by Robert Reed
Diamond blinked and looked ahead, ready for an answer to pop into his mind.
Then Nissim said, “No. Not your first response.”
The boy blinked, a little startled.
“Give me your eighth reaction. Will you try to do that for me?”
He wasn’t sure that was possible, but he started to resurrect what had just happened inside his head, counting the ideas.
Then the sentries’ call-line cackled.
A sour voice said, “Yeah?”
Something felt peculiar. Mother was standing in the hallway, leaning toward their protectors. Everyone listened as the sentry said nothing. They heard his boots sliding on the bloodwood floor, and the man taking a deep nervous breath. It was easy to imagine neck veins bulging, and maybe his hand shook a little. Then the same voice said one more word.
“Understood.”
But the sentry didn’t quite understand. He got as far as Mother before he stopped and delivered the news.
“That was the Archon,” he said, amazed by the important voice. “They found another one and they’re bringing it to big abattoir on Jakken’s Tree.”
“Another what?” Nissim asked.
“You know,” the man said, trying to sound sharp and informed. “It’s one of those special coronas.”
What did that mean?
“A detachment’s coming to take you,” he continued. “All of you. The Archon and King are already leaving . . . but he wants all of you brought after him.”
“What special corona?” Diamond asked.
But the answer had already popped into his head, and it was probably in everyone else’s head too.
Another silence got started.
And then as they were sharing numbed, astonished looks, Elata suddenly stood up, throwing her pencil down, a loud grim half-happy voice saying, “Well, good. Now we can finally be outside.”
Elata had known her intentions for the last few days.
As soon as she had the chance, whenever that was, she was going to climb over a convenient railing or open a likely window and then jump to her death.
The image found her one morning, clear and sharp and perfect. Her plan had one immediate benefit: for the first time in ages, Elata felt something that resembled happiness. She wasn’t joyful or ready to laugh, but the massive ache dragging at her soul was gone. A decision was made. Like the old phrase said: “One branch left to walk.” All that remained was finding the means while not losing her focus. She didn’t want others watching her when she did it, because that would be mean. But she also couldn’t afford to be picky with time and place. The others would try to stop her. Give them any warning, and they’d throw words at her, kindness and lies wrapped together, and they would use their own bodies too. But none of their warm-hearted efforts would work. Elata was certainly the dumbest person inside this house, and that might include Good. But better than anyone else, she didn’t bother trying to find the best answers to every smart, unanswerable question, and when given an answer to what mattered, she would never waste time with doubt or thinking twice.
Life wasn’t big enough for doubts, and after the first day of being alive, everything started filling up fast.
Elata knew that better than anyone.
Her bedroom was a mess of stuffed drawers and overflowing boxes and dirty clothes thrown over the clean, and standing in the middle of that unmapped chaos, she yelled at people who probably weren’t even thinking about her, telling them that she would be there in another two breaths.
Where did she hide her purse?
There. The leather-and-brass satchel was tucked at the bottom of a wooden box filled with secondhand dolls. It made her a little sick, reaching past those brightly painted big-eyed faces. She never liked playing with dolls. They were nothing but fancy sticks. Real babies and grown people never looked this way. But some old woman decided that she was another orphan needing toys, and the gift came with a soft pat on the shoulders. Elata had threatened to throw all of them away. But that was when they first arrived here and everybody was trying to be nice. Haddi took Elata aside to talk. With her most reasonable voice, the despairing widow told the gloomy orphan girl, “You should keep them, in case you have a daughter someday.”
Elata was living with strange, sick people, and talk about a daughter was just another example of how screwed up everyone was.
People they knew and people they didn’t know were always looking at Diamond and then at her.
She knew what they were thinking.
And she knew even better what she was thinking, which seemed like a blessing lately. This was the day to leave the world, she knew. Unless a different day would be better. Either way, Elata had a fancy purse filled with folded up drawings—the big drawings of blackwoods that others had seen, and also the secret drawings of her mother and her long dead father, plus her friends, including half a dozen careful drawings showing Diamond at various ages.
