Chương 14

By the time the wagon rolled out at first light, Kira had learned three things she intended to remain grateful for until death or godhood, whichever came first. First: indoor bathrooms existed. Second: hot water existed. And third: both of those things could be found on this planet in the same place without requiring a hospital bracelet, a nurse, an apology, or a machine humming beside the wall.

She had discovered the bathroom on the first night in the house with an astonishment so complete that she had simply stood there for several stunned seconds staring at the basin, the plumbing, and the entirely civilized arrangement of it all. Then came the second revelation: sitting down indoors like a person instead of crouching behind a bush bargaining with dignity and gravity at the same time.

The hot bath had come the next day, and that memory alone was enough to make her close her eyes briefly as the wagon jostled over the road. Glorious did not begin to cover it. Hot water. Real soap. Steam rising around a body that could feel everything. Dirt loosening from her skin. Her hair heavy and black and slick beneath her hands. The simple private luxury of washing because she wanted to, not because someone else had decided she needed cleaning.

She had nearly cried again then too, hand braced on the basin, just because she could. And yes, by then she had also discovered that this body came with the full maintenance package. That discovery had been less transcendent, but still preferable to a bag. So no, all things considered, Kira was in favor of civilization. Even bumpy wagon civilization. She adjusted on the bench and tucked one boot more securely beneath her as the cart hit another rut.

Across from her, the twins were in the middle of a low-grade war over seating rights that had started before dawn and never truly resolved.

"I was here first," Renn said for perhaps the twelfth time.

"You were here loudest," Rell corrected.

"Different thing."

"You had your turn yesterday."

"We were not riding in a wagon yesterday."

"That's not the point."

"It is if you have any respect for justice."

"Neither of you know what justice is," Toman said without looking back from the driver's seat beside his father. This was true. It did not slow them down. The argument, Kira knew perfectly well, was not actually about space. It was about proximity. Both younger boys wanted to sit beside her, not for any complicated or especially subtle reason, but because they were young enough to think their interest was mostly invisible and old enough to become absolutely unbearable when embarrassed about it.

Kira, for her part, had surrendered to the Presence stat doing whatever it was going to do. She had chosen it. She had made herself look like this. The System had then looked at her choices and apparently decided to reward her with a face and body so aggressively unfair that ordinary human eye contact had become a civic challenge. So, here ya go. In the end, Mara solved the problem with practical tyranny.

"The ball gets that space," she said, and placed it between Kira and Sela with such authority that even the twins accepted it as final. The soccer ball—still absurd, still beloved, still somehow the strangest item anyone in this wagon had ever seen—occupied the prime seat like visiting nobility. Rell looked betrayed. Renn looked as though he was considering whether he could challenge a ball to a duel and win. Kira rested a hand on it fondly.

"VIP treatment."

"It's because it causes less trouble than you lot," Mara said. That earned a laugh from Sela and a muffled grunt from Toman. Joren, seated up front with the reins, said nothing, but Kira had learned enough over the last two days to read what he did not say. He acted as though the game was an indulgence, something harmless and faintly ridiculous that had distracted the boys from useful work.

He also stood at the edge of the yard every evening and watched them play with the expression of a man trying very hard not to enjoy himself openly. Kira had caught him once, arms folded, eyes following a clumsy pass from Renn to Rell, the corner of his mouth almost admitting to pride before he noticed he had an audience. The memory pleased her now as the wagon rolled on. They had left before the sun fully rose, but the world brightened quickly.

Fields unfolded on either side of the road, some freshly turned, dark and rich in long furrows that still held the shape of recent labor, others green and growing. Low stone boundaries and wooden fences divided properties with the sort of practical confidence that only came from generations of shared understanding. Here and there, smoke climbed from chimneys. Men and women were already in the fields, or walking toward them, or driving animals between pasture and pen.

