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  I slashed with my wooden black blade, one step forward in that downward stroke, then back again to start over. Just that one move, step and slash, while he called out words in Ki’hade, making me repeat them. Numbers. Counting. He told me to visualize the movement in my mind as I did it, to listen to the sound of the blade slicing through the air, the sound of his voice, the slap of my foot on the floor as I stamped forward. I felt the muscles in my body move. He told me to slash harder after every step back into the rest position. He spoke to me until I couldn’t hear any more, until it all became a rhythm as deep as my own heartbeat.

  I didn’t know how long he kept me at it, but by the end I knew the weight and song of that sword. I stood inside of it. It was like another form of meditation, except I knew I could kill with this skill.

  Something in me began to open.

  “Before the dagger you must learn the long sword. When you can fight at a distance from your opponent, then you may learn to fight yta’n okaara. Heart to heart.”

  Like the slashing movement, his words buried deep until I felt them, until I didn’t have to think about them for them to be there.

  The four different jiie-ko, or blade styles, he taught me included a dictionary full of new vocabulary that he drilled just as hard as the martial forms. Once I’d mastered the very basic movements—drawing, parrying, cutting, and returning the sword to rest—Nikolas-dan taught me the styles. A third of a full day was spent doing the moves from my jii-na: the place of my sword, which was basically the center of an invisible circle around my body that I was supposed to protect. If I kept the enemy on the outside of that circle I would be able to defend myself better in a combat situation—unarmed or against weapons like blades. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to defend myself against a gun using that method. Only guns could fight guns, unless the shooter got inside my circle. Nikolas-dan said the gun training came later.

  Older, I thought he meant.

  My jii-klala, or blade mind, had to be inside the eight essential forms of striking before I could step out further in my training. This was the ki’ya of the ki’jii-ko—the first principle of the first blade style. Without knowing those eight forms I would never advance.

  Nikolas-dan demonstrated the eight forms himself. He brought his own jii into the inidrla-na, a beautiful sword about the length of his shoulder to his fingertips. The hilt shone black, carved with those familiar swirling patterns that he’d told me were meant for meditation, just like the patterns on the walls of the house. The guard was round, engraved, the shape of an open flower, the color of bronze. The blade itself was pale silver. His movements with it reminded me of hours I’d spent watching raindrops run like tiny rivers down the windowpane in my room. Peace despite the violence of a storm. I saw it on his face. It was a dance only for him and the jii and the air they moved through in silence.

  He showed me at half speed so I could see exactly where the sword was in relation to his body and the invisible opponent. Then he showed me in combat speed and I could barely see where the blade went. It hung at rest by his thigh, blurred, then hung at rest again. The air around him sang the movements. To me it was perfection. He was perfection.

  Once the physical training part of the day was over, he sat with me for a light midday meal of seafood and soft vegetables, and talked. He told me about the animals on the planet, about sailing and snow and stories from the past, when Caste Masters were challenged and both the accusers and the accused had to stand before the First Masters and be judged right or wrong. He said in the old times both parties didn’t even bother the First Masters—they settled things themselves, the way assassins did. The other seven castes even hired the ka’redone to settle their fights sometimes, which always caused a scandal because the ka’redane weren’t supposed to be mercenaries. He said there was less of that now, especially since the sympathizers had been integrated into Nan’hade. The Caste Master had strict laws about how sympathizers were treated.

  I dreamed in striviirc-na, dreamed of the planet and nothing else. I didn’t see, speak, or think anything but the language that was around me, that I saw in those rooms and over the balcony, in the lines on Nikolas-dan’s face, in his eyes and the eyes of his mother when she visited. They were all Aaian-na.

  The war and Falcone got further away, became only words on a screen that I could shut off. In the Tree Room, where I’d first met Ash-dan, Nikolas-dan let me read Send reports stolen from Hubside, translated into Ki’hade by a sympathizer. It didn’t matter what language they were in, the meaning was the same. With every passing month, Hub carriers tried to trespass farther through the demilitarized zone—the three-dimensional buffer between Hub space and striviirc-na space, which Markalan S’tlian had set up with Hub officials when he’d been a ship captain leading the striv fleet years ago. No colonization or satellite operations were supposed to exist in the DMZ. Ideally the buffer was all that kept EarthHub from pushing through to Aaian-na, but that was changing.

