My companions turned, bemused, to follow my pointing finger. The sky above the river had darkened to a clear indigo. The stars were as brilliant as any I had ever seen, their constellations warped slightly from the shapes I’d known since childhood, but they weren’t what had drawn my attention. The white moon still hanging above the trees had been joined by a second one: a hazy gibbous orb with an unmistakable gold tint. Two moons. The feeling of incredulous gratitude I had felt earlier, when I stepped down from the shuttle ramp, rose up in me again. “Oh my God,” I repeated. “The ships were one thing. And the starhavens. But this . . .”
Sohra came over and put her arm around me. “It’s an incredible feeling, isn’t it?”
“Ivri khedai,” I said. “The longing for another sky. I knew what the words meant before, but I didn’t really understand them.”
“Now you do,” said Hathan. “You’ve seen the sky over another world. You made it. You’re here.” As if echoing his words, something in the trees beyond us offered its haunting cry to the night: bird or animal, I had no way of knowing, but its voice was wild and lonely and like nothing I had ever heard before.
“I’m here,” I whispered.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
My time on Rikasa flickered past, one golden hour giving way to the next with disquieting speed. The dreamlike mood of that first night in the forest persisted, enhanced perhaps by the fact that my internal circadian rhythm was meaningless on a world whose days were only seventeen hours long. I woke when sunlight brightened my tent dome, which I left semitransparent for the sheer delight of sleeping under the stars, and stayed awake as long into the twilight as I could before drifting off to the murmur of my companions’ nearby voices. I was always the first one asleep and the last awake, and I was always tired, but it hardly mattered. From the very first morning, when I sat cradling my thermos of instant coffee, breathing clouds of white smoke into the air and listening to Zey gripe halfheartedly about dust in his senek, I was utterly content. The Outmarch felt so right, so inevitable, that I wondered how I could have imagined the mission without it. I remembered the first time I had heard Rikasa mentioned, on the Pinion, a few days before we docked at Arkhati. I had been instantly captivated by Ziral’s description—almost more so than by the description of Vardesh Prime offered by Saresh. It was as if some part of me had been headed here all along.
Hathan, to judge by his words, felt the same. “This is exactly what we need,” he said over breakfast that first morning. “I should have thought of it myself. There’s a reason why every year of Institute training includes a survival exercise. They’re good for morale.”
“I wish I could say I had that in mind when I suggested it,” I said. “But, honestly, I just wanted to go camping.”
He smiled briefly. “So did I. I’ve been trying to get into the Outmarch forever. Before I transferred to the Pinion, the Echelon turned me down three years running.”
“You’re not really in now though,” I felt obligated to point out. “Not as a contestant, I mean. When you applied before, you probably weren’t picturing crawling along at human speed.”
“Who cares?” Hathan’s offhand tone was a perfect imitation of Zey’s. I smiled; sitting on his bedroll, senek cup in hand, he did look completely at home. He gestured to the trees around us, which had the look of a fairy-tale wood, misty and luminous in the early light. “Ten days of this is better than three. Reyna will remember the contest, but she won’t remember Rikasa. I will. And I can always apply again. I have the form pretty well memorized by now.”
“Oh, please,” I muttered. “You’ve had it memorized since the first time you saw it.”
He gave me a wry sidelong look. “Maybe I have.”
This, for me, was the remarkable gift conferred by the Outmarch, more precious than double moonrise or tent domes glimmering in the darkness: Hathan and I were finally friends. Since the second Listening our interactions had been collegial but never warm. Fleet protocol aside, the simple fact was that, as the Ascendant’s highest- and lowest-ranking crew members, we didn’t interact enough to smooth down the rough edges left behind by the Flare. Even on a vessel as tiny as ours, we led nearly separate lives. Now, on Rikasa, all the walls had come down. We weren’t khavi and second novi any more. We were simply teammates. And Hathan was at last beginning to see what I, because I was so drawn to him, had recognized long ago: the likeness of mind between us. I had sensed it when we first discussed ivri khedai, and again when we sat in the Ascendant’s lounge exchanging backpacking stories. It was the same feeling I had had with Fletcher, amplified a hundredfold. We felt the same things. We were the same.
