by Monte Cook
“Skist,” she says. “That would have made it easier, if some fantastic new door opened and led the way. Ideally with an instruction book saying, ‘Do this and you can defeat the bad guy’.”
“Does that ever happen?”
“In my dream version of the world.”
“Think of it this way: if it doesn’t exist, then I guess at least the good thing is that Rillent can’t get a hold of it.”
“Fair point. It’s why we keep almost everything in our brains.” Not that Rillent can’t access her brain, so not even that is truly safe. But she doesn’t say that. Kyre doesn’t either. But the edges of his jaw twitch, and she knows he’s thinking it.
They make it back to Delgha, who’s still poking and pressing parts of the devices. Muttering. It’s mostly nonsense, but every once in a while, a clear swearword slips through.
Aviend clasps her hands behind her back. When she sees Kyre watching, she says, “So I don’t touch until I know what I’m doing.”
“Seems smart. You’re not going to blow us up, right, Del?” Kyre teases.
“I make no promises.”
“Right, remember that time when you were making that…” Kyre opens his hand toward Aviend, palm upward, asking her to give him the word he’s looking for.
“Butterfly drone,” Aviend says.
“Yes!” Kyre says. “A cute little thing that was supposed to fly around and take recordings, and instead it nearly blew all of our heads off.”
“After you touched it,” Delgha says.
“You said it wouldn’t do anything.”
“You weren’t supposed to touch it until I said so,” Delgha says, matter-of-factly. Then with an unusual bit of laughter in her voice, she says, “Speaking of which, Kyre, go touch that button over there, will you? The orangish… ah… stemish one.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t trust you one bit, Delgha.”
“This one you are supposed to touch. I think. I’m trying to make a connector to…” She’s not really talking to them, and her voice trails away for a few words before it’s intelligible again. “…and… power and then see if I can’t get the…”
“What does it do, exactly, Del?” Kyre says.
“I’m not sure. It seems vital to the purpose of all of this stuff. But I need to hold these two tubes together…” She lifts them and Aviend sees they’re foaming at the connection. A kind of interplay between the two parts that forms a circle of bubbles between them. “At the same time.”
“I’ll do it,” Aviend says.
“Sucker,” Kyre teases.
“Coward,” Aviend says back.
“I think ‘smart’ is the word you meant to use. Or perhaps ‘Man who likes to keep all his fingers’.”
“That’s not a word.”
“Fingerkeeper.”
It makes her laugh.
The button that Delgha means isn’t really a button, but it’s the closest word Aviend has too. It’s tall and rubbery, and looks like the stem of a flower without the flower. Except an orange so bright it almost hurts her eyes. “Push, Del? Or wiggle? Or what?”
“I don’t know. Try them all.”
“Oh, good.” She feels her face do the thing that she knows Kyre thinks of as her wink, then reaches out to touch the stem lightly at the very top. A thread of fear flows through her arm, causing her to release it before she is even sure she touched it.
“Ow,” she says, even though she’s not entirely sure if it hurt. Even now, her arm isn’t in pain. She can’t remember what it felt like, except that she didn’t want to be touching it anymore. “Skist, Delgha.”
“Sorry,” Delgha says. She frantically twists some buttons. But the way she says it tells Aviend that she’s not all that surprised by her response.
“You knew it was going to do that, didn’t you?” Aviend says.
“Why do you think I asked Kyre to touch it first?”
“Delgha!” she says, just as Kyre mutters a swear under his breath. She’s trying not to laugh, but the look on Kyre’s face makes it almost impossible not to.
“Honestly, I hoped it would do something,” Delgha says. “But I didn’t know what. What did it do?”
Aviend looks for words. She can still feel the emotion in her arm, which is one of the weirdest things she’s ever had to say. “It’s like it made my arm afraid. Not the rest of me, but just my arm. It wanted to let go of it before I even realized I’d touched it.”
“Maybe some kind of defense mechanism. That’s pretty interesting. Let’s try it again.”
