Call of Worlds

by K. D. Lovgren

  Why didn’t they hear it? Why didn’t they see? Roan didn’t talk using words like that. Roan’s voice didn’t sound like that. They didn’t know Roan better?

  There was a knock at her door. She sat up so fast it made her dizzy.

  She was silent, clutching her sheet.

  The knock came again. She knew it was him.

  “Come in,” she said. There seemed nothing else to do.

  The door opened. He stood there in front of her, dressed in his regular clothes. She was still in paper, her hair tangled around her. He loomed there, tall and wide through the shoulder. Stronger than he should be.

  She was afraid to say anything.

  He pulled the lone chair over near to the bed. He sat in it. It creaked.

  She didn’t want to look in his eyes, remembering what it was like to look in her aunt’s eyes and see Rai behind them. Instead she looked at his hands. His thick fingers, the broad span across the back of his hand, the hairs curling above his wrist. She thought of those hands touching her.

  He didn’t speak. She didn’t speak. They sat there, Kal studying his hands as if she must memorize them, refusing to look up. She didn’t know where he looked, but she felt his eyes on her.

  And then, she felt it. She felt it again.

  A crackling, slithery whip of sparks between them, invisible and irresistible.

  She couldn’t stop herself. She looked up.

  She had been right. It wasn’t Roan.

  And worse, as she looked at him, she knew something else. She wasn’t Kal.

  She was Rai.

  Or was she?

  Who am I? Who are you? What’s happening?

  Then it was gone, soon as it had come.

  Roan was behind his own eyes, again.

  “Why did you lie?” She barely moved her lips.

  He shook his head. Her paper shirt was torn. With one hand she held the pieces together at her neck.

  “You can’t tell me,” she said, not a question. It was part of this secret, which had grown to something horrific in Kal’s mind, that he kept from her.

  “You said if I guessed, you’d confirm,” she said, calling back to the time in the cave, when he’d been supposed to tell her then, before they’d been distracted by rubyglass. And touching. On purpose? Was that why he’d shown her the rubyglass? Why he’d touched her?

  “Mech,” she said. “Mech did something to you.”

  Roan didn’t move a muscle as he looked at her. His eyes shone, glimmered in the low light, giving nothing away.

  “Something went wrong. You had to land on Sextant. Got a—a distress call, maybe, or a strange reading, or it was a secret order the Ocean never knew about, to land on Sextant. When you landed, you found another ship, already there.”

  Roan swallowed. She saw his Adam’s apple move slightly. It was enough to forge on. She took her biggest gamble yet.

  “It was the Land.”

  He might have been a statue.

  She had forgotten about the tear in her paper suit, forgotten about her hair tangled about her shoulders. All she saw was the images in her head of the Land. “Something happened in the portal, split time and space, but maybe you got into the same layer of time as the one you’d split from. And in the other timeline the Land landed on Sextant. And in yours it did too, but you found yourselves already there.”

  Roan dropped his eyes to the floor.

  “Some of you died on Sextant. Some of you were brought back and incarcerated on the Land. You said Cooley had Flicker wipe everyone’s memory. But you,” she smiled, “you poked around in the Land, and you found them. Maybe you even found yourself.

  “What I think happened is that Mech took you over. Maybe one of you has Mech inside, and the other doesn’t. Or maybe there is only one Roan, but he’s been colonized. So Mech and--and Rai found a new way to pass information between each other.”

  Roan dropped his head into his hands. She’d seen him do it once before, after he’d hauled her out of the Land. She could have sworn this was Roan now, all Roan, but how could she trust it anymore? She felt like herself, right now. But was her knowledge all her own? Had Rai seeped in without her knowing? Could Rai hide from Kal inside Kal’s own mind?

  “If we let them communicate, they might figure out how to take over the whole planet.” His voice was deep and husky, but it was his.

  “Let them communicate through us, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  She sat frozen on the bed.

  “It has to be over, Kal.”

  “Over,” she said.

  “We can’t touch.”

  “Cooley knows? Cooley believes that’s what’s happened?”

  “No. I know.”

  “You know more than Cooley?”

  He nodded.

  “What are you doing, Roan?”

  “I’m trying to save every person on this planet, as well as the ones yet to come.”

  “Why can’t you tell the captains?”

  “You’re a captain.”

  “In name only,” she said.

  “No. In fact. In the act. You proved yourself.”

  “Who are you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Roan?”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “Are there two of you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me.” Kal’s voice rose at the end, so the me was almost screamed. He reached out his hand to her mouth, but stopped short of touching her.

  “We don’t have to touch for it to happen,” she said bitterly. “Didn’t you notice?”

  “I don’t think we can exchange information without it. So if we don’t touch, we’re safe.” He stumbled over the end of his last words. “Or they’re safer. The rest.”

  “Safe in hell. Something bad’s gone down, and you’re hiding it. Cooley’s hiding it. Who’s the villain in this, Roan? Cooley? Or you?”

  “It’s not me, no matter what you think.” He didn’t seem to care much about convincing her.

