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There are strangers in the lighthouse.
Voices mix together, more voices than Zane has ever heard in his existence, enlivening the lighthouse in a way he didn’t know it could be. Feet stamp up and down the staircase. Laughter carries on the sea breeze.
From his place where he’s been sent to wait in the basement, Zane listens with his head pressed against the fake wall, straining through the seams of the door to steal glimpses of the life above.
His father comes to him late that night. The lighthouse is empty; all of the strangers have gone out to work on the ship they sailed in on, the one Zane saw only briefly before he was sent away. The secret door grates open and his father steps inside.
The change in him is shocking. His father’s eyes are alight with new life. His movements are sharper, his speech quicker. Even his wings, scraggled as they are, lift behind him in a drastic change from how they usually drag along the ground.
“Father,” Zane says. Even though normally he might be running to embrace his father, he stands where he is. His lack of action doesn’t escape his father’s notice.
“Zane,” he says, and seems to force a smile that is at odds with the rest of his countenance onto his face. “I’m sorry about all the secrecy, but it will be over with soon enough.”
Zane nods. Silence elapses between them, broken only by the whining of his processors as they try to figure out the best way for him to approach his question. “Father,” he says finally, going for directness. “The white one with them.”
His father sighs. “Yes, Zane,” he says softly. “That is your original.”
Zane turns his eyes towards the beach as if they could pierce through stone and wood. “He looks like me.”
His father laughs. “I think it’s more apt to say that you look like him.”
He’s silent for a moment, long enough that Zane looks back to him. His father’s expression- Zane feels his fans kick in as his processors try to analyze it. “Zane,” he says, heavy, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
He takes a small step towards him. “The visitors’ ship is being repaired as we speak. When it’s done, it can take us from the island.”
Zane tilts his head. “Father, that is good news.”
“Yes, Zane, it is very good news. But-” His father exhales. “But I’m afraid that you can’t come.”
Zane hears the gears around his eyes click audibly. “I cannot come?” Are his audio processors malfunctioning? Why would his father say that? “Why not?”
His father’s lips pull into an awkward, strained smile. “Well- it’s just that with your Original here, he’s already so overwhelmed by finding me alive. And the simple matter of the fact is that you were built to replace him!” He scrubs a hand down his face. “I just don’t know how he’ll react to you.”
Zane says nothing. He doesn’t know what to say. His father looks up, and something must be displaying across Zane’s face because his father’s features tighten.
“I’m truly sorry about this, Zane. If there was any other way-”
He cuts himself off. “But I promise you, Zane,” he says, taking another step closer, close enough that he can set a hand on Zane’s shoulder. “I won’t forget you. Okay? When the time is right, I will come get you. I promise.”
Their feathers brush against each other. And Zane leans into the touch. “Okay,” he says.
Echo Zane is what they call him, when they show up at the lighthouse.
They’re eager to meet him, eager to introduce themselves, eager to take him with them back to the monastery on the mountaintop that they say is his new home.
He smiles and follows them and doesn’t tell them that he already knows who they are.
It’s hard to forget the faces of the people his father left with, after all.
The one named Jay sits down with him in a workshop a day after his arrival and set about doing various diagnostic tests and repairs. He pokes and prods and oohs and aahs, and Echo Zane finds himself relaxing into the familiarity of someone tinkering with his systems.
“It looks like a lot of your parts are actually in pretty okay condition,” Jay says, stepping back and running his eyes over Echo Zane’s body with the scrutiny of a professional. “I mean, obviousy there’s a lot of them that can be improved or replaced with newer stuff, but for what they are- yeah.” He smiles. “A lot of care went into making you, buddy.”
Echo Zane’s processors hum pleased lines of code. He knows that his father made him well, but it’s nice to hear it acknowledged from others too.
“About your wings, though,” Jay says with a wince, and Echo Zane refocuses on him.
Jay has reason to wince. Echo Zane had done his best to maintain himself on his own, but his resources had been funneled into keeping his main systems and body in working order and his wings had suffered for it. His feathers are covered in a layer of caked-on dust, and several of them are snapped and broken. And that was without mentioned the missing feathers near his back and scattered through his plumage.
“So we’ve got a couple of options,” Jay says, listing them off on his fingers. “One: we could get you a pair of metal ones like Zane-” Echo Zane can’t hide the way he flinches. “Or two: we can just repair the ones you’ve got.”
