S2E10: Through the Smoking Glass

For half a second that had already ended on the other side, Senty's paw was still against the glassed brick. The porch was above him. The kitchen was behind him. Every goodbye he had managed to give was still in the room with the banked coals, and the one goodbye he had not managed was already somewhere ahead of him in the dark, because Brent had gone first. That was what Brent did when love presented itself as a bad idea. He had said every goodbye there was to say, and one of them had said it back with an axe. He let go.

---

It was not a tunnel. It was water, if water had opinions. The road came up under Senty and lifted, and did not care which way he was facing. The two moons went over his head and under his feet and over his head again, and every fragment he had ever pulled out of the fog came back at once with its edges sharp. Warm stone. Bread. An oven, and the moment it went out. Rosemary. A paw on his shoulder that was not Brent's, heavier and older. Faces afraid. Not of him. For him. He reached for one face. The road turned him over and the face went by like a window on a train. This was not the road giving him anything. It was showing him the edges of what he already carried, all at once, and then taking its hands away. He had crossed once before. He had been small, and a whole apparatus built to protect him had gone into the road around him, and none of it had come out the other side. He had arrived without the protection, without his cousins, and without most of himself. So Senty knew slightly more than nothing. Brent had socks.

Senty found him the second time the road turned: a long way off in the dark, both arms out, turning slowly as a thing turns in a current, with the flashlight on his chest strap sending its beam wherever it pleased. Brent was in several rooms at once. He was seven again, one hand on the door of his mother's car while her voice followed him toward a piano lesson. A high school cafeteria rose around him, trays striking tables and hundreds of voices breaking against every hard surface while he ate quietly alone. A judge with kind eyes granted him a divorce. He sat beside a hospital bed, wondering what would happen next. Then the piano. Closed beneath a year of dust, every key waiting under wood he could not lift. The road showed Brent nothing new. It made him stand in every room he had already survived, all at once, and it did not let any one of the rooms know about the others. Senty reached. Brent saw him. He reached too. Their hands came within inches and never any closer. Brent said something. Senty watched his mouth make it. The road took the sound. What was left was the shape of Senty's name. He had been told once that a bond is only real if it travels. It was traveling. It was simply not doing it well. The road threw them both out.

---

They landed in sponge cake. For several seconds this was wonderful. Yellow cake stood around Senty's shoulders, warm as a thing just out of the oven, with a soft drift of icing along one side. Brent surfaced six feet away wearing the green backpack at an angle and a piece of cake across his forehead large enough to serve. They stared at each other.

Brent started laughing first. Senty followed, partly because Brent was alive and partly because, after a road made of grief, landing in dessert felt like a correction the universe had offered out of embarrassment. Then Brent sank to his chest. Senty's laughter stopped. His own hind paws had found nothing beneath them. Brent looked down at the cake closing around his ribs.

“This is a hilarious way to die.”

“Brent, take off the pack.”

“But...It has the food.”

“Brent.”

“Ok, Senty, taking off the pack.”

The flashlight came loose in his hand. He switched it on and sent a bright white circle three inches into the crumb.

“Useful...”

“I came prepared and packed for darkness.”

“You have merely...illuminated the cake.”

Senty spread his paws and stopped fighting. He let the cake have his legs and went still and listened with his feet, which was a thing he had never told Brent he could do because he had not known it. Near the icing the cake held differently. Under the sweetness, one narrow stretch refused to give. He worked toward it an inch at a time until his claws found a seam that had decided, for six feet, to be a floor.

Brent had the rope free by then. His first throw fell short. The second landed across Senty's forearm. Senty braced both feet against the seam and pulled. The pack came free behind Brent with a sound like a large spoon leaving batter. Brent followed it onto the hard edge, still holding the flashlight and one end of the rope. They lay beside each other until breathing stopped being interesting.

“We should bring some home.”

“No.”

“Brad could smoke it.”

“Absolutely not.”

Brent sat up. The old pack was iced along the right side, but the rope, blanket and canteens remained attached. The knife stayed secured in its sheath. Cold brisket still waited inside. Above them, two moons hung in a violet-black sky. The larger one was exactly where Senty remembered it. The ground under his paws was not. Something hummed inside the stone. It was too low for Brent to hear. Senty felt it come up through his pads and settle behind his teeth: a note bent just far enough to carry weight without telling the truth. It was a piano in the next room, a quarter tone flat, before anyone has played a chord on it. His body knew there should have been a center to it. The center had been moved.

Brent scraped icing from the flashlight with one finger and tasted it...

“Don't.”

“It's actually...good.”

“Everything here...is going to be good until...it isn't. Don't eat the ground, please Brent.”

Brent looked across the yellow country and stopped eating it.

“Where are we?”

“Zanon Prime.”

“What part...?”

“Honestly? I don't know.”

