she would miss what he said.

“Two,” the guard answered. “Any more and she’d be out cold. I don’t know how she’s withstanding it.”

“Give her another,” Dalor ordered. “I’ll take the chance. Nobody goes in there until I find something else to motivate our guest. We’ll crack her.”

The guard stepped into the prison room, and Dalor switched places with him. It all happened too fast for Zaphia to hide.

“What are you doing here?” Dalor snapped.

“Delivering some food for the prisoner,” Zaphia squeaked.

A frustrated Dalor smacked the food out of Zaphia’s hands. The banana flew across the waiting room and the coconut smacked the wall with a dull thud. Normally Dalor was the even-keeled one. Things must have been going really badly.

He glared at the banana like it had offended his mother. “Maybe being hungry will make our royal guest a little more talkative,” he fumed. “Is Iketa here?”

“She was just questioning the Seer,” Zaphia offered. Should she know that?

“Good, good,” he murmured, not caring that Zaphia knew way too much. After a few hundred years, the elders really did seem to forget a sixteen-year-old had a working brain. There was nothing magical about the coming-of-age ceremonies that turned a kid from a gelatinous blob of confusion into a functioning member of society. In a few hundred years, maybe Zaphia would forget sixteen, too. For now, she needed to figure out how to use this power of invisibility to stop Dalor and Iketa. If there were still people out there fighting to set things right, she could at least buy them some more time.