Stoneskin

by K. B. Spangler

  “Moto!” she said softly, alarmed.

  He hugged her; it was like being embraced by granite. “It’s not something to talk about at a party,” he said, resting his chin on the top of her head. “But now you know how I feel when your stress is showing.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “It’s work,” he said. “It’s just work.”

  She was about to tell him that there was nothing—nothing at all!—that could cause enough stress to petrify him, when he broke away. “Do you have a minute?” he asked. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  He brought her across the room to a small group of ageless Witches. Matthew was there, along with Williamson and a few others on the Tower Council she had met over the years. Moto took one of them aside: a Witch with long white hair dyed in the colors of the Deep, with a prism of rainbows painted across the right side of her forehead.

  She was the tall Witch who had been sitting next to Matindi at the Pavilion party a couple of months ago. The one who had been speaking to General Eichin on the dance floor. Tembi weighed the Witch’s value in her mind: she had money, obviously; those robes were pure linen and silk. But there was more to that. This Witch projected a sense of being there—a central force within the room—that went far beyond her physical presence.

  Moto returned, the tall Witch walking at his side. “Tembi, this is Domino,” he said.

  The name was obviously supposed to mean something to Tembi. It didn’t, but the way Moto had said it was touched with more than a little caution.

  The older Witch smiled at Tembi, and brushed her multicolored hair away from an ear. It was tapered to a point, just like her own.

  “You’re from Adhama!” Tembi said, delighted.

  Domino smiled. Her lips had been painted a pale blue, and against her dark skin and white teeth, this made her smile go on forever. “One of the first Witches chosen from our world,” she said.

  “Domino is my supervisor,” Moto said. “She’s Lancaster’s delegate to the Earth Assembly.”

  Oh. Oh! Tembi realized her mouth had dropped open. The Earth Assembly. The Earth Assembly!

  “It’sanhonortomeetyou!” she squeaked, and dropped into the low kneeling bow that Matindi had taught her, just in case, you’ll probably never need to use it, but better to know it than not.

  “None of that, sister of Adhama,” Domino said, holding out a hand to help Tembi rise. Domino’s skin was so hard it may as well have been stone made flesh. It was cool to the touch, and felt much thicker than her own. “The Deep chooses us, and we find our place within its order. At no point does it demand we must kneel.”

  Tembi knew she was nodding so hard her head might pop off and roll away, but she couldn’t seem to stop.

  “So, Miss Tembi…?”

  “Stoneskin,” she answered, before realizing that using that particular name in front of these two particular people was a very stupid decision. Moto put a hand on her shoulder and grinned at Domino; instead of embarrassed, Tembi was surprised to find she felt very much at home.

  “Miss Tembi Stoneskin,” Domino said, nodding, with only the slightest grin. “Have you given any thought to what you want to do when you pass your certification?”

  No, she hadn’t, not really—certification was years away! But she nodded and said, “I haven’t decided yet. I know Lancaster doesn’t think I should be a pilot.”

  (True. Every time the Deep did something without her direction, Leps unloaded with one of her speeches on Witches and responsibility and how Tembi was likely to get a starship full of people killed, or at the very least stranded on the galactic edge, and how she should only risk jumping a ship if every other Witch in the galaxy was dead or dying.)

  “Well.” Domino leaned down a little to bring herself closer to Tembi. “Did you know that Witches from Adhama often begin their careers as personal assistants for Witches on the Tower Council, or the Earth Assembly? Our skin makes us harder to injure, so we also serve as their bodyguards. I’ve been watching your progress in class, and Moto says you are quite skilled as a fighter. With more training and experience, you’ll be an excellent assistant.

  “It’s how I started,” she added, her grin growing wider. “And I think Moto might be considering a career in politics himself. I’ll hate to lose him, and I’ll need a replacement.”

  Moto pretended to cup a hand to his mouth. “She’s offering you a job,” he said in a terrible stage whisper.

