A Friend is a Stranger is a Friend

“Understanding the differences between us allows us to recognize what is worthwhile about ourselves. It would be all to easy to live a life taking how we behave and why we behave that way for granted. If we are exposed to different points of view, it allows us to make strange the familiar, and familiar the strange. Not all things that are different are wrong, and certainly not all of the things that we live with every day are there because they are perfect.”

-Helem Walochoulis, Sylva's Galactic Literature III teacher at the Academy

Rooting through the man's brain was easier than Sylva expected. It was far, far, far too easy. It was as though the power suddenly fit onto her like a glove, in the way it had never done before. This stealing, this theft of the patterns of another person's mind, the way this man's impulses suddenly overlaid her own, like two different understandings held at once, it was wrong, and right, and altogether too much. Sylva reeled back, clutching her own head which was pounding and screaming at her.

The man, tied to the tree, flopped limply to the side, his head drooping over his shoulder, and drool collecting along the corner of his mouth where the gag ended.

“Fuck, Sylva, what did you do to him?” Iri asked, somewhat concerned. Sylva sat on the bare ground, watching the world swim in front of her eyes. The pain was worse than she had ever felt before, leaping around in her brain. She could understand why her mentor had never had her do this to learn a language before now. It was too much. Too much.

Even Iri's words swam around, somewhat muddled by the way this new, stolen mind inside hers felt about the sounds as they came out. Sylva tried to process this and respond to Iri, but what came out was a half formed jumble of two languages.

“He should be alright,” she tried to say, but there were so many different problems that arose in the construction of that sentence alone that it all faded into incohesion.

Iri seemed even more concerned after that, and looked between Sylva and their victim, not sure what should be done. They would have to let this man go, and then they would have to get off this island, but both of those things brought their own complications, and Sylva was too much in the process of reintegrating her own mind, and dealing with the splitting headache that it gave her to do much of anything.

They all sat there, under the trees, as the light grew dimmer and dimmer above them, and the man slowly regained some of his senses. Sylva, too, got over her headache and spoke slowly enough that she could stay in New Imperial, without flashes of this new language, Valus, she thought it was called, jumping out of her mouth instead.

“We should let him go,” she finally choked out. Iri nodded. She removed first the gag from the man's mouth, and he breathed in choking gasps. It was good that he hadn't suffocated during this whole process, Sylva realized abruptly. They could have killed him, really, for real. But he was alive, and he started shouting as soon as he could speak.

Sylva covered her ears, the sudden noise driving spikes of pain through her brain. The understanding that came with that noise was more painful though, as her brain rewrote itself for comprehension of these sounds.

“You're children of evil!” the man was yelling. “I'll kill you!”

Iri was about to untie his arms, but hesitated as he screamed at her. She looked at Sylva for confirmation.

“You were able to tackle him before. Doubt he can do anything,” Sylva said wearily, the words coming only very slowly. Even though she had just napped fairly recently, she was still exhausted.

“At least get out of his way so he can't do anything when I let him go,” Iri said. Sylva obliged, and painfully got to her feet. She walked several meters away and leaned against a tree.

Iri pulled the ropes first off the man's arms and then off his legs, though the entire time she was attempting to free him, he lunged at her angrily, even if he was completely ineffective. She hopped back away from him once her task was complete, and he looked indecisively between them and freedom, considering. He made his decision and made a break for it, running and stumbling through the woods. Sylva and Iri did not pursue him.

“Did it work?” Iri asked, looking over at Sylva. Sylva had her eyes closed and her head tilted back against the side of the tree.

“I think so. God my head hurts.”

“Great. We should get out of here,” Iri said.

“Yeah,” Sylva replied, though there was absolutely no motivation in her voice. “Yeah.” She made no motion to leave.

Iri grabbed Sylva's arm, and Sylva let it be floppy and weak in her grasp. “Let's go.” Iri tugged on her. Sylva stumbled forward a few steps.

