Inventing a Tinker

Part 9

Jennai was already there when I returned to the apartment. She sat atop the back of the lone chair, her feet resting on the seat, elbows on her knees, watching the clock. She worked a longer day than me. The cannery should have kept her until nearly eight, and she still had the walk back afterward.

"You're back early," I said. She turned toward me and smiled, and that was when I noticed her injuries. The side that had been turned away from me was swollen and red, one eye puffed completely shut. There were welts along her forearms. "What happened?"

"Binned," she replied with a sigh. Her words were slurred and she barely moved her jaw. "Tardy one day too many. Foreman took a baton to me. Not as bad as it looks. He expected me to work the day, after all. But I couldn't keep my mouth shut. I'm just lucky I didn't get arrested and put in a collar; I was ready to hit him."

"Alyssa, I'm so sorry," I replied. "How do we live like this?" Crossing the room, I took Jennai in my arms and held her, but she pushed me away.

"What did you just call me?" she asked, holding me at arm's length and looking into my eyes. There was no anger in that one-eyed gaze, but the intensity there quickened my heart.

"I... I don't know. Alyssa?" I ventured.

"Oh, Erefan," Alyssa replied. "It's coming back to you. We'll make sense of this, you and me. The hard part to accept is over. I can teach you how this all works, existing in two worlds." She kissed me, ignoring the reek of my soggy clothes and her own injured jaw.

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I awoke on the beach north of Buou, with the dawn's first tentative rays testing the surface of the Katamic Sea. Jennai lay beside me, peaceful, attentive; her soft eyes watched as I shrugged off slumber's grasp.

"It couldn't have been just a dream, could it?" I mused aloud.

Jennai smiled. "It couldn't. Our kind don't dream, not really anyway. The slumbering mind is more receptive to the other world; that's how we see it."

I knew her so well, this girl who I'd met a month ago. But Erefan and Alyssa had lived together as husband and wife for two years, though that other world gave no such legal recognition to humans. Things were different in Khesh. "Would it be forward of me to ask you to marry me?" I asked.

"Forward? No," Jennai replied. "But awfully formal. We've done without long enough in Korr. Why rush things here?"

"I saw a great many things wrong in that other world," I replied. "Things no self-respecting man should ever abide. Why can't I try to make up for at least one injustice?"

"I expect a lot more than that out of you," Jennai replied, propping herself up on one elbow. "A lot of us don't sit idly by while kuduks ruin human lives. You'll remember more as things settle between you and Erefan, but there are reasons you knew those sewers so well. Some of us are fighting back—you included, though you're still new at it. You've got more untapped potential than any of us."

"What potential?" I asked.

"We're using both worlds. The kuduks can't track us here. They don't even know this world exists, best we can tell. The more of our kind we can find and bring in to the cause, the stronger the resistance will become."

"Fine, but I don't know any others like us," I said. "I didn't know about me until last night."

"You can be of more help than you imagine, but you have to think big—bigger than you've ever thought before. Maybe bigger than anyone's thought before."

"What do I need to do?"