by Audrey Faye
“I spoke with Tameka.” Janelle sounded like she was discussing the upcoming apple harvest. “She said you wouldn’t use force.”
My demon child lit, offended and furious. “I already promised you that.”
Devan inserted his bulk between us with surprising swiftness.
Janelle pushed him aside, temper flaring—and then slid to a halt, eyes beaming apology. She laid a quiet hand on my arm, and a cautioning one on his. “Yes, you already did. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to question your integrity.”
How could I not like someone who apologized that easily and that well? I sighed. “It’s a valid question.”
“So was yours the other day.” She met my gaze steadily. “You asked me whether I would do this if it were good for my home, my people. I’ve been thinking about that.”
Storm clouds gathered on Devan’s face as he listened. “You didn’t tell me that part.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “I don’t tell you everything, hot stuff. I can take care of myself. And I figure Kish has reasons for asking that she can’t tell us.”
I held my breath as she stepped toward the cusp of something I could nudge in entirely good conscience.
“No.” Devan’s words were quiet, but fierce temper kicked underneath them. “My parents have been working that line for twenty-six years, and in the end, what’s good for Bromelain III comes down to a matter of opinion.” His eyes were boring into mine. “If you know something we don’t, now is a really good time to say so.”
I couldn’t. I knew too much, and far too little. I knew how the StarReaders had voted, but I didn’t know why—and it was the latter we all needed right now. I took a deep breath, knowing battle lines had just been drawn and hating which side of them I stood on. “I’ve told you everything I can, and quite a few things I probably shouldn’t have.”
He nodded, eyes sad. “Yeah. I figured that.”
“Think about it,” I said softly. “Please.”
“I have. For more years than you can probably imagine.” He reached out a hand to Janelle. “I will always do what is best for my home and my people. But for better or worse, I have to be the person who decides what that is.”
Janelle stepped to his shoulder, arm around his waist. She didn’t say a word.
She didn’t have to. I knew what I was looking at. A united front, one backed by a brick wall of unswerving loyalty an arm-span thick.
I had enough Talent to blast a brick wall to smithereens—but they were right. Neither KarmaCorp’s ethics nor my own would ever let me use it.
I’d have to find a way around.
It wouldn’t be the first time I’d done that on assignment, but this time it was going to make my guts bleed. I liked these two a whole lot, and that was wildly dangerous territory, especially with a man who made my hormones buzz. I could hear my KarmaCorp instructors in my head, warning of the neon dangers of personal entanglement—the loss of perspective, losing sight of the greater good in the face of real human desires and the good people who had them.
I’d listened to them, I really had.
I’d just never landed in that mud quite this thoroughly—and it was sucking my heart out through my boots.
-o0o-
I pasted myself against a tree trunk, watching couples dancing under the light of BroThree’s twin moons, and tried mightily to keep the Song inside me tamped down tight. Letting it fly would give everyone in three kilometers a hell of a headache, and it likely wouldn’t make me feel one iota better.
I could read the signs well enough. One Singer knocked way off her rocker. My chakras hadn’t been this whacked since I was fourteen.
The trio in the corner of the lawn played lovely music on lute, viola, and some sort of percussive cylinder. Their subtle, skilled harmonies mocked me.
Harmony wasn’t within my reach tonight.
I hummed a basic rebalancing chant, cringing at the out-of-tune reverberations. Even the tree at my back seemed to wince. I activated my subsonics, looking to dampen the whole mess—and then gave up as I saw Janelle and Devan again and felt my insides slide even further out of whack. The two of them had made their way out into the clear area of lawn that was serving as tonight’s dance floor. She swung into his arms with a smooth grace that suggested they’d done this many times before, and started chatting away like two entirely platonic neighbors who knew what the fates intended for them and couldn’t care less.
I pushed my subsonics their direction, thoroughly annoyed at act two of their little play. And sighed when the echoes came back. They weren’t acting. Gorgeous music, twin moons hanging in a mystical sky, and the only one feeling the romance was me.
I turned a cranky eye to the sky and moons, about to give up and lock myself in a handy dungeon for the night, and then reconsidered. Devan and Janelle were expecting an attack on their brick wall—but I knew the benefits of a carefully placed drill. The flares of teal and gold overhead just might be a good place to start.
I opened my higher chakras, the ones that reach upward to spirit, to emotion, to those things we can’t quite see but know to be true, and gathered that energy into the beginnings of melody.
I frowned as the notes shaped themselves. Way too damn fragile and ethereal for what I needed—drills needed substance. I reached for the percussive beat from the musical trio, smiling as my forming Song took on a far firmer shape. Better. Much better.
I had a foundation now, and lots of easy material to build with. Next, I sought out the notes of romance in the dancing crowd. An old couple over to the left, rocking to the gentle, steady love of a lifetime. Two dancers with fast feet and appreciative eyes, feeling out how they moved together. A very pregnant woman, Devan’s oldest sister unless I missed my guess, swaying with a man’s arms wrapped around her belly. A young girl sitting under a bush with two friends, testing out the wobbly legs of her first crush. I didn’t change their songs any—they were beautiful just as they were. I only augmented their signal some, boosted the acoustics.
