Chương 70: Chapter 69: Mysteries of the past

A grade cannot be kept from the people who live with you. It is in how you lift a crate, the way you move, even how quickly you understand a concept or read a room. Children work it out before they can spell it. Grade and Tier details are shared amount those who you trust. If you want to know how well a household loves each other, ask a child at what tier its members sit, and see how fast the answers come.

- From the memoirs of Hilda Sternberg, Thirty third Principal of the Progenitor's faction Kara sent the message the moment his feet touched the terminal floor in Area 11. I'm good. Let's go. The confirmation came back inside a second. He shouldered his bag, put Waggy on top of it, and went looking for the transfer to the University.

The board sent him to a winged unicorn on the far pad, which was already saddled, and which had a handler standing beside it who checked Kara's name against her interface and then gave him a nod. Kara got on and secured himself. They lifted, and turned inland. Kara watched the coast go past on the wrong side for a while before he said anything. He checked the map and it showed him a destination he was not familiar with.

"I believe this is the wrong direction," he wrote to the handler.

"I'm afraid this is the destination provided to us," the handler returned.

"The Sanctuary of Hope." Kara had no idea what that was.

"Are you sure that's right? If I may ask, who provided the destination?"

"Mr. Shanks."

"Oh... Well, ok then." About an hour and a half later, they came down at a gate that was two poles and a bar, and after that there was a track. Upon landing, Kara received a notification welcoming him to The Sanctuary of Hope with a few dos and don'ts such as follow the track and don't go near any of the animals. He got off the unicorn pegasus, bid it farewell and started along the track. The land opened on the left and dropped into low country running out toward water he could not see the end of.

Several long-legged birds stood in the shallows. Sixth Sense went wide and stayed wide until the input stopped resolving into individual signatures and became a single pressure along the side of his skull, and he pulled it back deliberately, the way Isamu had taught him to pull back a canopy that was doing more work than the moment required.

Further on, the track climbed and the marsh gave way to dry grassland with flat-crowned trees standing apart from each other, and Kara's chest went tight before he had worked out why. It looked like the back slope above his maternal grandmother's house. Not exactly, but close enough. The trees were wrong and the grass was the wrong colour.

But it had the same open feeling, the same scatter of small animals and birds moving about and his grandmother's step had faced onto a view very close to this one and he had sat on it a hundred evenings watching hares work through the scrub. Four and a half years since he had been on that step. He had about an hour's walk along this route till he reached his destination.

He could have called for transport or jogged to make it faster but he chose not to, because somewhere far enough away, things had been set in motion and he wanted to see what would happen and also because if he was meeting Shanks, he wanted an answer to his earlier question. Hisn maternal grandfather had built that house alone, a little away from the rest of the community of old timers.

Two rooms and a covered step, the foundations dug out across one dry season with a spade and a plumb line, the water tank up on a timber frame he had cut and jointed himself so the pressure would carry. The wiring ran behind a removable panel his grandfather had fitted so it could be got at without breaking the wall. Kara had watched him take that panel off maybe fifty times and put it back with the same easy mechanism. The custom built transport had lived under a lean-to at the side.

It had started as a supply hauler that the community had written off, and by the time Kara was old enough to remember it, it had a rebuilt suspension, wheels off two different vehicles, a hand-wound winch on the front and a canopy his grandmother had made out of tarpaulin because the original had gone. It was the ugliest object in the settlement. It was also the only thing that could get up the back slope in the wet season.

The year Kara was nine, two of the community's proper vehicles went into the ditch at the second bend and his grandfather pulled both of them out with the winch and then drove his wife to market in the afternoon with the mud still on it. Kara had never quite worked out what it ran on. His grandfather had explained it to Kara at four and again at seven and again at eleven, at length, with diagrams in the dirt. Kara had understood none of it and nodded through all of it. Skills.

That was the thing that had not landed at the time. There had been at least four. Kara had never seen his grandfather's interface of course and his grandfather had never directly mentioned it, but he had heard the word used about his grandfather in that community more than once, always the same word. Mastered. Somebody's stone wall would come down and his grandfather would put it back up in a morning and one of the older men would say something about what a Mastered skill did to a job like that.

Kara had been small and had filed the word as an adult noise. His grandfather had been away most of the year. A few weeks at a time, and never a straight answer about where. If Kara asked his mother, he was told his grandfather was off helping some community or other. If he asked his father, the same thing in different words. If he asked the man himself, he got the name of a place he had never heard of and then twenty minutes about the road taken to get there, and by the end of it the original question was gone.