“These ones,” he says. “Please.”
Jay grins. “Yeah,” he says easily, “that’s what I figured. I wouldn’t want to get replace my wings either.”
It takes several sessions for them to first clean all the dirt and grime from his feathers and then to measure, manufacture, and install new ones.
When they’re all done, though, the results shock Echo Zane into stillness.
He has fallen into disrepair over the years. This he knows, and this he accepts even with his attempts otherwise. His once silvery-colored casing has tarnished so that he looks more bronze than steel now.
But the wings that rise from his back look fresher and cleaner than they did when they were first installed, and almost unconsciously, he reaches out for his own reflection in the mirror.
The patch of seagreen on his right secondaries jumps out at him. Echo Zane’s processors whirr, trying to determine how he feels about them.
It had been difficult to learn of Father’s passing when they arrived on the lighthouse’s doorstep. At the same time though, it was also a relief. His father hadn’t abandoned him, not willingly. The choice had been taken out of his hands.
Though that left the question of why he still hadn’t told anyone about Echo Zane. Echo Zane folds his wings, letting them and the color disappear from sight.
“Don’t worry, they won’t be blank for long,” Jay says, mistaking his reaction as something else. “We’ll get you our colors in a jiff!” He circles Echo Zane, occasionally reaching out to make an adjustment here and there. “Zane said that he didn’t technically need to paint the feathers for the colors to take, but it’ll happen a lot faster if you do. I’m sure I’ve got his paints around here somewhere! If you want them, I mean.”
Echo Zane tilts his head. “If I… want?”
Jay’s eyebrows fly up. “Yeah,” he says. “You’ve gotta paint your soul-feathers, of course, but the rest is up to you, buddy. Totally up to you.”
Echo Zane nods slowly. Whenever his father would make adjustments to him, he would let Echo Zane know what he was doing, but he never asked Echo Zane his opinion before doing something. It’s novel and more than a little intimidating to be asked now.
Jay waits, but when it becomes clear that Echo Zane doesn’t plan on saying anything else, he hums and jumps in to finish his tinkering.
“There’s still some rust around your port,” he says, scrubbing a brush against Echo Zane’s back. Echo Zane looks when it comes away and sees amber flakes clinging to the bristles. “It’s gonna take at least another session to get it all the way off. Other than that,” he continues, stepping back and putting his hands on his hips, “I think that’s that!”
“Thank you,” Echo Zane says. He smiles, hears his faceplates creak with the unfamiliar motion.
Jay smiles back, and it looks much more natural on his face.. “So,” he says. “Wanna give them a spin?”
“A spin?”
“You know, a test, a tryout, take them on a test drive?” Jay grins wider. “Aish, you’re just like Zane was in the beginning. It’s so cute! What I meant was do you want to try flying now?”
“I see,” Echo Zane says. “I do not know how to.”
Jay snaps his fingers. “Right, that makes sense. Missing feathers." His wings shift behind him, almost seeming to shrink before he flicks them out again. "Well, I can’t say that remember the first thing about learning to fly, but you know who does?”
Before Echo Zane can say anything, Jay’s reaching across the workshop desk. He grabs his cellular phone and types something into it. “Aha! He’s nearby, too!”
His phone whooshes with an outgoing message.
Echo Zane knows who’s about to show up moments before a shadow blocks out the sun. There’s the whisper of metal sliding against metal, and then the Original’s head appears through the open-air perch that leads outside of the workshop.
“You called?” he says amiably. His eyes take in the room and stop on Echo Zane. “Oh,” he says. “Hello.”
He doesn’t sound hostile. Curious, maybe, and a bit guarded, but none of the upset that Echo Zane’s father had anticipated. He watches Echo Zane, so Echo Zane takes the opportunity to get his first real look at the one his father left him for.
He looks like Echo Zane. This much is true. They have the same icy blue eyes, the same haircut, although the Original’s is silvery like the rest of his body and Echo Zane’s is rusted like the rest of him. They even have the same wingshape, the one of falco cherrug, a fact that makes Echo Zane draw his wings behind himself as much as he can.
But the more Echo Zane looks, the more discrepancies he also sees. It’s not that their material is different; Echo Zane had already considered and dismissed that observation as soon as he made it. No. It’s in the way that the Original stands: relaxed but in a way that is carefully calculated to be. It’s in the way that he speaks: casual, familiar, informal.
