Blaze (The High-Born Epic) (21 page)

             
The road was beginning to fill up in front of them and behind them as well.  Soon, they made it to the checkpoint, and as they passed through it, Harold noticed that one of the guards paid more attention to him than normal.  He held his data-pane on Harold for longer than normal, and Harold saw an earlier image of himself appear on the screen.  It registered with Harold that his muscles looked different than the last time the data-pane had recorded him. 

             
The guard’s tinted visor followed Harold as the data-pane recorded the other people.  Harold pretended to not notice the extra attention, and soon the guard was back to his normal routine.  Harold was thankful that none of the other guards seemed to notice, and he made a mental note to fix the problem before next week.

             
After a while, the entire circle was nearly full.  Townspeople in straw hats, overalls, and makeshift burlap attire littered the interior of the circle.  Hundreds of individual conversations were going on all over the circle, and it was a din of activity.  The only good thing about the weekly meetings was that it seemed to give the people some activity.

             
Harold quickly found Sarah and they stood with a group of others about their age and just waited for the ceremonies to start.

             
Colonel Foxx soon began speaking, and he gave more information about the Low-Born trade initiative.  Then he talked about the importance of hard work and unity between the High-Born and Low-Born.  After that, they watched the Vista again, and the entire town joined in the mandatory applause after it was over.

             
“Now we will have something new tonight,” Colonel Foxx said.  “From now on, children from odd-numbered and even-numbered roads will enter the gift area separately.  This is to ensure the equitable treatment of all citizens.  So, for instance:  If you are the parent of a child from road one; three; five; seven; nine; or eleven, please send forth your child now.”

             
After some initial confusion, the children began entering through the gates.  A few soldiers helped organize them into lines.  Then, they began giving out cans of food, and pieces of cloth.  They also made sure to give each child a new High-Born history book.  Harold looked at the platform around the pyramid, and noticed that there were still many more crates.

             
“Now,” Colonel Foxx said.  “If you are the parent of a child from road two; four; six; eight; ten; or twelve, please send forth your child now.”

             
Harold watched as Cooper shooed Scape towards Aunt Nean who bent down and he quickly came to her hands and sat at her feet.  Then Cooper and Ollie walked through the gates.  He saw many other children enter the area as well, but he eventually saw Scott and Cooper standing by each other in line.  As the children began exiting the area with their rations, and books, he caught a glimpse of Maggie as well.  She had on Ollie’s old dress and seemed overjoyed as she ran back to Phil, showing him a can of ham that she had gotten from one of the soldiers.

             
As Harold looked around the circle, he began to realize something.  He was noticing things that he never had before.  The movements of the soldiers, the slight hum of the engines of the gunships, and how they held their guns, but the thing he noticed the most was the wrongness of it all, and how the High-Born treated them. 

             
As he looked across the soldiers and their equipment, he found himself suddenly resenting the Low-Born trade initiative.  Since he had saved Ollie from the pytheel, things just seemed to make more sense than they did before.  He understood the inner workings of events on a deeper level than he ever had.  As he watched the High-Born group fly away on their gunships, he thought about Colonel Foxx’s description of the initiative. 

             
It was a complete farce of hope.

             
“You want to go to the bonfire tonight?” Sarah asked.

             
He had been so enraptured in his thoughts that Harold looked at her, dazed, “Yeah, I’d like that.”

             
She smiled as he took her hand and they walked toward road number twelve along with a small group of laughing and frolicking teenagers.  Some of the younger children tagged along, including Cooper and Scott, but they were probably the youngest members of the group.  Scape padded along with the two of them, but seemed to keep his distance from Scott, much preferring Cooper’s calmer demeanor. 

             
Harold was actually surprised at how good of a job that the two little boys had been doing at keeping his secret because no one seemed the wiser.  However, Harold did notice that several of the other boys cast strange glances at him, and the girls were looking at him and whispering in one another’s ears.  Harold noticed that Sarah pulled herself closer to him as she gave the girls a threatening look.

             
“What have you been eating, Harold?” one of the other boys said as he smacked Harold’s arm.

             
“What do you mean?” Harold asked.

             
“You know what I mean,” Sam replied.

             
“Same old thing,” Harold answered.  “I’ve just been plowing a lot this week.”

             
“Me too,” Sam said.  “But I haven’t grown that much.”

             
Harold shrugged, “I guess I’ve just hit a growth spurt.”

             
“Well, I hope I hit one soon,” Sam said as he turned his attention away from Harold and walked to the group of girls.

             
“Do I look that much different?” Harold whispered to Sarah.

             
“You’re definitely bigger than you used to be,” she whispered.  “You’re not any taller, but your muscles are way different.  You could be mistaken for a High-Born if you were taller.”

             
“Yeah,” he answered.  “One of the High-Born guards saw it too.”

             
“You don’t think they’ll take you away?” her eyes were suddenly full of fear.

