The Names Our Children Will Know

Competition - Draft One

Jordan Marcoppen was stuck. Again.

The damp ventilation shaft–designed to keep the huge house cool in the sweltering summer months–was too small and had too many sharp corners for anyone to navigate easily. Jordan was small, but she wasn't that small. Her legs had gotten stuck as she had wormed her way to a vertical shaft. "Tessa, are we even close?"

She was kneeling in the dark ventilation shaft, reaching up above her head to find the next horizontal shaft, trying to stand in the small space. She hooked her fingers in the seams of the stone to pull herself up.

Jordan's adopted older sister's muffled reply came from behind Jordan's feet where she was crawling behind Jordan. "We'd be closer if you'd quit getting stuck," Tessa Marsim griped, pushing her flyatian black hair out of her eyes. "Keep moving, maybe we can get to an open room."

Jordan hauled herself up so she was standing to her full height–which, at thirteen, wasn't much for a werian girl. She still didn't reach the edge of the next shaft. She balanced carefully on her finger-holds and clambered up to it, only barely reaching. This one was much dustier, like it hadn't been cleaned at all in the last ten years or so.

"What's the next turn?" Jordan pestered.

Tessa growled, "It's too dark in here, I can't see." There was a pause. "Take the next left." Jordan did so, her back and bare feet scraping the stone passage.

"I'm at a T," she said warily after a few more minutes. She could almost see into the room outside, but she couldn't make out the details. "There's a vent in front of me. I can smell dust coming from the room. Someone's snoring."

Tessa's flat reply was slightly muffled by the other noises. "What?"

Jordan tried to twist around to get a good look at Tessa. Jordan had the collar of her shirt covering her nose and she was doing her best to keep the passage ahead blocked so the incoming dust she had stirred up wouldn't choke her sister. "Should we get out here to see if this is the safe? There's a lot of dust... I think we should make sure. No one has been here in ages."

Tessa frowned, thinking hard and tugging on a strand of her short hair. The map showed that either way the two of them would lose the protection of the vents, since this shaft ended in the room ahead of them. Tessa made a face and ordered Jordan, "Open the vent."

Jordan nodded and twisted around again. It took a moment of pushing, but Jordan managed to give the iron grate a hefty shove and it came away from the wall with a sudden pop. She slithered out into the room. There was fire in a stone grate, but a large tabby cat that looked to be the size of a hunting dog was sleeping next to it.

Jordan knew the look of the cat well enough to know that it was actually a werian like herself, one of the three races that lived in and around her hometown. The werian race was capable of shifting from one form to the next–that of a two-legged person or a large cat, but at the moment this one was too busy dreaming, and its sleepily flicking tail stirred dust, smoke, and ash out into the room. It growled a little while Jordan was still on the floor, but didn't stir. Jordan was glad that there was no real danger.

She stood up slowly, looking around the room and shaking the dust out of her short blonde hair. "Is it here?" She was still short, even for a thirteen-year-old girl, so she didn't see much of the room around her. It looked like a study or a small library, but Jordan didn't think that someone rich enough to own a mansion in the city would keep so few books.

She looked back at Tessa, meaning to ask about it, but Tessa cut her off and said, "We're in the wrong room. It's not here."

Tessa shook her head, irritated with her mistake. Her hair was longer than Jordan's, black hair tucked behind her ears. She was much older than Jordan–almost twenty two–and her glossy black hair was muted from the white dust. Her bright blue eyes flickered across the map and she frowned, tracing her finger along the paper.