Stoneskin Page 10

  In Matindi’s time—in Matthew’s time—no Witch was allowed to sing. Or watch the channels. Or go to parties, or ride a lift on a different world, or walk into an unfamiliar store, or—

  Well. Prohibiting music? A stupid move, an idiot’s token gesture, and it was only a matter of time before the Witches were forced to accept that.

  Music had always been there.

  Music would always be there.

  After a few hundred years of such nonsense, the Witches finally admitted they might have been a bit on the hasty side when it came to music. There were some traditionalists who swore that music led to the corruption of their bond with the Deep, certainly, and others who weren’t as strict but still avoided music when they could. But music could now be found in Hub, in Lancaster, in the homes of the less orthodox Witches.

  (Tembi very much enjoyed walking past those traditionalist Witches with her soundkit on and singing as loudly as she could, but only when she was sure Matthew wouldn’t catch her.)

  So, music.

  Song.

  And singing.

  Since Bayle loved music herself and could already sing a passable tune, Tembi had decided the Deep couldn’t have meant singing. No, not actual singing. It must have meant…something else. Something like singing, but something Bayle couldn’t yet do. They pressed the Deep; it had no answers, and bubbled at them like a fish beneath the surface of a pond.

  So. They needed to find something like singing.

  It would be trial-and-error to find out what that was, so Tembi had decided to begin with sparring.

  Unfortunately, Bayle had taken to martial arts like a fish to a frying pan, and after a month of hard effort, they had decided to give up and try something else.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I love what it’s doing for my thighs,” Bayle said over a round of tumbarranchos. She pointed her toe and flexed the muscles now dotting her legs. “Better than swimming. But Tembi? I’m tired of getting hit, and I don’t like hitting other people. This isn’t for me.”

  Tembi nodded. “We’ll try something else. Does Pepper have any suggestions?”

  Bayle checked the databand on her wrist, as if reading a message from a friend. They were trying to use “Pepper” as code for the Deep when they spoke about it in public, but they both knew they were too self-conscious about such silliness to make it work.

  “No,” she said. “Pepper doesn’t have anything new to add.”

  Tembi shook a fist at the imaginary Pepper; this was met with the smell of a rampaging pack of enormous, soaking wet dogs about to crash down upon her in greeting.

  “You smell that?” she asked Bayle.

  The other girl shook her head and held up her dinner. “Only this,” she replied.

  “All right,” Tembi said. “I’ll check with Pepper tonight.”

  “Hey! Hey, look! Witches!”

  Tembi and Bayle exchanged a bemused glance. The Venezuelan restaurant was on the outskirts of the tourist district, and the paint on their faces tended to garner attention from visitors. The two young men who had spotted them were dressed in worn Spacers’ uniforms of dark black and blue, with streaks of red across their chests to denote fleet insignias and rank.

  The men dropped into the vacant chairs at their table; the older (and better-looking) of the two tipped his chair sideways to talk to Bayle.

  “Love the makeup,” he said, smiling. He reached out to touch a lock of Bayle’s black hair which was resting against her paint. She blocked with her right hand, and spread her fingers apart so he couldn’t help but notice the translucent webbing between them.

  “Hi,” she said, with the kind of toothy smile that reminded Tembi of a shark.

  “Hi yourself,” he said, and spread his own fingers. He had webbing too, darker and more textured than Bayle’s; he pointed towards his neck, and a set of rudimentary gills on his neck flared and closed. “I was just gonna ask you if that was a picture of kelp, but I’m thinking I guessed right.”

  Bayle looked him up and down with an appraising eye. “Lemurian?”

  “You know anybody else with gills?”

  “My mother always warned me about Lemurians.”

  “Really?” he grinned at her, and went to touch the lock of hair brushing against her face. This time, she let him. “What did she say?”

  “That they’re cheap and have terrible taste in drinks.”

  “Well, then,” he said, flagging over a waitress. “Why don’t you help me pick, and we’ll prove your mother wrong?”

