Page 110 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

Someone to use to get out.

The latter is Riley’s truest desire.

It’s at the root of everything he wants.

When he studies why he wants it, there’s a far deeper answer than the trees and the wind and the moon. Deeper even than his desire to see the ocean, to feel grass beneath his feet.

He’s being called to find family.

He knows it.

Riley replays over and over what the girl with the red hair said to Troy, and in his dreams, he sees broken fragments of that boy, just a little younger than Riley, who sits with him under the moon telling stories.

They are his family.

Troy is the man who hits him when he’s bad and yells when Riley talks too much or not enough. He’s the one they call your father, but he doesn’t feel like family. He never has.

Riley smiles back at Zachary.

He’s nine years old.

He must get free.

‘You’re… a good teacher,’ he says, always having to pause whenever the sentence is longer than two or three words.

Zachary nudges him. ‘Sweet talker.’

Riley begins plotting.

✴

Zachary brings him more books.

One of them becomes Riley’s obsession.

It’s an atlas.

Places. Countries. Continents. Islands. Oceans.

Oh, he can’t wait to see it all in real life.

From this book, he learns about earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tsunamis, wildfires. He learns about plates beneath the surface of this world and the earth herself. Riley carefully writes notes on each page, what he’ll do when he gets there, what it’ll feel like, what animals he’s likely to see in all these new places. He tries to figure out from the atlas where he is, but there are no clues. It takes a lot of courage to ask Zachary, who blinks with surprise when Riley does.

‘You know where we are?’

Riley shakes his head. He doesn’t.

Zachary mutters under his breath and flips through the atlas to show Riley a huge mass of land, and where he points is close to the blue. ‘Here,’ he says, tapping. ‘This is us.’

‘Was I b-born here?’ Riley asks, knows he’s pushing his luck.

Troy would never answer questions like these.

‘Yeah, of course you were.’

‘You born here?’

‘No, look,’ Zachary says, flipping to the other side. ‘Far away, different country, but my kids were born here.’