Tembi walked over to the edge of the roof and looked down. The city below was so distant that it seemed small—so small!—and yet it also soared above her as she stood atop this mighty mountain of shipping crates, one mountain among many, boxes of plass and metal wrenched from the nearby docks and bolted together to form crude housing. The Deep hadn’t stacked these, oh no. These slums had been shaped by human hands alone, slammed together into ridges and valleys, vast multicolored slices baking in the sun. They formed the streets of her home city: to the north was her old neighborhood, the one where she had spent eleven years, the one where people might still recognize her if she came around…
Adhama. An arid planet that was somehow also unbearably humid, its people with skin as hard as stone.
Home.
“You grew up here?” Bayle asked, staring open-mouthed at the slums below them while doing her utter best to pretend she wasn’t staring at all. She looked vaguely fishlike, out of place and gasping. “You and Moto?”
Tembi nodded. “He lived just a few neighborhoods over from me, can you believe it?”
“Why does the Deep choose so many of its Witches from your homeworld?”
“Moto thinks it’s because the Deep heard someone say that you’ve got to have thick skin to be a Witch, and the Deep took it literally.” She sighed, and added, “But who knows?”
Moto. Handsome, smiling Moto, always ready with a joke or a shoulder to cry on, whichever was most in need. He had an earnestness to him that was undeniable, an honesty that drew you to him for comfort.
It made him one of Domino’s most valuable spies.
And he had gone missing.
Which was impossible. Not when he was friends with a near-omniscient being who knew where each and every one of its Witches was at any given moment, down to the very location of (at least in Tembi’s case, but probably in Moto’s, too) the individual molecules in their bodies.
Witches didn’t go missing. They couldn’t. If you couldn’t get your friend on the comm, you asked the Deep to jump you to them. If the two of you were in a snit and they didn’t want to be disturbed, then you told the Deep with as much emotion as you could muster that you needed to see them, and eventually the Deep would relent and open the way. If you were a Witch with seniority, you could get the Deep to bend very quickly. As Domino was among the most powerful senior Witches—if not the most powerful—the Deep should have dropped Moto straight into her office, probably with a cup of her favorite morning coffee in his hand.
But Domino said that the Deep couldn’t tell her where Moto was, and it refused to bring her to him.
Was he still alive?
Yes. The Deep was sure of this.
Go, Tembi, Domino had told her. Go and find him, and bring him home to Lancaster.
To Adhama, then, and Moto’s childhood neighborhood. She pointed towards the valleys cutting through the metal mountains, far below. “That’s where Domino says we should start looking for Moto,” she said. “Says that if he’s gone to ground, he might have done so at home.”
“Do you think so?”
“Large hells, no!” Tembi hopped up on the low ledge of the shipping container’s makeshift rooftop. “Moto’s too smart to hide somewhere where anyone would think to look for him.”
Bayle climbed up beside her. “So we’re here because…?”
“Domino,” Tembi replied. “You think she doesn’t have at least one set of eyes on us?”
Bayle shivered. “I don’t like the idea that she might be hiding in our minds.”
“She’s not that powerful,” Tembi replied, as she shut her own eyes to concentrate on the sounds of the wind moving around her. “If she was, why would she bother with spies?”
Moto’s gone missing. Domino again, smiling gently, easily, offering Tembi a bribe she couldn’t choose to pass up. Find him for me? I’m sure he’s well, but I do worry.
Find her friend, and slide into Domino’s own personal council, all at once? Yes. Of course.
That’s how she gets you, you know. Another internal voice, and this one sounded exactly like Matindi when she went into full mothering mode. She gives you logical options with acceptable consequences, and there’s no good reason to keep your neck out of the noose.
Tembi sighed and rubbed her temples. It’d be easier if she were a telepath herself. Then she’d have a reason for all of this constant clutter in her mind.
Focus, Tembi.
Instead, focus on Bayle, standing beside her and shifting her weight restlessly from foot to foot. Bayle had asked her something: she waited until her friend repeated herself. “So we go through the motions of looking for him here, and then move on?”
Tembi replied by leaning forward and letting herself topple from the rooftop.
