Forever the Road (A Rucksack Universe Fantasy Novel) Read online

  She decided to keep this note too, folding the paper and tucking it down the front of her dress.

  Part of her mind tugged her to think more about the line, “the heart is not the path,” but she ignored it. Duty was duty. A Jade was a Jade. And a Jade was duty.

  “We serve because we love,” they had said during the training.

  There is no question of disobeying, Jade thought. We obey because we love. To disobey would be as futile as telling our hearts not to beat.

  But it no longer seemed that simple anymore.

  At least, she thought, it used to be that way for me. She stared at the note. Why is this right? She shook her head.

  It’s right because it’s what must be done.

  Jade took down a small tulip-shaped glass—the best way to present the scotch’s aroma—and poured in the exact amounts of each of the three elixirs in the order specified by The Management. After putting away the elixirs, Jade set the glass down on the bar next to the bottle of scotch.

  What will this combination of decision and destiny do to Jay? she wondered. What path is it keeping him on? What effect will it have on his traveling, on that look in his eyes, on—

  A knock on the outside door made Jade look up. Whatever happens, we’ve still got tonight, she thought. The rest is destiny.

  She poured a dram of scotch into the glass, followed by a slight trickle of water to bring out the aromas and flavors. Then she unlocked the door.

  “Whoa,” she said.

  Jay had never exactly seemed cleaned up to her before. Haggard when she first saw him, slightly de-fatigued last night, and showered but hung over today, the globetrotter had always carried a rumpled look. But some soap and a razor had scraped away all the grime and exhaustion. The man shone.

  Hints of creamy skin, bronzed by wandering days in the sun, glowed on his clean-shaven face. Jade wondered how smooth his cheek would feel under her hand. Even after going into the dusty air of the city in the evening, his scrubbed skin gleamed, and his short hair accentuated his cheekbones and his bright green-and-gold eyes. The long-sleeve black shirt he wore had some wrinkles and rumples to it, sure, but she could tell he’d smoothed it out as best he could. His khaki cargo pants were devoid of so much as a grease splotch on the knee or dried mud on the cuff.

  “You beat me to it,” Jay said. “You look incredible.”

  “So do you, backpack boy,” she replied. “Sometimes I forget how well a traveler can clean up.”

  “It’s the shirt. An English guy I once met told me every globetrotter needs one black button-down shirt. It’ll smarten him up for just about any special occasion.”

  Jade showed Jay into the pub and locked the door behind him. He set a bag on a table as she poured herself a glass of water with lime. “I was just getting our drinks,” she said.

  Oh the hell with it.

  She poured a second scotch and brought the drinks over.

  “How do I take my scotch?” Jay asked, glancing at the bottle on the bar and nodding his approval.

  “With three drops of water. Just a touch to help the aromas bloom.”

  “That’s how my dad took it too, and I’ve never drunk it any other way. You truly are the best bartender in Asia.” He looked at the two glasses. “I thought you didn’t drink?”

  Jade shrugged. “It’s my day off. I figured I might as well have one nearby. In case I felt like it.”

  “I still can’t wrap my head around everything that’s happened today,” Jay said. “But looking at you, somehow things make more sense.” Jay picked up his scotch.

  This is it, Jade thought. The moment his life changes. The moment he firmly puts himself on his path, on his destiny. I don’t know what that is. I just know that it must be.

  Jade’s stomach twisted. Adrenalin pumped through her. I’m following orders, she thought. What’s wrong?

  “Here’s to you.” Jay raised the glass to his lips. Breathing in the scotch’s aromas, he readied for the sip, the amber scotch almost shining near his lips.

  “Wow,” he said, lowering the glass slightly. “That aroma is perfect. You really brought out the vanilla notes. It might be the world’s best scotch, but now you’ve made it a beautiful drink.” He smiled. “All the better to drink with a beautiful woman.”

  He brought the glass to his lips again. The scotch rolled toward his mouth.

  “Wait!”

