by T Hearts
“What are you doing out here anyway?” Griffin eventually asked, seeing that IO wasn’t going to leave her alone. She looked delighted to be asked and swept about in excitable fluttering circles around her as Griffin walked.
“I’m a ranger for the park.”
“Do they pay you to do that?”
“No, but they buy me food that I can’t get for myself. Like pineapple or fish. I tried to once. Didn’t turn out so well. I couldn’t even get in through the door.”
“Sounds fair.”
“What do you do? As an Amethyst? Are you an assassin?”
“No way.” Griffin snapped sharply. “Sapphires are the assassins. Amethysts, we investigate and protect. We shoot incapacitate instead of kill.”
IO made a satisfied purring sound at this.
“Do they have any more Raptors on this ranch?”
“Three more from what I’ve seen with a whole bunch of other critters.”
“When you shut it down, what will happen to them?”
“Keepers and critter handlers will help take them back to their habitats and make sure that they’re all healthy again. We can’t really let them be wild out here.”
“Why not?”
“If you’re a ranger, then you should know why.”
“For Raptors yes, but what about those other critters you said about?”
IO swooped in front of her, landing on a rock and buffeting up a cloud of dust. She cocked her head to one side, tailfeathers splaying out behind in a wide V.
“Natural ecosystems aren’t ready for synthetic invasive species yet.”
“What do you mean?” She asked, tone coloured by both offence and curiosity.
Griffin paused, considering what to say. How could she break it down for her in a way that she could understand?
“A Gattan can outhunt a mountain lion and replace it in areas where there are none, but it won’t differentiate between the herbivores it needs to eat and other species like humans. Synthetic plants can overwhelm natural environments that have changed over time to be hotter and dryer, and since organic animals haven’t evolved to digest them, it could kill them or poison the food chain.”
IO tilted her head to the other shoulder and nodded slowly. Griffin smiled lightly and continued.
“Critters like Ossa and Rabbuck are hardier than most other prey animals, but only synths can digest them properly; again, without knowing what could happen when a coyote, fox, or wolf eats them. Then if they die from it and all the little insects eat the body, and the birds and animals eat those insects…. well it could do major damage without anyone realising until it’s too late. The same goes for all synthetic organisms.”
“Including us?” Her eyes betrayed her with a glance to the blue-black feathers along Griffins shoulders that lead up to her neck and ear-tufts. The big black with cherry-and-arctic wings trembled with a rustle like dry leaves as she uncomfortably shifted from foot to foot.
‘Where are they?’ Griffin could see her wondering as her red eyes flicked searchingly from shoulder to shoulder. ‘What happened? Where are they? Where are your wings? Who did this to you?’
Griffin cleared her throat, holding her head high as IO politely and apologetically looked away.
“Even Sapiential-synths like us.” She said cagily, “We’re better than organic species because we weren’t made through evolution, but because of that we’re incompatible to nature.”
IO scowled a little but gave a little chirrup of understanding.
The girl didn’t want to leave her, but Griffin couldn’t take her along with her on her assignment. She would be spotted immediately, and after her outburst they would absolutely be preparing to hunt her down and capture her. Griffin shuddered, she couldn’t just let her be left unprotected like that, but if she went out of the range of the target ranch to guard her Core would turn up with a bounty on her.
Maybe it was a good thing though. Maybe IO could draw out the mercenaries and she could arrest them to get more evidence and knowledge of the ranch, then call up Mykonos to explain everything. She may not have had the equipment or backup to make a full arrest but she was sure she could make it work.
She would have to think, but right now it seemed like the easiest way to solve two problems at once.
“Look.” Griffin sighed. “I really need to go before they find me, but if you’re not busy, perhaps I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Really? Could you tell me about the other critters too?”
“Of course. Where can I find you?”
She smiled brightly, then frowned. “It’s hard to get to. And will take you an entire day to get there if you’re walking.”
“Well Hasekura isn’t going anywhere.” Griffin shrugged and pulled out a map for IO to mark. The girl chirped excitedly and began plotting a path for her to follow.
Griffin smiled. This was all going to turn out just fine.
Chapter 10
IO had sailed back to her tower, mind buzzing with excited thoughts. She greeted her chickens happily as she continued to wonder and speculate.
What other critters were there? Could she pet them? How had she lost her wings? What was her name again? She was so used to never asking the tourists for their names and only giving them hers that she’d completely forgotten to ask the Amethyst what her name was.
‘Oh well,’ She told herself retrieving the food dish to get the chickens their vegetables, ‘I’ll ask her when she gets here.’
Then with an excitable thought considered making dinner for the Amethyst. The ration packs she had seen in her bag looked horrible. What the Amethyst needed was a good meal and some aloe for her sun scorched skin. It had been so long since she had hosted guests who weren’t park rangers or her sisters, what could she make?
Bubbling with enthusiasm, she turned the radio up loud, pulled out the entire shelf full of cookbooks and poured over them until it got dark, then realising how long she had spent reading hurriedly got the chickens their dinner before starting on her own.
