Miya took a deep breath, as if she’d forgotten to inhale. She let it out again in a cloud of frost. Her fingers picked restlessly at the hood of her jacket; I caught her staring at me again. I held her gaze for too long before I finally looked away.
I took out a camph, bit down on it; an excuse to stall. Then I glanced at Naoh. Her face had changed too, but not in the same ways. I wondered whether there was any emotion left in her that wasn’t rooted in anger and flowering with bitterness. At least this time her anger wasn’t aimed at me. “They did this to you—?” She touched her head. “The Humans?”
I hesitated before I nodded, not sure I really wanted to think of it that way, even though I knew that a part of me always did.
“How could you go on living among them?”
I looked up at the thumbnail of sky. “I didn’t have anyplace else to go.” Knowing that it wasn’t the whole truth; knowing that I didn’t blame the entire human race for what had happened to me. I’d made a choice when I killed Quicksilver, and he was the only one who’d had a gun to my head when I did it. I’d killed him to save my own life … and to save the life of Jule taMing, who’d mattered more to me right then than even my own life.
Believing that I’d had choices, and made the right one, was the only hope I had of ever trusting myself enough to use my Gift again. But somehow all of that seemed as remote now as the shining grid of Tau Riverton. I looked back at Naoh. “There’s no place for me with my mother’s people, even if I knew who they were. But I guess I still needed to prove that to myself. I guess I’ve proved it now.”
“You’re wrong. You do belong with us—” Miya said with sudden feeling. She glanced at Naoh. Naoh’s mouth thinned, but she didn’t deny it. “The Council doesn’t speak for our people. It never has.” Miya turned back to me. “You’ve suffered as much because of the Humans as any Hydran—as much as Joby has.”
“I’m not a victim.” I felt my face burn, remembering the things Kissindre had said to me earlier tonight. “I spent every day of my life since my mother died fighting to go on living. And every day, I won—” My voice was shaking. I closed my mouth, and didn’t finish it.
Miya stared at me with her head bent, the way they all did when they didn’t understand.
“I’m not helpless.”
“You’re alone,” she said with infinite sorrow. I wondered whether that was an answer or simply another change of subject. “You don’t have to be.” She reached out, stopped short of actually touching me again.
I looked away from her to glance first at Naoh, then at the leery shadow-forms watching us from the darkness. “I don’t hate humans—”
“Neither do I,” Miya murmured. But she wasn’t speaking for Naoh. “We need to get out of this place.” She said it aloud, giving me warning this time, one second before their minds sucked me into a vortex of utter blackness.
* * *
We were back where we’d started, standing in the bleak flat where they were keeping Joby. Soral and Tiene were there with two of the other HARM members. This time they seemed to be expecting us. They glanced up at our arrival and then went back to some silent debate, gesturing and stabbing the air with their fingers. Wherever they pointed, static crackled. I watched one of them rise into the air, her legs crossed like she was still sitting on the floor—setting herself literally above the others and whatever they were arguing about.
The taku they’d been harassing earlier was peacefully asleep in a niche in the wall, with its head tucked under its wing. Miya glanced at the debaters’ mental lightning, and I saw her frown. “Stop it!” Heads turned to look at her, their expressions ranging from resentful to guilty. The one levitating in the air slowly sank to the floor. Another one simply disappeared.
“What was wrong with what they were doing?” I asked.
“Lagra. ‘Showing off,’” she murmured irritably, slipping into Standard, like she didn’t want to be overheard. “Wasting their Gift. Using it in stupid, dangerous ways, as if it were just a meaningless trick. Like—like—” She broke off, as if she couldn’t think of a human analogy.
“I understand,” I said softly. I glanced toward the room where Joby lay sleeping. “What did you mean before, about Joby?” I asked. “What did humans do to him?” It had looked to me like Tau was doing everything it could to help his parents deal with his disabilities, even letting Miya get far enough into the keiretsu to betray them. And yet I remembered the stricken looks on the faces of his parents when they’d thought they were caught between a mind reader and the bureaucracy that controlled their lives.
