Edge of Dark Read online

  It wasn’t only fire. Everything on the Deep was controlled. Magnificent, some of it. Stunningly beautiful. Inside Satyana’s sphere of influence, she’d had access to a lot of the station, including habitat bubbles built by the rich for the rich. There, Chrystal had seen streams and flowers and trees with no purpose in life other than to be an expression of excess.

  On Lym, they wilded. They tried to get out of the way instead of trying to manage every detail. She had trouble wrapping her head around such an approach to life.

  “Nona!”

  She started and turned, wondering if Charlie had called her more than once. “Yes? Sorry, I got lost in the flames.”

  “Are you up to telling Jean Paul a story? He wants to hear about the Deep.”

  She reluctantly shifted direction so she had a better view of the two men than of the fire. “Sure. What do you want to know?”

  Jean Paul watched her closely. “What’s the best thing about it?”

  An easy question. “It’s so big you can get lost in it. No one can see the Deep in a whole lifetime. New habitats grow constantly, as if the station lives. There’s food and music everywhere. Costumes. Dances. Travel immersives. Games flow through the whole station at once. Best, everyone is accepted. Everyone. Some stations are all about being or believing one way or another, but the Deep accepts everyone.”

  Jean Paul raised an eyebrow. “And the worst thing?”

  She raised her glass and took a sip. “That’s harder.” She paused, considering. “There’s more than one bad thing. Maybe the way we make decisions. It all sounds formal with the ruling council up there—the Historian brings his interpretation, the Futurist brings hers, etc. Everybody talks. But it actually takes years for decisions to be made. All the important discussions happen off stage and then there’s this scripted courtroom action. Power’s really concentrated.”

  Charlie asked, “And another bad thing?”

  “The part that isn’t about the law. There’s a black market for everything. Drugs, sex, questionable cargo, votes. You’d think we’d do better, having all the sophistication of the Deeping Rules and all that.”

  “The Deeping Rules?” Charlie asked.

  She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. “Let me see if I can get them just right.” She paused, picturing the signs. “You must own yourself. You must harm no one. You must add to the collective.”

  “That should be simple,” Jean Paul mused.

  She laughed. “They’re so simple they can be interpreted a million ways. Is adding to the collective a real job like a teacher or is it just coming up with an idea? Is it okay to be a militant or do you need to obey the rules?”

  “So what do you do? To add?” Charlie asked.

  “I teach. I told you that.”

  His eyes sparkled with mischief. “And do you ever break the rules?”

  Was he flirting? The idea startled her. “Your turn. What do you like about Lym?”

  Charlie’s answer came as quick as hers had been. “That it’s so open. I’ve never been to the stations, but I can’t imagine being closed into a place where everything smells of humans.” He blushed for a second, maybe regretting saying bad things about her world. “Here, there’s hundreds of thousands of species. As much as we study Lym, we still find new things. We get surprised.”

  “I love how open it is, too.” She glanced at Jean Paul. “You?”

  “I like the sense of space. I almost never go to the cities.”

  She could believe that. Jean Paul looked clean but unkempt. Like Charlie, he didn’t have any visible augmentation. His long brown hair looked tangled and his clothes had been patched. Not exactly uncivilized, but he wouldn’t fit in very well. Probably not in Manna Springs, and certainly not on the Deep. “So what do you hate?”

  Jean Paul walked over by the fire, the light dancing on his face. “That after all of this time, people still don’t get how important it is to protect Lym. The spacers ignore it—like it’s just the past, like it’s something your Historian might talk about in a class or something.” He fell silent for a long moment and then spoke softly, his words slightly slurred by alcohol. “I hate it that Charlie here has to go dig up smugglers from time to time. That people think they can just come here and not do damage. People almost killed this place. It will never be really wild again. You know that, right?”

  She was trying to decide how to answer when he just kept going. “So many of the animals have been killed or tinkered with, created, that there’s no balance that doesn’t need some human intervention. But humans are dangerous and stupid.”

