by Mark Henwick
Finally, I’m doing an unsteady handstand on the bowl, arms shaking from effort, everything inside but my boots.
I can’t turn. I’m not flexible enough to tuck in and get my boots past the cistern. My strength is running out. I flip, landing on my heels and banging my head against the toilet door.
A berserk Hartzak would have been quieter.
I sit there for a moment, holding my breath and listening.
Nothing.
I open the door. It’s dark inside. There’s an entrance hall, a small waiting room. On the other side of the waiting room, doors to a couple of rooms. The medicine cabinet should be in one of them. I want to tiptoe, but after the noise I’ve made so far, that would be ridiculous.
The offices are open. The left-hand one is the doctor’s office and contains the medicine cabinet. It’s locked, but it’s a token lock. They don’t expect their medicines to be stolen.
I know I should just steal the stuff and go, but I can’t. Instead, I sit at the doctor’s desk. He has a notepad and pen. I write on the top sheet.
I am very sorry. I feel so ashamed, but our need is desperate.
I swear I will replace everything I have stolen. Z.
I tear the top sheet off and place it in the middle of his desk.
Then I scratch out the ‘Z’. I need to explain myself to him; I don’t need to leave clues if he reports this to the police.
Stealing medicines makes me want to cry. I bite my lip and force myself to break the lock on the cabinet.
The skin ointments are straightforward, and there are plenty. I take two for each of us.
The systemics are more difficult. I can’t empty the cabinet and hope. There are indications printed on the little bottles, but what if I get it wrong?
There’s a medical index on a shelf, which has more information, but it only makes me more confused.
I stand there hesitating, looking at the bottles in my hand, and I hear the sound of boots on the gravel outside.
I make it to the spare office and hide behind some boxes as I hear the sound of a key in the lock of the front door.
Chapter 33
Zara
The floor creaks. I hear him go into the toilet and close the window.
Maybe that’s what brought him back—he remembered it was left open.
Can he see I was in there? Did I leave dirt on the floor?
I can barely breathe.
The floor creaks again, and he goes into his office. I closed the cabinet. The broken lock isn’t obvious, unless he opens it. Why would he open it after hours? Maybe he’ll just go away.
Then...
Oh, Goddess, I left the note on his desk.
The feeling of sickness congeals in my belly and sweat chills on my brow. I can’t be caught. I can’t. I have to get the evidence to Iruña. The life of one village doctor against what will happen if the Hajnal remain unchecked...
I may have to kill him.
The plasma pistol is in my jacket pocket.
I can’t kill him.
Absent for so long, my grandfather returns.
If only you’d been born a man, he once said to me. I grant you have the resolve and the determination of a man, but you don’t have the ruthlessness. And one day, you’ll need it.
I remember being furious at him.
Will I have the cold courage to do what I must, today, now, to save Newyan?
A voice calls out. Brusque, authoritative. So like my grandfather, I wonder if I’m hallucinating.
“Do come in and join me, ‘Z’.”
What? He’s bluffing. He’s just seeing if I’m still around. With any luck he’ll go and fetch help before he checks and I’ll escape out the back.
“My eyes are getting a bit slow,” he says after a delay, “but my sense of smell remains excellent. I regret to inform you, I can smell you.”
It makes no difference now, but I move as quietly as I can. I walk into his office.
He’s sitting at his desk. Sixty or so, but he looks fit and healthy. His hair has gone completely white, but lost none of its curl. His eyes are blue and sharp. His hands lie neatly on his desk, fingers laced easily together. He has a ring on his wedding finger.
I see that, and it just became ten times as hard to think of killing him. My grandfather was right. I lack the necessary ruthlessness.
We look at each other and there is a tension so thick I feel I can’t speak, but I have to: “Stupid to leave a message, I guess,” I say.
How do I apologize for trying to break in and steal medicines?
“Not really. As I said, my nose told me you were here the moment I came in.”
“Are you going to call the Rangers?”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you’ve caught a thief.”
Silence, for several long seconds.
“Young lady, just because I choose to live here in the high sierras, doesn’t mean I don’t understand what passes for civilization in the lower regions.” He nudges the notepaper until it’s sitting perfectly square on his desk. “Part of that understanding is that thieves do not go trekking through the high sierras. They certainly do not write apologies. And, having signed it with something so unidentifiable as ‘Z’, they would hardly bother to erase it.”
He doesn’t add what I’m half expecting—that a young lady shouldn’t be out in the high sierras, looking like some kind of bandit.
I concentrate on the note, with its obscured initial.
“I obviously didn’t erase it very well.”
He picks up and tilts the notepad I tore the paper from. The light catches the indent of my writing. I wasn’t thinking very clearly.
He puts it back down carefully. I probably didn’t leave it in the correct position and he would have noticed that too, even if he hadn’t smelled me and seen the note. A detail man, this doctor. A precise man.
“I am a doctor,” he says, leaning back in his chair, knitting his fingers together again, and placing his elbows on the armrests. “I treat patients. What seems to be the problem?”
