Kayleen spooned up bowls of her stew, a proud grin on her face. “I made it all myself. It kept me from wishing I was with you.”
“Mmmmm.” I took a steaming bowl from her hands and set it on the floor in front of me. “I wish you had been there. We’re exhausted.”
“You look like it. Your hands are all scratched up.”
Alicia grimaced tiredly. “We had to scramble up a lot of rocks and gravel.”
I shot her a warning glance. We didn’t want to give away the location of the cave. Her eyes flicked away from mine, but her grimace told me she understood. “They were hiding in a bunch of trees halfway to the rim,” she added. “It took a long time to find them.”
Tom frowned, looking confused. “Everything is so muddy it should have been easy to track them.”
I choked down my bite of the spicy stew, swallowing a pol-root almost whole. “Hard to see where they’d gone through the grassy parts and the water.” The little lies adding up made me squirm. “Anyway, we caught them.”
Paloma nestled in a pile of saddlebags and blankets, her foot up on a full pack stuffed soft with dirty clothes. I turned to her, asking, “How’s the ankle? And Sugar Wheat?”
Paloma shook her head slowly. “We’ll both be okay with a little rest. But nothing got done. We didn’t work on the net nodes at all today.” She yawned. “I think we were all too tired. So we’ll do that tomorrow. I don’t know how you three had the energy to keep going all day. Maybe if both me and the silly beast out there rest, we can keep going in a day or two. But we probably shouldn’t ride Sugar Wheat for a few days.” She set down her own empty bowl. “How was being with Jenna all day? I’ve never seen her as friendly as she was this morning.”
Unanswered questions aside, I was still reeling from how much information Jenna had shared with us. “You know, she’s always quiet. But she’s a good tracker.”
Joseph must have decided to follow Jenna’s advice to hide the headband in the open. He pulled it out of his pocket. “She gave me this. To hold my hair out of my eyes when I hunt. Isn’t it neat?”
Tom handed his bowl to Kayleen and turned to look at both of us, his face stern. “I want you two to promise not to hunt without permission. It’s dangerous.”
Joseph and I glanced at each other, and he gave a tiny nod. Accepting that as acquiescence, I said, “Sure, we’ll ask first. I’m sorry.” I shrugged, trying to make it look unimportant, remembering the fear in Tom’s eyes after we killed the two djuri. “I just wanted to try it. I didn’t really like it that much.” It was only partly a lie. I didn’t like the killing part, but the chasing had been wonderful.
Tom’s gaze stayed on us. “I want a promise that you won’t hunt, or do anything else…anything else I wouldn’t like…without asking first.”
A vision of the inside of the cave filled my head. “I’ll try. But it’s dangerous out here, and sometimes we’ll have to act.” There, that would leave a little room for freedom.
Tom nodded. His voice sounded stiff as he said, “Thank you.” He turned to Joseph. “You, too. I want your promise as well. I am responsible for you both.”
Joseph mumbled assent, his focus on the leather strap he ran gently, almost reverently, through his hands.
Paloma and Kayleen both reached out for it at the same time. Joseph set it in Paloma’s hands. “Look at the embroidery. There’s silver and copper threads in there, so it looks different any way you turn it, and it shines in the sun.” Joseph’s face was a study in innocent enthusiasm.
Paloma, too, ran the leather strap through her fingers, almost an echo of Joseph’s actions, her face noncommittal. She passed it to Tom, who sat between her and the woodstove. He held the reader up to the firelight. The flickering light danced on his face, and caught the metallic threads woven into the leather. He looked at it for a long time, fingering it.
Joseph watched him carefully, a guarded look on his face.
Tom kept the headband, looking at Joseph, appearing unsure what to say next. “You may not be able to keep it. Hunter is leery of any altered artifacts, and he is still responsible for security. He made us scrub the whole area around Artistos clean, and there’s still a standing order to bring back anything we find and give it to him.”
My hands balled into fists all on their own, and I took a deep breath, commanding them to release. Joseph needed the headband. It was the only thing we had of our parents’. I could not imagine handing it meekly to Hunter.