Halfway through cooking, her phone rang. It was San.
“Hey Sundowner.” She answered chirpily, stirring the pot.
“Babybird!”
She cringed at the nickname that her older sisters had given her. An annoying reminder from all of them at the fact that she was a day younger than the rest of them.
“How are you doing? Did you ride or fly?” She asked.
“A bit of both. We’re at El Paso right now but we did stop in on Ashta. Turtle needed a break from riding, but we should be there in the morning.”
“Let me know when you set off, and make sure that you go to the visitor centre first, so Peyton knows when you arrive. She’s a little hot on people driving through without informing the park right now.”
“You’re not going to be working while I visit, are you?”
“This park doesn’t run itself you know.”
San laughed.
“Well it must be busy if you’ve got migrating Raptors in the park right now.”
“Oh. So Satu told you about that.”
“Of course she told me about it you nutcase! It had her tail in a real twist. Has someone collected them yet?”
“Not yet, but she hasn’t told me what she’s going to do with them.”
“Probably let them out into the wild.”
“San!”
“No one will notice! They’ll just be off in the desert.” She laughed dismissively, “Did you find out where they came from?”
“Uhh…”
“IO. Tell me.”
“So…”
“Oh no.”
“Promise me you won’t get upset, but…” Said IO slowly, already knowing that there was no way that San would be anything but frothing with rage. “There’s…apparently a ranch near where I am that is being run by some bad people who have been stealing critters from the old house.”
There was a beat of silence, and IO held her phone at arm’s length to save her ears f
rom the inevitable lecture.
“IO. If there’s someone from Hasekura working near you then you really need to keep a low profile.”
Her wings dangled over the edges of her hammock in relief. No major lecture.
“I’m not going-” She stopped and frowned to herself. “Wait how do you know what Hasekura is?”
“Satu told me.”
“How comes Satu never tells me anything about this stuff!”
“Because it doesn’t affect where you are Babybird. Or at least it didn’t used to.” Her sister made a nervous sound and rattled her tailfeathers loud enough that IO could hear them through the line. “Don’t go anywhere near them okay! Or else I’m telling Satu and Cipher.”
Now there was the lecturing that she was familiar with.
“You’ll tell them anyway!” Ice spiked her tone. “I’m not getting involved, someone from the old house is already dealing with it.”
“SOMEONE FROM CORE IS THERE TOO! IO! WHAT THE ACTUAL LIVING FU-”
“Don’t yell at me!”
“You stay exactly where you are! Don’t go anywhere near that Core person, don’t go anywhere near Hasekura. Stay inside! Wait- no. Fly!”
“I said I’m not getting involved!”
“But if they’ve seen you then they’ll be coming after you! You need to fly here right now, then we’ll hop state and go up to lie low with Zwei.”
“I’m not going to Utah and I’m not abandoning my home!”
“You are not staying.”
“If you’re that scared then don’t come. Stay in El Paso or go home. I will be just fine.” And without a goodbye, she hung up on San and silenced her phone. Trying to put the argument out of her mind, she turned up the radio, changed into her pyjamas and threw a knitted poncho over her wings. Unable to sit still with agitation, she ate her dinner between tidying her home up.
She was going to have guests whether San liked it or not.
After a few hours of rearranging the fossils and photos on the wall, she grew tired and checked her phone before bed. There were so many messages from San, even a few from Satu and Zwei. Of course, San had told them about it.
Rude.
Running crying to their eldest sisters when Babybird didn’t do what Sundowner wanted. Now who was the baby?
Turning her phone off along with all of the other electricals in the shelter, IO yawned deeply stretching out before she rolled headfirst into her hammock, wings curling up around her body broodily. Her head still reeled.
San was always argumentative, aggressive, and protective, but she was still her sister and she loved her dearly. She like any of them would tear the world apart for each and every sister.
She half-hoped though that the Amethyst would turn up before San did so that she could talk to her again without San becoming overbearing. Maybe she could tell her all about what the other critters she had named were.
Ossa, Thryn, Gattan, Olentya. What were they all? She had so many questions.
Eyes closing, she began to drift off to sleep, imagining what each creature might have looked like.
Her chickens bawked in panic, breaking the silence.
The sound startled her. All tiredness was gone, replaced with a chilled alertness in the darkness. She listened.
Footfalls, too many, too heavy, and too irregular to be a mountain lion or javelina wandering on by.
No.
It was the sound of humans.
Her heart thumped loudly in her ears. She needed to get out, but there were only three ways out of the shelter, the front door and the top hatch, and the slip route. However, all of these were designed for slender humans, not deep chested Avios with a twenty-two-foot wingspan who needed to be stealthy.
Slipping gently out of the hammock, she padded towards the kitchen to grab the chili powder and a skillet, then climbed up on top of one of the ancient electrical boxes that she had been using as a kitchen cabinet. Pulling her tailfeathers in tight and her wings in even tighter, she held her breath.
