by Audrey Faye
When she leaned back into the rock wall and finally looked up, her eyes were the kind of soft and dewy that said she’d been thinking about her man. “I might bring Devan up here. He’s got your same weird fondness for places where you can see every rock all the way to the horizon.”
Devan wasn’t coming again for months, and it was breaking her heart. Collecting future memories helped her hold steady while she waited. I reached down a hand and let her use it to swing herself up. Not a stunt to try with amateurs, but we’d learned early on in our friendship that neither of us ever fell off of anything.
She landed on the balls of her feet, crouched like a cat, and glanced over at Iggy and Tee, still both prostrate over the little spring. “What’s got them all google-eyed?”
Iggy held up a wet finger and laughed. “Water. And moss that’s every color of the green rainbow.”
Kish shook her head. “I’ve got five kilos of water in my pack, properly filtered and lugged all the way up here so you don’t die drinking from some strange crack in a rock.”
She’d climbed up with all the heavy stuff, and we’d let her. Sometimes one burden can be shifted out of the way for a while by carrying another.
Tee stood up and kissed my cheek. “Thank you for bringing us here. It’s beautiful, even if Kish can’t appreciate it.” She licked her finger and eyed her roommate. “And the water’s totally safe to drink, but thank you for bringing up our bottles anyhow.”
If Tyra Lightbody thought the water was safe, it was pristine. Which I already knew, since the first thing I’d stuck in the tiny spring when I discovered it was my tongue. Kish grew up believing the natural world was out to get her, which is more or less what happens when you drill big holes into unstable rocks. I’d grown up believing the earth around me and all it supported was my cradle—and if it happened to reach out for me with destruction, it was my time to go. The Anthros called that fatalistic, but they didn’t grow up tribal.
“So.” Kish busied herself unloading all the goodies from our various packs. “The boss lady’s decided it’s your turn to stick your head through a shredder, huh?”
That was another reason we came out here. Space to speak freely. Not that Yesenia eavesdropped or anything, but out here you could touch the energies with whatever words you needed to and not leave yourself a mess to clean up. Given what I’d heard from Bean, that felt particularly important this time.
Tee looked up from the spring long enough to fix me with a look that said she knew more than she was saying. “Galieus is where the Harmonium tech is being made.”
Fixers had more than a standard interest in anything that could stop cubecraft from bouncing and their fellow travelers from puking. Tee and Kish in particular—they both hated tin-can travel. They’d happily trade part of their souls for something that made trips faster and smoother. Not that there was much to hate about an easy-to-distribute technology that could ride on a ship or sit in a corner and clean up the residual stupidity of early space travelers and impolite interstellar residuals and the nuisance storms they created all at the same time. The Federation was fond of touting Harmonium’s environmental benefits, and corporations were rubbing their hands in glee at the gazillion-credit impact on interstellar shipping, but the rest of us were just looking forward to a lot less puke.
Iggy, who traveled a lot better than the rest of us, fluttered her fingers, clearly paying attention to something else. “This is bigger than what she sent the rest of us to do. Is it connected?”
I knew what she was asking. Their three life-bending assignments. We’d all been expecting a fourth. “I think so.” And out here, I could come cleaner than that. “She’s shaping us for something.”
Tee’s nose wrinkled. “I don’t like that.”
I didn’t like it either, especially with Regalis in the mix. But her words still surprised me a little. “Your family shapes all kinds of things.” Including the next generation of tough aunties. “Mundi’s got plans for you, in case you hadn’t figured that out already.”
She rolled her eyes. “Duh. But that’s the thing. Lightbody agendas are transparent. You know exactly what you’re getting if you hang out with us. Yesenia’s doing this in the dark.”
That was a place I was a lot more comfortable with than anyone except maybe Kish—and she expected it to crush her one day. Miners did fatalism as well as anyone. “I don’t know all of her agenda yet, but Tatiana’s the reason.”
I had their full and complete attention now. Iggy raised one very expressive eyebrow.