Joseph apparently agreed. His mouth was a tight hard line and his eyes bored into Tom’s, pressuring him.
Tom gazed back, evenly, fingering the reader.
They stared at each other that way so long I thought no one would give, would look away. After the tenth breath I counted, neither had changed position. I silently willed Joseph to relax, to give Tom an opening to relent. Joseph didn’t relax; Tom turned his eyes away. He looked down at the headband and shrugged. “I suppose a piece of decorated leather can’t be too harmful. You can keep it for now, but you must show it to Hunter when you get back.” He handed the reader back to Joseph, who passed it to Kayleen. “Did Jenna give anybody else anything?”
I resisted an urge to feel for the box in my pocket. Alicia and I shook our heads, each of us paying close attention to our food.
Paloma spoke up from her corner. “I remember when we were all scared of her. Some people still are, but I’d like the opportunity to visit with her more, learn more about her and her people. We are, I hope, ready to all live together rather than fight.” She fixed us momentarily with her bright green eyes, as if to make sure we caught her message. A caution to us. “If you see her again, will you tell her I’d love to talk with her someday?”
I wondered how much Kayleen told Paloma about our periodic short meetings with Jenna.
Alicia asked, “Do you know how she lost her arm?”
Paloma and Tom glanced at each other. Paloma smiled softly at Tom. “No reason not to tell war stories. They’re growing up.”
Tom looked uncomfortably at the scuffed wood floor of the cabin. I felt him caught between Paloma and Nava, between someone who trusted us and someone who didn’t, between a woman he liked and a woman he loved.
He would have to make up his own mind, but I spoke into his silence. “Nava told me some of her war stories the night before we left.”
Joseph narrowed his eyes at me. I hadn’t told Joseph Nava’s story. I’d planned to, but it had seemed too personal, and I wasn’t through digesting the implications. Besides, he’d had his own worries. I added, “I’d like to hear your stories, hear anything you know about Jenna.”
Tom looked up at me, then at Paloma. “Well, I’m already in for it when Nava figures out these two can hunt, and I started it.” Tom’s gaze slid to Joseph. “I just…didn’t expect…I thought you would flush djuri and I’d shoot them.”
He cracked his knuckles and drank from his glass of water. “I’ll tell her after Joseph finishes figuring things out, goes back to his work on the nets. Then I can tie his new self-confidence to the hunting.”
“But you will tell her?” Paloma asked.
“I never lie to Nava. How can she lead if we hide things from her?”
So we weren’t the only ones keeping small secrets. Tom wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling either. Yet. It was hard to picture Nava or Wei-Wei or even Hunter being thrilled that we could bring down food with our bare hands. I bet we’d have to hunt in secret like we had to run in secret. They hated displays of our skills, even though Jenna’s skills helped keep them safe. Because Jenna’s skills helped keep them safe?
I set my already empty bowl in front of me and scooted back against the wall. Kayleen moved a little closer to me, to a better spot to watch Paloma. Alicia and Joseph already sat close together, not touching. Still, even from a meter away, I felt a new closeness between them.
Paloma cleared her throat and her face went momentarily slack, as if she were sneaking into the past. “I first saw Jenna just aft
er the altered landed. I don’t remember being afraid then. I remember being curious. We were only a few years older than you. Me and Tom and Nava and Karin and Pam and…” Her voice trailed off, and she swallowed hard. “It doesn’t matter. Most of them died. Hunter and his wife, Sarah, ran the colony then. But none of us had any power yet. So we watched, fascinated, as the delegation from the ship walked past us, heading to meet with Hunter and Sarah and Wei-Wei and the guild leaders. We didn’t have a culture guild yet. That was created after the war by a group of older people, too old to fight, who made group dinners and kept Commons and River Walk Parks clean…and later, it became the natural home for the wounded.” She shook her head, as if to clear it of memories. “I’m sorry, I’m digressing.
