Sea of Strangers

by Erica Cameron

  Why didn’t she ask me for stories? I get an answer as soon as she pokes desosa-laced ink into my skin. A tingling rush of energy bursts through my chest. It’s distracting. And she was right to warn us about fighting back—this is a mental itch I want to scratch until it’s gone. It’d be so easy to do it unthinkingly.

  I push the urge down and focus on Tessen’s description of Sagen sy Itagami and the relentless ocean our city overlooks. He talks about the dangers of the desert and elaborately details the methods we use for everything from farming to education and training.

  Concentrating on Tessen helps, but the urge to itch becomes an urge to peel that section of skin off my bones to stop it from feeling like bugs have burrowed underneath. Like it has every time I’ve gotten even the most minor injury since the susuji, the desosa attempts to heal the irritation. I don’t let it. I shove it back, down, away. Let this wound stay. This one I want to keep.

  The energy does not want to comply. Soanashalo’a has to go over the lines several times, re-etching segments that the desosa wipes away. After several long minutes, I finally force it to listen to me and accept the ink as a new part of myself. I don’t think I’d be able to do this with anything more dangerous than ink—the desosa’s compulsion to heal is too powerful.

  But it works. A looping, swirling symbol bisected by lines of various lengths is now etched into my skin. The whole design is about as tall as my middle finger and as wide as three fingers together. I like seeing it against my brown skin more than I thought I would. It’s a lot nicer to look at than the scars I used to collect.

  I try to explain what it felt like to Tessen, wanting to prepare my oversensitive basaku for the sensations. In the end, I do what he did, sitting nearby and telling stories about home. When he holds out his hand, the motion as stiff and tense as the look on his face, I take it gently and trace the tiny scars on his skin as I talk.

  When it’s finished some time later, he lets out a long, shuddering breath. “That wasn’t unbearable, but I’ll be very happy to never do it again.”

  Me, too. But I keep my agreement silent as I inspect the mark on his skin, one that should look the same as mine. The design does—they are all but identical—yet his skin is inflamed and raised and looks far more painful.

  My expression must be giving me away, because he smiles and taps my newly marked, and not at all inflamed, skin and says, “Andofume.”

  “I knew that.” And yet I forget what it means for a moment. Sighing, I squeeze his hand. “How long do you think it takes for a mind to adapt to something like this?”

  “I stopped trying to predict your mind a long time ago.”

  “That is such a lie,” I insist, rolling my eyes and smiling when Soanashalo’a laughs. No one is better at predicting me than Tessen. The reason he got involved with our hunt for Yorri in the first place was because of how good he was at it. But the more important issue now is the katsujo. “How do these work?”

  Soanashalo’a’s expression grows serious. “They simply work. This one is not meant to find sources of desosa like you are looking for—no one knew they were real, so I doubt any mage in the world has a spell or symbol for that. What these do is connect you more deeply to the desosa to help you use it to find something lost, or something incredibly important to you.”

  Tessen leans in. “Anything?”

  “Any living thing or place connected to the desosa—or capable of producing it. It does not help if you have misplaced a book, for example,” she says, smirking.

  “How do we use it to find the katsujos, then?” I ask.

  “You need to focus through the symbol with the object of your search firmly held in your mind. It should feel like a string pulling you in the direction you need to travel, faint of course, but noticable if you are paying attention. If you need to intensify the connection, touch the mark and focus on it. And on what you need to find.”

  “This seems pretty simple. Why is it so secret?” I ask.

  “Because there is the potential for darkness in everyone, and this could easily be twisted and used for reasons a lot less noble than yours.” Soanashalo’a looks down, her expression somber. “This can track almost anything or anyone, Khya. That kind of power is not for everyone.”

  Track anyone. A frisson of energy shoots through me, eddying under the symbol on my chest. Could this help me find Yorri when we get back to Shiara?

  This could cut hours or days off our search, and they’re giving it to us even though it so clearly goes against all the secretiveness they’ve built their society on. It makes me want to grab Soanashalo’a’s bright red tunic and kiss her.

