Stoneskin

by K. B. Spangler

Her friend looked down at the tiny views of her homeworld. “Oh gods, Tembi!”

  “Oh, come on—” Kalais began.

  Tembi shut him down before he could say something about trivial concerns. “Bayle’s manicure has its own datasig,” she said.

  Bayle’s eyes moved between the two of them. “It doesn’t come off,” she said, her voice breaking. “And I can’t shut it down.”

  Another impact; more metal screamed.

  “I think they’re about to lock on,” Kalais said, staring towards the ceiling.

  “We need to get off this ship,” Tembi said to Bayle. “And we need to do it before the lockship latches on. If we don’t, the Sabenta lose their treaty.”

  “Tembi—”

  “You can do it,” Tembi said. “You and the Deep. You can take us home.”

  Bayle stared at her, panicked tears falling. “Tembi, I can’t jump us to Lancaster! It’s too far, and I can’t—”

  “No.” Tembi grabbed her friend’s hands and held them so Bayle could see her manicure. “Not Lancaster. Take me to Atlantis. I want to see this view, from this window. And I want to see it now.”

  “Home,” Bayle whispered. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the panic was gone. “Let’s do this,” she said, and wrapped her arms around Tembi.

  They fell.

  _________________________________

  lost

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 18 July 4196 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It was chaos. Bright, screaming chaos.

  They tumbled across the Rails, moving in and out of space. Tembi and Bayle held each other as if their sanity depended on it. As the moments stretched out, longer and longer, Tembi realized that they were no closer to Atlantis, or Lancaster, or any escape from this nightmare—

  “Deep!” Tembi shouted. “Deep!”

  The Deep appeared. Scared. Wild. Twisting and tearing at them with its talons to slow their fall. Tembi felt the Deep grab her robes, cut into the meat of her legs, digging for some leverage that might—might—pull them out of this madness.

  She didn’t scream. If she screamed, she would lose control—

  —and Bayle would lose control—

  —and the Deep would lose control—

  This is what happens to Witches who never come home, she realized.

  “Bayle!”

  No response. Bayle had her eyes squeezed shut in concentration, tears streaming across her cheeks.

  “We all need to know how to stay calm within the storm,” Tembi whispered, Matindi’s words from years ago taking on entirely new meanings. But meditation? That was a tiny bandage on a gushing artery (Why did that comparison come to mind?) and they needed—

  Tembi began to sing.

  It was a quiet song. A sad song, with a glad message. Most of all, it was a folk song from Atlantis that Bayle had taught her late one night as they sat by the lake and watched the stars.

  It was as old as her planet, Bayle had said. Possibly older.

  The water is wide and I cannot cross over

  And neither have I wings to fly

  Build me a boat that can carry two

  And both shall row

  My friend and I…

  Tembi felt a little weak; she laid her head against Bayle’s chest. Bayle seemed to be breathing easier, and as Tembi began the second verse, her friend joined in:

  As I look out across the sea

  A bright horizon beckons me

  And I am called to do my best

  And be the most

  That I can be…

  The Deep calmed. Not enough to join in the song, but enough to pull them into itself.

  Their fall slowed, stopped…

  …and Bayle stepped off of the Rails, taking Tembi with her.

  The smell of the sea, saltwater and wind; the calling of seabirds…

  “Are we dead?” Tembi asked. She had the notion that she was lying face-down on a carpeted floor, but that couldn’t be right. Not unless— “Wait. Are we there? Are we on Atlantis?”

  “Yeah.” There was a thump as Bayle rolled herself over. “Oh gods, we’re home!”

  Tembi sat up and looked around. They were in a large room, a bed with four posts and a canopy on a dais to one side, with various pieces of elegant wooden furniture placed throughout the rest of the space. The far wall was nothing but windows overlooking the ocean. Nearly everything that wasn’t furniture was a rich, deep blue that was very much like the color of Bayle’s eyes, but there was also a distressing amount of pink among the little-girl toys scattered here and there.

