by Audrey Faye
I strained to follow where she was headed. “I missed that while I was gone, very much.”
“I know.” She bent down slowly, never taking her hand off my arm, and picked up a handful of dirt. “You should spend some time with a trowel in your hand in these next days.”
She turned to face me now, and slowly funneled the dirt into my cupped hands. “But you, Tyra Armenia Lightbody, are a plant that is capable of growing in the dirt where very hard decisions have to be made.”
I gulped. “Because I’m a Fixer.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Because it is who you were born to be in this universe. KarmaCorp merely gives you a means to find your way to the hard soil where you will sometimes be needed.”
I felt the tears coming. “I never thought I’d leave this one.”
“I know.” She smiled at me, deep pride in her eyes—and sadness. “Don’t judge the other plants in your family if they look at you from the very good soil they live in and don’t understand.”
I could feel the horrible aloneness trying to sneak back up on me. “I don’t want this.”
“I know that as well.” She closed my hands around the dirt. “But you know what it is to be planted in good soil, and for that, you are considerably lucky.”
Her tone had gotten distinctly acerbic. I managed a grin, even as a tear rolled down my nose. “Are you trying to tell me to suck it up?”
“Something like that.” She stepped back from me, her eyes stern. “You are a Lightbody, Tyra—don’t ever forget it, even when it causes you pain.”
I managed not to wince. Because she was right—and because no one on Stardust Prime had an intelligence network equal to Mundi’s.
If she thought I needed a pep talk for where I was headed right after this, I should probably just go jump in the compost chute now.
-o0o-
I took my spot on the well-worn area in front of Yesenia’s desk, clasped my hands behind my back, and reminded myself that I had Mundi’s genes in my veins and she’d be seriously pissed off at me if they quivered.
The boss lady sat in her chair, watching me silently.
I didn’t bother trying to out-wait her. That just wasn’t possible—people far tougher than me had tried. And I had one small administrative matter to take care of before we got down to the business of deciding just how much trouble I was in. “I would like to recommend the Indigo for mission transport services.”
Yesenia raised an eyebrow. “They’re a small and entirely un-noteworthy cargo vessel.”
Perhaps on the spec sheet. “They’re friendly and accommodating, and any Fixer showing up with a basket of real food will be made very welcome.”
A second eyebrow joined the first. “That is unusual for spacers.”
“They’re an unusual ship—half the crew is dirt born.”
A moment of considering pause, and then Yesenia made a notation on her tablet. “Noted.”
The Indigo would likely spend half their lives ferrying Fixers now—it wasn’t all that easy to find crews that truly welcomed the disruption that often came with our transport. I’d checked with Captain Kriggs before volunteering her.
I’d also invited her and her crew for Sunday dinner, and planted a whisper in my father’s ear about possible supplies trade. We produced some lightweight, easy-to-store teas and spices that would likely be very well received on the Indigo’s normal trade routes. And my family would enjoy the heck out of spacers who drooled over real tomatoes.
Trying my very best to repair the web that sustained me.
And telling the Indigo crew about the weekly Lightbody feast had provided at least some distraction from worrying about this moment. I gulped and stayed quiet. I’d broken the silence—it was the boss lady’s turn now.
Her eyes lifted to mine, steely and grim. “Perhaps we can use them to ferry the flotilla of scientists and trainers you apparently felt entitled to commit to a distant biome for any number of years.”
No part of that sounded good. “I realize that I stepped far outside the boundaries of what I was tasked to do.”
“You exceeded your authority as a Fixer in more ways than I can count, and committed a dozen people at a time when we don’t have them to spare.” The words were clipped, furious swords. “Do you think mine is the chair you sit in, Journeywoman?”
I could feel all the blood in my body plummet to my feet.
“I thought not.” She looked ready to spit nails. “However, I also find myself with the same problem you had—I can’t think how else you might have solved this and produced a better result.”
My brain had worked better when Jerome’s willow had tried to suck all my water out.
“I sent you in under-resourced and I was well aware of that. You should have had a team with you, but I didn’t have one to send. I had hoped that the situation would stay manageable.” She looked down at her desk and almost muttered her next words. “I also didn’t anticipate the communications blockade, and that was an inexcusable oversight on my part.”
Two things finally seeped into my numb, blood-deprived head. Yesenia Mayes, director of all the universe that mattered, was pulling some of the blame for my actions on her own head.
And she had expected me to fail. “You didn’t think I could do this.”