They walked away from the cake along a strip of dark ground between blue scrub and low red stone. The pack pulled against Brent's right strap exactly as Brad had warned.

“Well, what do you know?”

“I remember the Two moons above us. A hearth that went cold. I was sent from here...once. I don't know by whom or why. And, someone here...was afraid for me...”

Brent did not ask him to turn fragments into an explanation. He walked beside him, sticky with icing, hitching the pack every forty steps without noticing he did it, carrying a knife he knew which end not to hold.

---

The first animal stepped from the scrub twenty yards ahead. At first glance it resembled a small deer. It had a narrow face, black eyes and a grazer's flat mouth. Its front half occupied the ground in front of them. The rest of it stood half a pace to the left, joined through a body that could not decide which place was true. It looked at Senty with the quiet attention of something that had once expected leaves. It was, before it was anything else, a little sad to look at.

Then its mouth opened too wide. More black eyes appeared among the blue branches.

“That seems bad.”

“Yes.”

The first animal charged. Brent drew the knife. Senty moved in front of him.

“Back to back, yours to mine...”

“I was hoping you knew something better.”

“So was I...”

The pack came out of the scrub. Each animal ran along two slightly different paths at once, hooves striking stone a moment before the bodies above them arrived. It was loud. It had been quiet for a long time, and now it was loud, and the sound went out across the yellow country in every direction like a flare. Senty redirected the first past Brent. The second clipped his hip hard enough to turn him. Brent slashed once, missed everything and had the good sense not to try again while Senty's arm was near him. The third lowered its head. Metal struck stone between its forelegs. A bear in dark armor came down from the ridge with a sword in both paws. She landed inside the charge and turned the blade flat. Steel met antler without cutting. The warped stride folded around the impact and carried the animal sideways. She followed, struck the ground in front of the next and used the flash and sound to break its line.

She was not trying to kill them. Senty saw her choose not to, twice. The second choice cost her. The last animal came beneath the sword while she turned another away and opened her forearm above the gauntlet. She took the wound, used the moment it was close to put a boot into its chest and sent it after the others. Branches shook. Hooves struck out of order and receded. No body remained on the stone. The armored bear stood with her sword lowered and her arm bleeding. A compact sidearm rode untouched at her belt. She looked toward the scrub where the animals had gone.

“They were gentle. Once.”

Then she turned and saw Senty. The commander went out of her face for one breath.

“Emissary.”

The word entered the place where the wrong hum had settled.

“Senty.”

Smaller now.

“I never thought I would see you again.”

Senty knew the ground under her. He knew the shape of the ridge behind her, and that the blue scrub would close over that road before morning. He knew none of it with his mind. He did not know the bear in front of him. He wanted to. He looked at her face, which was a good face and a tired one, and there was nothing behind it in him. Not a name. Not a hall. Not one hour of whatever life had taught her to say his name that way.

“I'm sorry. I don't know you.”

He watched her understand the size of what had been done. She did not look hurt. She looked, for one breath, like someone told the measurements of a thing she already knew was large. The sabotage had not only taken equipment and a road. It had reached into a cub she had known and taken her out of him, and left him standing here polite about it.

Then the commander returned to her face because it had to. She looked past him at the human in the icing...

“Who or what is that?”

“Brent Brooks. Human. Currently part cake.”

The armored bear considered him with the speed of someone assigning risk.

“Can it move?”

“He can.”

“Can you?”

“Yes.”

“Then we're all lying a little.”

Something almost reached one corner of her mouth. Duty arrived first...

“My name is Artio. We need to leave.”

Senty repeated the name quietly. It opened nothing...

---

Artio tied off her arm with a strip from beneath the armor and moved quickly toward a dry channel between black stones. She chose a road that kept them below the ridgeline...

“Who sent for you?”

“Three Featherfoxes came to the porch. Then the road came. They went ahead of us.”

“Who called them...?”

“I don't know. They asked whether the one who was sent would answer the hearth.”

Artio stopped only long enough to look at him.

“Nobody here called you.”

“Nobody called. Just for my notes. We came all this way and nobody called.”

“Something did.”

He was not sure why he said it. It had come from his feet.

“The palace will have felt the crossing. The old instruments were built to feel it. I came toward the mark. So will they.”

The fight had been loud. In the badlands, sound traveled farther than safety did.

“Who holds the palace?”

“Akar.”

The name passed through him without opening, but his body disliked it. Artio gave them what she could while they walked, in the voice of someone delivering a report, because it was the only voice she had left that would hold. Two years. She said the number once and did not decorate it. The pockets at the edges had been let go, as you let go of a field you no longer mean to plant. The roads that still held carried what Akar wanted them to carry. Whoever had known where the last true food grew now worked for him, or hid in the badlands, or had gone under the ground. Artio had people and a mill. She said nothing about where or how many.

