Episode 1: The Yards / The Falling Sky

Tasker is a breaking-yard town on a gray northern coast of Earth, and Jax has spent his whole life learning to keep a secret. When a crane load drops on a wet strand, he learns what the secret actually costs. Chapters 1 and 2 of The Battle of Mars.

Transcript

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Pathfinders of the Dark Book 1 The Battle of Mars Episode 1 Chapter 1 The Yards The town was called Tasker, and it lived and died by the ships that came to it broken. It sat on a gray northern coast where the tide went out for half a mile and came back like it meant something by it, and the great breaking yards ran along the water line for as far as a child could walk in a day. Old hulls came in under tow, freighters and lifters and the long spent bones of orbital tugs too tired to climb anymore, and the cutting crews swarmed them with torches and cranes and took them apart down to the last meter of plate. The whole town smelled of salt and scorched steel and the sweetish reek of fuel that had soaked into metal for forty years. Jax had never known any other smell. He thought for a long time that it was simply what the world smelled like. His father worked the heavy cranes, and his mother kept the books for one of the smaller, breaking outfits, and his little brother Theo followed Jax everywhere on legs too short to keep up, which meant Jax spent most of his childhood half turned around, watching for him. That was the first thing anyone noticed about Jax, that he watched. Not the way other children watched, fixed and dull on whatever moved. He watched the air a half second ahead of where things were as if he were reading a page just before it turned. The catching came first. He was four, maybe five, the first time anyone marked it. His mother dropped a cup, a heavy enameled thing off the edge of the table, and before it had cleared the lip, Jax's hand was already where it would be, and he caught it clean, and looked up at her with the mild surprise of a child who did not yet know that this was strange. His mother went very still. Then she laughed it off. The way you laugh off a thing you do not want to have seen, and she did not mention it again. But she started watching him watch. It was not magic. Jax could never have called it that, even later, even when he had the words. It did not feel like power. It felt like the world was very slightly transparent at the front edge. Like the next moment was a shape pressing through a thin cloth toward him, and if he paid attention he could feel the shape before the cloth tore. Most of the time he did not pay attention. Most of the time, he was a boy in a yard town, throwing rocks at the tide and stealing bolts from the scrap bins and getting in the way of men with torches. But the front edge of the world was always there, and when something came fast and hard and dangerous, it pressed through, and his body answered before his mind did. By eight, he had learned to keep quiet about it. Children are quick to learn which of their gifts make other people glad, and which make them go still and careful, and the catching made people go still. He saw it in his mother's face. He saw it in the way the yardmen who feared nothing would glance at him when he flinched at a thing that had not happened yet, and then a breath later, the thing happened. So he stopped flinching where they could see. He learned to ride the front edge of the world without letting his face show it, but he could not always stop. That was the part no one understood. Least of all Jack's. The catching was not a thing he did. It was a thing that happened to him, and when it came on hard it came with a price he had no name for then. After a close one, a real one, his head would split with a white pane behind the eyes, and sometimes his nose would bleed, thin and bright, and he would have to tip his head back over the kitchen sink while his mother held a cloth to his face and did not ask him what had happened. She had stopped asking by then. She had decided, the way mothers do, that the thing would either pass or it would not, and that talking about it would only make it real. It did not pass. The summer jacks turned ten. The front edge of the world pressed through harder than it ever had, and that was the summer he learned what his strange sight was actually for and what it would cost. Chapter two The Falling Sky They were not supposed to be in the yards on a cutting day. Everyone knew that. The cranes ran and the loads swung and the cutting crews dropped sections of hull plate the size of houses, and a child underfoot was a child who got folded into the scrap. But it was high summer and the school had let out and the tide was low and forever, and Jax was ten and Theo was six, and there was a whole dead freighter being taken apart down on the north strand, and no force in the world keeps a ten year old away from that. So they went down to watch, the way half the children in Tasker went down to watch, hanging back at the rope line where the foreman let them stand if they stayed quiet. A crane crew was lifting a long, curved section of the freighter's flank, a slab of plate forty feet long, swinging it slow across the strand toward the sorting yard. Jax watched it the way he watched everything, with the front edge of the world humming faintly at the back of his skull. And then the front edge tore open. It did not come as a thought. It came as a flood, the way it always did when it came on hard, except this was harder than anything in his short life had ever been, and the world went transparent all the way through. He did not see one future. He saw the branching, all of it at once, a dozen versions of the next four seconds laid over one another like the same photograph printed again and again on the same sheet. In most of them, the load swung past, and the day went on. But in some of them, the worn lifting strap on the high corner of the plate, the one no one was looking at, parted with a sound like a gunshot, and the slab came down, and where it came down was the rope line, and where the rope line was, was Theo. Jax saw all of it. He saw the branch where he froze. He saw the branch where he screamed and pointed, and no one understood in time. He saw the branch where he ran the wrong way. He saw, threaded through all the dark ones, a single narrow path, improbable and exact, that the others did not contain. In that one path, he was already moving. Already had Theo by the collar of his shirt. Already had both of them three steps clear before the slab touched the ground. The swarm of futures had no will of its own. It only showed him the shapes. The choosing was his, and the choosing was everything, and he understood in that torn open instant the truth that would define the rest of his life, that seeing the path and walking it were two different things, and that the second one was the one that mattered, and that he would have to spend himself to do it. He chose the narrow path. He did not remember deciding. He remembered his hand already closing on Theo's collar, his legs already driving, his brother's startled cry, the rope line whipping past, and behind them, the sound, the real sound, the strap parting with that gunshot crack and the slab of dead steel coming down where two boys had been standing half a second before. The ground jumped. Dust and grit blew over them. Somewhere a foreman was screaming, and then everyone was screaming, and Theo was crying against Jax's chest, alive, whole, furious in the way of frightened children, and Jax was on his knees in the wet strand, with blood pouring from his nose, and a white blade of pain driving through his skull so hard he could not see. They called it luck. Of course they did. The foreman and the yardman and his weeping mother. They all called it luck, a boy's quick reflexes, a near thing, thank God, thank God. His father did not call it luck. His father came down from the crane gantry white as bone and pulled both his sons against him, and held them too hard for too long, and over the top of Jax's head he looked at the fallen slab, and then he looked at his elder son, and in his father's eyes Jax saw the thing he had spent six years learning to fear. Not gratitude. Not even relief. Not only relief fear. His own father, afraid of him. That night, with the nosebleed long stopped and Theo asleep and the house quiet, his father came and sat on the edge of Jax's bed in the dark, which he had never done before. You knew, his father said. It was not a question. Before the strap went, you knew. He did not have the words, and he was afraid of the answer, so he said the only true thing he had. I see the front of it, he said. Just the front. Just before. His father was quiet a long time. Then he said, in a voice Jax had never heard him use, careful and low. Then you listen to me. You do not tell people, not the yard, not the school, not anyone. People are good, and people are kind right up until they meet a thing they cannot explain. And then they are something else. You keep it close. You hear me? You keep it close and you keep your brother close and you let them go on calling it luck. Yes, sir, Jax whispered. His father put a rough hand on his head, the way he did with the cranes when he was settling a thing that had come loose. You saved him, he said, softer now. Whatever it is, it saved your brother today. I will not have you afraid of a thing that did that. But his father was afraid of it. Jax had seen it on the strand, in the one place a child always reads true. And a boy can carry a great many things, but he cannot carry his father's fear lightly. Jax kept it close after that the way he had been told. He kept it so close that for a while he almost convinced himself it was gone. The world had other plans. It always does. The front edge was still there every morning when he woke, humming faintly, waiting. Episode two arrives next week. What seeing costs.