  At the time of the agreement, Enas-dan said, EarthHub hadn’t wanted to own Aaian-na. But opinions were changing. One faction of the space government, with support from some of Earth’s more powerful countries, wanted to “eradicate the strit threat once and for all.” As if the striviirc-na had any intention to invade Earth or even its Spoke colonies. If they encroached in the Rim, it was only to retrieve prisoners or attack military outposts that helped fuel the carriers and battleships that kept invading the DMZ.

  The people’s victory, Nikolas-dan’s name meant. I understood it now. The Warboy was his father’s successor in space, against EarthHub, and the only thing stopping the Hub from invading all the way to the planet, like they had done with Qinitle-na and a handful of other moons and previously claimed striviirc-na territories since then. The Hub called Nikolas-dan a terrorist, but he only did enough to keep the Hub at bay. If he wanted to fully attack, it would escalate the war and double the casualties. He and Enas-dan both told me so. Nobody on Aaian-na—striviirc-na or human—wanted that, despite what the Send said.

  Enas-dan was the leader of the sympathizers in Nan’hade, which was the strongest of the three countries that allowed humans to live with strivs. She worked directly with the Nan’hade assassin-priest Caste Master—the ki’redan-na. They helped the humans and striviirc-na live in peace.

  In addition to my physical training in the inidrla-na, Nikolas-dan made me learn all about how Nan’hade operated (these lessons were usually in my room or the Tree Room), about the eight castes and their colors and symbols. The swirling circle was the symbol of Nikolas-dan’s caste, the assassin-priests, who didn’t go around just killing people, he told me with a crooked smile. They kept the other castes in line, not through fear, but respect. There had been caste wars years and years ago, and the ka’redane had ended them through force. But then they’d made the laws that made the other castes redefine their places in society, and everybody’s na became less about status and more about your own progression toward hiaviirc-na. The sacred place.

  Out of conflict you found your na, but nobody in Nan’hade believed now that physical conflict was the way to find it. Societal conflicts weren’t desired now. The focus was on the emotional na, and the emotional conflict. Though everything was intertwined like the designs on their walls and the tattoos on their bodies, each line and curve could still be separately tracked, like you tracked a string of words that made up sentences in a paragraph. So all your principle nae were intertwined yet separate.

  These were the slate explanations, but when I dug through Nan’hade history, I found stories about Caste Masters that abused their power, and the bloody conflicts that followed. Still, always at the end, they assassinated the bad Caste Masters and someone better took his or her place. For a time.

  When I wasn’t learning the arts of the ka’redan, Nikolas-dan let me paint. It was something to do besides read and train, something totally different, and I enjoyed the quiet moments in the inidrla-na, looking out at the sea and trying to copy it on rolls
of canvas. It was somewhere to put my mind that had nothing to do with where I was or where I’d been. Only colors and shapes mattered. Sometimes Nikolas-dan joined me, both of us choosing a part of the landscape to interpret through paints, and he taught me in that too.

  It was comfortable to sit with him because he didn’t interrogate me. We could sit for hours together without a word between us. At the end of it sometimes he smiled, as if our nonconversation had amused him. And then sometimes he frowned, as if he remembered something that bothered him. He told me that it was sympathizer business and nothing thai I needed to worry about. I should only concentrate on my studies and my training.

  Sometimes I looked at his profile when he painted, at his tattoo, and thought someday I was going to get one too. I’d be a ka’redan, not buntla-na anymore.

  One morning during breakfast he told me to start my exercises on my own, he had to check on something before our lessons began. In the inidrla-na alone I did my breathing under the glare of sunlight in the room, but it was too hot so I went to the glass wall to open one panel, let in a breeze. I liked to do the drills with the scent of the sea and trees around me. There was a latch on one side of the glass and I pulled. Birdsong greeted me, riding on the warm breeze. A little rainbow-feathered bird perched on the balcony. It tilted its head at me and didn’t fly away, like they usually did.

