The thing about Life Energy was that you couldn't find it by looking for it.
Yosef had known this at seventeen. His father had said so in the kitchen before the assessment -- you don't reach for it, Yosef, you make yourself still enough that it finds you...
Yosef had gone to the assessment and reached for it anyway, because he was seventeen and he thought he understood the difference between being told something and knowing it.
And he had been wrong, the elder had set down his cup, and that had been that.
Finder, not guardian. He'd made his peace with it. More or less. He'd gone into archaeology and the archaeology had been good -- honest, important, thirty years of pulling the sacred out of the ground with his own hands.
He had not thought about the Energy ever since.
He had thought about it, actually. He had simply declined to pursue the thought, which was a different thing, but had served well enough until six days ago when he ate half of a gold fruit in an underground garden and whatever he had been declining to pursue had stopped waiting for his permission.
It was there now. Had been since the fruit.
He could feel it when he was still -- not heat, not energy the way people described energy in the texts his father had read to him.
Just a presence. Something that knew its own shape and was waiting for him to stop getting in the way of it knowing his.
He sat cross-legged in the grass three metres from the ember-copper tree and tried to be still enough.
It didn't work.
He exhaled. Started over. His father's voice, patient in his memory: not the chest, lower, three fingers below the navel, that is the first gate, that is where it starts, that is --
It slipped. The same place it always slipped. The same reason -- he was trying.... trying was the problem, had always been the problem, and knowing that had never once made it easier.
He was so occupied with this that he didn't notice he was no longer alone until the presence had been beside him long enough to be considered settled.
He didn't look. He'd been in the garden eleven days. He knew what that quality of stillness in the grass to his right meant and looking wasn't going to tell him anything new about it.
A finger touched the base of his skull.
Not pressing. Just locating. Here.
The Life Energy bloomed.
That was the only word for it. Not found, not reached -- bloomed, the way a flower opens up when sunlight it's it's petals or spring declares it's eve after winter.
The first gate. His father had called it the Gate of Waking and Yosef had always pictured warmth, something flooding in, but it wasn't warmth.
It was more like a torrent of Energy flooding every single pore of the body, but at the same time the flood is gentle, nourishing. It felt as if he could pick up a pick-axe and do a better job at digging substrates and underground caverns than those heavy duty machineries Dawud loves to operate.
He breathed out slowly.
There it is, he thought, in the interior voice he used for significant professional findings.
There it is.
The finger moved between his shoulder blades.
The second gate -- his father had gestured at it once and never named it, which Yosef had always assumed meant the name wasn't the point.
Here. His spine did something that registered as a correction, like a load-bearing wall being moved to where the weight actually was.
The third gate: the sternum. Fourth: the solar plexus.
Each one a touch, not a push -- the way you pointed at something on a survey grid when the other person was standing right there and words were less precise than your finger.
HereandHereandHere.
By the fifth, his hands were lit.
He looked at them. Blue, the same gentle blue that he had seen as a child being wielded by those elders, by his father.
He turned them over. It stayed. He turned them back. Still there. He examined this with the same attention he gave everything on a site -- present, methodical, not yet filing a conclusion.
The conclusion filed itself.
He had spent thirty years with a stone in his shoe. Thirty years excavating other people's sacred sites, standing at the threshold of things, close enough to do the work, not close enough to be what the work was about.
Finder, not guardian. His father had said it kindly and Yosef had believed it was the whole truth for three decades and was now sitting in an underground garden with his hands lit blue being shown the gates of the Life Energy by something that had been asleep since before any of them had been born, and it turned out it had not been the whole truth after all.
He looked sideways at the figure sitting beside him. Hands on his knees. Watching north, same as always.
His father had said the Mirkaveh needed a teacher. A senior guardian, Yosef had assumed -- someone from the clan, someone who knew the rite.
He had, as it turned out, been picturing it too small.
. . .
Dawud saw it first.
He'd been looking at the seventh tree -- the leaf, the branch, the particular quality of held breath the whole garden had taken on since the fruit -- when Yosef's hands lit up forty metres away and the gentle blue caught the edge of his vision.
He shifted his gaze. Took in the scene. Looked at his coffee, which had gone cold an indeterminate time ago. Drank it anyway.
He'd been waiting for something to happen in this garden since before the floor gave way. He wasn't in any hurry.
Khalil had already put down the rock hammer. He hadn't decided to -- his hands had made the decision some seconds before the rest of him caught up, which had happened three times in twenty-two years of demolition and always meant the same thing: something structural was happening that his body understood before his mind had named it.
He turned, looked at the figure beside Yosef, looked at what was moving between them, and left his hands at his sides. Whatever it was, it didn't need him.
He read it the way he read a wall he wasn't going to touch. He left it alone and watched.
Shai's spectral analyser was reading gentle blue, temperature null, source undetermined.
It had been reading some variation of this for eleven days. He checked it, looked at Yosef, checked it again.
The instrument was not the problem. He reached for his field notebook, held the pen over a fresh page, and sat with the fact that he wasn't sure yet which section this belonged in.
The analyser wasn't going to clarify that. He put the notebook down.
There were days when precision was the work and days when the work was something else and you just had to watch it happen.
Amara came around the base of the third tree and stopped.
She ran the standard inventory -- subject, status, context, anomaly -- the way she ran it every time something broke the expected pattern on a site, which in this garden was more or less continuous but hadn't stopped the inventory running.
Anomaly: Yosef, gentle blue.
The figure beside him, the gates she could now see mapped along Yosef's spine like a survey line....No, that wasn't the correct analogy, it was more like glowing nodes.
She stood with her pen uncapped and didn't write anything, because the assessment wasn't done and she had a rule about writing before the assessment was done.
Then the ground came up through her feet.
Not the garden's light -- that lived in the air, up here, sourceless and cool.
This was older than the garden. The bedrock, forty-three metres of Negev desert pressing down from above, all of it arriving through the soles of her boots and up through her legs and settling in her chest like something that had been trying to find that particular address for a while.
Brown-gold. Ochre. The specific warmth of desert stone giving back at the end of the day everything the sun had spent all day pressing into it. She started counting without knowing why she was doing it.
Eleven seconds. Then it was gone.
She opened her notebook. Wrote: Aura -- mine.
Below -- Ochre, earthy, eleven seconds.
Origin: Bedrock. Looked at it. Added: Apparently.
She looked up. He hadn't turned toward her. The corner of his mouth had moved anyway — the almost-smile, the one that arrived the same way hi had arrived, the same way every sound she'd made that found something in him had arrived.
Filed somewhere careful. She wrote noted in the margin and kept going, because the assessment still wasn't done and there was a lot left to cover.
Author's Notes: (And Here we go ladies and gentlemen, humie power system is online and it's Mirkaveh. Wait till taijutsu reigns supreme!!)