Stoneskin Page 17

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 14 November 3511 CE

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  Chapter Nineteen

  “The Deep is not a toy!”

  “I know!” Tembi shouted back at Matthew.

  The two of them had been roaring at each other for the better part of an hour; Bayle and Steven had fled long ago. Tembi had learned that she was impulsive, reckless, a leech on Matindi’s good nature, and would never become a pilot, especially if he had anything to say about it, which he did.

  Matthew, in turn, had learned that he was too strict, untrusting, undeserving of Matindi’s love, and his griddle cakes were filth. Oh, and he treated the Deep like a slave. That’s right, she said it! A slave!

  And Tembi, apparently, treated the Deep like a toy.

  “The Deep isn’t a toy!” she shouted. “It’s a friend!”

  That comment, more than anything else she had hurled at him, seemed to strike home. The fierce rage drained out of Matthew, leaving him cold and shaking in quiet fury.

  “No. It cannot be your friend,” he said, so softly that she had to move her ears forward to hear him. “It’s a tool. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Tembi stuck her fists against her sides to keep from punching him. “It. Is. A. Person!” she said, not quite shouting but still a little louder than was strictly necessary to get her point across. “And if you don’t realize that, then there is something wrong with you!”

  He flinched. Just a little, just the slightest bit around his eyes, but Tembi spotted it and locked on to that.

  “You do realize that!” Then, as the impact of what she had said hit her, she stumbled a few steps away from him. “You know it’s a person, and you still treat it like…like a tool!”

  “Tembi—”

  “That’s even worse!”

  There was a brief moment when Tembi thought she might actually hit him. Apparently, Matindi thought so, too; she was up from the kitchen table and forcing herself between them, almost as fast as if she had used the Deep.

  “That’s enough,” Matindi said, her long-fingered hands spread wide to keep them apart. “I won’t let you two come to blows under my roof.”

  Matthew turned to her. “This is your fault,” he said. “I should have never left her with you.”

  “Matthew?” Matindi said. “Get out. Come back when you can have a decent conversation about what it means to be a human being.”

  Matthew readied himself to say something, thought better of it, and then—

  “Kindly use the door,” Matindi told him, as he gasped at not being able to jump. “The Deep is part of my family, and I will not have it used or abused in this house.”

  He turned and walked to the front door. It opened before he could touch the access plate. Domino, dressed once more in full prismatic colors from her hair to her robes, entered.

  She stared down at Matthew with stony eyes. “I know I’m interrupting,” she said.

  “No,” Matthew said. “You’re not.”

  He left, pulling the door shut behind him.

  Domino turned to Matindi. “I’ll keep this short,” she said, holding out one elegant brown hand. “Are you hurt?”

  Matindi took Domino’s hand as if it were a dead rat. “I’m well,” she said. “So is Tembi.”

  “Good.” Domino held out her hand to Tembi. She took it and gave it a gentle squeeze, as Matindi had. As usual, Domino’s skin was as hard as rock, but tonight it was also cold.

  “I was at Lancaster for the Tower Council dinner,” she explained to Tembi, and held out a small plugin for a soundkit. “Matindi had mentioned you enjoyed music, so I wanted to give you this. It’s a catalog of songs from Earth. I didn’t realize my timing would be so awkward until the Deep jumped me to the end of your sidewalk, and no further.”

  Tembi was watching Domino’s ears. They stayed slightly askew, the sign of an Adhamantian suffering from secondhand embarrassment. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re very welcome.” Domino turned back to Matindi. “Let me know if you need anything. I’ve heard how difficult Matthew has become in Tower Council.”

  “He hasn’t,” Matindi said. “But rumors have legs.”

  “Yes, they do,” Domino said. “Please, reach out if you need to.”

  Matindi didn’t reply. After a moment, Domino nodded to her, then to Tembi, and left.

  Matindi threw up her hands and retreated to the kitchen table, where she sat and stared at nothing. Tembi, unsure of what else to do, started to make chamomile tea.

