He was going to have to defuse Ponch’s idea as quickly as he could. Kit started to get up. Then he paused, for Memeki was saying, “It sounds wonderful—but I can’t leave here.”
Why not? They’re mean to you! Why should you stay?
Some seconds of silence passed. “Because this is my place,” Memeki said. “This is part of realizing that I’m an I. ” There was no more hesitation over the pronoun. “I’m here to do something. I must do it … as soon as I can work out what it is. But you give me a feeling that maybe things are not so terrible, if somewhere the killing doesn’t happen, if somewhere no one listens to every word you say and punishes you for the ones they think are bad. Someone should find a way for that to be the way things are here. Someone should do something!”
But why does it have to be you? Ponch said. He was sounding distressed now. You’re good! What if you do something, and then bad things happen to you? That wouldn’t be fair! In Ponch’s mind, Kit could just catch sensory echoes of things that had lately come to embody this unfairness for Ponch: the flower scent clinging to Kit’s clothes after Nita’s mom’s funeral, the faint cries of pain trapped in young Darryl’s mind during his seemingly endless Ordeal.
“Though it’s not fair, it might be right,” Memeki said. “If no one ever does anything, nothing will ever get better. Sometimes when I was young, I would go outside the City with the other moltlings, and in the forest we would hear the trees crying.” She shivered. “I always thought what the workers did to them was wrong somehow. But the Great One said that the City had to be bigger, so that there could be more warriors to fight the Others, and there was no way for the City to be bigger without the paper that the workers make from the trees. Most Yaldiv didn’t care about the trees one way or another. And though their weeping troubled me, I’d never have dared say what I thought, because the warriors are always looking for anyone who says the wrong word. There’s never enough meat, and they get the first bite of any transgressor.”
Memeki shuddered again, but all the same, a new note started to creep into her voice, a sterner tone. “Yet I grew angry. I said to myself, if ever I could do something to stop the trees’ pain, I will. And later, after the Honor came upon me, I began to wonder: would they dare touch me if I spoke now? For I remembered what I’d said, and I could still hear the weeping in my heart, though a Yaldah who’s been favored by the King can’t leave the City.” Memeki rustled a little, a gesture like a sigh. “I was almost ready to speak. Then I turned around and saw Yaldiv in the tunnel who weren’t Yaldiv, and the world went strange… Now what I said comes back to me. If what the other Voice inside him says is true—” and she glanced over in Ronan’s direction— “if I’m truly one who can do something, if things here can be made different—”
Ponch whined once, way down in his throat. I’m afraid for you. Even when people mean to do good things, bad things happen in the world.
“They’re happening already,” Memeki said. “Pretending they’re not won’t help.”
Memeki began to tremble again. Once again, through Ponch, Kit felt the tremor—and another one, something that felt like it was happening under the floor. Uh-oh! Kit thought. Is this place earthquake-prone?
He started to get up, but the tremor subsided. I still think you should come home with us, Ponch said.
“But this is home,” Memeki said. She still sounded sad, but there was a touch of affection in her voice. “And if it can be made more like yours…”
They went on arguing, if it was actually an argument. That little shake was weird, Kit thought, reaching sideways into the air to retrieve his manual from its otherspace pocket. The last thing we need right now is to find that we’re sitting on some kind of volcanic plug. But if we are, it’s better to know about it.
He opened the manual and paged through it to the marked section that dealt with Rashah’s physical structure and characteristics. Kit flipped through to the page that showed mapping references for their present location, then zoomed in on the massive outcropping of rock that concealed the cavern. The schematic on the page shifted to show a wire-frame diagram of the cavern’s structure. Kit put out a finger and drew it down the schematic: the image obeyed his gesture and the wire frame changed scale to show the structure of the underlying stone. He studied it carefully, and let out a breath. Okay, at least there’s no lava or anything like that moving around down there. I feel better.
“…but why can’t I?” Memeki was saying. “Why wouldn’t it be right to change the way things are? The Great One has been telling everyone what was right for—for forever—and nothing’s any better! Maybe it’s time to try something different! To stand up and decide something different for ourselves, and not wait to be told.”
But you might get it wrong!
“Maybe we will. But that’s no reason not to do anything. Maybe someone else got it wrong, too, did the wrong thing a long time ago. If they did, why shouldn’t we fix it? And whether they did or not, what’s important is to make it right now. No matter what that takes.”
And without waiting for anyone to tell you it’s right, Ponch said, very slowly. Just look to see what went wrong, what needs fixing, and then fix it? All by yourself?
There was a very long pause. “I think so.”
A shiver, a jingle of dog-license tags. It sounds scary.
Kit looked over the underground schematic for a moment more before getting ready to put it away. Interesting, he thought, seeing that there appeared to be several minor interconnecting caverns underneath the large one. The stone’s structure seemed a lot more intricate than he’d thought from Ronan’s description—
He felt another tremor, stronger this time. Okay, just what is that? Kit thought, glancing down one last time at the schematic. And then he was shocked to see that one of those smaller caverns somehow looked longer than it had a moment ago.
He went cold with fear. I should have looked at this before! Kit thought, scrambling to his feet as he stared at the manual. I knew I should have! “Life signs, quick!” he said to the manual.
The display shifted focus, and various colored sparks of light appeared in it, some of them haloed to show that they were in a “mitigating” field, which meant one or another of the pup tents. Three Earth-humans, one Earth dog, one Wellakhit humanoid, one Yaldiv female—Kit blinked at the fog of life signs associated with Memeki. But of far more concern were the eight, nine, ten other life signs down there in one of those narrow caverns, and getting closer—
Kit plunged out of his pup tent, shouting, “Incoming!” He also really wanted to shout, “Ronan, how the heck did you miss this!”—but it would have been a waste of time. He felt another rumble underfoot as the others burst out of their own pup tents, as Ponch and Memeki looked up in alarm.
“What is it?”
“What’s going on?”
“They’re digging up from underneath!” Kit said. “It’s solid rock underneath there; how are they able to do that?”
Ronan looked completely stricken, but for the moment all he did was point the Spear of Light at the spot on the floor where, slowly, with a noise like a series of muffled gunshots, a thin crack had begun stitching its way across the cavern floor, and the stone to either side of it was humping up in fragmenting slabs.