Ashes and Rain: Sequel to Khe (The Ahsenthe Cycle Book 2) (17 page)

Pradat walked back to Justice House with me. “Show me your wrist,” she said.

I pulled my cloak tighter around me. “It’s still drizzling.”

She took hold of my elbow through the fabric and stopped, forcing me to stop with her. “Show me your wrist.”

I pulled free of her grip. “I checked this morning. All my age spots are still there, all as dark as ever.”

“Jonton will want me to accelerate the treatments,” Pradat said. “She’s not the patient sort.”

“Then that’s two of us,” I said, walking again. “Commemoration is in five days. Very little time left for anyone to be patient.”

Pradat tsked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “I knew you’d feel that way. Knew you’d clap your palm against your thigh when Jonton presented her plan to you. But you have to know that rushing the treatments could have unintended consequences. We could save your life, but leave you a babbler. Or leave your body so weakened that you’d spend your last years moving between your cot and a floating chair.”

I stopped again and turned to her. I pitched my voice so only Pradat could hear. I needed to tell someone. “I used to dream all the time. After what the lumani did to me, I didn’t dream at all until recently. Now, in my brief sleeps, I have the same dream, night after night. I dream the planet shivers and shakes more mightily than anything we’ve yet felt. I dream the shiver opens a great mouth in the world, and the mouth swallows me down and then spits me out. After, I’m not Khe any more. I’m something else. Something horrible.”

Pradat reached out to touch my neck, but I put my hand up to stop her. I didn’t want comforting now. I wanted anger and determination pounding in me. I wanted surety.

“Jonton will starve us all to get what she wants,” I said, “and she will always want more. We have to stop the weather machine, and her. Whatever it takes.” I started walking again. “Maybe then I can take what little sleep I need in peace.”

Larta drummed her fingers against her thighs — one hand going fast: onetwothreefour, the other moving in counterpoint. One … one … one. My back was to her in the room set up for my treatments. I couldn’t see what she was doing, but heard it, the soft pad of skin on the fabric of her hipwrap.

Pradat shifted one of her machines so its light hit the spot where my spine and skull met. The heat, and the drugs dripping into my arms, made my stomach hurt. I closed my eyes and visualized the sky at first-light, how the colors rose up in the dark to announce the new day. Pain and the nagging pinprick feeling over my body that the treatments brought — worth it all if it bought me more new days. Bought me time to start to rebuild what I’d destroyed.

Jonton was in the room, too. I heard her shuffle a few steps to look at the readouts from Pradat’s machines. Jonton didn’t like what she saw. I heard it in the way she spit out her breath. I opened my eyes and looked from Pradat to Jonton and back again, but they were too well trained and their necks showed me nothing. The treatment went on.

Once Pradat had unhooked me from her devices, Jonton motioned with her head for us to come with her. I followed her out of the room, down a long hall, to a doorway. Larta came third, favoring her damaged leg. I couldn’t see her, but I heard her — the uneven breath of someone unhappy with the situation. She followed behind me so Jonton couldn’t see her throat. Not that Larta had feelings in need of hiding — Jonton knew Larta didn’t trust her. Why else would she have insisted on sitting in on the treatment?

This was another thing that had come with the destruction of the lumani — sisters questioned each other’s motives and actions now. It had been simpler, easier, when we’d all performed our duties without question. When our leaders and
The
Rules
of
a
Good
Life
made it easy to know and do what was expected. Even when Simanca used
The
Rules
to her own advantage, there was at least security. Now there were no rules, and nothing to guide us in this new land.

Jonton opened the door and started down the stairs behind it. I knew where we were now, though we’d come a different route to this place last time. I knew, too, that something of what I’d said to Jonton last night had struck a note in her.

The door to the weather machine room irised open with the barest sound. Larta and I followed her inside.

The machine looked as I remembered it — a huge cube, the color of shadows in the white-on-white room. Its silver dials and levers were placed at just the right height for the average doumana. The long clearstone tube that measured how much rain had fallen was filled to the one-third mark. One-third of what, I wondered? What would full mean?

