Cracked Empties and the Ridge She Wanted Back

I set the bead against my temple and the reef-valley opened.

Salt air. The sort that comes off water moving slow over living stone. A cousin’s hands in front of me working something off a rock face, kelp or growth, I couldn’t tell which. I could smell the cousin’s skin. Warm. The particular warmth coast cousins had, from what Kaira told me once, or told somebody who told me, I couldn’t now remember which.

The casing cracked dry against my temple. The filament inside went slack and the reef-valley went.

I put the empty on the shelf with the others. Twenty-three up there now. I’d been cracking one every few days. At that rate the reef-valley would be gone in another month, and I’d have nothing of hers that I hadn’t opened.

One legitimate left, sealed in the pouch under my mattress. I hadn’t touched that one. A Kaira-weave went for twelve trade-beads at the Metsan counter, and I didn’t have twelve of anything.

The reef-valley was where I’d grown up, or near enough. A coastal settlement, three dozen cousins, living stone and salt water. Gone now, the way settlements went when the brush took them. I hadn’t been back in six years. The bead was as close as I could get.

* * *

The trade-stop was three buildings and a yard. Metsan ran the bead counter out of the east building. I stood outside at first light, waiting for Torni to bring Kaira back from the ridge-camp. She’d been at the ridge two days doing a weave. When she came back they’d rinse her and put the new carry-beads on the counter.

My job was the road. Bandits worked the brush between Metsan and the coast, and a weaver walking alone was worth the taking. I walked beside Kaira. That was the work. Three years of it now, and I still couldn’t have told you what she looked like at sixteen, before the rinses started. The filament-line at her temple had been thicker then. I’d seen the early weaves. A cousin with more thread to draw from.

Torni brought her in on the second count. Kaira walked fine. She always walked fine after a weave. The walking was the body’s. The rinse only took what the filament held. She looked at me and didn’t know my name.

“Veksi,” I said.

“Veksi,” she said back. Testing it. She’d known me three years. Every rinse took me too.

“You were at the ridge.”

“Was I?” She looked at her hands. Her fingers had the fine chalk the ridge-rock left on skin. She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “I suppose I was.”

Torni came out with the bead-tray. Six new carry-beads, sealed, labelled in Metsan’s short-hand. He didn’t look at me. I was road-work. He took the tray inside and locked the counter.

Kaira stood in the yard. The sun was on her face and she didn’t know where she’d been. She’d find out later, or she wouldn’t.

* * *

Night. My quarters, the small room at the back of the west building. Kaira knocked. She wasn’t supposed to be out after counter-close, but the rinse left her restless. Left a lot of weavers restless, the other guards said.

“Can I come in.”

Not a question. She was already through the door.

“Sit,” I said.

She sat on the floor. One chair in the room and I was in it. She folded her legs under her and picked at the hem of her coat. Metsan-issue, good wool, trade-stop quality. They dressed their weavers well. A weaver who looked poor didn’t sell beads.

“I need you to do something,” she said.

“You need a lot of things.”

“This is different.” She stopped picking at the hem. “There’s a bead. One of mine. From before. I want it back.”

“Before what?”

“Before Metsan. Before the counter. Before—” She stopped. The rinse took the autobiographical material first. She couldn’t tell me what she was before because the filament didn’t hold it anymore. “Before I was this, whatever this is. When I was someone who kept things.”

“Kaira. You don’t remember being that person.”

“No. But I know she existed.” She leaned back against the wall. “The Hall records have my intake seal. I was fourteen when Metsan took the contract. Fourteen years of keeping things. Days, names, faces. Whatever a fourteen-year-old keeps. And then they started rinsing and I haven’t kept a single thing since.”

Her hand went to her temple. The filament-line there was thin. Weavers’ filaments thinned over time, the rinse did that, or the infirmary-cousins said it did, and I’d seen it enough to credit them.

“I want one bead,” she said. “One. From before the rinses. Is that so much?”

The floorboards were cold through my boots. The trade-stop heating ran on enzyme-fuel and it had been low for a week. I should have said no. The job was the road. Carrying beads in my pocket wasn’t the job.

“Which bead?” I said.

“The northern ridge. A ridge-walk at first light.” She leaned her head back against the wall. “I asked Torni once what my early weaves were about and he told me that one. He shouldn’t have. He was drunk. But he told me, and I’ve been carrying the shape of it since. The rinse takes the memory but it doesn’t always take the wanting. I don’t know why. I want that ridge and I don’t know what’s on it.”

She reached into her coat and brought out a small cloth pouch. Opened it. Inside, a handful of small stones, red, polished, the sort the mountain cousins used for trade-coin.

“These will pay for it,” she said.

I looked at the stones. Good stones. Mountain ruby, or near enough that a fence would take them.

