Sinder had always been dreaming. That much was clear. They were all living as the dreams of the universe, pulled along as inexorably as cars on a track.
He would play his part in that journey, to the last. He would fulfill it. He would see Yuga’s blood on his hands, and he would know that he had done well.
Nkiruka walked the halls of Ashwina.
Like everything else, she was relearning the ship, coming to understand it as it truly was. Humming with life, with chaos, with movement—these were things that she had always sensed, but now they were a blatant reality that crashed relentlessly in on her like waves on the shore. More than once she had to stop, head down, panting and gently turning aside the people who paused to ask if she needed help.
They weren’t surprised, those few who had seen the last Aalim take her place. It always happened this way. Being born was an awkward business. It took time to find one’s feet.
She followed the corridors and hallways and chambers down toward the center of the ship, toward the great hall that extended from the middle of Ashwina’s bulk to her transparent top. As she exited the last corridor into one of the long galleries that circled around its side, she took a slightly trembling breath, something both more and less than a gasp. There was so much here. More than she could ever take in.
They were so close.
“Nkiru.”
Some part of her had already known, had felt the approach of a familiar dance, graceful and lovely. A dance she had joined, once not so long ago. One she had expected to join to her own.
“Hello, Satya.”
“You’re looking well.” The words weren’t as cold as they might have been, but they were distant, as uncertain as Satya’s body felt. She didn’t know if she should approach, and Nkiruka wanted to reach for her, take her hands, call her “my love” and “dear child” and “chusile, habibti, my life.”
No. Not those last. Never again.
“I’m … becoming.” It was the only word she could think of. She went to the railing that lined the gallery and laid her hands on it, feeling the space in front of her. A long way up, and a long way down. “It won’t be long now.”
“Yes. We’re a few hours from the system. Adisa asked me to tell you.” Satya paused, and it was heavy with her unhappiness. “I don’t know why he did that. I don’t know why I agreed.”
“I do.” She didn’t quite smile. Adisa, too wise for his years. Ixchel had taught him well. “We share a home here, Satya. We can’t be together the way we wanted. But we have to be together.” She turned back, letting out a sigh. “We have to find a way to … move together. You know that as well as I do.”
“We did move together.” Satya sounded—felt—more helpless than anything else. At a loss. The past was chaining her to itself, dragging her down, and Nkiruka thought of Adisa and Ixchel and wondered if Adisa had faced the same thing: a life looking backward or a push forward into the terrifying, lonely unknown.
If so, she knew what he had chosen. What it cost him.
“Yes, we did.” Despite her obvious pain, Satya was shimmering like a jewel, lit from within. Nkiruka had always known that she was beautiful, but now she saw her completely, all facets of her, and it made her heart ache almost more than she could bear. “Now the dance has changed. We change with it or we’ll be destroyed.”
“Do you know, I’ve spent hours lying in bed and thinking that being destroyed might be better?” Satya pushed past her, gazing over the edge of the railing. “The night you decided, I came out here and I looked down, and I swear to all the stars, Nkiru, I almost jumped.”
Unsurprising. But Nkiruka’s mouth went dry, her gut wrenching. “Why didn’t you?”
“I’m not sure. Something stopped me.” Now Satya seemed curious. “You always said I was too stubborn for my own good. Maybe I decided that you weren’t worth it.” She let out a breath. “No, that’s not true. That’s not why. I wish I could feel that way, but chere, I can’t.”
“It wasn’t your time,” Nkiruka said softly. Tiny stars danced through the air between them. “It wasn’t in your dance or your orbit. Your path is taking you elsewhere.”
Satya laughed softly. “Oh, fuck you.”
Nkiruka bowed her head. She deserved that. She would have felt the same. Part of her did feel the same.
“I will always love you,” she whispered. “If that’s a sin, I’ll be damned for it.”
