Sharon Shinn - Gateway

But Kalen was already pulling something out of his own pocket. “I found this in the river today,” he said a little diffidently. “I thought it was pretty, so I kept it.”

She took the rock from his hand. It was about the size of an egg yolk, although very irregularly shaped, and smooth from long tumbling in the river. The color was a milky caramel veined with darker lines of orange and inset with a nugget of opaque blue. “Oh, I like this,” she said. “Thank you, Kalen.”

Kalen jumped to his feet. “Time to go sell the qiji stones,” he said. He carefully placed the three confirmed qijis into his bag and then added a handful of ordinary rocks. When he caught Daiyu’s expression of surprise, he said, “I twould look very suspicious if I showed up with only gems. No one in Shenglang can separate them out by touch alone. The scanners would think I had stolen them.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “Can I come with you?”

“I’d be glad if you did.”

They took a trolley down to the river, north of the red gate, where there was a cluster of industrial sheds that Daiyu supposed held the scanning equipment. Outside each one, lines of stonepickers were already waiting for their bounty to be assessed, and they picked the shed with the shortest line. Soon it was their turn to step inside the testing station, which was little more than a room, a couple of workbenches-and some pretty sophisticated-looking machinery attached to the workbenches. The air inside was stifling and a little acrid; the four men who were operating the equipment and handing out money looked sweaty and bad tempered.

“Next,” one of them called out. Kalen stepped forward and poured the contents of his bag onto the black cloth that covered a section of one of the benches. The technician activated the machine and a startlingly bright light played over the stones. Three of them glowed an opalescent pink under the scope’s hard stare. The others remained obdurately dull.

“Three,” the technician said, scooping them up and transferring them to a scale situated at his right hand. “Six ounces,” he added. The man working with him recorded the information and pulled a handful of coins out of a drawer. Moments later, Daiyu and Kalen were back out in the fresh air.

“I feel rich,” he said. “I should buy us all a special dinner.”

But Daiyu had been in Shenglang long enough to appreciate the precarious nature of Kalen’s economic status. “You should save your money,” she scolded. “Anytime you get a windfall, you should put part of it away.”

“But I want to celebrate,” he said. “And I want to thank you. You found two of the qiji stones!”

“You can buy something small and inexpensive,” she decided. “Dessert for tonight’s dinner, maybe.”

He grinned. “All right,” he said. “I know something you’ll like.”

It was clear that whatever else might not translate between Jia and Earth, chocolate had certainly crossed iterations. Daiyu was willing to believe it had originated in the very first dimension and been faithfully copied ever since.

Aurora was still at Xiang’s, so Daiyu and Kalen and Ombri ate dinne rwith out her, topping off the meal with the chocolate confection Kalen had bought. Then Daiyu and Kalen practiced the tiaowu over and over, while Ombri tapped out a musical accompaniment. Daiyu closed her mind to her ongoing questions about whether she really should be planning to send Chenglei away and concentrated merely on learning the skills she needed to master. By the end of the evening, she was completely successful in slipping the bracelet on Kalen’s arm during one phase of the dance or another. She had also perfected the art of freeing her practice stone from a little pouch and squeezing it in her palm, even when Kalen was shouting at her or tickling her or dragging her across the floor.

“Bracelet in my left pocket, talisman in my right pocket. That’s what seems to work,” Daiyu said when they finally called it quits. “We’ll have to make sure I have pockets on both sides in all my clothes.”

“ Aurora will take care of that for you,” Ombri promised. He put away his musical instrument and yawned. “A long day for me,” he said, then disappeared into his own room without another word.

Kalen lingered. Daiyu thought he looked a little troubled. “But you have to remember to write yourself a note,” he said. “In case you really do get pulled to another dimension. In case you really do forget who you are.”

She glanced around. “Is there something to write with? I’ll do it now.”

He produced materials that were close enough to paper and pencil that she could understand them, though the paper was rough and the lead of the pencil was grainy. She tore off a piece of paper small enough to fit inside the pouch, and she carefully lettered a few words onto the scrap.

“‘Everything’s fine,’” she read back to Kalen. “‘Just take hold of the stone and don’t let go.’”

“That doesn’t tell you much,” he objected.

“I just want to be reassured and told what to do,” she said. “What’s the point of a long explanation that I won’t believe anyway?‘You’ve been transported to an alternate universe, but this piece of quartz holds the key to returning home safely.’ If I really am back in Ombri’s world, things will be so confusing that I don’t want anything complicated.”

“I suppose it might be even more confusing if you foundt hat message once you were already home,” he said. “If you didn’t remember anything about this trip, you wouldn’t know why you needed to be transported.”

She laughed. “Well, maybe I’ll remember more than Ombri thinks. He didn’t know I’d be able to read the qiji stones.Maybe he’ll be wrong about this.”

She turned toward her own bedroom door, but an odd expression on Kalen’s face stopped her. He was watching her closely, toying with one of his earring sand looking a little wistful. “What?” she said.

“Will you want to remember?” he said. “Or will you be glad to go home and forget us all?”

She paused with her hand on her doorframe. “Of course I’ll want to remember,” she said. “The idea of losing any of my memories is terrifying to me when I think about all the ways that could happen-if I have a concussion, if I have a brain tumor, if I fall into dementia when I get old. If I’m here, if this is real, I want to hold on to it forever.”

“It’s so strange for me to think that I’ll remember you for the rest of my life and you’ll forget me as soon as you go back home,” he said.

She started to respond but found that she didn’t have a good answer. Instead she just looked at him for a long time, taking in the details of his thin face, his wide mouth, the slightly rueful expression in his brown eyes. In just two days, he had turned himself into a true friend; he had become, unlike Ombri and Aurora, someone she completely trusted.

Actually, he had become that the day he rescued her at the red gate.

“I think I’ll remember you,” she said softly. “I think Ombri is wrong.”

There was a rattle at the door and Aurora stepped in, all blond hair and smiling face. “Oh, good, I was afraid you’d all be asleep by now,” shes aid. “Daiyu, we have to get your things ready. Xiang wants you to join her tomorrow morning.”

THE NIGHT HAD been virtually sleepless, so Daiyu was exhausted, but extreme nervousness kept her wide awake the following morning as she prepared to leave. Ombri had departed early on some mysterious errand, but Aurora and Kalen stepped out of the house behind Daiyu. Kalen was carrying a small suitcase filled with an assortment of Aurora ’s castoffs, although Aurora had assured Daiyu that she’d never have to wear anything they’d assembled.