“No, thank you,” Aviend says. Her arm feels… weird. Like it’s ready for her to ask it to do something it doesn’t want to do and it might slap her in the face.
Delgha looks up, confused. Shakes her head. “Sorry,” she says.
Aviend thinks she means it more for herself than anything. Delgha forgets that they’re humans, sometimes, she thinks. Sees them as machines or puzzles. Something to be solved. Used. Or at least utilized. That sounds meaner than she intends it to. Delgha doesn’t mean harm. But it is disconcerting, she thinks. For all of them, even Delgha, when Delgha goes into that space.
“All right, don’t touch it again,” Delgha says. “But try to touch it. See if it will let you.”
Aviend lifts her arm. Her fingers wiggle. She wills her hand to reach toward the button. You don’t have to touch it, she thinks. Just move toward it.
A thing she never thinks about: how her hand moves when she wants it to. It just does. But now she’s asking it to do so, like it’s a creature separate from her body. And it is absolutely refusing. It’s like it can’t hear her. She feels it again, the sense that her arm is afraid. She isn’t – she knows what fear feels like when it lives in her body, and this is not it. But her arm? That’s something else.
“Nope,” she says. She lets her arm drop and swears it floods with relief. “It’s like my arm is refusing to do as I ask of it. That is the oddest sensation I’ve ever experienced. And I’ve felt some odd things in my time.”
“Kyre, I hate to ask, but would you be willing to give it a try, please?” Delgha asks. “I’d like to see if it’s the same for everyone. Or at least for the two people I can talk into touching the thing.”
“Not particularly,” he says. “But I will if you need me to. In the name of discovery, and all of that.”
“In the name of discovery,” Delgha agrees without looking up from her swirling bubbles and tubes.
He moves over in front of the machine. “Hey, Thorme. How come you never have to touch Delgha’s stuff?”
“Chiurgeon,” she says simply, pointing a thumb at her chest.
“Right,” he says.
“I’d offer to hold your hand, but I’m afraid my hand would try to punch me in the face or something after that last go,” Aviend says.
“Great,” Kyre says. “Let’s get this over with then.”
He reaches out toward the stem. Aviend holds her breath. She can feel her face scrunching up in anticipation of his response. She almost doesn’t want to look, but knows it wouldn’t be fair to turn away. Plus, she’s a little bit curious. Will his arm be scared too? What does that look like?
He touches the stem. His fingers stay closed around it. There’s no reaction.
“Nothing,” he says. “It’s like it’s not even…”
He doesn’t finish his sentence.
Delgha looks up at the same time Kyre says something that starts out as a word and ends in little more than a guttural growl. His eyes roll back to whites so slowly Aviend thinks she’s imagining their movement. Blood flecks his fingertips where he’s holding the stem.
He disappears. Comes back. Disappears again. Returns, shuddering.
Aviend’s hand won’t let her grab him, won’t reach out even though she asks it to, so she body knocks him, sending him sprawling so hard he hits the floor with a thud.
“What the skist is that? Delgha?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” she says. She
is moving fast, shutting down the devices, quick switches and pulls.
On the floor, Kyre shakes, his feet battering the floor. The blood from his finger leaves small smears of red across the floor with every shudder of his body. He shakes so hard he’s moving himself across the floor in fits and starts.
“Kyre,” she says. “Kyre. Thorme, get the kit.” Even though Thorme is already there. Even though she already has the kit. Is already kneeling. Aviend might be screaming. She can’t tell. Her throat hurts.
By force of will, Aviend gets out of Thorme’s way, lets the chiurgeon kneel beside Kyre. She stays close, trying not to hover, in case she’s needed.
She’s never felt so helpless. It’s her role to be prepared, to plan. She can make the plan. Follow the plan. Adjust if the plan goes low-gravity. But this? She’s not prepared for this.
Thorme pulls a bottle out of her healing kit. Shakes it hard, once. Aviend can feel the chill coming off the bottle as liquid inside activates. The glass starts to ice over, even as Thorme screws an injector into the lid. She turns it over, taps the inside of Kyre’s arm twice, and drives the needle in.
