Her eyes drifted back to the crevice. She could make it her final resting place—the bottom, just next to Pahlo. Giving up promised to be less painful than trying, and failing, to drag her weakened body across the last leg of desert, suffering from her broken leg, starving, dehydrated, and burnt to a crisp under the hot sun. Out there, she’d become food for something—vultures, coyotes, or maybe some worse beast. Once again, her options were not over how she wanted to live, but how she preferred to die. No matter how far she went from the eclipser camp—from being a prisoner in a hole—no matter how much freedom she seemed to find, none of it changed her situation in the end. She never truly became free of anything, she just found new ways she could choose to die, and not one of them made a hero’s death. Not one was worthy to claim the life of a skyborn.
But she wasn’t skyborn. Or, she was, but it didn’t mean anything. Even skyborn children came about with no particular rarity. Whatever high she had been clinging to all her life, it was all a farce. She was no less ordinary than any other, and she’d meet as ordinary a death as any of her people who got buried namelessly in crowds deep beneath the ground where they should never have been to begin with.
She couldn’t go anywhere. Once she died, the coyote at her side would probably just eat her and then trot happily away to go live a truly free life unburdened by Honn or the other eclipsers. No broken leg could keep it back, and with its stomach full from feasting on her corpse, it could make it across the valley with no problem. It could do all the things she couldn’t.
Oleja froze. Her racing thoughts slammed to a halt. That was it.
The coyote could cross the desert—no wounds held it back, and with some food and water, it could make the trip that she couldn’t. Hitched to a sled, it might just be able to pull Oleja to safety.
But one problem remained: she barely had enough food left to fill one stomach, let alone two. Giving the coyote what it needed to fuel a trek across the valley meant leaving nothing for herself. She’d be taking a blind gamble. The plan meant making her entire life dependent on the coyote’s ability to cross the valley, dragging her to the mountains no matter her state of health as she went without food or water for the entirety of the day. It promised no heroism, only the curse of faith and dependency. She hated the plan. But it just might be her only chance.
If she ate her food and drank her water, it didn’t change the fact that she couldn’t move on her own. No rations could heal her leg, only the time she didn’t have. The coyote, on the other hand… all it needed were those rations. But could it pull her on its own? And how did she plan to get the sled out of the crevice? Holes and flaws riddled the plan, not the least of which was that if even one aspect of it failed, she would have given all of her food and water over to an animal that then had to do her bidding to keep her from dying when it, alone, could survive fine. What kept it from running off with a full belly just as soon as she had no more food to give it?
Once again, her choice lay between two paths that likely ended in death; one allowed her to die on a full stomach, while the other sent her to the grave on an empty one. Neither was pleasant, but with a deep breath, she cast her thoughts to Ude, and then to Pahlo. She knew exactly what advice they’d both spout at her. A slightly higher likelihood of survival waited down one of the two paths. She just had to let herself be saved.
It wasn’t time to be the hero. It was time to live.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Shifting away from the coyote made nothing short of a terrifying experience. She prayed the animal wouldn’t attack as she half-crawled, half-pulled herself away, putting her weakened state on full display—an easy target for sure, save for the knife she wielded. The coyote didn’t move from where it lay, curled up, eyes shut, presumably asleep. Moving made Oleja realize the extent of the heaviness in her limbs and how fiercely she longed for sleep. But now was not the time for it. She grabbed a coil of rope from her bag, one she took from Pahlo’s things, and went to the crevice’s edge. She dropped the rope over the side. It landed in a heap amongst the rubble. Burdened only by her knife and the clothes on her back, she began her descent.
In all honesty, she was fed up with climbing up and down the crevice walls. Falling down once had been plenty, and having to climb back out afterwards was more than enough. But then climbing back down, and then back up, and now down again—and soon back up—drew on energy she didn’t even know she possessed. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, she planned to sleep for a full day straight. With Honn no longer at large, sleep could come to her unbound by worries at last, no longer plagued by fears of waking to find an eclipser dragging her away. So long as the sleep she found at the end of her path wasn’t the endless slumber of death, the work would be worth it.
