Samson was not the only one with two names. In school, he rubbed shoulders with other well-off Sesharian boys who had replaced their family names with a Jantari one. Parsho, Jai, and Ramora became Parson, Jayson, and Ramson. Son of the father, so it was easier to trace their lineage and their chains. Their Jantari teachers pattered off their names while the boys struggled with the harsh consonants, the strange letters, the crude signals of a language that, merely decades ago, had lived in a different country, across the sea.
“I don’t like my name,” Samson had told his father one day.
“It’s a fine name, Sam.” His father hated abbreviations but, for Samson’s sake, allowed it. “See, this is how you spell it. S-A-M. Easy.”
“But Ruru is better,” he protested.
“But Ruru is different.” His father’s hand lay heavy on his shoulder.“And we need to fit in right now, Samson. We can’t afford to look foreign. Do you understand?”
Samson nodded, though he did not understand, not really. When his father had left to meet with the Jantari official who, once again, offered to buy their home, his mother slipped him her white smile.
“My little Ruru, how was your day?”
And he’d answer in a conspiratorial whisper: “As fresh as the sea.”
When his eyes had first turned completely blue, his mother took him to the temple. She made him sit before the dais as she lit incense and placed offerings at the feet of the serpent god.
“Great Serpent,” she sang, “have you come to free us?”
She consulted the scrolls. As the high nagini, his mother had access to all the temple vaults—the same ones the Jantari pleasantly but firmly offered to watch for her.
She flipped through scrolls, books, maps, and pictures while he sat, nursing a headache and a terrible itch on his back that would not go away, no matter how hard he scratched.
When she finally found her answer, she descended into an uncharacteristic silence.
“What’s wrong, Mama?” he asked.
She turned to him, her eyes wide, reverent, her face pale with fear.
“My sweet Ruru,” she said. Her hands shook as she touched his shoulders, his cheeks. “My little warrior. One day, you will set the Great Serpent free.” She pressed her forehead against his, her voice dropping to their familiar conspiratorial whisper. “But you must keep this a secret. A secret between us. Do you understand?”
Samson touched his eyes and then pressed his fingers against her brows in a solemn promise.
“I swear by the Great Sea,” he answered.
“Good.” She smiled, wide and bright. “Now, let me show you how to hide them.”
“It’ll go away,” he said.
Samson leaned his face into the fire. The flames curled up, kissing his jaw, his cheeks, his lips. The heat brushed against his face, gentle like a lover, but he needed it to be a monster.
“More wood,” he instructed.
Elena threw more wood into the pit, stoking the flames. They jumped onto the dry branches instantly, spitting and hissing. The heat intensified, but Samson did not pull away. He leaned into the fire, the heat pressing against his face and, like his mother had said, chasing away the blue.
Fire and water create the most beautiful dance, she had said.But they will always devour each other in the end.
He sat like that for a long time, letting the flames erase the blue, the curse, until his sclera were white once more.
Elena watched as he palmed a red flame. It curled around his wrist and then stretched to embrace his individual fingers. He tried to change it. To make it blue, more like him, foreign and strange, a drop of the sea in the ocean of this greenery, but the flame merely pulsed. It did not shed its likeness.
“What was that?” she asked.
He hesitated. He still did not know where he stood with her, if she forgave him or trusted him. Samson curled his hand and killed the inferno.
“You saved me, Elena, when you could have easily left me for dead. Why?”
Her mouth tightened, but her eyes gave her away. Desperation and pain. The same as him.
