by Eugen Bacon
They roared.
“I never seen a quarter-brid before. Feel like Columbus!”
They squealed, half-baked sounds like puppy yelps.
“Nursing your tongue little girlie?” Rock again.
“Maybe she nursing a spell.”
“And she not so little.”
Rock licked his lips. “Oh, my. Yes,” he said.
With a surge, Tempest soared toward the corridor of trees on the far side. They chased, not fast enough, not slow either. She ran until leafy fringes of hanging trees almost touched her head.
Rock arrived first. His gang, tongues almost hanging, panted behind.
Tempest, squared off, fists drawn. She faced Rock.
“I swear,” she said.
He advanced, eyes excited.
The tail of an undead creature fluttered in Tempest’s belly. She dropped her hands, stood feet apart.
“Careful boy,” someone quipped. “She a redhead.”
“Tiger eyes too.”
“I warn you,” she said, so quiet only Rock could hear.
“Yeah?” He licked his lips.
Perhaps it was the beast in her tone or a sensing of the tail in her belly, for although Rock laughed, fear spread in his eyes. The half laughter behind him was equally uneasy. Then deep silence claimed its space, until scattered little coughs punctured the silence.
Tempest’s eyes rolled. She was not sure to this day whether it was the sheet of lightning that cut across her path and sprinted to the end of the world, or the earthquake suspended in her fist that exploded Rock’s head. That same thing made the first punk behind him cringe against a tree and then stagger sideways clutching his head. He fell in a heap into the softness of dew. Whatever it was, lightning, earthquake or tail, it dispatched the rest. With spaniel yelps they swayed back a few steps, swirled and fled.
Tempest ran, her face covered in body fluid. She raced past Central as a train pulled up the platform. She did not think to fling herself through its singing doors before they snapped shut. She zipped west and sped all the way home.
There, she hovered by the kitchen doorway where her parents worked, as usual, like a pair of hands. Myra washed the dishes. Vida dried them.
It was Myra who noticed her first. “Hey darl.”
“Hey Migsy.”
“Hey poppet.” Vida.
“Hey Pappy.”
“Your face could do with scrubbing,” said Vida. “You been burying something?”
Tempest shifted her weight from one foot to the other, didn’t budge when Myra snatched a fresh tea towel from a drawer and dabbed at the grime on Tempest’s face. “Hell, it’s wet. Is this . . . blood?”
“Hooroo,” Vida drew her to his arms. “You alright, kiddo?”
Nod. Pause. Shake of head. Then: “Pappy, is hybrid bad?”
“This coming from . . . where?”
“Course not, silly.” Myra.
That was when Tempest told them what happened. She clutched Vida’s waist, her face pressed against his chest, as she trembled and trembled, a six-and-a-half-year-old once more in her daddy’s arms.
So they told her stories. Of T-Mo, her grandfather whose night grew silent. Of a girl named Dale Hocking whose pert face and russet tresses wound up in the river bed. Of a man-boy named Al whose body melted to porridge in the water’s wash.
Hearing the telling, Myra’s voice inside a voice, and seeing Vida’s inward drawn eyes, Tempest understood. These were not stories told to reconcile her with what she had done. These were not right or wrong stories. These stories just were.
• • •
If any survivor spoke to Middle Creek rangers about the incident, no one came to arrest the child. But with that gift, a tail in her belly that commanded thunder, came another: the stepping.
Tempest spent much time with Nana Salem, dashing, when she couldn’t telephone her affections, to visit the house on the hill. Perhaps it was that fragility in Nana Salem’s eyes but one day, alone together, Tempest looked inside them, and stepped in, just like that. Inside she saw a simple girl with big dreams that permitted her hypnotism by the careless smile of a man with lanterns for eyes. Tempest saw spring and summer, all in an instant. There was color and movement on dampened ground, then a soft prairie carpeted in grass. She saw water whose tide hissed and sighed as it touched the shores. If she’d seen beauty, what she saw was a thousand times more, and then the world darkened.