  Instead, I look down at the mark, wondering if I should’ve chosen a wrist like Tessen. Easier to access. It does work, though. Now that I know what I’m looking for, I can feel a very faint tug toward the southeast. When I meet Tessen’s eyes and lift my chin in that direction, he nods absently. “Not only there. I can feel at least three lines.”

  “I thought it might be stronger in you because of your skills.” Soanashalo’a seems pleased she was right. “Even so, it’ll take time for you to learn how to feel the differences between those threads and determine which is the one you need.”

  “Thank you.” I trace the symbol with my fingertip, wishing I knew what else I could say to explain how much her help has meant.

  The smile she gives me hints she might already know. But there are shadows in her eyes. “I hope this will help you find what you need, but it is only a guide. And not guaranteed.”

  “That’s all we need,” I say as I redress to prepare for the bitterly wet cold outside her warm wagon. Hopefully, I’m right this time.

  …

  I was wrong.

  Tessen’s sense of the katsujos is stronger than mine, which I expected given how sharp his senses are, so we soon decide that I can probably only feel the strongest or closest of the veins. We hope that if we choose our direction based on that, it might move the search faster. It doesn’t; no matter how hard we focus on the symbol, the katsujos we find are unusable.

  The first, five days after the marks, was under the path of a deep river. It takes eight days to reach the second katsujo, and another four days to find the third. Both are still too far underground to be any use. It’d take days, at least, to dig us deep enough to draw power, and that’s too long in the same spot.

  We’re still more than a hundred miles from Rido’iti which is, according to Soanashalo’a, our best chance at a ship. It’s possible to reach the city in less than a week if we travel straight there, but getting there is only part of the problem. We need a useable katsujo first.

  “Your boruikku needs to give us something more useful than this,” Rai mutters after our third failure.

  After they learned we had a hanaeuu we’la maninaio mark, Rai and Etaro told us they’d invented a word to describe the style of magic—boruikku. Tessen and I took to using the word, too, after that; Soanashalo’a’s name for the symbol is probably as closely guarded as the symbol itself.

  “Maybe it would’ve been faster to go to Kaisuama.” Sanii worries eir bottom lip between eir teeth. “At least there we knew what we’d find.”

  I’ve had the same fear since the day we found the first katsujo—but we can’t change course now.

  “There’s another source. Southeast.” Tessen’s left thumb is pressed in the center of the boruikku, and his eyes are closed. “I can’t tell if it’s any better than the others, but it’s there.”

  “At least it’s in the direction of Rido’iti.” I head back to the wagons. We got here before midday, so we can travel a while longer before the ukaiahana’lona are too worn out.

  Exactly two days later, we reach the next katsujo. I want to bang my head against a wall when I see the river cutting a path through the sloping hills. The energy is closer to the surface here than it’s been anywhere else, but even though I can feel it bubbling and flowing, it’s more like looking down at a river from the top of a cliff than being
able to wade into the water.

  Then Miari kneels to touch the ground. “How far down do you need to go?”

  “At least a hundred yards.” Tessen runs his hand over his hair—scruffy and long now since he hasn’t cut it in moons.

  We’re so close, standing exactly above where we need to be, and we can’t get there. Worse, the only katsujo I can feel now, other than the one we left two days ago, is west of us. Far west by the faintness of the boruikku’s tug.

  “There are caves.” Miari looks up, eyes alight. “This whole section of the range is riddled with caves, and if most of the digging has already been done by nature, I can probably get us at least half as far down as you need to be in a few hours. A full day at most if the caves have to be reinforced before I break from one to another.”

  My pulse picks up, tremulous hope kicking the pace higher. “Find us an entrance, Miari. Take Ty—” I cut myself off, pain welling up like blood from a wound. I can’t send Tyrroh with her to help, because Tyrroh is gone. The excitement in Miari’s eyes fades, and her gaze drops. I clear my throat and start again. “Take Nairo, Etaro, Sanii, and Tsua—if she wants to come. They’ll give you light and can help move some of the stone if you need it.”

