by Audrey Faye
And then I felt a pull that shouldn’t be there.
A foreigner.
An invader, and one I knew.
The seeking, questing tube of a Harmonium vacuum canister—one very nearby—trying to use me as a conduit.
The storm of wrongness battered all the consciousness I had left. I reached for every drop of skill and fierce warrior energy I owned and threw up a shield. Tried to block myself off from the awful sucking, rip myself away from the umbilical cord that was still trying to feed my soul.
I felt others joining me, knitting their puny energies to mine, trying to turn off the terrible switch I had just thrown.
And then the warm heartbeat behind me shifted.
Reached.
Acted.
Darted around all sides of me and through me and entirely changed the nature of who it was.
I gaped, horrified by what I was feeling and struggling to grasp the implications while keeping my shields up strongly enough that my brain didn’t get sucked into the wild flows.
Either of them. The Harmonium tech was still trying to vacuum the node—and the node was now trying to vacuum the tech. Or rather, reach through it to whatever lay on the other side.
I felt myself stretching into a shape that neither human nor Fixer nor Shaman knew how to hold. I hadn’t asked Scotty the one question that mattered—what they did with all the dust bunnies after they vacuumed them up. Based on the energy on the hunt all around me, I could only imagine it was left in a very tasty pile somewhere.
One the node behind me saw as its daughter.
My spirit web began to rip. I knew, deeply, that this should not happen, that dust bunnies and node were not meant to join in this way, but I had no way to make it stop. I might be the strongest Shaman ever to set foot on Stardust Prime, but I was no match for the molten core behind me—or for the tech that had somehow mistaken us all for useless.
My soul keened, a warrior fighting to hold her spirit, or to extinguish it. I would not let this happen through me.
I felt fingertips slipping into mine—ice cold, but solid. Firm. Something I could hold on to. Other hands settled on my shoulders, on my sacrum, on the crown of my head. I shook, feeling even more energies trying to overwhelm those that made me Raven.
And then I realized what they were doing. Pushing my energies down into the rock. Planting me in the great mother. Putting me inside the boss lady energy source of them all instead of in front of her.
Not warrior, but seed.
My soul exhaled in frantic, grateful understanding. I was the daughter. I was not the grandmother. Which meant it was time to stop trying to be some kind of galactic magician and start being what I was. A Shaman. A channel.
One who served.
I grabbed tight to the one message I needed to bring with me—don’t eat that—and then I let go of the fierce cage I was holding around my soul and let the energies under my feet swallow me whole.
16
“She’s back with us.”
It took me a moment to place the voice. Imani.
“Raven, can you hear us yet?” Elleni sounded more shaken, a lot less certain I’d actually found my way back into my body.
I struggled to find the muscles that opened my eyes and felt a cool palm settle on my forehead. “Relax, daughter. You just swallowed a nebula, and it might take a while to feel like a whole person again.”
That’s exactly what it felt like I’d done. I managed to open my mouth enough to croak for water.
“Dammit.” I heard Elleni rustling. “I should have thought of that. Her planet is wet and humid, and here we have her sitting by a hot fire.”
“We got it half right,” said Imani calmly, as cool water trickled over my lips. A strong arm settled under my shoulders and lifted me up like I was nothing. “Here, drink.”
“I’ve got her.” The voice from behind my ear was low and male and amused. Duncan. “Delia, slow the water down enough that she can breathe.”
“She’s breathing just fine. She needs water.”
The fractious squabbling was doing me almost as much good as the liquid pouring down my throat. I fought my eyes open, wincing at the feeble light. Delia’s blurry face landed right in front of mine, and a firm hand lifted my chin. “Next time you try a stunt like that, you could at least warn us first.”
My eyes snapped all the way open. “Anyone. Hurt?”
“No.” Imani’s voice was calm, and carried just a hint of chiding. “We are all guardians of the node, well equipped to take care of ourselves, even when a daughter tries to offer herself up as an entirely unnecessary sacrifice.”
I winced again. That hadn’t been the plan.
I heard a low drumbeat behind me. Since Duncan’s arms were still holding me half upright, I knew it wasn’t him. Tears leaked down my cheeks. A grandmother was drumming for me. Clearly I’d come far too close to being eternally stupid—but I’d been raised to join energies, not to fight them. Not when they were the ether of earth and sky and ancestors.
I closed my eyes. I was too tired to learn something new. I would join with the energy of the drum too.
-o0o-
The next time I opened my eyes, nobody was staring anxiously at me. I took that as a good sign.
It was a better sign that Imani wasn’t drumming anymore. She sat comfortably by the small fire, drinking a bowl of soup and holding a sleeping child.
I smiled when I recognized Seraphina’s dark curls and dirty cheeks. “When did she come in?”
“The moment we let her,” said Duncan dryly. “She insisted you’d feel better with her here.”
She wasn’t wrong. “Is there any more of that soup?”
Elleni snorted and set a small mug on the dirt in front of me. “There is, and you’ll drink all of it.”
I wrinkled my nose even before I leaned over to smell it. “What’s in it?”
Imani pinned me with a stern glance. “Things you need to drink.”