“Jenna was with the first delegation. They all towered over us, at least a head taller, some more. Like you, now. Otherwise, none of them looked very different from us. Healthy, almost glowing with health and strength. Perhaps they chose the least altered in appearance to keep from frightening us. Jenna had short hair then, and of course she wasn’t hurt yet. She walked with more grace than I had ever seen in anyone, as if she glided. I thought her beautiful and exotic. She took notes about Artistos, and I saw her deep in conversation with Sarah sometimes, and even laughing.” Paloma stopped for a moment, the faraway look relaxing her face.
Joseph shifted position nervously, his eyes fixed on Paloma.
I tried to picture Jenna laughing. Jenna beautiful. Jenna whole. She had smiled more than usual yesterday. No matter how hard I tried, the only Jenna I could see gazed at me from one eye.
Paloma continued. “But Jenna’s laughter died away. As we and the altered grew more wary of each other, her face became more like stone. She always seemed to notice everything. She began to seem more haughty than beautiful to me, like an ice-woman sent to watch us. But even though I overheard arguments between the altered and our own leaders, I don’t recall hearing her voice in the fights. Those of us who still lived with our parents weren’t allowed to attend any meetings with them, so we got information secondhand, or from listening outside of locked doors.” A little ghostly smile flew across her face and disappeared. “Therese and Steven were older than us, and sometimes included. They told us the altered leaders treated Jenna as important, that they asked her advice on some things, and brought her to almost every meeting.”
Paloma shifted, moving her leg a little. Tom handed her a cup of water. She sipped some and set the cup near her hand.
“And then the war started. The altered camped outside of Artistos, in the field past the hebra barns where we grow hemp now. Some of our young men and theirs clashed. People died, and the altered who weren’t still with their ships on the Grass Plains moved up the High Road and settled around here, near the lakes. We found three camps after the war, and burned them. Hunter made us burn them.” She looked down at her hands, which twisted in her lap. “I’m wandering again. It is so easy to get lost in those years.” She fell silent, chewing on her lip. Heart pain hovered in her eyes and settled into the tiny lines on her face.
“How did she lose her arm?” Alicia prompted. “And her eye?”
Tom looked at Paloma and nodded. “I was there.” He picked up the thread of the story. “It was near the last fight. I hadn’t seen Jenna fighting, not directly. Some altered who came here had only subtle changes, like you. The fighters were the strangest of the altered. They had physical advantages over us. More legs or arms or reflexes or…one had four eyes, two in the back of her head. God, there were a lot of them, and they killed us so easily.” He opened the door on the woodstove and piled in two more small logs. “But there were more of us, and so in the last fight, we knew we would either win or die. But you know the basics of that fight?”
Everyone in Artistos knew the stories and songs. Desperate, the original humans had committed all of their resources to a single fight at a newly discovered camp. Half the remaining altered were there, either counting on secrecy or needing to meet for some other reason. We never knew why the opportunity existed. But Hunter exploited it. For the first time, they died and we didn’t. Or vice versa. It made my head hurt to belong to both sides. I responded to Tom. “Yes, we know the story.”
“I was in the last fight. So were Steven and Therese, and almost everyone else. Nava ran messages back and forth between the fighters and Artistos. Paloma worked in our field hospital. The fight was…terrible.” He closed his eyes briefly and Paloma took his hand, squeezing it, and then releasing it again before he continued. “There’s no value to you in the details. We thought we had killed all of them when Geordie spotted Jenna and a man and a child running away from us up a draw. We hardly had any weapons left—just homemade rocket launchers and some stunners we’d modified to carry enough punch to kill. The child was too young to run; Jenna held it to her breast. We could see the child, but we’d been fired on by the altered for years, lost our own children, our parents, our brothers and sisters. We burned with anger. In retrospect, that’s no excuse for firing on an enemy who was running away.” He swallowed, and cleared his throat. “For firing at a child.”
Tom ran his hands over the light stubble of gray beard sprouting from his chin and stood and stretched. He walked to the door and opened it, looking out at the hebras, letting the cool scents of evening and damp grass and running water compete with the spicy stew.
