Book 1 of Rebirth of the Technomage Saga: Earth's Awakening

Location:Seven Peaks — Command Center, Medicine Hall; Millford Branch

Date/Time:TC1856.09.02 – TC1856.09.06

Raven did not bring it to the council as a question, which was how everyone in the room knew what it was.

"Elian comes off the screening rotation," she said. "Effective now. He doesn’t assess candidates, he doesn’t sit relays, and nobody carries him a report to look at as a favor. If that’s happening informally, it stops today."

Taron set down the flatbread he had been eating, because Taron ate through most meetings and the fact that he stopped was itself a kind of comment.

"How long?"

"Until I say otherwise."

"That’s not a length."

"No, it isn’t." Raven put both hands on the table. "You want the reasons. There are two, and you’re getting both, because if I give you only one you’ll spend a month deciding which one I’m hiding."

Nobody spoke.

"First. He is a Pillar Soul. There are two confirmed on this continent, and the younger is nine years old, and four days ago he went out past his own limit and came back gray and bleeding from the nose because I asked him to. He came back because Maren Harren was there to pull him. If she hadn’t been — I don’t know. Nobody knows. Nobody has ever known, because nobody has ever done this." She let that sit. "We are building every plan we have on the assumption that we can reach downward. That assumption rests on two people. If I spend one of them screening farm children for a match that comes up negative forty times out of forty, and something goes wrong on the forty-first, then I have traded the planet for a fortnight of convenience. I’m not doing that. Argue with the arithmetic if you can find a flaw in it."

Silence. Thorne, who could always find a flaw and said so when he found one, did not say anything.

"Second," Raven said, "he’s nine."

Taron’s jaw moved.

"He is nine, and he has carried more than any adult in this room since he was six. He hears things none of us hear. He knew about the dark under this mountain before we did and sat on it alone because he didn’t want to frighten anyone. He assessed a boy four days’ ride south last month and felt the child hoping, and then had to be the one to say no." Her voice did not rise. "I’m his mother. I don’t get to be only the person who does the arithmetic. Both of those reasons are real, and I’d have pulled him for either one alone."

"I wasn’t going to argue," Taron said.

"You were thinking about it."

"I was thinking that it costs us, and that somebody in this room ought to say so out loud so it’s on the record and not in people’s stomachs." He picked the flatbread back up. "It costs us. There. Said." A pause. "And you’re right. Both times."

Mira spoke from the end of the table without looking up from her notes. "I’d have brought it to you this week if you hadn’t."

"On what grounds?"

"Sleep. Appetite. He’s stopped asking whether he did it right afterward, which is the part I don’t like." She made a small mark. "Children ask whether they did it right. When they stop asking, it’s usually because they’ve decided the answer doesn’t change anything."

Shen Wuyan, who had been listening with her hands folded, inclined her head fractionally.

"Seven hundred years," she said, "and I have watched a great many councils decide that a child was an acceptable instrument, always for excellent reasons, always temporarily." She let that hang exactly long enough. "It is the most ordinary decision in the world. I am glad to be in a room where it was not made."

"Then somebody has to give me the thing that replaces him," Raven said, "because I’ve just cut our assessment time from under a minute to whatever the next best method turns out to be, and I don’t have a next best method."

Lin Yue, who had said nothing at all so far, put her hand up about six inches, the way she did.

"I might," she said. "In four days. It won’t be good."

***

It was not good.

Lira Feng got the summons at Millford at dusk and was on a Guild rider’s spare mount before full dark, which she regretted comprehensively somewhere around the third hour, because she was forty-one and had spent the last two years behind a desk that Sera Voss used to sit at.

She still thought of it that way. She had tried not to. The desk had been reassigned to her along with the coordination role and the twelve-branch correspondence and the little brass tray for pending requisitions, and for the first six months she had moved the tray to a different corner every few weeks because she could not stand where it sat.

Healing, not healed. Lin Yue had said that about her once, in a report Lira was never supposed to read and had read anyway.

