The Native Star

by M. K. Hobson

  “I don’t quite know what the government does with all the Exunge they store,” Stanton admitted, “but I’m sure they have a rational plan for its disposal.”

  “Oh, sure. For the public good,” Emily said. “Just like the Maelstroms.”

  The look in Stanton’s eyes indicated that he hadn’t ever quite made that connection before.

  Two Aberrancy hunters were rolling a large, box-shaped cart over the ground. They came toward the crowd in an unswerving straight line; the crowd parted to let them through.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Following ley lines, looking for other weak spots where Exunge might be released,” Stanton said. He pointed at the boxy cart. “That’s a Potentiator. It measures the potential for—”

  There was an extremely loud alarm from the box as it passed in front of Emily. She pulled back, startled. The hunters looked up. One of them jiggled the machinery.

  “Get back!” one of the Aberrancy hunters cried loudly, his voice muffled behind the green glass of his visor. “There’s a bolus right underneath!”

  Emily and Stanton were swept back as the crowd retreated in one panicked mass, shrieks and shouts peppering the air. Once the area was cleared, however, the alarm stopped. The men moved the Potentiator over the spot again, but the alarm did not repeat.

  Stanton seemed to find this failure of unfathomable interest. He watched the man with the Potentiator closely. He put a hand on Emily’s shoulder.

  “I want you to do something.” He pointed to the man who was fiddling with the Potentiator. “Go ask him for the time.”

  “Are you insane?” Emily wrinkled her nose. “You think he’s going to stop and pull out a pocket watch?”

  “Just go ask.” Stanton pushed her forward. She glared back at him, but went over to the hunter nonetheless. Before she could open her mouth to make Stanton’s ridiculous request, the alarm on the Potentiator went off with an ear-piercing shriek. She clapped her hands over her ears and stepped back. She felt Stanton’s hand wrap around her upper arm, and he pulled her back away from the crowd briskly, walking back toward the train. She heard the alarm stop again, and someone say, “Damn thing must be broken …”

  They came to an abrupt halt when they were about fifty feet from the crowd. When she looked up at Stanton’s face, she knew that something was very wrong. He was extremely pale, and he had a hand over his mouth—a gesture she associated with periods when he was lost in extreme thoughtfulness.

  “Of course it would”—he muttered to himself—“and you absorbed all that magic that Caul attacked me with …” He let his hand drop, releasing a heavy breath.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He seized her wrist, pulled the glove from her right hand. He looked at the stone, the muscles of his throat working anxiously.

  “The color’s changed,” he said, turning her hand. “It used to be clear blue. It’s almost yellow now. And look at all those little black inclusions …”

  “It’s been changing over time … I didn’t think—”

  “Don’t you see? If this is a piece of the Mantic Anastomosis—and I now have no doubt that it is—it will behave like the Mantic Anastomosis. It will absorb and purify magic. And it will also segregate and excrete Black Exunge.”

  Emily’s mouth went dry.

  “That’s why Komé was trying so hard to turn back the magic we were putting into the stone,” Stanton said. “The more magic the stone absorbs, the larger it becomes …”

  “The larger what becomes?” Emily said, softly. Stanton looked at her, his eyes holding hers.

  “Komé was cradling something. Holding something black. I know what it is now.” He paused. “There’s a black bolus forming in the stone.”

  Emily said nothing, but the horror of it grew within her slowly.

  “You mean … in my hand?”

  “It is the nature of the stone to segregate and excrete Black Exunge,” Stanton repeated carefully. “The stone is doing that. Those black inclusions—when there’s enough of them, they’ll become a bolus. When the bolus is large enough, the stone will expel it. There’s no way you could avoid coming in contact with it.”

  Emily’s heart thudded in her chest, and she thought of the grasshopper, shrieking and crackling as it burned to death. Or the Aberrant raccoon, dripping with black slime. She looked up at Stanton, and she saw the fear on her face reflected in his eyes. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she clutched his lapels and hid her face against his chest, squeezing her eyes shut tight. At first, Stanton pulled back imperceptibly. But then he placed a warm hand on her head, stroking her hair for a moment, a gentling touch.

