I showed her Wauno’s face.
(What happened…?)
I let myself remember, letting her see the rest for herself: that the memory of what Naoh and the Satoh had done to me was only the flotsam on a sea of blood.…
Miya moaned, pressing her hands to her mouth.
I broke contact, shutting her out of my mind before she sank any deeper, not able to bear her pain or knowing I’d caused it.
She stared at me, her pupils wide and black, her face garish with rainbows. I put my arms around her as she began to turn away; holding her close to my heart, resting my head against hers, so that I didn’t have to see her face—so that I didn’t have to violate this chamber’s perfect beauty with my mind.
TWENTY-FOUR
THAT NIGHT AFTER Joby had fallen asleep, Miya led me silently down through the levels of the monastery to a place where heavy wooden doors opened in a wall. Beyond the gate a path lay along the face of the cliff like silver thread, spooling down to the spot where the bridge crossed the river. There was no Human town on the other shore, here. There was nothing at all but darkness and silence.
But overhead the stars were everywhere, like sparks blown from some unimaginable sun-forge, netted in the pale nebula of our frosting breath. It was like seeing countless neurons firing all at once; like seeing what it felt like to make love.
I followed two steps behind as Miya led the way. I didn’t know whether she was touching my thoughts, whether she felt the image that warmed me against the night’s chill. Her own thoughts had been almost opaque to me since this afternoon. I didn’t know whether she was giving me the space I’d needed or hiding from me. And I didn’t know how to ask.
I trailed her down the narrow path through the darkness with a fumbling caution that couldn’t have matched her grace in broad daylight, until finally we reached the bridge. There were posts on either side of the path where the bridge began.
A chain barred the crossing. Locks dangled from each of its slender links. The chain itself looked corroded, even in this dim light, like it had barred the path of countless pilgrims since the beginning of Hydran time on this world.
And yet I could have stepped over it, easily. The chain wouldn’t have stopped a Human, let alone a Hydran. And why were there so many locks, some of them ancient, some new—preventing nothing?
Miya moved slowly along the chain from one end to the other, touching the locks silently, almost reverently.
“What does it mean?” I murmured, not wanting to break the silence by speaking aloud, but afraid of what would happen if I couldn’t make my mind form the question.
She looked up at me. I thought I saw tears reflecting the moonlight in the corners of her eyes. “They were put here by lovers,” she said. “Those who had a nasheirtah. It’s a pledge that they will be namaste for a lifetime.”
A deep, sourceless pain gutted me. I looked away into the darkness that was always waiting to close in.…
(Bian,) Miya said softly, inside me. (It isn’t true.)
“What?” I whispered.
(Your mother wasn’t a prostitute … your father wasn’t a rapist. If they hadn’t loved each other, you would not have been born.)
I looked back at her. (How—?) How did you … (How do you know? It could have been—)
(It would not have happened.)
“You’re sure?” I said hoarsely, my thoughts slipping.
She nodded.
“Then why? Why did he leave her in Oldcity?” My fists tightened. “Why did he leave me?”
(Maybe it was her choice.) Miya touched my shoulder gently. (Maybe he didn’t know about you; maybe she didn’t tell him. They were from different worlds. When worlds collide, things fall apart.…) She bent her head. (Love … love isn’t stronger than that.)
I remembered the lock I’d seen on the offering pile inside the prayer cave. I remembered the pain on her face as she’d picked it up and told me it was Naoh’s. I remembered Navu, a burnout cursing at us from a back-alley drughole.… I tried to remember Naoh without remembering what she’d done to me. I couldn’t.
I took Miya’s hand in mine, cold inside colder. A clasped hand was all the pledge I had to offer, all the promise either one of us could make, here, now, like this. She moved close; I felt our body heat begin to combine, warming us both.
Still holding my hand, Miya led me forward again. She stepped over the chain and waited as I followed, thinking about humility, and mortality; about how much of what happened to your body was inseparable from what happened to your mind, or your soul.
