Numenera

by Monte Cook

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I like it.” It is an amazing piece of work, if not exactly designed for laying under the stars.

  “Not to interrupt your proposed plan…” she says.

  “But you’re going to interrupt my proposed plan.”

  “Yeah. I’m having trouble with my wristblades,” she says. “Watch.”

  Aviend adjusts the knives at her wrists, then flicks her palms to see if they work this time. The right one pops out, pointing right at Kyre. The left one doesn’t. Last time, the left one worked and the right one didn’t.

  “Skist,” she says. “Let’s hope I get to stick with infiltration and not assassination, because it doesn’t appear that I’d be very good at the latter.”

  “You won’t have to kill anyone,” he says. As if by saying it hard enough he can make it come true.

  “But I can if I want to, right? I mean, if I happen to come upon a purple-eyed powermonger in a dark hallway, just him and me, you’re not going to be mad at me if I try to take his last breath?”

  “I can think of far better reasons to be mad at you,” he says. “Besides, have you ever killed anyone? I mean, on purpose?”

  “Not on purpose, no,” she says. She pulls her jacket off, giving the act far more attention than it probably deserves. Even with two blades in the sleeves. She doesn’t want to look at Kyre. They have so few secrets.

  She lets the faulty blade mechanism keep her attention for as long as she can possibly let it. Hitting the button repeatedly. It still only works about half the time. Which wouldn’t be a huge deal, except that the mirror cutters are magnetized. They only work if both of them work. All or none.

  “Let me see,” he says.

  She holds out her wrists, grateful for his touch. Not just because he’s good at fixing things, but because he’s Kyre.

  “I don’t really want to go do this without you,” she says.

  “I know,” he says.

  “We always do this kind of thing together,” she says. “What if Quenn and I can’t communicate? What if everything goes cockwire? What if… argh. There are just so many what ifs.” She’s not one for nerves, usually. She’s one for doing. This thing is weird and new and she hates it, every bit.

  “It’s a good plan,” he says. “It’s your plan.”

  “Our plan,” she says. “But what if I screwed my part of it all up? What if it’s terrible?”

  “Your plans are never terrible. At least not when the rest of us get done fixing them. I mean, they start out a little…” He makes a hand gesture that essentially means slistovile shit.

  “You’re a horror,” she says. “I don’t even know why I put up with you.”

  “Honestly, me neither,” he says. “Do you want to say more about that, not on purpose bit?”

  She does and she doesn’t. But mostly she doesn’t. Kyre isn’t the kind to pester her if she says no about something, because he knows she means it. So she’d better decide for sure whether she wants to say yes or no.

  “No,” she says. “Maybe someday. But I don’t want to talk about it now.”

  “Then don’t,” he said. “Besides, I’m pretty sure we’ve scraped off enough well-healed scabs for one week. What do you say?”

  “I say I agree,” she says. And she does. “I also say I’d like to do something on my last night here that doesn’t involve blades or deaths or secrets.”

  “Considering that’s all your next week or so is looking to be filled with, I think that’s a fine request,” he says. “What’s your pre-infiltration pleasure?”

  “I was thinking…”

  He glances up from the mechanisms he’s working on. When he looks at her the way he’s looking at her now, she swears the edges of her brain start buzzing. Loud enough that she can actually hear them. Which, of course, is impossible. Isn’t it?

  Although lots of things she believed to be impossible are not anymore. So who’s to say. Maybe Kyre really does make her brain buzz.

  “That sounds like a fine plan to me,” she says. “After you fix my blades, please.”

  “Fixed,” he says.

  She laughs. “No, they’re no–” But they are. She flicks her hands and both wrist blades pop out in perfect unison. She does it again and again. “Nice,” she says.

  “Good incentive,” he says.

  He dives down on the bed, grinning at her. “Come and join me in my bed upon the stars.”

  “Below the stars, you mean?” She stands over him, reaching down for his raised hands.

  “Above, below. What’s the difference?”

  “Um… everything?”

  “Not when we’re talking about you and me and stars.”

  “Your logic is faulty,” she says.

  “How about this then: you are above me, like the stars. But I would like you below me, like… My analogy fell apart.”

  “Because you were going to call me a mattress?”

  He wrinkles his nose. “Yeah.”

  “Good choice to stop there then,” she says. “Your bed might be pretty, but it’s not terribly private.”

  “Since when do you care about things like privacy?” he asks. “Remember that time we–”

  “All right,” she says, laughing. “Fair point. I didn’t mean people, necessarily. I meant, you know. Whatever’s up there, looking down.”

  He tugs her down, releasing one hand so she can twist to land next to him. She falls, laughing, into the openness of his arms.

  “How many years do you think the stars have been watching humanity get naked and have sex and birth babies and kill each other over petty disagreements?” he asks.

  “Well, that went dark fast.”

  “You always say that about me.”

  “It’s not always a compliment, you know,” she says. “You don’t have to sound quite so smug.”

  “You love me. What other reason could I possibly need to own my smugness?”

  “Did someone tell you that?”

  “About thinking I’m right to be smug?”

