Rain of Tears (7 page)
He came up to her and kissed her. “Good luck. Contact me in a few hours no matter what.”
“Yes, Specialist.” She saluted and winked.
Walking with Treani was humbling. Novice Treani was a Selna, and if the Citadel hadn’t claimed her, she would have been sold as a pleasure slave. Being able to act as an active pilot and navigator was her dream come true, and her enthusiasm touched Reyan deeply. It had been so long since she had been truly grateful for anything that she took extra care with Treani. She didn’t want to damage that bright light in any way.
“How are you going to do it, Master Rain?” Treani refused outright to call Reyan by her name.
“Get me to that water source, and I will show you.” Explaining it was difficult, but once Treani saw it, she would understand.
They settled in the shuttle, and Treani lifted off, moving them across the skyline with deliberate focus. She knew where she was going.
As the shuttle lowered to the ground next to the open lake, Reyan whispered, “Perhaps a little further from the lake. I can do this from up to a kilometre away.”
Treani didn’t question her, she simply repositioned the ship so that it was higher up and away from direct contact with the water.
Reyan left the shuttle and stepped toward the lake. Being practical, she knelt and closed her eyes as she felt the lack of anything around her.
Her first step was to pull the water up and out of the lake, forming a fog bank that spread until Reyan couldn’t see the shuttle, and Treani was next to her, gasping with shock.
The stillness of the air was the problem. Reyan extended her arms, pressed them palm-to-palm in front of her and stabbed upward at the sky. She punched through the layers of atmosphere into the stratosphere, and the fog sucked upward with her will pushing it.
Treani whispered, “You made a cloud.”
Reyan laughed softly. “I made one. Now, I have to make a few more. The fog is coming back, so if you need to get into the shuttle, you are welcome to go now.”
As she spoke, she was pulling more water from the lake.
“No, I will stay with you. This is amazing. You are starting a world.”
Reyan smiled. “I am starting a weather system. The moment we can get some rain coming down, we can leave.”
She repeated the fog-to-cloud pattern five more times. When the sky above her was heavy with the contents of the lake, she used the water and called a light rain.
Treani blinked. “Did you feel that?”
“What did you feel?” Reyan was dizzy.
“Wind, I felt a cool wind. It’s raining over there!” Treani clapped her hands.
“Oh good. The rain will fall, the earth will cool, the water will evaporate, it will rise again and it will fall again and the wind will blow. Cold water in warm will create motion and thermodynamics make the worlds go around.” It was the short version and didn’t include all variables, but hot air moving against cold was the basis for all weather shifts.
Reyan tried to get to her feet, and Treani helped her, boosting her off the ground and supporting her into the shuttle with surprising strength.
Reyan was nodding in her harness as Treani took them back to the start-up base.
Reyan heard her talking via the com, and when Unrik came, lifted her out of the shuttle, bringing her into the base, she nodded off.
Sitting up was difficult, because she was under a tarp. “What the hell?” She heard someone shout from the other side of the wrapping.
Unrik ripped the tarp away from her, and he crushed her against his chest. “I thought I lost you.”
“Why?” She squirmed against him, but he wasn’t letting go.
“You stopped breathing for two days.” His voice broke. “I thought you were dead.”
She pushed him back, and when he looked at her forlornly, she slapped him across the face.
He blinked and reared back. “What was that for?”
“You were crushing me. Plus, you forgot how we met. It is insulting for any woman.” She stroked his cheek to take the sting out of her words.
“What do you mean?”
“The day we met, they tried to drown me as a sacrifice to the Rain. Do you remember that?”
“Yes, but you didn’t die.”
“No, because I don’t need to breathe. I get my fuel from the elements, the very air around me. I was tired after starting the weather. Very tired. I have to remember to breathe, and I don’t really need sleep, as you know. If I am tired enough to sleep, I may not breathe for a while. Got it?”
He nodded and a tear snaked down his cheek. “I will try to remember it.”
Treani came in and shrieked, running up and flinging her arms around Reyan’s waist. Her words were in garbled Selna, but Reyan recognized thanks to a deity when she heard one. She was designed to be one, after all.
“It’s all right, Treani, I am fine. That goes for you too, Unrik.” She stroked his hair. “I have done this dozens of times before, and I always revive. I suppose we should have covered this in the briefing, but there wasn’t really time.”
Unrik moved to her other side, and he kissed her softly. It was a lovely moment, but Reyan really wanted to know. “So, how is the weather doing?”
He pried Treani off her and lifted her in his arms. She didn’t mind. Her legs were still set to optional.
