The Anatomy of Curiosity

by Brenna Yovanoff

  I instructed my fellow pacers to speak to their men about the impropriety of flirting with star clan women, unless they intended to invite one home to An Riel for marriage. Jarair guffawed when I said it, which made me feel defensive about the idea. Thinking already of Dinah Aniv, unconsciously.

  Some star clan women flirted back with our men, but only if there were no star clan men present, and I heard from Leonor that he didn’t think any of the refugee women but the mages were unmarried, except those too young for it. And too young to the star clans was different than it was for us—some of the married star clan women were only fifteen.

  But.

  It was not my mission to figure out the finer aspects of star clan personal or political relationships, and I tried to put it from my mind.

  I tried to.

  I wonder now, if I’d asked Dinah, how the rest of my tour would have changed.

  World building as foreshadowing!

  • • •

  Three weeks into my mission, Sky Breaker team had cleared all but one of the mines on the third terrace of the city of Shivers, and we were about to shift our focus to terrace six.

  We’d only just cleaned and balanced a dandelion bomb, and I remained perched atop the peak of an adobe roof to watch Dinah and two star clan men help the snails grind the ceramic shell to dust so it could never be reassembled.

  The hum was smooth and low, vibrating my toes as I studied Dinah and the wavering air around her. She was graceful, strong, careful. Her mass of hair knotted in a ladder down her back, her robes the same green-blue-pink of our first day. I remember I was thinking at the moment how she had almost no discernible breasts under the robe and if that was part of the reason for layers. Her robe cinched at her waist but did not spread over hips. She was slender as the poplar I used to compare myself to.

  I caught myself wondering if because she could not paint her arms or hands, she painted the star art of her people onto her bare belly, or asked a friend to trace constellations at the small of her back, or arcing down her thighs.

  It was not the hum my body was responding to anymore; I realized it suddenly and with sharp, burning shame. My skin was too hot, and I looked desperately over the cityscape for clarity.

  Just then something in the distance popped, and a wave of force shook dust from every roof between me and the Moon Shard team above us on terrace four.

  Everything froze for a split second—then I saw the telltale bowl of orange energy with a yellow-bright flare at the top. A tulip. The colors dissipated fast in the burned-sugar wind, lost against the orange adobe city.

  I leaped to my feet and yelled down to Dinah and the Sky Breakers, “Tulip, fourth terrace, a hundred meters east of my position.”

  And with that I took off.

  I ran hard as I could, climbing and jumping from roof to roof, into a courtyard, through narrow alleys I had to shift sideways to pass through, adobe dust scraping onto my red uniform.

  I arrived mere minutes after the blast. Swathes of cobblestone road were simply gone, only rubble now, and the sides of three houses were collapsed inward. Moon Shard’s sergeant had already organized half his men to the perimeter, checking for secondary devices, and the other half used shields to pry rubble away from the zero point. Two lookouts were down with broken bones, and all bled from lacerations.

  They were digging for their star clan mage and pacer, both caught in the blast and buried under the broken bricks from the nearest house. I helped dig. I hummed low in my throat, hoping some answer would lead me to them, as the hum led me to mines and rebels and sleep. But I could not hear it over the ringing in my ears, even though the hum is not truly a sound.

  By the time Sky Breaker arrived we’d found Belen—the pacer who always curled in his bed between mission and mealtime—crushed completely. Ten minutes later we uncovered the star clan mage Virva.

  It was Dinah who dragged me away, who wiped the hardening layer of adobe from my face, roughly and frowning, tears making mud on her own cheeks. “Go,” she said. “Be in the perimeter force while we star clans gather her up. Your man, the pacer, will be laid out too.”

  I put a hand on her neck, thumb aligned along her jaw. I opened my mouth but had no voice. I let her go, though her large dark eyes did not ask me to.

  This section is for tension: the sexual tension growing in Rafel’s awareness and the reminder that this entire world/job/situation can kill you if you do anything wrong. Literal and emotional tension.