  Jay shook his head and sat back, just before the scotch touched him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Sorry,” Jade replied. “Silly mistake.” She took the glass from his hand and moved hers over. “I prefer it neat, and I just realized I’d given you mine.”

  “Oh. No big deal.”

  Very big deal, Jade thought. I can’t do it. His heart isn’t the path? Since when is the heart not the path? Why shouldn’t it be?

  “To the rules,” Jay said, raising the uninfluenced scotch. He smiled. “And more importantly, to breaking the rules.”

  You have no idea, Jade thought. No, she wasn’t supposed to drink. But that was an on-duty rule. Off the clock was a gray area. Not encouraged, not expressly permitted, but not prohibited either.

  She raised her glass to his with a tink, and they drank deeply.

  Drinking someone else’s influenced drink, though?

  I might be off the clock, she thought, but I still took this directive upon myself. Jay’s now having the perfect, uninfluenced scotch I originally poured for myself, and I’m drinking someone else’s destiny—his destiny. What does that mean? Sure, it’s happened before. Someone got a drink order mixed up or swapped drinks with someone, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. But a Jake or Jade drinking someone else’s decision and destiny? She thought hard to remember whether this had happened before, but no other times came to mind.

  She waited for the impact. The scotch warmed her like Indian sunshine all the way down, but that was no different from any other scotch. After they lowered their glasses, they looked into each other’s eyes. Jay seemed content not to say anything. She felt the same. And she didn’t feel anything else. No great magnitude of existence. No shift in the order of things. No sense of changing direction. The world seemed the same.

  “Oh,” Jay said. “Dinner. Let me get that out before it gets cold.”

  Jade got them two Deep’s Special Lagers. He noticed nothing, she thought. I don’t feel any different.

  Was it that simple?

  Just because I drank his destiny doesn’t mean I’ve taken his path for him, she thought. I’m not him. It can’t work the same. Maybe it doesn’t work at all on someone else. Maybe that combination of elixirs is so specific because it can work only with one person, as a protection against mistakes—or, well, other occurrences. By me drinking it, it’s canceled itself out. I just can’t do it. Not to him. If The Management want Jay on a particular path that badly, well, they’ll just have to sort it out themselves.

  I like him too much.

  As they ate chicken and vegetables over rice—expertly spiced and cooked, with oven-fresh naan breads on the side—they gradually began to talk more. Jay spoke of his travels, and Jade talked about her years in Agamuskara. She thought about trying to explain more, but she couldn’t do that either. He’d taken on so much already today.

  She realized Jay had asked her about her family. “I had a lot of siblings,” she said. “Brothers and sisters.”

  “Big household,” Jay said. “Happy family?”

  She shrugged. “It was all too overwhelming for my parents, I think. Like they’d gotten more than they’d bargained for. They could be very strict.”

  “Is that why you can work the way you do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Watching you is like watching a poem move,” Jay said. “You’re like a dancer. There’s this focus to you, this strength in everything you do. I guess it sounds to me like you learned to live in your own mind, listen to what mattered, shut out the rest. A way to deal with the chaos you grew up with.�
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  “It’s not something people usually understand,” Jade replied. “But that’s a good way to put it.”

  “Do you keep in touch?”

  “Things got really bad at one point,” Jade said. I left home when I was thirteen. I’ve been on my own ever since.”

  “That must have been really difficult.”

  “At times. But I survived.”

  “Not what you expected out of life, though.”

  She shrugged. “What’s to expect? Life is what we live. Decision, destiny, it’s all still one foot in front of the other, all through our lives.”

  Jay nodded. “I like that. We never know entirely what will be before us.”

  “What about your family?” Jade said. “They must miss you.”

