Once the other cords were cut, the trap was utterly helpless, its bait free for the stealing.
With the knife in her right hand, she crept close to the yddybddy and paused, staring at the dense yellow folds of fungus tucked behind the finger-like branches. Her mind and then her mouth imagined the feast to come. She would eat today and tomorrow too, and the fungus’ hard fibrous heart would remain as traveling rations. Close to tears, she took a tiny step forward, feeling the ground and trapdoor sag slightly — just as she had expected. Then she took another step and heard what might have been a soft fart, and she turned in time to watch a single coil of elastic nanofibers spring from the ground beside her. She leaped back in time to save her leg but fell into another trap built along the same fierce lines. A second spring unraveled and flung out blindly, grabbing her by the right arm and yanking her down, and she kicked and flopped and dove back against the burning pressure as a thousand rit-hairs ate into her bicep and the burning joint of her elbow.
Two more traps were sprung, both missing her. She lay still and silent on the muddy ground, watching the coils lash at the air overhead, gradually losing their tension before dropping down and finally giving up. Then she stood, very slowly, looking at her bloodied arm, breathing hard, the air thick with the stink of an injured and terrified human monster.
For a long moment, there was no sound but her panic. Then from the hilltop came a strong wet woosh that continued up and up — a peculiar and important noise ending with another two breaths of silence, followed by an explosion and a brilliant flash of hard white light.
What had been so carefully contrived had done its gruesome work, and the rocket was a message telling the trap builders to come fast and marvel at their great luck.
There was no guessing how much time remained.
A decision that should have taken consideration and endless pain was made in an instant, without hesitation. With her free left hand, she yanked the precious nanocarbon knife out of its scabbard, making a first sloppy gouge to guide the following cuts. No blade could cut the fibers inside the coil, and trying would be an absolute waste of time. As she had been taught, she sliced up into her living shoulder, working too fast to let her natural misery killers take hold. Teeth clenched, body shaking, she choked back a scream as muscles and blood vessels and the main gray nerve were severed, and then she paused for a three-breath moment, allowing those gaping wounds to stop bleeding before using the knife’s keen point to dismantle the joint where the arm entered her body — the body that she was saving, leaving her dying limb in the trap’s tenacious grip.
Maybe the one arm would be enough, she told herself. Maybe its long bones would satisfy her enemies.
Though there was absolutely no good reason to hope so.
The long nameless hillside was covered with young forest, low and dense and as purple as a sick bruise, and a tiny woman with just a single arm could slip easily through gaps that might confound others. Not that that blessing occurred to her at that moment. What mattered was the desperate need to cover the greatest possible distance as fast as possible. Because it was a difficult direction, she ran sideways to the natural slope, pushing through the densest timber, and then she climbed a ridge and paused for ten breaths, listening as she gathered herself, wishing that nobody would come quite this soon. Then she attacked the steep ground, tearing downhill, leaping whenever she could and trying hard to touch only bare stone, making it a little harder to track her progress.
The country was dark purple to the brink of black, and it was drenched by rain. Even at a full sprint, she recognized dozens of smells — winter blossoms and sacks of fresh rainwater and fungi spores and bug dusts and the rocky soaked dirt itself. Westerwinds held their hiding places until she was in the midst of them, and then they broke for the sky — elegant green faces wrapped around empty gray eyes, fleshy mouths screaming and their voices always sounding like curses. Perhaps a hundred of the creatures lifted around her, and in a moment of pure fantasy, she wondered if she could lob off her legs too and grab one of them by its neck, letting the bird carry her away from this miserable place.
That long slope ended with a river that might or might not have been the same river she had followed for the last dozen days. The skin on the water was growing thin with the wintery gloom, but the dead white bubbleweed was stiff enough to support her weight, at least along the forested shore. Travel in the open was dangerous, but at least she wouldn’t leave easy tracks and the river made for quick running. Her sapphire knife had been lost with her arm. Her nanocarbon knife was still clenched in her left hand, lost blood clinging to the long gray blade, already infested with colonies of iron-eating bugs. She plunged the blade into the river’s skin and knelt and drank what poured from the wound. The water was warm, laced with winter algae and fish shit. As she drank, she wiped her knife against her trousers and then finished cleaning it with the hem of the little poncho covering her upper reaches, and then she pushed her only weapon back into its scabbard and stood again, discovering that her legs couldn’t hold her very slight weight.
She settled again, knees falling to the rubbery, interwoven face of the river. Something large passed below. She felt the river’s skin lift and then saw a long fin cutting into the bubbleweed, and a single black eye pushed through the hole that she had made, standing on a short thick stalk, considering the meal that seemed to be in easy reach.
An instinctive revulsion made her afraid, and that fear gave her enough strength to stand and run again. She followed the river past the next sharp turn, down to where the current picked up velocity and anger. Here the skin thinned until it couldn’t be trusted. Downstream was open water sprinkled with sharp corundum stones and sudsy foam, little fetchers skimming low while giant moth-planes hovered high above, wings thin as dreams, stiff and wide, baking in the muted orange glow of the midday sky.
