Episode 2: What Seeing Costs / The Screen

A yard gate on a rainy morning, and the lesson that seeing is not the same as saving. Years later, a recruiter's screen lights up and the fleet takes notice of a drive mechanic who keeps pressing the right key before the dot moves. Chapters 3 and 4 of The Battle of Mars.

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Pathfinders of the Dark Book 1 The Battle of Mars Episode 2 Chapter 3 What Seeing Costs The thing Jax learned next, he learned three years later, and it was the lesson that finally taught him to be afraid of his gift the way everyone else already was. He learned that seeing is not the same as saving. It happened on an ordinary gray morning when he was thirteen. There had been a storm in the night, a real one, the kind that drove the tide up over the lower yards and left the high gantries slick and groaning. The crews went out anyway because the crews always went out, and his father went with them to run the number two crane on the North Strand, the big one, the one that lifted the heaviest loads. Jax walked his father down to the yard gate that morning, the way he sometimes did. And at the gate, with no warning, with no fast and dangerous thing rushing toward him, the front edge of the world pressed through. It had never done that before. It had only ever come on hard in the instant of danger, never minutes ahead, never standing still at a gate in the cold. But it came now, and it showed him the number two crane, and a slick of rainwater in the control housing that no one had cleared, and a short in the slew break that would not announce itself until the crane was already turning under a full load and his father in the cab when it happened. It did not show him one future this time. It showed him the branching, the way it always did, and that was the cruelty of it, because in the branching there were paths where his father lived. There were paths. He could see them. A path where the brake was checked. A path where the load was lighter. A path where his father, for no reason at all, climbed down ten minutes early. The paths existed. But they were not his to walk. He was thirteen years old, standing at a gate, and the only body he could move was his own, and his own body could not check a break forty feet up a crane. It was not allowed to climb, could not make grown men in a hurry on a bad morning. Listen to a boy babbling about water in a housing he had never seen. He tried. God help him, he tried. He grabbed his father's sleeve and said, The brake, the slough break, there is water in it. Do not run the number two today. And his father, who had spent seven years keeping his son's secret and his own fear, looked down at him with a terrible gentle patience and said, Jax, not here. Not where they can hear you. We keep it close. Remember? We keep it close. His father went up. Jax stood at the gate and watched, and the front edge of the world ran ahead of him like a tide going out, and there was nothing in his hands to stop it with. The crane took its first heavy load a little after midday. It turned. The break, full of last night's rain, did exactly what Jax had seen it do. They told his mother it was quick. They told her he would not have known. They were kind about it, the yard men, who feared nothing, and had just learned again, the one thing the breaking yards taught over and over, which is that Steele does not care. Jax knew the truth they did not. He had seen it coming for three hours, and he had not been able to bend a single second of it. The catching, the thing that had saved Theo, the thing that hummed at the front of every waking minute, was not a gift that saved people. It was a gift that showed you in perfect and merciless detail, exactly what you were about to lose, and exactly how little you could do about it. You could save the boy whose collar was already under your hand. You could not save the man forty feet up a crane who would not listen because you had both spent your lives keeping it close. After that, Jax stopped riding the front edge of the world. He could not turn it off, no one ever turned it off, but he could refuse to look. He could let the shapes press through the cloth and decline to read them. He got good at it, the way he had once gotten good at hiding the flinch. He grew up that way, deliberately blind to his own sight, and he became what his father had been, because it was the only inheritance he wanted, and the only one that did not frighten him. He apprenticed to the drive mechanics. He learned engines and field coils, and the patient, honest work of fixing things that broke, things that stayed broken until you mended them, things that did not branch. He was good at it. He was happy, or near enough. He told no one. He kept it close. He kept it close for eleven years, while out past the orbit of Saturn, a door no one had ever seen opened in the dark, and the first of the Verithra came through. Chapter 4. The Screen The war was barely a year old and very far away when the recruiters came to Tasker. They came the way they came to every working town that year, quiet and efficient, with a mobile clinic and a battery of screens and a thin patriotic speech about service. And they tested everyone of age whether they wanted it or not, because the fleet had learned to need things it could not yet name. Jax went because everyone went. He sat in a folding chair in a converted cargo container that smelled of disinfectant and let a technician fit a soft band around his temples and tell him to watch the screen and respond to what he saw. He knew, the moment the band warmed against his skin, that it was a mistake to have come. The screen showed him shapes. Simple ones at first, a dot that would move left or right, and he was to press a key for the direction it went. Easy. Idle. He pressed left and right and let his mind drift, and somewhere in the drifting, the thing he had kept close for eleven years stirred and lifted its head, because the test, for all its blandness, was doing the one thing guaranteed to wake it. It was asking him, over and over what comes next. He tried not to look. He had eleven years of practice not looking. But the screen sped up, and the shapes came faster, and the technician's bland patter changed, sharpened, grew interested, and faster still until the dots were moving too quickly for any ordinary eye to track, and Jax was still pressing the right key every time because he was not tracking the dots. He was reading the front edge of the world the way he had read it at four, at ten, at the gate, when he was thirteen, and the front edge did not care how fast the dots moved. It showed him where they would be before they went. The technician stopped the test. She sat back. She looked at her readout for a long moment, and then she looked at Jack's with an expression he recognized instantly and with a sinking heart, because it was the expression his father had worn on the strand. It was the expression people wore when they met a thing they could not explain. Wait here, she said, and her voice was not bland anymore. Do not leave. I need to make a call. They came for him within the hour, two officers off a fleet cutter that had not been in the Tasker Roads that morning and was now, and they did not let him go home first. They were courteous, and they were absolute. They told him almost nothing, that day or for many days, only that he carried something the fleet had been searching for in every town on the coast, something rarer than they had any right to expect to find, and that there was a war on, and that whether or not he had volunteered, his world and his species had need of him. In the cutter, climbing away from the only town he had ever known, Jax watched Tasker shrink under him, the long gray yards, the tide going out for half a mile, his mother and Theo somewhere down there not yet knowing he was gone. And he understood that the thing he had spent eleven years keeping close had finally been seen by the wrong people, and that it would never be his own private burden again. He did not know where they were taking him. He did not know what they would ask him to do with the sight he had spent half his life refusing to use. He only knew, watching the gray coast fall away beneath the cutter and the dark come up to meet it, that the keeping close was over. Whatever waited at the far end of this, he was going to have to learn to look again. Episode 3 arrives next week The Moon Without a Name.