Day Five
(age twenty-four)
It was incredible how restless it was possible to become in such a small shared space.
Kelli ate her food, did her exercise, took her sponge baths, kept her mental notes on everyone, slept, watched Rowan’s media.
She was in the middle of one of those videos—a brightly colored romantic comedy called Chemistry, set on Triton—when Zhaleh knocked on the study doorway.
Kelli startled, pulling her headphones down.
Zhaleh’s hair was immaculate as always, and she wore a tight red jumpsuit today, with a strappy, asymmetrical top that barely covered anything at all.
Kelli looked at her and quickly looked away.
She’d been observing people covertly, but she didn’t want to have a staring problem.
“What?” she said, not looking.
“I’d like to chat for a bit, if that’s all right,” said Zhaleh.
“Why?”
“To see how you’re doing. You’ve calmed down since we first launched, but I like to make sure my heist teams are psychologically capable of doing a heist.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have blackmailed anybody,” Kelli said before she could stop herself.
Zhaleh tilted her head. She smiled just a little. They hadn’t actually discussed this with each other before; though she’d heard Rowan and Kelli’s fight about it just before the launch. “Did I blackmail anybody?”
“Conchita did, but you—” Kelli paused, flustered. Even after these two days of study, she didn’t actually know what had happened between Zhaleh, Rowan, and Conchita, not for sure. Conchita was the only one who had described that sequence of events to her directly. “You, um, told her. Didn’t you?”
“I did.” Zhaleh opened her bag and inspected the contents—they looked like more crystals, like the ones in her earrings, but bigger.
Kelli wasn’t sure why anyone would confess to a betrayal like that so boldly; or why they’d lug a whole bag of crystals around on a space mission.
“Now, I’m told you’re quite smart, in your way.
You’ve been here a few days now; you’ve seen how Conchita’s group operates.
Why do you think a girl like me might have done a thing like that? ”
“I don’t know,” said Kelli. There were lots of reasons. To get back at Rowan for something he did. To curry favor. To avoid a worse fate. Or maybe just out of the sheer joy of being evil. Zhaleh was so purposefully unreadable that Kelli couldn’t guess. She was pretty sure even Rowan couldn’t.
“Well, you can keep thinking about it. Now, I know this mission is hard for you. I wanted to offer a little wizardry that might help you think more clearly.” She pulled out a crystal, a big blue hexagonal one, and flourished it. “A crystal healing. I’m trained in the art.”
Kelli goggled at her. For a second, irrationally, she thought about the mermaid with the fake healing crystal. But Zhaleh couldn’t have known about that; it wasn’t a real Ship of Fools episode. “That’s pseudoscience,” she stammered. “Not even pseudoscience—it’s superstition.”
Some people in real life did try to use crystals for healing—but not in the Jovian system, and not in most other civilized places, either.
Religion was a concept that had only imperfectly made it out of Earth.
Kelli had read about the old days when people worshipped gods; she’d dutifully done her school readings about Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the local polytheistic faiths that came before them, especially the one that the planets were named after.
The Island of Lesbos, Kelli had once read, wasn’t far from the place where those gods had came from.
People still devoutly practiced many of those religions on Earth.
But there was something about them that seemed inextricably tied to the planet itself, its land and its weather, its seasonal agriculture and its brilliant blue skies.
Unmoored from those origins, on Mars and Venus, the religions that humans brought with them had mutated into a thousand unrecognizable cults.
Past Mars, past the asteroids, they’d fallen away altogether.
People were just people, in this part of space, making meaning out of their lives as best they could.
It was one of the reasons why Inspiration was so careful to create stories everyone knew; a way of filling in the empty space that once held those shared myths, to keep people feeling like they were all part of the same thing.
“Sure it is,” said Zhaleh. “But it’s structured, it’s sensory, it has a soothing effect. Worth a try, right? If it’s not real, it can’t hurt you.”
Kelli scowled at her, but she nodded. Goofing around with some crystals might be more interesting than watching more media.
It might even help her figure out about Zhaleh.
If Orlando was in the awful cave with the deep-sea creatures, and his mermaid came to him while he was still in his chains, offering to show him her healing crystals in action—still playfully refusing to admit that the crystals weren’t real—Orlando might agree.
