Prince of Attania, 2

Jet felt the repercussions even before Attan contacted him via his communicator. Every elemental across Attania felt it. Curiously, neither Daniel nor any of the Family Elementals, aside from Jet, noticed anything amiss. Which made Jet wonder, for the thousandth time, just what was it that made him so different from the rest of the Family? Attan was different, too, but then again, Attan had never started out as a physical being, so he was different from them all. Jet wondered who his other kids would take after—him, or their respective mothers?

“What happened?” he asked tersely, when Attan communicated not long after the first shock wave rippled through Attania.

“Tom Jadock’s dead.” Attan’s clipped response startled Jet.

“Tom Jadock did this?” Jet asked incredulously. He noticed the hesitation in Attan’s voice before his son replied.

“Not Tom. Elementals.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. But I think you need to see what happened.”

“Where are you, exactly?” Although Jet could probably find him easily enough just by following the free elementals. Attan told him, though, in brief terms, how to get there. “And contact Daniel,” Jet ordered. Daniel would know how to handle the situation. Daniel was Attania’s Enforcer, and as such, had authority to use any force necessary to resolve issues. Jet wasn’t sure force would be what was needed there, but if it was, Daniel was the better man to accomplish it than either Jet or Attan.

Jet didn’t wait for Daniel and his enforcers. Something about Attan’s voice bothered him. The boy was too matter-of-fact in his account of events. And Tom Jadock! First he had been missing for months, then when he finally did show up, he—died? Spectacularly, if what the elementals broadcast was correct. Jet became wind and, guided by Attan’s directions, the free elementals who were always around him, and his own instincts, he flowed across Attania to his son.

There were precious few elementals, no Family save Attan, and a bedraggled group of non-family who stared at Jet with wary eyes when he took form in the center of a barren pit of earth. This place looked like old Parrion at its worst. All it needed was a raging sandstorm or two to complete the picture.

Attan stepped forward. “Dad,” he said, his voice breaking on the single syllable. Jet surged into him, heedless of the non-family who bore witness to their transformations. They would just have to deal with it. Attan released his form, too, and finally let down his remaining defenses. All he had been withholding for the past few years came pouring out into the merge, and Jet accepted it, all of it, without judgment. Attan was his child, his heart. He wanted to accept it.

Jet came out of the merge first. He smiled crookedly. “You were able to hide all that from me all this time?” He seized Attan by the shoulders and pulled him into a very physical hug. “You idiot. You’re my son! You can tell me anything!”

“I didn’t want to cause you trouble,” Attan murmured, blinking unexpected tears out of his eyes. “What do we do now?”

Jet glanced at the scattered non-family who had come out of the cliffs at his appearance. “We fix this,” he said firmly. “Then we’ll figure out the rest.”

Attan visibly relaxed. He brought his father over to meet Tark and some of the other men. “This is my father. Jet Estee.”

Tark eyed Jet coolly. “The King. I know. What will you do with us now?”

“Should I do something with you?” Jet responded just as coolly. He liked this man Tark. From Attan’s merge, he understood Tark was the headman in this village, which had purposely stayed away from any association with Attania’s Family government. Jet couldn’t say he blamed them. If he wasn’t who he was, he would do exactly that.

Actually, it was the Enforcer who would make that determination. And it looked like Daniel was just about to arrive. The road which ran along the sea ended abruptly in a deep crater. Daniel had been forced to leave his cavalcade of vehicles some miles away, and he came now on a cloud, followed by at least fifty enforcers. Trust Daniel to make an entrance. He didn’t need to use the cloud, but he wanted the non-family to see him.

Daniel hopped off his cloud, gesturing sharply. Immediately, his enforcers fanned out around the villagers, with some of them going into the various cliff-side homes, all completely physical when it would have been just as effective to go in unseen. It was intended to intimidate, and it did. The villagers murmured uneasily, being made to stand in the middle of the devastated area as enforcers rounded up the remaining villages from inside their homes, the old, the infirm, the very young.

Daniel dismissed his cloud with a snap, and strode purposefully over to Attan. He leaned in close. “Did you do this?” he asked, referring to the blast which had leveled most of Tark’s village. “I’m impressed.”

It would have been the simplest explanation, but, “No,” Attan replied. “It was free elementals. Thomas Jadock was hiding in this village along with five men and a big machine.” Attan quietly gave his report, of how Tom knew these people from years ago, how his mother had come from this village, how he intimidated the people here into widening their narrow country road into one big enough for Tom’s giant machine to pass over. Daniel was immediately interested in the big machine, asking technical questions which Attan had no idea how to answer.

Daniel raised his eyebrows, glancing once at Jet. They had played this game before.

“Come,” Jet said to Attan. He would leave Tark and his village to Daniel, who would sift through truths until he found what he needed. He would use whatever means necessary to do so.