Iri practically had to drag her deeper into the woods. At the very least, they needed to get out of this spot. There was absolutely no chance that their recently freed captive wouldn't go and get a hunting party to come after them. That was the logical conclusion. It was what anyone would do. Neither of the two women had any desire to encounter what this planet's version of law enforcement was.

They treked through the woods until they came once again to the road, in a slightly different place than they had entered from, and, careful to avoid any people, they followed it for quite a ways. They walked until they were a safe distance away from where they had taken the man. They were now near the central hump of the island, almost directly below its highest point, though that was still not incredibly high. The hill became far steeper here, and Sylva and Iri sat to rest and collect their bearings. Their next step was obviously going to need to be to get off this island, which would involve stealing a boat. That would have to wait until true cover of night, and possibly night of the next day. After all, there probably would be people out looking for them during this night.

They settled down as much as they could, and formed a little base there. They didn't bother lighting a fire; it was plenty warm out, and they didn't have any food to cook, and it would have attracted needless attention. The one thing that was pleasant about night on this island was that, due to the proximity of the ocean, or perhaps due to the ecosystem of this planet, there were far fewer biting bugs than there would have been on an equivalently warm night on Emerri. For a while, Sylva looked up at the stars and contemplated the vast one way barrier out there in space, preventing their light from leaving.

They spent the night and the day in relative quiet, waiting until they could get the chance to steal a boat. It was good to have some rest, and to allow their wounds to heal at least a day's worth. They were both extremely lucky in that they seemed to have avoided infection thus far. Everything was hot and inflamed and tender, but no more than usual, and there was no puss or other alarming signals from beneath their stitches. Iri returned to wherever she had gotten food from that first day and brought back some more slightly under ripe vegetables.

Sylva's headache had mostly receded by time the next night rolled around. She hadn't been in a very talkative mood, but that hadn't meant her brain hadn't been stuffed to the brim with words. Every time she looked around her, she had this weird dual sensation of her own knowledge, and the language knowledge that going into the man's mind had brought.

The weirdest sensation came when she looked at Iri. Gender was baked into the structure of New Imperial. In New Imperial, every verb was conjugated with respect to the subject's gender: male, female, a neutral version for strangers, inanimate object(s), animal(s), groups of people, and so on. In contrast, this new language had none of that. There were two personal pronouns, but they related more to age than to gender. That was why when that man had spoken, it felt like he was calling them children. He had apparently decided that was what their “gender” was.

Sylva wondered what exactly the cultural dividing line where the age marker switched from one to the other. She certainly felt as though she were older than a child, and Iri was a couple years older than she was. She would just have to wait until she caught a glimpse of someone that sparked that new part of her brain into using the other pronoun. She couldn't exactly picture it in her head based on the knowledge that the word existed. She could know that that word was there, because of its natural contrast to the child-pronoun, and she could feel the child-pronoun when she looked at Iri, but she couldn't imagine backwards, thinking of the adult-pronoun and conjuring an image in her head.

They crept down the road under the cover of night, back towards the town that overlooked the lines of boats docked in the water. Though there were a few lights on in the houses, there was no one out. There seemed to be no security on the boats either. Presumably they weren't a thing that anyone would try to steal. This was a small island, and everyone living here already had their own boat. The docks creaked under their feet as they made their way through the jumble of masts and dark forms over the water. The air was calm, and the ocean lapped at the beach and rocked the wood they were standing on.

They chose a boat that seemed well stocked. Was it bad of them that they were stealing probably the entire livelihood of whoever owned this boat? Certainly. Was that going to stop them? No. Probably they would abandon the boat on some dock on a distant island, and perhaps it would eventually be returned to its owner. This planet must have some system for doing that. After all, boats probably drifted off to sea on occasion; if someone found one out on the open water, it seemed likely that they would have an authority to contact to deal with it.