Seldom called plaintively to Elata.
She ran back to the main doorway, except nobody was there except one young soldier, and his only duty was to wave her towards the half-secret emergency exit in the back of the house.
Haddi was the first person she saw. The old woman was telling the monkey to stay behind, and Good stuck out his chest, glad for the order. New soldiers had appeared, unfamiliar faces and muscles and office clothes bulging where the guns tried to hide, and only one of those men had a voice. He told Elata that she was wasting time. She smiled, making apologetic sounds. The hidden door led into a tunnel that existed only in reality and inside a few heads. No map or official diagram included this passageway cut through the bloodwood’s trunk. She had used it twice before, and it emptied onto a private landing owned by a fictional citizen, and there were three routes off the landing, into the mayhem of this overpopulated District.
This group would take one of those routes.
It didn’t matter which.
And that’s where she would take her break for freedom. The decision would be made with instinct, with her feet. She let herself imagine nothing but the running. If she grabbed a lead, then the only person fast enough to catch her was Diamond. But on the list of what was important, Diamond was a thousand slots higher than whoever happened to be second place, and these soldiers would almost certainly wrestle him down before he could confuse the situation.
Bodies were waiting inside the tunnel. The space was narrow and infinitely long, the only lights carried by hand, and the black air was always stale in the middle reaches. Rough, hurried tools had punched through the bloodwood, the rounded walls bristling with splinters that could shred fingers or entire hands.
She got into the line.
Everybody walked down the tunnel’s middle.
Nissim was ahead of Elata, his tall body hiding everyone else, and Seldom was directly behind her, long feet catching her heel once and then again.
“Sorry,” Seldom said.
From the front, the boss soldier said, “Quiet.”
Nobody could hear talking from inside the tree. But soldiers always wanted people to be quiet, if for no other reason than to keep their own heads clear.
The stale air got worse. Even good quiet soldiers coughed.
Diamond never coughed. That was one of those odd details in a boy who was built on oddities. Spending all of her days and nights with Diamond had made her understand just how strangely different he was.
Diamond was walking ahead of Nissim, she sensed.
Some kind of “good-bye” wanted to be said. But that would ruin everything. The perfect plan was to run away, buying distance and surrounding herself with strangers. And when nobody was paying attention to one girl, she would make the jump and be gone. The world could spend thousands of days hunting for her. Nobody could ever be sure what had happened, which was perfect. They would remember her with her purse. Maybe she had been carrying money. Maybe Elata was living somewhere close, or maybe she found some way home to the Corona District. The purse and the layers
of mystery would help her friends imagine her living as an adult, wearing an assumed name and ten lives worth of happiness.
That’s what she liked best about her plan. Everybody would be spared, believing whatever they wanted.
Coming out of the tunnel, Elata blinked and wiped at her tears. Everyone was walking on a landing that pretended to be attached to a normal rich home. The palace was on the far side of the bloodwood. Middle-of-the-Middle was this tree’s name, which she never liked. What she liked for a name was Marduk, and just that name triggered an image of herself, grown up and prosperous. The war was finished, and in her daydream she was the person honored with the chance to plant a new blackwood at the top of the world, naming it whatever she wanted.
Marduk was the name floating in her wet, weak head.
“This way,” the talking soldier told them.
They weren’t taking any of the normal routes off the landing. This was better than she could hope. They were aiming for the landing’s tip. A small, heavily armored fletch was moored there, waiting. Elata was ready. She felt her legs relax, preparing to sprint, and her eyes turned to the right long enough to make certain that the closest gate wasn’t closely guarded. Ten good strides and she would be gone. She knew it. But then she made the blunder of looking ahead again, searching for the closely cut scalp of a boy who had almost stopped looking like a boy.
She didn’t see Diamond anywhere.