He’d play along so he could learn what made his captors tick.
“Just stay still and try to relax,” said Zhaleh, “and I’ll show you what I’m doing. Are you right- or left-handed?”
“Right,” said Kelli.
“All right. Now take a deep, deep breath. That’s it.
” Kelli breathed as deep as she could, and Zhaleh picked up a rough sphere of something pale and sea-green.
“I’m not going to touch you. You’re just going to keep breathing, and I’m going to set these crystals around you in a grid.
This first one is a green Uranian feldspar; it’s come a long way to be here.
This is a stone that clarifies and directs emotions.
It won’t change what you’re feeling; it won’t siphon those feelings away.
It’s more like clearing the silt out of a pipe, giving them space to move a little more freely and with purpose. ”
She held the stone carefully, about a foot behind Kelli’s shoulder blades, and then she let go.
“Now this,” she said, taking an irregular, yellow-pink cube, “I like to think of as the feldspar’s opposite number. It clarifies thoughts more than feelings. It helps you sort through things. It brings the light in. We’ll put that one over your heart.”
Zhaleh placed the cube, in that same careful manner, somewhere vaguely in front of Kelli’s chest. When she let go, the stone hovered there. Kelli frowned at it skeptically. It seemed obvious to her that rocks, even pretty rocks, could not do any of these things.
“This, by your left hand, is a moss-granite, dug from under a mountain on Ganymede. That’s where we’re going.
Moss-granite grounds us; it reminds us of the necessary structures and limitations that we work within.
And by your right hand, I’m putting a jasper drop.
That’s a fiery stone. It focuses the will. ”
Kelli couldn’t help but snort in derision. “You think I need more fire?”
“It’s a metaphor. Maybe not more fire, but seeing more clearly what already burns within.”
Kelli shivered. She thought she saw her metaphorical fire perfectly well. It already scared her to death. She didn’t try to move, though, as Zhaleh placed both stones at either side of her. They drifted slightly in the air currents, twisting around her, tempting her to twist with them.
“Just two more,” said Zhaleh. She pulled out the big blue crystal that she’d showed her first and held it up to the light.
“Europan turquoise, cut straight out of the ice shelves, right where the light meets the ocean. This one is for what you want, for what you believe in, for your wildest dreams. This one goes over the crown of your head.”
“My wildest dream is to not be on this spaceship,” Kelli said, but Zhaleh just chuckled.
“And this, to finish it off, below your feet.” She pulled out a final stone, and even Kelli, who wasn’t taking this very seriously, frowned at the sight of it.
This one had an irregular off-roundness like the shape of an asteroid, and its color was a pitted pitch-black, so black that the light didn’t even glint off of it.
Something about it unnerved her, and she drew her feet up slightly.
This didn’t seem to bother Zhaleh, who placed the stone carefully just where her feet had been.
“What’s that one?” said Kelli uneasily.
“Ionian volcanic glass, not from the sulfur plains but from one of the darker, basaltic regions. We call it a shadow stone. For what you’ve been through; for what you fear; for what’s standing in your way that you don’t want to look at.
This one and the turquoise balance each other, opposite poles.
The other four spin them out in the other two axes, to help you find your way through. ”
“I don’t like it,” said Kelli, drawing her feet up higher.
Zhaleh smiled, and it looked to Kelli like a genuine smile: mirthful, but gentle. “It’s just a rock. It can’t hurt you.”
Kelli didn’t protest again. She floated there uncomfortably while Zhaleh reached to a side pocket in her crystal bag and drew out a small flashlight. “Are you light sensitive?”
“Not hugely. Just don’t shine it right in my eyes.”
“Okay. Now this is a full-spectrum bulb, calibrated to give the frequency mix of a ray of sunlight on a clear Earth day. High-end parks use this mix to light their atriums. People have a primal response to this light mix, even people born far away from Earth. We remember it in our cells. So I’m going to use this light to activate each of the crystals.
You just float there and breathe. Slow. That’s it. ”
Kelli took slow breaths, uncertain, as Zhaleh carefully reached over her head. With a flick of a button, she sent a beam of light through the blue crystal.
Kelli gasped as the shower of light prismed over her.