Cormorant Run

by Lilith Saintcrow

  The rifter’s dim shape as she watched Brood loom over him … the bitch had saved his life, but that didn’t mean much. He’d been dead the instant grenade shrapnel pierced his thigh. Should have turned around and headed for the wall then. Proper medical attention and sending another blacksheet in. They were anonymous, of course, and this was a juicy bit of dirt to have on your commanding officer. Kopelund probably would have sent someone else to take care of him in a hospital bed, though, especially if he suspected what Morov had done.

  The rifter wasn’t anything great—for Chrissake, she’d eaten a man’s eye—but at least she’d been there when it counted. Brood might have just clamped Morov’s nose and mouth shut; he’d been too weak to struggle. A little bit of choking, a little bit of twitching, and it could have been all over.

  Morov stared at the pavement. Pre-Event concrete was a lot better and more durable than the current stuff. The shock to the world economy meant that even though they knew how to make higher-quality shit, they didn’t have the resources. It had taken twenty goddamn years to get back to seventy-five percent of pre-Event GDP in most places.

  They stopped so Morov could drink from Barko’s canteen. The rifter found water, God alone knew where, but she wouldn’t say how she did it.

  Barko said something, and her reply was too quiet. Morov’s head jerked up. “What?”

  “I asked if she thought it was aliens.” Barko sloshed his own canteen a little. “The Event. We’re getting close to the center, or at least, I think it’s the center.”

  “It is.” The rifter crouched in the middle of the street, an arm’s length away from that vile, nasty moss with shriveled red beads all over it. “Right smack zero.”

  “So, do you?” Barko persisted.

  “Dunno.” For a moment, it looked as if that was all they were going to get out of her. Then her chin rose and she gazed thoughtfully at the skyscrapers looming close. “Ashe said maybe. Knew a guy who thought it was us.”

  “Us?” A mouthful of tepid water smoothed Morov’s throat. The goddamn cane made his shoulder hurt, too. His deepest fucking desire right now was for his leg to be fixed and a good bed to sleep for a week in, as well as some chow that wasn’t heated in pouches. An apple. Maybe a hard, sour peach, puckering up his mouth and filling his nose with hot saline. God damn, but that sounded good. “The shit you say.”

  “Maybe not us now. But in the future. Salvage is tech, right? Some scientist gets his pet project going and it rips something up. Either then or now. This the biggest Rift, and lots of government all over before the Event.”

  Barko let out a short sharp sound that tried to be amusement and failed miserably. “Wouldn’t that just be the shittiest joke ever. We made the Rifts.”

  “Or it could be things from outside,” she continued, by far the most Morov had ever heard her speak. “Time’s funny in here, gravity too. Things from outside our space. Eggheads like him been fiddling around ever since the world wars. Breaking atoms, breaking every fuckbuckle thing they can. What if something saw them doing it? Came to have a look around, found out we’re fucking meatsacks, and left? All this just fucking trash left after a picnic.”

  Barko’s mouth hung slightly open as he regarded her. He probably never thought someone who didn’t talk had enough brains to grind up a question that fine. “Never thought of it that way before,” he said, screwing the cap back on his canteen.

  She made a small spitting sound, and craned her neck to examine Morov. He stood, because getting down into a crouch was impossible and once he sat down he wasn’t sure he was going to get back up again without help. When she unfolded, he realized again just how small she was. Malnutrition and solitary in Guan would turn anyone into a rag of their former self. Maybe her eyes and teeth weren’t too big, they just hadn’t gotten the memo that shrank the rest of her.

  Her tongue flicked out, wet those lips. With some more weight on her, they would be lush instead of oversized. She might even grow some hips and tits.

  “You sure? We could make the shimmer near here by dusk.” She pointed, a brief movement with a thin, dirty finger extended, its nail bitten all the way down. “That way. It’s near, and it wants us gone.”

  So had she been leading them in circles while the group was whittled down?

  Did it matter? Morov decided it didn’t at the moment. There was only one thing that did. “Which way’s the Cormorant?”

