She came back to reality to find that she was lying on her back on soft grass with Dan half over her, his head cradled on her breasts. He seemed relaxed, replete, and she felt the same way. What a fool she'd been — they could have been easing each other's bodies, minds, and souls like this all along.
So much wasted time, and now he was going off to die.
"Rusty skills," she said, playing with his shoulder-length hair. Longer than he used to wear it.
"Is that a complaint?"
She heard the smile in it so didn't answer.
She'd rather not think at all, but her mind was coming back to life, protesting fate! "The stones. What were you doing?"
"Controlling matter." He lazily pulled a handful of grass and tossed it in the air. She watched it hang there, then suddenly shower down on them.
"Sorry," he said, brushing it off her. "Still rusty."
The fire Was in his touch, though, and brushing led to nibbling, nibbling to kissing, and kissing to another apocalypse. An easy way to mindless pleasure, but reality returned. He couldn't die. She had to save him.
"Someone must have sent for help," she said.
"Weeks ago, but it won't arrive in time. And anyway, what do federal bureaucrats know about blighters?"
But he sat and pulled her up to face him. "Any response might arrive in time to take some survivors off. Go north tomorrow, Jenny, and keep going north. Try to survive."
It was good advice, but Jenny doubted she'd take it. She couldn't imagine fleeing north while Dan went south to die. And she didn't want to leave Gaia. Perhaps it was the scrap of magic in her, that mysterious Gaian part, but she felt she'd wither and die away from here.
"I didn't know you could do things like that — the grass. How's that fixing?"
His grimace showed that he'd noticed her lack of promise, but he didn't pursue it. Perhaps he understood too well. "It isn't."
He collapsed onto his back, hands beneath his head, beautiful enough to distract. Perhaps that was his purpose. It wasn't going to work.
"So what is it?"
His eyes swiveled to hers. "Wild magic."
She knew he was about to tell her something important, but this time she wanted to know. "What's that?"
"The elemental force, I think. Fixers are born with magic. No one knows why. It doesn't go in families. No amount of effort can create it or increase it."
Okay, so she was weak. She leaned up on her elbow to trace the contours of his chest. "What about the training?"
"That's not to teach us how to do things. That's to teach us how not to do things. Here's the truth, Jen. Hellbane U makes such a fuss about finding fixers because they daren't leave a single one unchecked. We can't have wild magic."
"I don't understand."
"Remember when I fixed your finger?"
"But there was nothing bad about that."
"What about the baby?"
She'd pushed that to the back of her mind. "Would it really be so terrible for fixers to heal like that?"
"Yes, yes it would. In that, the training's right. We can't fool with nature. That's what drove Earth to the brink. Death's natural. Without orderly cycling of the parts the whole will rot."
"Then what are you doing with stones and grass?" She couldn't stop a sharp edge in her voice.
"Looking for a weapon. What if wild magic is more useful than tame against the blighters?"
She stared at him. "Tell me."
He rose and pulled her to her feet. "If I'm going to be coherent, we'd better get dressed. I have tea."
He picked up his shirt and found her bra and knickers underneath. With a grin, he tossed them to her. She resisted the urge to make a performance of putting them on. They needed to find a way to survive.
She noticed his small campfire, tucked behind rocks where it wouldn't be easily seen from outside the park. She dressed and went to sit there with him, holding her hands out to the warmth, though the night was not particularly cold. "Now tell me."
"I'm not sure I have my thoughts straight yet." He moved a metal pot onto a trivet over the flames. Steam began to curl out of the spout.
"Talking sometimes helps."
"Yes." He poured the tea into two cups. Had he always planned to draw her here?
"Talk," she said. "How do you suspend something in the air, and what use is it?"
"I don't know." He picked up a stone and released it in midair. It hung there, but then fell. "We don't understand what fixers do any more than we understand the blighters, but I think our… energy… comes from the same place."
"Negative and positive?"
"Perhaps, but perhaps not." He put his cup aside. "Look, assume that the blighters are not just energy but a species — undetectable to us, but following the same patterns as other species. They are born, they reproduce, they die, and they need to take in nutrients."
"Do they?"
"I have no idea. This is a working hypothesis. It would mean that they ash animals to feed, transforming them into the same kind of undetectable energy that they are."
"Like water transformed into steam by heat?"
"Or like green plants transformed into our ungreen bodies. That's a kind of magic if you don't know how it happens."
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," she said, remembering his words.
He pulled a face. "I can't see anything about the blighters we could remotely call technology. Perhaps that comment should say that everything we humans don't understand we classify as magic."
"And thus unreal."
"Until the unreal starts to eat us."
Jenny swirled the stewed tea in her cup, swirling what he'd said in her mind. "If the blighters are eating us, they'll have to stop, won't they? Otherwise…"
"Otherwise, they'll be like people on Earth and the cod."
"Good point. But they re-created the cod stocks from DNA."
"And the blighters almost certainly can't do that."
"So what are you saying? That they'll eat us all then die of starvation? That's not much comfort."
"I've been reading up on it. There are creatures that eat almost all their food source then go dormant until the supply recovers."
Pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. "That's why Gaia was so perfect for us! Fertile, lush plant life, but no large or sentient animals. The blighters had eaten it down to a nub. How long would they be dormant?"
"Probably as long as it takes."
"But instead," she said, almost breathless, "we arrived…"
"Like a delivery dinner."
"But it's been centuries!"
"Perhaps they're not programmed to stir until now. Perhaps their life cycle is naturally measured in centuries. Perhaps it's something to do with base energy stores…"
"Or perhaps," she said, "they were waiting for the dinner bell."
He nodded. "My guess is that the occasional blighters have been checking things out."
"Like the drones combing the universe for usable planets. Fair's fair, I suppose."
"And survival is survival." He broke a twig off a nearby bush and began to strip the leaves off it. Something he'd done as a boy when fretting. "Interesting, isn't it? Gaia was the perfect planet, settled with extreme care to ensure infinite harmony and balance: But it all comes back to the jungle in the end."
"Perhaps we had a good run because we developed fixers and learned to zap the blighters."
"Screwed up their system a bit?" He tossed the bare twig into the fire where flames licked at it. "Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. This is all crazy speculation, you know."
"But it makes sense." Jenny looked from the spluttering twig to the statue of the little girl. "Ashes to ashes … Something's told them dinner's ready, and they're rushing to the table. What do we do?"