  “Tembi!” Bayle had managed to pull herself upright. “You’re bleeding!”

  “What?” Tembi tried to stand and collapsed: the fabric of her Spacers’ kit had been torn to shreds, and her legs were leaking blood across the floor.

  “Oh,” she groaned. “Oh, Deep.” It hadn’t hurt until she had seen the damage; now, nothing existed except those stripes of searing pain across her flesh.

  Bayle staggered to her feet and walked to the open door on wobbly legs. “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! We need some help in here!”

  “No, I’m okay,” Tembi said, gingerly poking at the new holes in her legs. “It looks worse than it is.”

  “I can’t carry you,” Bayle said, as she lowered herself to the floor. “So unless you want to walk…”

  “You could jump us again,” Tembi said.

  Her friend glared at her, then collapsed flat on her back with a nervous giggle. “Oh gods, did this really happen?!”

  “Yeah, we’re wearing the proof,” Tembi said. Her legs hurt, but there were footsteps in the hallway and voices calling Bayle’s name. Soon, this would all be over.

  Bayle sat up in panic. “We’re wearing the proof! Tembi, the uniforms!”

  “Scheisse!” Tembi tried to fumble with the clasps on the jacket, but gave up. The only way to hide the uniforms in time— “Deep! Get rid of the uniforms!”

  There was a quick twisting sensation, and then the room was rather chilly.

  “Um…” Bayle began.

  Tembi shook her head in resignation.

  “The Deep doesn’t understand underwear, then?”

  “No,” Tembi replied. “No, it does not.”

  That was how Bayle’s family maid found them: both of them naked, one of them bleeding from wounds across her legs, and laughing their fool heads off.

  They were, of course, rushed straight to the hospital.

  The next hour was spent catching up with the world.

  Oh, and lying. Lots and lots of lying.

  “Bayle found out she could jump, so I begged her to take me to see Matindi,” Tembi said, as a technician pieced what remained of her skin together so the medical ’bots would have something to work with. “This is all my fault.”

  “It is not your fault, and that is not what happened!” Bayle said, all but crying. “I was showing Tembi I had learned how to jump, and she touched my hand at the wrong time. That’s all.”

  Then they indulged in some hysterics, which they were both badly in need of anyhow. They finally stopped when the physicians recommended some sedatives to help them calm down, but the idea of being lost again? No. Neither of them wanted that.

  Bayle’s father, a tall and distinguished Atlantean nobleman with Bayle’s blue eyes and thick black hair, had taken a seat by his daughter’s bedside and refused to leave.

  “Lord Oliver?” Tembi asked, once their hospital room was relatively calm and the ‘bots were knitting her legs back into a patchworked whole. “How long have we been gone?”

  “Please, call me Ollie,” he said to Tembi.

  “Uh…sir? I don’t think I can—”

  “Almost two months,” he said absently, his eyes fixed on his daughter. “I thought I’d lost you, Minnow.”

  Tembi’s stomach twisted, as if the Deep had jumped her without warning. “Two months?”

&
nbsp; Lord Oliver nodded. “No one had any idea where you’d gone until Bayle’s datasig appeared early this morning. We couldn’t get a lock on it, and about an hour later it disappeared again. The two of you appearing in her bedroom?” He shook his head, his face showing the exhaustion he must have felt during the last few months. “We’d given up hope.”

  “We’re back now, Daddy,” Bayle said, as she hugged him.

  “Two months…” Tembi’s brain was squirming under the weight of a hundred different things that demanded attention all at once. She decided to go with the most important one. “Is Matindi all right?”

  “Matindi is fine,” said a voice from the doorway. “Completely scraping furious, but fine.”

  Matindi pushed aside the privacy curtains and entered the room. The green-skinned Witch was walking with the help of a cane, but otherwise looked the same as she had before she had been poisoned.

  “Matindi!” Tembi nearly leapt from the bed, but a great weight pressed her arms against the mattress. “Um, Deep?”

