Spinning Starlight (35 page)

“You want to know if there’s been any news here about them, about the conduits.”

“There has indeed,” Dom says. “Would you like a summary or to watch them yourself?”

One finger for the first choice. Tiav seems startled as he realizes Dom is watching us through the in-house cams.

“Over the past nine days, each of the Seven Points has reported dozens of minor tectonic tremors. Damage has been minimal thus far, except to conduit terminals, which use highly sensitive
equipment. Conduit travel is thus restricted to emergencies, but technologists at JTI are currently working on a fix. The coinciding timing of the tremors on all seven planets is also being
investigated.”

They’re saying the earthquakes damaged the conduits when really the conduits caused the earthquakes. Minali has to know that, but it’s possible everyone else is buying the story.
She’ll complete the process of locking my brothers in, and if it works to stabilize the conduits, she’ll be praised as the hero who kept the Seven Points connected.

If it doesn’t, we’ll be buried under too much rubble to point fingers.

I don’t care what her simulations said. That eighteen percent chance of failure sounds more like a certainty to me. Her simulations didn’t account for the Khua, for
life
.
She’s working off of incomplete data.

“So, what do we do?” Tiav asks. “Do we tell these JTI people what’s happening, how to stop that woman who attacked you and your brothers?”

My expression in response is withering.

“She’s
with
JTI? Like, someone they all know?”

I hold my hand high above my head.

“The boss?”

Technically, that would be me, but close enough.

“Would she stop if she knew what she’s doing to the Khua and Ferinne?”

The question lodges in my head directly between yes and no. I’m not sure. She didn’t hesitate to put my brothers’ lives on the line and handcuff me, all in her obsessive
certainty that she’s saving civilization. But I’ve known her for years. She’s always been a little too driven by calculations and the bottom line, but I never thought she’d
take a cutthroat instinct so far. Maybe she can still be reasoned with.

Then I remember one important fact. I’m contemplating reasoning with a murderer. She killed Garrin. Why would she care about a planet we’ve forgotten, or a race our people never
believed was alive at all?

I shake my head. It’s like Quain said. Talking to her would only tip her off to any plans we might have. Not that we have any plans yet.

“What, then? Do we destroy the conduits?”

I drop onto a couch, my head in my hands. Getting rid of the conduits makes sense—they’re what’s causing all this trouble—but my brothers are stuck in there. And even if
we find a way to get them out first, the Seven Points would become completely isolated from each other. Minali is right that losing the conduits would be catastrophic. Our society for hundreds of
years has depended on movement between the worlds. Without the others, each Point is unbalanced in what it can provide. How can I destroy the lives of billions of people?

Spin-Still pulses against my chest. No matter what the Agnac think, the Khua don’t mind carrying people between worlds as long as they’re asked, not forced. Like Tiav said,
interacting with biological beings allows them to grow. They restrained themselves from fully manifesting in the Seven Points at the request of the Aelo, but if I ask, they’ll return. We can
extend use of the sempu and work together.

If Tiav and I can find a way to save them first. I look up at him and give an uncertain nod.

He sits next to me, runs a hand across my back. “Okay. We’ll find a way to do that. If there’s one thing you’ve shown Ferinne lately, it’s that you know how to
sneak around and sabotage things if you want to.”

I clamp a hand over my mouth to keep a humorless laugh from escaping. Maybe it’s a sob. He has no idea, but he might as well find out now. I pull up several old media-casts in rapid
succession.

“Liddi Jantzen, seen here at Syncopy last night—”

“Top fashion designer Igara confirmed that his new shoe line will be worn by Liddi Jantzen at—”

“No word yet on whether the Jantzen girl will debut anything at this year’s Tech Reveal.”

“With the deaths of Nevi and Savina Jantzen, control of Jantzen Technology Innovations passes not to one of their sons, but to six-year-old Liddi—or it will when she’s old
enough to—”

Tiav watches the screen, expressionless, so I scan the feeds for something current.

“There’s still been no sign of Liddi Jantzen on any of the Seven Points. We all remember that strange morning she wandered barefoot into the borders of Pinnacle, but she
hasn’t been seen since a few days after that incident. JTI officials have refused to comment, and the Jantzen boys likewise cannot be reached, leaving one question. Where are the
Jantzens?”

I turn it off, and Tiav takes a deep breath, processing it.

“Okay, I guess sneaking around won’t be that easy after all. But we’ll figure out something.”

We will. I need to think. But it’s hard to think when I feel dirty and smelly. I hold up a tangled lock of hair and roll my eyes at Tiav, which makes him laugh. After steering him to the
guest room, I go upstairs to get cleaned up.

Liddi Jantzen died of happiness upon returning to her own bathroom after a long time away.