The few occasions they had traveled together somewhere during his off time, people knew him. That was the part Kara had never thought about, because at eight years old you assume everyone knows your grandfather. Depot managers came out to shake his hand. A council administrator two Areas over had stood up when he walked in. Once, on the road, two men at a rest stop had squared up over a queue. Kara had been six or seven. His grandfather had put down what he was holding, gone over, and sat them both on a bench.

Kara's mother had taken him away after a couple of minutes and he never learned what was said. When they came back twenty minutes later, both men were laughing at something and one of them had a hand on his grandfather's shoulder. Kara had asked to be taught how to do that and had been told he would work it out. He had been furious about that for a week.

The track bent, and a building came into view with solar banks on the roof and a stack of feed crates against the end wall, and Kara realized he had arrived at his destination. By then he had also worked out what his grandfather had been. The interface connected to the building when he reached the door and he was let in. He climbed up to the office, and as he entered, the view took his breath away, even more so than it had from the virtual experience.

"Sir."

"You made good time." Shanks came round the desk.

"Sit down. Eat something, I'm sure you're hungry and Waggy is too. We'll be here for a few hours, so make yourself comfortable. You'll know why you were brought here soon enough." This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it Kara sat down. Waggy went straight under the chair and stayed there, because there was an orangutan on the window ledge who had been watching him since the door opened.

"That's Cato - you've seen her before, though you weren't properly introduced," Shanks said.

"Waggy will come around soon enough." Cato went out into the hallway and brought back a hearty sandwich for Kara and a bowl of what looked like rice in some meat broth for Waggy. Waggy emptied it in record time. Shanks observed this, amused. Kara took a little longer with the sandwich. Once he finished, Shanks handed him a cup of coffee and took one himself.

"Now then, you look like you have some questions." Kara thought about how to phrase it and what to ask first. He went with confirming something that he had realized on the walk here.

"My maternal grandfather was PfP, wasn't he?" Shanks set down his cup.

"What makes you say so." Kara turned his cup a quarter turn on the desk.

"A man who's away three quarters of the year and never once tells anyone where. Depot managers coming out to shake his hand two Areas from home. The way he somehow knew how things work in the community, and everyone would come up to him whenever there was a problem." He looked up.

"Eight weeks ago I'd have had no idea what any of that was. I've spent eight weeks watching people do exactly those things." Shanks looked at him for a while.

"We joined within four months of each other," he said.

"I was the second one in." Kara had known it since the bend in the track and it still went through him like cold water.

"Nobody in my family knows that."

"We were fairly close in our younger days, but we drifted apart over the years. I've never met your parents. Only your grandmother in her younger years, and even then, rarely. He preferred not to mix his professional and personal lives, and so did I."

"Was he someone important in the organization?" Shanks picked his cup back up.

"He was better than me at all of it except one thing, and the one thing was ambition. He could not walk past a job. Somebody's roof, somebody's argument, somebody's daughter who wouldn't come out of a room. He gave every hour he had to whoever was standing in front of him and he never cared much for his own tier or his career." He drank.

"He could do the job better than anyone else, but he never wanted to get into the management side of things. Everyone respected him, right to the top. I'm sure you've figured out by now the fact that he had multiple Mastered skills. And yet... You know what his Tier was when he passed?"

"He was G grade, tier nine," Kara said.

"He was that for a very long time. One more tier and he could have been F grade. And he had multiple Mastered skills. You can guess what I'm getting at." Kara was silent for a long time. But w hy? Was it simply because he had not had the time or was there another reason? They walked afterwards, because Shanks said the hours would go faster outside, and Cato came down off the ledge and went with them.

Waggy recovered his confidence about two hundred feet along the path and began ranging ahead, checking the scrub on both sides, doubling back to confirm they were still coming. He was doing this with considerable seriousness when a deer came out of the treeline forty feet in front of him. It stood taller at the shoulder than Kara did and its antlers went up and out in branches. Waggy stopped. Waggy considered his situation.

Waggy then reversed the entire distance he had gained at a speed that suggested his pores had been involved, and arrived behind Kara's legs, where he turned around and looked out at the deer with his chin up.

"Fearless," Kara commented. Shanks had a small smile on his face and Cato had covered her mouth and was making a sound that was a lot like laughing. The deer lost interest and walked off. Waggy waited a decent interval before resuming his patrol.

