Watcher's Web (21 page)

The young
female continued, “Ikay . . . says . . .
meet.”

“Ikay wants to
meet me?” The last time hadn’t ended so happily.

The servant
moved her hand down in a sharp gesture that meant “yes” and that
Pengali at the settlement had made with their tails.

A relieved
smile spread over the young female’s face.

“Ikay knows
where are . . . old people?” Damn, her Mirani wasn’t much
better than the girl’s.

Huge
eyes widened. “You . . . old people. You
Akkar.
”

“I am? What is
Akkar? Where from? Tell me.”

“Akkar fell
from sky.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.

“Where from?
Where did they come from? Where are they now?”

The young
female shrank against the wall, fear in her eyes. She whispered,
“Ikay.”

“Does Ikay
know?” This was so frustrating.

But at that
moment, voices sounded in the shop, and all servants scurried back
to their pillows, picking up their work just in time before the
curtain moved.

Another
Pengali servant came in, accompanied by a young keihu woman, who
looked like she’d spent the night in the rain. Rat-tails of dark
hair hung loose over her back. Dark eyes burned in a face paler
than those of other keihu people, as if she rarely saw sunlight.
Her broad lips muttered inaudible words. A khaki tunic hung off her
bony shoulders like a poorly erected tent. She wore no jewellery;
her lower arms bore angry red marks of recently healed wounds.

No matter how
much Jessica wanted to look away, she couldn’t.

The
dressmaker’s assistant held up an exquisite pink dress before the
woman. Other assistants smiled and talked, presumably about how
good the dress looked, but the girl just stared, hollow eyes
directed at the back wall.

“Anmi.” The
dressmaker’s youngest assistant held out the keihu girl’s hand,
motioning for Jessica to touch it.

As soon as
Jessica’s fingers made contact with the scar-crossed palm, a wave
of heat shot into her hand. She gasped. Yellow sparks swirled under
her skin. Holy shit.

The young
female whispered, “Avya.”

Yes, Jessica
had gathered as much, but . . . a keihu girl? “Are many
like her?”

“Many. Many,
many. Pengali in city, keihu children locked up by parents. Say is
mad. We do not know what to do.”

Children
locked up in rooms for being abnormal, children who might one day,
when forced, or abused . . .  She saw the limp
form of Stephen Fitzgerald’s body in the sand of the riverbank.
That was a dark place in her past where she didn’t want to go.
She’d been thirteen. He had been fifteen, drunk and challenged by a
friend to make advances. He’d grabbed her, and tried to drag her
into the dry river bed. Parts of her memory had never come back,
but she knew there’d been a flash, and that Stephen had fallen into
the dirt. A bright spot of light hovered over his limp form before
winking out. He had failed to get up. Drug overdose, the police had
said. Stephen’s parents refused to believe it. Jessica didn’t
believe it either.

It was
self-defence—he’d been drunk. He’d tried to rape her.

That was
before she could make the web, before . . .

It was no
excuse. No bloody excuse. Her only luck was that she had supportive
parents.

These girls
didn’t.

“But
Ikay . . .” Surely Ikay knew what to do.

“Ikay can help
only strongest. Ones who have avya spilling out.”

Like her.
“What happens to the other ones?”

“Usually die.
See?” She held up the girl’s arm, showing the large red marks on
the inside of the wrist. “She cut. Kill themselves. No one can
stopping them. Not Ikay even . . . She is losing many
children of herself.”

Jessica pushed
away a shiver of discomfort. The pain and burning inside her seemed
like years back, but her crazy run towards the central pillar of
the solar station had not been long ago. That action might easily
have killed her. She, too, had been on the path to
self-destruction. She took the girl’s hands, fine-boned and cold in
hers. “Can you hear me?”

Nothing.

Jessica turned
to the servant. “Does she speak Mirani?”

“Yes. Very
well. She helps father and father’s brother in business. Speaks
Mirani, and Coldi and Damarcian, and . . .” The
servant counted off on her fingers.

