Quiver and Crave

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

“Something like that,” Quiver admitted. It was difficult to admit to this coldly angry man that she loved them too much to let them down. She loved Micah too much to let him down, either. He had been so pleased when Esme Ganzo had offered the trial.

  “My folks want it,” she said quietly. “My friends. The whole Palatine, it seems.” She grimaced.

  Kal pushed his hand into his pocket and tilted his head to consider her. “Do you even like tankball?” he asked quietly.

  “I do,” she said quickly. “I love the Dream Hawks. They’ve been my team forever, especially since Micah and you started playing for them—well, training, in Micah’s case.”

  “Me?” he said blankly.

  Quiver bit her lip. “Everyone in the Palatine is glued to your career,” she said carefully.

  He didn’t react. His dark eyes were narrowed again. “Do I know you? I mean, have we met some time in the past?”

  “You’d think we should have, both coming from the Palatine.” She shrugged, hiding how her pulse had leapt at the so very near-miss question.

  He let it go. He straightened up and rolled his shoulders. It was a very physical gesture of a man dropping a subject. “I don’t know what to do with you,” he said frankly.

  “Toss me. You’ve already said I’m not a team player and if you say no, my parents will accept it. So will everyone else.”

  “I don’t get to make the final call,” Kal said, scowling. He pointed at the tank area. “Esme watched your one-man show.” He lifted the board in his other hand. “He loves you. He wants you to stick around for team training tomorrow.”

  Quiver’s heart squeezed. “Another try out?”

  “Training. You’re in, for now,” Kal told her. “You don’t get to play a real game until I think you’re ready, though.”

  “I’m on the team?” Quiver said, her gut clamping and her heart sinking.

  “Well, at least you do know it is a team sport,” he said dryly. “Be at the game tonight, Sheenan. You can cheer your friend on.”

  “Micah’s playing?” she asked, her spirits blooming again.

  Kal considered her again. “It’s a positive that you do have friends. I’ll give you that, Sheenan.”

  “Won’t you call me Quiver?” she asked. “All my friends do.”

  “What is your real name?”

  “Quiviannalon,” she admitted.

  “Your parents couldn’t shave it down?” he asked. He said it distantly, as if his mind was far away. “I have heard of you,” he added. “Years ago. When I was a child.” He frowned. “Something. I can’t remember it.”

  He went back to where Micah was standing watching the tank area. There were more players in the tank now, spread across the zones. Actual team training was about to start.

  Her team. Her parents would be thrilled.

  Quiver sighed. At least she wasn’t fully committed yet. She was only training and getting to know the team. She looked back at her parents and gave them a big, warm smile and they lit up with pleasure and hugged each other.

  Quiver wondered how much longer she could go juggling eggs in this way. Sooner or later she would have to pick a place to put them and she wasn’t sure playing for the Dream Hawks was one of those places. Even if they were her favorite team bar none. Even as much as she loved tankball. Not while Kallon Crave was part of the team.

  Chapter Two

  There was another practice session that afternoon—a light one where some strategies and formations were practiced and injuries assessed before the final starting line-up for the night’s game was decided.

  Kal introduced Quiver to the rest of the team. “She’s training with us for a while, to see if she works out.”

  “I could always put her in my back pocket if she doesn’t fit anywhere else,” someone from the back of the cluster of players whispered in a loud voice and everyone laughed.

  “Don’t let Quiver’s size fool you,” Kal shot back. “In the zero zone, everyone is equal and Quiver moves better and faster than anyone I’ve seen.”

  Quiver glanced at Kal, startled. He didn’t even look at her. So he had heard her this morning.

  “Okay, everyone up. Let’s stretch and test,” Kal said and everyone moved to the tank to work out.

  Quiver did her best to follow directions, moving in concert with the others, building piers and push-off pylons for players to lever themselves in the desired direction. In between maneuvers she stretched and rolled, enjoying time in zero gee. The patterns and holds were not new to her. She had watched the Dream Hawks play so many times she was familiar with most of them. This was the first time she had been a part of those patterns and it was enormously satisfying.

