In case you ever have a choice in the matter, inside a prefab workshop in the middle of a hurricane, with hail starting up outside, is a shitty place to have an argument. I wanted to find someplace, any place, quiet. I wanted to curl up on myself like a frightened plains-person. Instead I dug nails into palms, breathed as slowly as I could, and tried not to scream. I thought Elegy might be doing the same, and that didn’t help.
“If we run off now,” I said, “we let Jace and the corporate team tell the story of what happened here. By the time the storm’s over, we’ll be completely screwed. We need to talk with Cytosine now.”
I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that my conviction was anything more than anxiety talking, the flip side of my desire to hide in a box. But Carol and Athëo and Aunt Priya didn’t argue, and maybe more importantly neither did Rhamnetin.
“It’s the middle of a storm that they’re all terrified to go out in,” said Elegy. “They’re not going to complain if we hole up until the wind calms down.”
“Probably not,” I said. “But Asterion will milk the extra time for all it’s worth.”
“I don’t want to go back out in that atmosphere either,” said Rhamnetin, and I realized that he’d been digging out from under his own fear. “But Judy’s right. I know Cytosine—she’s furious, and whatever she comes to think over the next couple of hours, she’s likely to stay convinced.”
There were a few more go-rounds, but I think Elegy knew there was no real alternative. Whoever was hiding out in the other prefabs could still duck out, and probably would no matter what I said, but Rhamnetin’s witness and our records all showed Elegy here. She could try to defend herself personally, or she could hope the rest of us managed it.
That left the question of getting to Bear Island. Athëo retrieved his mesh and reported that there’d be a window of relative calm in seventeen minutes—twenty-three minutes long, more than enough time to get to the landing site under normal circumstances. If Cytosine wanted proof of how much we cared about this, we’d drip it all over her floor.
It was a long fucking seventeen minutes.
“Now,” said Athëo, and we went out into what would’ve been a perfectly respectable rainstorm any day. We could see a few feet ahead, and open umbrellas without losing them, but it was impossible to stay dry.
The path was a mess of mud, the river beside it a white torrent. Readings told me it was five feet above its normal level and considerably faster, but the readings were sparse; the sensors had all climbed out of the rapids and clung to crannies in the banks like artificial barnacles, trying to minimize post-storm replacement needs. The final records would be all right, but if there was a surge we might not spot it in real time.
And that was a problem when we got to the causeway. It was barely five feet above the river’s normal level, and a sheet of mud and sticks rushed shallow but slippery where there should’ve been solid ground.
“I’m not going over that,” said Elegy. “A branch could come along, you could slip on the mud—I’m not drowning myself for this. Cytosine can fucking wait.”
“She’s got no problem waiting.” But Rhamnetin stuck a tentative toe onto the causeway. “How dangerous is it, really?”
“Dangerous,” said Athëo. “Judy, we’ve got kids at home.”
Carol ducked under my umbrella and put an arm around me. She squeezed my shoulders tightly. “We do. And they need us to convince Cytosine that the watersheds are worth working with, or they might not have a planet when they grow up. One way or another. But we don’t all have to go.”
I heard it in her voice: one of the two of us needed to stay safe for Dori. And I was the one with the diplomatic cachet. I was the one with some modicum of diplomatic expertise. And Carol wasn’t quite willing to admit, aloud, that it should be me.
We had thirteen minutes left in the window, plus or minus thirty seconds. I pulled my wife close and kissed her, trying to taste and feel and not fear for a precious few seconds. She smelled like rain and mint balm. Then I handed her my umbrella, held out my arms, and hugged Athëo and Aunt Priya.
“You all go back to the prefabs,” I said. “You should be able to ride out the storm there, and once Rhamnetin and I get to the ship, we’ll stay there until it’s safe.”
“I should go with you,” said Priya. “I know more about the tech aspects of this than anyone else here. Except Elegy, of course.” Who wasn’t likely to be persuaded. And we still couldn’t count on texting.
I forced my voice steady. “And your sense of balance is…?”
“Not great on the best of days. But still.”
“You won’t convince Cytosine of anything if you fall in the river. Rhamnetin?”