  “Oh, you aren’t moving one centimeter, young lady,” Matindi said. “Matthew has gone to get your mother, and then we are going to have a very long talk about the dangers of untrained self-teleportation.”

  “Matthew—” Yet another thing that demanded attention squirmed to the surface. “Matthew’s been released?”

  Matindi nodded. “They assaults didn’t stop once he was arrested, so they couldn’t hold him for cause.”

  That wasn’t the most satisfying answer. Being released without cause wasn’t the same thing as being found innocent, but Tembi had been lost in space for two months so she’d take what she could get.

  “Who else has been poisoned?” she asked.

  “Tembi?” Matindi said, as she finally reached the side of the bed and moved within hugging range. “Hush.”

  They spent five days in the hospital. The first two days were used to put Tembi’s skin back together—difficult to injure apparently meant difficult to repair, as it took significantly less time to fix her severe concussion than the most minor cuts on her legs—and the next three days were devoted to doctors who examined them in the attempt to learn where they had been for the past two months.

  Somewhere in the middle of that, they managed to get Matindi and Matthew alone, and they finally told them what had really happened.

  Calls were made for confirmation. The Moonstone had arrived in dock as scheduled, with all hands accounted for. There were no reports that a lockship had tried to apprehend them, although the Moonstone was currently off-duty for unscheduled repairs.

  “You’re sure you weren’t kidnapped?” Matthew asked (for the eleventh time).

  “Yes.” Tembi flexed her feet to feel the new skin on her legs twist around the old. It was an intensely creepy sensation. The doctors promised it would fade as her new skin hardened to match the rest of her, but for the time being she felt like a broken ceramic doll that had been glued back together.

  “Well, not by the Sabenta,” Bayle clarified. “But somebody kidnapped us.”

  Matindi was sitting in one of the hospital room’s oversized chairs, her chin resting on the silver head of her cane. “The Deep confirms that a Witch was involved,” she said. “And that it’s promised to keep the identity of that Witch a secret.”

  “What does that mean?” Bayle asked. “That the Witch outranks you? That’s, what? Ten Witches at most?”

  “Five,” Matthew said. “And four of them have been poisoned themselves. Domino is still in the hospital on Found.”

  “Who’s the last one?”

  “Williamson,” Matindi said.

  “The Librarian outranks you?” Bayle sounded incredulous.

  “Of course he does,” Matindi replied. “If you’re thinking he’s involved, rethink that. The Tower Council already sent three Witches to question him. He laughed, answered their questions, and then made them clean a bathroom.”

  “Ugh,” Tembi winced, then asked, “What would it take to convince the Deep to listen to a Witch who doesn’t outrank you?”

  “A very good reason,” Matthew said. “One that it can understand and remember.”

  “So what do we do now?” Tembi asked.

  “You,” Matindi said, pointing her cane at Tembi and Bayle, “do nothing. If there’s a mad Witch jumping around, poisoning people and kidnapping little girls, Matthew and I don’t want you anywhere near Lancaster.”

  “But—” Tembi began at the same time Bayle lifted an eyebrow and asked, coldly: “Little girls?”

  “Look at it this way,” Matthew said, as he helped Matindi to her feet. “Everyone else believes you’re the only Witches who’ve returned after being lost along the Rails. We’ve told them you need some time to recover, which is only natural. If you come back now, they’ll be suspicious.”

  Thus trapped, Tembi and Bayle spent the next two weeks on Atlantis. They tried to keep busy. Yoga and meditation for the first couple of days; learning more Atlantian folk songs the next. Bayle was happy to show off her homeworld: Atlantis was beautiful. Every place Bayle had taken her looked like something from the channels, with hillside villas and small towns carved up the sides of mountains. Everything in a town was in walking distance, and everywhere you went, you overlooked the sea. Except, of course, in those towns built at sea level; when you were there, you needed boats to glide through the canals cut into the stony feet of the mountains.

  Bayle told Matindi she wanted to practice jumping with another person on her own world, where she felt safe. Soon after that, Leps came out to give them private lessons; several times she brought a jump teacher to help Bayle master the finer points of moving herself and another person through the Deep.

