"Here," I said, picking up a backpack. "I made one of these for each of us too. There are two of each kind of bear in there. I figured we should all have some, just in case."
Kaz nodded, throwing on his backpack. I shrugged mine on as well.
"You realize,” Kaz said softly, "that the soldiers you send out to stop those robots won't be coming back."
"What? They could run back in the tunnel, and . . ."
And I trailed off, realizing how stoopid it sounded. The Librarians might get surprised by my tricky plan - might - but they'd never let the Mokian soldiers escape back into the tunnel after destroying the robots. Even if all of this worked out exactly as I wanted, those six men and women weren't returning. At best, they'd get captured. Maybe knocked out by Librarian coma-bullets.
I hadn't even considered this. Perhaps because I didn’t want to. Go back and read the beginning of this chapter. Maybe now you'll start to understand what I was saying.
I glanced at the six soldiers. Their faces were grim but determined. They carried their backpacks over their shoulders, and each held a spear. They were younger soldiers, four men and two women, who Aluki had said were their fastest runners. I could see from their eyes that they understood. As I regarded them, they nodded to me one at a time. They were ready to sacrifice for Mokia.
They had seen what my request would demand of them, even if I hadn't. Suddenly, I felt very stoopiderlifluous.
"I should cancel the plan," I said suddenly. “We can think of something else.”
"Something that doesn't risk the lives of your soldiers?” Kaz said. "Kid, we're at war.”
"I just . . ." I didn't want to be the one responsible for them going into danger. But there was nothing to be done about it. I sighed, sitting down.
Kaz joined me. "So now . . ." he said.
"Now we wait, I guess." I glanced upward nervously. The rocks continued to fall; the glass's cracks glowed faintly, making the dark night sky look like it was alight with lightning. Fifteen minutes. If the Librarians didn’t burrow in during the next fifteen minutes, the dome would shatter and the Librarian armies would rush in. Most of the Mokians - the ones I didn't have watching for tunnels - were already gathered on the wall, anticipating the attack.
I blinked, realizing for the first time how tired I was. It was well after eleven at this point, and the excitement of everything had kept me going. Now I just had to wait. In many ways, that seemed like the worst thing imaginable. Waiting, thinking, worrying.
Isn't it odd, how waiting can be both boring and nerve-wracking at the same time? Must have something to do with quantum physics.
A question occurred to me, something I'd been wondering for a while. Kaz seemed the perfect person to ask. I shook off some of my tiredness. "Kaz,” I said, "has any of the research you've done indicated that the Talents might be . . . alive?"
"What?" Kaz said, surprised.
I wasn't sure how to explain. Back in Nalhalla – when we'd been in the Royal Archives (not a library) - my Talent had done some odd things. At one point, it had seemed to reach out of me. Like it was alive. It had stopped my cousin Folsom from accidentally using his own Talent against me.
"I'm not sure what I mean,” I said lamely.
"We've done a lot of research on Talents,” Kaz said, drawing his little circle diagram in the dirt, the one that divided up different Talents into types and power ranges. "But we don't really know much.”
"The Smedry line is the royal line of Incarna,” I said. “An ancient race of people who mysteriously vanished.”
"They didn't vanish,” Kaz said. “They destroyed themselves, somehow, until only our line remained. We lost the ability to read their language.”
"The Forgotten Language," I said. “We didn’t forget it. Alcatraz the First broke it. The entire language. So that people couldn't read it. Why?”
"I don't know," Kaz said. "The Incarna were the first to get Talents."
"They brought them down into themselves, somehow," I said, thinking back to the words of Alcatraz the First, which I'd discovered in his tomb in the Library of Alexandria. "It was like . . . Kaz, I think what they were trying to do was create people who could mimic the power of Oculatory Lenses. Only without having to use the Lenses."
Kaz frowned. "What makes you say that?"
"My tongue moving while breath moves out of my lungs and through my throat, vibrating my vocal cords and -"
"I meant,” Kaz said. "Why do you think that the Talents are like Lenses?"
“Oh. Right. Well, a lot of the Talents do similar things to Lenses. Like Australia's Talent and Disguiser's Lenses. I did some reading on it while I was in Nalhalla. There are a lot of similarities. Shatterer's Lenses can break other glass if you look at it; that's kind of like my Talent. And then there are Traveler's Lenses, which can push a person from one point to another and ignore obstructions in between. That's kind of like what you do. I wonder if there are Lenses that work like Grandpa's power, slowing things or making them late."
"There are,” Kaz said thoughtfully. "Educator's Lenses. When you put them on, it slows time."
"That's an odd name."
"Not really. Have you ever known anything that can slow down time like a boring class at school?"
"Good point," I said.
All in all, there were thousands of different kinds of glass that had been identified. A lot of them - like the Traveler's Lenses - were impractical to use. They were either too dangerous, took too much energy to work, or were so rare that complete Lenses of them were nearly impossible to forge.
"Some glass is called technology,” I said, "but that's just because it can be powered by brightsand. But all glass can be powered by Oculators. I've done it before."
"I know," Kaz said. "The boots. You said you were able to give them an extra jolt of power."
“I did it again," I said. "With Transporter's Glass in Nalhalla."
"Curious," Kaz said. "But Al, nobody else can do that. What makes you think this involves the Incarna?"
“Well, neurons in my brain transmit an electrochemical signal to one another and -"
"I mean,” Kaz interrupted. "Why do you think this has something to do with the Incarna?"
"Because," I said. "I just have a feeling about it. Partially Alcatraz the First's writings, partially instinct. The Incarna knew about all these kinds of glass, but they wanted more. They wanted to have these powers innate inside of people. And so somehow, they made it happen - they gave us Talents. They turned us into Lenses, kind of."
I frowned. "Maybe it's not the fact that I'm an Oculator that lets me power glass. Maybe it's the fact that I'm an Oculator and a Smedry. That's much rarer, isn't it?"
"I only know of four who are both,” Kaz said. "You, Pop, your father, and Australia."
"Has any research been done into people like us powering glass?"
"Not that I know of," he confessed.
"I'm right, Kaz,” I said. "I can feel it. The Incarna did something to themselves, something that ended with the creation of the Smedry Talents."
Kaz nodded slowly.
"Aren't you going to ask what makes me feel this way?"
"Wasn't planning on it."
"’Cuz I've got this really great comment prepared on unconscious mind interacting with the conscious mind and releasing chemical indicators in the form of hormones that influence an emotional response."
"Glad I didn't ask, then," Kaz noted.
"Ah well."
Now, it may seem odd to you that I - a boy of merely thirteen years - figured out all that stuff about the Incarna, when scholars had been trying for centuries to discover it. I had some advantages, though. First, I had the unusual position of being a Smedry, an Oculator, and a holder of the Breaking Talent. From what I can determine, there hadn’t been someone who had possessed all three for thousands of years. I might have been the only one other than Alcatraz the First.
Because of that unusual combination, I’d done some strange thi
ngs. (You've seen me do some of them in these books.) I'd seen things others hadn't, and that had led me to conclusions they couldn't have made. Beyond that, Id read what many of the other scholars - like Kaz – had written. That's part of what I'd spent my time doing in Nalhalla while I waited for the fourth book to start.
There's a saying in the Hushlands: “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Newton said it first. I'm not sure how he got hit on the head with an apple while standing up so high in the air but the quote is quite good.
I had all of their research. I had my own knowledge. Between it all, I happened to figure out the right answer.