38 - Who Or What Are You?

I have no idea what just happened but I’m a spider and cannot think a great deal.  I snip off my own parachute silk and tumble, a random ball of spider legs.  The silk flips away and across the eyes of a dragon and seems to blind it.  I see the dragon, clawing at its own face as if I pasted a full, opaque veil over its eyes. I can only see it in pieces as I tumble and one of my eight eyes happens to be looking that way. Until I land with a splash in water.

Ick. Ick. Ick. Water, why didn’t I think of this... I should have realized its not desert for the endarkened owner.  He dreams with more water than I’ve ever seen in my life.

I wave my arms around, the way Kyrus says you do if you are trying to swim and it works, sort of.  I seize a coded twig and have to pull myself through the skin at the top, into the air.  Who knew that water had a skin at all?

I grow bigger so I can think.  Slowly. Not a bigger spider, but a bigger self. Hara.  Girl-shaped. Four limbs. Two eyes, both blue. Human. Brown hair. I saw a man burst through the sky, hanging on a thread, reach down, grab a tree limb, that lashed around his wrist and then drag it up by the roots and take it, and the hive of bees apparently in it, trailing it, back through weird blue sky.

The bee tree and hive.  Papa.  The hive would have been stepapa. He’s the Lainz Radiance and they just like bees.

Good.  They’re out safe.  I’m lying in the code now, in the underbrush, with dragons all around and Tizrav comes bouncing out of the ferns and jumps on my head.  She’s trailing bits of security codes like blood or snakeskin and I unwind them from her wiggly self and wrap them into coils, tuck them into my belt pouch.

*Tizrav... how?*

*Girl girl girl... found you found you.  Old boy and old boy gone gone gone home.  Tizrav finds her boy. Tizrav takes him home.  Her go home.*

*No.  I’ll get Kyrus out.*

*No eat here.*

She has a point.  The ferret was using a tiny fraction of the energy that I was burning through.  My own reserves are getting dangerously low. *Werfas!* I can call, quietly.

The ferret coils once, twice, three times around me in approval and roll roll rolls away, before bouncing up, white as salt, over the puddle where I’d fallen, in spider shape.   

*Tizrav trail you, floaty smelly, boy here. Here. Here. Go home.*

*Werfas?* I can see him begin to take shape, slowly in front of me, ghostly pale as he puts the least amount of power he can into his sending.  There’s my path.  I set my hand on it, to crawl out and that is when this big, ugly, clumsy mechanical hand reaches down, swats at a swarm of bees, picks up my path, and stretches it out and around the moon in the sky.  *Fakkit!*

I slide along the data pathway fast as I can think, find myself nose to nose with a young man, “—Hey! Who—what are you?—“ with dark brown eyes, unveiled! Dark hair falling over his forehead... A short man? But he’s half lying down in a metal room with a stable of headless warbirds behind him... that can’t be right. Then I'm falling, falling from the moon like a star, arrowing toward the door Werfas is holding for me. A voice, fading behind me ‘wait, come back, who are you?’

I see Tizrav biting a tree that slaps her with its leaves, even as I smack against Werfas’s chest, tumbling us both through the door, out of the code and into our own bodies with a thump that has my head ringing, as if I’d slammed my teeth together as I land.

I open my eyes to see the Great Hive, humming over my head. I’m half-covered in bees, their feet tickling and prickling before they swarmed up off me.

Even as I sit up, I can hear Ky say, groggily, “Tizzy if you don’t stop biting me, I’m going to smack you.” That was when da folds me into the dark of his arms.

“Thank the ancestors you’re safe out of there.  We cannot have that happen again!”

I peek under da's armpit to see. Over on the next couch, Kyrus shakes his own boy by the shoulders. “You young idiot! It was up to us to get out.  Perrin’s systems have learned and forced us into stasis!”

“I love you too, da,” is all he answered his da.  “But we pulled a lot of code, out of there, so we can study and build on it and get back in better next time.”

Stepapa stares at him, holding onto his shoulders, shaking his head. “You, boy, are going to be the death of me!” Ky grins at his da and I smile too.  Boys.