Right. Never question the healers. I reached to pick up the mug and discovered just how embarrassingly weak I was. I did, however, manage to glare at Duncan when he leaned over to help. I was a Shaman, not a newborn. I could sit my own self up.
Imani chuckled. “She’s feeling better.”
I sighed and managed to squirm myself into something half-sitting. “Sorry. I’m a terrible patient.”
Duncan squatted at my side. “You’re no worse than Delia when she had the flu.”
Delia’s cheeks blushed the particular shade of dusty rose I was pretty sure only happened around a certain drummer. “No one asked you to help then, either.” She held the mug of soup to my lips so I could sip from it. It was steaming hot and tasted like it had been made from boiled underwear. I didn’t spit it back out, but it was a near thing.
Imani smiled faintly. “Once you finish that, you can have a bowl of my soup.”
I scowled. “I don’t need to be bribed to take my medicine.”
Delia nearly spilled the rest of the spiked broth down my front. Duncan rolled his eyes and cupped his hands around hers. “Need some help there, oh great Seer?”
“From a man who hasn’t washed a dish since he was in diapers?” She raised a sharp eyebrow and tugged her hands away. “No. Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”
He grinned at her, totally unrepentant. “I’d wash your dishes. And I’m here because it’s my job to learn all Imani’s drumming tricks before she kicks the bucket and we can’t call a soul back from wherever Raven went.”
Delia shook her head and poured more boiled underwear into me. “Imani’s probably not going to kick the bucket until you have grandkids, and Raven’s smarter than all of you think. I know what we all felt in there, but she’s not clan. I want to hear her story of what happened.”
I wanted to hear their version pretty badly too. I took a deep breath. I was about to step outside the bounds of oaths far deeper and older than those of a Journeyman Fixer. “I need your word, as those of The People,
that this will go no further than your ears, unless it is to one you trust as you trust your own heart.” That was the closest a Quixali ever got to asking someone to keep a secret. They were anathema to tribal hearts, but sometimes still necessary. The four in this tent would know who else needed to know.
Or five. I smiled at Seraphina, breath whiffling gently in Imani’s lap as she dreamed. Her spirit had found mine, and it wasn’t for me to tell her she couldn’t stay. I gently wrapped energy around her. Shielding. She would hear, but my words wouldn’t come into her knowing until her heart was ready.
Imani nodded at me fractionally. Approving. Blessing.
“On my home world, it is the birthright of every Quixali to join with the great mother.” I patted my bare feet on the earth of the tent in illustration. “We walk every day knowing we are one with her. Knowing it is her we serve.”
Four heads nodded in unison.
I sighed. The clues had been there—I’d just entirely missed them. “When I left Quixal and went to Stardust Prime to become a Fixer, that connection dimmed. I assumed it was because I had left home, because the ground under my feet wasn’t the sacred jungle I’d grown up in.”
Imani set a gentle hand on my knee. “Have you been home?”
The lump in my throat landed huge and hard and sore. “Twice. It’s a closed world, and I have many responsibilities outside it.” The many months required to go home were hard to come by, and my heart knew that I couldn’t go home very often and still find it within me to leave.
“When I step onto the ground of Quixal, it knows me. It reaches for me.” I swallowed and looked deep into the eyes of the people I needed to hold this new knowledge with me. “Exactly like your node did. It felt like coming home.”
Imani didn’t move. She only held me in the endless wisdom of her gaze.
I got the rest out. “I think my home planet is what you call a node. What we call the great mother.”
For a long, long time, there was nothing but the sounds of six people breathing. And then Imani chuckled, much amused. “It seems we were foolish when we discussed making you a guardian.”
Delia shook her head, catching the same cosmic joke. “She was born one.”
Imani raised a curious eyebrow. “Do your grandmothers know?”
They were more than capable of locking such knowledge away from an eleven-year-old daughter, but I had been home twice since then. I felt into the knowing inside me. “I don’t think so. We’re a closed world. Few leave, and I imagine nobody trips across a node by accident.”
“We try to prevent it,” said Elleni dryly.
I dipped into the precious, holy place inside me that was filled up for the first time in years. “They need to know.” So Quixali who did leave would know how to find water to drink. And so those who stayed would know the fullness of what they served.
Elleni and Imani exchanged looks. Elleni looked at me and nodded. “It will happen. We will send a small delegation.”
I made a face. “The paperwork will take a while.”
She smiled. “The Order of the Sisters of the Temple has obtained clearance to visit closed worlds before. You may leave me with that task and know it will be done.”
I wanted, so very badly, to go with them—but there was something far more pressing I needed to do. We had suspected that the Harmonium tech threatened the nodes, that it might vacuum one if it got too close. But what I had felt in that cave had been something far more terrible.
The nodes were the great mother. And the great mother, who collects all daughters to her heart, wanted the dust bunnies. All wise, and also very naive. She could not conceive of pollutants, of contamination. She would collect the dust bunnies into her embrace—and swallow poison. “The tech is a terrible risk.”
Elleni, whose eyes had never left mine, nodded. “I felt the node flux. I checked with spaceport traffic control. There are two ships in high orbit being fitted with Harmonium canisters.”
