Spinning Starlight (28 page)

Fair enough. If I were as big and solid as they are, I’d probably want a little more open space, too.

We go inside, and I discover the building is a house, furnished in a way that’s both simple and comfortable. Comfortable for Haleians, anyway, which means everything’s a few inches
too tall for me. Yilt gestures for me to sit on a cushioned chair, so I do, but my feet don’t reach the floor. I feel like I’m eight years old again.

“There you are, Yilt. More eventful than we expected?”

I turn at the voice, but we’re alone. It comes from a computer screen on a nearby table, displaying Quain’s shielded face.

“You could say that,” Yilt replies. “Something happened at the Khua, and the young Aelo turned on her. Look.”

He gestures to the disk dangling from my neck. As always, Quain has no expression for me to read, but he—if Yilt calls him a “he,” I guess I can, too—makes a slight
hiss.

“Unexpected. And intriguing. Liddi, you are still unable to speak?”

Yes, obviously, nothing’s changed on that front. I may have a bizarre energy-based being around my neck, but I also still have a hyperdimensional transmitter implanted in the same
vicinity. Worse, I no longer have access to Tiav’s symbol-reading program, and I only have a couple of words locked in my memory.

“Are you able to commune with the Khua as the Aelo do, now that you have the disk?”

The weird feelings and impressions I had before come to mind, but I don’t know if it’s the same. Tiav said what some of the other races called communing was just watching and
listening to what the Khua “said” inside, then trying to make sense of it. No deep understanding, just gut instinct and guesses.

My only answer is a shrug.

“If you can communicate with them as you cannot with us, it is important you do so. And soon.”

I open my expression to look as curious as possible, hoping Quain has enough experience with Ferinnes to read it.

He does. “Unlike the others on the planet with you, we detect the energy of the Khua in much finer detail. Since before your arrival, the energy has been changing. Either the Khua are
trying to tell us something, or something is very wrong.”

That weird feeling comes again, the instinct-from-outside, telling me the answer.

Yilt informs me this is a safe-house, but without the program to read off the symbols for me, I can’t easily ask why they have one, and Yilt doesn’t volunteer the
information. Despite hours of being carried across the countryside by the guy, I’m not sure what to make of him. At least Durant’s age, if Haleian life spans and aging patterns are
anything like ours. Built like Reb’s laserball-playing friends, only more. Maybe that’s what gave me the impression that he’s not too bright. He got us all this way without being
caught by the keepers, so he can’t be completely stupid.

I just don’t know. It’s hard to get to know someone when you can’t talk.

Somehow Tiav and I managed. Only now he thinks all my non-words were lies.

“Liddi, are you listening?”

I push the sudden surge of emptiness back to my toes. Yilt’s trying to explain the safety protocols in the house, and no, I haven’t been listening. I lower my eyes, apologetic.

“You’re probably too tired to remember anyway. Go on and get some sleep. We’ll try again in the morning. And hopefully the Khua will tell you something.”

I’ve been “thinking at” the Khua all I can, trying to get it to respond to me, with no luck. But sleep sounds good. At least it’s something I know I can succeed at. I
curl up on a too-large and too-high bed and close my eyes, emptying my mind and allowing it to float.

I do float. I float out of the room and away from the safe-house, up and out until I’m surrounded by white light. The same white light. The light inside the portal, like with Tiav. Only
Tiav isn’t with me. No one is.

Wait. Someone is. One of my brothers?

No.

My brothers don’t come, but someone’s still here.

Yes, I am.

The Khua is here, somewhere.

Not somewhere. I am here. “Here” is me.

Not helpful. Dreams rarely are, but maybe this one will be. I want to ask a question, but the words don’t come. The Khua waits, circling me. I feel her motion, without any visual
clues.

Her. Why do I think of the Khua as a her?

If we were male and female, I would choose female. That is why.

She answered that question, but I wasn’t asking her. That means something, and I try to work it into something useful, but an image of Tiav emerges instead. The aching emptiness swells,
and I can’t focus on anything else. I hurt him, the most solid ally I had on this planet. The first person to care about me without knowing about JTI and wealth and fame, my fate and my
failures. And it’s because of this Khua, because she stowed away in the crystal disk and made me run away.

I didn’t force you. You had a choice.

It didn’t feel like a choice.