  • • •

  The star clans asked us four remaining pacers to stand guard for Virva’s funeral, at sunset the next night. Because they held their memorial out in the desert, because they worked with blood, there was always a danger of desert cats or wild dogs disrupting. It was a kindness and an honor for them to include us. A hand of friendship I was not sure we deserved.

  But we all said yes.

  • • •

  It was impossible to know if the tulip’s detonation had been the fault of mage or pacer. The lookouts and shield rows of Moon Shard team had not seen a mistake by either, though obviously there had been one, and the after-investigation revealed only that it had not been set off by a secondary trigger or hidden rebel. All we knew was something had gone wrong in the cleaning and balancing, and the tulip’s blast threw both mage and pacer into the wall of the house, which then collapsed upon them, along with the roofs. It made a crater of the road.

  I was glad we did not have one or the other of them to blame.

  • • •

  As I stood alone as a funeral guard, under the vast, starry desert sky, the hum was overwhelming. I felt it in my eyeballs and in my hair follicles. I felt it buzzing along my spine and in the soles of my feet. I knew none of the other pacers felt it. I knew that if they had any sense of the hum, they were unsettled by it, not part of it. Not alive with it the way I was.

  As I stared at the dark line of horizon, where stars gave sudden way to black bluffs as empty of light as the deepest part of the ocean, I wondered if there was something wrong with me.

  • • •

  Belen’s service was quick, without much ceremony. His body—what we could assemble—never touched the ground once we wrapped it in ocean-blue cloth. He was boxed up to be carried home between two horses, hanging from ropes only a foot off the earth. With his family in An Riel he would be set to sea, his bones to feed the great whales so that they might sing his memories.

  In the desert, we carved his family name upon a flat stone and settled it near the gate so anyone who entered or exited would see it, walk over it. To remind us we move forward on the achievements of our fallen. He was the first from this tour to die, though I am sure I was not the only veteran remembering the spreading patio of name-bricks marking the gate of every base camp during the war.

  Funerary rites are my number-one favorite kind of world building. Not only are they fun and challenging, funerals are one of those things that link and distance all cultures from each other, and one of those things that might separate us from the animals of the world. Sometimes all we have to study about an ancient culture is the evidence of how they treated their dead, and so I love playing thought games about what funerals do and don’t, can and can’t mean in reference to the living, to the story I’m telling, to the narrator, and how they reflect (or contradict) the culture I’m building.

  • • •

  Two days after the tulip exploded, Sky Breaker team was back to work. We finished our terrace, then skipped to where Moon Shard had been—their team was dispersed now among the rest, awaiting a new mage and pacer. I finally realized that I’d been assigned here so late because Sky Breaker—Dinah Aniv—had lost their first pacer in a similar explosion. I got the story out of Jarair: that one had been the pacer’s fault. Everybody, even the sergeant and all the Rielan lookouts, had agreed. He’d disregarded a word from Dinah and arrogantly knocked over a just-defused dandelion. Its dying energy had snacked on his leg. He was out of service, back in An Riel, but beca
use he hadn’t been killed there was no name brick for him, and I hadn’t suspected.

  • • •

  Dinah Aniv knelt delicately before a rose bomb, skimming the very tips of her sensitive fingers along each of the curving petals of this strange mine. We were in a tight, triangle-shaped courtyard with brittle, overgrown vines and a trellis that made it impossible for me to perch upon a roof and still observe. So, after walking the perimeter, I’d chosen the farthest corner of the triangle and crouched so I was eye-level with Dinah and the bomb. It had been hidden here where a fountain should have been. Long ago, this was the private garden of some city dweller rich enough to have plentiful water carried up.

  The rose was too big for the courtyard, too, and even the team’s shields would not save any of the men from the blood-hunting power if it detonated. I’d ordered them to the alleys and streets just beyond, into the houses themselves that created the courtyard. The adobe would protect them. Only Dinah and I were in the kill zone.

