The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4)

by Guerric Haché

  Turou brought them to a long, stone building; both floors featured a long gallery open to the elements facing the courtyard, and as he led them up onto the second floor gallery she realized the series of doors here must be individual rooms. He led them to one in particular, leading into a small room with a simple bed, a few wall shelves packed with books, and a small technological device built into one side. The room looked like it should have been a complete rectangle, but one of the back corners was walled off, likely concealing a bathroom. It was perhaps the most uncluttered place Ada had seen in a long time. “Is this yours?”

  Turou grimaced, fidgeting with his very short hair. “Yes. I asked about getting you beds, but… They just want to pretend you’re not here. Any unusual activity might be noticed.”

  Elsa grumbled. “Ada being here is unusual.”

  “I know. Frankly, I don’t think they like this at all. You’ll have to rough it for now, and I might need to leave to allay any suspicions. The only good news is that nobody reported me missing - apparently they thought I spooked after the stream and biked into the woods on Freyja.” He yawned. “I’m not that skittish, am I? ”

  The lone window’s thin wooden lattice allowed something approaching daylight to filter through, but Elsa and Turou both had bags under their eyes. Ada realised they had been awake for almost an entire Earth day now, capping it off with hiking. She didn’t need rest right away, but it never hurt to catch some extra sleep. “You two want to rest?”

  Elsa glanced to the bed. “Three people won’t get any actual rest in that.”

  She was right, but somebody soon arrived and handed Turou a set of blankets, pointedly avoiding eye contact with anyone. Turou offered his bed to Elsa and, after trading polite refusals and insistences, lay down on the floor; they were both asleep in minutes. Ada lay down on a blanket folded over the stone, staring up at the bare ceiling, listening to the world outside. Wind rustled through leaves, occasional patters of rain came and went, voices swept past outside. After some quiet time, she realized that for the first time since arriving in the Union, she had space to breath.

  How long would that last?

  Focusing on the relative calm around her put her to sleep soon enough; but sleep within a day of the last sleep was never as long or as deep, and Chang’e’s slowly brightening sky just made it worse. The moon’s day was so stupidly long it was difficult to tell how long she had slept, but it was noticeably brighter, and the rain had ceased entirely.

  She stood up, watching her companions sleep for a moment. They didn’t react, so she stepped onto the open gallery. Opposite the room was a stone wall about as high as her midriff, and the tiled roof jutted a bit further out to offer more shade. She leaned on the wall and looked into the forested little garden below, a patch of carefully cultivated chaos between oddly jagged vertical rocks. Alone, unthreatened, and unsupervised, Ada’s instinct was to explore. Peering down from the gallery, she suddenly grinned and glanced to her sides. She was alone. She swung one leg over the stone wall, then another, hung down from the second-floor balcony, and dropped, testing the weaker gravity.

  She landed comfortably and smiled at the ease of it, but a hushed exclamation caught her attention. She turned to see who was there, still smiling, and found a black-haired, pale-skinned woman sitting on a bench, wearing flower-embroidered green robes and holding some kind of paintbrush in her hand. Her eyes met Ada’s and glinted with recognition and fear, and that made Ada’s mood falter. What did this woman know of her? Only what everyone had seen in the recordings. It wasn’t an unreasonable fear.

  She tried to keep smiling, and walked over to the stone bench to sit down next to her. “Hi.”

  The colonial offered a nervous smile. “Hello. You’re… Ada Liu? It’s you?”

  Hearing her own name without prompting from an alien was a bit of a surprise. It shouldn’t be, of course, but it still was. “Yeah. Who are you?” She peered at the brush. “What are you doing?”

  The human’s eyes widened, and she looked down at the brush and paper she was holding over a polished wooden tablet. “Oh, um, I’m Jae Sung. This is… calligraphy.”

  The symbols she was painting onto the paper were small, complex, yet strangely elegant. It reminded her of the other human language found on the Union’s coins, though these symbols curved and flowed in ways those did not. “I like it.”