At the bottom, she took a moment to breathe, but beyond that brief pause she wasted no more time. She scooped up the coil of rope and went to the sled. Before, she hadn’t cared for the shape of the vehicle after its tumble into the pit, but now she looked it over more critically. Fortunately, the frame seemed more or less intact, minus a dent in one of the two runners. Honn’s belongings lay strewn about, with many of them buried alongside their owner. Oleja took a moment to look for food or water but found nothing. The time and energy she’d expend searching through the rubble and excavating the rocks in search of whatever supply he carried would likely be counteracted by the limited amount she found—if she found any at all and if she verified it both edible and safe for humans. Determining that the eclipser carried nothing useful to her—save perhaps the crossbow, which now lay entombed below at least a ton of stone—she drew her knife and cut the bag from the sled in an effort to lighten it. The less weight she had to pull up out of the crevice, the better.
She tied one end of the rope around the frontmost bar of the sled, and then tied the other around her waist. Then, knife in hand, she moved to the harnesses.
Sticky blood spattered the leather straps. She tried not to look at the heap of carnage. Where one coyote’s body ended and the next one began was often hard to tell, as blood-soaked fur seemed a constant across it all. A quick survey confirmed none of the others clung to even the faintest spark of life. It seemed the lone survivor found luck beyond likelihood. And, just maybe, so did she.
With a few quick strokes, she cut through the leather straps that still bound the corpses to the sled, though she left one harness intact and joined to the body of the vehicle. The remaining harness still contained the broken body of a coyote, and so began a gruesome task. The limbs of the creature moved relatively freely, appearing to be dislocated or broken in places. Getting the head out of the tangle of straps proved trickier, but she managed after some prodding. Soon, the coyote carcass fell away and the harness came free, leaving the sled no longer weighed down by the carnage of her own making. Fresh blood stained her hands even darker red than before. She wiped them clean as best she could and then returned to the crevice wall.
One last climb, that was all she had to do. Two climbs down to the bottom and three to the top seemed absurd in her condition, but she had come too far down the path to turn back now.
Sand clung to her blood-coated fingers and made her grip slick on the stone. A few times she slipped when searching for handholds but caught herself each time. She fell into a rhythm: right hand, left hand, right leg. Right hand, left hand, right leg. The rope dangling behind her grew heavier the higher she got as it uncoiled and rose into the air behind her. When she threw herself over the top and lay panting on the ground, the relief helped instill a new surge of hope in her, but it slipped away quickly as her thoughts turned to the next step of her plan, the part that truly put her dwindling energy to the test.
A few tugs on the rope proved more useful for pulling her body closer to the edge than for pulling the sled up into the air. A second attempt made it rock back and forth and budge an inch or two. The metal grated on the stone and shrieked as it shifted, but it never lifted off the ground, only settled back into position afte
r a moment. Oleja, on the other hand, breathed heavily as she looked down at the sled in frustration.
An outcropping of stone jutted up from the ground just behind her. She pushed herself over to it and wound around behind, the rope growing taut around her waist but allowing the movement with just enough give. On the other side of the stone, she lay back and braced her right leg against the side. And then she pulled.
Shrieks split the air, this time accompanied by a chorus of cracking and shifting as she felt the sled move across the crevice closer to the wall. Another yank and it seemed to lift off the ground, hitting the wall with a clang. Stars danced in her eyes. Her head spun. Oleja loosened her grip and the sled hit the bottom once more. This was useless. She was too weak to pull the sled out.