No flashlights, only deep indigo-glowing blacklights, illuminating parts of her collection of treasures up in various fluorescent colours, including a tiny little turquoise glowing scorpion which had found its way into the corner of the room. More subtle than bright lights, useful in a desert full of scorpions, rattlesnakes, and other dangerous creatures, however, all it did was make them clumsier as they struggled to see under the light. One caught a fossil placed on a shelf with his elbow as he turned with what looked like a netgun and sent it thudding onto the floor.
They cleared the walls around her trophy room and drew closer to the hydroponics wall. If they damaged her plants she would be very, very, angry and if they hurt her chickens then they would be lucky to leave in one piece.
She didn’t like violence, but she could always make an exception.
Quietly, they made gestures to one another, shining the blacklights over the maps and photos on her walls. One made a small gesture to the plants and plucked off a bell pepper.
Her chickens gave a startled chorus of clucks and clattered about their hutch as someone stumbled into it and began softly cursing at the birds.
Big mistake.
Without even thinking, IO threw the skillet across the room at the man by the peppers. The loud GONG of the skillet whacking the man full force across the back of the head caught everyone’s attention, as did the sound of both him and it falling to the ground. They looked at him in panic then carefully around the first room.
One of the blacklights caught the colours of her tail feathers, the cobalt and whites immediately creating brilliant piercing glow, following it up to where she was perched with a gasp.
She shrieked at them, a piercing raptorial noise and flared her wings out within the limited space as the light fell on her feathers. Immediately the room was illuminated, her feathers a blinding white to raspberry pink, allowing her to count every man in the room.
Seven. And none of them had eye protection.
Perfect.
She launched the chili powder at them, buffeting it up into a glowing sandstorm of burning peppery rage. As soon as the powder touched their eyes and noses, the men immediately began screaming. They flailed, knocking over her shelves of treasures and colliding with one another. Their disorientation affective, IO dove off the shelf and bolted out of the narrow doorway, kicking a man out of the way, a trail of pepper following her. One fired off a gun, but the bullet came nowhere near her.
One beat, two, three- she rose higher and then –
-CRACK-
The sound shocked her but not as much as the heavy net that tangled around her wings. She plummeted, crashing onto the ground face first, rolling several feet down the hillside. Feathers were torn from her wings, skin grazed.
It wasn’t a tough net and with a little struggle she had ripped through part of it, but the men who had remained outside were quickly on her.
They grabbed at her wings, pulling upon the long primaries and tailfeathers, another man wrestling them down so that they could pin them to her back. She kicked out hard, snapping one man’s legs out from under him, and rolling over to kick up at their faces. They reeled back as she threw them off her wing, smacking them with the hard bones of the wing-wrist. A gun fired, close by. An electrified cartridge struck her side and she screamed, every nerve in her body jolted. Collapsing to the dusty ground, a hand grabbed her hair, yanking her head back as the others rushed forward again to contain her.
“Don’t.” One man said firmly to the other who had her by her hair “If you do that, she’ll take your entire hand off.”
“Sure, whatever.”
Obligingly, IO twisted her head quickly and snapped her teeth down on the mercenary’s hand, biting straight through the skin and crunching the bone beneath. The shriek and IO’s furious struggling gave the men caution and they backed off.
“I warned you.” The same man said with a laugh, letting loose a second net that weighed IO down even more. “Everyone take not
e! They’re just like Raptors, remember that.” Then with a whistle the mercenaries were back on her, tying and tightening the nets around her.
“Keep still,” Said their leader, pressing a knee between her wings, “this will hurt no more than a pinch.”
A strange tingle down IO’s spine and her limbs went momentarily limp and the world around her span wildly. Everything around her moved so fast that they were a blur. Something prickled against her shoulder. Mottled bronze snake eyes watched her.
Then everything went black.
Chapter 11
This was entirely not what Griffin had intended to happen.
Staring wide eyed up at the tower that IO had marked on her map, she was horrified to find it completely ransacked and disturbingly silent.
Amethyst training kicked in, and she took her Fénix out.
Picking her away around the premises, she examined everything and holding back on making any assumptions until she had seen it all.
The tire tracks further down the narrow winding road, the deep gouges in the ground from things being pulled up, lots of bones and treasured items scattered across the floor of the shelter inside.
She recognised a few bits of the equipment as being old radio transmitters and cold war structures, as well as the Delta made technologies such as the hydroponics wall and the solar window. It was strangely dissonant, but the fact that there was feathers all over the place and no brilliant-winged IO made her stomach churn.
No blood though, she was glad of that at least. However if they had hurt her in any way, then she was fully prepared to face the consequences of the Major’s anger after she had beaten the hell out of each and every person involved.
A small cartridge caught her eye amongst the broken bones and dust, and on closer examination it put everything into perspective as to what had happened.
An EMI bullet, all the power of a tazer in a tiny little bullet. Hasekura had absolutely been here. They never cleaned up the mess they made and had probably tried to take a lot of IO’s belongings with them.