Mireya’s distraction ended as soon as Marty reacted explosively. "What!? Will, are you serious!?"
Jeff shot his brother a hot, embarrassed look. "Serious about what?"
"You've got planets!?"
Jeff blushed almost black. "Everyone's got planets."
"Not planets and prodigies! Why didn’t you tell me!?"
Jeff looked like he wanted to squirm out of his own skin. "Joe told me not to!"
"Joe? Wait, Joe knows!? Does that mean--?"
"Yeah, Frank too." Jeff hung his head.
"How long have you known this? How long has everyone else--!?" Marty threw a hurt, accusing glance at Mireya.
I had no idea, Mireya wanted to tell him. How could I have known your brother was a Stellae when no one even told me?
"Since we came out here," Jeff said. "On the plane ride when we left Saratoga Falls." Marty's jaw fell open. "Joe said he had a hunch, so he gave me their stupid diagnostic test. Remember when we got to Charles’ house, and he took me to see him first?"
"Of course. First time I tasted Laverne’s hot cocoa."
"Well, that’s when I learned I was--" Jeff flinched.
"And everyone decided you shouldn't tell me," Marty fumed.
Jeff looked altogether wretched.
"It was my idea, not theirs!" he retorted. "Well, Joe thought I shouldn't. He thought you'd react like you're doing now!" Marty's eyes hardened, but he blushed. "Charles told me I should tell you, but he left it up to me and, well ... After all we'd gone through--"
"So why even tell me at all? Why not just keep it a secret?" Marty's eyes swelled up, and he blinked back the wetness.
"I had to tell you sometime!"
"So why wait? Until now?"
"‘Cos it's only now that I've got any kind of a handle on them! It took going to Miranda to learn how to use ‘em, and she says I still haven’t gone through all I could do. no Stellae knows all of its prodigies from the get-go, and some don’t get to even know all of ‘em in their life!"
Jeff’s last claim struck hard on Mireya. Though she had seen many Stellae live long, fulfilled lives, like Charles, she heard the tales of others that perished early. Her mother was one of them, but not the only one. Her emotional pain and her physical pain balanced each other, enough to give her a moment of strange clarity; this finally meant a solution to Jeff’s enigma. She only needed to stay put and listen.
"So what are your prodigies?" Marty asked.
"Well, the main one," Jeff mumbled, "is that I can kind of make myself invisible. Not actually invisible. I can just sort of make it so that no one notices me. I can be standing right in front of them, and they'll just sort of look through me."
Marty stared, then broke into a giant grin.
"Dude! If we were still going to school, you could totally use your prodigy to sneak into the girls'--"
"Shut up!" Jeff blushed so hard his face nearly turned black, and he shot an embarrassed glance at Mireya.
"It's an amazing ability you got, Jeff," she said, as diplomatically as she could.
"And I wasn't trying to 'spy' on you!" Jeff went on. "Charles just suggested I try it in the field, since I wanted to keep an eye on you anyway. He said you were one of the best trackers in the world, and that if I could keep out of your sight--"
"I understand. It's a typical training technique for us," Mireya said. And if you messed up and revealed yourself, she thought to herself, it would force you to tell your brother that you're a Stellae. Like he thought you needed to. Aloud, she said, "And you saved our lives. Thank you."
"It was nothing." Jeff squirmed. "I can make other people disappear too, and when I saw you were in danger--"
"I'm glad you were here to keep an eye on your brother. And me."
"I'm sorry too, Mireya," Jeff sighed. "I didn’t want to accept you had my brother’s best interests in mind. But..." Finally relaxed, Jeff thanked her with a rare, genuine smile: timid, shameful, but honest...and a little cute. He looked at his brother, the realization dawning on him. "Marty, you wanna be a field agent?"
"Hell yeah!"
"Fine. But if you’re gonna do it, I wanna see you usin’ your smarts."
"You bet!" Marty guffawed. "Gonna kick ass and be resourceful!"