I glanced around. Kayleen’s dark eyes watered and she looked up in a corner, away from all of us, her skin a pale white. Joseph fidgeted, rearranging his weight, apparently unable to be still. Tears streamed silently down Alicia’s face.
We waited for Tom to start again, watching as he carefully levered himself back down next to Paloma. “Geordie sent a rocket after the three of them. The rocket launchers made noise when they were fired, and so the man with Jenna had time to turn and fire on Geordie. They were like that—so fast they could react as if they knew our intent before we did. Maybe he heard Geordie take aim. I don’t know.” Tom paused and licked his lips. “Geordie’s aim was good. The rocket exploded square in the middle of the little group. The rockets were full of shrapnel, of hard metal that burst in a wide pattern with every explosion. So anything near the explosion should have died.
“I ran up the hill to Geordie, only to find he had been shot through the head. He died as I was carrying him back down the hill. I didn’t stop to check on the group up there. If I had, I would have found Jenna alive, and I would have killed her then.” He reached for Paloma’s water glass and took a sip, licking his lips. I thought perhaps he was done, but he went on. “I thought about that a lot over the years. How it might have been kinder to her to have killed her.”
The subtext was the same, whether it came from Tom or Nava. If we’d just killed everyone, killed Jenna, killed you kids, then life would be easy.
Perhaps Joseph heard the same unspoken words. His hands were clenched so tightly in his lap the knuckles whitened, but his voice came out even and reasonable. “But if you had killed her, Jenna wouldn’t protect Artistos like she does.”
Tom frowned. “Things are never as simple as they seem.”
Paloma picked the story up. “I climbed that hill with a clean-up detail two days later. Hunter had us searching the whole area, bringing all the altered weapons and bodies and artifacts and food…everything…down to a big pile to be burned. So three or four of us went up the hill to find anything left after Geordie’s rocket. We found pieces of the child and of the man, and a hand that must have been Jenna’s. Two of us followed a bloody trail for an hour before we lost it. After we reported what we’d found, Hunter himself tried. He, too, lost Jenna’s trail. And then Hunter was pulled back to town, into the debate about you six.” She raised her eyes and gazed at us contemplatively.
Tom broke the quiet moment, his voice soft. “In the last fight we killed so many of them, so ruthlessly. We had to. But we hated ourselves for it.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Chelo? How did you feel when you killed the djuri?”
; I hesitated. “In the end, after it was too late, I didn’t want to kill it anymore.”
Tom nodded and waited a moment before saying, “I think you lived only because we were so tired of killing by then.”
I swallowed, and took Kayleen’s hand. She scooted a little closer to me.
Paloma whispered, watching Kayleen closely. “I’m glad that we didn’t…that you’re here.”
“Me, too,” I said.
Paloma held up a hand, clearly asking for silence. “We were all so busy recovering and rebuilding that we didn’t make it back to Jenna’s cold trail. The ship was gone, our enemies gone with it.
“We had, at most, one damaged enemy left. At first, Hunter was convinced Jenna lived, and posted special watches. After a month passed with no sign of her, we assumed she had died after all.
“No one saw her until the following winter, which was particularly cold. She haunted the edges of town. She had somehow managed to slip inside the boundaries. People chased her. Some to kill her, some to catch her. She was elusive, amazingly fast, and she did no harm. Some people spoke of missing ears of corn, or once a small goat, but no one could produce real evidence. There must have been many opportunities for her to kill us, but she didn’t take any of them. After a while, she started killing predators and bringing them to town under the cover of darkness, so we’d find dead paw-cats or full clutches of demon dogs.”
“I remember,” I said carefully, “I remember how people used to chase her.”
Paloma shifted again, her eyes still pained. “I’m sure she must be lonely. I imagine she very much liked spending the day with you today.”
I nodded.
Paloma’s voice held a note of longing as she said, “I would like to know if she ever tells you any interesting stories.”
I pushed myself up. “She doesn’t seem used to talking.”
The Silver Ship and the Sea Page 22