Meeting (19 page)

“Mine is named Rimi,” Maya said.

Sibyl unscrewed the cap on her root beer, and it fizzed up and ran over her hand, splattering the front of her red dress. “Shee-oot!” she cried, and then the golden scarf around her neck unwound itself, reached down its fringed and tasseled ends, and sucked the root beer right out of the fabric. “Thanks,” Sibyl muttered, and held her wet hand up to the scarf, which wrapped around it. The scarf thrust a tassel into the root beer bottle, too. When it retreated, Sibyl’s hand was clean and dry, and half the root beer was gone.

“You are such a pig, Yiliss!” Sibyl said, but she laughed.

“Yiliss drinks root beer?” asked Maya.

“He loves sweets,” said Sibyl. “Usually I have to use half my allowance to buy him treats. It’s the only way I can stop him from shoplifting.”

“Gosh. Rimi eats a lot of weird stuff, but I don’t have to feed her candy,” said Maya. “Can you taste what Yiliss is eating?”

“Huh?” said Sibyl. “No. Are you saying you can taste what yours eats? That is
so
weird.”

“Not all the time,” Maya said, “but sometimes.” She shuddered. “Rimi eats garbage.”

“Oh, no!”

They stared at each other, their eyes wide. Then, suddenly, they were muffling giggles, then laughing out loud.

When Sibyl caught her breath, she asked, “So what does yours look like? Is it your hoodie? I thought probably not, because you have three different hoodies. Unless yours can change color. Yiliss can do a couple other colors, but he always looks kind of the same.”

“Mine’s—”
Rimi, I don’t want her to know you’re my shadow! I don’t want her to know anything important!

That’s all right,
Rimi thought. She poured part of herself into Maya’s front hoodie pocket.
I’ll be like hers.

Maya reached into her pocket and pulled out a bunched-up scarf, the yarn soft as chick feathers, woven with holes in it. It was much bigger when she spread it out than she would have thought possible. It was longer than it was wide, but it was almost as big as a tablecloth, though fine as gossamer. Color shimmered across it, pale pink and yellow, green and blue, with threads of gold and silver glinting in it. She spread it wide, flapped it, then rolled it thin and tucked it back into her pocket.

“Wow,” Sibyl said. She frowned. “Pretty,” she said, her tone gruff.

“Yeah,” said Maya, “but I’m not really a scarf person, so it’s kind of—I keep her in my pocket.” Maya patted the small part of Rimi that was the scarf, feeling the larger part still wrapping her round.

“So where were you on Thrixa? You didn’t train with us. Was there a second program somewhere else?” Sibyl asked.

Maya just looked at Sibyl, then away.

“Come on. You don’t have to keep secrets anymore, not from me, anyway. You’re like me. You must have been involved in a different egg collection mission, though, because I trained with the other two who grabbed eggs when I did. Actually, there were five of us, but two got caught. Where did you train? Just tell me, all right?”

Maya stopped on the sidewalk and turned to Sibyl.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you. I was never on Krithi, or Thrixa, or whatever it’s called. I wasn’t part of any program. I don’t understand any of those weird words you’re using, because I’m from Earth, and I’ve lived here all my life. Okay?”

“No!” said Sibyl. “That makes no sense at all!”

“Did you know someone named Bikos Serani?”

“Bikos!
Sivertha
, of course! He was the other successful one besides the Hasible, and I thought he came to Earth, too, but I didn’t see him, even though we were both supposed to be going to the same school.” Sibyl frowned. “I’m supposed to show how well I can survive on Earth without help, and Bikos was supposed to do that, too, until we’re ready for the next part of our mission. The Methry said we could talk to each other in school if we acted like strangers the first time we met. I wanted to see him again . . . but he wasn’t here.” She looked away from Maya, toward the houses across the street.

“Are you originally
from Earth?” Maya asked.

“Sure,” said Sibyl. “I lived here until I was seven, and then Gaelli found me, and—well, wait. What about Bikos? What can you tell me?”

“He was from someplace else. Not Earth. You knew that, right? He got a
sissimi
egg. The Krithi put him on Earth, and he couldn’t eat the food or breathe the air very well. He got really sick, and then he asked me to take care of the egg for him. Like, randomly. And then he—he died.”