Iri swung herself down over the side of the boat, and Sylva clambered in much more cautiously and awkwardly. They didn't turn on any lights to avoid attracting attention, which made Iri's fumbling around with the ropes difficult. At least they didn't need to worry about jerry rigging the motor or anything to get it started. Since neither of them knew how to sail, their intention was once again to have Sylva pull the boat along with the power. It was, in essence, the least elegant solution imaginable, and if they encountered a serious storm they would be in danger of dying from lack of knowledge, but the were hoping that it wouldn't come to that.

The computer system in the front of the boat booted up when Iri fiddled with it. It didn't appear to be connected to the engine in any way, as following the wires that came out of it led to a giant antenna that stuck comically upward from the top of the mast, and to a small solar panel and battery that were away from the motor and the small drive computer at the wheel. The display showed a map of the nearby area, and a multitude of flashing beacons superimposed over it, as well as an icon for their current position, and the jumble of boats sitting sleeping around them.

“Can you read this text?” Iri asked. Sylva came over to look at it. She squinted at it. There was a feeling, when she looked at the characters, that there was meaning there, and she could learn it much more readily than if she had not stolen from that man's brain, but as with the inability to connect the words in her brain to an image that she didn't have, the forms of the words on the screen didn't crystallize into meaning. Maybe they were supposed to, and she had done her little trick wrong, but it didn't matter. She wasn't about to go trying it again on someone else, on the offchance that she would gain the knowledge.

“No,” Sylva said. She sat heavily down on a bench in the front of the boat.

“You gonna help me untie?”

“I'm about to do all the work,” Sylva said. “Let me be lazy just for a minute. I'll keep a lookout.”

Even in the dim light from the stars and the computer screen and the town on the hill above them, Sylva could see the expression that Iri made. But she didn't argue, and went back to untying the boat from its moorings. When they were free at last, Sylva used the power to drag the boat out onto the open ocean. They didn't even bother unfurling the sails; it probably would have been more trouble than it was worth.

“So, where are we going?” Sylva asked, after they were a fair distance out from the island. “I can't read, so I don't know if it's worth going to the city.”

“I think we need to go there anyway,” Iri said. “Maybe not for information, but for supplies. We'll probably have to travel pretty far to get to that mind you've been feeling. Is it still watching you, by the way?”

“Constantly,” Sylva said. She had tried to ignore it for the most part. It wasn't that hard to ignore, since she really only felt its presence when she used the power, and when she was doing that she was trying hard to focus on that, and only that. “I can definitely follow where it wants me to go, so getting there shouldn't be too much of an obstacle.”

“Yeah, but let's go to the city first. We need food, and at least one change of clothes.” They had been wearing their same stolen tunics for quite a while now, and they were fairly dirty. Especially Iri, who had rolled around in the dirt while grabbing the man.

“We don't have any money,” Sylva pointed out.

“Are you even sure this planet has money?” Iri asked.

Sylva thought about this for a second. “Uh, there's definitely something.” When she thought about the feeling of making a transaction, of buying something, words sprang into her head, but she got the distinct impression that it was quite different than paying with charges in the Empire. She guessed they would see when they got to the main planet.

“Doesn't really matter either way. I assumed we would just continue to steal things.”

“Won't we be way more likely to get caught in a city?”

Iri wrinkled her nose. “It's either that or we starve for a while.”

“I'm not saying we shouldn't, I'm just saying we should be careful.”

“I never suggested otherwise.”

“Do you know which way I'm supposed to be steering us?” Sylva asked. She had the power gripped tightly in her hands. She was getting alright at this. Maybe there was a slight feeling that their boat was also being pushed along by that other presence, but she ignored it. She would get them to where they needed to go.

“We're heading towards this beacon,” Iri said, pointing out one of the blinking lights on the monitor at the front of the boat. “Surface based relay.”

“It's weird that they don't use satellites,” Sylva grumbled, looking up at the mast where the antenna poked up.

“This place doesn't seem to have a lot of big industry,” Iri pointed out. “And it takes a lot of infrastructure to make satellites worth it.”

“Whatever. As long as it works, I guess.”