And then I turned back to my errant couple, satisfied with the Song I’d built. Time for some flanking maneuvers of my own. We’d see how well their stubborn heads held up against well-crafted Talent.
Devan and Janelle were still gliding through the simple shapes of whatever dance this was, feet on autopilot as they moved and talked.
Good. They’d let their guard down, as had everyone else. No one was paying any attention to the cranky Fixer under a tree. I wasn’t harboring any illusions—both of the people in my sights would be utterly furious if they knew what I was about to try next.
It wouldn’t break my promise to Janelle, but it would skirt damn close.
I closed my eyes, readying.
And then, ever so lightly, I wrapped my song of ethereal, pulsating romance around the two of them, light as a feather.
Something in my heart keened.
I blasted it with pure heat. I was a girl from a digger rock—I knew better than to pine after things I couldn’t have.
I sent my melody of romance and wooing up Janelle and Devan’s musical currents, looking for cracks. Tiny crevices, ones where I could maybe give a note a little more resonance, a harmonic a slightly more tuned pitch. The lightest of touches, seeking a place for my drill to land.
Their crevices pushed back.
I gripped the tree behind me and snarled, patience suddenly and irrevocably gone. I wasn’t the best Singer in this quadrant for nothing. Dialing up the nozzle on my Talent, I leaned harder, put more demand into my quest for a chink in their united armor.
I wasn’t asking them to frolic on the lawn naked, for fuck’s sake. I just wanted them to look. To see each other with eyes that hadn’t been trained by twenty-five years of familiarity—to see each other as I saw them. A woman who could be a friend. A man I could love.
A man I could love.
My Song exploded, notes skittering away into the dancing, starry sky. I cringed into the tree at my back, holding on to its solidness for
dear life as the careening remnants of my melody shrieked and rended.
Spaceships had torn in two with less noise.
And when I could finally lift my head again, I wanted nothing more than to be that spaceship. I could feel the panic rising from my root chakra right up to the tips of my hair. The catastrophe had been silent to all ears but mine, but a catastrophe it was, nonetheless.
My Talent had failed—and it had been done in by my own base notes rising up in mutiny.
14
Finally. I breathed fully for the first time in hours as the last of the lights of the Lovatt compound dimmed behind me. I had waited until every last guest had gone, offered every polite smile and gracious word I had in me to give. I’d nodded politely at Devan when he included me in conversation, and agreed to join Janelle for a horseback ride in the morning.
I barely knew what a horse was, but every gram of self-preservation I had left had simply been trying to survive the current minute and the one after that.
The minutes were finally done. And now I could let what had broken inside me rise and be free. I had no choice but to let it out. My Talent had failed, and that was the kind of problem that killed missions.
A Singer can’t sing against her own will. I’d powered through my own distaste, dislike, and some really foul moods on previous assignments, but always, always I’d been able to lean on the one truth that is soaked into every Fixer’s DNA. Do the job. Act for the greater good, whatever your personal reactions. Trust KarmaCorp. I didn’t Sing blindly—but somewhere, I’d always been able to dig up that faith.
Until now.
I filled my lungs, feeling my breath hitch and the winds curl around me in reply. I’d come to the right place. These grasslands called to me, even when my heart and Talent were in total disarray.
I felt my legs leap into action, answering the call, carrying me beyond the edges of manicured civilization and out into the sweeping sea of grass. My churning legs bolted far into the night and the rustling waves, trusting that the grasses would bring me back again when I needed them to. I would never be lost here—not physically, anyhow.
The stalks closed in around me, murmuring quiet sympathy. I sang them a few quick, pissy notes. This was not my planet, and they were not my grasses. Answer rippled from organisms that traced their DNA from long before the first humans began. They belonged to no one, to everyone, just like the stars over my head.
I sighed and slowed down my wild run. My parents hadn’t understood the child they’d taken in, but they’d always let me move my legs. On an inner planet I’d have landed in the office of a well-meaning psychologist, but miners had never found me deal-breaking strange—hanging out in dark tunnels for forty-eight hours straight tends to rejigger your definition of sane.
My lungs heaved, protesting the late-night exercise. And my Song strained, fighting the stranglehold I’d set on it the moment I first laid eyes on Devan Lovatt. It was time to let it loose, to give time and space and oxygen to whatever inside me had tried to run my Talent into the side of an asteroid this night.
Time to let my soul speak its truth in the most honest way I knew how—even if I quaked at hearing what it had to say. I stopped my feet, knowing I could run forever and not get away from what I carried inside me. The demon child had tried.
The first notes rose up the instant my bare toes planted in dirt. Weightless, soaring high ones that would be audible far above the waving grasses. My lament to the stars. No subsonics this time—this was a Song that needed to be heard.
I reached down to earth and up to sky and let the wild energy in my ribs go. Music exploded out, great rending runs of notes and aching, fragile ones. Chromatics that made my ears wince, and harmonies so beautiful, I could hardly stand to let them go.
A cacophony of sound and meaning—and very little of it made any sense at all.
