by Robert Reed
Words hit him and flowed away, and he just nodded.
“The Eight,” she said.
Diamond blinked. “Who?”
“I know this is hard, and too soon,” Prima said. “But that creature down there. The one that murdered your father. Did she have a name?”
“Divers.”
“Divers, yes.” She glanced at List before looking at the boy again, and very carefully, she asked, “Do you think Divers is responsible?”
The question made no sense.
“She was trying to kill you too, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, madam.”
“And did she say . . . do you have any sense . . . did Divers have any role in the attack that dropped the trees?”
Diamond wanted to vanish and couldn’t. Quest could disappear easily, and that was a fine reason to be jealous of her. “Others did the attack. She told me. But the ideas were hers, and she was in charge. Yes, madam.”
“Well,” said Prima. “Thank you. I needed to know.”
Then she was on her feet, and gone.
List lingered.
“Where’s King?” asked Diamond.
The Archon of Archons didn’t answer immediately. He had to study the boy, his mouth working itself into a tight rough pucker. And then a new smile arrived, plus the words, “I’ll take you to him.”
King was using a fancy telescope. Nobody else stood near him. Nobody wanted to be close to him. King had never been taller or more powerful, dressed in shorts and those gorgeous bright scales, spikes jutting from his elbows and that spectacular head. Hearing Diamond approach, he took a step backward. “You can have a good look,” he said. Then he gave his brother one long stare before saying, “I saw you and the smoke fighting all of them.”
“All of them?”
“The Eight,” he said. “It goes by the name Divers, but eight of them are trapped inside that one big body.”
That made everything worse. Diamond listened to an explanation that his brother had harvested from various sources, various mouths. He learned how many brains were merged inside one body. The creatures were united, and once he understood that and accepted it, there was no purpose in listening to anything else.
Good dropped to the floor, quickly falling asleep under the telescope’s mechanisms, where nobody could step too close.
Diamond wished that he could do the same.
Approaching the telescope, he discovered that the eyepiece was glad to get pulled down, and he looked ahead with that new eye, powerful but very narrow. Human soldiers were carrying bodies wrapped in bright white sacks. The landing party was heading back toward the cages, ready to abandon the reef. Then Diamond twisted his gaze to where the tent had been erected, except the tent was gone and the papio were standing in close ranks. Most of them wore uniforms, but one was larger than the others. One of the papio was wrapped in tent fabric and almost too weak to stand, knots of the complicated pink hair rooted in the rebuilt scalp.
“I see her,” Diamond said.
“Let me,” his brother said, easing him aside. Then after a moment, he asked, “Was the smoke our other sister?”
“Yes.”
“Does she carry a name carry?”
“Quest.”
“Well, that’s a funny sort of name,” said King.
Prima was standing beside the most important window, talking to generals with words and slicing hands.
King didn’t look anywhere but through the telescope, yet he seemed aware of everything. With a calm slow voice, the one mouth said, “You know, she has a plan. She plans to kill Divers.”
“Who does?”
“Your Archon. As soon as our people are off the reef and safe, she’s going to launch the big rockets. Reef-hammers, we call them.” Then because he was proud about what he knew, he told his little brother a string of details about hammers and firing mechanisms, each detail earned by being quiet and sly.
This news was important. Diamond felt the impact even if he couldn’t piece together all of the meanings.
Then King stepped back. “Look again,” he said. “Because I don’t think the papio will let us see her any day soon.”
Diamond stood very still, looking at nothing.
A smell was hanging on his brother, some pungent quality that meant something, and King moved differently than before. He wasn’t trying to be human anymore. Gazing at the half-human face, King told Diamond, “You look tired.”
“I am tired.”
“And something else. I see something else.”
“In my face?”
“And through your body too.”
Diamond nodded and said nothing, and he glanced at the middle of the bridge, watching the tall control panels and their red buttons. But when he walked, he walked straight to Prima. A general was talking loudly about ship positions and the timetable to reach home again, and the woman was listening, satisfied if not happy. The Archon looked engaged and nervous, but she didn’t jump when a boy’s hot hand suddenly grabbed her by the elbow.
“Hello, Diamond,” she said.
“Are you going to kill the Eight?” he asked.
There. She jumped, if only slightly. Then she glanced at the general beside her, letting her bottom lip curl against her teeth. Very carefully, she asked Diamond, “What did you say?”
“Are you going to use the rockets?” he asked.
Every general made some noise, and the one full of timetables asked, “What’s our boy talking about?”
“Something overheard by his brother,” Prima guessed.
Just then, List arrived.
“Will you try to kill her?” Diamond persisted.
“What is this?” List asked.
The generals started to explain the confusion with a confusion of words and gestures.
