We, Li said.
Shall I show you?
He pulled away from her, his hands lingering on hers. He took a step backward. He reached up to unbutton his shirt.
Li flinched, hands jerking up to cover her eyes. It was the gesture of a terrified child, the child whose growing up had been wiped out of her jump by jump, leaving no bridge from past to present, no path from her old fears to the understanding she should have grown into in the years since her leaving.
There are no monsters, the thing that wore her father’s flesh said. Not down here. Not even you.
He unbuttoned his shirt with agonizing slowness. She watched, button by button, breath by breath, knowing that her heart would stop if she had to look at that black horror that haunted all her dreams.
But the dream had changed. Or she had.
His body was a map now. The life of the planet coursed through him—this planet that had given birth to both of them. His wasted muscles were mountain ranges. Oceans waxed and waned in the bone house of his ribs. The secrets of the Earth lived in him.
She dropped to her knees, dazed, ears ringing with the song of the rock around her. She laid her hands on him, learned him, studied him. She passed from not knowing to knowing in the space of a touch. The world reached out through him and changed her, and she let it. Just as Sharifi had.
Do you understand?he asked. Do you see what this world could be? What it wants to be?
Yes.
Do you believe in it?
Yes.
Do you?
She trembled. Because he wasn’t asking what she believed in. He was asking what she was willing to do about it.
“I can’t,” she said. “Don’t ask me to. I can’t do what Sharifi did.”
Anaconda Strike: 8.11.48.
White light. Open spaces. The sweep of a hawk’s wing above her.
She stood on a dry plain. Silver-green sage covered the hills. Sunflowers marched across the valley like the squads and battalions of an army in parade-ground finery. The wall behind her was overrun with blooming jasmine, and the musky smell of the blossoms was as hot and exotic as the brilliant plain before her.
She jumped at the sound of a footfall behind her. A tall, long-limbed girl strode across a courtyard under the blazing sun, white skirts kicking up in front of her. Red dirt coated her bare feet, faded into the tawny gold of her ankles. Brown curls blew around her face and veiled the smiling mouth, the hazel eyes.
Cohen?
She felt him in her mind, restful and reassuring after the terrifying presence in the glory hole.
“The whole planet is alive,” she said, “isn’t it?”
“Alive,” he repeated. She felt him turning the idea over, pondering it, poking at it. “I guess that’s as good a word as any other.”
“What does it want?”
“To talk to us. Or to talk to our planets, I imagine. I doubt it understands that we’re not mere parts of a larger being.”
“So what do we do now?”
He gazed down at her, squinting a little in the bright sunlight. “That’s not quite the same question for me as it is for you.”
Her stomach wrenched as she remembered what she was here for. To hand the condensates over to Nguyen and TechComm. To do what Sharifi, in the end, had not been willing to do. Was she even now walking in Sharifi’s footsteps, stumbling through the same impossible choices that had led Sharifi to her death?
“What would you do?” she asked Cohen.
“What would I do? Or what would I do if I were you?”
She looked into Chiara’s eyes. She could see Cohen lurking behind them now, so close she could almost catch him, almost know what it was to be that shifting, kaleidoscopic many-in-one.
“Both,” she said.
“For me it’s simple. Or rather it’s a matter of choices I made so long ago that they don’t seem like choices anymore. I’d like to be able to say that it’s a matter of principle, that I don’t think TechComm or Korchow or anyone else has the right to control Compson’s World. But it’s not that. It’s just… curiosity, I suppose.” He paused, looking down at the rich dirt blowing past their feet. “You have more to lose than I do, of course.”
She took her hands from his, unable to bear the mingling of physical intimacy and this newer and more threatening intimacy. “Are we safe here?”
“It makes no difference; we couldn’t leave if we wanted to. The worldmind wants us here.”
“The worldmind? Where’d you get that from?”
“That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
They walked under the hot sun of a world that had been dead for two centuries. The far fields had been cut already. Trout-colored horses grazed among the knee-high sunflower stalks, their silver tails swishing back and forth like pendulums. Birds stabbed for worms in the furrows, and the tall stalks harbored invisible singers that Li’s oracle told her were called crickets.
She’d never seen a cricket, and she kept stopping, searching through the tall green stalks for them until Cohen laughed and asked if she wanted him to catch her one.
“No!” she said, speaking too quickly, too sharply. A memory welled up in her, clear as running water across the stretch of more than twenty years.
Her twelfth birthday. Her father had bought her a small-gauge over-under Gunther. It was fake, a rim-manufactured knockoff, but it was still an outrageously extravagant present. They climbed into the hills at dawn, crossing creeks heavy with red spring runoff, too excited to stop and look for the stocked fish that lurked in the riffles. They penetrated far enough into the canyons to smell native air and feel their breath start to shorten. When her father started coughing, they dropped altitude and hiked sideways along the cut line of an old lake bed.
They found the magpies just as the sun began to silver their backs and flash blue fire off their long tail feathers.
The magpies made a game of it, just as they made a game of everything. They hopped from tree to tree flaunting themselves, cackling at the slow, stupid, earthbound humans. She loved them. She loved their defiant beauty, the strong curve of chest to wing to pinion, their gleefully unashamed thievery. She wanted one of them more than she could ever remember wanting anything.
She snugged the shotgun into her shoulder the way her father had shown her. She led the target, reveling in the dog-sharp reflexes that had been her construct’s birthright long before the first piece of Corps wetware burrowed into her spine. She squeezed the trigger softly, felt the give of it, the final burr of resistance as the slack of the uncocked mechanism gave way to the sharp, clean union of brain, trigger, firing pin. She fired, and the blue-black-and-white glory that had been a magpie burst into a tumbling whirl of blood and feathers.
It fell into a puddle. She remembered that very clearly. She remembered running, impatient to see the bird, to get it in her hands, to possess it. She remembered kneeling in the dirt, picking up a broken, bedraggled, limp thing with a shattered chest. She remembered crying. It was the last time she could remember that Caitlyn Perkins had cried. She certainly hadn’t cried when her father died.
She surfaced from the memory to feel Cohen beside her, inside her. Are you the hunter or the bird? he asked. A question only Cohen could ask.
She looked into Chiara’s gold-flecked eyes and thought that the world was the bird, and the miners were, and the crystals. Everything people used and used up. “I guess I’m both,” she said. And she felt Cohen accept both the spoken answer and the unspoken one.