HER TIMING WAS OFF

1563 4D

Andrew‘s eyes opened to a lazy warm spring day. The insect buzzing continued, just as when he had fallen asleep. He looked up through an arbor of leaves and flowers into a piercing blue that was not quite right for the world he knew, but so much like the times he and Leil had spent when they had first met, stealing time away from the city up in the public gardens at the surface.

Those gardens and Leil had vanished. Now he lay hurt and exhausted on a stone bench, and some woman with a strange nose had… Andrew picked up his head and looked around. The garden lay thick and beautiful-smelling around him.

One by one the tendrils of recent memory unrolled in him. Angie. The battle. The visit to his old home.

Where was he now, after all the darkness? Had he died? He sensed his body, his scars, the still-drying blood from the two wounds in his side, the salt thrill beating in his mouth and veins from Angie‘s farewell, the children stripping the dead… the children. Where was Janny? Engel, was it Engel he had heard in the dark street?

Andrew dragged himself to a sitting position, his feet dropping to a pebble-filled pathway that circled his bench. His head spun; he gripped the thick bench with his fingers. The smell of roses and hyacinths filled him. He inhaled. Nostrils — the woman had had two rows of nostrils. She had smelled him. He had been carried, large hands, Yethrib the name she called out, large hands had put him down.

“Here is something to refresh you.” Andrew looked slowly up. Before him towered a beautiful woman, much taller than he was, wearing only a metallic veil of vine-leaf strands. Her skin was olive-brown, her limbs long and lithe and strong, her figure discreetly but gorgeously ripe, her hair almost nonexistent but grained into spirals and curves on her skull. She smiled with a wide, full-lipped mouth, sat down next to him, and offered him a brimming jug, holding it carefully up to his lips with one hand and supporting his back with the other.

Andrew quivered with thirst. He inhaled a faint scent of fruit and herbs, and bent to the jug; she tipped it slowly up as he drank deep, going on and on until he had finished it. “Shall I get you some more?” He nodded. She ambled away, the strands parting and gathering around her hips, and returned with a fresh jug.

He drank it without taking a breath, and said, “Where am I?”

“Consider yourself a guest. You were badly hurt when you arrived here. Do you feel better?” Her voice, low and musical, soothed him. He looked closely at her. Was she acting? Something didn’t feel quite right; her speech, her movements, seemed to come a little late and a little abruptly, as if her timing was off and she was trying to compensate for it.

“I feel better. But where is this place? Am I in the City?”

“Of course. Here, let me show you the rest of this place. Can you stand yet?” She took his arm.

Andrew drew his feet under himself, bent forward, and to his own surprise, rose to stand beside the woman. His eyes came level with her chin. “That’s not bad,” he said. “I feel better than I thought I should.” Where the alien soldier had clipped him and the street robber had knifed him, his side still stung.

“Come with me, then. Others are resting here, and you may join them.” Together they walked through the garden’s paths, their feet clicking pebbles aside, until they arrived at a set of sunken concentric circles surrounding a flower bed. Men and women dressed in coveralls lay sleeping among the flowers, their faces blank and calm. “Here. Find yourself a place and stretch out.” The woman gestured at a patch of springy green grass mingled with moss.

“But you haven’t told me whose place this is, or anything,” Andrew said. He turned to face the woman, and at that moment his knees weakened. He began to sag, his arm and leg muscles losing control, and she caught him and lowered him to the grass.

“What you need right now is rest,” she said, “and I will make sure you get it.” Again, the wrongness of her speech struck Andrew.

Andrew tried to answer, but he could not make his lips and tongue and voice work at all. What had she done to him? It must have been the drink. His head let itself down on the turf. His eyes stayed half-open; he stared off through blades of grass at the face of a sleeping woman not far away. Her head reclined in the opposite direction from his, making her face appear upside-down to him. Thick, wavy brown hair lay evenly spread across her golden-tan face and her closed eyes. She appeared to be about half Andrew‘s age.

He studied her features as he lay immobile. Broad, short nose with a delicate, clear ridge and flared nostrils that opened slightly on each slow exhalation. Mouth slack but with full softly-defined lips, a few strands of hair captured gently between them.

Little pieces of a very large puzzle fell slowly and painfully into place; feeling sleepy, he rotated the puzzle, sifted his mind; this woman’s familiarity came from a long time ago. A bench, no, a lawn like this, but in the real sun.

He had been very young, barely of age, younger than the lovely inverted face that now slept opposite him. Lying in the hot sun, he had been fingering the bruise his father had just that morning inflicted on his cheek, feeling for skin abrasion and bleeding, wondering how Martin had escaped being slapped for their little raid on the food cubby two levels up from their crowded family apartment.

“Where’d you get that? Fighting?” She had stopped to stand over him in the City‘s crowded public sun garden. A voice soft as honey.

“Yeah, with some guys.” He looked up at the young woman, her hands on her hips. “A collechi thing.”

“Which coll? Mine’s Astran Terxil.” She showed him her arm name-scar, nestling in a rich tan smoothness of skin.

“Darko Hejj.” As he said this, she drew back. “It’s okay, I’m not part of the feud,” he added. But my father would cripple me to know I’m talking with you.

“Neither am I.” Then she had thrown herself full-length on the only patch of grass near him, putting her head near his, staring upside-down into his eyes with her own dark-brown ones, laughing. And that had been Leil, the first time.

And this, her eyes shut, was Leil. But so young? He blinked heavily. It had to be. He tried unsuccessfully to lift his head to get a better look. It had to be her. He wanted to shout, to reach out. Fear and delight capered and collided again and again in his head; his heart pounded. As he lay paralyzed, time slid slowly by.