  “I know!” Tembi whispered back, and elbowed him in the ribs.

  “Hey Tembi, want to introduce me?”

  She turned. Rabbit was standing there, looking…different. He had a glass of wine in his hand, but he wasn’t drunk. No, he was the opposite of drunk—he was focused like a laser, staring straight at Domino, looking…

  …looking violent!

  Moto put himself between Rabbit and Domino, pulling Tembi behind him as he moved.

  “Easy, friend,” Rabbit said to him. “We’re all friends here, right? I’m just here to make some conversation with my friends.”

  “Where’s your boss?” Moto asked.

  “Who, General Eichin? He went home for the Solstice,” Rabbit replied. “He’s Sabenta, so it’s probably the last one he’ll have with his family, you know?” He turned to Tembi. “Did you know I’ve sat in on meetings with my good friends here? They’ve said there’s nothing they can do to help the Sabenta. Witches are most powerful people in the galaxy. They can empty an entire planet with a wish! But they say there’s nothing they can do.”

  “This isn’t the time or the place,” Moto told him.

  Rabbit ignored him. “You could end this,” he said to Domino. He was so angry that his words sounded clipped, like they were full of teeth. “You could end this right now. Choosing not to act doesn’t make you moral—it makes you complicit.”

  Moto went to answer, but Domino held up one long, graceful hand to stop him. “There are always wars,” she said to Rabbit. “There will always be wars. We cannot get involved.”

  “You mean you will not get involved. Have any of you gone to the front of this war?” Rabbit asked. “Have you seen how they treat the Sabenta? Have you seen the camps? The mass graves?”

  “Yes,” Domino said. She seemed frozen in place, her head and ears held high. An Adhamantian statue in rainbow paint. “I jump there at least once a day. We know what’s happening—we make sure we understand the price that is paid through our inaction.”

  Her answer rattled Rabbit. He recovered by moving closer to Domino, his hands held tight at his sides. Moto stepped forward; Rabbit didn’t back down. “Liar!” Rabbit hissed. “You can’t see that and still say you’re apart from it! Millions have died! Millions!”

  “They’re not lying. They’ve seen it.” Tembi didn’t realize she was speaking until she had stepped out from behind Moto. Rabbit blinked at her; he had forgotten she was there. She closed the short distance between them, and stared at him until Rabbit—funny, snarky Rabbit, who never failed to make Bayle smile, who was always there for Kalais, who had carried her on his back through Hub when her ankle had twisted while dancing—took a step away from her.

  “They’re like me, Rabbit,” she continued. She moved closer; Rabbit’s eyes had locked on hers. “They’re from Adhama. They’ve got my skin. Just…just calm down, okay? Shake their hands, and you’ll know what they’ve seen. Or…or if you have to? Throw that punch you’re sitting on—you’ll break your own hand.”

  She knew what she was saying was cold truth. It was the only reason Moto could feel like stone, Domino could be like granite. They were carrying death in their skin.

  Rabbit knew it, too. He stared at her for another long moment, then shook himself, as if breaking from a spell. “Those deaths are on your conscience,” he said to Domino. “May you carry them every day of your gods-damned life.”

  He turned and walked away, brushing past Bayle and Kalais.

  Oh, gods, Kalais! He had been standing right there—he had see
n the entire thing.

  “Let him go,” Moto said, not knowing she had already forgotten that Rabbit existed. “He needs an enemy right now, and the one he wants to fight isn’t here.”

  She pulled away from him.

  Kalais was waiting for her: she already knew what he was about to say.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “I have to.”

  He moved as if he was ready to kiss her goodbye, but stopped himself. Instead, he pressed a small brightly wrapped box into her hands.

  “You don’t have to leave,” Tembi said.

  “I do.” He touched her cheek, the one without the birds. “I wish… I wish things were different.”

  And then he was gone.

