Stoneskin Page 24

  He landed beside her with a grunt and a gasp. She pulled him into the hollow of the window, hiding their bodies from anyone looking down.

  “Tembi, c’mon!” he said. “We have to keep going!”

  “Quiet,” she said, staring up the side of the building to the roofline.

  “Tembi!”

  “Quiet!” she said again. “The Deep doesn’t let its Witches get hurt. Not if it knows it can stop it.”

  “But—”

  “Do you have any idea how hard I had to fight it to let me take martial arts?” Tembi fixed her eyes on where the shadowy figure’s head would appear. “It’s still beating itself up over cutting my legs, even though it did that while trying to save me. And it thinks it should’ve kept Matindi from being poisoned—it cries every night about that!

  “But it loves games,” she continued. “The Deep thinks this is a game, and if a heat gun is a stupid weapon to use on a Witch… Well, maybe this is all just a game.

  “So I’m going to play.”

  “Um—“

  “Shut up,” she said.

  A head peeked over the edge of the roof.

  Tembi lashed out with the Deep—she grabbed the figure in her mind’s eye and pulled.

  It was easier than sending foam balls flying towards targets in the classroom. The figure was lifted up and over the edge, then sent hurtling across the street in a great sopping wet mess of cloth and rain, their robes pulling away from their face—

  No! she thought to herself as they flew past. Then, as the events of the last few months came together: Oh!

  The heat gun appeared in Tembi’s hand. It was a short, squat, hideous thing that resembled a carnivore bred for killing. She asked the Deep to break it into a thousand pieces; the gun shattered into scraps of itself in the air, and she picked out the parts that were most likely its power cells and stuffed these into her pocket.

  “Now,” she said, “we go home.”

  _________________________________

  stonegirl

  listen

  fireboy

  listen

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 16 July 3616 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  They reached the hopper station without further incident, and made it back to Lancaster without being shot down from the air. Not that Tembi was worried about that. Not anymore.

  Kalais followed her to Matindi’s house, as quiet and as obedient as a puppy. There was no more talk of getting back to his ship: he was in pain, yes, but Tembi thought that disarming their assailant had gone a long way towards proving the value of formal training as a Witch.

  Matindi greeted them at the door with sleep-slow eyes: the Deep had finally woken her. She broke out a fresh Medkit and propped Kalais on the couch to treat his legs, and then shooed Tembi over to the kitchen table to interrogate her.

  Tembi had no reason to lie; she told Matindi everything. Almost everything: she left out the part where the mysterious figure might no longer be mysterious. It had been raining, after all, a downpour in the dead of night. She wasn’t completely sure about what she had seen. But the heat gun’s power cells were unmistakably military in their origins, and when Matindi flipped on the local news channels, they learned an office building in the center of town had been destroyed by lightning.

  They asked the Deep about that—the Deep laughed.

  After that, she and Matindi sat, neither one of them talking. Matindi had her chamomile tea; Tembi abstained. They both kept sneaking glances at Kalais, waiting until they were reasonably sure he was asleep.

  (He’s a spy, they reminded each other in low voices, so let’s play it safe for now.)

  “I think,” Matindi said, “that this young man will be more trouble than he’s worth.”

  “No argument here,” Tembi said. “I don’t know what the Deep was thinking.”

  “Me neither.” Matindi shook her head. “But I stand by my belief that you’re proof that the Deep is looking to change Lancaster. Maybe Kalais is more of the same—maybe the Deep wants us to fully commit to helping the Sabenta, and not just shuttle refuges out of harm’s way.”

  “Maybe,” Tembi said quietly.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “The Deep…” Tembi chose her words carefully. “Tonight? That’s proof that the Deep is working with a Witch. I thought I was in real danger until I felt how much fun it was having. The Deep must… It must really trust that Witch.”

  Matindi nodded. “Or it trusted the Witch wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Almost,” Matindi said. She stood and ruffled Tembi’s hair on her way to the sink. “Going to tell me who it was?”

