Call Forth the Waves

by L. J. Hatton

  Esther looked from Ollie to me and back again. She ducked her head and hurried out, watching the ground as she went. The others, followers all, went with her.

  “I’m not sure eating words was what Baba had in mind for breakfast,” Jermay whispered, grinning.

  Ollie had remained behind, refusing to be dismissed by a girl he had no intention of listening to.

  “We’ll finish this discussion later,” he said—to Baba, not me, which was enough to bandage his ego. He decided it was time to go.

  I flicked my wrist, and Flame appeared in the door, blocking his exit. Primal-fear triggers have their uses.

  “Winnie is my friend,” I told him.

  “I’m sure she is,” he said to me, then turned to Winnie. “I don’t have anything against you, personally, but—”

  But that was not an apology, and I was still cranky.

  “I try very hard to keep my temper in check—bad things happen when I don’t—but you aren’t making it easy. Winnie isn’t just my friend, she’s family. She saved my life more than once, and of the people who arrived with me, she is not the one you need to worry about. The Commission has turned the world upside down looking for me—and for good reason. Nafiza is right. Winnie does accompany destruction. She came with me.”

  “We’re only protecting ourselves and our families.” He was far less boisterous without the angry mob.

  “So am I,” I said. “Now, I’m going to repair what you’ve managed to break, and I suggest you keep in mind that anything my father built, I can take apart just by looking at it wrong. Ask the boys Beryl brought in, if you need clarification on that.”

  I whistled, and Flame shrunk to his hummingbird form, flew into the kitchen, and lit on my hand.

  “I don’t like bullies. Don’t threaten my friends. Winnie would have helped this place thrive, and she could have helped protect it. Banishing her was a grave error on your part. Listen very carefully when I say that trying it again would be a fatal mistake.”

  Xerxes and Bijou took the cue I gave them and trumpeted out a roar of agreement for good measure. After that, there really wasn’t anything Ollie could say. He attempted an intimidating glare, but I’d faced down Nye, Arcineaux, and a table full of their cronies. One guy with an overdeveloped sense of self was a shadow puppet by comparison. He stalked out the door and slammed it behind him.

  Baba, Nola, my sister, and my friends were stunned, and since I didn’t have to pretend anymore, so was I. I hadn’t thought of what to do if Ollie decided to call my bluff.

  “You are my favorite person on or off this planet.” Winnie squeezed me so tight, I thought she might leave bruises.

  “What about me?” Birch asked, with an exaggerated pout.

  “Booted to second place.” She kicked at him.

  “Do I have a shot at third?” Nola asked. “You might have to spot me some points for coming into the game late.”

  “You start at fifth, behind Baba and Dev.” Winnie let me go and held her hand out to her cousin. “Where you go from there is up to you.”

  “I’ll take it, and I’m sorry. I should have trusted you.” Nola grabbed Winnie’s hand and pulled her into another embrace.

  “I think we’d best get ourselves to the town square, if we’re all done with the hugging,” Anise said. “We’ve got a shot at changing a few minds, depending on what we’re able to do over there. I know every one of you is capable of performing under pressure. So, everybody hit your marks, take your bows, and make this the best show of your lives.” She tactfully sidestepped the threats I’d issued, which none of us wanted to follow through on.

  CHAPTER 13

  Whenever things got particularly tense, I turned the moment into a Show performance and imagined myself announcing it. Repairing the Mile’s power core was one of those situations.

  Welcome to The Show, dear patrons. If you will direct your attention to the center ring, you’ll be amazed by a feat never before attempted by mortal girl! Watch as our ringmaster takes the stage to balance enough worry to crush a full-grown elephant, all on her skinny shoulders! Marvel as she navigates the dangerous waters of an unknown society and its technology, all while juggling the locals’ mistrust and trepidation! And since this is The Show, dear friends, she’ll do it all from miles above the Earth, with no safety net! Let’s hope she doesn’t blow it! (’Cause chances are, she’s gonna blow it.)