“You’ve each had peeks at it. Some hint that she cares about her daughter. Those weren’t accidental.” Mine surely hadn’t been.
Tee nodded slowly. “And she’s allowed us all prolonged contact with Tatiana. At first I thought maybe Mundi had her fingers in that, but maybe she’s taking her cues from the boss lady on this one.”
Grandmothers did agendas better than anyone. “Maybe some of both.”
Kish frowned, and I knew her thoughts had come closer to the dark than anyone else’s. Singers might work in the light, but she’d grown up in the tunnels. “So we’re saying Yesenia’s got some kind of secret agenda, and it might be personal?”
Iggy just looked perplexed, because of all of us, she carried the most sweetness. I reached out and took her hand in mine. “Each of you has had a recent mission where you had the distinct impression that she approved of your actions, even when they strayed far from the rule book.” Which we all knew was very non-standard Yesenia Mayes. I paused and waited for my soft-hearted roommate to catch up.
When she did, it hit her entire body. She scrambled to her feet, a Dancer in full flight. “Wait. You mean she’s growing her own private little Fixer army, and we’re it?”
Somebody watched too many old-school vids, but she wasn’t wrong. “Maybe. We don’t know yet. But she wouldn’t be the first mother in history to put the needs of her child above anything else.”
Tee leaned forward and brushed her fingertips gently on Iggy’s shin. Calming. “What do you see in the ether, Raven?”
Lightbodies knew how to play the long game too. “Something’s coming for Tatiana and it’s got dark edges, but it’s a long way off. Years. I don’t know how many.”
Tee didn’t move, but her eyes flared burnished steel. “Can I tell Mundi?”
Tribes didn’t keep secrets. “Yes. Tell her, very quietly, that I think Yesenia’s trying to keep the energies from noticing Tatiana. I think that’s part of how she’s trying to keep her safe. It feels important to keep doing that.” Even though it was going to fail at some point when the daughter chose to reach out with love anyhow.
Iggy’s face went white. “I can help with that.”
Soft heart or not, my best friend can be a fierce warrior when she’s riled. And she had a very deft touch with the energies she saw as threads. “Study what flows around her for a bit, and then yeah, gently clear what you can. But know that Tatiana’s already doing some of the work herself.”
Iggy’s eyebrows flew up—and then I saw her connect the dots. All of them. “That’s why I’m in this. She’s a Dancer, just like me. And I know how to keep things really smooth.”
I squeezed her hand. “You know how to step into all of who you are and keep the appearance of smooth on the surface.” I suspected she would also be the one who would know when it was time for Tatiana to shatter the smoothness, but it wasn’t yet time to pull that knowing into the light. This was a long game, and as yet, I saw the far-off moves only dimly.
My job now was to wait. To prepare myself, and to face this mission that I fully expected would be a rite of passage of some sort. The grandmothers believed many such journeys were necessary to grow fully into power and wisdom. I would walk into it with my eyes wide open and unafraid.
I let my eyes sweep over the barren stretch of rocks and dust spreading to the horizon. If I turned around, I’d be able to see the edges of the cultivated zone, but that wasn’t what my eyes and my soul needed
right now. In a few days, I’d be staring out over inner-planet cityscapes, with metal and lights and moving parts as far as the eye could see. Every fiber of me preferred this view. It bothered me that Yesenia was sending me off to somewhere so alien to my DNA for this particular assignment. I did inner planets just fine, but if she was going to try major surgery on my spirit web, I wanted my feet touching the great mother while she did it.
Nothing about me liked how she was playing this. And like Tee, I didn’t like that her agenda was hidden. But I knew the rules of the dark. You couldn’t see when you first arrived. You had to wait, be still, find patience, let your eyes adjust.
And not get eaten while those things happened.
