Paisano slept hot and hated it, so the windows to his room were always open at night. Tembi didn’t mind. It meant Paisano had a bedroom to himself, a rarity among the Chameleons who usually chose to cluster together for heat. She had found a downy blanket nearly as soft as the Deep’s own feather-fur, and she kept herself wrapped within it as she curled against Paisano’s naked back. Having a sense of touch was just bliss.
She reached out and ran the beck of her hand down Paisano’s arm. Velvet, she thought. Why do the books all say skin feels like velvet? It’s like… The comparison escaped her: the closest she could get was the feel of a clod of freshly ploughed earth, warm from the sun and ready for planting.
(It was possible she had gone a little wild lately, running around the colony and touching everything she could. No regrets about that! A sense of touch was such a fleeting luxury for her that she was willing to act the fool. Not for the first time, she wished she could smack her ancestors for not making the distinction between physical and psychological stress when they had paid to get their genes adapted, but she supposed they had been operating at the mercy of a tight budget like everybody else.)
Paisano stirred in his sleep, the colors of his skin shifting towards a deeper shade of gray. He was changing, too, now able to integrate some different shades of blue and purple into his camouflage. He had confessed that he didn’t think he’d become comfortable enough to blend into their new planet’s bold golds and greens, but the youngest Chameleons had already learned how to blink in and out of the background. Games of tag among the colony’s children were epic.
Hands knit behind her head, Tembi stared out the window. There were so many stars! They brushed against the nearby rooftops, lighting the town in pale white. Paisano had chosen a house in the second circle of the town, and said it was large enough for him and eight others. There were only three bedrooms, but the Chameleons had lived in small cramped quarters for so long that they felt most comfortable when they were packed tight together. It reminded Tembi of her own childhood, with her mother and older sisters all sharing a couple dozen cubic meters back on Adhama, and the ever-present knowledge that there were layers upon layers of unseen human beings pressing against her on all four sides. She hadn’t realized she missed that kind of forced community.
Was she happy? Was this happy?!
Tembi grinned.
Her databand chirped. She slapped her wrist to silence it, but the chirping continued: Lancaster would not be denied. They had been especially pushy lately, yanking her this way and that, asking for more of her time. It was as if Lancaster was trying to bring her back to heel without forcing the issue. It was the same for Bayle, and had gotten so bad that her friend had given up her room in the colony and started sleeping in her own home on Found again, just because she was tired of being summoned to the Tower for ridiculous reasons.
Tembi leaned over to kiss Paisano’s shoulder, and made the short jump from bed to the street below, asking the Deep to grab her robes on the way. Dressed and decent, she slapped the databand and opened the channel. “Good night,” she said, crunching down on the word.
A small grammalight projection appeared before her. A man’s face, his brow pinched. “Can you get here?”
She blinked. She hadn’t talked to the other members of her old bomb squad in months. “Cooper?”
“We need you. Right now. Can you—”
“Yeah,” she said, as she asked the Deep to swap out her robes for her bomb uniform. It was spotless: Matindi must have found it and given it a good wash. “Pressure bomb?”
“We don’t know.”
“On my way.” She broke the connection and stepped into the Deep. It was a long trip, about five minutes along the Rails. The Deep had sunk itself into her mood so there were no bright colors, only the sharp nervous anxiety of moving towards a dangerous unknown. Cooper had trained her in the fundamentals of demolitions and explosions, and had worked with her as she and the Deep had honed their skills. He had—quite grudgingly and while very drunk—admitted she could do things which he and his team of specialized ’bots couldn’t. If Cooper needed her now, it didn’t necessarily mean all was chaos and flame, but it meant things were certainly close.
The Deep opened onto what must have been a small colony on a moon with a paper-thin atmosphere. Cooper was waiting for her in a breather and grav gear.
“Gods! Always jealous of you Witches,” he said as she walked towards him. “Takes me a year to get kitted up.”
She grinned. “Good to see you, Coop.”
“Same. This way,” he said, gesturing towards the colony. As with Downriver, there were atmospheric bubbles around clusters of buildings. “They called me out here an hour ago. Bernie is evacuating the locals.”
Tembi hissed. Bernie was the Witch who usually got tapped to move Cooper across the galaxy. If they had left Cooper alone to evacuate the colony, things were bad.
“Tell me about it,” he agreed, and turned to the atmospheric equipment which adjusted the climate within the colony’s bubbles. “It’s over here.”
The device in question was smaller than her bobcat synth, and was standing apart from the rest of the machinery. It was obvious why the colonists had reached out to Lancaster for help: shaped from sleek matte gray plass, cut into hard angles, and plumbed all over with tubes, there was a sinister quality to the device. You knew just from looking that it was meant to do something, and that something was most certainly not benevolent.
Except…the device looked…familiar? There was something about it which strutted around her subconscious, looking for something to kick. “Are you sure this is a bomb?” she asked.