  She pointed in another direction, a forty-five-degree angle. There was a street heading that way, a concrete canyon already losing what little sunlight had managed to reach its floor. It looked cold, and the Rift exhaled again, soft wet paintbrushes flicking over Morov’s cheeks.

  “I told you,” he said. “I want to see what we came for. Let’s get on with it.”

  Barko didn’t argue, but he did dig in his pack and bring out one of his little handheld devices. A strap with sensors went over the scientist’s chest, and Morov thought of ancient warriors needing help with their armor before a decisive battle. So he hobbled closer, and buckled what he could with his thick, clumsy, swelling fingers.

  58

  WHITE WINGS

  The sun, halfway between noon and horizon, was a glaring golden eye glimpsed between high concrete spires, their tops afire with its gaze. There was a clatter as Morov dropped his cane, and Barko grabbed the younger man’s arm before he could topple. “Shit,” the scientist muttered. “Should have put the plasma in a little higher on the leg. Or more of it.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Morov leaned on him, awkward but not overly heavy. “Damn thing slipped. Sorry.”

  The rifter wrapped a scrap of cloth around the head of the splintered bar-support, tying it with quick neat fingers. It would soak up the sweat—Morov was wet all over, and his breath had started to wheeze again. Barko walked beside him, sometimes stepping ahead to toe chunks of fallen concrete out of the way. Every once in a while the rifter would stop dead, and moments later tiny pieces of concrete or metal would peel from the edifices around them. Even a pebble could kill you if it dropped from high enough, and Barko’s back prickled painfully each time he heard the clattering from other parts of downtown.

  The buildings began to crumble more thoroughly the further they traveled. After a while, the sunlight was scouring half-tumbled monuments of twisted rebar and vaporized concrete, the road starred with wreckage. Even further, as the shadows lengthened and a soft breath of a warm spring afternoon reached its zenith, creeping between the ruins, the stresslines from some unimaginable almost-explosion became clearly visible, raking across the buildings. The rifter had chosen the one street that was relatively clear, but Morov had to be helped over wreckage too big to skirt, and eventually the rifter took the captain’s pack and carried it as well as her own. The skyscrapers melted away, crumbled into dust, and strange yellowish-green grass with fleshy pods at the bottom of each blade and full, nodding seedheads began to spring up. Trashwood reared in the more sheltered corners, scrub brush daubed with bright fresh green. One or two spiny copse-clots appeared, but the rifter kept them well away. She threw her little rags more frequently now, and often paused even when one did what it should and fell without shredding, or hovering, or being smacked aside with a terrific crack, as if hit by a cricket bat. Birds—or birdlike things—rose and fell, diving into the grass or twittering among the bushes; there was a gray flash of something that could have been a rabbit once or twice.

  Morov’s cane sank into the damp earth more than once, but they didn’t have to go far. The pasture was roughly circular, in the very heart of downtown, the sides of skyscrapers shearing away in irregular curves at its borders. The rhythmic breezes were softer here, and rustled the undulating grass in discrete, discreet lines.

  “So this is the center,” Barko whispered. The spectra, strapped securely to his fist, was showing off-the-charts readings in recognizable patterns. Each time the Rift took another breath, every damn emission it could read hit a plateau, then slowly fell off. Nice, even, regular
—he could barely believe his eyes. Where was the randomness? Where was the—

  Morov coughed, wheezing. “Shit,” he said, very loud in the stillness. “Can’t breathe.”

  “Almost there.” The rifter pointed, her scabbed palms dark and her dirty fingernails brutally short.

  After the wrecked buildings and the sudden grassland, it was almost absurdly anticlimactic. A weathered shack perched on a slow rolling rise, its west wall snug against a huge gray-barked tree in full leaf. The closer they got, the warmer it became, until the temperature settled on a balmy summer’s day with just enough wind to keep the sweat cooled but not enough to raise a dust storm. The tree looked normal, except for that smooth, sheer bark. The leaves were somewhat oakish, with deep-fingered fringe, but its seeds had a maple’s whirling wings.