"That's enough about your grandfather. How much do you know about your grandmother... Let's start with her tier since that's where we left off with your grandfather," Shanks asked. At first, Kara thought that was rude, but then again if he knew so much about his grandfather, maybe he knew about his grandmother too. Further, considering his position in PfP, he could have likely found out anyone's tier if he chose to. Kara opened his mouth. Then closed it, brows furrowed in confusion.

"Um, actually I... I don't know," Kara said. That was weird.

"You've forgotten it?"

"That isn't it." He stopped walking.

"I know my mother's. I know my father's, I could give you both without thinking about it. I knew Ghilim's before we lost touch. There was a woman who ran the supply depot close to my grandmother's house who I saw three weeks a year and disliked every one of them, and I know hers." He heard his voice climbing and brought it down.

"My grandmother raised me until I was three. My parents were both working and I was with her the whole time. After that I got sent to her every summer break and I never wanted to leave. She named me. My parents had something else picked out and she said no, and that was apparently the end of the discussion. I hold her dearer than almost anyone else. And yet, I somehow cannot for the life of me, remember her tier."

"And all this time, nobody said a number?"

"Nope, nobody said a number. I never asked, because it just never occurred to me to ask. It generally comes up in conversation or some occasion, so we don't typically need to ask our close family right?" Kara looked out over the grassland.

"It's just something we know, just like their names." Shanks nodded. He tried to place her. It was not that she had felt strong. He was standing next to Shanks right now, and everything about the man told him early F grade, and Kara had never asked and was not going to. She definitely did not have an aura like those above D grade either. Nothing had ever come off his grandmother. If she had been high grade there would have been something, because there was always something.

He had spent three years on an island with beings who he suspected were beyond S grade. Their presence was subtle, but it was all around, almost like the air itself somehow had their flavor. Only when he got off the island had he realized that. His grandmother had not been that either. His grandmother had been a small woman in a two-room house who cooked better than anyone he had eaten from since, on Earth or off it.

"Ok, do you know about her family?" Shanks asked next. Kara reached for it.

"There isn't any," he said slowly.

"No brothers. No sisters. No parents, nobody who came to my grandfather's funeral from her side. I don't think I know anything about where she grew up either. She told me stories every night when I was at her home, hundreds of them, and not one of them had anyone she was related to in it. All I know is I got my surname from her. Arafel."

"And your grandfather's family?"

"Four brothers, three sisters. Two of the brothers came to the burial and one of them talks exactly like him. Cousins I couldn't count if I tried. His mother lived until I was six and I met her twice and the second time she gave me a knife, which my mother confiscated before we were out of the yard." Kara stopped.

"That took me no time at all." He had never noticed the gap. Fifteen years, and it had taken a man he barely knew asking two plain questions in the right order.

"She disappeared after the funeral," Kara said. He had not planned to say it, and he heard what it sounded like from outside for the first time.

"Inside a month. She wasn't in the house, nobody could reach her, and nothing was ever filed." He kept his eyes on the treeline.

"I asked my mother. She told me my grandmother had gone to be with people who could look after her properly, and she said it like it was already settled."

"You accepted that."

"I was fourteen, not quite in the right state of mind, and she was calm about it." Kara made himself finish it.

"I know, looking back now, it doesn't make sense. My grandmother had just disappeared and yet, nobody tried to look for her, almost like they knew where she was. At fourteen I read that as her just being strong for me." Growing up, he had admired his maternal grandfather like a role model, and his grandmother was one of the people he held dearest. With both of them gone one after the other, something had broken inside him. It was why he had not resisted much when his brother had suggested isolation training.

Knowing Ghilim, this was also one of the reasons he had suggested it, though he had never mentioned it. He had left for the training within a couple of weeks after his grandmother had disappeared. Shanks did not say anything. Kara turned around. He was standing with his hands behind his back, and he did not seem surprised by any of it.

"You already knew," Kara said.

"To some extent. And to answer your initial question of how I knew about the saying in the wall of your ancestral home, it was from your grandmother. I will not pretend like I know too much about it. Just my own speculation and research. It is not my place to tell you anything further. You have enough to think about." Before Kara could respond, at the north gate, a bell sounded twice. Cato was moving before the second note finished, going down the slope ahead of them.

"That's the transport," Shanks said, and started after her.

"Three animals coming in. One of them you know."