“He has neurological damage because of a lab accident involving material from the reefs while his mother was pregnant.” Miya sat down wearily on a bench. “Someone overlooked a toxic viral during the preliminary processing. Ling called it ‘a disease with tungsten claws.’ It ate its way through the seals of two isolation levels, killing everyone in them, before Tau could stop it. Tau’s countermeasure killed a hundred of their own people along with the toxin.…”
I grimaced, watching Miya weave her fingers together to stop their restless motion. I thought about how still most Hydrans were; wondered whether restlessness was a habit she’d picked up from humans. If it wasn’t, I wondered what that said about her state of mind.
She glanced up at me, suddenly self-conscious. “Ling was working on the fringe of the affected area and wearing a safe-suit,” she said, her voice still deceptively even. “She got very sick, but she didn’t die. She told me she doesn’t know whether the disease or the ‘cure’ caused Joby’s birth defects.”
“Was it negligence on Tau’s part?” I asked. “Is that why the Feds are here?”
“It was negligence.” She shrugged. “And there’ve been other incidents. Tau’s researchers are overworked and its installations are all understaffed. Burnell says he sees safety code violations and poorly maintained equipment all the time. Reef-mining is expensive. Tau cuts too many corners to make its profit.”
“So the Natasas are the whistle-blowers—?”
“No!” She shook her head. “They wouldn’t dare. Ling knew Joby would be born with a neural defect. The doctors couldn’t repair it, but they said any future fetus would probably be stillborn. Tau promised her that if she didn’t file a grievance they’d give her child the very best help available. But if she did, Joby would have nothing—they’d all have nothing. They wouldn’t be part of the keiretsu anymore.”
My hands tightened. Nobody’s innocent. The parents had been hiding something big. So had Tau. “Then all the complaints against Tau are true, I’d bet my life on it—” I broke off, realizing what I was saying: That if Tau had any idea how much Miya knew—and they probably did—she’d bet her own life by taking Joby. That if they ever realized I knew all this, I’d be as good as dead myself.
“Miya,” I said, facing her again, “I want to help you. I’ll contact Isplanasky. But he’s on Earth; it’s going to take time for anything he can do to affect Tau, or your situation. Tau’s dangerous. Don’t back them into a corner. They’ll crush you, if that’s what it takes for them to survive. What you’ve done puts everyone on this side of the river in danger, not just you and HARM. You understand—?”
Miya nodded, without questions or even much surprise.
Naoh stood listening, but she didn’t react. I was sure she’d heard everything, but I couldn’t be certain whether she understood what I was saying. The other HARM members were all silent behind her. I couldn’t tell whether they were following this at all; didn’t know what might be going on between them and Naoh that I couldn’t hear. But at least they’d stopped making jokes about my ancestry.
I looked back at Miya. “What about Joby?” I said slowly, uncertainly. “If you’ll trust me to take him back—”
“You go back alone. Now,” Naoh said flatly. “The child stays here until we’ve gotten what we need.” End of conversation.
Miya glanced at her sister as if she was about to protest.
“Send him back,” Naoh ordered.
Miya nodded. As she turned to me again, her face looked colorless in the lamplight.
Exhaustion came down on me like a hammer, not just physical but mental. Send him back. Like a piece of freight. “All right,” I said. “Send me back.”
“I’ll take you back,” Miya said, almost gently, as if she hadn’t heard me, or maybe because she had. “It’s too late to leave you down at the riverside. Where are you staying?” I told her. She nodded. “Think of your room.”
I hesitated. “I can’t teleport,” I muttered. “I never could. You can’t—”
“But you know where everything is,” she said with a confidence I couldn’t feel and didn’t share. “You always know where you are, with a certain part of your mind. You were born knowing it, because you have the Gift.”