Whatever the bridge was made of, it didn’t creak or sway under our weight. The yielding surface muffled our footsteps until they disappeared into the sound of the wind. When we reached the middle of the span, Miya sat down, holding on to the moorings of the handrail, letting her feet dangle over the abyss.
I settled beside her, taking my time as I eased my stiffening body down onto the walkway. I looked out and down at the abyss, up into the giddy heights of the sky, the way Miya was doing now. Sitting beside her, I felt safe in a way that not even the abyssal heights and depths could disturb. The moon’s half-revealed face barely dimmed the stars out here, even though its light was bright enough to show the fragile ghosts of colors in our clothing. I felt Miya’s thoughts flow out of her, into and around me, embracing the nightworld like a prayer.
I couldn’t pray. My thoughts were the futile dreams of a mebtaku. But I remembered other skies, other times I’d looked up in awe at these same stars in other settings.… I hoped some part of that went with Miya’s prayers into infinity.
We sat together for a long time, suspended between worlds; huddled next to each other, the warmth of our bodies keeping the cold air and the uncertain future at bay. I tried not to remember that once I’d sat with Kissindre Perrymeade in too much the same way, warming each other in the chill predawn air of another world while we waited for the day. Here and now were all I had left, would have to be all the time in the world. I pulled Miya closer, kissing her, the contact exchanging heat, hunger, two souls.
At last I felt her mind fold me inside warm wings, and she teleported us back to the monastery, to the comfort of our makeshift bed. We crawled under the piled blankets, where we could peel off the layers of clothing that kept us from taking the final step that our trembling, goosefleshed bodies ached for. We made love, urgently because we couldn’t wait, gently because it was all my healing body could endure, silently to keep from waking Joby, completely, until there was no urgency left in us, only a mindless sense of peace that would hold back tomorrow, at least until morning came.…
* * *
I woke again at dawn to a changeless, perfect sky, to the timeless present of a long dead past. I told myself our past, our future—even the thought of one—was meaningless, here in a place where the impossible still happened.
Joby was already awake. I heard him in the chamber beyond the filigreed wall, holding a one-sided conversation with the taku as they swooped down from their nesting places to eat the bits of fruit and bread he handed out to them. I felt their thoughts brush his, and mine, with the softness of fur, and realized that maybe the conversation wasn’t one-sided.
Miya was next to me, still asleep. I lay back, just looking at her, realizing that we’d never seen each other’s bodies in the light of day. My eyes followed the curve of her back from the edge of the blankets up to the nape of her neck. At the base of her neck I found a pattern of colors half-hidden beneath the snarled gold of her hair: a tattoo—a kind of mandala, a circle formed of intricate geometries and bounded by intersecting lines.
Miya stirred, rolling over to look up at me drowsily. (What—?) she thought, her mind smiling.
“The tattoo. I never saw it before.” I pulled my shirt on as I began to shiver. It was stiff with dried blood; I hid a grimace as it caught at my healing skin.
The smile spread to her face. She reached over her shoulder to touch the pattern. “It’s a sign of the Way … hidden, ye
t always with you, joining the mind and the body, making a person whole. They used to be done at birth, to grow with the child for a lifetime. A few of us still have one.…” She glanced away, reaching for her clothes as she began to shiver too.
“I saw something like it at the Community Hall. It was … hidden.”
“Did you?” She turned back to look at me. Her smile came out again, and widened. (Of course,) her mind said. She rested her head against my shoulder.
“What do you mean?”
“It was a … linpoche.” She shrugged, like there was no equivalent Human word. “Not everyone senses them. Some people go their whole lives without ever seeing one.”
I shook my head, wondering. I remembered the look Hanjen had given me that day as he entered the courtyard and saw me standing there. I kissed her open mouth as she ran her hands down my side, over my tunic, over my skin, not flinching as she found old scars or half-healed wounds, accepting every part of me.
But as her hand reached my hip, she paused. “What is this?” she murmured, touching the tattoo that climbed the back of my thigh. “I felt it last night.”
“You—felt it?”