Options swarmed her mind, none of them good. She could take apart the sled and haul it up in manageable chunks, but that required a trip climbing down and back up for each piece, which she felt equally too weak for. Aside from carrying the individual pieces, she could use more rope to tie up each and then bring all of the other ends up, pulling them to the top one by one. But she didn’t have more rope, and that plan still required another trip down into the crevice, which also pushed beyond her limits. She could construct her own sled up at the top, but of what materials? Or she could get the coyote to help her pull—but she barely even had faith in it to refrain from eating her; it seemed unlikely that the coyote wanted to help her drag the sled from the crevice—a sled it had spent a good deal of time bound to, probably against its will. And just because she wanted it to do something didn’t mean she could get it to. Even when it came time to direct it towards the mountains, she just hoped it knew what to do. She didn’t know the first thing about tending to animals; that was Pahlo’s skill.
She had one option—the one she already sat in the middle stages of: pull the whole sled up to the top as she initially planned. It was that or die in the desert.
She took one deep breath, two, three, and then pulled together all the strength within her. The sled lifted off the ground again as she grabbed the rope hand-over-hand, reeling it in. She had to get it to the top. Her determination had never known limits, and she couldn’t start boxing it up now.
She pulled with her right hand, then her left hand.
She was Oleja Raseari, skyborn.
Right hand, left hand.
So maybe her birth wasn’t a badge of fated heroism. Maybe the sky didn’t make her special.
Right hand, left hand.
But she was still Oleja, skyborn daughter of Rasea and Uwei.
Right, left.
And she got to decide what that meant.
Right, left.
And she had made up her mind.
Right, left.
She knew what it meant.
Right, left.
It meant she was the hero of her people.
She was going to get out of the desert. She was going to save them.
Right, left.
With one final surge of strength she pulled the rope and the sled landed on the ground with a crash like the sky splitting apart. The coyote perked its ears up. Oleja flopped onto the ground and threw her arms out to her sides. Her lungs burned. Her arms ached. She felt like her body fell slowly through deep water. But she had a sled now.
Stars blinked out one by one. From her place on the ground, Oleja watched them go. She gave herself a moment’s rest, but then pushed herself back up. There was still work to be done.
She dragged the sled another few feet away from the edge—much easier now that its runners sat on the ground and she wasn’t trying to lift the full weight of it up through the air. When it came to rest where she wanted it, she grabbed her bag and got to work. The single coyote on its own couldn’t pull the sled meant to be drawn by eight even with all of Honn’s supplies removed and with a lighter, starved human on board in place of an eclipser in full metal armor. The sled needed to be as light as possible—the lighter she could make it, the faster and farther the coyote could go. Everything but the barest essentials had to be stripped away.
She took off the metal bar Honn held while riding first. The avalanche bent it out of shape and snapped one side off, making it easy to finish the job. Next, she tore apart the braking system. Stopping found no place in her plan—only going, as fast as possible, until they reached the mountains. The whole platform at the front for loading gear and other items went next. Canvas, wood, and metal fell away as she severed tethers with her knife, bashed away bars with rocks, and unhooked various fasteners with her tools. Every discarded piece of scrap got tossed into a heap off to the side, and soon the parts removed towered in a mass larger than what remained. Oleja took that as a good sign but kept working.
Last to go were the boards that formed the platform on which the driver stood. Removing all of them left her with nowhere to ride, so she pried up every other instead, creating a precarious, gap-filled floor on which one wrong move promised to pitch her off the sled entirely. When she finished, only the bare bones of a sled sat before her. A quick job of bending the dented runner back into shape through a complex and precise method involving her fist and a big rock completed the job, and then the sled was ready to go.
From her bag she pulled a bit of the salted meat. Immediately, the coyote perked up and came trotting over. She dropped the treat to the ground and then, after a moment of hesitation, took the coyote’s broken harness in her hands and slid her knife through a few of the straps. It fell away and the coyote shook off the rest. Thankfully, it seemed grateful, and given that it could have reacted one of two ways to Oleja putting a knife near its body, she regarded it with equal gratitude. With another bit of meat in her hand, she led the coyote around to the harness at the front of the sled. When they neared it, the animal shied away. Oleja bit her lip.
