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Soldier’s Boy walked away from them. His personal light went with him. He walked toward the wall of the cavern. There the ceiling dropped low, but he ducked down and walked hunched for a time. The dim circle of light around us showed me little more than the stony floor in front of his feet. His back began to ache and I wondered where he was going and why. When the ceiling of the cavern retreated, he straightened up and stood tall again. He closed his eyes, then breathed out hard, and suddenly light burst into being all around me. It was no longer his personal light that shone. We were in a different chamber, separate from the long rift we had been following. The cavern we were in was as large as a ballroom, and everywhere I looked, the walls sparked with crystals. Somehow Soldier’s Boy had woken light from them, and it illuminated the cave.

The crystals glittered brightly as he drew closer to them. They were wet and gleaming and appeared to be growing from the walls of the cavern. Some were quite large, their facets easy to see and other were tiny, little more than a sparkle against the cavern’s dark wall. Soldier’s Boy seemed to consider them for a long time; then he chose a protruding crystal structure and broke it from the wall. I was surprised at how easily it came away, and also at how sharp it was. Blood stung and dripped from his fingers as he carried it away from the wall and back to the center of this cavern.Advertisement

There was a pool there, as dark as the crystals were brilliant. Soldier’s Boy lowered himself down to sit beside it. He dipped his fingers in it and they came up inky with a thick, slimy liquid. He nodded to himself. Then he began to systematically prick himself with the point of the crystal and then dab some of the noxious liquid onto each tiny cut. The cuts stung, but the slime itself did not add to the pain. In fact, it seemed to seal each tiny wound as he dabbed it on.

He worked systematically, doing both his arms from the shoulders down and then the backs of his hands. He was working on his left leg, jabbing and dabbing, when I became aware that a new light had joined us in the cavern. It was yellow and flickering. Olikea had wedged two burned torch ends together to make one that was barely long enough for her to hold without scorching her hand. As she drew near to us, she exclaimed in sudden pain and then dropped it. She no longer needed it. The light of the crystals glittered all around us still.

“I didn’t know where you had gone. It worried me. Then I saw the light coming from here. What are you doing?” she demanded.

“What you suggested. Becoming a Speck, so the People will accept me,” he replied.

“This is only done to babies,” she pointed out to him. “During their first passage.”

“I am not a child, but this is my first passage. And so I have determined that it will be done to me, even if I must do it myself.”

That silenced her. For a time, she stood watching him prick my flesh with the broken crystal and then dab the wound with the black slime. Her feet were wrapped now in clumsy shoes made from the old fabric that Likari had found. Her failing torch added a flickering yellow to the light around us and was reflected in the glittering crystals that surrounded us. As it began to die away, Olikea asked quietly, “Do you want me to do your back?”

“Yes.”

“Do you…how do you wish it to be? Like a cat? Like a deer? Rippled like a fish?”

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“You may decide,” he said, and then bowed his head forward on his chest to present his full back to her. She took the broken crystal from him. She worked swiftly as if this were something she had done before. She made a series of punctures, then daubed them all with a handful of the thick, soft muck. The pain seemed more intense when someone else did the jabbing.

I heard a sound behind us and became aware that Likari had joined us. “The fish is cooked. I took it away from the fire,” he said. Uncertainty filled his voice.

“This won’t take long. You may eat your share,” Olikea told him. But the boy didn’t leave. Instead he hunkered down carefully on the shard-strewn floor and watched.

When Soldier’s Boy’s back was finished, Olikea had him stand, and did his buttocks and the backs of his legs. Then she came around in front of him and regarded him critically. “You haven’t done your face yet.”

“Leave it as it is,” he said quietly.

“But—”

“Leave it. I am of the People, but I do not wish any of them to ever forget that I came to them from outside the People. Leave my face as it is.”

She puffed her cheeks, her disapproval very evident. Then she handed him back the crystal. “The food will be cold, and our fire dying,” she observed, and turned and left him there. pqdm.com