  “The problem with living such a scraping long time but never becoming old,” Matindi said softly, “is that you won’t get to the point where it’s easier to forget than remember.”

  Tembi put a cup of tea in front of Matindi, and took her own to the other side of the table. Both of them avoided looking at the chair where Matthew usually sat.

  “What started all of this?” Matindi asked.

  Tembi retrieved the book of poetry from the common room, and slid it across the table.

  Matindi glanced at the cover. “Of course,” she muttered to herself. She flipped through a couple of the pages and cringed. “Oh. Well. I suppose sometimes you do forget.

  “All right, Tembi,” Matindi said, as she closed the book. “What do you want to do now?”

  “Go to bed, I guess,” she said. The tea seemed to be working faster than usual; she felt a little lightheaded. Must have been from all of the shouting.

  Matindi shook her head. “No,” she said. “I mean, moving forward. Matthew isn’t happy with you.

  “Or me,” she added, a little sadly. “He’ll be fighting us every chance he gets.”

  “Why?” Tembi asked.

  “Because all of this?” Matindi waved a hand in aimless circles to take in Lancaster. “If Witches start to think of the Deep as a person instead of a…an energy field that we can get to play tricks? All of this gets infinitely more complicated. And now that Matthew knows that I’ve permanently corrupted you with my wicked, wicked ways?” She sighed and took another sip of tea. “I suppose he expected both you and the Deep to fall in line once you started classes. You’d learn how to talk to the Deep, and you’d get it to obey and stop taking actions on its own.”

  “But the Deep’s always done its own thing!” Tembi insisted. “It plays jokes…it shows up at parties—”

  “And Lancaster tolerates those small deviations. Keeps us humble, I suppose. But it claimed you, and it brought me back here, and now Matthew knows you’ve managed to pull Bayle and Steven into our small anarchy…” Matindi trailed off and laid her head down upon the table.

  She was silent so long that Tembi thought she might have gone to sleep. Tembi was thinking about sneaking off to bed herself when Matindi sat back up.

  “They—” Matindi paused and looked to the ceiling, as if praying for strength, “—and by ‘they,’ I mean the well-meaning Witches like Matthew and his scientists, think the Deep has always been here. Part of our galaxy, I mean. They think it didn’t bother to show itself until we had developed space travel. As if we were inferior beings who needed to become worthy of its attention before it bestowed its gifts upon us.

  “That’s what gods do!” She laughed, all edges, harsh and without humor. “The Deep is in no way a god! Nor is it an energy field. C’mon, Tembi. Energy fields don’t play practical jokes. But another kind of creature? A living being that has the physical traits of an energy field?

  “Matthew. The Tower Council…those idiots.” Her voice suddenly sounded weak. “The Deep’s nothing more than a sweet naive alien. It might even be a child! I think it came here recently… Keep in mind that ‘recently’ is relative, honey. For the Deep, ‘recently’ is after we had started to explore Earth’s solar system. For us, it’s…you know…Thursday.”

  Matindi let her head drop back down the table. “I am twenty-six hundred and…and… I forget. Old. I’m old. I’ve talked to the Deep every day of my life since I
was twenty-two. I was called upon to help the most powerful and most innocent thing in our galaxy. That is an honor.”

  She tried to lift her teacup and couldn’t; the cup tipped over and the tea washed across her hands.

  She tried to stand and couldn’t.

  She fell!

  “Matindi!” Tembi was on her feet, her own cup of tea spilling everywhere. The room twisted around her, and she grabbed for the table’s edge to steady herself. “Deep! Deep, get help!”

  Her knees hit the floor and she found herself on all fours, but the room was still spinning. She crawled beneath the table to find—

  Matindi.

  Lying on the cold tile.

  Lying so very still.

  “Matindi!”

  The familiar *whump!* of displaced air.

  Footsteps behind her, the table lifted and hurled across the room.

  Voices she didn’t recognize.