She said nothing about before. Senty listened for it, and it was not there, and he understood that the not-there was a wall she had built on purpose and was standing in front of. At one point she spoke his name again. Just the one. Senty.

“There's more of it.”

“More?”

“Senty Sterling Martindale Brooks.”

Three names she had never heard, from a life she had not been in. He watched her take them and put them somewhere.

“Brooks...”

“It was given to me in love.”

“Then someone kept you.”

“Yes, he did...”

The dry channel bent toward a stand of silver trees. Senty had one question he could not leave behind them.

“My family. Are they alive?”

“They were when I last had word. I will not tell you where while Akar holds the palace.”

Senty received the mercy and the refusal together, and understood that they were the same gift.

“Thank you...”

From beyond the silver trees came the sound of many heavy feet moving with one purpose. Artio drew her sword. They had reached the last quarter mile too late.

---

The bison came from every side. They wore dark coats over fitted armor and carried swords only. One stepped through the trees ahead, then two behind, then enough along the ridge to make counting an argument with the obvious. Big. Broad through the shoulder in a way that made a bear look like a well-fed dog, with heavy heads carried low. Brent had never seen a bison stand like a soldier. Senty watched him see it: a man who had spent a year on a porch with a bear and a possum couple and a hyena, looking at the first thing in his life that was simply, plainly, enormous, and forgetting to breathe.

Senty had seen one stand behind a coat rack beneath hard white lights, dark canvas over its shoulders and sunglasses hiding where it looked. Months ago, while Senty spoke about the tether to a room prepared to take the porch away, a bison had listened from the back corner and caught his scent with one quiet snort. The watching had begun before the wall opened. He understood that in his stomach before he understood it anywhere else. Artio measured the ring. Alone, she might have found the gap behind the narrowest sword. Senty watched her see it. Then she looked at Brent, at the pack dragging his right shoulder and the knife still secured where it would do the least harm. She lowered her blade. The captain approached.

“Princess Artio. The palace has been expecting you.”

“The palace has better manners when it belongs to us.”

“The instruments announced the crossing. The noise saved us the final search.”

Two bison took Artio's sword. A third lifted Brent out of the green pack and caught the smell rising from the flap.

“Careful. There's food in there...”

The bison turned it upside down.

“I walked into that.”

The patrol closed around them. They were taken.

---

The palace stood inside a city that had learned to lower its voice. Senty remembered none of the streets, but his paws anticipated the shallow step at the first gate. Somebody had built this place to be looked at from a long way off, with the two moons behind it, and had made every line of it agree with every other line. Warm stone still showed through the occupation in small surviving patches. The wrong hum strengthened as they climbed, running through walls that had been built around a truer note. The palace had not been remade. That was worse. Its old shape remained in the arches, warm floors and lamps set into stone, but everything that had once invited someone farther in had been turned toward control. Doors stood open where rooms had been emptied. Other doors held new locks.

At the entry, a broad bison with a pale scar through one ear unbuckled Artio's sidearm without hurry, looked at it, and hung it on an iron hook beside three keys and an empty lantern. Nobody guarded it, because it was a hook, and this was a wall, and the thing on it did not work. Artio's eyes went to it once and came away. The pack went onto an effects cart that followed the prisoners through the inner hall. Somebody smelled it. Senty knew where the throne room was before the captain pointed. His paws went there as if the rest of him had been attached only recently.

---

The formal throne was empty. The crown rested on its seat. Akar sat one step below it in the king's working chair, a broad bison dressed with the exactness of someone who considered occupation a form of administration. He sat as you sit in a chair that belongs to someone whose house you are in: easily, forearms on the rests, head up. He had left the crown above him like a prize nobody in the room was permitted to misunderstand. Artio's smaller throne remained beside her father's. Two guards forced her into it. She sat only after making them spend the strength.

“Two years. For two years, you have bled the pocketworks, chained the kitchens and driven whole towns onto roads that serve your mill. Now you sit in a chair you cannot fill, beneath a crown even you know better than to touch, in a house that has never once been yours. Everyone in this room knows it, including you.”

Akar let her finish. He did not look up at the crown.

“You are still explaining why I have no right to be here.”

“You have none. That is why you left the crown where it was.”

“The mills turn. The roads carry what I send down them. My guards hold you in your own chair. I did not ask.”

Then Akar looked at Senty. He had a good face, wide and calm, and eyes that took a room as a surveyor takes a field. There was nothing in it that Senty could read as cruelty, or as pleasure, or as anything at all. He looked like someone who had been told something was going to arrive and had arranged to be sitting down when it did. Cake remained in Senty's fur. Brent stood beside him without his pack, the empty right shoulder held slightly high from carrying it. Akar did not look surprised.

“You always did hear farther than your world could measure, Sentinel.”

