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On the fifth day, Aventurine gives up trying to sleep.
He turns his goddess-blessed eyes to the window beside his cot in the tiny shuttle, staring at the horizon as dawn bled into the sky, a wound of gold carved along the horizon that should have been familiar to him. Should be stirring up memories of the decade he spent here, wandering the wasteland on tiny feet. Should mean something to him as one of the last Avgin alive. Instead, he feels hollow and useless as a broken jar.
Aventurine rolls out of bed and pads through the interior of the shuttle, leaving his shoes behind because he’ll get sand in them anyway and steps onto his home world in bare feet.
The body is supposed to remember, but he wobbles on the shifting sand, fights the slope all the way up the dune until the sun’s warmth touches his cheeks like a memory. He sits and plunges his fingers into the sand, flexing and straightening them to bore tiny holes that heal the moment he removes his hands.
Nothing.
This trip was pointless. His own survival was pointless. His culture is as dead as it would be if he was already buried here with his family, if he’d never made it out, if he’d stayed just little Kakavasha and never became—
“Aventurine.”
He leans back on his hands and tilts his head over his shoulder, blinking as Dr. Ratio comes into focus. “Ah, I must have woken you. Sorry, doc. Just enjoying the sights—” his voice catches. He coughs.
“May I join you?”
“Not like you to ask,” Aventurine deflects, and when Ratio simply stands there in the milky light of dawn, he can't find a reason to turn him away. “Sure. Why not.”
Ratio sits down just inside arm’s reach, and in silence both men watch the light soak into the sky.
“You never answered me when I asked why you wanted to come along,” Aventurine points out, picking at the social scab that holds their silence together.
“I suppose I did not.”
He slides his gaze to the side and watches Ratio watch the sky. “That's your cue to tell me, you know.”
“Mm.” Ratio does something with his mouth that tells Aventurine this is a pause, not a denial. So he waits, bending a knee to rest his cheek on it, and watches the sun rise.
“An acquaintance of mine let slip that you were planning this pilgrimage and asked for my assistance identifying Avgin encampments in this part of the desert,” Ratio explains, as though he is the kind of man to help others spontaneously.
“Didn't think anthropology was one of your degrees, Doctor.”
“It is not, but I do know art; I know how to look for a culture's values in their visual flourishes, how to identity the materials they used, how to find the ghosts of their inhabitants in the signs left behind. I am not fluent in the local dialects, but I understand metaphor and oral tradition enough to listen closely to what is said and how it is said. In short,” Ratio concludes, “I came because I thought I might be of use.”
That isn't quite what Aventurine meant, but if he listens closely enough he can imagine two more words added to the end of that last line.
To you.
Aventurine lays down on the sand and stares up at the vast sky. Schneider had once said that the Avgin might not have died out if they'd used the stars to navigate by instead of the earth itself. Perhaps he was right. At least Aventurine wouldn't have spent the last week flying low and slow through the arid climate, following a half-remembered song’s directions along the equator trying to spot a single familiar landmark.
But it wasn't practicality that made the Avgin use the land itself as a guide; it was reverence for HER body, for the very ground they walked on that they would nourish at the end of their lives.
“Sorry to waste your time,” Aventurine mutters. “When the crew wakes up, we’ll head to the spaceport and return to orbit.”
“You are giving up?”
“I'm being practical, Ratio.” He traces the paths of the stars with his eyes, imagining what other clans might have drawn as constellations. “We’ve been out here for days with no luck. It’s official. My time as a slave burned the memories out of me.”
A tear slides down one cheek and soaks into the sand.
“The sooner I can put this behind me, the better.”
“Is that truly what you believe?” On a good day, Ratio’s imperious tone is entertaining. Charming, even.
Today is not a good day. “I know I’m a habitual liar, Doctor, but whatever you think, I don't lie to you. I don’t remember any of this!” He gestures to the wasteland beyond Ratio, arm and hand crusted with sand where it had rested beside him. “We’re supposed to be along Gaiathra’s thighs, less than three days walk from the Basin, and nothing looks familiar.”
Fuck. He’s losing his composure. Aventurine takes in a deep breath and forces himself to hold it. And that is enough time for Ratio to speak.
“Will you sing that song for me, again?” the professor asks.
He snorts. “You've got a copy of it written down.”
“I want to hear it. As you remember it.”
