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Zentz spoke more with a gargle than with real words.
“Ozette!” Nevi called, “she’s sick. She goes back or she dies, you know that. It’s not a choice. Send her out.”
Ben’s finger went to his lips.
“He can’t see us,” Ben whispered. “Don’t move.”
She couldn’t tell one person from the other. The gigantic holo danced on its curtain of mist. Surreal figures outside the holo field became a futile blur. Three lasgun flashes burst the curtain of rippling light and a cascade of prisms lighted up all around her. Ben pulled her to the ground and in a blink the image reformed.
“Stay low and don’t move,” he whispered. “This is the perfect holo. Perfect!”
She wriggled with him into a fold of hylighter against a black lava boulder. Though faint, a wisp of images rose out of the hylighter skin and filled her mind in a steady unraveling of Pandora’s tangled politics. The thick skin of the hylighter held the warmth of afternoon sunlight. With Ben tucked close against her she felt safe. Flashes of sunlight sparkled intermittently throughout the hologram that surrounded them. Crista drew a new strength with the hylighter’s touch, and a confidence that insisted Nevi would fail.
“They can’t see us as long as we stay inside the image,” Ben whispered. His voice strained with the effort of focusing through the dust coursing his veins. He kept low, and his quick eyes took in all they could.
“This is incredible!” he marveled. “We’re inside a holo … where the hell did he get the triangulators to bring this off? And the resolution … ?”
“From the kelp,” Crista said. “He got everything he needed from Avata.”
“I wish we could see what the hell’s happening,” Ben whispered. “Right now we’re inside a hole in the light show. See this edge here? Rico’s holo follows the outline of our hylighter. He’s made a stage out of a hylighter skin.”
His finger reached out to the edge of the hylighter skin and appeared to disappear as he pushed it through the hologram. A momentary flutter of light and shadow around his finger was the only sign of disturbance of the image.
“The mist makes the illusion especially colorful,” he said. “All the tiny flashes that you see are the lasers catching a water droplet spinning in the mist—kind of pretty.”
“I can take her back dead or alive, Ozette,” Nevi’s voice insisted. It was closer now, only a few steps away. “If she’s dead, the world will think you killed her. If she’s alive … well, then everyone gets another chance.”
“Going back there,” she whispered, “that is not living.”
“Don’t worry, he knows how it’s got to be.”
Three more flashes burst through the light screen and pitted the boulder above them in a dazzle of red and violet. Ben wrapped his arms around Crista to sandwich her between himself and the rock. It seemed that the dust was bringing her out of a dream instead of into it. She felt her head and senses clear beyond anything she’d experienced in Flattery’s custody.
“I think the dust … you were right about it,” she told Ben. “It’s offset whatever Flattery gave me.”
She pulled Ben’s arms tighter around her and felt as though she were melting into him, her busy atoms scooting between the oscillations of his own. She felt herself disassemble into her qualities of light and shade. She was no longer so much a substance as an idea, an image, a dream. She felt no pain or pleasure, just a sense of transmission, of movement with purpose over which she had no control.
“Ben,” she asked, over a stab of fear, “Ben, are you here?”
“Yes,” his breath puffed her ear, “I’m here.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She knew something was coming, some feral intensity crested her awareness and would not be cowed. “I’m sorry.”
A sensation like the one she had felt at the dockside in Kalaloch welled up inside her, then burst with a loud crack that rolled outward from her heart like angry thunder. Everything around her stilled except the wet rush of the incoming tide.
Welcome home, Crista Galli.
The voice spoke through her mind, without the impediment of sound. It came at a rush from the dying hylighter, from Avata itself.
A refreshing sense of detachment, then a familiar disembodiment overcame her. The distinction between hylighter skin and her own blurred. She was encompassed within a familiar tingle. This muted, struggling tingle she knew to be a kind of death in body that hatched the great hylighter of her mind. Her mind flexed its great sail in the sun and caught its first breath.
We hatched of the same vine, Crista Galli.
She remembered, now. Before the bombing that cut her free she had been rooted for safety in a pod of kelp. The memories filled her head so fast they stunned her. Ben’s groan in her ear reeled her attention back to their huddle on the beach. The holo was gone, and enough of the mist lifted to reveal a scattering of bodies in the rocks.
“I thought I was dead,” Ben said, rubbing his temples. “How … what have you done?”
Crista couldn’t answer. She felt as though she straddled two worlds—one on the beach, with Ben, and one in the sea with her great guardian, Avata. The holo had switched off with the thunderclap, and Nevi lay on the beach, nearly within her reach, his eyes blinking stupidly and blood oozing from his red-veined nose. She got up slowly and retrieved his lasgun. Rico, though wobbly, was the first to recover and he did likewise with Zentz.
“My apologies, Sister,” Rico said, with a slight bow and a quizzical smile. “There is much this ignorant brother did not understand.”
He reeled and nearly fell, but caught the side of a great rock and steadied himself.
Others around them, the stunned ones, began stirring and shaking their heads. A few, victims of the lasguns, would never stir again. A deep breath of the mist-laden air cleared her mind and helped pulse a new strength to her young legs. The tide hissed up to her feet, and a few meters away it licked Nevi’s outstretched form in the sand.
She felt bigger now, taller, and it seemed that even Rico looked up to her.
“So, Rico, do you still want to keep me from the kelp?”
He managed a laugh and shook his head.
“Two rules,” he said. “The first: never argue with an armed woman.”
She hefted Nevi’s lasgun as though seeing it for the first time, then inquired, “And the second?”
“Never argue with an armed man.”
She returned the laugh, and Ben joined them.
“You argued with Nevi,” Ben said, “and look what it got him.”
“I didn’t argue with him,” Rico said, “I tricked him—that is, Avata tricked him. Now we’ve got more work to do. Believe it or not, we have to save Flattery. If we don’t—”
“Save Flattery?” Ben’s bitterness dripped from his voice. “He started all this, he should suffer the consequences.”
“Not if we all suffer,” Crista said. “Not if human life on Pandora is extinguished. He can do that, I feel it. Rico is right. Flattery must be stopped, but he must stay alive.”
The dozen stunned Zavatans struggled to regain their feet and their senses. Ben picked up Nevi under the arms and dragged him out of reach of the water. A Zavatan scout took over and trussed Nevi’s thumbs together behind his back with a stout length of maki leader.
“That holo,” Ben said, “I’ve never seen anything like it. How did you do that?” “Thought you’d never ask,” Rico said.
He picked up a length of kelp vine from the water’s edge, caressed it momentarily and then dropped it back into the sea.
“That was the trick. I think our Zavatan friends here have these two zeroes under control. Follow me, I’d like you to meet my friend, Avata, the greatest holo studio in the world.”
A warning shout went up from a scout at the clifftop, and simultaneously a hunt of dashers splashed out of the upcoast mist in a sinister blur. Ben snatched the heavy lasgun from Crista’s hand and pushed her toward Rico. He fired a quick burst and the b
arest scent of ozone accompanied the snapping of the weapon. Two dashers crumpled in a flurry of screams and sand only a dozen meters away. The others began to feed on their dead, as was their instinct. A Zavatan scout emptied his charges into the rest of the hunt.
“They’re so … so fast,” she gasped, and discovered herself clinging to Rico’s arm. He did not cringe or push her away, but put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze.
“Not much time to think topside,” Rico said. Then, to Ben, “I see you’re still quick in your old age.”
“Some of us stay young forever,” he laughed. “Must be the company I keep.”