  “I’m sure that Komé is helping,” he murmured. “I’m sure she’ll do everything she can. But we can’t let the stone absorb any more magic. If an actual bolus forms, she might not be able to control it …”

  There was the sound of voices approaching—train passengers returning to the cars, chattering about flaming grasshoppers. Stanton seized her shoulders, put her at a manly arm’s length, and gave her a bracing shake.

  “Buck up,” he said firmly. “It’s only a few days to New York. Professor Mirabilis will know what to do. You’ll be fine, Emily.” He paused, giving her another little shake. “You’ll be fine, I promise.”

  The Aberrancy hunters finished their work, leaving behind a neatly capped Exunge pit, and the train got under way a few hours later. Emily and Stanton were both very quiet for the rest of the day.

  If she hadn’t been “tormented” before, she certainly was now. She wished she could cut her hand off and run away. What had Stanton said about that man in Ohio? Fifty feet tall, he’d smashed up an entire township with his bare hands? And it took a whole detachment of military Warlocks to “put him down”?

  She bit her lip hard and stared out the window. The sunshine of earlier in the day had vanished, replaced by brooding black clouds. In their depths, streaks of lightning flashed like distant signal flares. When the rain began, it came down in great gouty sheets that rattled against the windows like handfuls of pebbles. The temperature plummeted; passengers began pulling out shawls and coats against the cold. Emily just stared out the window, shivering.

  Night came again, the lanterns were lit again, the conductor moved through the car to fold down the seats. Stanton and Emily took their now-accustomed places on the floor. But even with the coal stove on one side of her and Stanton on the other, she couldn’t stop shivering. She wrapped her horrible plaid coat more tightly around herself, listening to the rain lashing against the roof.

  The longing to run never left her, nor the nauseating understanding that there was nowhere she could run to. She tried to comfort herself; Komé had protected her, and would continue to protect her. But what if she couldn’t? What if the Exunge in the stone was already on the verge of overwhelming the conscribed spirit’s ability to control it?

  “What will happen to me?” Emily asked quietly. Stanton, lying beside her, pushed up his hat.

  “What?” he asked. It was clear that he hadn’t been asleep; Emily guessed he was no more pleased to be sleeping next to a person who might at any moment become an Aberrancy than she was to be that person.

  “If the stone expels the Exunge, what will happen to me? Specifically, I mean.”

  Stanton was silent for a long moment. When he finally did speak, his voice was matter-of-fact.

  “There is a process of mutation that lasts about a minute. During that time, the Black Exunge works upon the physical system of the affected … creature. After that time, the Exunge is fully ingrained in the living spirit, and the transformation is complete.”

  “Back in Dutch Flat you said that Aberrancies were most vulnerable while they were mutating. Like the Aberrancy hunters burned that grasshopper while it was still growing.”

  “Yes,” Stanton said.

  “You have the misprision blade,” Emily said. “Could you stop me with it?”

  “Don’t say such things,” Stanton grow
led. “It’s not going to happen.”

  “Now who’s trying to believe unpleasant things into being untrue?” she murmured bitterly. “I suppose there’s always your flamma trick, but that would hardly be fair to the other passengers.”

  There was a long silence.

  “You will not become an Aberrancy, Emily.” The finality in his voice was like a door slamming shut, but it did not make her feel better.

  Emily turned her head, looked up at the shadows on the pressed-tin ceiling. They kept resolving themselves into giant loping jackrabbits, slavering raccoons, Aberrancy hunters with flamethrowers. The song of the rain snickered in her ears.

  The next thing she knew, the cold apricot-colored light of dawn was threading through the windows of the car and there was a soft sound of metal grating against metal. It was the rattle of the stove door; the conductor was throwing in lumps of coal. In her sleep, she had curled close to Stanton, snuggled against his side. He’d draped an arm around her shoulder, and she’d pillowed her head on it. The rise and fall of his chest, the smell of stale cigar smoke in the fabric of his coat was reassuring. She let herself drowse that way for a moment, until a thought made her heart leap unpleasantly.