More farmhouses appeared the farther they traveled. More wagons. More roads branching off from the main track. The whole region was waking into itself. Kira sat with her hands folded over the soccer ball and watched it pass, trying not to let wonder show too plainly. Every house was a piece of confirmation. Every worked field another proof that the world did not merely contain people, but contained ordinary life. Families. Labor. Routine. Trade. Dirt under fingernails.

Arguments about weather and feed and next season's yield. Real enough to smell. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Real enough to join, if you knew how. The wagon had not been on the road long before the conversation turned, as Kira had suspected it might, toward money. Not her money directly. Cattle.

One of the ridgeback calves had to be sold this season, apparently, depending on feed and whether the neighboring Halver family managed to get their breeding pair through another winter. Rell claimed old man Halver overvalued everything with four legs and a tail. Toman said old man Halver overvalued everything, period. Mara thought beef prices in town would rise before frost. Joren thought they would not. Sela, to Kira's delight, had strong opinions on breeding stock and no interest in pretending otherwise.

Kira listened. Quietly. Carefully. By the time the conversation looped around the price of young cattle versus cured leather and wagon parts, she had enough context to estimate that the coins in her pouch were not meaningless. More than that—they were enough to live on for a while if she was careful. That loosened something in her. Not forever. Not enough to make her foolish. But enough that the future shifted from cliff edge to narrow bridge. I can live for a bit, she thought. Not long, maybe.

But enough to not be instantly desperate. That mattered. Beside her, Sela had been quiet for a while, watching the road unwind ahead of them. Kira glanced over.

"You all right?" Sela exhaled through her nose, then tucked a strand of hair behind one ear.

"I might be," she said.

"Or I might throw up in the wagon before we get there. Not sure yet."

"That encouraging?"

"Very." Kira smiled. They rode in companionable silence for a little while after that, until Sela spoke again, lower this time, careful that her parents were too occupied with the road and the twins were too busy arguing about whether a proper goal required a crossbar.

"If I'm seeded," she said, "I want to go to the Church of Ariana." Kira turned her head. Sela kept her eyes on the road.

"I haven't said it out loud much."

"Why not?" Sela's mouth twitched.

"Because then it becomes real. And if it becomes real, then maybe I've jinxed it." That, Kira understood immediately. The dangerous intimacy of naming a hope.

"Ariana," she said softly.

"Hope and light." Sela glanced at her, surprised.

"You know that one."

"Keleria too. Zurran. I do listen when your family talks." Sela's face warmed at that, more deeply than Kira expected. The names themselves were small. The listening behind them was not.

"The Church of Ariana trains Luminants," she said.

"Sometimes healers. Sometimes field-blessers. Sometimes… other things. Depends on the seed, I suppose. But the training is expensive, and I don't know if I'd even be accepted, and I definitely don't want to talk about it in front of Da because he'll start thinking in numbers and Ma will start pretending she isn't." Kira smiled faintly.

"So you told me instead." Sela risked a look at her, embarrassed now that the words were out.

"I did."

"I'm honored." That earned her a laugh, quiet and a little shaky. The wagon rolled on. It passed other families traveling the same road, some with children dressed more neatly than usual, others with goods loaded for market alongside hopeful young people trying to look as though they had not been awake all night imagining every possible outcome of the test.

Kira counted at least three other girls and four boys around Sela's age or a little younger, all headed in the same direction with versions of the same tension held differently in their faces. The testing festival. Right. That. Every time she let herself forget about it for more than five minutes, reality leaned over and tapped her on the shoulder. At one point a neighboring wagon slowed alongside theirs.

The driver, a red-faced man with forearms like carved wood and a daughter perched beside him in festival clothes, called out some greeting to Joren about weather and ruts and whether the lower road was still washing out by the old stone bridge. They knew each other, of course they did. This entire countryside, Kira was beginning to understand, ran on overlapping familiarity. Families knew families. Fields knew fields. Names traveled faster than carts. Good for community.

Potentially catastrophic for mysterious girls with impossible eyes and very few lies prepared beyond I'm from far away. When the other wagon drew level enough for introductions, Joren handled it with alarming efficiency.

