The others sess what I am doing, however. Bimniwha gets a taste of my mood and immediately alerts the others – because I am the nice one, usually. I’m the one who, until recently, believed in Geoarcanity. Usually Remwha is the resentful one. But right now Remwha is coldly silent, stewing on what we have learned. Gaewha is quiet, too, in despair, trying to fathom how to demand the impossible. Dushwha is hugging themselves for comfort and Salewha is sleeping too much. Bimniwha’s alert falls on weary, frustrated, self-absorbed ears, and goes ignored.
Meanwhile, Stahnyn’s smile has begun to falter, as she only now realizes I’m serious. She shifts her stance, putting hands on her hips. “Houwha, this isn’t funny. I understand you got the chance to leave the other day —”
I have considered the most efficient way to shut her up. “Does Conductor Gallat know that you find him attractive?”
Stahnyn freezes, eyes going wide and round. Brown eyes in her case, but she likes icewhite. I’ve seen how she looks at Gallat, though I never much cared before. I don’t really care now. But I imagine that finding Niess eyes attractive is a taboo thing in Syl Anagist, and neither Gallat nor Stahnyn can afford to be accused of that particular perversion. Gallat would fire Stahnyn at the first whisper of it – even a whisper from me.
I go over to her. She draws back a little, frowning at my forwardness. We do not assert ourselves, we constructs. We tools. My behavior is anomalous in a way that she should report, but that isn’t what has her so worried. “No one heard me say that,” I tell her, very gently. “No one can see what’s happening in this room right now. Relax.”
Her bottom lip trembles, just a little, before she speaks. I feel bad, just a little, for having disturbed her so. She says, “You can’t get far. Th-there’s a vitamin deficiency… You and the others were built that way. Without special food – the food we serve you – you’ll die in just a few days.”
It only now occurs to me that Stahnyn thinks I mean to run away.
It only now occurs to me to run away.
What the conductor has just told me isn’t an insurmountable hurdle. Easy enough to steal food to take with me, though I would die when it ran out. My life would be short regardless. But the thing that truly troubles me is that I have nowhere to go. All the world is Syl Anagist.
“The garden,” I repeat, at last. This will be my grand adventure, my escape. I consider laughing, but the habit of appearing emotionless keeps me from doing so. I don’t really want to go anywhere, to be honest. I just want to feel like I have some control over my life, if only for a few moments. “I want to see the garden for five minutes. That’s all.”
Stahnyn shifts from foot to foot, visibly miserable. “I could lose my position for this, especially if any of the senior conductors see. I could be imprisoned.”
“Perhaps they will give you a nice window overlooking a garden,” I suggest. She winces.
And then, because I have left her no choice, she leads me out of my cell and downstairs, and outside.
The garden of purple flowers looks strange from this angle, I find, and it is an altogether different thing to smell the star-flowers up close. They smell strange – oddly sweet, almost sugary, with a hint of fermentation underneath where some of the older flowers have wilted or been crushed. Stahnyn is fidgety, looking around too much, while I stroll slowly, wishing I did not need her beside me. But this is fact: I cannot simply wander the grounds of the compound alone. If guards or attendants or other conductors see us, they will think Stahnyn is on official business, and not question me… if she will only be still.
But then I stop abruptly, behind a lilting spider tree. Stahnyn stops as well, frowning and plainly wondering what’s happening – and then she, too, sees what I have seen, and freezes.
Up ahead, Kelenli has come out of the compound to stand between two curling bushes, beneath a white rose arch. Conductor Gallat has followed her out. She stands with her arms folded. He’s behind her, shouting at her back. We aren’t close enough for me to hear what he’s saying, though his angry tone is indisputable. Their bodies, however, are a story as clear as strata.
“Oh, no,” mutters Stahnyn. “No, no, no. We should —”
“Still,” I murmur. I mean to say be still, but she quiets anyway, so at least I got the point across.
And then we stand there, watching Gallat and Kelenli fight. I can’t hear her voice at all, and it occurs to me that she cannot raise her voice to him; it isn’t safe. But when he grabs her arm and yanks her around to face him, she automatically claps a hand over her belly. The hand on the belly is a quick thing. Gallat lets go at once, seemingly surprised by her reaction and his own violence, and she moves the hand smoothly back to her side. I don’t think he noticed. They resume arguing, and this time Gallat spreads his hands as if offering something. There is pleading in his posture, but I notice how stiff his back is. He begs – but he thinks he shouldn’t have to. I can tell that when begging fails, he will resort to other tactics.
I close my eyes, aching as I finally, finally, understand. Kelenli is one of us in every way that matters, and she always has been.
Slowly, though, she unbends. Ducks her head, pretends reluctant capitulation, says something back. It isn’t real. The earth reverberates with her anger and fear and unwillingness. Still, some of the stiffness goes out of Gallat’s back. He smiles, gestures more broadly. Comes back to her, takes her by the arms, speaks to her gently. I marvel that she has disarmed his anger so effectively. It’s as if he doesn’t see the way her eyes drift away while he’s talking, or how she does not reciprocate when he pulls her closer. She smiles at something he says, but even from fifty feet away I can see that it is a performance. Surely he can see it, too? But I am also beginning to understand that people believe what they want to believe, not what is actually there to be seen and touched and sessed.
So, mollified, he turns to leave – thankfully via a different path out of the garden than the one Stahnyn and I currently lurk upon. His posture has changed completely; he’s visibly in a better mood. I should be glad for that, shouldn’t I? Gallat heads the project. When he’s happy, we are all safer.
Kelenli stands gazing after him until he is gone. Then her head turns and she looks right at me. Stahnyn makes a choked sound beside me, but she is a fool. Of course Kelenli will not report us. Why would she? Her performance was never for Gallat.
Then she, too, leaves the garden, following Gallat.
It was a last lesson. The one I needed most, I think. I tell Stahnyn to take me back to my cell, and she practically moans with relief. When I’m back and I have unwoven the magics of the monitoring equipment, and sent Stahnyn on her way with a gentle reminder not to be a fool, I lie down on my couch to ponder this new knowledge. It sits in me, an ember causing everything around it to smolder and smoke.
***
And then, several nights after we return from Kelenli’s tuning mission, the ember catches fire in all of us.
It is the first time that all of us have come together since the trip. We entwine our presences in a layer of cold coal, which is perhaps fitting as Remwha sends a hiss through all of us like sand grinding amid cracks. It’s the sound/feel/sess of the sinklines, the briar patch. It’s also an echo of the static emptiness in our network where Tetlewha – and Entiwha, and Arwha, and all the others – once existed.
This is what awaits us when we have given them Geoarcanity, he says.
Gaewha replies, Yes.
He hisses again. I have never sessed him so angry. He has spent the days since our trip getting angrier and angrier. But then, so have the rest of us – and now it’s time for us to demand the impossible. We should give them nothing, he declares, and then I feel his resolve sharpen, turn vicious. No. We should give back what they have taken.
Eerie minor-note pulses of impression and action ripple through our network: a plan, at last. A way to create the impossible, if we cannot demand it. The right sort of power surge at just the right moment, after the fragments have been launched but before the Engine has been spent. All the magic stored within the fragments – decades’ worth, a civilization’s worth, millions of lives’ worth – will flood back into the systems of Syl Anagist. First it will burn out the briar patches and their pitiful crop, letting the dead rest at last. Next the magic will blast through us, the most fragile components of the great machine. We’ll die when that happens, but death is better than what they intended for us, so we are content.