by Aimee Ogden
Later, Atuale will remember this moment, how time and space crowded in too close around her. It’s strangely like her passage through the airlock, with closed doors in front and behind and all the air squeezing away. “I’ve been asked to read this message by the chief speaker on his behalf. Well. You will forgive me, I hope, if I don’t go through it verbatim.” A cough. “The speaker and the Council Majority are of the opinion that your earlier actions endangered the lives and safety of several million sentients. Their concern is that, based on the precedent you set here . . . they’re offering you a choice, you see. To ensure that you don’t go on to jeopardize another stationhold, or planet, or such.”
“What choice is this?” That’s Yanja, not Atuale. She has forgotten how to speak.
“The choice is not your concern, pilot. This was her doing, not yours, and the Council has been convinced to spare you for your proximity to danger.” Undergray picks her way carefully over slippery, capricious words. “It is a matter of confinement. That part has not been left to your choice. You may return to Maraven only under the agreement never to leave its atmosphere again. And please understand: Farong Council will not depend on your honor as a sentient to remain landbound. Their ties to other civilizations are strong and plentiful. Breaking your confinement will mean at best an arrest in a similar manner to which you’ve already been accustomed.” She clears her throat. “At worst, any ship upon which you travel will be destroyed before reaching its destination.”
Well. That is no great punishment. It is for Saareval that Atuale came; it is to him that she will return. She opens her mouth to accept her sentence.
But Undergray is still speaking. “Otherwise, drylander, you may accept probational citizenship in Farong—where the Council can keep a close eye on your doings.” Atuale’s heart twists sideways. The view above the window, of the close and glittering lights, expands to fill her heart and mind. She sees herself walking on the arcade, tasting the arcane offerings there, losing herself in the sweet strangeness of alien song.
A choice, Undergray said, but what a strange thing to say. There is what Atuale wants, and there is what Atuale needs, and between the two there is no choice at all. “Back to Maraven. I’ll stay there. I promise.”
Yanja pushes away from the crystal, toward the back of the ship. Heedless of the din he makes as he starts cramming discarded objects back into their storage—perhaps the crystal cannot pick it up at such a distance—Undergray says, “Yes, I thought that might be the case. Why risk so much, if the world meant so little?” Her voice teems with the warmth and life of the Nearpoint market when she says, “You would have made a good citizen, I think, and a welcome adherent to the temples of Undergray, or whatever sector offered you a calling.”
“Thank you,” Atuale says again. The phrase rings hollow, scraped empty of meaning by her repetition.
“Farong will be in contact soon to transfer our offering, but I do not expect I will speak to you again. I hope that the life you return to will be a happy one, and that your gods, if you have them, and mine alike will smile on your time there.”
She says it one last time: “Thank you.” But there is no further sound from the crystal, so perhaps the words never made their way to Undergray, perhaps they will stay trapped in orbit around Farong forever. An appropriate souvenir to leave behind, perhaps. Her heart tears down the middle, between memories of the Maraven - that - was and dreams of the Farong - that - will - never - be. She pushes backward and swims toward Yanja.
Her hand traces the curved line of his spine where he hunches over an open locker. He does not flinch away or lean into the touch, only keeps trying to get the contents of an open bag of biobatteries to stay behind the door while he shuts it. “This body. Did you let this happen because you thought I would prefer it? With gene-eaters, you could have—”
“This body is mine. My skin finally fits me right. You were long gone by then, living like a Vo, marrying into their families.” His lips draw back from the yellowed crests of his teeth. “I hadn’t seen hide nor hair—nor scale of you in twenty years.”
“Yanja—”
“You left first.”
