ORTHOGONAL: BOOK ONE
NIGHT SHADE BOOKS
San Francisco
This edition of
© 2011 by Night Shade Books
Jacket art and design by Cody Tilson
Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart
All rights reserved
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-59780-227-7
EISBN: 978-1-59780-351-9
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1
When Yalda was almost three years old, she was entrusted with the task of bearing her grandfather into the forest to convalesce.
Dario had been weak and listless for days, refusing to move from the flower bed where the family slept. Yalda had seen him this way before, but it had never lasted so long. Her father had sent word to the village, and when Doctor Livia came to the farm to examine Dario Yalda and two of her cousins, Claudia and Claudio, stayed close to watch the proceedings.
After squeezing and prodding the old man all over with more hands than most people used in a day, Doctor Livia announced her diagnosis. “You’re suffering from a serious light deficiency. The crops here are virtually monochromatic; your body needs a broader spectrum of illumination.”
“Ever heard of sunlight?” Dario replied caustically.
“Sunlight is far too blue,” Doctor Livia countered, “too fast for the body to catch. And the light from the fields is all sluggish red. What you’re lacking lies between those extremes; a man of your age needs umber and gamboge, saffron and goldenrod, jade and viridian.”
“We have all those hues right here! Have you ever seen such glorious specimens?” Dario, who’d taken to resting limbless, budded a lone finger from the middle of his chest to gesture at the garden around them. Yalda, whose job it was to tend the flower bed, warmed with pride, though the blossoms he was praising were closed for the day, their luminescent petals furled and dormant.
“Those plants are merely decorative,” Doctor Livia replied dismissively. “You need a full range of natural light, at much greater intensity. You need to spend four or five nights in the forest.”
When the doctor had left, Yalda’s father, Vito, and her uncle, Giusto, talked the matter over with her grandfather.
“It sounds like quackery to me,” Dario declared, snuggling deeper into his indentation in the soil. “‘Umber and gamboge’! I’ve survived for two dozen and seven years with sunlight, wheatlight and a few floral adornments. There’s nothing healthier than farm life.”
“Everyone’s body changes,” Vito said cautiously. “There must be a reason you’re so tired.”
“Years of hard work?” Dario suggested. “Or don’t you think I’ve earned a rest?”
Giusto said, “I’ve seen you shining yellow at night. If you’re losing that hue, what’s putting it back?”
“Yalda should have planted more goldenrod!” Claudio blurted out accusingly. Giusto shushed him, but Claudia and Claudio exchanged knowing glances, as if they were the doctors now and they’d finally exposed the root of the problem. Yalda told herself that it was only an adult’s admonition that meant anything, but her older cousins’ smug delight in her supposed failure still stung.
Vito said, “I’ll go with you to the forest. If the doctor’s right, it will give you back your health. And if she’s wrong, what harm can it do?”
“What harm?” Dario was incredulous. “I don’t have the strength for a twelfth of that journey, and I doubt you could carry me even halfway. It would finish us both off!”
Vito’s tympanum became rigid with annoyance, but Yalda suspected that her grandfather was right. Her father was strong, but Dario had always been the heavier of the two and his illness hadn’t changed that. Yalda had never even glimpsed the forest, but she knew it was farther than the village, farther than anywhere she’d been. If there had been a chance of hitching a ride on a truck then someone would have raised the possibility, but the route
