“Tembi! C’mon, Tembs, get up!”
A familiar voice.
No, an annoyingly familiar voice: Kalais.
Wait, no. Kalais? Why is he here?
She managed to get one eye open, and the world flopped over sideways. She really wanted to throw up again.
“Tembs, get up!”
Definitely Kalais. “Matindi? Winter…she hit me.”
There was something wrong with that. Winter hit her? No. The Deep wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.
But the Deep let Matindi die. It knew what would happen and it did nothing.
There was something wrong with that thought, too. It didn’t do nothing. The Deep had brought her back through time to be with Matindi at the end, so Matindi could—
A hard jostle. There was a shoulder tucked under her arm. “Here, take her.”
“Where’s she injured?” Another familiar voice: Paisano.
“Can’t find a wound, and her skin’s too hard to cut. I don’t think the blood is hers. Hide her until she can jump you out. I need to help with the evacuation.”
“Kalais?” Her skull nearly split with the word, but she had to know. “Where’s Matindi?”
“She’s here in the colony?” Tembi opened her eyes to see Kalais shake his head. “Haven’t seen her. She’s probably jumping people out.”
“…no…” She couldn’t explain, couldn’t ask why he had found her but not Matindi’s body.
“Keep her awake.” Kalais was talking to Paisano. “Use this on her, even if she shouts at you to save it for someone else. She’s how you escape.”
“Yes, yes.” There was a hiss, followed by a soft weight draped across her forehead. She had enough feeling left in her skin to know that the object shifted temperature and began to act as a cold compress. A medical nanopack, the emergency version of her usual mini-med pills. A million microscopic ’bots were no doubt zipping through her system, diagnosing her injuries, swarming the damaged tissues and repairing them, but all she felt was cold.
Tembi was passed from one set of hands to another, and then another. Paisano left, the man who replaced him as her nurse soon followed him. Their voices reappeared from time to time, always talking softly to her to keep her from slipping back into unconsciousness. Slowly, Tembi’s thoughts began to clear, letting her puzzle out the circumstances: they were in hiding, and the adult Chameleons were darting naked into live fire to locate and rescue their fellow colony members.
She opened her eyes. Around her were some of the colony’s children, crying in absolute silence. Not all of them. Not even most. There should have been five times their number. Most were Chameleons, sitting still and blending into the walls so closely that they were almost invisible in the gloom. The older Chameleon children were standing with their backs to the windows, their skin the same shade of mottled gray as the room itself. Anyone taking a cursory glance through the plass would think the room was empty.
“What’s happening?” she whispered.
“Blackwing raid.” The speaker was Chime, a young woman fairly high in the colony’s hierarchy. She had been a Sabenta soldier before she had lost an arm; repairing missing limbs was prohibitively expensive for most refugees. “Paisano asked you to take the children to safety as soon as you’re able.”
Tembi tried to nod, and found her head no longer felt like a shattered egg. The med ’bots were doing their job. “The War Witch is here?” she asked.
Chime hesitated. “He says the Deep brought him to you.”
“Oh.” The medpack beeped softly, its cycle complete. Tembi sat up. Save for a grave sense of sorrow and a bone-deep weariness, she felt normal. Wide dark eyes followed her every move: she wondered if the older children would have been out assisting with the rescue if she hadn’t been knocked flat and left defenseless. When she got her hands on Winter, she was going to sossing murder the old—
Focus, Tembi.
She opened her arms. “Come, children.”
They rushed to her, Chameleon and Sabenta alike, and she folded the Deep around them. They moved across the galaxy wordlessly. Tembi knew she should have been chattering to keep up their spirits, but she couldn’t make the effort. The Rails were gray: the Deep shared her sorrow.
The Deep opened into her own living room at Lancaster. It hadn’t been a conscious choice, but the Deep had picked a longing for home and security from her emotions, and Tembi’s house met those needs. She snapped off the lights, drew the shades, and told the children not to leave the building. Then, she was back into the Deep.
Cooper came next.
Tembi knew even before she found him. The Deep twisted in on itself when she asked about him, and the gray of the Rails turned black. The Deep took her to his body, now nothing more than a corpse floating alone in the dark, all of his nimble brilliance spilt along with his blood.
What a way to die.
She gathered up his body, too numb to cry and unwilling to say anything to the Deep to put it at ease. She knew it was miserable; she knew the Deep knew that she was angry. She also knew there was nothing that would come out of either her mouth or her mind that could be kind, and so she forced herself to say nothing, think nothing, feel nothing at all.