That’s because the right choice feels like no choice at all. Would you choose differently?

No, I wouldn’t. Thinking back on that moment, I realize she’s right. I
did
choose. When I realized it was my first real hope of helping my brothers, the choice was made. It
might break my heart all over again, but I’d choose my brothers every time. I just hate that I had to choose in the first place.

The Aelo is skilled, but he didn’t understand, and we don’t have time to wait for another to come to us. You are the one who’s been to both sides. You understand
what’s happening.

No, I don’t. I’ve been bumbling and fumbling ever since my brothers went missing.

You know who puts us in danger, you know those she’s using to do it, and you know catastrophe will be the end of it all.

Minali. Yes, I know about that. But the Khua talks like I’m some kind of chosen one meant to save everybody. I’m not. My family tried that. It didn’t work.

No, you are not chosen. You are the one who chose. And you are the one who still chooses.

The teacher showed the children a new game. New for the other kids, anyway. Anton had taught Liddi before she started school. He also told her it wasn’t just a game.
It was to teach kids the basics of circuits and resistors and switches.

As much as Liddi liked playing with her big brothers, running around with six-year-old kids who didn’t really care about keeping the rules was a different kind of fun.

She chased Pira through half of a double-bind—a parallel circuit—and caught her before a teammate could throw the switch. Pira hated to lose, so she wrenched her arm out of
Liddi’s hand and screamed.

“Cheater!”

“Liddi.”

Liddi whipped around at the teacher’s voice. She hadn’t cheated—she’d been following the rules better than anyone—but the teacher glared at Pira before turning
back to Liddi.

“Come here, please.”

She followed the teacher to the door and out into the hall. Luko stood there waiting. Shaking.

Everything went cold, like winter had come and the environmental controls failed.

He swept his sister up in his arms, hugged her too tight. She started crying before he said a word and didn’t know why.

Then he told her why. Something about an accident. The details didn’t make sense. Only the bottom line mattered.

Liddi would never see her parents again.

THE NEXT DAY, I OPEN
my eyes and commence staring at the ceiling. I have a problem, and it’s bigger than the fact that I’ve just slept
until midday. The “conversation” with the Khua is only as clear as a dream. Something about making choices, I remember that much. At the time, I thought I had an idea what choices she
meant, but that’s slipped away.

Slipped through my sieve of a brain, just like everything else important. I rub my temples, trying to come up with anything useful. Nothing. Whatever she tried to tell me, it’s gone.

It would be nice to have a name to call her other than “the Khua.”

The name is too strange for me to have made it up, but I don’t hear and feel her voice the same way I did in the dream. Seems like the key to getting answers from Spin-Still is not to ask
directly, but that makes it awfully difficult to get the right questions asked. Maybe that makes sense for an energy being, not bound by the limits of physicality, existing in a hyperdimensional
state. Makes sense but doesn’t, because I’m still limited to a simple set of three dimensions, plus the fourth—time.

A bang on the bedroom door interrupts my efforts to ask without asking. “Are you awake?”

The only way to answer Yilt is to open the door, so I do. He’s alert, tense, yet I get the feeling he hasn’t slept. Maybe Haleians don’t need as much sleep.

“There’s something you should see.” Without another word, he turns back to the main room, so I follow.

Ferinne doesn’t have media-casts, but their news-vids put Sampati’s to shame. One’s frozen on the screen—an image of my face with text symbols along the bottom. Yilt taps
a command to resume the playback.

“Liddi went missing sometime yesterday. The Aelo are concerned for her safety and ask that if anyone sees her, they contact local keepers immediately.”

I look to Yilt, confused. He’s glaring at the screen.

“They’re not talking about the incident with the Khua. Not labeling you a criminal…yet. They haven’t mentioned me. I don’t think that will last.”

His statement confirms he’s smarter than I initially thought, because I think I know what he means. People might panic if they know I’m wearing a Khua around my neck and deliberately
ran off. The idea that an unbalanced Haleian took me might be easier to swallow. If they identify him and word gets out, Yilt will be in trouble, maybe even here in Cim.

There’s a single-symbol word I’ve used enough times that I remember it. I pull up a keypad and hunt the symbol down.
Why?

He starts to say what I’ve already figured out about why the news-vid isn’t reporting everything, but I shake my head to cut him off. I point at Yilt, then point at the word
again.