“Not at all,” answered Cooper. “Never seen anything like it. The locals said they noticed it a couple hours ago. Called their investors and their equipment suppliers to learn if it was an addition to the usual gear. Once they confirmed that nobody knew where it came from? Well…”
“…chaos,” she finished for him.
“Yup.” He glared at the device. “Might be a prank. Might not. I don’t trust it.”
“Have you poked it?” she asked. Cooper had explained his telekinetic abilities as an extension of his sense of touch, where he could feel objects without laying hands on them. Much like she used the Deep’s own extraordinary senses to help her explore unfamiliar objects, Cooper could move his mind across a strange bomb from a distance.
“Lightly as I could,” he admitted, arms crossed. “Didn’t want to poke it too hard, in case it responds to tekkers.”
Tembi shivered. Some people (*cough*cough* the Blackwings*cough*) didn’t approve of telepaths and telekinetics, and had developed mechanisms which responded to extra-sensory intrusion. Can’t keep out Witches, though, she reminded herself as she sat down and shut her eyes. Can’t keep us out of anywhere.
A deep, centering breath…another…another… Unlike Cooper, she needed to lay hands on a bomb before the Deep could feed the pieces into her mind, but maybe if she took a moment to herself, centered her mind and focused on the device, the reason for its familiarity would make itself clear.
Where have I seen this before? Those angles, those sleek materials. Her subconscious kept telling her it was too clean, too perfect. And far too small. The last time she had seen something like this, it was a mess. A giant mess.
Sometimes bombs go off. Sometimes I only get to see them once they’ve blown. Think bigger, Tembi. Think about ruined bombs. Think about broken—
“Scheisse!” Tembi shouted. She leaned over to seize Cooper’s foot and wrapped the Deep around them and—
Everything stopped.
They were caught in the blink of a moment between reality and the Deep. Cooper was frozen in time. Behind him, the strange device had begun to activate, twisting in on itself, the strange design folding sideways to open a portal. In that portal were colors, brilliant, bright colors—The Rails, she thought. It’s a gateway to the Rails—but all of them losing cohesion as soon as they appeared.
The machine couldn’t contain it.
You can’t have the Rails without the Deep!
Whiplike cracks of light appeared, lashing out from the center of the portal. The device pulled away from the ground, fragmenting, the uncontainable energy of the Rails lifting the device and the atmospheric machinery around it. Sound was starting to catch up with light, a gathering roar of destruction which would do as much damage as the coming explosion. Tembi threw all of her strength into hauling Cooper towards her, into the safety of the Deep, and then—
Darkness.
Silence.
Then, a small fleck of gold-white light, which grew to illuminate the Rails and the broad feather-furred back of the Deep. And Cooper, lying beside her, teeth clenched and trying not to scream from the loss of most his left leg.
“Gods! Coop!” After the roar of the device, Tembi’s own voice sounded like the squeak of a mouse in her ears. She tore off her headscarf and wrapped it around his thigh, yanking it tight to slow the flow of blood. “Don’t move. Don’t move!”
“Not…not planning on it.” He let out a small half-laugh. “Left leg?”
“Yeah.”
“Good, good.” He was gasping from shock. “That knee was bad. Thought about sawing the sossing thing off myself.”
“Stop talking,” she said. She needed to calm down. She needed to focus. The colors of the Rails were wobbly and the Deep was miserable and there was a chirping noise she couldn’t place and there was so much blood, oh gods! “Deep, take us to a hospital…” Which hospital? So many of them, but not all of them had the equipment to regrow limbs—“The hospital on Found!”
Her bobcat synth appeared and squalled at her, all of its fur standing on end.
“Deep! The hospital!”
The cat lunged at her face. Tembi fell backwards, astonished, and shrieked as she rolled off the Deep’s back and straight out of the Rails. She landed on solid ground, her breath knocked out of her body and more nauseated than she had ever been in her life, vaguely aware she had landed in the middle of a quiet pastoral town square.
“Tembi!” Matindi’s voice. Small green hands around one of hers: Matindi was kneeling beside her, checking her pulse. “Where did you come from?”
“What?” Tembi could barely hear herself. She had hit the ground hard. Her ears were ringing—chirping?—and she was sure her stomach was about to pop out through her mouth and begin walking around on its own. “Where’s Cooper?”
“Cooper? Is he here? Why are you bleeding?” Matindi tried to help her sit up. Tembi made it about halfway before she had to curl up in a ball, but in that moment she had noticed where she was, her landmark a house directly across the square from them. Paisano’s house: the Deep had brought her back to the Sabenta colony. Matindi began to pull Tembi’s robes aside, searching for the source of the blood. “Tembi, where are you hurt?”