Sibyl pulled in a hissing breath. “Oh. Oh, no. Oh.”

Maya sighed. “Yeah. It was sad. . . . So I took care of the
sissimi
, and she hatched, and we’re a pair, but I didn’t have any training. I don’t speak whatever language you keep talking to me in, and I don’t know your Golly-guy.” Maya stroked her Rimi-scarf. “Rimi was just trying to find out who you were and whether we could be friends when Yiliss attacked us.”

Sibyl’s mouth actually dropped open, and she stared at Maya. Then she shook her head like someone trying to wake up. “Whoa. Rewind and start over. I need to reboot my brain. Okay. I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time.” She muttered “Whoa!” a few more times.

Maya walked toward home and Janus House. Sibyl, still staring at distance, kept up with her. “So anyway,” Maya said after she’d sucked down some Dr Pepper and given Sibyl time to stop “whoa”ing, “I don’t know from Methry or Kalithri or any of that stuff.”

“Okay. I get that. How the heck did you manage to hatch and bond without any training?”

Maya drank Dr Pepper. “Lucky, I guess.”

“That’s amazing,” Sibyl said.

They had reached Maya’s block, the block with Janus House on it. Maya stared across the street at Janus House. Sibyl followed her gaze.

“Is that—what is that place?” she asked.

“Janus House,” Maya said. It was public knowledge.

“Where those weirdo kids come from. The ones you’re always hanging out with.”

Maya checked for traffic and headed across the street. Sibyl walked with her. “Yeah. I live next door,” she said, pointing to her own house. Maya wasn’t sure she wanted Sibyl to come inside, but she didn’t know where else to go. “So we got to know them.”

Sarutha was sitting on the Janus House porch with her backstrap loom, watching them. Maya didn’t wave, and Sarutha didn’t, either.

I don’t think we’d better tell Sibyl and Yiliss anything more about Janus House than we can help
, Maya thought.

That layer of secrets we keep to ourselves,
Rimi thought.
And many others. I do not trust them.

“ ‘We’?” Sibyl repeated.

“My family.” Not exactly a secret, either. Maya glanced at her Dr Pepper and Sibyl’s root beer. They both had drinks, but as the hostess, she felt she should offer something. “Want some tea or something?”

“Sure, I guess,” said Sibyl.

Maya led her into the house through the front door and back to the kitchen.

No one else was home yet. Maya shrugged out of her pack and put the kettle on, got down two mugs. “Cocoa? Tea? Instant coffee?”

“Cocoa,” Sibyl said.

“Have a seat.” Maya gestured toward the kitchen table, and Sibyl sat. “Where do you live?” Maya got cocoa packets from the cupboard and poured them into the mugs. “I never found out where Bikos lived. I think maybe he was living in the park.”

“I live with a family that thinks I’m an exchange student from Canada. I’m not sure how Gaelli set that up.”

“Who’s Gaelli?” Maya asked.

“He’s—we had these people who took care of us on Thrixa, and Gaelli is the one who protected us and trained us and brought us here. He left me with this family. They’re kind of nice, but they’re kind of afraid of me, too. Yiliss did a couple of strange things soon after he hatched that I forgot Earth people wouldn’t understand. Now they think Canadians are really weird and a little scary.” Sibyl shrugged. “I’m learning survival skills all the time. So far I’m surviving okay.”

“The Krithi just dropped you and Bikos here and told you to make it on your own?”

Sibyl winced again. “Please don’t call them that!”

“What? Krithi? What’s wrong with Krithi?”

“Krithi is the drone people, the worker class that’s too low to converse with. They have no brains. It’s an insult. The people who took care of me, Bikos, and the Hasible were Methry, special trainers, members of the Kalithri, which is the teaching and government class.”

“Okay,” Maya said and shrugged again. “What do they call their planet, then?”

“Thrixa,” Sibyl said.

“Okay. The Thrixa people just dropped you and your egg here? And Bikos and Rimi’s egg?” The kettle whistled, and Maya poured hot water into the cocoa mugs and handed one, with a spoon, to Sibyl.