He edged closer, listening.
“There are a few low branches across the path. If you take the high road can you sort of dangle down, and steady me if I slip?”
He lifted two limbs’ worth of eyes to peer down the path. “I think so. Most places, anyway.”
“Great. You go ahead of me, then.”
I checked my pack, made sure the straps were tight and not likely to get in my way. I took a deep breath, and another. At least this wasn’t the sort of thing that made me anxious. It was just terrifying.
Of course a nasty argument, where the fate of the watersheds and the planet might hang on my ability to say the right thing, was waiting on the other side. It didn’t feel real, but was exactly the sort of thing to make me extremely anxious anyway. I kept breathing, tried to focus only on mud and rocks and sticks and keeping track of where Rhamnetin hung in the branches.
Mud squelched. I moved slowly, and still stumbled when I hit one of the roots that straddled the path. We lost a couple of these old trees every storm, came out later to plant far more saplings than we needed. Most would wash away before they could grab tight to the earth. Now I was the unsteady sapling, an East African plains ape picking her way over unsteady ground, my only real advantage over those distant ancestors a friendly grip waiting above. In the corner of my eye, Rhamnetin swung across a gap. I caught whistles and chords over the sound of the wind. I would have to ask later whether that was prayer or complaint. Would have to make sure there was a later to ask.
About a third of the way through, the river had cut a gully across the causeway. Water rushed through the low point, brimming with detritus. I couldn’t tell how deep it went, but fording it was almost certainly a bad idea. I might have jumped across, given stable earth on both sides—but there was only slick, messy ground sloping into the hungry river. “Rhamnetin?”
He lowered himself gingerly from the overgrowth, clinging with several limbs and letting three more hang down like furry vines studded with eyes and mouths and pincers instead of leaves. (So, in fact, not much like vines at all.) I grabbed on, testing to be sure I couldn’t pull him down, and tried to figure out how to steady myself for a jump. Instead, he wrapped a limb around me as if I were a branch myself, and lifted me over the gully. I stumbled on the landing, startled, but he kept hold of my waist until I’d caught my balance.
“There you go, Fay,” he said. “Oof, you weigh almost as much as I do.”
“The weight’s all in my head. Fay?”
“Fay Wray? King Kong climbing buildings? Never mind. I know your movies better than you do.”
“I think I’ve seen a different version.” I wished he didn’t have to let go. The moment of shared balance passed, and we pushed on. Seven minutes. We wouldn’t make the ship in that time, but we needed to at least reach the island.
I moved faster, eyes wide for any hint of safe footing. I was wet enough to almost imagine my discomfort an ordinary state. If I could just believe I’d always been soaked to the skin, always had mud caking my pants against my legs, leaves plastered to my arms and face, it couldn’t distract or distress me. I slipped, grabbed for whatever was nearby, found Rhamnetin again. I murmured the Shma—if I fell, that was supposed to be the last thing I said, right? No, focus on the walking, not the falling. I turned the gain on my soles up all the way, and it still wasn’t enough. The signal stuttered through sensors never designed for this much moisture. I clung to Rhamnetin while I pulled my shoes off entirely. Now I could feel the packed earth beneath mud and roots and stones, whether they moved or stood still. Wood and rock scratched my feet, and the rush of brown water stung my skin, but that’s what bacteriophage cream was for.
Three minutes left, plus or minus thirty seconds, and I thought we were almost there. The sound of the river changed, echoing a nearby shore, and curtains of rain misted a higher canopy ahead.
“Judy!” I jerked my head up, almost losing my balance, and sodden spider legs snatched me into the air. Something slammed against my thigh, and Rhamnetin swung me higher. My stomach cringed with vertigo, a sickening hint of the plunge barely avoided. A tree lay across the path where I’d been. It shifted, settling, and I belatedly processed the close-thunder crack of its breaking.
“Hold on,” called Rhamnetin. “Baby grips, don’t ball up.”
“Can’t,” I called back shakily, “only got two hands,” but I wrapped my arms tight around one limb, my legs around another, the opposite of what my monkey brain wanted. My muscles strained and my guts lurched, and Rhamnetin swung us over the broken oak and down its trunk to safe, muddy ground.