She saw the fading shadow of an ashy man walk into night. He walked light, gentle, treading on air, giant feet moving away, away. Night could not mask the glitter of his copper hair, nor could it fade the shine of sunglasses perched upon his head. Before he touched a deeper corridor of night, he turned and waved.
His smile was wide as a rainbow, his teeth perfect as baby ivory.
When Tempest stepped out of her grandmother’s body, she was as shaken as Nana Salem, who looked as if she had just walked out of a daze. Eyes aglow, Salem shook her curly as a poodle’s hair and eyed Tempest strangely.
“Child,” in a voice filled with awe. A beat fluttered on her temple. “The oddest thing happened . . .” Words faded on a wistful note. Her gaze wavered, as if accepting that old heads did hallucinate.
• • •
Months.
Tempest took courage to execute the stepping upon Tonk. He was sprawled on a damask armchair, reading a newspaper, when she entered. A burst of hostile light raced from the shadows, halted just before a lane whose mouth held a white arrow on a wooden post. Words on the sign read: The Way. She pondered it, wondered whether to continue down the path, or turn back. For what if there was no coming back out of Tonk, into the real world?
Before she could decide, she felt the promise of rain in the air. A sweep of wind carried and deepened that scent, before something jungle, a thing animal, invaded her senses. She was almost out of that godawful place when the excited pant of a creature about to eat her touched her neck. She swerved and caught a close-up of the ash man’s face. He was only a face, nothing else, and coasted inches from her face.
“Why do you run?” His voice was hard as a gravestone.
“Who are you?”
He laughed loud, so loud that night fled and dawn arrived.
A chase of rain escorted Tempest’s bolt, as the man laughed laughed laughed.
Down a valley she shot like a cannon and dived out of Tonk. She found herself quietly sat next to him, a novel fallen from her lap. A sandy filled head and a cardboard mouth made her wonder if it were a dream.
Inside the cool head and handsome face of Nana Margo, Vida’s mother, Tempest found birds the color of blueberries. Here, the ashy stranger wore pigmentation. His lips bore the hue and texture of rubies. As her fear of him faded, as she more and more questioned him about his identity, his lips took a playful softness when he smiled. But it was the world inside Ken Stuart, her grandpa, a man always full of amusement with life, that created something special. The ashy stranger that dwelt in him carried a song on his lips, poetry in his eyes. Things in this world came in shadow, rainbow and gold. The stranger crept as though he held diamonds in his toes, and Tempest chased after him. She brushed aside bushes with her fingers, found herself headed toward a moon in full plumage. But as she neared, night folded and light changed. A shift of wind, and the man turned. He watched her approach. His smile was wide, almost wild. His eyes connected with her soul, and she almost ran into him.
“Who are you?” she said.
“You know,” he said.
But how could he? Be . . .
“T-Mo is dead,” she said.
“Is he now?”
His eyes became stars full of shadows, deep endless shadows. He smiled, waved and walked into a harsh blast of winter.
A crease promised to break into a smile on Ken’s face when she stepped out of him. She wondered
if he knew, what he knew, and if that was why he was smiling. He coughed into his hands and indicated with a nod toward the kitchen. Sounds of Margo scolding the cat flitted out the doorway.
“It’s not funny,” said Nana Margo. She walked briskly toward Ken and whipped a baseball cap off his head. His smile vanished, but a twinkle still burnt in his eyes.
• • •
Tempest thought long and hard about her parents, about Myra’s mystery and distance, about Vida’s tallness and simplicity, and their love for each other. Theirs was an affection that sometimes shut her off.
One day, unable to resist, she did it. They were quietly sat in the reading room, side by side, Vida’s eyes not lifting from the screen of a mobi-tech on his lap, Myra reading Twenty-One Ways, a book he had written. Each was rapt, as though nothing could break their concentration, but their toes mindlessly slid toward, brushed and climbed each other. Watching them, Vida’s handsome face, pale complexion and burgundy hair, and Myra’s blue hair splashed with light, Tempest felt a pulse of wonderment, mostly at her mother. Vida, she understood completely. He was uncomplicated and sensible, straight as a pin. She loved him too much to invade his inner space. But much as she esteemed her mother, Tempest’s curiosity overwhelmed her. So she stepped . . .
