Khe (16 page)

I glance at Larta, who is still standing by the door. One of her spots fires orange, showing her embarrassment. I like and trust the guardian more for that emotion. She bends her knee and balances her foot against the wall.

“I think Azlii and Inra hear what they want to hear,” Larta says. “They claim that everything in a corenta is sentient, but where’s the proof?”

“Larta prides herself on doubting anything she can’t see, hear, touch, or smell,” Azlii says cheerfully, “though she believes in the creator and the Powers easily enough.”

“Trah,” Larta says. “I don’t have to see them to see their effects, and that’s enough for me.”

“Can you talk to this structure?” I ask the corentan.

“I’ve tried,” Azlii says, “but the kler structures don’t respond. I hear them muttering to themselves, but I’ve never heard one speak to another. There seems to be something here that pains them. They grumble about being uncomfortable. I think that whatever hurts them also muddles their consciousness.”

The more they talk, the more I feel at ease with these two. I want to trust them. Need to trust them.

“When I was in the wilderness,” I say slowly, “I built a small sled to haul my goods. When it was about half done, I ate some wild fruit that made me sick. I fell into a delirium and dreamed the sled spoke to me, telling me how it wanted to be made. When I woke up, the sled was finished.”

“What kind of fruit was it?” Larta asks, leaning forward from the wall.

Talking sleds don’t seem to surprise her; it’s the fruit she’s interested in.

“I don’t know what it’s called,” I say. “It was about the size of my fist, with an outer brown husk. The flesh was bluish-pink and creamy looking. At the center were five small white seeds in a star pattern. The bush it grew on was about waist high and had purple leaves.”

“Aruna,” Larta says. “Aruna can have effects similar to villisity.”

One of my spots flares an anxious blue-red. Marnka said it was villisity that made her lose her mind.

“You were lucky to get away with nothing more than a dream,” Larta says. “Aruna can kill you.”

I wipe my hands against the hip wrap Tanez provided and try not to look as frightened as I feel, though my neck spots betray me.

“Trees don’t like to be cut down for nothing,” Azlii says. “It would have wanted you to make the best sled of it that you could. Maybe the mind-changing qualities of aruna opened your internal ear to the sentients around you.”

Azlii is quiet a moment and then says, “Inra says that you’re an empath, too, but don’t know it. She says that if you let yourself, you’ll realize you’ve always known things that others didn’t.”

My blood feels hot beneath my skin. “What kind of things?”

Azlii shrugs. “Inra said to ask you about the preslets.”

“I don’t like them very much.”

Azlii says nothing. From the corner of my eye, I see Larta, her foot still braced against the wall behind her. She stares at nothing, as though not listening to Azlii and me. In the silence, I remember the preslet that Stoss offended and my insistence that she apologize. How could I have known the bird was offended and not merely surprised or frightened by Stoss’s sudden appearance? But I did know, as clearly as if it were a commune sister.

I think about Azlii’s description of how to talk with other species. It’s not so different from how I did the growing. I spoke to the plants with thought energy, and it did often seem that they spoke back to me, throwing a picture into my mind of how big and strong they would become.

“Are you an empath?” Azlii asks.

My head aches as though a rope is being twisted around my forehead and pulled tight. I look at Azlii, but she seems far away and seen through a mist. My neck burns as all my spots flare greenish-blue with hope. Not my hope—
Azlii’s
.

Blood pounds in my temples and my ear holes ache. It’s enough to have my own emotions. I don’t want to know what others feel. My temperature drops. I feel as cold as snow. My breath comes in short gasps. I try to breathe the way Tav taught me to calm myself, but can’t.

The door whooshes open. Inra rushes to me, shoves Azlii aside and wraps her arms around me.

I lean against her but can’t slow my breath. The air feels like embers scalding my throat and lungs.

“Don’t fight,” Inra says. “Close your eyes. Put your heels flat on the floor and your arms over your head. Good. You’re doing well. Now slowly blow out your breath.”

I do as she tells me. My heart slows its frantic beating. When I open my eyes, I feel oddly refreshed.

Inra glares at Azlii. “You should have waited.”

Azlii shrugs. “For what? The next Commemoration Day, for Khe to gain her thirty-fifth spot?”

