Andrea Höst: Gratuitous Epilogue [Touchstone: Extras]

Inisar described how the Nuran Setari gain their strength, which sounds to me much like a cross between Native American Spirit journeys and sensory deprivation. When they were vetting apprentice Setari, the Nurans started them off at around five years old, gave them mental exercises about thinking about the world around them for nearly eight months, and then put them through five more months of ordeals where they try and focus their own connection, and if they don’t succeed by then they’re finished as an apprentice and go back to their former lives. It’s a terribly young age to be doing things like that. The Nurans believed that if you didn’t learn very young you would be incapable of learning, and they’re not sure if my enhancement means they’re wrong, or if learning when older is only possible when a touchstone is involved.

There won’t be any more Setari adoptions for a while. Plenty of the Setari are in relationships (mostly with other Setari) but not ready for kids. Nils and Zee are very much in a relationship now, but they’ve no immediate plans to move out of barracks, and keep going off together on their weekends. They’re both really really private people and they want time alone together.

Sometimes I envy them all that time alone, but only sometimes.

April 10

Islands

Contact with Tare and Kolar was made only two days after the last time I wrote. It took them another few days to scan the last short section and calculate an end to end run of both routes, but after that the floodgates opened.

It takes between three and five hours to get through now, instead of just one, and there are long patches where nothing’s aligned enough to get through, but we’re actually a lot less cut off than everyone feared we’d be. They’re now trying to work their way to the Pillar where Second Squad was stranded to see what condition it’s in. And also to Channa, since there’s been people stuck at the mining installation there.

Tare and Kolar (and the Channan staff) didn’t have any convenient touchstones to let them check the condition of other planets, and so for four months could only guess what had happened. Kolar had had no warning whatsoever, and from Tare’s point of view I’d vanished and a bunch of people had gone haring off into deep-space to look for me and then all of the Ena had melted down and they could only hope it wasn’t the beginning of the end. They didn’t know if I was alive, whether the colony had survived, or whether all of Muina had been destroyed. At least the decrease in Ionoth numbers and the slacking of the tears into real-space gave them hope. Of course, once Muina’s collected four months of news had been transmitted, there was a media frenzy over the whole drama of my kidnapping by the Cruzatch, and the risky destruction of the malachite marbles, and then the short eternity of picking collapsed building off the top of me and hoping they got to me before I died.

And Lira.

I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like to be in Lira’s position at her age. Used as a tool to destroy her world, trapped in a half-life, doing what she could to sabotage her captors, and then after connecting with me finding that everyone she knew was dead and she was part ways responsible, and that she might possibly not really be alive. And now a new life, a soap-bubble existence which nobody can definitively say is real.

There have been articles talking about how dangerous Lira and I are – the things we could be used for – but mostly it’s open adulation. The MBC , wanting to keep on KOTIS' good side, are careful never to be too full-on, but even they maintain a Caszandra-Watch page which is constantly updated with the latest images and stories about me and my family. And a lot of that is now about Lira, who is after all a gorgeous Lantaren who helped save them all. There’s now a couple of billion people fascinated by the idea of her.

Naturally some pretty unvarnished opinions of her have leaked out of the talent school, but these are very inconsistent. Some people claim she’s traumatised and describe her as clinging to Ys for support (Ys is still getting positive press for being so brave during my dragon day). Others say Lira’s cold and arrogant – the classic evil Lantaren. But mostly she’s seen as a true Lantaren princess and it’s almost expected and accepted that she be a bit imperious and pampered. I make sure to check the news and keep alert to what stories are going around about them. Lira finds anything about her, positive or negative, to be annoying, but doesn’t seem too caught up by it at the moment – the people immediately around her are more interesting. Rye gets embarrassed and Ys occasionally infuriated. Sen’s still a little too young to comprehend more than the fact that everyone knows who she is and they wave at her when we go into town. And then new pictures of us show up on the interface. Living on an island was a damn good idea.

For me the first news of reconnection to Tare came along with a handful of emails from Zan. They were typical of Zan’s calm formality, with just a thread of uncertainty beneath. I think in a way she must have been trying to help me by writing them, creating an expectation for me to be alive to read them. Or maybe she wanted some kind of sounding board, the same way I used to use my diaries. She needed someone to talk to.

Twelfth had been off-shift, asleep, when I fell down the Cruzatch-hole, and when KOTIS went to full alert upon Kaoren’s return they’d been stuck biting their nails for rather too long, then sent after Thirteenth and Fourteenth, who had been assigned to Maze Rotation. They were deep within the tangle of whitestone walls, working in two different locations to lower the chance of attracting roamers, and when Twelfth reached the maze space, Zan immediately ordered everyone back to Tare.

Twelfth had waited just within the maze space entrance, and when Thirteenth arrived had sent them back ahead. And then the first wave of distortion had hit. They’d felt it in the Ena of both Tare and Kolar, not to such a paralysing level as Muina, but enough to make clear that something was wrong and only getting worse.

Zan’s email covers all this in a sentence, but I’ve since watched the mission log, and listened to the conversation between her and Kin Lara, the sleepy captain of Fourteenth who I mainly remember as being a friend of Els'.

"Go ahead, Namara," he said, as Fourteenth raced around the twists and bends of the maze [4] Zee tells me that it’s a very bad idea trying to fly over the top of the walls there. .

"We’ll wait," Zan replied. "I can move us fastest."

"Not the time to ignore protocols," Lara said, still sounding sleepy and unperturbed, almost amused, even though his squad were running for their lives. "You’re usually more sensible, Zan."

The next wave of distortion hit them then, underlining his point. Lenton’s log shows me Zan’s face, white, expressionless. Then she says: "Hurry," and sends her squad through the small house space which leads to the maze space, and then into near-space, then she picks them up and flies all-out, as fast as the strongest Telekinetic in the Setari can manage, back to the gate-lock.

Fourteenth made it to near-space before the storm which followed the destruction of the malachite marbles hit. If they’d still been in the maze space they would have been completely lost, since it’s now shifted out of alignment with Tare’s near-space (this bothers me a lot because no-one’s seen Ghost since). Twelfth, waiting in real-space at the gate-lock, couldn’t do anything when the gate – usually invisible – suddenly washed bright white and roared power at them.