All energy is the same, through its different states and names. Movement creates heat which is also light that waves like sound which tightens or loosens the atomic bonds of crystal as they hum with strong and weak forces. In mirroring resonance with all of this is magic, the radiant emission of life and death.

This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies. To manipulate and mitigate and, through the prism of our awareness, produce a singular force that cannot be denied. To make of cacophony, symphony. The great machine called the Plutonic Engine is the instrument. We are its tuners.

And this is the goal: Geoarcanity. Geoarcanity seeks to establish an energetic cycle of infinite efficiency. If we are successful, the world will never know want or strife again… or so we are told. The conductors explain little beyond what we must know to fulfill our roles. It is enough to know that we – small, unimportant we – will help to set humanity on a new path toward an unimaginably bright future. We may be tools, but we are fine ones, put to a magnificent purpose. It is easy to find pride in that.

We are attuned enough to each other that the loss of Tetlewha causes trouble for a time. When we join to form our initializing network, it’s imbalanced. Tetlewha was our countertenor, the half wavelengths of the spectrum; without him I am closest, but my natural resonance is a little high. The resulting network is weaker than it should be. Our feeder threads keep trying to reach for Tetlewha’s empty middle range.

Gaewha is able to compensate for the loss, finally. She reaches deeper, resonates more powerfully, and this plugs the gap. We must spend several days reforging all the network’s connections to create new harmony, but it isn’t difficult to do this, just time-consuming. This isn’t the first time we’ve had to do it.

Kelenli joins us in the network only occasionally. This is frustrating, because her voice – deep and powerful and foot-tingling in its sharpness – is perfect. Better than Tetlewha’s, wider ranging than all of us together. But we are told by the conductors not to get used to her. “She’ll serve during the actual start-up of the Engine,” one of them says when I ask, “but only if she can’t manage to teach you how to do what she does. Conductor Gallat wants her on standby only, come Launch Day.”

This seems sensible, on the surface.

When Kelenli is part of us, she takes point. This is simply natural, because her presence is so much greater than ours. Why? Something in the way she is made? Something else. There is a… held note. A perpetual hollow burn at the midpoint of her balanced lines, at their fulcrum, which none of us understand. A similar burn rests in each of us, but ours is faint and intermittent, occasionally flaring only to quickly fade back to quiescence. Hers blazes steadily, its fuel apparently limitless.

Whatever this held-note burn is, the conductors have discovered, it meshes beautifully with the devouring chaos of the onyx. The onyx is the control cabochon of the whole Plutonic Engine, and while there are other ways to start up the Engine – cruder ways, workarounds involving subnetworks or the moonstone – on Launch Day we will absolutely need the onyx’s precision and control. Without it, our chances of successfully initiating Geoarcanity diminish greatly… but none of us, thus far, has had the strength to hold the onyx for more than a few minutes. We observe in awe, however, as Kelenli rides it for a solid hour, then actually seems unfazed when she disengages from it. When we engage the onyx, it punishes us, stripping everything we can spare and leaving us in a shutdown sleep for hours or days – but not her. Its threads caress rather than rip at her. The onyx likes her. This explanation is irrational, but it occurs to all of us, so that’s how we begin to think of it. Now she must teach us to be more likable to the onyx, in her stead.

When we are done rebalancing and they let us up from the wire chairs that maintain our bodies while our minds are engaged, and we stagger and must lean on the conductors to make it back to our individual quarters… when all of this is done, she comes to visit us. Individually, so the conductors won’t suspect anything. In face-to-face meetings, speaking audible nonsense – and meanwhile, earthspeaking sense to all of us at once.

She feels sharper than the rest of us, she explains, because she is more experienced. Because she’s lived outside of the complex of buildings that surround the local fragment, and which has comprised the entirety of our world since we were decanted. She has visited more nodes of Syl Anagist than just the one we live in; she has seen and touched more of the fragments than just our local amethyst. She has even been to Zero Site, where the moonstone rests. We are in awe of this.

“I have context,” she says to us – to me, rather. She’s sitting on my couch. I am sprawled facedown on the window seat, face turned away from her. “When you do, too, you’ll be just as sharp.”

(It is a kind of pidgin between us, using the earth to add meaning to audible words. Her words are simply, “I’m older,” while a whitter of subsidence adds the nuancing deformation of time. She is metamorphic, having transformed to bear unbearable pressure. To make this telling simpler, I will translate it all as words, except where I cannot.)

“It would be good if we were as sharp as you now,” I reply wearily. I am not whining. Rebalancing days are always hard. “Give us this context, then, so the onyx will listen and my head can stop hurting.”

Kelenli sighs. “There’s nothing within these walls on which you can sharpen yourself.” (Crumble of resentment, ground up and quickly scattered. They have kept you so safe and sheltered.) “But I think there’s a way I can help you and the others do that, if I can get you out of this place.”

