Thren Valis's Arc

Chapter 13 of 18

Thren's ship rested whole on the packed dirt of her shipyard. She had flown it home and landed it soft. But it obeyed only her. She had grown it around her own touch, her own signals fed through the fungal web. When she pressed her palm to the hull, the plants answered. When anyone else tried, nothing moved. A ship that took orders from one hand was a story no one else could believe. She needed a way in for other people, or her work stayed her secret. She thought of the engineer who had laughed at her years ago. Plants do not take orders, he had said. She wanted to put the controls in a stranger's hands and watch the hull respond. That was the proof. But she had no way to link a new person to the living web. Sylvana came through the rows at dusk. Her vines dragged her forward across the dirt, slow and rooting as she went. Flowers crowned her head. She had brought Thren the fungal binding and the seed pods that made this ship possible, appearing when Thren was stuck and leaving her changed. Now she stopped beside the hull and pressed one green hand to it. Nothing stirred. "It knows you like a river knows one bank," Sylvana said. "Not the other side." "I need it to know everyone," Thren said. "A door anybody can open." Sylvana went quiet. Then she drew a coil of vine from her own lower body and laid it in Thren's palm. It pulsed with pink and blue threads under a green skin, woven like the neural web itself. "This carries voices under the ground," she said. "It listens. It speaks. Wrap it on the wrist. It will teach the wearer's mind to the roots." Thren turned the cuff over. Its ridges felt warm, alive. She spliced it into the fungal line at the ship's hatch, then slid it onto her own arm first. The hull recognized her at once. She pulled it off and held it out. "You try," she said. Sylvana fixed the cuff to her wrist. She thought a command. The hatch petals unfolded slow, then wide. The hull breathed open for a hand that was not Thren's. Thren watched vines and leaves take an order from someone else, and her chest went tight. "It works," Thren said. "Anyone can fly it now." Sylvana studied the cuff, not smiling. "It opened for me," she said. "But it heard something under us too. Older than roots." She looked down at the dirt beneath her vines. Thren barely heard. She had her proof. A living ship that took orders from any hand. But the cuff did more than open a door. It reached into the ground and touched a voice Thren had never known was there, and now it had heard them both.