The mine looked like some giant had taken a hammer the size of the moon and slammed it into a mountain peak
.
People crawled and jumped and sat among the rocks, busy at work. One girl could have been my twin, except for her crooked spine. She scrambled among boulders, her small hands dipping into crevices in the rubble.
I looked between her and Grandmother. Grandmother was staring at the shattered mountain peak and smiling.
I had to tap her shoulder to get her attention. She looked at me, eyebrows arching under her hairless scalp. "What?"
"Why do you have people working here? I thought you said the mine was closed."
"Mostly. We won't be breaking any more rock till the crisis has died down."
It had been a month since Thesil and I had come to live with her. Lira, who had little to do with us, had even begun to show. I knew little of what was going on in the outside world beyond hints Grandmother had dropped. But if death-palsy still beset the cities, after a month…
I was afraid for my parents.
Grandmother was still signing. "Those workers are collecting the dust and fragments of ore we've already freed."
"Why do you have people collect the ore instead of the automas?"
"They get paid well. We don't often have rockslides. Don't you worry for them."
"But why wouldn't you use the automas?"
Grandmother's mouth turned up. "They can't gather pure oracle ore, kitten. They can pull down half the mountain, but taking up a handful of raw ore?" She shook her head. "They die. Overloaded. Believe me, we've tried."
I licked my lips. "But don't the people get… overwhelmed… too?"
"I only hire ones who've built up a tolerance. They can't get a rise out of a lungful anymore. They have to consume it. And if they can't wait until payday to take their share, I send them on their way."
I stared at her. "You pay them in oracle ore?"
"Only partly. Ore doesn't quench your thirst or fill your belly. It just makes you feel like it does. Do you indulge?"
I swallowed and fluttered my fingers in an embarrassed sign. "No. I can't get close to it without falling over." I could never had done a miner's job. Or held a handful of powder, like Holy Efra. "No one called it indulgence back in the cities. It was a holy rite."
Her grin was like the sun coming up. She leaned towards me. "Once it was only a drug. Illegal, even."
"I can't imagine."
Her smile faded. "No. I suppose you can't."
A worker who wore thick black braids trundled a handbarrow towards us. I held my breath, nervous I would fall into a twitching heap and bash my head open on a rock. Grandmother caught my elbow.
When I turned towards her, she signed, "You should build up your tolerance. Let yourself get used to a bit of it in the air. Otherwise you'll never be able to come close to it."
"Why would I want to?" I signed, ignoring the longing the thought sparked in my belly. "Thesil can't. It could kill her."
"Thesil isn't looking at inheriting all this."
I gaped at her. "What?"
White eyebrows lifted. "What? Do you think I have any other heirs lying around? Unless you have a brother or sister, and they've also been tossed out with the trash by Efra's dictates–"
"No, but – I'm an only child – but I didn't even think about it. You don't look sickly."
"Just because I'm not already in the ground doesn't mean I'll outlive you, Granddaughter. I'm eighty years old."
I felt like an infant. I was only sixteen.
The handbarrow was getting closer. Grandmother signed, "Stand your ground and let him pass. A breath of it won't hurt. You have to build resistance somewhere."
"I'll fall over."
"I'll hold you up." And she did.
The barrow wobbled across the stone path towards us. Its load glowed a faint green, the same shade as the lichens that grew underfoot. The smell of ore grew stronger, and stronger. As it came within arms-reach, it drowned me.
#
For once I wasn't swooping through mountaintops or following a dead saint from one room to another. I hovered in the air, at a tall tree's height, above and behind a small camp. The fire that danced at the middle of the circling tents cast the only light; it was nighttime, and clouds had snuffed out the stars. The air smelled like roasted meat and ash.
Men and women, equal in numbers, sat on the ground around the fire and argued, waving withered hands and glaring through misshapen eyes. They were all of them imperfectas.
Their lips moved too quickly for me to read, but the way they squared themselves off, backs stiff as the handle of a paintbrush, spoke of smoldering fury. I tried to move closer, but I was trapped, hanging still as the smoke that gathered over the camp.
Mother was sitting on the other side of the circle of people, staring intently at the faces around her.
No. Not Mother. This woman's face was too sharp, her skin a touch too light, and she was a few years younger than Mother. But the resemblance was unmistakable. She was some member of our family, one I'd never met.
A man rose from the side of the circle closest to me and hurled a chain of flowers into the flame. He spun away as though he'd been burned, clenching his four-fingered hands.
At that moment, I realized I was not looking at a cookfire. A small body lay at its heart, already turned mostly to charcoal and bone.
The woman who looked like Mother stood. Everyone around the crematory fire turned towards her.
Her hands moved. Even from here, I could read them.
They said, "I will."
#
I staggered, and the world regained its color. It was midday, not night, and not a cloud scraped by overhead. Grandmother's arms were corded muscle around me, so solid I knew I wouldn't fall. But they had a thinness to them, a slackness to the skin, that made her age impossible to forget.
I got my feet under me and stood firm. Grandmother let go. The handbarrow had passed us by and continued on its way towards the town – not, I hoped, anywhere near the side Thesil and I lived on.
This vision hadn't been as long as all the others. Perhaps I was building up some tolerance to it after all.
Grandmother signed, "Refreshed, Granddaughter?"
I clenched my hands, embarrassed at the amount of energy that filled me now that I'd had my little vision. It was tempting to skip towards the mine and offer to help collect the ore. How good would I feel after that?
But I didn't. I signed, "I'm okay."
Grandmother smiled and motioned me towards the town. "Come along. It's time we returned. I had some of the workers put together a surprise for you back at the town."
I blinked. "A surprise?"