  At the end of the short session, everyone swam, dived or climbed down to the floor and gathered around Kal and the gray-haired Esme Ganzo, who was peering at the board that Kal held while the two of them conferred.

  “Okay,” Kal said. “Cody, that knee is still too weak, so we’re going to bench you for tonight.”

  Cody Giles nodded and let out a heavy breath. Quiver couldn’t tell if he was relieved or upset about missing one more game.

  “Jayde, you’re in the start lineup, in his place,” Kal added.

  Jayde Woodham grinned and punched the man next to her on the arm. She was taller than him and possibly wider at the shoulders. Quiver had seen her take down players and sit on them. The fans loved her.

  “Micah,” Kal said. “You’re second string, so suit up tonight.”

  Micah’s dark features beamed. As Kal read out the rest of the team for the night’s game, Melody threw her arms around Micah and kissed him. Cody Giles ruffled his hair and others patted his back and shoulders.

  Quiver suddenly didn’t mind her own personal dilemma in the slightest. It would put her close to Micah for his debut professional game, something he had dreamed about and worked himself to the bone to achieve. For tonight at least, she would be happy for him.

  That just left tomorrow and her increasingly more complicated problems.

  * * * * *

  Quiver had been to the tankball arena hundreds of times before, but had never watched a game from the players’ bench, which was right in front of the glass wall on the other side from the Captain’s box.

  Ursula Middelesworth was there tonight, too. Quiver was thrilled that the Captain herself was there for Micah’s first game.

  It was interesting watching the game played from this side of the tank, having watched these same people painstakingly practice the patterns that afternoon. It made the game come alive in a way she hadn’t experienced before. She was right there in the tank with them, critiquing every move and figuring out how she would have made it work.

  When Micah waded onto the bottom layer, a cheer went up from the other side of the tank. Quiver could see many familiar faces there. It looked as though most of the Palatine had turned out to see the game live.

  There was an equally as large a cheer for Kallon Crave when he stepped in, too, for he was as much a son of the Palatine as Micah was.

  It was a close game. The Delta Bullets were an Aventine team shaping up to be possible champions for the year. Esme Ganzo had said during practice that he’d prefer to keep the Bullets from stealing the crown from the Warriors, for the crown belonged to the Dream Hawks. The Hawks were trying their best to make that happen for him.

  The crowd was boisterous, enjoying the suspense. The front rows on all three tiers smacked at the glass, expressing a thunderous encouragement.

  Just before the end of the first semi, as the ball was worked up to the zero zone, closer to the Hawks goal mouth, the tension spiraled. The clapping and stomping and the rumble of hundreds of hands pummeling the plasteel glass lifted the noise level up until it was hard to think.

  Quiver stared at the glass right in front of her, centimeters away from her nose. It looked as though it was vibrating.

  Of course it would, with so many people slapping it with their hands and fists. It had been designe
d for exactly this purpose, to hold spectators away from the fluxes of gravity and to give the players something to push off from. It took repeated blows from balls travelling at speed and players who couldn’t stop quickly enough. It could take this sort of punishment easily.

  Except…except…. Quiver bit her lip and looked around the arena, not at the game, but at the wall, assessing it and the way it was moving under the assault. It wasn’t the flexible waving motion that said it was handling the forces.

  It was quivering.

  She put her hand out slowly, almost afraid to touch it. She laid her hand against the glass. It was warm, as plasteel glass should be. And yes, it was vibrating, too. Only, that might be normal. She had never been lucky enough to sit close enough to the glass to be able to touch it. Whenever she had watched a live tankball game, it had always been from the back rows.

  Quiver leaned closer, fascinated.

  She could hear the wall singing.

  * * * * *

  During the half-time break, the players returned to the universal locker room beneath the arena, each team hugging an end of the room.

