by Stacey Berg
Finally the girl nodded. Fists jammed in her pockets, she shambled back the way she had come, glancing at them once or twice over her shoulder.
Stupid, stupid to let her go.
Echo stood frozen until Netje disappeared around the curve in the path.
Then she grabbed Khyn’s arm and started to run. The girl might not meet anyone on her way to the dispensary. The Preservers in the glasshouse might not look out. It couldn’t be far now, three or four minutes if Khyn could keep up the pace . . . “How far can your aircars go?”
“Aircars?” Khyn gasped. “So that’s—”
“How far?”
“I don’t know! The vektere fly them. I’ve never been past the edge of the Preserve.”
“Can they cross the rift?”
Khyn stumbled, tiring already. “The rift! Preservers keep us! How far away is your city?”
That was not the immediate problem. Echo pulled Khyn along. The clearing was just ahead, a flat, open space with a small structure at one end and light posts set around the perimeter. By now it was nearly full dark. Only a few of the lamps were on, creating irregular pools of light, but it was more than enough for a hunter to see by.
There were three aircars, and no visible guards. Of course not. The Preservers thought their enemies were all natural: weather, predators, the dissolution of the line. None of those would be huddled in the shadows, furiously planning an escape. Still, there should be at least a watchman, proof against mischance or a vektere who’d had too much ferm.
On a night where everything had fallen her way, the absence of such a precaution seemed one stroke too lucky.
If it was a trap—well, sometimes traps sprung back at those who set them. She dismissed the concern she could do nothing about and studied the aircars. They were like and unlike the ones she knew from the Church, the same stub-winged, triangular shape; but these were bigger, boxy; designed originally perhaps for cargo carriage rather than long distance patrols. Still, at least one of them had had the range to find her in the desert. She looked for signs of dust and sand, but the storm had washed them clean. Baked-on mud around the landing struts showed her which one had flown most recently; she hoped that meant the vektere trusted its reliability.
She hoped the stewards could not bring an aircar down with a thought.
The hatch was open. Echo pushed Khyn ahead of her up the ladder and said, “Stay here.”
“Where are you going?” Khyn’s voice slid up towards panic, as if she feared the aircar might take off on its own.
“I’ll be back in a minute.” She ran to the other two aircars. There wasn’t time to be thorough, but she could buy them an hour, maybe more, depending on the vektere’s skill with repairs.
She had just jumped down from the third aircar’s hatch when the voice behind her said, “Stop there, Echo. Now raise your hands and turn slowly. No, don’t come any closer.”
Taavi had been better trained than she gave herself credit for. The young vektere stood at the proper distance, black weapon ready but not within easy reach of her quarry. All she needed to do was shout. Or maybe the vektere in the dispensary had been found by now, alarm already raised. But if not, then Taavi wouldn’t know that Khyn was already inside the aircar. Echo glanced around the perimeter for others, saw no one.
She hadn’t seen Taavi either.
It didn’t matter now. Taavi was the immediate threat; she had to be neutralized. Echo inhaled, sending a wave of strength to muscles still aching from their previous effort. It would be a long step on the bad ankle. Taavi took in her torn clothes, the bruises. Her mouth crooked. “I didn’t like the orders Birn gave the vektere,” she said. Then she lowered the weapon and turned her head away.
Echo’s elbow caught her behind the ear with precisely judged force. Echo made no move to catch her as her body crumpled to the ground. The scrapes would only make Taavi’s story more believable, if the vektere thought to check. She felt a pang of guilt. When Taavi woke and learned that Echo had taken Khyn . . .
A few seconds later Echo sat at the aircar’s controls. “Hurry,” Khyn urged, unaware of what had passed outside. Echo ignored her, studying the dials and switches for a few precious seconds. There, lift and direction, and there the distance meter, all familiar enough. That button would be power—
Saints. Maybe they were really going to make it.
