How long does this take to work?
Is this how it’s supposed to work?
Why couldn’t he have just written a sossing letter?
The Crisp was taking its sweet time to dissolve. It tasted like processed sugar and rotting bread. She wanted to swallow and get it off of her tongue (and go and brush her teeth for maybe half an hour or an hour or maybe a nice round 24-hour cycle because the best-case scenario was that she was sucking on her own stolen blood c’mon, Tembi, focus), but it needed to recognize her, right? It needed to get the message into her bloodstream, and from there into her brain, right? That couldn’t be an instantaneous process, right?
A glimmer of light, even though her eyes were still shut tight.
A man’s face in the darkness. Handsome, or he would have been if he wasn’t wearing exhaustion like a shroud. The brown skin and high pointed ears of Adhama’s children. Nearly her own age, or just a few years older: the Deep might have stopped him from aging, but his dark eyes hadn’t started to grow ancient in that frighteningly timeless way. He had shaved his head since the last time she had seen him, and this helped show off the red-gold flames cast in paint which ran up his cheek.
Hi, Moto.
“Hey, Tembi.”
The background filled itself in. The image was a memory: Moto was talking to himself in his bathroom mirror. Behind him was the unmanageable mess of blankets he called a design element so he could avoid repairing the linen closet’s broken door.
“I hope you never have to watch this. If you do, things have gone wrong.”
What, no, really? Thanks, Moto. That’s very helpful.
“If you’re watching this, I’m—” He paused to laugh. It was not a wholly sane sound. He was sweating and shaking, a mild tremble which rocked his perspective in the mirror. “I’m in a stasis pod that I’ve asked the Deep to move two weeks into the future. Hiding outside of time is the only thing I can think of. I don’t know if this will work. I’ve never tried it before. The Deep…I think the Deep says it won’t bring me back unless I ask, and if I’m in stasis, I can’t ask, so… Small gods, Tembi, I can’t believe I’m doing this. The Deep is… Nobody else believes the Deep can manipulate time. It’s the best way to hide. But…”
He swallowed.
“I’ve found something big. I can’t tell Lancaster. If I do, it’ll get back to the Council and they can’t know that I’ve got this. Not yet. That means I can’t tell you, or Domino might pick it out of your head. Except…” He paused and looked around, as if expecting Domino to pop into the bathroom behind him. “Except she always gets what she wants. So I’m taking the data with me when I hide.”
Everything went dark. She felt herself begin to panic, but he reappeared in the mirror within a heartbeat. Ah. Moto had covered his eyes with his hands before he had caught himself.
“Something big is coming,” he repeated. “If I’m not back by the third of Asteracaen, you’ll see it for yourself. The Deep’ll make sure of that.”
The third… Today. That’s today.
Oh. Oh no. He’s talking about that moon.
That wasn’t the worst of it. Like a flash of lightning burning through her cluttered brain, she realized that if the Deep had taken her to see the broken moon, then that meant Moto hadn’t come out of stasis as he had planned.
Moto’s memory-self was still talking. “If I’m not back by then, ask the Deep to bring me to you. You’re my safeguard. The Deep trusts you, and it listens to you like nobody else. You might be able to talk it into bringing me home.” He grinned, and a little of his exhaustion cracked away around his eyes. “I hope you never have to watch this. Or, after this is over, we’ll go to the place with the fish and you can watch it in front of me. I’ll be drunker than all hells when you do.
“I’m leaving this with my brother, just in case. You need the data I’m carrying. If you get me back and I’m…” Another long pause. “If I’ve died in stasis, give the data to Kalais. Make sure he gets it to his contacts in the Sabenta. They won’t know what to do with it, but somebody who isn’t in the Earth Assembly needs to have it. That’s what I’m planning to do once I get back. By then, they’ll have to listen to me, and—”
His face and voice vanished. Not a mistake of the hands this time. The memory had ended.
Tembi kept her eyes shut. Most Crisps were designed so the message would repeat. Not that she’d ever forget what Moto had said, but better safe than sorry.
Moto didn’t reappear.
She felt a little annoyed that Moto had purchased what was obviously a shoddy knockoff Crisp, and then she felt more annoyed at herself for being annoyed at what was obviously her friend’s moment of crisis. She opened her eyes. Bayle was eating, the white bags from the tavern on Adhama spread out around her. She handed Tembi a paper boat overflowing with a greasy brown mess.