  Cue the thunderous applause, and ignore the fact that someone was always hoping the trick would fail so they could watch the fall.

  That was Ollie’s role for the day. He stayed with the group assembled to watch me falter. They’d already seen evidence of Birch’s ability; I was the one unproven in their eyes. The heir of Magnus Roma, laying claim to skills I couldn’t possibly possess. All I needed was another ill-timed power outage.

  Winnie, Jermay, and Nola stood nearby, fingers crossed. Birdie and her friends were there, too, but they were there with the expectation of success, waiting to cheer at the finish. Birch and Anise were left to deal with Esther, while Klok had stayed behind with Baba at the house, probably planning our getaway and type-mumbling insults about the neighbors.

  I’d performed in front of live crowds my whole life, and never had the jitters so bad. Between the unpleasantry from the kitchen and the nagging feeling left over from the night before, things couldn’t go smoothly—but they did. The repairs were simple. They couldn’t have been done with physical hands or tools, but it didn’t take me much longer to untangle the problems with the Mile’s power core than it had to fix Baba’s house. I restored everything to the settings my father had chosen as optimum, closed it up, and waited for the system to reboot.

  Talking to machines was surpassing second nature and moving into first.

  “That’s it?” asked a woman in the crowd. “Nothing’s changed.”

  She didn’t understand that you couldn’t rush the payoff. Setup was the most important part of a routine, and it took time to execute. Thankfully, not enough time to reignite the mob.

  Someone yipped, hopping sideways into the person beside them. It happened again and again, much like the way my tours reacted to the Constrictus when he raised sections of his metal snake body and lifted people off the ground without warning.

  “Look at the sidewalk!” Wren shouted.

  Everyone obediently checked their feet.

  A cement-like polymer bubbled up through the cracks, filling them and washing over the top to restore the original finish. Even the shoeprints and debris dissolved. Without the fog that had plagued our arrival, the walkways looked amazing.

  “Hey!”

  “Over there!”

  “It worked!”

  Yes, it did.

  Broken buildings recycled pieces no longer attached to them, and repaired themselves. New fronts superimposed over old stores and houses, while several buildings shook from the stress of internal repairs. The conglomeration of storage units that functioned as a town hall branched out with new wings, and another floor built itself above the rest. If the protocols had never been interrupted, all of that work would have been done in real time, as things were needed. No one would have noticed it happening. The few years of exposure to the Mile’s harsh winds and other environmental oddities had left things with enough decay that the restoration was spectacular. Birch’s new plants would make it better, adding color and beauty to an otherwise drab metal vista.

  “I guess you really do take after your dad,” Ollie said grudgingly. It was tempting to tell him that I got my temper from my sisters and introduce him to the worst parts of Nim and Vesper. Waterspouts and hurricanes. The flood and the gale.

  The Mile made a better advocate for us than we did ourselves. The same people who had filled Baba’s kitchen to demand we take Winnie and leave were now rejoicing for what we’d done.

  Off the square was a market made of stalls and tables that folded up and reopened into a new configuration, now with awnings attached to their poles. New, higher fences p
opped up, along with trash cans and benches there’d been no room to accommodate before.

  “Do you think it fixed the park, too?” Birdie asked.

  “The only way to know is to check,” I told her.

  She ran off on tiptoe with Dev and Wren. Dev caught them by their shoulders and whisked them all out of sight in a cloud of sparking, cinnamon-scented smoke that made the Mile smell like our old midway.

  I should have known it was too good to last.

  The haze behind Dev’s teleportation hadn’t had time to lift before a new cloud appeared to darken my day. Nafiza whirled into the square like a woman possessed, desperate for someone to listen to her.

  “The order’s changing. The heart is false. It changed the order.”

  She was screeching, tearing at the edges of her shawl and stopping short to avoid obstacles that weren’t actually in her path.

