He sounded bitter. “Every time we make a mistake.”
26
ALICIA: AT THE FESTIVAL OF HIGH SUMMER
I kept expecting a shadow to swoop down from behind us and take us back to the Garden of Deadly Morning Routines. To make it worse, we really couldn’t look up all the time just in case we needed to duck, or run, or fight. So I felt like I was walking around with the short hairs permanently climbing up my neck.
It felt good to spot the painted wooden sign that proclaimed, The Festival of High Summer. I leaned into Bryan and whispered, “At least we know what season it is, now.”
He looked puzzled for a breath before he got it, then he held his arms out as if accepting the warm late-morning heat into his body. “The land of always summer.”
“Yeah, isn’t that sweet.”
He frowned. “Like your mood.”
“I bet Chelo’s truly mad.”
“I had to go.”
“We did.” This was the second time I’d run out on her. We’d still be slaves on Fremont if I hadn’t done it the first time, and once, Chelo had even agreed with me after we’d both had some wine on one of the ships. But I never really felt forgiven, and this might even be worse. Well, maybe not. I could see her face though, the way her eyes would look betrayed and her mouth would be a sharp little disapproving line.
We hadn’t planned. We’d left because Samuel had politely refused to leave us alone to talk. I just couldn’t take him anymore, or being without Joseph, or hiding while bad guys were theoretically chasing us down. Bryan swore he needed to find Ming, but I think he’d finally realized Chelo and Liam and the kids were wrapped in about five layers of sanctimonious safety and no one would dare kidnap them. It wasn’t as if they were ever alone.
Besides, we should have heard from the others.
We wore blue. We might need to find this Juss, and Seeyan had said to wear blue. We’d also stolen some food, although we’d eaten it all last night and this morning. I wasn’t really hungry yet, but I would be.
All morning, waiting, while we hid by walking purposefully through town and back, and then sitting quietly for a while under a tree, Bryan had been listening inside himself. Hoping for a call from Ming. Instead of looking angry or tense, which fit the Bryan I knew better, he just looked lost. As if missing Ming was missing half of him.
I missed Joseph fiercely, but I wasn’t missing myself over him.
At least now there were other people walking alongside us. For the first time, I saw a real flier child, maybe fifteen. The child had black wings with deep purple highlights, and black hair that hung over her face, almost obscuring black eyes. She was thinner than an adult, and even less steady on her feet. But what really gave her away was the protective looks of the three fliers who flanked her. Bryan reached for my hand. “Don’t stare.”
Well, there was plenty more to look at. Sculptures had been scattered across the grass like windblown petals. We passed a tall thin rendering of three raindrops playing with a cloud. Nearby, as if the cloud fed them water, grand yellow flowers swung in the wind and tinkled softly against each other, the fake flowers giving off a real, sweet scent. Another sculpture consisted of fifteen or so perches all jumbled so close together it would be hard for fliers to occupy even a few of them. Its rounded base let it rock lightly in the wind. “If a flier did land on it, they’d get a ride,” Bryan said.
“Or fall down. I wonder what the artist meant? Do they want the fliers to sit closer together?”
He stopped and stared at it, too. “I don’t think so. It looks pretty hostile.”
We neared the open gates. About ten other parties also converged on the path in a steady stream. Most were human, a few in formal robes like the ones Kala and Mohami wore, others dressed more like Seeyan. Maybe half looked like offworlders; either in the simple tan pants and mono-colored tunics of Islas, or the foamy silk dress of Joy Heaven. For allies, the two couldn’t have looked more different. To a person, the wild Islans looked more severe than our own pet Islan. At least Dianne had let her hair grow out from its just-above-the-shoulders blunt cut. People from the pleasure planet dressed with a hedonistic flare that was meant to look abandoned. Once, when I’d asked Marcus about the odd alliance, he’d said they were the light and dark of each other, and I figured he meant the Islans for the dark.
