by Faye, Audrey
Elena raised an eyebrow. “That’s very bold.”
It was quite clear that bold wasn’t something she felt she could approve of, and I felt strangely naked. My painting skills were entirely average, but it was something I deeply enjoyed, and where I very rarely stood out. That I suddenly had, and over something as innocuous as my choice of color palettes, was disconcerting.
My energies were wide open, and she’d just judged my bears.
I tried to pull myself together—being personally vulnerable on assignment was just asking for trouble. I leaned over to get a better look at her easel. It was a beautifully rendered painting of a window opening onto a bright garden, and from the feel of it, I imagined that both the window and the garden lived somewhere here on Thess. The lines were soft and welcoming, with a kind of hazing that encouraged the viewer into a memory that might not quite be theirs, but could be borrowed at will. It was gorgeous and non-threatening and Elena clearly had more skill in her little finger than I had in my whole body. “That’s lovely.”
“Thank you.” She smiled, responding to a compliment she obviously heard often. “I make them to sell to our visitors so they can take a bit of Thess home with them.”
It was very well aimed to do just that. “What do you paint when you’re not trying to sell your work to tourists?”
“All my works are for sale.” She looked at me quizzically, and then eyed my bold orange splotches. “Yours might do well in one of the more avant-garde galleries on Cherum or Devios.”
Those were two of the bigger planets in this system, and my art didn’t stand a chance there—I was a happy amateur with a paintbrush and I knew it. But that hadn’t been her point. Elena was not-so-gently telling me that I wasn’t producing work that fit in with the lovely and lush Thess.
I was being guided. Or maybe pruned.
I looked at my orange paintbrush and the dribs and drabs that had made it onto my skin, and contemplated the messages I was receiving. Kish called it data collecting, and she usually managed it more dispassionately than I did. For me, the beginnings of an assignment were more about finding threads, touching them, mapping them in case I needed to gather some and Dance.
Which wasn’t going to happen on an observation-only assignment. Some not-very-mature part of me grumped about that. I would have enjoyed wiggling the threads of Thess and splashing a little orange paint Elena’s direction.
The pettiness of that thought surprised me. This place was feeding my soul—but it was also getting under my skin, and that was a red flag every Fixer knew to watch for.
I looked at the rendering of the dreamy, hazy window and the woman who had painted it, trying to see the essence of who she was in the soft brushstrokes. And found very little. A work of art purely as performance, an exterior intentionally designed to communicate a message and nothing more. One that left the artist tucked away under the bed, just like a certain pair of orange boots.
That thought annoyed me. I let out a long, slow breath and tried to let go of my personal reactions. Elena had a right to artistic expression in whatever form she chose, even if she didn’t like my orange. “Have you lived on Thess for a long time?”
“Forty years.” She smiled, pride in every line of her face. “I was part of the first group that came when they wanted to revitalize the village. It was old and run down and there were hardly any artists here anymore. We changed all that.”
My Talent was sitting up and paying attention, even if my amateur artist was still sulking a little. “You’ve built something special here.”
The pride dimmed somehow. “Oh, I’m just a painter. Everyone did their little bit and somehow it all came together.”
That felt off. I’d been to many small communities. Founder pride was a real and powerful thing, and not usually something people skittered away from. “Was there a central group that drove things, or was it more organic?”
She laughed, and it had the sound of her hazy windows. “We’re artists. Not a one of us likes meetings, so things here happen very much like a painting. A dab here, a nice bit of color there, with everyone stepping back every so often to take a look at the whole.”
It sounded beautiful, and risky, and not actually true. Thess was far too harmoniously integrated to be an organism without a head—but it was possible the head didn’t acknowledge its own accountability, and that could well come with its own set of problems.
Interesting.
I touched my orange paintbrush to the canvas once more, knowing the small act of rebellion for what it was, and then put the brush in the neat container that would keep it wet and ready until the next time I needed it. “Is it okay to leave this out and come back to work on it later?”
Elena looked strained. “Of course. The door is rarely locked at this time of year, but if you need to be let in, I live just across the street. Anyone can tell you where to find me.”
And she could keep tabs on the dangerous woman with the disturbing fondness for orange. I’d be paying her some attention too. I’d just tripped across one of the power brokers of Thess, no matter what she might want me to believe.
I’d come back to watch and paint again. In the meantime, I planned to take a walkabout. I knew a few things at this point—but they were carefully manicured things. I’d had a lovely few hours, my artist’s heart was full, and I could easily imagine spending a week here on vacation and enjoying every moment.
But this trip wasn’t a vacation, and I was acutely aware that I needed to avoid being distracted by ease and beauty and really good cookies. Except for the strange ripples occasionally pointed my direction, the energy here felt as neat and tidy and smooth as I could possibly wish it.
Which meant I hadn’t looked closely enough yet.
I tucked away the last of my brushes, gave one last look to my easel, and promised the swirling colors that I’d be back. Then I walked out, leaving the splashes of orange on my hands. Time to find the parts of Thess that didn’t fit into a hazy garden window. Like the cargo Gerhart had mentioned, moving in the dead of night outside the visible cadence of village life.
