Oracle--Solar Wind Read online

  “But people can change, Ret.”

  “Oh, you mean people like Lionel? You know, my best friend who just turned the whole world against me? Yeah, he sure changed, didn’t he? How could he do such a thing? Why would he do it? I never met a better person than Lionel—never met someone who was as noble or honest. How can one person be both my hero and my enemy at the same time?”

  Suddenly, the train hit a bump in the track. Ret flew from the edge of the boxcar where he had been sitting. He fell a few feet to the ground and then rolled down a short hill. After coming to a stop, he slowly rose to his feet and dusted himself off. He had a few scrapes here and there, but nothing serious. His backpack had broken his fall from the train, which had already sped out of sight.

  Ret looked around. He found himself in a great valley. The ground was mostly rocky with a few patches of brush. Mountains surrounded the basin, the tallest of which were still covered in snow. Trees were around but sparse. There was a lake at the other end. Storm clouds were gathering in the distance.

  “I wish Mr. Coy was here,” he lamented. For a man who was often perceived as someone who didn’t quite have it all together, Mr. Coy had a way of somehow bringing it all together—and in a manner that you swore had to have been planned even though you knew it wasn’t. It was much more than dumb luck or good karma; it was a special brand of grace, the kind of grace that is earned and cannot be shared. Ret longed for a generous dose of it now.

  With a broken heart, Ret put one foot in front of the other. The coarse ground crunched beneath his heavy steps. His stomach ached with hunger; his throat cracked with thirst. Exhaustion filled his thinning face. He was covered in dirt and was as poor as it, too. And he was alone—totally, utterly alone. Gone was his faith in men. Fled were his hopes for humanity. Love by him had waxed cold, for there he was, lost in a barren wilderness, precisely as he once thought he wanted.

  He hadn’t made it very far across the valley when, in his extremity, Ret fell to his knees. The hillsides rang with perfect silence. The airwaves were empty and still. Ret glanced down at his scar, which had all but faded. Then, being in an agony, he clenched his fists and shook them at heaven. His heart swelled. His eyes wept. His soul refused to be comforted.

  With a roar of frustration, Ret slammed his fists against the ground. It made the earth shake. He swung his arms to his sides and sent tidal waves of dirt all around him. With his mind, he reached toward the nearest mountainside and broke off a huge piece of it, then threw it against one of the valley’s slopes. The boulder broke into chunks and rolled to the valley floor. One by one, Ret drew the chunks toward him and then punched them like a boxer, causing them to burst into dust. In his rage, he combed through the dust, searching for traces of alkali metals, which he knew reacted with water. He found some, freed them, and showered them over the lake at the other end of the valley. The lake began to erupt with a hundred miniature explosions. Meanwhile, he reached deep into the belly of the earth and forced a lava tube to erupt, which set the valley floor ablaze. Finally, to end the chaos, Ret decapitated a snowcapped mountaintop and held it over the valley. He warmed it until the snow melted, extinguishing the fire and cooling the lava. Then he held the peak over the still-fizzing lake and dropped it. It plunged into the water with a deafening boom that rattled the earth. Fatigued, Ret collapsed to the ground.

  Storm clouds veiled the afternoon sun, and it started to rain. Lying on his back, Ret watched the heavens weep with him. Then, directly over the valley, lightning lit up the darkened sky. The thunderclaps followed without delay. Bolt after bolt, the lightning cackled, but Ret wasn’t looking at the bolts. He was looking at the energy left behind by the bolts. He could see it, those inordinate streaks of light-purple hues that zigzagged with the power ignited by each lightning bolt. As he was falling into a much-needed slumber, Ret could feel his scar pulsating with renewed life. It was an unwelcomed way to drift off to sleep—a sleep that he hoped he would never awake from.

  But he did. He awoke to a dog licking his face.

  “Down, boy,” the canine’s master called. The dog retreated, and Ret heard a man’s footsteps coming toward him on the graveled ground.