She couldn’t feel the wind as she fell, but she heard it, roaring in her ears as she fell five stories, ten…twenty… She turned and looked over her shoulder; Bayle was right on her heels, her own eyes shut and long hair billowing behind her, smiling with the joy of it.
They spread their arms and let the Deep catch them, the air moving around them to slow their descent. They came down to earth as gently as blown feathers, bare feet alighting upon pavement so old and cracked it was merely a memory of concrete.
“The Witches have landed,” Bayle muttered quietly, as the crowds around them pulled away, pulled back, disappeared into the dark of the stores, the shelters, the alleyways, leaving the two of them alone in the middle of the street.
“And now…” Tembi took hold of Bayle’s sleeve and jumped them ten streets to the east. They stepped out of the Deep in an alley.
Bayle recoiled at the smell of the trash piled around them. “Let’s go pretend to look for Moto,” she gasped, as she unfolded a headscarf and wrapped it around her hair. “Good?”
“Good.” Tembi adjusted her own scarf, making sure her earrings were visible. Before they had jumped to Adhama, they had stacked their fingers with silver and gold rings, and hung heavy chains around their necks, their hard currency on display. It was a siren’s song of wealth, sure to tug at the smartest and bravest who lived within in the shadows.
Ten streets over, the word of their fall from the heights was spreading. The rumor that Witches were in town would keep them from getting popped or rolled. No one in the slums of Adhama was a fool. Witches had money, but you couldn’t take money from a Witch. Not without enraging the Deep. But if you had something she wanted, you could con her for all the coin she carried.
They had come to Adhama to be conned.
Bayle reached up to touch her face, an unthinking gesture. She stopped herself before she could blur the paint. She and Tembi had washed the Deep’s own paint away and had drawn their own versions of Witches’ marks. Bayle’s fake mark was a spiderweb, while Tembi’s was a decent resemblance of the carnivorous pink rose from Matindi’s garden. They were Witches, yes, but they were not themselves. For the length of the afternoon, Bayle would call herself Eliá and Tembi would be Selene, and anybody who tried to describe the two Witches who had come to town would run into problems.
Into the streets. The Witches ignored how the people pressed close, unnaturally close, testing the lines of their bodies for a purse. Sorry, friends, no coin or credit here, just the jewelry, and no pickpocket was good enough to slip away with a ring without the Deep noticing and bouncing it back to its owner’s finger. This wealth must be earned.
A mention here, there. Do you remember Moto? Yes, the local boy who left for Lancaster. Has he been through here recently? Why? Oh, no reason. He’s on vacation and we want to surprise him.
Lunch time. Meats of indeterminate origin on a stick, eaten while leaning against the wall of the market square. A far cry from their earlier plans of gourmet dining on Earth, but Bayle’s eyes widened in astonishment and she went back to the vendor for seconds, and another small silver ring vanished into the old man’s pockets as she showered him with compliments.
More walking. More talking. The children swore they’ve seen Moto! Just today! Come, come, we must hurry… A neighborhood elder stopped them before the children drew them off the street, clapping his hands and driving the urchins away with shouted threats, followed by apologies to the Witches. Children, ach! But what can you do?
More walking. The neighborhood turned to ruins. There are no more children, at least none that they can see. They had been replaced by people who seemed carved from living stone. Tembi’s skin, hard as it is, is still skin: it moves along with her moods. She could still smile. She could still frown. These people were petrified by the cruelty of their very lives. Cracks along their eyelids allowed them to blink; canyons along their cheeks allowed them to eat and speak; their fingers might as well have been rock with pliable clay for knuckles.
More walking. A storm had torn a path straight through the center of the neighborhood, and no one had bothered to put it back together. Maybe they couldn’t afford to do so: a one-credit nail still cost a credit. They saw children again, playing on a chunk of rusted metal with a twisty bit that nearly resembled a playground slide.
Bayle was close to crying.
Tembi jumped them another ten streets north and east, and they started again.
The process repeated itself, except now neither of them had any appetite. They bought food and gave it away. The silver rings were spent; they had gold, but by then they had realized that dropping gold into this system would be like seeding it with tiny bombs, future disasters in the forms of robbery and murder.
Tembi conjured more silver from her stash back on Lancaster, and they bought food for the pack of urchins at their heels.