  Tembi laughed in the wild lilting way of the Deep, kissed Matindi on the cheek, and went to bed.

  The Deep was waiting for her in the dream, leaping and bouncing across the featureless plane like an excited child. Fiery red diamonds scattered beneath it with each step.

  “I know, I know,” she said, as she buried its face in its silky fur. “You’ve been so good at keeping this a secret. Take me to him.”

  The two of them flew across the plane, colors bubbling out from the Deep. It sang, swooping and soaring in time with its own music.

  Tembi, in no mood to join in its song tonight, stayed silent.

  The Deep pulled itself to a stop and circled a small figure standing far below.

  The figure waved.

  The Deep landed and wrapped itself around him, chiming in happy pink and blue clouds.

  “Moto.” Tembi nodded at him from the back of the Deep. “How are you going to explain the building to Domino?”

  “What building?” he asked, a grin playing around the edges of his mouth. “The one that was struck by lightning?”

  “Someone could have been hurt.” She dismounted and slid to the ground. Moto was shorter here in the dream, and barefoot. She didn’t think she had ever seen him without shoes before. Even on the sparring mat, he wore cotton wraps over his feet.

  The Deep said something in orange: judging by the smell of the color, it was not polite.

  “Give me time,” Moto told it. “She’s confused. She doesn’t know how long we’ve been planning this.”

  He turned back to Tembi. “I had to know if you could keep your head when it mattered,” he said. “I’m sorry if we scared you.”

  “If?” Tembi snapped. “If?!”

  Moto had the good sense to look embarrassed. “We had to know.”

  “Did Domino drop a building on you when you started working for her?”

  “What?” The grin dropped from his face. “Domino? No, she’s got nothing to do with this.”

  The Deep huffed and tiny silver sparks appeared around its talons.

  “Humans can only successfully communicate one concept at a time,” Moto told it. “You know that. I need to put events in order for her.”

  The sparks faded as the Deep sighed and shuffled around Tembi before flumping to the ground in a pile of feathery rainbows.

  “To clarify,” Mako said, as he rolled his eyes at the Deep, “Domino is one of the many reasons that the Deep sought us out, but she wasn’t involved with what happened tonight.”

  That answer seemed to mollify the Deep; it began to purr.

  It didn’t mollify Tembi. Not at all. “A test,” she said. “You took down a building because of a stupid test?!”

  “Yes,” he said. “More to hide the evidence of the test, but yes.”

  Tembi shook her head. She was dangerously close to shouting. Or worse. She realized her ears were plastered flat against her skull, and took several deep breaths until she could move them again.

  “Why?” she asked. “Don’t say you needed to test me. That’s not enough.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “If you hadn’t beaten that man to a pulp in the alley? Then you’d be right.

  “But you did.” Moto stared at her, his smile gone.
“We had to know if you’d break when it mattered. Do you have any idea what Domino is capable of? Burning a few holes in a building is nothing. If we’re going against her, then we need to—”

  “Wait!” Tembi threw up her hands. “Stop. Going against Domino?”

  “Tembi, don’t you get it? She’s responsible for all of this.” Moto took her by the shoulders. “She’s the one who’s been pushing Lancaster away from helping the Sabenta. And…” he paused and studied her face before adding, “She’s the one who poisoned Matindi.”

  “But—” Her thoughts smushed up against each other and formed a disgusting, confusing mess. “But Domino’s in the hospital!”

  “Yes, because she thought she was immune to the toxin,” he said. “She’s Adhamantian—all she had to do is spread it on her hands and then touch you. Since her skin is—”

  “Oh gods…” Tembi cut him off. “That night… The night Matindi was poisoned… Domino’s hands were so cold!”

  “Turns out that even Domino couldn’t fight repeated exposure forever,” he said. “Bioaccumulation finally got to her.”

  “The Deep wouldn’t let her hurt anyone! Even herself!”

