Tension hung in the air like a swarm of flies, those first few hours in the stonewose camp. I was sure that, any minute, Ikamja was going to change her mind about believing me and I would have to fight my way out of the middle of a compound containing hundreds, maybe even thousands, of stonewose. I’d been in worse situations, but I still didn’t like my odds.
Ikamja was, for the most part, consumed with the sorts of quotidian operations that I knew had to come with leadership, but had never thought about before. She went from area to area, having very official-sounding discussions with various stonewose (all in a language I didn’t speak), presumably related to the fact that they were picking up and moving everything again. Considering how much stuff they were carrying around, tables and tents and beds, it wasn’t long at all before the camp had turned into a swirling hive of activity. While all that was happening, I stayed in Ikamja’s wake, a silent bodyguard and attendant to the warlord herself.
I decided to stay silent and learn a thing or two. And learn I did; even without being able to understand a damn thing anybody was saying, I learned more about the stonewose as a people than I had previously. As I’d suspected, they were operating at a roughly medieval level, most of their gear made out of wood, leather, shell, or fabric, aside from a few essentials made out of metal taken during raids. It was all designed with incredible ingenuity, though, almost every device able to fold up for transport, or serve multiple purposes to save on weight. The shell, which they used for containers, utensils, and weapons, was another example of the stonewose finding ways to get multiple uses out of things: it came from their main form of transportation.
Have you ever seen one of those deep-sea isopods? Almost like a horseshoe crab with more segments, or a roly-poly writ large. They’re adorable. Now imagine one of those, but it’s about the size of a full-grown bison, and you have a bessel. They’re very slow-moving, being adapted to eat grass in a similar way to how a roomba eats dust, but they more than make up for it with massive size and excellent carrying capacity. Bessels could easily pull carts the size of a van, and the stonewose kept a whole herd of the animals to let themselves move from place to place. The bessel pens were, by far, the least pleasant part of that unintentional tour.
There was one exception to the general rule, one place that failed to fit with the aesthetic of stonewose civilization, and also one place which I was not allowed to silently observe. It happened out of nowhere, one tent which Ikamja barred me from entering with her arm, leaving me outside while she performed inspections. It was only by sneaking around to the far side of the tent and carefully lifting up the wall that I learned that this was the armory.
Knives, spears, gripping arms, all these ordinary weapons were considered essentially tools, available to all. The weapons that Ikamja kept a careful leash on, counting regularly, appointing only her most loyal followers to defend, were those she had obtained during her time working for Cassandra. There were, if I had to guess, a few hundred of them, clockwork rifles capable of emptying a twenty--round magazine in five seconds. There weren’t even enough to equip one-quarter of the host she had assembled, not even one-tenth, but it didn’t matter; automatic weapons were so far beyond the milieu that her civilization was operating on that even that small core of them in the middle of her army was enough to provide total domination.
The final stage of preparations, as Ikamja explained to me after it had been done, was to explain herself. She was a warlord, yes, and being warlord earned her quite the tariff of loyalty, particularly from those warriors pledged to her service, but that service wasn’t unlimited. She had to prove her virtue through courage and skill on the battlefield, and wisdom and leadership off of it; to lead her people on mad dashes across the Desolation for no good reason was a good way to have herself branded as an oath-breaker and a madwoman.
Thus, the accounting. She gathered the entire camp, multiple thousands of stonewose, and before them she listed out in rough terms the dilemma I’d given her. The voyage into the Desolation would not be an easy one, if nothing else because of the other stonewose bands who lived in that area. But it was necessary for their continued survival, to keep the weapon out of the hands of the Cassandrans. Moreover, this was far from the first time they’d faced long odds fighting against others of their kind; Ikamja was as sure of victory against the stonewose of the Desolation as she was against those of the plateau and those of the savannah.
I couldn’t understand any of it. Whatever language Ikamja spoke, it wasn’t one of the ones that had gotten programmed into me by Tersine when she brought me to this world. All I could hear from my position at Ikamja’s flank was her tone, the ebb and flow of triumph and uncertainty as she projected her emotions into the audience, and the audience did the same back to her. I have to admit, there was something inherently unsettling seeing stonewose excited.