  I measured my breathing and listened to the hum in my teeth. I watched every corner, every brick, for shifting shadows or falling dust. For the slightest tilt of curled, brown leaf against the wind.

  Dinah’s veil did not wave at all, not even to show she breathed. The ends of her thick black braids curled on the mosaicked stones behind her heels. Only her strong arms and hands moved: slow and steady, exploring every surface of the bomb.

  Sometimes rose bombs took hours upon hours to clean and balance. It only required the removal of one thin petal and the entire thing fell to pieces. But pull the wrong one, and that was the end.

  It was one of the least interesting defusings to watch, as there was little in the way of outward magic, but for just that reason it took the most skill. I barely breathed as Dinah caressed the rose, as she lifted away her veil and put her mouth against one petal, then another, as she tasted, smelled, as she breathed it in.

  She leaned back, pinched a petal near the top between her fingers, and with a firm, quick motion slipped it free.

  The hum of the desert clicked, paused … shuddered.

  I was running toward her before I knew it, to throw myself between her and the armed rose.

  Dinah quickly pulled out a second petal, and the hum fell into its place again.

  I skidded to a halt nearly at her side, panting, sweat covering every inch of me. I was dizzy, light-headed; my heart roared. My fingers were numb, my ribs tight.

  Breathe, breathe, I told myself. She is all right, the rose did not explode.

  Dinah stood and turned to me in the oppressive silence of the shady old courtyard. Her eyes were wide, her cheeks blotched with unusual color. “Rafel,” she whispered, shocked.

  “I thought—I thought you’d pulled the wrong one.” I struggled to calm my panting, the rush of blood in my skull.

  “I did,” she said, stepping nearer to me. “There was a trick in it.”

  “You—you defused it, though.” My chest was loosening, my head losing the clutch of terror. “I thought it was going to explode. It should have.”

  “Yes,” she said calmly, though her posture added, of course. “How did you know, Rafel Sal AnLenia?”

  Just then our sergeant approached, scowling at me. “You had us all choked, sir,” he chided. “What happened?”

  I licked my dry, salty, sandy lips. “I thought she’d made a mistake and the rose was going to explode.”

  The sergeant narrowed his eyes, and behind him a line of star clan men were muttering in their own tongue. Our lookouts and shield men were gathering, too. “So you ran closer to it?” the sergeant said slowly, carefully, as if speaking to a particularly foolish dog.

  He was right.

  I stared at Dinah, and she stared back at me, shocked, amazed, appalled.

  I’d tried to save her. Tried to outrun a mine.

  This was the first moment between Rafel and Aniv I wrote down: that he would not realize the strength of his feelings for her (because he isn’t that in touch with his heart) until he instinctually leaps in front of a bullet to save her, so to speak.

  I had to prove that he’s very good at his job and very levelheaded at work, a good soldier, in order for this scene to work. He doesn’t break rules, so when he does, it hits like a ton of bricks.

  Also: it was the moment for Dinah to have an epiphany too.

  • • •

  Everybody knew I was crazy after that afternoon: crazy pacer, reacting like a madman. At least I’d been right that the bomb was about to go off. Dinah reported the trick trigger to everyone.

  They knew I wasn’t just run-of-the-grinder crazy, either. It was her. Jarair and Leonor and Sars fed me bitter wine from An Riel, inside the privacy of my tent, and Jarair told me I was a fool in love.

  I wasn’t a drinker, but I did not stop that night until I forgot.

  She found me in the morning, alone, wrung out, splayed undressed on the thin rug next to my cot. She sat me up and said, “I suppose this means Sky Breaker is taking the morning off,” in a tight, annoyed little voice. But then she found water and washed my face, made me sip slowly, and left for long enough that I’d nearly dressed myself completely before she returned with a hot bowl of salty bean soup, greasy chunks of goat, crisp flatbread, and even a small pat of butter. I devoured it with my fingers, eyes pinched against the light, and when I finished, I felt like I remembered myself.

