Ruuel hated this plan. He didn't openly object to it, or look annoyed or anything. But he kept his eyes almost closed the entire time, and what few orders he gave were even more clear and precise than usual. I don't think Kanato of Eighth liked it either, maybe because he and Mori spent a lot of time yesterday evening talking quietly to each other. I didn't enjoy the idea of Mori being trapped among the sarcophagi any more than they did – nor Sonn. Sonn doesn't make it easy for me to like her, but I appreciate the way she approaches my combat training. Well, I wouldn't like for anyone to be trapped under a mountain, even Fifth Squad.
But nothing bad happened. Whatever else the malachite marble might or might not do, it was obedient enough about removing the seal. Ruuel opened his eyes to half-mast again and nearly caught me watching him (who am I kidding – I've really got to stop watching him because I already know how effortlessly he spots such things).
After the seal was gone they did another round of readings and had the various Sight talents touch the marble to try and figure out what it's for. They all seemed unsettled by it, particularly Halla, and all said pretty much the same thing: dominance. Somehow the marble would give power. Halla said over others, Selkie said over the world around us, and Ruuel wouldn't say more than just power.
Then, of course, they had me touch it and it gave me a headache. And made
everything
go blurry. I felt like my bones were vibrating, and had a hard time not vomiting all over the mysterious mystic stone. This was one of the days when I had to struggle to not have a tantrum. Obviously they wanted lots of readings – and because of the Nuran calling me a touchstone and this being a big stone (which makes me feel sick) they spent ages (well, it wasn't that long, but it felt like forever) until finally Tsur Selkie said I could go back to the ship and have my brain scanned for the ten-hundred-millionth time.
When the medics let me go I still felt sick so I went back to my pod and sulked until I fell asleep and now, of course, I've woken up just after everyone's gone to bed. Must try to get back to sleep so I don't konk out halfway through tomorrow.
Sunday, April 20
Belonging
So I'm back on Tare.
This whole day has done my head in, starting out with another of the Ruuel-dreams. I was half-awake and knew he was there, but I didn't have that proper dream-logic which lets you just accept everything no matter how unlikely. I really thought he'd for some reason gotten into my pod with me, and was lying curled against my back. My thoughts were this escalating stream of wtfwtfwtfwtfWTF! and then he leaned forward and I thought he was going to kiss the back of my neck, and I took a great gasping breath, and woke up. I was lying in the same position as I'd been in the dream, just with no Ruuel. And my nanosuit was completely withdrawn into a pad onto my back, so I was wearing only underwear and the uniform harness. The interface isn't supposed to respond to your commands when you're asleep, but I guess I must have been just awake enough. I'm so glad I didn't make the lid of my pod transparent as well.
I went and hid in the shower, thinking about all the ways I could humiliate myself half-asleep, and horrified by the idea of going anywhere near Ruuel. I don't really know why. Sight Sight is a difficult talent to define, but nothing I've seen or read suggests he'd be able to know what I was dreaming when I was inside a shielded pod. It almost certainly shows him that I'm highly embarrassed when I'm around him, but it's not "Omniscience Sight" or anything close to it.
And it didn't matter. After half my shower I managed to spare a glance out of Angst Central at the day's schedule and saw that Fourth had just headed off on another attempt to find a good route through the spaces to Pandora. And then the
Litara
arrived and Tsur Selkie sent me a message that I was being assigned back to Tare. The wrong dream had come true, in reverse.
I had hardly any time, since the
Litara
was leaving after a quick drop-off of equipment, and could only numbly dry my hair and grab my bag and something to eat. I did send an email to Fourth saying not much more than goodbye and good luck, which they would have received as soon as they were back in real-space. I'm so glad I've been preparing myself and not letting myself think of Fourth as 'my' team again. If nothing else, I can pretend to be pleased to be proven right. But I felt very alone and disconnected on the trip back to Tare, with a whole 'pod room' to myself.