“The one thing I'm worried about,” Iri said, “is if we're broadcasting our position data.”

“I'm sure we are,” Sylva said. “You saw that the other docked ships showed up on our display. But it's probably only line of sight stuff. Not global.”

“Then I'd guess we'd better hope no one sees us. Keep us away from other ships, will you?”

“Obviously. But it's not like everyone will be on the lookout for us or anything,” Sylva said.

“You never know.”

They sailed on through the night, and when morning came, Sylva was exhausted from her constant use of the power. She took a nap under the tarp of the sail, and Iri kept a watch for a while. Then when she woke, they continued on their journey. It took them all through the day, and the next night, to arrive at the island that seemed to be the major population center.

When they were a little way out, Sylva and Iri put up the sail, so that their boat would look less strange. A boat that came into port with neither engine nor wind power would probably be viewed with suspicion.

There were a stream of boats coming out of the harbor as the sun rose. Their sails dotted the horizon like birds. Sylva, pushing their little craft the other direction, watched them catch the bright morning sun and the cool breeze that was kicking up off the water. The world was fresh and alive. They were coming into port.

Iri pretended to be busy with the sail. There had to be a place around here where visiting boats could go, small ones, not the giant shipping vessels that Sylva could see lined up along the side of the island. She directed their boat into what felt like an absolute maze of wooden docks, all crammed full of small craft. Now that she could speak the language, and they were coming in on something more real than a life raft, it was probably more appropriate to dock in this way, rather than finding an empty spot along the shore to ditch at. And if it wasn't actually legal for them to park the boat there, well, they could always just steal another one.

Was it bad that she was getting a little too casual about stealing from people on this planet, who presumably most of them had nothing to do with Yan? Probably. Could she bring herself to care all that much? Not really.

There weren't very many people actually out walking the docks here. Sylva suspected that the boats she had seen out on the water were fishing vessels, and these ones were more personal boats that might not see daily use, so their owners were less likely to be out dealing with them at the crack of dawn.

Sylva pulled into a space, perhaps a little too quickly, because their little craft bumped the side of the dock with a sickening thud. She let go of the power with a sigh of relief. It took a lot of effort to keep them going. Much more so when she had to navigate in a series of complicated directions, rather than a straight line over the open water.

Iri tied the boat up, and they both got out. They weren't exactly pleasant looking. Their hair was greasy after a good few days without soap, their clothes were dirty, and they looked around themselves nervously as they shakily walked down the dock to the shore. There didn't appear to be a harbormaster or anyone enforcing which boats went where. Perhaps it was all first come first serve on boat parking, or perhaps there was a code of behavior that everyone followed. Either way, they had their bags on their backs, and they left the harbor area as quickly as they could.

The few people who were around paid them no attention whatsoever.

The city was arranged once again around the central hill of the island. This island was significantly larger than the first they had been to, and actually was composed of one very large hill in the center that stretched the length of the island, with a sort of dip in the middle.

Docks ringed the outer edge, but quickly gave way to warehouses, then paved streets with buildings. Out of respect for the fact that the buildings needed to be grouped closely together, they all had straight sides, unlike the rounded houses that had been on the smaller island. The windows on all of them were still large and extremely airy, even on the ones that looked like businesses.

The streets began to fill with people as the sun climbed high enough to crest over the tops of the buildings and glare off the windows. Small vehicles hauling carts full or empty, people walking on foot, and a scattering of bikes and larger vehicles mixed and mingled in the streets. Because the motorized traffic was relatively small in volume and usually in size, there seemed to be no regulation of the streets. People walked every which way, and simply moved to the side like a stream parted by a rock when a vehicle needed to inch its way through. Sylva somehow doubted that this was very safe, but they didn't see any actual collisions as they walked, just some near misses.

A near miss involved, worryingly, a man carrying a very young child in a sling on his chest. He was walking through the street, and a bicyclist going too fast swerved quite close. The man clutched his baby with both arms as he lept out of the way. Something in that action, the parental instinct, clicked in Sylva's brain. She realized now what the distinction between the two different pronouns in this language was- one was either a parent or a child. A mother or a daughter.

