“I wonder,” the Master says, “if you have ever thought about joining our Order.”
I spin to look at him. The Order is an ancient organization of men and women who act as knowledge keepers for the galaxy. To become a Master of the Order, you must live on Mount Kilmon for a full cycle, from the end of one eruption to the start of the next. During that time, you’re trained in the Order’s Three Pillars.Move as water moves, breathe as wind breathes,andgive as earth gives.During the volcano’s eruption in your ninth year, you must use these learned skills to escape. It’s a final test with one simple outcome: If you make it off the mountain alive, you become a Master.
“You have potential,apata,” Master Ira tells me in serious tones. “Your spirit reminds me of myself at your age, as does your… solitude.” It isn’t like the Master to hesitate over words, but it’s also not like him to mention our orphanhood. I pick at the hem of my shirt. It feels sheer as gauze. “You want a home,” he continues. “A future to look forward to and a family to which you can belong. The Order can provide those things, and in exchange, you can devote your life to knowledge keeping.”
My eyes—on their valiant quest to look anywhere but at him—find Mount Kilmon. The volcano is monstrous on the horizon, craggy, unrepentant.It’s painted with the souls of the deceased, the Longji locals like to say.That’s why it’s so dark, even in full sun.
I’ve heard endless stories about Mount Kilmon’s explosions. How the plumes of smoke darken the sky for months, how lava bursts from fractures in the volcano’s sides. The snowstorms that follow, the changes to bird andfish migrations, the endless loss of crops… and the Great Hunger. There is never enough food in the years after an eruption, no matter how the people of Planet Venthros try to prepare. It’s too cold and too dark, and by the time the smoke clears and the fields are revived, the cycle begins again.
I’ve never seen an eruption. This year will be my first.
Possibly sensing my shift in mood, Master Ira sets a hand on my shoulder. “You are young, with plenty of time to discover your path. If you would like, I can teach you some of the basics of the Three Pillars. Show you how it might be if you journeyed to Mount Kilmon.”
“You—” I have to lick my lips and try again. “You would do that?”
“Of course,” he says.
But it’s notof course. I can hardly understand thisof course.
Earlier that year, on my tenth birthday, Master Ira caught me in the woods with a ray gun.
All told, it probably took less than a second for the Master to realize the metal in my hand wasn’t a toy, and the bottles I’d set in a row across the log weren’t for drinking. Yet that moment had stretched for ages, and in it, I’d read my doom. Weapons were strictly forbidden at Master Ira’s school. When I’d arrived the prior year and was struggling to absorb my new life, the Master had been kind, yet he’d made this clear: If anyone brought a weapon onto school grounds, the consequences would be severe.
Master Ira took a long, hard look at the gun in my hand, turned around, and walked away.
A few breathless minutes later, after I’d buried the weapon under a pile of leaves and rushed out of the woods, I found Master Ira sitting on the school’s garden bench where he usually liked to read. But he wasn’t reading. He wasn’t doing anything.
I didn’t realize, until that day, how deeply I feared abandonment.
But that’s what was going to happen, wasn’t it? It was my mom walking away all over again. Master Ira was going to expel me. He couldn’t keep a kid who’d smuggled a ray gun onto the grounds of his children’s home. Notonly did it break his most serious rule, but Master Ira was a member of the Order, vehemently opposed to violence of any kind. The ray gun didn’t just go against the school’s regulations. It went against the Master’sbeliefs.
I had no excuse. There was no coming back from this.
Master Ira swallowed. “Get the gun. We will walk.”
I didn’t even think about disobeying. I dug up the ray gun and held it stiffly as we walked the short distance from the children’s home into the nearby town of Longji. Master Ira led us to the local tea shop, then left me in the back room with the shop’s owner who had apparently—in her younger years—been a hired gunwoman. She was a friend of the Master’s and asked me simple questions. Where did I get the gun? How long had I owned it? What had I used it to shoot?
I found the gun in my room a few weeks ago,I answered honestly.Someone left it there along with a pamphlet for… I mean, I don’t know who did it. I’ve only used it for target practice, I swear, that’s all.
After her interrogation, the shop owner took the weapon and tucked it into a drawer. Master Ira returned, and the two of them had a short, private conversation. Then the Master told me it was time to go home.
“What?” I croaked. “But I thought—aren’t you going to leave me here?”
“Leave you?” Master Ira’s brows went up. “Keller, no. You have a place at my school for as long as you need. Do you understand?”
No, I didn’t. There must be a mistake. “But… but you…” I was horrified to feel my eyes fill with tears. “Shouldn’t you—?”
“The gun is upsetting,” Master Ira said in gentler tones, “and very much against our rules. But you are mine,apata. My ward and my responsibility. I am not leaving you behind.”
I never understood Master Ira’s patience. Not the day he welcomed me back into his home, and certainly not after, when he asked if I was interested in joining his ranks. Yet underneath all the confusion was an undeniable yearning. He was right. I wanted a home. A future. Something I could dig my fingers into, something solid and real that couldn’t be taken and couldn’t be lost.
The night we released the fireflies, I accepted his offer to begin training in the ways of the Order.Maybe this, I thought.Maybe this is what I’ve been looking for.
Three weeks later, the ray gun mysteriously found its way back into my room.
07
I wake up shortlyafter Illiviamona’s injection and sit on the edge of the hospital bed in a too-short dressing gown, questioning every life decision I’ve ever made. My ruined uniform is in a sack at my feet along with a bottle of pain pills and a few papers detailing my post-op procedures, which include such items asDo not look directly into any mirrorandSleep in stints of four hours on, three hours off, for the next twenty-eight hours.