It’s in the way he carries himself: confident in his position, in himself, in his skin.
“Hello,” Echo Zane returns, matching his tone.
Jay’s eyes dance between the two of them. “Echo here was hoping to try out his wings,” he says, “and I figured, you know, who better to help him than the guy who actually had to reteach himself how to fly?”
“Of course,” the Original says. “I would be happy to.” He looks at Echo Zane, and the plates around his eyes squeeze in a way that mimics an eye smile.
“Ah, great! Well, I’ll leave you to it, then. Nya and I were gonna try to meet up for lunch anyway, so I’ll just go a little early.” Behind his back, Jay unsubtly gives the Original a thumbs-up.
The Original laughs. “All right. Have fun.”
Jay leaves, and then it’s just them.
The Original turns back to Echo Zane. “You never have flown before?” he asks, tone perfectly unassuming.
Echo Zane shakes his head. “I never had enough feathers to try.”
The Original nods like he expected this answer. “In that case, I believe it would be best for you to start with some branching. Let’s go to the courtyard; you can practice gliding off of the roof there.”
He leads him to the courtyard, and Echo Zane follows.
The Original is a good teacher. Echo Zane is not loathe to admit it. His eyes are observant and not only pick up when Echo Zane is struggling but also why. His advice is easy to implement, and after about fourty-five minutes of learning how his wings feel with wind beneath them, the Original deems Echo Zane ready to venture into the open air.
And flying- real flying, surrounded completely by sky, the world dropping out from below him- Echo Zane has never felt anything better.
Once he’s got the subtleties of the wind down, flying isn’t hard; he has no muscles to exhaust, after all. He banks in a slow, wide spiral above the monastery, an irrepressible smile slowly growing on his lips. The freedom that comes with flight- now he understands the longing looks his father would throw at the gulls who visited the lighthouse.
After a few more minutes of flying, the Original directs Echo Zane back to the rooftops. “You are picking this up remarkably quickly,” he says, smiling as Echo recalibrates his balance after landing. “How is it?”
“It is incredible,” Echo Zane answers honestly. The wind whips across his face, carrying his words with it.
The Original nods his head. “I felt the same way, upon remaking my wings.” He hesitates, and the uncharacteristic action catches Echo Zane off guard. “Echo,” he says, “before you go- I had one question, if you don’t mind me asking it.”
“What?” Echo Zane asks, even though as soon as the Original paused, he had a sinking feeling he knew what he was going to say. A shudder runs through his wings. He forces them to lie still.
The Original’s eyes track the movement. “Those feathers,” he says, and he’s not asking a question, he’s making a statement. “They were his, weren’t they.”
So he had seen.
Echo quells the urge to draw his wings even further behind him. “They are,” he says. There’s no use in denying it if the Original has already guessed.
He raises his eyes, scrabbling to catch any reaction, any twitch of expression or flipping of wings to betray the Original’s thoughts. But the Original just watches him with that same unreadable light in his eyes. “It always made me wonder,” he says, quietly, finally, “why he didn’t just fly out if the lighthouse. I assumed it was that he was too weak for the flight back to the mainland.”
“But no,” he says, and a small, bittersweet smile tilts the corners of his lips. “He was giving his feathers to you.”
Echo Zane drops his gaze. “I am honored to bear his feathers,” he says.
But the Original frowns in his peripheral vision. “Not his- they’re yours now, Echo. Just because they came from him doesn’t make them any less yours.”
Echo Zane tilts his head.
“My original pair came from him too,” the Original says. And oh. Of course. “Back then, they didn’t have anything like featherplates, and the technology to artificially create feathers still escapes us. So my feathers were originally his, but once color started appearing on them, they became mine.”
He spreads out his right wing and motions for Echo Zane to do the same. At the sight of the seagreen on Echo Zane’s secondaries, his eyes tighten for a brief moment. “See?” he says. “You bear his heart-color. If they were his wings, it would be back here." He gestures towards Echo Zane's scapular feathers. "But since it's here, it can only be for you.”
Echo Zane’s eyes rest on the Original’s wing, on the clean titanium stretch of secondary featherplates. The Original folds it back down.
“I’m glad that you were there for him,” he says. “Really, I am. I only wish-”
The Original cuts himself off. He shakes his head, eyes on some unfocused spot in the distance. “No. There is no use in wishing. Master Wu has a saying: the past is the past, but the future is the future.”