“Come on… please? This is the only way I’m getting out of here,” she said, her voice hoarse. The coyote didn’t seem to comprehend. Oleja tossed it the meat and then grabbed another piece.
Cautiously, the coyote approached. Oleja let it eat as she made quick and gentle work of fastening the harness to its body. She scooped up her things and took a seat on what remained of the driver’s platform.
The need to travel as light as possible meant making a few hard decisions. Her bag she had to keep. It had been with her through far too much already, and tinkering was the only thing she knew to use in order to keep her hands busy while she sat to think. If she ran into a problem, something in the bag could come in handy. It stayed with her.
She sighed as she turned her attention to her glider. It had already lost the ability to function after she dismantled one limb to serve as a pickaxe and stilt. Without the limb, the rest became useless, and though she could repair it easily, it just added more dead weight in the meantime. After a moment of pause, she laid it on the ground. Only her bag with her tools and materials, her food and water rations, and her knife remained on her person. With her gear set, she turned her attention to the coyote hitched to the front of the sled. It looked back at her with curious eyes.
In her bag, she closed her hand around the bundle that contained all of her remaining food. As soon as she gave it to the coyote, it’d be gone, scarfed down in seconds, and she’d be left with nothing. If this plan failed, that failure left her without food or water. She had to be sure of what she wanted to do before she enacted the last step, because after she did, there was no going back.
It would work. And even if it didn’t, it was her only shot. She couldn’t get out of the desert alone. To survive, she needed help, even if that help came from this coyote—little more than a wild animal and dead-set on killing her not long ago. Living meant putting her trust in it to get her out of the desert in once piece.
Slowly, with reluctance still stalling her hand, she withdrew the bundle. She unfolded the corners until the cloth fell away, revealing the last of her food. The coyote perked up and panted, its tongue lolling about as saliva dripped from its maw.
&
nbsp; “Here you go,” she said, setting the bundle down in front of it. “Don’t let me down. Get us both out of here.”
In moments the coyote gobbled down the food in its entirety. She held out her canteen next and emptied it into the animal’s mouth. She took a sip from her last semi-full waterskin—Pahlo’s—and then gave the coyote some from there as well. A few gulps remained. She stowed the waterskin back in her bag.
“Uh, that way,” she said, pointing ahead to the mountains. The sled lurched forward as the coyote started off at a run. Oleja almost toppled from the platform but managed to hold on as they took off down the hill. Thankfully, the coyote got the message, because she didn’t know how else to direct it. Maybe eclipsers could all speak coyote.
No, that was a stupid thought. Delirium gripped her tighter and tighter as the hours went by. She curled up on the platform, tucking her braid over her neck and under her chin to keep it from getting caught on anything below the sled as it sped across the ground. Bumping over obstacles hurt her injured leg. Pain swirled like white rapids around her, pulling her down. She glanced at the sky. Dark blue gave way to streaks of pale gold as the sun neared the horizon, though it had yet to arrive and bring about the new day. Oleja’s eyes drifted shut. She was on her way to the mountains. There, she could finally rest, and after she recovered, she could make a plan to go back to her village and save her people.
Consciousness visited Oleja in ripples throughout the ride. One moment she looked ahead at the expanse of sand and in the next she dreamt, though never deeply. Fits of rest found her and restored some strength to her limbs, but it was sapped just as quickly by the heat of the sun as it rose and cast the earth into fiery heat. The sled rattled on, bouncing and shaking across rocky patches and gliding smoothly in the sand. A few times Oleja awoke in a start fueled by fears that she was falling off the sled, but each time she awoke to find herself still firmly atop the platform, curled around her bag as she hugged it close to her chest. During one such awakening, she bolted awake to see the sand passing by slowly beneath her. She rolled over through flares of pain and looked to the coyote.
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