by Audrey Faye
I closed my eyes. “This isn’t my jungle.”
“No, it’s not.” She took both my hands, and it was her spirit speaking to me now. “But for those of us who have chosen to serve in this terrible way, where we must leave our jungles and the waters and fires that most nourish our soul—” She stopped, and waited for me to meet her solemn, compassionate gaze. “These are your people now, Raven. And if you’re to truly be their Shaman, you must find your nourishment even here.”
I swallowed, her words sharp in my heart. I was to serve the people who had no tribe. I’d been eleven years old when those words had first been spoken to me, and they were no less true now.
“If I came to your planet, to your home, seeking to help you, what would be your first demand?”
Quixal was a closed world, but I knew what she asked—and the dreadful truth of it soaked my soul in shame. “That you truly saw us. That you understood us as a people. That you shared your heart with the great mother.” We would accept no less, for help doesn’t come from those who lack understanding and respect.
And yet here I was, trying to offer help without truly seeing.
“You walk with the earth and sky as one born to it. But those who guard the nodes must also walk with human hearts, even if they gather in tribes far larger than we find natural. This is a human jungle, and it’s one we have promised to serve.” She eyed me carefully. “You are already more than a child of the jungle. Someone taught you to love a small, manicured square of grass.”
I shook my head ruefully. Somehow, the best teachers always knew how to make me squirm. “One of my closest friends is a gardener, in the deepest sense of that word. Her family has served the green growing things for generations.” They’d collected up a jungle child and made very certain she never hungered for the feel of dirt under her feet or a bright blossom in her hand. Somewhere in there, I’d even learned to appreciate grass.
“Your aura shines with your love of them.”
The Lightbodies were very easy to love.
“They helped you take those first steps away from the comfortable spaces of your birth.” Elleni sounded contemplative, almost sad. “Now it’s time for you to take another.”
I looked at her, drawn to the sadness. “How many steps have you needed to take?” Her serenity made more sense now—and I imagined it had come at a very high price.
“A few.” She tipped her head at me. “And don’t you dare feel sorry for me, Leticia Ravencroft, or I’ll change that request I put up on the Wanderer web for a clan to meander through Stardust Prime every so often.”
I stared at her. “You did what?”
She laughed gently. “It’s not just for you. Things are clearly stirring at KarmaCorp that affect us and what we guard, and Delia said we must invite you to a clan fire again soon. She also said you should bring your young friend who wears the bracelet that matches the scrap in your amulet.”
I would think of the bracelet and its wearer later. “You’re sending us a tribe.”
“Yes.”
She would know exactly how cherished a gift that would be. “Thank you.” I hid a somewhat wavery grin. That would throw an interesting wrench into whatever Yesenia had up her very large sleeve.
Elleni eyed me, amused. “Is there someone we might contact locally who could smooth things? Wanderers aren’t as fond of paperwork as Sisters are.”
Neither was anyone born on Quixal. “Ask for Lucinda Coffey, but call her Bean. She’s a magician of paper and red tape. Tell your people to say they’re friends of Raven.”
She raised an eyebrow. “And who, pray tell, is this wondrous Bean?”
“Technically, she’s Yesenia’s assistant.”
Elleni’s eyebrow wasn’t getting any lower.
“Kind of like Delia’s a seller of pretty fabrics.”
She laughed. “Like that, is it?”
It was. There were so many things I could say about Bean, but I picked the one that would matter most to the woman in front of me. “She serves.”
“Good. We will do that.” She smiled at me. “And now, perhaps you will accept a small task from someone who occasionally finds herself in the role of teacher.”
I blinked at her.
“In the Wanderers, people often go out on a walkabout before big changes in their lives. Does your tribe have something similar?”
It was a hallmark of tribal life. “Yes. We walk. And then we sit, and we don’t get up until the great mother is ready to let us go.” Sometimes she wasn’t ever ready.
“And the purpose of those journeys?”
That was an answer as automatic to my tongue as the first one. “To set your soul right before it changes.” I found words that weren’t from my childhood, but grown from the wisdom of having left. “It gives a chance to touch the tribe’s most unyielding and trustworthy compass so that we change in ways that serve the grandmothers.”
Elleni bent her forehead into mine. “Exactly.”
I could feel my soul yearning. And confused. “There’s no space here.” No room to walk.
She gestured at the street behind us. “Go on a walkabout, dear Raven. Walk the streets of this jungle and seek your compass. Let go of what you believe this to be, and let your heart drink from what truly is. Find what you can appreciate, even if it isn’t what you most desire under your feet. Let your aura breathe into the fullness of who you are in the middle of a Galien street.”
I could feel the wisdom in what she asked of me. I needed to find the heartbeat of the people of no tribe. The one I’d somehow managed to convince myself I didn’t need to join in order to serve.
18
It had been a long time since I’d done a vision quest I hadn’t assigned myself. It was different when you were on one because an elder had decided you needed a good stiff kick in the pants. There’d been plenty of those in my childhood, and a few weeding sessions in Lightbody gardens that I was quite sure served the same purpose, but by and large, not all that many people in the galaxy tried to impart wisdom to a full-grown Shaman.