“Why me?”

“Because you go to the coast-stop next week. The supply run.” She picked at the hem again. “And because you still have that reef-valley bead. I know you do. You haven’t cracked it. I can tell. You carry it different from the empties.”

She was right. I did carry it different.

“Nobody’s kept a legitimate weave as long as you’ve kept that one,” she said. “You know what it’s worth. You understand why I want one back.”

She didn’t know the reef-valley was the place I’d come from, or near enough. She couldn’t. She’d woven the bead herself, from the reef-valley, before the rinse took the memory of being there. The bead held my home and she’d forgotten she’d ever visited it.

“All right,” I said.

She handed me the pouch. Our fingers touched. Her skin was cool. The rinse lowered body-temperature, the infirmary-cousins said, and I’d noticed it enough times to believe them.

“Thank you,” she said. She got up. Went to the door. Stopped there.

“The northern ridge,” she said. “First light. That’s the one.”

“I heard you.”

“Good.” She turned back. “Veksi. If you can’t get it, that’s all right. I’d rather you came back in one piece than brought me a bead.”

“I’ll come back.”

“I know you will. That’s why I asked you.”

She left. I sat with the pouch of stones in my hand. They were warm from her coat. I put them in my pocket and didn’t sleep for a long while.

* * *

The coast-stop was a day’s walk east. I went with the supply cart, ordinary enough that Torni didn’t question it. Enzyme-fuel and wool and dried fruit going out, empty jars and trade-coin coming back. The cart went once a week.

The fence worked out of a lean-to behind the chandler’s. Her name was Saura. Cropped hair, broad across the shoulders, hands going through beads in a flat tray the whole time I was talking. Marks scratched in the wood of each compartment. The thick-wax ones with the proper seal were legitimate. The rest weren’t. One or two you could see the filament right through the casing.

“Looking or selling?” she said.

“Both.” I put the pouch on her table. “Mountain ruby. I want a specific weave in trade.”

She picked up the pouch. Spilled the stones into her palm. Looked at them. Then she laughed. Not a kind one.

“These are glass,” she said.

“What?”

“Glass. Good glass, whoever cut them got the colour right. But glass.” She set one on the table and tapped it with her fingernail. The sound was wrong. Too high, too short. “Mountain ruby rings longer. Hear that? That’s glass.”

I heard it. Picked up a stone myself. Cold now, not warm from Kaira’s coat. She’d given me a pouch of fakes and hadn’t known. The Metsan clerks had swapped real for glass at some point, and Kaira, who couldn’t remember what she owned because the rinse took that too, had never noticed.

“Where’d you get these?” Saura said.

“A cousin gave them to me.”

“Tell your cousin she’s been had. Glass for ruby, all season. Three sets I’ve seen now.” She pushed the stones back across the table. “Trade-stops swap them out. Weavers can’t tell, the rinse takes the memory of what they own.” She went back to sorting. “You still want the weave?”

“What’s the damage?”

“Eight trade-beads for a legitimate early Metsan, and I haven’t got one.” Her hands moved through the tray. “I’ve got a bootleg. Northern ridge, first light. Early, Kaira’s hand, if I’m reading the seal right. Two beads. Copy of a copy. Copy-fatigue, possible embedding. You take the risk.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Two beads.”

“I’ve got two.” I had three. I wasn’t telling her that.

Paid her from my belt-pouch. She handed me a small carry-bead, seal intact, but the casing a shade lighter than legitimate issue. Copies used thinner wax. The filament inside would be there, but flatter. The cold might not come through. And there could be other things in it, bootlegs carried residue from the copying.

Put the bead in my pocket next to the glass stones.

“Northern ridge at first light,” Saura said. “That’s the one?”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Good weave, if it’s the one I’m thinking.” She looked at me. “You know she won’t remember asking you for it.”

“I know.”

“Right.” She went back to her beads. “Don’t crack that one on the road. Bootlegs don’t keep well in the heat.”

* * *

Kaira came back from a coast-walk weave three days after I got in. She’d gone out with one of the other guards while I was on the supply run. Six new carry-beads on the tray. Torni took them to the counter. Then the infirmary-cousin came for the rinse.

I helped her onto the rinse-bed. Narrow cot in the east building’s back room, headrest, tray for the enzyme-wash. The enzyme came in a stone jug, the kind with a wax seal you broke fresh each time. I poured the measure into the tray and set the trough against her temple where the filament-line ran.

The room smelled of old enzyme and the sharpness the rinse left behind.

“Was it a good one?” she said. The weave.

“I wasn’t there. I don’t know.”

“You could ask Torni.”

“Torni doesn’t tell me things.”

She laughed, a little. “No. He wouldn’t, would he.”