“Until I could have been here with her,” Inra says.

Azlii tsks. “Khe chose the moment, not me.”

A tremendous energy rages in me, like the need to move that I’d felt at Morvat Research Center after my surgery. The air seems alive, electric. I have the crazy thought that if I concentrated, I could see through the walls. I jump to my feet and stalk the room. I feel Inra’s concern for me, Azlii’s confidence in herself, and Larta’s interest, but knowing their emotions no longer hurts. I feel their deeper emotions as well, the forces that push them to rid the world of the Powers. Azlii feels like anger, Larta of humiliation, and Inra of grief. I feel their care about me, their desires for me to be safe and well.

“Sit down,” Azlii says sharply.

I stop and stare at her, but I don’t sit. How can I sit with this energy rushing through me?

“Please, Khe,” Inra says. “You’ll make yourself sick this way. You need to control what you’re feeling.”

“Sit down,” Azlii says again, “and get your feet up from the floor.”

I do sit then, pulling my feet up and sitting cross-legged. The careening energy in me seems to die down to a hum. I feel warm and strangely peaceful, given all that I’ve heard and experienced in this dwelling. My mind feels clear, my thoughts as sharp as broken glass.

I look at Azlii. “You think I have something you want.”

Azlii rubs her chin, thinking, before she speaks. “We’ve known for a while that some of the doumanas in the Resonance restoration project had shown new talents after their surgery.”

I’d known this, too. Pradat had told me.

“We’d hoped,” Azlii says, “That one of these doumanas would come forward and tell her tale. But all the doumanas we’d heard about, the new talents drove them mad.”

Like the one Pradat said heard the future in the wind?

Like me, eventually? Is that what this sudden blast of energy means—that I’m becoming a babbler?

Inra takes my hands in hers. “You’ve passed the crisis time. If you were going to go insane, it would have happened years ago.”

I let out the breath I’d been holding. “Where are these changed doumanas now?”

“They were in the research centers at first,” Azlii says. “Perhaps they are with the Powers now. We think that they are probably Returned.”

My anger burns like a light through the fog. Those doumanas wanted what I did, to feel Resonance, to find a mate and lay their egg. And went mad in the pursuit.

“Khe,” Azlii says, “we have the same enemy.” She leans close and whispers, “Join us.”

“And do what?”

Her mouth crinkles in a grin, which disappears as fast as it had come, as if satisfaction is not an emotion she allows herself to feel for long.

“We will tell your story across the planet. When the soumyo see what the Powers’ tinkering has brought, they will rise up against them.”

I blow out a breath. “Rise up how?”

“By refusal,” Azlii says. “Once the truth is known, the orindles will refuse to continue torturing their sisters in the Powers’ experiments. Commune and kler leaders will refuse to send their doumanas to the research centers. If the Powers try to take someone by force, all her sisters will stand with her and defend her. If the Powers ask for beasts or plants, we will refuse them that. We will reject them again and again, until they see their defeat and go.”

Or the Powers destroy us all for our insolence, I think but don’t say.

“Why should anyone believe me?” I ask.

“Why not?” Azlii says. “If you were telling an untruth, your emotion spots would give away your lie.”

“Unless I was insane. Babblers can say anything and not be betrayed by their spots.”

“Which is why only you can help us,” Azlii says. “We’ve waited a long time for someone who’s been changed by the Powers but kept her mind. When the doumanas see and hear you, they’ll know you are sane and telling the truth.”

“Even if they did believe me, why should my tale make the doumanas, and the males, too, rise up?”

“Because of what we are, Khe,” Azlii says. “As a species, we are loyal to our sisters or brothers above everything else. When the soumyo know for certain what the Powers are doing, when they see and hear you, their outrage will make them push the Powers out.”

If I’d been loyal to my commune-sisters at Lunge, or they to me, I’d not be in Chimbalay. Yet I still cared for them, about them, missed them. I would do anything to keep them from harm.

“How would we tell my story?”

Larta, not Azlii answers. The guardian has been so quiet, I’d nearly forgotten she was there. “We’ll use the vision stage sending site to reach all the doumanas in the sections at once.”

“They’ll let us do that?”

Larta laughs without humor. “We’ll use the site either without their knowledge or against their will.”