I’d gotten far too used to being my own guide. Far too lazy about stretching my developing wisdom in ways it didn’t want to go. I took myself on a hike in Stardust Prime’s backcountry and congratulated myself on my spiritual responsibility. I cleared my chakras, kept the dust bunnies under my bed corralled, and called it good.
This was a whole different kettle of fish.
I stood smack in the middle of the biggest thoroughfare of people I could find in central Galieus, ones moving under their own steam, and took a hard look at my own prejudice.
Because Elleni was right. I saw people here as tribeless, as somehow missing a connection gene that I’d been born with and ached for every moment of my life. Which was foolish. I could see signs of tribe all around me. Parents holding tiny hands and speaking down to bright eyes. A woman waiting patiently for her much older companion to lever up off a bench where they’d stopped to sit a while. A musical trio on a tiny raised platform, playing something catchy and smiling down at passersby and up at the midday sun.
I’d judged them because they had no campfires. No universally acknowledged grandmothers. No quirky customs that would identify them as tribal, and therefore as perpetual outsiders.
The people flowing by me weren’t a totally healthy tribe. I watched a young man walking slowly on the edge of the crowd, hands in his pockets, making eye contact with no one. There was no grandmother nearby to push a friend his way, or to give his hands something to do to bring him back into the energies of communal give and take. It was possible to disappear from notice here, to travel the steps of your day unseen and never be missed.
I cupped my hands, scooping up some of the cheerful energy of the musicians and tossing it toward the ears of my loner. He paused a moment, confused—and then caught sight of the trio and brightened. I watched as he angled into the crowd and joined the periphery of people who had stopped to listen.
An older couple smiled and made w
ay for him. A tiny, insignificant thing for them, but the young man between them brightened a little more.
I exhaled. A drop in an ocean of endless need. A grandmother could easily run herself into exhaustion here. This tribe would need to do things differently. That didn’t make them less worthy.
A small girl skipped by, holding hands with a child twice her size and half as coordinated. Both of them were entirely oblivious to anything but the joy of landing on the ground and bouncing off it again. Friends with spirit webs as conjoined as sisters. I grinned as they reversed course and bounded back toward two women walking arm in arm. More conjoined hearts, these of much longer standing.
People building their own small tribes within the larger one.
The lonely young man listening to the music stepped forward and dropped a chit in the hat and then exchanged a few words with the couple who had made space for him. Today, someone who walked alone had been seen. I kept my eyes on him as he strolled away. Down the middle of the thoroughfare this time, and when random strangers met his gaze, he offered them a smile.
All it had taken was the smallest of nudges. The kind that happened in families and tribes and trainee Fixer cohorts and Lightbody family dinners all the time. I bowed my head, letting new clarity seep into me. I had many tribes, but I’d somehow assumed that was because I had some kind of special DNA that knew how to belong to one.
I laughed quietly. The snobbery of a tribal child. Elleni was right. It was time to let that go. I could honor what made me Quixali, what made me a daughter of the grandmothers, without standing separate from the human tribe I was also born to. Even when they insisted on cramming themselves, thousands at a time, into a street too wide for any jungle and too straight to call to my own heart.
A stately couple walked past me, dressed in the kind of classy informal attire that spoke of Federation dinners and nightcaps with those in the inner circles of power. Inner-planet born down to their fancy synth-leather footwear, with faces that revealed nothing but a polite modicum of interest in the world around them. And yet their bodies turned toward each other in the way that only couples with decades of strong and shared love ever achieved. Inside the folds of her stylish cape, I could see her fingers wrapped warmly in his. His small, amused smile at something she said—and then at something she didn’t say at all.
A woman of indeterminate age walked the other way, harried and dressed in a uniform that spoke of a job in one of the lower rungs of a medical facility. The kind of job that often came with high demands, sharp sadness, and very little thanks. Her face wore the lines of her life, and her steps landed heavy. A soul carrying more than it wanted to.
I looked around for something that might catch her attention, that might lift those weights for a moment so she could remember what it felt like when they got lighter. And then I saw her face slowly transform, her eyes tracking someone I couldn’t see.
It didn’t matter. She had tribe waiting for her too, in whatever shape that might take.
It wouldn’t always be so, and I couldn’t fix even a small fraction of the times someone walked alone or hurt badly enough that they couldn’t feel the arms of tribe around them. But I could serve. I could find my respect for this, my larger human tribe, and I could serve from a place of love and connection instead of walking like the young man on the edge of the crowd and somehow believing I could save the crowd from itself without ever actually getting my hands dirty.
Elleni had been so very right. I could feel it now, here on this crowded Galien street, brushing smoothly against the porous, bendy edges of my spirit web. I had just enough barriers up to keep myself intact and safe.
The rest of me was listening to the heartbeat of my people.
19
I popped in the last bite of the grease-laden, onion-drenched hot dog I’d picked up from a street vendor and chewed happily. It was the kind of food I always sought out if real wasn’t an option. Enough fried onions could eventually fool even my taste buds, and this particular street vendor had laid them on with a generous hand, a wink, and the spiciest mustard on his shelf.