  The shack’s silvered, weathered wood was the exact same shade as the tree bark. The scientist blinked, trying to decide whether the house had been built or had simply grown there, an abscess on the tall, graceful, leafy column.

  The door faced them. Sagging leather hinges did not squeak, but the wood itself made a scraping, singing noise as the breeze pushed at it. The rifter’s dark fuzz of hair moved a little under the wind; Barko’s stubble tingled, trying to stand straight up like the hairs on his arms and chest and back and legs.

  Morov kept coughing. He’d gone alarmingly cheesy-pale, and it occurred to Barko that moving around after the application of plasma might have worked a blood clot free inside the commander’s body. Embolism. Those little bastards tended to lodge in the lungs. “Oh, shit—” he began, but Morov dropped the cane and staggered forward. The rifter, her head tilted slightly, watched them with her wide, dark eyes, and for a moment Barko saw it again—the unconscious, regal beauty a stray angle could give her in this summer afternoon light.

  Anything could be lovely, if you turned it the right way.

  Morov staggered, coughed rackingly, made it another few steps. The rifter didn’t move to help him, and Barko hesitated. Throwing him into the house, the Cormorant—if that was what this was, and not just another random, deadly piece of the Rift—what would that do? Stopping him so he could choke out his last staring up into a sky that was too blue, with fluffy white clouds that looked like pendulous breasts and streaks of black-oil shimmer that hypnotized the unwary, was that the right thing to do?

  Barko couldn’t tell.

  The captain tripped, his wounded leg bending with a crunch, and fell over the threshold. He screamed breathlessly, a despairing sound cut short with a lungwhistle, and the entire shack shuddered. The tree shook its leaves, and white flashed among its branches.

  Butterflies, or something close to it. They poured out, fringed white wings holding black spots in their centers, and Barko half yelled, half moaned, stumbling back in disgust. They looked wrong, their long fleshy bodies too heavy for those papery wings to keep aloft. Some circled the rifter, who simply stared, her generous mouth slack instead of tight with pain; a few fluttered toward Barko, who dumbly raised the spectra as if it would ward them off. The majority cascaded onto Morov’s legs and flashed into the gloom over the threshold.

  They had short-stubby proboscises, and the sound of those tiny blunt needles sinking past fabric and into skin was a pickpocking murmur that threatened to bring the last ration pouch Barko had ingested out in a painful acidic rush. They spread their wings and preened, and Barko’s vision blurred. Hot water slid down his cheeks.

  After a short while, he became aware of his own voice, raggedly repeating Morov’s name, and one other thing.

  “I’m not going in … I’m not, I can’t. I’m not going in there. Morov … Morov, you asshole …”

  Neither he nor the rifter had a chrono, so they had no idea it was precisely 4:37 p.m.

  They camped at the edge of the grassy circle, their backs against a chunk of concrete that had once been a statue of a dictator. It lay facedown and broken, but it sheltered them from both the wind and from any prying eyes. No fire, but at least the ration pouches were hot, and they had Morov’s blankets as well as their own.

  The rifter made herself a nest in the most acute angle, scooting back until she could rest her head against the torn inside of what had been a broad strapping statue-chest. She settled, slurping from her pouch and covering her mouth afterward with that same half-guilty movement. Barko did his best not to look at her during mouthfuls, staring instead out over the undulating grass. The sunset was beautiful—masses of fire dying under a slow assault of ink, the colors between night and the end of weary day bleeding rapidly through too many shades to count, too many shades for the human eye to distinguish all at once.

  When they had both finished, Barko swallowed the last of the dessert syrup—something probably meant to taste like cherry—and chased it with the flat, tepid water from his canteen. “Ozymandias,” he said, finally.

  The rifter rested her chin on her thin knees. “What’s that?”

  “Poem.” He indicated the shattered statue. “About a guy seeing a statue of a conquerer, lying in the dirt. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”

  “Huh.” She thought this over, or maybe she just dismissed it. Was there any poetry in her thin frame? She didn’t seem like the sort.