  The first time Bayle jumped after their escape from the Sabenta spaceship, she moved less than a meter away, and was pale and shaking at the end of the short trip. The second time she jumped, it was across her bedroom. Then, across the great dining hall her family used for formal gatherings. Soon, Bayle was taking the two of them across Atlantis, and then up to the docking station on its moon, then over to a nearby orbiting space station…

  “I think you’ve got this,” Tembi told her, after Bayle had jumped them to yet another shoe store on a remote corner of her planet.

  “It was such a traumatic experience,” Bayle said, as she tried on a pair of tall black leather boots. “Best to practice and be completely sure before we try a long jump to Lancaster, don’t you think?”

  “But you don’t even like shoes,” Tembi offered weakly.

  Bayle sniffed. “I don’t like wearing shoes,” she said. “There’s a difference.”

  Tembi didn’t mind, much. As the friend of an Atlantean noble lady, she was learning the planet was full of pleasant experiences just waiting to be had: shopping was only a small part of it. Dancing and parties at night, long days in the sun by the water… And the food? It leaned heavily on fish and crustaceans, but Bayle had proved that the trick to enjoying all forms of seafood was a sufficient quantity of butter.

  It was a nice vacation. Except, deep down? Tembi knew that neither of them could afford the time for a vacation. She tried not to dwell on what might be happening at Lancaster, or out in Sagittarius. Or how the Deep was acting like a beaten dog in their dreams. Most of her time asleep was spent assuring the Deep that it wasn’t its fault that she and Bayle had nearly gone missing along the Rails.

  “You asked me to teach her how to sing,” Tembi said, patting its downy feathers. “I thought that meant…well, I thought you meant communication. I didn’t know you meant she needed to learn how to focus. It was a misunderstanding.”

  Nothing worked. The Deep would sigh and mope, and beg for forgiveness until Tembi could coax it into receiving another a belly rub.

  (She was working her way up to asking it the question that was now living and breathing in the front of her mind: how had the Deep known—and known for months!—that Bayle would need to learn that particular definition of singing? Any decent ans
wer to that question would probably leave her screaming, Tembi knew, but if the Deep could see through time as well as space, then… Yes. So much screaming. And too much happening in her brain for Tembi to calm down and relax. They had been gone for two whole months, gods take it all!)

  Tembi was starting to feel stir-crazy when, nearly three weeks to the second after Bayle had dropped them onto the floor of her childhood bedroom, she surprised Tembi by announcing it was time to leave.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “For what? Lunch?” Tembi was poking at her new soundkit and didn’t bother to look up. She had thrown the one Kalais had given her for Solstice into the sea; its replacement had seemed like a good investment but performed like it was full of angry sand.

  “Ready to go back to Lancaster,” Bayle clarified.

  “Oh? Oh!” Tembi leapt to her feet. “Really?”

  “Matindi wouldn’t allow the Deep to let us make the jump,” Bayle sighed. “Not until we’d been grounded for three weeks.”

  Tembi flew around the room, packing. “And now?”

  “The Deep says it can send for Matindi if we don’t want to risk it ourselves.”

  Tembi laughed. When she slowed down to stuff her clothing into her bag, Bayle surprised her by dropping a small box of deep ocean blue onto the top of the pile.

  “What’s this?” Tembi asked, as she picked up the box and settled herself on the bed beside Bayle.

  “A memento. You, me, and the Deep know what happened on the Rails,” Bayle replied. “And we all know that we wouldn’t have gotten back home without you.”

  Tembi opened the box. Six golden earrings sat on a pile of soft cloth, each one set with a stone that reflected all of the colors of the Deep.

  “Atlantean opal,” Bayle said. She was blushing. “Native to…well. The name speaks for itself.”

  “They’re beautiful,” Tembi said. “But you don’t have to—”

  “I did.” Bayle shut her up with a hug. “This is something I had to do—I don’t think we’ll ever forget what happened on that jump, but I always want you to know how grateful I am.”