Except for an old white cat that would never die, Tembi Stoneskin’s bed was empty. Cooling, but empty, as its usual human occupant was blearily shrugging into her uniform and muttering impolite words about explosions. A splash of water on her face, a scarf to hold back her mutiny of black hair, and Tembi wrapped herself in the Deep and vanished. Five minutes later, she was two solar systems away from her bed and staring at the latest bomb.
She was so very tired of bombs.
Tembi wasn’t prone to the dramatic. She was from Adhama, after all, a dry-baked world with windstorms fierce enough to tear itself apart at least five times a season. Her people had a reputation for being quietly practical: as long as you never pushed them to their breaking point, they could micromanage the galaxy. Adhamantians dealt with the latest crisis, prepared for the next, and rested in the moments in between. But this relentless, perpetual, eternal chore of bouncing from one solar system to the next to disarm one bomb after another made her want to scream.
Be fair, she reminded herself. Better to get here before they’ve gone off instead of after.
She had seen more than anyone should of that, too.
Killing was easy. Death was easy. Bombs were so easy, a couple of parts banged together and left in a strategic location, and then? Either the Blackwings or the Sabenta took credit for the chaos, and promised next time things would be much worse. That this was said while Tembi was still on-site with the cleanup crew, trying to make sense of the bits and pieces of what had once been people, also made her want to scream. She was so very tired of soldiers who insisted the use of bombs was the ethical choice, or the tactical one, or that circumstances necessitated turning other human beings into distorted flecks of carbon.
But! More than anything else—anything in the entire galaxy!—she was tired of disarming the twice-cursed things in front of panicked onlookers.
This particular bomb had been left in a shopping plaza aboard an orbiting shipping hub. A bit of a misnomer, as the station hung in empty space, with not even a nearby planet to provide a sense of scale. Ships jumped in, ships jumped out, and their crews used the hub to switch cargo or grab a meal in those hurried minutes in between. The station’s security team had shooed the travelers back to their ships, but others had been left behind, hundreds of them, those poor souls whose only purpose was to maintain small shares of this groaning chunk of plass and metal.
They stared at her, silent, their worry a palpable force.
Tembi was already sure this was a Blackwing bomb. This station was home to those who lived on the edges, people and companies crushed by the weight of those more powerful than themselves. This far out from the central Earth-normal systems, the definition of what it meant to be human got complicated. Out here, bodies were shaped for survival. Cheaper to modify a genome than a planet, after all, and heavy-duty genetic modding made a tasty target for the Blackwings.
She hated Blackwing bombs, with powerful explosives sealed inside tiny, well-designed packages. The Sagittarius Armed Forces had money and resources and, worst of all, trained engineers. Their bombs were disgustingly clever. They were only slightly easier to defuse than the Sabenta’s bombs, which were slapped together from whatever materials the rebels had on hand and were thus the essence of unpredictable.
The security team grumbled and paced, saying the usual things about Witches and the war. Behind them, the crowd was beginning to stir, their worry turning to anger as they muttered about how a Witch had been called instead of any form of law. How this particular Witch didn’t look old enough to know what a bomb was, let alone how to take one apart. How Lancaster could stop all of this in a heartbeat if they wanted to.
Well, they’re not wrong.
She did her best to ignore them, her eyes shut tight and ears half-curled so her other senses could trace the hard plass shell of the bomb. Except her dear departed ancestors had gone and upgraded their sense of hearing when they sossed around with the shape of their ears, and she couldn’t help but overhear when someone mused aloud about how this young woman with her filthy uniform and her bare feet couldn’t possibly be a real Witch.
About how they should stop her before she made matters worse.
Tembi turned and stared at the speaker, willing her face to be utterly still, to be devoid of all emotion. It was easy: practice, practice, practice. For Adhamantians and Witches alike, emotions could be more dangerous than bombs. She was doubly damned to bind herself in false serenity for the rest of her life.
The crowd was chastened into silence. Good enough. She turned away from them and back to the device. Its shape told her a large part of what she needed to know about how it was connected to the utility conduits of the shipping hub, how it had been shaped into sleek, perfect tubes and concealed within all of the other sleek, perfect tubes, completely unnoticed except by one sharp-eyed security guard with a keen appreciation for atmospheric maintenance systems.