  Tembi tried to pull Matindi into her lap, but her body didn’t want to obey—

  …Matindi, still struggling to stay conscious. Her eyes were unable to focus, but she was still trying to form the right words…

  “…you’ve been called…” she said, squeezing Tembi’s hand. “…it’s your honor, too…”

  “I know,” Tembi told her. “I know.”

  As Matindi’s eyes closed, she whispered, “Be worthy of it.”

  _________________________________

  hear

  see

  know

  mother father

  come

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 26 May 3781 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Twenty

  A hospital.

  A white bed.

  Whispering—quiet at first, and then picking up in excitement as they realized she was awake.

  “Tembi? Tembi!”

  “Steven?” Her mouth felt like she had left it lying open during a summer windstorm on Adhama.

  “Hey! Hey! Get the Councilwoman! She’s awake!”

  Puffs of displaced air moving on both sides. Her eyes didn’t want to focus, but there was a cascade of rainbows floating in front of her.

  “Hey, Deep,” she said, smiling.

  “Tembi? It’s me.” A woman’s voice—not a stranger’s, but not quite familiar. Not yet. “We need you to tell us what happened after I left your house.”

  Domino.

  “This is important, Tembi. We need information. It looks like you and Matindi had something to drink. What was it?”

  To drink? Yes, a spilled cup of— “Chamomile,” she said. “We had chamomile tea.”

  “Moto, go. Have them check the container, too, in case the contents were jumped out.” Domino’s voice. An order. Another puff of air as someone else left the room. “Tembi? Did anyone come to the house? Did Matthew come back after I had left?”

  “This is too much for her.” Bayle. Angry?

  “Let her answer. Tembi, did Matthew come back to the house?”

  “No. Let her rest.” Bayle. Very angry. “She’s got a million ’bots swimming inside her! Come back when they finish scrubbing her kidneys.”

  “Young lady—”

  “Yes?”

  Tembi tried to pick her head up, but it was too heavy and the lights burned too bright. Still. She knew Bayle would be standing there, hands on her hips, staring up at the older Witch with polite murder in her eyes.

  Domino admitted defeat. “She’s in good hands.”

  Tembi agreed, and allowed herself to drift back to sleep. At the edge of consciousness, she realized there was something she was forgetting…

  …something important…

  She woke some time later, shouting Matindi’s name.

  “She’s alive!” Bayle was standing beside the bed, a little distance away from several people in short white robes who were gathered near a large silver box. “Matindi’s in bad shape, but she’s alive. The Deep got her to the hospital just in time.”

  Tembi went limp. “Thank the gods,” she whispered. “What happened?”

  “Five more minutes,” one of the people in white said. He had dark purple eyes and a slim cybernetic attachment running across his collarbones, and other than that he was all but indistinguishable from the other medical technicians.

  She lay back and let them work. The nanobots were too small for her body’s senses to register—she knew this!—but there was still a strange tingle across her torso as the technicians recalled them into the processing unit.

  “Adhamantian?” Not a technician this time. A doctor? Apparently so; he wore silver diagnostic cuffs on each wrist, and was using one of these to review a holo of her chart.

  “Adhamantian?” he asked again, moving his eyes to look at Tembi.

  She nodded as she pulled the privacy sheet up over her body.

  “Could you check your skin and let me know if it differs from your personal normal?”

  Tembi pinched herself; the sensation barely registered. Then, she ran her fingertips across the sheet; she couldn’t feel the cloth at all, and the sound it made was harsh and grating.

  “Harder than normal,” she replied.

  “That’s understandable. Your body has been in defense mode.” He glanced at the technicians, and they packed up the ’bots and left the room. He glanced at Bayle. “Are you comfortable with your friend hearing this?”

  Tembi nodded.

  “All right,” he pulled over the only chair in the room, and sat beside the bed. “You’ve been exposed to an organic toxin. We haven’t been able to diagnose the source, but we were able to remove it from your body. The toxin was concentrated on your hands and around your mouth.”