They came out in the same shadowed room in the colony. Chime was surrounded by another dozen children. When they saw Cooper, they began to moan quietly. She laid him down against the far wall and whispered, “I’m sorry.” Then, again, Tembi opened her arms and took the children back to her house at Lancaster. This happened twice more, until there were no more children waiting in the little house, and after that she moved the adults.
“Keep them safe,” she told Chime, and gave her a code she could use to ping Bayle’s databand. The children were all sitting in tight clumps across the central room, staring at nothing. Soon, a new clump of problems would arise—Sheltering Sabenta children from a Blackwing raid in her own home? What was she thinking?!—but for the moment, no one would look for them here.
Back to the little colony.
Her anger was high, a brutal song within her veins. No hiding in the quiet room this time. She stepped out of the Deep in the center of the village. There were bodies all around, some left where they had fallen, some stacked into a rough pile and burning. A nearby Blackwing shouted at her, pointed a popstick at her…
Tembi didn’t bother to raise a hand as the Deep blinked the soldier out of her reality.
“Enjoy your time in Assassins’ Paradise,” she muttered, as she walked into the battle.
Soldiers closed on her. The hot song of her rage lashed out, again and again, taking those who would kill her and sending them away, away. Where? She didn’t care. The Deep mourned along with her in a burning wind which lifted the soldiers and hurled them aside, away…
Would the Deep kill for her? Oh, yes, yes! Gladly! It knew she was hurting and it would do anything to heal that.
A Blackwing came at her, and she wondered if the Deep could fragment the faceless soldier into a million sharp-edged pieces, just like—
The smell of roses. The taste of the galaxy’s best coffee. Warm, clean sheets wrapping her up at night.
“Stop,” she whispered to the Deep. “Don’t kill them. Matindi wouldn’t want that.”
Instead, she punched the soldier in their throat, right below the protection of their faceplate, and then kicked them to the ground.
She kept kicking them.
The Blackwings knew there were Witches here.
Another soldier came at her from the side. A foot behind their knee, a tug to put them on the ground, the same foot straight into their faceplate to drive them back.
They had a way to kill Matindi. The Deep knew it would happen, but it couldn’t stop it!
The reflection of green sparks against the polished black of his shielded armor. She turned and blocked the popstick before it could touch her, tossed it aside, and kicked the soldier in the stomach.
If the Deep couldn’t stop it from happening…
She hissed with realization: the Deep wanted me as witness.
The soldier staggered back, and then barreled forward, shouting. They were massive, a human-shaped avalanche bearing down on her. Tembi snarled at them as she lifted the fallen popstick.
Bayle and I kept getting yanked back to Lancaster. It annoyed Bayle so much she started living at Lancaster again, and if I wasn’t getting laid—
The popstick flashed as she jabbed it straight at the soldier. Unlike the others, this one appeared to have a little more than basic combat training; the popstick slid across the armor of their arm as they blocked, and then they threw a fast and heavy punch at her face.
Cooper called me out to defuse a bomb.
She dodged and raised the popstick again, all set to drive it straight into the solder’s ribs to hurt and hurt and hurt! Gods, she was so glad the Deep was letting her fight!
Cooper works for Lancaster.
Tembi stopped, the shock of realization nearly freezing her in place.
She threw the popstick at the soldier and wrapped herself in the Deep, this time asking it to jump her to a nearby rooftop where she hid behind an overhanging ledge. From there, she stared down at the village, forcing herself to slow down instead of letting her rage drive her. There were connections she didn’t want to make, didn’t even want to consider.
Pause. Breathe. Take in the battle.
The action was winding down. There had been two soldiers for every villager, and as the raid had started in the dead of night, the colonists had had no chance of winning. Some of those who had fought back had been killed, but the majority had been stunned, captured, and herded like livestock towards waiting FTL transport ships. It would have been over ages ago if it hadn’t been for the Chameleons and their camouflage, and Tembi would have bet every credit she owned that their slim advantage had lasted until a Blackwing soldier had remembered to flip on the infrared.
She leapt across the rooftops, running on the night air when she couldn’t clear the distance between buildings, searching. There were people in the colony she couldn’t abandon, not even for the forty-plus children crying in her living room on Found.
Paisano!