6
The easiest way to survive arrival on an inner planet is drugs. I hadn’t availed myself of those, despite numerous offers from the very nice flight attendants, but every fragment of me was working to withstand the assault. It had begun when the viewscreens inside the cubesat had begun showing imagery as we approached the major spaceport in the DaVinci cluster. I was pretty sure they deleted some of the ships from what they showed us—for security, and to keep passengers from having anxiety attacks at the constant state of imminent collision.
I’d been in a lot of tin cans in the past six years, and not one of them had run into anything, but some atavistic part of me always wanted to duck anyhow.
I’d tolerated the toothpaste tube of humanity that was the process of getting through customs and shuttling down to the main cityport on the outskirts of Galieus, and then, like every other experienced traveler, I’d headed out of the shuttleport as fast as my own feet and a very efficient transit tube could carry me. I’d arranged to meet my local contact much closer to where I’d be staying, although she probably had a lot more tolerance than I did for acting like toothpaste.
I ignored the weird quivers under my feet as the pod I was riding in vibrated to a stop, and stepped out of the tube that had brought me to the center of Galieus. I kept moving, because toothpaste knows better than to stop, and let my eyes absorb the flow of humanity stepping onto the moving sidewalks. Five levels, eight directions, three speeds. A very normal tube-station arterial.
I stepped onto one going up and kept my eyes open for anyone who might need help joining me. It was an inner-planet courtesy I appreciated even as I cursed the need for such a thing. The people around me shifted as the sidewalks splintered in myriad directions, merging and changing levels like some kind of dizzy, three-dimensional ballet. It was oddly beautiful, fascinating to watch, and interesting to join for a while. Iggy had given me lessons, back when we’d taken our first field trip to an inner world and I’d looked like a wild-planet native totally out of her element. She’d helped me to see it as a dance, an intricate flow of tiny human atoms each playing their role in a much larger whole.
Thanks to Iggy, I could appreciate what I was seeing—but in the end, it still felt deeply foreign to my soul. An alien way of life, touched with shimmers of disturbing. Every step people took here required thought, even if it was thought so well honed that it was almost instinct. As a kid, I’d hurtled and danced and crawled and explored my way through the jungle near my village without ever thinking about how fast or slow my next step would be.
Always thinking ahead changed you. People here were careful, right down into their DNA.
Iggy was mostly like that too, except when she danced. Even when she moved in the body torture that civilized people called ballet, my best friend knew how to touch her inner wild, that pure and holy thing that lives in everyone unless they let it die. Even here, in this jam of souls, the wild wasn’t totally dead, but it was tamped down so deep I couldn’t feel it, and to me that wasn’t all that different from dead.
Which often ended up making people prickly in very strange ways. I took a deep breath and looked around for the statue of vines rising to the sky that was supposed to be my meeting point with my local contact. An unusual choice, and it already predisposed me to liking her.
I smiled as I stepped off the exit ramp that had slowed me down and deposited me on unmoving ground. I’d already spied the tall, slender woman in a bright green robe heading straight for me. We weren’t going to need the vine statue. Our souls had felt each other, and I leaned into the lovely feeling of that as they said hello. Hers was luminous, a beam of serene light in the midst of polite, carefully choreographed chaos.
Her name was Elleni Whitesong. It suited her.
She held both her hands up, palms toward me, as she approached. “Raven. You’re here.” She came to a graceful stop in front of me and reached out her fingers to the feather earring dangling from my left ear, pausing just short of touching it. “May I? It’s beautiful.”
The knot of sudden homesickness rising in my throat was as unexpected as it was real. I nodded, and swallowed as she brushed the feather with reverent, welcoming fingers. “You’re familiar with Quixali customs.” Feathers were our connection to sky, to breath, to self, and the ones we wore from our ears invited others to touch our souls.
In fifteen years, I’d only had one stranger ask.
She smiled. “I wasn’t, but when your briefing materials indicated your planet of origin, I asked a few questions.”
Answers about closed-planet cultures weren’t all that easy to come by. “You have good sources.”
