Page 14 of Love, Nemesis
“Your ID card? You don’t mean to—”
“I’m coming out of retirement. State orders. Do you still have my Atlas here?”
“W-Well yes, but you—you can’t use it, can you?”
“I didn’t say I was. Can I just see it, Pamina?” Ana replied, deadpan.
Pamina scrambled from her chair. “Yes, yes, of course. I’m sorry. I don’t know when to stop sometimes!” She scurried off, her scrawny legs shuffling under a faded blue dress as she disappeared behind a bolted black door.
Ana stepped back from the bars and paced with slow, patient steps around the room. She scanned the familiar photos, the same ones she thought she’d seen for the last time. She stopped when her eyes settled on a picture of Santiago and the former Sixth Hour, Rosco. The two men were grinning at the camera, drinks in each hand, status awards hanging from their necks.
The State military, or Numbers, had twelve generals called Hours, each commanding sixty Minute soldiers with squads of their own.
Rosco had been one of the elite. Being an Hour meant so.
The path to achieving that honor took years of experience, merit, and a rigorous testing process. Having a family history of service in the Numbers didn’t hurt either.
Even among the elite, though, Rosco had been a model of a soldier. He’d retired at forty-six with six years left on his Atlas. He’d died at fifty-two with family all around him. She looked at another photo of her old mentor, Juliana, who’d died three years ago, age forty.
The Atlas was the State’s crowning invention and most powerful weapon. Many would say it was the only reason the State could resist the Mystics’ incursions for so many years. The only trouble was, the users had to sacrifice their own lifespan to make it work. Ana was all too familiar with that sacrifice.
“Ana?” The word jogged her from her thoughts, and she turned to see Pamina with her ID and Atlas in hand.
Ana took her ID and put it away before accepting the ball of rolled velvet, recognizing the weight of her Altas inside.
“Thanks,” she said, and started filling out a form near the bars. She finished writing the details into the form in silence before turning with her Atlas and walking out.
She passed by the capital’s museum with its grand steeple and stained glass, striding into training building B a few buildings down. She perused the corridors before locating Jasper’s class, nearing what should have been the end of his regular hours. She stood outside the doorway, listening in on his lecture.
“…Eating Ocean is the source of energy we refer to as Madness. Madness is like ink. Mutations, or more deliberate manifestations, called curses, are like the writing from that ink. Do any of you know where The Eating Ocean came from?”
There was silence in the class.
“Good,” Jasper said, “if anyone raised their hands, I’d be amazed. No one knows, except for maybe the En Sanctans. As far as we know, it appeared out of nowhere and broke the world. Simple as that. Now. Neutralizing Madness and its mutations.”
Jasper started explaining how an Atlas and the time generated from it could neutralize a mutation.
Ana had always understood that The Eating Ocean, an alien force, existed on another plane, in another world, maybe. People and things with mutations didn’t seem to age, and a bit of The Ocean lived inside every mutation in the form of Madness. To some, that meant that The Ocean was timeless and maybe even repelled time.
“Mortals are mortals because we have time applied to our lives,” Jasper explained. “Time restricts energy, and when werun out of time, our energy is released back out into the world to be recycled. We become dirt, another form of energy, to be harnessed again in other ways, like becoming a plant. Now, say we take some of our mortal time and pin it on an immortal energy, like Madness. Through the application of our time, it becomes mortal, and then it can be killed and released back to The Eating Ocean on its own plane of existence. You see, it invades our world, but it can’t play by our rules. Time is like a pathogen to it, a disease that we are used to living and dying with.”
“And that’s how we always win,” one student replied.
“Right,” Jasper said. “The ancient world used fire to completely destroy the hosts of Madness, but that takes oil, it’s hazardous, and it’s hard to control. We use time. It’s how we purged the State from mutations, mutated things, and mutated people. It’s how we beat back the Mystic empire. It’s how we preserve what few natural laws are still left as Madness seeks to mutate them. Don’t forget it.”
Ana checked her watch before peering into the classroom to see Jasper, a lanky blond, traversing the room. The gestures of his hands and the methods of his teaching were all perfected practices made to seem deceptively natural. The eyes of the students followed him like a spotlight.
He wore the Numbers uniform like one of the manikins in the museum—fatigue hitched at every button; bootlaces pulled to such perfect angles that they looked drawn on. His utility belt stretched across the desk behind him, equipped with his map, Atlas, flare gun, canteen, and knife.
“This is why we honor the Numbers. They spend their lives to protect the State way of life. In a year of service, we can easily give up five years of our lives.”
Jasper turned his back to the class as he retrieved something from his belt.
Ana adjusted her watch.
“Now, I’m going to show you an Atlas. I will do a very short demonstration of how it works and then we’ll go through all the proper ways to use it.”
Ana groaned inwardly.That’ll take forever.This must be his extended Atlas seminar that the students had to go through after their final exams in the academy.