I knew all Vardeshi felt wanderlust to some degree. But our crewmates had seen other worlds before now. They had grown up in the reality of interplanetary travel. I hadn’t, and now, finding myself confronted with fresh proof of it at every turn, I found my excitement impossible to contain. And Hathan, who had the chart of his first trip offworld displayed on his wall, who alone of all our companions was planning to spend his three weeks on Earth backpacking through the remote wilderness, found it hilarious and endearing and familiar. I had persevered through the trials of the past nine months, and in doing so had won his respect. But it was that quality—my transparent joy in wandering on foot through the forests of another world—that finally made him like me.
I sensed the difference, the new warmth in him, from the very first morning. Going down to fill my flask at the river after breakfast, I was astonished to see innumerable faceted blue crystals nestled among the pebbles on the streambed. Some of them were as large as my fist. I hadn’t noticed them last night; in the swiftly falling dusk, they had simply looked like stones. I scooped up a dripping double handful and carried them back to the edge of the camp, where I deposited them proudly in front of Hathan. I didn’t seek him out on purpose; he was simply the first person I saw. He was sitting on a rock, flexscreen on his knee, adding with light but sure strokes to the hand-drawn trail map he had begun drafting the day before. “Look what I found!” I said.
He leaned forward to examine them. “Pretty, aren’t they? They’re naturally occurring prisms, like your quartz crystals. They’re as common as dust on Arideth—we’ve found them on at least a dozen different planets.”
I picked out the most regular of the stones, about the size of a robin’s egg, and polished it carefully on the hem of my shirt. “They look like memory crystals.”
“They are. Or, rather, it’s the same stone. But we don’t source it on Rikasa. Too many impurities. May I?” Hathan took the one I had cleaned and held it up to the light. “Ah. There’s an imperfection, but you have to look closely to see it. The encoding won’t work unless the stone is nearly flawless.” He handed it back to me.
I balanced it on my palm, admiring its color, a paler blue than sapphire in the sunlight filtering down through the leaves. If there was a flaw in the stone, I couldn’t see it. “Maybe that’s why humans don’t have perfect memories. Too many impurities.”
Hathan said lightly, “If that was how it worked, I’d be a lot worse at Khivrik sevens.”
To me the words signaled an end to the conversation. I closed my hand around the crystal, thinking to keep it as a souvenir, and stood up. I was surprised when he said, “I hope you know how lucky you are.”
I sat down again. “You think I’m lucky?”
“You and Saresh both. You’ve experienced something truly rare. Something unprecedented in both our histories.” He turned his attention back to his map, began shading in the line of the river a little more deeply. I watched his face. He seemed tranquilly absorbed in the work, but the regret was clear in his voice when he spoke again. “I wish . . . If things had gone differently this year, I like to think I might have had the chance to see a human memory. Just one. Imperfections and all.”
Setting aside the two occasions on which he had apologized to me, he had never voluntarily raised such an intimate subject before. I said slowly, “I had no idea
that was even something you wanted.”
“It’s something I want very much.”
He could have no idea what he was suggesting, what even the briefest contact with my mind would reveal. I spoke with a brightness that was as natural as I could make it. “Then you will. I’m sure of it. Cross-species Listenings won’t be off-limits forever. Not if the only side effects are the ones we’ve discovered. For me, at least, the first Listening was the easy one. Going the other way, into your memories, that was where I had trouble.”
He nodded. “Maybe you’re right. But I’ve missed my chance this time around. And Saresh is no help. He won’t tell me anything more about the first Listening than he did in the ten seconds after it happened.”
I said neutrally, “You asked him? About my memories?”
“I did, and he was exceptionally vague.”
Damn right he was, I thought. “The Vox code of ethics, huh?”