  She nods, expression still drawn, and stands. “I’ll ask Wehli to come, too.”

  “Shouldn’t he—” No. I’ve already seen that the injury isn’t affecting him the way they told us it would. “Whatever you need.”

  “I’ll go down with them,” Tessen says. “I’ll know better when we’re getting close.”

  Everyone moves quickly, arranging the supplies they’ll need and then setting up camp nearby. The rest of us stay aboveground, out of their way, but I don’t go far. I find a grass-covered spot near the entrance and sit with a map of southern Ryogo in my lap, a ward above me to keep the pounding rain off. It doesn’t take long for Sanii to join me.

  Eir eyes are wide and pleading. “Are we finally close to going home, Khya?”

  “No. We’re close to going to war.” I turn back to the map. “I’m not sure home exists.”

  “It can be reclaimed or rebuilt.” Sanii says this with so much force it’s like ey’s trying to make emself believe it.

  “Do you really think the clan will let us come back? We left. We broke almost every law that mattered and turned against the Miriseh.” I shake my head, trying not to imagine the welcome we’d get. “If we defeat Varan, save Yorri, and live through both, I hope the Denhitrans or the Tsimosi let us in, because I don’t see us ever being allowed inside Itagami again.”

  “You never know. You do keep pulling off the impossible.”

  I look up, raising my eyebrows. “I do? This coming from the yonin who managed to create a sumai bond, discovered a secret Varan has kept for centuries, and knew exactly how to convince me to go against everything I’d been taught to help you.” Laughing softly, I fold the map. “Circumstance may have thrust me into command, but you’re just as responsible for getting us here as I am.”

  Ducking eir head, ey smiles and takes the map from my hands. Ey points to where we’re camped and talks about the fastest, safest way to Rido’iti. Ey’s not wrong to be concerned about our route, because there are so many cities and towns here. And more roads. And more chances for us to be seen by the Ryogans’ scattered network of garakyu spies.

  So, while Miari and the others are below us, clearing a path down to the katsujo, I plan paths with Sanii, both of us treating it like a puzzle and trying to think like Yorri. When the group comes back, covered with stone dust but smiling broadly, I know they’ve succeeded before any of them speak.

  “Rest well tonight,” Tsua says as we head back to camp. “We’ll start in the morning.”

  The words send a thrill of excitement through me, one that lingers, rising and falling in my veins like a tide all night. It never falls enough to allow sleep to come easily. I lay in the wagon’s bed for hours, keeping still to avoid waking Tessen, Sanii, or Ahta. When the others start getting up, I do, too, but I doubt I slept more than an hour or two. Whether because of the adrenaline or the susuji, the lack barely bothers me.

  We leave the camp when Tsua decides it’s morning—the storm is too thick overhead to give us much hint of the time—and everyone comes. There’s no reason for it, especially since I’m positive we’ll send them away once we’re ready to begin, but no one orders them away.

  Tsua and Etaro are leading the group, our fourteen bags of Imaku rock floating in midair between them like baby mykyns flying between their parents. Climbing down into the caves is strange, so reminiscent of descending into Itagami’s undercity and yet entirely different. The air is too damp. The stone is too dirty and cold. The passages are too narrow. The desosa in the air is so strong it vibrates against my skin, infinitely more powerful than anything I ever felt on Shiara. It’s different, but that’s good. It helps keep my mind here. It helps keep the tremulous excitement building in my chest from bubbling over.

  We really have found a katsujo. Finally, something is going right.

  When we reach the lowest cavern, Tsua and Etaro slowly upend each bag, keeping them low to avoid shattering the rocks and making sure they’re well away from our andofume. When they’re done, there’s a foot-wide rock line running the length of the cave. It’s the only thing odd about this cave—on the surface, it’s just a damp, cold bubble of air in gray stone. The immense power under the surface is invisible, but my feet buzz with it.

  This looks like nowhere important, but it feels like a place where marvels can happen, and I desperately need that to be true.

