The leader, a fat one named Zuck, read aloud her sentence in stilted English. The bats would not even face her. Instead, they had these mercenaries do it for them. “For crimes against Nature, you are hereby sentenced to punitive labor for a period of eighteen seasons.”
“This is not a Sanctuary Union facility,” she told them. “The Hosanna Charter does not recognize this jurisdiction. You have no right to hold me here.”
They whipped her.
“My people will come for me!” she screamed. “My Watchers will put your heads on spikes!”
None of it was true. Her people had left her to her fate. The bats tricked them. They even tricked Castor, her son. He would not speak to her before they carried her away. But he must have known why she did what she did, why she tried to eliminate the bats once and for all. It was to protect Lodge City, the only refuge for her kind. Those ratwings would destroy it all, if given the chance.
“Mother, I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” Castor often said.
When she fell silent at last, Zuck went through the trouble of reading the statement again. “The work you do here will be important,” he said, rolling the paper into a tube. “Every day, you’ll know that you made the world a better place.”
With welts blooming under her fur, Nikaya repeated the mantra in her head. The water flows. Lodge City could never die. Not as long as she lived.
Which she did.
And now, shoveling shit again, her regret and anger sharpened her senses. After so much time spent as a ruler, she had become an animal once more, sniffing the wind for traces of danger. Every new movement of the guards, every break in their routines caught her attention. She knew all their names, their habits, the sounds of their voices. Daily, she probed their weaknesses. Soon, she would put it all together. She would vanish from this place. In a rage, Zuck would turn the whip on his brothers. And then someone would use the whip on him. The Great Cloud of bats would tremble knowing that the heart of Lodge City still thumped in the woods.
At the end of her shift, with her knees aching and her throat wheezing, the sky changed color from black to purple. She dumped the last load with Geller trailing behind her. He would escort her to the gutted school bus that served as her prison cell. The rear door hung open, welcoming her once more. With the windows barred, the door served as the only entrance. The badgers covered the bus with graffiti, mostly symbols of horny females wiggling their hips. For their part, the bats often shat on the roof of the bus when they returned from the cave, a reminder of Nikaya’s war crimes against them.
The walk to the bus provided her best chance of the day to scope out the campsite. As usual, a trio of badgers played cards by the fire as they waited to start their next shift. Inside the cabin, two more badgers guarded the supplies and armaments. Unlike the bats, who foraged for everything, the badgers needed to haul in their own food. They would restock soon. Another weakness to exploit.
Without tilting her head, Nikaya spotted an ax leaning against the cabin wall. Beside it, someone had left a carving knife embedded in a split log. More tools she could acquire, should the opportunity arise. She kept track of every sharp instrument and blunt object in the camp. If she got free of her cell, and found herself stumbling in the dark, she would find the nearest one and aim it anyone who tried to stop her.
As she imagined driving the head of the ax into Zuck’s snout, a frantic screeching sound filtered through the trees. A panic signal, meaning follow me, now! She’d last heard it on the day she ordered the Cloud expelled from Lodge City, the day she became their enemy, according to the bats. But they knew damn well that they viewed her as an enemy long before any of that. She’d merely struck first. All these years later, the screeching still rang in her ears, like spirits reaching out from hell.
The noise was getting closer. Geller grew tense. He shoved her forward. “Get in your cell.” She heard the keys jingling on his belt. Another mistake on his part—she knew each lock that the keys opened.
“Let’s go,” Geller said.
A fluttering overhead, followed by a breeze. A branch swayed. In the slowly brightening morning, it took a moment to realize that a bat hung from it, his wings wrapped around him. He panted. He shivered. No—he trembled.
She knew this bat.
Two more of them circled the tree. The bats clutched the branch on either side of their comrade. The screeching changed pitch from a high squeal to a lower chirping. An annoyed tone. She knew some of it. None of the guards had figured out that she could speak Chiropteran. None of them gave her the credit. It was another miscalculation that would cost them their lives.
Why? one of the bats asked.
Danger, another said. The bat in the middle kept his beady eyes on Nikaya as he argued with the others. His name was Gaunt. He was there the day they took her away. The day they destroyed what she spent a lifetime building, something a rat with wings would never understand. That day, Gaunt had mocked her. He’d ordered her silenced. And now, amid his other noises, Gaunt uttered a panicked squeak, again and again. Wind. Wind now. Wind! It meant fly. Fly away, as fast as they could, as far as their strength could take them.
Geller’s palm shoved her again. “I said get in your cage, Your Highness.”
She could not afford to argue. Something important was happening. She got inside. The door shut behind her. The key scraped against metal as Geller locked her in.
She waited near the slatted windows and listened. Several times, the bats left their perch and flew in circles, squawking and whining, the pitch going so high it made Nikaya wince. This was how they argued, all movement and chaos. She followed what she could. Danger was coming, they said. Danger close. Danger here. Danger. Death.
Can’t be!
Yes, true. Wind. Wind now.