  Jay lowered his gaze. “There’s no one to miss me. I started traveling five years ago. I’d never planned to. I… I had to. See, I grew up about as average an American as can be, in a small town in Idaho with a river running through it. I never wanted to go anywhere else. I was an only child. My parents wanted more, but after me they couldn’t have another. Mom never explained why. My parents and I were very close. After school I started working, got a house not far from where I grew up. It was just me and them, and we’d have dinner together a few times a week. Dad and I would work on each other’s houses. I’d take Mom out for errands or mom-and-son dates. We’d all get together and play board games, drink wine, and talk for hours. I was never much for friends, and I didn’t really date.” He sighed. “I can’t remember the last time I talked about all this.”

  Jade touched his shoulder. “I’ll get us another drink.”

  “My mom and dad were the best people I’ve ever known,” Jay said. “Dad was a lawyer, and an honest one. Everyone in town looked up to him. Mom was a teacher, and she was the heart of our home. She was so vivacious. She read travel magazines. She played violin and ukelele. She liked to tell me she wanted to play ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ on the uke on every continent before she and Dad died.”

  “They traveled?” Jade asked.

  Jay shook his head. “They wanted to. They were planning to. Dad was going to work a few more years, take an early retirement. While he put in long hours at his law firm, my mom clipped photos, read guidebooks, and planned itineraries after school.”

  Jade came back with two more scotches, both uninfluenced. A corner of The Management’s note poked her chest.

  “One evening when I came over for dinner,” Jay continued, “Mom and Dad were beaming when they opened the door. When I looked behind them, I saw why. On the wall in the living room, they’d framed and hung a huge map of the world. Mom had stuck purple pins in every continent. ‘Our retirement-around-the-world,’ she called it. She was so happy and Dad was excited. They weren’t planning some quick posh luxury vacation either. Over dinner that night, Dad told me about how they were planning to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Mom told me about riding elephants in Thailand, and the abandoned Angkor capital city in Cambodia, the old stone buildings now thick with jungle. They spoke of the wild, fierce North Atlantic, and the Scottish Hebrides islands there—the strong, reserved, kind people who lived honest and closer to the earth and sea. They spoke of music in Vienna and Incan cities in Peru. Their eyes were wet with tears when they said they wanted to ride the train across all of Russia, from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. They wanted to stand in the Australian Outback and watch the sun rise and set on the massive red face of Uluru.

  “Dad figured they’d have enough saved to travel the rest of their days if they wanted. Not lavish travel, mind. They talked of hostel dorms and public transport in Europe, of looking for where the mothers took their children to eat in India. They wanted not just to see the world but to become friends with as many people in as many lands as they could in the years they had left.”

  “Didn’t you want to go too?”

  Jay laughed. “Funny thing is, I didn’t. I was happy where I was. I liked my job. I liked my home. I was living a quiet, content, nondescript life in a quiet, content, nondescript bit of true-to-heart Americana small town. I figured if anything, I’d be like Mom and Dad. I’d work and live. Maybe find a wife and raise a family. Maybe not. When I was older and retired I’d look at the whole travel thing. If I was even interested. As far as I was concerned, Mom and Dad had more than earned their dreams, their excitement, their happiness. I hoped that one day I would too.”

  “I don’t understand, though,” Jade said. “You’re here, not there. Why didn’t they get to travel?”

  For a moment Jay looked away. When he looked at her again, his eyes glistened. “They died.”

  Jade took his hand. “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded. “It was my twenty-fifth birthday. We were meeting at my favorite restaurant. It was raining hard that day—so hard there were concerns about flash floods. I waited. But they didn’t show. After an hour, a sheriff’s deputy came in. It’s a small town, after all. He and I had been in high school together. He knew where we’d be, what day it was. He said my parents’ car had been found in the river, half submerged and banged up against a bridge pillar. Mom and Dad must have been swept away. We searched for days. I took time off work. I helped dredge the river. I roamed the forests. I called police departments from there all the way to the Oregon and Washington coast. We never found their bodies, but there was no way they had survived. Mom and Dad were declared dead.”

  “Jay...”

  He cracked a fragile, tense smile. “Funny thing is, Dad being a lawyer, all their affairs were in perfect order. The house, vehicles, everything was paid off. They didn’t have so much as credit card debt or an unpaid magazine subscription. I was the only beneficiary on their life insurance policy, and they left everything—travel books, the map, the house, their money—to me.”