  “You alright, son?” the man asked.

  Ret looked up to see who was standing over him. It was Principal Stone.

  CHAPTER 6

  ONE MAN’S PAST IS ANOTHER MAN’S FUTURE

  There were no layovers during Mr. Coy’s flight from his Manor on Little Tybee Island to the far-flung Pacific isle called Waters Deep. The journey was long, not only because of the distance but also because of the solitude. For thousands of miles, Mr. Coy was alone with nothing but his thoughts to keep him company. He tried not to dwell on the passing of his wife, but how could he not? Returning to the place of her demise was like traveling to a cemetery to visit the grave of a loved one. Her absence would not be so agonizing for him had their lives together not been so wonderful. But even the good memories stung because Mr. Coy blamed himself for the death of one of the world’s most intelligent minds and compassionate hearts.

  As heartbreaking as such a trip was turning out to be, there was a separate, though related and much more important, act of heart-breaking that was taking place simultaneously. You see, it was very soon after Helen’s death when Mr. Coy strongly set his heart on never, ever going back to the place now known as Waters Deep. He had drunk the dregs of one of life’s most bitter cups and, thereby, became bitter himself. In an endless cycle, the bitterness would build up in his heart until, eventually, it would break his heart all over again, and he would become even more hardhearted, which only led to more bitterness. He refused to forgive himself, came to loathe himself. He tried to bury his old self under a new, false self, but the reincarnation was a weird and whacky disaster.

  But now, in this gruesome but glorious moment, the true Benjamin Coy was breaking free from the shackles of the past. It was difficult; it was painful; and yet it was all possible precisely because he was doing the one thing he had set his heart on never, ever doing. He was deliberately going against the innermost wishes of his hardened heart, willfully choosing to break it. But, this time, rather than becoming bitter again like it had so many times before, his heart was becoming soft and pure. He was, at last, letting go of his personal will and, instead, yielding his heart to another will, one that was more selfless than selfish. And, as he knew, such a life-saving transplant had been brought about and carried out by the one and only Oracle.

  In the floatplane he had borrowed from Thorne, Mr. Coy flew nearly halfway around the globe with a specific set of coordinates as his final destination: 31°42’08”S 172°33’03”W. These were the exact same coordinates that, months ago, Lionel, who was then being held captive at Waters Deep, had included in the letter he had sent asking Ret to come and rescue him. Of course, Mr. Coy never actually saw the letter, nor did anyone find out who actually wrote it. But fortunately, a simple check of the hot-air balloon’s electronic navigational log revealed just the information Mr. Coy had wanted to see from the letter that Lionel refused to show him.

  It was with slight confusion, therefore, when Mr. Coy arrived at the coordinates and found nothing there. All he could see, in every direction, was open ocean. There was no island (or any land, for that matter), neither was there a ship or platform or any sign of human life anywhere.

  Mr. Coy didn’t bother checking the map he had brought along, as he remembered from his initial visit with Helen that the mysterious island could not be found on any maps. This was not uncommon of small landforms in the vast Pacific Ocean, where not every single atoll or cay was charted. So, instead, Mr. Coy consulted the plane’s global positioning system. He zoomed in as far as the screen would allow, but still there was no sign of any island at the given coordinates.

  Mr. Coy reasoned there might be something secret at work here. What he knew about Waters Deep was far less than what he didn’t know about it. It was obviously being used, at least in part, as a sort of military base
for Lye, since that’s where his fleet of ships had been headed. It also likely had accommodations for prisoners, since Lionel had been held there (if, in fact, he was telling the truth). Moreover, the island was oddly shaped and heavily guarded, according to Ishmael’s account, and it seemed to share a connection with one of Ret’s scars.