“Apparently it applies to humans too.” His smile was so swift and brilliant I wondered again how I could have failed for so long to see his resemblance to his elder brother. “So don’t worry,” he went on. “Your thoughts are safe from me—for now. But I think you should know that, as far as I’m concerned, you owe me a memory.”
His tone was teasing. If he’d been human, I might have called it flirtatious. A sudden recklessness took hold of me. I opened my hand and looked down at the blue gemstone. “Here. Take this. Call it a Rikasan bar coin, worth one memory of your choice. We’ll probably never see each other again after the mission. But if we do, and if you still haven’t seen a human memory, I’ll make good on it. Whether or not the ban is still in place.”
Hathan said, “I’ll hold you to that. I think you know I’m not likely to forget it.”
“I know.” Abruptly overwhelmed, certain that I’d gone too far, I set the crystal down in the fallen leaves beside him and headed back to the campsite. I didn’t look back to see if he picked it up.
I could feel Saresh watching me as I rejoined the others. I ignored him steadily until I’d finished snapping on my pack and adjusting the straps. By that point, the betraying flush had faded, and I was able to meet his eyes. “Ready to go?”
“Well, yeah,” Zey said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
I moved to take the lead, nudging him with my elbow as I went past. “Get used to it, pal.”
I remained a little on edge until our second oxygen break of the morning, when Hathan sought me out to ask about my rock-climbing experience. I knew at once from the nonchalance of his manner that I hadn’t betrayed myself earlier. I remembered all the times I’d seen him working in the Ascendant’s lounge with Reyna. Their seriousness had been woven through with moments of levity. Of course he hadn’t been flirting with me. He’d been being friendly, that was all. I’d misread the signals. I vowed silently that I wouldn’t be caught quite so off guard the next time it happened. If there was a next time.
As it turned out, there were plenty of next times. By the end of that first day, we had drifted into the habit of walking together. It made sense, practically speaking. The team could only move as fast as its slowest member. There was no point in Hathan’s planning out a tricky ascent of a mountain face only to learn that it was too steep for me to climb. From the second morning on, without an acknowledgment from either of us, we were a dyad. We hiked at the front of the pack, or at the back, or in the middle, and wherever we went, the others looked to us for guidance when there was a decision to be made. I nearly laughed out loud when it struck me that I, and not Saresh or any of our other eminently capable companions, had emerged as de facto second-in-command.
I was anxious at first, sure my pace must seem agonizingly slow to Hathan, but he never hurried me along or betrayed any sign of impatience. I knew he was alert to the passage of time; he sent pairs of scouts ahead of us in a near-constant rotation to find the most efficient way forward. Watching Zey and Khiva return, mud smeared and laughing, from one such excursion, I realized that the scouting missions weren’t only a time-saving measure. They were also a welcome chance for my crewmates to move at their natural pace. After that, I wondered when Hathan himself would join one of the scouting parties. He never did. He stayed with me. And at length it dawned on me that there was more to our near-constant proximity than simple pragmatism. With Reyna gone, he had stepped quietly back into the role she had abdicated. He had no intention of leaving my side, even for a few hours. He was doing the job he had, to his own shame and self-recrimination, twice failed to do. He was keeping me safe.
As I watched our path take shape under his pencil, I wondered whether the starting point the Echelon had chosen for us really was as favorable as they’d claimed. Our route was torturously indirect. We were constantly dodging obstacles reported by our vanguard to lie ahead: cliffs, thickets of thorny brush, gorges too deep and wide to cross. Some of these we avoided for my sake, but most were simply impassable. If this was an easy approach to the Perch, I thought, what were the other ones like? What kind of pace would Reyna and the others be setting, to conquer more challenging terrain than this in just three days?