Then I understood: The thing humans liked to call a “sixth sense” was a part of any psion’s wetware, just like the eidetic memory. A psion knew exactly where he was and where he’d been, in the same way as some creatures that humans liked to think of as less intelligent. Birds, fish, and herds of animals migrated hundreds or thousands of kilometers—farther than any psion could teleport. But for a psion, simply remembering what a place looked like wasn’t enough. A teleporter had to feel its location in space, sense varying densities, re-create the three-dimensional coordinates to within fractions of a millimeter—or he might jump home only to end up buried in the floor.
“You’re sure I can do that?” I repeated. I’d never consciously used that sense, even when I could control my psi.
“Trust yourself,” she said. “Trust me too.”
“I can’t seem to do anything else,” I murmured, showing her a half smile as she glanced back at me. She blinked and looked down. I looked down too, centering my thoughts; tried to picture my hotel room, all that it wasn’t, everything that it was, in a way that meant something. Her hand touched my shoulder and her eyes met mine. I felt the contact of her thoughts, gentle and alien; felt it set off alarms in my brain as she reached into my head for a signpost, a clue. Panic began to fragment my thoughts. I fought it down; her confidence steadied me as I pictured the room, the hotel, the view out across the city at night …
I felt something give way as it all changed—
TWELVE
I WAS STANDING in my hotel room, staring out the window at the night and the city. I staggered as the view registered, feeling like a sleepwalker. Three solid walls, a solid ceiling and floor closed me in. I saw the featureless door of my room, the bed that always looked like no one ever slept in it … Miya.
“Son of a bitch.” I wondered why everything that happened to me since I’d come to this world seemed like part of a dream. “I did it.”
She nodded, breathing hard but wearing the smile I remembered from a moment before, in a different place.
I realized she was making a point, one that even I knew when I wasn’t hating myself. Too many humans who worked with psi had tried to make the same point to me, but coming from her it didn’t sting. I smiled, surprising myself. “We did.… Thank you.”
She shrugged slightly. I wondered whether that was a Hydran gesture or a human one. “Save your thanks until you share what you’ve learned with the FTA. You may not want to thank me then.” Her body was like a wild thing’s, poised to disappear at the first sense of someone else’s presence. But her eyes stayed on my face, lingering like a caress.
I felt a hot-ice burn climb my spine as she went on looking at me. I bit my tongue, wishing I could be sure of what I thought was in her eyes, wishing like hell I could read her mind.…
“I should go.” She looked toward the window, looked back at me, her fingers playing with the seal of her jacket.
“I … wait,” I murmured. “You don’t have to go. It’s safe enough. Rest a while … you must be tired.” I lapsed back into Standard, tired of the effort of speaking Hydran.
She hesitated, looking at me like she thought I’d read her mind and she wished she could change it. But she nodded and sat down in one of the room’s featureless chairs, rubbing her eyes. She raised her head abruptly as I shifted my weight. I stayed where I was, wanting to sit down but not wanting to spook her. “So are you,” she said finally.
“What?” I asked.
“Tired,” she murmured, shadows filling the hollows of her face.
I nodded, feeling my smile come back. I thought about the reasons I suddenly felt like smiling and about how all of them had to do with her. I sat down in the other chair. “Someone I knew said once, ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.’”
Her face turned quizzical.
“He was talking about human psions trying to live with the rest of humanity. But it fits a lot of situations. It fits the one we’re in now … caught between worlds.” Guessing now, just barely certain enough to say it.
Her smile disappeared. Her gaze dropped.
“You didn’t get involved with that program Perrymeade set up so that HARM could put an agent on this side of the river.” It wasn’t really a question.
“No,” she said. This time even her voice wasn’t steady. “I thought…” She took a breath and tried again. “I believed that it could be a start, the way Hanjen promised … that it would lead to real opportunities for our people if the Humans could see me succeed. Hanjen had such hopes—”
“Hanjen? From the Council?”
