Gateway

by Sharon Shinn

  What if she became so at ease here in Jia that she forgot there was another life awaiting her in the place where she belonged?

  What if she became so comfortable with Aurora and Ombri that she stopped questioning their motives and their explanations?

  What if she became so attached to Kalen that she wouldn’t want to part with him when it was time to go?

  Shouldn’t she leave now, while her mind was still relatively clear, while her heart was still disengaged?

  Her fingers closed more tightly over the bag. She stared at the golden drawstring.

  I’m not ready to leave, she thought. Partly because she was curious. She would like to know if the stories she’d been told were true; how would she ever find out if she didn’t let the adventure run its course?

  Partly because of Kalen.

  Which was ridiculous. She had only known him a day. She wouldn’t even remember him once this wild adventure was over. It would be stupid to base any decision on her feelings for a cangbai boy.

  “All right,”she said at last, hoping her voice showed none of her inner strain. “And what about the bracelet?”

  Aurora picked it up and snapped it shut around her own arm. It was clear the bracelet was made for a man’s thicker wrist, for it was almost big enough to slide down over her gloved fist. “If you touch the silver for more than a second,” she said, “you will be sent to our world. You will be safe there, and the residents will recognize you as a sojourner who does not belong and who is probably afraid. But most of them will not know where you do belong or how to return you there.”

  Daiyu was alarmed. “Couldn’t one of you come after me?”

  “We would, of course, try,” Ombri said. “But there is a difficulty when you attempt to use a talisman that is not designed for you. It could fling you to a different time as well as a different world. We might not know which year, or even which century, you had gone to. It would take us some searching to find you and guide you back.”

  Daiyu didn’t miss the revelation implicit in that remark: He and Aurora could travel backward and forward through time. So could she, apparently, but she didn’t have any control over where she might end up.

  “Well.Okay.Iwon’ttouchthebracelet,”shesaid.“Butthen how am I going to put it on Chenglei? And why would he allow me to get close enough to do that?”

  “At the Presentation Ball,” Aurora said, “you will be appropriately gowned. Your costume will include gloves. We will make sure your dress includes a hidden pocket where you will place the bracelet. Every young girl is invited to dance once with the primeminister. During your dance, you will take out the bracelet and place it on Chenglei’s wrist. It should be very simple.”

  None of it sounded simple to Daiyu. “A formal dance? Like a waltz? The only formal dance I know is the Electric Slide.”

  Aurora did not look discomposed. “I can teach you the basic steps of the tiaowu—the dance that continues throughout the ball—but you will have to confess to Xiang that you have not had much practice. I’m sure she will hire an instructor for you. There are certain times during the dance that you should have one hand free so that you can slip the bracelet from your pocket.”

  “You would do well to practice beforehand,” Ombri observed.

  “Yes, I imagine I would!” Daiyu exclaimed.

  Kalen started laughing. “And then she would do well to practice what she’ll say when Chenglei disappears while she’s dancing with him.”

  “Yes!” Daiyu responded. “I hadn’t even thought about that!”

  “I believe your best course would be to simulate shock and hysteria,”Ombrisaid.“ There should be little reason to suspect that you had any hand in his abrupt departure. I cannot imagine anyone will be observing you closely enough to see you attach the bracelet to his arm.”

  “And if anyone questions you, or menaces you, merely take out the quartz and send yourself home,” Aurora said.

  Daiyu took a deep breath. “Okay. I suppose I can see how this would work. Except the part about practicing with the bracelet. If just touching it means spiraling off to a foreign galaxy—well—I don’t want to take too many chances.”

  Aurora nodded. “I had the same thought. I’ve made a copy from ordinary materials to be found on Jia. You can rehearse with that one without risk.” Now she opened the small box to reveal a copper bracelet about the same size as the silver one. “It’s perfectly safe to touch this one with your bare hands.”