  She opened the box, mostly to have something to do that wasn’t thinking about what had just happened. There on the spun fibers was a new soundkit, its earpieces sized for her ears. She nearly hurled the box away to go running after Kalais, but—

  The Witches were watching. All of them.

  Instead, she held her head and her ears as high as she could, and went to start cleaning up the party mess in the kitchen.

  _________________________________

  stonegirl

  fireboy

  the painted woman

  fear

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 19 July 3881 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Sixteen

  The party was over. Tembi had retreated to her room as soon as the last Witch had left, and had broken down in a torrent of tears. Bayle was more stoic, and had very unkind things to say about Rabbit. Even though she kept trailing off into silence, and twisting the ring he had given her for Solstice around and around her finger.

  Matindi had there-there’d as best she could, but she’d admitted that being twenty-six hundred and twenty-eight years old tended to distort a person’s perception of healthy relationships. Instead, she had jumped to Earth and returned with chocolate cake from her favorite café, and left this on the kitchen table under a stasis cage set to keep the cat away.

  The next few days were breakdays, which was for the best as Tembi spent them all in a deep sulk. She was supposed to go to a beach on Adhama with her family for the Solstice, but—

  (…there was no chance of accidentally bumping into Kalais on Adhama, or him knocking on the door of the beach house to apologize, or…)

  —she didn’t feel up to it.

  Steven came over. They watched some of the romance channels, ate popcorn, and shouted at the characters when they made stupid decisions.

  Eventually, the self-pity burned itself off. This was helped in large part by the Deep, who had decided that if Tembi was going to spend her time holed up inside and petting Taabu to make herself feel better, then it should fill the house with hundreds of cats to speed up the process. Tembi tried to herd them outside, but that didn’t work. Oh no, that didn’t work at all!

  She called Bayle; her friend jumped over to help. Between the two of them, they managed to convince the Deep to take the cats back to their homes. And then they cleaned, as hundreds of panicky cats could do a great deal of damage within a short amount of time.

  They cheated, a little. Not with the Deep, even though it had realized too late the cats were a mistake and had offered to put things right. No, Tembi rented a box of commercial clean/repair nanobots from a large grocery store in Hub, set the controls to “All,” and then she and Bayle went to lunch. By the time they returned, the nanobots had fixed everything except the broken glass and the scratch marks in the wood trim. The girls swept up and dumped the glass, and puttied and painted the scratch marks.

  “No more cats,” Tembi said to the Deep, as she coaxed Taabu out from behind the stove with a piece of fish. “I like this one. He’s enough for me.”

  There was a petulant *clink* from the garbage bin as the Deep whisked the broken glass away.

  Tembi decided to bury herself in the book the Deep had chosen for her in the Library. With the help of a dictionary, she cut her way through about twenty pages a day. Twenty pages on conflict, suffering, and the ethical implications thereof. She wasn’t sure what she was getting out of it apart from a larger vocabulary, but at least her essays for Leps were definitely not copied off of the channels.

  At nights, in the dreamscape, the Deep sulked and pouted at her. Its fur and feathers were mourning black, and it left a trail of red where it passed.

  “I’m trying,” she told it. “Would it help if you could talk to Matindi? Or Bayle? Maybe they could translate—”

  Sometimes, it would flop down on the featureless ground and sigh. Other times, it would shake itself into rainbows and dance through these, singing.

  “This would be easier if you had a face,” Tembi said one night, as she rested against its back. “You have a body, you have wings and feet—I mean, I don’t see where they begin or end, but you still have them—but no face? How can you even sing without a face?”

  The Deep huffed and nuzzled her until she fell over giggling.

  “Fine,” she said. “I imagine you as a canine, though. I hope you know that. A big friendly fluffy dog, with feathers. And bird feet. And wings. Okay, maybe not a dog. Doglike. Dog…adjacent.”

  The air was filled with bright yellow meows! and a shower of glasslike cats rained down from the sky and shattered across the ground.