She crossed back to solid ground and stopped and looked upstream, watching the walkable stretch of river.
No enemies were visible.
She leaped from one rock to the next, and the next, and when she misjudged the distance, both of her bare feet slipped and she dropped hard, cracking something inside her hip that instantly caught fire, her abused little body struggling to push that fresh misery aside.
Where the river slowed, the skin reappeared, and she ran with a limp across the face of it.
After the next bend, where trailing eyes wouldn’t see, she crossed over to the far bank before coaxing her legs to hurry, convincing herself that she had outraced every foe.
But she was nearly spent. Passion and fear gave out in the same instant. Gasping, she dragged her trembling, half-starved body past the ancient trunk of an enormous sky-hugging tree. Had she ever seen leaves such as this? Never, no. The river was heading north, pushing into country unlike that of her birth, and with their delicate but broad purplish leaves, the trees welcomed her with deep shadows and brushy cover and the rich fatty stink of a nearby grief-hive.
The hive was fixed to the water-swollen trunk of a massive tree. It was an old hive covered with living and dead griefs, and the entire colony buzzed, warning her of their presence and their very difficult mood.
Using her surviving arm, she picked up a slab of mudstone and walked up to the tree, closing her eyes for no reason. The insects could never hurt her. With a sweeping motion, she broke into the hive. The griefs went insane. Wings and rubbing legs roared. They picked up their dead and carried the desiccated bodies before them, driving barbed stingers into her poncho and her thin brown flesh. But toxins powerful enough to sicken a hundred Nots did nothing to her alien tissue. The stingers would feel like tiny pricks on her most sensitive day, which wasn’t today, and she barely noticed as she flung the rock twice again, battering the woodish walls, crashing into the queen’s quarters and exposing the rich golden wax that would give her a lingering bellyache as well as a fortune in calories.
Here was enormous luck, but the cool voices of the Dead reminded her that good for
tune always demands the bad.
That first mouthful of wax made her gag and cough, and she had to push her hand between her tiny teeth to hold the bite in place. Chewing was work. Swallowing was misery. But her injured body responded immediately, unleashing enzymes tailored to break stubborn bonds, reshaping the peculiar lipids into other, more digestible fats that were already awakening glands and ducts that for too many days had done nothing but dream of food.
Twenty breaths, and she felt drunk.
Twenty more, and she was kneeling on the moldy floor of the old forest, her jaw working at a second mouthful while her hand kneaded what would become her third bite. That was when she noticed a pleasant heat building inside her wounded shoulder. She swallowed again and took another bite and then looked at the shoulder, studying the hairless pink bulge emerging from the gore — a totipotent structure ripe with everything needed for true muscle and nerves and bone. If she could eat her fill and then sleep, a short workable right arm would emerge, complete with a tiny new hand begging to be used. Her body would be only a little smaller as a consequence, and the rest of her bones only a little more frail. Several days of determined feasting would be needed to recover her lost mass, and richer meals than this had to be found before she found her strength again. But inside this splendid, unexpected moment, it was easy to believe that her life had suddenly changed. In this obscure corner of a country that she didn’t know, she had stumbled across a wilderness full of grief-hives and other easy treasures; and for the next thousand years she would rule this forest — a monster of importance inflicting miseries on the local Nots as well as more dangerous and far more persistent enemies.
Motion caught her attention.
Smoothly and slowly, she turned her head, looking down the slope and out onto the river.
The rain was stronger now, gray and steady, splashing against the river’s sun-starved skin. She heard the rumble of the rain and smelled it and smelled the river too, and then she saw a solitary figure running with a strong relaxed gait along the river’s far bank. The intruder was built not too differently from her, but it was wearing more and better clothing — a wardrobe that changed color to match any background — and the creature had the posture of a hunter following a promising trail, the back tilted forward, head up and watching, and both hands carrying some kind of long, awful weapon.
Her first thought, odd and wrong, was that she must have wonderful eyes if she noticed that monster at such a distance.
But then the second hunter stepped out from behind a nearby tree. This was what had moved first, plucking her out of her daydream: A male human, tall and gloriously strong, his face rounded and hairless, that big spoiled body as well fed as any she had ever seen before.
To someone else, the man said, “Nothing.”
Then, after too long of a pause, he added, “Here.”
Her half-filled belly ached, and the stub of her new arm flinched. Otherwise she remained on her knees, still as death.
The man paused long enough to look in several directions but never straight at her. Like his partner across the river, he carried a weapon — an ancient gun sporting a long barrel, its magazine probably full of explosive rounds. His armored helmet was topped with some kind of radio transmitter. Riding his broad back was a leather pack large enough to hide somebody’s severed limb. She watched the diamond barrel aim at nothing, and then it dipped. But it didn’t dip far. Then she watched both the gun and man retreat back down to the river, and he stepped onto the rain-soaked skin, and once more he said a few words, too soft for her to make out but their tone sounding nervously happy.
They knew where she had been.