Prima ignored all of them. She bent just enough to bring their eyes close, and very carefully, almost patiently, she said, “I thought I should. I even hoped to do so. But no, no, it’s too careless, too incalculable. Millions of people depend on me, and that’s why as soon as we get clear of the reef, I will order Lieutenant Sondaw to disarm the weapons, and then I’ll relinquish my command.”
Diamond nodded slowly.
“Not soon enough,” said one general.
And then List said, “Be gracious, gentlemen. These last days have been awful, but today will be better than most.”
Good was still napping on the floor, and King was listening to every conversation while he watched their sister learn to walk on new legs. Diamond started to walk in their direction. He wasn’t thinking about anything hard or certain. The adults behind him were happy to feud, and nobody thought about him again. Even when he broke into a casual trot, nobody noticed.
A woman was sitting near the critical panel, but she was talking into her headset, talking to an important voice.
Three more soldiers were between Diamond and the red knob.
Then there were only two soldiers left, and he was past King too.
Someone yelled, “Hey.”
The boy moved a little slower.
“You,” someone shouted.
And Diamond got up on his bare toes, running harder than he had ever run in his life.
FOURTEEN
Divers found herself awake.
Awake and upright.
Once again and forever, Divers was in charge of everything that mattered, and the rest of the world stood in mute amazement, watching her rapid recovery.
Then the flashes came, each flash brilliant enough to make the coral change its hue, and the light seemed odd and a little lovely. That’s what she was thinking. Then one soldier told everybody to get down. It wasn’t order or an alarm, it was just a request. But the body’s position wouldn’t help anybody. The reef was beneath them, ancient and stubborn, secure as any surface in Creation, and then something faster than any wing, faster and quite a bit larger, dug into the coral, burrowing into the slope beneath them, and at some preset depth the finest explosives anywhere t
urned into noise and wrenching motions that tore the coral and every other body to shreds.
With that first blast, Divers’ flesh mimicked stone, holding her parts together.
Then she was falling back to the reef again. She was wondering where she would heal next. But a second rocket impacted and erupted, and still airborne, she was sliced by the flying debris, desperate hands clinging to pieces of her own flesh as she tumbled, as she fell, followed by a third blast that took away her eyes before flinging her remains out over the lip of the reef.
The Eight fell blind, together and never so close.
Out of the panic, Tritian spoke to the others. With a steady quick voice, he said, “We’re going somewhere warm.”
He said, “None of you can live there like I can live there.”
He said, “Decide. I am the First and you are the Seven, or the coronas eat us all over again.”
The vote was instantaneous and unanimous.
And the long fall continued while the body hurriedly wove itself into the beginnings of something new.
And in a sad fashion, Divers began to laugh.
“Is this what you wanted?” she asked her brother. “When you were walking me in the dark, in my dreams, Tritian . . . were you trying to step us off the edge of the world . . . ?”
Both species had played games and polished their best weapons, preparing for a moment rather like today, and here was a long day with plenty of opportunities to employ all of those lessons. Assumptions were tested as well as their own character. None of the details had been imagined beforehand; who would have dreamed up impossible children waging some ancient, deeply personal war? Yet the results were remarkably close to what had been planned. The tree-walker fleet deployed itself in battle formation, overlapping guns delivering withering fire. Every wing that attacked would be lost, so the papio shifted their aim, finding success in every other part of the world. The sickly Hanner tree was dropped with the first wave. By the time the Ruler of the Storm returned to the Corona District, the Hole had more than doubled in size, and the surrounding forest was riven with smoky stubborn fires. There was no thought of pausing, much less defending the ruins. Delays were another enemy. The combined fleet continued to push straight ahead, spitting off fletches and bigger ships to protect worthier allies. In every sense of the word, war had begun, and a general selected by List two days ago had become the dictator to every human clinging to the branches.
The boy watched the battles until the sameness and fatigue claimed his will. And then without announcing his attentions, he abandoned his piece of the bridge, walking quickly to the Ruler’s main dock.
Every face stared at him.
And reading every face, he saw hatred and fear and the keen paranoid thoughts of creatures that would never look on him with any shred of real trust.
The dock had always been a vast space, a gigantic room busy with small airships and the Archon’s private fletch. But those lesser craft had been moved elsewhere, or they were burnt and lost. What had replaced them was a single vessel—the Panoply Night. The dock’s largest wall had been peeled back to bring that great clumsy, heavily armored balloon onboard, and dozens of cables kept the Panoply secure, comfortable. Armed guards stood where they looked menacing, and other guards watched from high perches. Until they reached home, the Ruler of the Storm was only the second most important ship in the world.
“Stop,” one guard said.
King continued walking. “Call and ask my father,” he said. “He’ll explain why I’m going up there.”
“Your father doesn’t have buoyancy anymore,” said the next guard.
“Then please shoot me,” said King. “Punch my hearts, and let’s find out what happens next.”
Guns were lowered, and he walked on. But every available call-line was opened, generals hearing news that would ensure a nice fresh panic.