Soon, the entire cloud joined them. Their voices blended into one another. Nikaya could no longer understand. But she did not need to. They were screaming for help, for someone to save them, like so many doomed peoples before them. This is why the beavers would prevail. They awaited no messiah. They could count only on themselves.
In a great whoosh, the bats poured into the cave. By then, the eastern sky blazed with the sunrise. Another day was beginning. At last, a day different from all the others before it.
The badgers were not without mercy. On the morning after a big scoop, they typically let Nikaya sleep late. She would need it. Upon returning to her cell, she would find a pot of bush tea waiting for her, along with a salad stuffed with greens, fresh water, and a roll of tobacco. They would toss in a fresh log of maple or birchwood so she could sharpen her teeth—without it, her bright orange incisors would protrude from her mouth in a matter of weeks. She hated herself for being so grateful for all of it, but some days this small feast seemed a great bounty. If she weren’t careful, the badgers’ random moments of generosity could break her as easily as the crack of their whips.
In a matter of minutes, she had licked the salad bowl clean. The water was nearly depleted, the teapot empty. Her belly continued to grumble, demanding more. She imagined the smoke taking solid shape in her mouth, somehow nourishing her.
Despite her hunger, Nikaya began to doze off with the pipe in her mouth, the end of it still trailing smoke. Barely moving her lips, she asked the Three Goddesses to spare her any nightmares involving the giant ants, the ones who destroyed her home. They had a habit of ruining the most peaceful dreams, leaving her a gasping, quivering mess when she awakened.
With the seats gutted, only the floor near the steering wheel provided a comfortable spot to rest. She could sit in the driver’s chair, but the front window was sealed with metal plates, with only a tiny slit to see through, like a tank. The side door, where passengers had once entered, was rusted shut. Metal bars had been fused to the windows. Someone—human or animal—once used this vehicle in a time of war. She could still smell the fuel, converted from vegetabl
e oil, but the bus would never drive again.
Like a good beaver, she had tried to make this tiny space as cozy as possible. The badgers let her carry sticks and leaves inside. Over time, she built a lodge of sorts, covering nearly every inch of cold metal and plastic with branches and mud. She imagined her granddaughter helping her. Little Nikki, the future of Lodge City, bouncing around at her feet, asking questions.
“Nana, why?”
“Nana, will you sing with us?”
“Nana—”
A terrible squealing jolted Nikaya from her half sleep. She rolled onto her side, pushed herself to her feet, wincing through the grinding in her knees. “Now what?” she said.
The noise blasted from the mouth of the cave. The sun climbed high, a time of day when the bats typically slept. But the sound grew louder. Some kind of argument, a bitter one. They shouted insults. Fool. Traitor. Coward. The badgers rose from their seats at the card table, alarmed but silent.
Something moved inside the cave. Nikaya could not make it out until a bat shot out of the opening. It was Gaunt again, wearing a leather aviator helmet with polarized goggles. He startled the badgers, who took cover beneath the tabletop.
The squealing inside the cave changed pitch. Instead of a screech, the bats let out a slower, mournful sound. She tried to detect what they said, but the noise coalesced into a single word: No. No, no, no. Bats made that noise when someone died. Or was about to die.
Nikaya thought of the beavers’ song of mourning, the same one she sang for the old ones in her family who survived the Change. They lived long enough to see the promised land before joining the Three Goddesses.
For too long, Nikaya assumed that she had time to escape. But now something terrible was on its way. She needed to get out of here. The forest would protect her. The river would mask her scent. The water flows. If only she could get to it.
Dusk settled rapidly in these colder months. The low-hanging sun filtered through the barren trees. As Nikaya expected, Geller ordered her to work on the construction project near the cave. There, the badgers laid the foundation of a new garrison to replace the makeshift one in which they’d shivered all winter. On this day, Nikaya whittled a pile of logs with her teeth, sharpening every one into a pike. The bats had their caves, the beavers their lodges, but these badgers simply could not live without a human-style building. No culture for these rodents. No tradition. Just mimicry.
Nikaya kept that opinion to herself.
Two other prisoners joined her—a male and a female fox who spoke only to each other, either by whining or barking. And not a dog’s bark, but a squealing little sound. Epp epp epp! The badgers did not like it. For all they knew, the foxes plotted to escape right in front of them. But these foxes were simple folk. Brother and sister, but also mates, Nikaya suspected. She remembered when the male cut his hand on an ax and let out a high-pitched wail until the female consoled him by licking the wound.
Nikaya, meanwhile, could not be trusted with her own kind. Two other beavers were arrested with her on the day everything changed, and she had not seen them since. Most likely, they cleaned out the guano in some other cave, far from her influence. A good call on the bats’ part, she had to admit. If she even had a chance to sing a song with the other beavers, the lyrics would be all about sneaking out at night and following the stars to the water.
She wanted to sing. As she pushed the wheelbarrow, she imagined the badgers joining in, the foxes trying to hum in the background. Some melancholy tune, but a defiant one as well. She knew just the one.
Damn the Goddesses
Even as they pray for me.
I damn the Goddesses
They won’t take this day from me.