  I stepped out onto the balcony, my feet instantly warming on the baked tiles. There wasn’t any barrier between me and the outside air and the rolling-down landscape below me. It always gave me a moment of slight dizziness, if I wasn’t careful.

  The balcony stretched the length of the window, about a meter out from the building. The sun was brighter out here, hotter. It seemed to prick through my skin and squeeze around my throat. I went cautiously to the bird but as soon as I held out my hand it peeped and leaped away, dropping like a dart toward the trees below, then alighting on a branch. I held the top of the balcony for security, leaned a bit to watch. The rail was at the level of my shoulders so at least I couldn’t slip and pitch over the side.

  All the roofs below me were flat and white, but shadowed in those swirling designs. The walls were brightly painted in rust reds, blues, golds. Lips curved down from the edges of the roofs, making a little shade over the balconies. The breeze brushed over the side of the mountain and through my hair. Water winked in the distance, a blue deeper than the sky, but I couldn’t hear it. Only the trees whispered, answering the wind. I’d heard wind before outside my window, but here it was as clear as the glass that usually separated me from feeling it.

  Below me on my left, on another balcony of another building about five meters away, stood a slender figure I had never seen before. That balcony was always empty. Branches partly covered it but it leaned over, extended one long arm, and cast something down the slant of the mountainside, in the direction of the sea.

  The object floated, got jerked by the breeze, and danced upward for a bit, then spun and flipped toward the lower roofs. The flight reminded me of the paper ships we used to fold and fling off the upper ramparts in main engineering, when Jules allowed us. We’d watch them soar and dive, flying through the air totally unlike how our ship cut through space.

  I rested my chin on the rail and squinted at the figure. It wore tight clothing, almost like the white coils I’d seen on Nikolas-dan and his mother, except the white arms and sides were bare—gaps in the fabric all down the legs. Something about the movements reminded me of my teacher, the slow deliberate gestures. But something was off. They were too smooth.

  The figure had long white hair, white like Enas S’tlian’s face was white. The skin was the same. As it tilted its chin to look up at the sky and stringy clouds, I saw a flash of black eyes.

  Completely black eyes. A striviirc-na.

  I shrank down until only my eyes showed above the balcony. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. It had a face that made the S’tlians’ seem friendly by comparison. It looked carved from stone, as if someone had a general idea of human features without bothering to put in fine details like lines beneath the eyes or at the corners of the mouth, or the little indentations where nose met cheeks. The nose was oddly small compared to the boldness of the rest of the face, the lips just as white as the rest of its skin. But its skin shone, as if polished like their black screens. The tattoos around its eyes and down the edges of its cheekbones were dark silver swirls and points, more complicated even than Nikolas-dan’s, shining slightly under the sun. For some reason it reminded me of the white pictures on the black screens.

  Long neck, broad shoulders, slender torso… I took them all in, rising farther above my hiding place.

  Maybe it saw me in the corner of its eyes—or sensed me in some alien way I had no way of knowing. But it turned then and looked at me square on.

  I saw nothing friendly in that face. I saw nothing at all. Against the white of its skin, the large upswept black eyes pinned me with the pointed authority of a gun barrel.

  The striviirc-na moved suddenly, without sound, grabbed one of the thick branches of the tree brushing against the balcony, and vaulted up onto it. Diamond points danced below its raised arm. I thought it was a trick of the sunlight before I recognized the thin skin of a small wing fluttering free from the gap in its coiled bindings. It sparkled like raindrops on a windowpane, a wide flexible arc from the wrist to the waist.

  Before the striv landed firmly on the branch, he (or she— though something told me it was a he) flung himself to another branch, and another, all around that tree until he was in leaping distance of my balcony.

  In one uncoiled jump he landed right in front of me, a soft slap of bare feet on the balcony tiles. He straightened as if one long muscle ran through his body and looked down at me as I backed up.