  “Oh, stop,” she said. “Everybody wants to be a cat! They’re the sweetest, prettiest murderers. But you’re definitely a dog. You want humans to understand you so badly and we…can’t. That’s definitely a dog trait.”

  The Deep tried a bark: it came out as the scent of sulphur and fruit. Then it tried a howl, and this worked much better; Tembi started to howl along, most of her lost in the silly freedom of the act, with a small sliver of self-consciousness that was glad Matindi and Bayle weren’t around to witness this.

  Well, maybe they would have joined in.

  Well, maybe Matindi would have.

  It was hard to feel tired in the dream, but this was a good, long howl. At the end of it, Tembi felt as if she had run for kilometers in the rain. A good, clean exhaustion.

  She wondered if the Deep felt the same way.

  “I wish I could talk to you,” she sighed.

  The Deep sighed back at her, a puff of pink and purple wind that tasted of mangoes.

  “I don’t know what to do for you,” she said, idly scratching the Deep on what seemed to be an especially itchy spot. “I’m happy to just be your friend, but I think you want me to…do something. That book you want me to read? It talks about Witches as your emissaries to the human race. Is that what I am? One of your emissaries?”

  That was too much information for the Deep to process at once. It grumbled and stood, dumping Tembi into the air in a wave of indistinct sensations.

  “This is what I mean,” she said, as the Deep paced in circles around her. “This is a communication barrier—I don’t understand you, and you don’t understand me. If we could just talk—”

  Little puffs of fire appeared around her.

  “Fine,” she sighed. She waited until the fires died down, and then tried again. “You’ve shown me wars before,” she said. “You’ve shown me those ever since I was a little kid. Generals who fought, and…those who didn’t fight. I guess I didn’t realize what you were trying to say.”

  Agreement, but in harsh brassy notes.

  “All right,” she said. “Can you take me to Sagittarius? I want to understand. I don’t need to go there physically. Can you…can you just show me what’s happening to the Sabenta?”

  The Deep exploded in a shower of flowers.

  “Yes or no,” Tembi said, hands pressed against her head as the blossoms faded away. “Not a difficult question. Just answer yes or no.”

  A long pause, as if the Deep was thinking. Tembi felt her body make a quick turn sideways, and she was standing in—

  “Oh gods!” Tembi whispered.

  She was st
anding in a pit—

  —there were bodies all around her—

  —hundreds of them, maybe thousands—

  —they weren’t stacked or piled—

  —they had been dropped on top of each other like sacks of clothes stuffed with—

  “This is a grave,” she said quietly.

  She would not throw up. Her own body wasn’t here. She was all the way across the galaxy, safe in her own bed. This was a nightmare—a real nightmare—but she had asked to see it.

  She would not throw up!

  Tembi kicked off of the ground and floated upwards. The Deep’s dream-visions still behaved somewhat like dreams—she couldn’t fly, but she could jump and glide, and wake herself up if things got rough.

  She landed on the edge of the mass grave. It was an open field that was probably very beautiful, once, as there were plants still struggling to survive in the rain and the mud. But these streaks of green were dotted with torn earth.

  More graves. Each as large as the one she had just left. And they had been recovered with dirt.

  “Please tell me those weren’t full,” she whispered to herself.

  “Yessss…”

  The word was full of consonants. Tembi closed her eyes, counted to ten, and turned to see the body of a little girl haul herself out of the open grave.

  “Deep?” Tembi asked, with a silent prayer to ward off evil. “Are you doing this so you can talk to me?”

  The dead girl nodded. Her lips were gone; talking would be an appalling problem.

  “Deep?” Tembi paused and tried to decide on the right phrasing. “Do you remember what this person looked like when she was alive? Maybe it would be easier to talk through that version of her, instead of this one.”

  The zombie froze, as if she was a holo on pause. Then, she stepped forward, her body whole, her robes as fresh and crisp as if they had just come from a shop.

  “Thank you, Deep,” Tembi said. “It will be easier to talk to her like this.”