Stoneskin

by K. B. Spangler

  Tembi slumped back into her seat. She had never considered the Deep in the hands of a baby. “Matthew—”

  “It brings you cars when you don’t ask for them,” Matthew said. “What would it bring a baby?” He paused. “Matindi and I have tried to give you enough space so you could grow without the Deep. But, Tembi? It’s time. We need to know why it came to you, if there’s something it wants that we haven’t been providing it. It’s time you learn how to live with it, so you can find out what that might be.”

  “I don’t want to.” Tembi’s voice was a whisper. Taabu strolled into the room, sniffed at the strange vehicle, and left to see about activating its food bowl.

  “I know,” Matthew said. “That’s another difference between you and everyone else who’s been chosen—we were all ready to join with the Deep.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All of us Witches? The only thing we’ve ever had in common was we had broken hearts. We had recently gone through the loss of first love. Myself? I’ve always thought the Deep felt the pain of our loss, and it chose us because of that. Filling a void, if you would.

  “You’ll be sixteen next week,” he continued. “Still younger than any other Witch here, but I think you know that you need to take control of this situation. If you don’t, someone else will have to. And if you’re in control, you can at least make sure the situation is a little fairer for you, right?”

  Tembi nodded.

  “The Deep is going to be with you for the rest of your life,” Matthew said. “It’s time for you to learn how to make it live with you on your terms. Not its own.”

  _________________________________

  painted woman

  knows

  mother father

  painted woman knows

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 7 August 4013 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Eight

  On the day she turned sixteen, Tembi left the golden birds on her face and went to take her place with the Witches.

  Lancaster Tower. Tall and white and gilded, and no Matthew at the door to greet her this time.

  Chin up, she told herself, her head and ears held high. The doors in the spun crystal spirals parted for her, and she entered the Tower. It’s not like they can kill you.

  (Maybe they could? Matindi had been awfully keen on wishing her luck that morning, but—No. The Deep didn’t let its Witches die in accidents. Or get murdered. Or—)

  No. Hush.

  Across the white marble floors. Down the third hall to her right. Why did the Witches need such huge overdone hallways? It’s not like they ever bothered to walk anywhere. She was wearing black and gold. Maybe she shouldn’t have gone with the gold scarf for her hair? It matched the birds but maybe that was bragging? Nobody else had gold paint. It wasn’t too late to take it off, dump it in one of the potted plants, pick it up on her way home—

  “Hey, Tembi!”

  Leps!

  Four years older than when Tembi had last seen her, still bald, still in her Spacers’ uniform. The Deep hadn’t yet frozen her in time; she looked more in control than before (And honestly? Slightly less like a carnivore from an ice planet, which was comforting.).

  Tembi picked up her pace, her bare feet padding across the marble.

  “Hey, kid, you look good.” The bald woman fell into step with her. “Did you know I’m your teacher for the prep course?”

  Tembi shook her head.

  “Basic stuff,” Leps said. “Introductory Deep work. But here’s the thing—the other students in this class? Most of them completed their educations before the Deep tapped them. So I’m going to be referencing data you might not have covered yet. Let me know if you don’t pipe in, ’kay?”

  Pipe in…? Some kind of slang, probably. Moving to Lancaster had dumped Tembi into a cross-cultural nightmare of regional dialog. At least in this case she could understand Leps’ intent from context.

  “Okay,” Tembi agreed.

  “Good.” Leps nodded. She stopped in front of a large door made from a deep brown wood. “Now, I’m gonna be hard on you in there. It’s just how it goes. But you’re tough so you’ll be fine.”

  Leps touched the doorplate and the door pulled open on silent hinges. The low sounds of conversation flooded out, then stopped as Leps led the way inside.

  “Attention,” she said, using the two-toned voice of the Deep. “Newest student in; most experienced student out.”

  Leps’ voice shifted to normal. “Putnam, you’re gone. Move up to the next class. Try not to disappoint them like you’ve disappointed me.