As a Dancer, I understood that—people mostly wanted to see grace and beauty and skill, so we tucked away the sweat and curses and bruises and bleeding toes that produced beautiful art. But art didn’t happen without those things, and if I wanted to understand Thess, I needed to see beneath the final product.
9
Thess wasn’t that big, but I was doing my best to find its back alleys—and they were proving elusive. I knew what I was looking for. Every community has its decorative parts and its hardworking parts, and while they could be laid out very differently, there had to be parts of this village where it got sweaty. Places where residents got their hair cut and their small appliances fixed and their toe blisters treated.
Except I wasn’t finding them. The only grocery store I’d found had the cute displays and exorbitant prices of one that catered to wealthy weekend traffic, but it had enough people in it that perhaps the locals shopped there too. The only place I could find to buy small household items had hand-painted dinner plates so expensive I’d be terrified of dropping them, and nothing that resembled the simple drinking glasses that had been my excuse for walking in. The sweet and chatty proprietor had suggested a couple of online places that could ship me some and then politely shooed me out of her store.
I’d spent a couple of hours trying to find the mundane, practical side of Thess, and I wasn’t having a whole lot of luck. I pulled out my tablet, curious, and ran a quick search for someone local who could repair a broken window or a misbehaving compost chute, and shook my head wryly when nothing came up. Either magic faeries kept everything working here, or that information was kept far underground. I was sure the locals would know, but why hide those people away?
Thess’s public face was art, and nothing more. One-dimensional, and while it was an attractive dimension, real life required something a whole lot less flat.
I spied a sign up ahead for
the community garden and perked up. Gerhart had mentioned a lemon oregano plant I might be able to help, and that was the most I’d heard so far about the seedy side of town.
I turned into the garden, passing under an arbor constructed of curved branches that looked like they’d accidentally managed to fall into a beautiful archway. I stopped to run a hand over their gorgeous lines. So much to touch here, and all of it speaking to the part of my soul that deeply appreciated beauty and had felt more than a little battered by my last few missions. Even the artisans of the Vesuvian guilds had been yelling at each other, and I was well aware I’d had a gentle assignment in the grand scheme of the Etruscan sector mess.
I gave the archway one last pat and then walked into an enchanting and surprisingly large space. Clearly, this was no ornamental garden—I’d hung around Tee’s family long enough to know when real food was being produced in enough quantity to matter, and this was definitely that kind of garden, once you looked beyond the general attractiveness.
I could see Greta’s handiwork everywhere. The garden was beautiful, just like everything else in Thess—but it was also eminently practical. Kitchen herbs with artistic labels, plantings of complementary vegetables obviously designed to make access to an entire meal’s worth of tasty food options easy, picking baskets of just the right size tucked into nooks and crannies to invite spontaneous gathering by people wandering through the vibrantly fertile space.
I didn’t see anything on my first pass that looked like lemon oregano, or anything that looked at all unhappy, for that matter. Which was fine. I was glad to spend a bit of time being generally more useful.
I took one of the smaller baskets and headed over to a very well-behaved raspberry bush in the back corner. It had mint plants growing at its base, and I leaned over to sniff the fragrant leaves. Tee would know how to turn the green leaves and plump red berries into some kind of drink concoction or fancy dessert, but my skills didn’t extend much past eating, so I’d leave the mint where it was. I plucked off one of the raspberries and popped it in my mouth, letting the pungently sweet flavor squirt on my tongue. It was delectable, and quickly followed by its juicy neighbor.
I grinned and dropped a couple in my basket too. I’d been taught my berry-picking skills by the littlest Lightbodies, and I knew the proper ratio of ones for my mouth and ones for my bowl.
A small hand reached out and snagged the two berries in my basket. I laughed at the pudgy, dirty face beaming up at me. “That’s cheating, cutie—you have to eat ones off the bush.”
“Sorry.” A harried woman no older than me came up behind the toddler and took his hand, tugging. “Come this way, Nate. Let’s leave the nice lady to pick her berries. We can have a turn next.”
My Lightbody-trained brain took a couple of extra beats to process her sentences. Littles were never chased out of anywhere green on Stardust Prime, and I definitely didn’t want Nate chased out of this one on my account. “I’d love some company.” I leaned over and grabbed a second small basket and handed it to the toddler. “I’m Iggy. Will you help me pick some raspberries?”
A sticky hand took the basket and grinned at me.
“He’s not talking yet.”
I winked at my small companion. “Leaves you more time for eating, huh?”
“He eats everything,” said his mother, crouching down. “Dirt, rocks, sheet music.”
There were threads here, and they hinted at a lot more than a slightly harried morning. I added a couple of berries to Nate’s basket and studiously ignored him as he promptly ate them both. “Are you a musician?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m Gloria, by the way. I work in one of the local shops. We moved here because I wanted Nate to be able to eat berries and run in the forest, you know?”