  “Oh. Thank you?” Jae fidgeted, still glancing furtively at Ada, and rested the brush on the wooden tablet. “Um. Why did you jump from the gallery? There are stairs back there.”

  Ada leaned back against the wall. “I wanted to see what it was like to fall on Chang’e.”

  Jae frowned but nodded. “Why… how did you get here? From Freyja? ”

  Turou had said people here didn’t know; she should probably keep it that way. “I don’t want anybody to get in trouble.”

  Jae nodded again, looking into the garden for a moment before glancing nervously back at Ada. “You… That was real? At Starcast? It wasn’t faked?”

  “Definitely real.” Ada tried to smile. “But I don’t hurt anybody unless they hurt me. Or my friends.”

  Jae nodded. “Of course. Friends and family are important.”

  “Just friends. Family died a long time ago.”

  “Oh, um. I’m sorry.”

  Ada could tell she was making the stranger uncomfortable, and her first inclination would always be to leave. But what if it ended up being better, in the long run, to try befriending her? It might be that making a positive impression would save her trouble down the line.

  Then again, when had Ada Liu ever made a positive first impression? She pursed her lips and made to stand when Jae suddenly threw her a question. “What do you eat? On Earth.”

  Ada fumbled. “What? Food? I mean… I don’t know if you have the same words.”

  Jae bit her lip. “I’m sure some are.”

  She shrugged, unsure of the sudden interest in food. “Animals; chicken, boar, fish, mammoth if you go far enough. Drinks like tea and koaffa and lemon. Fruits - apples, pears, berries.” She smiled, suddenly remembering the familiar sensation of biting into a cherry, popping the pit out with her tongue, spitting it out and chewing the flesh apart. “I love cherries.”

  “Cherries? We have cherry trees here.” Jae grinned and pointed off to the side, glancing nervously. “I like them too. I have to go through them all to get rid of the pits first, so that I can eat a bunch of them at once.”

  Ada laughed. “Really? You don’t do them one at a time?”

  “That would be so annoying.” Jae smiled and looked like she was blushing, turning her face away even as she made a shoveling gesture. “I’m impatient. I… kind of just want to shove them in my mouth.”

  They laughed together, for a moment, and fell quiet again. She looked to Jae’s calligraphy tools, then leaned over. “What is it?”

  Jae looked at her a bit incredulously. “Oh, it’s writing. And art.”

  Ada frowned. Writing and art? It was certainly pretty - was pretty writing an art? “What does it say?”

  “Uh.” Jae pointed at the individual symbols, and spoke a short sound in an unfamiliar language for each symbol. “It’s just a saying about, um, water. And doing what you can without worrying about the things you can’t.”

  Like poetry, then, but written - and written in quite a captivating way. Ada nodded and kept peering at it, marveling at the sweeping lines that swooped and curved and intersected back onto themselves.

  Words could be art? Now there was an interesting idea. Another diamond in the rough of the Union, perhaps. She reached out her hand. “Can I try something?”

  Jae frowned but gave her the brush, pulling away her own artwork to reveal blank paper underneath. Ada awkwardly held the brush - she was no painter - and tried her best to trace out in ink the shape of a light sigil. It was a complex of interlaid circles and intersections and jutting arms, very unlike Jae’s calligraphy, but as she traced it she wondered if mayb
e code could be art too.

  Jae looked at it. “Is that how you write on Earth?”

  “No, it’s…” She inspected the wooden board, handed the paper to the calligraphist, and started tracing the light sigil with actual code - from her fingers, not her dark spindles, in the more paint-like code all coders learned in their youth. Jae gasped quietly, and again more loudly when the final connection made the sigil glow with a gentle light. “Magic, sort of.”

  Jae grabbed the board and looked closely at it, gingerly touching the code to no effect. “It… It’s beautiful.”

  “It is.” She smiled and leaned back for a moment, then patted Jae on the leg and stood up. “Where are those cherry trees?”

  The calligrapher paused for a moment, still distracted by the code, then pointed left. “That way - two gates down from here.”

