Involuntarily, Mischa shuddered. Gemmi had called her, toward insanity, many times. Chris felt her tremble and pressed his hand against her shoulder. "Hey."
She could not become angry over his undependable concern; she was too used to his unconscious selfishness and his occasional abrupt generosity. "Gemmi sucks out my brain and licks at my eyes," she whispered. "He's making her call me more often now—"
"It won't be long," Chris said. "We're leaving earth. We're going to the Sphere."
Mischa was caught with surprise and hope. She could hardly believe that he had found a position, after so long. If this were true, everything they had been through was worth it. For two years Mischa had stolen for both of them, to placate their uncle and support their younger siblings and to free Chris for his own work. She had begun to despair, and the changes in her brother had seemed to confirm her fears.
Chris's eyelids flickered and he smiled his small diffident smile of keeping a secret until the right moment. "I'm leaving Center. Like we talked about. We'll be so far away Gemmi will never be able to call us. You do want to come?"
Mischa protected herself with distrust. "When?"
"One of the shipowners saw my stuff. my new stuff. Hers is the last ship out."
"That's great, Chris." Mischa clenched her teeth and kept back tears. "Sure." The last ship had taken off long before, barely avoiding the first sandstorm of the winter. Chris felt as though he believed what he said, but Mischa could not tell if that truth were reality or the remnants of their dreams. Now it hardly mattered.
She shifted her supporting grip on his waist to ease her shoulder muscles, but stopped abruptly when Chris gasped at the pain of his cracked bones. The same pain flared in tandem in Mischa's side, beating at her reserves of strength and endurance. Chris stood hunched over, swaying. Mischa touched his ribs more gently and found the place that made him wince.
"Don't—"
"It's all right," she said. "Just a little farther. I won't do it again." He let her start him walking. His emaciated muscles had no tone.
A long time passed before they reached Chris's niche. It was almost in Center itself, on the first circumference out from the main cave. In a crowded and competitive place, Chris had kept his home because fighting with a knife or barehanded, he was good. But soon some chuckie would realize that he no longer had the desire or the ability to fight for anything.
The door was open. Mischa led Chris inside, locked the door behind them, pushed aside the hall curtain, and stopped abruptly, staring. The niche was a five-meter cube cut in stone, rough-polished. The wall facing the entrance had been a quiet, bright scene of a world where things grew, a vision of what she and Chris had imagined of other places. Now the wall screamed with color. "You changed it—"
Chris's hand slid limply off her shoulder, as though he were giving up the little strength left him, as though he did not need it in this familiar place. He seemed to feel safe. Mischa felt threatened. The left wall had been painted over and experimented on a hundred times since Chris had come here; Mischa had seldom visited without finding a new picture, or design, or invention.
This time, what was left of the top layer of paint was smeared, and the wall had been smashed with a stone. Flakes of paint lay scattered in the sand, and the wall was a mosaic of old work in bits, almost recognizable. Mischa looked at it for a long time, until finally, with a deep breath, she was able to pull her gaze away. She tried not to look at it again, but the brilliant disaster kept catching on the edge of her vision.
She moved between heaps of Chris's flamboyant clothes to straighten his bed. She threw the filthy tangled blankets on the floor and rummaged for cleaner ones. When she turned back, Chris was curled in fetal position. She sighed, at the point of frustration. "If you want to lie there soaking wet—" She stopped. There was no way to make him feel guilty about himself.
He had wrapped his arms around his head and buried his face between his knees; she could not reach the fastenings of his shirt. She pulled one arm away but it crept back like a sick snake to shield his eyes. The slow-motion wrestling match made her fruitlessly angry. Eventually she got the front of the shirt pulled apart. Once she had dragged the bright frayed material off one arm, the other was not so difficult.
Over sharp bones, under fine gold hairs, a black bruise marred Chris's blue-white skin. Old scars stood out in darker ridges on his chest and forearms. His boots came off with a faint squelch. When Mischa had finally made him straighten out his legs, his pants were too loose to be much trouble. Naked, he looked very frail. He went limp when she tried to get him to his bed. She shook him and cursed, and very nearly kicked him in the side herself.
Whatever his reasons, he must have been wandering awake near the deep underground for days, because he had passed through hyperactivity and euphoria and false clarity of mind, hallucination and paranoia, and reached the last stage of exhaustion before coma.
"Chris?"
"Uh?" His translucent eyelids flickered.
"Is there any sleep here?"
"I don't want it." His voice was just a whisper, but the whine had returned.
"You started," she said. "You can't stop now."
"It helps," he said. "It used to." He lifted his hand to gesture at the one new wall, but his arm trembled and fell back across his chest. "That's what I did when I started. It was so good—"
"You were good before."
"Not that good. Not good enough."
"And this?" She gestured toward the ruined wall, without looking at it. Chris did not answer, but turned his head away. Mischa shrugged. The changed room reached out with tendrils of color, mindlessly, probing at her. It was full of a nervous and dissipated kind of energy. The controlled power of Chris's earlier work was unleashed here raw.
"You lose a lot when you sleep," he said. "You have visions that would be the best things you could ever do, but you can't remember them when you wake up. Your whole brain gets used, but you forget. That doesn't happen anymore."
"Now you don't dream at all." She said it, and instantly regretted the needless cruelty.
His voice turned ugly and defiant. "Maybe it was worth it."
Mischa looked around, at the walls of the room where she had been able to sit and imagine what it would be like to leave Center and be free, where now she could only withdraw into herself and hope to escape quickly. She wished she did not care. If she had not cared, she could get up and walk away from him and never come back.
With no emotion, Chris said, "It's in the carryall."
She went through the pack and found a vial of round transparent capsules. Fine white filaments writhed slowly inside them. "How many?"
"Just one."
She could feel the lie. She shook two into the palm of her hand and took them to him. "I can tell, Chris. You're not clear like Gemmi, but I can tell." She wanted to grab him and shake him, or scream, or cry: Two! You need two! And you never looked for me, you never let me help.
He closed his hand around the capsules. There was hate in his skeleton-face because she would not let him kill himself now, because next time, alone, he might not have the nerve.
He swallowed the capsules and lay back, changed, gradually relaxing. He reached out blindly for Mischa. His hand was skin and bone, starved muscles and sharp, dirty fingernails. She held his hand until his grip slackened and he slept, a dreamless, necessary, torturing sleep, the only kind he had anymore. She felt it come upon him. For the thousandth time she wished her mind were closed to others. In the spectrum of her strangeness, Mischa could feel Gemmi the most strongly; her sister was not only detectable, but could force herself clearly into Mischa's thoughts from a great distance. At the farthest end of the spectrum, a few people were so calm, so self-contained, that Mischa could hardly sense them at all. She could feel Chris a little more than she did most people: never whole thoughts or words, only vague currents of emotion.