“Yes. We will.” Satya faced her, hesitated for a moment, then reached out and took Nkiruka’s hands in hers. A shock pierced Nkiruka through her fingers, lanced up her arms and into her throat and brain and heart, but she bit back her cry. She gathered the pain to herself and devoured its bitterness.
“I think this is good-bye,” Satya murmured. “When we reach the planet … everything will change. Everything is changing.”
“Everything is always changing.” Nkiruka cupped Satya’s face and leaned in. If they were seen, this might result in her exile, but she didn’t care. One last moment together, one final sweet, terrible farewell. “Love, I’ll carry your dance inside me. Always and forever, until the last star burns out and the night is empty and cold.”
Satya drew in a breath that was more like a sob, and Nkiruka pulled it into herself when she erased the distance between their lips. She would keep it with everything else, like a secret treasure.
Now she had to close this love into her heart and turn her face to what lay ahead. To what she must do.
There was no time for mourning.
After Satya left, she stood in the gallery for a long time—and in fact, the time slipped away from her and became unimportant. Slipstream was violence done to space-time, a worm’s tunnel burrowed through a forest of entropy. She was near the center of it, and so was the universe itself, and the center was pulling them in. It was the gravity well of a black hole, dragging everything into itself, and there was no escape.
When she felt Ashwina shivering her way out of slipstream, she bowed her head and whispered a prayer.
It had begun.
Things were moving quickly. By the time the transport was well away, Rachel and Aarons had commandeered a field comm unit from among its supplies, and were keeping its band open inside Lakshmi’s house, posting someone near it at all times. The sun was still an hour or so from rising when the young man who’d been on watch found her sleeping beneath the trees and shook her, reporting that the transport had detected the recon fleet approaching. That they couldn’t be more than an hour out.
She brought this information to Adam, who was sitting with Lochlan at Lakshmi’s table; Lakshmi was seated in her rocker with her eyes closed. She seemed asleep. Adam knew she wasn’t.
Gathered with the core group, he sat and listened as first Rachel spoke and then Aarons, the shape of the thing becoming clear, along with how badly the odds were stacked against them.
“There’s three ships in all,” Rachel said. The lantern sat in the center of the table, casting strange shadows over their faces, deepening their lines and hardening edges. “Which is a lot worse than one but a lot better than … Well, a lot better than anything more than three. Like we saw when we escaped the camp, they’re not large, nor are they heavily armed, but they do have fighters and they do have peacekeepers, though Aarons tells me they can’t land a huge number of people at any one time. Either way, they have enough firepower to knock our transport out of the sky. They’re a threat. We shouldn’t assume otherwise.”
She produced a pad and set it on the table, tapping it to bring up a map of the surrounding terrain. “We managed to get the signal beacon out of the transport, though it was tricky. It has an external power supply, which won’t last, but we think it’ll broadcast long enough to get their attention.”
“What we need more than anything else is cover,” Aarons cut in. He pointed to the meadows around the little square that Adam assumed represented the house. “And we need to keep ’em as far away from the village as possible. Lakshmi told them this was coming a
while ago. They’re evacuating, spreading the word to others—the people here are good at removing themselves from harm’s way. This place isn’t far enough out of the way to completely escape Protectorate notice, but they’d just as soon make it look like there’s no reason to come here. Apparently they have plans for this kind of thing. But let’s minimize property damage all the same.”
He smiled grimly. “So we put the beacon under the trees in this wood here.” He pointed to the wood outside where Adam had found Lochlan the day before. “They’ll head for it. The trees are thick, and they’re easy to climb. We’re stationing about a third of our people in there with rifles. They’re mostly not snipers, but we do have two of those, and in any case, they’ll have the element of surprise. If nothing else, they should scare the shit outta anyone who comes nosing around in there.”
