by Audrey Faye
“How could you?”
His words raked across the chalkboard of my promises to clan and universe. I let him see some of that—there was no way to prevent it. But I also let him see some of my resolve.
“You could fix this.”
Even now, he was too proud to ask.
I shook my head. I couldn’t save the willow even if I wanted to—the poisoner can never be the antidote. “That job is for you. You will need to learn control over your Talent, and to use it cleanly.”
His eyes tried to incinerate me where I stood.
I raised an eyebrow. “It beats sitting in a classroom with little girls.”
The killing glare never wavered.
I hoped his ears could still hear. “You’ll learn, because otherwise your tree will die. You will need to carefully separate what is her, what is you, and what is poison. Until then, you are her life support.”
I watched the rage twisting across his face and knew it was the greatest danger to his ability to choose well—and that I had to let him choose anyhow.
He could wreak revenge on me and half the habitat if he wanted—he had the Talent, and he had the boiling, ravenous fury.
But if he did, his willow would die.
She needed him, and she needed him right now. And in every way that mattered, the willow was Jerome Salmera’s child.
I held my breath.
His tree was growing noticeably weaker. Drained by his fury, his need for revenge. The lessons starting even now.
He tipped his forehead to her trunk. Feeding her energy. Reminding her to drink water, to stand tall.
I breathed as she breathed.
I had gambled on love, and on my own strength and skill. If he chose wrong, or he couldn’t learn fast enough, I would be a murderer. One with a supremely pissed rogue Talent on my hands and three hundred people to protect.
The tree steadied, held up by the strength of the man who loved her.
His eyes closed—a man daunted. Tormented. Overwhelmed.
And one who accepted the task in front of him.
I could feel his answer in the dirt at my feet. His head might not know yet—but his cells did. His body would stay, and it would eventually teach his heart and his mind where to walk.
I stepped backward, knowing my quivering legs weren’t going to hold me up much longer. And knowing I couldn’t collapse yet. I had one job left.
24
I wafted the steam from the tea gently toward my nose. Barely acceptable by Mundi’s standards, but the best I could pull off on a world where most of the plant life still hated my guts. That much wasn’t going to change until a certain rogue Talent and his tree were done with their unholy temper tantrum.
Making the right choices didn’t always mean you made them gracefully. From what I’d heard, almost everyone in the biome was taking a wide berth around experimental dome Alpha at the moment.
Part of my mission this afternoon was to change that. To plant my trapped, rebellious, hostile duo in the beginnings of good soil.
I took a seat, cross-legged, on the straw mat Toli had scared up from somewhere when I told her I was hosting tea. It wasn’t even close, culturally, to the woven rugs of my ancestors, but she’d offered it with a diffidence that told me using it mattered. And cultural rituals that couldn’t adapt to the people using them were about as useful as square ball bearings.
Moving slowly, just as Mundi had once taught me, I carefully poured fragrant tea into four shallow cups. Three sets of eyes followed my movements. I kept an eye on Glenn—he’d spent the last few hours monitoring the situation in dome Alpha, even though he was in no way recovered from his own attack, and while he looked strong and alert, I was prepared for that to change at any moment. Judging from Nikki’s solicitous glances, she had the same concern.
Toli couldn’t figure out if she was more interested in the tea pouring or the slightly pink cheeks of her two companions.
I hid a wobbly smile—lab managers never missed much. I didn’t know exactly what had happened in the medical pod, but it had gone beyond a lab tech nursing a medical with a sore head back to health. Fortunately, Growers had a pretty broad definition of what constituted healing.
I sipped my tea and waited for the energy in the room to find itself. Slowly, the tea peeled back the layers of politeness and uncertainty and unveiled what lay underneath.
Polite, betrayed distance. Three very good people who were making an effort—and didn’t understand.
I set my cup down with hands that were once again shaky. “I asked you to come here so I could apologize.” And ask a favor, but that needed to come second.
Toli raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
Because I’d broken more than one promise in the middle of the night. “We made a commitment as a team to try to save the willow. I poisoned it instead.”
Glenn let out a sigh and set down his cup beside mine. “The old medicals used to cut off limbs to save a patient’s life.”
I shuddered at the very vivid visual that produced.
“Ugh.” Nikki punched him in the shoulder. “That’s totally disgusting.”
He grinned at her and rubbed his shoulder. “I don’t think you’re supposed to hit people at tea ceremonies.”
Not usually, but in the interests of finding good soil and water, I could be pretty broadminded.
“We get it.” Toli was still sipping her tea, clearly used to minor squabbles in her space. “And that tree was dead anyhow the minute Mary Louise found a shovel.”
“No,” I said gently. “Dr. Salmera has enough Talent to have prevented that.”
Glenn grimaced in remembered pain. He understood better than anyone just how much risk Jerome posed.
And now they knew why.
“I don’t like what you did,” said Nikki quietly, looking down at her tea. “But I believe you did what you thought was best.”
I closed my eyes, feeling the hesitant friendship they were still willing to offer me. The excuses they were trying to offer up on my behalf. Shaky community—but I was humbled by their willingness to connect at all.