  Stripping off her gloves, Daiyu fished the copper band out of the box and practiced snapping it around her left wrist a couple of times. It made a nice satisfying click every time the clasp engaged.

  “The protocol of the dance requires you to leave your right handinyourpartner’s left hand while you promenade,” Aurora said. “That means we will sew the pocket in the left side of your dress—and you must learn to handle the bracelet with your left hand.”

  “That’llbetrickier,”Daiyumuttered,andtriedtofastenthe bracelet around her right wrist. She was clumsy enough that the copper band clattered to the floor. “Can’t I just brush it against his skin?” she asked.

  “We do not want him to sense danger and jerk away before he has been transported,” Aurora said. “It is best to take no risks. Plan to secure it around his arm.”

  “As I said,” Ombri commented, “it will be wise to practice. And on someone other than yourself.”

  Kalen immediately held out his own bare arm. Daiyu tried to snap the bracelet around his wrist, but she accidentally caught a little skin in the clasp. He smothered a yelp and pulled back.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Seeming a little less easy all the time.”

  Kalen laughed back at her. “Even less easy when you’re dancing,” he teased.

  “Do you know how to perform the tiaowu?” she retorted. “Because you’re the one I want to practice on.”

  She expected him to say no, but he surprised her. “Yes,” he said. “Aurora’s been teaching me.”

  “We have been focusing on this day for a very long time,” Aurora explained. “We thought Kalen might make a reasonable partner. Ombri will play music for us whenever you’re ready to learn.”

  Daiyu rose to her feet and everyone else followed suit. “May as well start now,” Daiyu said. “The sooner I learn, the sooner I’ll be able to go back home.”

  I tturned into a scene of hilarity. Ombri hauled out what looked like a xylophone and used soft mallets to coax music fromit. At first Daiyu just stood near the wall and watched Aurora and Kalen tread out the patterns of the tiaowu. The moves were very formal, a hand clasped here, a step taken there, a bow, a twirl, a promenade.

  “This doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen in cultural videos about China,” Daiyu remarked when they took a break. “It’s more like something out of a Jane Austen movie.”

  “The Han culture on Jia has points in common with China, but not everything has translated,” Ombri replied.

  “And it becomes even more complicated when you add other couples to the dance floor,” Aurora said as she motioned Daiyu forward to take her place. “Once you learn the basic steps, Ombri and I will join you, and you’ll see how the pattern changes.”

  “That might not be for a while, ”Daiyu said. She had slipped the copper bracelet into the pocket of her black pants, and now she stood facing Kalen, arms extended, palm to palm. When the music started, they took their first careful steps, forward, back, to the side. She was concentrating hard, but she stumbled once and missed two key turns. By the time they segued into the part of the dance where he was escorting her in one wide circle around the dance floor, she was so frazzled that she forgot about pulling the bracelet from her pocket to manacle his wrist.

  “You lost your opportunity,” Kalen said. “That’s when you were supposed to fling me back to my own iteration.”

  “Oops,” Daiyu said. “Let’s try it again.”

  She made almost as many mistakes the second time through, and the third, but she was sta
rting to get a sense of the pattern of the dance. It got more interesting when Ombri and Aurora joined them in the middle of the room, both of them humming the music as they danced.

  “Well, I finally understand that little turn after the promenade,” Daiyu observed when they were done. “Let’s do it once more with all four of us.”

  This time as she paraded down the middle of the room, her right hand on Kalen’s arm as they followed Ombri and Aurora through a sequence of steps, Daiyu managed to free the bracelet from her pocket. The music swooped to a peak, sending a signal to the dancers, and Kalen swiveled in Daiyu’s direction. Daiyu snapped the bracelet on his wrist.

  Instantly he collapsed to the floor, gasping and writhing. Daiyu shrieked and dropped beside him, crying out his name. Ombri flew across the room as if to fetch an antidote. Aurora came to her knees and tried to grab hold of Kalen’s flailing hands.

  “Kalen!” Aurora said urgently. “Kalen, can you hear me?”

