Sovereign Hope by Frankie Rose

more than a trip to the dentist, and
I really hated
the dentist.
    “ Nope.”
    Perfect.
    “ He’ll be worried about Aldan. He’ll be back soon.”
    “ Worried about Aldan? The man tried to kill me!”
    Agatha pursed
her lips into a hard line and cut me a sideways look. “You have to
understand, Aldan never meant to hurt you. Please believe that. I’d
explain more, but it’s all too intricately linked with Daniel. It
wouldn’t be fair of me to discuss it with you without his
consent.”
    She was being
ridiculous if she expected me to buy that sorry excuse. “It’s not
like Aldan accidentally tripped me or something, Agatha. He could
have killed me.”
    And that was
the end of that particular conversation. Agatha refused to discuss
it any further. Instead, she told me about herself. She told me how
she’d left the Four Quarters a long time ago—she couldn’t stand the
way the Reavers took life—and refused to be a part of their
society.
    I knocked out
a distracted rhythm on my water glass with a pencil. “Have you
always been with Daniel and Aldan?”
    “ No, not always. I spent a long time just traveling, seeing
what was out there, y’know? I didn’t even know who they were until
I came across Daniel one day.” She laughed. “He tried to kill me.
I’m glad that was back when he hadn’t refined his skills and not
now.”
    “ How long ago was that?”
    Agatha thought for a moment. She looked up to the ceiling in
concentration, frowning. “A really long time ago.”
    That didn’t
really help. “This side of the year two thousand?” I asked. Daniel
would have been a kid before that.
    “ Ha! No, when I say a long time, I mean a really, really long
time.”
    My jaw
dropped. “But…I thought it was just the Reavers who didn’t die. You
said only the men of the bloodline were immortal.”
    “ That’s true. But members of the Four Quarters live a lot
longer than normal people. We die eventually, yes, but most people
in our society can expect to live for at least a thousand years or
more. I’ve been alive four hundred and ten years. I guess in your
terms I’m around thirty-six or thirty-seven. I was born in 1601 in
Stirling, Scotland. I came to America a hundred and forty years
later. I missed most of the formative history of this country,
however. We always kept to ourselves.
    “ Once I left, I did get to experience the Industrial
Revolution and the twentieth century, though. And that was a very
exciting time to be around, I can tell you. Daniel was in his
element. He learned how to design and build every kind of steam and
combustion engine imaginable.” She cast a glance over to the
dismantled engine that still lay on the sheet before the main
entrance, totally missing my horrified reaction to her
speech.
    Everything had ground to a halt. There were a hundred
questions I wanted to ask, but I was too busy freaking out over the
fact that Daniel wasn’t my age. He was old. Like, really old. History
class sucked, but I still paid attention. The Industrial Revolution
had been sometime in the nineteenth century. That made him well
over a hundred at the very least. The number was probably much
bigger, though. That knowledge was, for some reason,
earth-shatteringly upsetting. It took a lot of effort to wrestle
free from my weird emotions.
    “ So you’re from the First Quarter?”
    Agatha snapped
out of her reverie and smiled. “Yes, the first of the houses. We’re
the oldest after the Reavers. Our history goes back the furthest.
We were alone with the Immortals for a very long time.”
    “ And which house is Daniel from?”
    Agatha pursed
her lips and drummed her fingers on the desk. “Daniel doesn’t come
from any of the houses. He’s…something else.”
    “ What do you mean, something
else ?”
    “ Sorry, kiddo. It’s Daniel’s story. Not mine to
tell.”
    There was no
point probing further. Agatha would only give me the spiel. The
topic was clearly out of bounds. I groaned and rested my