An intelligent
girl with a natural talent for languages, just like herself. But
she had never gone into unresponsive moods like this. If anything,
her fits had been just the opposite.

Damn it—what
could she do?

The answer was
as simple as it was scary: use her body to draw off the built-up
energy. Ikay had done it, when they had first met at the tribe.

She closed her
eyes and focused her own strength. Then she opened her eyes again
and met the girl’s brown gaze. It was empty, as if all life had
withdrawn. Yet somewhere deep within Jessica sensed a knot of heat,
so tightly bound it resisted Jessica’s probe. She needed more
energy, and that had always come to her on hot and sunny weather,
because she absorbed energy from the environment.

She broke eye
contact and turned to the servants. “Bring me something very
hot.”

One of the
females left the workshop and the others continued to work without
speaking. The girl rocked gently to and fro, still muttering her
inaudible words.

Within a
minute, the servant returned carrying a bowl of steaming water.
Sheesh—those volcanic springs were handy—hot water on demand. The
servant placed the bowl on the floor in front of Jessica. Sulphuric
air rose from it in wisps of steam.

She stuck out
her hands, rubbing them nervously as steam enveloped them. She
placed one hand flat on the surface of the water. For a
split-second, she wanted to scream. Heat seared her skin and pain
flared up her arm, but pain turned into warmth and warmth produced
tiny flecks of light which moved up her arm like twinkling stars in
the night sky. Her body drank in the energy. Greedy for more, she
plunged her other hand in the water. Then she went back to the
girl’s unfocused gaze. She found the knot of power and tugged at it
with a flush of energy.

The
girl’s mind-voice spoke.
Go away.

Jessica
replied.
I’m here to
help you.

I
don’t want to live like this any more.
Images of a dark room with a high window
passed through Jessica’s mind. A broken chair lay in one corner.
Bed sheets had been torn to shreds. Stains of red marked the
walls.

Your
family will miss you.
Jessica forced herself to think of her mother years ago,
giving her cups of warm milk when Jessica emerged, raged out and
tired from her temper tantrums, from the old shed. Tears threatened
in the corners of her eyes.

A
flicker of surprise went through the girl’s mind.
My family says I’m
mad.

I can
help you control this.
Jessica thought of how she had learned to make the light
with the help of Ikay.

The knot
loosened.
Who are
you?

They
call me Anmi. Let me help you.

I’ve had
enough.

No,
come.
Jessica
gritted her teeth and wrenched the knot of heat apart. A wave of
sparks swirled before her eyes, bringing a blast of power that
flowed from the girl’s body. She gasped, concentrated on a spot in
the air and directed as much of the spare heat into it as she
could. The spot glowed, and grew, and grew, out of control. Jessica
tried to clamp down on the energy flowing from her, but it was as
if another mind,
a
third power,
had
taken possession of it. The girl’s face vanished to be replaced by
the face of a man.

Daya. And for
once, she wasn’t inside his head, but experienced him as if she was
next to him, and for the first time, she could see him, but still
feel his thoughts and emotions.

*     *     *

Black eyes
stared at her out of a pale-skinned face framed by dark curly hair.
Yellowish light gilded long eyelashes, which blinked. Moisture
glistened on dark lips, slightly parted. God, he was so much like
her.

His feet
slapped on a smooth floor. Freezing air stung through his
tunic.

A dim light on
the other side of the room reflected in the smooth surface of a
table top or a bench. In one corner stood a shallow metal dish,
some instruments protruding over the edge. A man busied himself in
the corner under the light, pulling on smooth gloves that reached
to his elbows.

A slight
figure dressed in white approached from near the frost-covered
window. The silver embroidery of the Mirani emblem glittered on his
chest. His uniform was adorned with so many other coloured and
glittering markings that he had to be someone high-ranking. His
grey hair was cropped short and framed a sharp face with a pointy
noise, a jutting chin and skin stretched taut over high cheekbones.
His eyes had the colour of a glacier in early morning light.