Once the dust and grime is gone and I’m wearing my own clothes, I’m ready to go back down and get to work. Except something catches my eye. I keep images of the family on screens
throughout the room. An image of Durant and me on Yishu is next to my bed. We went to a concert on that trip.

The stringed instruments captured my attention at the time. Each string vibrating, held down on the ends. Then the musicians would press their fingers somewhere, pinning the string so it held
still in that spot and vibrated to one side. The music harmonized when the vibrations were at related frequencies.

Related frequencies…

I run down the stairs two at a time. I know what to do. At least, where to start.

The space between the back of the sofa and the wall was tiny enough that only Liddi could fit there. Only if she turned herself sideways and squeezed in at just the right
angle. It was the one hiding spot of hers the boys didn’t know about, so when all the strange people arrived to offer their condolences, she was nowhere to be found. Each of her brothers
assumed one of the others knew where she was, and there were too many people, too much going on to realize she was missing. Too much noise to hear her crying.

That was true at first, anyway. Then the crowd thinned out, and Durant spoke from somewhere nearby.

“Fabin, I
still
haven’t seen Liddi. Where is she?”

“I don’t know. With the Triad, maybe?”

“She’s not with us.” That was Marek.

“We haven’t seen her, either,” Luko said.

Durant’s voice took a hard edge, and Liddi could picture the face that went with it. “Find her.”

He sounded like their father. That made her cry harder.

“What? Where’s that coming from? Liddi?”

Moments later, hands reached into the small space and pulled her out. Part of her wanted to scream and squirm, but she didn’t, and once Durant had her out, he held her tight. He
didn’t say anything until they were in Liddi’s room, with no more strangers looking at them. Then he sat on her bed with his sister on his lap.

“Why did you hide, Liddi-Loo?” he asked. “You scared us.”

“I—I don’t know.” She hiccuped. “Because I’m sad.”

“We’re all sad. You don’t have to hide it.”

“But when I’m sad, Mommy makes me happy again. Mommy’s gone, and so is Daddy, and I’m alone.”

Liddi’s oldest brother hugged her tighter than before. “There are eight of us, Liddi. You’ll never
ever
have to be alone.”

WORKING WITH MY OWN COMPUTER,
even without my voice, is such a release. All the familiar icons and subroutines, and Dom is still set to fill in the
blanks where he can. Time to draw. I point to the existing picture for Tiav.

“Right, blue are the Khua, the red are those false Khua—conduits.”

He’s got it, so I minimize that drawing. For this to make sense, I’ll have to simplify. Just two planets, connected by both a Khua and a conduit. After some fiddling, I get the
computer to animate the red and blue lines vibrating at the same rate, exactly aligned like a single plucked string on Yishu’s instruments. Each planet holds the ends of the
“strings” like children holding skip ropes.

“You want to get both on the same frequency. Why? They’re already getting too close. That’s the whole problem, right?”

I move that drawing aside temporarily and try another, eight people standing on a red line, arrows drawn from there to a blue line, and finally arrows drawn out from the blue to a house with a
tree.

“If we get the two synced, you think your brothers can cross over fully to the Khua and come out like we do?”

Yes, that’s exactly what I think.

“But there’s no way to do that. Khua are filtered to one ‘ frequency’ using sempu, but only in one place, or on one ‘ end.’ The filtered part makes sort of a
bubble around us when we go in. The rest of that Khua’s being stays unfiltered on all the other Points, plus at their secondary connections to other planets like Agnac. Your conduits
don’t seem to work that way. And besides, the only sempu we have right now is holding Spin-Still.”

He thinks it won’t work, but at least he understands. I go back to the animated drawing and slide the anchor points off each planet, moving them along the “strings” toward the
center until they’re practically on top of each other. The tiny lengths in between still vibrate as one.

The four loose ends swing randomly, chaotically.

“Bringing everything together into one ‘ bubble’ somehow?”

I nod. Something like that.

Tiav just stares at the picture for a long time. “Liddi,” he finally says. “Is this something Spin-Still is telling you to do?”

Good question. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s mine and what’s the speaking-through-instinct from her. As I wonder, though, the answer comes through clearly enough. No, this
is my idea, because I see the Khua from the outside, as they can’t see themselves. I shake my head.

He gestures to the diagram. “Even if I knew how to focus a Khua that way, and even if I knew how to force your people’s conduits to align with it, I don’t know what would
happen. I don’t know what these ‘ loose ends’ would do. The Khua embody powerful forces. The destruction could be severe, and I don’t mean the minor tremors they’ve
been talking about. The stress could tear into the planetary cores.”

Part of me doesn’t want to care. Part of me says I’d destroy half of every planet I’ve ever set foot on if it would save my brothers. More of me knows I can’t be that
irresponsible. More of me
does
care. But freeing my brothers dovetails with undoing the damage Minali has already done to the Khua. There has to be a way.