Stoneskin Page 13

  Hmm… Matindi and the tall woman seemed to be arguing about something. Matindi had that too-stubborn look she got when she was pushed too far, and the tall woman had a familiar tilt to her chin that reminded Tembi of—

  “Oh, I do not belong here,” Kalais said.

  Tembi snapped her attention back to her boyfriend. “That’s a shame,” she said. “The food’s pretty good.”

  She nodded to where a group of other underage Witches were sitting on the floor, hidden from the eyes of the party-goers behind a catering table. They were all laughing and scraping food out of nearly empty serving platters. Bayle and Steven weren’t among them, but she recognized the others from class. She and Kalais grabbed two plates from the buffet, and plopped down among the young Witches.

  “Hey, Stoneskin,” said a man with twisted stripes of purple across his face. He was wearing a beaten Spacers’ uniform, and he nodded appreciatively at Kalais’s own Spacer kit. “I’m Ghent,” he said. “Nice outfit! Where’d you find it?”

  “I got it when I enlisted,” Kalais said.

  Tembi hid a little grin as Ghent tried to recover. “Military man,” he said, and elbowed Tembi. “Where’d you find him?”

  “He found me,” she said, passing Kalais a platter of mystery meat. “Are there any rolls left?”

  The other Witches couldn’t pass her the rolls fast enough. There was even some butter (there was never any butter!). They started throwing questions at Kalais: where did he serve, how old was he—You can enlist at seventeen in Sagittarius? Wait, you enlisted at fifteen?!—and what was it like?

  You know, what was it like? On the battlefield? In space, with the ships firing on each other? Is it just like on the channels—

  This was the exact kind of situation that Tembi had imagined. Not about the war. No, she had imagined this curious interrogation of her boyfriend. She had an answer prepared to get them to back off (and in her mind it sounded amazing!), but Kalais beat her to it. He pushed up the left sleeve of his uniform, revealing the burned, ruined skin of his arm.

  “It’s not great,” he said.

  The Witches recoiled. Most of them had never seen a serious injury before.

  “I fight for the Sabenta,” he said. “They don’t have much money. When my arm got crushed under a pylon during a battle, they could only fund functionality repair. I’m responsible for repairing the cosmetic damage.

  “If I make it through the war, I’ll get my arm fixed up,” he said, as he tugged his jacket back into place. “Until then, I’ll wear long sleeves.”

  “Did it hurt?” asked Vix, a woman from the Kowal system with silver runes on her cheekbones. She slammed her eyes shut as soon as the words slipped out, as if realizing how stupid her question had been.

  “It did,” Kalais said, almost kindly. “It doesn’t anymore. The medics shut down the existing nerves.”

  The other Witches started asking questions. Slowly, at first, and then, once they realized Kalais was going to answer them honestly, as fast as he could manage them. Tembi sat back and watched: it was only after he had turned the conversation away from what he had done in the war to what they could do to stop it that she realized Kalais was…working? Yes. He was working, doing publicity outreach for the Sabenta.

  And the other Witches? They sat, plates of food forgotten, hanging on the words of a boy several years younger than themselves.

  “I know it seems like the war is too far away to matter, but it does,” he said to Ghent. “People are dying. My commanding officer, General Eichin, is here to persuade Lancaster that their involvement will help save lives.

  “In fact,” he said, pointing, “he’s right over there.”

  Everyone turned and rose on their knees to peer over the top of the caterers’ table. Kalais guided their eyes to a man in a crisp black Spacers’ kit with a red stripe across his chest. He was standing off to one side of the dance floor, talking to the tall Witch with the rainbow hair and robes.

  “I love a man in uniform,” Vix whispered to Tembi, nodding towards the general.

  “Tell me about it,” Tembi replied, as she glanced over at Kalais.

  “Sorry, but we can’t get involved,” Ghent was saying to him. “I mean, I can donate money to get your arm fixed up, but we can’t use the Deep to help you.”