Team Ascendant’s pace was as fast as I could make it without actively courting injury. I had never been in better physical shape, nor carried a lighter pack on a multiple-day trek. In my own admittedly unscientific estimation, those gains balanced out the toll exacted by Rikasa’s heavy gravity and unfamiliar diurnal rhythm. We saved time wherever we could. We kept our breaks short. We ate the first two meals of the day cold and prepared the next morning’s senek and coffee along with dinner. I had been a runner long enough to know exactly how hard I could push myself, and I did it, over and over again. By the end of each day, I was drenched in sweat and trembling with fatigue. I had no idea how the Echelon had calculated their ten-day window, what data they had used, whether their concept of a traversable distance for a human aligned at all with mine. If it could be done, though, I was determined to do it. While there was daylight, we hiked.
In the evenings, though, I let myself relax a little. Ahnir had brought along a larger version of our individual tent domes, meant to shelter ten or twelve people sitting on the ground. We ate dinner under it, shielded from the bites of insects and the cold edge of the wind, our plates lit by the stars and whatever combination of moons was visible. I never made it very far past the meal. Once I was dressed in my warm fleece layers, with a stomach full of warm food, my body began to shut down almost immediately. But that half hour of quiet talk was my favorite part of the day. The others stayed awake late into the night, telling stories and playing dice and (some of them) drinking. Alcohol was out of the question for Echelon teams, not forbidden so much as understood to be counterproductive. We were playing by our own rules, however, and my companions were determined to enjoy their recreational leave to the fullest. Now and then a cry of mirth or outrage roused me briefly from sleep. I didn’t mind. Those moments reminded me of falling asleep as a child: the strip of golden light under the door, the sound of adult laughter from another room. I had a flask of contraband whiskey tucked away in my own pack, waiting for the right moment. Daskar had strongly discouraged me from bringing liquor for myself, but she hadn’t gone so far as to actually forbid it.
On our third full day soilside, we lost an hour for another reason, one I couldn’t bring myself to regret. We had spent the day climbing up out of a valley, slowly but steadily gaining elevation. At midafternoon Zey and Sohra returned from a scouting trip wearing identical knowing grins. “We found something up ahead,” Zey said. “Eyvri’s going to like it.”
We walked on. A few minutes later, Hathan paused, listened intently, and said, “He’s right. You are going to like it.”
We had gone another hundred yards before I heard it too: the muted thunder of a waterfall. Soon afterward we stepped out from under the trees into the sunlight, and I caught my breath in wonder at the beauty of the scene before me. We were standing on a ledge near the foot of the waterfall, a cascade two or three t
imes my height. The pool into which it plunged was wide and still, with boulders at the downstream end forming a natural dam. The water was clear as a windowpane; blue crystals larger than any I had yet seen sparkled on the sand fifteen pellucid feet below. At the center of the pool was a tiny island, a broad flat rock with a single tree growing upon it. Its red leaves caught the light like stained glass. Without a word to the others, I dropped my pack, walked out to the end of the ledge, and knelt to dip my hand into the water. It was achingly cold. I looked at Sohra and Khiva. Both of them wore expectant smiles.
“Yes?” Sohra said.
“Yes,” I said firmly, and turned to Hathan. “Can we—”
“Of course.” He started unbuckling his own pack. The others, taking their cues from him, did the same. I fished my bikini out of my own bag and stepped back into the woods to change. I took a few extra moments to make sure all the pieces were in place—the suit was revealing enough when properly situated—before rejoining my crewmates. When I did, the various conversations that had begun in my absence faltered and died. Not since I laughed out loud in my initial interview with the Pinion’s senior officers had I been the focal point of such universally horrified silence. It dragged on for so long that I started to wonder if, my female crewmates’ assurances aside, I had committed a serious cultural gaffe. Then Sohra and Khiva began to giggle helplessly. So did Zey. I looked at Saresh and Ahnir, both of whom had their eyes resolutely trained on the ground. Vethna wore the tormented look of a man fighting desperately to contain about eight different off-color jokes. As for Hathan, I had no idea what his reaction was, if any, because I simply couldn’t look at him.
At last Vethna said cautiously, “Eyvri? Where are your clothes?”
I glanced down at my bikini, affecting unconcern. “I’m wearing them. This is a swimsuit. I’m going swimming.”
Bright Shards (The Vardeshi Saga Book 2) Page 31