  “So you have a good bit of travel money.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, but I work a lot too. I like to earn my money. I grieved hard for Mom and Dad. I still carry their picture in my money belt. After a few months, I knew what I had to do. I quit my job and I sold both our houses. I sold anything that didn’t mean anything to them or to me. Then I took the map and the guidebooks and promised Mom and Dad that since they never got to see the world they loved so much, I would do it for them.

  “A year after they died, I left Idaho. I’ve never been back. Everyone understood. It was a son’s way to handle his grief and honor his parents. Now I’ve been all over, doing the things they wanted to do, and having a few adventures of my own. I keep doing all I can do to honor their memory. And I’ve learned so much. I can’t believe I never wanted to travel. Now I can’t imagine ever stopping. I guess you could call me a traveler and a globetrotter, but really, all I am now is their wish to see the world.”

  Jay looked like he was holding back tears. Jade squeezed his hand. She said nothing. Just watched him. Just thought. No matter how gentle or funny or comforting or crass, nothing she said would keep this rare fragility. The first word from her mouth would close up his heart tight and perhaps add locks. No words could bring Jay closer to her or prove he could trust her or show what she felt for him.

  Her own doubts and turmoil pulled at her, the calls of roads not taken and the grass-is-greener regrets of the paths she treaded. Just as she had no way to comfort Jay with words, she had no words to voice her shared grief, her confusion, her regrets, her wishes for home, a different life, an open heart, a warm touch, a comfort by her side. Jade had nothing to say.

  So she kissed him instead.

  Now, this seems like destiny, she thought. His lips were as soft as she’d wondered, and so were his cheeks under her hands. His hands were gentle yet strong as he held her.

  There was no pub. There was no Management, no destiny, no decision, no spinning little god eggs or ancient evils or strange inscrutable tricksters. There was just them: Jay and Jade, travelers and a destination, a journey they no longer had to wander alone.

  When at last they moved apar
t, they said nothing. Jade held Jay’s hand tight in her own and he squeezed back. They stared into each other’s eyes.

  “I don’t know what this could be,” Jay said.

  “I don’t either,” Jade said.

  “I want to find out.”

  “Me too.”

  They kissed again.

  Later, after more kisses, more words and relief and hopes, Jay helped Jade tidy up their dinner plates and glasses. Then, after many final kisses, he went up to his dorm, to dream of their plans of a sunrise ride on the river.

  As Jade stood behind the bar, Jay’s kisses still fresh on her lips, she tried to think only of Jay, of what they might have together.

  Tomorrow there would surely be repercussions. Tomorrow there would surely be another note from The Management, a rebuke, a punishment. Hopefully, she could explain. Hopefully, there would be a way to convince The Management that Jay could just remain a traveler, that there was no special destiny that needed him. Surely it didn’t have to be Jay. He’d done enough. He’d lost his parents already. Shouldn’t that be enough for anyone? Couldn’t he just travel in peace, honor their memory, and live some simple pleasures of his own? And couldn’t she be there with him?

  She wondered what that would mean. Am I thinking of resigning? she thought. Whenever this is all finished and he can leave Agamuskara, won’t I want to go with him? Of course I will. But I can’t be both a Jade and his love. I can only be one or the other. I’ve been a Jade for a long time, just as Jay has traveled for his parents’ memory for a long time. Maybe it’s time for both of us to live some different reasons. Some different passions. Maybe it’s time we found a different happiness.

  A knock resounded through the front door.

  “Even your bloody knock sounds like a laugh,” she said.

  The moment Rucksack and Kailash saw her, their big smiles got even bigger. Rucksack took a bounding step inside and wrapped his arms around Jade, lifting her off the floor and spinning her around.

  “What?” Jade said, slightly dizzy. “What’s going on?”

  “Ah, Jade,” Rucksack replied, setting her down. “We had to tell you right away.”