Myra jumped back, startled. She cast her book aside and black eyes glittered. Slap! “Don’t. You. Ever! Try that again.”
But Tempest did try it on others. The sensation it roused was of a different nature. She understood that the stepping was something that could mushroom out of control, yet she could not stop it. She saw and heard things, people, creatures. She began to understand the folk like Salem and Tonk and Margo and Ken whose thoughts she reached, whose sight, whose memories she shared. She saw things they had witnessed only moments before. It became an addictive game, one that captured people’s fears, affections, imaginings. The experience carried her on a giddy slide more powerful than the tumble of waves in the waterfall she had made years ago on 180C.
But only in her family did she see T-Mo. She sought him and his river-wide smile. He morphed inside Nana Salem, Margo, Ken and Tonk, looked, acted and spoke different inside each one of them.
• • •
Tempest stepped into Balmoral.
That dawn, before the stepping, unable to shake sleeplessness, she slipped out of the house in Middle Creek. She bounded in an exhilaration of wind toward the river. A mile away, she saw light through the trees and sensed . . . tragedy?
She hid in shadows, saw males with lasers drag shackled exiles from Camp Zero. Her heart fell out to them, the prisoners. The live tail in her belly awoke. Swish, swish. Adrenaline gushed. Swish, swish. About to step out into light and dash to the giant ship on a rescue mission, she saw a big flash of radiance. Myra—Vida enveloped in her arms—flapped in from the night. She swooped from the air, onyx eyes alight, and gently released Vida, who fell by Tempest’s feet.
Myra had just about time to slap with a bare hand a deadly laser beam aimed her way, when her feet set running before they touched ground. She flashed toward the firing Shiva guards, blocking with her palm blasts of the humming lasers.
Swish. Swish. An undead tail. Tempest straightened to full height. She raised a fist to unhinge something seismic, but Vida tackled her to the ground.
“No baby, don’t. Get help. Now.”
Plenty must have happened in her absence. By the time Tempest returned to the giant spaceship by the river, a chase of Middle Creek ranger sirens close behind, the situation had changed. Her eyes scanned, sought information and found a bedraggled Mayor Jenkins acting with the incompetence of a complete idiot.
“He can’t grill people like hot dogs,” a person complained. “Judging by the questions he’s asking, he has no clue what happened here.”
“Cursing, more than grilling, I’d say,” another one said.
“I’d curse too if I were plucked from my bed at the sleeve of dawn.”
“A worthwhile plucking if it will trim the swell of that girth from our sweat, that’s government for you, and he dares complain.”
Half the Shiva guards lay on the ground. Tempest noted their lack of weaponry and took in the picture of Myra, legs akimbo, admiring her work. Her blue as blue hair flew, a single topaz sheet in a leeward float. The lip of Vida’s laser gun swallowed any escape ideas the remaining Shiva guards might have fostered.
• • •
It was later as Vida, in pajamas still, sought the wounded among prisoners and Myra talked to Mayor Jenkins, as Tempest wandered aimless, no longer needed, that she saw Balmoral.
He sat among a dulled crowd of rescued prisoners somewhere on the ground, away from the action. He hugged his knees, de-souled eyes pinned toward a space in the horizon. She walked toward him and, just like that, wordless, stepped into him. She saw his terror, his torture, his desolation. And before she stepped out of him, her heart staggered. A dark puddle grew beneath a little girl thick-haired, flat faced, a child shaking, shaking under a straw bed in Camp Zero.