             
“They probably would’ve gotten me tonight if they were going to do that,” he replied.  “I’m going to start wearing a shirt underneath my overalls to hide it, because I don’t think it’s finished yet.”

             
“How do you know?” Sarah asked.

             
“I don’t know,” he replied.  “But something more is coming.”

             
“Like what?” she asked.

             
“I really don’t know,” he answered.  “But I feel like other things are going to happen to me.  I just can’t explain it.”

             
Sarah regarded him silently and then they just walked for a while, small talking with the other teenagers until they arrived at a small clearing in the woods.  There was a pile of broken branches with piles of pine straw and dried moss beneath it.  All around the clearing were several mounds of chopped wood.  Sam pulled out two pieces of flint and began banging them together while standing over the tinder under the pile of branches.

             
Harold watched him struggle for about a minute, and was just about to give him a bit of unknown help, but the straw flamed up.  In but a few more moments, the young men of Foxx Hole had the fire roaring furiously.  Sam pulled out his harmonica and began playing a tune.  Another one of the boys from road number eleven named Dylan pulled out his banjo and began strumming along with his tune.  Though it took them several tries, they eventually put together a decent melody.

             
Sarah grabbed Harold by the hand and pulled him into the clearing.  Someone behind Harold clapped and another whistled as Sarah put her arms around his neck.  Harold smiled as he intertwined his fingers at the small of her back.  They pulled each other close and began gently swaying to the music, and in a few moments, there were several other young men and women dancing in the flickering light of the bonfire.

             
“I don’t know why they all like to do that so much,” Scott said as he threw a limb into the fire.

             
“Yeah, I know,” Cooper replied as he watched the ember of a leaf float up into the sky.  “Girls are so gross.”

Chapter 19

             
As the days turned into weeks and the weeks became four months, life in Foxx Hole did not change much.  In the mornings, Harold often went to the woods to practice, and Scape even occasionally went with him, but more times than not Harold was alone when he practiced.  Though the basics of his abilities did not change, he became extremely adept at the use of his powers.  He eventually learned to send waves of flames a little farther than 200 yards from him, and keep them confined to a fairly narrow beam.  He found that when he did that, he could burn through large trees in mere seconds.  He was always careful to check his surroundings before he practiced this.  As far as he could tell, no one had ever seen him because he often practiced in different spaces.  There were a few close calls, but he simply air-burned away before they could see him.

             
He also learned to use a stick as a decent representation of a sword.  It worked very well since the piece of wood was merely an object on which to focus his heat and fire.  The stick did not do the cutting—the heat did that.  He could slice through young trees with no problems.  As time wore on, he began to realize that all of the felled trees would look suspicious.  So, he made sure to burn the remnants, but after he had destroyed a few dozen trees in locations all around Foxx Hole, he decided to just practice on the air and save the trees. 

             
Air-burning to several different locations in rapid succession became one of his favorite things to do, especially when he combined it with the flipping and twisting.  He often fantasized about fighting a lot of High-Born soldiers who were all shooting at him as he blinked in and out of existence.  He would pick random trees to represent High-Born soldiers, and as bounced around the forest, he would appear behind them, and kick, punch, or hit them with a stick.  He could keep it up for more than an hour if he so needed, but on one particular day, Harold poured his fire into his muscles, and he stayed at it for more than two hours before he needed a break.

             
As his morning practices became part of his daily routine, he would often go see Sarah in the afternoons, and sometime she would come to Aunt Nean’s house.  Usually, they ate with each other’s families at least two or three times a week, and they would often take walks in the woods, and sometimes they hunted for arrowheads in the fields.  They even found a few, but none of them were complete pieces.  A couple of times they even danced together, listening only to the music of the forest as they held one another.

             
On a few occasions, they took the children swimming.  Ollie, however, wouldn’t let them out of her sight, and though they wanted to be by themselves, they understood.  Harold was glad that she would still even go to the river, but she was always braver when he was around.  It often touched something deep inside of Harold when the belief in her eyes met his eyes.  Harold could see there that she believed he could do anything.  What bothered Harold even more was that he often saw the same look coming from Cooper and Scott too.  

             
On most nights, Aunt Nean continued to teach Harold, and his progress remained remarkable.  By the end of the first month, he had completed both the Algebra II book and the English book as well.  He could see that Aunt Nean was overjoyed with his development.  She said that he had completed in a month what took students from the Old World an entire year to finish.  Aunt Nean then revealed to Harold that she had an even more advanced book of Calculus.  It had many pages missing, and some of the pages were torn and ragged, and difficult to read.  Aunt Nean confessed that she did not know much about it, but she told Harold that he could probably do well if he thought about it.  For the most part, Harold left the books in Scott’s secret base alone.

             
The weekly meetings scarcely changed at all.  There was always a speech and the monthly Vista.  The High-Born did, however, show a different version of the events now and then, but it was basically the same.  It was the same information presented in a slightly different way.  After the weekly meetings, soldiers would put up strange posters though.