Stoneskin

by K. B. Spangler

  “Yes,” the little girl said, and looked somewhat pleased that she was able to form the word. “Yes,” she said again. “Yes.”

  Tembi started walking towards the edge of the field, where a series of ugly brown-and-gray buildings stuck out against the bare earth. These were set behind a metal fence that towered above Tembi and the dead girl. “I want to help,” she said, and tried to ignore the sounds of clumsy footsteps as they crunched across the ground behind her. “But I don’t know what you want me to do. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  Shipping and schedules, Tembi reminded herself. It understands transportation, because to the Deep, the details required to move a starship across a whole scraping galaxy are simple—

  “Is this the only—” What did you call a place like this? She didn’t think there could be a name for something this evil, but Williamson had showed her a history book once, about another war, and the name was right there in her memory. “—concentration camp?”

  “No.”

  She took a deep breath. “How many more?”

  “Five hundred, sixty, and two. Across eight planets in this system.”

  “Oh, gods,” Tembi whispered to herself.

  “No,” the Deep replied. “No gods here. Only humans.”

  She set the metaphysics of that statement aside: if she unpacked any part of it, she knew she’d start screaming. “Deep? Do you want this to stop?”

  “Yes.”

  Good. She didn’t know what she’d have done if the Deep had said no, or had been indifferent.

  “Do you want me to stop it?”

  No response. Tembi turned to look at the little girl. The girl was nodding her head, her arms outstretched and moving up and down at the shoulders. It looked like a shrug, if the person had only seen shrugs and was doing its best to imitate them, but had no body to understand how the pieces went together.

  “You do want me to stop it, but you don’t think I can?”

  The vibrancy went out of the little girl again as the Deep put the clauses together. Finally, the girl smiled. “Yes!”

  That made sense. She was a sixteen-year-old Witch. Not even a fully trained Witch, either. Stopping something like this… “Okay,” she said, turning to look at the heavy metal fence with the gray houses encaged within it. “Take me home.”

  Tembi woke in her own bed. Taabu was stretched out across her feet, and the windows were starting to shift from opaque to transparent as morning dawned outside. Taabu woke almost as soon as she did: the cat stared at her, and then fell over itself to hide beneath the bed.

  She tried several of Matindi’s meditation techniques to calm herself down.

  Nothing.

  “Deep?” she asked.

  The book by Rowland that she kept beside her bed floated into the air, and then resettled itself on her nightstand.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to cry now. It’s because I’m feeling sad about the war.” She paused to make sure the Deep had time to understand her, and then added, “You did nothing wrong. If you feel sad too, you can stay with me while I cry.”

  Nothing for a few moments. Then, the bedsheets around her crumpled as if pressed beneath a heavy weight, and the two of them stayed like that until the sun came up.

  _________________________________

  they come

  mother father

  far

  far

  they come

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 19 January 3997 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Seventeen

  The next few months were…odd. Tembi managed to convince Bayle to come to Sagittarius in the Deep’s dreamscape, and they both walked through the graves and the camps in shared horror.

  “This can’t be allowed to happen,” Bayle said. It was the only thing that she had said since she let out one brief scream at the start of the dream. “This is evil. There’s no other word for it.”

  “The Deep wants it to stop,” Tembi said. “I’ll talk to Matindi and Matthew. Again.” Matindi was willing to talk about what was happening in Sagittarius; Matthew wasn’t. But if she cornered him while he was making breakfast for them on a breakday morning, he was usually willing to listen.

  “I’ll talk to my family,” Bayle said. “Maybe there’s something they can do.”

  That was one of the odd things: Bayle’s family had more money than most of the people on Hub put together, but the ability to stop a war? That, Tembi wasn’t sure about, and Bayle refused to elaborate.

  Another one of the odd things was how often Sagittarius and the Sabenta came up in the channels, or in conversation, or in throwaway comments between strangers. Now that Tembi was aware of the war, it was everywhere! It was as if a veil had been lifted, and she could see and hear clearly for the first time. Worse, she knew the topic had always been there, but it just hadn’t registered to her as…

  …as what?

  As something that mattered, she supposed.

  (The idea that the Sabenta could be dying by the millions but she had been so blissfully ignorant that those deaths didn’t even blip on her mental radar? That hurt. And then, when she realized she was feeling pity for herself instead of for the Sabenta? That hurt! Tembi decided to stop beating herself up about the past and try to put things right in the present, because if she didn’t she’d never feel good about anything ever again.)

  She felt impossibly frustrated, and found herself picking fights with Matindi for no good reason. This didn’t help: Matindi would usually ignore her and talk to the Deep.

  “It’s adolescence,” Matindi would say. “Her body’s chemistry is all over the place. I could reason with her until my face goes from green to bright red, and it wouldn’t make a difference. Just let her get it out of her system.”

  This didn’t help.

  After a long day at class, followed by a fight with Matindi that was truly spectacular in terms of how loud she got and how thoroughly Matindi managed to ignore her, Tembi stormed out of the house and headed to Hub.

  She might have been hoping to bump into Kalais again.

  (Emphasis on the “might.”)

  He had called once, a few weeks ago. Just to talk.