Pure, indigestible deliciousness. The perfect way to end an urban vision quest, especially when no one wiser was watching to shake their head and mutter that I’d be better served by a nice bowl of soup and a nap.
I didn’t want a nap, and my energies weren’t suggesting I needed one, either. I’d tapped into the heartbeat of this city, and I needed to use that for good before the euphoria that always came with clarity crashed and burned and I really did need a bed and food that my body knew how to process.
Which meant I needed to think, because I had a tricky problem on my hands. Now that I was away from the fires of tribe and ways of knowing that went above, beyond, and around rational, my brain was coming back online. Lining up what it knew.
The Harmonium tech was dangerous to the nodes—and more particularly, it was dangerous when it had a channel like me. I’d served as a kind of introduction, a way for node and tech to recognize each other. And it wasn’t the tribal-child part of me that had done it, or Delia and Imani and Elleni would have discovered the problem long before my arrival. The issue was unshielded, unordered ability to connect to the woo. Which would be fine and good if all that meant was that we needed to teach Shamans not to be idiots and keep their personal protections in place when they ventured anywhere near one of the Harmonium vacuum cleaners.
Except that a Shaman with her walls down looked an awful lot like an undertrained psychic or sensitive—or even possibly latent ones—and those people numbered in the millions. And a whole lot of them flew around in spaceships and worked in spaceports and took vacations in places where they might randomly walk a little too close to a canister and not even know it.
Then there was the issue of Wanderers and Sisters and closed-planet tribes who sheltered energy workers in their midst and sometimes intentionally did things that opened channels and stepped into connection and might look far too much like dust bunnies. We could probably get adequate warning out to fully trained adults—but my heart squeezed as I thought of Seraphina’s dirty, shining face. No one had said she carried power, and I hadn’t felt it, but the tribe treated her as one they expected to take a seat of deep importance one day. Imani and Delia would keep her well protected, but there were Seraphinas all over the galaxy. Small children who would one day be Seers and aura readers and Shaman trainees. Little ticking time bombs that wouldn’t register on any instrument a scientist had yet invented.
I sighed. No matter what hot-shot ideas I’d shuttled back down to the planet with, this wasn’t a fight for a Shaman flying solo. This needed to get fixed at the center, and to do that, I needed to convince a whole bunch of scientists to believe something they couldn’t see. The Federation would cringe at poisoning the nodes—but first they would have to believe such things existed. Or at least a reasonable cover story that would protect sacred knowledge and still get the job done. Most Fixers are fond of telling the truth. Shamans will say whatever needs to be said to get to the truth.
I drummed my fingers against my thighs. We needed a voice people would believe. The Harmonium tech was deeply valuable, and I was just a quirky woman with black hair and a feather hanging from her ear and very little stature in the circles that would matter. KarmaCorp might be big enough, but even Fixers who hadn’t been cradled by the great mother might find this one a heavy lift.
Except for one. My fingers paused their drumming.
Yesenia was a Traveler. She had used the nodes. And she had exactly the kind of clout this would need. People expected a Traveler’s words to be shrouded in mystery—and they listened anyhow. Even the scientists of Epsi would find it difficult to openly flaunt the wishes of one of the galaxy’s most famous and secretive superheroes.
I winced. I’d never seen Yesenia actually play that card, but there was no way she ran things as smoothly as she did without at least laying it down on some very private tables.
I breathed in and let my un
certainty flow out on the wings of my exhale. I would go back to Stardust Prime. I would tell my boss as much as I was able—in person, because she would need to feel my words as much as hear them—and then we would fix this. Somehow.
It wasn’t the most detailed of plans, but it was a start. I glanced around the street, aware I’d just wandered several blocks in a complete daze. I was outside of the central district now, although that hadn’t done a lot to fix the congestion, it had just made it a little less focused. I smiled at another street vendor loading onions onto a hot dog. Some things hadn’t changed.
And then they did. I didn’t see anything, didn’t catch so much as a glimpse of whatever raked up and down my spirit web and then wrapped it in a cold, dark stranglehold.
The voice beside my ear matched the frigid, dark evil that had just put me in an energetic straightjacket. “Just keep walking, Shaman. We need you to come with us.”
I reached for my Talent and came up with useless slime. Which had most of me skittering in abject terror, but the rest of me knew better than to let an enemy walk at my back, no matter what had just happened to my more woo strengths. I coiled. Carefully. If they were expecting a compliant inner-planet victim, they had another think coming.
“Don’t.” A hand on my back reinforced the single sharp word. “Face forward.”
A second presence, and this one tasted and sounded and smelled like a thug.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Tolino. I don’t believe Ms. Ravencroft is going to cause us any trouble.”
I could feel the thug’s scowl. “She’s tougher than you think she is. Walks like she knows what she’s doing.”
Mr. Tolino wasn’t an entirely stupid thug.
I saw a large man walking toward me, his bearing and uniform screaming peace officer. He scanned the crowd in an easy, attentive sweep. I had no control over my own energies, at least not any kind of projectile capabilities, so I relied on the kinds of signals that were universal. A face full of panic. A wordless plea for help.