I knew I had made a terribly hard choice for anyone else to understand. And the reactions of the people in this room were only faint shadows of what I would need to navigate at home. My family honored green, growing things. We didn’t threaten them, poison them, or hold them hostage.
I believed in what I’d done. But for the first time in my life, I’d acted entirely on my own, and I’d made a choice that was going to horrify those I loved. They’d take me back in, but something important had shifted and it wasn’t ever going to shift back—and I wasn’t at all sure how I was going to live without it.
Toli cleared her throat abruptly. “Are you going to be in trouble?”
“Yup.” I tried to deliver it with a dose of my brother’s zany casualness. “They’ll be getting in line to figure out who gets to thump me first.”
Nikki winced. The other two just looked a little rueful.
Toli winked at me. “You’ll live.”
Said by a woman who had never met Yesenia Mayes. There wasn’t much doubt what the director would think about the news that I’d intentionally provoked a rogue Talent—and then left him attached to a new and possibly sentient species of tree. Jerome wouldn’t be able to leave Xirtaxis Minor for years. There would be a river of trainers and scientists flowing this direction in the next few rotations. “You guys will probably be getting quite a few visitors.”
“Good.” Toli didn’t look at all disturbed. “That will shake things up around here.”
The power to do that lay in their hands—it always had. I took a deep breath. I needed to plant what I had started in good soil, and these were three people with excellent instincts and the seeds of a strong and vibrant community in their hearts. “I was hoping you guys might take the lead in making that happen.”
That had three tea cups pausing in midair.
“You’re more than a collection of scientists her
e, or you could be.” I could hear the passion in my voice—and the plea. “Feed each other. Know each other. Help each other figure out how to grow. Fight back the dark and the scary together.”
“We’re not in charge.” Nikki looked more than a little disturbed at the idea of the mutiny I was fomenting, even though she’d been headed on exactly that course two days ago. “The Basturs like things the way they are.”
Hopefully that was going to change. Part of my crisp message to Yesenia had suggested, in the strongest words I dared, that the Basturs be replaced. They weren’t capable of shepherding what needed to happen in this place. I’d even had the temerity to suggest one of my cousins as their replacement. Davie was a top-notch scientist, a master gardener, and mother to six kids who would make the willow look positively well behaved.
But the soil here needed to get better whether the powers at the top changed or not. I could have tried to convince Nikki of that myself. Instead, I reached for a small green plastic pot and set it in her hands.
She looked down at the spiky red mascot she’d let me borrow for a while, and finally grinned wryly. “You’re telling me to take lessons from a galactic weed?”
There were worse things to learn from. “The new and improved version with almost passable social manners, anyhow.”
She snorted. “They’re not that passable.” She swept a practiced eye over the plant, and homed in on the place where I’d taken off a sample.
I hadn’t healed it. She deserved to know.
Her eyes came up to mine, a woman careful, but determined. “What happened to it?”
“The potion I used on the willow came from many sources. Your little spiky guy here was one of those.” An irreplaceable one. The one that had tipped potion into poison. Even now, especially now, I regretted what I had asked one small plant to be.
We sometimes place the very hardest burdens on the feistiest amongst us.
Nikki cleared her throat—and then something fierce and protective swarmed into her eyes. “You made him into a poison?”
I could have told her that her little plant was both male and female, but that would have been avoidance of the highest order. “Yes.”
“How could you?” Her hands shielded the pot, but the rest of her looked ready to jump up and pound me on the head. With a grav-tank.
I told the truth as best as I knew it, hoping to soothe us both. “Sometimes it’s the harshest essences that are the greatest healers. I couldn’t ask a plant that was too cooperative to do this. I needed something that knew how to be strong, knew how to keep trying, over and over and over.”
“To kill the willow.” Her eyes were flat, hard, and entirely unforgiving.
“Yes.” I met her gaze as calmly as I could, well aware there were a whole lot of Lightbodies who would be standing behind her in the days to come, hating what I had asked of innocents. “And to give Dr. Salmera the opportunity to heal it.” Over and over and over.
Because true skill only comes from repetition. And because it was going to take a lot of opportunities for him to open to what he needed to learn.
The flatness in Nikki’s eyes shifted a little—but they were nowhere near forgiveness.
I yearned to reach out, to connect, to beg for that which she wasn’t ready to give. Instead, I did my job. I settled my hands in my lap, palms up. “Feel as you need to about me. But please—help him.”
She looked at me blankly.
I let my most important plea be two simple, whispered words. “Help Jerome.”
Glenn’s eyebrows flew up into his hairline. Nikki reached for his arm protectively, still glaring at me.
Neither of them would manage to stay mad for more than two days, if I knew my people. “He’s got a really hard job to do, and he’s going to need help.” Something he likely wouldn’t realize for months yet, but I wanted them to be ready when he did.
I turned to Toli, knowing she would end up the ringleader of the three, or at least the coach in the corner. “Wait until he asks for it, though.”
She snorted. “That will happen right after a meter of snow falls in the domes.”
