Note to readers: “2200 Blues” is a novel in progress, and each chapter is an early draft in its unfolding journey. Your thoughts and reactions are invaluable, guiding its evolution and refinement
Nickel’s feet caused a noisy ruckus on the metal he walked on. metal.
“Is this a hovercraft?” Nickel blurted out.
“Shhhhhh!” Hissed one of the three.
They don’t know what that is, Nickel remembered. He sighed, following for what movement he could discern through the dizzying darkness.
The shafts of light created shards of illuminated pockets within the cavernous space.
Vertigo threatened to dizzy him, the unknowingness of what lay a step ahead overwhelming him. He didn’t want to hit anything by mistake, but he wanted to make it to the end of his initiation process before dawn broke.
“Where are you?” bellowed Nickel.
“Would you be quiet!” hissed a voice, A different Thraíha. Too deep to be Farrul.
“Where am I supposed to go?” Nickel asked in a quieter tone, his voice still echoing and resounding through the space. “I don’t know where any of you are. I thought I had to be up for the stars before the sunrise!”
He spoke that last sentence with an agitation and anger that surprised him. His head pounded as he desperately tried to orient himself in the darkness. His chest roiled with a growing knot of outrage.
Why was he angry? He’d come this far with the Thraíha after falling into their encampment by accident. He’d met with Steve and Farrul by accident too. But they were helpless, two crazies stuck in the canyons with no larger goal than surviving the next day. Only when they’d met him had they wanted to go somewhere else, to Hedonim to escape.
“What then?” Nickel muttered under his breath.
“Then what?” asked a man he couldn’t see.
Nickel, startled, doubled back. The surprise melted some of the rising anguish, tapering the bubbling outrage. It still fizzled in him, choking through his lungs, gulping for air.
He breathed heavily.
There were solid thumps on the platform, ricocheting through the frame. Nickel turned to the right where he heard them come from. The metal was a disorienting anomaly, reminding Nickel of his time in the hovercraft in the flimsy floors of the military decanting stations.
The darkness beckoned him, an empty shell of what he’d once known, walking over the hovercraft.
“Without real answers, you can’t get anywhere,” said the husky Thraíha.
“What does that mean?” asked Nickel.
“The Huntsman points the way,” said the Thraíha, gently pulling Nickel’s wrist. Nickel started after him, looking for the way out he was being led to, not finding it.
They walked in a humdrum manner, climbing over leveling platforms, dappled by shifting rays of light. They reached an inclining surface of a platform, held by a long pulley chain that clinked in the gentle air of the darkness, it’s surfaces glinting with the reflection of starry light shining from above, through shafts of opening light as minuscule as the drops of moving air itself.
The Thraíha had let go of Nickel by now. Nickel followed him and the huddled mass of Thraíha onto the platform. They grouped together, a large huddled mass of men, the edges of their fur robes brushing roughly against one another.
“Will I ever see my hovercraft again?” asked Nickel. “Or leave the canyons?”
The husky Thraíha man with the straw beard turned to look down at him, a strange glint in his eyes and an upturned smile on his face.
“Pull the ignition!” Shouted the younger Thraíha from the farther edge of the huddled group.
“The ghosts of the past world have finally led us here,” muttered another Thraíha.
“And they will lead us out,” muttered the hollow voiced Thraíha from behind the Thraíha standing to the side of Nickel.
“Ignition?” Nickel muttered, looking around in awe and surprise. “What’s being ignited?”
“A skeleton of the Past World,” muttered the husky voiced Thraíha man, “showing us where the ancestors of the Past World searched for stars.”
Four Thraíha men standing at the corners of the platform started to pull the chains holding it causing them to grate against the mechanism of the platform.
“The Past Worlders tried to create the power of the stars on earth,” whispered the husky Thraíha, stooping over to speak in Nickel’s ears. “Now we move through the skeleton of their dead star, moving where we were always meant to shine— under the stars of the Huntsman sky.”
Nickel frowned, looking around at the darkened space. As the chains kept grating and the platform kept elevating, they passed walls and jagged protrusions sticking out against the walls, emerging out of the shadows.
They passed a large pattern of bright colors splotched across the rustic bronze and copper of the walls surrounding them. It was a patterned strip of yellow rectangles, interspersed with black, arranged diagonally on top of each other.
