He screamed. “Akhila, no!”
Dark Akhila turned to him then and threw out a hand in his direction. “Stay back!”
“What did you do to her?” Vegar turned to Sigurd, but the older man could only roll his eyes in the younger priest’s direction and plead with his lips.
“I couldn’t stop him. I tried. And I couldn’t stop her,” Dark Akhila said and then addressed her other self. “Let him go. Please let him go.”
Bright Akhila sneered up at the man choking in her grasp. “What was it you said? No sanctuary, no redemption, no peace.”
Then Dark Akhila drew the remaining sand up into her body, processing it, growing with it. “I can’t let you make him a carrier. I took refuge among these people.”
“For what? So they could lock you in the dark? So they could rape you?”
“For him.” Dark Akhila’s arm spanned the rest of the distance between her body and Vegar’s. She brushed her hand across his chest, and for a moment he held it close until she slipped it out from under his grip and brought it back to her center. “He said that I’m a person, and I will believe it. I have to believe it.”
Then Dark Akhila blazed blue-hot, her face full of compassion. Her arms extended, elongated, and stretched forward, inviting her brighter half to step inside the circle of her embrace. Bright Akhila turned, a pivoting motion on legs still pulsing with gathered sand, and the rhythm of her body faltered; the leer on her face softened. Her fingers tightened once and then loosened. Sigurd fell to the ground, dead.
A moment passed, and both bodies stilled. Then Bright Akhila fell forward, a scream filling her throat and filling the air. Dark Akhila caught her, brought her close and wept blue tears that fell from her cheeks and dissolved in the mass of pale hair beneath her chin. They shook together for a time, and the barren trees shook with them.
Then Dark Akhila looked up at Vegar. “Is there redemption? Is there peace?” she asked as her body began to wrap itself around Bright Akhila’s seething form.
Vegar’s face was grief-stricken. “I hope so.” He looked down at his broken mentor and added, “For both of you.”
“You need to go now.” Her dark, blue body converged around the raging woman inside her. “This will be hot.”
Vegar turned and ran. As he ran, he could smell hot metal, could hear a crackling sound like the spark of a welding torch, could feel a rising heat chasing him out of the arboretum, could see a reflection like daylight in the night sky over his head. When he finally fell to the ground gasping for breath, the world was cool and dark again.
The Councilor arrived with the military an hour later to take custody of Akhila, but there was nothing for them to retrieve but the mingled ashes and bone fragments of tree, bird, monk and nanobody. Vegar was kneeling in prayer just outside the blast radius, where smoke still rose from the earth. When the Councilor asked if he knew where his mentor was, he fell to his face in the snow and sobbed.
In time, his body healed and the bandages came off, but a reddened, stretched place remained on his chest. As the scars softened, they took the shape of Akhila’s elongated face in the throes of change, pleading for her life. The day he first recognized her face on his body, he packed his belongings and left the monastery to walk the path that had marked him, gathering broken Augments in Akhila’s name, mending broken Organics in Sigurd’s. When the time came, he had his scars limned in black and filled with a blue that shone even when he walked in darkness, which he often did.
THE MOON-KEEPER’S FRIEND
by Joanna Galbraith
Mohammed Muneer’s Twenty-Four Hour Tea Service was a rather long name for a roadside teahouse but Mohammed had liked it from the moment he’d conjured it. Painting the words neatly across an old wooden plank, his hand had cramped twice before he’d finished the first coat. He thought the long name would catch the attention of drivers. Make them slow down. Give their stomachs ideas. But the sign was too elongated for those who were weary so they drove straight on past him and stopped further down. Outside the burger joint with the squat name of Munch, lit up in pink neon by the side of the road.
On top of the teahouse was a small crescent moon which Mohammed Muneer polished each morning after the Fajr. Humming Nahna Wil Kamar Jeeraan in three different octaves, he burnished it vigorously until his fingers shred skin and sweat hung like a necklace across the brow of his forehead. The manager at Munch often watched on bemused. Eating jam doughnuts, belching black coffee, shouting between mouthfuls: “You should go neon, mate. More glow for less grind.”
Mohammed Muneer’s tea house rarely saw visitors even though he served tea in gold-lipped tulip glasses and offered ruby-inlaid nargiles from which to smoke tumbak. Even though he made sweets as fragrant as spring: churros glazed with rosewater, pistachio baghlava, rice-flour cookies sprinkled with crushed poppy seeds.
Road weary travellers, it seemed, simply weren’t interested.
Their tastes were much simpler, their guts far too staid. Cheese-and-bacon fingers. Fat plastic tubs filled with mousse. A Munch burger special with extra egg and thick beetroot. Who needed tumbak when you could smoke Bensons? Three puffs in the parking lot beside the dry spinifex grass. Butts flicked in the air like butterflies with torched wings.
Alas, for Mohammed Muneer, the townsfolk were no better.
Narrow in mind, if not in their girths, the very idea of something edible even being called a pashmak had them crossing the road promptly without checking for traffic. They crossed even faster when Mohammed Muneer was about. Waving them over with his wide, beckoning arms, apron to armpits, smiling so hard the tips of his moustache tickled the lobes of his ears. They’d rather risk their lives on the fast metal of the highway then engage with a man who didn’t serve milk in his tea.
It hurt Mohammed Muneer to be so scorned but in some small ways he was actually quite fortunate. The townsfolk were slobbish. They ate with their mouths open. They also had a rather perverse inclination for walking through dog poo instead of around it, so though he felt sad he was actually quite blessed.
There was only one local who ever visited his tea shop and that was Reggie Macklewaite, the town’s sort-of handyman. A softheaded fellow who wore lime velour tracksuit pants; he liked to help Mohammed Muneer wherever he could. Fix cracking pipes, empty clogged cisterns, sweep earwigs from gutters and the treads of the stairs. He used to come round every morning with his tools in a supermarket trolley until Mohammed Muneer told him he could sleep out the back, in a shack he had furnished with a bed and a basin.
Now it was true that poor Reggie Macklewaite hadn’t always wanted to be a handyman.
Indeed, he’d dreamed of being a pilot until cruelly advised to aim lower. “Stick to what you’re good at,” his teacher had said grimly. “And if you’re not good at anything then just be damn good at that.”
It wasn’t, however, that Mohammed Muneer’s tea shop never had visitors. (Reggie aside; but he was more of a fixture than a bona fide guest.) It was just that his visitors weren’t the usual types. Arriving at dawn from far-flung lands, they’d stagger through his bead curtain, eyes stung from no sleep, and collapse at his tea counter, feet shredded and sore. They would speak in strange tongues. Use their hands to make gestures. Tell tales that made no sense except to each other. Like the Argentinean fisherman who had lost his way at sea. Thought he was tracking a Patagonian Toothfish across the Southern Ocean, chasing the whites of its terrified eyes until one night he discovered he was tailing the moon instead. Or the pretty young girl from the Mekong Delta who carried a stash of hairy cherries in the cone of her hat. Said she’d wandered for months with a grain of rice in her eye that wouldn’t wash away no matter how much she tried.