“Everyone else is taking cover in the other smaller wood behind the hill. There are some rock outcrops there that also give good cover.” Eva sounded focused, almost excited. Like Rachel, she had a head for this. Rachel might be a general, but it would be good if she wasn’t the only one. Of course, it would all depend on what Eva wanted. And the tiny life inside her—that might change things. But she probably wouldn’t be content to sit by. “Once the peacekeepers are under the cover of the trees, those people move in and surround them. We’re keeping some back to provide support if needed. We press, we take as many of them out as possible, and then we head back to the rocks and the trees before they can land more people and surround us.” She let out a breath. “Rinse and repeat.”
“Until they realize what we’re doing,” Kyle pointed out. “Which won’t take long. They might be oblivious as hell to certain things, but they aren’t stupid.”
Aarons shrugged, though he was scowling even harder than usual. “Thanks. Yes, we’re well aware. We can only work with what we have.” He paused, running a fingertip along the edge of the pad. “There’s not going to be any beating them, you know that,” he said. “Not this time. About the best we can do is push them back. Make them run for a while. But there’s no winning in the picture here.”
“And they won’t be casually sweeping things under the rug this time.” Adam sighed. So much of it always came back to this. “The Protectorate … They don’t merely smooth over rough spots. They go after them with a fucking hammer. They’ll mean to end us, and at least five people here have seen what that looks like.”
“Then I see two more issues,” Lochlan said. “We still have the fighters to contend with, and last I checked none of us had engines or wings strapped to our back or turret guns hiding somewhere in our heads, lovely though that would be.”
Aarons snorted a laugh. “We don’t? You’re kidding. What’s the other one?”
“Simply this: If they’re coming after us with all hammers waving—and I agree they will—we can’t stay here. Even if we do manage to chase them off temporarily, they’ll come after us as soon as they can.”
“Right,” Rachel said, giving him a quizzical glance. “Which is why the transport will come back for us if it works.”
“I don’t mean that,” Lochlan said patiently. “That’s fine, good, I get it. But after.” He was quiet a moment. “This is the start of something bigger, assuming we don’t all get killed.” If Rachel had seemed old, now Lochlan appeared ancient. And tired. Very tired. “You know I’m right.”
“He is,” Lakshmi murmured. She was rocking slowly, her hands in her lap, but her eyes were open and pale as a moon. “Ama,” she said, even more softly. “Habibti, I know, I’m telling them. Hush, now.” She turned her attention back to them, her mouth tightening. “For years I’ve seen this coming. Here, far from my Halls, far from my children, you think I can’t still feel the dance? You think I can’t still weave my fingers into the tapestry and pull just the right threads? You don’t know what it is to see what I’ve seen, and know that no living being can change it.”
She leaned forward then, gripping the arms of her chair tightly enough that her knobby knuckles went white. “For so long I had peace. Me and my Ama, waiting for the end, waiting to be together again. Then I dreamed waves of blood, and evil in the roots. I saw the Plain and a man, and then so many more people, like an oncoming tide. I would give anything to trade my place in this. But it’s here.” She stamped her foot on the floor, and they all jumped. “Here with you, at the threshold of this war. My role is to open the door. I will carry that to my death and beyond, that stain on my soul.”
She went quiet again, and the silence of the others was heavy, stunned. Lakshmi had been peaceful, even happy, apparently pleased to finally see the people she had been waiting for and satisfied to play the part she seemed to believe had been set for her. Now all her muscles were tense; her face contorted with pain, and Adam wanted to go to her, though what he could do, he had no idea.
The question is what we sacrifice.
“Feel no guilt, children,” she murmured. “Life is cruel. It can only ever be what it is, and the same is true of us all. Only know the nature of the door I’m opening before you. Know its nature, before you step through.”
At first no one said anything. After a while, Adam realized that they were all gazing at him, all waiting for him to speak.
“We’ll find a place to make a stand,” he said slowly. “Look, I … I don’t completely understand what’s gotten us this far. I don’t understand all of what’s happening, and I sure as hell don’t know what’s going to happen next. What I do know is that there’s something at work here that’s greater than all of us.”
He paused. Once he never would have imagined himself saying anything like this. But everything had changed.