Trying to ignore the cool, polished surface of the pistol in my pocket, I take out the handful of creams I’ve stolen and place them on his desk. Nudge the tubes into a neat line for him.
“The obvious skin infections,” I say, pushing up my sleeves to show him the rashes and infected scratches.
He peers at my medicine selection. “Well done, young lady. Those are the correct creams. However, it seems rather a lot for one person.” His cool blue eyes lift and latch onto me. “How many of you are there? Three?”
I nod. I guess it makes no difference telling him. “And one has a systemic infection. That’s what delayed me. I don’t know what to use.”
He takes a deep breath and leans back again.
“Bring them here. Systemic could be a serious problem and I won’t take a chance trying to diagnose on your second-hand description of the symptoms.”
“I can’t. I shouldn’t even be talking to you. I can’t believe you’re not going to call—”
“I am a doctor,” he says again. “And you have to trust me. Your friend with the systemic infection could be in great danger. Have they started vomiting everything you feed to them?”
I nod. “Two days.”
“And blood in the vomit?”
“A little. This morning,” I say.
He grunts.
“Narrows it down. You have a stark choice, young lady. I’m not going to call the Rangers to arrest you, but I’m not going to blindly give you medicines either. So your first option is you can try to make it to the next village. You might break into their clinic undetected, and take a wild and possibly fatal guess on the system medicine your friend needs. But actually you don’t need to worry about all that, and you won’t need to break in, because your friend will be dead before you get there.”
He leans forward, placing his hands back on the desk. “Second option is you trust me.”
The crazy thing is, I do trust
him.
“I’ll expect some explanation, and I’ll take this,” he touches the note, “as promissory note against the value of the medicines and repair of the cabinet.”
Another deep silence.
I find I believe him—both that he won’t call the Rangers, and he is Kat’s only hope.
I pick up his pen. My hand is trembling and I take a couple of deep breaths before I trust myself to write at the bottom on the note.
Zarate Mirari Aguirre
I can’t tell if he even reads it. He’s watching me thoughtfully.
Strangely, after writing my name, I feel calmer, as if a fever has broken. Everything will be all right.
“I’ll be twenty minutes,” I say, and leave.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
It takes twenty-five, ten of those persuading Talan.
I’m not sure I would have been able to, but Kat has vomited blood again, then passed out completely. We can’t wake her.
We leave the sled hidden where I lay watching, and Talan carries the unconscious Kat into the clinic.
The doctor stares at the weapons Talan has strapped to her back, but doesn’t say anything. He hands us astringent soaps and tubes of creams, then waves us away. “Use the toilet basin. Wash yourselves and your clothes as well as you can, and spread the cream on every affected part of your body. I will be busy for some time.”
Then he turns his entire attention to Kat.
Talan and I have to take turns in the small toilet. The soap doesn’t smell of anything, but it stings like bees wherever the surface of our skin is broken. The cream afterwards is like putting out fires with ice.
It takes us over an hour, but at the end we’re clean, damp and cold in squeeze-dried clothes.
Kat is lying on a gurney: stripped, cleaned and covered in the cream. She has tubes down her throat and nose, drips in her arms, sensors taped to her skin. A monitor displays medical information in green and black above her.
I realize a few stolen pills or an injection wouldn’t have been enough to save her life.
“Is she going to be okay?” I ask.
“Yes. Close timing, but for a youngster like her, she’ll recover fully and quickly.”
“How long?” I ask, looking at all the medical equipment.
He chuckles and starts to disconnect it all.
“Don’t worry about this, it’s mainly precautionary. She’s strong. A couple of days, she’ll be on the road to recovery. But she’s going to need to really rest for those two days,” the doctor says. “Fortunately, that’s what she’s going to get.”
I’m about to tell him we need to keep going.
I’ll suggest, if it’s okay with him, we’ll sleep here until an hour or so before dawn and then be on our way. We can’t leave Kat here and I can’t tell him why we need to get to Iruña, but there’s no time to rest. I suppose we can continue to carry her in our sled.
But as I open my mouth to speak, there’s a noise of wheels crunching on the gravel.
Talan surges to her feet, plasma rifle in her hand
“Ah! Here they are at last,” the doctor says.
Chapter 34
Zara
Tense hardly covers it.
‘They’ are a couple of Rangers, and they certainly didn’t expect to come in and find their doctor held at gunpoint, or have the door close behind them and find a plasma rifle pointed at their bellies.
“Please,” the doctor chokes out. “Put the guns down.”
He’s talking to Talan and me. The Rangers have come in without weapons drawn, and without any obvious aggressive intent. Talan and I can both see that.
“These are friends,” the doctor says and I let him go. “I’m sorry, I got distracted. I should have explained.”
The Rangers don’t say anything yet. They’re watching me, mainly, with narrowed eyes.
I take a breath and put my pistol back into my jacket pocket. I still trust the doctor. He’s been stupid, not warning us, but I don’t think he’s betraying us.
The Rangers turn out to be nice, once we introduce ourselves politely, though we keep the names out of it. The doctor knows who I am, but they don’t need to.