I hadn’t noticed last time, but the machine gave off a faint hum, low-pitched, wavering up and down a few tones, almost like a greeting. Why not a greeting? Wood and stones had consciousness — why not metal? The machine could be happy to have company.

I walked to it and set the palm of one hand against its cool, metallic side. An electric buzz shot across my skin. I jerked my hand back and stared at my palm, expecting to see a burn. Nothing. I touched my palm with the fingers of my other hand. It wasn’t even warm.

Jonton’s eyebrow ridges drew together. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

She touched the same spot I had, fingertips first, and then with her whole flat hand. Jonton looked at me, and I stared back, my face blank.

The orindle brushed her hand against her green hipwrap, seemingly brushing off her concern for me as well. “Shall we begin your first lesson?”

“I’d like the history first,” I said, “how the machine came to be here. You said before that the lumani asked for it to be built after the… problem with the weather-prophets. But I don’t understand why.”

“Can you not guess?” Jonton said. “Think about it.”

I had guesses, but shook my head. I wanted to hear Jonton’s version.

“To make our world perfect. Think back, Khe. When is the last time you remember too much or too little rain to grow the crops at Lunge commune? The last time hail destroyed tender stalks? The last time planting was delayed because the sun came late and the soil wasn’t warm enough?”

In my lifetime we’d taken for granted planting on a certain date, harvesting a given number of days later. There were stories, though, at Lunge, about bad years, crop fail years. That was back when every commune had their own weather-prophet, before the lumani centralized the prophets in Chimbalay — before my lifetime, before Simanca’s.

Jonton had shifted her gaze to Larta, enjoying her audience, I thought. “When was the last time Chimbalay’s streets were drowned in water? Before now, I mean? When was Growing Season ever too hot, or Harvest Season ever anything but pleasantly cool?”

“Never that I remember,” Larta said. “But it gets plenty cold every Barren Season.”

“For a reason,” Jonton said. “There are certain valuable crops that need extreme cold for their roots to form. There are beneficial organisms that only reproduce when the temperature drops below a threshold. The crystals that convert the planet’s magnetic field into the electrical power we use to heat and cool, and cook, and run our vehicles only grow if a certain low temperature lasts long enough.”

“All from this machine?” I asked.

Jonton stroked the machine’s side. “With the weather-prophets we had warning. The lumani could adjust what crops needed to be grown — could hope the necessary organisms would thrive, that the crystals would set properly. With the machine we could guarantee that all conditions would be perfect.”

We
, she’d said. Not the lumani. Did she consider herself one with them?

“How does the machine work?” I asked.

Jonton drew herself up very straight. “How it works isn’t important, only that it does and we can make it do what we want.”

I saw that it bothered her, not knowing — because she was an orindle and her life was devoted to the how and why of things. I understood the frustration, and almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

I waved my hand toward the third-full water tube. “What do you do with the water? Does it go to the cisterns?”

“Not the cisterns.” Jonton seemed relaxed now that she had been asked a question she could answer. “When we set new parameters, the stored water is pumped into the ground to start everything working.”

Something I’d noticed before came back to me — that every time the world shook, it was preceded or followed by heavy rain. Maybe pumping water below ground caused the shivers. Because the planet didn’t like it? I remembered the sounds I’d heard, like distant sobs, just before a shaking. The sobs — not knowing where they came from, not knowing how to help — felt like a wound to my heart.

“How do you make the machine give you the weather you want?”

“You want me to show you,” she said, a statement, not a question.

I shrugged. “I’m curious. And I think it’s to your advantage for me to know.”

“I disagree,” she said. “You need only know what I can do, not how I do it.”

“Teach me,” I said, taking a step toward her, “because I’m like you — I crave knowledge. Teach me because if you’re right and I am becoming something new, then knowing how to work the machine might give me a way to make it work even better. What a gift that would be for you to give your sisters throughout the world — an even better way to control the weather.”

I didn’t know which of my words moved her, if any. I could have fallen in line with plans she’d already made.

Moments passed, little chips of time that were gone forever.