Aventurine stares up at the distant, brilliant sky, sighs, and relents.
“She dances through the water, our Mother, and we dance along; from her bare knees to the cradle of her womb where all life belongs.” His voice is reedy, his pitch clumsy. It's not meant to be sung alone. “Up her chest to her shoulders that bear the shroud of sky; and back down like flowing water until we are one and die.”
“Flowing water?” Ratio asks. “Not falling water?”
Aventurine sighs, closes his eyes, and hums that section of the song again. “I… I don't know which one it is.”
“Weather systems generally move from west to east in this part of Sigonia.” Ratio is scribbling something in the sand now, frenzied by some misguided zeal. “Therefore we assumed the route in the song went in the same direction. But if it's flowing water and not falling, then it might be based on the movement of streams and rivers rather than the rain.” The professor scrambles to his feet, spraying sand behind him, and grabs Aventurine’s wrist. “Come with me. I believe I know where we went wrong.”
Ratio is taller and stronger than Aventurine; this is something he knows from logic rather than experience, as Ratio hardly deigns to touch anyone, so the sensation of being lifted with very little effort takes him by surprise. His pulse quickens. “What—”
“We thought that Gaiathra’s path through the star-sea followed the movement of the sun, but what if dance means to spin instead? Then HER submerged legs are in the south, and HER veiled head is the north.” Instead of taking them to the ship, Ratio is dragging them towards one of the sand-bikes the biologists use for sample collection off the main path. “We’re supposed to go to the poles, not along the equator.”
Hope dares to flare in his chest, like an old wound suddenly aching. Aventurine follows Ratio anyway, bare feet sinking into the sand with each step until he’s mounting the bike behind the professor and hiding his face between Ratio’s shoulder blades.
The wind whips past them, the hum of the engine drowning out any chance for conversation. Aventurine savors the silence, pressing his face into the folds of Ratio’s robes and taking deep, greedy breaths of the professor’s scent. They haven't spoken about where they stand since the letter Ratio had slipped him in Penacony. It might be too much to expect them to be friends. Aventurine will savor this moment anyway, the heat of another body against his that has nothing to do with sex or favors or debts.
Eventually, they slow to a stop. Aventurine flexes his fingers, pushing through the ache of holding them so tightly closed for so long, and imagines the wrinkles his grip left in Ratio’s white clothes. He keeps his nose pressed to Ratio’s spine for a moment longer, afraid to look and let them both down again.
Ratio doesn't press him. He simply waits astride the bike, quiet, his breathing slow and even. Only when Aventurine’s breathing syncs up with his does he pull away and look.
They’re on a crest of rocky hillside, scrubs clinging to the soil with partially exposed roots. Birdsong is slowly filtering back in as the world relaxes in the wake of the sandbike’s roar, the sound nostalgic but formless, contextless. A song with no lyrics and no meaning that tugs at his heart all the same.
“Look north, gambler,” comes the quiet instruction. A hand on his shoulder turning him slightly away from the sunrise that lingers a moment. “I doubt we are properly on route, but—”
Kakavasha freezes.
He knows that silhouette in the distance. The mountain range of Gaiathra's right arm, the splay of HER fingers demonstrated by the valleys coursing through the western side. In his memories, he can see the reds and teals of the exposed rock that is muted by the early morning light, but he knows it. He remembers.
The hand on his shoulder slips to his side, the arm across his back bearing some of his weight as relief swamps him.
He remembers. They’re hard to catch, like grabbing fish bare-handed in a stream, but they’re there. The memories are there.
Something of the Avgin still survived.
“We— we’ll need to head west to get back on track,” Aventurine says, blinking rapidly as his vision blurs. “We overshot the passage—”
Ratio catches him, both arms wrapped around Aventurine to hold him upright and, Mama Fenge bless him, he makes sure Aventurine’s head is pressed against his shoulder just so he can still see the mountains as Kakavasha cries harder.
“I will tell them,” Ratio murmurs. “In time. Keep breathing.”
As the sun rises, spilling light and color into the desert below, he presses his mouth to Ratio’s shoulder and remembers how the weave of his sister’s favorite cloak felt against his cheek when she held him like this so many years ago. The sound of his grandmother’s laugh, the scent of his uncle’s favorite pipe, the bitter taste of unripe berries bursting between his teeth and the softness of the ones his mother picked for him.
Dead but not gone. Just buried, and waiting to be found.
