In other words, she had every reasonable right to be there. Shanti was dumbfounded. How could a girl look so soft on the outside yet have a heart of cold steel on the inside?
“Speaking of business, you should join me on it,” Xueli offered all of a sudden.
“What? Why?!”
“Don’t you want to learn more about nanomachines and the elves who created them? I think you would benefit from having more information to help you make your decision.”
Shanti wasn’t good at arguing. It wasn’t in her nature. So as much as she hated to admit it, Xueli had a very good point.
The Devicer walked through Central Tower’s halls quickly and with confidence, stepping into an elevator that shot up the length of the building. They rode it to the fifty-second floor.
“It looks like a hotel,” Shanti commented.
“This is the living quarters. It’s where the elves reside,” Xueli explained.
Doors lined the corridor, spread apart at generous intervals that spoke to the ample space granted to each resident. The girls continued along it until they came to an open lounge hall. Elegant elvish men and women were standing around chatting, conversing on the sofas, poring over documents, or simply passing the time in their own graceful ways.
Xueli ignored all of them, pacing straight for the center of the room where a small elf girl sat. All the migrants from the other side looked young, but this girl especially looked to be fifteen or sixteen by human standards, and her face seemed somehow more youthful than the others. Her ears were long, and her skin was the same dark shade as Shanti’s but a twinge redder.
Shanti had passed by a multitude of elves in the last few hours, and they had been anything but homogenous. Just like humans, they were a diverse people and had skin tones of all hues.
The bronze-skinned girl had a cherubic face, and she sat on a rug with her legs strewn to the side. In her hands, she plucked a long string instrument reminiscent of a koto. She sang to the tune of the melody, “Gate Gate Paragate... Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha... Gate Gate Paragate... Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha...”
“It’s beautiful,” Shanti murmured. The song brought a smile to her face. “She’s speaking the elves’ language, right? I wonder what it means.” She spoke quietly, for fear of disturbing the girl’s performance.
Although she hadn’t been expecting an answer, Xueli obliged. “It means ‘O Traveler. Heed me, O Traveler, Wanderer of the realm and distances vast. Rejoice, O Siddha. The awakening has begun.’”
“You understand her?” Shanti asked.
“A little. I’m still studying. But it’s not the elves’ language, per se. It’s the common tongue in most of Param,” Xueli replied. “It’s extremely similar to Sanskrit on Earth, but they aren’t one-to-one. I imagine that long ago in the ancient past, our world and the alien one were once connected by some means. And so our cultures mingled. At least, that’s one theory the evidence points to.”
“Wow...”
Evidently, the airs Xueli put on weren’t just for show. She was a genuinely intelligent person. Granted, her skill in martial arts had already been made abundantly clear, but even now, as they communicated in English, Xueli commanded the language even better than Shanti herself.
Just as Shanti was beginning to find new respect for her, Xueli marched pompously to the bronze-skinned girl, swaggering with her same old belligerence.
“This makes three, Klan,” she said, with a tone so pointed it would put a dagger to shame. The elf girl jolted in shock but said nothing. Xueli, however, took Klan’s obviously apprehensive silence as clearance to continue. “I believe the saying is ‘third time’s the charm,’ so I hope you’re ready to tell me what I want to hear. You’re a Replicant of the Earth Bloodline, aren’t you? A clone of their last ruler, the Queen of Stars. It’s your duty.”
No reply came.
“All I’m asking is for you to assist the Asura Frames and Devicers like you’re supposed to. Namely me and Varuna,” Xueli continued. “If you really are the princess everyone else makes you out to be, then you’ll know the definition of noblesse oblige.”
Klan took the ear-lashing in silence, shrinking smaller with every word. She didn’t even turn around to meet the girl’s cold yet magnetic gaze. Shanti wasn’t sure if she was just quiet or timid or what was even going on, but she didn’t much care at that point.
“Stop that!” she interjected. “Can’t you see you’re scaring her?”
“Oh, forgive me. It’s only all of Asia and thereby the entire world at stake,” Xueli snapped back. “I’ll be sure to remember my manners while society crumbles around us.”
“There’s absolutely no reason you have to be rude!”
Eventually, some of the surrounding sages came to stop the argument and carefully soothe the fuming Devicer. The elf girl named Klan took refuge behind Shanti as they did.
When everything was said and done, it had grown late into the night, and Xueli (still very much in a bad mood) reluctantly decided it was time to retreat to her room. Before Shanti could leave, though, Klan reached out and grabbed Shanti’s right hand with both of her own.
Shanti waited for her to say something, before asking, “Are you, um...saying goodbye?”
The elf girl stayed quiet. She was smaller than even Shanti, who was already pretty puny, but while Shanti was fairly lean from all the dancing she liked to do, Klan had a lot more curvature to her figure. She looked up at Shanti with an unreadable expression.
“I’ve gotta go too, so...” Shanti trailed off awkwardly. “See you tomorrow?”
Klan’s lips curved into a vague smile. Her deep eyes seemed to say “yes.” The girl then promptly trotted away in total silence. She was so quiet, everything she did made her look like a small, shy animal.
The exhaustion crashed into Shanti all at once. What a day it had been. Replicants, nanomachine this, nanomachine that...
And then she saw something in the corner of her eye.
“Is my hand...glowing?”
It was. The palm of her right hand, the very hand Klan had been holding, was faintly sparkling.
“WHAT THE HECK?!”
The room was already empty, so Shanti wandered dumbfoundedly into the adjoining corridor to find someone who could tell her what the heck was going on this time.