Spinning Starlight (39 page)

Fabin isn’t here.

I set off the trigger, and he wasn’t in the safe zone of Spin-Still’s energy.

The weight I felt from the Khua was nothing compared to what hits me now. Weight to crush my soul, to hold me down on the bottom of the ocean. I deserve more. I deserve worse. I want to sob and
dissolve and lose myself to the emptiness of failing.

Metal screeches across the room as the door is levered open in a damaged frame. Minali and three guards spill into the lab.

They have guns drawn. Including Minali.

“Nobody move,” she says. “Don’t. You. Move.”

I may have failed Fabin, but this woman is the reason. She sacrificed my brothers instead of finding a real solution. She had Garrin killed to hold on to her secret. She nearly destroyed the
Khua and turned me into little more than a piece of equipment.

The guards’ guns point at the ground. Minali’s points at me, but it shakes.

And I don’t have to keep silent anymore.

“Computer, voiceprint override. Identify Liddi Jantzen.”

Minali fires. I flinch as the shot hits the ground two feet to my right.

“Liddi Jantzen, identified,” the computer replies. “How may I help you, Miss Jantzen?”

Tiav is dragging me toward a console to shield us, but I have to talk fast, before Minali steadies her aim, or worse, goes for my brothers.

“Disable JTI weapons in Conduit Lab, Level Nine.”

The power indicators on the guns go dark, but I’m not done.

“Minali Blake is to be terminated immediately. Relay such to all news-vid sources as well as authorities on both Banak and Neta. And get the police to JTI headquarters to have her
arrested. If you three don’t want to get arrested with her, go help my brothers.”

The guards start climbing over the debris. Minali doesn’t seem to inspire much loyalty. Despite what I said, she’s not looking at me anymore. She’s looking at a monitor and has
gone pale. “You stupid, stupid girl! I nearly had everything fixed, and now you’ve destroyed them, the conduits…they’re gone. Do you think anyone in the Seven Points will listen
to you when you’ve cut us all off from each other?”

“They will when I tell them about the Eighth Point and explain a new way to get from world to world. Or an old way. And especially when I tell them everything
you’ve
done.
It’s all about how you spin it, right?”

She grits her teeth with half a growl, coming at me past the rubble of the collapsed ceiling. Maybe she’ll try to tear my limbs from my body with her bare hands. I’m not convinced
that pain would be any worse than what I’ve already experienced. Tiav is worried enough to get between me and her, but it’s not necessary. As long as one particular thing in this mess
is still working.

“Computer, is the neural incapacitator online?” I ask.

“Confirmed, Miss Jantzen.”

I glance at my brothers, who are just starting to come around with the three guards tending to them. I think about everything they’ve been through. I swallow the despair when I see Fabin
still isn’t here.

This is letting her off easy. I’ll have to see if the authorities can come up with something more fitting. But for now, this will do.

“Calibrate for Minali Blake and engage.”

The sky turned so dark, Liddi thought maybe it was already dinnertime, but no one came to bring her in yet. So with the stubbornness of a seven-year-old, she kept climbing
the tree. She looked up at the dark, bloated clouds just in time for a fat drop of water to land in her eye. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Then a crack of lightning, not so distant, with a
bone-shaking boom half a second later.

Retrieved or not, it was time to get inside.

Raindrops pummeled the girl, like they were trying to push her down the tree faster. She was soaked instantly, and her hand slipped as her foot reached for the next branch.

She missed.

Liddi tumbled down, grabbing at branches and getting nothing for her trouble but bark-scrapes all along her arms and legs. At the last second, she caught hold, but only for a moment. The
force of stopping so suddenly broke her grip again, and she fell to the ground. She had no way to right herself, no way to keep herself from landing awkwardly with a thud…and a snap. Her scream
used up any air that hadn’t been knocked from her lungs.

Fabin rushed over, finding his sister just a few seconds too late. “Liddi, what happened?”

“I slipped. My leg.”

He took one look at it and got to work, finding a couple of branches that he broke to a particular length, and then cutting strips of cloth from his shirt. “I’ve been looking
everywhere for
you,” he said, fashioning a splint. “Why did you wander so far from the house?”

“The trees here are taller.”

“Why does that matter?”

“I wanted to be closer to the stars when the sun went down. I wanted to try to find Ferri to see where Mom and Dad are.”

Fabin’s hands slipped as he tried to bind the sticks with the strips. His voice was as heavy as Liddi’s rain-soaked clothes. “Ferri isn’t a planet. It’s not
real. You know it isn’t.”

“But I want it to be!”

“I know you do. But even if it were real, it wouldn’t be the kind of place you can see.”

That couldn’t be true. Liddi’s parents had to be in the sky, watching over her and the boys. They wouldn’t have left the children alone. “So I can’t see
them?”