  Tembi sighed into her meal. This wasn’t an uncommon event: Bayle was beautiful, and radiated an aura of being the type of woman best approached through dinner and dancing. Men gravitated towards her. At least this time they weren’t embarrassingly old.

  She turned to the younger Spacer beside her to pass the time. “Hey.”

  He was busy fiddling with the levels on a brand-new soundkit. “Hey,” he said, idly.

  “Tembi.”

  “Kalais,” he replied. “You know how to make this thing work?”

  She did, actually: it was a few models newer than the soundkit she had brought with her from Adhama, but it was in the same family.

  “Thanks,” he said, as music began to chirp through the earpieces. He added, almost shyly: “I’ve never met a Witch before.”

  “I’m not really a Witch,” Tembi said. “I’m still in training.”

  “What’s the difference?” He had light brown skin but his eyes were almost black, and deeply earnest. They reminded her of a puppy.

  “I can’t jump myself or talk to the Deep yet.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged. “Brain development,” she said. “It’s a prefrontal cortex thing. It’s already talking to me, but I won’t be able to hear it clearly until I’m at least eighteen. Probably older.”

  “Wait, how old are you?” He peered at her with new interest, and Tembi realized that he was probably her own age.

  “Sixteen,” she said. “You?”

  “Seventeen.” He held out his hand. “Kalais.”

  “You said that,” Tembi said. She paused, and then shook his hand. He grimaced as he touched her skin. “I’m not Earth-normal,” she said, setting her ears flat against her head as an example.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “But who is?”

  She looked more closely at him. Kalais’ puppy eyes were a little larger than most, but they weren’t too unusual.

  “My planet’s pretty dim,” he said. “They call it a perpetual twilight.”

  “Sure.” She had heard of low-light planets. Most of the people living on it needed special lenses to travel to worlds with standard lighting. Maybe his eyes—

  He blinked, hard, and his dark irises vanished. Beneath those near-black lenses, his real eye color was almost white. Tembi jerked back in surprise, and Kalais laughed. He blinked again, and those dark irises were back.

  “Whoa!” Tembi said. “Can you see in the light?”

  “With the lenses down, yes,” he said. “If they’re up, everything’s just blurs of different colors.

  “I like your ears,” he added. “They make you look like an elf.”

  “What’s an elf?”

  “Kalais, don’t bore the poor girl.” The older Spacer pushed two drinks in front of them. These frothed a thick pink foam all over the table. “Here you go, kids. Two virgin rose petals, for two virgin roses.”

  Tembi felt the need to blush and stammer, but Kalais was doing a better job of that than she ever could. Bayle winked at her, and sipped daintily from a long-necked bottle of something that smelled of berries and spice.

  “The boys are military. They’re here on reconnaissance,” Bayle told Tembi, and then nodded towards the older Spacer. “Rabbit’s job is to set up meetings for his boss.”

  “What’s your job?” she asked Kalais. She tried the pink drink; sweet, but with a strangely sour aftertaste. The flavors went well together.

  “To learn his job.” He nodde
d at Rabbit. “General Eichin says you always need a backup in key positions. Just in case.”

  “War?” Tembi tried to ignore the feeling of furious wings beating against the back of her mind in bright sparks of rainbows.

  “You heard of the conflict in Sagittarius?” Rabbit asked. When she nodded, he said, “It’s getting bad. There’s a real humanitarian crisis happening—it’s getting real bad.

  “You Witches,” he said, as he pressed an index finger lightly against Bayle’s nose, “don’t let the Deep move anything involved in war. But we’re the good guys. No doubt about that. We’re going to war to end a genocide, not cause one. I’m here to lay the groundwork for Eichin to come and petition the Witches for use of the Deep.”

  “It’s not going to happen. The Deep wants peace,” Bayle said. “That’s the only request it’s made from Lancaster.”

  “But if it helped us now, it’d be promoting peace,” Rabbit said.