  She frowned. “Not all of us.”

  “Yes. Well. Maybe not us three. But even some of the Lym natives get caught stealing animals and exporting them. We caught two a year ago.”

  She put her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Okay. I get it.” She glanced at Charlie. “What do you hate?”

  “What he said.”

  “That’s all?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again. “I hate it that we have so little power. The big stations decide everything.”

  She raised her glass. “So here’s to a way to figure out how to get more power. For all of us.”

  Charlie looked startled at that. But he clinked his glass with hers and Jean Paul’s and they drank.

  She must be a little drunk herself. Satyana was always telling her to get more power, and she was always refusing.

  The wine tasted earthy and full of life, like wine that could only come from a place where the soil was more than a foot deep.

  When Nona woke the next morning, the wine still muzzed her head, but she remembered her toast to power. She went into the living room and poked at the ashes of last night’s fire. She had no idea how to rekindle them. She pulled on her coat and went outside. The air felt so cold that she crossed her arms and stamped her booted feet on the pavement.

  The sun had just started pushing up a faded grey bit of light to eat the stars. She watched it blossom into the hello-gold of actual morning. She looked at the pale sun, shading her eyes with her fingers, and whispered, “I promise to watch you rise and set every day I’m here. Not to miss a one.”

  It felt good, if silly. At least no one could hear her.

  She checked the time and the orbital location of the Diamond Deep. Only a few hours later. Close enough. She called Satyana and talked to her for a long time in spite of the slight irritating delay.

  Afterward, she basked in the morning sun. A flock of black and orange birds wheeled and danced in the great blue sky. Puffy white clouds floated over her. She drank in the odd wonderment of them, swearing that she would remember the clouds and the birds and the incredible open space, and the horizon.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHARLIE

  Charlie sat beside Jean Paul in the kitchen. Each warmed their hands on a cup of Jean Paul’s favorite morning tea, a concoction made from stinging rock-grass, py-berry leaves, and dried gern. It wasn’t Charlie’s favorite, but Jean Paul made it for him every time he thought there might be danger, which was almost every time Charlie left. Jean Paul was convinced it made Charlie’s reflexes faster. Charlie himself wasn’t convinced it didn’t.

  Cricket lay curled in a ball of fur by the door, which was a polite request to go outside and sit with Nona. Charlie ignored the tongat and watched Nona through the window. Quiet time became her.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Jean Paul asked.

  “You’re the one who said I should take the job. You practically made me do it.”

  “I meant take her out to Neville?”

  “It’s fitting.”

  Jean Paul sipped his tea. “I thought you’d hate her. Now I’m worried I’ll lose my roommate.”

  “To what?” Jean Paul only sounded a little like he was teasing, which bothered Charlie enough that Cricket lumbered over and sat beside him and rested her big head in his lap. “I’m not leaving Lym, and she’s unlikely to stay. Besi
des, don’t forget I’m a hired hand.” He stroked the tongat’s head, grateful for her company. His rocks, these two. His strength.

  “You could use a lover,” Jean Paul whispered.

  Charlie went quiet. If it were anyone else suggesting it, he’d be offended at the familiarity. But Jean Paul had once wanted more than the friendship they shared. Charlie had thought that was over, maybe a decade ago. “No,” he mused quietly. “She’s probably exactly what I don’t need.”

  As if on cue, Nona pushed the door open, looking slightly surprised to see them awake. “Good morning.”

  Charlie made breakfast for all of them, managing two pans and thus keeping himself too busy to talk to Nona or Jean Paul. Even Cricket stayed out of his way, preferring to wrap herself around Nona’s legs the way she treated Charlie when he was sick or tired. Come to think of it, Nona was almost as subdued as he was. Maybe her dreams had been no better than his had been, full of threats he couldn’t outrun or see.