By the end of the speech, the sun was starting to get low, and it was time for the main meal of the evening. That, too, was a major event, thousands of stonewose rushing about to cook up vegetables, meat, broth and grain into a wide variety of soups and pies. Thankfully, this wasn’t one of the meals at which human flesh was being served. I was still desperately hungry, the meal I’d eaten earlier having only partially taken care of the hunger from so many months unconscious, so for that reason alone I was highly interested in the progress being made. Ikamja had other ideas.
She dragged me away from the hubbub to her own private tent. It was much as I remembered it: as the warlord, Ikamja reserved the right to keep her space lavishly decorated. The furniture was all carved wood and ivory, the floors were covered with lavish woven carpets, and festooned all around were trophies stolen from defeated foes, human and stonewose alike. She’d definitely acquired more since the last time.
“What is this about, exactly? If you’re going to drag me away from food right now, you’d better have a damn good reason.”
Ikamja stalked over to her desk and retrieved some papers. “So far, I have been acting as though you are not lying to me, that this is a legitimate alliance and not some damnable human trick. If I am to continue acting under that assumption, I will need more information. Much more.”
What she’d pulled out of her desk was a map, exquisitely inked, probably by hand. It must have been an incredible effort to chart out the entire eastern half of Imbrium like that, years of work by a master cartographer. Notably, the map also included the entire Desolation, though in notably worse detail.
“I can’t tell you much, I’m afraid. Most of what I do know… it’s based less on anything I’ve seen and more on how Tersine talks about it.”
“Do you not know its location, then?”
I glanced down at the map, then shut my eyes. In the weeks between finding the original map and being sent back to Earth, I’d stared at Laura’s sketched copy of the original map more times than I could count. But that had been months ago. I opened my eyes again. Carefully, I placed my pinky roughly where the edge of the Desolation met the coast, and my index finger roughly at the Desolation’s center. After a few abortive attempts, I was able to trace out the arc of the Desolation’s border with my pinky while my index finger remained in the same place.
“It’s… it’s near there. I think maybe a little bit to the south of that, off in this region here where the cartographer doesn’t seem to have known anything at all.” I paused. “That makes sense, actually; if there were any maps that showed the location of Primary Control, someone else would have already explored it.”
Ikamja looked down at the area of the map I’d indicated, grimacing as if it had insulted her. “That is quite a large area.”
I shrugged. “Smaller than the entire Desolation, no? If we’re lucky, it’ll be something obvious to find, like a big shiny ruin sticking up out of the sand. Hell, if Tersine’s already found it, we might be able to track via sound.”
“Perhaps. But you must understand, there are harsh limits on how long I can have my people wandering through the Desolation on a fool’s errand. Certain… supplies will run out eventually.”
I nodded. “Maybe we could have a small search party go out into the Desolation itself, while the rest stay behind in more hospitable territory?”
“I would not like to travel through the Desolation without a great deal of protection. What you suggest may become inevitable, but I would not like to do it more than a moment before then.”
Ikamja rolled up the map and moved it away. “What is Primary Control, exactly?”
“I don’t know. If you’d like me to make a guess, I can.”
“Speculate at your leisure. I wish to understand.”
“Alright.” I paused, gathering my thoughts about Primary Control and Tersine’s goals, trying to bridge across the gap of five months that it had been since this had all happened.
“So the thing about Tersine is that I think she’s a scientist more than she is a Cassandran agent. She doesn’t have any qualms about Cassandra’s activities, but she’s doing it for the science. And the same is true with her looking for Primary Control, or at least I believe that’s the case. It’s not something as simple as a gun, it’s something she thinks will advance the cause of science.”
“But it is a weapon?” Ikamja asked.
I nodded. “Cassandra wouldn’t have let her spend so much of their resources going after it if it weren’t. But… lots of things can be weapons, right? A new kind of metal alloy can be a weapon if it makes all your ships immune to enemy fire. A new drug can be a weapon if it means you have the antidote to a chemical weapon that was previously too dangerous for the battlefield. An automaton that only works a factory can be a weapon if it means you can field twice as many troops.”
“So you believe it to be something of that nature? Not a weapon, but a… device? Some work of Forebearer ingenuity which will give Cassandra the upper hand?”
