Sodi and Chlora

The trouble was that Sodi gave to everyone, and almost nobody actually needed what she had.

She had offered her electron to Helio, who was full up and floated away without even slowing. She had offered it to Carbo, who already had four hands busy and no room for a fifth thing. She had pressed it, once, hopefully, toward a very polite rock, which said nothing at all. Each time, the glowing dot stayed stubbornly above her palm, un-given, and Sodi hopped home feeling a small odd heaviness that a rabbit so light really should not have felt.

Across the flats, in the cool shade under the loading dock, someone else felt the opposite kind of odd.

Chlora was a mantis-tween, bright yellow-green, sharp-eyed, and she sat very still with her right hand cupped upward like a small bowl. She was waiting. She had been waiting a careful, patient while. Her hand was cupped because there was exactly one thing missing from her — one electron, the last one, the one that would make her whole outer ring complete — and she had learned not to grab. Grabbing scared things off. So she waited, and watched, and stayed precise.

"Not that one," she murmured as a stray spark drifted past, too big. "Not that one either." She was not sad, exactly. She was just slightly, constantly, unfinished — like a sentence with the last word held back.

They met the way two people meet when one is always reaching out and the other is always holding still: eventually, and then all at once.

Sodi came bouncing along the shade of the dock, palm out, electron bobbing, calling her usual hopeful call — "Anyone? Anyone need a spare?" — and she nearly hopped straight past the still green figure in the corner. But Chlora's sharp eyes had already locked onto the little glowing dot above Sodi's palm, and Chlora's cupped hand had already lifted, just slightly, the way a plant leans at a window.

"You," said Chlora, very quietly, so as not to scare it off. "You're carrying one. A spare."

"I am!" said Sodi, so delighted that her ears stood straight up. "Do you — I mean, would you — is it possible you actually need —"

"One," said Chlora. "I need exactly one." She held her cupped hand out, steady as glass. "I have been waiting for exactly one."

For a moment neither of them moved, because both of them had spent so long being the one who reaches and never lands, or the one who waits and never receives, that the idea of a perfect fit felt almost too neat to trust.

Then Sodi turned her open palm toward Chlora's cupped one, and let go.

The glowing dot lifted off her hand — it had never done that before, not once, not for the cart or Helio or the polite rock — and it drifted the short bright distance between them and settled into the bowl of Chlora's waiting hand. Chlora's fingers closed around it, gentle and exact. Her whole outer ring, which had glowed uneven and gap-toothed for so long, went smooth and full and quiet.

And then the strangest, best thing happened.

The moment the electron crossed over, Sodi — now one electron lighter — hummed with a small warm plus, a positive charge, like the top note of a bell. And Chlora — now one electron fuller — settled into a low steady minus, a negative charge, like the bell's deep bottom note. Plus and minus. And a plus and a minus, it turns out, cannot help but lean toward each other. An invisible pull drew them close, closer, until the small grey rabbit and the bright green mantis stood locked side by side, snug as two magnets, unable and unwilling to drift apart.

"Oh," said Chlora, looking at their joined shoulders in something like wonder. "That's what the pull is."

A young student named Streamer had wandered over to watch, and Streamer said, "Wait — so you're stuck together now? Forever?"

"Not stuck," said Sodi, wiggling happily against Chlora's side and not going anywhere. "Fitted. She took the exact thing I had too much of. I gave the exact thing she was short. Now she's a little bit minus, and I'm a little bit plus, and that's the whole reason we hold on." She beamed. "There's a name for the two of us together, you know. Sodium and chlorine, holding hands. You've eaten us. We're salt."

More of them arrived, then — plus and minus, plus and minus, giver and taker — and each pair pulled a neighbouring pair close, and those pulled the next, until a whole tidy cube had built itself out on the white flats: a crystal, row on row, every giver beside a taker, a lattice you could have sprinkled on soup.