"Connection," she whispered.
Ben breathed beside her and she felt it as her own breath. They were one person, pulses synchronized with rainbows, waves and the great heartbeat of the void. She knew the choices in his mind and marveled at the sacrifice he was prepared to make. She saw the play in his mind: spin her by the hand, get between her and Nevi, take the hit while the netmen brought him down. At the moment he elected to move, she touched his shoulder.
"No," she said, "it's not necessary. Can you feel it?"
"I feel those sights on my chest," he said. "He's the only thing standing between us and -"
"Destiny?" she asked. "There is nothing between us and destiny."
The image of Rico stood behind Nevi, gesturing wildly to her, still smiling.
Nevi came out of his crouch, moved carefully across the rain-wet rocks toward them. She liked the smell of the rain, a different wetness than the smell of the sea, easier on the lungs but not as rich. The scent of the sea, of the dead hylighter, lay heavily beside her like a sleeping lover.
"Do you see?" she asked Ben, and smiled.
"I think I do," he said.
Nevi barked a few orders and two of the surviving netmen slowly began to disentangle Zentz. Crista Galli had that feeling again, the feeling of being a subject in a painting.
"Be still," she whispered.
Ben didn't move.
Nevi stopped walking, a look of surprise washed over his face.
"Where are they?" he shouted, and he shaded his eyes even though the sun was to his back. "Where did they go?"
Crista suppressed a giggle, and the figure of Rico applauded silently from behind Spider Nevi.
"I don't understand," Ben said. "Are we invisible?"
"We're not invisible," she said, "we're simply not visible. He can't pick us out of this landscape. I think it's a trick that Rico has taught the kelp."
Ben squeezed her hand and started to speak, but that was when the shooting started.
***
I will this morning climb up in spirit to the high places, bearing with me the hopes and the miseries of my mother; and ther... upon all that in the world of human flesh is now about to be born or to die beneath the rising sun I will call down the Fire.
Twisp walked Kaleb to the flickering lights at the Oracle's edge. This was a small cavern, a subset of the great root that Flattery had burned out a few thousand meters downcoast. This was a hushed place, a place to breathe iodine on the salt air and feel the cool pulse of the sea.
Kaleb trod the well-worn path with his father's bearing - tall, shoulders back, large eyes alert to every nuance of light and motion. While his parents lived no one had consulted the Oracle as often as he. In the dim light by the poolside Twisp saw that Kaleb's adolescent gangliness had transmuted into the epitome of athletic grace.
"You are the man your father would most like to know," Twisp said.
"And you are the man my father most liked."
The two of them stood together at the poolside, watching the flickerings of kelp just beneath the surface. Both men kept their voices low, though the kelp chamber carried every whisper to its farthest crannies. Behind them, at a discreet distance, stood the complement of Zavatans who tended the pool. They busied themselves cleaning and reassembling one of the great borers that helped them tunnel out their habitations in the rock.
"When your parents met they were younger than you are now," Twisp said. "Is there someone in your life?"
The perceptible blush that rose from Kaleb's collar reminded Twisp even more of the young man's father. Kaleb's skin was darker, like his mother's, but his naturally kinked, reddish hair was a gift from Brett Norton. "Yes? So there is someone?"
"Victoria is a big place," he said, "I've seen a lot of women." His voice bordered on sullen, bitter.
"'A lot,'" Twisp mused, "and which one broke your heart?"
Kaleb snorted, half-turned away, then turned back to face Twisp. He was smiling.
"Elder," he said, "you are truly a force to be reckoned with. Am I that transparent?"
Twisp shrugged.
"It is a recognizable affliction," he said. "I endured it myself one day. Thirty years, and I still daydream."
He didn't go on. It was more important that Kaleb do some talking.
Kaleb sat at the poolside, dangling his feet in the water, caressing the kelp with his bare soles.
"When I travel the kelpway, and take my father's branch, I see you as he saw you himself. You were good to him - firm, kind, you let him talk too much." Kaleb laughed. "He was a good man, I know. And you, you were a good man, too." He bowed his head and shook it slowly. "I would like to be a good man, but I think I'm different. My life is different."
Then he lowered himself into the pool and lay on his back on the kelp as though reclining on a great couch. His head and chest rested above water. Even in the colorful blue and red flickerings of the kelp-lights about the cavern Twisp could see a new life come into Kaleb's large eyes.
"How are you different, Kaleb?" he asked. "You breathe, you eat, you blee..."
"You know why we're here," Kaleb interrupted. His voice was firm now, none of the hesitation of youth deferring to age.
"How many people died out there today because they wanted to tear Flattery apart but settled for tearing anything apart?"
Twisp remained silent, and Kaleb went on.
"I'll be truthful, I respect you, I want your respect for myself, I want your approval that what I'm doing is right. If this doesn't work, we will probably have to attack him, you know."
His voice was becoming dreamy, and Twisp knew that the kelp was gathering him in, guiding him down the eddies of the past. Twisp steered him past thoughts of failure, past the matter that gave him the sense of failure.
"There is a woman who won't let you sleep," Twisp said. "Tell me about her."
"Yes," Kaleb said, closing his gray eyes.
Kaleb's eyes, like his father's, emanated a maturity beyond his years.
"Yes, she's here. She had two wots before we met. Qita, she knew the kelp as you and I have known it. As an ally. She had other lovers, but I was her last. As she will be the last for me."
This wrenched out of him with such an agonized moan that Twisp's hair raised up on his neck. Kaleb splashed the pool with both fists, but stayed immersed in the kelp, quieting with the caress of the waves.
"Elder," Mose whispered, tugging at Twisp's sleeve, "did you see his eyes?"
Twisp nodded, and before he could respond the kelp's display of flickering lights took on an intensity he'd never seen before. It was like one of the winter magnetic disturbances in the night sky, with great leaping rainbows of color that seemed to transcend water, rock and air. Mose stepped back from the pool in fear, but Twisp reached a hand to stop him.
"Old friends," Twisp whispered. "They are glad to see each other."
Perhaps Kaleb's bloodlines led to this moment. His mother, Scudi Wang, and her mother before her had been the first two to communicate with the waking being that humans called "kelp" and the kelp called "Avata."
When Twisp met Scudi Wang she was a dark young woman passionately working in her mother's wake to reestablish the kelp worldwide. In her own words, she "mathematicked the waves," and in doing so made Current Control possible, a system that saved thousands of Islander lives and revolutionized travel in Pandora's seas.
Scudi Wang was beloved by the kelp - this Twisp had heard from the kelp itself long before Kaleb was born. When Flattery attacked the kelp, lobotomized it, Scudi ordered her inheritance, Merman Mercantile, to stop trading with him. She and Kaleb's father were assassinated three days later.