Chapter 13
ISAT CROSS-LEGGED BY a campfire. The samurai sword rested in my lap, and the night breeze wafted smoke in my eyes. I had just moved out of the smoke’s previous path, trying to maintain focus before the start of the next loop. This whorl didn’t have many corruptions, so the time between the start and end of the loop was short. Still, with each loop, my ability to mimic the ancestor’s movements and tolerate the pain degraded, like a top wobbling toward the end of its spin. I had left two corruptions behind already. They stood across the fire, watching me.
According to Lou, an experienced shaka could ride the Ghost on the first or second loop, but beginners like me usually needed seven or eight, so maintaining my focus in the corrupted space between loops was key. I had to ignore my narrative, the ancestor’s narrative, and any other narrative that crept into my brain. “Describe what you see without bias,” was the tip Lou had given me. So I ignored the shells of myself across from me, and I studied the smoke, the fire, the coals.
Then the first rancher stepped into the firelight, the back half of him still dipped in shadow, the desire plain in his eyes. He didn’t say a word. The loop had started again.
I was a woman, young, judging by my hands, and living some time in the 1800s, judging by my clothes and the narrative I’d already slipped into twice. I was traveling by foot over the Bald Hills to visit . . . . No, I had to stop indulging in that, forget all of it, and lose myself in the movements of the ancestor.
I stood and made the foundation gesture for fear, and I followed the pain as I unsheathed my sword and said, “Leave me be and I’ll be on my way.” Two rifle barrels floated forward on either side of the rancher, and before I could see the men carrying them, I turned and sprinted into the darkness through the tall grass of an open field, leaving my pants wet with dew. When my eyes adjusted, I crouched under the grass and doubled back with stealth and grace. I heard grass slapping and snapping against the men’s thighs as they looked for me. I heard them separate. One spewed nasty taunts into the night. I found him first, a gunman, and I slashed his hamstring. He cried out as he fell, and again after I sliced open his forehead and the blood cascaded down his brow and into his eyes. I heard the crack of a rifle as the second gunman took his shot and missed. I ran, then crouched and doubled back to the now wailing injured man, and I waited. The second gunman came. He wasn’t expecting me. As I stood, emerging from the grass, I lopped his arm off below the elbow. Blood splattered the grass, and I ran straight for the first rancher.
I was starting to wobble now, like the top, like a drunk. Involuntarily, I was shrinking away from the intensifying pain. The loop was almost over. If I could just reach the end, I could try again. I needed to mirror the movements of the ancestor to entangle my cackle with this Skill Whorl and all the other Skill Whorls in Kaliah’s line that housed memories of samurai sword mastery. Once entangled, the graft would dissolve, and I would return to the normal world riding the Ghost, wielding my newly entangled cackle—the aggregate of samurai skills collected over generations—until the bloom wore off.
Memory Whorls worked the same way, but instead of returning with skills, shakas returned with a perfect recollection and an intense case of déjà vu.
The rancher ran from me, ran from the screams of his companions, but I couldn’t keep up. Shaking with pain, I dropped the sword, fell to the ground, and escaped into the ancestor’s narrative. Before the graft failed completely, my rekulak burst from the corruption I’d made and covered me in blue scrill. As the whorl dissolved, I wondered why my rekulak insisted on doing that every time. Was it re-infecting me? Was it marking its property? Or was it upset over me leaving a corruption, and this was its retaliation?
Back in Lou’s basement, Lou used a rubber spatula to scrape the drying scrill off my arm into a large glass jar. “You’ll get there,” he said. “Your mind just doesn’t know how much pain it can take, but it’ll learn.”
I’d been training almost nonstop since I got here, eating hot peppers and trading off between taking the trout test, practicing tai chi, yoga, martial arts, and foundation gestures and expressions. I lifted weights. And I tried to ride the Ghost.
Growing up, I wasn’t that into sports. I’d wrestled a few years in high school, but I hadn’t been that great. And I hadn’t played any sports since, so I was surprised by how my body was responding to exercise. I was losing the little fat I had and gaining muscle. Even sitting down I could feel the new energy in my muscles just waiting to be called on. It felt good.
After we’d gotten home from the poetry reading, Lou and I had studied the program. Most of it was comprised of facts about the 1964 Christmas Flood, but the last section, the one with my shower curtain patterns, had instructions on how to form portals in a Nexus Whorl. It called the patterns seeds in the language of the Gods and claimed these seeds required only thought to grow.
These Blanche-infected humans were learning some method of traveling