She punched the button. Relief surged through her with the vibration of the engines, quickly modulating to a victorious hum. The aircar lifted, gaining forward speed. The moon rising behind the mountain cast long shadows across the fields, dark arrows pointing east. Somewhere that way lay her city, her Church. And her Saint, waiting, sleeping in her crown on the altar.
And beside Echo, face pale in the control panels’ light, sat a woman who knew how to help stewards out of the link.
Chapter 8
The aircar whined through the darkening sky. Echo pointed the nose north, though her whole being strained to fly east, towards the city. She didn’t know what tracking mechanisms the Preservers might have. The fighting hormones still coursed through her blood, heightening her senses uselessly. The pilot’s compartment offered only a forward view. Anything could be looming behind, ready to blast them into a thousand bloody bits. She stabbed at the panel that should indicate objects around her; the round screen lit up with a sweep arm rotating in a slow circle, an even green glow brightening and fading behind it as it turned through the quadrants. No tell-tale dots flashed on the dial; she hoped that meant no pursuit. Even so she pushed the engines to their screaming limit with her heart pounding and the seat pressing hard into her back. She forced herself to count slow breaths, one after another after another.
When she got to a hundred, she eased off the power; the engines quieted to a pulsing hum. Then she tested the controls, going through them systematically until she had an adequate understanding of the aircar’s function. It was a cargo vessel, she thought, built for long distances and high reliability; it had no weapons or defense capability that she could ascertain. The Church’s aircars had been designed for the bitter war that preceded the Fall. Those few that remained, these hundreds of annuals later, no longer had functional weapons, but the predatory lines still showed.
She ran through a series of exercises to dissipate the fighting hormones, saving vital energy for a time it would be needed. Gradually her pulse and breathing returned to normal. She became aware of a small sound inside the aircar, not mechanical: Khyn weeping softly, her face turned away.
“Are you injured?” Echo’s eyes swept over her; she saw no blood or obvious deformity.
“N-no.”
“There is no sign of pursuit. For the time being, at least, we are safe.” That was not precisely true: the Preservers could be anywhere, and there was no way to know how long the aircar’s power would last; but there was no point worrying Khyn about conditions that could not be changed.
“That’s good.” Khyn’s voice trembled, more than the engines’ vibrations accounted for. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Sorry to act like a silly child. I’ve never fled for my life before, that’s all.”
The children Echo knew didn’t weep. And the Preservers had not directly threatened Khyn, though perhaps, having defied Stigir, she found it easier to imagine they had. Nonetheless Echo said, “It is a natural reaction to the stress.”
“You’re the one who did the fighting, but I don’t see you falling apart.” Then her voice changed, as she remembered: “The vektere—you were limping, I saw. I’ll check whether there’s a medkit somewhere on board.”
“That isn’t necessary. It is an old injury.” She glanced at the physic. “Do you know how to pilot this aircar?”
“Useless on both counts,” Khyn said, attempting a small laugh that mostly failed.
Echo concealed her disappointment. A second pilot would let them stay airborne that much longer. But she only said, “You performed adequately when it was required.”
There
was a small silence. “Thank you.”
“Rest. I will wake you when I need assistance.”
“I doubt I could sleep that long.” Then Khyn did laugh, tremulous but warm. “If I had to run for my life, I’m glad I picked you to do it with, Echo.”
Echo said nothing. After a little while Khyn’s breathing settled and her face slackened. Echo concentrated on the controls, glancing at Khyn from time to time.
Only after she was certain Khyn was well and truly asleep did she change course towards the city.
Hours later the pull of fatigue became inescapable. She could go a long time without sleep, but it was folly to fly at night over unfamiliar territory with her vision limited and reflexes slowing. The digits on a display blurred. She rubbed her eyes, trying to clear them—then realized that it was not her sight but the numbers spinning, too fast to follow. The aircar was suddenly at three times the altitude, too high, much too high—she shoved the yoke forward to drive the craft down, then leveled at what should be a safer height. She read the dial again, scanning for the ground below, not understanding what the instruments told her, and then her heart leapt against her chest as a solid rock face loomed straight ahead. She jerked back on the controls, yanking the nose into a steep climb, and the straining aircar skimmed barely over the edge. Hands shaking, Echo let the craft settle beside a jumble of rock and exhaled a long breath. They had just crossed the enormous rift—and she had nearly flown them into the far wall.
