On Whetsday (10 page)

Before he could finish the sentence, Yulia flipped back the cloth, reached down, and grabbed the silver ball firmly in her left hand. At once, her eyes flew open wide and her back arched. Her lips peeled back from her teeth. Her nostrils flared. Then it was over, and she relaxed, breathing hard.

Cousin Sirah slid around on the rug until she was sitting beside Denny, both of them facing toward Yulia. “Are you all right?”

Yulia took a moment to respond, but eventually she nodded. “I don't... No, wait.” Her mouth turned up in a sudden smile. “Hello, Athena!”

Denny looked around the room for the green woman, but without the maton in hand, there was nothing to see. “Is she talking to you?”

Yulia nodded. Her eyes were fixed on a point in the center of the room. “Yes, hold on... She's telling me...” Yulia's head slowly turned from left to right, as if she was watching someone walk across the room. “Yes,” she said. Then after a pause, “yes,” again.

“What’s she doing?” asked Sirah.

“She can see Athena. We can’t.” Denny leaned forward. It was strange to watch Yulia talk to someone that was invisible to the rest of them. He found himself wishing he was the one talking to Athena. “Can you ask her if the cithians found the things I left by the dome?”

Yulia nodded without looking his way. “Athena, did the cithians... Wait.” Her eyes flicked down toward Denny. “She can hear you, you just can't hear her. She says yes, the cithians found the stuff.”

Now Denny really did feel sick. He hadn’t expected the remains of his disguise to be found so quickly. “Do they know a human left them?”

There was a short delay before Yulia answered. “She's not sure.” Another pause. “Athena only knows the things that the cithians have put into their central, um, central store. Somebody may know it was a human, but they haven't recorded it.”

Sirah rocked forward, sitting on her knees. “You can really see someone?”

Yulia nodded. “A woman, just like Denny said, only she's not made of stone.”

“She's not?”

“It's more like, like skin. Like she's real.”

Denny wondered if Yulia was seeing the same thing he had. Maybe Athena had changed her appearance. Maybe she was different for everybody.

Yulia suddenly broke into a wide smile. “She knows my name.”

Denny remembered when Athena had first spoken to him. “She knew mine too.”

Sirah scooted forward again. “What about me? Does she know my name?”

Yulia looked at the center of the room, frowned, then turned to Sirah. “She says she does, but she has it wrong. She says your name is Ani... Anisyretta.”

Cousin Sirah's mouth flew open. “It is!” she said. “That's the name my mother gave me. The name I used before—” She swallowed hard, then turned to look at Denny. “Sirah is just a nickname.”

Denny was amazed to hear it. Sirah had always just been Sirah. Athena didn't just know how to find her way out of cithian buildings, she knew other things. Secret things. He grinned. “Athena,” he said. “Do you know where to find some powdermilk?” he asked.

“Or crackers!” added Sirah. “Or...”

Yulia held up a finger to signal silence. “She says that human food...stuff? Foodstuff. Anyway, human food is kept in a building called maxillary two-fourteen.”

“Where is—”

“She says it's just outside the gate.”

Denny clapped his hands together. “Tomorrow we feast!”

Yulia's usual nervous look returned. “Do you think we should?”

“Why not?” Denny said with a shrug. “Athena got me through the big storage building without getting caught. I'll bet she can tell us how to get away with some stupid crackers.”

“Maybe,” said Sirah. “But if there's human food missing from storage, won't the cithians know it was taken by humans?”

Denny had to admit that they would. “But what about something else? Athena knows about everything. What would you want if you could have anything?”

Sirah was slow to answer, but Yulia's face suddenly lit up. “I know what we should ask.” She pulled in a deep breath and turned to the open space at the center of the room where the woman only she could see was standing. “Athena, do you know where we are going to be consigned? Will it be the same place as my parents?”

Denny found himself looking at the empty air, as if expecting an answer. It was only when he heard a strange sound, a sound not too far from a moan, that he looked back at Yulia. Her mouth was open. Her lip trembling.

“But...” she said. “No, but...”

Then she started to scream.

21

Yulia hurled the maton across the room with enough force to leave a dent in the thin wall of Denny's compartment. The silver ball fell to the floor, bounced, and rolled in a lopsided path to clink loudly into the side of one of his father's metal sculptures.

“No!” Yulia shouted, her voice coming out with a raw force that sounded as if it would tear her throat. “She's lying!”

Sirah scrambled to her feet and rushed toward Yulia, but the other girl turned away from her, facing into the wall and throwing her arms over her head. “No,” she said. “No.” Her voice was muffled behind her hair and her arms, but it was still painfully ragged. After a moment, her back heaved up and down, and Denny heard her words turn into sobs.

“Did it hurt you?” asked Sirah. She pulled one of Yulia's hands away from her face and tugged open her fingers to look at her palm, as if expecting to see painful burns. Yulia only continued to sob.

Denny looked down at the maton. The silver surface still had prints showing on the surface from where Yulia's hand had been wrapped around it. He reached down and picked it up.

At once the pain ripped through him head to toe. If anything, it seemed worse than before. He had just enough time to think that if it went on any longer, it would kill him. Then the pain was gone and Athena was standing beside Yulia.

