Idols (29 page)
What this is.
“I—”
I don’t know what to say.
I’ve been waiting for so long. I don’t want to wait anymore.
“Dol.” He pulls me toward him, slowly, unbuttoning his leather cuff. It falls to the ground next to the curls of my abandoned cloth binding.
Skin on skin in the damp heat of the afternoon.
In the bank of weeds beneath the dock.
I lace my fingers through his and we press our hands together, flattening our palms.
Slowly, I lower my wrist to his.
Dot to dot.
Love to Sorrow.
Lucas to me.
The shiver that begins in his body echoes down the length of mine. My hand starts to shake uncontrollably, and I want to cry—but I don’t know why.
My heart pounds and my heart hurts and every moment is terrifying and every moment is bliss.
All this from his hand in mine.
The warmth that is Lucas flows through me and I take it. I offer back my own stillness, my peace. I give him the thing that I am. My calm, cool gray to his gold.
There in the weeds along the water’s edge, we become something so much larger than what we are alone.
There is love and there is sadness and there is not one without the other. Not for us.
We are one story now, and we are true.
One true thing.
He buries his face in my neck.
There
, he says.
There
, I answer back.
When everything is over and we have fallen back into ourselves, I kiss him on the mouth.
Then he pulls me to him, and I curl into his side.
“That was—that was—”
I lie on my side, looking over at him.
“Yes,” I say. “It was.” Then I reach up and kiss him softly on the cheek. “And so are you.”
We lie like that, sleeping on the shore for hours, until the sun sinks and the busy streets quiet behind us.
So this is love
, I think.
This is Lucas, inside and out, with me.
Let the gray ash come now.
Do what you will, Lords. I am bound to something bigger than myself.
My heart is no longer alone and you can’t kill that.
Not even you.
By the time I notice the dock is on fire, the streets are filled with Colonists trying to help. As we scramble out from beneath the wooden pilings, I hold my sarong tight. I blush as I slip past the anxious-looking men, who dump bucket after bucket of water on the flames.
“You know what this is, don’t you?” Lucas doesn’t look me in the eye when he says it. “Who?”
I do.
There’s only one person who would care so much about me kissing Lucas that his even seeing it would set this dock on fire.
Perhaps we weren’t as discreet as we thought.
We turn the corner to the dirty canal, leaving the fire still uncontained.
Just as I slip the book into Fortis’s warm jacket, the school’s gong announces dinner.
Fortis and Bibi are so preoccupied with a set of ancient scrolls—maps, held in place with silken cords, red and gold—that they don’t come out to join us.
It’s a good thing, too, because my sarong is muddy and wet and smells like smoke, and Fortis might have noticed.
I only know because Ro makes a point of telling me.
Ro notices everything. This is not new information. Neither are his feelings about me—about me, and my own feelings.
I know Ro sees it all, the way Lucas stays at my side, now more than ever. The way our arms graze against each other when we walk down the hall, the way my hand finds a way to touch him, as if there were a reason.
The way our eyes meet and our cheeks flush and the pull Lucas has over me—over everyone—is now no more than the pull I have over him.
Love.
That’s what Ro sees.
That’s what there is.
It breaks my heart, but I know it breaks his more. Which is why the sky still smells like smoke, even now.
SPECIAL EMBASSY DISPATCH TO GAP MIYAZAWA
MARKED URGENT
MARKED EYES ONLY
Note: Contact Jasmine3k, Virt. Hybrid Human 39261.SEA, Laboratory Assistant to Dr. E. Yang, for future commentary, as necessary.
FORTIS ==> DOC
Transcript - ComLog 04.02.2067
//comlog begin;
FORTIS:
Do you think there’s any chance NULL is biological?;
DOC:
Unlikely but difficult to confirm.;
FORTIS:
Hmmm… Well, think about how we might find that out. It could be an angle, either way.;
DOC:
Agreed.;
FORTIS:
And if you have spare cycles, keep working on possible ways to stall NULL. Confuse, hack, hijack. Anything to buy us more time before they get here and send us off to join the dodo.;
DOC:
Dodos are fascinating. Extinct, but fascinating.;
FORTIS:
You know what was wrong with the dodo? It didn’t know to be afraid of predators. I won’t make that same mistake, DOC.;
DOC:
So noted.;
//comlog end;
“We should be walking,” says Fortis. I can see him glower, even in the early-morning light.
