Facing Fortune (Guardians of Terath Book 2)

by Zen DiPietro

  After a long day spent mostly indoors, Kassimeigh was glad to retire to the room she shared with Arc. Each night she stayed there, she felt more rooted to the new life she’d made for herself.

  She considered their living space while she got ready for bed that night. So far, they’d done nothing to personalize it, other than joining their quarters into one living space and replacing the side table. Since they were making their home there, they probably should do something to decorate and make it comfortable for their long-term use. She wondered what Arc would do with his house, since it wouldn’t be his primary residence anymore. She made a mental note to ask him in the morning. He’d told her not to wait up for him, but she liked simply knowing that when he did retire, he’d come home to her.

  Entrenched with the Guard now, she had the opportunity to enjoy her relationship with Arc, her friendship with Will, and to kick all kinds of ass in training the troops. As hard as it had been for her when the shiv elders ejected her, she recognized the wisdom in forcing her to experience life in a new way. Sometime soon, she’d have to call up Eryl on the comm and let him know that. It wouldn’t be a thank-you, by any means, but it would be an acknowledgement.

  For Will, the next few days flew by in a flurry of administrative and physical activity. In addition to creating systematic activity rosters and training regimens, he and Kassimeigh worked at assembling their support staff. They chose from applicants who were already members of the Guard. Quite a few troops were happy to sacrifice a good portion of rigorous physical training for some relatively sedate office work. Will selected a young woman named Violet as his personal assistant, and he was just about to meet Kassimeigh’s new assistant.

  He stepped into her office with a friendly smile, but it froze on his face. “Canan?” His eyes bounced from the young man, now well-groomed and respectable in a Guard uniform, to Kassimeigh. His appearance had changed greatly since his poor choices in Janis.

  “He’s your assistant? Or he’s here for something else?” Though what else it could be, Will had no idea.

  “Canan assures me he’ll do an excellent job as my assistant. He’s already proven he’s good at motivating people.” Although Will had given Canan a chance in the Guard, with the hope that the young man would find some discipline and direction, he never would have guessed that Kassimeigh would select him to be her assistant. The position would require a great deal of trust and rapport. Will sure would not have made the same choice, but this was Kassimeigh. He trusted her judgment.

  “Well, welcome to the paper-pusher’s guild of the Guard. You might soon be aching to get outside and just wave a sword around.” Will shook Canan’s hand.

  “Thank you, sir.” Maybe Will wasn’t giving the guy enough credit. Canan really had changed during his short tenure in the Guard. He knew that Canan regretted his misguided actions in Janis, and had worked extra hard to show how dedicated he was. He’d made a habit of staying late after training sessions and volunteered for the menial tasks that no one else wanted to do.

  “Good, then. You and my assistant Violet will be working closely together, so why don’t you go introduce yourself?”

  “Yes, sir.” Canan left the room.

  “Well, you surprised me there,” Will admitted once he was alone with Kassimeigh.

  “He’s smart and motivated. Of everyone I interviewed, he was the one that most needed this chance.”

  “Ah.” Now he understood.

  “He was also the right amount of daunted. Just enough to keep him motivated, not so much it would distract him.”

  “Daunted by you?”

  “Yes.”

  That made sense. He’d noticed that his applicant pool had been larger than hers, but he hadn’t drawn attention to that fact.

  Kassimeigh’s eyes shifted to the door briefly before she said in a quieter voice, “With his hair cut short and his face clean-shaven, he looks entirely different. Attractive, even. His demeanor is entirely different now, as well. You did a good thing in letting him join up.”

  “The Guard isn’t a charity,” Will pointed out. “Though I thought it would benefit him, I allowed him to join because I sensed he was motivated. And he’s worked very hard here.”

  “Agreed. He’s going to make a good assistant. I’ll make sure of it.”

  Will chuckled. “I’m certain of that. With you as his boss, he won’t dare to fail.”

  Later that afternoon, Kassimeigh was frowning over a duty roster when Canan pinged the comm panel on her desk. “Yes?”

  “Finnan Sparks is on the comm for you. Do you want to talk to him?”

  She wasn’t sure if she really wanted someone screening her communiques, but Will thought it best to establish a front line of administration to keep the senior members of the staff from getting mired down in minutiae. While he had a point, she was accustomed to doing things for herself. She’d need to adjust.

  “Yes, send him through, thank you.”

  The scientist appeared on her screen. “Kassimeigh, you’re looking well.”

  “Thank you. What can I do for you, Dr. Sparks?”

  “Please, call me Finn. I’ve been meaning to tell you that for a while now.” He smiled. “I’ve been working with Luc and the other scientists to determine what we should do about the mana bugs, and I think we’re onto something. I’d like your help here at the lab to run some tests, so we can know for certain.”

  “Of course I’m glad to help. When do you need me, and for how long?”