“Help me… sharpen myself?”

(She soothes me with a polishing stroke. It is not a kindness that you are kept so dull.) “You need to understand more about yourself. What you are.”

I don’t understand why she thinks I don’t understand. “I’m a tool.”

She says: “If you’re a tool, shouldn’t you be honed as fine as possible?”

Her voice is serene. And yet a pent, angry jitter of the entire ambient – air molecules shivering, strata beneath us compressing, a dissonant grinding whine at the limit of our ability to sess – tells me that Kelenli hates what I have just said. I turn my head to her and find myself fascinated by the way this dichotomy fails to show in her face. It’s another way she’s like us. We have long since learned not to show pain or fear or sorrow in any space aboveground or below the sky. The conductors tell us we are built to be like statues – cold, immovable, silent. We aren’t certain why they believe we actually are this way; after all, we are as warm to the touch as they. We feel emotion, as they seem to, although we do seem less inclined to display it in face or body language. Perhaps this is because we have earthtalk? (Which they don’t seem to notice. This is good. In the earth, we may be ourselves.) It has never been clear to us whether we were built wrong, or whether their understanding of us is wrong. Or whether either matters.

Kelenli is outwardly calm while she burns inside. I watch her for so long that abruptly she comes back to herself and catches me. She smiles. “I think you like me.”

I consider the possible implications of this. “Not that way,” I say, out of habit. I have had to explain this to junior conductors or other staff on occasion. We are made like statues in this way as well – a design implementation that worked in this case, leaving us capable of rutting but disinterested in the attempt, and infertile should we bother. Is Kelenli the same? No, the conductors said she was made different in only one way. She has our powerful, complex, flexible sessapinae, which no other people in the world possess. Otherwise she’s like them.

“How fortunate that I wasn’t talking about sex.” There’s a drawling hum of amusement from her; it both bothers and pleases me. I don’t know why.

Oblivious to my sudden confusion, Kelenli gets to her feet. “I’ll be back,” she says, and leaves.

She doesn’t return for several days. She remains a detached part of our last network, though, so she is present for our wakings, our meals, our defecations, our inchoate dreams when we sleep, our pride in ourselves and each other. It doesn’t feel like watching when she does it, even if she is watching. I cannot speak for the others, but I like having her around.

Not all of the others do like Kelenli. Gaewha in particular is belligerent about it, and she sends this through our private discussion. “She appears just as we lose Tetlewha? Just as the project concludes? We’ve worked hard to become what we are. Will they praise her for our work, when it’s done?”

“She’s only a standby,” I say, trying to be the voice of reason. “And what she wants is what we want. We need to cooperate.”

“So she says.” That is Remwha, who considers himself smarter than the rest of us. (We’re all made to be equally intelligent. Remwha is just an ass.) “The conductors kept her away until now for a reason. She may be a troublemaker.”

That is foolish, I believe, though I don’t let myself say it even in earthtalk. We are part of the great machine. Anything that improves the machine’s function matters; anything unrelated to this purpose does not. If Kelenli were a troublemaker, Gallat would have sent her to the briar patch with Tetlewha. This is a thing we all understand. Gaewha and Remwha are just being difficult.

“If she is some sort of troublemaker, that will show itself with time,” I say firmly. That does not end, but at least postpones, the argument.

Kelenli returns the next day. The conductors bring us together to explain. “Kelenli has asked to take you on a tuning mission,” says the man who comes to deliver the briefing. He’s much taller than us, taller even than Kelenli, and slender. He likes to dress in perfectly matched colors and ornate buttons. His hair is long and black; his skin is white, though not so much as ours. His eyes are like ours, however – white within white. White as ice. We’ve never seen another one of them with eyes like ours. He is Conductor Gallat, head of the project. I think of Gallat as a plutonic fragment – a clear one, diamond-white. He is precisely angled and cleanly faceted and beautiful in a unique way, and he is also implacably deadly if not handled with precision. We don’t let ourselves think about the fact that he’s the one who killed Tetlewha.

(He isn’t who you think he is. I want Gallat to look like him the way I want you to look like her. This is the hazard of a flawed memory.)

“A tuning… mission,” Gaewha says slowly, to show that she doesn’t understand.

Kelenli opens her mouth to speak and then stops, turning to Gallat. Gallat smiles genially at this. “Kelenli’s performance is what we were hoping for with all of you, and yet you’ve consistently underperformed,” he says. We tense, uncomfortable, hyperconscious of criticism, though he merely shrugs. “I’ve consulted with the chief biomagestre, and she’s insistent that there’s no significant difference in your relative abilities. You have the same capability that she has, but you don’t demonstrate the same skill. There are any number of alterations we could make to try to resolve the discrepancy, fine-tuning so to speak, but that’s a risk we’d rather not take so close to launch.”

