She shifts her legs toward mine, her hip against my hip, her side against my side, her arm propped behind my back. Her bare feet point naturally like a dancer’s.
I don’t touch, by nature. Our kind does most everything by glance and voice. Even Our Lady Herself only touched us once, the eve before we jumped out to the front—how can I say it in metaphor, how to trap truth in a human body—we reached for Her and She feathered Her fingernails down the inside of our arm, and we had a sense of what mathematicians mean when they cry out: god.
But Miri wells with touch. She presses against the world. Embraces everyone. Pushes her palms into gravel until they bear its mark. She drapes her leg over mine, not meaning anything save that legs are legs and meant for draping.
“You had bad dreams.” She must have smelled my nightmares, like spent sparks on the air: saw them swim between the stars.
I hate narrative, O Self, preferring logic and clear answers: I’m a forward mover by nature, and stories stutter into the past.
Once there was a War in the heavens and we were pickets, running between battles bearing news and aid, until at a bloodbath in the Abyss we beheld—
Herself: vast and broken, leaking plasma, whimpering across q-bands, wreathed in Witchmite swarms. We can’t help Her as She screams to deafen galaxies, and in a moment’s fool bravery we shout a challenge to the Witch. Pick on someone your own size.
The Witch is bigger than us. So much bigger.
A million eyes turn. The Witch licks her lips as she spies us, such a tiny thing, a moment’s morsel, no great lady like Herself listing near death, only a messenger girl, lightly armored, hummingbird-swift and all alone in the black.
She chases. We flee. And before we can close our ears, she starts to scream.
Mites land on our hull. Witchfingers snare us, break, press. Wood clasps limbs round and breaks them and she tears our exposed belly open and does things with the bloody ropes inside.
Miri’s arm settles around my shoulder.
“I need to find her. If she’s gone over—if she’s helping the enemy—”
Miri’s fingers tighten.
If I had been Miri, back before the war, I could have touched Herself like this.
“I can’t stop dreaming until I find her.”
Miri leans her head against my shoulder and tells me where to go.
*
Following Miri’s directions, I reach a part of the island I’ve never seen, a tiny cave in a cliff-wall cleft where the spume rises a hundred feet at high tide. A risky climb down even for Callie—the slightest slip of claw would send her tumbling to jagged rocks, or drown her in whirlpool current.
I couldn’t make this climb in full gear, let alone regularly unaided. Fortunately I don’t need to. I fly down and settle on the ledge.
Charnel-house smell wafts from the cave, mixed with salt sea air.
I am light, so I need none inside.
The piles of corpses were a grim touch, O Self. Rodents aplenty, some few birds, several of the larger lizards. (How did she carry them down the cliff?) She drained their blood into a turtle’s upended shell, having scooped the rest of the turtle out and chucked it against one wall. She left the meat in a heap and only gnawed it slightly. (She wouldn’t want the old man to wonder why she wasn’t hungry come dinner.) Why not toss the corpses into the sea? Afraid, maybe, I’d notice circling sharks.
What she did with the blood surprises me.
Callie loathes education. The old man tries to bring her into line, and I encourage her, but she scorns paper and pen. Force a quill into her hand and she breaks it, or eats it, point first. She drank a pot of ink to get out of lessons, and spent the rest of the day vomiting black. Once, she threw the notebook the old man had given her into the fire. She hates sums especially.
But equations cover the cave wall.
She mixed her ink from critter blood and berries and drew them with a crab-leg stylus and wrote row after row of math, circuit diagrams, NO-space topology, filament stress analysis, and, on the ceiling—punctuated by the wounds her claws must have left as she hung there three-limbed drawing with her right, she might have hissed eat your heart out, Michelangelo and wondered how his heart would have tasted—a diagram plotting a black hole slingshot orbit.
Callie planned our flyby, estimated the point of my greatest distraction. She knew to the picosecond when the filaments would give, when I would lack the cycles to watch her. The equations have been scrubbed clean and rewritten. She’s worked on this for a while. Bided her time. Waited for her chance.
And seized it.
The cave leads back into the rock and becomes a tunnel shored with shark jawbones and whale ribs.
Find her, the old man said. I follow.
Down and down, twist and turn, screwing into bedrock and soil. I dislike water and earth and they return the favor, pushy gross elements, ick. I wish I could deny this, but—they remind me of the tree, oh Self, they remind me of witch hands pressing wood over our limbs, of sap hissing solid around our fingers, of the cloyed dark as she streaked the wood across our lips and eyes—
A spark dancing on the wind of a draft, I descend. But there shouldn’t be a draft down here.
Naturally, as soon as I think that, the tunnel collapses.
There’s no warning, O Self. The tunnel mouth crumbles in. I could almost flee back to the surface, dart up through the twists and turns to burst free.
I don’t. Callie came this way. And I have to find her.
I sprint past snapping jawbone stays, I dodge falling rocks, I laugh and sing, and I descend.
The genius of this place! The tunnel winds through part of us I thought destroyed, rent by Witchmite teeth before we closed our eyes and ears. Callie built her hidey-hole from burned circuitry and stitched code. Miri always said Callie wasn’t dumb, just obstinate—hated the old man’s rule, hated me for helping him. She didn’t like his teaching, so she taught herself.
I burst from the collapsing tunnel into void.
For one exhilarating brilliant minute, down’s up, right’s left, and I don’t know where I am. New senses unfurl through broadband and q-stream, and reflexively my legs clutch our hull, scraping plate.
What?
Unfamiliar hardware sears me, I’m tickled with serial numbers that don’t belong. This form has optical sensors, and irising them open I see us in visual band as our forebears saw, an enormous flattened gold-white teardrop attenuating to a stern bubbled with NO-engines. We are so beautiful, even scarred. Beauty and scars alike catch me, choke me, even as I remember the last time I used eyes like this, to watch Herself burning, redshifted, away, as we fled. . . .
And then I realize where I am. What Callie’s done.
I have legs. A tiny engine. My q-antennas, my radio receivers, are open to all the horrors of the deep.
I’m in a Witchmite.
In space, no one can hear you hyperventilate.
I thought we broke them all. Scraped off the ones clinging to our hull, killed and culled them with EMPs and subtle magic, kept ahead of the swarm. I thought we were quiet, secret, safe, broken.
Maybe we missed this one. Or it hid, until Callie found it.