Gratuitous Epilogue : Touchstone Extras

by Andrea Höst

  My own month has been fairly busy. Now that I'm properly recovered from my injuries, I have a regular work schedule. Mostly visualising whole forms of decrepit and ruined books recovered from Kalasa, and sometimes the insides of rooms. They're being very careful about not overtaxing me, and every second day is still an exercise day. I'll probably 'retire' for a couple of years after Kaoren and I get married, but even though I'm theoretically rich enough never to work again, I'm happy enough to contribute in these non-dramatic ways. Still rather wary of them plugging me into Ddura-making machines, but they're keeping quiet about those possibilities at the moment.

  My fitness is probably the highest it's ever been, and I'm even progressing a little in combat training. I do a lot of canoeing – Kaoren's birthday present to me was canoes for the whole family (we had to build a boat house and a dock – and work out how to paddle). Even better, he arranged limited permission for me to go off on my own. I have to tell people where I'm going, and not go out of the immediate area of the islands – and my guards of the moment get to stay on alert and track me via the interface, ready to fly off and rescue me – but it's still a taste of independence which I really appreciate. Mostly I go with people anyway. Kaoren and I like getting up just before dawn and going out just the two of us, and I think the group trips are one of the things that all the kids really look forward to, even Ys and Lira. Each weekend we paddle to a different island to explore. I've even paddled the kids to school a few times, though mostly we use one of the floating sleds to take them because it's a fairly long trip.

  I visited Siriath frequently while Lohn and Mara's and Jeh, Ketzaren and Grif's houses were being constructed. They'd designed an entire little neighbourhood – seven broadly expansive multi-family houses – in anticipation of contact with Tare being re-established, since they knew that not only their parents but most of their siblings were going to apply to settle. Housing is so cheap and easy with whitestone, and they built quite close to each other so that they can share the power, water and recycling installations which are the costly part. Each house has land about the size of four suburban blocks (I think that would make an acre of yard for each house) and in the centre of them all, leading down to the lake's edge and a dock is a big semi-cleared space which will be a grassy parkland once it's recovered from being 'weeded' of trees. Lohn and Mara plan to get married in their park, and Maze and Rye had a great deal of fun consulting on the design. A few more Setari house 'clusters' have been seeded about Siriath, and also on the furthest-out island, Nula, but none have been finished yet.

  Lohn got amazingly stressed about adopting. He wasn't the only one keyed up, but Lohn especially just hated that there would be all these kids that they didn't choose. And that those kids would know it, and feel rejected. During their dual housewarming Mara, Jeh and Ketzaren asked me whether I felt like I was Sen, Ys, Rye and Lira's mother. Which is yes and no, really. I don't think any of them – even Sen – think of me as their mother. Sen might one day. To Ys, Rye and Lira, I think we might be too close to their ages for them to consider us Mum and Dad, even after we formally adopt them. But Guardians, elder siblings, whatever. We're family now, and I love them all.

  Mara, Ketzaren and Jeh had a very interesting discussion – more with each other than with me – about the children they liked most among those they'd been working with at the talent school. And once again I was just so utterly glad I didn't have to do any picking. They were talking about whether it was better to adopt children who you simply liked the most, or if it was kinder to take those who needed you more. One of the medics working with the Setari and the talent school had already adopted, and she'd chosen a very traumatised and isolated girl around Sen's age who had lost everyone she knew, and who wasn't coping at all well with the 'boarding school' living arrangements. She wasn't a very appealing kid, inclined to snivel, but it really helped her to 'belong' to someone. And yet, as Jeh pointed out, holding stoic resilience against children who were coping better didn't seem fair.

  Moving to their new houses had been the decision point they'd set, and three days after the housewarming party five children came home for the first time.

  Which kids were chosen mattered a lot to me – Mara and Lohn are so important to me that I stress about things coming between us. I made sure not to offer opinions on any of the residents of the talent school, though Lira hasn't been shy about sharing her thoughts on them with me, so I've more of an idea of the major personalities. I would have found it awkward if any of those chosen were ones who didn't seem able to see Ys and Rye as anything but servants. I didn't even talk about this to Kaoren, but he could tell as usual when I'm stressing, effortlessly worked out why, and pointed out that Lohn and Mara care about Ys and Rye too, and were likely to have taken them into account.

  Lohn didn't succeed in talking Mara into taking four, so they stuck with their original plan of two. Both of them boys. Feinaren's eleven, and a real imp – spends all his time swarming up trees. Sharalentelasker (Shar) is thirteen and it's a bit hard to tell what he's like since he likes to watch more than talk, at least when I'm about. A strong Sight talent, with everything except Combat and Gate Sight, and inclined to behave with the typical slight distance that a Place Sight talent cultivates. Sen – who is my early-warning system for suspect people – doesn't object to him, so I know he can't be too bad, but I had to ask Mara what had drawn her to him. Fein I can understand – he and Lohn are a lot alike – but Shar seems very self-contained and able to handle himself and not someone I would have expected them to feel parental about.