  And what if the stone decided to expel the Exunge right now? What if you turned him into an Aberrancy right along with you?

  She pushed herself away from him, cursing as she climbed to her feet. She staggered out of the car, wanting suddenly to put as much distance between herself and Stanton as she could. She decided she would go sit on the observation platform. For some reason, the idea of watching the plains’ endless repetition appealed to her this morning.

  The conductor nodded his head to her as she made her way back through the car.

  “Mornin’, son,” he said. “We’ve passed the storms. Gonna be a nice day.”

  “I doubt it,” Emily said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Ososolyeh

  Emily spent the early part of the morning alone on the observation platform at the rear of the train, thinking deep thoughts about life and death, until she finally got hold of herself, reclaimed her uncommon good sense, and scolded herself for being so tragic.

  All right, you rotten mineral, she thought. It’s you or me. And it’s going to be me. Because with all the power of my belief, I believe it’s going to be me.

  Pulling herself up straight, she walked back to the seats, where Rose was regaling Stanton with another of her interminably winding tales. When she appeared, he stood, his eyes searching her face.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yep.” Emily flashed him her most confident smile.

  “And where were you, Mr. Elmer?” Rose batted her eyelashes at Emily. “With all the Aberrancies running around, I couldn’t think what might have become of you!”

  Emily worked to keep her smile from dimming.

  “I think we’ve left all the Aberrancies behind,” she said.

  “Horrible things,” Rose said, confidingly. “You know, they say they’re all the fault of Warlocks. That if godly people would finally take a stand and put their foot down against all these Warlocks and Witches running around … why, there wouldn’t be any Aberrancies. They say that they’re a punishment on godly people for allowing sin to walk the earth unanswered—”

  “Who is this ‘they’ you’re always referring to?” Stanton glared at Rose, his eyes gleaming with unhidden malice. “Your mongoloid Aunt Kindy? Your drunken Uncle Sal? Or are you talking about the slack-jawed hacks who bang out those dime novels for a bottle of whiskey and the price of a flophouse?”

  Rose stared at him, her mouth open in astonishment. But Stanton pressed on, his voice flat and awful.

  “Or maybe you’re just using the word ‘they’ as so many pea-brained idiots use it, as a cowardly rhetorical device, an excuse to say the things you really believe without giving anyone the chance to judge you for the narrow-minded, stupid creature you are.”

  Rose’s lip trembled for a moment. Then she snatched up her carpetbag and ran out of the car. Emily stared at Stanton.

  “What has gotten into you?” she asked. “That was awful. How could you—”

  “That girl is an albatross.” Stanton pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes. “Saying those things to you, after everything that’s happened—”

  “She didn’t have any idea what she was saying,” Emily said. “And if you were trying to protect me, at least you could have picked on someone your own size.”

  Rising abruptly, Emily went out in the direction Rose had gone. She found Rose sitting in the vestibule between cars, collapsed in a tearful heap. She was sobbing, clutching the carpetbag to her chest.

  “Miss Rose?” Emily said softly.

  “I’m sorry I bothered you.” Rose dashed drops from her eyes. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Oh, him.” Emily cast a scornful glance back toward the car where Stanton was. “He’s a meaner varmint than Sheriff Black, the Skull Mountain Kid, and the Scabby Badger all rolled up into one.”

  Rose giggled, sniffling, at what was certainly quite a ridiculous combination.

  “You’re awful nice, Mr. Elmer,” Rose said. “I have a brother like you. He’s nice, too. Whenever anyone’s mean to me, he knocks ’em down.”

  Emily sat down next to Rose, suddenly wishing that she were Rose’s brother. At that moment, she wouldn’t mind a life spent taking care of a girl like Rose. A life spent protecting her from all the terrible things in the world. More than anything, she envied Rose’s wide-eyed innocence, the cozy narrowness of her existence. She had no idea how vast the world could be, how many horrors and mysteries lurked in its dark places. Emily felt she had discovered far too much—far more than she’d ever wanted to, just as Lawa had promised.

