“Zhu Kongqi,” Tú’àn said, “you have not stated your preference.”
“An affront to privacy is a serious matter,” Kongqi said. “Words spoken publicly cannot be erased; therefore, the punishment must be permanent as well. None of the bodily punishments would satisfy me, for they are not permanent. Given the situation from which the offense arose, I believe a just punishment would be for Zhu Dìqiú to permanently surrender his claim upon the human Cynna Weaver, regardless of the outcome of the examination we will make later.”
Dick Boy did not like that. He tried to hide it, but he was an emotional kind of guy. His very dislike made the rest agree that it was an appropriate punishment—that, and the fact that it let them end the discussion. Lily had the impression the spawn didn’t much like hanging out together. They agreed to meet again in six months for the examination of the “larger issues”—how to define “prisoner,” Lily supposed—and it was over. Three of the spawn zipped off, moving so fast they made her think of enormous mosquitos.
Dick Boy didn’t leave with the others. Neither did Shēngwù the beautiful.
Lily let herself sink down to sit on the floor beside Cynna. Her head ached miserably. She wanted the last two spawn to go away so she could try to contact Rule again . . . though she doubted she could. The mind-stuff in her gut was too thin. She wanted a cup of coffee. A couple ibuprofen wouldn’t hurt, either. And a pillow. Why hadn’t she tried to bargain for a pillow? They had chickens here, right? They must have feathers to stuff pillows. But coffee . . . she sighed in pointless longing and rubbed the back of her head.
Two rocks floated up. One paused while the first settled itself with a dull crack against those still in place. The second one joined itself to the wall on the other side of the hole.
“I will assist, with your permission,” Shēngwù said in his smooth baritone.
“As you please.”
Lily leaned against the wall—an undamaged interior wall—and continued to translate quietly as the Master of Body Magic attempted to tease information out of the surly Master of Earth Magic while the two of them rebuilt the wall. Shēngwù floated the rocks up to the hole. Dick Boy ignored or deflected Shēngwù’s oblique questions while placing the rocks, sometimes altering them. That was weird to watch; the rock seemed to melt and reform, but without heat. Eventually Shēngwù abandoned subtlety the oblique and asked directly about Lily’s “secret meeting” with Alice.
Dick Boy snorted. “Information has a price.”
His price did not seem to be high. He required Shēngwù to promise to inform the other spawn, then described what had happened before Kongqi showed up.
The interesting thing, she thought, was how readily Dick Boy and Shēngwù accepted that Lily had spoken the truth. Perhaps not the entire truth—they had, after all, been interrupted. But they both spoke as if they believed that Alice had asked Lily about the Codex, which they called the Book of the Gods.
As, of course, she had . . . when Lily first arrived. Which had provided Lily’s inspiration for that particular lie: it wasn’t entirely a lie. Maybe that had helped her fool Dick Boy. Whatever body signals he might have been using to detect lies—respiration, blood pressure, who knew?—would have been going crazy with fear for Cynna. Subtler tells should have been lost in that swamp of emotion, but if he did have some other way of detecting lies, she’d spoken a partial truth. Alice had asked about the Codex, just not at the meeting Dick Boy was so interested in.
Dick Boy and Shēngwù had no trouble believing that Alice was interested in the Codex. Wouldn’t all the spawn be? Now that she thought about it, though, she’d met with Kongqi almost every day, and he hadn’t asked about the Codex. Not once. He’d wanted to talk about altruism, the difference between sympathy and empathy, and dragons. Most of all, dragons—the ones he referred to as “the sentient dragons.” Did that mean Kongqi already knew plenty about the Codex, but hadn’t shared his knowledge with Alice? Or that Alice had told him that Lily knew very little, and he accepted that? Or did it mean that he really didn’t much care about the Codex?
She rubbed her poor head and wondered if everyone here was insane.
“Headache?” Cynna whispered.
“Yeah.”
Cynna took Lily’s hand and lifted her eyebrows . . . inviting her, Lily realized after a moment, to mindspeak. Lily gestured at the nearly finished wall and shook her head. Touching skin-to-skin made mindspeech easy, but didn’t make it invisible to one with the Sight. Harder to see, probably—or that’s what Cullen had told her once. But difficult was not impossible. She didn’t want to take the risk.
Cynna opened Lily’s hand and wrote a letter on her palm, then another, until she’d spelled out, “Depleted?”
Lily nodded. “And hungry.” Maybe depletion headaches and hunger headaches were the same thing. “Why do we get headaches when we’re hungry anyway?”
“It’s a blood sugar thing,” Cynna said absently. She frowned at the nearly finished wall—or at the spawn on the other side, still discussing what Lily might know about the Codex. “Low blood sugar can make the blood vessels in the brain spasm or constrict.”
Outside, the two spawn agreed that whatever Lily had told Alice about the Codex could not be considered reliable, but it would, nonetheless, be interesting data. The last rock snicked into place. And the spawn fell silent.
Gone? Lily got up to check, peering out the reconstructed window slit.
“Are they gone?” Cynna asked.
“As far as I can tell. I don’t see them.”
Cynna sighed. “That was weird, wasn’t it? The way they kept speculating about what you’d told Alice, but they never asked you. You were right here, but it’s like you were a tree.”
“A tree?”
“I’ve been thinking about how the spawn see humans. Seems like it’s kind of the way we see trees. People mostly like trees, but we see them in terms of how to use them—for shade or landscaping, or we can chop them down for lumber and firewood. And people who love trees love them differently. Some love forests. They don’t worry about any individual tree, but they want the forest to persist. Another person might love the big oak in their backyard, but they’ll poison or uproot any little oaks that sprout in their lawn. No forests allowed. Someone else might really enjoy studying trees, but he doesn’t worry about how the trees feel. Tree feelings aren’t real to him.”
“Kongqi studies us,” Lily said slowly. “Dick Boy is all about functionality. Using us. Killing a child means the same thing to him as pulling up a weed.”
Cynna nodded. “And when other people are around, that’s what we pay attention to. People get our attention whether we want them to or not. I think to the spawn, ‘people’ means other spawn. The rest of us are trees.”
“So they didn’t ask me anything because I’m just a tree and they forgot I was here.”