  “Everyone else, this is Tembi.”

  Muttering from the students: too much to have hoped that they wouldn’t have heard of her. Tembi walked past them, head and ears high, and took the empty desk that had been vacated by a smallish man (whom she assumed was Putnam, but how could she say for sure?). She settled herself crosslegged on the chair, her robes concealing her bare feet.

  Tembi had expected a classroom, but this was more like a small training facility for athletes. With desks. There were glyphs taped off across every available surface; the tops of the black desks had been taped in white, while patterns in colored tape chased each other across the floors, the walls, even the ceiling had been marked in targets.

  There was no desk for a teacher. Instead, Leps paced the front of the room like a great white cat.

  “None of you can hear the Deep,” she said. “That’s not a personal flaw, or a failure—it’s physiology. In Earth-normal humans, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t finish developing until your mid-twenties. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for both rational thinking and telepathy, so you’re twice at a disadvantage.

  “But while you can’t hear the Deep, it can hear you. The purpose of Lancaster’s beginner’s program is to train you to talk to the Deep as if it were an extension of your will. You will master control now, so that when you can talk with the Deep, you have the confidence and skills needed to manage it.

  “Who’s my training dummy this week?” she asked, her hand on a rack of foam balls.

  A hand went up. Its owner, a stunning young woman with long black hair and deep blue eyes who was a few years older than Tembi, stood. “I am,” she said.

  “Scheisse,” Leps said. “May the gods save us all. Fine. Bayle, take us though the first mantra.”

  The young woman—Is her name Scheisse or Bayle? Maybe it’s both.—moved to the front of the class. The paint on her face was a blue fern with long, broad leaves, and her eyes kept darting towards Leps, as if expecting the pale woman with the spots to strike out at her without warning.

  “We are the Deep,” she said, her voice decidedly Deep-free. “We are its Witches, we are its voice—”

  Leps hurled one of the foam balls at the woman’s head. The woman didn’t cry out, but the ball vanished before it touched her.

  “Fail. And you knew it was coming. Bayle, sit down,” Leps snarled. “Tembi, get up here.”

  Tembi’s stomach dropped through the floor. The feeling of going into a fight against a much larger opponent (one the size of a planet, maybe, with fists like stony moons) broke over her. She stood and moved to the front of the classroom, and turned to face the room full of young Witches.

  They were all very pretty young people, in rich, colorful clothes. Forty of them, watching her with varying degrees of interest. Almost all of them were Earth-normal, but here and there—Oh, that boy has scales!—were some adaptations.

  She looked past them to the far wall, focusing on the glyphs painted across the back. There were racks of foam balls all over the room, and between these were long wooden sticks in messy stacks.

  “This is Tembi. The Deep came to Tembi when she was…how old were you, Tembi?”

  “Eight.”

  “And yet nobody at Lancaster knew about you until you were…?”

  “Eleven.”

  Yes, oh yes, this was definitely the worst-case sce
nario. First day at Witch school and the scary predator lady was making her tell her embarrassing personal history to a room full of pretty people.

  “Tembi, tell the class why you got caught.”

  Oh, this kept getting better. The edges of her vision blurred; she felt as if she might black out. “I wasn’t paying attention. Two ships looked like they were about to hit each other. They weren’t, but I thought they were, so I…”

  “Speak up!” Leps slapped the end of her stick on the floor. “Tell them why you got caught!”

  “I thought two ships were about to crash. The Deep heard me, and it moved the ships.” Her voice sounded pathetic in her own ears.

  “You hear that?” Leps shouted. “She panicked and jumped some ships. That’s the kind of mistake we can forgive in a little kid with no training. It’s unforgivable in an adult. You will be responsible for moving food and medical supplies. Sick and injured people. Entire families looking to begin new lives on distant planets. Tell me who loses control.”