My mind spins. Is it true that the orindles follow the Powers’ orders? If the Powers are driven away, will the orindles be more or less likely to help me? I’m quiet, thinking. Azlii and Larta wait.

“All right,” I say, surprised by the words I’m saying. “I’ll do it.”

Azlii’s mouth draws tight. “You need to know that if we fail, it’s likely the Powers will have us. We’re not the first to have tried to overthrow them. The doumanas who tried before disappeared—all but one, who was sent back here when they’d finished with her.”

Revulsion and pity sweeps through me. I’m grateful I can’t
see
Azlii’s memory of that one doumana. Feeling Azlii’s emotions is enough to turn my bones to water.

Chapter Eighteen

With my sisters I will tear down the mountain.

--The Song of Togetherness

“When will we go to Presentation House?” I ask.

“Tonight,” Azlii says.

I feel the muddy gray of fear and the bright blue of anticipation light on my neck.

Larta grins at me. “Fear is good. It will help keep you from doing something noble and stupid.”

I glance at Tanez. Her neck is ablaze with bright blue spots. I realize why her face feels familiar—she looks much like me. No, she looks like me mixed with the male of my second Resonance. I feel a sudden rush of affection for her, different from the warmth I felt for my sisters at Lunge. It’s more like the satisfied pleasure of seeing seedlings I’d tended grow to mature and fruitful plants.

Larta catches Azlii’s eye. “Who will be going with you and Khe?”

“Just Inra,” the corentan answers. “To read the truth or lies of what any doumana we meet is saying.”

“I’ll go,” Larta says.

Azlii shakes her head. “You’re too valuable. As First of the guardians, you can go places and learn things no one else can. We can’t risk your capture.”

Larta’s jaw clenches. She nods slowly and says, “Three is too few. Four would be better, in case you need to split up, leaving one or two behind as sentries while you and Khe breach the presentation room.”

“We’ll get a fourth from the corenta,” Azlii says.

“I’ll go,” Tanez says. “I want to go.”

I look at Tanez and then at Azlii, hoping she’ll let Tanez come, then hoping she won’t.

“Tanez will be number four,” Azlii says.

The young doumana grins. Her spots are crimson with happiness.

A sudden thought strikes me. “Azlii, if the Powers watch the doumanas, how do we know they’re not watching us right now and know everything we’re planning?”

“Inra has been feeling for that,” Azlii says. “The Powers watch this house often, they seem very interested in the hatchlings, but they’ve had their attention elsewhere lately. We have to move quickly.”

***

The light from the obelisks makes the gently falling snow glow pink as Azlii, Inra, Tanez, and I leave Hatchling House behind. We look no different from any group of doumanas on the avenue, huddled in fur-trimmed cloaks and high-topped foot casings against the cold. Azlii is wearing Larta’s cloak with its guardian’s insignia pin, and both of Larta’s bracelets. My nerves are strung as tight and thin as the black lines of a power grid.

I nudge Inra, who walks beside me. Azlii and Tanez walk side-by-side behind us.

“Why are there so many energy panels?” I ask in a low voice.

“It takes energy to run a kler,” Inra answers, keeping her voice as low as mine. To anyone watching, we are just two doumanas chatting amicably. “Much of it is used to send presentations throughout the region and to run the research centers. Some is used to regulate building temperatures, to run cookers, heat water, provide light.”

The snow changes, becoming wetter, with bigger flakes.

“There’s more energy being made here than a kler twice Chimbalay’s size could use,” Inra continues. “And the energy from every panel in the kler feeds into one building, then is routed out again. Azlii says that no other kler does it that way. Larta and I have tried to discover what it’s used for.” She turns her hands palms up in a gesture that says they’ve failed.

We stride down Bright Blue Circle. The buildings look no different than when I walked this street only a day before, but they feel more menacing. Each time we pass one of the wide, blue-brick paved spaces between buildings, I expect a guardian to stop us. Or for us to disappear, the way Azlii says the doumanas, beasts, and structures did when the Powers first arrived. Behind me, I hear Tanez and Azlii talking together. Their voices are soft and conversational, muffled by the snow. I can’t catch the words.

We come to the building that made Larta nervous when she and I passed it before.