She arrived at Seven Peaks at midmorning, was fed, and was walked directly into the alchemy annex where Lin Yue had cleared four benches and covered the fifth with paper.

"I need a test," Lin Yue said, without preamble, which Lira had always liked about her. "For a thing I can’t describe, in a person who doesn’t know they have it, run by a practitioner who has never seen one, four days’ ride from anyone who has."

Lira put her bag down.

"Say the last part again."

"The test has to work in the field. Not here." Lin Yue’s hands moved over the papers. "I can build you something exquisite that works on this bench. I’ve done it twice this week. Both times I got to the end and realized it needs a formation table, a second-grade alchemist, and forty minutes of undisturbed silence, and there are eleven branches on this continent and four of them are a room and a curtain."

"Branch Nine is a room and half a curtain."

"Yes."

"All right." Lira pulled a stool over and sat on it heavily. "Then we’re not building a test. We’re building a screen. Something that’s wrong sometimes and cheap always, and it has to be wrong in the direction we can afford."

Lin Yue looked up.

"Say that properly."

"It should never miss one." Lira reached for the nearest sheet and turned it around to face herself. "If it says no, that has to mean no. If it says maybe, that’s fine, that’s a rider and four days and somebody’s afternoon. We can afford a hundred maybes. We cannot afford one no that was actually yes, because that one walks away and we never look at them again."

"That’ll flood us."

"It will," Lira agreed. "I’d rather drown than lose one."

***

They had it in five days instead of four, and it was ugly.

It came out as a two-stage thing, which offended Lin Yue’s sensibilities and which Lira defended on the grounds that a screen nobody could run was worse than a screen that was inelegant. The first stage was a paste — foxglove base at three-point-two percent, which Lira had built four years ago for something entirely unrelated and which turned out to hold spiritual residue better than anything in the compendium — applied to the inner wrist and left for a quarter of an hour. The second stage was a plate.

The plate was Silas’s contribution, and he was rude about the whole exercise for a full day before he handed it over. It was a palm-sized formation blank, unpowered, that a practitioner pressed against the treated wrist and read by the pattern the paste left behind when it lifted. Not a reading of the person. A reading of what the person’s presence had done to a compound over fifteen minutes.

"It’s a smudge," Silas said. "You are asking practitioners to make decisions based on a smudge."

"Yes."

"I want that written down. Not as an objection. As a description." He put the blank in Lira’s hand. "Because in four months somebody is going to ask why the screen has a nineteen percent false-positive rate, and I want the answer on file to be that it was designed to."

"Twenty-two," said Lin Yue, from the bench.

Silas closed his eyes briefly. "Wonderful."

They tested it on Maren Harren, who submitted to the paste with the expression of a woman being fussed over by people half her age, and who read as a clear positive at eleven minutes.

They ran it on Elian, once, with Raven standing in the room, because the screen was worthless if it couldn’t find a known Pillar Soul.

It found him in nine.

Then they ran it on forty-one people who were not Pillar Souls, and it flagged nine of them anyway, and Lira wrote the number down without flinching because she had asked for exactly this.

***

The first field week went out with the riders on the ninth.

By the fourteenth, the third stack had eleven names in it, which was more than it had held in the previous four months combined, and each needed somebody to go and look.

Lira went herself for two of them, because she was not going to sit at a desk she still thought of as Sera’s and send apprentices to do the part that mattered.

The first was a woman of sixty in a hill village who had been flagged at nineteen minutes, borderline, and who turned out to have spent thirty years working an antimony seam and carrying enough residue in her skin to fool a smudge. Not a Pillar Soul.

Lira spent an extra day there anyway. The woman’s hands had gone bad from the seam — the joints thickened, the grip failing, a slow deformation that had been happening for two decades while three separate healers told her it was the weather and one told her it was punishment. Nobody had ever told her what it actually was. Lira told her. Then she wrote out what could be done and what could not, which was a short list on one side and a long one on the other, and left a fortnight of paste and a note for the nearest branch.

