Spinning Starlight

by R. C. Lewis

  Something jerks inside my chest as Spin-Still’s will ties to my own. I have to direct the Khua, line them up, she can’t without me. I see them from outside, and she doesn’t. Tiav and I stand in a wedge formed by two walls of energy. All I can see of the others are the bright lines where they cross each other, so I focus on those. The line in front of us, where those two walls meet—that’s where I want the others to go. I set my attention on one, imagine it moving.

  The weight of ten thousand worlds presses into me. I can’t breathe. But the line moves, so I keep pushing. It inches closer to the center seam, finally making contact. The energy in the room spikes, echoed by my heart as it threatens to go into arrest.

  That was just one, there are more, too many. I can’t do this.

  Something heavy pounds on the door. We don’t have time.

  Tiav clasps my hand in his, pressing the sempu between our palms so we can both maneuver the Khua into position. He’s not even looking. His eyes are closed, his breathing steady.

  “You don’t have to push, Liddi,” he says. “Imagine them wanting to fall into position, like it’s where gravity would naturally make them settle.”

  No one has ever conceived of anything like this before, but clearly his years of attuning himself to the Khua make him the expert, not me. I close my eyes and shift my focus. The Khua are like grains of sand falling into a cone, hitting the sides, sliding down, but always coming to rest at the point.

  A single point. The center.

  I feel it working, but only because the weight is still there. It’s not the weight of pushing. It’s the weight of holding myself together, of not letting every neuron in my body explode with the energy pouring into the room.

  I’m not the only one struggling. Tiav grunts with the effort, Spin-Still burns hotter, and the floor vibrates beneath us. Then more than vibrates—it trembles. Not like before. This time is more like every molecule in the room is going to fly apart. The light of the seam flows red through my closed eyelids. It’ll be too bright to look at directly, so I turn toward Tiav before opening my eyes.

  He’s already looking at me. Determined. A little scared, a little overwhelmed, but determined is what wins. Because he knows how much I need this. Not because of the Khua or his duty as an Aelo, even though those are good reasons. Not to save eight worlds. He’s standing here, ready to do something that could get us both killed, because he knows I need to save my brothers.

  That’s the moment I know I love him.

  “It’s ready,” he says.

  I nod. I feel it, too. The sand has settled.

  Careful to keep our eyes averted, we step together toward the seam, the center where all ten Khua-fields meet. Even without looking, it’s not difficult to find. The energy’s pulling us there.

  “Close your eyes.” We turn to face the joining of ten Khua, so bright it nearly blinds me even with my eyes closed. “Ready…now!”

  We thrust our clasped hands into the seam, the sempu between them.

  Placing Spin-Still inside what she is already inside. Creating the bubble, the space where the attuned Khua and conduits can all gather.

  Taking us with her.

  It’s like communing with the Khua on Ferinne…only terrible.

  It’s like my first chaotic, agonizing trip through a portal…only cleaner.

  We exist in a white emptiness of everythingness with too-sharp focus cutting to the point of pain. But the pain is like joy that’s just too much, that’s more than one person can bear so it hurts. It hurts and I want out, I don’t want more pain, because this joy is twisted and wrong and not happy at all. It’s death wearing the face of joy and it lies.

  “Do you feel it?” Tiav whispers, only it slices through the roar of silence. “It’s killing them.”

  My brothers? No, that’s not what he means. I do feel it. The false joy, the lying death, it’s the tainted energy of the conduits poisoning the Khua. My brothers are part of that, they’re the bridge between Khua and conduit, but they aren’t meant to be. That’s what we have to break, what we have to undo.

  “Liddi?”

  That’s not Tiav’s voice.

  Emil fades into view, the effort clear on his face. He’s here and he’s okay! But it’s not like on Ferinne, there’s no barrier keeping us apart. I know because I can hear him, and nothing stops me from throwing my arms around him.

  It worked. We matched the frequencies.