  Quiver didn’t need to cool down, shower, or rehydrate. She hadn’t played and wasn’t likely to.

  Instead, she looked for Esme Ganzo, the most senior person she knew. He was surrounded by players, cameras and fans and while he tried to be polite and listen to her, she could see he really wasn’t processing what she was saying.

  “Run that by me again. How are singing walls dangerous?” he asked. Unfortunately, Esme Ganzo didn’t know what voice modulation meant. His words carried. Someone inside the huddle of people waiting to speak to him sniggered. Esme looked up and realized what he had just said aloud and rolled his eyes. That created more laughs.

  Normally, when she was dismissed this way, Quiver just walked away. She couldn’t do that now. “It’s dangerous,” she repeated. “It could be fatal.”

  “Those walls take all sorts of punishment,” Ganzo said dismissively. “They’re built for it. Whether they’re singing or not.” He smiled at his own joke.

  “No, really,” she insisted, her gut clamping. She could see he would not listen to anything else she said. Only, she didn’t know who else she could possibly talk to who was in a position to do something about it.

  “How do walls sing?” Kallon Crave asked. He had come up beside her in the last few minutes and she had been too focused on trying to make Esme Ganzo understand to notice.

  “It’s not really the walls that sing,” she said quickly. “It’s the air next to them vibrating in sympathy with the walls.”

  Kal’s face was blank.

  Esme burst out laughing. “Sympathetic air…stars and novae!” He headed back to the group waiting to speak to him. She had been dismissed.

  Kal was still staring at her and she could see he was on the verge of reacting exactly the same way.

  “I know what I’m talking about,” she said quickly. “You have to believe me. We call the walls glass, only they’re not. They’re a translucent plasteel. Plasteel is incredibly strong, we use it for everything on the ship. To make it clear like glass, the molecules have to be synthetically grown into a single-crystal metal and that makes a difference.”

  She made herself stop babbling, because Kal was no longer looking at her with the almost-amused, disbelieving expression on his face. His eyes narrowed. “What difference?” he said.

  He was listening.

  Quiver trembled. She hadn’t realized how utterly sure she had been that no one would hear her. Incredibly, the one person who was listening was Kallon Crave.

  She made herself slow down and use the simplest words she could. “There are two factors at work. First of all, have you ever run your finger around the rim of a glass and listened to it ring?”

  He considered her for a moment, then rolled his eyes. “Singing walls,” he muttered.

  “Exactly,” she said. “The molecules in the plasteel vibrate from all the pummeling. They resonate in a way that makes the air next to the walls vibrate, too. Then you hear singing.”

  “So, the walls are singing. It’s cute, but I don’t see why it’s dangerous.”

  “Because of the piezoelectric effect,” she said.

  Kal shook his head.

  “The piezoelectric effect is something that happens with coherent crystals. Depending on what they’re made of, if you pass a voltage across the crystals, it can make them shrink or stretch.”

  “I don’t think anyone is about to plug a current into the walls, Sheenan.”

  “They don’t have to. Didn’t you ever play around with musicians’ tuning forks when you were a kid, Kal? Tap them, stick them in water and get sprayed?”

  “Sure.” He shrugged.

  “Did you ever sneak off with the fork and try touching a glass with it while it was vibrating?”

  Kal’s jaw clenched. “It shattered,” he said. “That’s a glass and a tuning fork. No one is playing music out there, either.”

  “They’re pummeling the plasteel,” she said patiently. “It’s another oddity about clear plasteel. If it vibrates at the right frequency, it builds static electricity.”

  Kal looked at her with the same narrowed, thoughtful expression.

  “You’ve seen fans stick their team shirts up against the glass when their team wins.”

  “Of course.”

  “Static electricity,” she said. “In other words, voltage. Plasteel crystals expand when enough voltage is applied.”

  “Expands,” he repeated flatly.