  The purring stopped; Moto tilted his head to listen. “The Deep isn’t sure what the difference is between hand lotion and poison. It says humans are always grooming themselves,” he said. “And it didn’t realize what was happening before it was too late.

  “I didn’t, either,” he said. “Domino does her own dirty work.”

  This was too much for Tembi. She turned away from him and slumped against the Deep. “I don’t want to do this here,” she said, shaping each word as carefully as she could; she was dangerously close to crying. “Somewhere else. I want to—I need to be somewhere real!”

  Moto fell silent, then nodded. “Deep?”

  Space twisted around them.

  “Oh!” Tembi found herself fully dressed in a set of rough tan robes she knew she didn’t own, and standing in the center of a street in Marumaru. The sun was setting; a woman with a cart full of shopping swerved to avoid colliding with Tembi, and said something exceptionally unkind. Tembi darted off to an empty spot on the sidewalk. A moment later, Moto appeared beside her, wearing a set of tan robes identical to hers.

  “Is this still part of the dream?” she asked him.

  “You tell me.” He was staring at his bare feet and wiggling his toes.

  Tembi shut her eyes. Voices, everywhere: happy, sad, arguing, laughing, loving… Behind these, the presence of the Deep, watching over them.

  “It’s not,” she decided. “We’re here. We’re home.”

  “Yeah,” Moto said. “Well, you’re home. I grew up about seven hundred klicks to the west.”

  Home.

  All of the sights and smells of home, all of the quarrels and the smiling faces, all of the noise, all of the music, all of the streets scoured down to their bones by storms.

  But…not home. Not anymore.

  The Deep bumped against the edges of her mind, trying to comfort her. She realized it was getting easier to sense its presence. In fact, all night she’d been able to feel it more clearly than ever before.

  “It’ll be another few years before you can hear everything it says,” Moto said. “But more will start to come to you.”

  “How’d you know what I was thinking?”

  “Because I was you,” he said. “Seven or eight years ago? I was in the same place. Trying to make sense of something more powerful than I’ll ever be, but it needed me.

  “That’s why you’re here,” he added. “It needs us.”

  “Because of the Sabenta?” She stepped aside to let a handful of children race by, their worn robes causing something of a twinge in her throat. “Lancaster is finally paying attention to the Sabenta, and Kalais…? I guess Kalais is right. If he’s a Witch, Matindi and Matthew can use that as proof that the Deep wants us to get involved. Not just in helping the refugees, but shutting down the camps!”

  Her heart lifted. Not much, but enough. She had been thinking about Kalais becoming a Witch from the wrong side of things. The selfish side of things. On the other side was a range of options—good ones—where people would be helped instead of—

  Moto interrupted her train of thought. “Not the Sabenta,” he said. “The Deep says something is coming. Something…”

  “Something what?”

  He stopped walking so he could meet her eyes. “Something dangerous,” he said. “Something that makes bringing down a building…” he paused and tilted his head again. “The Deep keeps talking about ants building bridges.

  “C’mon,” he said, and leapt into the air.

  Gasps from the crowd as Moto soared above their heads.

  Tembi waved at them, and followed.

  The two of them bounded across the rooftops of Marumaru. Tembi was more careful than she was when she ran the rooftops in Hub: gardens and water cisterns here were for survival, not decoration or vanity, and she wasn’t about to damage them if she could avoid it.

  The Deep heard her, and lifted her up. Her bare feet alighted on the buildings, a light tap! and she was up again, higher than ever before. It wasn’t flying, but oh, so near!

  From up here, there was a beauty to her city that she had never appreciated on the ground. The city was a patchwork of colored cubes, stacked into mountains. Small townships like those on Atlantis, but where those mountains were made of earth drawn from the seas, these were designed and assembled.

  The sky was clear; sunset was coming, and red was working its way into the reflections in the plass windows and on the unpainted metal. Clean clothing flapped on the lines, and the mingled smells of dinner cooking rose from a thousand kitchens.