  “You lied as smooth as if you did it for a living, in there with that little tribunal.”

  “I know.”

  “Aren’t you going to say it wasn’t you?”

  He didn’t answer. His eyes were cold and light. For the first time she hated them.

  “Did you take some of it?” he said.

  “Take some of what?”

  “The rubyglass.” He voice was quiet and icy.

  “You gave me a piece.” His expression made her sit back from him. “Don’t you remember?”

  “What did you do with it?”

  It burned in the pocket of her trousers, slung lazily over the hook in the corner with some of her few other clothes. She willed herself not to look at them.

  “Why?”

  “It’s not safe to have it.”

  “What does it do?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re not alone anymore, Kal.”

  “What is happening?” Kal gripped her own head, as Roan had held his.

  “I think you know more than you’re saying,” he said.

  She hated him being like this, cold and untrusting.

  “Did you know Rai had colonized you?”

  “No!”

  “You saw it happen on the Ocean. You knew more about what could go wrong. You had Sif right in front of you.”

  To be accused of something by Roan was the worst feeling she’d ever had while she was with him.

  “She promised she wouldn’t,” Kal said, misery making her choke on the words.

  “You believed her, after seeing what happened to Sif? What she’d tried to do to the other people on board? Why, Kal?”

  “You spoke with Mech’s voice,” she hissed. “If you didn’t know, how would I know? Or did you know?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t know, until after the roller.”

  “How did you come up with that lie to the captain
s?” His presence seemed to fill the room, darkening the light and thickening the air. He was between her and the door.

  “As soon as I woke up, I knew what I had to do. When I opened my mouth I knew whose idea it was. I can’t explain it better than that.”

  “Who’s making you talk now? Who’s telling you what to say?” Kal had pushed herself back further on the bed, away from him.

  “It’s just me,” he said, his face tired and empty. “As far as I know.”

  “So you think it comes and goes?” she said.

  “Maybe.” He caught her eye. “Can you feel Rai?”

  “Only when…when it happened, just now, I thought I could feel it. Feel her. Or be her. I don’t know.”

  “And you could tell when she was gone?”

  “She can’t ever really be gone, can she, if she’s there? I could be wrong, though. When I heard Mech’s voice, I thought the same thing could have happened to me. I could be wrong.”

  “You know as much as I do,” he said. “Or more.”

  “That’s not true.” She twisted the sheet in her hands, over and over, into a tight spiral. “You know what happened on Sextant.”

  He shrugged.

  “Are you never going to tell me?”

  She couldn’t read his expression. He didn’t speak for a long time, so long she thought he was preparing himself to explain it all, trying to find the words.

  “I’ll never tell you, if I can help it.”

  “You promised you would, before the cave.”

  “I know.”

  “Was it just to get me in there? Was that Mech, too?”

  Kal felt the same flash of fear and revulsion she’d felt in the astrolab, in that last flying moment when she’d seen Sif launch herself in attack. He was another like Sif. He could attack her, kill her at any moment, if that was what Mech decided he should do. And there would be nothing she could do about it.

  “I don’t know.”

  What had been what Roan wanted, and what had been Mech?

  If he couldn’t tell, how could she tell what she wanted, apart from what Rai did? Was Kal’s attraction to Roan really Rai’s command to communicate with Mech?

  17

  Ground

  Later, in the sunshine and wind, Kal escaped the warmth of her room for a long walk by herself, trying to parse out her situation—her own mind. Was this real? Or was something else going on she couldn’t discern?

  Roan had left her room in the night quietly. He hadn’t tried to speak to her since then. He’d done his usual rounds without her.

  Was it rational? Was it real?

  Could some sort of distortion of the gel created the sound she heard, making Roan’s voice sound like Mech’s? Was her own fear of being colonized provoking her sensation of looking through Rai’s eyes?

  And most of all, what would Noor say?

  Noor was the voice of reason. It was Noor who Kal should seek out.

  Since the pod had landed, they had only briefly spoken. Kal was so thoroughly in the midst of her own dramatic life on Demeter, it was as if the people from the pod weren’t that real compared to who was already here. Kal was somewhere in between, part Demetrian already, part the crew of the Ocean, part the captain who bonded with Rai and brought the Ocean home to Demeter.

  The wind was constant, the color of the sky blue-green and strange. She didn’t know what it meant. This wasn’t her country. At home it meant a warning, when the sky roiled itself into a nauseous green, casting wheezy shadows, trees unreal and shrunken. The sky could eat them all. Lowering itself down, bowing low over the grasses, it could interfere with all their plans if it wanted to. If it wanted to show its power.

  They were the ants on the surface and at its mercy when it twisted into itself, rumpling the air into spirals tracing crusades along whimsical paths.

  Why did the sky ask for souls and trees? What did it want when it lowered itself, proving its eminence, stealing the things creatures made or the sun grew?

  Here the sky wasn’t quite the sickly cast she remembered from warning skies at home. It was still too blue for that. It was the color of Tess’s eyes, a watery blue-green that could turn cool grey in the right light, or the wrong.