She nodded and shrugged again, like it involved a sense too elusive for words. I caught a nebulous image of energies I was blind to.
I pushed the covers aside, twisting my body so that she could see the rest of it, the dragon/lizard with a collar of holographic fire. “My tattoo. I have one too, but it doesn’t mean anything.”
(Draco—?) I heard her breath catch. “Why do you wear Draco’s logo?”
I lay back again, wincing. “I don’t,” I said. “I don’t know, I mean.” I looked down. “I don’t even remember getting tattooed. I was doing a lot of drugs, then.”
She looked up at me, half frowning.
“It’s nothing,” I repeated. “It doesn’t mean anything.” I pulled the blankets up over it and reached for my pants. We finished dressing in silence.
But as she got up to go and find Joby, I caught her hand, drawing her back down beside me. “What really happened between Naoh and Navu? What—twisted her like that? Show me, Miya … I have the right to know.”
She sat down cross-legged on the blankets, pushing her tangled hair back from her face, stroking it with her hands like she was trying to calm her thoughts. “Naoh…” She spoke out loud, like I had, as if the memories were too volatile to share directly. “Naoh turned wild and bitter, after our parents died…” she took a deep breath, “and we learned we were sterile. Hanjen tried to help her, but he couldn’t reach her; she was too strong. She blamed our parents for their own deaths. She blamed the Community for being helpless against the Humans—” She broke off and took another unsteady breath. “Naoh became one of Borosage’s drug dealers. She never used the drugs herself, but she sold them.…” She shook her head, running her restless fingers through her hair.
“And then she met Navu; she found her nasheirtah.… He was an activist, a Satoh, like our parents. When they found each other, Naoh stopped dealing drugs for the Humans. Navu gave her back her pride in our heritage and her belief in the things our parents died for. But when she tried to turn her back on drug selling, Borosage had them both arrested. Eventually he let Naoh go, but not Navu. He told her to keep selling his drugs or she’d never see Navu again. He kept Navu in prison for a year. By the time Navu was released, he was addicted.…”
I pressed my hands against my eyes, seeing pain as phantom colors.
“Naoh went on selling drugs so that she could get them for Navu.” Miya’s gaze was lost in the trackless blue of the walls when I looked up again. “But … but he wasn’t the same. They broke him. That was when Naoh—changed. She stopped dealing and tried to get Navu’s habit treated. You saw how well that worked.” The words were flat, beyond emotion. “She finally turned her anger where it belonged, on the Humans. She joined me in studying with the oyasin. And then…” Her voice faded again, and she rubbed her face. “Then Naoh had the vision. She believed that she could save us; that all her suffering had only been to make her strong—”
“God,” I breathed, and for a while neither of us said anything more. Joby’s laughter and the skreeling of the taku echoed from the next room. At last I said, “Miya?” She raised her head. “Why don’t you hate Humans?”
She looked at me for a long moment with her head bent to one side. (Why don’t you?) she said.
* * *
More days passed. Joby walked and laughed and sang to the taku that followed him everywhere like a migration of sentient toys. His speech, and his thoughts, grew clearer and more complex every day. Just his smile could blind us to the shadow of death that bounded our existence.
Every morning I woke up surprised to discover we’d survived another day. As I lay beside Miya and Joby, sharing their warmth, I knew this was as close to having a family as I’d ever come. And I knew there was nothing more I wanted from life, except that Tau would never find us.
But I knew Tau’s CorpSec would have orbital surveillance searching for us, programmed to scan for anomalies like three heat sources in an abandoned monastery, a mix of Hydran and Human genecodes. They’d find us sooner or later. Miya knew it too: knew that every moment we stole from fate was another victory, for us and for the lost little boy who might never have another day of freedom, no matter what happened, once our time together here ran out.
Miya made a trip to Freaktown every few days to pick up food and other supplies, and to pick up news. Day after day there was no sign that our message had reached Isplanasky; that it had ever even gotten off-world. Naoh and the Satoh were in hiding; Miya didn’t dare spend enough time in town to find out where.