Atuale’s breath catches. She spends so much time curled around the pearl of her own pain that she’s forgotten Yanja knows how to hurt, too. “I’m sorry.” She waits a moment, to let that statement settle beneath the surface of the tension between them. Her palm flattens against the plane of his back; his vertebrae press back, like knuckles. “We both put our backs to the sea, but I went to the Vo and you went to the traders’ guilds. I didn’t think you wanted to see me, after I climbed the stair alone. I thought then that you might follow me. That was—that was naïve. We have both been looking always outward, upward. But in different directions. And later, when the fighting broke above the waves, when I realized the whole time, you’d just wanted to use me against my father . . . to implode the Greatclan holdings. Gods know he deserved that. But I didn’t.” She squeezes her eyes shut, as if in the darkness behind them she could peer into the past. “Did I?”
She’s not asking the right questions, not quite. Yanja can’t have just wanted, because just is an empty, useless word. There’s never a just this, or an only that, when someone does something. It’s a web, all tangled together, and the person least likely to unwind it all is the one in the middle. But the concepts she seeks recede from her, and she is left holding only the tattered shreds of a vast idea. Her hand slides up to his shoulder and she pulls. Weightless as he is, she still has to fight his inertia to force him around to face her. “This trip, though. That was for me, wasn’t it? You thought I’d taste this life and then thirst for it forever after. Enough to join you in it, maybe.”
The lines of his face are inscrutable. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever taste you had was poison anyway.”
When he goes to turn away, again to the damnable batteries, she yanks him back. “Because it was so short? It was never poison. It was perfect. The things I saw—the people—I saw aliens, did I tell you that, actual aliens?” Dark marks spangle Yanja’s face and chest; it takes her a moment to realize that these are the meteor scars of her own tears. “Not poison. Something precious.” She takes his hand and settles it over her breastbone. “Something I’ll keep close to my heart always, for when I need it.”
His fingertips twitch and press in harder, as if he might dig deeper, tear through her suit, take that heart out, and examine it for the truth of her words. She hisses, but not in pain. Her hands slide up behind his neck and she pulls them together. His lips part around unspoken words before she presses her mouth against his.
All questions asked and answered, with a single kiss, save one. “Saareval,” says Yanja against Atuale’s open mouth.
“Saareval,” Atuale agrees, and closes her eyes on that beloved name. It should feel like a betrayal. Instead, as Yanja’s mouth seals promises into the skin of her neck, Atuale has the sense of writing an ending to a book long left unfinished—or if not an ending, then, perhaps, the bridge between two verses of a well-loved song.
Hands tremble with the pressure of twenty years’ wait as suits are peeled away. Atuale’s scaled limbs whisper letters of long-lost emotion against Yanja’s oil-slick fur when she wraps her legs around him. His hands, bigger now than she remembers, find purchase on the muscle under her arms, and he tugs her against him, up and down. His claspers explore the topography of her body before one slides needfully inside. There’s a jolt of pain as it anchors itself inside her, quickly washed away by the cocktail of anesthetic and nerve-warming pheromones released by the binding. The same mechanism that anchored generations of their ancestors together beneath the waves now lets them drift not in water but on a heady tide of weightlessness: two orbiting moons accreting into a single, softly spinning body, and the windows are spangled with stars to bear witness.
* * *
Atuale does not look back on Farong as it grows small behind them, does not grab for a last souvenir of those glittering strings of l
ight. Until the first gate swallows the ship up, she and Yanja sit side by side in silence: not companionably, exactly, but not the confused coldness of before either. If this moment is a new part of the song, it is one that will need to be rehearsed if it is to become as easy as second nature. She takes out the pot of blue paint and, without asking, reaches across to sweep broad strokes of the electric color beneath his eyebrows, along the curve of his lower lip. He closes his eyes into her touch.
“It’s a long way across,” says Yanja once she has finished, once he looks like Yanja, her Yanja, again. He adjusts the console minutely, gliding from panel to panel with the confidence of a practiced pipe-player or engineer-artist. “You ought to get some rest, before you go playing nursemaid to an entire subspecies.”
“We both should rest.” She studies the unfamiliar constellations that shape this particular frame of the universe. “Playing hero to an entire planet is wearisome work.”
