Spinning Starlight (36 page)

As usual, Tiav sees all that I’m feeling. “Can I see what Spin-Still thinks?”

I hate that. The sempu around my neck is his. He shouldn’t have to ask for permission, and the answer is always yes.

He slips his fingers beneath the crystal, brushing against me. I’m not sure if it’s my pulse or his that I feel, but I count the beats. It’s eight before he lets go, and his
hand doesn’t move far, just enough to rest on my cheek.

“She says the Khua won’t be well again until your brothers are released, and if they aren’t well again, worse things will happen. She thinks if we tell your brothers your idea,
one of them will know how to do it.”

That means finding my brothers. It’s hours until sunset, and we can’t wait that long. Hovercars aren’t anywhere near as fast as streamers, so getting to a place on Sampati
where night’s fallen isn’t an option, either.

We can talk to them inside the Khua. Not the “narrowed” Khua that Tiav is used to. I couldn’t hear my brothers in there. It’ll have to be the unfettered, full-blown,
on-
all
-the-frequencies kind.

The kind Tiav didn’t want to go into again.

I take his arm and lead him out to the yard. Looking for a Khua on Sampati is nothing like finding one on Ferinne. I wonder how we’re going to do this.

Just like making a wish, a Khua winks into existence, ready and waiting.

Tiav sighs. “We’re going in there, aren’t we?”

I squeeze his arm. He likes it about as much as I like streamers. I’d go without him, but I need him to do the talking.

“This is definitely not what I expected in all the years my mother trained me to be an Aelo. But I guess important things are often unexpected, aren’t they?”

We enter the Khua, and I focus everything on not
going
anywhere—none of the other Points—just letting my brothers find me. Through the chaos and the freezing heat of dark
fire and the screeching silence and the pain-pain-pain, I have to keep my focus.

Fabin is first, then the others one by one, gathering around us as they did when they took me to Ferinne. As then, their presence blocks most of the pain, but they’re weak. They
won’t last long, not in a Khua twisting and pulling like this, poisoned and sick.

But we’re together. All of us.

“Liddi had an idea,” Tiav says. He’s better at focusing through the chaos than I am, and he dives into explaining.

My brothers listen, not interrupting, not questioning until he’s done.

“That works on the figurative,” Luko says. “But we have to work out how to make it happen on the literal end.”

“I might have a piece of it,” Fabin says. “We came in through the conduits, but our biological energy pulls us toward the Khua, because they’re drawn to life. The eight
of us are what’s getting the two tangled in each other. We’re the glue.”

“If that’s true,” Durant says, “getting us out will let them untangle and separate, fixing everything.”

“After all this, the conduits will probably collapse,” Ciro adds. “They’re too damaged.”

Emil gives an uncharacteristically dark look. “Good.”

Tiav is watching me and sees what I want to say. “We still need to know
how
to get you out so all this can happen.”

“I have an idea,” Fabin says. “But we’ll need help from the Khua, if they’re willing.”

He talks about convergence and nesting energies and things I only half understand, but I get enough. Tuning several conduits and Khua to match, creating the “bubble,” pulling my
brothers free…and Spin-Still. We’ll definitely need her.

Ten minutes and five eternities later, we have a plan.

It’ll take a lot more wishes to pull this off.

I’m pacing. I know it won’t accomplish anything, but there’s nothing else to do. We’ve slept—my brothers insisted on it as we left them in the
Khua—but all it’s done is make me restless.

Through a lot of drawing and gesturing, I got Tiav and Dom working together on fabricating a blank sempu. Between the two of them, they got the right crystal composition, and Tiav’s
engraving it now in the workshop. When he’s done, Dom will make exact duplicates, some for the Khua and some modified to interface with the conduit control systems, ready to filter the Khua
and bring those conduits into harmony with them. Temporarily.

My job is to figure out how we’re going to get to the conduit terminals to set things up. Eight conduits, one for each of my brothers. Not just any conduits—the ones they were
working on when they were trapped, which they made Tiav and me memorize. We have to get to them even though the second I go into any city, the vid-cams will be all over us. Minali will know
I’m back, and she’ll stop us.

I can’t let that happen, but I also can’t find a way around it. If Tiav goes alone, the vid-cams will ignore him, but he has no voiceprint, no one knows him, so no access to
anything. I need to be there, because Liddi Jantzen would be let into a restricted conduit terminal, but I can’t go, because Liddi Jantzen can’t go anywhere without getting noticed.

I’m an idiot.

Tiav is sitting at Fabin’s usual spot in the workshop when I come in. I don’t want to mess up his engraving, so I wait until he notices me. It’s difficult when I’m ready
to explode.

“You have an idea?”

Yes, but I really don’t know how to explain it. Then I remember one of the news-vids Dom summarized. I pull it up and scan to the right moment.

“JTI technologists are working on repairing the damage to the conduits.”

I freeze the image accompanying the words—people in JTI uniforms entering a conduit terminal. I point to one of them and point at myself.