Tau added new embargoes to their sanctions against the Hydrans every day that their demands weren’t met. Even Tau couldn’t justify wiping Freaktown off the map with a retaliatory strike, but they could bleed the Community for information until they bled it to death. There was nothing we could do to stop that, change it, now, even if we gave ourselves up. Naoh had seen to that. An hourglass full of days was all she’d left us, and the choice of living a lifetime before it ran out.
Miya and I ate and slept and roamed the monastery’s maze of halls with Joby skipping at our heels, trailing a flying circus of taku. Miya taught me all she knew about the history of our people, in between games we made up for Joby to strengthen his growing control. Sometimes the games made me laugh so hard Miya glanced up with a look that said I seemed newer to real child’s play than Joby was.
When the monastery’s walls began to close in, Miya took us on teleport pilgrimages into the interior of the Homeland. I’d thought nothing existed there anymore, since the cloud-whales had abandoned the reefs and taken the rain with them. But the bones of the past lay everywhere. She took us to a dozen different sites where time-eaten remains of Hydran civilization lay abandoned to the wind.
Some of the things we found there were mysteries to our eyes and minds, things even Miya didn’t know the purpose of—tiered towers that rose like prayers step-by-step toward heaven; dozens of hive-shaped kiosks of unknown material, each a meter high, laid out in a wedge in the middle of nowhere. Some were things any Human would have recognized—the remains of towns, of homes, of what could only have been research or production centers based on a technology as long forgotten as the structures themselves. Now they were all just ruins, echoing husks filled with broken artifacts.
Sometimes while Miya and Joby slept, I sat alone in the monastery’s dusty rooms sorting through salvage we’d carried back. I daydreamed about taking the artifacts back to the team, studying them in some well-equipped Tau lab.… And then I’d remember again why that had become impossible. I’d never see any of the team again, never even see Hanjen, the only Hydran I knew who might still be able to tell me something about how the Community’s tech had functioned.
But out of everything we carried back, the thing that haunted me the most was an idea. It had come to me as I stood in a ruined building in the heart of
a dead city. Maybe the place had been a government center, like the Community Hall in Freaktown. It could as easily have been something more frivolous or something more bizarre. All that remained now was a skeleton, an empty cage constructed of God-knew-what. Arcane organic forms flowed upward, defying gravity, reaching toward the sky—the home of the an lirr—with finger-spires tipped in something that shone like gold in the sun. The building’s interior was hollow now, whatever it had been once. Patterns of light and darkness falling through eyeless window openings illuminated the patterned floor, giving it a third dimension. Arcs circled within circles, diamond spines were framed in ovals, webs of delicate tracery spun across expanses of open space three stories above our heads.
Everywhere there were startling views of the sky, like whoever entered this place had been meant to look up often and remember. Everywhere I looked, the sky was as perfectly clear and cerulean as the walls of our room in the monastery. Not a single cloud was visible. When the an lirr abandoned the Homeland, they’d taken the lifeblood of the land with them, just as their going had sucked dry the spirits of its people.
As I stood looking up at blue infinity, the universe hidden behind it, I thought about the Hydrans who’d left Refuge and the an lirr for the stars, spreading the Gift and the Community thin across the light-years. I wondered whether there was any connection between losing touch with the an lirr—losing something so vital to their spiritual identity—and their decline as an interstellar civilization.…
(Miya—) I called, and she turned to look at me from across the glowing floor. (What if the an lirr came back to the Homeland?)
She looked at me for a long time; I felt her turning the question over and over in her mind without finding an answer. She shook her head at last, calling Joby to her with a thought. “It’s time to go,” she said, and that was all she said, before she carried us away.
* * *
Whenever we could we made love, exploring each other’s bodies inside and out. And knowing there should be no secrets, no need for them now, still a part of me was always on guard, shielding Miya from my past—the dark needs, the darker fears, the poisoned memories hidden like deadly anomalies in the dream-reefs of our joinings.