  “You said the copper was harmless!” Daiyu cried.

  Abruptly Kalen sat up, laughing, and pushed his hair back. “I was joking,” he said cheerfully. “I figured there’d be some kind of uproar when Chenglei disappeared, so—”

  Aurora sagged back on her heels and stared at him. Daiyu shoved him on the shoulder. “You practically gave me a heart attack,” she said.

  He grinned unrepentantly. “Well, I think you ought to prepare yourself for the idea that something pretty dramatic is going to happen,” he said.

  Ombri had slowly crossed the room again and now he stood looking down at the three of them, his dark face even more serious than usual. “In fact, Kalen is correct,” he said. “Daiyu should brace herself for chaos.Well done, Kalen, if somewhat—unnerving.”

  “I suppose we should try that again,” Daiyu said a little doubtfully.

  “I don’t know how many more tries I have left in me,” Aurora said dryly, but she let Ombri pull her to her feet. “One or two more, I suppose.”

  The four of them completed the dance three more times. Once Daiyu dropped the bracelet—a very bad outcome, all of them agreed—but twice she managed to get it around Kalen’s wrist and then brace herself for whatever lunacy he would try next. The first time he shouted for guards to come arrest her. The second time he simply grabbed her in a bear hug and hung on.

  “If I’m going to another dimension, you’re coming with me,” he said.

  She broke free and then turned to stare at Ombri. “That wouldn’t happen, would it?” she demanded.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “The talisman should work so quickly that he should have no time to react.”

  “But if he’s holding my hand at that moment and pulls me along with him—”

  “We’ll come for you,” Aurora promised. “As quickly as we can.”

  “Take out the quartz,” Kalen said. “If he drags you with him. Just pull it out and let it send you home immediately.”

  She was getting flustered. “But what if I’m so confused by ending up in another dimension that I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do—”

  “Write yourself a note,” Kalen suggested. “Put it in the bag. ‘Shake this stone into the palm of your hand—and hold on tight.’”

  Daiyu put her fingers to her temples. “Sometimes I’m really not sure I can do this,” she said. “I’m not sure I want to.”

  “Obviously, we should stop for the night,” Aurora said. “We can practice more tomorrow. Xiang has commitments the rest of this week—it will be a few days before I take you to her house.”

  Suddenly Daiyu was exhausted and ready to seek her bed. But before she could claim first dibs on the bathroom, the night was filled with a rich, mournful, metallic clangor.

  “What in the world—?” Daiyu exclaimed, turning jumpily toward the door.

  Kalen reassured her with a hand on her arm. “It’s just the river bell,” he said. “Telling everyone the water will be held back tomorrow. Stonepickers should be at the banks in the morning.”

  “So you’ll go to work?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. “I’ll stay and keep you company.”

  “I don’t think you can afford to lose too many days of wages for me.”

  “Aurora and I can take care of household expenses,” Ombri said. “There is no need to worry about funds.”

  “So don’t worry,” Kalen said, smiling at her.

  She smiled back. “You know what? I want to come with you.”

  “Really?”he said. He looked delighted.

  “Just tell me how to dress,” she said. “And I’ll be ready in the morning.”

  EIGHT

  THE RIVERBED WAS a muddy mess, and before she’d taken three steps into it, Daiyu was grateful for the knee-high pair of old boots that Kalen had lent her. He had his right arm extended protectively, ready to catch her if she fell, but he was looking down, studying the swirls the currents had left behind.

  “See that?” he said when they were about fifty yards from the bank. “Looks like there was a little groove in the bottom of the riverbed, and a whole pile of stones collected in the middle. Let’s start there.”

  There were maybe five hundred other people fanning out to take up positions in the dammed river—male, female, old, young,heiren,cangbai,Han. Most of them wore thick, high rubber boots and carried a variety of sacks and tools, but a few waded out barefoot and crouched near the mud line, sorting through the debris with their hands.