  But there was one nugget of information that intrigued Mr. Coy more than the others: Waters Deep was the place of the most recent sighting of a certain missing man named Jaret Cooper. Mr. Coy had never contributed much credence to the hope that Jaret was still alive, but now that his survival had been confirmed, Mr. Coy was impressed. And even though it was almost certain he was being manipulated by Lye, Mr. Coy still thought he ought to meet Jaret. In fact, that was the major impetus for his trip. Jaret was his ‘in.’

  Mr. Coy circled the area, hoping for the vanished island to rise up out of the sea or appear once the sun shone on it at some magic angle. Still nothing. He widened his search, gradually increasing the diameter of the circle he was making in the sky.

  It took a few more hours, but he finally found it, a couple hundred miles west of where it should have been. From the air, Mr. Coy could plainly see the odd shape of Waters Deep. It had four slender arms or peninsulas jutting out from its main, circular body. There was a fifth protrusion, but it was much wider and shaped like a trapezoid. It looked like a six-legged starfish with the gap between two of its legs filled in with land. Now Mr. Coy knew why Ishmael had had such a hard time trying to describe the place to him. It was downright bizarre. If Ret had been there, he might have compared it to a Ferris wheel.

  Mr. Coy took the plane down, his finger poised to press the ejection button if he noticed any sort of bullets or bombs headed his way. He hovered just above the water as he flew into the space between two of the jetty-like peninsulas. Before the arms met, Coy landed the floatplane on the water and taxied to the rocky edge of the nearest peninsula. After securing his craft, he stood on the wing and paused.

  He had been here before. The past played out before his very eyes, whose every blink displayed a new photograph like the click of a slide projector. It was the photo album he was unable to erase from his memory. He saw his hands, younger and stronger, mooring their boat to the island. There was Helen, her instruments in hand, stepping onto those same slippery rocks. He saw her glance back at their humanitarian ship anchored further offshore, worry on her face.

  Ben came to himself. His heart was pounding in his chest. He looked out across the ocean, as if to see if the humanitarian vessel was still there. It wasn’t. It was all in the past—a past that he kept making the present. He was nervous, an emotion that was seldom his. More than once, he looked back at the cockpit, entertaining the idea of just going home. And, after several anxious moments, that’s what he decided to do. Downcast, he climbed back in the plane and was about to turn the key to start the ignition when he heard a voice in his mind, saying:

  “What are you doing? Have you come all this way just to turn back? You’re right here. You’re on the cusp of a bright, new future, one unhampered by the past. You’re so close. Now you’re just going to give up?”

  “I can’t do it. I just can’t face it again. I miss her. Every single day, I think of her and miss her so much. But she’s gone, and it’s all my fault. How could I have done such a thing? She was an angel, a gift to mankind, so much better than me. Why? Why did this have to happen?”

  “What has happened has happened for a wise purpose. You must learn to forgive yourself, for if you are not able to forgive yourself for what you think you did, then you would not be able to forgive someone else had he or she done it instead, and such would be your tragic flaw. You already forgive others freely: the truth that people can change is the founding philosophy of the Manor. But there is one student at the Manor who has yet to change: you. You must learn that you can change, too. You are not a bad person, though you feel guilty for a part of your past, which you have done everything in your power to rectify. Don’t let yesterday hold today hostage. The past is holding you back. Move on. The time to change is now.”

  “But why couldn’t I be the one who died? Most days, I wish I had been. Life has turned into misery without her.”

  “Your life has been spared to carry on the work that she so loved—the work of helping to cure the world. Yes, something bad came into your life, but you took that negative energy and turned it around into something positive: you created the Manor, which has changed hundreds of lives. You could have let that negative energy fester inside of you until it snuffed out the light within. But you didn’t. No, you did the opposite. You did what Helen would have done, and you are using her flame to light countless others. Don’t you see? You two are still working together, spirit to spirit, in the cause to cure the world.”

  Mr. Coy recognized the familiar phrase cure the world. It was the prophecy’s one phrase that Ret referred to most frequently. Until now, however, Mr. Coy had never considered that Helen’s work and his continuation of it might be a means of fulfilling such a lofty directive. He had always thought that he had little to do with curing the world; rather, that his contribution was merely to help Ret to do it by finding the elements. Now, however, that perspective was changing. Maybe, like Ret had recently told him, the Oracle had very little to do with elements and quite a lot to do with people.

