4No more coldness. No more fear. I felt warm, the heat pulsing over me. My eyelids glowed a hot yellow and red. Slowly I inhaled, my consciousness making me aware of my breathing as it surfaced to waking. I rolled over and opened my eyes, the ground beneath me grainy and hot. I heard rustling, and my skin was cool as if someone had sighed across my back.
Opening my eyes, I saw blue. Blue everywhere, like nothing I'd ever seen. Blue water rippled over the sand, blue sky met the blue horizon, a color so vivid it nearly hurt my eyes.
I stood up. Where was I? On a beach, on an island. How did I know what a beach was? A sky, I had never seen a sky before. These things, trees, something completely alien to me. And yet, I knew exactly what it was called.
I stepped to the shore line. I felt good, but I felt...timeless...as if nothing was actually passing time, as if things were taking instants or years. I sat down, feeling very peaceful despite this new awareness of time. The sun felt good; I could feel it all over my body in rippling waves. I dug my does in the sand. This was so much better than the silo, even the green house could not hold this feeling. Lying down, I felt the water lap at my legs. It was cooler than the sand but still warm, heated by the brilliant sun.
I could feel my body, and I was feeling less aware of the beach as the water pulled and pushed at me. I shifted inside my body with the pull, falling and rising, weightless. Up and down did not exist, and I couldn't feel the sun any more. I must be waking up.
The water ran down my body, the steam robing me and curling around my face. I looked over. Number six had his eyes closed. He hadn't said anything to anyone since the hushed up incident. They told us that they had taken care of it, that there was a problem with one of the wards, but that it was all secure now. They told us that Andrea was moving to a lower level of the silo. We were glad that the problem had been taken care of, that it hadn't given us much stress.
Running in the green, running the deep, running the blades of light that filtered through the dome of the green house. I didn't make a sound as I moved. Light falls from the glass, and forms pools on the ground. The other angels sit in their individual pools of light, their backs arched and their mouths open, minds asleep in the green that is the deep. Leaping as I move, I land lightly in my own little pool, barely rippling as I soak in the water and light, mind stilling. Each strand of my hair becomes long and iridescent, floating up in a white stream from my head, warming me as it weaves through the beams of light.
Kale? A voice runs along the tiny veins of my consciousness, a fluttering brush of blue and brown on my mind.
Yes, Mai?
Come here, I need to be in the deep with you.
Yes, Mai.
I float up, my legs shapeless bands of water and skin mixing with each other. I call up nutrients from the soil to filter through my now indistinct toes to run up to my hips and spread over my chest. I float silently through the branches, like the moon through the trees at night. I reach into the darkness, effortlessly pushing through the thick, to Mai's special place. Feeding her calm through our stream, I search for her in her hollow tree.
There, surrounded by dark, swollen purple flowers, viny bark and gentle moss pulsating with life, Mai sits, her eyes closed and her head leaned back. I descend upon her, circling our arms around each other, melting the edges of our bodies together, wrapping my mind around hers.
I am pressed comfortably into the moss, Mai's warmth like a blanket. I lean my head back to rest in the cup of a flower, and surrender myself to the deep. Going down. Going back. Falling. My own awareness bleaches into Mai's quiet, confident one.
At first, her flow of emotion was light, illuminating her concern for En, and her worry for Kino, being separated as she was from Kerin at that new place. I accepted these things into me without comment, simply feeding her a warm blue wave of gentle understanding. At this she began to increase the flow to me. I tasted the rough bitterness of the amount of stress she was holding, she said that she was worried for Andrea, and that she wished she knew more of what was going on around her. She worried about why we were so different from the wards, if we were related, what would happen to us, she cried for En's loss of communication, she cried for Kino, she cried for the strange machine they'd strapped her in, she worried if she was doing things right, what would happen to her if she was wrong. She poured out her worries into our deep, and I stroked her mind with warm blue encompassing love. It will be allright, I told her, we will not come to harm, everything is fine, you don't need to be afraid of anything, you don't need to feel alone, you don't need to be unhappy.
After a while Mai quieted, and we stayed in our deep, silently dissolving the toxins of stress between us, enfolded in each other, holding each other tenderly. Finaly Mai withdrew, opening her eyes and stretching. I sat up, wishing I had such a nice spot in the garden as she did.
"Thanks, Kale. I needed that." She said, smiling at me. It was common for us to speak to each other afterwords, it helped to ground us into the real world.
I smiled back, noticing with satisfaction that her pupils had gone nearly back to their normal, healthy pinpoint size in their white disks. "It was no trouble."
