They came out of the Rails on a pastoral planet beneath a red-and-blue sky. Nearby were the ruins of a small settlement, long abandoned and stripped bare of anything of value. Pools of water splattered across a dense landscape of gold and green, with patches of flowers and small flying creatures. It reminded Tembi of the cemetery on Tolkien, except the living had a right to be there. Beside her was Paisano, dressing down in a silver-gray tunic and pants, a small jeweled collar, and thick but plain metal bracelets.
She had to ask. “Where do you shop?”
Paisano, staring all around them as if he had never seen a world in the sunlight before, said, “I don’t. All I wear belonged to my father, and his father before him.” He paused, as if he had finally processed what she had said. “Chameleon used to be able to buy anything it wanted. Now, all we have are castoffs and antiques.”
“Do you want to buy this?” Gallimore, their arms wrapped around Bayle’s waist, stepped out of the Deep. It was a fair question. Lunair was lush and close to Earth-normal in all but sunlight, as one of the planet’s two suns was in the latter stages of dying. The abandoned settlement was located on an island several thousand square kilometers in size. Not far across the sea was a city of three million settlers, serviced by a small starport. Lancaster rarely came here, and the Blackwings had no need to do so, as the planet had no hidden wealth and the majority of its settlers were Earth-normal. Lunair was, quite simply, a nice starter planet if you couldn’t do better, and a terrible one if you could.
The Chameleons’ leader began to walk, slow and graceful, along the memory of a paved road. His skin was mimicking the color of dark clay, near to gray but with a little red thrown in to bring it closer to Tembi’s own, and the silver in his tattoos had changed to gold. Strange, to think he was using her as camouflage. “Nobody wants to go to the refugee camps,” he said. “They’re filth, dropped on continents or planets nobody wants. They are so far off the chains that there’s no way to get any resources in, no buyers for anything they make, and you Witches won’t touch them. Here, we might have some degree of comfort and have time to prepare for a better future.”
He removed his collar and stared at it, his thumb caressing the gemstones. “Go,” he said, hastily pressing it into Gallimore’s hands as if worried that one of the two of them might change their mind. “Buy me an island.”
“Paisano?” Bayle asked, as she exchanged a weighty glance with Tembi. “There are other worlds available. You don’t have to take the first piece of land you see.”
“We are used to castoffs and antiques,” he said, gazing towards the settlement. “I like this place. I think we can thrive if we rebuild upon these bones.”
Tembi looked to the sky. “And the sun?”
“When it goes, we have a spare,” he said, and grinned at his own joke.
It was the first time she had seen him wear anything but a frown, and it transformed him, elevating him from a near-alien creature of shadows to a gorgeous human man.
“Do that more often,” Gallimore said, and Bayle had enough time to meet Tembi’s eyes and fan herself dramatically with one hand before the two of them stepped back into the Deep and left Tembi and Paisano alone.
“Do what?” Paisano asked them as the air closed itself with a small thunderclap, and then he asked the same question of Tembi, who shrugged in feigned ignorance.
The two of them walked towards the settlement, Paisano taking the lead. “A plague took these people?”
“A treatable plague,” she said. “They chose to not treat it.”
“Why?”
“Religion, I think.” Tembi looked around at what remained of the small colony. Nothing but overgrown foundations and scraps of standing plass were left. “This place has been avoided since then. The locals say it’s cursed.”
Paisano made a ritual gesture, touching first his forehead and then his heart. “Let’s find where they were laid to rest. We will build a memorial, and we shall give them whatever honors we can.” When Tembi raised an eyebrow in question, he turned his gesture into an embarrassed shrug. “I know very little about this universe, except that we are at its mercy. We do what we can to avoid its wrath.”
“That’s a…pragmatic philosophy.”
“I agree, but I’ve yet to be proven wrong,” he said, as the old road turned towards the ruins of the settlement. They explored as best they could through the overgrowth, startling a great many naturalized old Earth honeybees in search of pollen. Several alighted on Tembi’s bare arm, and Paisano went to remove them. “Here, let me. I don’t react to venom if they sting me.”
“Leave them,” she laughed. “They can’t sting me.”
“Ah.” Paisano seemed to notice his hand against Tembi’s arm, the colors close enough to match. He coughed, and his skin shifted several shades closer to its usual gray, with the gold edging in his tattoos moving towards tarnished silver. “Apologies,” he said. “It’s mostly unconscious. Think of it as a compliment; we tend to model ourselves after the most powerful person in the room.”
“It’s not an issue,” replied Tembi, flushing slightly. “And Bayle outranks me by a matter of magnitude.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said, smiling gently.
Tembi’s flush grew and threatened to evaporate everything south of her hips. She turned and moved deeper into the ruins. “How much control do you have over it?” she asked, as she clambered over the pieces of a tumbled plass wall. “My skin reacts to stress. Physical, psychological, emotional…the greater the strain, the harder it gets.