The scent of cold metal brushed against her senses, followed by birdsong. Tembi didn’t bother to open her eyes as she formed the mental question: “What?”
An emotion not of her own making rose within her, and she paused to pick it apart. Tension, anxiety, shame, and a dreadful sense of loss: the Deep didn’t like this particular bomb at all.
“Can we do this?” she asked her friend. “Or should we evacuate and let it go off?”
Two questions stacked against each other was too much for the Deep. The sensation of uncertainty strengthened, anxiety swelling to fill the cracks.
Tembi shoved this new surge of anxiety down into the boiling cauldron of ulcers that served as her stomach. “We’ve got this,” she assured the Deep, molding her thoughts into certainty. The two of them had done this a hundred times, a thousand times, countless times before. Maybe this bomb would be different, but they wouldn’t know unless they tried. And they were a team, right? The two of them were unstoppable.
The feelings of anxiety and stress eased as she comforted her friend. The smell of metal rose again, a fresh brassy scent. Tembi grinned to herself as the Deep’s confidence swept through her.
“Are you sure you should be doing this?” A new voice, and angry: the station’s captain, standing a meter away from her left shoulder. As the captain snapped Tembi’s own question at her, this newfound confidence trembled. She crushed her insecurity into a tiny mental ball before the Deep could notice.
Focus, Tembi. Concentrate on the bomb before it detonates and things go from bad to worse.
A calming breath, a moment of stolen silence. The explosive device beneath her fingers was—
“Pardon me, young woman, but are you sure you should be doing this?” The same question again, delivered in a much sharper tone. The captain was losing his patience.
“Yes,” Tembi replied without bothering to open her eyes.
“How old are you?”
“I am a Witch,” she replied automatically, as she tried to follow the twists and turns of one slick black conduit which hummed a quiet song of murder. “We are timeless.”
That usually worked. Except this captain knew Witches, did the endless political meet-and-greets as they jumped into and out of the busy shipping port. He was familiar with their ageless faces and their self-possessed demeanors. Only an experienced Witch could look at another human being and see a problem they merely had to outlive. At twenty-three, Tembi couldn’t shake the habit of looking at other human beings as human beings. She was sure she’d grow out of it in a century or so, but for the moment it was an enormous inconvenience.
Be honest, Tembi reminded herself. Pretty much everything is an enormous inconvenience. Your life is nothing but bombs, bombs, and more bombs, and he’s right, you shouldn’t be the one responsible—
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized the captain was reaching for her hand to snatch her away from the bomb.
“Deep?” Tembi said aloud. “Bobcat.”
The captain—I should have learned his name. They’re never as angry when I call them by name.—squalled and fell to the ground in a ball, trying to protect himself from the snarling bobcat that the Deep had dropped on his head.
“It’s not real,” she said to the security team, some of whom had gone for their weapons and found them missing. Behind them, the crowd murmured in restless shock. “It’s a synth, programmed to keep him occupied so he doesn’t touch me.
“He won’t be hurt,” she assured the sharp-eyed guard who had discovered the bomb and started this whole mess. “I need to focus, or…” she pointed at the bomb, and flicked her fingers in a semblance of an explosion as she whispered, “…boom.”
The guard nodded and went to remove the synthetic bobcat from his captain’s face.
“Please evacuate the area,” she told the others, who were suddenly more than happy to listen to a girl willing and able to hurl strange animals willy-nilly. Better than any motivational speech, that bobcat. One of the best purchases she’d ever made.
Tembi shut her eyes and ears, and reoriented her attention on the bomb. Again. By all the small and wriggly gods, this bomb should be dead by now. I should have led with the bobcat. A calming breath…another…another. She needed to silence her mind so she could let the Deep fill her senses. Her friend spoke in layers upon layers, a sediment of meaning that pressed itself into the fluid fabric of space and time, emotion and memory twisted into dense knots of intent. If she was extremely lucky, the Deep would articulate a word or two, to accompany its true meaning, minuscule decorative sprinkles atop a scoop of ice cream the size of a planet. She didn’t grab at those words, oh no, not any more, not since she was first able to speak with the Deep and learn that its opinion of words was the same as her opinion of rocks on a beach, where one was very much like the other and were, for all practical purposes, wholly interchangeable.