  “This is a managerial issue,” Tembi heard herself say in ageless Matindi’s no-nonsense voice. “Bayle and I can’t help you.”

  “I know.” Rabbit rolled his head to stare up at the ceiling. “I’m just… I’m just blowing air. Read up on what’s happening in Sagittarius, if you want to understand why we’re here.”

  The conversation went flat for a moment. Bayle rescued it, steering it deftly towards what Hub offered in terms of nightlife. The men said they would be stationed on Found for several months, both to set the groundwork for Eichin’s arrival and to support the general once he had arrived. Tembi asked a bunch of questions about why Eichin couldn’t do any of this himself, and was told that there were some things that high-ranking military personnel had time to do, but grunt jobs? No, those were not among them.

  As it didn’t take much time to set up meetings or find a decent hotel room, Rabbit and Kalais expected to have some time to kill.

  “We’re looking forward to it, to be honest,” Rabbit said. “My little buddy here got hurt in a battle a few weeks ago, and I’ve earned some shore leave. We want to live in a place where we don’t have to worry about whether the ship’s gravity’s going to cut out while we’re using the bathroom.”

  Tembi wrinkled her nose at that, but had to agree that he had a point.

  They agreed to meet up again on the next breakday. Rabbit asked if they could escort them to the hopper back to Lancaster. It was such an old-fashioned thing to do that Bayle agreed on the spot.

  They fell into twos, Bayle and Rabbit leading the way, their arms entwined. Tembi and Kalais followed; they talked about music, mostly, and about how they missed their homeworlds and families. Tembi listened more than she talked; she tended to keep Marumaru close to her heart. Kalais told her how he had enlisted young; most of his family were military personnel themselves and they approved of his decision to serve.

  “Rabbit said you were hurt in a battle?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, an almost wondering expression on his face as he moved his left arm. “I mean, I wasn’t fighting in it. I was in a section of the ship that got hit, and my arm got wrecked. I mean, just scraping wrecked! I’m lucky I wasn’t killed. I don’t even remember how it happened—it was that fast! One moment I’m running errands for Rabbit, and the next I’m trapped under a metal pylon. I was there for hours until the battle ended and they could spare the time to cut me out.”

  Tembi didn’t know what to say so she offered a weak, “That’s terrible.”

  “I don’t remember most of it,” he said. “They shoot you up with a short-term memory blocker if you’ve suffered battlefield trauma. They say it keeps you from suffering post-traumatic stress disorders, but I think they do it to keep soldiers from going AWOL during recovery.”

  “Does it still hurt?” she asked.

  “Nope. I got the full rehabilitation treatment,” he replied. “But they didn’t fix the cosmetic damage. It’s really ugly to look at. Definitely second-date territory.”

  “Oh, so this is a date?” she asked.

  “Well,” he said, slipping his hand into hers. “Now it is.”

  She laughed.

  “Your skin is amazing,” he said, turning her hand over in his own. “It looks Earth-normal, but I bet you could stop a knife!”

  “Probably not,” she admitted. “It gets tougher when I’m under stress. It’s been a pretty quiet month, so it’s not as hard as it usually is. Besides, getting stabbed would still hurt.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know when you bang your leg on something with a sharp edge? My skin might not show the injury, but I still feel it in the nerves beneath it.”

  “Can you feel this?” he said, as he ran his thumb over her knuckles.

  “Sort of.” She nodded. “Not through my skin, but everything under my skin knows I’m being touched.”

  Kalais put more pressure on the back of her hand. “How about now?”

  “Now I’m worried you’ll break something.”

  He laughed, and brought her hand to his mouth. He kissed the back of it. “How about now?”

  Tembi shook her head. She felt awfully lightheaded.

  He nibbled, very gently, on a fingertip. “How about now?”

  That, Tembi felt. Along her finger, along every single centimeter of her body—

  “Yeah,” she said, grinning the slightest little bit. “I felt that.”