  Moto led her across Marumaru, higher and higher, moving up the shipping container mountains. Far below, children cheered and ran after them, trying to keep pace with the Witches soaring in the evening sky.

  Tembi grinned.

  Then, she recognized her family’s old street, well-worn but clean.

  Her family’s old home.

  So small.

  Moto landed on its roof. She dropped lightly beside him and looked around. It was so small! Her entire childhood home would have fit inside Matindi’s common room. Whoever had purchased it from her mother hadn’t upgraded the old weather cage; she saw a dent in the cage generator where she had accidentally smacked it with a chair. But the garden seemed to be thriving, with new plants growing in the dirt she and her sisters had hoisted up with buckets and an old anti-grav sled they had stolen from the loading docks of a grocery store up in Blue.

  “Any regrets?” he asked.

  She touched the leaf of a pepper plant; she couldn’t feel it, but the leaf bruised beneath her fingers. “Some,” she said. “And none.”

  He sat on the edge of her old house, his legs dangling over the side. The fall down that side of the stack was sheer and probably lethal; Tembi could still hear her mother yelling at her to stay back, curse it all, don’t you have any sense?!

  “What’s coming?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But the Deep needs us to fight.”

  “Is it worse than what’s happening to the Sabenta?”

  “Yes, but it’s connected to the conflict in Sagittarius…” Moto’s voice was barely there, as if he was worried someone might overhear. “I think that’s why the Deep has been pushing Lancaster to get involved.”

  The idea that the Deep could see through time wanted out! out! out! of her head (Did someone hide us in the Deep for two months, or…or…were we moved forward?) but Tembi wasn’t ready to let it run free. Not yet. Instead, it was easier to ask, “How long has it known that something worse is coming?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Long enough to start making plans.”

  “Poor Deep,” Tembi sighed. “Planning is so hard for it.”

  “No kidding,” Moto said, nodding. “It doesn’t understand consequences too well, either. You’re not the onl
y one it chose as a little kid,” he said. “You’re just the one who got caught.”

  “What?” Tembi sat and gawped at him like a dying fish “Who?! You?!”

  “Yup,” Moto nodded. “Woke up on a starship when I was eleven. The Witch stationed there knew exactly what had happened—she’s great, by the way, you’ll love her—and she helped me hide until I was eighteen.”

  That was…

  …um…

  …she stared at the streets of Marumaru, unblinking.

  Moto seemed to accept she needed a moment to herself, and sat silently beside her, watching the sun go down.

  “Why us?” she finally managed to ask. “Why take people from Adhama?”

  “The Deep probably heard that Witches were too thin-skinned and took it literally,” Moto said, then cracked a smile. “I don’t know. I’d guess it has something to do with Domino.

  “Not everybody’s like her, though,” he added. He was staring at his toes as he wiggled them again. The gesture made him seem younger and quite adorable. “There’re tons of Witches out there who don’t like how Lancaster manages the Deep. They put in their time and retire, or get posted to remote stations where they won’t be bothered. I think we have more allies than we know.”

  A rush of light colors and the smell of unprotected electronics flooded Tembi’s mind.

  “I don’t know what that means,” she told the Deep, and the sensations disappeared in the taste of cold metal. “I don’t know what any of that means.”

  “It means the Deep wants us to recruit allies,” Moto said. “No, wait. Warriors?”

  “I must be hearing that wrong.” He shook his head. “It says we’ll need the princess. Is that Bayle?”

  “Probably,” she said. A blue the color of Bayle’s eyes rested against the setting sun before it disappeared, and she felt the Deep bump against her legs. “Definitely.”

  “And the…rogue? Criminal-not-criminal?” Moto shook his head. “The word doesn’t translate from Deep to Basic.”

  “Yes, it does,” Tembi shook her head in resignation. “Why do we need Kalais?”