  Rose caught the faraway look in Emily’s eyes, and something sly crept across her face. She leaned closer to Emily, whispered words in her ear.

  “You’re outlaws, aren’t you?”

  Emily pulled back a little, looked at her warily.

  “What?”

  “I know you’re a woman,” Rose said. “I knew it from the first time I saw you. That’s why I was interested in you two. I thought … oh, never mind what I thought. I’m just a pea-brained idiot.”

  “No, you’re not. Tell me what you thought.”

  Rose looked at her, her eyes sparkling with sudden excitement.

  “I tried to guess what your story was,” Rose said. “I do that sometimes. I just look at people and try to figure out their lives.”

  Rose hitched herself closer.

  “Here’s what I guessed. You can’t have been outlaws long, because you sure don’t do it very well. Maybe you robbed a bank or something. But you’re madly in love, and you’re on the run from the law. Is that it? You can tell me. I promise I’ll keep the secret.”

  “That’s not it.” Emily felt herself blushing, but she didn’t quite know why. “But that would make a good story, wouldn’t it?”

  “Things work out in stories,” Rose said. “If this were a story, I wouldn’t be going to Aunt Kindy’s, I’d be going someplace … exciting.” Her lip trembled. “I hate Aunt Kindy. All those things I told you about her weren’t true. She’s mean to me and she smells. I don’t know what Mr. Smith called her, but I’m sure it meant that she’s unpleasant. And she is. She’s a spiteful woman who wants me around just so she can smoke cigarillos and drink gin on the sly.”

  Emily tsked sadly and put her arm around Rose.

  “Maybe it won’t be that bad,” she said, aware of how useless the words were.

  “Yes, it will be,” Rose said. She was trying to hold back her tears, but they kept trickling down her cheeks. “She just wants me for a slave. And I have to go. What else can I do?”

  “I’m sorry, Rose,” Emily said softly. “It’ll be all right. I’m sure it will.”

  Rose leaned against her, resting her head on Emily’s shoulder, and Emily held her companionably. From behind them
came the sound of a cleared throat. It was Stanton, looking down at them disapprovingly.

  “Elmer,” he said. “I need to speak with you. Now.”

  Emily glared at him. She gave Rose a strengthening squeeze before standing and following Stanton back to the seats.

  “You’ve broken her poor heart,” Emily said accusingly.

  “Oh, please!” Stanton rolled his eyes. “You really don’t know anything about being a man, do you?” Stanton gestured curtly to the seats, indicating Emily should sit; Emily shook her head furiously.

  “I can’t leave her like that. I’m going back.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Stanton growled. “You can’t go putting your arm around a girl like that … you’ll be facing her father down a shotgun. I have no doubt that her broken heart will heal before lunchtime. Now sit.”

  “Why are you being so horrible?” Emily hissed at him, sitting.

  “Why are you being so naïve?” Stanton returned. “Of all the difficulties I thought we’d encounter on this trip, I must say a farm girl falling in love with you was one that never even crossed my mind.”

  “She’s not in love with me,” Emily snapped. “She knows I’m not a man.”

  Stanton’s face hardened.

  “You told her?” he said, in a low voice, leaning forward. “Damn it, Emily—”

  “She figured it out herself,” Emily said. “You said yourself that I’m unconvincing as a man.”

  “I had hoped you could at least convince someone like Rose,” Stanton said. “The fact that she knows not only puts us in danger, but it puts her in danger right along with us.”

  That thought made Emily pause. Stanton saw the realization on her face, nodded soberly.

  “Another one of the joys of being a fugitive.” Stanton sighed. “It’s high time we distanced ourselves from her. When we come into Omaha, I want you to get new clothes. We’re going to get out of these damn Zulu cars and into a Pullman, where she can’t follow us.”

  “Switch to a Pullman? Can we afford it?”