(And don’t get the Deep started on homonyms, not unless you had an entire week free and were willing to explain the nature of how two things could be both the same and different to a galactic intelligence who knew very well that this was a frequent happenstance but at least it had the good sense to attach a few musical notes and the scent of an extinct animal for the sake of clarity, thank you very much.)
The Deep was good with specifics. Shipping schedules, bills of lading? It understood those, no problem at all, and any confusion was easily resolved by changing problematic line items. “We need to take apart this bomb” was a good directive, too, as failure to pay attention meant messy consequences. The Deep had all of the concentration problems of a small child hopped up on sweets, but it could focus when the stakes were high. So when she shut her eyes and closed her ears, the silence gave the Deep what it needed to fill her with information.
The environment came first: she stood within the mechanical hold of a shipping port stationed a million klicks from anywhere of consequence. A shipping port like hundreds of others, a waystation between a nebulous here and an ambiguous there.
The shipping port was a fact, a thing, a sterile creation of humanity glittering away against the black. It shouldn’t be a thing at all: the Deep made shipping ports irrelevant. Except nothing that humankind touched could exist as the sum of itself alone. This shipping port existed because of three-thousand-year-old laws which declared that, no, the Deep didn’t need ports, but we should build them anyway because what if the Deep vanishes as quickly as it first appeared? If that happens, we’ve got an entire civilization spread throughout the galaxy and no infrastructure to get around.
The next level was commerce: after a couple hundred years of using the Deep to jump from here to there, the Deep had become as much a simple fact as the shipping ports themselves. Nobody thought the Deep would disappear, not any more. But there were industries which made their money from shipping ports, along with all of those employees who depended on the jobs that went along with those shipping ports, and the invisible hand of the market continued to masturbate itself into relevancy. Humans suffered from a dire failure of imagination. This glorious alien entity appears and offers up its services, and all they can think to do is remake what they already had? Shameful, really.
And then came war.
Focus, Tembi.
She grinned. It had been her voice, the kind of thing she said to herself a million times a day. But she never added the petal-soft brush of flowers against her cheeks. By all the invented hells, she couldn’t even remember the last time she could feel something as delicate as a—
Focus, Tembi!
Right. Eyes closed, ears sealed. Get this done.
The shipping port. A speck of mechanical brightness within the void. Now fully evacuated of all human life except for the captain and his crew standing around her, standing around the bomb seated deep within its guts.
The shape of the bomb appeared in her mind again, quite quickly this time. Plass, copper and aluminum alloys—They used metal in the build? For the Blackwings, that’s practically prehistoric.—a dozen different kinds of conductive gels. A fist-sized chunk of atmosphere sealed in stasis field. No ’bots in this one, which was good, as nanotech was single-minded about accomplishing its mission. In this case, the mission would have been to populate the space formerly occupied by the shipping port with brand-new flecks of carbon. ’Bots in bombs were oh so much fun.
“Deep?” she said quietly.
A flutter of musical notes lined the edges of her mental image of the bomb.
“What happens if we were to remove this part here?” As she spoke, she concentrated on one of the parts of the bomb, that particularly nasty-looking black conduit which fed into one of the near-infinite number of tubes. She imagined the conduit as pulsing red.
There was a pause. Then, her mental version of the bomb disappeared into a menace of ugly brown-and-yellow paisley.
“Great,” she muttered. Whoever had built the bomb had left a few decoy triggers, just in case it was found and someone tried to disarm it.
Well, they hadn’t planned on her and the Deep. Right?
Right.
Back to work. Focus, Tembi, and all that. She let her fingers do the walking. Not by her sense of touch, as she could barely feel anything through her skin of late. But movement was its own form of communication. As her fingers moved, they helped solidify the image of the bomb in her mind, giving it shape and depth, transforming it into a complete object. The Deep kept filling in its invisible guts, those internal pieces she couldn’t see or feel. After a few minutes, she finally knew the bomb well enough to take it apart.
“Captain,” she said.
“Ma’am?” It was the sharp-eyed guard.