They didn't have an actual destination in mind, simply a place where they could “acquire” supplies, so they followed the general flow of people, sticking close together to not become separated as the crowd became denser. They were headed around the side of the city, back out towards the ocean again, but to the docks where the giant ships loaded and unloaded their wares. It was the ideal place for a market.

One curious thing that they passed was a long line of children, about thirty or so, all trailing behind one adult. Sylva and Iri ended up near them for a long stretch of road, so they had plenty of time to observe. The children, though they seemed to be between the ages of perhaps five and eight, were all remarkably well behaved and independent. There was no rope holding them together, or any enforced hand holding. In fact, at several points, children would wander away from the line for thirty seconds or so to amuse themselves with something they found on the street. The teacher, if that was what he was, seemed to be aware of this and paid it no mind, continuing to lead the group on. Every so often, they would come to a building, the teacher would call out the names of two of the students, and they would run into the building and come out with a third child, though the group kept on walking while they did this. At one point, a kid even went up to the teacher, said something, and then left the group completely, running back the way he had come.

Even for Sylva, who had grown up with all of the freedom and oversight that attending the Academy entailed, she thought this was incredibly strange. Eventually the children and teacher disappeared around a corner and were gone. They caught glimpses of similar lines further away, all headed in different directions. She wondered where the school was, for presumably that was where they were going.

They could hear and smell the market long before they saw it. People shouted and called, and the sound of loading and unloading of boxes on the ship rang out and echoed between the walls of the buildings. A few people were playing music on instruments that Sylva didn't recognize by ear, and she honestly couldn't tell if it was people playing different songs nearby, or if that was one song that just sounded really discordant. The whole air smelled like salty ocean water, and foods of all types cooking.

They came into the market proper, pushed along by the crowd. It was a massive square, and along the sides of the buildings, tents were set up. Near the center there were plenty of vendors, but no tents. Possibly because if the wind was too strong, they would be blown away without the support of a firm building behind them. But as Sylva watched, she saw a person drag a small cart through the crowd, pick a spot in the middle of the square, and start holding out his wares to sell. So perhaps it was simply that people in the middle had no need of even semi-permanent tents. Anyone could set up shop here.

The whole place was overwhelming, and Sylva was hungry. She dragged Iri over to the side where the most delicious smells were coming from. A man was frying fish up in a giant pan, pouring alcohol over it to set it on fire briefly, then serving it over a bed of rice and fruit. A customer came up and purchased one serving, in a wooden bowl. To buy it, the woman took from around her neck what Sylva had assumed to be jewelry, a long string of flat and colorful disks, pulled one disk off the string, and handed it to the vendor. She stood there and ate the meal, scooping the rice out of the bowl with her hands, then returned the bowl. When she gave the bowl back, the vendor traded her for a different colored disk.

In Sylva's eyes, it seemed really cumbersome to need to carry around physical representations of charges, or what she assumed to be equivalent to charges. But then again, maybe this world, being so disconnected, didn't have a central net where everyone's balances were logged and accessed.

She stood on her tiptoes to whisper to Iri. “We need some of those disks.”

“You'd be better at getting them than I would,” Iri said.

They wandered away from that stall and perused the market. People were selling everything. Electronics, clothes, jewelry, so much food, tools, what looked like instruments, boating equipment, books, pottery... If it could be hauled to the market, it was being sold there. There was even someone standing in front of a giant farm tractor, yelling and gesturing at it. Most people ignored him. How would anyone even get that home? There were several stands that were selling boats, however, which seemed to attract moderate interest. The little things were propped up on blocks, and people would come over and touch their hulls and make inquiries about the cost.

Sylva and Iri scanned the bustling marketplace for an easy target. Iri pointed at a girl of about ten, who was wandering around by herself with a string of the disks dangling loosely off the waistband of her tunic.

