Kip shrank into himself. “Um, you really don’t have—”
Teia put her hands on both sides of Kip’s face and kissed him full on the lips. When she released him, he looked so poleaxed that she burst out laughing.
“Ooh, I want to make a ridiculous bet,” Lucia said.
“No!” Kip said, jolted out of his stupor, hands rising defensively.
“Not with you, Kip!” Lucia said, laughing.
Kip put his hands over his face. “Let me die now, please.”
Cruxer threw his arm around Kip’s shoulders as the rest of the youths began to slow down and turn around to see what was so funny. “They do it to us all, Kip. They do it to us all.”
Chapter 55
Gavin was out skimming at dawn again. Today he was alone. Karris had been training some of the Seers in self-defense yesterday, and a storm had kicked up in the evening, trapping her in their little town on top of the volcano’s rim, Highland. Gavin yawned as the sun rose and took his eyes off the waves at just the wrong second. The skimmer turned a bit to the side and Gavin’s hands came off the reeds.
The loss of speed made him pop up on the next swell. The skimmer landed sideways in a trough, and Gavin went flying. He hit the waves at breathtaking speed, skipped across the top of one, and then was crushed by another.
Gavin swam back to the skimmer, which was bobbing merrily in the waves without him, and, fully awake now, pulled himself up on the deck. What had he told the Third Eye? Something about not making mistakes often? He laughed quietly at himself. Then froze. She’d asked him if he was a swimmer; he’d said only when he made mistakes skimming; and she’d said, “I see.”
Note to self: when a Seer says, “I see,” pay attention.
He’d been heading west this morning, to start part of his grid from within sight of the Red Cliffs. He’d already been skimming for an hour.
The Third Eye had told Gavin, “Three hours east, two and a half hours north. Get there before noon.” Five and a half hours from now put him an hour and a half after noon.
If she was talking about right now, there was no way he could get there before noon. So she must not have been talking about…
‘You like to cut corners, don’t you?’ she’d said.
Clever witch. Playing with him.
He didn’t need to go directly east and then directly south, he needed to go southeast… He did some figuring, his fingers flicking little imaginary beads. Taking the hypotenuse would take him… Four hours. Noon exactly.
Of course.
So he turned his little craft southeast and raced the sun.
Hours later, noon was nearly on him, and he thought he must have gone the wrong way or misunderstood the directions. It was a big sea, after all. But there was nothing for it but to keep going.
And then the sea changed, began to get calm. There was something odd about it. Gavin stopped the skimmer. He looked to either side. There was something like a shadow on the waves. It was as if a thin cloud were blocking the sun and he could see the edges of that shadow in the difference in color of the waves. But there were no clouds in the sky. This was some kind of slick, like oil calming the waters.
Gavin knelt on the edge of the skimmer and put his hand in the water and scooped up a handful. It was like thin slush, except it wasn’t cold. Gavin looked at it closely. There were thousands, tens of thousands of tiny spars, like needles, like fragments of snowflakes, and they were all lined up the same way. He couldn’t see blue, couldn’t draft it. If he could, maybe there’d be no mystery here. He smelled the water: salt, and the faint ephemeral smell of resin, the chalky mineral scent of blue luxin.
The waves were awash in blue luxin, trying to form itself in crystals, somehow spontaneously coming together, rather than breaking apart and breaking down in the sunlight as it ought to.
As his hand cupping the water turned, he noticed that so, too, did the little spars, like a compass needle. One end pointed toward the outer edge of the slick. So the other way had to be pointing toward the center—where he needed to go.
He was as ready as he could be. He strengthened and narrowed the pipes that propelled the skimmer, thought again, and made them join to one pipe. He’d want a hand free. Then he skimmed toward the center.
The water thickened, though his scoop extended beneath the sludge and still propelled him at good speed. Then it thickened more until he could see that the scoop pipe was swirling the water like a spoon stirring soup.
Then the crystals of blue luxin began to clump together and form larger sheets. His passage made a sound like rumpling rice paper as he broke the luxin ice.
Ahead, he could see a blue island, floating where no blue island should be. It bobbed very slowly in the great, crusty water, cracking huge sheets of the luxin ice with every move. Some of it melted immediately in the sun, but other parts had become so infused with blue luxin that they held.
Then he saw something that made him stop drafting altogether and freeze. He was in shallows now, solid luxin ice floating maybe one pace beneath the waves. With that white background, he could see that there were bodies floating in the shallow waters. Dozens—no, hundreds—of bodies, bobbing at the surface, naked and encrusted with crystals.
Oh hell. Not bodies. Blue wights. Not dead, but absorbing the sun and the luxin. The water was so heavily infused with luxin it was helping them make the transition to blue wights.
“Get there before noon,” the Third Eye had told him. Gavin suddenly had a sick intuition of what happened to the sleeping wights at noon.
He drafted an oar and maneuvered his way through the bobbing, unconscious wights until he reached the shore, his heart thundering in his chest. He threw his anchor ashore and jumped onto the ground. It was solid blue luxin.
It made an alien landscape. There were crystals as long as Gavin was tall. The action of the waves had shattered many of them, but the spars in general were pointed in the same direction—inland, always inland.
So Gavin began running. His goal was a huge spire at the center of the island, perhaps half a league distant. At first it was slow going, the ground simply so broken that he had to jump from gnarled crystal to odd glittering beam. Periodically, the ground would crack and a jet of blue crystals was shot into the air. Above, odd tornadoes circled, twisting top to bottom in mesmerizing mathematical motion. Twisted triangles like glass birds gyred on invisible zephyrs.
Crystal crunched beneath his feet like snow, but left glass behind, taking the heat and pressure of even his steps to make greater perfection.
As he moved inland, the order of blue began to assert itself more strongly.
He saw one spar, which was sticking at an angle to the ground, shiver. Then it slid even with the ground, seamless. The entire island here was flat, perfect. Ahead of him, he saw twelve shards of crystal, pillars arranged in a circle around the base of the great spire.
The twelve pillars were each three paces tall. As Gavin approached the nearest, he saw inside it the most perfectly formed blue wight that he’d ever encountered. It had fully sloughed off its human skin. In its place was a woven tapestry of gems, the weaves themselves altering for exactly how much motion the muscles beneath demanded of the skin at each point. It was terribly beautiful, like someone had painted a masterpiece with blood.
Gavin didn’t hesitate. He ran toward the central spire. There were stairs up the outside of the thing in an odd square. No railing. Gavin ran up them, two at a time.