  “I wish Ret was here.” But, Mr. Coy remembered, he at least had the next best thing. He leaned across the cockpit and reached into his bag to retrieve the Oracle. He held it in his hands. It didn’t open, of course, but it shined back at him. It was such a striking, almost mesmerizing object that, despite containing so much power, exuded an overwhelming sense of peace. Mr. Coy paused to stare at each of the three elements they had collected thus far. From earth to fire to ore, the attractive trio brought back a slew of memories. He missed Ret—his undaunted bravery, his heroic spirit—and wished he was here now to tell him to stop moping and get his butt out of the cockpit.

  It was while looking at the Oracle when Mr. Coy saw how the scar over one of the sphere’s three empty wedges was glowing. He knew the six markings that were etched around the waist of the Oracle were identical to the six scars that Ret had on his hands. In the past, only when a scar on Ret’s hands was illuminated did the corresponding marking on the Oracle also begin to glow. So, as Coy realized, what this meant was this same marking that he was seeing was also burning brightly on Ret’s hand.

  And what a curious thing it was! It was an empty circle with two barbs or lines extending from it. One of the barbs was stationary, pointing down with a pennant at its end, while the other barb was anything but stationary, twitching and switching often. The mobile barb had perpendicular lines (not a pennant) at its end, but even the quantity of those changed once or twice while Mr. Coy was analyzing it. He recognized the scar as a wind barb, a graphic used in meteorology to show both the direction and strength of the wind.

  Mr. Coy smiled to know the quest to fill the Oracle was alive and well. In fact, he let out a hearty laugh and slapped his knee at the irony that even though Ret had tried to run away from the Oracle, it had found him!

  Mr. Coy tossed the Oracle in the air a few times, marveling and smiling at it as though he had just caught a foul ball at a baseball game. For being such a small and simple thing, it could certainly bring to pass great things. True, it could crumble great mountains and erupt fiery volcanoes and demolish ancient pyramids; but it could also break hard hearts and bind up broken ones. And, as he looked into it, it seemed to look into him, whispering the reminder, “People can change.”

  And so he did. In the spirit of Helen and with the vigor of Ret, Mr. Coy threw open the cockpit door, leapt onto the barnacled rocks, and once again set foot on the forbidden island of Waters Deep. A new man, he took in a lungful of salty air and exhaled triumphantly, marching along the peninsula toward the isle’s mainland. In true Coy fashion, he did something that most certainly would have been the last thing anyone else would have
done having just trespassed onto a heavily guarded fortress where stealth and sneakiness were paramount: he started singing. He wasn’t simply humming quietly to himself; no, he was bellowing with the loudest tenor voice his diaphragm could summon. He just couldn’t suppress the happiness and relief he felt from letting go of the burdens of his past. And so, arriving at the start of the island’s vegetation and waltzing right into it, Mr. Coy’s voice rang out across the treetops, singing the familiar lines from the favorite play Oklahoma!: “Oh, what a beautiful morning! Oh, what a beautiful day! I’ve got a beautiful feeling everything’s going my way.” And even though the day’s morning was long gone, somehow everything would go his way.

  For, meanwhile, deep within the concealed walls of Lye’s lair at Waters Deep, a vigilant team of surveillance officers was closely monitoring Mr. Coy’s every move. In fact, they had picked up the presence of his plane long before it ever landed at their shores. Thanks to the security cameras hidden all over the island, they watched him get out, then get back in, talk to himself for a few minutes, then get out again and finally come ashore. And now, he was dancing through a grassy meadow, still singing: “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow, there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow. The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, and it looks like it’s climbing clear up to the sky.”

  Witnessing this behavior, one of the security officers remarked, “Who is this whacko?”