  (And then he had come over, and they hadn’t “just talked,” oh no, they had done very little talking and quite a lot of things that didn’t require any talking at all, and now Tembi was extremely mad at him and wanted to see him, all at the same time. But he wasn’t returning her calls.)

  She stepped off of the Lancaster hopper and into a swirling mass of angry protesters.

  This was yet another odd thing, and Tembi realized she probably should have listened to what the hopper driver had been trying to tell her on the trip into the city.

  The protesters wanted to shout at her—she got the impression they wanted to shout at any Witch they came across—but she was also sixteen and they weren’t quite sure how to shout at an underage Witch. She was able to run down a side street and use the Deep to scramble up the nearest wall, and then watch the protesters from the rooftop. There were only about a dozen of them, all dressed in mourning black and holding signs in different languages. More protesters seemed to be streaming out of the hopper station, clustered together in groups and headed for a different destination.

  Tembi licked the sleeve of her robe and scrubbed the golden birds from her face, and then jumped across the rooftops until she found another cluster of protesters. She dropped to the ground and began to follow them.

  The main square of Hub was several kilometers from Lancaster. It was a center of commerce, with convention halls and tasteful hotels and restaurants scattered all around. Tembi had trained her friends how to pick pockets there, as almost everyone they saw was a visitor to Hub and had neither time nor attention for three young Witches. Today, there were very few people in suits but there were thousands of people in dull mourning black, surrounded on all sides by the law.

  She walked among the p
rotesters, unnoticed despite her robes being dark gray instead of black. They were chanting; she didn’t recognize the language. The lawmen and women watched it all with careful eyes.

  The next chant was in Basic:

  Stand up—fight back!

  Stand up—fight back!

  Stand up—fight back!

  There didn’t seem to be more to the chant than those four words, but a lot could be done with them: a woman, Earth-normal except for deep blue patterns covering every centimeter of her bare arms, took over the chant by shouting: Stand up!

  The others rallied: Fight back!

  Call and response, call and response.

  Flat and loud, rather like an extremely boring song.

  Enough of this, Tembi thought, and tapped on the shoulder of one of the nearby protesters.

  The woman turned and said, in Basic: “Can I help you?”

  She was friendly and her eyes were kind, but Tembi had problems hearing her over the chanting. “Is this for the Sabenta?” Tembi asked.

  “Sabenta? No,” the woman shook her head. “This is for trade route policy. There’s a Sabenta rally later tonight.”

  “Thank you,” Tembi said to her, and kept walking.

  Trade route policy. Well, then. She thought she had studied enough trade routes during Leps’ classes to know something about policy, but apparently she hadn’t learned enough to get this…passionate about it. She moved off to the side and ducked into a small alcove between two buildings that didn’t smell too much of overripe garbage, and pretended to adjust her soundkit as she watched the protesters.

  A quick rush of air blew past her as another Witch jumped into the alcove.

  Tembi turned, expecting Matindi or Bayle, or maybe even Steven if he had found someone to jump him. Instead, a tall Adhamantian woman stood there in robes of dull mourning black. The woman pressed a finger to her lips, and Tembi managed to recognize Domino—the other Witch had stripped the rainbow colors from her hair and face, and had pulled her wild waterfall of long hair into a tight coil at the base of her head.

  “I was across the square,” Domino said, her voice more melodic than it had been at the Solstice party, “and I asked the Deep if anyone else was nearby. Do you mind if I join you?”

  Tembi shook her head—No, of course she didn’t mind if Lancaster’s representative to Earth joined her!—and the two of them left the relative calm of the alcove. They didn’t talk. They walked, and watched. Domino’s eyes darted across the crowd, missing nothing.

  “Do you know why I’m here?” Domino asked, as they made their second circuit of the protest.

  There didn’t seem to be a clever answer to that question, so Tembi decided on honesty. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

  The older Witch smiled. “You grew up in Marumaru, yes? Shipping containers for homes? A hydrosonic shower to get clean, but no water for drinking or cooking unless you had a rain cache, or carried it from the community pumps?”

  Tembi didn’t reply.

  “I’ve never been to Marumaru,” Domino continued. “I was born on the other side of Adhama. But I know what your home was like; I imagine it was very much like mine.

  “Every year, there’s an economic conference,” she said. “It’s done to help galactic leaders establish trade relationships and plan policy. You’ll visit this same conference in your third year of training, but the location rotates so it won’t be held in Hub.”

  “Why are the protesters here?” Tembi wasn’t sure that trade relationships and planning policy merited the presence of several thousand angry people wearing mourning black.

  “Because you grew up in Marumaru,” Domino replied. “Because there is a Marumaru, and places that are much worse than Marumaru. The protestors want all children to have access to water, food, education… They want life to be fair.”

  Tembi burst out laughing. “Life isn’t fair!”

  “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make it so,” Domino said. “Also, some of these protestors want Lancaster to leave their planet alone, so they’re protesting Witches and the Deep. And others want Lancaster to change their policies and pay attention to causes that are dear to their hearts.”

  “That’s why you’re here,” Tembi guessed. “You’re trying to find out what all of these different groups want.”