He carefully lifted her up, kissing her forehead when the pain made her cry out again. “Of course you can. Every time we close our eyes, we all see them. And sometimes that’s
enough.”

THE COUNTRY HOUSE HASN’T
been so full since right after Mom and Dad died. To my mind, though, it’s just shy of full enough.

My brothers are weak after so long in the physically nonphysical state of the conduits. I smuggled Jahmari in from Ferinne to look after them. He says it’s nothing they won’t recover
from—they just need to get their strength back, and that takes time.

They can have all the time they need, but I could use a few more hours in the day.

Our stunt with the Khua had an impact everywhere. The collapsed ceiling in the lab was nothing compared to some places. Structural damage to buildings, terrible rockslides in the mountains of
both Erkir and Pramadam, an amphitheater on Yishu was a total loss. And people were hurt. Concussions and broken bones, mostly. But some deaths.

Deaths I’m responsible for. At least in part.

I almost shut down when I found out about all the people. Spin-Still gave me impressions of how much worse it would’ve been if we hadn’t done it. Cities full of people dead and some
of the Points no longer habitable for the survivors.

That’s definitely worse, but I can’t tell whether it should make me feel better. So instead of thinking about my choices, I’ve kept busy. I talked to engineers about finding
the best, fastest ways to rebuild and repair. That was just the beginning of the talking.

Talking to top technologists about the collapse of the conduits and reinstitution of the Khua, talking to government officials on Neta about interplanetary implications, talking to law
enforcement chiefs on Banak about crimes committed, talking to historians on Tarix so they can get the record right…I never thought I’d miss silence.

Others want to talk to me—media-grub demands are at an all-time high—but I’m too busy, with the fallout, with the company, with my family.

Today, I’m busy doing nothing.

“They’re beautiful.”

Emil’s voice startles me. He’s supposed to be back at the house, not crossing the river to the small clearing, and the walking stick he holds isn’t doing that much to help.

“You shouldn’t be out here,” I say, supporting his other side.

“I’m fine.” The words are strong enough, but the way he leans on me says otherwise. His color’s still not right, his eyes worn and weary. He really ought to be resting,
but I’m not going to argue. “
You
shouldn’t be out here alone.”

“I’m not alone.” Three Khua float lazily around the clearing, and that doesn’t count Spin-Still. “When did you know the Khua were alive?”

“I’m not sure. Not right away. But when we held one here so you could use it, I think we knew. It felt wrong, like holding someone prisoner. We shouldn’t have done it, but we
had to get you safe, away from Blake.”

Understanding pulses through me from Spin-Still. “And you didn’t know how to ask. They forgive you.”

“Good. But I still say you shouldn’t be out here alone—I don’t mean with or without the Khua. We left you on your own too long. We all hated it.”

He’s saying they’ve worried about me, and maybe that they still do. Maybe they’re right to. Maybe they don’t need to. It’s hard to tell anymore, so I choose not to
say anything about it. We stand and watch the Khua dance.

Silence has been with me too long. Even with all the talking I’ve done, one piece of silence has followed me, and I can’t let it stay anymore. Not now. My question might barely be
loud enough to hear, but it won’t remain silent.

“Emil, why didn’t Fabin come?”

His arm across my shoulders pulls me closer, and I feel his sigh more than hear it. “He didn’t tell us. We didn’t know until we found you and he wasn’t there. Liddi, it
was very strange in there, the way we could sometimes know and understand things and then not.”

“What did you understand?”

“The pulse triggered by your vocal implant wouldn’t have disrupted enough. It might have set
us
free, but the conduits’ energy would still have been entangled with the
Khua. They’d still be suffering. Fabin knew. He knew if one of us was outside the safe zone, taking the hit from the pulse, it’d be like an explosion, enough to knock the conduits
loose. No more parasites for the Khua.”

A rock lodges in my throat, or might as well. “But what happened to Fabin?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. These things, these energies, they’re still so new to us. He could be lost in a different strand, separate from the conduits
or
the Khua. I don’t know. One thing I
do
know. You found us and freed us. Our little Liddi unlocked cosmic energies and got it done. So maybe we can still find Fabin.”

It’s hard to be hopeful when my heart only feels the emptiness of Fabin’s absence, but Emil’s right. Maybe we can. The checked genes were a lie. I can trust my instincts, and
maybe they’ll come up with something unexpected.

“Now, why are you out here on your own, watching Khua, when every other day you’ve been so busy we hardly saw you?” Emil asks.

“I’m waiting. Tiav said he’d come back today…if they let him come back.”

“Is it possible they won’t?”

Why does he have to ask me that when it’s the last thing I want to think about? “Sure, it’s possible. It depends on what happened after we left, everything I did when I was
there, if they still think Tiav acted against his duties…I don’t know. I don’t know anything about Ferinne right now and that’s what kills me. They could arrest him, or they
could let him come back.”

“Tell me about this boy. Clearly not another Reb Vester.”