He struck out as though he had forgotten who she was or that she was ever there. Because he had not planned it, because she had not expected it, he hit her, hard enough to knock her back. She lunged and reached for him, but he lost his balance and rolled. The water closed over him and sloshed against the well's side, reflecting in irregular waves.
Mischa straddled the wall. Her face might be bruised, but Chris was not strong enough to hurt her. He floated motionless, face down. She reached out and down and caught the tail of his shirt. As she pulled him toward the rim, he revived, flailing and choking, trying to fight her. When he almost pulled her in, she let him go and waited.
His struggles slowly ceased. He hung in the water; ripples surrounded him. He looked up at her, and intelligence leaked back into his eyes.
'Give me a hand.' Still whining, self-pitying, yet trying to demand.
'I tried,' she said. She brought her bare feet up on the wall and crossed her arms on her knees.
Chris paddled slowly toward the edge, reached for the stone, caught it and held on. 'Bastard,' he said.
'And you too.'
He pulled himself half onto the wall, stopped, and swung his leg up to hook his heel over the corner. Water splashed out of his boot and dripped from his shiny black pants and bloused sleeves. He held himself there, trembling, unable to pull himself any farther.
'Misch...' His voice was very weak.
She dragged him out of the water, over the wall, into the sand. He fell against her; she supported him. He tried to lie down, but she would not let him. 'Home, Chris, huh?'
'I want to go to sleep.'
She did not answer, but pulled his hand across her shoulders and put her arm around his waist, turned him and took him away, down a radius and toward Center. He stumbled, and leaned on her heavily, but he came.
Chris was twenty, half again as old as she. He looked taller than he was, as Mischa would when she finished growing. Chris's hair was pale, almost colorless, fine-textured, tending to fall across his eyes. Mischa's was darker, a shade between dark blond and brown, untidily cut, but it had the same texture and the same tendency. Her forehead was wide, her jaw strong and rather square. Chris's face was more delicately built, and the fine bones were accentuated by his painful thinness.
What marked them truly close was their eyes. The startling green was an unlikely shade, but no one had ever asked either of them if they heightened the color.
'Why'd you come down here?'
He took some time to answer. 'Where?'
'So near his niche.' For Mischa and Chris, their uncle had no name.
'I didn't know I was.' His voice trailed off, and Mischa kept him walking until he began to make weak and ineffective movements of escape. 'Why don't you let me sleep?'
She stopped, let him go, and looked up at him. 'Could you? Even if I let you try, right now?'
He met her gaze, for just a moment. It was like looking deep into a person she could too easily be, if she ever let herself become as frightened as Chris was now. He looked down. 'I can't dream, Misch. I forget...' His voice rose, and he grabbed her shoulders as though to shake her in anger, but he had to use her as a support. 'I never dream anymore.' Terror and despair were the only emotions he had left.
There was nothing Mischa could say, nothing she could do but put her arm around him again and lead him through the tunnels, back to Center, back to his niche. He came obediently, silent now. Glowing light-tubes began to outnumber dead ones. As they passed beneath the lights, their shadows lengthened and shortened like turning spokes.
Nearer Center were more people, but they took no notice of Chris and Mischa: a couple of kids, one sick, no account.
Mischa's clothes were wet down the side where Chris leaned, clammy and warm against her in the heavy air. But she felt him begin to shiver; she moved her hand against his side and found that all the warmth came from her own body. Chris was cold, all the way through, his energy depleted by exhaustion because he could not sleep and by oblivion because he could not dream.
His boot slid across the stone; he stumbled and fell, pulling Mischa with him. She knelt beside him, holding him up on his knees, engulfed in his limp arms. 'Get up, Chris, come on.'
'Leave me alone.'
She could not carry him and he could not stand.
'Get out' the way!'
Mischa looked up, startled. A miner swayed above them. Mischa could smell the alcoholic taint of his breath, but she had not felt his approach. The sight of helplessness excited him. He struck out at her; he wore heavy rings on every finger of his soft white hands. Mischa threw herself backward into the sand. The miner turned from her to Chris and kicked out viciously. The heavy boot caught Chris in the lower ribs, lifted him, and threw him against the wall. He slid down next to a little pile of trash.
The miner chuckled low in his throat and went toward him, clenching and unclenching his fingers, head low, shoulders hunched. Mischa darted in front of him. She tossed her head and her hair flipped back; he was confronted with anger on the edge of irrationality. 'Don't,' Mischa said. A touch flicked the crystal blade of her knife straight out. The point just grazed the miner's stomach. As he jumped back, a spot of blood spread on his shirt. Mischa followed him, one step. He backed away. His gaze jerked down to the well-blooded knife. He backed another step, and when she did not follow, he turned and ran.
Mischa wiped the blade. It remained bright, clear ruby from other encounters in which it had tasted blood more deeply. The miner, Mischa reflected, should never have left his Family's safe rich dome and the machines that did all their work.
Chris was curled around himself, unconscious or simply unaware. He did not move when she shook him, though his eyes were open. She supported his head and slapped him gently until he closed his eyes and opened them again. False euphoria, backed, then overwhelmed, by depression, crept up in Chris and leaked to Mischa. She resonated to the pitch of his exhaustion.
'Let's go, Chris,' she said, very softly, and he did the best he could.
They walked. Their surroundings grew brighter, warmer, more crowded, noisier. Mischa kept Chris near the wall so she would be between him and other people. She ignored the few who noticed them. None offered help. She did not want it.
'Why were you there?'
'You know why.' She could not quite keep the bitterness from her voice. 'I always go to the underground after I have to go home.' She needed the solitude and silence and petrified fragile beauty of the lower caverns, as well as their danger, perhaps, to renew her faith in herself. The echoing paths that humans had never despoiled restored her.
Chris was silent for so long that Mischa thought he had forgotten they were talking; when he finally spoke he might as well have said nothing. 'They can still call you, huh?'
Her temper flared, but she damped it and did not answer.
Chris closed his eyes and let her lead him. 'I didn't think Gemmi'd live this long. I really didn't.'
And again, Mischa had no answer. The sick, stupid feel of their sister remained in her mind. Gemmi's aura had to fade slowly, like a foul odor. She lived only through others, in the consciousnesses where inhibitions held, and in the soft underparts of the mind where animals still lurked. It was best that she had so little intelligence; she would have been driven insane otherwise. Had her body been so deformed, she would have been exposed to the deep underground as soon as she was born.
'She hasn't tried to call me,' Chris said, 'not for, oh, a long time.'
'Shut up, Chris.' Mischa had kept her own invisible differences almost secret for so long that the defense was automatic. It worried her that Chris was no longer so cautious. The wrong word at the wrong time, and he—or both of them—might be banished from Center.
When Mischa left the city, as she was determined somehow to do, it would be of her own will, her own plan. She had no intention of being driven out because of an ability for which she did not even have a word. Mischa imagined being chased into the deep underground: as a prison, it would lose its beauty and its fascination. And she would be doubly trapped. If she were seen near the city again, she could be killed; if she stayed in the underground and tried to defy Gemmi's inevitable call to return, she would go mad.