We reverberate in one accord for a moment, all of us very glad for this. “She said that she was here to teach us context,” I venture, very carefully.

Gallat nods to me. “She believes the solution is outside experience. Increased exposure to stimuli, challenging your problem-solving cognition, things like that. It’s a suggestion that has merit and the benefit of being minimally invasive – but for the sake of the project, we can’t send you all out at once. What if something happened? Instead we will split you into two groups. Since there’s only one of Kelenli, that means half of you will go with her now, and half in a week.”

Outside. We’re going outside. I’m desperate to be in the first group, but we know better than to show desire before the conductors. Tools should not want to escape their box so obviously.

I say, instead, “We’ve been more than sufficiently attuned to one another without this proposed mission.” My voice is flat. A statue’s. “The simulations show that we are reliably capable of controlling the Engine, as expected.”

“And we might as well do six groups as two,” adds Remwha. By this asinine suggestion do I know his eagerness. “Will each group not have different experiences? As I understand the… outside… there’s no way to control for consistency of exposure. If we must take time away from our preparations for this, surely it should be done in a way that minimizes risk?”

“I think six wouldn’t be cost-effective or efficient,” Kelenli says, while silently signaling approval and amusement for our playacting. She glances at Gallat and shrugs, not bothering to pretend that she is emotionless; she simply seems bored. “We might as well do one group as two or six. We can plan the route, position extra guards along the way, involve the nodal police for surveillance and support. Honestly, repeated trips would just increase the chance that disaffected citizens might anticipate the route and plan… unpleasantness.”

We are all intrigued by the possibility of unpleasantness. Kelenli quells our excited tremors.

Conductor Gallat winces as she does this; that one struck home. “The potential for significant gains are why you will go,” Conductor Gallat says to us. He’s still smiling, but there’s an edge to it now. Was the word will ever so slightly emphasized? So minute, the perturbations of audible speech. What I take from this is that not only will he let us go, but he has also changed his mind about sending us in multiple groups. Some of this is because Kelenli’s suggestion was the most sensible, but the rest is because he’s irritated with us for our apparent reluctance.

Ah, Remwha wields his annoying nature like a diamond chisel as usual. Excellent work, I pulse. He returns me a polite thank-you waveform.

We are to leave that very day. Clothing suitable for travel outdoors is brought to my quarters by junior conductors. I pull on the thicker cloth and shoes carefully, fascinated by the different textures, and then sit quietly while the junior conductor plaits my hair into a single white braid. “Is this necessary for outside?” I ask. I’m genuinely curious, since the conductors wear their hair in many styles. Some of them I can’t emulate, because my hair is poufy and coarse and will not hold a curl or bear straightening. Only we have hair like this. Theirs comes in many textures.

“It might help,” says the junior. “You lot are going to stand out no matter what, but the more normal we can make you seem, the better.”

“People will know we’re part of the Engine,” I say, straightening just a little in pride.

His fingers slow for a moment. I don’t think he notices. “That’s not exactly… They’re more likely to think you’re something else. Don’t worry, though; we’ll send guards along to make sure there’s no trouble. They’ll be unobtrusive, but there. Kelenli insists that you can’t be made to feel sheltered, even if you are.”

“They’re more likely to think we’re something else,” I repeat slowly, thoughtfully.

His fingers twitch, pulling a few strands harder than necessary. I don’t wince or pull away. They’re more comfortable thinking of us as statues, and statues aren’t supposed to feel pain. “Well, it’s a distant possibility, but they have to know you aren’t – I mean, it’s…” He sighs. “Oh, Evil Death. It’s complicated. Don’t worry about it.”

Conductors say this when they’ve made a mistake. I don’t ping the others with it right away, because we minimize communication outside of sanctioned meetings. People who are not tuners can perceive magic only in rudimentary ways; they use machines and instruments to do what is natural for us. Still, they’re always monitoring us in some measure, so we cannot allow them to learn the extent to which we speak to each other, and hear them, when they think we cannot.

Soon I’m ready. After conferring with other conductors over the vine, mine decides to brush my face with paint and powder. It’s supposed to make me look like them. It actually makes me like someone whose white skin has been painted brown. I must look skeptical when he shows me the mirror; my conductor sighs and complains that he’s not an artist.

Then he brings me to a place that I’ve seen only a few times before, within the building that houses me: the downstairs foyer. Here the walls aren’t white; the natural green and brown of self-repairing cellulose has been allowed to flourish unbleached. Someone has seeded the space with vining strawberries that are half in white flower, half in ripening red fruit; it’s quite lovely. The six of us stand near the floor pool waiting for Kelenli, trying not to notice the other personnel of the building coming and going and staring at us: six smaller-than-average, stocky people with puffy white hair and painted faces, our lips arranged in defensively pleasant smiles. If there are guards, we do not know how to tell them from the gawkers.