  “The order’s changing. It’s all collapsing,” she said in manic English before switching to a language I didn’t recognize.

  That was one skill I definitely didn’t inherit from my father. He spoke enough bits and pieces of different languages to be conversational on every continent. What he couldn’t put into words, he conveyed with his hands. I could only mimic sounds and voices. No doubt I could have repeated Nafiza’s ranting back to her, but I would’ve had no understanding of the words.

  She scrambled from person to person within the gathered crowd, staring into eyes and faces until she found me.

  “The heart is false,” she announced.

  Whatever that meant, it was of the utmost importance.

  “The heart of what?” Jermay asked.

  She tried to answer, but the words were fighting her. Either they wouldn’t come out or something in the way her touch worked was preventing her from saying what she wanted to and trying to force her to say things she didn’t.

  “You know.” The words shot out of her mouth like she’d been choking on them.

  “We know what?” Winnie asked. “Is it a person we know? Tell us who.”

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “But you know. I see the heart. The heart is false. The heart betrays. That’s the order, but it changes the order. You’re not supposed to let the order change.”

  She doubled over, grabbing her stomach as she sank to the ground on her hands and knees like she was about to be sick. Instead of throwing up, she shouted words in the soulless monotone she’d used on Baba’s porch, but she’d transitioned back to English.

  The crowd began to whisper. A familiar, fearful hiss threading its way through the gaps, carrying doubt and the darkest of rumors. Whispers were small. No one noticed when they settled into ears or chewed away at better judgment. No one saw the details shift as they passed from mouth to mouth, growing grander and more sinister, adding volume to give them more power.

  Nafiza pounded her fists against the cement, but none of her gathered neighbors came to help.

  “They’re afraid of her,” Winnie said. “She had a fit like this before I was exiled. It only happens when something big is coming.”

  “I can’t see the order,” Nafiza said purposefully. “You’re there, and there, and there, and there. There’s too much overlap.” She stopped beating the cement and sat up on her knees to take a deep breath, staring at me and pointing to all the places I supposedly occupied.

  “It’s feedback,” Nola said. “I can see it. Whatever changed has left too many variables for her to process. Possible events are piling on top of each other. She can’t filter them.”

  It’s a fact of human nature that fear will only hold people back for so long. Eventually, if a crowd is large enough to believe they’re stronger than the thing or person they distrust, they’ll surge. The only way to head off the debacle brewing around us was to get Nafiza on her feet and coherent enough to reassure her neighbors that both she and her foresight had calmed down.

  “What changed the order?” I asked, kneeling beside Nafiza. “Can you tell us that?”

  “Lies!” She slapped herself on the head. “I can’t make it come out straight. Too many lies. A heart that lies . . . no . . . that’s not right. Help me! Catch the stones as they fall. Fall up! Fall up! Too late.”

  “Give her a shock,” Jermay suggested. “Maybe it’ll help.”

  As more people joined the ring that had formed around us, those nearest came closer.

  “If they keep boxing her in like this, she’s going to freak out,” Nola said.

  “You mean we haven’t hit freaky yet?” Jermay asked.

  “Not even close.”

  “This is bad.” Winnie surveyed the crowd.

  Ollie had turned away from us. He was speaking and making grand gestures with his arms—gloating. The crowd loved it, and that love turned into frenzy. I suddenly missed Klok and every inch of his larger-than-life self that was dedicated to protecting me from harm.

  Machines were so much easier than people. They didn’t argue when you told them there was a glitch in their system making them act offensively, and if all else failed, you could cut the power and rebuild. Some humans were determined to be difficult, even if they had to create the difficulty themselves.

  “We should get her back to the house,” I said. “Your grandfather seems to calm her down.” Plus, Baba’s neighbors liked him too much to do more than annoy him with their ideas and complaints.

  “I don’t think we can get through,” Winnie said.

  In their rush to keep an eye on Nafiza’s breakdown, the crowd had closed ranks, making it impossible to pass through unless they let us.