Daya said,
through shivering lips, “What are you doing with me?”

The small man
passed him with slow footsteps that clacked on the tiles, his hands
behind his back. His breath steamed. “No need to worry. This won’t
take long. We won’t harm you.”

Someone
grabbed Daya from behind. “Come, over here.” The man pushed him
against a wall of metal, cold biting into his back. “Hold
still.”

He tied a
strap around Daya’s arm.

Daya yanked.
“Hey!”

The man
restrained his other arm in a similar strap and went to pick up the
metal bowl from the table. From this he took several medical
instruments. The man had to be a medico; he squirted a spot of cold
spray on Daya’s arm. Then there was a sharp prick and the medico
was taping a needle to Daya’s arm, with a thin lead attached to a
machine. “What’s all this?” Daya asked.

“It doesn’t
harm you. Relax.”

The medico
sprayed cold stuff on his other arm. “Hold him.”

Someone else
pushed his arm into the metal wall, one hand on his upper arm, the
other on his wrist. Another sharp prick and biting pain spread from
his lower arm.

“What are you
doing to me?” In the dimness, his shoulder pushed against the
metal, Daya only saw the medico’s hands, attaching a long strip of
tape to his forearm, and untangling a length of wire.

The
pain, the pain, the pain.

Jessica wanted
to jump out of the vision and grab him, take him to safety. He was
hers, and hers alone, one of her kind.

*     *     *

The keihu
girl’s face appeared again, no longer empty, but her cheeks wet
with tears. She threw thin arms around Jessica’s shoulders, resting
her head against Jessica’s chest. Her whole body shook with
anguished cries.

“
You
must go and rescue him.” The girl had
seen
Daya?

Jessica patted
her back awkwardly, her whole body still glowing and throbbing.
Damn him. She was in no position to rescue anyone. She didn’t even
know where he was.

A deep voice
behind her said, “You’ve quite finished breaking each other’s
hearts?”

Iztho stood
there, leaning against the doorframe, his thumbs tucked in his
belt. Blood rushed to her cheeks. How long had he been
watching?

He jerked his
head at the door opening. His face betrayed no emotion. “If you’re
ready, I have something you might find interesting.”

Chapter
18

I
ZTHO WENT TO a
couch against the side wall in the shop, where he had left his
screen, and turned it towards Jessica. “The markings on the walls
in that cave you were talking about—did they look anything like
this?”

He spoke
Mirani and made no attempt to simplify his speech for her sake.

So
he
had
been interested in her story
about the cave. She made a note not to underestimate him
again.

The screen
displayed an image of a stone, like a brick in a wall. Carved
grooves in the surface depicted, under each other, an arrow, two
suns and three people. Her cheeks flushed, Jessica nodded.

He touched the
screen. Another picture displayed an overview of a chamber with a
flat dais in the middle, just like in the chamber she had visited
with Ikay. The walls were covered in carvings. She whispered, “Yes,
like that. Where is this?”

He cursed, or
at least she thought he did because she didn’t recognise the word
he uttered. “This is one of the chambers they found on Asto.”

“Where is
that?”

“It’s the
inner world in this system. I’ll show you tonight. Asto is very
bright in the evening sky at the moment.”

“Have you seen
this cave?”

“I can’t. It’s
too hot to go there.”

“Too hot?
But . . .” She sought for words. “Can I do this in
English?”

He gave
her a withering stare that said
I thought you were made of tougher
stuff.

All right. Not
in English then.

His attention
returned to the screen. “Asto wasn’t always the desert it is today.
Many years ago, a great civilisation, the Aghyrians, inhabited the
planet. They invented many things we use now; they invented things
we don’t even half understand. They started space travel at the
time Ceren was only a jungle inhabited by savages.”

The
people from the frieze. “Were they tall and. . . ?”
She didn’t know how to say
broad-shouldered.