“I'm not going to steal from a kid, Iri,” Sylva grumbled.

Eventually, they concocted a plan. It was neither a bright plan, nor a fun one, but it would probably be enough. They watched one merchant who was selling onions out of long bins propped up at an angle tuck his disks into a bag underneath one bin. They split up, with Iri going around behind the vendor, and Sylva standing in front, pretending to inspect his onions. While she picked out a few and inquired about their price, she nudged an onion in the bottom of one of the bins with the power, and it sent a whole cascade of them rolling out into the square.

Sylva began apologizing profusely and picking up the onions. The vendor came over and helped her. While he was distracted, Iri walked around and simply grabbed a handful of disks out of the bag, tucking them into her tunic's pocket. Once all the onions were retrieved, Sylva apologized again and left. She met back up with Iri at the corner of the marketplace. Iri handed her the ill gotten disks.

Now that she had them in her hand, she could see clearly that they were irridescent and patterned shells, with somewhat elaborate markings etched around the sides. Curious, she tried to snap one in half, and found that she couldn't. It was incredibly strong.

“Can't believe they use shells,” Iri said dismissively. “Couldn't anybody just go and pick one up from the ocean? Not secure.”

“I somehow doubt that they could, or that these are entirely natural,” Sylva said. “Look, these ones are identical.” She held up two of the shiny green ones, and lined them up so that the pattern of marks just underneath the surface of the shell lined up. They were exact duplicates. There was no doubt that they were shells, but there was also no doubt that they were completely clonal, grown in some sort of controlled environment.

As Sylva reflected on their spoils, she realized how shockingly easy it had been to talk to the vendor. The words had come so naturally, and she had felt even weirdly confident as she pulled off her con. Perhaps that was something that had come along with her out of that young man's mind. Either that, or her time pretending to be a doctor had made her better at lying in general.

Regardless of all of that, though, it had been a success. They had money, so they could get new clothes, new food. They watched the other patrons of this marketplace as they purchased things, to see what kind of buying power they held in their hands. After all, the exchange rate was an enigma. It seemed as though they could get new tunics, and food for about three days. They made the exchanges and hoped that would be enough. Sylva's new tunic was bright blue, and Iri's was a deep red, with thick yellow ribbon embroidered onto the edges.

Once they had spent every last piece of their money, and they were slightly laden down with their purchases, they left the market. They weren't going to be able to find any information on this planet, not without being able to read, so there wasn't any point in staying. They made their way back to the docks, taking a different route than the way they had come before. Despite the city being unfamiliar, and many of the buildings looking the same to their unfamiliar eyes, it was still easy to navigate. All the roads eventually led to the water, and then they could follow the water until they got to where they needed to be.

The city was still crowded, and the buildings were packed closely together, but occasionally there would be a space where clearly a building could have been, but wasn't, and a little park would be there instead. The people here carved out space for trees. In one of these parks, they encountered a group of older kids, teens, playing some sort of rough game that involved hitting a ball with a large flat stick, held above the shoulders. The ball was clearly bouncy and heavy, and about the size of Sylva's fist, and each player of the game carried a heavy wooden bat with a flat end, and they used it to hit the ball around. They watched for a second. She couldn't parse what the rules of the game were, or even what team the different kids were on. Every so often they would all yell in either disappointment or happiness, or stop by some unspoken signal and reset their positions around the park. They didn't stay and watch for long, and continued back on to the docks.

Their boat was right where they left it, though the docks were significantly more crowded now that the sun was high in the sky. People were coming and going, many of them hauling in fish. The whole air was filled with the sounds of people yelling to coordinate their business. Luckily, no one bothered Iri or Sylva, and they managed to get their boat out onto the open water with no one stopping or questioning them. That had probably been due to them hustling by any obstructions or other people without even a nod of greeting.