Mireya smiled to see the brothers reconciled. It had been a storm, but as with most fights between young people, it had passed almost as quickly as it had blown up. Now, she decided, was the time to put a lid on it for good.
She gasped as she tried levering herself upright, and Marty rushed to help her. "Then how about I start," she said, "by showing you how to finish off an ettin."
--
They searched for it the rest of the day. As they did, Mireya explained what ettins are--she compared them to "dryads gone feral"--and how they rarely forage far from their nests, where they regenerate if killed. But she got a lesson too, from Jeff, as he showed his prodigy. He compared it to a cloak that he could wrap about himself or anything else, within a reasonable area close to himself, that would cause observers to simply ignore whatever he put within its folds. Using it, he was able to hide them from a foraging deer, which they got close enough to that they could almost touch it.
But night came and they still had not found the nest. They made camp under a small cliff, and Mireya prepared a meal. Jeff had vanished, though, when she looked around. At first it annoyed her--this was not the time for his vanishing trick--but then she saw that Marty had gone as well, so she called out. Marty answered, and she followed the sound of his voice to a spot outside the light of the fire, where she found Jeff seated in apparent meditation. "He said he's looking for the nest," Marty said when she asked what he was doing. Before she could ask for clarification, she noticed the Moon, almost full, rising in the west like a lopsided pumpkin.
So she and Marty waited without speaking. Some twenty minutes later, Jeff opened his eyes and rose to his feet. With a small gesture, he beckoned them to follow him into the darkness.
Mireya didn't know how he did it--and when she questioned him afterward he said he wasn't sure either--but Jeff without a single stumble led them a quarter mile through the heavy woods until they found a cluster of fir trees smothered in yellowy hairs like an ettin's, and exuding the same rank odor. "Do you think you can find it for us again when it's light?" Mireya asked Jeff.
He hesitated--he still seemed to be in a semi-trance--and only said, "It's easier by moonlight." Mireya did her best to mentally mark the trail as Jeff led them back to the camp site.
The next morning they found the nest again with little difficulty, and Mireya doused it with oil while Jeff and Marty cleared out a zone of underbrush around it. The nest shook and rattled, and the trees groaned and bent as though in a high wind, as the fire consumed it. Mireya and the boys kept busy stamping out any stray sparks that flew into the woods. When the nest was gone, Mireya threw more oil onto the trees and burned them until they were no more than charred columns.
"You'll have to go with Frank the next time there's a hunt like this," Mireya told Jeff and Marty when they were back at the camp. "He'd take down a deer when you were done, and you could all have a feast to celebrate." Marty looked into his cup of instant potato-and-leek soup, and made a face.
--
"Why didn’t you tell me?" Mireya demanded of Charles when they were alone, back at his house in Olympia. She kept her tone respectful, but even she could hear that her voice was tight with anger.
The old man chuckled. "You didn’t ask!"
"How I was supposed to know? For all I knew, Jeff was just going to be another associate, like Marty! But a Stellae? And a Sulva!?"
"It took us all by surprise. They are so rare, you know. The Moon hides them, as if hoarding them. To have a second fall into our laps, so soon after we lost the first to join us in, well, many a Moon—"
Mireya thought of Helene, and her awful fate--killed by a retrograde member of their own order. She said nothing, but Charles seemed to read her thought. "A great tragedy," he said.
"How do I deal with a Sulva, sir? I know nothing about them."
"We can only rely on what the ones before us have said, but if you must..." Charles began to muse, explaining what he knew. "The Moon is like a mirror. It reflects what you want to see. And just like the Moon, those influenced by Sulva will be shaped by what they see of others. Don’t look for what they were, or are. Look for what they will become."
Though Charles’ words were still wrapped in mystery, Mireya seemed to have finally found a way to understand Jeff. If Jeff was like a mirror, showing only what others could see, she only had to find what anchored that mirror; what made it stand, or what held it. Marty was a good start; if anything, his brother was one of the few things that anchored him in place. If she was to understand Jeffrey Harrison, Mireya had to find the things that anchored him in place.
Family. And tragedy.
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