(Neither of them would admit that this was for them, and not the children. They both knew that no matter how many children they fed, there’d always be more they couldn’t reach…couldn’t even see! Suffering was like cockroaches in the sense that for every person in pain you saw, there were a thousand you didn’t, and most of the time it was easier to pretend you didn’t notice that first one than to do anything about it. At least these children could have a good meal, and their consciences could scream a little more quietly.)
They repeated the process again.
And again.
And then it was finally sunset.
“Ready to call it?” Tembi asked, thinking, Please, please, please don’t make me be the one who turns away from my own home.
Bayle stared at her long enough to make Tembi wonder if, perhaps, her friend was a telepath after all, and said, “Once more. To be sure.”
“To be sure,” Tembi echoed, her stomach sinking as she said it.
Their jump to the northeast dumped them out in the doorway of a small tavern. Wordlessly, they went inside. The tavern was old, its walls made from stone instead of metal. The building had stood for so long that every object was slightly abraded from Adhama’s frequent windstorms, and the walls were curling inward from a hundred layers of peeling paint. They fell into a booth at the back corner, not looking at each other. If they did, then one of them would have to bend, and then they’d end up back in the streets again. So, it was studious concentration on anything except each other.
Tembi ordered for the two of them, paying for their meals with yet another silver ring. They sat in silence, nursing drinks that were more fruit and ice than liquid.
“It wasn’t all bad,” Tembi said after a long while. “Growing up here, I mean. My mom and my sisters made sure I never went hungry. I had a good home. I was loved.”
Bayle nodded, stirring her drink with an old long-handled spoon, tink-tink-tink, metal against plass.
“Although, you know, once I got out of here, I spent a long time wondering why the Deep didn’t just come down here and fix…” Tembi waved a hand in the air aimlessly. “…this.”
“Probably because that’s our job,” Bayle replied. When she saw Tembi’s face, she added, “Not you and me. Everybody. All of us. Since we’re the ones who made this.”
Tembi nodded.
“That’s probably why the Deep doesn’t like war,” her friend continued. “We keep killing each other, and it could stop it, but why bother?” Bayle was still stirring, adding a little more force than necessary, tink!-tink!-tink! the drink near to sloshing over the sides. “No matter what it does, we’ll just find new excuses to start the next one.”
A litter of sleeping kittens appeared on the table in front of them. There was enough time for one of them to wake up and let out a tiny squall before the Deep vanished them again.
“That’s going to grow up to be one weird cat,” Tembi muttered.
Bayle slid out of her booth and stomped off in the direction of the washroom.
Tembi put her head in her hands. “What a day,” she said to herself. The bomb and the moon and the Council and then Domino and now a missing Witch when Witches can’t go missing, and she’d probably been awake for at least twenty hours but once space lost all meaning then time was the next to lay its head on the chopping block, and after she found Moto she’d be dosing herself with meds to get back on Lancaster’s sleep cycle—
“Pardon, Witch? Excuse me?”
Tembi looked up to find an Adhamantian standing beside the table. Their long hair was tied back by a headscarf. They wore no jewelry, and their robes were a couple of cycles away from threadbare, but they were clean and their dark skin moved in all the usual ways.
“I have a message,” they said, eyes fixed on Tembi’s cheek. “If you are a Witch.”
Tembi sat up. “I am.”
Their ears tipped down, a gesture which shouted louder than words about how they thought she was a liar. Tembi’s own ears moved to lay flat against her head to show she had taken offense. An overreaction? Maybe, but this day just kept going and there was no end in sight. Matthew didn’t like it when she went brawling in the streets, but she felt it was good for his health if he got to lecture her on conduct unbecoming a Witch at least once a quarter.
The messenger ignored her. “There is no shame in waiting for the Witch to return,” they said, glancing towards the hallway which led to the washroom.
Tembi glared at them and stood, gathering her robes around her, and walked towards the rear exit. As she passed the washroom, she rapped on the door and called, “Clandestine meeting in the alley.”
Splashing sounds answered her, as if the sink had been stoppered and filled, and an out-of-place woman from an ocean planet was trying her best to get as much of her body in the water as possible. Then, a muffled, “Be right there.”