Paradisers, our allies, dressed like us, but had more muscle. Not Bryan’s brawn; more like a subtle strength that showed in the fine lines of their limbs and the graceful strength of their movements.
The fair smelled like sugar and fruit and wood shavings. Booths lined both sides of wide paths. Some drew the eye with bright colors and ornate shapes, or flapping flags. Others were understated enough that my eye wanted to pass right over them. Here and there, a booth-sized space held fountains or chairs or benches or both, some meant for water and talk stops, some perhaps as ways to admire the sculptures. In every direction, movement: people, flags, colors, fliers coming or going. Even standing here at the gate it seemed bigger than all of Artistos or Li Spaceport or Pilo Island. The immensity made even finding a man named Juss look tough, not to mention five people who were hiding.
Crowded places were tough to be invisible in. Even if you were watching in front of you, people could walk into you from the back. If I ever got to pick another mod for fun, it was going to be a second set of eyes in the back of my head.
Right inside the gate, two sculptors worked. An ebony-skinned man with bright yellow eyes and long yellow hair touched up the fine ridges of feathers on a twice life-sized wooden flier with spread wings. The flier imitated the sculpture I’d seen on Silver’s Home, except that the face had tears streaming down its cheeks, falling periodically down to water a garden in a pot at the flier’s feet.
The second sculptor was a thin brown man, shorter than me. He painted silver fins on a ship headed toward a gas giant planet, the whole thing swinging on nearly invisible wires and the yet-unpainted part made of an unfamiliar whitish material. Both artists were failed fliers, with visible nubs on their naked backs. A small crowd seemed to have split between watching each of them, rapt, and talking among themselves. It saddened me to see two men who’d lost the ability to fly making art that detailed flight.
Bryan dragged my attention back to our reason for being here. “Do you see any of them?”
“Not yet.” The fair was laid out in a huge square, more than we could possibly cover in a full day. It looked busy in every direction. “Let’s go right.”
“Why?”
“We have to start somewhere.”
I walked beside him, looking right while he looked left. “I haven’t heard from Joseph yet, either.”
“You didn’t expect to.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s safe. We have to be all right on our own.”
He stopped and looked at me as if I’d shrunk a meter. “No. We don’t. We need each other.”
“I’m helping you look.”
“You don’t really want to be alone. I know you don’t.”
How did he know? “That’s not it. But we shouldn’t be dependent on each other. We should be okay no matter what happens.”
“Well, I’m not. None of us is. We’re family.”
He’d saved me once, and I’d saved him once, which made us more than family. Out of the six of us on Fremont, we two had had it hardest, except for Jenna. We were the angriest, maybe also except for Jenna. She was harder to read now that her body and face had been fixed. I adored Kayleen, and wished I could Read the Wind and be a better match for Joseph, except she was half-crazy. The other three were good at everything.
Bryan’s eyes had narrowed and his jaw tightened, his mouth a downturn of worry, showing how hard he bled inside for Ming. Wherever she was, she’d better be bleeding for him. I took his arm. “I’m glad we both came.”
“Me, too.”
After that we didn’t talk for a few minutes. We passed jewelers and painters and three-dimensional holo painters who made
us jump as alternate realities passed over our perception. Unlike Silver’s Home, there were no genemod booths in easy evidence, although I’d heard mods could be bought here. One booth had a few simple pieces of jewelry designed to highlight small feathers, like the one Caro had gotten at the first party we attended here. The proprietor was a slender human woman, so not the mysterious Juss. I pretended to want one of the simpler pieces long enough to find out the price.
Marcus hadn’t been kidding about the value.
We walked until after midday, wandering and looking, and looking, until my eyes hurt. I finally stopped. “We’re never going to find them this way. If they’re here, they’re in a booth.”
“So what do we do?”
We didn’t dare use credit to buy food, or we’d be found for sure, if anyone was looking. “We find some people to talk to. And maybe we see if there are any traders here.”
“Oh—like the roamers.”
“That’s right.” All I had was my jewelry, which I didn’t want to sell, but still, maybe we could trade work for information. “Look, let’s not stop looking. But we should look faster.”