  “It’s one of our laws,” agreed Tayler. “’cause if we help in this war, we’ll have to help in others.”

  Ghent nodded. “And there will always be wars.”

  “Hey, we should probably drop this,” Kalais said. “I’m just here for the free food—I don’t want to bring everybody down by getting political. Did someone say there was quesillo?”

  There was, and also cake and pie, and a squishy dish that was like an egg custard, only a little too creamy for Tembi’s taste. They ate and chatted until the buffet was broken down and the catering crew kicked them out, and then Tembi and Kalais slipped away into the grounds.

  “Sorry if I sucked up the conversation,” Kalais said.

  “No, it’s fine,” Tembi replied. “They wanted to hear what you had to say. And you were…kind to them.”

  “Because they haven’t—” He stopped himself before the next words came out.

  “They haven’t seen anything,” she said. “Yeah. I know.”

  “Someday,” he said, slipping his hand into hers, “I’d like to hear how you got to be so different from them.”

  “Let’s just say that my biggest fear? It’s forgetting where I come from.” She stopped walking and took in the grass stretching out beneath her bare feet. The grass felt cool and wonderful; she knelt to run her fingers through it, and realized her skin had softened to the point where she could feel each blade of grass. She wondered when she had gotten used to something as alien as grass. “I think I might have already started.”

  “I hear you,” he said. “I’m worried that I might have changed too much to go back home.”

  She stared up at the sky. The lights from Hub were still too bright; the stars wouldn’t be out until after the city went dim at midnight. But she knew where the constellations should be, and while she knew Adhama’s entire solar system like the back of her hands, she couldn’t quite remember the position of the stars that shone in Marumaru’s night sky.

  “I’m worried that this might be home now,” she said quietly.

  “It’s not a bad place to live,” Kalais said. “Quiet. Safe. Your family probably doesn’t worry about you.”

  “They do, but I can jump home to see them. Your family probably worries much more than mine.”

  “I doubt it.” He shrugged. “We’re military. Always have been. I got started a little earlier than they thought I would, but they always knew I’d leave to serve.”

  “When do you go back to the Sagittarius system?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not up to me.”

  She turned them down another path and into a secluded area of the garden. A fountain in the center of a close-mown patch of grass held a bronze statue of a girl playing a pipe. The night-blooms were especially sweet-smelling at this time of year, and their large bell-shaped heads reflected the path lights like tiny floating moons. Beneath these, the gardeners had planted breeze reeds, which sang a soft tune as the wind blew through the holes in their fronds.

  “I can see why you like this spot,” Kalais said, his eyes closed, listening.

  “It’s peaceful,” she said, settling herself on the grass. “Nobody ever comes here.”

  He opened his eyes. “Really?”

  “Not at night.”

  “Really?” he asked again as he knelt beside her.

  “Yes,” she said, as she pulled him into her arms. “Really.”

  Sometime later, he asked her another question.

  She said yes.

  _________________________________

  stonegirl

  sings

  stonegirl

  listens

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,”
18 February 2997 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Fifteen

  There was no winter on Found; the planet didn’t have enough of an axial tilt for true seasons. That didn’t stop its inhabitants from celebrating Earth’s winter solstice with some truly remarkable parties.

  Lancaster Tower was glowing. Thousands of tiny lights moved across its surface in preplanned patterns, mimicking the ebbs and flows of a snowstorm. Across the grounds, white dunes of nanotech snow blanketed the greenery, moving aside for pedestrians using the footpaths and sweeping over the hoppers’ landing docks when they weren’t in use.

  Strange robotic animals with exotic names were set to roam the school’s grounds. The Library’s maze became the temporary home for enormous four-legged creatures with crowns of bone antlers, and small canids with red fur and little white tufts on their tails. Tembi and Bayle had an unexpected encounter with something called a bear, which wandered out of a bathroom and sniffed them before disappearing into the school’s hallways.