The turbulence had jerked Khyn dazed from sleep. “What’s wrong? Have we run out of power?”
“Not if I read the gauges correctly. I must sleep for a few hours.”
Khyn scanned the dark sky anxiously through her window. “Any sign of them?”
“No. The rocks will shield us from all but direct view. Keep watch through that window. Wake me if you see anything. Anything at all.”
She was hunting a child again up a cliffside trail in the dark rain. She called over and over, but the child, fearing a predator pursued, kept running just ahead. Echo heard her gasping for air, then a sharper cry, cut off all at once. She ran harder, fighting against the flood. The child would be swept away, over the edge.
Struggling over the last rise, she caught sight of a figure writhing beneath a fallen tree. No, not a tree: a flash of lightning lit not branches, but a pyramid of bones. Where was the child? There was no sound now but the rushing of the water and an animal’s desperate bleating, that even as she pushed forward turned into a bubbling scream as the water rose over the velvet nostrils.
She tore at the bones. They knew her too well; each move she made only locked them into a tighter trap. And now she knew them too: the bones of her dead. Ela. Tana. Another girl she had hunted once, and dragged back to be sacrificed on the Church’s altar. The trapped animal, pinned through and through, kept screaming. She couldn’t bear it. She took its face between her hands and snapped its neck. In the instant that it died the lightning flashed again, actinic white, and the face she held was not the animal’s but Lia’s, Lia’s neck that she had snapped, and the rising flood was not water, but something thick, hot and sticky as it filled her mouth, her eyes—
She jerked awake with a sound like the animal had made. Rolling onto an elbow, she wiped her face. Her hand came away wet. Sweat, she told herself. Sweat. Not blood. She hadn’t killed anyone.
Not tonight.
Khyn, head pillowed on the passenger seat, was watching her with eyes that reflected moonlight. “Maybe you’ll find your Lia again one day.”
But even in her dreams, Lia was gone.
Two days later the aircar limped perilously a bare hundred meters above the desert sand. The sun should lend it power, but there was something wrong with the panels, or perhaps it was just her ignorance of the systems. Echo nursed it along as best she could, alternating engines and cutting power until it barely maintained navigable speed. Once she misjudged; the craft stalled, falling like a stone until she slammed the engines back on full and pulled them up with crash alarms blaring. Khyn didn’t made a sound, but the padding on her armrests still showed the marks where she had gripped it. From then on she mostly stared out the window, eyes fixed to the horizon, never looking down.
Now Echo flew as close to the ground as she dared. That it comforted Khyn was foolish, she knew; the fall would kill them just the same; but the engines strained less, and they needed all the distance they could get. She kept one eye on the desert floor all the time, the other fixed on the dial at the left edge of the instrument panel. She did not understand every readout, but that one she was certain would show the homing beacon, the signal the Saint sent out from the mast atop the cathedral spire. Though hunters used it as a guide in the desert, it wasn’t meant for them. Instead, it was the Church’s signal to the world, the city’s plea to any who might have survived the Fall. Come to us, it said. Join us in the fight to survive. In four hundred annuals, no one had ever answered.
Until now.
The white line dragging itself across the black dial stayed stubbornly flat. They were traveling in the right general direction, the sun showed that; but it was hard to estimate the distances. Even at its slowest, the aircar far outpaced the progress Echo had made on foot. In the vastness of the desert, it would be easy to miss the city altogether. When she had left, returning had been far from the forefront of her thoughts.
The white line glowed and died, glowed and died. The engines coughed along, every catch making Echo’s gut clench in fear of their last breath. If the craft did not intersect the beacon soon, it would be too late. She tapped the dial, as if that would make a difference. The line winked lazily, mocking her. Frustration blurred her vision. She scrubbed at her eyes, creating sparks behind the closed lids.