“Is your memory good, Khe? Controlling the machine isn’t simple. You’ll have to pay close attention and no doubt we will have to go over this many times.” She drew in a breath and huffed it out. “This will be an interesting test. If I am right and your intellect was improved by the powers, you will learn quickly. This will be our first experiment together.”

Larta started toward us, likely wanting to see what Jonton was about to show me. Jonton jerked her head to look over her shoulder at Larta. The orindle had let her guard down in those moments that her emotion spots lit, but her training was back in command now.

Her voice was bland as she said, “Larta, would you mind fetching my lead helphand? Her name is Zavren. I’m not sure where she is. You’ll have to search for her.”

Larta ran her hand over her scalp. It was as obvious to her as to me that Jonton wanted Larta gone while she showed me how to work the machine. It was just as obvious Larta didn’t want to leave, but what choice did she have? To refuse without a good reason was unthinkable. It went against every rule of courtesy we’d been raised with — kler or commune. Larta hesitated, then turned and left the room. I heard her footsteps slap against the stairs as she climbed.

Jonton smiled. “Now listen closely, watch what I do, and learn.”

It was hard for Larta to hear me in the strong rain, with our hoods pulled up, as we plowed along the nearly deserted streets of Chimbalay. We could have gone back to Justice House, but Larta didn’t trust that we’d have privacy there. Not that her guardians would talk, but Jonton seemed to know everything that was said in any structure in Chimbalay, though no one knew how.

“Did you learn how to work the machine?” she asked.

“It’s not as hard as Jonton pretends, but it does take precision. But we can’t destroy the machine.”

“Nothing is perfect,” Larta said. “There’s a way. We just have to find it.”

I wished it were that easy.

“We can’t destroy it because we need it. Without it, we’d go back to uncertainty. Hunger in years without enough or too much water. No crystals for heat and power if the Barren Season is too mild.”

Larta huffed. “We managed to survive all those generations before the machine. We can do it again.”

I turned my face into the rain and let the drops sluice down my skin. “We could, but I can’t do it. I destroyed the lumani and threw Chimbalay and our world into disorder. Now Jonton and the orindles want to rule over us. I can’t bear to be the cause of more suffering, to do to all doumanas what I’ve done to Chimbalay.”

“You didn’t destroy the lumani alone, Khe.”

That was true. But I seemed to be the only one who felt responsible for what Larta, Azlii, Pradat, and I had done, and its aftermath.

We walked without talking, the rain splattering against the stone streets. The first group of doumanas we’d seen since leaving the research center hurried along on the other side of the road, their heads down, hoods pulled up.

“Do you have another idea?” Larta asked. “Or are we to let the orindles take over?”

“I have an idea, but it’ll take you and Azlii to make it work. We need the council — more than ever now. Do the orindles still control Presentation House?”

Larta’s lips drew into a line before she spoke. “They’re still there. My Second has a close sister at Presentation House. She told me today that the orindles now let the technicians run whatever old programs they want, but stop them from sending out anything new unless Jonton orders it.”

She seemed to think something over. “My Second says that since the day we found Jonton at Presentation House the technicians rarely leave, and no one is allowed in unless they have approved business there. Approved by the orindles. The only way would be if we rushed in there as a force and took over.”

The falling water stopped suddenly, as though a timer had clicked off. I wondered if Jonton had that much control over the weather that she could make rain start and stop exactly at her whim. I pushed the hood of my cloak back. Rushing Presentation House might work, but I had a different target for the guardians in mind.

We walked in silence a few minutes, coming to a break in the street, a choice to keep on the way we’d been going, take a different route, or turn back and return to the research center. I dropped back a pace, to let Larta take the lead, but she stopped and turned to me.

“Jonton isn’t going to quietly step aside.”

“No, she won’t. By the time the representatives get here, we’ll need to have Jonton contained.”

She hiked up her eyebrow ridges. “Contained?”

“I’ve thought about this. Jonton’s become a babbler. No sane doumana would risk starving her sisters to gain power. Kelroosh found hatchlings left at a mating site. Just left there. Either the doumanas who should have gone for them forgot, or someone told them not to bother. Either way, things are terribly wrong in Chimbalay.”