"You came four days for this," the woman said, at the gate.

"I came four days for something else. This is what was here."

"Will you write down the antimony part? For the others working it?"

Lira had not thought of that, and was ashamed of not having thought of it, and sat down on a wall in the cold and wrote it on the spot.

The second was a boy of six, flagged strongly, in a farming settlement on the Millford road.

Lira could not resolve him.

She ran the screen three times. Strong at nine minutes, then nothing at all on the second run, then strong again on the third — and the third time she watched the paste lift and could not tell whether she was reading a pattern or her own hope, which was the specific failure she had spent five days designing the thing to prevent.

She stayed two nights. She watched the boy eat, sleep, argue with his sister, and lose a tooth. She asked his mother forty questions that a mother should not have to answer about a six-year-old and got forty ordinary answers.

On the second night she sat outside with the plate in her lap, and admitted to herself that a year ago she would have sent for Elian and had an answer by morning, and that this was what it now cost not to do that.

She wrote it up honestly. Cannot resolve. Screen inconsistent across three runs. No corroborating indicators. No exclusion either. Recommend re-screen in sixty days by a different practitioner, and that it not be me.

She sent it to the cold room, where it went into the third stack and stayed there.

***

Lin Yue found her at the Millford desk four days later with the correspondence backed up and the little brass tray full.

"You didn’t come back through Seven Peaks."

"I had eleven branches to answer and a screen to defend to nine practitioners who think it’s an insult to their training." Lira did not look up. "It is an insult to their training. It’s also the only thing we’ve got, so they’ll learn it."

Lin Yue sat down uninvited, which she did about twice a year.

"The boy on the Millford road."

"Is a six-year-old who lost a tooth." Lira’s pen stopped. "Or isn’t. That’s the whole content of my professional opinion after two nights and three runs — I don’t know — and I have spent twenty-two years being able to say better than that."

"You could have sent for—"

"No." It came out harder than she meant it. She set the pen down. "No. I know what that would have got me and I know what it would have cost him, and the Sect Master has made a decision, and I’m not going to be the one who quietly works around it because my afternoon would be easier." She pressed her thumb and finger against the bridge of her nose. "I sat outside that house, and I wanted him. I want that on the record too. Wanting it and not doing it aren’t the same thing, but I’d rather you knew I wanted it."

Lin Yue was quiet a moment. Then she reached across the desk, moved the brass tray about four inches to the left, and put her hand flat on the wood where it had been.

"There," she said. "Now it’s your desk."

Lira looked at the empty space for what felt like a long time.

"That’s very cheap sentiment," she said thickly.

"It’s extremely cheap. I’ve had four days and no sleep." Lin Yue withdrew her hand. "Send me the sixty-day list. All of them, not the good ones. And Lira — the eleven names this week. Two resolved, one unresolvable, eight still walking. Before the screen there’d have been none of them. You understand that’s the actual number."

"It doesn’t feel like a number."

"No," Lin Yue agreed, standing. "It feels like eight people we haven’t got to yet. That’s what being slow feels like. Everyone’s going to have to get used to it."

She left.

Lira turned back to the correspondence. Branch Four wanted a paste allocation she could not fill. Branch Nine wanted to know, politely, whether the coordinator understood that half a curtain did not constitute a treatment room. Somebody in the eastern network had written three pages arguing that a screen with a twenty-two percent false-positive rate was not a screen but a rumor with a formation blank attached, and Lira read it twice and found that she agreed with every technical point in it and would be implementing the screen regardless.

She wrote the sixty-day list last, because it was the one she did not want to write. Eleven names. Two struck through. One with a note beside it in her own hand: not me — send someone who has not already hoped about this child.

Eight without any notation at all.

She looked at the eight for a while. Somewhere out on four roads they were doing whatever people do — sleeping, arguing, losing teeth, working seams that were poisoning them — and not one of them knew that a woman at a desk in Millford had their name on a sheet of paper, or that the world had recently become a place where that mattered.

She worked until the lamp guttered, and did not move the tray again.