The gangway led up to the public hallways, and King soon arrived at the steel door leading to the prison.
One hard blow with his palm, and the door shook in its frame.
From the other side, a scared man shouted, “I’ll open. Let me unlock.”
“I’ll save you the bother,” said King. “Stand back.”
One moment of focused, harmless violence made him a little happier.
Every guard vanished after that. Three prisoners were sitting in the first cell. No charges had been named, but until the full conspiracies were dissected, they would be kept here for their own safety. Nissim was standing in the room’s center—a sorry man suddenly older than his days. The two children were huddled against the back wall, staring at King without quite focusing on him, each holding the other’s hands. Those creatures used to look frail and small. Not anymore. After today, after watching what the Eight and Quest could achieve against one another, King felt the sudden need to huddle with them, awaiting the next awful storm.
The next cell was empty, while the cell after that held the other boy, Karlan.
Like Nissim, he was standing. But he was far from defeated, and despite blisters and burns and probably no sleep, he looked happy enough. At least the smile was more convincing than some, and the humor came with a sharp, unaffected tone.
“Are we winning the war?” he asked.
With both mouths, King laughed, and he pressed on.
Prima and her lieutenant were locked together in the same cell. King’s father and the generals weren’t sure what blame to strap to each of them. The woman had ordered the reef-hammers armed, and her loyal lieutenant did nothing to stop the disaster. Neither had been interrogated, but Sondaw suffered some cracked bones between his last post and this bleak little space. Then they were thrown together so that careful people could listen to every word, waiting for them to convict each other.
The pair acted as if they hadn’t shared one word all day.
But looking at the intruder, Prima sighed deeply.
“Do you know what I would do?” she asked. “If I could step back fourteen hundred days . . . what would I do without any regrets?”
“Throw us back to the coronas.”
She nodded, dipping her head.
“And knowing what I know,” said King, “do you think I’d crawl out of that stomach? Out into this miserable shit of a world?”
Her lieutenant rose, making ready to defend his lady.
But King pushed on to the end, to the solid door that he didn’t break down once before and didn’t need to touch this time. The door was unlocked and ajar. The prisoner and his monkey had been told to remain where they were, and both seemed happy to comply, sitting together in the farthest corner. Diamond was wearing a mechanic’s jumper, sleeves cut short to suit his arms. The air smelled of toilet wastes. Monkey shit and human shit smelled mostly the same to King. He entered the cell where an old woman once beat up an old man. Boy and monkey stared at the dried blood on the floor. King approached, stopping a long stride short of them, and then he said, “They’re afraid that I told you what to do. Starting the war was my idea.”
The monkey looked up, one lip lifting to brandish the incisors.
“They don’t want to think you could have done this by yourself. You’re too polite, too kind. Too dull and plain and normal. I must have coaxed you somehow, and the guilt is half-mine.”
“It’s not yours,” said the boy.
King laughed, asking, “Aren’t you going to share with your brother?”
Diamond sighed and closed his eyes. “You’re still walking free.”
“Do they have a room that can hold me?”
“You’re my brother,” Diamond said.
King said nothing.
“And you tried to kill me once.”
“I won’t again.”
“No?”
King needed to see the eyes, wanting this chance to measure the soul. That’s why he said, “I killed ten men to come down here and tell you something, brother.”
The pale eyes lifted.
King tried two smiles. “You’re
the scariest one among us. But you always suspected that, didn’t you?”
She ate enough not to need food anymore, and she practiced shapes that she had never mastered, measuring her successes in the reflective surfaces sharing the storeroom with her. One shape was critical, and she didn’t like the results. But this was the best disguise for the environment, and that’s why she put it on and made it as close to perfect as she could before leaving the storeroom behind.
The long, awful day was finally drawing to an end.
Fear had always governed Quest’s life, but this was no simple fear, urging her to flee to reliable safe havens. She knew that she couldn’t continue living in the wilderness, not with a war screeching past every few moments, and she couldn’t feel safe in any outlying District. But riding the Ruler back to its home berth wasn’t the strategy of a desperate coward. This was one brother’s home, and from the scuttlebutt and offhand statements of little officers, she knew that the other brother would soon live among the bloodwoods, biding his days until he was old enough to sire a new race of humans.
She needed to be close to Diamond and to King.
A thousand terrors had pushed her inside a white sack filled with dead parts, brought to the Ruler and a storeroom where field rations and bottled water made her halfway strong again. And now she was inside an endless hallway that cut down the middle of the world’s largest machine, walking past soldiers, past civilians and mechanics and people whose lives were undecipherable to her. She wore a plain face for good reason. Men didn’t look too carefully at her features or her bland fleshy body. Her uniform and the boots were stolen from a closet, and they helped hide most of her new flesh. But every step brought terror, every pause doubt. She smelled wrong, and her bones were wrong, and she didn’t have any kind of life story to share with strangers.