“Thanks,” she said, and started eating. It had gone cold. Silently, she asked the Deep to vibrate the gravy’s molecules a bit, and the gravy in the boat began to steam.
Bayle raised an eyebrow. “And?”
“Moto’s in trouble.” Before Bayle could reply with a sarcastic comment, Tembi added, “It has to do with the weapon that destroyed the moon, I think.”
“You think? You don’t know? Wait, just start at the beginning.”
“Hold on.” Tembi said. “Let me see if I can get Moto back. Deep? Can you please pay attention?”
Drops of water fell from the roof of the atmosphere bubble. As they splashed against the black rock, the color shifted from teal to red.
“Buddy, do you know about the message that Moto left for me?”
More water. This time, the droplets shaped themselves to appear as faceted red gemstones, which caused Bayle to chuckle and carefully gather them together in a small pile.
“Is he still alive?”
More red gemstones. Tembi took the color consistency as a good sign.
“Can you please bring him here?”
The water stopped falling, and the gems in Bayle’s hands turned teal before they fell apart and ran through her fingers.
“Deep?” Tembi paused. If the Deep felt as if it had done something wrong, it might panic. “I’m not mad, I promise, but I would really like to see Moto.”
Moto appeared. An illusion, yes, but an illusion of Moto sleeping comfortably within a pure white stasis pod. Was this Moto as he appeared at this moment, lost somewhere in space and time?
Tembi wanted to punch the entire universe.
“Thank you, Deep,” she said, forcing herself to grab on to calm, calm, don’t do anything which might scare the Deep into sending Moto away forever. “Can you take good care of him for me until you bring him home?”
Another stream of red water, bursting into more gemstones on impact, and the illusion of Moto disappeared.
“Gimme,” Tembi sighed. Bayle handed her one of the bottles that had come with their meals, and Tembi chased her anger away with cold alcohol and hot food. Between bites, she repeated Moto’s message. It was easy; it had been burned into her mind. Stupid cheap Crisp. She hoped it hadn’t done any damage to her own memories. She ran through what little details the Crisp had delivered, only leaving out the part where Moto looked like he had already been chased across half the galaxy and driven past the edge of panic. Bayle had a tendency to take in strays, and her perpetual crush on Moto didn’t need any additional fuel.
Once she was done talking, they watched the dagger-fish while they finished their meals. It was a pretty sight, Tembi had to admit, especially as the sun was beginning to set, and the fish started to glow with bioluminescence as long hair-like tendrils extended from their sides to weave the schools together into a single massive organism. Tembi hadn’t seen any nocturnal predators, but if hundreds of thousands of fish had evolved to mimic a single gigantic glowing creature the size of Lancaster’s Tower, she could die happy never learning exactly what wanted to eat it.
Bayle kept her attention on the fish. If Tembi didn’t know better, she’d have thought Bayle wasn’t listening, but… Her stomach sank: Bayle was kneading that dense sourdough pause that always came before she invested herself in a conversation she didn’t want to have.
She tried to head off the inevitable. “Don’t say it.”
Bayle didn’t listen. “If we can’t find Moto, we need to talk to Kalais.”
“No.”
“Tembi—”
“I’m not being stubborn,” she sighed. “We have no proof. Of anything! We have Moto’s memory inside my head, and Kalais and I are long past taking each other on faith.”
“He’d believe you,” Bayle muttered, as she turned away to watch the fish.
Tembi balled up the wrappers and shoved them into one of the bags. “How about this,” she said. “Moto said he had data. How about we find that data and bring it to Kalais? We need to keep trying to get Moto back, so…” She hurled the bag at the wall of water surrounding them. It passed through the wall and stopped, and then slowly floated towards the monolithic dagger-fish, which ignored it except to provide holes for it to pass. “Moto told me just enough to keep Domino guessing, but he knows what’s happening and we don’t. We bring him home, and then he can handle the details.”
Bayle wrinkled her nose.
“Am I wrong?”
“No,” Bayle replied, as she packed up her own trash. “But there’s a war, Tembs! If we can save lives by talking to Kalais, we should.”
Tembi fixed her attention on the dagger-fish as she whispered, “Scheisse.”
Bayle grinned at her, opened the jump, and they were gone.
A moment later, the ocean crashed into the void where they had been sitting.
A moment after that, the bag of trash Tembi had hurled into the water disappeared.