I could have told her how to make that happen—it was standard Lightbody fare for the winter Festival of Lights. Instead, I set down my cup for the last time. It was time for me to go home. I’d put my feet in the dirt and done something so wrong, I could barely stay in my own skin.
I needed to begin my own healing.
“Wait.” Nikki stared up at me, something new sliding into her eyes. “Your face tats—they’re gone.”
I tipped my gaze down to my almost-empty cup and didn’t say anything. They’d find my tats on the willow tree soon enough.
25
“We give her to the soil, and from the soil may she both give and take. May they live as one.”
I took a deep, heartfelt breath as I murmured the final words of Gilly’s dirtwalker ceremony, feeling the healing comfort of ritual slide warmly over the wounded surfaces of my heart. Words continuing what the vibration of friendly dirt under my bare toes had begun—and only begun. I still had a long way to go to land back where I needed to be.
Mundi had been right. Normally I arrived back from assignments very grateful to get off the tin can and happy to step back onto home turf, but nothing more soul-wrenching than that. This time, as I had watched Stardust Prime come into view on the Indigo’s sensors, I’d been struck with a yearning that was shaking me still.
A need, bordering on desperate, to get my feet into the soil of my birth. To remember and to grieve and to let go and give to the land what it could hold and would one day be able to turn into new life. To remember, and to know that I would never feel quite the same again.
I’d lost some kind of important innocence on this mission—the simple belief that my dirt would always be ready to take me back.
There had been no chatting happiness at my arrival, not this time. They knew—they would have known hours before I had arrived, probably days. For starters, unless several planetary hells had frozen over, the botanical team Yesenia was almost certainly assembling would be peppered with Lightbodies.
My family was trying. Dad had fired the dirtwalker ceremony into gear about five minutes after I’d loaded off the cargo ship. I wasn’t sure if he’d done it for Gilly or for me, but I was pathetically grateful either way.
People were moving around me carefully—it didn’t take Talent to know I was a pretty shattered Lightbody. Or to know that my choices had rocked my family deeply. They loved me, but they were finding my recent actions very hard to accept.
I had tried to kill an innocent, and one we valued as much as we valued my small cousin. I had made a choice that violated the promise every Lightbody made right after we learned to walk—and it had walked me out of my tribe’s light. It was going to take a while to make my way back.
I watched as Gilly took small potted plants, one at a time, and handed them to the guests. She had a big smile for Yesenia’s daughter as the lithe teenager leaned down to accept hers. I raised an eyebrow, stirred for a moment out of my navel gazing—those two were awfully comfortable with each other.
“She’s been helping with the peas,” said a voice at my shoulder. “Some of your younger cousins have taken her under their wing.”
I looked at the Lightbody family matriarch. “That was fast.”
Mundi’s face gave away very little. “We know when something needs watering.”
They did. And if Tatiana was here and smiling, they’d decided to make that watering more public than usual. A choice I was quite sure her mother wouldn’t have missed.
I swallowed, knowing that a thirteen-year-old trainee wasn’t the only one desperate to be watered this day.
Mundi watched as Gilly handed out more plants, wildly proud of herself and yawning at the same time. “The child will need a nap soon.”
She wouldn’t be the first dirtwalker to curl up in a bed of flowers before her day was done.
“If Yesenia has any
issues with our treatment of her daughter, tell her to come to me.”
I had no idea why we were talking about Tatiana, but I knew better than to push Mundi any faster than she wanted to go. “I don’t tell Director Mayes what to do.”
Her lips quirked. “I have, a time or two.”
It was a miracle Stardust Prime was still in one piece. “How big was the earthquake?”
An oddly satisfied silence, and then Mundi lifted her shoulder in a small shrug. “She can be quite reasonable if you take the right approach.”
I knew exactly zero other people on the planet who would agree with that assessment. It probably helped if you were a hundred and three years old and didn’t work for her. “It sounds like you have some interesting stories to tell.” Ones I hadn’t heard, which was particularly interesting.
She shrugged again. “Come have tea with me sometime, and I’ll tell you one or two.”
I would do that—but I had a story of my own to tell first. And there weren’t any broader, tougher, wiser shoulders to tell it to in all the galaxy. “I did something awful, Mundi.”
She laid a hand on my arm. “Yes, you did.”
Those three words nearly shattered me. I stared at a blurred clump of dirt. “I couldn’t think of a better way.”
Her hand was still for a long moment. “Perhaps there wasn’t one.”
That was weak comfort. I looked over to where my father stood, holding Gilly’s hand. “He thinks I did something wrong.”
“Yes.” She waited as one of the aunties walked past us with a fretful baby. “Do you?”
I’d spent three days meditating on that question on the long ride home. “No.” There hadn’t been a good choice—just awful ones. And this way, both Jerome and his tree had a chance.
“A good garden has all kinds of plants.” Mundi sounded as if she were going to peel off into one of her stories. “Some are beautiful and require lots of care, and some can grow wherever there is a bit of dirt and a ray or two of sun.”
She patted my arm again. “The Lightbodies plant their children in good soil, and most of them will stay there all their lives.”