“The Sisters honor all that is sacred, including the holy traditions of others. You might even say we collect them.” She guided me carefully onto one of the slowest moving sidewalks, the way one might help a revered elder. Not because I needed it, but because it honored me. “A Sister on Davios was once fortunate enough to spend some time in retreat with a drum daughter of your grandmothers. She shared what she knew with me.”
She’d learned more than anyone off-planet I’d ever met. I cast her a quiet glance, absurdly touched. “Thank you. It feels good to be seen.”
“Holiness is everywhere, if you’re willing to see.” She flashed a grin at a small boy waddling down the walkway in total violation of directional protocols, happily using the forest of legs around him to aid in his travel.
I looked around for the distressed parent or caregiver who would surely be following in his wake.
My companion scooped up the boy as he reached us and kissed his forehead. “You’ve made several people smile this afternoon, young man. Well done.”
A man who shared the boy’s rosy cheeks huffed up to us. “Thank you, Sister. He’s convinced the world is his oyster, and he’s out to explore all of it today.”
The child jabbered happily and reached for his father.
I couldn’t help myself. I touched the boy’s spirit web, gave a little strength to the wild that lived so free inside him, and smiled at his father. “It’s good you let him be who he needs to be.”
The man blinked in surprise. “Thank you.”
Sometimes words can do far more than Talent. “He has a need to roam. You’re letting him find a way to do that, even here. It nourishes him.”
The child was staring at me now, quiet. I touched his tousled hair. His bright eyes reminded me very much of the darker ones I’d played with in the jungle growing up. I was glad his father’s spirit web had a decent-sized echo of this little one’s need for space and disorder.
Elleni watched me, a smile playing at her lips. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small permapaper card and handed it to the father. “The Temple of Sisters is happy to welcome small boys who need a little more space than usual. We have a frost-cherry tree in the back garden that could use a climber to test its limbs and help keep it strong.”
That hadn’t been in any of my official briefing materials. I grinned, delighted at this moment that had fallen out of the sky and made my day so much better.
The father murmured something respectful and grateful and tinged with surprise and faded into the river of humanity. His son watched us go, a small boy who had somehow found kindred spirits in a crowd of thousands.
�
��That was well done,” said Elleni, guiding us over to another sidewalk, this one a whole lot faster than the last.
I glanced at her, surprised.
She snorted. “What, you think Fixers are the only ones who quietly encourage the hearts of small boys, even though it’s officially against the rules?”
I raised an eyebrow. This conversation had just taken a turn for the really interesting. She wasn’t talking about the words I’d offered to his father. “You saw what I did to the child’s spirit web?”
“Is that what you call it?” She scanned the crowd ahead of us, clearly looking for something. “We speak of auras and vibrations, but perhaps it is one and the same with the work you do. I saw the light purple at his core strengthen. It was neatly done.”
As far as I knew, KarmaCorp had a collegial working relationship with the Order of the Sisters, nothing more. They were cultural historians, witnesses to humanity’s evolution. If she could see the delicate Shamanic work at the level I’d just done, that was a whole different kettle of fish. “Evidently my briefing materials weren’t as thorough as yours.”
Elleni smiled serenely and said nothing.
I’d walked a jungle path with enough grandmothers to know that look. She wanted me to know this much, and I’d find out more if and when she was ready. Fair enough. I could wait, and in the meantime, I could get on with the official reason I was here. “How much do you know about the Epsilon Conglomerate?”
“They get called Epsi around here.” She was still steering us through walkway mergers with the skill of someone who had been born on an inner world and spent most of her time out and about in it. “And I do believe I’m supposed to stay quiet, get you situated, and let you form your own impressions.”
I shot her a sideways look. “I also hear that neither of us are supposed to mess with the hearts of small boys.”
She chuckled quietly. “Fair point. But in this case, I don’t want to influence your perception of what you’re about to meet.” Something in her spirit web firmed. “Once you’ve met Dr. Miori and her team, I would like to hear your impressions.”