The blackwing war, p.23
The Blackwing War, page 23
At least she wasn’t in danger of dying. The Deep was, as always, her ever-present guardian. When these new teachers forgot she was a Witch and set out to break her down, the Deep would remind them, often by flinging them across the room, or sending their clothing to the rooftop. It never hurt them: those new teachers didn’t want to kill Tembi, so the Deep didn’t send them to wherever it sent those assassins who had come after her while she worked on bombs. Proof that the Deep was still picking through her assailants’ thoughts to determine appropriate punishments, although Tembi developed a minor fear that some of these teachers might get fed up and send a hypnotized assassin against her, some generally innocent person who thought they were at a recreational firing range or something equally banal, and they would empty an entire battery into her before the Deep realized that the bubbling puddle of goo on the ground had once been Tembi.
(Or maybe this had already happened and the Deep had wiggled with time to prevent it, and this twisting of what had-been and what-was caused Tembi-the-not-goo to spend entire nights staring at her bedroom ceiling, wondering.)
There were also some cross-disciplinary skillsets in effect, as Tembi quickly learned that dealing with angry people would be a mainstay of every part of her professional life, clandestine or otherwise. Someone was always furious with the situation, and since there was no use in getting mad at war or money, that meant someone was always furious with her.
Two months. Angry people, deadly people, and Tembi caught in the middle.
Through it all, Moto slept.
She and Bayle would go to his hospital room and watch him, his chest rising and falling in a slow unchanging rhythm. It was good to see him out of the stasis pod, and his dreams were gentle enough to allow the physicians to manipulate his skin.
But.
Frustration boiled up, up, into the stress of the day. Bayle still needed to teach classes at Lancaster; Tembi had taken over Moto’s duties with Cendo. They were exhausted, short-tempered. They snapped at each other more than they should. There was never enough time, and Tembi sometimes came close to asking the Deep to wiggle more hours into her day…but no. She didn’t know how that would go, except for badly.
Then, finally, a last clandestine gathering in the tunnels beneath Adhama. Paisano stood among a collection of anti-grav crates, the hundred-odd Chameleons clustered around him. A young child clung to his legs, shaking.
“It will be good,” he promised her, as she began to cry. “There will be two suns, and a sky full of stars.”
Tembi couldn’t take it. She reached out and joined hands with Paisano, and spun them away, all of them, children and crates and three generations’ worth of suffering, into the Deep.
TWENTY-TWO
The colony on Lunair still had no formal name, so Tembi opened her heart and showed the Deep the ruins of the old village and the spectacular ombre of the blue-red sky above. Instead of opening onto the memory of the road, the Deep set them down in the middle of a damp field. Tembi had no idea why until she realized that the nearby village was a hub of activity, construction crews moving up and down fresh-made streets. There was no room for two Witches and a hundred Chameleons to drop in unawares. They slogged through the muck towards the village until Tembi had the bright idea to let the Deep lift them in the air, and then it was a game in which the children giggled and raced each other around the sky.
Paisano watched one large-eyed girl as she stopped and stared at the open world around her, and then began to cry as she struggled to climb down to the ground. “Ah, my heart,” he said quietly, and went to rescue her. As soon as he reached her, the girl buried herself in his arms, as if the sunny day was a monster she couldn’t face.
As they came upon the town, voices cried out in shock: was this a Blackwing raid? There were weapons brandished, but Paisano was known to some, and Tembi was recognized by most. Soon, it was a celebration: there were Chameleons in the galaxy again, they were here, and they were safe.
Safe.
What a wonderful concept.
Safe was certainty. It was knowing where your next meal came from, and there was a reasonable expectation of regular meals after that. Safe was lying down in a bed of your liking at night, knowing that when your eyes were closed, the world would pass you by and let you wake to rejoin it on the morrow. It was trusting that those around you would catch you if you fell, and hold you up when you couldn’t move on your own.