  “About thinking you’re right that I love you.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Some cute girl told a cute boy that forever ago. And a hundred and forever years later, I heard it through word of mouth.”

  “Whose mouth?” she asks.

  He doesn’t answer her. He kisses her instead.

  And the stars, above or below or everywhere around them, shift and shine.

  They’ve been over the plans and over the plans. Possibly too many times by now. Still, Aviend worries that they’ve missed something. She dreams of hidden doorways and Rillent’s eyes and falling stars.

  When she wakes, the stars have gone out above them.

  “We missed something,” is the first thing she says. Putting it into the air means it’s true.

  “We’ll find it,” Kyre says. “You’ve got this. We’ve got this.” He’s not awake yet, eyes still closed, one arm across her. This is when he’s his most real, honest, opened-up self. If he says a thing while he’s caught in the space between sleep and wake, she knows how tender it is. How not to poke at it, but to take it like the gift of an egg. Fragile and promising.

  She believes in him and in the plan and in the team. Even if she doesn’t believe in herself. It’s not that she thinks she’ll fail – although she knows that’s a possibility for all of them. This doubt is the seed of something, something that she has to carry with her until it needs to be buried. As important as her knives or her brain or her–

  She knows what it is that she’s missed. Such a small thing. Almost the end of her. Of everything. She finds the pendant in the drawer. Runs the pieces around between her fingers.

  “Let me,” Kyre says. Awake now. But still soft. Still defenseless. Such a rare moment, and she closes her eyes and holds out the pendant.

  He loops it around her neck. Tightens the clasp. They stand together, touching, a long time, saying nothing. And saying everything.

  When they hear Quenn’s footsteps i
n the hallway, they let each other go. The unwinding is slow and soft. Done with the opposite of need.

  Their fingers stay together even as they come apart. Make the sign. It once meant the Night Clave. Now it means that still, but also something larger, deeper. The most important things never have names, because no words are big enough to hold them.

  6. Enter and the Stars Shall Touch You

  They set off for the kubric together first thing in the morning. Kyre had a sense of altered déjà vu. They’d done this not so long ago, he and Aviend. There was a third person now, but that wasn’t what altered it.

  Then he’d felt his stomach clench and roil with the thought of what was to come, but he’d thought it excitement or purpose. Now he knew it for what it was. A sense of losing himself, of losing his moral center.

  You’re the one who talked to the philethis. There are seventeen ways this could go, and all of them are yours.

  He’d thought he’d known what it meant, but he hadn’t. Not really. What it truly meant was not just that you owned all seventeen ways, but that you had to choose one that you could live with. The choice, after all, was the hard part. Someone telling you the answer was easy. To know all the options and choose the right one? That was your challenge.

  Now he felt the right answer in his bones, in the movement of his feet across the moss, in the easy banter of Aviend and Quenn before him. He felt it in the cakes Thorme had tucked into his pockets at the last second, the roughhewn skin of Delgha’s stained fingers as she’d pressed them to his cheeks this morning. The right decision was in everything he did and saw and thought of, and he let the lightness of it bring him to a smile, despite the worry in his chest.

  Aviend glanced back at him, shifting her lips and lifting a brow. She touched her thumb to her cheek – it was stained green, all her fingers were – and the glint of her ring caught a filter of sun though the trees.

  It was still early by the time they reached the far edge of what had once been Ovinale. Where once there had been roads, houses, shops and people. Now it was a smatter of graves so old and vast that the wolflilies had made a meadow of it.

  You could see the top of the kubric from here. In the day, it seemed almost plain. Powerful and huge, but nothing like the ornate device it became at night. There was no movement around it, bird or beast. No sounds or shadow. But the air breathed itself of electricity, making Kyre’s hairs lift from his skin. He felt as though the world had sucked all of the air inside it and was holding its breath, deciding whether to let it out.

  At the top of this tiny mound; the well. Still standing. Still doing what it was made to do. And then some – he tucked his fingers into the spot between stones where Thorme had told him, feeling around for the latch. He felt it and popped it at the same moment, and a folded bit of synth fell into his palm.

  Both Aviend and Quinn looked at him expectantly. He could sense their worry, although neither of them spoke aloud.

  He pressed his fingers to the back of the message, watched the symbols swim into visibility. “All plans go,” he read.

  “That’s it?” Aviend asked.

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s good, right?” Quenn asked.

  “That’s good,” he and Aviend said together. It was. It didn’t mean that things couldn’t still go cockwire, but it was reassuring to know that they hadn’t yet.

  They sat with their backs to the well, breaking open Thorme’s muffins. Eating slower than they needed to. Drawing out the inevitable.

  “I was only here a few times,” Quenn said, looking across the broken landscape. “Before, I mean. There was a sweet shop or a bakery or something near here. Vesi would cry for these little buns they made shaped like seskii.”

  “I remember those,” Aviend said. “They would bring them to the hall sometimes, for the Aeon Priests. I never wanted to eat them. They had ears! And faces.”

  “My sister is a savage,” Quenn said.