  Gifts were exchanged. Pastries were baked. Religious customs were celebrated. But mostly, it was an excuse to get dressed up and hold parties.

  Matindi tended to go a little overboard.

  “The problem with living for twenty-six hundred years,” she said, as she added yet another plass storage box to the stack in the center of the common room, “is that you tend to accumulate the most baffling junk.”

  Tembi, who had just discovered what appeared to be a string of several freshly severed cat heads at the bottom of a box of ornaments, agreed.

  Matindi glanced at the cat heads. “Plass and fiber replicas,” she said. “There was a despicable tradition on…oh, some backwater throwaway planet I can’t remember. It’s been outlawed, but they still insist on displaying the replicas.”

  Taabu hopped off the sofa and stalked out of the room, tail twitching.

  The false cat heads disappeared from Tembi’s hands. Matindi sighed. “They were a gift,” she said to the room at large, “from a dear friend who’s long dead, and I think of him when I see them.”

  The cat heads reappeared, but began to tuck themselves under a pile of crinkled packing tissues.

  “Criticism noted,” Matindi said, holding up a stasis box of holiday lights. “Here. Decorate the roof. Be creative.”

  The box vanished.

  “Would you mind?” Matindi whispered to Tembi. “It loves an audience.”

  Tembi grabbed a scarf from the rack by the door, and stepped outside. The Deep had been waiting for her. As she stepped into the (not all that cold) snowy night, the walls and the roof of their house lit up in golden constellations.

  “Oh,” she said, wonderingly, as she realized she could still recognize the night sky over Marumaru, “This is perfect. Thank you, Deep!”

  “I thought Matindi didn’t let you use the Deep for chores.” Bayle was walking up the path, her bare feet padding on the pavement.

  “We aren’t doing chores,” Matindi said from the doorway. “This is family time. Did you bring the cookies?”

  “Oh,” Bayle said. “I thought I’d just—”

  “That’s a chore,” Matindi said, and went back inside.

  Bayle and Tembi stared at each other for a moment. Tembi shrugged, and Bayle sighed and turned to retrace her steps down the front path. She passed Kalais and Rabbit, their arms full of packages, and grabbed Rabbit around his waist to drag him away with her.

  “What was that about?” Kalais asked, leaning over the packages to give her a careful kiss.

  Tembi held as still as she could, enjoying the feeling of his lips against hers. “Witch business,” she said once they broke apart, as she gathered some of the packages into her own arms.

  “Always with the Witch business,” he said, as he pulled her against him in a one-armed hug.

  The packages vanished, and they stumbled against each other.

  “Matindi?” Tembi called.

  “Not me!”

  “Thanks, Deep,” Tembi said.

  Kalais shook himself. “You realize that’s weird, right? An invisible…thing moving stuff around for you?”

  “Says a man who puts himself in a spaceship and lets the Deep jump it across the galaxy.”

  “Okay,” he said, hands held up in surrender. “Okay, don’t make me think about that.”

  She laughed and led him inside.

  They spent the next hour setting up. The Deep was in a playful mood, so there were several moments when they needed to stop and find missing items (such as the furniture), or shoo robotic animals out the door. But by the time the guests began to arrive, Matindi’s quarters were sparkling clean and decorated like the houses on the Solstice channels.

  This was Tembi’s fifth Solstice party with Matindi, but her first as a Witch in her own right. She had pulled her hair back with a wide red velvet band to show off her golden birds. When they arrived, the Witches greeted her as an equal instead of Matindi’s wayward charge.

  The Deep was on crowd control. The same tricks it used to bend space at the Library were used to ensure that Matindi’s quarters had enough room for all of Lancaster’s Witches and their guests. Hundreds of people—thousands, maybe!—kept flooding in, and yet somehow there was always a picturesque, quiet place to stand and talk near the ice sculpture.

  Bayle and Rabbit began to dance. Others joined them; the music wasn’t live, but it was lively; even the oldest Witches who normally wouldn’t tolerate music took a turn around the dance floor at the Deep’s bidding.

