The Nominal Hero, chapter 10: Ten Percent Inspiration
The nightmare was already fading at the edges, in the usual way of dreams, but the last image stood out sharp and clear in his mind. Craters in the ground, huge and black, their edges melted into glass. Ruined buildings on the horizon like broken teeth. A setting sun, red in a smoky sky.
And there’d been somebody with him, standing behind Caden’s shoulder so he couldn’t see them. He’d asked: “How long has it been like this?” And the answer had come:
“Since always.”
His breath was steadier now, and he could look around the room in the dark and see the safe, familiar shapes of his furniture, and the outline of the window, and the bar of orange light from the streetlight that shone across the foot of his bed--but none of it was reassuring. Caden knew it had just been a dream, but he also knew, or felt like he knew, that it could easily be real.
If they went through with their plan and filled the Nouns’ world with tools of war, even if they defeated the Magic forces in the distant past, how likely was it that those weapons would never be used again? Nouns wanted to do what they were meant for. Missiles and Tanks and Mechas would find other causes to fight about.
Caden’s plan wasn’t going to end the war. It was going to ensure it never stopped.
There was a light tap on his bedroom door. “Caden? You okay, sprout?”
“Fine,” he tried to say, but it came out in a whisper.
The door opened a little way, and he saw his mom silhouetted against the hall light. “Bad dream?” she asked quietly. Caden nodded, and pulled himself half upright, still clutching his tangled blankets.
His mom came into the room, closing the door quietly behind her, and sat down on the edge of the bed to gather Caden into a hug. He buried his face in her fuzzy bathrobe. It smelled like static electricity and the kelp detergent she sold at the store. The familiar scent helped calm him.
“Want to talk about it?” his mom asked.
“Uh-uh.” He’d have to explain too much, and he didn’t think he could do it, not now.
“Want me to stay here for a bit?”
“Yeah.” Caden lay back down on his pillow. His mom straightened his blankets over him, and then shifted around so she was lying propped on one elbow beside him, her other arm snuggling him firmly against her side. “Tell me a story?” Caden asked. She told Paz stories a lot, but he hadn’t asked for one in a long time, preferring to read on his own. Right now, though, he just wanted to hear a voice that wasn’t his own thoughts.
“All right. What sort of story?”
“Why’d you name us what you did?” The question sprang to Caden’s lips almost without thought. Names had been on his mind since Duck’s revelation about Hunter. “Me and Ruth and Paz. Did it mean something, or was it just--what was it?”
He could hear the smile in his mom’s voice. “Oh. Well, that is a story, actually. Ruth was named after your dad’s grandmother, of course. She raised him, you know, almost from when he was a baby.”
Caden nodded. His dad had explained about having been an orphan, which was hard for Caden to imagine. He understood the idea, of course. There were lots of orphans in books, it was a normal thing to be, especially if you were a budding sorcerer or the last heir to a lost kingdom. But he couldn’t really picture what it would feel like to have a grandmother instead of parents. It seemed to have been all right for his dad, though.
“Well, and so when you came along,” Caden’s mother continued, “we thought you should be named after someone from my side of the family, to keep things even, as it were. Only the thing was, my family is rather larger than your father’s--I think there were something like forty cousins the last time we counted--and it seemed like everyone had an opinion.”
“They wanted me named after themselves?” Caden asked, fascinated. He might have been called after Great-Uncle Lewis, or Uncle Dan, or his mom’s dad even, whose name Caden didn’t remember because they always just called him Granddad. You probably couldn’t name a baby Granddad. There was probably someone in charge of stopping people from doing that. Although actually people did a lot of silly things without anyone stopping them, so--
“After themselves, or their favourite uncle, or their favourite ancestor,” his mom agreed, unaware of how Caden’s thoughts were drifting. “There were fights. People stopped speaking to each other. It would almost have been funny if it weren’t so awful.” She chuckled. “Eventually your dad and I both put our feet down and told them we’d had enough nonsense and we were picking a name we liked that nobody in the family had. We went through a baby name book in the library, reading names out loud to each other--I was about seven months pregnant then--and we both really liked the sound of Caden. And we knew it wasn’t the name of any of my cousins.”
“Huh,” Caden said. He wasn’t sure what he thought of that. A rootless name, chosen just because they liked it.
Then again, if Duck was right and people’s names could shape their lives in some way, he’d probably gotten lucky. Suppose he’d been named Lewis and ended up with Great-Uncle Lewis’s birdwatching obsession and love of boxed raisins. Or if he’d been another Ted like Uncle Ted, who thought fiction was silly and called Caden “the little professor” when he saw him reading. There was an appalling thought.
“We were going to do the same thing when Paz’s turn came,” Caden’s mother went on, “but just before she was born, my dear friend Olivia--you remember her, don’t you? She came to visit the summer before last.”
“Mm.” Caden didn’t, really, but he was starting to drift off and just wanted his mom to keep talking while he fell asleep.
“Well, Olivia ended up in the hospital. She’s a photographer, you know, for the news, and she was taking pictures in a--well, a violent situation, and she got hurt. I went to see her, and we talked, and at some point she said to me, very seriously, ‘You should name your baby Peace.’ She always said the work she did was for peace, that that was what motivated her to go into danger, the hope that she was helping bring about a more peaceful world. Well, I liked the idea, but somehow I just didn’t like the sound of the name very much. So Olivia suggested Paz, which is ‘peace’ in Spanish, you know. And it’s not that unusual a name among Spanish-speakers, which most of Olivia’s family are. So, Paz it was.”
Caden’s eyes had slid closed. A more peaceful world, he thought. Paz. Peace. And four years later she’d drawn a pair of Noggles on a cereal box, and Caden had used them to start a war... so much for Duck’s theory... but couldn’t they stop it too? Instead of weapons you could make... something... flowers or something? But that was boring, nobody wanted that...
Adventure, that was what the Nouns wanted... “Your world is huge,” Duck had said... a bigger world, a world full of exciting things... so many things that no-one would need to fight over anything... so much to do that they’d be too busy to fight... the Noggles were the key... a new world...
“Good night, sprout,” his mother said softly, and kissed him on the forehead, and slipped out of the room.
...It was morning, barely, and Caden burst through Ruth’s bedroom door, ignoring her squawk of outrage as she was awoken.
“I know how to fix everything,” he said.
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