Tempest found the girl inside the log cabin, rocking the head of her brutally ravaged sister. Lake deep albino eyes studied her. When Tempest stepped into them, the world opened like a water lily into a giant emptiness. A pale white sun hovered in the horizon . . . Tempest had difficulty holding her heart down. To her surprise, inside this strange child, she caught the familiar sight of T-Mo. He came toward her, giant feet bounding on air. He wore his river smile.
“You don’t belong here,” Tempest said. “This girl is not family.”
“She is more.”
“Than what?”
“More than you know.”
“You are an intelligent illusion. I do not believe in you anymore.”
“Look.”
She looked at tall, gnarled trees and rebel flowers of black gold. She isolated deeper shadows from plainer ones inside the stars in T-Mo’s eyes, felt a circular effect of wind on her neck. She found the silence of moving things, the sound of the unmoving. The ground sighed, and then whistled. Tragedy, destiny, and then something vibrant.
The road back was spread-out, deep.
Tempest stepped out of the exile to a wild dog howl in the distance.
The little girl was exactly where she had been, cradling her dead sister. Small knees pulled up, tiny hands, not balled into fists, stroked Jacadi’s braids. The eyes like peanuts sunk deep, spread apart, were calm, appraising. There was nothing in the line of beauty to recommend the girl. The absence of emotion confounded Tempest. It was fruitless to attempt.
“But that’s stupid,” the girl said. Peanut eyes spoke loud, studied Tempest as though they understood her secret.
“What’s so stupid?”
“I know.” This voice scratched.
Something snatched the ground from Tempest’s feet. She sank knees up beside the plain girl with bony legs, feet like maitake mushrooms, a girl whose best or worst praise, insult or affection possibly bordered on one word: stupid.
“What’s your name?”
“Amber.”
“What is it you know?”
“Fedele crai brook?”
Tempest returned her gaze, startled. Not because she understood the strange tongue but because Amber did, in fact, really know.
“His name is T-Mo.”
“Fye fi crem put?”
“He knows death.”
“Clova fo rick max?”
“His world changes, inside people. In yours, there was wind and song, and the yawn of something empty. Vosco ani prom. Tat row doman rout.” Tempest slipped with ease into that new language, a tongue that was not of Middle Creek, nor Hybrid, nor Exile. She kicked off her shoes, curled her feet. “Mag dir a ti vae.” Her voice was within a voice. She did not recognize it.
They spoke of things past and present, of places cool as a mountain breeze, of water fresh as lemon mint.
They talked of fragments of longing, of rich, clasping terror that was hard to break. And they spoke of wind that struggled, and failed to escape, of amity between brand new strangers. Of an ashy man whose pale, colorless skin was fragrant as honey and sage.
Until they lost time.
AMBER
• 39 •
Myra steers in and out of a storm cloud. A white streak of lightning inscribes the red sky ahead. The shuttle rolls. It judders through eddies of air, swirls of draft that push it up and down the firmament. Myra aligns the vessel. She reduces speed and moves the throttle. She lowers the flaps, stabilizes speed and noses for landing. She lines up against the planet, brakes at touchdown.
The land’s pulse is perceptible even in the vessel. Myra looks back at her passengers. Vida is a little green but recovers sufficiently to smile at Amber and Tempest seated behind him, nonchalantly so.
It is Myra’s position as president of the Arbitration Assembly that allows such ease of intergalactic transportation for the family. She could just have easily enveloped all three, transmitted them in a swoop and flash to the remote galaxy. Instead, she chose to borrow a repatriation shuttle not on live commission to the planets. Naturally, government commanded she fund her own fuel. Not a problematic task on dual income, with Vida’s thriving professorship in Cosmos Medicine at Techno Institute. His stellar decoding of the navigation map is reason for their early arrival.
Novic is not expecting them—should it matter?
Myra worries. She has not been to Grovea since childhood, not since T-Mo, her bona fide bloodline. Later, when Tonk was wed to her mother, his human status limited the privilege of intergalactic tours, though his prosperity would have permitted it. But Tonk was not a man of the voyaging ilk. The arrogance that curled his lips when he said it made “voyaging” sound like prostituting.