  I look around. In the whiteness of this non-place, I can still see the extra spark of the sempu holding Khua within, ten of them floating around us. Spin-Still isn’t in my hand anymore—she’s around us in the everywhere, holding this place separate from the loose strands.

  I take one of the sempu and press it between my hand and Tiav’s like before, then do the same with another, holding Emil’s hand. Luko and Anton are here, too. The others are arriving.

  The poison-pain cuts into me again, sharpest in my hands where I hold the sempu, where the Khua have felt the pain for eternities already. And weight on my shoulders, on my chest, it hasn’t left. It gets heavier every moment.

  “Everyone take a disk,” Tiav says. The strain shows in his voice. He feels it, too. “Hold it between your hands, like this, and form a ring.”

  We’ll complete the chain, then one final push to free my brothers. They take their places, a Khua between each…only there’s one left over, still hovering free.

  Fabin isn’t here.

  DESTRUCTION. BAD THINGS. EVERYWHERE.

  It’s Spin-Still, telling me what’s happening outside in the “real” world. I feel it around us, behind us, beyond us. The chaos of the unbound energy. Like a ship in a storm, tossed on the waves, riding the peaks and valleys.

  A ship ready to capsize.

  But Fabin isn’t here.

  My brothers have closed the circle, with Ciro joining Tiav on the other side from me. Without Fabin.

  Tiav doesn’t know my brothers, but he can count.

  “Someone’s missing, right, Liddi?”

  I nod, but the waves beat closer to us now, hammering the weight into me. I almost lose my grip on Emil.

  “It’s time, Liddi, we have to go,” Vic says.

  That’s ridiculous. It’s not time until we’re all here.

  Something hits my brothers on the other side of the circle. They wince and double over.

  “Now, Liddi,” Marek says. “That Khua can’t hold this together much longer.”

  I shake my head so hard it hurts. Everything hurts.

  “Where’s the other one, the one missing?” Tiav demands.

  “He’s not coming,” Durant says. Agony radiates from him, more from his words than what’s happening to us. “Liddi, do it.”

  It’s collapsing. The bow of the ship is breaking. My body shudders under the waves of chaos, tears squeezing from the corners of my eyes. Tears that match my brothers’.

  I won’t go. Not yet. My brothers’ voices blur together. One voice, a hundred voices.

  “We have to.”

  “There’s no choice.”

  “Liddi, go.”

  “No time.”

  “Go now!”

  “Not coming.”

  “Liddi, now!”

  The pressure, their pressure, my heart bursting through my chest—it all breaks.

  I shout.

  “Not without Fabin!”

  And because I speak—because I trigger the implant, using Minali’s pulse as the final push—without Fabin is exactly what happens.

  An explosion, an implosion, or an infinite expansion of nothingness—something shoves me away, delivering the real world in the form of the floor slamming into my back.

  I suppose it was my back slamming into the floor, but when I can’t breathe through five thousand points of pain, I don’t care about the distinction.

  Something else stops me from breathing—clouds of dust choking the air. I’m in the same lab, but nothing’s the same. A section of the ceiling has collapsed. I push m
yself up to look around.

  Most of the lab equipment is intact, the conduit platform is crushed, and some items are just knocked over. The others sprawl on the floor around me. A quick headcount confirms it. Seven Jantzen brothers, all unconscious, and one Ferinne Aelo.

  Fabin isn’t here.

  I set off the trigger, and he wasn’t in the safe zone of Spin-Still’s energy.

  The weight I felt from the Khua was nothing compared to what hits me now. Weight to crush my soul, to hold me down on the bottom of the ocean. I deserve more. I deserve worse. I want to sob and dissolve and lose myself to the emptiness of failing.

  Metal screeches across the room as the door is levered open in a damaged frame. Minali and three guards spill into the lab.

  They have guns drawn. Including Minali.

  “Nobody move,” she says. “Don’t. You. Move.”

  I may have failed Fabin, but this woman is the reason. She sacrificed my brothers instead of finding a real solution. She had Garrin killed to hold on to her secret. She nearly destroyed the Khua and turned me into little more than a piece of equipment.

