But before Našobok could suss it out, Tokela turned away.
“We should go.” He started walking, his forelock once again falling over his eyes.
Našobok watched him go for several breaths.
Perhaps nothing. Hints of another impossibility. A reflection of his own experience, a belief…
Unexpected, this recognition. And possibly dangerous.
THIS IS… unexpected.
Cavodu shifted foot to foot, sandals creaking in the damp. He hated the Grotto. He always had. Dank, dripping, reeking of brine. But it was where, this centum, she had fashioned herself to reside.
They all had ways of dealing with exile. Or choosing not to deal.
Yet you come by slow and primitive means, and with news of this import!
Skimmers were hardly primitive! “I thought ’twould be better to speak in person. You know the Matrices are less… secure. Or reliable, come to that.”
Very true. Even our own tech has become contaminated by this place. And now, your own children have succumbed to the lure of it. Despite the Accord.
“I fear it’s inevitable, the drift,” Cavodu replied. There were many reasons they had decided upon treaty and nonintercession: for scientific study, for expediency, to avoid further contamination…
And because they’d had no choice.
Drift is one thing. Choosing a savage’s things over our own? That is worrisome. A flit of blue-white skin in darkness, then a swirl of bubbles loosed in a flutter of translucent membrane as the Domina floated past the clear portal.
She had always been graceful. Cavodu remembered—as few did—how she had danced with the Dominus in the Great Halls of Mount Klariyon before it had blown, coaxed by the savage powers into volcanic eruptions of fire and ash. She’d been a creature of dry land wrapped in layered veils of shilla-weave… eons ago? Or a mere hundreds of this recalcitrant world’s rotations about its meagre sol?
Cavodu wasn’t sure. But the Dominus had betrayed them in the end, as surely as this world had betrayed them: a trap laid in the click-tick passages of a small and powerful world’s rotations, of their own bioengineered flesh grown obsessed with corporeal realities.
Adaptation had been the only answer. It wasn’t one they cared for. Time—a bare philosophy flung against a distant future—was catching them up.
Time, indeed. She followed some thoughts as easily as she slipped through the salt waters of the now-extinct volcano. Which got us into this disarray. Then. And now.
Other thoughts Cavodu kept close. “I don’t think”—careful, go careful—“that either of them chose this path.”
Another flash of pale in the dark beyond the crystalline viewing portal; another spin and swirl of seawater. She preferred her present form and its physical expression. Cavodu had tried it once; not unlike a long-ago memory of space, and freefall, disconcerting if held too long. Full gravity had its drawbacks, but still. Preferable.
Your Sivan has chosen a native lover. Jorda chose to aid one of the little animals when he should have allowed it to whelp in its own fashion. And you—her eyes spun with the Sending—chose to allow it.
“They were born here.”
Another choice that should not have been allowed.
“But it was, and here we are, Domina.” He inclined his head, respectful. “What is your will?”
She circled once, then twice. Already the natives gain ground against us. They’ve evolved with our help, and now prey on us as we travel, attack our ports, raid our places! They’ve taken the Far Atoll, and our own people enduring unspeakable cruelties at their hands! If the Big Island also has decided to break the Accord we made with them… if the life force that continues to thwart us is actively turned against us again—
“Why would a native boy want to do such a thing, even if he could?”
She stopped before the portal, hanging in the brine. Never forget, Cavodu, the seeds of our present ignominy were sown long ago by a traitor’s choices! What if your foolish son has switched on some oddling genetic pattern? Triggered some default we thought long deactivated?
A chill, nothing to do with the damp, draped Cavodu’s shoulders. “Surely there’s no possibility of that!”
But if there is? We once refused to believe in the sentience of this parasitical planet—and that to our ruination. If there’s any possibility it could gain a final weapon against us, it likely will. The risk is too great. We’re vulnerable. We must act. This creature must be found again, by any means necessary.
She didn’t openly say that the native boy shouldn’t have been allowed to leave their territory. But then, she didn’t have to.
Your son and daughter will go and find him. She begun swimming back and forth, swift and almost nervous. If they can. The little savages are nomads.
“Not all of them.”
Have our contacts converge on every edge. Disperse a description, offer a price they won’t refuse. Not for a corpse, mind, she interrupted just as Cavodu started to protest. If it’s truly been engineered, then it could prove much more useful to us alive. Haunt the ports, the slave markets—
“Domina, all of this is against the very Accord you speak of! It protects us as much as it does the Big Island!”
Cavodu. She flattened both hands upon the portal. You know what’s at stake here.
He did, more the pity.
And as to the Accord? She pushed away, membranes casting a swirl of bubbles and foam. In light of this, it can no longer matter.
16 – Trial & Trust
“I weary of fish,” Aylaniś tossed a tidbit to Arrow—who plainly was not tired of said meat—and stood up with a stretch. “Your mother, Madoc, has given me leave to hunt; I was hoping you’d do the honour of accompanying us? It smells of a light Rain, perfect for the stalk.”
Us. Anahli grinned as her mother looked her way with a slight nod. Anahli had fully expected to be packed off to the oških dens after midSun meal. Particularly since her sire—mending a riding pad—nevertheless had been watching her since they’d woken.
“I’ll stay, finish this,” he said, his gaze still