  Kalais bowed to Tembi and extended his hand; she took it, and they joined the dancers. It was a different kind of dancing than the wild-eyed excitement of the nightclub: not as much instinct, and with more of the mind invested in the purpose of dance.

  Sway, swing, back and forth, back and forth, together.

  Robes flared out and blended together as the dancers turned. Tembi’s robe was a deep red velvet which matched her hair band, with gold birds stitched across the hem and sleeves. Kalais had abandoned his usual Spacers’ kit for a dark blue suit with tails, and their colors twined together as they moved.

  Kalais seemed to like her dress. He kept tracing the edges of her sleeves and telling her the color suited her; the two of them kept running their fingertips along the velvet to enjoy the feeling of its soft plush pile.

  When the music broke, they went to help Matindi and the Deep restock the beverages. The supply had gotten a little low; Kalais commented on how quickly some of the Witches seemed to be emptying their wine glasses.

  “Things are about to get exciting,” Tembi said, and nodded to an almost dreamy-eyed Witch in formal robes who was standing across the room. “Watch.”

  The Witch took a long pull from a bottle. A few moments passed, and then a blissfully happy expression overtook his face. “I am attending a party!” he announced in the two-toned voice of the Deep. “This is a pleasurable experience!”

  The Witch sobered up instantly, but the damage was done; everyone broke into laughter.

  “Witches almost never drink,” Tembi explained to Kalais. “Except when they’re around other Witches. It’s safe for the Deep to show itself here.”

  “I’ve heard the Deep talk through Witches before,” Kalais said, as another Witch across the room loudly declared that everyone looked very nice tonight and that they should get dressed up more often!

  “Yeah, but that’s a mutual act—the Witch and the Deep have to be thinking about the same thing for it to work. This is the Deep taking over a Witch’s body, if only for a moment,” she said, and nodded towards the room. “It only does this at parties.”

  “Could the Deep take over a Witch for…I don’t know…hours? Days? Permanently?”

  “I don’t think so,” Tembi said, and shrugged. “I’ve never heard of that happening. Ask Matindi or Matthew. If it’s happened, they’d know about it.”

  “That’s kind of scary,” he said. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

&nbs
p; She stood on her toes to kiss him, a quick bump of the lips, nothing scandalous enough to set the old Witches to gossiping “You’re cute,” she reminded him.

  “Is that a yes?” he asked. “A no? I’m unclear on the whole issue of possession.”

  Bayle appeared out of nowhere; if Tembi didn’t know better, she would have sworn the Deep had dropped her off. “You didn’t tell me Moto would be here!”

  “I didn’t think I had to!” Tembi glanced over towards the front door. Moto was stomping the false snow from his Spacers’ boots. She had assumed Bayle was over her crush on Moto. There was Rabbit, for one thing, and the fact that Moto had spent a month teaching Bayle how to spar by knocking her flat on her butt was another.

  “Well, I would have at least made an effort to look nice,” Bayle said.

  Tembi stared at her friend. Bayle was always stunning, but tonight she looked like a vision from the sea. Blue, green, and silver robes fell nearly to her feet, belted with woven silver at her waist. Her hair was a single long braid, with silver and pale green shells moving through it like waves.

  “And what would you have done differently?” Tembi asked her.

  Bayle laughed and hugged her, and stepped away to greet Moto with a flying hug. He swept her off of her feet and swung her around in a circle before planting a chaste kiss on her head.

  “’scuse me for just a second,” Tembi said, setting down an empty bottle of wine. Kalais nodded and went back to refilling glasses.

  She danced across the room, moving around the Witches and their guests, and stepped into Moto’s arms as soon as Bayle had left them. But as soon as she touched him, she stopped, fear jolting through her. While her own skin was almost back to normal, Moto’s skin was harder than hers had been when she began her formal training as a Witch.