  The guards’ guns point at the ground. Minali’s points at me, but it shakes.

  And I don’t have to keep silent anymore.

  “Computer, voiceprint override. Identify Liddi Jantzen.”

  Minali fires. I flinch as the shot hits the ground two feet to my right.

  “Liddi Jantzen, identified,” the computer replies. “How may I help you, Miss Jantzen?”

  Tiav is dragging me toward a console to shield us, but I have to talk fast, before Minali steadies her aim, or worse, goes for my brothers.

  “Disable JTI weapons in Conduit Lab, Level Nine.”

  The power indicators on the guns go dark, but I’m not done.

  “Minali Blake is to be terminated immediately. Relay such to all news-vid sources as well as authorities on both Banak and Neta. And get the police to JTI headquarters to have her arrested. If you three don’t want to get arrested with her, go help my brothers.”

  The guards start climbing over the debris. Minali doesn’t seem to inspire much loyalty. Despite what I said, she’s not looking at me anymore. She’s looking at a monitor and has gone pale. “You stupid, stupid girl! I nearly had everything fixed, and now you’ve destroyed them, the conduits…they’re gone. Do you think anyone in the Seven Points will listen to you when you’ve cut us all off from each other?”

  “They will when I tell them about the Eighth Point and explain a new way to get from world to world. Or an old way. And especially when I tell them everything you’ve done. It’s all about how you spin it, right?”

  She grits her teeth with half a growl, coming at me past the rubble of the collapsed ceiling. Maybe she’ll try to tear my limbs from my body with her bare hands. I’m not convinced that pain would be any worse than what I’ve already experienced. Tiav is worried enough to get between me and her, but it’s not necessary. As long as one particular thing in this mess is still working.

  “Computer, is the neural incapacitator online?” I ask.

  “Confirmed, Miss Jantzen.”

  I glance at my brothers, who are just starting to come around with the three guards tending to them. I think about everything they’ve been through. I swallow the despair when I see Fabin still isn’t here.

  This is letting her off easy. I’ll have to see if the authorities can come up with something more fitting. But for now, this will do.

  “Calibrate for Minali Blake and engage.”

  The sky turned so dark, Liddi thought maybe it was already dinnertime, but no one came to bring her in yet. So with the stubbornness of a seven-year-old, she kept climbing the tree. She looked up at the dark, bloated clouds just in time for a fat drop of water to land in her eye. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Then a crack of lightning, not so distant, with a bone-shaking boom half a second later.

  Retrieved or not, it was time to get inside.

  Raindrops pummeled the girl, like they were trying to push her down the tree faster. She was soaked instantly, and her hand slipped as her foot reached for the next branch.

  She missed.

  Liddi tumbled down, grabbing at branches and getting nothing for her trouble but bark-scrapes all along her arms and legs. At the last second, she caught hold, but only for a moment. The force of stopping so suddenly broke her grip again, and she fell to the ground. She had no way to right herself, no way to keep herself from landing awkwardly with a thud…and a snap. Her scream used up any air that hadn’t been knocked from her lungs.

  Fabin rushed over, finding his sister just a few seconds too late. “Liddi, what happened?”

  “I slipped. My leg.”

  He took one look at it and got to work, finding a couple of branches that he broke to a particular length, and then cutting strips of cloth from his shirt. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said, fashioning a splint. “Why did you wander so far from the house?”

  “The trees here are taller.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “I wanted to be closer to the stars when the sun went down. I wanted to try to find Ferri to see where Mom and Dad are.”

  Fabin’s hands slipped as he tried to bind the sticks with the strips. His voice was as heavy as Liddi’s rain-soaked clothes. “Ferri isn’t a planet. It’s not real. You know it isn’t.”

  “But I want it to be!”

  “I know you do. But even if it were real, it wouldn’t be the kind of place you can see.”

