“Feel how sharp this is, but don’t slide your hand down it,” he says. “Drag your thumb against it, like this.” He gently pulls the pad of his thumb perpendicular against the blade, then offers the knife to me, hilt-first.
I use my thumb as he did. The blade feels very sharp. I hand him back the knife. He reaches into his bag and produces a second stone, which he passes to me.
It takes me a few tries to position the long spear in a way where I can slide the stone against the blade. It makes a small grinding noise when I do.
Coyotl smiles and nods. “That’s it.”
He didn’t want to kiss me, he didn’t want my spear—he just wanted my spear to be sharp. Together, we slide stones across steel. Ten strokes. A hundred. Slow and steady. My world narrows to the stone, the metal.
He stops. “I know you and Aramovsky are fighting.”
His words pull me out of it. I realize that when I sharpen the spear, I’m not thinking of anything else. In a way, I guess doing this gave my mind a break. I feel more relaxed now.
“We’re not fighting,” I say. “We have different ideas. We’re trying to figure out the best way to take care of everyone.”
Coyotl thinks on this for a minute. He nods, goes back to sharpening.
“That’s good,” he says. “Because this place…I love Omeyocan, but it’s—” he stops and looks at me “—it’s scary.”
It is at that. I nod.
He smiles wide, like I have just helped him with a big problem.
“Aramovsky helps me not be afraid,” he says. “There’s a lot of us who are afraid. He talks to us, tells us that the gods will protect us.”
I again put the stone to my spear. I sharpen. I think.
Aramovsky is helping people? He’s trying to turn people against me. Could it be both things at once? I think of what he said to me in the pilothouse. He seemed so genuine, so sincere. Maybe he’s talking nonsense, but he believes that nonsense.
The scrape of stone on metal chases away my thoughts. I lose myself in the task. I don’t know how much time has gone by when Coyotl stands suddenly, staring out toward the vine wall.
I look and see nothing. The only light comes from the shuttle behind us. My imagination turns the city’s deep shadows into creeping spiders.
“What is it?” I ask quietly. “Do you see—”
“Shhh.”
He leans forward slightly, peering—he smiles.
“They’ve returned.”
The shadows move, take shape: Bishop, Visca, Bawden. Long vines are wrapped around their black coveralls. They look like part of the landscape, even though they’re running. Standing still, they would be invisible. As they draw closer, I see their faces: covered in plant juice and dirt.
Coyotl runs down the ramp, feet hammering on the metal. Bishop is right—he is noisy.
Coyotl meets them halfway. His left hand goes to Bishop’s right shoulder, Bishop’s left hand goes to Coyotl’s right. Coyotl repeats the greeting with the other circle-stars. There is something formal about the motion, and also something deeply emotional. None of the other symbols do that. In many ways, the circle-stars are a people unto themselves.
Coyotl and Bawden enter the shuttle, leaving me with Bishop and Visca.
“Welcome back,” I say to them.
I was so worried about Bishop. Now that he’s back, I feel exhausted. I just want to sleep.
“We saw spiders,” he says. “They stay still and hidden, mostly. We couldn’t get a good look at them. We saw some lurking around a strange building near the Observatory. I think it’s their nest. We had to go all the way around so the spiders couldn’t see us, and approach the Observatory from the far side.”
Visca shifts from foot to foot, so excited he can’t stand still. Even with the coating of dirt and gunk, his skin is so much paler than Bishop’s.
“Some of my training came back to me,” Visca says. “I know tracking, even better than Bishop does.”
I remember how Bishop tracked the pig back on the Xolotl.
“I don’t think the spiders hear very well,” Visca says. “When we decided to take the long way around, we didn’t see any sign of them. No tracks, no broken vines—nothing. We can take that same path tomorrow and avoid the spiders completely, I bet.”
I look at Bishop. He nods in agreement.
“The Observatory is big,” he says. “It’s cold at the top. We could see the entire city. The landing pad, the shuttle, the city wall, the jungle and the ruins…everything looked so small.”
“What about other people? Anything moving?”
“No,” Bishop says. “We saw maybe four different spiders inside the city limits. When we got up high on the Observatory, we could see over the city walls. We saw more spiders moving through the ruins.”
Four of them inside the walls? And more in the jungle? I had held out hope there was just one spider. So many…we could never stand up to that many.
“Gaston thinks the wall goes all around the city,” I say. “Does it?”