“How long has this building existed?” Asked Nickel. “Before the Thraíha?” The black and yellow pattern was faded, cut off, splotched with rusty streaks, yet still distinct.
“This is the world we inherited,” said the husky Thraíha. “Before humans found the way of the hawk.”
They passed a large metal ledge hanging across from them. As Nickel and the Thraíha passed the platform, similar black and yellow patterns encircled the edges of the platform. Elevating higher, Nickel could make out the words embossed on the platform:
WARNING TOXIC WASTE
There was something else scribbled below it, but it had largely faded away.
“As to your first question,” said the husky Thraíha. “There are many ways in this world. We live and pay for the sins of the Past World, living with it orange embers around us.”
The platform jerked to a stop, causing the chains to jangle against one another and the platform to make a clinking noise. The platform wobbled slightly and more Thraíha men walked out from the group, moving towards the Thraíha pulling the chains, rushing to their side to assist them.
There are more Thraíha here than I came with, thought Nickel. Now closer to the gaping shafts and the ceiling, the mass of huddled Thraíha was further illuminated.
There were Thraíha already inside of this building, waiting for Nickel and Farrul. Thraíha living and working here? There were at least seven more Thraíha standing apart from the ones who’d escorted Nickel up the canyon impasse. They didn’t all wear moccasin fur robes like Nickel and the Thraíha who brought him here. Many of them, including the ones pulling the chains, wore long leather vests donned like aprons, hanging over their torsos, dangling over their legs.
“We pay for the sins of the Past World by searching for the grace of the Huntsman’s light and we are blessed with vision and crops by mother Hawk, enriched by our toil,” said the husky Thraíha.
The pulley started up again. They passed a wide window made of cracked glass. If not for the swarming Thraíha behind the cracked glass and the adornments of multi-colored leaves woven into shrouds and adorning the space, it may have looked like a control room on a military station.
“We are blessed in the canyons,” the husky Thraíha had told Nickel. “Mother Hawk blesses us through the fog, her warmth as radiant as the sun. On this morning, we will now show you the blessed natures of the cosmos, where Father Hawk carved a world for us.”
“Will there be fog?” asked Nickel.
“The perch is the only part of the canyons where you can see the cosmos without the orange embers, said the Thraíha. Where only the stars of the Huntsman shine through.”
There was a loud banging and scraping overhead, a thunderous cacophony that threatened to break Nickel’s ears drums.
As their platform lifted closer to the ceiling, one of its chain mechanisms hit a separate pulley embedded in the ceiling, creating a louder rumbling as entire plates in the ceiling came apart. It was an unraveling of metal plates, clanking and twisting as a starry space beckoned them, opening wider and wider. Nickel’s breath caught in his throat and he squeezed his eyelids without closing them, bracing against the chilly wind that wafted through the widening opening in the ceiling. Where am I going? thought Nickel. The chains wobbled in the cacophony, jerking the platform.
Nickel scrunched his limbs, holding his arms tight against his sides. He grabbed the arm of the husky Thraíha in an instinctive grip, tightening his fingers around the thick layer of fur and the stringy arm underneath.
“Where are we going?” Nickel exclaimed. The grip he held felt like a last anchor against the searingly dark clearing emerging above him.
Nickel heard no answer in the growing din of the ceiling. He didn’t dare look around him to see the Thraíha’s reactions. The expanding clearing of stars was like a blanket of clear cold threatening to smother him.
Months in the hovercraft’s screens and later in the orange fog had not prepared him for the vista of nature he was being raised to.
The speckles of glowing white peeked at him, one by one as he moved closer to the ceiling and its metal plates moved apart. He’d seen them before. Clear as day, wrenching the memory of a starry sky that he’d visited or that had visited him in a large grassy expanse. A meadow he’d run through as a young child. The bespeckled face of his father looming over him like a moon, his glasses glinting in the night light and his beard wide, dark and enveloping.
Each hair as pitch black as the night sky blanketing the stars. The shadows of a past before the Ether splayed out in all their clear darkness over the sky, threatening to engulf him.
Had he seen stars in a real meadow? Or was it the Ether? Nickel’s heart hammered in his chest, only becoming noticeable as his throat began to clamp onto itself. The thunderous dismantling of the ceiling was so close it was like a looming ocean wave threatening to crash onto him. Nickel was about to get closer to seeing if that memory was real or not. The real nature of what he remembered was awaiting him just mere feet away.
G.R. Nanda 