That was what she thought the first blip was, a spark. She didn’t even bother to hope. Then she saw it again, and a third time, the line peaking and falling each time it swept across over the left side of the dial. It pulsed like a heart, stronger and stronger with every beat. Lia, she thought, and pressed her palm to the dial. She felt nothing but cold glass.
Her other hand reached to punch the engines into a last dash straight for the city. Then she made herself see sense. It was one thing to bring back a single Preserver, with her knowledge of the link technology and the secrets of the Vault. It would be something else entirely to lead a pursuing force straight to the Church.
Lifting her eyes from the dial, Echo fixed the line in her mind: the flattened boulder not far ahead, a skeletal thornbush, the distant weathered outcropping. Then, too gradually for Khyn to notice, she swept the aircar in a wide half turn, changing their heading away from the city. To make certain, she flew even lower, letting the engine exhaust mark the desert in a trail a clever pursuer would find.
After a little while Khyn stirred in her seat. “We’ve changed direction. Have you seen something?”
That was far enough.
Echo dropped the aircar to the sand, but she didn’t kill the engines. She hit the button to pop the hatch. “Get out,” she ordered Khyn.
“What?”
“Wait for me here. I won’t be long.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just do as I tell you. Stand over by those rocks.”
Biting her lip, Khyn clambered down the ladder. On the last rung she stopped, clinging to the rails. “Don’t leave me here. Please, don’t leave me.”
Echo didn’t answer. Khyn, white-faced, stared at her hopelessly, then dropped the last little distance to the ground. Echo pulled the hatch to, but didn’t latch it. She nudged the controls, and the aircar coughed uncertainly into the air, barely making forward speed. A canyon gaped just ahead, nothing compared to the great rift, but still a long, long way to fall.
She crouched on the pilot’s seat, one hand on the controls while the other held the hatch handle against the rush of turbulent air. She cut the power even further, peering over the aircar’s nose, estimating speed and distance second by second. She would only get o
ne chance.
The ground disappeared from view. She jerked the craft sharply left and killed the engines. Uncoiling her legs with all her strength, she exploded through the hatch at the instant the aircar fell, two landing struts on the hatch side hitting sand, the other two hanging over the cliff’s edge.
The aircar tilted violently away from her as she leapt. Her bad foot caught on the last rung of the ladder, and for a moment she was being pulled up, swinging through the air as the craft began a slow roll into the abyss. With a desperate jerk she pulled the foot free, cartwheeling away from the aircar towards the rocky ground. The impact slammed the breath from her lungs, but if she made any sound, it was drowned out by the screaming protest of metal across rock as the aircar slid over the edge and tumbled into the canyon. She heard it bang once, twice against the cliff wall, then a final hollow boom as it hit the rock below.
Flat on her back, she listened as the echoes died away. Finally she dragged herself to her feet and limped cautiously to the scarred edge. The rock showed fresh gouges as if a giant hand had clawed the cliff, searching for some hold to save it from the fall. Crushed metal lay scattered across the floor of the canyon. She saw no fire, but a small column of smoke drifted gently down the canyon, and the smell of burnt polymer stung her nose even from this height.
No one could have survived that crash. That was what she hoped any pursuers finding the site would believe. It had been close enough to the truth for her. She had nearly made a fatal mistake.
She hoped she wasn’t making another one with Khyn.
By the standards of the desert it was not a particularly difficult journey, though she had to keep her boot laced tight to brace her purple and swollen ankle. The ache was constant enough that she almost didn’t notice it anymore. Khyn was so furious at Echo for not explaining about the aircar that she didn’t speak at all the first day, but soon she had no energy left for anger. The hardest part was finding the landmarks that had been so obvious from the air, and even after that there was nothing to do but trudge to the next waypoint Echo lined up, and then the next. The huge desert canids tracked them all the time, patiently waiting for signs of weakness; they howled mournfully to each other in the endless dark while Echo and Khyn tried to sleep atop whatever jumble of rock raised them highest above the desert floor.