  Sanii, Tsua, Chio, Zonna, and I space ourselves out along the line. I’m glad Sanii finally learned how to channel the desosa. Even with the added endurance of the immortality, the amount of desosa we’re going to run through ourselves and into the stones is immense. More than I used to fix the katsujo in Kaisuama. It’d likely kill us if we were mortal. Having five of us working together on this instead of four will hopefully be enough.

  “Are you ready?” Miari stands near the entrance of the cave, the rest of the squad arrayed behind her. She’ll stay, with multiple wardstones to protect her from energy backlash, and she’ll reinforce the caves if our work starts to degrade their structure.

  Tsua nods, her eyes on the line of black stone. “Everyone but Miari, clear out.”

  Tessen clearly doesn’t like leaving, but when he stops in front of me, he only lingers long enough to brush his fingers down my cheek and murmur, “Be careful,” before following the others up to the surface.

  Then the six of us are alone with rock that, according to the Ryogans, the Kaisubeh once dropped from the sky to help the Ryogans destroy people exactly like us.

  “Somehow this feels like standing on the desert plain during a lightning storm.” Sanii swipes eir finger through the moisture on the cave’s floor.

  “I’ve done that.” I force my voice to stay light. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Not all of us are as reckless as you.” Ey rubs eir eyes, continuing before I can respond. “It might be less terrifying if I could see it as well as I can feel it.”

  Ey has a point. It was a little less unnerving when we were in Kaisuama because not only could we see proof of the power under our feet in the light seeping through the cracked stone, we were in an open space. Clearly that area wasn’t without its dangers, but this feels worse. We’re enclosed in a small cave we had to dig our way into, and there is nothing here that hints at the power under our feet. Only mottled gray rock. As far as anyone can see, the oddest thing about the cave is our presence in it. And the line of black rocks we’ve brought with us.

  “We’re creating something that can kill us as easily as it can kill the bobasu,” Sanii says after a moment. “I just want to make sure we’re all aware of that.”

  Zonna huffs a strained laugh. “Oh, I am fully aware of that.”

  Chio and Tsua, their expressions more serious than their son’s, share a long look. Then Chio says, “Rea
dy, vanafitia?”

  She grips his hand and nods, but says nothing else.

  It’s time.

  As soon as I grip the katsujo’s desosa, I feel like I’m falling, dropping down into the vein of energy like I had to do in Kaisuama. I’m engulfed in light that’s somehow every color I’ve ever seen and nothing but brilliant white. I scramble upward, trying to hold on to myself, but I can’t. I can’t and that should terrify me.

  It doesn’t. The energy embracing me feels like feathers and niora fur. It feels like the first rays of the desert sun. There is warmth, light, and something brushing against my mind like curious fingers. And I’m not alone. Sanii, Tsua, Chio, and Zonna are here, too. Sanii looks at me with wide-eyed confusion, but the others are staring at our surroundings with nothing but awe.

  I follow their gaze just as a picture forms in the light, all those colors I saw before coalescing into a landscape that looks solid enough to touch. And there’s movement. Somehow, this feels like a memory, but it can’t be mine because I’m looking down at myself kneeling in the center of Kaisuama and working on the broken vein of power.

  Someone was watching me work. To them, a form of myself made of white light and smoke has sunk into the katsujo to work, and when that work is finished, when the katsujo is healed, relief crashes into me like a wave against a cliff.

  White wipes everything clean and leaves the five of us standing in what feels like solid light. And then we’re back in the cave, all five of us hovering over ourselves. The energy we began pulling up from the katsujo is still pouring into the black rocks, thick, bright rivers of desosa, beautifully multicolored threads of light, fill up the stones to the breaking point.

  Then the color of the desosa shifts. The threads of color wind together into one thick rope of pure white light, and what I thought was the limit of the stones disappears. More energy floods into them. More.

  It’s like there’s an extra hand on the katsujo, someone with the ability to bend the power of the entire vein to whatever purpose it wants. And right now someone seems to want to help us make a weapon more powerful than I’d even hoped was possible.