His mind seemed to slip gears again, and then abruptly catch. He had known about the meteorite. He knew that this part of the planet was geologically inactive. Putting the sensor out this morning had made perfect sense to him because the meteorite hit would send a tremor through the ground.
How could he know all of that and yet not reliably know it? Feeling confused and angry, at himself as well as TARC, he turned away to start back down.
Tai stopped him. “Drink more of your water. You need it.”
Hydration seeped into his cells as he walked downhill. He soon felt more clearheaded. But when they left Site A through the big square gate, he suddenly felt cold dread. The sky looked too long. The river plain looked too exposed. He compulsively looked toward the sea. He thought he could see the thread in the sky above E-prime. Thread in the sky is threat in the sky. It was irrational fear. Besides, the Disunionists wouldn’t bother this one in any event.
He hadn’t realized he’d said that aloud until Tai said, “Gaudy right. Taking down the transit tower over Strata was all they needed to make their point.”
She was right.
Haze started shaking, his heart pounding in his chest.
5 Rusty
The Site B expedition came back in the late afternoon as the sun flooded the Rift with golden light. Mercury was glad to see them. They all seemed tiredly languid—until they heard about the door. The Lees rushed into Site A, followed by Tai and Hopper.
Haze just leaned against the compound’s outer wall, looking exhausted and shaky.
Mercury asked him, “How’s your shoulder?”
“Hurts.”
She had the impression that more than that might be wrong, but he seemed unwilling to say more. “Go wash up before supper.” She gently pushed him toward the refresher unit at the end of the station.
Mercury expected Tai to spend the rest of the day if not the night in the Site with the exciting new door. To Mercury’s surprise, Tai came back out. “Where’s Haze?”
“Washing up.”
“Are you seriously attracted to him?”
Tai could be a raconteur, but in an urgent situation, she asked questions as focused as a laser beam. It was smart to answer in kind. “Yes.”
“I’d like you to keep him company tonight.”
Mercury blinked. “And keep him away from the door and what else we might find?”
“Yes, but in addition, he’s having flashbacks to the Fall on Strata. I don’t want to have to airlift him out having a psychiatric emergency if you can prevent it.”
“But he slept through the Fall!”
“The aftermath was bad enough. After thousands died, a hundred thousand still lived in a hellscape. The common treatment for their trauma was drug-induced amnesia. Unfortunately it can turn brittle,” Tai said grimly.
Oh no, Mercury thought. What she knew about trauma that came back to haunt someone was not encouraging. So was the likelihood that it would intrude on getting to know Haze better, in the very limited time he would be here. Damn!
A few minutes later when she looked at Haze, with pain carving lines on his face, Mercury ached for him. During supper, Haze was very quiet, which went unnoticed in the excitement about the opened door. After supper, he went to bed early. Mercury asked Silk for numb-spray from their medical supplies. Mercury took a small flashlight and stole to Haze’s tent. “Haze?”
He was still wide awake. He immediately let down the flap.
“Let me see your hurt shoulder.”
“It’s OK.” Belying his words, he was gripping his shoulder.
“I’m sorry about it.” Remorse bubbled up inside her. It was like this every time her accidental psychic alchemy hurt or upset anyone at all. It was even worse when she cared about them. “It was my fault.”
“But accidental.”
“Accidents still hurt.”
He winced.
She opened his shirt and pulled the fabric off his shoulder. In the light of her flashlight, the bruise looked dark and painful. She applied the numb-spray.
It worked instantly. Some of the pained tension ebbed out of him. “Thank you for bringing that.”
“I’d like to stay, if you’d like that.”
His eyes widened. He took her into his tent and into his arms. He held her with an urgency that she would have mistaken for purely sexual, if Tai hadn’t warned her about his state of mind. “There’s so much I’d like to know about you,” he said.
Yes, men liked to know what they were getting into with her—if not before something unusual happened, then very soon after. She, however, had an ingrained resistance to telling much of the truth about herself and her people. “Would you like to ask me a question?” Please not a whole battery of them!
“Are you named for Mercury the mythical god, or Mercury the metal?”
The question surprised her. “The metal. We have our own god. We call him Skance.”
“A god, not the God?”
“A lesser, trickier god, but ours alone. We’re different from everyone else.”
“The Pastfinders seem like the different ones to me. All of you are so different from each other.”
She could understand why he saw it that way, but she knew better. Skance’s children were the true aliens wherever they went, even among Pastfinders. She steeled herself for more questions to affirm, deny or evade. But he seemed exhausted—as well he might be if all day he’d been fighting memories of a devastated city.
“Feels good not to hurt. Feels good to touch you,” he murmured sleepily.
She kissed the side of his face. His breath slowed. Her flashlight came on and went off, electrons improbably jumping a gap in the circuit, light splashing the shoes he’d placed by the tent flap ready to pull on, the good habit of a field scientist. She put the flashlight in the inside pocket of her jacket in case it did that again.
“Quicksilver?” he asked in the dark.
“Yes, I answer to that too. Traveler names are meant to translate into other tongues and dialects.”
He nodded and dozed off again.
She remembered something vital about her psychic alchemy, the psychalchemy of her people, Skance’s often disruptive gift. Being in love ramps psychalchemy up. Haze was likely to see more of it, she realized. She just hoped it wouldn’t trigger more of the memories already troubling him.
That he’d been underground that day in Strata, asleep, and not above ground awake, had been hugely consequential luck. Some people took luck for granted, but most—and in particular, intelligent and analytical people like Haze—realized how capricious it could be. Realizing what had fallen out of the sky while he slept surely had to have traumatized him then. And now it had come back—most likely triggered by the falling scaffold yesterday.
Which was her fault. It had been lucky for the Pastfinders, but unlucky for Haze. She grimaced in the dark. Even contented people didn’t always like to be reminded how a little luck could make a decisive difference.
The psychalchemy of her people was always unintentional: that was the important thing to say to outsiders. It was not, however, quite true. Under certain rare circumstances, psychalchemy could be willed. One of those circumstances was at the end of the death road—at death’s door. She hoped not to be there for some time to come.