There, below, hiding behind a row of tall bushes which resembled chunks of seaweed blowing in the night breeze. His camouflage was mottled gray to resemble the shadows cast by the bushes. She wouldn’t have spotted him at all, had Kalais not been crouched beside him, cloaked in an atmospheric bubble cast by the Deep to hide them from scans.
Into the Deep and out again, kneeling beside Paisano. He gasped, or would have, had Kalais not whipped a hand across the other man’s mouth. “Shhh,” Kalais cautioned, and nodded to Tembi.
“Matindi’s dead,” she said. The words sounded absolutely unreal. “She was killed as the raid began.”
“Oh, Tembs.” His lenses were up, allowing him better clarity in the dark. Tears welled up in his pale eyes. Even when the two of them had been at their worst, Matindi had shown him love, too.
“Later,” she said, peering through the shrubs. “What kind of weapon fragments a body into sharp pieces?”
“Sharp?” Paisano whispered. He hadn’t turned to look at her, instead keeping a watch on the people being loaded into the nearby dropships.
“Yeah. Clean edges, like broken glass. Matindi was—” Tembi took a deep breath. “She was shattered. The Deep put her back together almost as fast as it happened, but she was already dead.”
“The Deep didn’t stop it?”
Tembi glared at Kalais, but it was an honest question instead of a perfectly aimed arrow. “No. I don’t think it could. Instead, it brought me back to bear witness.”
At least her second mother hadn’t died alone. A blessing in the form of a trauma, but she hadn’t realized it until now. Gods, the poor Deep was probably so confused!
“A weapon that can kill Witches.” Paisano sounded almost in awe. He turned to Tembi: “I’m glad you’re safe.”
She smiled at him, so sadly. Less than a half an hour had passed since she had been curved around his sleeping back. And now—
“Yes, well,” Kalais whispered quickly, and pointed at the ships. “What to do about that?”
“My people are in there,” Paisano said. “I can’t leave them.”
“Some of your people are in my house,” replied Tembi. “Almost half of your children. Consider that before you charge the ship.”
Paisano’s shoulders slumped. “Shadow spirits, I don’t know what to do.”
She looked to Kalais. “No,” he said. “I want to tear those ships apart, Tembs, you know I do. But—”
“Lancaster is pulled straight into the war.” She shut her eyes. There had to be something they could do, some trick of the Deep’s to salvage the situation. She could yank out parts of their engines, or jump out captives one by one as soon as they were loaded.
Focus, Tembi. They know there’re Witches here. They probably have taken precautions—by every dark hell, they killed Matindi! You’re not invulnerable any more.
Oh, now there was a sobering thought! She hadn’t given herself time to process how she might actually die here.
Focus, Tembi.
“I have an idea. You’re not going to like it,” she said to Paisano. “You’ll spend it doing childcare while Kalais and I rescue the others.”
“Tembi—” Paisano’s lips curled back, exposing his sharp teeth.
“Fight the right people now,” Kalais reminded him, a hand gripping his shoulder. Paisano closed his eyes tight and nodded.
“C’mon,” Tembi said, as she laid her hand atop his and jumped them.
He wanted to talk; she couldn’t. The colors of the Rails were black in utter misery. “Give me a moment,” she told him, and shut her eyes. “Deep? I understand now. I’m not angry with you. I’m sad, too.”
Cooper died alone so Matindi didn’t have to. It was a half-formed thought which she packed up and shoved away, as there was no way she could manage all of this at once. Instead, she held on to those last precious moments with her second mother, where Matindi wanted nothing more than to help her, even if she didn’t know how.
That had been the essence of Matindi, always. From the moment the Deep had brought the two of them together, Matindi had tried to help Tembi. She had faltered and fallen more than once, had run from their problems, had tried to help by hurting—the last time Matindi touched me was to hit me, oh, heartbroken gods!—but she had always wanted to help.
“Matindi was so much like you,” she said to the Deep. “All she wanted was for things to be better.”
The Deep sang a mourning dirge in greens and golds and shadows.
A few moments later, they stepped from the Deep into her house. Bayle was there. She received a quick hug, Paisano got a gentle kiss, and then it was back to the colony to rejoin Kalais in the bushes.
“Now what?” he asked, as the last of the colonists were loaded and the cargo doors were shut.
“Now we pick a ship and stow away on it,” she said.
“Tembs, no,” he protested. “We can jump inside the ships but we can’t take people out without being noticed. And if they spot us jumping in, we’re done.”
She nearly grinned. “That’s not what I said.”