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Part I
1
Key Pass
Phuong
Phuong swallowed hard as she pushed open the door to the store. She hated doing this. Last time, her brother said. Just once more.
“Hello! How can I help you?”
She tried to ignore the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach as she smiled back at the store clerk.
Her eyes turned silver. “I need your help.”
She could see the silver in her eyes reflected in the clerk’s eyes.
“How can I help you?”
She couldn’t control other people, but she could suggest things to them.
“I really need your help to get a key pass, but I don’t have any money. Do you think that it would be fair to give me one, since I can’t afford it?”
She nudged him in the right direction, but the clerk was the person who made the final call.
“I think that would be fair. What color do you want? Do you have a code number for the lock that it should open?”
Phuong hadn’t thought through what color the key pass should be.
“Gold, please. And the code number is 5894.”
“Coming right up.” The clerk went to the back, got a gold key pass, and swiped it to activate it.
“There you go. Thank you for your business!”
Phuong nodded. “Thank you!” She took the gold key pass from the clerk and tucked it safely in her pocket. The bells chimed as she walked out of the store.
That was the last time. Xuan had promised her that she’d only need to do it once more, just to get all of their ducks in a row. After this, her brother said that they’d be on easy street.
She trusted her brother, but she thought that he might have over-promised.
She slipped into the shadows as she neared the service entrance of the aquarium. Inside, there were burnished bronze tunnels that made a lot of noise if she was careless enough to touch the walls. She walked quickly and carefully towards the den that she shared with her brother, trying to be as quiet as a ghost. To her relief, she finally got to the hatch door that would let her into their living space.
It hadn’t been easy to find a place, not when they didn’t have any real money. They were stowaways from Heritage House, the group home where they’d been raised. It’s not easy finding a place to live when you’re wanted. Even harder when you can’t live in a place connected to the city’s water supply.
When Phuong or her brother Xuan used “tap” water, they broke out in full-body hives. Either they had to take antihistamines on a daily basis, or they had to use clean water.
The aquarium was one of the few places in town that had ultra-purified water, so they had to stay near it.
Phuong was ashamed about it, but it also had a steady supply of fresh fish. They were careful not to take too many or too much, but they sometimes had no other choice. At the most desperate moments, fish could get them through.
“Xuan?”
Xuan didn’t reply, so Phuong went past the circular front area of their home. It had a bunch of water pipes that brought them their supply. She looked around their small living space, but Xuan wasn’t inside. He must have gone somewhere.
Phuong settled down on one of the boxes that they’d taken from the aquarium. She stared at the Kiyin stone sitting on the mantel of the generator vent.
The Kiyin stone was the only clue to who they were. There weren’t any other indications of where they’d come from when they landed on the doorstep of the group home.
It shimmered, just a little bit. It was obviously powerful, but they didn’t know what it did. When they’d left, Xuan had stolen it from its place of honor in the head office.
As hungry and desperately poor as they were, it would’ve made sense to sell it. But Phuong and Xuan weren’t willing to part with it. They’d kept it close in their den, and Phuong could feel something awakening inside of her gut.
She just knew that it was the key to something big, something that would help them figure out where they came from.
As she thought about it, her mind slammed into a stone door. She gritted her teeth. The implant in her brain that neither her brother nor Phuong had been able to overcome threw up mental blocks whenever she thought about something that the group home had deemed “dangerous.”
Growling, Phuong went to her medicine cabinet. They were next to one of the least-visited tanks, and she could see an eye next to her, then a fin in the dark water. The little Kneck loved to visit them, probably because they were something new and shiny to look at.
She went to get a glass to take her medications. She gulped the whole thing down. Just being out and about made her so thirsty, but there wasn’t a lot of water that she could drink.
Then she heard the hatch door open.
2
Blueprints
Phuong
“Where have you been, Xuan?”
“Did you get it?” Xuan answered her question with another question, avoidi
ng the discussion.