  “At your earliest convenience, as we’re pretty much at a standstill until you can confirm or deny what we’re thinking. How long, I don’t know. The testing shouldn’t take long, but if all goes well, we’d like to implement the plan as soon as possible. That might take a few days of work. Or longer, depending on what’s involved.”

  Kassimeigh consulted the calendar on one side of the comm panel. “Assuming Will has no objections to my taking a sabbatical so soon, I can be there in the morning.” She doubted he would, given the importance of the spark research, but as her commander, he’d have final say.

  “The request could come through Magistrate Trewe, if that would lend more weight.”

  “No. It shouldn’t be a problem.”

  They said their goodbyes and she turned off her panel.

  Another trip to the Capital. At least she’d gotten to be home for almost two weeks straight, this time. Hopefully, after this trip, she could settle in for a good, long while.

  “Here.” Finn placed a few beetles in Kassimeigh’s palm.

  She waited, but he just looked at her hopefully while they walked across her skin. She would have expected a tiny tickle from the unseen bug legs, but she didn’t feel a thing. “Okay.”

  “Can you sense the mana?”

  “I can, but it’s so faint, I could almost say no. It’s like a whisper coming from another room.” She looked to Luc. “Did you sense it?”

  “No. Too faint. It’s so faint, in fact, we couldn’t even prove they have a signature.”

  Finn lit up. “Until a few days ago. Prior to that, all of the equipment we had for measuring mana failed to detect anything from the sparks themselves. But that didn’t make sense because if the droppings contain mana and the bugs contain droppings, then they should also contain mana. Luc came up with an ingenious idea to boost the detection capability of a particular type of sensor, and it worked.”

  Élan’s “sparks” nickname had clearly caught on, to Finn’s delight.

  Right now, he looked so incredibly pleased with himself. Justifiably so, because it was an important finding. It was one thing for someone to sense the signature. It was another thing to prove it with science. The irrefutable fact that the bugs held mana led to a host of new questions.

  “Why could you detect a signature from the droppings but not the sparks themselves?”

  Finn seemed to expect her question and launched into his answer almost before she stopped speaking. “Sample size. From all of the soil samples that
had been taken, we had a sufficient amount of the waste material to allow us to detect the faintest hint of mana. We have only a handful of the bugs themselves, and it just wasn’t enough to register.”

  “So what have you figured out about them?” He seemed only too eager to spill everything he knew, so it was probably best to give him an open-ended question and let him get it all out.

  “One thing led to another, and what it comes down to is that the sparks don’t eat and digest mana along with the plants. They create mana.”

  That, she had not expected. She stared down at the pretty little beetles with respect and awe. For some reason, Finn stopped speaking. She realized that he, too, was admiring the beetles, and had forgotten to continue.

  “Explain.”

  “Oh. Right. We believe we got the causal relationship backward. We think the sparks created those mana-rich areas. They’re like . . . self-fulfilling little prophecies with wings.”

  That was a bit fanciful for a scientist, but Kassimeigh wasn’t about to distract him from his explanation by remarking on it.

  “We think they arrive as a swarm in an area with an attractively abundant amount of mana, then they eat the surrounding plants. They don’t feed on mana‌—‌we’ve proven that with countless tests. They eat the plants in these areas that already have a relatively abundant amount of atmospheric mana. Then they do what creatures do. They excrete. These little creatures actually generate mana in their digestive process and as a result, create a remarkable abundance of energy. Of course, once they eat all the vegetation, they fly off and start the process again somewhere else.”

  “Leaving behind the dead zones,” she surmised. She searched Luc’s face, which shone with the excitement of discovery, just as Finn’s did.

  She watched the bugs for another moment, then extended her hand toward Finn, so that he could return them to their habitat. “Since Élan has been keeping the food supply abundant in her little oasis, she’s kept them fed and happy, which is why no new dead zones have formed.”

  “Precisely.” Finn gently put the sparks into a container and set it aside.

  “You’ve proven that they create the mana during digestion?”

  “We have.”

  That was mind-boggling, and she had to resist the temptation to discuss the potential mechanics. That would have to wait until they’d solved their current dilemmas. “Why are they attracted to mana, if they create mana?”

  Finn wore a calculating expression. “Right now, we’re speculating that it’s due to a natural swarming instinct. They want to be with their own kind, which means seeking out mana. Like I said, self-fulfilling prophecies.”

  Finn, for once, seemed serious and composed. Kassimeigh supposed that she was finally seeing the scientist as he usually was, when he was not reeling from the discovery of a lifetime. He still radiated enthusiasm, but he focused it into their work.

  “How long have they been around? Surely if they were old, we’d have discovered them before. We’d have noticed the deforestation long ago.”

  “We’ve studied their DNA.” Kassimeigh felt a spike of concern, as most DNA tests required a physical sample, but he cut her off before she could speak. “We took a passive sample, and none of the sparks were harmed. They’re all in very good health as far as we can tell. Anyway, the DNA conclusively ages them at tens of thousands of years old. Maybe hundreds of thousands.” He paused. “Not these particular ones, of course. We don’t know their lifecycle just yet, but little bug bodies only last so long. Ecologically speaking, they’ve existed for a very long time.”