  The smell of eggs and herbs mixed with the light scent of Jean Paul’s tea. The silence in the room was so thick that the sizzle of hot oil, clanking pots, and even the pouring of water all seemed loud and intrusive.

  Jean Paul stepped carefully into the awkward void, probably quite aware that his comment about sex had sparked Charlie’s cooking frenzy. He spoke to Nona. “Let me show you where you’re going.”

  Well, now Charlie was taking Nona to Neville whether he wanted to or not.

  Jean Paul dragged out a physical picture book. The form of the object fascinated Nona, and she held it in her hands, turning it this way and that and feeling the heft of it.

  “You’ve never seen a book?” Jean Paul said.

  “That’s what this is? A book? Static information?”

  “Historical information doesn’t change much,” Charlie called from the kitchen.

  “What you know about history might,” she said.

  “Point.” Charlie blushed and turned back to cooking, barely listening as Jean Paul took her through the book, showing her pictures of Lym in its most recent technological heyday at the beginning of the age of explosive creation. Neville had been designed to scoop resources out of the sea and use them to help people flee the gravity well and establish new bases in space.

  Charlie put Cricket’s big metal bowl on the ground and watched her lick the edges clean before she started crunching the bones of the tharp in the center.

  He piled plates high with eggs, toast, and grilled vegetables, and set them down in front of Jean Paul and Nona just as they were opening the page of the book that showed pictures of Neville.

  It had been a beach town once. Since these pictures, ice had repopulated mountaintops and turned into solid sheets on both poles. Sea level had fallen enough that more than a few kilometers separated Neville from the beach now, all downhill.

  In the long-ago Neville had been a testament to high technology and design. Nano-strength buildings flowed one into the other in graceful, glassy arcs. Imposing metal sea gates had protected the city from tidal waves and storms. Lacy and filigreed bridges married one building to the other in a series of arches. In one sunrise shot, gold light haloed a long string of fantastic bridges.

  Nona picked up the book, ignoring her breakfast. “That’s beautiful. It’s even more beautiful than the Deep.”

  Jean Paul looked pleased with her. “In Neville’s time, it was the most beautiful city in the solar system, and by far the most exotic. The most advanced.”

  She glanced at Charlie, who had just brought his own plate over to sit down. “We’ll go there?”

  Charlie’s blood raced. If they did go, he’d have a whole day alone with her. He loved the idea, and it scared him. He glanced at Jean Paul. “Do you want to go?”

  For a moment, Jean Paul’s eyes lit up, but then he turned away and when he looked back his expression was flatter. “No. I’ll stay here. Someone’s got to be able to come save you if you need it.”

  Nona must have caught some of the awkwardness in the exchange, as she looked from man to man and then dug into her eggs.

  He left Cricket at home with Jean Paul. As he and Nona neared the beach, a school of longfish danced in the wave spray, their wet, blue-green bodies giving themselves away by movement alone. When they splashed into the water after they leapt a wave, they seemed to merge with the ocean, fish and water all the same shimmering blue-green. Each fish was almost the size of the skimmer, maybe twice as long as he was tall, and thin.

  He slowed down so that Nona could lean out and point at fish after fish, until she fell back against her seat laughing in delight.

  He took her to the beach and they stopped to walk on the sand. The fish were gone, but one edge of the rocky beach had a number of exposed tide pools. He walked barefoot, and she followed suit, following his steps carefully. He couldn’t explain why he wanted to show her as much of what he loved about Lym as possible, or why it felt so urgent. Maybe the battle above them—beyond them—past them—maybe that battle made him feel like every good thing in his life had become fragile.

  Nona seemed to feel the same way. She knelt on moss-covered rocks and took pictures of the clearest tide pools, the beach, even of him standing on rocks and pointing down at particularly bright spiny slugs or, once, at a black eel that slithered out from behind two rocks for just a moment and then went back in. She’d shown him the camera setup she had—a small physical lens that she held in one hand and controlled with clever finger gestures. Today, she used it almost nonstop as if creating memories for later.

