She licked her lips and slowly, slowly focused on his face. “Yes. I am.” She shook her shoulders and dropped the stone onto the fabric on the sofa. It made a sharp click as it hit the others. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you … I …” She started wrapping the cloth around her spheres.
“You were meditating?” Perivar suggested uncertainly. Even from where he stood, he could see her hands shaking, and she moved with deliberate overcaution, as if she were exhausted, or drunk.
“I don’t understand that word,” she said. “I was … thinking. Putting all the things I have seen into place.” She fumbled with the cloth and, after several tries, managed to knot the ends together. Her eyes, he noticed, had returned to normal, but the expectant trust she had shown before was buried.
“If I interrupted something personal, I’m sorry,” said Perivar. “Eric never told me much about the religious customs in the Realm.”
“It’s all right.” Arla leaned her arm against the sofa’s back and stared out the window. “I should have waited until I was more settled.” She laid one hand on the windowpane and fixed her gaze on the street. Her discarded headcloth still lay on the couch, and an untidy braid of black hair hung down between slumped shoulders.
Perivar looked past her to the scene outside. There wasn’t much to see. Because it was a terraformed world, most of Kethran’s cities were the result of meticulous planning. The process made for the efficient use of space but did not necessarily produce splendid views. The stone and polymer walls of the warehouses blocked out the horizon in one direction and the park in the other. To Perivar, the view looked more like a canyon than a street. Which was, he realized, why Arla was staring at it so hungrily.
“Just got an answer for you,” he said. “Let me know if I say something you don’t understand …”
“Just tell me,” she said wearily. “I will understand.” She added something under her breath that he didn’t catch.
Perivar felt his eyebrows arch, but he said, “All right.”
He told her about Iyal’s offer. She let him keep talking until he was done and not once did she take her gaze from his face.
“What do you think?” Perivar asked finally.
“I think”—Arla toyed with the end of her headcloth—“that my decision to go over the World’s Wall was beyond reckless. It was, in fact, stupid.”
“I can arrange for you to go home easily enough.” With one twenty-word call to the labor authorities, in fact.
Arla wound the black cloth between her scarred fingers. “If I return now, I, at the very least, am dead. I should not have left, I should have found some way …” She looked at the backs of her hands. “But this is less than useless. Do we leave for this ‘Amaiar Gardens’ place now?”
“Only if you want to go.”
She gave him a crooked, half smile. “I want the skills it will buy me. If I have to surrender a few drops of blood every so often for that, then”—she shrugged—“it will be worth it. Tell me, though, are you Skymen all so interested in each others’ blood?”
Perivar began to wonder what she was hearing through the translator. “Not usually,” he admitted. “Listen, Sar Stone, I want you to be clear on one thing. Once you leave here, you leave here. I don’t ever want to have to hear your name again, all right?”
For a moment, he thought she was going to ask him why, but she didn’t. She said, “I don’t care to risk anyone’s skin but my own.”
“Glad to hear it,” Perivar said. “We should go now.” He stood aside to let her pass.
It’s a decent beginning, he told himself. The beginning of an end, Kiv. And this time, I’ll make it stick. Perivar laid two fingers over his heart and watched Arla’s straight back as she walked unafraid through his door. I swear it.
Kelat was not the first to exit the shuttle, or even the twenty-first. He did not care. The hard-packed dirt that pressed unevenly against the soles of his boots belonged to the Home
Ground. The ruins that stood out knife-edged in the sunlight, despite the filters on his faceplate, had been inhabited by the Ancestors. And if they were broken and sagging, and pitted by thirty centuries of dust and radiation, they still waited for the descendants of their makers. Those descendants who now walked under a black sky and tried to come to grips with the fact that they were home.
The thin wind he couldn’t even feel through his suit blew more dust onto the drifts that piled up against what used to be a building’s wall. The cement had been sheered off at about the level of Kelat’s waist, leaving behind a rectangle that must have been half a kilometer on a side. Inside it, rubble lay in heaps, broken by burn craters, which in turn were being filled with yet more dust. Here and there clusters of girders, blackened by time, pushed their jagged fingers out of the dust, as if to see the outlandishly colored forms of the First Company as the Vitae spread out between them at a steadily increasing pace, like children left alone in a new park.