The back door of the café was locked with a length of chain, an old security ’bot clinging to the padlock with a set of oversized claws as an extra deterrent against anyone on the inside trying to open the door for would-be looters. Tembi didn’t slow her pace, letting the Deep jump her from one side of the door to the other. The alley was almost pitch black, and there was a sharp drop on the other side where a staircase had rotted away; she stepped from the air to the ground, her robes billowing around her as she slowly descended stairs that no longer existed.
If Matindi had taught her anything, it was how to make an entrance.
A voice came from the shadows: “One of ’em’s real.”
A different voice, from a different pile of shadows: “Gallimore, did you get the other girl to come?”
“She is on her way,” said Tembi’s escort. “It won’t be long.”
“I’m just going to start hurling bobcats,” Tembi grumbled to herself. Then, loudly, “I’m told there’s a message for me?”
“For the Witch.” The second pile of shadows moved, and as Tembi’s eyes adjusted she could see the outline of a slim figure. There was a muffled clinking sound, and a short rod held loosely by their side bloomed in electric fire, vivid green sparks cascading from one end. “From her friend, Moto.”
Moto. His name should have been a comfort, but Tembi couldn’t look away from that sparking rod. She had been popped by the local law more than once as a child, and she had never been able to shake her lingering fear of popsticks. They could shock or stun or even kill—No, judge, I don’t know how the settings got damaged! This is horrible and it’s all my fault!—and she never trusted a person with a popstick. Never.
“May I hear it?” she asked, her ears high.
“If the Witch says so, yeah,” they replied, tapping the side of the popstick against their thigh. The device was eight ways from bootleg; Tembi could see it sizzling away, its sickly energy turning the air around it into hot bits of plasma which sparked and flared out as quickly as they appeared. The air crackled like fat on a hotplate.
“What are we doing here?” she heard herself ask. There was a muffled, distant quality to her own voice. “Because it seems you’re threatening me.”
“No, girl, not threatening you, not at all,” the first speaker said, staying well-cloaked by the dark. All she could see of them was illuminated by the thin light of the popstick. “But Witches? They’ll turn me inside-out if I put a word wrong. Can’t blame a soul for wanting to scar their hide before he goes, yeah?”
No, she couldn’t. The Deep wouldn’t intentionally kill anyone, no, and had not, not once in three thousand years. But there had been accidents, so many accidents, and there were drinking games among the young Witches at Lancaster, games that got dark, about how you might use something like the Deep to torture, to punish, to murder… A few hundred years ago, there was that serial killer who figured out a combination of ’bots and anti-grav plates to create impossible crimes. Crimes that were easy to blame on a naughty Witch and the Deep because no human should ever be that creative with intestines. Sensational story. Lancaster went to great lengths to keep it out of the public eye, which meant it would probably live on forever.
Oh, no, Tembi couldn’t blame him for it at all.
“What can I do to get you to put that away?” she said, nodding towards his popstick.
“Think I’ll keep it out,” he said, still tapping away, pop-sizzle, pop-sizzle. “Until your Witch gets here.”
The air in the alley blew itself to pieces as Bayle appeared. She dropped a half-meter to the ground, bare feet landing on the alley floor with a hard thump. “Our food’s up,” she said to Tembi.
The man with the popstick nodded to Bayle. “Witch-nim,” he said. “Do you want your companion to hear this?”
Bayle glanced at Tembi.
“They don’t think I’m a Witch,” she explained.
Bayle chuckled and reached out to touch Tembi’s face. She held up her fingers, now slightly pink from the paint that had once been a carnivorous rose.
Tembi winced, and used the sleeve of her robe to remove the rest of the ruined markings. “Knew we should have used stick pens.”
“Neither of us can draw for shit.”
“Right.” Tembi turned to face the shadows as she sent a silent request to the Deep. She couldn’t feel its own paint bloom across her face, but the person with the popstick took a step towards her, pulling himself from the shadows. It was a man, tall and thin, touching upon middle age, and his skin rough but flexible.
“Those are birds…” he said quietly. “Are you Tembi?”
She nodded.
“This changes things,” he muttered to himself.
And then he rushed her, popstick raised and ready.