Overall, their trip to the city had been quite successful. They had gotten probably as much as they could, and even though they had been somewhat careless criminals, no one had stopped them or even seemed to notice. This was a strange place. It was nothing like the tightly coordinated streets of most places of the Empire. She couldn't imagine children running free there, or a market where anyone could just sit down and start selling their goods of whatever type without a permit. She was sure she had only scratched the surface of this place, barely gotten to know anything about it, but she was intrigued.

They only had three days of food, so Sylva and Iri tried to plot a course to the mind that would get them there as quickly as possible, or if not, pass them by other inhabited islands so that they could get more supplies. They sat out on the open ocean and talked as the boat bobbed up and down on the calm water beneath them.

“Do you actually know where we're going?” Iri asked.

“I got the direction,” Sylva said. “They were pretty insistent on where we should go.”

“Distance, Sylva, distance.”

“Let me see.”

Sylva closed her eyes and, this time very intentionally, reached out for that other mind. It met her halfway, lurking on the edge of her awareness, just out of complete contact. “Where?” Sylva asked it, putting the most intention behind the thought that she could.

The other mind reached out to her more fully, and though there was a fuzzy barrier between their thoughts, the most basic of content came through, and the boat leaped forward beneath them, knocking Sylva slightly backwards onto the wall of the boat.

“You could be a little more gentle,” Sylva grumbled aloud. Clearly the mind didn't care, because it was filling their ill tied sail with wind and hauling them headlong across the water.

“Did you figure it out?” Iri asked, gripping onto the bench as the boat lurched up and down, keel to the sky as it jumped over the waves more quickly than the previously still air should have allowed.

“We're about eight days away,” Sylva said. “If we keep going at this pace.”

“Fantastic,” Iri said. That was not fantastic at all. Their two choices would be to stop for more food somewhere, or ration three days of food into more than double that. Neither choice seemed ideal. “And we're on a straight course?”

Sylva nodded. Iri consulted the charts. “There is a place we can stop midway. Tell your little friend that's our plan.” She showed Sylva the chart. Though the words were still incomprehensible, it was more than possible to navigate a digital map without them.

“I wouldn't call it my friend,” Sylva said. “But alright.”

And so, they sailed on, night and day, pushed forward by the sweetest breeze that ever flowed, and the fairest weather that ever shone on that part of the ocean.

---

On the morning of the eighth day, they spotted land. It certainly crept up on them. Despite the boat being pushed forward by that force, such that Sylva did not have to use the power to keep it going, they still took turns keeping watch, so she was actually asleep when they came into land. Her dreams were turbulent, probably due to the constant jolting of the boat up and down. Having a dream about flying, and then being crashed down by a few inches onto the hard deck of the boat whenever the keel lifted over a particularly high ripple in the water was not an entirely pleasant experience, but it was one that Sylva was getting quite used to.

Iri was getting antsy after days trapped on the boat. It was almost worse than being with the pirates, because at least there they could have gotten out of their room and walked around. There was the idea that other people were around, even if the crew of the Bellringer were no people that they wanted to talk to. And there had been much more to do on the pirate ship, what with keeping track of the goings on on the bridge. This was just pure tedium.

The boat slowly gliding to a halt was what woke Sylva. She crawled out from underneath the tarp of the sail that she covered herself in. After days at sea, she and Iri were both sunburned all over. They wrapped their second tunics around their heads to shield them from the sun, and they stayed in the shade of the sail as much as possible, but it didn't help as much as they would have liked.

“Oh, good, you're awake, so I don't have to kick you,” Iri said. Sylva rubbed her eyes, slightly blinded by the sun that was about a quarter of the way up the sky.

“What's going on?” Sylva asked with a yawn.

“Maybe take a look behind you,” Iri said.

Sylva turned. There, looming closer than she had thought, was a tall mountain, rising up out of the water. The side of it was clearly covered in terraced farms, and it was ringed by forest. “How did I not see this before?”

“I think it only came over the horizon after it got dark last night. Either that or we missed it when it was far away. I've been watching it since the sun came up.”

“And we're stopped because...?”

“You'd know that better than I could,” Iri said. “What's your friend say.”