  “Very good,” Domino replied. “You can only learn so much in a conference room, or through briefings. You learn so much more talking to people.” The Witch smiled down at Tembi. “I wasn’t always on the Council. My old job was more…direct. I miss it, sometimes.”

  “What did you used to do?”

  “This and that,” she replied, waving a hand as if the past was of no real consequence.

  Tembi might have believed her, if Domino’s ears hadn’t perked up at the memories.

  “Much of it involved talking to people on Lancaster’s behalf,” Domino said. “I suppose my job hasn’t changed too much, just the setting in which I’ve found myself.

  “I must say,” the older Witch added, “I was impressed at how you handled that young man at the Solstice party.”

  “He’s—he was a friend,” Tembi said. “I think he’s gone back to Sagittarius. To fight in the war.”

  “Ah,” Domino said.

  Tembi couldn’t read anything in that little word. The silence grew awkward; it was a relief when Domino asked her what she thought about the war.

  “I don’t understand why we aren’t doing anything about the Sabenta,” Tembi said. “There’re five worlds involved, and millions of people being killed, and Lancaster’s not…not doing anything.”

  “There have always been wars,” Domino said. “It’s easy to ignore one more war. It’s easy to ignore images you can’t see with your own eyes, or stories you don’t trust to be true. By the time we learned this war was—Well, no war can be better or worse than another, and there is always some element of genocide in war. We didn’t understand that this was a system-wide extermination of the Sabenta throughout Sagittarius until it was too late to intervene.”

  “You’re lying.” The words were out of her mouth before Tembi could slam her own face shut.

  Domino stopped. “Oh?”

  Nothing to do but own the damage of her stupid mouth. “I can read your ears,” she said, meeting Domino’s eyes as best she could. “They… When you said you learned after it was too late to do something about it? They drooped.”

  The Witch stared at her, unmoving, and for no reason she could put a finger on, Tembi was suddenly very, very certain that Domino had intended to let her ears—

  Wind, soft and sudden, blew past Tembi. She spun and found Matindi, dressed in woody green robes from head to toe, different (and more much formal) than the t-shirt and sweatpants she had been wearing when Tembi had stormed out of their house several hours earlier.

  Matindi was several hands shorter than Domino, but she carried herself like a queen as she greeted the other Witch. “It is good to see you, sister,” she said, moving her head the slightest bit downward.

  “As to you, sister,” Domino replied. Her chin and ears stayed level. “I have been enjoying young Tembi Stoneskin’s company this evening. She is quite observant.”

  “Yes.” It was a flat word, its only feature bland agreement.

  “I should be leaving. Thank you for sharing this time with me,” Domino said to Tembi. “I hope we get to do it again, very soon.”

  A flash of dark robes, and Domino was gone.

  “Stoneskin?” Matindi asked, as she started walking. “Not that I’m judging—most Witches change their names at least once—but I thought you wanted to manage your stress.”

  Tembi shrugged. Between her dreamtime trips to Sagittarius and her breakup with Kalais, her skin was as hard as it had ever been. Williamson’s nickname fit her like a stone glove.

  “Okay,” Matindi said, stopping dead in the center of the street. She spun and looked at Tembi. Tembi was now of a height with the green Witch, but
it was yet another odd thing to realize she would soon be taller than her own guardian. “I need you to focus, Tembi. Pick a restaurant. Any restaurant.”

  Fine. Tembi picked one she hadn’t tried before, a little place in the suburbs of Hub that Steven had eaten at on a date and raved about to her and Bayle. Astronomically expensive pieces of raw fish served over clumpy rice? Well, Tembi wouldn’t eat something like that on her own credit, but if Matindi wanted to talk so badly…

  The meal was served at low tables without chairs. Matindi flipped her robes tight across her legs and sat in a tight kneel, then ordered in an unfamiliar language. Tembi pointed at pictures on the menu, and pretended she knew what they meant.

  Tea came, served in delicate porcelain mugs. Matindi savored the smell, and took a careful sip. “Good choice,” she said. “I haven’t had sushi in decades. I hope it’s becoming popular again.”

  A normal conversation, Tembi realized. A peace offering, of sorts.

  “Thanks.”

  “Tembi, can we have an honest discussion? None of my wise old lady nonsense, none of your angsty teenage rage?”

  Angsty teenage rage? The term alone made Tembi want to start shouting again, but—

  She nodded.

  “Thank you,” Matindi said. “You know I’ve always tried to let you find your own path. Being called to service by the Deep? That comes with responsibilities, and those responsibilities have limited your options. You were a Witch from the moment the Deep chose you. Not a dentist. Not a farmer. Nothing but a Witch.

  “That doesn’t mean you’re going to be a pilot, of course.” Matindi set down the porcelain cup and tented her fingers. “By now, you’ve realized that Witches have jobs that go beyond moving items across the galaxy. We’re responsible for an entire industry, which means we play critical roles in keeping civilization itself moving.

  “Not all parts of civilization are good.” Matindi was staring at her, green eyes boring straight into Tembi’s own. “At best, we follow paths which minimize the damage we do to others. But at our worst?”