  “Did you go to school?” He could no longer see the smear halfway to the horizon that was the listing, horrifying little shack.

  She nodded, but didn’t add details.

  Barko closed his eyes. Wished they could have a fire. “What happens out here at night?”

  A short pause, and he could almost see her thoughtful expression. Another man might have mistaken it for stupidity, but nobody stupid could have survived the past few days. Then again, brains was no indicator of survival ability, either.

  “Dunno,” she said, finally. The wind rustled through the grass. “Feels safe enough.”

  “Okay.” He thought about it, and decided—much to his own surprise—that she was right. “That’s funny. It does.”

  “Make a rifter of you yet, bald man.” A hint of a smile, and the bloody sunset light made her regal again for a bare moment.

  He shuddered so hard his pack, sitting obediently next to him, made a small whoof noise. “No, thanks. I just want to get out of here.” He tilted his head back, examined the sky. A few stars glimmered, and he wondered if they were the same ones he’d see outside the Rift. “Was that really the Cormorant?”

  “Yes.” Short, definite, crisp.

  “Do you think he wished for—”

  “He was dead before he crossed the drift, baldy.”

  Was she lying? How could she tell? Did he believe her?

  Some things it was best to just not think about at all.

  “Are you coming out with me?” He didn’t mean it to sound so wistful.

  “Maybe.” Her face dropped into her knees and her breathing lengthened, and that single time, Barko knew beyond a doubt she was lying.

  59

  COOLING ENTROPY

  Inside a slumping triangular lean-to on the edge of downtown, thin wisps of smoke rose from a bed of cooling ash. The fire, having hugged all the fuel it could find, settled into cooling entropy. The side-lying shape in deeper shadow, an amber spine protruding from its slack neck, lay in a single bar of sunshine from a rent in the roof. The golden light glinted off a large, twisting belt buckle, its grooves and whorls darkened with grime.

  60

  OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW

  With just the scientist, it didn’t take as long as Svin thought it would to reach the slugwall from the core. Some ways were shorter than others, and while the Rift might resist you going in, it generally didn’t mind so much when you were heading out.

  She stopped more than she had to, though, thinking carefully about each part of the route. No reason to get lull-stupid.

  The scientist plodded behind her, and after a while, he stopped talking. It was a relief. He didn’t start again until lunchtime, when they halted at the edge of a residential district. The hous
es had transformed into spongy, resilient material exuding an acrid moisture. The day was clear, no caustic fumes, but dark oilslick clouds were gathering over the river. Looked like a sweep starting, and if it hit before she could reach a safe hole, she might end up just as dead as Morov.

  “Funny.” He broke off half a dry-ration cracker, handed it to her. “Ashe said I’d never go into a Rift.”

  Svin’s chest threatened to cramp. She breathed out, softly, and examined the pressed bar of dehydrated fiber packed with sweeteners and ersatz vitamins. The jagged edge where he’d broken it showed the striations—gigantic machines had extruded this, dried it, packaged it, sorted it into boxes. Then it had been shipped and unpacked, put in kits, shipped again to a storeroom, requisitioned for this trip, and now it was going into the machinery of her body, that marvelous thing that turned everything she put in her mouth to shit.

  A lot of trouble for too small a return, really. Just like everything else.

  “So she was wrong.” Svin nibbled at the bar, holding her free hand cupped to hide her lips and to catch any crumbs.

  “She wasn’t wrong about much.”

  Who gonna be my sweet thing? A faint faraway voice. Memory was like the old pressed-wax cylinders, it wore out after a while. At least, some things did. Then there were things like the screams when a tangle of living metal sucked the fluids from a man, contracting to draw out more and more before it began to drip with red resin to strip out all the minerals and fat-soluble nutrients. And things like Ashe next to her in the dark, her mouth a sticky delight and lightning playing through Svinga’s veins.

  “You could Rift, if you wanted,” Svinga said, finally. She took another nibble, gauging just how dry and old the bar was. After she swallowed the small wad of tasteless cardboard, she decided to tell him the whole truth. “But you’d die soonish. You don’t listen enough.”