"This is Kira," he said, with just enough in his tone to suggest that was all anyone needed. The red-faced man opened his mouth, saw whatever was in Joren's expression, and closed it again with admirable speed.

"Friend of the family?" he asked instead.

"Yes," Joren said. That was the end of that. Kira filed the tactic away with deep appreciation. He did not explain her. He did not invite scrutiny. He just placed her within the family's social perimeter and let that do the work. More than a few nosey people they met over the next hour looked as though they had questions. Very reasonable questions. Who was she? Where had she come from? Why did she look like that? Why were Joren's sons orbiting her like fascinated livestock around a new gate? Was that a ball?

Why was the ball in the wagon like a person? But a look from Joren, or Mara, or occasionally both, shut most of it down before the words fully formed. Most of it. The one question that made Kira nearly choke came from a woman with two baskets of apples and an apparently fatal commitment to speed over discretion. The woman had stopped beside the wagon to exchange festival news, looked from Toman to Kira to the family to Kira again, and then blurted, "Oh! Are they engaged?" Silence detonated.

Toman made a sound like his own lungs had betrayed him. Rell doubled over instantly. Renn slapped both hands over his mouth and failed to contain a shriek of laughter. Sela nearly fell off the bench. Mara, to Kira's horror, looked not offended but briefly thoughtful, as if the notion had not occurred to her until this exact moment and she was now involuntarily testing it for structural integrity. Joren's expression did not change at all, which somehow made it worse. Heat rose all the way up her face.

Toman, still dying quietly, managed, "No." The woman blinked.

"Oh." Then, fatally: "You'd make handsome children." That finished Sela completely. She bent over laughing against Kira's shoulder while the twins made noises usually associated with demonic possession. Toman looked as though he would rather be trampled by ridgebacks in public than remain in the wagon one second longer. Kira sat very straight, eyes fixed on the road ahead, and thought with grim clarity that Presence might not solve murder charges if she committed one on festival day.

Mara finally took pity on everyone.

"She's traveling with us," she said firmly, in the tone of a woman drawing a line under nonsense.

"That's all." The apple woman, to her credit, realized she had overshot the social moment by several fences and retreated with embarrassed goodwill. The wagon moved on. The laughter did not stop for some time. Toman rode half a shade darker in the face for the next mile. Kira, once she could trust herself to speak, leaned slightly toward Sela and murmured, "I'm so sorry." Sela wiped tears from her eyes.

"No, don't be. That was the funniest thing that's happened all month." Across from them, Renn choked out, "Handsome children," and set Rell off again. Toman made a low sound of warning that had no effect whatsoever. Kira bit the inside of her cheek to keep from joining them.

"Your family," she said softly to Sela once the worst of it had passed, "is terrible." Sela smiled, still glowing from laughter.

"Yes. They're wonderful." That, Kira thought, was probably the same thing here. The road climbed a low ridge sometime later, and from the top of it Kira finally caught her first real glimpse of the town. It spread wider than she had expected, clustered around a central rise with a pale stone structure near the middle that was either a temple or something close enough to make no difference at this distance. Rooflines gathered around it in layered bands. Smoke. Fields. Roads converging.

People moving in small bright threads toward the festival grounds. Her pulse kicked. The twins spotted it at the same moment and erupted into fresh noise. Sela went suddenly quiet again. Mara sat straighter. Joren only clicked to the horse and guided the wagon onward with the same practical calm he had used all morning, as though towns and tests and futures were simply another road to take in proper order. Kira looked at the place waiting below and felt a familiar split open inside her. Curiosity. Fear. Excitement.

She rested both hands on the soccer ball as if it might steady her. It did not. But it helped.

"All right," she murmured under her breath. Sela glanced over.

"What?" Kira kept her eyes on the town.

"Nothing," she said.

"Just trying not to look like I'm about to be arrested by destiny." Sela laughed, not nearly alarmed enough by how accurate that might prove. And the wagon rolled on toward the festival.