If you had safety—true safety, with all the quibbly bits managed—you could want until your eyes fell out, but you would need for nothing else.
Providing safety and maintaining it in the face of all challenges was the most enduring form of love.
There was a moment where Tembi, standing next to Paisano, had to take him aside as he folded over himself. She slipped an arm beneath his shoulders and pulled him away, into an unfinished building, and watched as he wept.
“We can never repay you,” he finally said, as he wiped away his tears.
“Never think you have to,” she replied.
He stared at her, his dark eyes earnest and far too similar to Kalais’ for her to safely lose herself in them. She gave him a smile and a firm pat on his shoulder, and left him to rejoin the celebration.
It was too easy to stay on and help the colony. The Sabenta had so many needs, and so many of those were about moving: moving people and goods in, moving information around, moving water and earth and plass and stone, moving the natural world around to make way for humans. Tembi might have been reluctant about helping them, except the Deep loved building towns. It was poor with the fine details, such as plumbing and cabling, but the town was to be made from prefab plass shells like Matindi’s quaint country cottage, and their foundations were ready to go. (They were also kitted with dehydrating packbins for waste, so at least there would be no toilets zooming into the stratosphere this time.) As long as Tembi and Bayle could ensure that each building went to its proper location, the colony’s technical laborers could attend to the rest, and so the town sprung up around them, as fast as if a clever child was playing with a favorite set of blocks.
Besides, it wasn’t as if she and Bayle could just abandon these people. They had sworn to do right by the Chameleons, to do what Lancaster had not. So, the two of them jumped between their duties on the far side of the galaxy, and came back to the hidden colony when they could sneak away. Sometimes, Matthew asked her why it was that she was avoiding Lancaster. She wasn’t. She was killing herself to keep to the schedule that Domino set for her, those ongoing meetings with financial tutors and all-purpose assassins. But she was so tired, and her attendance at their little non-rebellion had suffered. She didn’t know how to explain how she was doing something real instead of merely talk, talk, talk, and so she let that part of her life slip away. He didn’t press her. Why would he? She and Bayle were still young, and the young were notoriously unreliable.
Matindi, on the other hand?
It was a pleasant evening and the air smelled of early summer and rain. The mood of the colony was high, with nearly all its members present at the nightly communal dinner in the village square where everyone came together at the end of another day of hard labor. The town was nearly finished. The main road was established, the group habitations completed. All that was left were the small homes for individuals and families, and as the town had been planned and built out from the center like the hub of a wheel, these could be completed at a slower pace. Tembi and Bayle were sitting at one of the wide tables with Paisano and some of the other community leaders, laughing even as they made plans for tomorrow. Then, Flury, a former Sabenta colonel who was sitting across the table from them, stood up in shock.
Tembi and Bayle turned to see Matindi stomping towards them, robes flapping from her pace. “This is where you are?” she shouted. “Here?!”
“Excuse us,” Tembi said to the table, and she and Bayle pretended not to scurry as they went to meet her.
Matindi was furious, just burning with anger. “How dare you?!” she hissed. “The ego of you two selfish children! The Blackwings will make an example of these people to punish Lancaster!”
“Matindi—”
The small green Witch threw out an arm, and the Deep pushed the girls into the shadows of a nearby building so quickly that their feet scraped across the ground as they flew backwards. “You had no right! Their deaths will be on you.”
“Matindi—”
“We’ve got to get them to a safe—”
“Matindi!” Tembi shouted. “Look!” She pointed towards the tables in the village center. The three of them were the center of attention, nervousness pouring from the community in tremulous waves. The crowd was coming together, slowly, with the Chameleons in the center. The adults and older children couldn’t shake off the shades of gray that had defined their lives, but the smallest children were turning brown and green to blend in with the landscape.
“No,” Matindi whispered as her hands slammed across her mouth. “Oh gods, no.”