  "We wanted to get him away from Nuran politics," Mara told me, looking wry. "He's one of two who could arguably be Nuri's heir if they were going by their rules of succession." She laughed at my expression. "Not that that's any reason for me to want to play parent. He's far from incapable, and has been involved in quashing a few disputes within the school. If he was Kalrani he'd be on the captain track. Which is a good thing, but we also noticed that he was terribly tired every morning. That's the impact of the politics – he has a lively night life thanks to being drawn into the Nuran power struggles. They bring disputes to him to settle, just as they do with Inisar."

  "And you got all protective." I understood it then. "A bit like me and Ys – Ys is so much better at looking after Sen than I am, and I keep having to find ways to ensure she no longer automatically puts Sen above herself. Because I want Ys to have time to be Ys."

  Mara nodded. "It's a very odd feeling. We had been planning on taking two younger children, because someone as old as Shar will never truly regard us as parents. And he doesn't need us. But I wanted him to have a quiet night."

  Ketzaren, Jeh and Grif ended up doing something similar. One of the children they chose, Zaranar, is sixteen. She has a five year-old brother, Dealanar, who is very traumatized and withdrawn – they lost their parents and several other siblings, including Deal's twin – and Ketzaren says they wanted to both give Deal the care he needed, and also make sure Zar had a chance to look to her own future as well as Deal's. Zar's really interesting – she's not some angelic, self-sacrificing type, but full of curiosity and with an excellent sardonic sense of humour which matches Ketzaren's. I'd like to get to know her better, but Deal pretty much stays attached to her leg, and doesn't like her talking to anyone else – getting him to separate into age groups at the school has been pretty difficult, and over the months he's actually been getting more clingy, not less. Ketzaren says it will be a slow process teaching Deal to feel safe with anyone else, but she seems determined to succeed.

  Their third adoptee is Ennanal, a ten year-old girl. Enna likes to dance about – she reminds me of Sen when Sen's happy – and she also shares Sen's tendency for terrible nightmares, though these are because she lost her family, and because she found the journey through deep-space particularly terrifying, not because of any Sights.

  After they'd had a few days to settle in, we invited them and the rest of First and Second over for a barbeque, having
had a discussion with our four beforehand to make sure they weren't too uncomfortable with the idea of these children coming onto 'their territory'. They knew them all already, of course, since they go to the same school, though Zar and Shar are in the elder 'grade' and they don't have much to do with them. Fortunately Fein is someone Rye already seemed to think was okay, and he was quite keen to show off his garden and parts of the island to him. Lira and Ys made it clear that so long as no-one was allowed to go into their rooms, they didn't care who we chose to have over, but they ended up politely taking Enna around and keeping her entertained. They're not going to leap into friendship with her, but they didn't freeze her out, and I made sure they knew I was pleased with them for being nice.

  Sen was having one of her bad days, and ended up in my lap most of the time – which at least made her match Deal and gave me a chance to chat with Zar. Shar started out more like a visiting dignitary than a child – all formal and polite and detached – but then we went down to the docks so they could try out the canoes and he enjoyed that, and was positively approving of the idea of canoes for Siriath after everyone's passed basic swimming. It was fun noticing how pleased Mara was by that. We're going to get a larger boat/flyer so we can 'carpool' the kids to school. Canoes and flying and the simple six-person sleds are all dandy in sunny Summer weather, but won't be much fun in the middle of Winter.

  Except for Zar, who has a medium strength level, all the kids are extremely strong talents, which of course is why they were in the talent school in the first place. They're not on par with the Setari (Nuran or Taren/Kolaren) because they haven't been pushed in the same way, and don't have the expanded interface or ability to focus their connection to the Ena. There's been endless discussions recently about teaching new Setari the methods the Nurans use to become aware of the Ena link versus cheating using me. More and more of the Taren and Kolaren Setari are becoming able to enhance themselves, but many of them still can't.

  Inisar described how the Nuran Setari gain their strength, which sounds to me much like a cross between Native American Spirit journeys and sensory deprivation. When they were vetting apprentice Setari, the Nurans started them off at around five years old, gave them mental exercises about thinking about the world around them for nearly eight months, and then put them through five more months of 'ordeals' where they try and focus their own connection, and if they don't succeed by then they're finished as an apprentice and go back to their former lives. It's a terribly young age to be doing things like that. The Nurans believed that if you didn't learn very young you would be incapable of learning, and they're not sure if my enhancement means they're wrong, or if learning when older is only possible when a touchstone is involved.

  There won't be any more Setari adoptions for a while. Plenty of the Setari are in relationships (mostly with other Setari) but not ready for kids. Nils and Zee are very much in a relationship now, but they've no immediate plans to move out of barracks, and keep going off together on their weekends. They're both really really private people and they want time alone together.

  Sometimes I envy them all that time alone, but only sometimes.

  Chapter 5

  April

  April 10

  Islands

  Contact with Tare and Kolar was made only two days after the last time I wrote. It took them another few days to scan the last short section and calculate an end to end run of both routes, but after that the floodgates opened.

  It takes between three and five hours to get through now, instead of just one, and there are long patches where nothing's aligned enough to get through, but we're actually a lot less cut off than everyone feared we'd be. They're now trying to work their way to the Pillar where Second Squad was stranded to see what condition it's in. And also to Channa, since there's been people stuck at the mining installation there.