“I don’t know if you’d call it a god, or gods, or fate, or simply the way the pads fall. I don’t know which of those I believe in anymore. But I do know I’ve gotten this far on faith. Not unquestioning faith, and I doubt everything all the time, but … None of it’s been planned. I’ve just trusted that whatever’s guiding this, it’ll get me—get us—to where we need to be. I think that’ll keep happening. So if we do live through this, I have faith that we’ll find somewhere to stand.”
They glanced at each other. Then Kyle laughed, shaking his head. “Friend, you are so fucking different.”
Adam smiled, thinly. “Tell me about it.”
“If only I’d known we were moving on the whims of a mystic,” Rachel said, but she was smiling too. “Well, whatever. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t care why we’re doing what we’re doing now, I only care that it works. We can get all metaphysical once we’re on the other side and still breathing.”
“Right. Let’s get going.” Eva pushed back from the table. Her face was drawn, her jaw tight, but her eyes were cool and focused. She wasn’t looking at Kyle, had barely looked at him throughout the entire proceedings, and Adam wondered if she had told him yet. If she intended to.
Perhaps not until much later. Either way, it had to be her choice.
The meeting dispersed. Kyle and Eva had put themselves in charge of those using rocks for cover, while Aarons and Rachel were taking the other group into the trees. Adam watched them head toward the door, Lochlan still beside him.
“Which are you with?”
“The ones playing Klashorg in the trees.” Lochlan took his hand. “You’re going to stay here.”
Adam turned to him, mouth twisting. It didn’t feel exactly like a smile. “We’re really going to do this again?”
“Not if you don’t argue with me.”
“You know the chances there.” Adam raked a hand through his hair. He felt dangerously close to the sort of tantrum he remembered having occasionally as a child, screaming and kicking things and ultimately accomplishing nothing. “Lock, seriously, when are you going to treat me like a fucking adult?”
“When all has grown cold and stale and I no longer love you.” He was standing placidly, his arms folded. “How many times do I have to tell you that you’re not a soldier?”
<
br /> “I can fire a damned gun.”
“From a fighter turret. That’s not the same as close-quarters combat, Adam, not one bit, and you know that. Look, you’re right. Okay? You’re right; I can’t keep stopping you. I get that now. So when this is all over, we’ll have lessons. I’ll show you everything I know. In the meantime, you stay put. You help the ones left behind however you can. You stay out of the line of fire, or stars help me, I will kick your ass from here all the way to the Plain when I get back.” He unfolded his arms and laid his hands on Adam’s shoulders, his voice dropping into something thick and tight so suddenly it jarred Adam. “Do not—do not—make me terrified to lose you while I’m fighting for my goddamn life. Don’t do that to me. Not again. Don’t you dare.”
Adam stared at him, mouth open. He’d had retorts, all manner of arguments, and they had died in an instant. What Lochlan was saying wasn’t new, but the way he was saying it … Choked. Desperate. Pleading.
“All right,” he whispered.
“Yes,” Lakshmi said, and they both spun, startled. Adam had forgotten that she was even there. She stood by the stove now, leaning on her stick and looking at Adam with an expression that he wasn’t at all sure he liked. “You stay with me, child. We have work to do, you and I. I think you know what I mean.”
All at once the dream—the vision—came rushing back to him, and he did. And he was terrified.
“On this ground, you may be an Aalim.”
He eased himself from Lochlan’s grasp and went to her, his head bowed. Everything in him was screaming run, get out while he could—but of course he couldn’t. Not now.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Yes, you do.” Lakshmi tilted her head to one side, and Adam thought of a bird, the lenki birds, leathery and wrinkled but so lovely. “You know who and what you are, boy. Not for us, but for your own people. If there arise among you a prophet, a dreamer of dreams …” She extended a hand. “We have to prepare.”
Adam glanced back. Lochlan was standing only a few feet away from him, but the distance seemed vast and still expanding. Lochlan’s face was a mask of confusion and unease, but try as he might, Adam could think of no way to comfort him.
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