We tried. My belly felt ever-emptier, and after a few hours, the balls of my feet and my heels hurt when I stepped on them, in spite of the soft path. We went up every other aisle. Sometimes we stopped and rested on arty benches and drank the water that ran out of fountains. Water gave me enough energy to keep going, but not enough to improve my mood. After a while, we stopped whenever something drew us: hand-carved string instruments, a small, thin man giving away samples of bread and honey, a booth of colorful shirts like the ones Liam had brought us when they came here earlier, even though he said he found them in a store.
I had no bearings.
After we went back twice for more bread and honey, I started to feel better, and more frantic. I didn’t want it to get dark. If the festival closed, and we hadn’t found Ming and Jenna and the others, where would we go? Last night, we’d hardly slept at all. Another night like that would keep me from thinking straight.
We passed a few large clear areas with stages along one side, and semicircles of perches and benches. One had a human storyteller and a thin crowd of children, all human as well. On another stage, two men strummed musical instruments and a third chanted, more sounds than words. We also passed two empty stages.
The closer we got to the back of the fair, the more we found useful items: kitchen and gardening tools, fine human wings, plain shoes for the wingless and shoes with strings and decorations for the winged. Here and there, personal services like massages or hair-braiding could be had. Fewer tourists seem to make it this far; most people were locals or fliers. Some of the booth owners were failed fliers, which made me think again of the two sculptors showing off for the crowd near the front. “Maybe this is where they were planning on coming,” I mused.
“Probably. Doesn’t help. I don’t see them. Should we find this Juss person?”
I wanted to solve our problems ourselves. Besides, who could we trust? The sun sent long slanted rays through the booths, catching dust motes in gold light. We needed to do something, soon.
“Sit down,” I whispered to Bryan. “You look more intimidating than I do.” I waved him to a seat in one of the bench clusters, and walked slowly up and down the aisle, watching the thinning crowd. After a while I found two people who looked like they were from Silver’s Home: a man and woman in bright clothes. Her multicolored eyes gazed out from under purple lashes as long as my thumb, and he had the telltale signs of perfection that screamed layered mods. “Excuse me.”
She turned to me. “Yes? Can we help you?”
“I’ve only just gotten here, and I can’t seem to find a list of all the vendors.” I turned my eyes down so I wouldn’t look like a threat. “I was wondering if you could help me access one.”
Perfect Guy blinked at me, and Purple Lash Lady fingered a black stone hanging on a chain around her neck. “You don’t have any interface devices?”
I shook my head. He looked slightly irritated and pointed back the way we’d come. “You can get them near the entrance. They’re keyed to individuals, so you can’t use ours.”
It was almost refreshing to talk to someone who hadn’t been washed out by the peace of Lopali. Maybe that was why we’d been wandering so aimlessly. I grinned at them and said, “Thanks,” slightly pleased at the puzzled look on their faces.
Going back to the beginning wasn’t as bad as it might have been. We walked fast. I wanted to see how the sculptures turned out anyway.
Except the sculptors were nowhere to be seen. At least those two. The ship and planet and the flier had all been moved out into the open grass in front of the fair, and two more pieces had been started, although barely.
Sure enough, we’d missed the rock necklace interfaces, and the wristband interfaces and, in fact, three booths of interfaces. They were boring compared to the booths next to them, and I shouldn’t have let Marcus’s prohibition on having local interface devices keep me from knowing we needed one now. At the guest house, we’d had to work with tightly controlled built-ins he’d tweaked the security on.
We still had the credit problem. Bryan frowned at the booths, looking stymied. I grinned at him. “We’ll figure something out. Let’s split up and see if someone will let us try one.”
I went to the closest booth, which was staffed by a dark-skinned man wearing a simple shirt and shorts over sandals. He smiled broadly, the smile actually touching his bright blue eyes and reddening his cheeks. “Hello.” He gave a small bow. “Guide to the festival for my lady with the violet eyes?”
