I laughed wryly. She was talking appearance. I was talking life. “Of course. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah. If I were given the chance.”
And so the invisible elephant in the room reared its head. We met each other’s eyes, acknowledging it from across the vast expanse of our separate experiences. My existence had usurped her place in the Zodiac, and nothing short of my death would alleviate that.
“The redness will remain for a while,” Chandra finally said, turning away. “For now, we’ll just take away the sting.”
She turned back to the partitioned room with its greenhouse lighting and drip system, a little bit of life sprouting in a concrete underground. I had time to think how nice it was…before my eyes grew wide. Chandra waved her hand over a bald spot among the pink sandstone, and seconds later the stiff rosette of an aloe plant appeared. My mouth dropped open as she pulled a straight-edged knife from her pocket and sliced a spiny leaf. Sensing my awe as she returned, she shot me a satisfied smile as she sheared open the fleshy middle and scooped thick aloe like honey into her palm. “Another lesson on vibrational acuity, though smaller in scope than what the doppelgänger’s been providing. Duplicate it in front of Tekla and you might get extra credit. Vibration is matter, and, after all, matter is all that matters.”
I ignored that for the time being. “But how did you-?”
“Do something we all can do? Well, that the Light can do, anyway. Shadows can’t create life…even their offspring are born half dead. On the other hand, we can’t create man-sized black holes the way the Tulpa did. That skill requires a lack of Light. After all, a black hole is the opposite of light, right? Nothing living can exist in such absolute darkness.” She waved her hand in the air, and behind the glass the succulent again disappeared among the rocks. Show-off. “I may not be a hereditary star sign, but I know how to maximize my gifts.”
She was applying the pure aloe to my chest and arm as she spoke, and when she was done she stepped back and wiped her hands on a nearby towel. I was looking at the rock garden with renewed interest, but if Chandra noted it she said nothing. It made sense, of course. I could create walls out of nothing other than my mind, but for some reason I’d never thought my mental powers extended to living things.
So did they also extend to black holes? The question hung there, unvoiced by both Chandra and me.
“You wear this well,” she finally broke the silence, motioning down the length of my powder-soft body, from the bright blond locks to the French-manicured toenails. “This body. Your sex-kitten image. I fell for it at first.”
“I know. You called me names.” She’d called me a cream puff, a bimbo. A life-sized Barbie.
“You called me names back,” she said flatly.
“Only the ones I knew would piss you off.” I’d long ago learned that every criticism said more about the critic than their subject. She’d attacked my looks, which was how I’d known what her sore spot was, and where to push in return.
“But you’re not what you seem,” she said hurriedly, like she was a cliff diver and might lose her nerve if she thought about it too much. “I know that now. And you’re not…petty.”
That statement confused me, but I shrugged it away, flush with her implied apology. This was acceptance from a quarter I’d never expected. Tension drained so that I actually slumped a bit, but as I opened my mouth to thank her, she shook her head.
“Look, there’s something you need to know.” Chandra hesitated, and I felt the tension return as I suddenly realized I was on the receiving side of a confession. And from her body language, I gathered I wasn’t going to like it any better than she did. “It’s about the animist’s mask, and what you see. You don’t have bad chi, or if you do it’s not like…a head cold.”
A head cold? “What?”
She sighed, her usual self-assurance gone as she cleaned off her instruments without looking at me. “What I mean is, it’s not catching. Kimber lied about seeing her own destruction in the mask. She didn’t see anything. I thought it was a joke when she told me, she said she was just playing a bit…”
I fell stone-still. So that’s what she meant about being petty.
“But you let them all believe…?” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. After all the effort and trouble I had fitting into this place, all the time and energy spent convincing these people they could trust me, that despite my Shadow side I belonged in this troop…
Holding her hands up in front of her, Chandra did look at me now. “I just found out, I swear. I thought about telling Warren, but he didn’t seem too concerned to begin with, so instead I decided you might want to take care of it yourself. I know how you are when someone-”
“-is petty?” I asked bitterly.
She nodded, biting her lip as she looked at her fingers again, at the floor. Anywhere but at me.
“You’re starting to know me well.”
She did look up now that my voice had gone flat. “Just don’t go overboard-”
“Wow, you are starting to know me well.”
She winced. “She was just having some fun…in her way. It wouldn’t have come to anything. The danger to you from the doppelgänger is still real, so I mean, it changes nothing, right?”
She was already regretting telling me, and I put a hand on her arm-comforting, not threatening-so she wouldn’t have to second-guess me, so she knew exactly what was coming. “No, Chandra,” I said, very clearly. “It changes everything.”
Chandra was wrong about something else as well. I could be petty, and had metaphorically tweaked her nose enough times that she knew it. She was hoping I’d take the high road here, but there was a difference between a joke and a malicious rumor, and Kimber had crossed that line without even knowing me. I didn’t know if her assumptions matched Chandra’s original impression of me, if this glossy exterior had her convinced that nothing of import or use lay inside, but she’d clearly decided taking the Kairos down a few notches would be a good way to establish a foothold in the troop. My troop.
One thing I’d learned in my short time as a Zodiac member was that while we were all capable, we were also all proud, and since we had the same essential hierarchy as a pack of wolves, the internal battle for position was as bloody and fierce as our wild counterparts’. When a combatant threw down, the issue wasn’t resolved until one agent had clearly, if figuratively, pinned and submitted the other.
And that’s what I planned to do to Kimber now as I snatched up the animist’s mask from its wall peg in the astrolab, and headed to Saturn’s Orchard, where I knew Kimber spent every morning honing her kata.
She was still warming up when I entered, sitting lotus-style on the mat in the middle of the pyramid-shaped room, using meditation to bring her mind in balance before she engaged her body. Her image was reflected back on itself in the mirrored walls, and I had a moment to consider how serene she looked sitting there, almost like a monk with her hands splayed over her knees. Then the door slammed shut, her eyes winged open to find me, and the peaceful image was ruined.
Her upper lip curled in a sneer and she shut her eyes dismissively, though her countenance held a stiffness it hadn’t before. Her spine straightened, her awareness of me making her self-conscious when what she really needed to be was wary. Ah well, I thought, turning my shoulders. Live and learn.
I unfurled the mask, whipping it like a skipping stone so it clattered across the floor and struck her thigh hard enough to leave a bruise. She yelped, eyes flying open as I began my slow stalk, keeping to the perimeter of the room. To her credit, she stayed where she was even though my heart rate was up and my fury scented the air. I kept my stride even.