I nodded. “Something like that.”
“Then how do you propose we deny this to Tersine?”
“Take one copy, burn the rest? Smash the thing? Kill her and destroy every copy of the map so that nobody but us knows where it is? Depends on what it is that we…”
A pulse of weakness passed through my body. I staggered, clutching my head as I suddenly found myself almost unable to stand, caught only by my hip finding one of Ikamja’s fancy armchairs. My chest heaved, but any kind of movement was almost impossibly difficult, my flesh lagging behind my brain. Ikamja approached, asking for an explanation, but her voice was muffled as though by a great distance.
There was another voice, though. It started quiet as a whisper, but grew rapidly closer… closer and more familiar as well. Shadowy visions appeared in front of my eyes that rapidly overtook my vision. I reached out to Ikamja, felt myself collapsing even as a numb dissociation overtook my flesh.
Air sucked into stiff lungs. I was lying on my back, in a soft bed, with a hand gently resting on my shoulder. The dissonance of the flesh was enough to be instantly perceivable; and if that wasn’t enough, the voice speaking to me belonged to Yasmin.
“Emma? Please wake up, you’re starting to—”
I overreacted, that much I will admit. Not thinking rationally, I assumed that Yasmin herself had been the one to somehow drag me back from Selene to Earth, and I took that about as well as you would expect. I rocketed out of bed, reaching out for her with clawed hands.
“You bitch! What did you do to me, get your hands off me, what have you done!”
Yasmin, understandably, took a step back, eyes gone wide. I overextended myself; my limbs were weak, and my tremor was stronger than it had been in weeks. The moment I was supporting my weight on both of my feet instead of on the bed, I lost my strength and tipped over. Yasmin had to catch me, and for the next several seconds it was all I could do to not make the both of us tip over. That gave me a few seconds to think. Almost immediately I realized that there was no way Yasmin was responsible for this. Then I realized I’d attacked her.
“I’m…”
I was also speaking in Rochathan. I cleared my throat, remembering the words in English. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You woke me up so suddenly, I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t mean to…”
Yasmin sighed. “It’s alright. Can you stand?”
I shook my head. “Hand me my crutch.”
She did. Once I had that under me, I started to feel better. The reinforcement of the crutch was mental almost as much as it was physical, and within a few seconds I could stand again. The time was a little bit after five in the morning, well before I had to wake up.
“What happened? Why were you trying to wake me?”
“There was a fire alarm. Nothing major, just a false alarm, but you didn’t evacuate, and you were still asleep when I got back here. I was… worried.”
That took a few seconds to process. Of course time continued to progress on Earth while I was on Selene. But more than that, my two bodies were, what, connected? Being forced into consciousness in one universe would shunt me out of the other. I could theorize later; at that moment I needed to talk to Yasmin.
“Shit. Dammit, this was something I was told could happen. It’s a… a malfunction of the sleep cycle, or something.”
“As part of your… condition?”
I nodded. “I think I would prefer not to be woken, if that happens. Unless… I guess unless it’s life or death and you can’t just move me, or if I’ve been sleeping so long it feels like a coma, or something. I’ll have to talk to the doctors and everyone about this. Dammit.”
Yasmin didn’t look very happy about it, but she wasn’t going to disagree. She left me to my own business, which was good, because I was terrified.
If every single trip to Selene required a fresh jolt from the machine, then I was done for. A handful of hours every couple of days was no life worth living. Was I going to have to take extreme measures, options I couldn’t undo, if I wanted to make this permanent? Or would doing something like that in my fragile, mortal body from this side of the void just kill me for real?
That day at the lab was a tense one. For the first time in months I wasn’t thinking about how to steal from the place, but it was completely impossible to focus. Partially that was because of exhaustion from only getting six hours of sleep on this side; mostly that was the unceasing terror of what all this meant about my ability to live on Selene.
I survived, though. I made it through the day. I was exhausted by the end of it, of course, mentally and physically drained, but in some ways that made it easier to pass the time before going to bed early. When I fell asleep in my room on Earth, I woke up on the back of a bessel-cart on Selene. I wasn’t getting kicked out of anywhere: by some horrific miracle, my mind, my psychic pattern, had established a stable orbit.