  “Then why are we only now finding them?”

  “They seem to live in forests and don’t seem to require any water besides what they get from plants. Where they prefer to be is exactly where people tend not to be. They’re also remarkably good at staying hidden. I think they just didn’t want to be found. Not that they have any more consciousness than any other bug, but they’ve probably evolved to be hard to detect. In short, they’re tiny, they’re well camouflaged, and they live where people don’t usually go.”

  “What about the deforestation? That’s new, even if the sparks aren’t.”

  “It seems like they might be staying in a given area for longer periods of time. Before, perhaps they grazed in a more open-range way, taking a little here and a little there, so people wouldn’t notice the effects. Another possibility is that their population has increased and the effects of their feeding have multiplied as a result.”

  “More sparks would mean more mana on Terath. How much do they generate?”

  “We don’t know yet. We haven’t had any census of how many bugs there are, and we haven’t been able to do any long-term studies on their output. We can’t yet determine if their output is measurably significant on a global scale.”

  “If you already know all this, what do you need from me?”

  “Oh. There’s definitely more to be done. Come. We’ll show you.”

  The three of them took an elevator up a few floors from the meeting room. As Kassimeigh stepped into the lab at Finn’s urging, she admired the setup. The room ran the entire length of the top floor of the building. No space had been wasted on a washroom, break area, or anything else. It was all lab. Big, open, nearly empty lab. Cabinets with elaborate latches lined one wall, and Kassimeigh wondered if they were designed to keep something in or to keep something else out.

  Luc and Finn joined her in the room. “This is where we’ve been working.”

  “It’s a great space.” The floors and cabinets, all white, nearly shone with pristine spotlessness. Kassimeigh was glad she wasn’t on the cleaning crew for this room.

  Luc rubbed his hands together and adopted a stance that Kassimeigh recognized as take-charge mode. He’d been respectfully quiet while Finn did his bit, but clearly Luc had decided it was his turn.

  “We’ve been working on a shield for the sparks,” he told her.

  “I thought that might be the case. What I tried with Élan worked well to contain them.”

  Luc gave a sharp shake of his head. “You misunderstand. We don’t want to contain them. If they’re to continue doing whatever they do, and we’re to study them doing whatever that is, we need them to have free rein. What we need is to ensure that they have a safe haven where people won’t interfere with them.”

  Now that he said it, it made perfect sense. “You want a barrier that recognizes the sparks and allows them to pass through, as well as the atmosphere. But it would have to keep people out.” It was an interesting puzzle, and one she’d never considered. “And you want it tied off as a permanent structure, so that it needs only to be fed with mana to maintain itself. And . . .” she frowned for a moment. “We’d need to make it visible to everyone, not just mana-holders.”

  Luc’s eyes sparked with his own particular brand of pride even though the rest of him remained impassive. He’d been Kassimeigh’s first mana instructor, as well as the one to mentor her in advanced training. Her mastery of practical skill and her foundation in theory were a direct reflection on him, and she was grateful for his teaching. His pride in her felt surprisingly . . . nice.

  “Good thing you’re not asking for much.” She enjoyed the bite of a little sarcasm. Another new pleasure.

  “I’ve seen you do more.” Luc’s mild statement conveyed so much more than the five simple words that composed it.

  “Uh-huh, I know.” She was getting tired of that story. It was like constantly being told of something she’d done as a child. She felt that the phoenix incident really wasn’t relevant to the person she had become, and she’d prefer to leave it in the past.

  She chewed her lip, thinking about the problem to be solved. “Okay. Let’s start with the barrier.”

  She backed up until she was pressed against a wall, then slid down so she could sit leaning against it. This was going to take such minute fiddling and adjustment. She’d be better off if she didn’t have to also keep herself up on two feet.

&nb
sp; “What have you found, Luc?” She addressed him without looking at him. Instead, she stared into empty space, following the twists of her thoughts as they journeyed through her mind and shattered into cascades of possibilities. “I know you must have done some experimentation.”

  Luc made an introspective hrrrrm sound. “Having multiple manahi was a failure. We tried having one person handle the barrier to humans while another person handled the permeability for the sparks. It didn’t work. It can’t be two sides like that, it has to be all one layer, one work. We also didn’t find a way to tie it off that didn’t begin to decay right away. Our best attempt lasted two days.”

  He made it sound like a failure, but that was impressive, actually. To manipulate mana so cleanly that it kept its shape even without someone maintaining it was a feat of engineering. It was like removing the juggler from beneath a rainbow of juggled spheres, while the objects continued to juggle themselves. Luc was one of the strongest manahi on Terath, and his knowledge of the mechanics of mana was unsurpassed.

  Kassimeigh remained silent, letting her mind take custody of the problem. She filled herself with mana and began to manipulate it. She lost her sense of time as she followed trails of possibility through her mind, knitting together two parts of what needed to be one whole.