Not quite left to my own devices however, since a greysuit had obviously been assigned to make sure I didn't go off the rails during the trip. There always seems to be someone now: usually one of the squads, or a greensuit or a greysuit who will pop by and pretend they're not checking me over for signs of imminent meltdown. It's hugely annoying, but I guess they felt they'd been forgetting my psychological aspects too much lately. Why they think reassigning the useful stray without warning is a good way of dealing with me is another question.
Not just a useful stray: I'm a
multi-purpose
stray. I enhance, hear LOUD noises, act as a key to lost civilisations, and see blurry! From the looks of my calendar, I'm going to be Third Squad's babysitting problem now. Pass the bloody parcel.
There was one good point to counter my gloomy morning. Tsur Selkie had organised a techie guy called Voiz Euka to recreate Earth's calendar, and I spent an hour with him after my inevitable medical exam, explaining the way Earth measures time, letting him measure the time units from my phone, and working through all the variations of the calendar. He seemed to think it not too difficult an exercise, once we'd properly compared my phone's seconds and minutes to Tare's time units, and so now I won't have to fret about losing my phone. A whole clock and calendar program, written specifically to keep me happy. I even remembered leap years.
And as soon as First Squad heard I was back, they arranged to meet up. They were heading out on rotation soon after I arrived, and I was on a slightly earlier shift to them, but we met at Mara's quarters when they finished their rotation and had nuna (crepes) for dinner.
It was great to be off-duty and off-record. As off-record as second level monitoring lets me be, anyway. Also fun to not have to wear my uniform, and to eat food which involved a lot of sweetness and not a lot of attention to nutritional value. To be teased by Lohn and hugged by Mara and have Maze be kind and a little worried.
I wasn't even close to surprised when Zee took me back to my room and interrogated me mercilessly about the whole thing with Ninth Squad. And, to my dismay, about what exactly Fifth and Seventh Squad had done to make me not want to work with them. But she said that my squad preferences weren't general knowledge, that Maze gets told stuff like that because he's senior captain, and that she was asking on his behalf.
I really didn't want to bring Zan into it – I don't think she'd be at all happy about me talking about the way they bully her – so I just said I'd seen how nasty Kajal and Forel were toward other Setari, and explained about the testing session I'd had with Fifth Squad.
"It's not that I think they
do
anything to me," I said. "Just that I think they find it funny if I scared or embarrassed. Going into spaces, need to trust squad more than that."
Zee was more than a little annoyed after reviewing my testing session with Fifth, and said I should have told someone, at least about the part where they went ahead of me in the Ena. And then she asked me if anyone or anything else had made me uncomfortable or unhappy. I gave her an entertaining description of my meeting of Squad One, and she seemed satisfied that I was getting along with most of the Setari.
I'm so glad Zee's okay. They all looked tired, but I couldn't spot any new injuries. It's so messed up that when I meet up with my closest friends here, I check them for damage.
Oh, and it's Jules' birthday. Happy birthday, brat. Hope you scored lots of loot.
Monday, April 21
Something a little different
Taarel from Third had me meet her for breakfast, and explained what we'd be doing for the next few days. One of the gates from near-space to real-space is in a tremendously inconvenient spot on Unara: a major travel junction. Over the past few decades it's slowly been growing, and they've continually had to increase the size of the lock around it. It's nearing the point that they're going to have to do some major infrastructure rejigging if it grows any further, and it already causes a huge amount of blockage and trouble.
Ever since they figured out that with my enhancement there was a possibility of actually closing gates, there's been an increasing amount of pressure to assign Taarel and me to "closing really annoying gates" duty. The 'mayor' (Lahanti) of Unara, one of the most powerful people on Tare, finally ordered KOTIS to give this particular gate highest priority and get it done. Guess that explains my abrupt reassignment.
The problem was that even with my enhancement, it's exhausting work and they estimated it would take just Taarel and me weeks to get this Rana Junction gate closed. They decided multiple talents assisting would speed it up, if Taarel initiated a closure, but they couldn't take off rotation every strong Ena manipulation talent, particularly now KOTIS is posting squads to Muina as well, so they're using the strongest of the Kalrani Ena manipulation talents instead.