“They’re the last. The Sabenta have been sheltering them,” Tembi said. “They couldn’t move them onto a ship to get them to a colony, not without separating them for safety. When we found out, we wouldn’t leave them, and once we got them here, we…” She didn’t know where that thought was headed. How did you package hopelessness and empowerment in the same word?
Bayle took over for her. “Domino knows,” her friend said. “She knew there were a small number of them left, and she told Tembi to help them”
“Does Matthew—” Matindi stopped, unable to continue.
“We think it’s just Domino,” replied Tembi. “She had to keep it close to keep it quiet.”
Matindi nodded, and then kept nodding, as if the motion was helping her brain process the rediscovery of an entire lost race. Tembi couldn’t help but grin: she had never seen her second mother so shaken. “All right,” Matindi finally said, and smoothed her robes. “Introduce me around.”
After that, the new colony had the help of three Witches.
It was an idyllic time. The small colony thrived, and as the phase of building things ended and the phase of building lives began, there was real joy to be found. Almost all of those in the colony had been refugees, and the stability and security of a true home was so strange that it was itself a cause of stress. Some couldn’t manage, and they left, disappearing into the fields or hopping out with a supply run. The rest relaxed into the new status quo, unpacking bags for the first time, or removing their valuables to store them in their houses.
There would be crime, of course, someday in the near future. Crime and anger and pettiness, and most likely violence, once their needs seemed less important and their wants came forth. For now? They were safe, and that alone took up so much space in their lives that they could not make room for anything else.
Sometimes people broke into song.
It was hard but hopeful. Tembi and Bayle were tired, but it was a good exhaustion. For the first time in her life, Tembi felt whole. It showed in her very skin: once, she tripped and fell and skinned her knee, and the sight of her own blood caused her to weep in relief. After that, she went to the nearest garden and pressed her face into the flowers to feel the petals against her skin, and after that, she went looking for Paisano.
All in all, it had been a very good four months.
The only bit that gnawed at her was Winter.
Tembi had found the old woman by accident. She had been walking along a side road, snacking on a plate of truly substandard chips. A nagging impulse kept poking her in the stomach, reminding her that the best chips in the galaxy were at that little seaside booth on Tatumn, a quick five-minute round-trip—
“Witch.”
Tembi stopped, chip in hand. Everybody called her a Witch, but they said it like it was an honorific, a curse, or caught between those, not…
Not like they knew.
There!
A woman, lounging in a pile of garbage ready for transport. Sprawled across the top of a hundred different kinds of filth, using it as her throne. She was ancient, a piece of dog-gnawed leather which had gained the ability to walk. Her head was bald save for a few strands of silver hair, and her clothing was rags, rags, a dense tangle of rags, rags layered so thick she could barely move, as if she had taken to wearing an album of her entire lifetime wardrobe on her body. She looked Earth-normal, but she must have been from one of the desert planets and modded for its climate, or she’d be baking herself alive in the heat.
“Jig off to Tatumn, would you? Get yourself some of those chips?” The old woman grinned, showing a full set of pristine white teeth. Tembi doubted they were her own. “Good stuff, yeah? Can almost taste ’em meself.”
Another psychic! The only true mind reader Tembi knew of was Domino. She couldn’t resist: she stopped beside the old woman and set her basket down.
“What’s your name?” Tembi asked.
“Ah, you’re a raw one, y’are…” The old woman stared at Tembi with eyes the color of mildewed sewage. “Tembi Moon? No…” The old woman caught herself. “Stoneskin now. Changed your name already, but it doesn’t suit you.”
“Oh?” Tembi’s hands were still rough, the tiny impacts of daily life ensuring she would always have hard calluses. She ran her fingers over her thumb, stones over sandpaper, and the sound crumbled in the air between them.
The old woman cackled. “Skin deep, you absolute pudding.” She peered through those sickly eyes to see Tembi’s face. “Birds? Ah.” The old woman shook her head. “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and then I marked you like cattle in the pen.”