“Hero!” Yanja snorts. “I still want that contract, you understand. This ship doesn’t run on—on—” The thread of the joke unravels there, leaving him frowning into the empty space ahead. Atuale leaves the unsaid words unexamined. Her lips pull into a faint smile, an upside-down mirror to his expression.
Neither of them rises from their seats. The dull hum of the engines below echoes the vibration of their constituent atoms. All things are different and the same and thus interconnected, all things are ever in motion, and the way home can be a great distance and close to hand at the same time. The vacuum of words that stretches between them is filled by her ever-expanding sense of rightness. Of what will have to pass for peace.
Yanja breaks the quiet first. “I’m sure he’s fine. Saareval.”
“Yes.” The universe may be unfamiliar, but it has not turned upside down; this must be so. “I know he is.”
“You’ve loved him a long time.” It’s something between a question and an accusation. Yanja has spent twenty years thinking she went to the land not with her arms open for an embrace, just with her back turned on the promise of power in the world to which she was raised.
There’s that word again, just, as fragile and unworthy of the weight placed upon it as ever. “I’ve loved him a long time, and I’ve loved him the most.” Atuale licks her lips, testingly. A trace of salt lingers on her tongue. “But I loved you first.”
In the space between them, their hands float out and fingers twist loosely together. Everything is new and everything is familiar, all at once, a strange kind of balance and an exhausting one. Atuale closes her eyes and gentle sleep comes seeking her company.
* * *
They approach the planet from the horizon opposite the Greatclan Lord’s holdings. The lesser clans on the opposite hemisphere acknowledge their entry but do not oppose it, and Yanja clings low to the dancing waves as he flies homeward.
He lands on the pad in the Keita Vo marketplace, not at the bottom of the cliffs. Atuale hasn’t asked that of him, but relief sings in her anyway. The sensation of weight settles back into her bones all the heavier for her time without it. When she puts it on, the straps of the pack bearing Farong’s cure dig heavy into her shoulders; its ballast is lopsided and sends her staggering sideways.
Yanja catches her and redistributes the weight of the pack. His hand lingers on Atuale’s belly a moment.
She stills into the moment, thinking he means to slide his fingers lower, ask her to stay without so many words. “You could come with me, you know. Mods or not—you could come for a while, a short one or a long one.”
But he lets go with a soft grunt of deferral, and there is no time to tarry over a gentle argument now that the implacable clock of interworld travel has run down. Later, she will wonder if he could smell it on her, if his fingers sought some soft change in her, some confirmation of that instinctive knowledge. For now, she turns her back on him, raises a hand against the dry afternoon sun, and steps down onto the soil of her homeworld.
A few Vo have come out from the shelter of homes and market tarps to watch the ship make landfall. The reek of illness rolls off of them, of the entire town; Atuale’s stomach curdles, though she strives for a neutral expression. The stone-faced Vo watch her as she walks down the main street through town, but with their peeling scales come cracks in the mask: some hopeful, some resentful, some painfully unsure.
Atuale opens the door to the shared room of the sisterhouse. Two of Saareval’s siblings and one of his cousins are there, weeping, huddled together on a single divan. On the table in front of them oddments are scattered: empty pill-vials and open widemouthed jars still rancid with the remnants of holy oils. All three fall silent when Atuale enters. “Where have you been?” asks the cousin, jumping to his feet. He points to the pack on her back. “What is that?”
The younger sister shakes her head. A scale is peeling off her chin; it hangs by a strand and rattles against her jaw when she moves. “He won’t thank you for that.”
“I’m not here for his gratitude.” Atuale has not stopped moving and she does not pause at the open archway into the pairdwellings. “There’s more, if you want it, and you’ll be only as beholden as you wish.” Her foot finds the first stair and she pushes upward, against relentless gravity, against a sudden sense of dread. “If not, keep your thoughts to yourself.”
