The Water Sign

First Flight

At first I didn’t like the ritual of the kohl but I grew to love it. Lilith chose me to do hers. When my hand shook as I tried to apply the makeup, she grabbed my wrist so hard it hurt. I thought she would yell, jerk my hand away, and go pick a different partner. I’d embarrass both of us.

“Relax,” she whispered. “Don’t poke my eye out, okay?”

I gave a weak laugh.

It could have been worse. Hela had ended up with Aichus as her partner.

I saw him gritting his teeth as he let her encircle his eyes. He looked about ready to spit on her. He often did.

All the other graduating classes were kneeling in the station, all in pairs, all clumsily going through the ritual honor we’d been forbidden until now. I drew the dark lines around Lilith’s eyes and they transformed her, turning her eyes a deeper dark against her pale skin. The kohl matched the color of her hair well.

Then she began to do mine.

Her breath tickled my face. So close. Too close.

She kissed me.

Khaya.

Like the desert.

But there was no pointing finger. No yelling. No one noticed in the darkness of the station’s dimmed lights. The trains kept humming. The whispering continued. No one saw.

I almost sighed until I saw Hela, watching us from the corner of one eye as Aichus angrily dabbed the pen. I did not expect to see so much disappointment there, trembling in her face—or to feel so much either. I tried to hide my sadness from Lilith.

Why couldn’t I have been paired with her instead, I wondered. Why couldn’t Hela have kissed me?

***

“You scared, Pond?” Aichus asked me from across the cabin, using his favorite nickname. It was short for “Pond Scum,” coined in that moment when he first called me “as useful as pond scum.” Now everyone used it. No one called me by my true name anymore. The teachers didn’t like that for a while but they let it pass. Like everyone else, they got tired of sticking up for me.

When I looked up at him, he smiled another hateful smile, his favorite kind, and I felt myself begin to lift against my seat straps, my stomach lurching as Aichus drained my gravity with his Aspect. A favorite prank of his. I felt bile rising at the free-fall sensation. It was not fun to float.

The lips curled back on his handsome face, arching up his fair-skinned cheeks, framed by that blond hair. Certain. Confident. Attractive. It was as if his status as my tormenter had been preordained—but that was a forbidden thought, a religious thought.

“Leave him alone,” Lilith snapped and at once I flopped back down onto the bench, Aichus already miming innocence while the others laughed.

Then she made it worse because she couldn’t quite help but look over and give me a reassuring smile. A little one that said, “I know you’re scared. It’s okay.” I’m sure the whole class saw it. Some of them probably sighed or rolled their eyes. It had become routine to them how weak I was.

Hela, sitting at the other end of the transport, looked at me too. Sometimes, when she looked at me like that, I felt like I watched another world inside her. A secret world. The secret spin of galaxies. The secret birth and death of stars. I told myself it wasn’t right; she was too pretty to look that scared. Hela wasn’t supposed to be scared of anything. Not after what they’d done to her.

Recognizing her fear made me feel better. And worse too.

“Forty klicks to insertion,” came the squawking voice of the AI pilot over the engines’ howl. It was a serf system, mindless outside of anything to do with navigating the controls. But in its dead monotone I heard something more because I was scared. And maybe if I’d taken the time to look around at the shuffling of feet, fingers playing with ties of hair, all our little nervous tics, I would have seen that we all were.