A moment later, the man slipped out of sight. But the figure next the far bank was running upstream now, the gait youthful and bold. The man’s partner wanted to cross where the skin was thick enough. Then both of the humans, and perhaps others, would converge on this damp little place, ready to wage war against the poor little monster lurking here.
Instinct told her to run. Now.
But the endless need for food was too much. She stood slowly and with her surviving hand brushed away the griefs and yanked free another lump of hard wax, and she ate it much too fast, suppressing the urge to vomit. When her mouth was empty, she began to cry, fear and fatigue and honest, precious joy finding room inside her. Dying was better with a full stomach. How often had she heard that said? Many times, her mother had repeated those grim old words, and to prove their wisdom, the woman’s death had been a blessing at the end of a miserable long famine. And that was why her daughter stood up now and reached high, risking everything to steal even more food from the furious griefs.
The two hunters reappeared, climbing the riverbank together. They could have been brother and sister, or maybe products of some tiny population where inbreeding ran deep. Definitely, they had similar faces and identical mannerisms. They acted bold. With their camouflaged clothes and long guns, they looked exceptionally competent, immune to every fear, ready for any surprise. But their broad bright eyes dispelled those illusions. They were a young couple, she realized. They might be dangerous in a thousand awful ways, but during their little lives, they had done nothing quite like this repugnant, awful work.
Kneeling behind a low ridge of packed clay, she studied them.
Inside the woman’s pack was a gaunt brown arm, mangled but still alive. It bent and then straightened. When the lost hand closed on nothing, the injured girl ached. Severed limbs could reattach themselves, she was thinking. Flesh always recognized its own kind. If she could just hide where she was, and if they followed her tracks too closely, and then if she charged with her knife, dodging their shots and cutting their throats . . . well, then it would be easy then to take back what was hers and steal their weapons too, pumping bomb after bomb into their helpless bodies.
“The Creation was built on grand, foolish blunders,” her mother used to teach, in days not long ago, yet irretrievably remote.
Leaving her knife resting inside its scabbard, the young woman crept back into the darkest shadows.
Young as they were, these hunters were not idiots. Speaking in whispers, they spread apart, guns lifted and the man walking after a set of footprints that would look old and rain-worn by now. At least for another twenty breaths, they would never guess that she was this close. That gave her enough time to find a ridge of shale that offered a trackless route up the hillside. Then with the rain sounds covering her little noises, she jogged, climbing the slope until the ground softened, and then after sucking down a single deep breath, she forced her tiny body into a desperate sprint.
The forest ended at the top of the hill. Where the high ground flattened, the Nots had attacked the native trees, using explosive summer fires and corundum axes to create a single long field dotted with burnt stumps and winter crops. Purplish earweed and coldharm and the blue-black cindercane grew lush and thick with the chill rain. She paused at the field’s edge, listening past the raindrops, resting while she compared what were a series of exceptionally poor choices. And then she moved again, slipping along the edge of the forest and wishing that was best.
By very little, an aluminum-hulled bomb missed the back of her head and fell into the shaggy field, detonating with a hard, awful thud.
Weak despite wounds and her overstuffed belly, she ran into the cinder-cane, pressing hard even when she left behind a broad trail any fool could follow.
Duplicity was dropped, replaced with a bold taunt.
“Follow if you dare!” she was telling them.
Her first Not was a youngster, half-grown and consumed by its little work. She saw the long exoskin — like a poncho with a tall hood, washed milky gray with the season — and she saw the wooden hoe being lifted high and the warm rain sliding off the creature’s greased back, merging with the ground where roots like fingers worked to absorb and protect what came only in the winter. She couldn’t see any face, but she heard the creature speaking to itself. Nothing about the voice was sensi
ble: Neither the words or their meanings, nor the emotions, or even if this was true speech at all. But the creature made its soft private sounds, and then down went the hoe, beheading a single green plant growing in the midst of all that happy black cane.
Before the hoe lifted again, she called out.
The Not turned abruptly, its face showing beneath the folds of thin gray flesh. Staring into the shadows, memory supplied the features: Two pairs of eyes and a beak-like mouth and flat nostrils and purple skin laid across stiff protein-woven bones that bore no resemblance to hers.
The young Not saw her and gave a weak holler.
Believing it was doomed, the creature bowed to the monster and wished it well, and then it lifted its head again, perhaps more startled than pleased to discover that she had already run past it, offering not so much as a brutal slap.
A few strides beyond the Not was the main trail.
She paused, just for an instant. But there was no way to decipher which direction was best, and so she made her guess and never looked back, even when the next hard thud rolled across the plateau.
One of the hunters had shot the Not.
The trail was narrow and curling, and then all at once it was straight and wide, leaving the cane field for ground more established and far more open. The burnt stumps were gone. The crops were perennials like elder and pack-a-long. A pair of adult farmers were walking home at the end of a wet good day, hands filled with implements too important to leave in the mud. This time she made no sound. She ran between them, and even exhausted, she pushed one farmer down and looked back at his friend until that creature thought to yell out a warning into the gathering night.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books) Page 102