“Oh god.” Everything ached when I let go. I wanted to lie down, and I wanted to puke, and through the lash of adrenaline I tried to remember how to avoid either. My head swam, and I found myself on hands and knees, throat burning with the remains of the scone I’d eaten only a couple hours earlier.
“Judy? Judy, please! Please be okay! What did I do? Did I break something?”
I waved him off, lifted my head to get rainwater in my mouth, spit out terror along with acid. “I’m fine,” I said at last. “Just fear and vertigo. You don’t get motion sick, do you? You couldn’t, swinging around like that.” I tried to figure out how someone with ten mouths would even throw up, and started giggling. “Sorry, more—more maladaptive fear reactions. Give me—give me a second.”
“Okay. I think I strained a couple of legs.”
“You and me both. Ow. We’d better get going, though, the storm is about to get worse.”
The rain closed in, bringing visibility down to almost nothing, and the wind slammed against us. But the path was clear enough, as long as we moved slowly and remembered that runoff would always edge us toward the cliff. It was better than the causeway, and I could brace myself when Rhamnetin had to boost me over fallen branches. I was limping, slowed by strained muscles and a nasty bruise where the tree had grazed me, by the time we stumbled into the clearing and onto the scaled hull of the Solar Flare.
“Will they let us in?” I shouted. The ship felt like metal, like the rain should drum against it, but instead it seemed to slow as it approached and roll off gently. Hail wasn’t much different from micrometeorites, I supposed.
“I’ve got signal here,” said Rhamnetin. “Someone will come.”
He steadied me up the slope, a scramble made bearable only by the promise of its end. I wished for more legs and hands. But light glowed fuzzily ahead of us, and we stumbled through the door into the Ringers’ tame forest, watered only by hydroponics. Moss cushioned my feet, and warm air soothed my aches. Plains-folk and tree-folk surrounded us, exclaiming over our state, Rhamnetin’s injuries as apparent to them as my bruises. Towels, or something close enough to serve, draped over us. Mine was sized for plains-folk, and I didn’t mind at all. I huddled, trying to decide whether it was safe to remove my soaked clothing. It wasn’t like the Ringers wore much, but I needed all the dignity I could get.
“Take that off,” Rhamnetin told me as I picked at my sleeve. “We’ll find you something else later.”
“I know you’re more used to this kind of nonsense,” said Phenylalanine, attempting a cursory medical examination, “but it can’t be good for you.”
“Not really.” I looked around, didn’t see Cytosine, and said fuck it and stripped off my shirt and jeans and bra. I dried my mesh and my scalp and put the mesh back on. I got only the same thin trickle of signal I’d had outside. I texted Carol, just in case it might get through.
I heard Cytosine before I saw her, a cacophony of untranslated Ringer. I wished for Athëo’s translation skills, but not enough to want him here sharing my danger. I stood, tried to make the towel into a dignified wrap rather than a pile of absorbent fabric. Tried to keep it around me without crossing my arms, to keep my body language open and honest. Or maybe I should play up my drowned-kitten state—no. What I needed was to stop second-guessing myself. Pick a course of action, and act.
Loud enough to cut through the furious string section, I called, “We tried to stop the sabotage. I think we succeeded. You should know that Asterion pushed the tech team into it in the first place.”
“The hell we did.” I hadn’t heard Adrien over Cytosine’s anger, but here sui (I recognized the outfit) came beside her. St. Julien trailed behind, jiggling Brice.
“My god,” she said, unguarded. “You look like someone gave the cat a bath. What happened?”
“These people”—I jerked my head at Adrien—“convinced some of our tech team that the corporations were routing malware through the antenna. The team came to my aunt for help, she came to me, we went out in the damn storm to stop them from sabotaging your construction. Asterion caught the tech team, exactly like they planned in the first place, and reported them to you in order to drive a wedge between us. They set them up.”
Adrien cocked sur head. “Faced with all this supposed villainy on our part, why didn’t your techies bring everything to your crowd and poll opinions about whether we were actually doing anything? The networks don’t suffer people haring off on high-risk missions on their own recognizance—or so you boast. Every decision goes through every possible expert until you know it’s right.”