  The rest of the class stood. “Witches lose control,” they said in a raggedy unison.

  “Again.”

  “Witches lose control.” Louder this time.

  “Again!”

  “Witches lose control.” The class had locked together in their rally.

  “Correct.” Lep’s stick whacked the side of the nearest desk. “The Deep does not lose control. We lose control. We are here to learn how to maintain control, no matter what.”

  Leps whipped the tip of her stick towards Tembi’s face.

  The end of the stick shattered against her rock-hard skin.

  Tembi stared bloody murder at Leps. If this was a test to see if she could resist strangling her new teacher with her bare hands—

  Leps froze, staring at the broken end of the bamboo staff. It took her a moment to recover. “Pass!” she said. “Tembi, do you require a trip to the physician?”

  “No,” Tembi growled through clenched teeth. She touched her cheek; her skin was unbroken. The muscles beneath it were sore, but that was nothing a medical nanopack wouldn’t fix when she got home.

  “Tembi, return to your seat. Andon! You’re up.”

  The next four hours were spent doing drills where they moved objects across the room. The glyphs and taped areas were targets: Leps would bark orders, and then the young Witches would ask the Deep to move a foam ball from point to point.

  Tembi turned out to be extremely good at this. The Deep rallied to her requests, bouncing the balls across the room with precision. She even managed to keep one of the balls floating in mid-air for thirty seconds before the Deep let it fall.

  “Child’s play,” Leps would say as she walked around the room. She had obtained a new stick, and was whipping this behind her like a tail. “Wait until you have to juggle a dozen objects at once while also keeping the Deep in your head. You think it’ll be easier when you can actually hear what it has to say to you? No. It doesn’t speak in words. It has its own language, and that’s hard enough to understand when you aren’t trying to move a starship across the galaxy.”

  Colors and song and emotion, Tembi thought, and remembered meeting the Deep in her dreams. In spite of herself, she thrilled a little to the idea of seeing it again, as if a friend were about to return from a long journey.

  Every foam ball in the room vanished, then reappeared in a large, precise pyramid floating a few centimeters above Tembi’s desk. The last ball hovered in mid-air above the highest point on the pyramid, spinning slowly.

  Leps sighed. “Fifteen-minute break,” she said, and disappeared.

  The class scrambled for the doors. Some of them grabbed bags from beneath their chairs; a few paused, eyes closed, before their own lunch bags dropped into their hands.

  Tembi watched this, slightly horrified.

  “Don’t worry,” came a voice from behind her. “You’re doing great. A few weeks and you won’t have to pack your lunch.”

  It was the young woman who Leps had ripped apart at the beginning of class. Scheisse? Or maybe Bayle? She was smiling. “C’mon,” she said. “We usually don’t get more than one bathroom break a day. If we miss this one, it’ll be a bad afternoon.”

  “Your name is Scheisse?” Tembi asked.

  The woman’s eyes went wide and she pressed her hands to her mouth. Her fingernails were perfect works of digital art, with detailed moving scenery showing images of the sea. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, no. No. It’s Bayle—Bayle Oliver. And maybe don’t say that word around anyone else?”

  Tembi winced. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine, I do stuff like that all the time,” Bayle said. “C’mon, we need to hurry.”

  Tembi followed her through the heavy door and down the marbled hall. Bayle was practically running, her skirts pulled up to her knees. Her feet were bare, too, but much wider than Tembi’s at the heel. Her people weren’t Earth-normal.

  “I like your manicure?” Tembi offered.

  “Thanks! It’s the view of home from my window. I wanted to bring it with me to remember it,” Bayle said, and folded her fingers in so she could inspect the digital display. Like her feet, the balls of her hands were a little too wide to be Earth-normal. “It’s overcast today. Usually it’s much nicer.”

  A continuous streaming feed from another planet? Tembi couldn’t imagine how much something like that would cost.