He looks back at Echo Zane, then, and smiles. “I want us to be able to put the past, important as it is, behind us. I want us to be able to start a new chapter together, the two of us. Brothers.”
He says the last word so low that it is almost lost to the wind. But Echo Zane hears it.
“Brothers,” he says, testing the word on his tongue, and his Original’s eyes snap up. Brothers. The sound of it- he likes it very much.
“Brothers,” he says again, firmly this time, and the smile that spreads across his Original’s face is blindingly bright.
Echo Zane makes his way down the hallway after departing from his Original.
Two people are inside the workshop when he pushes open the door. One has the feathered wings of a human. The other bears the silvery featherplates as his Original. Both notice him immediately, but it’s Nya who waves Echo over with a grin.
“Zane told us to expect you,” she says, patting the floor beside her. “How was your flight? It looked like you guys were having fun out there.”
“It was enjoyable,” Echo Zane says. He approaches her. Nya has a small pile of photographs in front of her, and closer to Pixal are several containers of paint.
“These are the paints that Zane uses on his wings,” Nya says, noticing his attention. “I brought Jay and my colors! If you want them, of course. No pressure if you don’t want to rush things.”
“I would certainly like them,” Echo Zane says, sitting in the spot at the point of both of them. All the ninja have been nice to him, but Jay and Nya in particular have been enthusiastic in having him ever since they showed up at the lighthouse.
“Zane’s heart-colors reappeared in their same places naturally,” Pixal says, giving Echo Zane a smile of her own. “But just to be sure, we took the liberty of taking some reference photos to guide us.”
She spreads out the printed images. Colors jump out at Echo Zane from the pages, a full rainbow of hues, but it’s the sight of periwinkle that sends lines of discomfit scuttling abruptly through his processors.
“Wait,” he says.
Both of them look at him, surprise evident in their expressions. Echo Zane too is surprised. It’s not like him to interrupt, and yet-
“What’s wrong?” Nya asks. She leans back on her hands, wings falling open at her sides. Open, unthreatening body language.
Echo Zane realizes his feathers have puffed up, making himself look bigger. He forces them to lie flat again. Pixal’s eyes track the movement.
“I am a Zane model,” he says, haltingly.
“You are,” Pixal agrees.
"And that's okay,” Nya says. “That you’re a model, I mean. Our Zane isn't the first-model Zane either, but it doesn't change the fact that he's still Zane.”
“I am the sixteenth P.I.X.A.L model, but I am as much Pixal as any of my sisters,” Pixal adds.
Echo Zane stares at his lap. Sisters. Brothers, says his Original’s voice in his memory bank. "And what if- what if I don’t want to be Zane?" he asks quietly. “What if I don’t want to be defined by him, as him, anymore?”
Pixal’s head tilts to the side, almost like she’s confused, but something like recognition flashes through Nya’s eyes.
“Then I would say,” she says, suddenly fierce, leaning forward and taking his hand in her own, “that you should define yourself.”
Something passes through Echo Zane, a buzz, like the hum of his processors but through his entire body. He looks down at their conjoined hands and squeezes, just slightly.
Pixel draws in a short breath. When Echo Zane glances at her, her eyes have gone wide. “Look,” she says.
Echo Zane tries to follow her line of sight. He twists and finds his wings.
The honey-colored rust around his port has spread. It creeps along his scapular feathers, staining the white- except no, it’s not rust, Echo Zane realizes.
It’s heart-color.
Nya cheers. Pixal begins to smile. Echo Zane drops Nya’s hand to reach out and run his fingers delicately over his scapulars.
Yellow. Yellow; not seagreen, not periwinkle. Not his father’s, even though it is his wings that Echo Zane bears. Not Zane’s, even though he is his original.
This yellow is his and only his.
“Ready for some more?” Nya asks, brandishing a paintbrush and a wide smile. Pixal begins organizing the colors, her wings fluttering behind her and betraying her own excitement.
The energy in the room is infectious. Echo Zane’s processors sing with it. “May I choose where to place them?” he asks.
In a moment, Nya’s face softens. “I think that sounds like a great idea, Echo.”
The way she says it; she doesn’t say it like a nickname, like a temporary title to distinguish one version from another. She says “Echo” like it’s a full name.
And Echo smiles back and reaches for a paintbrush of his own.