I took a deep breath and let the notes fade, shaking my head ruefully. I felt like I’d flown through three lightyears of space shrapnel without a suit. There was a reason we were supposed to Sing every day. Even a first-year trainee knew the basic exercises to keep Talent degunked and chakras unglued. It was long past time for some Singer basic nutrition.
I reached out both hands for the grasses at my sides and joined their swaying, letting the cool earth beneath my toes and the starkissed light on my forehead shape a loop. Anchoring into that flow, I let my base note rise up the center of my spine, listening as it passed each of my chakras. Noticing the resonances and the lack of them.
Not fixing, yet—just listening.
I let the note that was entirely, purely me rise all the way up to my braids. And then I tipped my head up to the starry night and let a sad, wry chuckle limp out. “You are one heck of a mess, Lakisha Drinkwater.”
The grasses around me murmured their agreement.
I pushed my toes deeper into the dirt and began with my root chakra, singing the low, resonant notes that would call it back into alignment. That one shifted easily enough—it always had. Rocks were hard to unbalance overmuch.
I worked my way up, Singing to the nodes of energy in my spine as I went. My heart chakra quivered, but settled into place with a little tender underpinning. It was my throat chakra that balked entirely.
I had things to say—and it wasn’t going to go quietly into the night or into alignment until I said them.
I sighed and stopped trying to placate it with simple harmonics.
The music that rose out of me this time was less wild, less chaotic. Meaning lived there now, stories I could hear and understand. Stories I needed to honor, no matter what I chose to do with them next.
I breathed in and listened to my own truth, Sung as best as I knew it. Layers of frustration and hurt, emanating, as always, from the edges of a demon child who never felt quite worthy and a woman who had never felt entirely comfortable as a cog. Notes I knew well.
I swam deeper, seeking what it was that my soul needed me to hear this night. And found it in the yearning. In the wanting. In the small, reverberating undertones that held tight to stardust and romance and didn’t want to let go.
Fragile, ethereal notes. Ones that had never met the business end of a drill.
I let them out, tears rolling down my cheeks.
The grasslands offered soothing, lullabies of ease and comfort. I kicked my Song out at them. Comfort wasn’t what I sought this night.
They kicked back and almost made me laugh—planets don’t take much shit. This one didn’t have any tolerance for my self-pity.
I didn’t care. Sometimes, we puny humans need to feel things even when the wiser entities of the galaxy find us foolish.
I let my Song range back to the aching high notes it had begun with. A soprano’s lament, sung to grasses and stars that would hear and hold my truth long after I ceased to exist. Devan Lovatt wasn’t mine to have. Even if the StarReaders hadn’t already cast their vote, I was a Fixer. I’d never visit BroThree again, and he was this planet’s ruler-in-waiting.
I broke the music off in mid-note, cursing. I was sounding like some hapless heroine in a romance novel, dammit.
I let go and charged out into the dark, grassy waves again, feeling them grasp at my running feet and then give way. I’d run like this in the tunnels as a child, and one insanely memorable time, on the asteroid’s surface. A demon child in an astrosuit, feet pounding on the surfaces of the rock she called home.
Alone beneath the stars. Just like tonight.
My lungs heaved in the air of Bromelain III, protesting the exertion. I was no longer the child who had traveled all her days at breakneck speeds. I was the woman that child had chosen to become, and that woman didn’t want to break her neck on a backwater planet over a man she couldn’t have.
The grasses murmured as I dropped back to a walk, my breath rasping out from lungs that had been caught by surprise too many times tonight. I reached into my bag for water to soothe my throat.
And then, with a discipline that would have astonis
hed my trainers, I pulled on the cloak of responsible adult. I let my breathing settle. I set my Song loose long enough to wail her last lines one more time and then reeled her back, smiling a little as the sulky, miffed final notes settled into place.
My throat chakra was sore as all hell, but it was back in a nice tight line with all the others. I had listened. I had allowed my truth its moment on earth and under sky.
Maybe now it would stay out of the way while I did the job I’d come here to do.
15
A decent night’s sleep can set the whole world right again. Or not.
I looked over at Janelle, who was seated on a creature identical to mine and looking entirely at home there. “This is nuts—you know that, right?” I’d ridden a digging drill down a five-hundred-meter mineshaft with half my safety tethers loose, and that hadn’t felt nearly this crazy.
“You said you loved the grasslands, and like I told you last night, this is the best way to see them.”
I had no memory of that conversation.
She leaned over and patted the neck of the beast I sat on. “Don’t worry. Dusty here is as mild-mannered as horses come. All the kids around here use him to learn to ride.”
I stuck my right foot in the thing that looked like a medieval torture device and tried to find some kind of comfortable way to sit. “Apparently, I’m just a dumb flatlander.”
Her laugh pealed out over Dusty’s ears. “You kind of look like one at the moment.”
I looked like hell warmed over. That much I’d verified before I’d slammed on a hat and slithered out to greet the dawn.
Janelle tipped her head a little, regarding me closely. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Just plotting my revenge when you visit my digger rock.”
She grinned. “I have four brothers—I don’t scare easily.”
Most days, I didn’t either. I stuck out my tongue at her smart-ass face, feeling better despite my best efforts—and then yanked it back in again as she kicked her horse’s sides and we started to move.