As Yulia had said, Athena no longer looked like she was made of stone. Or at least, not completely. The woman's robe now looked as if it was made from a pale cloth that bunched and hung against her legs. Her hair, pulled tightly behind her head, was a glossy black. Her skin was, kind of like skin, only she seemed milky pale. A color that Denny had never seen on a real human.

“Athena?”

The woman turned toward him. Despite how real the rest of her looked, her eyes were still as featureless and smooth as stone. Across the room, Yulia was still crying, but Athena's face was touched by the same slight smile that had been there since Denny first saw her. “Hello again, Denning.”

“What did you tell Yulia?”

Athena tipped her head to one side. “She was asking about other humans.”

Denny looked across the room toward Yulia. Touching the maton hurt, but Yulia had felt that pain like he had, and she hadn't screamed, or cried. Something that Athena had said had hurt her more than the agony that came from the machine. There was something here, a danger that Denny didn't fully understand, but one that he also couldn't avoid. “Yes,” he said.

Athena looked at him with her stony eyes and her slight smiled. “I told her there were twelve.”

“Twelve?”

“Twelve humans.”

Denny took a moment to think, then nodded slowly. “In Jukal.”

“Yes,” said Athena. “Twelve humans in the Human Containment Facility, Jukal Plex, Rask.”

There was nothing wrong with what she said, but Denny still found that there was a tightness squeezing at his stomach, and a cold feeling in his arms and legs. “But that's just in Jukal. There are other towns.”

“Yes,” said Athena. “There are eight major complexes on each of the three major continents, each of them arranged to mimic the placement of limbs around the body of a cithian adult,” said Athena. From somewhere, a simulated wind seemed to ruffle her simulated hair. “There are 432 smaller communities, chiefly on the southernmost continent.”

Denny found he had to clear his throat before asking, “…and how many humans?”

“Twelve,” said Athena, her smile still the same. “There are twelve humans in the Human Containment Facility, Jukal Plex.”

“And in other complexes?”

“There are no humans in other complexes,” said the woman who wasn't there. “There are no other humans anywhere. There are only twelve.”

22

Denny's tongue felt thick in his mouth. He was about to ask something more when an idea occurred to him. “You're wrong.”

Athena didn't change her expression, but there was a quick blink of her center less eyes. “In what way?”

“There are thirteen people in Jukal,” he said. With every word, he felt a little better. It was obvious Athena didn't know everything after all. If she could miss a human who was right here in the city, how could she know about people scattered around the world? “You forgot Loma.”

“Paloma Azi,” said Athena. “Was consigned on Tollsday, cycle 14, 237 PC.”

“She was consigned?” The date Athena gave was the same as the last day Denny had seen Loma. They must have come for her right after Denny had left. “Consigned where?”

“The Jukal Plex Human Containment Facility is the terminal node.”

Denny had never heard this phrase before, and he wanted to reply that he didn't know what Athena meant. But he did. He really did. “They killed her.”

“Yes.”

“And my father?”

“Carrel Ellitson was consigned on Passday, cycle 22, 234 PC.” Athena never stopped smiling.

“Consigned...where?”

“The Jukal Plex Human Containment Facility is the terminal node.”

Denny didn't notice that he was falling until his knees came down hard against the floor. There was pain, but that seemed like a distant thing. Across the room, Yulia was saying something to Sirah, but that might have been something happening in another compartment, in another building, in another plex, on a different planet. Sirah turned toward him and took a step, but slowly... everything was moving so slowly.

On the floor, the little metal figure his father had made still sat in its usual place, with its tiny metal fist raised above its head, and its tiny metal body caught in middle of a motion Denny couldn't name. He had always thought that one day he would be able to give the metal figure back to his father. Then his father would know that Denny remembered him, had waited to be with him, had thought about him. But now the metal things—the little figure, the curved shapes that stood beside the bed, the taller, jangly piece sat in the far corner—they were all there was. All that was left of his father.

Denny wished that he had never sold one of the pieces to Poppa Jam, never bought the shell and the heavy cloth for his disguise, never taken the maton. Never talked to Old Loma. He wished that the chug had never dropped its awful little purpley cube into his box. If none of that had happened, Denny's father would still be dead, but at least Denny wouldn't know.

Something moved in front of him. Denny's eyes seemed to have a hard time focusing. “Denny?” A voice. Sirah's voice.

“We're all that's left,” he said. “Just us.”

“I know,” said Sirah. Her voice was raw. “Yulia said the same thing. But there's something else we need to worry about.”

Denny blinked. He realized that his eyes were full of tears. “How can there be anything else?”

“It's what Omi said. Do you remember? Last week at Restaurant.”

It was hard to think, but Denny dragged his mind back to Omi–silly Omi and his plastic shell, Omi who had always liked human music and human dancing and human food. Moments before, it had been the world that seemed to run slowly, but now it was Denny's mind. Just thinking of something other than the words Athena had just said to him was like lifting something very heavy. “Omi said... he said.” And then he remembered. That tight feeling came back to his guts. “He said we were all going to be consigned.”

Sirah nodded. “He said we were all going to be consigned
soon
.”