Surprise made her gait slow, and then a very warm hand took her from behind, grabbing her by the elbow.
“Are you all right?” Diamond asked.
She hadn’t been paying attention. Diamond was behind her all this time, probably watching her.
As much as anything, she hated living with his stares.
But now they were talking quietly. She assured him that she was fine fine fine, nervous but not too badly so.
Together, the two of them walked up the gangway into the fletch.
People noticed the two of them, and there were smiles.
Why did all this bother her so much?
FOUR
Mature bloodwoods were extraordinary in their length, reaching deeper into the Creation than any other tree, and even the youngest, most sun-starved among them were still giants. Each bloodwood was a spike of vibrant living wood. The wood was lightweight and indifferent to fire, and the brownish-red bark might be ten strides deep, while the branches resembled short burly trees growing horizontally, covered with dense tangles of blackish-green spines and needles that served as leaves. But no mere half-trees grew in the District’s middle. Only the greatest of the grand were allowed, each hanging alone with its army of stubby branches. Every morning’s light rose full and strong into the forest, feeding the overhead jungles and farms, and mouths and more mouths. This was abundance. Here the Creation had been mastered. Each mindless tree was endless and enormous, too old to count reliably, and even at a distance, too vast for eyes to hold.
From inside a quick fletch, the Middle-of-the-Middle seemed like a Creation in its own right, and Diamond almost believed that he could feel that mass of wood and brown bark and sap and people pulling at him.
And it was pulling.
The Master had explained: scientists manipulating wires and steel balls had proved that objects tugged at every other object, and these great pillars were cloaked with a power that revealed itself in the dance of every tiny sphere.
“Of course your bodies can feel none of this magic,” Nissim said. “These impulses are everywhere, but they’re minuscule. The demon floor is what we experience. The floor has its own relentless pull, and that’s what wrestles with us every moment, and every object obeys it, and there are reams of strong, hard-to-see evidence that it is the same for the coronas too.”
“They look up at the sun, not up at us,” Seldom had said, gladly guessing at the Master’s next words.
And grinning over her busy pencil, Elata had whispered to Diamond, “Which you knew all along, didn’t you?”
But the sun was under his feet, and he didn’t let himself think otherwise.
The ranking soldier had told Diamond to stand away from the window, letting him watch without being seen, and the boy thought about quite a lot while staring out at a rectangle of bark and landings and the critical government buildings that looked like toy houses pinned to the Creators’ wall. And then the fletch turned without warning, sprinting toward the adjacent tree.
This was not a long journey, but it seemed as if the roaring propellers weren’t covering space nearly quickly enough. Diamond stood between Elata and Seldom. None of them spoke. Nissim was making friends with soldiers and of the crew. Somehow the Master was able to say a few words that meant nothing, and watching faces until clues were given, it was easy for him to pick the one person onboard this airship who might answer his questions.
“They told us all about the corona,” Nissim said.
That wasn’t quite true, and it wasn’t a question. But there were slippery ways to steal what others knew.
Nissim smiled at his victim, saying, “It’s the same kind of giant that gave us the children, that boy there.”
The crewman glanced at Diamond.
“We heard the sirens,” Nissim said. “Of course we couldn’t see anything, buttoned up indoors like we were.”
“Oh, there was a battle,” the crewman volunteered.
He was younger than the various soldiers, probably in the fleet not more than a couple hundred days.
“Did you take part?” Nissim asked.
“Oh, no, sir,” he confessed. “The slayers did the hunting, the fighting. They’re the ones to be applauded.”
Seldom started forward, ready with a question.
Nissim warned him away with a glance. Then he nodded, and with a low voice, he said, “Tomorrow’s Girl.”
The crewman blinked, plainly impressed. “Oh, you heard what the Girl did?”
“Yes,” Nissim lied.
“A bunch of heroes on that good ship,” he said happily.