“Please.”
He waved his hands over his wares as if feeling for the right one from above. “And where, may I ask, are you from?”
I wanted his attention, and to get what we needed. Maybe I was just too tired to be cautious. “Fremont.”
“Where the Maker came from?”
I blinked. Chelo had said they called Joseph that. “Yes.” I pointed to a necklace like the tourist’s, except with a lavender stone. “Can I try that?”
He shook his head. “It will get you caught. You have to give up your ID to access it, and there’re people looking for you.”
I shouldn’t have given him the clue. I took a step back and cocked an eyebrow at him. “Who’s looking for us?”
“A few wingless here, a few fliers there.”
Great. My blood ran so much faster that I felt it in my neck and my palms. “Anyone else from Fremont looking for me?”
A quirky grin touched one side of his lips, and his eyes had a bit of a challenge in them, as well as a drop of warmth. “I don’t know who you are. I know people are looking for folk from Fremont.”
“Who’s looking for people from Fremont?”
“Mostly people I don’t like.”
Well, that was a relief. Sort of. He looked earnest enough. “So why do you care?”
“ ’Cause I like the Makers. That’s why I have my booth here.” He gestured toward the two sculptors. He did, in fact, have the best view of the platforms. He was equating the sculptors to Makers? Artists to Joseph and Marcus?
“I need to look someone up. Is there a way to do that?”
He looked around, maybe checking for potential customers. “Come sit in back with me. I’ll close up for a few minutes.”
Wow. “I need to get someone.”
He didn’t look happy about that. Bryan was two booths over, turned so his back was to me, and standing stiffly. I turned back to our maybe-benefactor. “I’ll be right back.” Without waiting for him to answer, I headed over to Bryan.
He was talking to a tall, heavyset man who had a look on his face that suggested he thought Bryan was thick in the head or something. “I have to have credit first.” He glanced at me, giving me a dubious smile. “Maybe your lady will understand?”
I tugged on Bryan’s arm. “Come on. I think I found something for us.”
Bryan gave me a long look, then nodded,
and without a backward glance at the man he’d been talking to, he let me lead him to the guy with the booth, catching him in the midst of covering up the interfaces on his table with black cloth. He frowned at Bryan, but led us into a blue tent with full sides, a door in front and in back, and a netted roof. The roof was interesting; designed to keep fliers out?
A neat row of boxes lined one wall, and three chairs sat in the middle of a large empty space.
I didn’t introduce Bryan, or say my name, since I didn’t know how much trouble we’d gotten into by leaving the Keeper tied up. Even standing inside the tent, I felt exposed. The interface merchant knew more about me than I did about him, we were surrounded by strangers while he probably had friends in nearby booths. The look he gave us felt like being stripped naked and then found to have a slightly bulgy belly or too much fat in the thighs.
But then, the interface merchant hadn’t offered his name either. His gaze fell away from us and he got a lost look on his face, slacker even than Joseph and Kayleen got. A Wind Reader? Selling interfaces?
Then I noticed his hand turning and twisting on his wrist, touching a wristband that must have sensors in it. Not a Wind Reader, just someone with enough money for internals, like retina views, or a mod from Silver’s Home. Just as I was getting worried about his silence (who was he calling? It was like my invisibility), he looked up and grinned. “Bryan. You’ve got to be Bryan.”
Bryan nodded, his eyes wary.
“And so you’re Alicia the Brave.”
Wow. What was he reading?
“That’s bad, though. Everyone’s looking for you.”
A voice sounded behind Bryan. “That’s right.” The man Bryan had been talking to at the booth next door stood in the doorway of the tent, looking directly at me with a satisfied grin bisecting his thick face. “But I found them.” He stepped all the way into the tent and let the door fall shut behind him.
The interface merchant’s eyes had grown wide, and they turned even brighter blue. Mods? Another interface? “Get lost, Jackson,” he said. “I found them first.”
Wings of Creation Page 25