“Not mine.” Tembi rolled onto her side and threw up. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, tasted copper, and then threw up again. “The blood…it’s Cooper’s. He called me out for a bomb…it went off…” She glanced at her databand and realized it was the source of the incessant chirping. Messages were flooding in, one after another, the display blinking up every few moments. “I was trying to get him to a hospital, but the Deep threw me out here.”
“He’s on the Rails alone?!” Matindi sounded horrified.
“I’ll find him.” Blearily, she saw a dark-skinned woman appear in the street in front of Paisano’s house. A moment, two, and then the woman changed clothes in a heartbeat before she vanished into thin air. Once she was gone, Tembi instantly felt a million times better, as the fog that had been clogging her thoughts vanished, and her stomach stopped roiling. She stared at the spot where the woman had stood, and whispered, “Oh, that’s not good.”
“What?” Matindi grabbed Tembi’s chin and peered into her eyes, as if checking to see if she had a concussion. “Sweetling, you’re scaring me.”
“The Deep brought me here—” Tembi realized her mistake as soon as she said it, and she found her feet. “No! Matindi, the Deep brought me to now. This moment! Why?”
The two gentle slaps across her face didn’t hurt; Matindi never had the heart to truly hit anyone, and Tembi’s skin was already going hard again from stress. It did shock her enough to freeze her in her tracks. She stared down at her second mother, finally realizing that Matindi was terrified. “Tembi,” she said in a calm, gentle voice. “You’re scaring me. Stop moving and explain.”
Tembi shut her eyes. Where to begin? she wondered, and then started by prodding her databand to stop the message notifications. “Do you remember the device that split the moon?”
“Yes.”
“Cooper found another one. When I got there, it activated. Matindi…” she paused. “Matindi, it opened a portal to the Rails.”
Her second mother’s jaw dropped. “That’s not possible.”
“I know what I saw.” The memory of the bright colors turning sickly was burned into her mind as clearly as if it had come via a wonky Crisp. “The Deep got us out of there, but not before we saw the device start to… I don’t know if it exploded, or if opening a way to the Rails tore everything apart. It sliced straight through Cooper’s leg—gods! Cooper’s still out there!”
“Tembi, finish your story, or so help me, I will smack you again.”
She glanced across the way towards Paisano’s house. “The Deep brought me back here. It brought me back in time. I just saw myself leave.”
“Oh, that’s not good,” muttered Matindi.
“Right?!” Tembi looked around, searching the dark shadows of the colony for whatever the Deep wanted her to find. “Something’s happened. Or will happen, here.”
“Then we must—” Matindi stopped, her words hanging on a single breath. Before Tembi could ask what was wrong, Matindi’s body flew apart into a million sharp-edged fragments.
There was no warning: it was impossibly sudden. The space between Matindi standing in front of her and Matindi spread across five square meters in jagged pieces took up less time than a heartbeat. The cuts were as clean as that which had severed Cooper’s leg. Nearly as bad was the sense of unholy wrong-ness Tembi had felt when the portal had opened to the Rails was back, only devoid of light and sound.
Tembi screamed.
Then—and only then—did the Deep act.
The fragments of her second mother came together, pieces of a puzzle fitting together. They aligned perfectly, cleanly, and Tembi could see their edges seal. Matindi was staring at her, eyes unfocused but flawless, as if the damage had never happened.
Then she toppled lifeless to the ground.
“Is this a vision? It’s got to be another vision—” Tembi knew she was wrong even as she dropped to her knees and turned Matindi over. The Deep would shatter illusionary planets and pretend to dissolve strangers into nothing, but Matindi? It would never hurt Matindi! She was sure it couldn’t even imagine hurting Matindi! “Deep! Help!”
:: GRANDMOTHER ::
:: FIND GRANDMOTHER ::
:: GRANDMOTHER::
The Deep’s voice roared around the square, sorrow and rage in its purest form, echoing from every corner. Plass shattered; rock turned to dust. Heedless of all else, Tembi held Matindi to her and began to cry. Another wave of nausea came over her, this one from the stark realization that she was holding her second mother’s body. The grief of it settled into Tembi’s bones, becoming part of her, bonding to her soul.
And the night sky broke into warships.
Sleek predatory dropcraft blinked out of FTL, cracking the air from displacement. Their bellies split open; Blackwing soldiers in dark gray body shields and grav kits fell in controlled arcs towards the small village, popsticks burning with cold white fire.
Pure rage caught Tembi as she realized she and Bayle had been tricked off-planet—that Matindi had been assassinated!—all to keep the Witches from fighting back when the colony was purged. Ears flattened against the noise, she placed Matindi’s body on the ground and then stood to face the invaders.
“Let’s do this,” she whispered to the Deep, and it howled around the square, readying itself.
Tembi hit the ground, the back of her head throbbing. She glanced up in time to see Winter bring a heavy bottle down on her skull again.
Winter peered down at her. “Don’t kill the poor girl,” the old woman said, as she lifted the bottle a third time.
All went black.