Soldiers knew better than expose the names of ships or their activities. But this wasn’t their ship or their problem, so they retreated to distant parts of the cabin, watching for enemies they could fight.
“Karlan,” said Seldom.
The crewman glanced at the boy, a trace of suspicion in his otherwise earnest, self-possessed face. “Who’s Karlan?”
“That boy’s brother,” said Nissim. “Our last news was that he was stationed on Tomorrow’s Girl.”
“I wouldn’t know either way, sir. But I heard half their crew is dead.” It was important to sound brave, which in his mind was the same as being caustic. “But the survivors are what helped win the corona, and they’re getting first honors cutting up that big ugly carcass.”
A second bloodwood was slowly, slowly approaching. It was as big and ancient as the Middle-of-the-Middle, and a sweeping portion of its trunk was recently cleared of homes and businesses. That was an Archon project, huge amounts of capital and labor focused on a single structure that was nearly as big as the palace. Its exterior was armored with scales and adorned with cannons, while the vast interior was built around the world’s largest room, lit with mirrors by day, and in the night, powerful lamps.
During peaceful days, coronas were butchered on the reef, the papio receiving two-fifths of the carcass. A few rough little abattoirs were scattered across the other Districts, but they were raided by the papio, and more and more targeted by bandits. Now the precious carcasses were brought to a worthy fortress, and List refused to be shy when it was time to take credit for this work.
Diamond approached the front window, fingers to the glass.
No soldier bothered to stop him.
A wide landing was perched at the bottom of the abattoir, eleven fletches moored in the air above. Some were damaged, and at least one engine was smoking. But none were Karlan’s ship. Probably the Girl towed the corona inside, but every door and window was closed. The only traces of activity were a few defl
ated balloons dangling on the scaffolding outside and one broad vent spouting a thick stream of fumes—the exhaust from hard-running motors.
Seldom joined him at the window.
“Hi,” they said in the same moment, with matching voices.
Something wanted to be asked. But the question remained hiding while Seldom stood tall, pushing out his long chest.
Diamond glanced over his shoulder.
Mother was sitting alone, carefully studying the floor.
Elata was standing beside the farthest window, hands wrestling with a leather purse as she stared back at the Middle-of-the-Middle. Nothing in front of them mattered.
Seldom groaned softly.
Diamond looked at his friend’s face in profile. Seldom was thrilled and terrified, and when he felt the eyes, he grimaced.
Diamond asked, “What?”
“Inside the corona,” Seldom began. Then he swallowed hard and looked into the sun, adding, “What if there’s a stomach full of children like you? What do you think you’ll do?”
Diamond inhaled. Suddenly and very clearly, he saw himself walking between cribs, and he was teaching odd creatures to speak and run, and in another instant he dared imagine a second King and another Quest. Then he blew out the long breath, imagining a human girl who became a woman so real that she had a name. In his mind, their lives were woven together, days without number, and these bloodwoods grew old, people mining out the wood before their cores fell, and holding hands, the two immortals watched new ranks of bloodwoods descending into the endless, wondrous days.
All that happened inside one gasp and sigh.
Then Seldom asked again, “What will happen?”
Just one answer deserved to be said.
Quietly but with all of his confidence, Diamond told his best friend, “My head doesn’t know, or it isn’t telling me.”
Tomorrow’s Girl was safe inside the abattoir and Karlan was alive.
Seldom wanted quite a lot more than that to be true, but he would happily settle for those two blessings. Losing this last shred of his family would be too awful, too unfair. His brother had to survive today and for ten thousand more days. But of course Karlan was a slayer and a warrior, and wishing for his survival, Seldom began to think in black directions, finding a keen awful hope that maybe the warrior had been wounded in some crippling but survivable way. His back was broken, maybe, but only his legs were dead, and now he was damaged and harmless and sure to live to be a very old man riding on a wheeled chair, and a selfish brother wouldn’t have to go to sleep every night wondering when someone else he loved and counted on would suddenly die.