  “I don’t remember that place,” Kyre said. He wanted to, closed his eyes and tried to pluck that detail out of his memory, but found he couldn’t.

  “They used to use so much powdered sugar that it puffed around in the street like snow,” Aviend said. “There was always a crowd of kids gathered around it, sticking their tongues out.”

  And then it was there – the memory of sugar on his lips and tongue. Powder in his eyes. The dusting of it on his clothes. He’d never gone in, never seen the rabbit buns – his family didn’t buy things that way – but he remembered the stillness of standing in the street, being coated in sweetness. It made him think of Rillent’s trenchers now, that fine film of dust, and he pushed the image away.

  He was tempted to suggest they go over the plan one last time, but he knew there was no need. It was as good as it was ever going to get, and if they failed, there would be no contingencies for them, or the world. Not this time. Not this world or the next.

  His equipment check was: map in his pocket, monoblade at his hip, glowglobe, node against his neck, Aviend and Quenn and the others in his heart. Cyphers… he nearly forgot that he had cyphers for Aviend.

  Kyre scooped the devices from his pack and held them out to her. A set of small clamps, a vial of liquid, and a small orange-and-black striped pill.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be all right with all of these?” he asked. Delgha had warned them again and again about the risks of loading yourself up with cyphers. In overly graphic detail. He felt a bit like he was handing her danger, all wrapped in a pretty package.

  “I won’t have them for long,” she said as she placed them carefully into already full pockets. “If everything goes according to plan.”

  “They’re coming,” Quenn said.

  From across the wolflilies came the ghosts, hued by the flowers. As if their feet were stained by their passage.

  A few at first, and then, behind them, more.

  “I guess they got the message,” Kyre said.

  “They’re so solid,” Quenn said. “I’ve never seen them like that.”

  There were so many of them. They had asked them to come, and they came. He didn’t want to be up here on the hill when they arrived. It felt too much like Rillent, holding court.

  “This is where we part ways,” he said. He was aiming for light, teasing, but fell short of the mark.

  “It’s a good plan, Kyre,” she said. She emphasized good, meaning: solid and strong. Also meaning: not evil. Her confidence, so much stronger than last night, bolstered him.

  “It is,” he agreed.

  “It’s going to be amazing there,” she said. “I can’t wait to hear all about other-me.”

  He took Aviend’s fingers into his own, tightened around their cold tremble. “I’m sorry you can’t go,” he said, because he knew her enthusiasm for his own travel was a veneer over sadness. He would have given anything to go to Ovinale, the other Ovinale, with her, together.

  “Maybe when this is all over,” she said. “We can go back together and see our world as it should have been.”

  They both knew that wasn’t true. If everything went according to plan, the barrier would seal forever after he came back. If it didn’t, nothing mattered anyway.

  “See you in the stars,” she said.

  He didn’t look back as he made his way down the hill. The ghosts filled the grass, a wave of people – he knew they were people now – coming toward him. He pulled the transformation hood up around his face.

  With some distance between them – he didn’t know what was proper and so he guessed – he went down on his knees, pressing wolflilies and dirt to his skin. The petals were dew-damp and chilled, and he shivered as he lowered his head and closed his eyes.

  “Mishda paal,” he said.

  He thought he could hear them say it in return.

  There was no sensation of someone brushing his skin or of him moving through time or space. He didn’t know the moment they touched him, or the moment he left the world he was kneeling in, but he kne
w the moment he arrived. He could smell sweetness in the air.

  He opened his eyes and closed them just as quickly. And still, the view was engraved on his eyelids, bold and bright, and would not fade. Before him, a dead city, now resurrected.

  When the flickers behind his eyelids faded, and he found he couldn’t bear to not see, he opened his eyes. There, the town of Ovinale spread out before him. Unruptured. Unrazed. Houses still standing. The air was filled with impossible scents – the yeasty butterspread of rolls, the pure sun-warmed sweetness of flowers, somewhere a fire smoking meat. People walking toward him or away, on their way to places as mundane as the market or their home, as if everyday life was still happening here.

  It was still happening here. It was as though he had been transported not to another place but to another time. A time that he had dreamed of as a child. He hadn’t known until this very moment what he’d thought his own future would truly look like. But this, he thought, this was exactly what he’d dreamed of.

  How was this possible, this place?

  He forced his legs to move, to walk down the street, following the scent of sugar, the sound of children. Startled into action by everything he was seeing. He found himself stopping at random to take something in, often something he’d utterly forgotten. People who looked familiar, but not the same as the ones he’d known, went on with their business. Some acknowledged him, a nod or a tilt of a lip. But most acted as though he was just another stranger walking down a street in a city filled with other strangers walking down a street.

  He looked at the time tracker Delgha had given him. He had some time; it would take Aviend and Quenn far longer to complete their mission than it would take him to finish his. He could afford to linger, if just for a few moments.

  When he reached the little bakery on the corner, he stopped there, watching the clouds of sugar puff out the door. He pulled down his disguise hood for a moment, then walked through it slow, letting the sugar settle on his lips and tongue like sweet snow.