Kyre instantly goes still as death. His eyes open, but unseeing. He’s not shuddering anymore, but he doesn’t seem to be breathing either.
Aviend hears herself, repeating Kyre’s name and Thorme’s name over and over, in an alternating, escalating call and no-response, but she can’t seem to stop herself. This is what true panic feels like, she thinks. It’s not your death that drives you over the edge. It’s watching the death of the one you love over something stupid and having no way to stop it.
Thorme breaks the cycle with a pinch on the back of Aviend’s hand. “Stop,” she says calmly.
Aviend does. She inhales, and can’t remember the last time that she did so. “Is he…?”
“Shhh.”
In order to be quiet, Aviend has to close her eyes. She’s not sure why, but she understands that as soon as she opens her eyes, she will also open her mouth. She sits with her eyes closed and her mouth closed and listens to Thorme work on the body of the man she loves and she waits. It’s one of the hardest things she’s ever done.
“All right,” Thorme says. “He’s all right.”
Open your eyes, Aviend thinks. But finds she can’t. Her eyes are the things that are scared now. If she stays here, in this moment, eyes closed, Kyre will have the potential to be all right forever.
She feels a hand touch hers. Opens her eyes. The whitewash of Kyre’s eyes has been replaced by his normal eyes once again.
“That machine… is an asshole, Delgha,” Kyre says, slow and careful. The words seem to come hard.
Delgha is kneeling beside her. Now they’re all kneeling, with Kyre in the middle of them. “I’m sorry,” Delgha says. “I had no idea that something like that was going to happen. I should have…” She reaches for Kyre, as if to pat his shoulder or maybe his head – Aviend isn’t quite sure, but then she draws back. “I’m sorry,” she says again.
“No sorries,” Kyre says. “I kind of offered. Although, in the future, before you sign me up for things, you should probably… probably remember that if you accidentally kill me, Aviend will never forgive you.”
Aviend laughs, because he’s right and that makes it funny, but the sound scrapes her raw throat like acid.
Kyre pushes himself slowly to sit. Gives a nod to Thorme’s questioning glance. “I’m all right. I feel all right.” Turns to face Aviend.
“I had no idea you could scream so loud,” he says to her.
“Me neither,” she admits. “I’m having a bit of a hard time hearing. I’m a little worried that I burst my own eardrums.”
Her hand is not afraid to reach for him. She doesn’t have to ask it to move forward. It just does, as if they’re already in agreement that it’s the thing they want to do. He takes her fingers, wraps them in his.
He drops his voice to a mock-whisper. “In case you didn’t notice, our resident Aeon Priest just tried to kill me. Perhaps we should do something about that…”
“I know, but I think we kind of need her around,” Aviend says. “It’s probably a risk we have to take. At least for a little while longer.” It’s easier to be very serious about this not-serious concern than it is to be about the fact that Kyre just collapsed on the floor in a fit.
“However,” Aviend says, “you are not allowed to touch anything anymore ever again.”
Delgha shifts. Scratches the back of her head. “I also hate to ask, but what did it feel like? I’m guessing not similar to Aviend’s experience.”
“Noo…” he says. Drawn out. Thinking. “All right, I’m going to say all of this with the caveat that I might have hit my head, because it’s going to sound way out there.”
Delgha merely nods. Aviend gets the sense that while devices often do unexpected things, there is nothing Delgha could hear about a machine that would actually seem unbelievable to her.
“It was as though I was somewhere else for a moment. No, as though I was supposed to go somewhere else for a moment, but I got stuck. Like trying to walk through what you thought was a door but was actually a wall. A kind of porous wall.”
He shook his head. “I wish I were better at this. When I was walking back here with Quenn, something happened. Something I forgot about until just now. He paid homage to one of the ghosts and then it touched him and he disappeared. It was a blink. A second. Not even. But I saw it. And he felt it.