Tembi sighed and gathered up her basket. The woman was cracked through and through. Any insight she could have given into Domino’s abilities would be tainted with the batty rabble churning in place of her brain. “Do you need anything?” Tembi asked her. “I can get you clothes, some food… Would you like some of those chips?”
The old woman started laughing, a deep frog-croak of a belly laugh. After a time, she sighed. “You have a good soul,” she said, wiping tears away with a filthy thumb. “But souls can be corrupted, girl. Better learn who you are before someone tells you elsewise.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Tembi said, but before she was two steps into her escape, Matindi appeared in a flurry of brown robes.
“Tembi, can you—” Matindi began, and then her voice cracked and froze at the sight of the old woman.
The old woman, who had finally let her froggy laugh fall away, renewed her croaking.
“Do you two know each other?” Tembi asked Matindi.
Her second mother stared at the old woman. “I’ve never seen her before,” she whispered, voice all but gone.
“H’llo, Matindi,” the old woman managed, before she toppled flat on the ground in uproarious laughter. A pedestrian carrying an oversized bucket stepped around her, shaking their head in disdain.
“You sure about that?” Tembi asked.
“Yes,” Matindi said, as she began to climb the garbage pile to reach the quivering pile of rags. A little of the usual metal had returned to her tone. “Quite sure. Run along, dear, I’ll take it from here.”
“Uh-huh.” Tembi inspected the trash. There was a clear path up the far side which would take her straight to the old woman. She started to climb, toes squishing in the damp. “I don’t think so.”
The woman cackled. “Witches, Witches everywhere, and not a one who thinks!”
“Tembi?” Matindi’s usual no-nonsense voice was back. “Leave.”
Stray pieces of garbage began to shake themselves loose from the pile, up, hanging in midair. Was it the Deep? Or…no. If the old woman was a telepath, she was also telekinetic.
“Tembi, dear, I’m serious.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” Tembi replied, as the garbage began to fly in slow circles, a solar system of trash all centered on the gravitational pull of one ancient crone. “Deep?” she said, speaking loudly so the old woman couldn’t help but overhear. “You got this?”
The old woman laughed all the harder, and the shivery scent of unripe pomegranates filled Tembi’s imagination. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but she got the feeling the Deep was laughing, too.
“Go, Tembi,” Matindi said firmly. “I’ll be fine.”
Tembi went. Fifteen minutes later, when she returned from Tatumn, a filmy plass baggie of hot chips and sauce in one hand and a bundle of clean clothing in the other, she couldn’t find either Matindi or the old woman. The Deep was no help; it was in a good mood, and bounced her across the colony following false leads until she got fed up and ordered it to just go ahead and send these to Matindi, godsdamnit! When the chips and clothing disappeared, she dusted her hands clean of the whole affair and went back to work, assuming she’d never speak to that old woman again.
She was wrong.
Throughout the next few weeks, the old woman kept appearing and disappearing along the periphery of Tembi’s life. She would pop up, mutter a strange comment or two, and then vanish into the colony again. This shouldn’t be too unusual; the colony didn’t have more than a couple thousand settlers in it, after all. You tended to see the same faces.
It would have been fine if Matindi hadn’t been glued to the old woman’s side. They were inseparable. The old woman—“She calls herself Winter,” Matindi told her—was everywhere, with Matindi by her side. This caused problems: Matindi walked away from her job as a teacher, leaving a classroom of distraught children. And with a Witch as her protection, Winter was everywhere! bouncing across the colony, charging into locked rooms and closed meetings, and generally making herself into a public nuisance. She was a wrinkled, laughing ball of chaos, a bottle of alcohol never far from her hand. There were other substances, too; Winter wore a scarf which reeked of ptarch. That particular drug killed its users sooner rather than later, burning through their skin and their central nervous system with unseen chemical fire; Tembi had no idea how a person of Winter’s age could use ptarch and survive.