  Ada thanked her and stood up, walking through the garden, looking at trees cozily resting between jagged rocks. They had strange leaves unlike any Ada had ever seen, fan-shaped and slightly lobed along the edges. Small bushy shrubs clustered around the rock formations as well, carefully trimmed and tended to. It was a peaceful place, and the courtyard layout reminded her of the Institute’s best places, the ones furthest from the classrooms.

  Writing, and code, could be something beautiful as well as useful. Of course, she had always thought there was a certain beauty to code, but it was a functional kind of beauty. Coding for the sake of its beauty was not something that had ever occurred to her, nor writing for the sake of calligraphy. It was… rather fascinating.

  How fascinating, too, it was to suddenly not be fighting for one’s life.

  She drifted curiously through the gardens for a little longer, but the promise of cherry trees soon drew her off where Jae had pointed. She passed through one gate, a circular stone arch protruding slightly from the stone wall, and quickly crossed the next courtyard to a second gate. Stepping through that, she didn’t see any cherry trees at all - plenty of trees of various sorts, but not what she was looking for. She frowned and turned around, checking to see if there was another gate she had missed somewhere in the courtyard, but found none; the courtyards were arranged in a straight line, with almost identical housing buildings on either side.

  After pacing further through a third and apparently final gate, she returned where she to ask Jae for some help finding the things, but the calligrapher seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps to replace the board Ada had turned into a magical lantern, ot perhaps to get away from the murderous space alien. Well, she couldn’t really blame the woman, could she?

  She found herself oddly alone and aimless, standing in this alien garden with no immediate threat but also no clear direction yet. She needed Turou to show her where to access Union archives, but her colonial companions needed the rest. Reaching out to Zhilik or anyone else offword would be trouble, and she didn’t even know how.

  So she sat down in the garden and used the quiet to mentally run through sigils again; an exercise she had been forced into at the Institute, but code meditation had its merits when she was choosing it herself. This time, as she saw the complexities of the wraith sigil etched out across the dark of her closed eyes, she noticed a few patches of patterns here and there that were particularly lovely in the way they flowed or their surprising symmetries.

  When she had finished running through some of the more complex sigils, she slipped back into Turou’s room. She was surprised to find him and Elsa awake and sitting next to each other on the bed, leaning against the wall. They were equally surprised to see her, as evidenced by how quickly they scuttled apart. She frowned and tilted her head. “Did you get enough sleep? We need to get busy.”

  Elsa eyed her. “Busy? We’re trying to hide.”

  “ You are, Elsa. I need access to the archives. Or a tachyon comm, or whatever they’re called.” She blinked. “Actually, first - Turou, somebody told me there was a cherry grove here, but I couldn’t find it.”

  He blinked in surprise. “Sure, it’s not far. I can take you down there. Just, er, let me get changed.”

  Turou stepped up and made for the bathroom, grabbing some new clothes along the way, and locked himself inside. She raised her eyebrows at Elsa, but this line of questioning had never proved fruitful in the past.

  Elsa sighed, shaking her head and tapping at the eyepiece that seemed to be her communications device of choice. Her eyes started flickering rapidly. “Nothing in the news about us, at least. Lots of rioting.” She frowned. “Apparently the Lower and Upper Houses are discussing emergency laws about -”

  Ada held up her hand. “Elsa, you people start talking about government and I stop listening. Are we safe?”

  Elsa’s eyes flicked to Ada, then back. “Lots of bickering, no concrete plans being announced, but the real plans would be made in secret anyway. We can only hope they’re too busy with riots and the constitutional crisis to spend much time hunting us.”

  She sat down on the bed. “Any word from Baoji?”

  Elsa shook her head, but Turou emerged freshly dressed and having apparently heard the question. “Not after I told him and Ngoc we arrived safe last night. He said he’d be in later this noon with a new ship.”

  Ada sat up straight. “Later this noon? Everything is weird here. Even the trees.” She pointed towards the garden. “Little fan-shaped leaves. Looked alien to me; I thought you said this place was supposed to be about Earth?”