“This felt… kind of like that looked. Only as if it didn’t work the way it was supposed to.”
“Whatever it felt like, that is definitely not what you looked like,” Aviend says. “You looked like you were… having a seizure.” He’d really looked like he was dying, but she couldn’t say that word out loud. Didn’t think he needed to hear it, either.
To Delgha she says, “Do you think it’s a transition device, like the transporter? It takes us somewhere else in the forest?”
“Or the world,” Delgha says. “The Steremoss is big, but this thing is bigger. It might take us hundreds of miles from here. Maybe farther.”
“I wonder if we can use it for…” Kyre starts.
“…Rillent,” Aviend finishes. “Let’s see if we can find out what this stuff actually does, how far away it might take us.”
“Ideally without trying to kill me again, Aeon Priest.”
“I wonder why it did that to you and not Aviend,” Delgha says. “It scared her away, but tried to draw you in.”
“And kill me. Don’t forget that part.”
“Yes. Why have two different protective devices?”
Aviend looks at the devices all around the room. Each one slightly different. Had they all started like that? Or had they all started the same, and each one had grown and changed over so much time to become the thing they were now? It was almost impossible to know. At least not until they had more time and information.
“That would mean either it was built to ward off two different kinds of enemies, or that one of those – probably the last one – isn’t a defense reaction at all,” Aviend says. “Maybe it was trying to send Kyre where it wanted to, but it didn’t work for some reason. You said yourself, Delgha, that we don’t know how old it is. Even with the dual organic and machine, certainly it could malfunction, right?”
“Yes…” Delgha’s rapidly scribbling on her portable notetaker. It’s clear she’s got more to write than the pace at which her hand can move.
“Just our luck, it would teleport us right into Rillent’s hands.”
“Well…” She’s still not quite ready to put her idea into the world, but it slips into her tone of voice. Clear enough that Kyre catches it, even if the others don’t. “That actually might be something we could use.”
“You have a plan,” he says.
“No,” she admits. “It’s more like I have the promise that there might be a plan again some day. It’s mostly just holes right now.”
He nods. “We are full of things t
hat fill holes,” he says. “Or make holes. Or are holes. I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess we’re all just about the holes…
“Thorme,” he says. “Are you sure I’m all right? I feel like I’m talking nonsense.”
“That’s how I know you’re all right,” Thorme says. “If you were making complete and utter sense, I’d have to stick you with some more needles and force a pill or two down your throat.” There is no sense of tease in her voice.
Aviend snorts back laughter. Thorme’s doctoring skills have always been a million times better than her social skills.
“Hmph,” Kyre says, attempting to emulate Thorme’s most common addition to any conversation.
“I can hear you,” Thorme says. She’s waving a needle that’s so long it can’t possibly be designed to stick in a human body.
“Delgha?” Aviend says.
“I’m done for now,” Delgha says. “I limit myself to one near-death per day. Unless it’s my own. Then I get two.”
A moment later, as if it pains her to admit such a thing. “I might have gotten carried away, let my excitement get ahead of my science. I need to do more research.”
“All right,” Aviend says. “Let’s take a break from the death-by-science plan. I’m starving.”
Kyre snorts at her, and she waves him away. “Shush, you. I have something I want to check on, and then dinner? I saw some of Thorme’s famous dossi patties in the chiller.”
Thorme narrows her eyes at famous, but doesn’t disagree.
“We’ll continue to make a plan, unless someone objects,” she says.
No one does. Which is both good and bad. Agreeing to make a plan isn’t a plan, yet, but it’s a promise nonetheless. A promise that they will try again to take down Rillent. To free the Steremoss and its people. To accomplish what they’d originally set out to do. Ideally, without killing anyone in the process.
Well, what else was there? You either died trying to do good and right, probably by touching a little orange stem on an ancient machine under the guidance of your friends, or you died under the boot of a man who thought he was a god. She’d choose the former, every time. And be grateful she had the chance to choose.