  “I can’t believe you passed the stick test,” Bayle said. “I don’t think anyone’s ever done that before.”

  “How was that a test?” Tembi asked, her fingers poking the sore spot where the stick had shattered across her face.

  “You had enough control over the Deep to let the stick hit you,” Bayle replied.

  Tembi rolled that idea over in her mind. “Well…I don’t think you can call it control if you don’t know what you’re supposed to do. Besides,” she added, “when I started martial arts, my guardian and I convinced the Deep to allow me get hit!”

  “Hah! Never tell that to Leps!” Bayle laughed. “Let her think you’re a prodigy.”

  The bathroom was similar to the one that Leps had jumped her to on her first day at Lancaster. In this one, there were multiple stalls and toilets, but the white and gold were still dominant. Bayle went straight to the sink and began to scoop water from the tap to her mouth.

  She was still drinking when Tembi finished with the toilet. “One moment,” Bayle said, her hands splayed out in front of her like a bowl. There was water where there shouldn’t be; Bayle’s fingers were webbed.

  “Toes, too.” Bayle lifted one foot and spread them so Tembi could see the translucent skin between them. “Can’t stand wearing shoes.”

  “Me neither.” Tembi grinned.

  Bayle vanished into one of the stalls. “I get a lot of crap from the Earth-normals,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Tembi agreed, and spoke louder so she couldn’t hear the other girl while she was in the midst of peeing. “I’ve been here for a while. They don’t like my ears, but I live with a bright green Witch and she manages, so I can’t complain.”

  “Sure you can.” Bayle opened the stall door and went back to the sink. She washed her hands, and then started drinking again. “Poor treatment is poor treatment,” she said around huge mouthfuls of water. “It’s not a competition. Ugh, this world is so dry!”

  “Matindi says it’s something to be fought by living your best life in spite of them. Oh, and,” Tembi added, “that grace is where you find it.”

  Bayle laughed. “What does that even mean?”

  “I don’t know, but people usually leave her alone after she says it.”

  “Oh, I’ve got to try that!”

  They two of them left the bathroom and retraced their steps to the classroom.

  “Are you hungry?” the older girl asked.

  “A little. Is Leps really going to keep us all day?”

  “Not if you can do that pyramid trick again.” Bayle did a little jump and a kick, her robes floating down around he
r as she landed. “That threw her. Usually she spends a full eight hours tearing us down. We get one short break—the Deep help you if you have to use the bathroom and you haven’t learned gastric movement yet.”

  “What’s gastric movement?”

  “Really?” Bayle sniffed. “You’ve been living with the Witches and you haven’t heard about that? It’s asking the Deep to dump your…um…contents…into the toilet for you.”

  Tembi stopped dead. “That’s awful. That’s so awful! Why would anyone make the Deep do that?!”

  “I don’t do it!” Bayle sounded defensive and offended, all at once. “That Witch you live with never told you about that?”

  “No…just…No!” Tembi felt nauseated. “That might be the worst thing I’ve ever heard!”

  “Well,” Bayle paused, her head tilted as if trying to hear something. “The Deep doesn’t mind. From its point of view, if…if food is energy, then what’s left over from food needs to be turned back into energy so it can be put to use again.”

  “Sorry, but I want to hear that from the Deep.” Tembi suddenly didn’t want to go back into that classroom. “Not from the Witches who use it.”

  “That’s smart.” Bayle got an odd little smile on her face. “That pyramid trick was incredible, by the way. It usually takes years before we get that level of coordination with the Deep.”

  “That wasn’t me.” Tembi shook her head. “I’m not exactly on speaking terms with the Deep these days.”

  “But…” Bayle glanced at Tembi, her eyebrows knitting together and her head tilted to the side again. “Maybe you should be, if it’s willing to listen to you.”

  Tembi opened the door to their classroom, but didn’t reply.

  _________________________________

  fireboy

  alone

  with painted woman

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 9 April 3410 CE

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