Today was a test day, to see whether a mass effort would work, so after breakfast we met up with the Kalrani who had been selected for the experiment. There were ten, all very correct in their brown and cream uniforms. The youngest looked about twelve and the oldest the same age as me: probably one of the candidates for Fourteenth Squad. Thirteenth Squad has already been chosen and is on 'pre-rotation training' and has moved into the rooms on the same floor as me, though I haven't seen any of them about yet.
They all seemed to know Taarel, at least to say 'good day Tsee Taarel' to. I hadn't thought about it, but the 'graduated' Setari would be the logical candidates to give the Kalrani some expert tutoring. And of course before the Setari had qualified for their squads, they'd been Kalrani as well. Since it was Taarel, I wasn't surprised that most of them couldn't quite hide being awestruck by her presence, and were more than a little nervous and determined to be excellent for her.
They didn't know how to treat me. I'm a curiosity and the prospect of a massive increase of power. I wondered if they'd heard about Ninth Squad, and politely said hello back when they greeted me, and otherwise kept my mouth shut, even when I saw that the test session was in my old room in the medical facility, and the gate they were testing closure techniques on was the one I'd torn into near-space. It was very strange seeing my old room-with-a-view with a thick metal gate-lock built around where my bed had been. They'd removed one of the walls, but there still wasn't much room for the twelve of us, and I had to be careful about where I was standing.
Taarel took them through the touching-the-stray rules, then enhanced herself and started the closing process. Once she'd demonstrated, she had each of the Kalrani enhance and try in turn to close the gate just by themselves. I found this very dull, even with a projection of the gate for me to look at, and so it was simply a procession of serious kids frowning at the air. One of the Kalrani, a boy about fourteen called Dayn, managed to start it closing. It meant so much to him, and he was trying so hard not to show it that he went white and then red when Taarel gave him one of those brief, approving nods which Ruuel does so well, except Taarel adds a warm smile. Taarel is definitely charisma-plus.
After that, she enhanced again and started working on closing the gate properly, telling each of the Kalrani to enhance and join in one by one. They can't work on it continuously, needing to rest sooner than the five minutes my enhancement lasts, with long recovery times. But still, in less than a kasse they'd completely closed the thing, and were all looking tremendously exhausted. But very pleased.
After that were medical tests for all, heh, and Taarel told me that we were likely to be cleared to head to Unara tomorrow. Then I slept all afternoon and for the second time since I came back to Tare I dreamed of wandering around KOTIS, through endless empty corridors, looking for Ruuel.
Back in Year 10, Alyssa fell for a guy named Kyle Marcus. He was the sort who ends up Dux of the school, playing violin recitals, and winning debating prizes, but fun enough that hardly anyone hated him for it. Alyssa and Kyle were both on the student group helping organise the joint Year 10 Formal with Agowla and the Boy's Tech, and she spent the entire term being her brightest, funniest self: chatting with him, putting up all the signals. But when the term was over, and he'd passed up going to the after-party she'd arranged, she gave up. She said it would be embarrassing for them both if she ran after him like a dog in heat.
I don't want to run after someone who doesn't want me. And I've been trying very hard not to think about Ruuel, or write about him, and I try to avoid sitting around looking at log images of him because I'm sure what files I access is part of second level monitoring as well. But I keep having these dreams and when I wake up all I can think about is that he's not there. That he's not just one pod over. That he's not even on the same planet as me, and if I cried out for him he wouldn't come. It's so pathetic.
Ruuel has never encouraged me in the remotest way, never shown any interest in me beyond carrying out his captain-duties. Unfortunately, I can't simply make a sane, logical decision to not want him, and so I've spent the past couple of days feeling miserable and being frustrated with myself. Because Ruuel, who has never sat down to chat with me or spent any effort trying to socialise with me, isn't here. I miss just being near him.