  Dinah roughly combed my hair and used a thread from her robes to lash it all back into a twist like hers, though only as long as my neck. She did not speak while she worked, and I held myself rigid, enjoying the rose-oil smell of her skin, the soft touch of her strong hands on my neck and unshaven jaw, on my ears, and her nails skimming against my scalp. I held myself rigid and tried not to react beyond the tiny little shivers and slick sweat on my spine and chest.

  She finished and shifted away. I caught one of her hands. Dinah froze, kneeling on my cot behind me. I put her palm to my palm. Her hand was as large as mine, with long fingers, strong-looking, but soft and supple from the repeated oiling, from the silk gloves she wore when not working. Star clan mages keep their fingers as sensitive as they can—not like mine. My hands are scarred and calloused, sun-roughed and salted from the sea so they are even a bit darker than my face. Dinah’s were lighter than her desert face and black eyes. Her nails were perfectly shaped pale ovals; mine were trimmed too low, the cuticles ragged.

  Slowly she drew her hand away.

  But she did not stand up to leave.

  I said, “The desert has a hum, Dinah.”

  For long moments she was silent. I felt her gaze upon me but kept my face forward, crushing my teeth together because the hum was making them tremble.

  Finally, Dinah said, “You used it to hunt, didn’t you. In the war. You use it now to sense what you are looking for. It’s why you’re the best pacer. Your cousins do not know the song.” I nodded, still not looking at her. “You ran toward me.”

  “Yes.” My voice is a rough whisper again, like we’re back in that narrow triangle garden, under the trellis shade. It had been such a grossly stupid thing to do, for a soldier, for a pacer, for a man.

  “Oh, Rafel.”

  “Aniv,” I said, hollow and horrified with myself.

  Part of world building is what characters call each other and when. When do they use titles, what titles, are names appropriate?

  This conversation was twice as long, but Maggie told me it was 90 percent redundant and she was right, so I cut it down to the real emotions. So much better now.

  “This is terrible,” she whispered, sadly.

  She stood. Her head nearly touched the canvas ceiling of my tent. So did mine when I struggled to my feet, too. There was something so compelling about her, so certain and lovely and different. She was set apart, and I decided in that moment it was because of her place in the desert hum. Dinah Aniv was a harmony, I thought to myself exactly then, when she stood there looking mournful and worried, but she drew her soft, large hands toget
her and said, “Get your boots on, pacer, we have work to do.”

  • • •

  I did my job. I was not distracted by her presence, or ruined for pacing.

  I was very distracted.

  But I did my job.

  I would have run again into the heart of a rose bomb if the situation had presented itself. The knowledge vibrated louder than the hum, and just like I’d been shocked to remember how easy it was to kill my first boy, I was shocked to realize I’d never felt that way before—never wanted to kiss or touch or be kissed or be touched—with any other person, soldier or lady, in my life. It only occurs to me now that maybe the oddity was that it had taken so long, not that it was Aniv who brought it out.

  • • •

  Every evening when we left Shivers, Aniv and I spent the brief walk from fortress gate to camp talking softly. Of small things: her family, expatriate life on the border of Eruse, living with only women to learn the ways of magic. I told her about my mother and aunts, about my older brother Onor. About humming to get myself to fall asleep when I went home after the war. She asked me about becoming the Gardener, and I asked her if she was the most powerful star clan mage.

  One night, after defusing a triplet of dandelions, I said softly to Dinah, “That last one felt different.”

  She glanced at me, surprised. “It was a decoy. Perhaps one in fifteen is so.”

  “Unarmed, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  I nodded, let my arm brush hers, and then forced myself to keep a few inches away.

  We stepped on quietly, surrounded by the Sky Breakers. Thin clouds striped the dark purple twilight above us. I heard a creeping low of wind through empty homes behind us.