“It’s who he is now,” Pittacus replies earnestly. “It’s a great honor.”
Her eyes narrow. “It was hard enough being married to a Garde. We used to talk about having children, you know. Now, after that trip to Mogadore, after becoming an Elder . . . I hardly see him. When I do, all he talks about is that project, his obsession.”
Pittacus tilts his head. “What project?”
Celwe swallows, maybe realizing that she’s said too much. She walks away from the window and goes to the bed. She begins to push the wooden frame away from the mattress so that she can flip the thing right side up but thinks better of it, instead looking to Pittacus.
“Help me out, would you?”
Pittacus uses his telekinesis to turn the bed over, straightening the covers at the same time. His eyes never leave Celwe.
“So easy for you,” she mutters as she sits down on the newly made bed.
Pittacus sits down next to her. “What is Setrákus working on?”
She takes a deep breath. “It’s a dig. Out in the mountains. I shouldn’t—I don’t know how exactly to explain it. What he does out there . . . he says he does it for me, Pittacus. Like it’s a gift.” Celwe’s voice catches. There are tears in her eyes. “But I don’t want it.”
“I don’t understand,” Pittacus replies.
“You should see it for yourself,” she says. “Don’t . . . don’t tell him I told you.”
“Are you scared of him?” Pittacus asks, his voice low. “Has he hurt you?”
“He hasn’t hurt me. And I’m only scared of what he might become.” Celwe reaches out and grasps Pittacus’s hand. “Just make him come home, Pittacus. Please. Make him see reason and bring my husband back to me.”
“I will.”
Pittacus streaks through the sky, flying, slicing through clouds. He dips through a mountain range and then shoots downwards into a deep chasm, like a bigger version of the Grand Canyon. As he descends, walls the color of sandstone flecked with Loralite gems rising up on all sides, Pittacus notices an array of complicated machinery and heavy-duty construction gear below him. Someone’s been digging deeper, as if this chasm wasn’t already deep enough.
Pittacus’s gaze turns, like mine, to the towering piece of machinery at the dig site’s center. Twisted beams of steel augmented with blinking circuits and Loralite symbols—it’s like a bulkier, less-refined version of the pipeline Setrákus Ra lowered from the Anubis.
So this is what Legacy meant when it said Setrákus Ra had pulled it apart before. This is where it all started, all these centuries ago. The beginning of my grandfather’s descent into madness.
When Pittacus lands, a young Loric in a lab coat hustles forward to greet him. His skin is oddly pale for a Loric and he moves in a way that’s almost robotic, as if his limbs are no longer quite in sync with his brain. Pittacus seems taken aback by his appearance, but it doesn’t put him off his task.
“Where is Setrákus?” he asks.
“He’s at the Liberator,” the young Loric says, and points towards the giant pipeline. “Is he expecting you, Elder Lore?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Pittacus replies, and marches towards the so-called Liberator. The pale Loric gets out of his way, but Pittacus hesitates. He turns back to study the kid. “What has he been doing out here? What has he done to you?”
“I . . .” The guy hesitates, like he isn’t supposed to say. But then, he holds out his hand, concentrates and levitates a handful of rocks with his telekinesis. It seems like a real strain for him.
Pittacus cocks his head, surprised. “You’re Garde? Why don’t I know you?”
“That’s the thing,” the guy replies, “I’m not Garde. I’m nobody.”
During his weak telekinesis demonstration, black veins began to pop out on the Loric guy’s forehead. Pittacus takes notice of these and reaches out to touch the young man’s face. He flinches away.
“It’s . . . it’s a work in progress,” the pale guy says. “I haven’t had my augmentation today.”
“Augmentation,” Pittacus whispers under his breath, then strides purposefully towards the Liberator machine. He passes a handful of other assistants on his way there, all of them similarly pale and skittish. I can feel the anger building inside him, or maybe that’s my own rage, or maybe it’s both. We’re witnessing something truly corrupt.
The Liberator is turned on. It emits the same grinding and shrieking as the pipeline Setrákus Ra lowered from the Anubis. There are lumps of Loralite dumped all around the dig site, like the crew here had to rip the bluish rocks out of the earth to get at the current beneath. Loric energy is pulled up from the ground and transferred into big, pill-shaped glass containers. Once in the containers, the energy goes through processing—it’s zapped by high-frequency sound waves and blasted with subzero bursts of chemical-filled air, all until the energy somehow becomes solid matter. Then, it is churned by a roller covered in razor-sharp blades before passing through a series of filters.
The result is a black sludge that Setrákus is able to fill a test tube with. He’s in the process of doing just that when Pittacus comes upon him.
“Setrákus!”
My grandfather looks up and actually smiles. He’s proud. There are black veins running under his skin, too, and his dark hair has begun to thin out. Surprisingly, he’s excited to see Pittacus and sets aside his twisted work to greet him.
“Old friend,” Setrákus Ra says, approaching with open arms. “How long has it been? If I missed another meeting of the Elder council, tell Loridas I’m sorry but—”
By way of greeting, Pittacus grabs the front of Setrákus Ra’s shirt and slams him into one of the Liberator’s support beams. Although he’s smaller than Setrákus, he manages to take the larger man by surprise.
“What is this, Setrákus? What have you done?”
“What do you mean? Unhand me, Pittacus.”
Pittacus checks his temper. I really wish he wouldn’t. He takes a deep breath, lets go of Setrákus and takes a step back.
“You’re mining Lorien,” Pittacus says, clearly trying to wrap his mind around the dig site. “You’re—what did you do to these people?”
“The volunteers? I helped them.”
Pittacus shakes his head. “This is wrong, Setrákus. This looks . . . it looks like you’ve defiled our world.”
Setrákus laughs. “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. It only frightens you because you don’t understand it.”
“Explain it to me, then!” Pittacus yells, and small flames erupt from the corners of his eyes.
“Where to begin . . . ,” Setrákus says, running a hand over his scalp. “We were together on Mogadore. You saw the hate the Mogs had for us. The savagery. What good could ever come of that place?”
“It will take time,” Pittacus replies. “One day, the Mogadorians will choose peace. Loridas believes that, and so do I.”
“But what if they don’t? They endanger not just our way of life, but the entire galaxy. Why should we simply contain them and wait for their mind-set to improve when we could hasten their evolution? What if the Mogadorians we chose, the ones we see as peaceful and potential allies—what if we could give them Legacies? Make them Garde? Leaders among their people, capable of excising the warlike and dangerous? We could change the fate of an entire species, Pittacus.”
“We aren’t gods,” Pittacus replies.
“Says who?”
A moment of silence follows. Pittacus takes a step away from his old friend.
“It’s all I’ve thought about since we returned from Mogadore,” Setrákus continues. “Not just the Mogadorians, either. Us. All of us. The Loric. Why are there Garde and Cêpan? We have peace, yes, but at what expense? A caste system where our leaders are decided by who is and isn’t lucky enough to be born with Legacies? We Elders sit around a table that reads ‘unity,’ but how are we equal?”