Spinning Starlight (38 page)

Tiav’s words aren’t meant as truth, though. They’re meant as hope. I snake my arms around his neck and hold him back even tighter.

Hope is better than nothing. I’ll take it.

The seventh conduit still has no police presence and no workers, proving Minali hasn’t figured out exactly what we’re doing, which conduits we’re visiting.
Almost all of my brothers were captured while investigating on other Points. Tiav and I traced out the Sampati ends of those conduits through the planetary rerouter, so our targets would look
random to Minali if she hasn’t done the same backtracing. Which it seems she hasn’t, at least not yet.

The last one’s going to be impossible for Minali not to pick up on, though, because it’s not a public conduit terminal at all. It’s at JTI headquarters. Anton had the bad luck
to get caught in a conduit that traces back to one of the labs. We saved it for last, knowing it’s where we’re most likely to get caught.

An assistant spots us in the lobby and flags me down. “Miss Jantzen! I didn’t realize you’d be coming in today. Has there been any progress on the conduit outage? Is there
anything I can help you with?”

“Miss Jantzen is very busy, but I think we can manage,” Tiav says. The woman is persistent, but another word or two succeeds in brushing her off as we get into an elevator.

“Which floor?” Tiav asks.

I hold up nine fingers and bounce anxiously on my toes. Minali will have been alerted as soon as I entered the building. We’ll have to move quickly.

The voiceprint on my com-tablet gets us through two sets of doors. A Banak police officer waits inside. Even though I told myself to expect it, I’m startled and freeze.

Tiav doesn’t. Two punches, a knee to the groin, and a blow to the back of the head add up to an unconscious police officer who didn’t even have a chance to pull his gun. The man had
focused on me and didn’t expect Tiav’s reaction any more than I did.

“Spending half my life fighting Kal has its advantages,” Tiav says, answering the question in my eyes. “Just don’t tell my mother I did that.”

Right, behavior not befitting an Aelo, I’m sure.

He drags the officer to a storage locker while I work on the doors. We don’t have any time to spare, but if I can slow Minali down, I might buy enough. I enter the first level of locks
easily enough, using the standard icons and my voiceprint. Then I have Dom enter some code we came up with on the drive here.

It won’t last forever, but it’ll have to do.

This part of the dance I can do in my sleep by now. Open up a panel, slide out two components, slip the sempu in, and tap the icon to reconfigure.

We’re done, and they’re going to find us any second.

“Okay, Liddi, time to finish this,” Tiav says, closing the access panel. He steps toward me but stumbles as the floor shifts beneath us. “Sparks, not now!”

He’s right—not a great time for another tremor, though at least it waited until my head was clear of the console. It’s not a bad one, but I’m pretty sure we’re
about to make it worse.

“We have to hurry. Tell Spin-Still to call the others.”

She’s already glowing so bright, I’m afraid the heat might burn me. They’re on their way.

They’re here.

Ten Khua burst into life in the middle of the room. Not like on Ferinne, so calm and controlled. They writhe with the pollution of the conduits’ energy, sparking and twisting, dancing
around each other as they instinctively try to escape something tied to their very foundation.

It’s gotten bad. But they’re strong, holding themselves together and staying in this room despite the nearness of a conduit—the source of their pain. One for each of my
brothers, to pair with his conduit. One for Tiav and one for me, to complete the chain and pull them out.

Hopefully.

“Unidentified energy signatures in Conduit Lab, Level Nine.”

Leave it to the computer to state the obvious. If Minali had any doubts about where we are, she doesn’t now. All I can do is hope my locks will hold as Tiav and I get to work. We take the
remaining sempu disks from our pockets, one to bring each Khua to the same “frequency” we’ve tuned the conduits to, and set them on the floor in a circle. Or as close as we can
get to a circle while the room’s shaking. Spin-Still burns even hotter, warning the others not to join with the disks until we’re ready.

We’re as ready as we’ll get once we stand back from the circle. I take Spin-Still off my neck so I can hold her in my hand. The heat is just about as much as I can take.

The other Khua fly to their sempu like drops of water joining together, and the room explodes. Not literally, but the blast of light and color sends Tiav and me both back a step. The shaking
stops, but I’m not sure whether it’s because the tremor’s done or the force of the Khua overpowers it.

Just like on Ferinne, each Khua forms a length of energetic fabric centered on its sempu. Only now, with no spires to confine them, the fabric extends to the edges of the room, floor and
ceiling. And with ten of them, they intersect each other, forming seams of searing-white energy. But not all at the same point, and that’s what we need. One intersection, all together.

Something jerks inside my chest as Spin-Still’s will ties to my own. I have to direct the Khua, line them up, she can’t without me. I see them from outside, and she doesn’t.
Tiav and I stand in a wedge formed by two walls of energy. All I can see of the others are the bright lines where they cross each other, so I focus on those. The line in front of us, where those
two walls meet—that’s where I want the others to go. I set my attention on one, imagine it moving.

The weight of ten thousand worlds presses into me. I can’t breathe. But the line moves, so I keep pushing. It inches closer to the center seam, finally making contact. The energy in the
room spikes, echoed by my heart as it threatens to go into arrest.

That was just one, there are more, too many. I can’t do this.

Something heavy pounds on the door. We don’t have time.

Tiav clasps my hand in his, pressing the sempu between our palms so we can both maneuver the Khua into position. He’s not even looking. His eyes are closed, his breathing steady.

“You don’t have to push, Liddi,” he says. “Imagine them
wanting
to fall into position, like it’s where gravity would naturally make them settle.”

No one has ever conceived of anything like this before, but clearly his years of attuning himself to the Khua make him the expert, not me. I close my eyes and shift my focus. The Khua are like
grains of sand falling into a cone, hitting the sides, sliding down, but always coming to rest at the point.