Her grin was both tranquil and sinister. I wasn't sure how she managed it. "Wait and see."
#
Outside the thorn wall, we rinsed off with buckets of water, then walked in dripping, our slippers leaving dark crescents in our wake.
I fretted about Thesil, but she greeted us outside the house, grinning like a pleased fox. If hints of ore bothered her when she came to take my hand, she didn't mention it.
Grandmother was grinning, too, as she took my other arm. I'd walked into a trap. But it was too late to escape. They guided me inside between them.
I gasped.
Our stone counter was stacked high with wooden panels that smelled of pine and cedar and all the trees that didn't grow in the desert lowlands. Stacked next to them, dozens of wax-stopped glass jars gleamed with the color of their contents.
Though Grandmother and Thesil stopped in the doorway, I took a step forward, out of their grasp, then another, drawn in by the glow of expensive powdered pigments. A roll of leather lay beside the jars. I unrolled it and revealed a quiver of brushes, their handles polished hardwood, their human-hair tips wrapped in protective rags. Under the roll sat a light wooden palette, a stylus and a couple of knives.
My hands were shaking. Here was everything I needed to make paints. Everything I needed to make beautiful paintings. Even a bucket filled to the brim with donkey and goat hooves, which I knew were not easy to find. Boil them and mix the glue with chalk and I could prime every board laid out for me.
I could paint.
My cheeks were damp. I rolled the leather back up, laid it down with utter gentleness, and spun to hug Thesil.
"Surprise," Grandmother signed.
I hugged her, too, and then Thesil again. My cheeks ached from smiling by the time we separated. I signed, "Where did you get these? How did you get these? I thought you had shut down trade with the cities. To protect us."
Grandmother shrugged. "We still do a little trade. We'd starve otherwise. But don't worry about that. Paint something for us."
"I need to get the panels ready," I said, and went to do just that.
#
I primed them all afternoon, and sanded them, and primed them again, so I was left with twenty smooth white panels, each pleading with me to cover them in color. Thesil dragged me to bed before they'd dried enough to work on.
In the morning, the dawn turned the mica panes to a wash of honey and apricot. I eased out of bed, trying to leave the blankets on my side pooled warmly at Thesil's back. She woke anyway and rolled to face me. She always knew when I tried to sneak out. I credited her ears.
I found the stylus Grandmother had included with my gift and propped one of the larger boards against the wall. I examined its white surface, as if imperfections there could tell me what to paint. But there were none. I had sanded it well.
When I looked back towards the bed, Thesil had shed our blankets. She sat cross-legged, arms draped loosely over her calsounds-clad knees. Her camise still hung off the end of the bed, leaving her pale goat-butter skin and apple-firm breasts exposed to view. My view. No one else's.
I was dressed similarly, clad in calsounds and nothing else, my hair matted about my head. We had yet to go farther than that. We were young; we had all our lives in front of us, and I felt her upper half – with its stray freckles and hidden ticklish spots – was more than enough to explore for the whole year.
"Are you going to paint me?' she signed.
I examined her carefully, my gaze drawn to the strand of hair that escaped her braid to wisp between her eyes. I didn't have the right shade of green for those eyes, for their intense color so deep it was like staring through a leaf into the sun. The only thing I'd seen that matched them was oracle ore.
For a second, I wondered if the powdered ore would serve as a pigment when mixed with egg and water. But I couldn't do Thesil's portrait in something that made her sick.
"No," I signed. "I'm painting something else."
She frowned, her glance trailing over her own chest and her gangly arms. "Too thin for you?"
"I'm out of practice. I don't want to paint you until I know I can get it right."
She smiled. Perhaps she said more, but thoughts of the ore distracted me. I'd had such a short vision this time. Maybe it was losing its power over me. I wished I could hope it would lose its power over Thesil.
I found myself sketching out the vision with my stylus. It filled the whole huge panel from corner to corner, impractically large. I wouldn't finish this tonight.
I sketched most of the morning. When I finally was satisfied, I sat back and examined it.
In my sketch, the imperfectas circled the fire Thesil and I had lit over the troupe-member's corpse, not the fire I'd seen in my vision. And I didn't remember the faces of every imperfecta, so I gave them the faces of Abursa and Frisa and angry, regretful Amaz.
But the woman who looked like Mother sat at the center of it all, exactly as she had been in the vision, her hands lifted to sign "I will."
"It's going to take me days to paint this in," I signed to Thesil, who had gotten dressed and come and gone several times since I started.
"Put on your clothes," she signed back. "Unless you want your grandmother to see you like that."
"What?"
Those beautiful eyes rolled. "It's lunchtime."
#
The painting took a whole week.
Thesil was at first happy to stay inside and watch me work, until she realized the oracle ore was safely stored outside of town and most of the townsfolk spoke sign on account of Grandmother. Then she vanished, off to make new friends.
I would've missed her more, but she came back each evening and at every meal to tell me of the arguments and adventures she'd had that day.
Besides, the painting haunted me.
It wasn't turning out like my sketch. The faces of the imperfectas I'd added in had changed to ones I didn't know at all, although they felt utterly right. Like I'd seen these people for years and remembered every mole, every broken nose. It was disconcerting. I had to force myself to keep painting. Who was I to question the Unknowns and whatever wisdom they chose to send me?
But the fire was the worst.
I don't know what came over me. We hadn't even seen the dead man's body through the burning of the tent and the wood. Even in my last vision, the fire had hidden the person's face. But I parted the flames and painted a head on the corpse. I felt like something in the old visions – the ones I'd had before ever meeting Grandmother – guided my hand.
Because the face I painted there was Holy Efra's.
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