After they walked down the hall, they emerged in a huge rotunda with a transparent dome ceiling. The water coursing down onto the dome was answer enough. She smiled and the bio-forming team applauded.
With a sigh, she leaned back in Unrik’s arms and spoke to Treani. “All right. Let’s get going. I want to sleep in my own bed, eventually.”
The return to the Citadel Morganti was done with a barrage of questions coming from both of her companions. Reyan sat in Unrik’s arms and answered everything she could before she nodded off.
She had no idea if she had stopped breathing, but Ka-8 would be the last time she would ever wake up on a slab under a tarp. Across the years, she would wake up in a rolled carpet, a helium balloon and once inside a large fish, but never again would it be a slab and a tarp.
Epilogue
The city of Nekahar on Jarko was celebrating its five hundredth birthday of renewal. Three travellers arrived with their heads hooded and moving with the crowd to the first dome.
The first weather machine was being celebrated on Rain Day and only those lucky enough to gain one of the precious tickets to this event would hear the Reyan Ikali Mar symphony.
Silence was the watchword for all of the observers, and the three standing off to one side watched closely.
The music started subtly and rose in volume as it played the celebrated song that had yet to be replicated by any man, woman, child or machine.
Reyan took Unrik’s hand and squeezed tight. With her other hand, she clutched Ainari’s hand. Their daughter watched and listened to her sibling sing as she had done once every ten years since she had been born, ninety years earlier.
They remained in place long after the song had faded. The crowd slowly returned to the city where the great Rain Day celebration was kicking into high gear now that the song had announced the day.
Reyan flicked back her hood and touched the housing slowly, “Hello, baby. How have you been?”
The machine chirped, clicked and chuckled for a moment.
Reyan smiled as the words translated into her mind.
Unrik and Ainari stepped up, and together, they communed with the weather machine.
* * * *
One of the guards looked back and saw the figures swarming their precious weather machine. He steeled his features and started to walk toward them.
His partner grabbed his arm. “Don’t do that. They are having a family moment.”
“What? It is a machine.”
“Is this your first year?”
“No, I have been here for six.”
“If you had been here ten years ago, the same three people came, they spoke to the machine and it spoke back. See that woman in the middle? Whom does she look like?”
He looked carefully at the figure. “She has the same hair colour as the Rain, but so does half the population.”
“But, the population does not come every ten years for the last five hundred to speak to the machine.”
He was confused, but he mumbled, “How can a machine have family?”
He stood there as his partner explained how the machine came to be where it was and how the Rain had helped them rebuild the city.
* * * *
Unrik smiled. “New guard this year.”
Ainari chuckled. “He is getting
the lecture.
I can tell by his face.”
Reyan smiled at her family, all three of them. “They always get the lecture, and in another ten years, there will be another new one and another lecture. Cycles are cycles.”
Ainari stroked the housing of her mechanical sibling. “We all start somewhere and end somewhere.”
Unrik finished their family mantra, “And if you are very lucky, you do it with the ones you love.”
Reyan brushed the tear from her cheek, and she smeared it onto the weather station’s metal plates. “And it all goes around again.”
After another hour, they walked back to join the party that was underway. As they paced, Ainari whistled the symphony softly from start to finish without missing a note.
Reyan grinned up at Unrik as he paused to pull her hood up as he did every time. “And it comes around again.”
Author’s Note
Rain of Tears
was written while I had the worst cold I have had in the last five years. I got moody, I got emotional, and with the weather here at home, I really, really wanted rain.
Next time,
Waking Dream
covers a woman who goes out of body to deal with situations that would kill others, and while she is on an assignment, someone steals her body. She has to find it with the help of the Citadel and a master of tracking.
Warning… there will be no sex between the characters until her body can be found. J
Thanks for reading,
Viola Grace
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About the Author
Viola Grace was born in Manitoba, Canada where she still resides today. She really likes it there. She has no pets and can barely keep sea monkeys alive for a reasonable amount of time. Her line of day job tends to be analytical which leaves her mind hopping to weave stories. No co-worker is safe from her character analysis. In keeping with busy hands are happy hands, her hobbies have included cross-stitch, needlepoint, quilting, costuming, cake decorating, baking, cooking, metal work, beading, sculpting, painting, doll making, henna tattoos, chain mail, and a few others that have been forgotten. It is quite often that these hobbies make their way into her tales.
Viola’s fetishes include boots and corsetry, and her greatest weakness is her uncontrollable blush. Her writing actively pursues the Happily Ever After that so rarely occurs in nature. It is an admirable thing and something that we should all strive for. To find one that we truly like, as well as love.
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