I fastened the first strap. Her wrist. The leather was soft from use. The rinse-bed had strapped a lot of cousins down. I’d heard the old weavers didn’t need straps. They lay still on their own. Kaira wasn’t old enough for that yet. She still moved.

“Veksi,” she said.

“What.”

“I had a thought before the walk. I thought, I know that man. The guard. I know his name.” She looked at me. “I was right, wasn’t I. Veksi.”

“It is.”

“I forget it every time. After. Every time I have to learn it again. And every time, before the rinse, for a moment or two, I know it.” Her eyes were wet. She wiped them with the back of her hand, a rough wipe, not gentle. “That’s the thing about this. It takes the weave, but it takes everything near the weave too. If I spoke to you on the coast, I’ll forget what I said. If I felt something at the water, I’ll forget. Goes into the filament and the enzyme strips it off.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” She said it hard. “You crack a bead every few days. You get the reef-valley for a minute or two. I lose days, Veksi. Every rinse takes days.”

I fastened the second strap. Her other wrist. She pulled against it, not hard, just checking.

“I found your bead,” I said.

Her breath caught. “You did?”

“Bootleg. Copy. It’s all I could get. The stones you gave me were glass. Someone at Metsan swapped them out.”

“Glass.” She said it like she was tasting the word. “I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t. You can’t remember what you own.”

That came out harder than I meant. She flinched. I should have put it different. Too late now.

“The bootleg’s in my pocket,” I said. “I’ll give it to you after.”

“No.” She closed her eyes. “After I won’t know what to do with it. I won’t know why I wanted it. Keep it for me.”

“Kaira—”

“Keep it.” She opened her eyes. “If you give it to me after, I’ll look at it and not know what it is. I’ll hand it to Torni and he’ll put it on the counter. It’ll end up in somebody else’s temple, and they’ll crack it and walk my ridge, and I’ll still never have seen it.”

She was right. She was always right, in the minutes before the rinse, when she still had enough of herself to know what she was losing.

I set the enzyme-tray against her temple. The liquid started its work. Her breathing slowed. The infirmary-cousins said it didn’t hurt. I don’t know if that’s true.

“Veksi,” she said, just before.

“What.”

“Nothing. I wanted to say your name while I still had it.”

Her eyes closed. The filament-line at her temple went pale, then white, then back to ordinary skin. By first light she wouldn’t know the coast-walk, wouldn’t know my name, wouldn’t know she’d asked for the northern ridge.

I sat with her until she was under. Then I took the jug back to the shelf, wiped the tray, left the room. Torni was in the yard writing in the counter-ledger. He didn’t look up.

* * *

In my room I sat on the floor with the bootleg in my hand. The casing was thin. I could feel the filament through the wax, a fine thread, flat, carrying whatever Kaira had drawn from the northern ridge however many years back. The filament held the ridge-light and the rock and whatever she’d felt standing up there watching the day come in.

I held the bead to my temple.

The casing cracked. The filament touched skin.

The ridge was there. Not sharp, the copy had flattened the edges, but there. Rock under my boots. Cold before the sun. Dark still holding in the low ground. A cousin standing at the top. Young. Kaira at sixteen or seventeen, her third year, before the rinses had started thinning the filament-line. Her hands were empty. She was looking east.

The light came up from below the horizon, gold and slow. The filament carried the feel of it, being somewhere you’d walked to on your own legs and chosen to stand. The ridge was hers. The first light was hers.

The bead went slack. The ridge went.

I sat on the floor with the empty casing in my hand. Ninety seconds, maybe. Ninety seconds of a sixteen-year-old standing on a ridge she’d walked up because she wanted to see the sun come over. That was the bead she’d asked me to find. That was the day she’d wanted back.

And I had it, and she didn’t, and she’d told me to keep it because giving it to her would only put it on Torni’s counter.

Put the empty on the shelf. Twenty-four.

The legitimate reef-valley was still under the mattress, sealed. I wasn’t going to crack it. The reef-valley was where I’d come from, or near enough, and when I held that bead to my temple I could walk the shore again for ninety seconds. Smell the water. Feel the rock. Be there, for a bit.

Kaira had woven that one too. She’d been at my reef-valley once and drawn the light out of it and sealed it in wax. Held my home in her filament. The rinse had taken the memory of being there. But the bead kept it.

Somewhere in the Metsan counter there was a legitimate copy of the northern ridge at first light, if it hadn’t sold yet. Eight trade-beads. I had one. At my pay-count from the road-work I’d get there in three years, maybe four.

Kaira would have three or four more years of rinses by then. Three or four years of losing days. Three or four years of learning my name and forgetting it.

I lay down on the floor. The chair was hard and I couldn’t be bothered with it. Cold through my shirt. The heating was clicking the way it did when the enzyme-fuel ran low, same as the last three nights.