She nodded. “He’s the only one still trying to do what’s right for all our people. But he’s outnumbered … and he’s afraid to admit it.”
“How did he choose you for the therapist training?”
“He…” She broke off. “He was a friend of our parents—Naoh’s and mine. Before they died.”
“He and Perrymeade have more in common than they know,” I murmured, thinking of Kissindre.
“Like we do.…”
I looked up.
She glanced away. Getting up from her seat, she moved toward the window.
“Miya?” I said, suddenly afraid she might disappear. “Miya—I—” I broke off, losing my nerve. I pushed my hands into my pockets, searching desperately for a thought. I pulled out the picture ball Soral and Tiene had been playing games with, back in that Freaktown room. I looked at it, feeling something like disbelief.
Once before I’d seen a thing like that, a Hydran thing. Once before I’d taken it without a thought … as if it had been mine by right. I remembered how right it had felt to my hands, warm and alive. How once the pictures inside it had changed whenever I’d willed them to. The ball hadn’t been mine then, just like this one wasn’t mine now. This one still held the image of a taku—because I couldn’t make the magic anymore that would turn it into something else. “Sorry,” I muttered. I held it out to her. “Sorry.”
She looked at the globe lying in my palm, at my fingers trying not to close over it. “Keep it.” Her gaze seemed to penetrate my flesh, as if I were as transparent as the wishing ball.
I slipped the ball back into my pocket. It filled the empty space like it belonged there. “Where do these come from? Do you make them?”
“No,” she said. Her hands folded over her coat sleeves. “It’s a relic. We don’t make anything like that anymore.”
I thought about Soral and Tiene using that fragment of their lost heritage like some piece of cheap flash. I wondered why they’d done that. Lagra, Miya had said. Showing off. Dishonoring the Gift. “I had one of these, once.”
“From your family?”
“No.” I put my hand into my pocket again, picturing the image of a taku inside the ball. “Miya, what does mebtaku mean? Your sister called me that. I don’t know what it means.”
Her fingers began another restless migration up her sleeves. “Nothing.” She shook her head. “Just a stupid thing she said because she didn’t know you. She won’t do it again.”
“What does it mean?”
She looked at me, finally. “There’s an old story … about a m
ebbet who longed to be a taku—to fly, to commune with the an lirr. The mebbet went to the Humans and begged them to change it, so that it could become like a taku. And the Humans gave it artificial wings, and they put things into its head so that it could hear what the taku hear.… But it wasn’t a taku, and the taku despised it. It was no longer a mebbet, either, and the other mebbet wouldn’t take it back. ‘You are nothing,’ they said. And it was alone to the end of its days, and died of a broken heart.” Now she wasn’t looking at me anymore.
“Oh.” I sat on the low cabinet in front of the window, feeling the blood that had drained out of my face come back in a hot rush.
“Naoh was wrong,” she said, almost angrily, as if she blamed herself for having told me. “Now that she knows you, she won’t do it again. Now that you’re helping us.…” She turned away. “I have to go,” she murmured. “I shouldn’t have stayed here like this. I have to go.” She began to center herself, getting ready to disappear.
“Miya—” I said, filled with sudden, hopeless need.
She looked up again.
“Touch me,” I whispered, the words barely audible. “Here, I mean,” touching my head. “I mean, just once, for a … just for a—”
She stood there, motionless. Her eyes slid out of focus, as if she’d slipped both into her own thoughts and out of reach. My mind stayed empty.
“Forget it.” I turned away, seeing the empty bed waiting for me. Feeling pathetic.
(I will never forget you,) she said, and each silent word formed with the perfect clarity of music inside my head.
I turned back. (Oh, God,) hardly daring to think it. (Are you really here—?) I touched my forehead again.
She nodded, holding me still with her gaze. Slowly she raised her hands. Her fingertips brushed my temples as gently as a thought; I felt them tremble. I took her hands in mine, not knowing why touching me made her tremble, only wanting, needing—