SEEDED WORLD PART-2

Chapter One

Sungai. The Letter.

The Riverbed. The Appointment.

The old man was still holding the pipe when Theo walked back to him.

Not because he had been told to hold it — because he had picked it up after the water started and had not put it down again, the way you held something when you were not sure yet whether you were supposed to give it back or whether the giving had already happened in the other direction. The maroon cloth moved in the morning air. The crescent hole faced him. He looked at it and then at Theo coming toward him across the wet mud of the riverbed, the water still running around their feet from the broken dam, the irrigation channels filling with a sound they had not made in years.

Theo stopped in front of him.

"You are the first priest of Crescent Sun," he said. "That is yours. The flag is the symbol. You are the one who keeps it."

The old man looked at the pipe in his hands. He looked at the cloth. He looked at Theo with the expression of a person who had been given a title they did not expect and were deciding what to do with the weight of it.

He straightened. Both hands on the pipe, the metal bar leaning against his leg now, the flag held upright with the specific deliberateness of someone who had understood that the way you held a thing communicated something about how seriously you were taking it.

It was slightly funny. Not disrespectfully — the specific warmth of something that was sincere and slightly too large for the moment it was standing in, the dignity of a limping man in a wet riverbed holding a dress tied to a pipe as though it were a standard of an army. He meant it completely. That was the part that made it work.

Aasu, beside Theo, noted it in the book without comment.

* * *

The Riverbed. The Accounting.

Eon came to Theo while the water was still finding its level.

He stood in front of him with the specific quality of a person who was holding two things at the same time and was not going to pretend otherwise. Grateful and angry. Neither one canceling the other.

"You covered Raya," he said. "When the blast came. You put yourself between her and it." A pause that had weight in it. "I want you to know I saw that."

Theo nodded.

"The Leox piece," Eon said, same tone. "We came here for it. That was the mission. And now it is fused to you and we are leaving without it."

"It would not have worked anyway," Aasu said.

Eon looked at him. Aasu adjusted his glasses.

"The Leox pieces reject everyone except Theo. They are fused to him in a way that is not transferable — they will not respond to any other person and they will not respond to any machine they are installed in. If you had taken the piece from the cave you would have taken a seed that did nothing." He said it the way he said things that were factual and did not require apology. "The mission was already resolved before you arrived. It was resolved the moment Theo made contact with the first piece."

Eon absorbed this. He looked at the cave, now closed under the running water. Then at the number that the mission had cost — the three who had been on the ground when Kalshi's blast came through, the three who were not here now — and the calculation of what it had all been worth ran through his expression and settled somewhere that was not resolved but was accepted.

Raya spoke into the quiet that followed.

"The Rexor piece in Husky7," she said. "It never responded properly. We tested it seventeen times. The piece was functional — every diagnostic confirmed it — but it would not integrate the way it should have. We could not understand why."