A sweet and deeply intended dream, and one that had clearly run into some bumps. I took a moment and showed Nate’s chubby fingers how to pull a raspberry off the bush, debating how hard to lean on his mom. “I often think the most important jobs are done by the people who hold everything quietly together in the background.” Something nobody on Stardust Prime ever forgot, but I had the distinct feeling that wasn’t the case here. “It must take a lot of work to leave the artists so free to create.”
Gloria watched me with wary eyes. “Not many visitors see that.”
Or residents, either. I might not have Kish’s skill at reading vibrations, but I knew the signs of someone who felt woefully underappreciated. “Do you have good help with Nate?”
She reached over and rescued a cheery orange flower from her son’s lethal grip. “Children are welcome here on Thess.”
I plucked a few more berries for Nate’s basket. “Even ones who eat sheet music?”
Gloria let out a sigh. “I keep hoping it will get better as he gets bigger. Right now he’s just an oversized baby, and he has no idea how to be quiet or still.”
I knew enough mini-Lightbodies to be pretty sure that transformation wasn’t coming anytime soon. I also knew that on Stardust Prime it wasn’t the littles who were expected to shift their behavior and conform. Gloria had the eyes of a woman who was constantly having to step in between her son’s antics and the rest of Thess. It was also pretty clear she didn’t want to talk about it, and it wasn’t hard to guess why. Retail staff likely ranked very low on the totem pole here, especially if they came with an exuberant and sticky little boy attached.
Although this one was suddenly looking pretty droopy.
“I think he’s ready for a nap.” Gloria reached behind her to collect a shoulder bag.
I tapped a finger on Nate’s nose. “Bye, little dude. Come pick berries with me again soon, okay?” I broke protocol and added a smidgen of finger-wiggled Talent so that his mom would know I meant it.
He grinned, mushing the last few berries in his basket and stuffing them into a mouth that looked exactly like a toddler in a raspberry patch should look.
It was Gloria’s eyes that were bothering me.
Thess was a dream, an idealized little world that made my inner artist feel like a kid in a candy store. But if it couldn’t make space for kids and their sticky fingers or amateur painters who were too fond of orange or little old ladies who wanted to dance, that hinted at a worrisome fragility.
I let out my breath as Gloria and Nate disappeared under the arbor, grateful for what they’d helped me to see, and then turned back to the work most immediately at hand. My fingers danced happily with fat berries, filling my basket, while I let my thoughts wander a little. It was tempting to see only the bright and juicy surfaces here, but I was catching whiffs of more than that. A pretty surface glossed over some cracks. I had no idea if the cracks were big enough to matter on the StarReader scale of things, but observational missions were all about following vague hints and seeing where they led. I had the scent—now I needed to follow it deeper.
I dropped a pair of fat berries on top of my very full container and added a couple of sprigs of mint. Fancy fixings might not be in my repertoire, but I bet Greta had those skills. I would go offer my basket as a small gift, beg myself something quick to eat, and then I would set out for my evening with a very specific goal in mind.
It was time to find my people. Somewhere in this village there were dancers, and my intuition would be a lot less spongy in lands I knew well. I had only an enthusiastic amateur’s feel for painting and green, growing things, but dance lived deep in my soul. I needed to take a more finely calibrated read of the health of this place and the good it did in the world, and I’d do that best with people who spoke with their hands and feet.
10
I made my way in the side door of the dance studio, hugging a wall and trying to keep my head low. This time I wanted to stay in the shadows a bit.
I’d gotten about three steps inside the door when it became clear that invisibility wasn’t going to work. Several sets of eyes were already tracking my progress, which meant they definitely weren’t focused on their footwork. That surprised me. Whe
n most serious dancers get in the groove, it would take a minor earthquake to get their attention.
The part of the studio I’d entered was an offshoot, a square bump attached to the main floor. A staging zone, one where the dancers hung out and obviously drop-in visitors didn’t.
I shrugged off my bag, peeled off the light sweater I was wearing, and headed for a warm-up barre. There were two ways to make the point that I belonged here, and moving was a whole lot faster than talking. I’d come in a sleeveless black skinsuit, and I slid sleek pink slippers on my feet as I walked. I generally preferred to dance in bare feet, but these would make my point more quickly.
The eyes kept watching me as I slung a heel up on the barre and leaned over it, my body flat against my leg, but the tenor of the gazes changed. They knew I was one of them now.
Two people joined me at the barre moments later. I smiled at both of them and let them decide how this was going to play.
The blonde woman looked over at the tall, dark man who had come with her. “I didn’t know we were getting any new dancers this week.”
I opted for the most uninformative true answer I could come up with. “Greta said I would be able to do some basic conditioning here.” No dancer worth their feet can take very many days off, even on vacation—our bodies have the kind of tuning that doesn’t take well to pauses.
The blonde watched my next stretch and then nodded. “Don’t hurt yourself, and don’t try anything you can’t do solidly at home. We’re running through some set pieces this evening and working out choreography on a few others.”
I got the not-so-underlying message. Stay out of the way.
I cast a quick glance at the tall man who had begun stretching beside me, in case his vibe was different. He was watching my movements carefully, but said nothing. His eyes reminded me a little of Nate’s mother, and that had me turning on my Talent sensors along with my next toe point.