“We’ll disguise ourselves as repair workers from JTI?”

No, not that. Vid-cams use sophisticated face-recognizing algorithms, so disguises are useless. Before I can think of a way to be more specific, Dom jumps in.

“Liddi hardly needs to disguise herself as a JTI employee when she stands to inherit the company.”

Perfect. With a nod, I put on a stern face and act out marching around giving people orders.

Tiav slowly smiles. “You’ll go as yourself. With something as big as all the conduits being down, of course the head of the company should oversee repairs personally. Will it work?
Will people believe it and let us in?”

I scan through the news-vid again until I find an image of Minali. Freeze. Point. Shake my head.

“That’s her, the woman who did this? So everyone but her? Okay. Then we definitely watch out for her.”

We’ll need a few things from Dom. I didn’t want to resort to this, but I can’t think of any other way to explain it, so I fish into Tiav’s pocket for his com-tablet. Not
connected to the Ferinne network anymore, but it still has the read-aloud program. He keeps engraving while I work out a message.

“Dom mayk mee tock nooz-vid.”

“I don’t believe I understand,” Dom says.

Of course not. He wasn’t programmed to interpret something so broken, but Tiav’s become an expert at it.

“She wants you to make one of those news-vids with her talking, but she can’t talk, so you’ll have to fabricate it. Can he do that?”

“Certainly,” Dom answers for himself. “It depends on what she wants to say, naturally, but with the number and variety of recordings on file, it’s quite likely I could
find the right words.”

“You want to announce that you’re going to check progress on the conduits?” Tiav asks. “Is that smart?”

It’ll be a little bit tougher for Minali to quietly get rid of me if everyone knows what I’m doing. I nod. I need something else, too, but I think I can draw this one. A sketch of
myself standing at a door, little sound waves traveling from my mouth to the receiver.

“Voiceprint,” Dom says. “Yes, if a conduit is unattended, you’ll need to use it, and that will be difficult if you can’t speak. Shall I prepare a high-quality
recording of that as well?”

Another nod, and I get to work writing the exact words I need for the news-vid. No shortcuts, no skipping anything. Word-for-word.

By the time Tiav finishes engraving the sempu and fabricating the duplicates, I’m finished, too. Dom pieces together the script, remodulating it so it sounds natural, and I practice
mouthing along a few times so it looks convincing before we record. Tiav has a strange expression, so I give him what-face.

“First time hearing your voice, sort of,” he says with half a smile. “But I’m still holding out for the real thing.”

With the plan as we worked it out with my brothers, he’ll hear it soon enough. We link Dom to one of my own com-tablets in case we need him and head out to the hovercar.

Time for me to show Tiav around Sampati.

Being the oldest also made Durant the busiest, so when he offered to take Liddi to visit Yishu, just the two of them, she was thrilled. She wasn’t sure what
they’d do there, but time with her brother was good enough.

They got there, and she was confused.

First stop was an art institute where they saw students working on paintings and sculptures, and walked through the galleries. Sometimes Liddi could identify what the piece depicted. A
painted landscape. A sketch of a child’s face. A sculpture of a dog. Others made no sense. Splotches of color and random shapes.

Next they took in a series of concerts. Stringed instruments. Metallic instruments. Big drums and little drums. Some of the music had rhythms that spoke to Liddi’s sense of patterns.
Others felt discordant, unnatural.

Finally, a dance performance. More music, and then the movements of the dancers. Some fluid, some sharp. The lines and angles of their bodies forming patterns of their own, moving again
before Liddi could fully take them in.

During an intermission, she couldn’t take the confusion anymore. She tugged on Durant’s sleeve. He turned to her, but she waved him down to her level so no one else would
hear.

“What’s the point?” she asked quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“On Pramadam, I get it. They cliff-dive for adrenaline, and they play sports because they want to win. But what’s dance or any of this for?”

Durant’s response confused her more. He looked concerned. “When they were dancing just now, what did you feel?”

“I don’t know. That I didn’t get it.”

“You’re thinking too much, Liddi.”

At eleven years old, Liddi had never been accused of doing that. Thinking too
little
, maybe. “You’re all always telling me we’re Jantzens and we use our
heads.”

His expression softened as he smoothed her hair back. “I know, maybe we say that too much. When we go back in, try not to think about what they’re doing. See what you feel,
okay?”

It wasn’t easy. Liddi just wanted the answer, and hated that Durant wouldn’t tell her. Not thinking wasn’t natural.

Then a new dance started. Just a man and woman dancing with a younger boy.

Parents and their son,
she thought.

And the music was sad. So were their movements, their dancing. Aching and yearning.

They lost him. Or he lost them.

Like we lost Mom and Dad.

Tears fell, and Liddi was glad vid-cams weren’t allowed in the performance hall. As the audience applauded, Durant put an arm around his baby sister and whispered in her ear.

“That’s the point of art, Liddi. It reminds us that thinking is well and good, but feeling is what makes us alive.”