Sui knew that was bullshit, and knew I couldn’t say anything without admitting that this was our second harebrained sabotage attempt in as many weeks. But there was no mockery in sur voice or stance, just the semblance of disbelief worn as perfectly as sur leathers.
“Not everyone follows the rules,” I said instead. “As you all damned well know. Your malware—which is real, even if it’s not going through the antenna—is keeping us from talking properly on the network.” Which was the first time that we’d formally laid that accusation in front of Cytosine. I hoped it stuck. “I can’t even count the number of messages I’ve sent today that never arrived.”
“In the middle of a hurricane,” said St. Julien quietly. I glared at her, but it wasn’t in her interest for the watersheds to weigh heavily in the negotiations either. She wanted off-planet. She was as sure of Brice’s best future as I was of Dori’s and Raven’s.
“They’re designed for disaster response,” I said. “We spun up our core code to hold things together during the cluster storms of ’47. Don’t tell me I can’t get eyes on a thread about corporate sabotage because of a fucking Cat 1 hurricane.”
“This is nonsense,” said Adrien evenly. “She’s trying to distract you from what the watersheds just tried to do. They want us all stranded on Earth.”
I pulled my towel-thing tighter around me. Arguing with Adrien wouldn’t solve anything; it was Cytosine I needed to convince. She’d gone quiet, eyestalks flicking between us, waiting.
I turned to her, trying to focus my communication so she could understand, even through our unfamiliar body language. Even through my shivering, only partly from cold, and the shudder of breath in my throat that threatened to shatter my words. “Cytosine, I appeal to you. Asterion—maybe just Jace’s group, I don’t pretend to understand internal corporate dynamics—has undermined our networks in an attempt to co-opt these negotiations. All the tools we’ve developed to help us cooperate, they’re doing everything they can to wreck. Unless you refuse to work with them, they’ll continue to undermine us—and you’ll be stuck trying to form a symbiosis with people who’ll subvert any decision they don’t like. They think everything is a game, and cheating part of the rules.”
Cytosine’s gaze turned on Rhamnetin. “Explain this eccentricity.” I stumbled over the venom in that last word until I caught up with the Ringer metaphor: an eccentric orbit, unstable and about to crash.
Rhamnetin might not like Cytosine’s anger, but he was used to it. “It’s like Judy said. Her mother’s sister traveled through the storm to warn us. She’s an expert in the code underlying the networks, and she believed Asterion had misled the rogue group about the risks of the antenna.” Here he added something in his own language—a better term? “We couldn’t message the rogues either, so we rode out to stop them. I saw Judy and Priya and Carol and Athëo take great risks to save our antenna, and watched Elegy attack them. And then you called. I could only get one human over the causeway to the ship, so Judy traveled with me and the others went back. She risked her life to make it here. She’s been courageous, and we’d be wrong to hold the rogues’ actions against her.”
“I hold nothing against her. But the watersheds are another matter. They want to keep humanity on Earth. They wouldn’t object at all if the antenna failed.”
“I did,” I said. “I worry about Earth’s future, but I didn’t think it was right, and I risked myself to protect your way home. My whole household shared those risks, and Aunt Priya shared them. Others would too, if we’d been able to reach them. The watersheds care about means, not just ends. If we don’t do things the right way, it poisons any outcome.” Something I should have remembered on Zealand, before it proved itself true.
“But you still want to keep humanity earthbound,” said St. Julien. “The sabotage could have forced that outcome.”
I turned on her. “We’re not arguing about our goals! We’re arguing about what we did. The watersheds aren’t trying to screw anyone over—the corporations are, and it sounds like you plan to help them.” I winced as I said it. Losing my temper with St. Julien wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Losing my temper would push Cytosine to stay angry, our similarities keeping her from taking anything I said seriously. Rhamnetin stroked my shoulder.
“Enough accusations,” said Cytosine. “I can’t trust anything you say, only what we know happened. I won’t put you out in this atmosphere; you can wait with the others.”