  “So, what are we looking for?” Daiyu wanted to know.

  Kalen dredged a wire net through the top layer of mud and shook it till most of the soil filtered out. Left behind were about a dozen rocks of all sizes and composition.

  “A qiji can’t form in the presence of certain minerals, so you can leave behind anything that’s got streaks of black or red in it,” he said picking out three or four stones, showing them to her, and tossing them away. “But anything that’s this shade of gray or rose—that could be a qiji. Save those.”

  She looked doubtfully at the rocks remaining in his wire mesh. That still left a lot of possibilities. “Where shall I start?” she asked.

  He pointed at a slick of mud a few feet away. “There’s some buildup right over there. See what you find.”

  A little reluctantly, she took a few steps from his side. She had been nervous about walking this far out into the mud, but she hadn’t wanted to be left behind on the riverbank. Here on Jia,shedidn’tactuallyfeelright—shedidn’tactuallyfeelsafe—unless she was near Kalen.

  Once she made it to the small tumble of debris that Kalen had indicated, she scooped up her first collection of stones with the long-handled sieve. Of the ten rocks she shook free of the mud, four were black and one was veined with blurry copper. But the rest were a soft, chipped grayish rose, and she dumped them in the shapeless sack she wore on a strap over her shoulder.

  This could be a really long day.

  She got a rhythm down in the next half hour—bend, scoop, shake, sort, bend again. In addition to stones, she brought up bits of broken glass, fish bones, unidentifiable scraps of metal, what looked like animal teeth, twigs and clumps of bark, the occasional live worm. Twice when she sorted through her collection of debris, she picked up ordinary gray rocks and felt a tingle against her fingertips. By this time, Kalen was too far away for her to shout out a question, so she tossed those stones in the sack just in case.

  By noon she was famished and thirsty, even though she had brought a handful of crackers and a full water bottle to see her through the morning. She was just about to tramp back to Kalen to ask how much longer they would be working when the air was filled with the silver riffle of dozens of tiny bells.

  “Daiyu!” Kalen was calling before she’d even registered what the pretty noise might mean. “They’re going to raise the gates! Out of the river!”

  “Eek!”she squealed, and tried to fight her way faster through the heavy mud. Kalen laughed and caught up with her, putting a hand under her elbow.

&nb
sp; “They give you time to get out before they lift the gates,” he assured her.

  “It might take me longer than they think to get through the mud,” she said breathlessly.

  “How’d you do?” he said.

  “I don’t have any idea! I picked up a lot of rocks, though.”

  “Hand me your bag. I’ll carry it for you.”

  “I can carry it myself,” she said indignantly. But she didn’t protest too much when he simply reached over and lifted it from her shoulder, settling the strap across his chest.

  “Not very heavy,” he teased. “You must have thrown away a lot more rocks than you kept.”

  “I thought I was supposed to.”

  “Never know what you might have left behind.”

  They were almost at the riverbank when Daiyu stepped in a particularly slimy patch and pitched to her knees. Kalen was beside her instantly, one hand on her arm. “Oops—are you all right?” he asked. She could tell he was trying not to laugh.

  She brought her left hand up in one smooth motion and clicked the copper bracelet around his wrist. “I’m fine,” she said sweetly.

  He stared at her in disbelief a moment before he burst into laughter. Then he stood up and yanked her to her feet, still laughing, and towed her back to solid ground so fast that she was practically stumbling behind him. They climbed out of the mud and a few feet up the stony slope, then Kalen dropped his burdens and turned back to face the river.

  “You ought to see them send the water back in,” he said.

  They settled beside each other on the incline. Kalen gave her his last strip of dried meat, and Daiyu washed it down with her final swallow of water. The small bells were still trilling out their aria of peril .It hadn’t been too hot that morning, but now the sun was beating down, and the humidity in the air was taking on an extra malevolence. Daiyu wiped her forehead with her sleeve and felt herself leave a smear of mud behind.