  My shoulders hit the window panel of the inidrla-na. My heart thudded inside my head, an echo from where it had dropped into my stomach.

  His body looked like a human’s, except for the see-through wings that folded softly against his sides now that his arms were down. Two legs, two arms, all in basic human proportion though the limbs seemed a bit too long. He was smaller in height than Nikolas-dan. The way he moved was not human. He approached me with soundless steps, face fixed, more graceful than my teacher. This one was born with it.

  His white hand—completely covered on the back by silver tattoos—reached out and grasped the top of my hair, but not violently. I gasped. Or squeaked. It wasn’t a caress or even a possessive touch like Falcone used to do. Instead it seemed curious, as if he wanted only to know if I were real. The touch let me know that he was real, that I wasn’t dreaming it, that maybe he wasn’t going to hurt me. It was gentle.

  Then he released me. One long sculpted arm pointed toward the sea.

  “You saw me release my klal’tloric,” he said, in Ki’hade. The words came from deep in his throat, but were as clear as birdsong. He paused and said in my language, “Mind enemy.” Then he switched back to Ki’hade. “This is what many ka’redane do. Do you like this world?”

  I got asked that question a lot. They wanted me to like it. Of course they did, it was my home now. Before, I hadn’t seen a sunset or stood outside and felt the heat on my skin. I hadn’t held a jii in my hand. But now was different.

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “You have language,” he said. “And thought. Now you need strength. Do you like the kia’redan bae?”

  I rubbed the end of my nose and glanced up at the expressionless white face. My heart had stopped running. He smelled like the sweet vine, and despite his alienness, I knew he wouldn’t hurt me.

  “Nikolas-dan teaches me a lot. I’m learning a lot.”

  What did an alien mean when he said “like”?

  The breeze made his long white hair lift off his shoulders. Up close I saw lines in the wings, fine as thread and just as silver as his tattoos. I wanted to touch it but didn’t dare.

  “I am pleased,” he said, then sprang onto the balcony railing in on
e light move. He turned, standing on that narrow bar with no show of fear, even though he was a hairbreadth from a tumble to the rocks. His toes were long, curling around the rail.

  Before I could discover more details on his body, he leaped off the balcony onto a branch, walked around and under the shadowy arms of the tree, and landed lightly back on his own balcony. Without stopping he disappeared inside. I stared after him but he didn’t come back.

  I leaned my chin on the railing and peered over the rooftops toward the sea in the distance. My heart drummed in my head, louder even than the breeze. Not out of fear. I couldn’t see where his klal’tloric had landed, but I stared at its flight path until my teacher arrived to begin the day.

  * * *

  XII.

  I didn’t tell Nikolas-dan about my conversation with the alien. I spent hours with my teacher every day but the brief meeting with the white and silver striv was something I kept to myself and only opened up when I was alone. It felt rare, unusual, and I didn’t want to ruin it with talk. It was enough just to hold it in memory, and wonder.

  The leaves outside the Tree Room turned all shades of red, gold, and lavender. The hot days began to die and the sunlight went away faster. Outside, the morning sun rose reluctant and low. We had more of these kinds of days, now that summer was gone. The insect noises had gone away too and the sweet vine began to die, taking with it the scent that gave me good dreams. But I didn’t need it now. At the end of a rigorous day doing sword and denie work, I slept soundly. The vine would bloom again when the weather turned back warm, Niko said. But for now it would die.

  In my head I started calling him Niko, like Enas-dan did.

  Fighting Niko took all of my concentration. He read me easily and if I only blinked too long he had me on the floor. We used wooden jii, in length just like the real ones but lighter and blunt. They still hurt when they hit with the force of a cutting blow but wouldn’t draw blood. The inidrla-na rang with the connection of our blades as Niko attacked my jii-na and I desperately tried to keep him at bay. He barked advice at me when he saw me getting desperate. A desperate mind was not a blade mind. Usually his voice, so familiar to me now, could bring me out of myself and into the place I was supposed to be: in this case, inside the blade.