  Later that night, after the hopper flight with Bayle and a mug of chamomile tea with Matindi, after she had showered and changed and taken a few minutes to redraw Taabu’s fake eyebrows, after she was safe in her own bed and watching the fireflies creep along the plass, Tembi thought about that simple, stupid, unhygienic nibble.

  And wondered if Kalais would do it again the next time she saw him.

  _________________________________

  greenlove

  stonegirl to greenlove

  love

  home

  family

  strength

  FIGHT

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 18 May 4042 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Twelve

  “Tembi!”

  Tembi looked up from her holo just in time to grab the foam ball flying at her head. She tossed it back to Leps, but before the ball reached her teacher, it stopped and hung in the air.

  “Hands,” Leps commanded. “Hold them up. High as you can.”

  Oh. Great. This again. Tembi obeyed. Leps had been pushing the class harder than usual lately, but no one could figure out why. Mornings and afternoons were now a blend of textbook learning and object movement, with the occasional pop quiz.

  In this particular case, it was a literal pop quiz—the foam ball smacked Tembi in the face. Tembi blinked to get the dust out of her eyes; the rest of the class snickered.

  “Did you even try to catch it?” Leps snapped.

  A trick question, and one without any good answer. Too late, Tembi realized her mistake: if she said she had tried to catch the ball using the Deep, then she had failed the test; if she said she had asked the Deep to stay passive, then she hadn’t instinctively understood Leps’ lesson; and, if she said she hadn’t tried at all, then she was dumb as a pile of flat rocks.

  Three foam balls vanished from a nearby rack, and reappeared to smack Leps across the back of her head, one! two! three!

  Leps closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “I didn’t—” Tembi began.

  Leps held up one finger, and then pointed to the door.

  Tembi decided to double down. “I didn’t ask the Deep to do that.”

  “Oh?” Leps said coldly. “Then I want a two-thousand-word essay on why that’s a bigger problem than if you had asked the Deep to hit me.”

  “But—”

  “Three thousand words,” Leps said. “By the time class is out this evening. And cite your sources. You pull anything off of the channels without crediting it, and I’ll make you run errands for me. Literally.”

>   Tembi shoved her chair back, taking perverse satisfaction from how one of its loose feet shrieked as it skidded across the marble floor, and left the room.

  She stomped around the halls of Lancaster Tower for a while, listening to the echoing pad-pad-pad-pad of her bare feet against the stone. The Tower never failed to irritate her: all of its hallways were beautiful works of art, gleaming from gold and polished stone, and nobody except visitors and novice Witches bothered to use them. Fully trained Witches jumped everywhere. And she had never seen a person doing maintenance, not even to monitor a swarm of janitor ’bots—

  “You clean these, don’t you?” she said aloud. “You just…you just move the dirt and footprints away, don’t you?”

  Nobody answered, but she suddenly felt guilty about her bare feet.

  Her feet had to be cleaner than shoes, right? She washed them three times a day—how often did shoes get washed?

  …still…

  Tembi left the Tower and cut across the South meadow. Orange butterflies soared up around her in a cloud; she thought about yelling at them, just on general principle. But that wasn’t productive. Nothing seemed productive, not with three thousand words hanging over her head—

  She turned east on a whim.

  She was off to visit the Martian.

  Lancaster Library was a goodly distance from the Tower. It was a warm, welcoming place…if you could get to it. It wasn’t just the hike through kilometers of grass and wildflowers, oh no. Set within a maze made from giant boulders and strategically placed shrubbery, the Library stayed where it was, while the maze changed at the whim of the Librarian and the Deep.

  (The Librarian said that since fully trained Witches could always jump directly to the Library, this was done to teach the students humility in the face of higher knowledge. Normally, Tembi could complete the maze within a turn or two, but that’s because she actually enjoyed visiting the Library. If she was with another student, the maze usually continued to dump them back into the lawn until they had completed sufficient penance to show respect. Or, failing that, serious annoyance and swearing.)