  Instead of the sky, Kal looked at the ground. She’d worn herself slight trails in the high grasses outside of camp where she liked to walk.

  She could breathe away from camp. Even inside the airy biohab she felt enclosed and pinched. Outside was freer but wrong, not what outside was supposed to be. Her ankle turned in a hole hidden by grasses. That and a stab of homesickness brought Kal to her knees. The grasses under her palms were thick and crackly, sharp-edged. She put her forehead to the ground and tried to breathe.

  If she closed her eyes she could imagine she were home, in the emptiness of the land she knew. Not this imposter.

  Emptiness where the call of crows should be. Silence where the clicking of insects would crescendo around her once she became still, at home.

  With slow despair, she lay herself down on the path, hidden, her cheek cut by dry golden grasses, her hipbones pushed against the thrum of the planet.

  Would her bones like it here?

  What would the Huntress in the stars say?

  What would Wóhpe, daughter of the Moon and Sun? She had opened the door for Kal. Did that mean Kal was supposed to be here?

  Kal fell through the ground. In the cavern beneath were slow rains and ruby crystals, shining even in the dark. The water collected, gathered around her, rising slowly enough for her to know she would drown.

  She opened her eyes. It was cold. Her body was numb, her hands and knees stiff where they pressed into the ground. She stuck her head up like a turtle. Nothing but grasses shuffling in the wind.

  Standing up in stages, Kal looked for signs. She turned to where she’d come from, to walk back.

  Instead of the ground, which was a dusty shadow at her feet now, or the darkening sky, she looked ahead, scanning the horizon, of which the camp was only a tiny sliver. The wind had died down.

  18

  Intelligence

  The usual cozy glow around the warmth of the plaster termite mound (as it resembled) had gathered to itself the usual suspects, all listening to Crenshaw read to them from Chance Talon. He had been catching up those who hadn’t been there the last time, Kal could hear. She hadn’t missed anything.

  She dragged a flopper closer. Roan was on the other side of the room. She stayed on the outskirts, closer to Tess than anyone else.

  Chance looked—and leaped.

  She landed on someone who shrieked a long cry of shock and pain and crumpled beneath her. Chance felt relief in her feet from hearing someone else call out their agony. She’d chosen her landing spot well. Chance wasn’t hurt, other than the skin burned away from the soles of her feet.

  Chance rolled off the collection of limbs flattened by her bodyweight.

  With a gasp of horror, Chance saw who it was she’d heard plotting in the darkness. Before she could tear her eyes from that guilty figure writhing on the floor, she heard footsteps racing away. Her head jerked up to see who had disappeared into the darkness, but she was too late. With her feet in tatters, Chance knew she couldn’t catch them. She’d concentrate on who was in front of her. That would be effort enough.

  The captain was trying to crawl away. Chance whipped her head back and forth at the thought of the betrayal of this person she’d trusted with everything. The person they’d all trusted with everything.

  Chance gripped the captain’s ankle with uncompromising force. The captain kicked her in the face. Chance took the blow as stoically as she had the burn to her feet, willing herself forward despite the blood running freely from her mouth. She could hardly feel the pain anymore in her rising anger at the captain’s guilty presence at this meeting, this collusion with evil that couldn’t be explained away.

  Chance removed her consecrator from its holster, put it up against the captain’s calf, and squeezed.

 
; Kal stood up. Everyone looked at her. She turned on her heel and left the room.

  Outside, in front of the biohab, she looked at the lights from the other structures and breathed in the air. Even after all this time to acclimate, it still wasn’t satisfying to draw a deep breath. She always wanted more, to get the rarefied oxygen into the deepest part of her lungs.

  A hiss of the door and she felt someone beside her.

  When she turned her head she was surprised to see Cooley.

  “Captain Sarno and I have been talking about your ethicist.”

  Kal kicked the ground. “Not my ethicist.”

  “The former ethicist. Sif Elfa.”

  “And?”

  Before Cooley could answer, the door opened again. Sasha, this time.

  “A council,” Sasha said. “About time, wouldn’t you say?”

  “All three of us?” Cooley said.

  “She’s earned the right,” Sasha said.

  Cooley nodded. She jerked her head for them to follow.

  The darkling light had finally completed its exit from the atmosphere. Only the lights from the other structures lit their way. Cooley led them to one Kal had never entered. Cooley coded herself in and stood aside so they could enter. Following Sasha, Kal stepped into a meeting room with three chairs facing each other, an empty space in the middle. The chairs were made of flopper material but formed into static shapes, ergonomic but more formal than the moldable floppers from the biohab. Hooded backs made them look official and a bit grand. Cooley gestured for Kal to take one. She did, shifting in hers to squeaking noises from the material she could have done without.

  It was comfortable. Her back relaxed for the first time that day, with support in just the right places. Cooley sealed the door and the other two seated themselves. Gentle spotlights glowed upon each chair’s inhabitant, making it easy to see everyone without a bright overhead light to strain the eyes. Kal felt a faint smile settle on her own mouth. This felt like some degree of respect.