A single point. The center.

I feel it working, but only because the weight is still there. It’s not the weight of pushing. It’s the weight of holding myself together, of not letting every neuron in my body
explode with the energy pouring into the room.

I’m not the only one struggling. Tiav grunts with the effort, Spin-Still burns hotter, and the floor vibrates beneath us. Then more than vibrates—it trembles. Not like before. This
time is more like every molecule in the room is going to fly apart. The light of the seam flows red through my closed eyelids. It’ll be too bright to look at directly, so I turn toward Tiav
before opening my eyes.

He’s already looking at me. Determined. A little scared, a little overwhelmed, but determined is what wins. Because he knows how much I need this. Not because of the Khua or his duty as an
Aelo, even though those are good reasons. Not to save eight worlds. He’s standing here, ready to do something that could get us both killed, because he knows I need to save my brothers.

That’s the moment I know I love him.

“It’s ready,” he says.

I nod. I feel it, too. The sand has settled.

Careful to keep our eyes averted, we step together toward the seam, the center where all ten Khua-fields meet. Even without looking, it’s not difficult to find. The energy’s pulling
us there.

“Close your eyes.” We turn to face the joining of ten Khua, so bright it nearly blinds me even with my eyes closed. “Ready…now!”

We thrust our clasped hands into the seam, the sempu between them.

Placing Spin-Still inside what she is already inside. Creating the bubble, the space where the attuned Khua and conduits can all gather.

Taking us with her.

It’s like communing with the Khua on Ferinne…only terrible.

It’s like my first chaotic, agonizing trip through a portal…only cleaner.

We exist in a white emptiness of everythingness with too-sharp focus cutting to the point of pain. But the pain is like joy that’s just too much, that’s more than one person can bear
so it hurts. It hurts and I want out, I don’t want more pain, because this joy is twisted and wrong and not happy at all. It’s death wearing the face of joy and it lies.

“Do you feel it?” Tiav whispers, only it slices through the roar of silence. “It’s killing them.”

My brothers? No, that’s not what he means. I
do
feel it. The false joy, the lying death, it’s the tainted energy of the conduits poisoning the Khua. My brothers are part of
that, they’re the bridge between Khua and conduit, but they aren’t meant to be. That’s what we have to break, what we have to undo.

“Liddi?”

That’s not Tiav’s voice.

Emil fades into view, the effort clear on his face. He’s here and he’s okay! But it’s not like on Ferinne, there’s no barrier keeping us apart. I know because I can hear
him, and nothing stops me from throwing my arms around him.

It worked. We matched the frequencies.

I look around. In the whiteness of this non-place, I can still see the extra spark of the sempu holding Khua within, ten of them floating around us. Spin-Still isn’t in my hand
anymore—she’s around us in the everywhere, holding this place separate from the loose strands.

I take one of the sempu and press it between my hand and Tiav’s like before, then do the same with another, holding Emil’s hand. Luko and Anton are here, too. The others are
arriving.

The poison-pain cuts into me again, sharpest in my hands where I hold the sempu, where the Khua have felt the pain for eternities already. And weight on my shoulders, on my chest, it
hasn’t left. It gets heavier every moment.

“Everyone take a disk,” Tiav says. The strain shows in his voice. He feels it, too. “Hold it between your hands, like this, and form a ring.”

We’ll complete the chain, then one final push to free my brothers. They take their places, a Khua between each…only there’s one left over, still hovering free.

Fabin isn’t here.

It’s Spin-Still, telling me what’s happening outside in the “real” world. I feel it around us, behind us, beyond us. The chaos of the unbound energy. Like a ship in a
storm, tossed on the waves, riding the peaks and valleys.

A ship ready to capsize.

But Fabin isn’t here.

My brothers have closed the circle, with Ciro joining Tiav on the other side from me. Without Fabin.

Tiav doesn’t know my brothers, but he can count.

“Someone’s missing, right, Liddi?”

I nod, but the waves beat closer to us now, hammering the weight into me. I almost lose my grip on Emil.

“It’s time, Liddi, we have to go,” Vic says.

That’s ridiculous. It’s not time until we’re all here.

Something hits my brothers on the other side of the circle. They wince and double over.

“Now, Liddi,” Marek says. “That Khua can’t hold this together much longer.”

I shake my head so hard it hurts. Everything hurts.

“Where’s the other one, the one missing?” Tiav demands.

“He’s not coming,” Durant says. Agony radiates from him, more from his words than what’s happening to us. “Liddi, do it.”

It’s collapsing. The bow of the ship is breaking. My body shudders under the waves of chaos, tears squeezing from the corners of my eyes. Tears that match my brothers’.

I won’t go. Not yet. My brothers’ voices blur together. One voice, a hundred voices.

“We have to.”

“There’s no choice.”

“Liddi, go.”

“No time.”

“Go now!”

“Not coming.”

“Liddi, now!”

The pressure, their pressure, my heart bursting through my chest—it all breaks.

I shout.

“Not without Fabin!”

And because I speak—because I trigger the implant, using Minali’s pulse as the final push—without Fabin is exactly what happens.

An explosion, an implosion, or an infinite expansion of nothingness—something shoves me away, delivering the real world in the form of the floor slamming into my back.

I suppose it was my back slamming into the floor, but when I can’t breathe through five thousand points of pain, I don’t care about the distinction.

Something else stops me from breathing—clouds of dust choking the air. I’m in the same lab, but nothing’s the same. A section of the ceiling has collapsed. I push myself up to
look around.

Most of the lab equipment is intact, the conduit platform is crushed, and some items are just knocked over. The others sprawl on the floor around me. A quick headcount confirms it. Seven Jantzen
brothers, all unconscious, and one Ferinne Aelo.