“She can’t,” the cousin says, “she isn’t—” He looks between the other two, as if expecting them to finish his sentence. But neither of them does.
She navigates the warren of pairdwellings with the confidence of long habit. The curtain to her and Saareval’s rooms is askew and she slips through it without touching it.
Inside, the smell of sickness and rot is enough to bring bile to her mouth. She gags, and tears burn her eyes.
But ragged breath cuts through the dark and wretchedness, and Atuale stumbles toward the bedside. She finds Saareval’s familiar shape, strokes his face, hushes him when he strives for speech against the fluid in his lungs. “It will be all right,” she whispers against the indentation of his ear. Her fingers find the soft, scaleless seam inside his elbow, and she presses a micro-canister of Farong’s cure into his skin. “Everything will be all right.”
His eyes betray neither forgiveness nor anger; there will be time to navigate a course between those two shores later. But Saareval’s withered arms slide around her, and it is good. “I’m not sorry,” she tells him.
His words drift to her from the depths of the lymphatic sea that drowns him: “You came back,” is all he says.
Sweetwater tears prickle her eyes. She takes his mosaic-patchwork hand and places it on her belly. “My love,” she says, and there are so many new notes to the symphony of that word now. “Rest a while. Let me tell you a story.”
* * *
One day, later, not so very long from now, Saareval will hold her again this way in a tide pool of salt-kissed stones, as three healthy pups press their way free of her body. They will be the children of his heart, if not his body, and their hearts too will be sun-warmed with love for all their parents, though they are the children of the sea, and of the stars too, when they are older and prepared to join their father-Witch in his far-ranging travels.
And whether one day, in that hazy future, one of them might ask their father-Witch for a way to go live for good with their mother and father of the sun and sand—she cannot, dare not, say for certain. But if one should, surely their father-Witch would find a way for it to happen, for there will be no coin more dear to him in the currency of any world than the laughter of his sun-daughters, sea-daughters.
Acknowledgments
Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve wanted to hold my very own book in my hands. It’s surreal and thrilling that it’s finally happening! What I didn’t know then, though, is that it takes a village to raise a book, and I’m very thankful to have such a smart, kind, thoughtful village behind this one. I’m grateful for the Codex members who read it in its infancy, as well as the incisive critique from my second readers—Lina Rather
, Jordan Kurella, Meábh de Brún, and of course Bennett North, my frequent partner in literary crime, who talked me off many a ledge with this book. I’m grateful to my Viable Paradise instructors and classmates; my experience with them helped me figure out how to get the story where it needed to be. I’m grateful for the team at Tordotcom Publishing, starting with my brilliant editor Christie Yant, who took a chance on this story with me and who had a vision for how to take the story to the next level; to Lee Harris, Ruoxi Chen, and font of publishing information and know-how Emily Goldman; Chase Stone, the cover artist who made the book pretty on the outside; and Sona Vogel, the copyeditor who made it match on the inside, and all the other people working hard in the background of books like this one.
I’m so very grateful for my wonderful spouse, Andrew, who supported me along the way; my in-laws, Dale, John, and Cecily, who spent time with my children and thus bought me hours to write and revise; and my two beautiful babies who were so often patient when Mommy needed to sit down and clatter away on the YouTube machine for a while. Thanks, kiddos, I love you, and no, I will not read this to you at bedtime.
And finally, I’m grateful to a gloriously misspent youth crammed full of fairy tales, Disney films, and queer-coded villains. This book could never have been what it is without that.
About the Author
AIMEE OGDEN is an exciting emerging author with more than two dozen short story publications in venues such as Analog, Shimmer, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and The Dark. Aimee is a former science teacher and software tester; she now writes stories about sad astronauts, angry princesses, and dead gods. She’s also the coeditor of Translunar Travelers Lounge, a new speculative fiction magazine devoted to fun, optimistic stories. She lives in Madison.
You can sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this Tor.com ebook.
