Page 7 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Livira glanced in the direction of her home, looked at Acmar then went to stand beside him, setting a hand to his quaking shoulder. “We need to get them somewhere…” She wanted to say “safe” but the place they were in wasn’t dangerous to ghosts. “…somewhere they can live. This isn’t their fight.”

“It’s everyone’s fight,” Yolanda said, looking up at Leetar as she came to stand, red-eyed, beside Livira.

“That’s what people in wars always say.” Livira shook her head. “Whatever happens with the library and however doomed this world is on the grand scale, there’s still time to live out good lives.” She looked at the settlement hunched around them. “People lived them here. They weren’t happy all the time, but they laughed, there were games, they loved, children grew. I was loved. And yes, dammit, I want to see that, even if it makes me cry. So, send the others who haven’t chosen this fight somewhere better.”

“You overestimate what I can do.”

Livira had already turned her back though, and her feet brought her to the open doorway of her mother’s hut. The small dome was dried mud bricks, layered in a reducing spiral to a smoke hole that a tall man could reach without going to tiptoes. Her mother sat a little way within, the morning sun lighting her to her neck, face still shadowed. Crimson hands moved almost too quickly to follow, the action ingrained even now in Livira’s muscle memory, shelling beans. The jarra bean had three skins toprotect its moisture from the Dust’s endless thirst. The innermost one was toxic and unless it was completely removed the bean stew would induce vomiting and diarrhoea.

Drawing closer Livira saw her mother’s face for the first time since she was six years old, and the storm had taken her. For a moment Livira didn’t understand why she couldn’t breathe. The sound that burst from her was as ugly and raw as it was involuntary and unexpected. Like Acmar she found herself on her knees. The grief for Meelan Livira had been able to wall off though she knew it would find her later and hurt her all the more. This emotion was primal, like a fist striking up from within, and Livira could no more stand against it than she could stop her heart from beating.

She had thought that she might study her mother as an object of curiosity, then step by her to peer at her infant self. Instead, she crawled away, passing Leetar who stood bewildered but wise enough to stay silent. Once out of sight of her mother Livira rose, standing to continue her retreat, bent around a child’s pain, bowed beneath the weight of a lifetime’s unspoken words.

By the time she reached Yolanda, Livira had straightened herself and dried her face, walking now with the careful steps of someone cradling a wound. The girl offered no comment and an echo of Yute’s compassion could be seen in her face, though perhaps she was still too young to inherit her father’s seemingly all-encompassing care.

“We need to get them out of here,” Livira said.

“I can’t make portals.” Yolanda raised a white hand to forestall what would have been unreasonable objections from Livira. “But”—and now she rose from the ground, flying just as Livira and Evar had learned to do as ghosts—“in this form our motion is not limited to up and down, or through. We can move in time too. Though it is more difficult.”

“How difficult?”

“It requires something to push off,” Yolanda said. “If I push the rest of you forward to a point where you will regain your present, it will push me much further backwards into the past.”

“We’ll do it together, if you show me how.”

“You know how,” Yolanda said. “You wore the white. You just need to remember.”

Leetar, who had been following Livira silently, a ghost’s ghost, spoke up behind them. “I want to go with you. There’s nothing for me now. I don’t know how to start…”

Livira opened her mouth to say that it was too dangerous, that Leetar didn’t understand what she would be letting herself in for. She closed it. Even Livira didn’t know what she was letting herself in for. And Leetar had seen the danger. A huge mechanical wonder had crushed her brother beneath an assistant. “All right.”

“Should we tell them?” Leetar said. “The others?”

Livira looked out across the settlement and in that moment saw Jella, who was standing some way off between two huts, turn and stare in her direction. Gentle Jella, who only wanted peace, and had not long ago had only a rapidly failing door between her and a raging canith warrior. Jella would never forgive her for what she was about to do. Never forgive her for saving her.

Livira looked to Yolanda. “Can you send them somewhere good?”

“I can only send them some-when. They’ll still be here. Right in this spot. Just like we will be. And good times are few and far between. In fact, in most of the better times, this spot is underwater. But I’ll do my best.”

“There’s a baby.” Livira stressed the word.

“I’ll do my best.”

“Should we tell them?” Leetar repeated. Jella was walking towards the three of them now, with purpose.

Livira stared at the dusty ground, seeking wisdom, or at least inspiration. She could tell them, but they would want her to go with them. Or they would refuse to go. Those that didn’t know her would think she was using them somehow. Those that did would want to help her and want her help. Jella would want to help her. Already the guilt was eating at her, and yet all she’d ever done was try to save them. She could go with them, leave Yolanda to the quest. Spend her life shepherding the refugees through whatever future Dust they arrived in. As if not having abandoned them to the canith hordes made her somehow responsible for their survival forevermore. As if she were somehow more able to carve out a life for them than Acmar or Breta or any of the others were.

“No.” Livira met Leetar’s bloodshot eyes. Where dirt and panic hadfailed, grief had dented the girl’s seemingly impervious beauty. It made her more real, closer to someone Livira could like.

Jella was almost on them. Livira raised her hand, asking her to wait, and Jella did, confusion in her eyes.

“Don’t leave me,” Leetar hissed. They’d trained her to be a diplomat, to falsify smiles, to flatter and deceive. But sorrow had pared all that away, leaving honesty. “I need to be with people who knew him. Who loved him.”

Livira met Leetar’s honesty with her own. “I did love him. I don’t know what he would want me to do. But I’ll take you with me as far as you can go.” She turned to face Yolanda. “How do we do this?”

It’s not until you’re the third wheel that you fully understand the merits of the tricycle.

Locomotion: A History, by Lance A. Strong

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