“Tell the crew to do a last sweep and make sure you’ve moved all residents and irreplaceable equipment to safety,” she said, as two short lengths of tubing, identical to some of those supporting the bomb, appeared in the air beside her.
“It’s just me,” the guard replied.
Tembi looked around; they were alone except for the synth bobcat sprawled across his shoulders, purring.
“The captain thought it would be better to give you some space.”
“You mean he’s sure I’m about to blow his station apart and he doesn’t want to get caught up in it.” She had to chuckle at that. “You better clear out, too. Find a ship and get a few klicks away. Just in case.”
“Can I stay?” She snuck a glance at his face. He seemed…eager. Not at all the kind of expression that she’d expect to find on the face of someone whose career choices might be about to go up in flecks of carbon.
Watch him, Tembi told the Deep.
Three crystal bubbles appeared in front of the guard. These popped—one, two, three!—each bubble releasing the sound of a cat’s meow.
“Um…”
“The Deep likes cats,” she said. It wasn’t much of an explanation, but she didn’t owe him one, especially if he wasn’t just a sharp-eyed guard, especially-especially if he was waiting for her full attention to be on the bomb so he could slip something sharp and deadly between her shoulder blades. “It doesn’t like assassins,” she added. “It hates it when we try to kill each other. I don’t know what it does with the people who try to kill me. They don’t end up in any prison we know of.”
“I…what?” His eyes went wide. “I’m not here to kill you!”
“Sometimes I wonder if there’s an island out there,” she said, as she reached for the two tubes floating in the air beside her. “A pleasant tropical island, on some planet we haven’t explored, and it’s full of all the people who’ve tried to poison me or shoot me or blow me up or shiv me in the back.
“By now, they’ve probably got a good-sized colony started.” Tembi positioned herself in front of the utility conduits. She hated this part. It took her days to recover the little feeling she had left in her fingers. “Wonder if they’ve named it after me, or the Deep, or if they call it Assassins’ Paradise or something equally ’gregious.”
She shoved both the tubes and her own hands straight into the central mass of the bomb.
The guard gasped.
Tembi didn’t. A gasp was near-kin to pain, and she was already on the verge of crying. Abusing a law of physics was painful as all raw hells. Two objects should never occupy the same space at the same time, even if the Deep assisted by moving molecules around.
“We walked through a wall once, me and the Deep,” Tembi said, her eyes closed as she let the Deep paint the alignment of the tubes along her mental image of the bomb. Her hands burned, burned at the cellular level, burned so much she had to keep talking to keep herself from screaming. “I wanted to see if we could do it. Yes, it can be done. No, it’s not an experience I want to repeat.”
The image of the tubes aligned with reality, and she pulled her hands away, leaving the new tubes in place while sections of the old ones fell to the ship’s deck. “Oxygen bomb,” she explained, as she pointed to the scraps. “Whole place would have gone up if we had exposed its core to an Earth-normal atmosphere. Safer if I swap out some of the trigger pieces instead of having the Deep try and move them. It’s a terrible plumber.”
The bobcat wrinkled its nose at Tembi, growling.
“You are,” she reminded the cat. “When you tried to fix the bathroom sink, you shot it straight into orbit.”
“Um—” The guard jerked in place, as if recent events had given him a sudden twitch. “Is the Deep inside the cat?”
The nervous energy that ran alongside bomb defusal disappeared in a puff of spent adrenaline, leaving Tembi exhausted and shaking. She waved at the pile of scraps on the ground, and the hunks of plass still embedded within the ship’s atmospheric input tubes. “Don’t touch that,” she said. “It’s safe now. Mostly. Lancaster has a disposal team to take care of the rest.”
“I can’t believe you did that.” He was staring at her hands. “How did you do that?”
She didn’t reply. Exhaustion had grabbed her by the throat. All she wanted to do was sleep, and sleep, and sleep…
Tembi pulled back her shoulders and put some iron into her voice. “Thank you for calling upon Lancaster. We’re glad to be of service.”
As the guard started to reply, his face froze, motionless.
No! Tembi thought.