  Tare and Kolar (and the Channan staff) didn't have any convenient touchstones to let them check the condition of other planets, and so for four months could only guess what had happened. Kolar had had no warning whatsoever, and from Tare's point of view I'd vanished and a bunch of people had gone haring off into deep-space to look for me and then all of the Ena had melted down and they could only hope it wasn't the beginning of the end. They didn't know if I was alive, whether the colony had survived, or whether all of Muina had been destroyed. At least the decrease in Ionoth numbers and the slacking of the tears into real-space gave them hope. Of course, once Muina's collected four months of news had been transmitted, there was a media frenzy over the whole drama of my kidnapping by the Cruzatch, and the risky destruction of the malachite marbles, and then the short eternity of picking collapsed building off the top of me and hoping they got to me before I died.

  And Lira.

  I've been trying to imagine what it would be like to be in Lira's position at her age. Used as a tool to destroy her world, trapped in a half-life, doing what she could to sabotage her captors, and then after connecting with me finding that everyone she knew was dead and she was part ways responsible, and that she might possibly not really be alive. And now a new life, a soap-bubble existence which nobody can definitively say is real.

  There have been articles talking about how dangerous Lira and I are – the things we could be used for – but mostly it's open adulation. The 'MBC', wanting to keep on KOTIS' good side, are careful never to be too full-on, but even they maintain a 'Caszandra-Watch' page which is constantly updated with the latest images and stories about me and my family. And a lot of that is now about Lira, who is after all a gorgeous Lantaren who helped save them all. There's now a couple of billion people fascinated by the idea of her.

  Naturally some pretty unvarnished opinions of her have leaked out of the talent school, but these are very inconsistent. Some people claim she's traumatised and describe her as clinging to Ys for support (Ys is still getting positive press for being so brave during my dragon day). Others say Lira's cold and arrogant – the classic evil Lantaren. But mostly she's seen as a true Lantaren princess and it's almost expected and accepted that she be a bit imperious and pampered. I make sure to check the news and keep alert to what stories are going around about them. Lira finds anything about her, positive or negative, to be annoying, but doesn't seem too caught up by it at the moment – the people immediately around her are more interesting. Rye gets embarrassed and Ys occasionally infuriated. Sen's still a little too young to comprehend more than the fact that everyone knows who she is and they wave at her when we go into town. And then new pictures of us show up on the interface. Living on an island was a damn good idea.

  For me the first news of reconnection to Tare came along with a handful of emails from Zan. They were typical of Zan's calm formality, with just a thread of uncertainty beneath. I think in a way she must have been trying to help me by writing them, creating an expectation for me to be alive to read them. Or maybe she wanted some kind of sounding board, the same way I used to use my diaries. She needed someone to talk to.

  Twelfth had been off-shift, asleep, when I fell down the Cruzatch-hole, and when KOTIS went to full alert upon Kaoren's return they'd been stuck biting their nails for rather too long, then sent after Thirteenth and Fourteenth, who had been assigned to Maze Rotation. They were deep within the tangle of whitestone walls, working in two different locations to lower the chance of attracting roamers, and when Twelfth reached the maze space, Zan immediately ordered everyone back to Tare.

  Twelfth had waited just within the maze space entrance, and when Thirteenth arrived had sent them back ahead. And then the first wave of distortion had hit. They'd felt it in the Ena of both Tare and Kolar, not to such a paralysing level as Muina, but enough to make clear that something was wrong and only getting worse.

  Zan's email covers all this in a sentence, but I've since watched the mission log, and listened to the conversation between her and Kin Lara, the sleepy captain of Fourteenth who I mainly remember as being a friend of Els'.

  "Go ahead, Namara," he said, as F
ourteenth raced around the twists and bends of the maze. [Zee tells me that it's a very bad idea trying to fly over the top of the walls there.]

  "We'll wait," Zan replied. "I can move us fastest."

  "Not the time to ignore protocols," Lara said, still sounding sleepy and unperturbed, almost amused, even though his squad were running for their lives. "You're usually more sensible, Zan."

  The next wave of distortion hit them then, underlining his point. Lenton's log shows me Zan's face, white, expressionless. Then she says: "Hurry," and sends her squad through the small house space which leads to the maze space, and then into near-space, then she picks them up and flies all-out, as fast as the strongest Telekinetic in the Setari can manage, back to the gate-lock.

  Fourteenth made it to near-space before the storm which followed the destruction of the malachite marbles hit. If they'd still been in the maze space they would have been completely lost, since it's now shifted out of alignment with Tare's near-space (this bothers me a lot because no-one's seen Ghost since). Twelfth, waiting in real-space at the gate-lock, couldn't do anything when the gate – usually invisible – suddenly washed bright white and roared power at them.

  The effect on Fourteenth was a combination of a severe aether overdose combined with the overenhancement which occurs when they touch me while I'm expanded. The Levitation and Telekinesis talents, who were flying as fast as possible, lost control and they tumbled to near-space's ground. Blinded by white, bruised and with a couple of broken bones, they used the interface to track each other and find the gate, dragging each other toward it.