  As they were walking back, he asked her what she thought of the tide pools.

  “There’s more order than I expected.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I always imagined Lym as all tooth and claw, that things would be eating each other every place I looked.”

  He laughed. “Everything here does eat other things.”

  “But not every minute. I expected a constant fight between wild things. I think I’ve been understanding biology all wrong.”

  “The fight to eat or be eaten is constant if you know how to look. We’re working hard to allow natural responses.”

  She dug her bare toes into the sand. “Disorder is practically banned in space, but you’re creating it.”

  “We’re creating room for disorder and measuring it. We’re not creating the thing itself.” He walked. “That’s not even right. We’re creating balance.”

  “Okay.” She brushed wind-blown hair from her eyes and took photos of the waves. “Coming here is like coming home must have been for my parents. They were on The Creative Fire. You know what that was?”

  “The miracle ship that came back home.”

  “People lived and died in it for generations. They flew through space but never actually saw stars. They had no idea what Adiamo was like. They had a game that depicted the world before the sundering or the remaking, before the Ring of Distance. It showed Lym and Mammot and a few stations and nothing else. The game play was here, on a fictional Lym. I know. Dad showed me a version of it once—he used to play it with Ruby.”

  “That Ruby?”

  “Ruby the Red.”

  “You knew her?”

  “No.” Nona pursed her lips. “Ruby died right after I was born.”

  “So you weren’t ever on the Fire?

  “No. Well, I was conceived on it. It was destroyed before I was born. But I think Lym is to me as the Deep was to the Fire. Close, anyway. A place where the very genetics that shape my muscles and bones originated. A place that I wouldn’t exist without.”

  He loved her poetic way of looking at things. It altered how he saw Lym, if only by adding the tiniest bit of completely strange and new perspective. “Ready to see some more history?”

  She grinned, tucking a stray strand of blue hair behind an ear. “Sure. Will there be less breeze?”

  “Probably.” He flew her into Neville through the broken sea-gates, which hung askew on great hinges, opening outward.
They dwarfed the skimmer.

  She surely expected something like the pictures Jean Paul had shown her.

  Jagged edges and ripped and broken bridges surrounded craters full of broken building material. Mangled and stripped vehicles littered cracked streets. The largest building still stood, but the center of it had a hole almost all of the way through, and the tail end of a star fighter stuck out of the middle of it. Near all of the edges, dirt had blown over the streets and a wild cacophony of spring flowers reached along every edge on their march to reclaim the city.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed. She leaned forward like she had over the fish, but the sounds coming from her were small moans of disappointment mixed with awe. “Can we land?”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Why?”

  “Sometimes there are looters. Parts of the city are still full of treasure and bones.”

  One hand shaded her eyes as she squinted down at the city. “I don’t see anyone.”

  He scanned the area. Too many intact walls and other good places to hide. “There’s no way to know if anyone’s there.”

  She turned her face toward him, her eyes as excited as they had been earlier, watching the fish. “I do want to land. To look around a little.”

  Her enchantment reminded him of Neville’s beauty. He forgot it these days, seeing the dangers instead. A hazard of his job. He flew them all around the perimeter so she could see the devastation from all sides.

  “I don’t see anyone else here,” she pointed out.

  “That doesn’t mean it’s safe. Looters hide when they see me. But I know a place where we can probably stretch our legs safely and eat lunch.”

  He took her to a low hill piled with big rocks and tucked the skimmer neatly beside one rock a little taller than the vehicle. They were close to the broken city, but with a long stretch of clear land between them and the nearest buildings. A pool of spring water fed three scraggly trees. Flat rocks made an artful half circle for comfortable seating. “My theory is this area used to be a park,” he told her.

  “What happened?” she asked, as they climbed out of the skimmer. “To the city. Such . . . I never saw so much destruction.”