They call themselves Fox and Ox. The doctor remains Doctor, and we are Z, T and K. Just in case things go wrong.
Fox looks like a fox. He’s small, with bushy red hair, sharp blue eyes, and he moves quickly. Ox doesn’t in the slightest resemble an ox, but he’s about as big as he can be and still fit in their Rover.
The Doctor has persuaded these two Rangers to take a couple of days off for a ‘hunting trip’, down in the lower sierras in their Rover, a hulking all-terrain vehicle with an electric motor for each independently-articulated wheel.
With some hasty explanation that getting to Cabezón is not as easy as we might have been anticipating, the doctor sends us on our way.
It takes a bit of getting used to, the Rover does; it’s quiet and the cabin only sways gently while the wheels bobble over the unmade tracks. Still, it’s ideal for Kat, who sleeps soundly.
About halfway through the night, we stop and Fox takes Talan for a short walk with a pair of night-vision binoculars. She comes back and describes what she’s seen in the valley, on the main road down to Cabezón: a Syndacian road block. Apparently, there are patrols along every paved road in the region. It’s not that we couldn’t get around them, but using the Rover on the dirt tracks avoids the risk of blundering into a road block, and besides, it’s letting us recuperate.
My back, feet and shoulders are very thankful.
It gets better. The back of the cabin is warm, flat and it has foam rolls. After our last week in the pine forests this is unimaginable luxury.
Without us exchanging any words, I can tell Talan is still wary.
“Wake me when you need to sleep,” I whisper, and then drift away to the gentle murmur of Fox flirting with Talan. It puts a smile on my face. He just about reaches her collarbone. You have to admire the ambition.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I’m woken by the dawn. Fox is driving now and Ox is asleep, with his seat flat back.
Talan nods at me, lies down and is gone in seconds.
Kat is half-awake but groggy. Talan has already updated her on what’s happened, though I’m not sure it’s all sunk in.
Fox leans back and hands us some nutrient bars. “Breakfast,” he mouths, and then grins.
They’re okay, these Rangers.
We pull off the track a couple of hours later and, hidden away under the pines, there’s a Ranger out-station with recharging capability for the Rover and better food than the nutrient bars for us. There are also some spare boots which fit Kat. I mentally add some costs to the IOU I left with the doctor.
Cabezón is only forty or fifty kilometers away, but the forest tracks wander all over. Fox tells us the plan is to circle the city and approach from the other side, closer to the main station which is where I’ve said we need to go.
When we resume the journey after lunch, Talan and I are making unnecessary repairs to our clothing with odd colored patches of old cloth. The Rangers say we’ll stand out if our clothes look too new. We’ve stained our backpacks to look older. We’re also doing what we can to salvage Kat’s clothes. She spent much longer up on the high sierras than we did, and that was hard on her clothing. My first sight of her emerging from the building remains vivid in my mind: that wide-eyed apparition with a rag tied around her head like a pre-spaceflight sea pirate.
Even with the best intentions, there’s a limit to what we can achieve for her clothes.
“You’re still going to look like a vagrant,” I say, smiling at Kat.
“She’ll fit right in,” Ox says bleakly.
“That Hartzak came close to getting a bigger piece of you,” Talan says to Kat, wiggling her fingers through the gap in one leg of her pants. The claws caught in the fabric, ripping it, just as Kat dived through the gap into the building.
It’s not that the Rangers have bee
n especially chatty or involved, but there’s a sudden quiet from them.
Interesting.
“You Rangers get much trouble from Hartzak?” I ask, conversationally. It was something I’d been thinking about a lot as we came down from the high sierras.
There’s an exchange of glances between them.
“No,” Fox says.
Really?
“Guess they don’t come down off the Sierra Arija, or they’d be tearing whole villages to pieces, and I’d have heard about that.”
No response.
“So, no one goes hunting up there?”
Ox shakes his head.
There’s something very different between what I thought I knew of the Hartzak and what happened to us, up on the Sierra Arija.
When I flew up there in the hedge-hopper, I’d chosen to use Berriaren as a hiding place for the data modules, because I ‘knew’, like everyone on Newyan ‘knew’, that the Hartzak were insanely territorial. That they need only to sense humans in the area and they would always attack. People on Newyan generally avoid the whole Sierra Arija, apart from small parties of young Aguirres in Barriaren, so I’d gambled that no one would accidentally find the data modules hidden down a well in the Auzitegi. Good plan.
That day, I landed the hedge-hopper beside the lake. The short journey from there, into the city and back, counts among the most terrifying moments of my life. According to the common wisdom, Hartzak avoided the city, but still, while I was in Berriaren, I was sure that a Hartzak would scent me and call others. I half expected to die down that well.
But having got away with it, I’d dismissed it as good luck and went back to congratulating myself on the plan.
And yet, now we’ve retrieved the modules, Kat, Talan and I have just walked much of the length of the Sierra Arija. Kat’s done the journey twice. We’d seen one Hartzak, and it happend to be in Berriaren.