When Kelenli comes toward us, though, I finally notice guards. Hers move with her, not bothering to be unobtrusive – a tall brown woman and man who might have been siblings. I realize I have seen them before, trailing her on other occasions that she’s come to visit. They hang back as she reaches us.

“Good, you’re ready,” she says. Then she grimaces, reaching out to touch Dushwha’s cheek. Her thumb comes away dusted with face powder. “Really?”

Dushwha looks away, uncomfortable. They have never liked being pushed into any emulation of our creators – not in clothing, not in gender, definitely not in this. “It’s meant to help,” they mutter unhappily, perhaps trying to convince themselves.

“It makes you more conspicuous. And they’ll know what you are, anyway.” She turns and looks at one of her guards, the woman. “I’m taking them to clean this dreck off. Want to help?” The woman just looks at her in silence. Kelenli laughs to herself. It sounds genuinely mirth filled.

She herds us into a personal-needs alcove. The guards station themselves outside while she splashes water on our faces from the clean side of the latrine pool, and scrubs the paint away with an absorbent cloth. She hums while she does it. Does that mean she’s happy? When she takes my arm to wipe the gunk off my face, I search hers to try to understand. Her gaze sharpens when she notices.

“You’re a thinker,” she says. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean.

“We all are,” I say. I allow a brief rumble of nuance. We have to be.

“Exactly. You think more than you have to.” Apparently a bit of brown near my hairline is especially stubborn. She wipes it off, grimaces, wipes it again, sighs, rinses the cloth and wipes at it again.

I continue searching her face. “Why do you laugh at their fear?”

It’s a stupid question. Should’ve asked it through the earth, not out loud. She stops wiping my face. Remwha glances at me in bland reproach, then goes to the entrance of the alcove. I hear him asking the guard there to please ask a conductor whether we are in danger of sun damage without the protection of the paint. The guard laughs and calls over her companion to relay this question, as if it’s ridiculous. During the moment of distraction purchased for us by this exchange, Kelenli then resumes scrubbing me.

“Why not laugh at it?” she says.

“They would like you better if you didn’t laugh.” I signal nuance: alignment, harmonic enmeshment, compliance, conciliation, mitigation. If she wants to be liked.

“Maybe I don’t want to be liked.” She shrugs, turning to rinse the cloth again.

“You could be. You’re like them.”

“Not enough.”

“More than me.” This is obvious. She is their kind of beautiful, their kind of normal. “If you tried —”

She laughs at me, too. It isn’t cruel, I know instinctively. It’s pitying. But underneath the laugh, her presence is suddenly as still and pent as pressurized stone in the instant before it becomes something else. Anger again. Not at me, but triggered by my words nevertheless. I always seem to make her angry.

They’re afraid because we exist,she says. There’s nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There’s nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing – so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives.

I think at first that I don’t understand everything she just told me. But I do, don’t I? There were sixteen of us once; now we are but six. The others questioned and were decommissioned for it. Obeyed without question, and were decommissioned for it. Bargained. Gave up. Helped. Despaired. We have tried everything, done all they asked and more, and yet now there are only six of us left.

That means we’re better than the others were, I tell myself, scowling. Smarter, more adaptable, more skilled. This matters, does it not? We are components of the great machine, the pinnacle of Sylanagistine biomagestry. If some of us had to be removed from the machine because of flaws —

Tetlewha was not flawed, Remwha snaps like a slipstrike fault.

I blink and glance at him. He’s back in the alcove, waiting over near Bimniwha and Salewha; they’ve all used the fountain to strip off their own paint while Kelenli worked on me and Gaewha and Dushwha. The guards Remwha distracted are just outside, still chuckling to themselves over what he said to them. He’s glaring at me. When I frown, he repeats: Tetlewha was not flawed.

I set my jaw. If Tetlewha was not flawed, then that means he was decommissioned for no reason at all.

Yes.Remwha, who rarely looks pleased on a good day, has now curled his lip in disgust. At me. I’m so shocked by this that I forget to pretend indifference. That is precisely her point. It doesn’t matter what we do. The problem is them.

It doesn’t matter what we do. The problem is them.

When I am clean, Kelenli cups my face in her hands. “Do you know the word ‘legacy’?”

I’ve heard it and guessed its meaning from context. It’s difficult to pull my thoughts back on track after Remwha’s angry rejoinder. He and I have never much liked one another, but… I shake my head and focus on what Kelenli has asked me. “A legacy is something obsolete, but which you cannot get rid of entirely. Something no longer wanted, but still needed.”

She grimace-smiles, first at me and then at Remwha. She’s heard everything he said to me. “That will do. Remember that word today.”

Then she gets to her feet. The three of us stare at her. She’s not only taller and browner, but she moves more, breathes more. Is more. We worship what she is. We fear what she will make of us.

“Come,” she says, and we follow her out into the world.

***