The foxes glared at her as she hummed the tune and patted her tail on the ground. One of them snarled at the other. While she sat and chewed on the logs, they hauled mud. They did not like it. “All day, on your ass you sit,” the female said.
Nikaya offered her the log. “Would you like to trade? Your teeth will fall out in two minutes.”
Before the female could respond, Geller told them both to shut up. The foxes continued loading the wheelbarrow. The male lifted the handles and rolled it toward the growing pile in the clearing. In a few months, the soil would become a garden. The sun would arc higher in the sky, and the leaves would return. It would be beautiful.
No, you’ll never see it. You’ll be gone. Remember?
She spat a mouthful of wood and licked her teeth.
As she stretched for the next log in the pile, a terrible scream echoed from deep in the forest. Geller aimed his rifle toward the noise, resembling a real soldier for once—if not for the terror in his eyes.
Nikaya took note of everything. Where the guards stood. The distance from the bus to the barracks. The time it took the other guards to arrive.
The screeching grew closer. It came from the sky, from a bat calling for help. Everyone turned at the sound of branches rustling. As it careened through the forest, a flapping bat bounced from one of the trunks and landed hard on the roof of the bus. Exhausted, bleeding, the bat rolled off the roof and flopped onto the dirt.
Gaunt had returned. He screeched in a broken voice. Wind. Wind now.
“Stay here,” Geller said. He raced to the bat, who resembled a pile of leather on the ground. Three other badgers joined him, though judging from their stunned faces, none of them knew the slightest thing about treating a wounded bat. One of them, a foul-smelling badger called Nestor, was clearly drunk already. He leaned on the bus to keep steady.
Wind, the bat said, his chest deflating. Wind. Wind now.
After nearly a year, these dumbass badgers hardly knew a word of Chiropteran.
“He’s telling us to run!” Nikaya said.
Geller spun around, aiming his rifle. “Stay where you are, Your Highness.” Behind him, the others knelt over the bat, no doubt worrying about how this would affect their next payday.
Nikaya glanced at the foxes for help. Epp-epp-epp, the male said.
Epp-epp-epp, the female replied.
Nikaya felt it in her feet: a disturbance in the dirt. Footsteps. Some on all fours. Some in pairs.
“Leave that ratwing!” Nikaya said. “We have to get out of here!”
More of the badgers emptied from the barracks. Inside the cave, the bats must have heard Gaunt return. They cried out from the darkness. The noise pounded against Nikaya’s skull.
Geller moved closer to her, his arms stiffening as he leveled the rifle.
“If I hear you say that one more time—”
His head jerked to the side. Nikaya jumped at the movement. Then she saw the shaft of an arrow lodged in Geller’s neck, its sparrow-brown feathers fluttering in the breeze. The foxes panicked and took off running, side by side. Geller let go of the rifle and gripped the arrow, his eyes bulging. Blood oozed between his knuckles. He dropped to his knees. Behind him, a volley of arrows rained down on the badgers as they tried to take cover. One of the arrows caught a badger from behind. He flopped onto his stomach. The others ran, ignoring his cries for help.
Nikaya stumbled past the arrows in the dirt. More of them zipped through the air. She ran past the bat, who lay still, most likely dead. After taking cover behind the bus, she peeked into the forest. The invaders moved from tree to tree, each covered in fur. Had to be wolves. Marauders.
The remaining badgers returned fire from the barracks. Bullets tore gashes into the tree bark. An arrow hissed overhead. And for a horrible moment, the bus, the oversized tin can that served as her prison, felt like the safest place in the world.
Nikaya ducked inside the entrance. More projectiles slammed into the bus, echoing so loud she could feel it in her chest. Outside the window, Geller gripped the arrow in his neck, his body already stiffening.
From inside the cave, the bats continued to shriek, begging for
mercy, while three enormous wolves cast a net over the opening. These were not the wild marauders she had heard about. They moved with a strange, mechanical purpose. Like ants.
Realizing too late they were sealed in, the bats tried to spring themselves loose. The net bulged but held firm. It was like—
Oh, Goddesses, that was what the spider did to these people. She’d spun her web, encasing them inside. Because that was what Nikaya wanted. The Three Goddesses would make Nikaya relive her crime before the wolves ate her.
Something tugged on Nikaya’s foot. She glanced down to see the leathery wing of the bat, reaching inside the bus.
“No,” Nikaya whispered, kicking him. Ignoring her, the bat tried to shimmy his way through the door, getting far enough that Nikaya could not shove him out. His thin ribs showed through his fur. One of his wings crinkled like the skin of an old human. A bloody, ragged hole punctured the other one, leaking black blood on the floor.
“Get out!” Nikaya said.
He screeched at her.
“Shut up!” she hissed. She pounced on top of him, trying to clamp his mouth shut.
He screeched again. This time, he lifted his wing toward the front of the bus. He made the same noise over and over until she recognized it. He was saying the word move.
Move. Wagon move.
“You can drive?” she asked. He did not understand. She gestured with both hands on an imaginary steering wheel.
Yes, he chirped.
“We need the keys.”
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