  “Don’t you see?” she said, urgency making her speak quickly again. “A bio-engineer should check the walls. They shouldn’t be rattled or even touched until one does. They’re dangerous, Kal. Those walls are a shaped bomb, wrapped around tank players and sitting right next to all the fans.”

  Kal let out his breath. “Damn, you nearly had me,” he said.

  Cold touched her middle and halted her heart. “Excuse me?”

  “You’re unbelievable, Sheenan. You’ll stop at nothing to get out of playing, won’t you?”

  The cold gripped her throat. “That’s not…” She couldn’t finish. Horror was making it hard to think. “I’m not lying.”

  “Maybe not about all the science stuff. I don’t know about that. As soon as you started talking about bombs and stopping the game, though, I got it. I finally understand you, Sheenan. You haven’t got the guts to just say no to your parents and Micah and everyone who thinks you should playing. You’re looking for an out, something that will take the heat off you. Although I would like to know who told you about tomorrow night. I only just found out myself.”

  “Tomorrow night?” she repeated weakly.

  “Esme wants you in the game in the first half, early enough to give you a run and see what you’ve got.”

  “I’m…playing?” She could barely form the word. Micah had worked for months to earn his debut tonight. She had been here less than a day. It was impossible. “This is a joke, right?” she said, her lips moving awkwardly.

  “That’s what I think it is.”

  “Hey, you left this on the bench,” Micah said, holding out her reading board. He squeezed her arm and winked, using the eye farthest away from Kal. Then he stepped around them and headed farther back into the room, where Melody was stretching and warming up.

  She glanced at the board as it activated at her touch. It was purely habit. There was a message from this afternoon sitting at the top. It was from the Institute of Coding Master. The preview cut straight to the point. We regret to inform you….

  Her chest was already squeezed by an invisible vise. Her heart was already pounding. This made her feel sick. Quiver bent from the hips, her hands on her knees. The board dropped to the ground and she didn’t care.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  “Sheenan?” Kal asked, sounding only mildly curious.

  Quiver realized that more people than Kal would be watching her, wondering what was wrong. Or were the
y all like Kal, happy to see her wounded?

  She needed to get away, find somewhere where no one could see her. She forced herself upright and staggered away.

  “Sheenan!” Kal shouted. “Game starts in five!”

  She didn’t care. No one would listen to her, anyway. Quiver kept going.

  Chapter Three

  “You know, I thought of looking here about six times. Every time, I didn’t bother because I thought a tank would be the last place I would find you,” Kal said. “You keep doing the unexpected, Sheenan.”

  Quiver turned carefully around, waving her hands like fins until she could look down at the floor. Kallon stood just outside the tank area. It was dim in the gymnasium, yet she could still see he had showered and changed.

  “The game is over?” she asked, with only a tiny amount of curiosity.

  “We lost. Comprehensively.” He stepped into the tank and walked over to the ladder with the heavy, wading stride typical of groundmen who knew how to move at speed in the two gees. He climbed the ladder to about where the middle zone started, then flexed his knees and threw himself up into the air, arrowing up to the zero zone just as Quiver preferred to do.

  He met the roof and rolled to keep himself in the zone. Finally he righted himself so he was floating just in front of her.

  “You overcompensate too much,” she told him. “Then you have to flail to reposition.”

  “I’m a groundman. They didn’t recruit me for my gymnastic ability in the free zone.”

  “You were looking for me?” she asked.

  “Have you been crying?”

  Quiver blinked her aching eyes. “I had some bad news.”

  “So I figured. Well, I didn’t figure, actually. I asked Micah. He told me you were expecting to hear back from the Coders any day now. They turned you down, didn’t they?”

  She didn’t nod, because even that small movement would shift her, up here. “They didn’t even give a reason.”

  Kal waved his arms slowly, bringing himself back to a level he was happy with. Then he carefully folded his arms. “So you really do know all that science stuff.”

  “I really do.” There was no point hiding it anymore.