The visceral wrongness of it slimed my gut again. “It reached for the node—and the node reached back.” I looked at Delia. “It feels black. I don’t know what the tech does with the energy it vacuums, but it feels wrong. Like a disease, like something that would contaminate the mother.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry—the node.”
Imani flicked my clumsy words away. “They are one.”
She accepted in a breath what I fully expected would take my lifetime to explain to almost anyone else. I lowered my chin and tried to put words to the darkness. “What the great mother seeks to collect—it’s energy that is no longer attached to its source.” Lost, yanked asunder by a canister that didn’t respect roots or heritage. Much of it energy that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. “Some of it will be poison.”
Imani’s eyes drilled into me. “Explain.”
I started with the easy part. “Some of what the Harmonium tech cleans up is pollution. Leftovers from early space travel and the like. Some of it will be energies the node has never felt or experienced.” Less obvious poison, but human history was full of both cultures and planets that had died unpleasant deaths from eating the wrong thing. “And some is fairly pure receptive residuals, which won’t cause the node harm, but might intensify its energies.”
My last sentence had the guardians exchanging sharp glances with each other.
Delia nodded. “This, I have Seen. I didn’t understand it, but I have Seen. Stronger nodes would be destabilizing. Risky. Perhaps necessary, but my dreams say this will not be true for many years yet.”
Something deep in my soul clenched. I, too, saw darkness coming in the years ahead.
“You speak rightly, Shaman.” Delia used my title with clear, careful purpose. “You speak as a guardian.”
That wasn’t the role that worried me right now. “I also speak as a Fixer. One who was sent here to clean up the side effects of the Harmonium technology if I found any and to support its release. KarmaCorp believes it serves the higher good.” Yesenia might not once she got my report, but the StarReaders didn’t tend to change their minds.
“It is complicated.” Elleni spoke softly, but with deep conviction. “You serve in many ways, and you will need to untangle those ways and find your own path of highest good.”
That smelled suspiciously like the assignments my friends had come back from—except that I had never had any problem defining my own priorities. I was a Shaman. It was almost expected of me. “I need to start with Epsi.” Whatever was about to happen, we needed to understand it better. Starting with what was in the dust bunnies and what might be done to keep them from being a snack for hungry nodes.
Scotty had just become my new best friend.
“That’s a world you know best.” Imani spoke with the confidence of one who had led for decades. She glanced over at Elleni. “We will work to protect the nodes. And we will reach out to the grandmothers of Quixal and learn more of the great mother you serve.”
My heart hurt, but it was a smart division of labor. They would work for the tribes.
My job was to work for the people who didn’t have one.
17
I skated left a step to avoid yet another jostle from a core-planet dweller used to using their bulk to create space and tried not to grimace. We were back in Galieus, and people here had a very different sense of personal space than I’d grown up with, but that wasn’t the kind of thing an experienced Fixer should be cranky about.
Especially when she had a mission that had just grown faster than a zucchini on a hot summer night.
I grinned as I skated right. Tee would like that comparison. She’d been the first one to take me zucchini hunting, and I remembered crouching at her side, squinting at the end of one very large, very stealthy green vegetable and trying to decide if it had gotten longer while we sat there.
“Your aura does interesting things when you do that.”
I shot a look at Elleni, who walked beside me and somehow managed to avoid most of the jostling. “When I
do what?”
“You get annoyed by the crowds and you let your mind wander somewhere else. You must have a very nice bank of memories to escape to—that one was making you smile.”
Zucchini hunting wasn’t a story I wanted to tell in an urban crowd. “Ask me around a fire sometime.”
“All right, I will.”
There wasn’t likely to be another campfire together, and we both knew it. I had a scouting trip to Epsi in my immediate future, to see if there was any way to deal with the energies they mopped up in a way that wouldn’t make them look like a snack for a hungry node. Likely a futile task, but I liked Scotty, and I wanted to give him every chance to make sure I had the information that might save his precious canisters before I put through an emergency communication to Stardust Prime and rang the alarm bells.
A hand touched my arm and drew me to a stop.
I stared at Elleni, puzzled.
“I’m not one of your tribe,” she began. “But there is a task before you, and I believe there is a thing you must do before you complete that task. One you don’t see.”
I slid us backwards until we were tucked against a wall, as firmly out of the flow of humanity as I could manage on a crowded street. “Tell me.” It was always good to have other eyes. Sisters, daughters, grandmothers, friends.
She smiled at me gently. “This need you have to distance yourself from the crowds here—it points to a decision, a judgment you’ve made in your soul. You see those of us who live here as less. As lacking because we don’t yearn for jungles or grass under our toes or space in which we can move without always thinking about those around us.”
Those were terrible words, and my soul wanted to set them on fire—and yet, they carried truth with them. “I’m different. That’s not the same as seeing the people here as less.”
Her shoulders jerked up in a half shrug. “Less is perhaps a poor choice of words. But something in your soul can’t fully accept being here. Can’t become one with all that is here. You have a choice to make that might deeply affect the lives of every person on this planet, and yet you can’t feel the heartbeat of those who live here.”