“Also rougher,” she added. Better he learn now than at a completely inopportune time. “My people measure our lives by our grit.”
Paisano was silent for a few moments. Then: “Mine have forgotten green.”
“Hmm?” She turned to look at him.
He had picked a frond from a plant and had laid it against his own arm. “I was born off-world, in hiding. Same with all who are younger than me. Green was the first color to go.” His skin beneath the plant was guttering through different shades of blue. “I also can’t do orange or yellow, but that’s hereditary among the men in my family. There’s no reason why I should not be able to master green.” He sighed and let the frond slip to the ground. “No one took the children out of hiding. The first time I saw a large quantity of green, I was past the age where I could easily learn new colors.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I suppose. I do find it very sad.” Paisano stopped and gazed at the sky. “Our eyes are different from Earth-normal. I see a wide range of distinct colors, and can mimic most of them. Green feels like a loss I’ll never fully understand.
“I want more for my people,” he said, as they walked into the middle of what might have once been a small town commons. “I want my children to grow in a place like this, and learn more colors than those of rocks and shadows. But I don’t want them to be in hiding forever. If we can’t rejoin the galaxy as ourselves—as Chameleons!—we should have stayed in the tunnels. So we will come here, and establish ourselves in some rarified trade, and our children will learn green.”
“How will you rebuild?” Tembi asked, a little bit of dread rising. If Paisano didn’t want to stay in hiding, the Blackwings would be on this place like cats on murder. The Chameleons were their quiet success, their best example of what would happen if they were crossed. A small number of survivors might be allowed, living reminders to wander the galaxy, lost. A colony of them, though, rebuilding their lives? No. Oh no. That must be stopped. That must be crushed.
“Slowly,” he replied. “Carefully. And we shall not be alone. There are many among the Sabenta who also see no future in the refugee camps. Gallimore has suggested that we add three Sabenta for every one Chameleon. They will give us a different form of camouflage.”
She chuckled at that. “You’ve thought this through.”
“I’ve done nothing but,” he said. “All I haven’t planned for is the possibility of hope. Your head Witch? Domino? Was she telling the truth about other Chameleons in hiding?”
“I think so.” Domino had told the Deep to take Tembi to a colony on the edge of a nearly-nothing solar system. The planet was colder than Tembi liked, and most of the settlers wore thick clothing. Still, she had seen some of them display the same unreal beauty she had come to associate with Chameleons, and some of the men had tattoos on their hands and necks with gilded edges. “She says there are several thousand survivors, hidden in different locations. Once you’re set up here, I’ll give you the coordinates and you can decide how you should proceed.”
“How to proceed?” He laughed. “I have no idea! We’ve lost nearly all of our civilization. I’ve never set foot on our homeworld. I might not recognize what they brought with them when they fled. I might not recognize them.”
“Do you want to go?” The words were out before Tembi could catch them. “To Chameleon, right now. I don’t know how much time we can spend there without getting caught, so we’ll have to be fast, but…”
She trailed off as Paisano stared at her, tears in his silver-gray eyes. “I have misjudged Witches,” he said, taking a careful step towards her. “You’ve been villains I can blame. But you, Witch Stoneskin, have done nothing but try, and that makes you more a hero than almost any other soul I have known.”
She stared up at him, somewhat amused and more than reasonably aroused, as he gently touched her bare arms, her shoulders, her face—
The air blew apart beside them.
“Paisano, my good friend!” Gallimore stepped from the Deep, with Bayle a half-step behind them. Gallimore saw Tembi step away from Paisano, and their ears tipped forward in a wordless apology before they turned back to the Chameleon. “Cendo needs two months to put all of the pieces in place, and then you will be the anonymous owner of this pleasant chunk of Lunair.”
The Chameleon bowed at the waist, and Tembi grinned at Bayle as he took the opportunity to adjust his tunic. Ah, well. Since she had started bomb duty, all she allowed herself was the occasional kiss. No one in possession of a decent balance of common sense and self-preservation wanted to cuddle up with an actual rock.
The four of them took a moment to celebrate, with Bayle conjuring sparkling wine from one of Atlantis’ best vineyards. They laughed and danced and got decently drunk, and after Bayle and Gallimore snuck away into the bushes, Tembi shared a small kiss with Paisano. It was sweet but short, with her pulling away before he could introduce anything more complex, and then turning away so he could check his lips for abrasions without either of them feeling guilty.
After that, the real work began.
How did you rebuild a civilization? A secret civilization, with barely enough surviving members to form a viable gene pool? Carefully, cautiously, each decision made with the welfare of the future colony in mind. What outsiders could be introduced? Soldiers who could no longer fight, and the families of dead Sabenta heroes.
Loyalty. Trustworthiness. Careful section and evaluation, each step of the way.