Mai rested her head on her knees. "You are always there for the deep. I like being in your's better than any one else's, I think. I mean, they're all nice to be with, but I think we have something special to share. Do you think so, Kale?"
I nodded, my form more solid now. I could feel my skin hardening. "Come on, help me get this stuff off." We floated silently through our personal jungle, our hair like thick upswept branches, moving very slowly with us. We landed in a pool of clear water.
Kneeling down and facing each other, we began to peel away the shedding layers of hard, dead shell that our skin had formed. I peeled off a section of shell from Mai's eyelids, and she giggled, taking one off of mine. Gently, we scraped the shell off our cracked and dry lips, off of our backs and legs, off our arms and chests. I splashed water over my torso, always loving how new skin became even more translucent under the rivulets of water running down my body.
Our skins, which had turned a dull, pasty yellowish-white, was now almost porcelain blue with translucence. I examined the little tiny red capillaries that ran through my hands, beating out a rhythm just below my fresh skin.
I heard a cracking sound. I quickly began to snap the bits of hard shell off of my hair along with Mai, dropping them in the water. I picked off the last bit of shell from my roots, which grew pearly white and down to my ears in the usual short cut I preffered for myself. I waited for Mai's hair to grow back, which it did, curling around her chin in a cute bob.
Come on, Kale. Lets go to the top.
Not yet, our skins'll get fried!
Pssh. Fine. When you get toughened up a bit, we'll go. You'll just have to wait for your skin to get thicker, since we can't absorb anything now.
I nodded, and lay back in the water. I knew that, beneath the water, I was just a mass of blurry x-rayed bones and organs, a fine web of red and purple arteries and veins, extending to my extremities into little
capillaries, like the tiny fine roots of plants.
Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see the submerged vegetation, glowing green in the flickering light. I could see their veins, un beating, but still alive. Breathing in deeply the water, I waited. After a while I could feel my skin becoming thicker and opaque. I glanced to my right. Mai was submerged next to me, lying on her stomach and gazing at me. Her skin had gone back to normal as well.
We lifted out of the water, extending our wings from our backs. When I say we had wings, I do not mean that they grew fully formed and feathered from our backs; I mean that we formed new joints and bones extending from our shoulder blades, which grew out, clothed in newly formed skin, and then sprouted black feathers.
There was a roar of beating wings, a black and white blur ascending to the tree tops, to join Eva. She often stayed in the tree tops, as close as she could get to the glass.
Enjoying the view? Mai asked Eva.
What view? The glass is gelled over blue; you know that. Eva said, looking at us with slightly resentful eyes. I looked away, wondering if it was good to be here, but Mai liked it here so I stayed.
Ever wonder what was on the other side of the glass? Mai asked no one in particular.
I thought about her question. In truth, I had perhaps wondered maybe once or twice in my life, but always with no serious interest. To me, it was unimportant, I had everything I wanted here. Might as well ask what was under our feet; what did it matter?
Not really. I told Mai. Do you?
Sometimes it's all I think about. Mai said.
My eyes widened in surprise. It was a weird thing to hear, especially coming from someone as...well...*stable*...as Mai.
It's just more labs, I'm sure. Atleast for us, anyways. Eva said.
Yeah? How do you know? I asked, hoping she didn't take it as an insult to her credibility.
Because that's where I came from. On Jupiter, I grew up in a lab. That's all I knew. That's all it is for us. We might even be moved to another lab, who knows. Maybe without a green house.
We both stared at her in shock.
You can't be serious? Mai asked.
About what? About there not being a green house? My old lab didn't have one. Maybe a few potted plants, but that was it.
No, I mean...you coming from a lab. You didn't come from a family? Did your mother give birth to you in the labs?
No, I mean I really-
We felt a familliar pulling sensation. It was time to go back to the silo.
We all lifted off of the branch, beating our wings loudly. Silent white shapes, the other angels, moved below us towards the exit of the green house. Landing and retracting my wings, I looked back at Mai. She shrugged, and we were herded out.
In the next couple of days, I confronted Eva about what she said. Always privately, of course, either before lunch or in one of the recreation areas. Every time, Eva would tell me to forget about it, that it wasn't important.
Eventually, I left her alone, but I could feel a tension in my heart. I felt it all the time, eating lunch, running through the green house, while that strange machine asked me irrelevant questions, in sleep. No deep could dissolve this tension. It was a sort of aprehension, a kind of lonely anticipation. I could not help but worry, as Mai had, about us. What would happen? I felt that, for some reason, these were our last days of contentement and peace.