  Turou grinned as he stumbled out of the bathroom. “Oh, ginkgos! They’re very rare. Almost went extinct on Earth thousands of years ago, but monks cultivated them and kept them alive, then someone brought them here to Chang’e. It’s the only place beyond Earth you can find them.” His smile faltered a little. “Assuming they are still on Earth.”

  He looked a little stricken by something, so Ada decided to play it safe. “Well, I haven’t visited the whole planet.”

  He hummed something uncertain, and then stood up. “You wanted to see the cherry grove?”

  She grinned and stood. “Yes please!”

  Turou led her onto the balcony, Elsa sticking close behind but still paying more attention to her eyepiece. He pointed to the garden as they turned left. “We try to preserve garden and landscape traditions here; most of these plants are native to Earth, not the colonies or Mir. We’re lucky these ones survive well enough in the long days and nights, but even so, you see those long flat panels up -”

  “Honestly, I just want to see the cherry trees.”

  He chuckled and led them down the stairs, through the circular arch in the stone wall. The sun poured down on them, warmer than Ada was used to, though cooler than the worst wasteland summers she barely remembered from her childhood.

  “Is it summer?”

  “It is - but it’s also noon.” He gestured around the courtyard. “Usually these are for gatherings or sports or dance, but noons get so warm most people stay inside.”

  Elsa looked up at the sun. “Tlaloc is hotter.”

  “You’re from Tlaloc?” Turou asked, and when she nodded he smiled at her. “Me too, originally. I moved here for school as a kid. Born in Yucata.”

  She grinned. “I’m from Lim. I guess I’m supposed to hate you.”

  Ada nudged her. “You seemed perfectly comfortable when I walked in on you earlier.”

  Elsa chuckled while Turou shook his head comically, but his expression normalized when they stepped through the second gate, the same one Ada had gone through earlier. Turou came to a stop, and she looked around, trying to figure out what he was waiting for. It was the same nondescript trees as last time.

  The colonials had stopped; they were looking at her. She frowned at them. “What? Why did we stop?”

  Turou frowned. “I thought you wanted to see the cherry grove.” She looked around, puzzled, and after a moment Turou tilted his head. “It’s summer, remember? They’re not blooming. Was it spring on Earth?”

  Ada blinked. These were not… no. She took a step closer to the trees.
>
  She knew the bark - little horizontal lines across a papery trunk. She knew the leaves, at least in shape. But the leaves were plain green rather than the purples or reds they should be, and there were no blossoms at all. They were utterly unremarkable, mundane, just like any other tree.

  She turned to look at Elsa and Turou. “What’s wrong with them?”

  Elsa eyed Turou, and he stepped closer to look at them. “I’m no horticulturalist, but they seem fine to me.”

  She gestured at their barren canopies. “Where are the blossoms? Why are the leaves… Green?”

  “They -” Turou seemed put off by her agitation. “They’re not in season.”

  She turned to face him. For some deeply irrational reason, her heart was climbing in her chest. This was wrong . “What do you mean, they’re not in season? They’re not fucking tomatoes. Cherry trees always bloom.”

  Turou glanced at Elsa. “Maybe we’re using the same word for different trees. These c herry trees only bloom for a few weeks in spring. The blossoms symbolise the fragile beauty of life. Like the blossoms, we are all beautiful for only a short time before passing on.”

  She hit him.

  She was barely aware of doing it until she had already lunged out and shoved against his shoulders. He flew to the ground with a thud and winced, landing against thick roots. She should have known that would happen. Now she was shouting. “No! No! That’s not what they’re for!”

  Elsa stepped in front of her, eyes wide with panic. “Ada, calm down! Wait! What’s -”

  She blurted it first in her own language, her mother’s words, but they just stared at her because of course they would. They didn’t understand. She tried again. “The gods are life, death, and transcendence. They found the cherry blossoms so beautiful they gave it all their gifts. It’s always being born, always giving birth, always dying. It’s - they’re always blooming. Always. Because the gods - the ancients - they gave them eternal grace!”

  They were staring at her, wide eyed, Turou gingerly pulling himself back up. They didn’t get it. Here she was shouting her own stupid religion and her own stupid gods at them and of course they didn’t get it.