They’d have to be careful, especially for the first few years. Yes, the island had been purchased by new settlers. There was no choice but to accept that information would get out, and that the locals would drop in with Lunair’s version of pies and casseroles to welcome their new neighbors. The Chameleons would be forced to blend in to the Sabenta colonists, to pass as members of the new population and not the primary reason for the colony to exist. They had two things in their favor: the galaxy was sure they were dead, and they were Chameleons. Blending in was what they did.
A slow procession of tasks, each more important than the last, began to swallow their lives. Bayle managed most of the logistics and paperwork, while Tembi had strange, often irritating, clandestine meetings with ranking members of the Sabenta, most of whom wanted her to explain precisely why the refugee camps that were good enough for the Sabenta weren’t good enough for the Chameleons.
“We should trade jobs,” Tembi had said to Bayle. “You’re so much better with people than I am.”
“I agree,” replied Bayle. “That’s why I know there’s no way in all of the greater hells that I want to do yours.”
So Tembi spent half of her time meeting with angry people, and the other half meeting with exceptionally skilled people, as she began to learn what it would take to manage Lancaster’s charities. Finances, certainly, and her lessons weren’t too different than what she had gone through when she had trained with Cooper, where an experienced professional recognized that investing a little extra time in Tembi would save them whole shiploads of work in the long run. She had always possessed a good head for math, and she already had a Witch’s education in logistics, so the pieces of Lancaster’s charitable investments scattered throughout the galaxy quickly came together. Her tutors were eager to help her. None of them were Witches themselves, and the Witch who once held Tembi’s future position had gone on sabbatical several years before, leaving no clear plan to return. There were moments when she thought her tutors would have been happy to shove any old Witch into that management void to save them from needing to fill that role themselves.
However, mastering the practical skills needed to oversee Lancaster’s charities was only part of Tembi’s training. She wasn’t sure it was possible to cram common sense into someone’s skull, but Domino appeared to be hells-bent on keeping her from repeating her mistakes with General Carroll. Tembi had never before considered how the gritty tricks of politics were put into play: Domino set her to lessons with teachers who knew how to manipulate courtrooms, financial institutions, and an assortment of seedy underbellies. She had thought that her own childhood meant that she wouldn’t be surprised at cruelty, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. Life at Lancaster had caused her to go soft—how she had laughed when she had realized that!—and the people who showed her how to navigate the different arenas in which Domino’s personal contingent of Witches moved were brutal.
All those skills she thought she already possessed? Compared to her new teachers, she knew nothing: she didn’t know how to fight; she didn’t know how to move within dark corners of the galaxy; she didn’t know how to slip in and out of dangerous places. These new teachers didn’t care enough about her to throw her the occasional compliment. It was sink or swim, and she sank to the bottom like a rock. She spent a lot of time on the Rails, screaming out her frustration.
At least she wasn’t in danger of dying. The Deep was, as always, her ever-present guardian. When these new teachers forgot she was a Witch and set out to break her down, the Deep would remind them, often by flinging them across the room, or sending their clothing to the rooftop. It never hurt them: those new teachers didn’t want to kill Tembi, so the Deep didn’t send them to wherever it sent those assassins who had come after her while she worked on bombs. Proof that the Deep was still picking through her assailants’ thoughts to determine appropriate punishments, although Tembi developed a minor fear that some of these teachers might get fed up and send a hypnotized assassin against her, some generally innocent person who thought they were at a recreational firing range or something equally banal, and they would empty an entire battery into her before the Deep realized that the bubbling puddle of goo on the ground had once been Tembi.
(Or maybe this had already happened and the Deep had wiggled with time to prevent it, and this twisting of what had-been and what-was caused Tembi-the-not-goo to spend entire nights staring at her bedroom ceiling, wondering.)
There were also some cross-disciplinary skillsets in effect, as Tembi quickly learned that dealing with angry people would be a mainstay of every part of her professional life, clandestine or otherwise. Someone was always furious with the situation, and since there was no use in getting mad at war or money, that meant someone was always furious with her.
Two months. Angry people, deadly people, and Tembi caught in the middle.
Through it all, Moto slept.
She and Bayle would go to his hospital room and watch him, his chest rising and falling in a slow unchanging rhythm. It was good to see him out of the stasis pod, and his dreams were gentle enough to allow the physicians to manipulate his skin.
But.
Frustration boiled up, up, into the stress of the day. Bayle still needed to teach classes at Lancaster; Tembi had taken over Moto’s duties with Cendo. They were exhausted, short-tempered. They snapped at each other more than they should. There was never enough time, and Tembi sometimes came close to asking the Deep to wiggle more hours into her day…but no. She didn’t know how that would go, except for badly.
Then, finally, a last clandestine gathering in the tunnels beneath Adhama. Paisano stood among a collection of anti-grav crates, the hundred-odd Chameleons clustered around him. A young child clung to his legs, shaking.
“It will be good,” he promised her, as she began to cry. “There will be two suns, and a sky full of stars.”
Tembi couldn’t take it. She reached out and joined hands with Paisano, and spun them away, all of them, children and crates and three generations’ worth of suffering, into the Deep.