“You mean, we should be sleeping,” yawns Ro, from the back of the
tuk-tuk
.
“We should be more careful about drawing attention to ourselves,” Fortis says. The water buffalo in front of him—one pinkish white, one black—stumble in the empty, uneven street, as if they agree.
“The sun is only just rising. There is no attention to draw,” Bibi points out. Lucas and Tima, wedged on either side of Bibi’s enormous yellow robes, look like they would rather be walking themselves.
Fortis rolls his eyes. “I’m surprised the water buffalo can even still pull you, William. Perhaps you should lay off the coconut milk curries.”
“And perhaps you need a little sweetening up, my friend.” The
tuk-tuk
careens to one side, and Bibi smiles. “There it is.”
There, surrounded by an enormous wall, is a complex of the most beautiful and elaborate buildings I have ever seen. Intricately carved rooftops form into peaks, golden spires rising into the sky between them. “Those are stupas,” Bibi says, pointing to the golden, spiked towers. “Very beautiful. Which means we’re at the Grand Palace. Where we find the Wat.” Bibi nods. “Wat Phra Kaew.”
“Wat what?” Ro asks.
“The Temple of the Emerald Buddha.”
“Emerald meaning the color, not the stone,” Fortis says. “In other words, green. Green like jade, or like your jade girl. It’s a start.” He winks at me and I feel for the carved jade shapes in my chestpack.
The Temple of the Emerald Buddha. To find the jade girl.
Could she really be so close now?
The streets don’t stay empty long, not even as long as the sunrise. As soon as we near the temple, the crush of people in the streets outside the walls of the Grand Palace is amazing. Even now, all around me the morning heat presses in—the heat, the people, and every thought or feeling they have. I am overwhelmed. Desperation and longing fill the air around me, closing in. I hear the pleading minds: “My son is ill, please heal him.” “My mother is missing, please bring her back.” The crowd has come to make their offerings, to ask blessings of Buddha—and they create a whirlwind in my mind.
Then I hear a voice behind me. “Breathe, little one.” It’s Bibi. “Their pain is not your pain,” he says. “Say it. Build the wall. Their pain is not your pain. Not today.”
I breathe and concentrate.
Not today. Not me.
I remember, and I calm down. At least, a little.
In front of me, a small child holds a stack of cages packed full of tiny mice, her hand outstretched.
“What’s that?” I gesture to the child, and as I do, I hear Tima suck in her breath behind me.
“Karma.” Bibi shrugs. “Some believe it is good luck to free a caged creature. So others cage them, to sell the chance to free them.”
“Isn’t that cheating?” I look up at him.
“Not for the mice.” He shrugs again.
I wonder. Is that how the Lords see us?
Ro snorts, and Lucas says nothing. Tima is heartbroken, pulling her pockets inside out, searching for anything of value.
Before Tima can say a word, Lucas is pressing a handful of digs into the little girl’s hand.
“I’ll take them all.”
With a flick of his hand, it’s done.
Mice burst out from the small wooden boxes, flooding into all corners of the temple.
I don’t know who’s happier—the mice or Tima. She takes Lucas by the hand, gratefully.
Lucas smiles at her, rubbing her head with his free hand. They’ve been together a long time, I think.
They’re something old. We’re something new. Not everything changes.
Not everything should.
A woman interrupts the scene and thrusts a handful of necklaces at me. “You buy. You buy. Good luck. Two hundred dig.” I shake my head, but when I look at the necklaces, I see a teardrop-shaped piece of clear glass, with a tiny green figure inside.
It’s him. The same. The jade Buddha. The chess piece belonging to the jade girl, the one I see on the chessboard, in my dreams. Same as the one the Bishop gave me.
Is this the Emerald Buddha?