“But . . . “ Attan glanced worriedly at Tark. He had bared his soul to his father in their merge, which Daniel had not been a part of. Jet could see that Attan feared for the safety of these people, but Daniel needed to do his job without that complication .

“It will be all right.” Jet trusted Daniel implicitly. He and Attan had more important things to take care of first. In the merge, Attan had shown him where the village girl he had entrusted with his secret had gone. Jet vanished, leaving Attan to follow as he desired. Attan merged with him seconds later, and together they sped above the cliffs, ever inland until the terrain turned into heavy forest and veered away from the river. Attan and Jet absorbed more and more free elementals the farther they traveled from Tark’s village, making Jet realize just how few there had been in the vicinity of the blast.

Attan had sent Elea back to Midver, but she hadn’t had time to make the entire trip. She waited in a small clearing along a forest trail. Jet and Attan took physical form to find the non-family girl staring at them. And next to her, holding anxiously onto her hand, was a young Family boy, not much older than Attan. In fact, the Family boy bore a striking resemblance to Attan.

“This is him?” Jet approached the pair slowly, noting how the Family boy’s body wavered as if he was about to discorporate completely any moment. Only the girl’s hand kept him anchored to the physical.

“Dad, this is Meetoo,” Attan said.

Meetoo’s face lit up at the sound of Attan’s voice. He smiled tremulously.

“And Elea.”

Elea, Attan’s little friend, was clearly non-family with her fuzzy, light-colored hair and skin that would never be quite as pale as Family’s. Jet frowned, recalling what he’d learned from Attan in their merge. She could sense what they were. Jet didn’t see how that was possible.

“Can you talk?” Jet addressed the Elemental directly. Meetoo stared at him without answering. He stepped closer, meaning to force a merge, but the being shrank back against Elea. His body flickered wildly.

Attan said, “I don’t think he even knows what he is yet. He’s—unstable.”

Obviously. But Jet had to know. Glancing at Attan, he dissolved his body and went into the newly-made Elemental, who shattered, the explosion both physical and etherea. What was once Meetoo became a writhing mass of discrete free elementals: water, wind, fire, earth, and more. These now all swirled around the clearing, held in check by Jet, who had anticipated such an occurrence.

Attan threw his essence around the non-family girl to shield her from the backlash, which could have destroyed her just as easily as it had destroyed her village earlier. At the same time, Attan expanded to encompass the entire area to contain the wildly agitated elementals, including those which had so recently combined to form Meetoo. Jet half-believed Attan could have expanded to encompass all of Attania, if he chose. Jet wasn’t sure he could do the same, not without losing the kernel of self that held him to this existence. But Attan could.

Jet aggressively merged his essence with the many different essences of Meetoo. And he found a spark of something that was the same in each piece. An awareness.

Abruptly, Jet took form. He was disconcerted to see the girl Elea watching him as he took on his physical shape. Attan was right; she saw him in elemental form, too.

Attan took Jet’s transformation as a signal to draw in his own essence, and Meetoo’s along with it, much as he had done for the little boy in Arden, and for Bian a few years later. He guided Meetoo into his physical shape.

Meetoo had a hard time holding form, wavering in and out of reality, until Elea clasped one of his hands in hers. Her solid touch seemed to steady him. “Can—talk,” he said earnestly to Jet. He reached out his free hand and touched Jet’s, initiating a form of merge. Jet melded with Meetoo where their physical bodies touched, being careful not to merge completely as he had moments before. What Meetoo was, a combination of different elements, was not exactly the same as a Family Elemental, or even Attan. But it was close. As astonishing as it was, Meetoo was an original Elemental, like---

“I need to find Daniel,” Jet said, breaking away from the contact. “Where can I meet you three again?” His gaze swept them all.

Attan replied. “We can wait for you in Midver. I’ll go with Meetoo and Elea now.”

“Midver. Right.” Jet discorporated, bemused as three sets of very physical eyes tracked his movement across the sky. Daniel. He needed to talk to Daniel.

By the time Jet got back to the broken village, Daniel’s enforcers had separated the inhabitants into various groups and were working with them to repair some of the damage. Daniel himself sat inside one of the cliff dwellings with Tark. He looked up at Jet’s entrance, smiled wearily and asked, “Did you come to the same conculsion I did?”

Jet dropped down beside Daniel and rubbed his forehead. “What conclusion is that?”

“Machines we never heard of, Tom Jadock gathering non-family whom he insists are Sons of Men, trying to use Attan to do his bidding. Who does that remind you of?”

“It’s more than that,” Jet said. “Elementals who are aware of us and who interact with these non-family—and others. Something happened here, and I’m not sure if Tom Jadock was the instigator or just a pawn in the whole thing, but he was definitely a catalyst. So was Attan, unwitting or not. Someone—or something—is behind all this.”

It was impossible. Only Meetoo just proved that it wasn’t. “Aylard First.” Daniel said what they both were thinking.