The sentence entered him like a key. A lesser hall opened. Six chairs. A table set for exactly six. A guest admiring every joint in a kingdom until pride carried the kingdom across the table to him. A warm laugh built to the correct size. Beneath it, a whole interior arranged toward ownership. A cub hearing what nobody could measure and understanding that truth without proof might still be useless. Then a smaller working room. One lamp. Maps on a table. A tired king listening to the end.

“Do not trust him.”

“I believe you.”

“Keep your eyes open, and your ears. Especially your ears. Promise me.”

“I promise, Your Majesty.”

The throne room returned around Senty. Akar had watched every piece arrive. He had said the sentence for that reason, to watch it, as you say a name to a dog to see if it still knows it. His pleasure was quiet and real, and it was the only thing in that face all night that was.

“Ah. There you are.”

Senty said nothing.

“The palace felt you arrive. Mass. Duration. Displacement. Signature. The instruments were built for it.”

Artio made a sound from beside the empty throne that carried no admiration for his instruments. Akar kept his attention on Senty.

“You should not imagine this is the first report I have received from your adopted world. My people have sat in your rooms for months.”

The back corner of the HOA hearing came clear. Dark canvas. Sunglasses. The snort. Brent looked at Senty. Senty did not explain. Not here. Akar studied the cake in his fur.

“The reports agree on one charming detail. The emissary has made a profession of feeding strangers. Chef would be too ambitious, I think. A cook. A designated cook.”

The guards laughed because he had made room for it.

“My men and I are hungry. You will prepare a meal from whatever the Royal Kitchen provides. Feed us before the lamp burns down, and perhaps this adopted occupation of yours will finally prove useful.”

The charge was plain. The real consequence stood behind it and was not introduced, and everyone in the room could see its shape through the door. Brent looked around the occupied throne room, at the swords, the empty king's place and the crown nobody touched.

“Buddy, we have a restaurant. If you and your guys were hungry, you could have made a reservation.”

Akar's attention shifted to him. Brent stood without the backpack and without the small knife he had carried through the Door. Icing remained in his hair. Akar was nearly twice his weight and built almost entirely from the part of that weight that could break things. Brent did not step back. Something tightened behind Akar's composure.

He removed one armored glove finger by finger. Then he rose from the working chair and crossed the room slowly, making the distance into a performance.

“You are very far from your restaurant.”

The reinforced cuff struck Brent across the mouth. It was not a punch. A punch from Akar could have killed him... This was carefully measured to leave Brent standing and brutal enough to open his lip. Brent's head turned. Blood appeared against the icing at one corner of his mouth. He looked back at Akar and did not lower his eyes. Akar had crossed the room to make him smaller. Standing over him had not done it.

“That is your one warning...”

The sound came out of Senty before he knew he had it. A growl began behind his ribs and entered the throne room low enough to belong to the stone. It was the first growl Brent had ever heard from him, in a year of porches and kitchens and one bad night with a wolf. The guards nearest Senty changed their footing.

“GRRRRRRRRRRRRRHHHH!”

Artio turned her head. Not toward Brent. Toward Senty. Akar looked at the bear and, for the first time, calm appeared to require effort.

“Sentinel, control your human.”

“He doesn't control me.”

Akar held Brent's gaze one beat too long. Then he returned to the working chair and pulled the glove back on as though the exchange had obeyed him. He lifted two fingers.

“Dostel. Take them to the Royal Kitchen.”

The scarred bison and another guard closed around Senty and Brent. Artio remained in her throne with a guard at each shoulder. She did not turn her head as they were taken past her, but her paws lay flat on the arms of the chair and her eyes stayed on the crown. Brent moved close enough for his shoulder to touch Senty's.

“You know him...”

“Yes.”

“What is he..?”

Senty looked once over his shoulder. Akar remained in the working chair beneath the crown, warm, composed and already speaking to the captain as if the two prisoners had become a solved part of the room.

“He is Akar. He does not visit. This bison... annexes.”

---

The Royal Kitchen had been beautiful once. Senty knew it before the door opened. He knew it by the width of the frame, and by the wear on the sill where a hundred years of feet had gone in carrying and come out empty. One wall still held a mosaic of copper pots above a blue hearth. Half the tiles were gone. The long preparation table carried knife marks from cooks whose names the occupation had not bothered to preserve. Iron rings had been fixed into the stone beside the cold ovens.

“This place...used to be beautiful.”

“You remember it?”

“I did something kind here once.”

“What?”

“I don't remember. I wish I did.”

Senty was pushed inside first. Brent followed. Dostel walked in behind them carrying the green pack. He dropped it onto the preparation table. The canteens struck wood. The flashlight knocked against the first-aid kit. Something inside that had been warm on a porch a world ago made one small sound against the table. Dostel nodded at the pack.

“Cook provisions. By morning.”

The door closed. The closing took a full second.

The kitchen door closed.