Her silent protest was caught out of context. What was wrong? Nothing? No, the Deep never slowed time, never stopped it, not unless—
—the station shredded itself around them. Fire, shrapnel, a roar of pressure and a twist of oxygen, as the bomb she thought she had disarmed exploded. But the guard? Instead of dissolving into tiny flecks of carbon that had once been a human, he shattered! Shards of flesh, of bone and brain, fractured into slivers, as if he was made of crystal and thrown at the floor with great force—
“Hey? Hey, um…Witch?”
Tembi blinked. The guard was staring at her, his body whole and unfixed in time. His face was a moving portrait of concern. Around them, the station stood firm. “Are you feeling all right?”
There was a twist in the air, and other people began to arrive through the Deep. They had hard faces beneath their translucent body shields, and carried large, heavy boxes with suspiciously sooty marks along their seams. They stepped over to the bomb and began to prod it with various objects; some nodded to Tembi in professional friendship.
Life had returned to normal.
“Bye,” Tembi told the guard, and she wrapped herself within the Deep and disappeared.
The Deep swept her across the galaxy. The space it occupied was made from colors and liquid edges, a swirl of light, a breath of moments.
Tembi couldn’t be bothered with its beauty. Not now. “What was that?” she asked. “The vision of the explosion you showed me?”
Plants appeared around her, a grove of slender trees with smooth bark and long, pointed leaves. They began to sing in an unfamiliar language.
She resisted the urge to press her fists against her eyes and scream. Instead, she thought of a calm sea, ever waiting. “I don’t understand,” she said.
The plants threw up their leaves in frustration and vanished.
“I know,” Tembi said. “I wish it was easier, too.”
Seashells appeared within her mind, pearlescent traced with gold, followed by the smell of the open ocean cast up by a great green lawn. That was the first layer of sensation: beneath that lay a knot of emotions in all their twisted complexity—love, anger, frustration, and above all else, a sense of belonging.
She could recognize that particular knot anywhere. “No,” she said. “Let’s not go home. Not yet.”
A querulous noise shook the space around them, and then the Deep asked, ::WHY?::
Tembi sighed. It was a musical sound. When she was inside the Deep, everything sounded pure. She usually sang as they crossed the galaxy together: extra-dimensional entities had the perfect acoustics of empty bathrooms.
The Deep was not to be put off. ::WHY?::
A logical question. She needed to go back to Lancaster and be debriefed on the bomb, on the captain, on that sharp-eyed guard. Maybe another bomb had been discovered and they’d need her to disarm it. That would fit her mood quite nicely, as she felt that careening from one potential disaster to another had become the sum of her life.
But…no. Not Lancaster. Not now.
“I’m tired, buddy,” she replied.
The Deep solidified around her, faceless, feather-soft, larger than the entire universe and small enough to fit in her pocket, all at once. A thousand downy white wings spread wide on either side, its broad back a welcoming bed. Tembi shook her head, but laid down anyhow.
::GOOD?::
She pressed her cheek against the Deep’s back, listening to the quiet-loud sound of its heart. Everything about the Deep was a sweet contradiction. “Yes,” she whispered, thinking the word as hard as she could to cover up the silent “No” which clamored around her head like a sparrow in a bell. It was easier to lie, to pretend that she was merely physically tired instead of finding the right combination of words and emotions to convince the Deep that she was wrung dry.
Oh, well. She needed to get some sleep anyhow, and the usual nightmares about things exploding never came when she was safe inside the Deep.
She woke in orbit above a moon.
Now she gasped, a deep heaving breath which proved there was an atmosphere around her, a breath hard enough to shock her awake so she could take stock of the situation.
She was in space. Okay. She’d been here before, zipping around with the Deep functioning as both her suit and her jetpack. For a Witch, space was manageable.
She wasn’t in freefall. That was good. No, that was great! Freefall was the absolute worst. And the air wasn’t burning her lungs, so she wasn’t freezing to death. The planet, small and ominously red, was on the far side of its moon, and its gravity was ignoring her. Everything else could wait until she figured out what the Deep wanted her to learn.
“Deep?” she asked. “Is this real, or is it another vision?”
A tiny meteorite appeared beside her and shot straight towards the moon.
Tembi nodded, and watched, and waited.
And the moon cracked in half.