“No. I didn’t.” She took another look down at her tablet, and the ghost of a smile moved across her face.
“Invoking clause 47.3.ii.4a was well done, Grower.”
I blinked and tried to figure out what in the galaxy she was talking about.
The ghost of a smile returned. “I wish more of our Fixers would learn the power of a good legal maneuver.”
Memory finally twigged—the contracts clause I had invoked to buy some time when the Basturs had first imposed their death sentence on the willow. An event deeply overshadowed by the ones that had followed. “It didn’t really work.”
“Nonetheless, it was well done.” She tapped her tablet briskly. “Perhaps we have found a future instructor of our constitutional clauses class.”
I stared at her in horror, trying not to whimper.
“Or perhaps not,” she said dryly, looking almost amused.
I managed to find some words. “I would prefer alternate disciplinary action.” The cells of my throat felt like they’d wandered lost into the Arabi Desert. “Please.”
Yesenia had always known the value of strategically placed silence. She used it to full effect now.
I swallowed. Audibly.
She tapped her tablet. “There will be no disciplinary action. You were sent on a very difficult assignment and resolved it admirably. You presented Dr. Salmera with a choice—a hard one, but a choice nonetheless.”
She looked at me, and for the first time ever, I saw something akin to empathy in her eyes. “At great personal cost to yourself. That was very well done, Tyra.”
I could feel tears welling up—and the desperate need for them not to fall in this office. I grabbed the edge of her desk, needing something to hold me up.
“We all, at some point in our lives, end up in water far over our heads.” Yesenia’s voice was back to brisk, but I had the oddest feeling it was for my sake, not hers. “Not everyone can step up to such overwhelming responsibility. I wasn’t at all sure you were one of them.”
I was outright staring now, and I knew it. I just couldn’t figure out how to stop.
“Your sense of family is powerful, Journeywoman. It gives you strength and direction, and those are not small things.” She was silent a moment. “It is good to know you can also work without them.”
Somehow, she understood.
Yesenia Mayes knew what this had cost me. The woman who had abandoned her own daughter.
I swayed, rocked to the soul of my boots—and then whispered the single thought my brain could manage to form. “If you know about family, how can you leave Tatiana without one?”
I froze, knowing even as the words landed that I had just stepped way, wa
y out of line.
Yesenia’s face could have been carved from granite, but her hands slapped down on her desk with vicious force. “I have my reasons. You would do well not to judge.”
I barely heard the words. I was too busy listening to what was underneath them—processing what my Talent had just incontrovertibly read from the energies passing through the desk that linked our hands.
Beneath the boss lady’s rock and steel lay terrible, beating anguish.
It lasted only a moment, and then the steel resonances of the planet’s best Talent came crashing down. I felt my chakras recoiling in panicked reverberation, but I knew what I had felt. And even as every brain cell I had scrambled for safety—the need to heal rose up, fierce and hot and desperate.
I needed to be a Grower again.
One who didn’t poison things.
One who watered them. Running on pure instinct, I reached into my bag for the small potted plant from Gilly’s ceremony. I slid it onto the edge of Yesenia’s desk, my hands shaking badly.
She regarded it as if it were a small bomb.
“It’s from—” My throat struggled to make words that weren’t a whimper. “My niece. We had a dirtwalker ceremony.”
Now she was looking at me like I was the deliverer of small bombs.
I managed to choke out the last few words. “Tatiana has one too.”
Her eyes dropped back to the little plant in slow motion, like a ship falling inexorably into a wormhole.
And then the steel around her Talent evaporated, and I wanted, so very badly, to run, because the boss lady was going to cry any second, and the only thing in the universe that could possibly be more frightening than Yesenia’s wrath would be her tears.
She waved a hand in fierce, abrupt dismissal, and I obeyed with wild alacrity.
But I didn’t miss her whispered words as I fled.
“Thank you.”
Thank You
I appreciate you reading!
As you might have guessed, there are more KarmaCorp books on the way. I have two more Fixer tales to tell, and the next one will be Iggy’s story. (And after that, Tatiana might just have a story or two coming…)
To know when Fortune’s Dance is out, head to audreyfayewrites.com and sign up for my New Releases email list. You can also find me on Facebook. And if you’ve been kind enough to write Tee a review, please read this note :).
Also, if you’re a reader who likes to graze widely, you might enjoy my assassins while you wait.
May there always be boots on your feet and a story in your hands,
Audrey