“Not my friend.”

“Well, we're about to meet them, so maybe we'd better start getting to be friends,” Iri said. “And since they haven't killed us yet, they're definitely not our enemy.”

“Yet.”

“There's always time,” Iri said cheerfully. “Anyway, I'd love it if you could get us in to shore.”

Sylva took a few minutes to splash water on herself to wake up, and drink some water that was getting hot in a bottle on the deck of the boat. “I'll be so glad to be on land again.”

“You're telling me.” A lot of things about boat life were not idea. In their tiny, tiny vessel, lack of privacy had been one true annoyance.

Sylva used the power to haul the boat forward, until the hull scraped on the rocky bottom. Iri tossed out the anchor, and then they both decided what could be carried with them as they swam to the shore. Iri was stronger, so she was able to quasi dog-paddle forward, one hand holding her bag on top of her head, until she could stand. Sylva simply decided to leave all her belongings on the boat, pray that nothing would happen to them, and go ashore.

The water was cold, but not enough to steal their breath and stop them from swimming, so they made it to shore in one piece. They stood on the beach and looked around. It was rocky, mainly made up of little pebbles, and there wasn't much distance between the high water mark from storms and the beginning of trees. This planet, not having a moon, did not have tides to speak of.

Sylva could still feel that mind tugging her onward, and they had come this far, so they might as well keep going. There wasn't a path out of the little area that they were standing in, so they were resigned to shoving their way through a close tangle of bushes for quite a while. Eventually, the forest became easier to traverse. Sylva and Iri walked in companionable silence. After eight days on the boat, they had mostly run out of things to talk about.

The trees thinned, giving way to a grassy area, and they saw a beaten dirt road, leading around the edge of the trees up towards the terraced farms. They didn't see any people at first, but then off in the distance of the fields there were a few walking around on inscrutable business. It didn't look really like they were tending the land; there weren't any of the classic large machines that such scale of operations required. Perhaps they were all in use elsewhere, and these people were just out checking on the crops. Either way, they were too far away to talk to them, and it wasn't as though Sylva and Iri were going to go trampling through shoots of green rice to go talk to strangers.

The road wound on. They did pass one person, heading in the other direction, who stared at them piercingly, smiled, and nodded, but continued on even as Sylva attempted to say hello. Did people on this part of the planet speak a different language? Was everyone here really used to visitors?

It was very odd, and Iri was acting a little disconcerted. She had her hand on the gun in her pocket. Sylva nudged her to get her to calm down. “Nobody cares that we're here,” Sylva said. “Stop fiddling with that.”

“I'm not fiddling. This place just gives me the creeps,” Iri said.

“Get over it, it's fine,” Sylva said.

“That's what they all say right before something horrible happens.”

“You're the one who thought we should come here,” Sylva said.

“Well you're clearly the one this person wants, so it's both of our faults.”

“Oh, shush. We don't really have a choice at this point.”

The fields eventually gave way to a bunch of cleared land where a few animals, mainly goats, grazed. Outbuildings were scattered around, and the dirt path branched off in a few directions, though all of them were thinner than the main trunk that they were on. There were more people here. One woman was sitting outside, weaving a complicated patterned tapestry on a large loom. A man was milking goats. A girl of about fifteen was climbing on a ladder to clear out the gutters of one of the outbuildings.

Off in the distance, coming around from behind a corner of one of the white, round, stone buildings, Sylva saw a familiar tall figure. Brown, skinny, wearing a light green tunic that went down to her knees, hovering a massive chunk of stone in front of her with the power, Yan was walking down the dirt path.

Sylva broke into a run, screaming.

“Yan! Yan!”

She dashed across the field, scattering goats and chickens in her desperation. No one seemed to pay her any mind. Even Yan didn't notice her at first, despite how much noise she was making. Sylva practically crashed into her, wrapping her arms crushingly tight around Yan's chest, standing on her tiptoes, and impulsively kissing her full on the mouth.