  “You repaired it, but you can’t fix it,” Nafiza said. “Thank you for try-failing.”

  She patted my hand. Her way of saying we did our best, I guess.

  “Baba can’t talk them all down,” Winnie said. “They’d rather listen to the person shouting than the one speaking sensibly.”

  “What changed?” I asked Nafiza desperately. “Tell us what changed and we’ll put it back.”

  She faltered, shaking off her trance into startled lucidity.

  “I don’t know—NO—sorry. There are seven of you here, one still working on the power core, three at the house. Which one? Which one are you?”

  I took her hand.

  “Me. This is here. This is now. I’m the real me. When did the order shift?”

  I knew better than to say that . . .

  “Never ask me that! Never when! When is then and now and always forever.”

  Nafiza went back to hitting herself and chanting in that foreign language.

  “I can tell you when things changed—the moment you arrived with her,” Ollie said, nodding at Winnie. “False heart, lies, and betrayer. Another warning of impending danger. I’d say that’s a pretty clear description of someone destined to usher disaster to our doorsteps.”

  A man of original thought, he wasn’t. He had one argument and made it ad nauseam, hoping to wear down his detractors.

  His plan backfired.

  “I’ve had years to bring the wardens here if I wanted to, you idiot,” Winnie said. “This was my home! The place I was born and the only life I knew. You never even gave me a chance to defend myself. I was too young to defend myself!”

  “We’re the ones who can’t defend ourselves against you! Two words out of that cursed mouth, and you could have us all jumping off the rim.”

  “Why would I do that? Why would anyone do that? I protected you! No matter what they did to me, I never said a word about any of you. Do you want to see proof? Is that it? I can show you!”

  She held up her arms so her sleeves fell from her wrists and showed her scars.

  “You gave me these—and these.”

  She moved on to the neck of her shirt.

  “Your names are inscribed across my back and down my legs. They’re burned into my veins. I thought of every one of you every time they hurt me, because you’re the reason they were able to. I never did anything to any of you, and I held my tongue for years
! Are you proud of what you turned me into? Would you like to see the rest?”

  She reached for the hem of her shirt, like she was going to rip it over her head for a visual aid. Her eyes were darkening toward black.

  “Whoa.” I pushed her hands down. “One touch overload at a time. Take a breath before you do something you’ll regret.”

  “Anything I say to him, I won’t regret!”

  “Have any of you bothered to notice that she still isn’t using her touch to defend herself or her friends?” Nola asked. “Even with all of you ganging up on her, she hasn’t forced any of you to do anything. I don’t know how she’s managed. I couldn’t.”

  “I would have made them all cluck like chickens,” Jermay said.

  “I’m not sure humor’s the way to go here,” I told him.

  From the time I could walk and memorize lines well enough to speak them back on cue, I had led tours through The Show’s Caravan of Wonder, introducing people to ghoulish absurdities and monstrous machines. I knew what fear looked like because it was my job to cultivate the crowd’s mood with slight changes in my voice and manner. Emotion is contagious in crowds. People in the back relied on those up front to be their eyes and to cue their responses to things they couldn’t see on their own—that was how mobs started. One person panicked, and everyone else assumed there was a good reason.

  Lit match to paper.

  Ollie’s tells were subtler, but still present. He tightened his jaw and set his feet boxing-width apart, ready to absorb a blow. He narrowed his eyes to tighten his focus on his perceived adversary. Conscious decision or not, he was daring Winnie to try to make him move. He wanted her to prove him right. It would have solidified his control. He thought.

  He had no idea what he was dealing with.

  When Winnie faced Warden Arcineaux, she’d been calm and coolly calculating. She’d had little choice in the matter, considering the experiments he’d done on her physically prevented her from defending herself, but she’d found a loophole and those restrictions no longer applied. These people, they unhinged her. She was on the verge of giving Ollie what he wanted.