  That couldn’t be true. Liddi’s parents had to be in the sky, watching over her and the boys. They wouldn’t have left the children alone. “So I can’t see them?”

  He carefully lifted her up, kissing her forehead when the pain made her cry out again. “Of course you can. Every time we close our eyes, we all see them. And sometimes that’s enough.”

  THE COUNTRY HOUSE HASN’T been so full since right after Mom and Dad died. To my mind, though, it’s just shy of full enough.

  My brothers are weak after so long in the physically nonphysical state of the conduits. I smuggled Jahmari in from Ferinne to look after them. He says it’s nothing they won’t recover from—they just need to get their strength back, and that takes time.

  They can have all the time they need, but I could use a few more hours in the day.

  Our stunt with the Khua had an impact everywhere. The collapsed ceiling in the lab was nothing compared to some places. Structural damage to buildings, terrible rockslides in the mountains of both Erkir and Pramadam, an amphitheater on Yishu was a total loss. And people were hurt. Concussions and broken bones, mostly. But some deaths.

  Deaths I’m responsible for. At least in part.

  I almost shut down when I found out about all the people. Spin-Still gave me impressions of how much worse it would’ve been if we hadn’t done it. Cities full of people dead and some of the Points no longer habitable for the survivors.

  That’s definitely worse, but I can’t tell whether it should make me feel better. So instead of thinking about my choices, I’ve kept busy. I talked to engineers about finding the best, fastest ways to rebuild and repair. That was just the beginning of the talking.

  Talking to top technologists about the collapse of the conduits and reinstitution of the Khua, talking to government officials on Neta about interplanetary implications, talking to law enforcement chiefs on Banak about crimes committed, talking to historians on Tarix so they can get the record right…I never thought I’d miss silence.

  Others want to talk to me—media-grub demands are at an all-time high—but I’m too busy, with the fallout, with the company, with my family.

  Today, I’m busy doing nothing.

  “They’re beautiful.”

  Emil’s voice startles me. He’s supposed to be back at the house, not crossing the river to the small clearing, and the walking stick he holds isn’t doing that much to help.

  “You shouldn’t be out here,” I say, supporting his other
side.

  “I’m fine.” The words are strong enough, but the way he leans on me says otherwise. His color’s still not right, his eyes worn and weary. He really ought to be resting, but I’m not going to argue. “You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

  “I’m not alone.” Three Khua float lazily around the clearing, and that doesn’t count Spin-Still. “When did you know the Khua were alive?”

  “I’m not sure. Not right away. But when we held one here so you could use it, I think we knew. It felt wrong, like holding someone prisoner. We shouldn’t have done it, but we had to get you safe, away from Blake.”

  Understanding pulses through me from Spin-Still. “And you didn’t know how to ask. They forgive you.”

  “Good. But I still say you shouldn’t be out here alone—I don’t mean with or without the Khua. We left you on your own too long. We all hated it.”

  He’s saying they’ve worried about me, and maybe that they still do. Maybe they’re right to. Maybe they don’t need to. It’s hard to tell anymore, so I choose not to say anything about it. We stand and watch the Khua dance.

  Silence has been with me too long. Even with all the talking I’ve done, one piece of silence has followed me, and I can’t let it stay anymore. Not now. My question might barely be loud enough to hear, but it won’t remain silent.

  “Emil, why didn’t Fabin come?”

  His arm across my shoulders pulls me closer, and I feel his sigh more than hear it. “He didn’t tell us. We didn’t know until we found you and he wasn’t there. Liddi, it was very strange in there, the way we could sometimes know and understand things and then not.”

  “What did you understand?”

  “The pulse triggered by your vocal implant wouldn’t have disrupted enough. It might have set us free, but the conduits’ energy would still have been entangled with the Khua. They’d still be suffering. Fabin knew. He knew if one of us was outside the safe zone, taking the hit from the pulse, it’d be like an explosion, enough to knock the conduits loose. No more parasites for the Khua.”

  A rock lodges in my throat, or might as well. “But what happened to Fabin?”