Sibyl stirred, staring down into her mug. Then she glanced up at Maya. “Gaelli arranged for me to have that host family. I thought Bikos had a host family, too, but I got dropped off first, so I didn’t see where he went. And we have help lines,” Sibyl said. She frowned and drummed her hands on the table. “We can call the Methry if we’re in total distress. I don’t get why Bikos didn’t do that.”

Maya sat down, her warm mug gripped between her hands. The spoon jangled as she set the mug on the table. She stirred the lumpy powder into the hot water. The scent of chocolate drifted up.
Rimi, you were there. Do you remember anything about this
?

When Bikos was so sick, right before he gave you to me, did he think about calling these guardians
? Maya wondered.

Rimi was quiet. Finally she said,
He had many many thoughts. He was very sick. And he was confused. We were not inside each other’s minds the way you and I can be; we had bonded, but it was not the complete bond you and I share. What I remember about it: before he got really sick, he met someone and talked to them. It wasn’t one of the Krithi, but it was someone who didn’t feel local either. Someone who confused him. Many of Bikos’s feelings shifted after this encounter. He had been thinking he would find help from the Krithi, or Thrixa, and then that avenue was cut off. The new person made everything inside him shift. Then he just wanted to find someone with
chikuvny
who was
not
Krithi. He was thinking about saving me, and then I was so sick I couldn’t really think, either, though I was trying to save him, but I couldn’t do anything inside the seed. I don’t remember that part very well, except we were both in such distress.
Rimi’s self flushed with warmth, and she hugged Maya a little tighter.
Then we found you, Mayamela.

I am so glad,
Maya thought, and then said to Sibyl, “He was so sick when I met him I didn’t get to ask him a lot of questions, and I wouldn’t have known enough to ask him that one. It was kind of overwhelming. One day, everything’s pretty much normal, except my family just moved here from Idaho, and the next day—space aliens, and
sissimi,
and—” Maya shook her head.

“Whoa,” Sibyl said. “I say again, whoa. So you kinda got drafted!”

Maya nodded. She smiled. “Rimi is so great.”

Sibyl smiled, too. “I know what you mean.” She stirred her cocoa, but before she could drink it, the golden scarf stuck its end into the mug and made slurping sounds. “Hey! Except once in a while! Yiliss, you are so bratty.” She gave her scarf a little slap and dragged the drinking end out of the mug, then peeked in. “Whew, there’s a little left for me.”

Maya laughed. “I can make you another cup. Maybe he wants one of his own.”

“I don’t want him to get spoiled,” Sibyl said.

Yiliss lifted a golden end and waved some fringe at Maya.

“Maybe he needs chocolate,” Maya said. She mixed up another mug of cocoa from the still-warm water in the kettle and put it down near Sibyl’s first mug. Yiliss dipped an end into it and made big sucking noises. His whole length rippled from one end to the other and back.

Sibyl frowned at Maya. “Well, he says thank you, he needed that, and I say, hey, what did I say about spoiling him?”

“But—” Maya frowned and stared at the floor, trying to work this out. “Okay, sorry,” she said.
Was that bad, for me to give him something he wants when she says he can’t have it?

He said he needed it,
Rimi thought.
You would give me something if I needed it, wouldn’t you?

You would give me everything I needed if you could
, Rimi said.
I don’t want to fuse with Yiliss. I don’t know if I like him anymore, and I don’t want him to know our secrets. Although I want to learn how he attacked me, so I can use it if I need to, and learn how to defend against it. I don’t like it that she won’t give him things he wants.

Dad says there’s a difference between need and want,
Maya thought.

Rimi was silent. Then she thought,
I’m glad you gave him cocoa
.

Thanks,
Maya thought.

“Sorry,” Sibyl said. “I kind of, well, I’m not the best at talking to people. Still trying to figure that part out.”

“How do you get along with your host family?”

Sibyl wrinkled her nose. “Not so well. There’s a boy. He’s fourteen and creepy. Sometimes it seems like he wants to kiss me, and sometimes he just wants to beat me up. Yiliss discouraged him from that, all right.” She smiled, her eyes fixed on distance, and nodded. “Then there’s another boy who’s nine, and he’s pretty much okay, but he snoops, and sometimes he steals. I didn’t bring a whole lot of stuff with me from Thrixa. He took my worry stone, though, and I don’t think it’ll be easy for me to get another. Going through the portals is so expensive. . . .”