  The tea. She hadn’t drunk too much of it, but she had spilled it…

  “If you weren’t Adhamantian, more of it would have been absorbed by your system,” he said. “I’m sorry to inform you that your guardian wasn’t as lucky. She’s alive, but in critical condition.”

  “I want to see her.” Tembi stood and gathered the privacy sheet around her.

  The doctor was having none of that. “Rest,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can, and it’s already too crowded in her room.”

  The way he said that last part…

  Tembi glanced over at Bayle.

  Bayle grimaced. “The Deep is, um, helping.”

  Tembi pushed herself off of the bed. A pile of white hospital robes lay folded on a nearby cabinet, and she put these on as quickly as her aching body would allow. “Which way?”

  “You’ll know,” Bayle said.

  Tembi left the room, the doctor one step behind her and objecting the entire time. The moment she entered the hallway, she knew what Bayle had meant: to the right, the hallway was perfectly empty.

  To the left, the air was thick with floating objects. Anything that wasn’t bolted to a surface (and some that had been bolted down, oh dear, those appeared to be pieces of tile and wood flooring) was hanging in midair, ready and waiting if the doctors found themselves in immediate need. The cluster of objects didn’t appear to be organized; medical supplies, of course, but also food and toys and—

  “Is that Taabu?!”

  “No, it’s a different cat. Taabu was here for a while, but the Deep swaps them out when they get too cranky.

  “Careful where you’re walking,” Bayle added, as they started down the hall to Matindi’s room. “Some of these things have sharp edges.”

  From the other end of the hallway, Tembi could see technicians moving slowly, trying to reach Matindi’s room but unable to get there because of the cluster of items blocking their way.

  Tembi sighed. It hurt; her lungs felt stiff. “Deep?” she called. “Could you clear a path? We need to be able to reach Matindi.”

  The objects began to bob, very slowly, to either side of the hallway.

  “Thank you, Deep.”

  Tembi and Bayle began to creep along the thin pathway, pushing past the overlarge pieces of medical equipm
ent that didn’t quite fit against the walls. The cat stared at them with bored unblinking eyes.

  “Have you tried reasoning with it?” Tembi asked.

  “Of course we have!” Bayle replied. “And Matthew can overrule it, but he must’ve fallen asleep. He’s spending all of his time here.”

  Matthew!

  The germ of an idea she didn’t want to deal with grabbed onto the surface of her mind.

  If there was a toxin…

  If there was a toxin in a tea that Matindi drank every single night…

  If there was a toxin in a tea that Matthew knew Matindi drank every single night…

  Tembi was working her way towards fury before she knew it. She pushed through the microbe cage blocking the entrance to Matindi’s room and—

  Matindi, on the bed. Looking small and fragile and a husk of her usual self, lost beneath the machinery keeping her alive.

  Matthew, asleep in the chair beside her, holding her hand, wearing the same clothes that Tembi had last seen him in.

  He looked up as she stormed inside, and said, “Tembi…”

  His voice broke apart the suspicion in her heart, and then there was nothing else other than she was crying, and Matthew was crying, and both of them held each other by Matindi’s bed as they wept.

  Some time later, Tembi found herself sitting on the floor of Matindi’s hospital room, Matthew sitting beside her. They hadn’t spoken; she was unsure of what to say, and too emotionally drained to try and figure it out.

  Matthew, twenty-six hundred years her senior, did know. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “The toxin bonded to the neurons in her cerebral cortex. They say they can remove it quickly using ’bots and screeners, but there’s a small chance that doing so might damage her brain. The safest way to proceed is to do what they did with you, which is to help your own body process the toxins and allow you to recover naturally.”

  “Sounds good.” It was a ghost’s voice. Not her own.

  “But she’s much—” Matthew had to pause. “She’s much older than you, and the doctors don’t understand how the Deep prolongs our lifespans, so… So the risk of her not waking up at all is real, and…”