by D. J. Butler
Eirig crouched on the ledge, more rope coiled in his one hand and at his feet.
“Where’s Cheela?” Dyan asked.
“I ate her.” Eirig grinned, his expression revealed in a strip of moonlight that cut across his face. He nodded at the crack. “She’s inside. Now come on, turn around, or I have to throw you into the river. Hands behind you.”
Dyan turned around. She put her hands behind her back, trying to look as cooperative as possible, but also tensing her muscles. The Magisters had never taught her anything about escaping from bonds, but she’d seen a few funvids, and more than once the captured, outgunned Outrider escaped from her captivity by tensing her muscles while she was being tied up, so that when she relaxed them later she gained a little slack.
Eirig fumbled a bit in tying her up, but only a bit. Again, Dyan noticed the heat of his touch, and felt terrible.
Two days ago, she thought, getting her Lot Letter from Magister Zarah’s hands and looking forward to being Blooded and becoming an adult, she hadn’t expected anything like what had actually happened. The Hanging, yes. But everything after that had been a shock, a world-changing trauma.
As it must have been meant to be, she realized. As the System must want it; as the Cogitant Council and the Magisters designed it to be.
“Is she tied?” Dyan heard Jak call from the bottom of the chimney.
“Yeah!” Eirig called back. “Come on up!” Dyan heard the scuffling sounds of climbing in the chimney and then Eirig pulled her back, gently. “Lie down,” he whispered. “You’re going to need to roll sideways.”
Dyan felt a little sick to her stomach, realizing that she was lying back in bat guano, but she steeled herself and did it. Then Eirig pushed her shoulder, and she rolled from shadow into darkness. She spun like a wheel several times, struck her head on stone, and then came to a halt against flesh.
“Cheela,” she said.
“Get off me!” the other girl snapped back.
Bats shrieked about them. Dyan rolled away from her Crechemate and tucked her face into the collar of her own coat for protection.
The cold beam of a light stick snapped across the two girls and Dyan struggled to inch away from Cheela. She managed to get herself backed up into a sitting position against a rough piece of stone, and then Jak scraped into the cave on his belly, climbing down through the same crack through which Dyan had rolled. He pulled the saddlebags in behind him, and Dyan’s bow, tossing them into a corner.
While Eirig crawled in, Jak stomped over to the girls. He flipped Cheela over first, looked at the ropes around her wrists, and grunted. Then he pulled Dyan forward, away from her boulder, and checked her similarly.
“Good job, Eirig.” He dragged his friend to his feet. They were dirty and wet, and their ragged wool trousers and shirt made them look like oversized children, so much so that Dyan had a hard time not laughing.
“I’m just glad they had a light stick.” Eirig looked pale and his voice quivered slightly as he spoke. “Now if someone goes to hold my hand tonight, at least I’ll be able to tell who it is.”
Jak sat beside the saddlebags and began to dig around inside them.
“Any good snacks?” Eirig wanted to know. He squatted in a corner and then rolled back, disturbing two fist-sized balls of fur that instantly flapped away, shrieking angrily. “I hear that food is always the first order of business for a Wahai outlaw.” He wagged his eyebrows suggestively at Dyan. “I’m afraid that love can only come second for a rogue such as myself, my dear.”
“Love’s third,” Jak disagreed, “if it even ranks that high. Our first order of business has to be medicine.”
In the splashy, reflected light of her stick, Dyan looked around. The crack opened into a roughly cylindrical shaft, choked with boulders and rubble that ascended at a forty-five degree angle. The stink of bats was so strong she couldn’t smell anything else.
“Here it is.” Jak threw aside the saddlebags he was rummaging in, holding up a medikit. He pulled at it, twisted it, gnawed at it, but the kit wouldn’t open.
“You have to pop the seal, idiot,” Cheela growled.
“You could tell us how,” Eirig pointed out.
“Why?” Cheela stared at him. “So that when you kill me, your boo boos will feel better?”
“Hey,” Eirig objected, “I don’t know that we plan to kill you.”
“We do,” Jak confirmed.
“I’m sorry I didn’t slice your head off,” Cheela said to Eirig. “I’m sorry you didn’t bleed out, and I hope you die of infection.”
“You started it,” Eirig pointed out. “You tried to kill my friends.”
Dyan felt sick.
Jak slammed the medikit against a boulder. With a hiss, it popped open.
“Nobody’s going to die of infection,” he announced, coming up with a tube of topical antibiotic.
Cheela closed her eyes and feigned sleep while Jak knelt to take care of his friend, but Dyan couldn’t look away. She saw now that Eirig had a tourniquet around his arm, and that the wound at the end of his stump was bandaged with strips of wool that had been torn from Jak’s shirt and were now soaked through with blood. Jak peeled away the bandages, smeared antibiotic ointment over the wound, and then wrapped it in gauze from the medikit. Eirig bit his lip the entire time, in obvious pain but not crying out.
“On the plus side,” the injured boy said, “it’s a clean injury. No bone fragments or anything. You have to admire the precision of an Outrider’s bola.”
“Outrider-designate,” Dyan said. She said it automatically, not meaning anything by it, but Cheela obviously took offense. Without opening her eyes, she kicked Dyan hard in the shin.
“You’ll want a painkiller,” Jak said, digging through the medikit again.
“I’m fine,” Dyan said, though it smarted enough to bring tears to her eyes. “I just wish my hands were free so I could rub it.”
“I’d rub it for you,” Eirig offered. “You know, if I had two hands.”
“Funny,” Cheela snarled. “I’d have thought one hand was enough to accomplish everything a guy like you ever does.”
“Painkiller’s not for you, Systemoid,” Jak said, popping open a canister of pills. He tapped two of them out into his palm and gave them to Eirig, who swallowed them.
“Thanks.” The injured boy leaned against the wall of the cave and closed his eyes.
“Stop calling me that,” Dyan murmured, but too softly to be heard.
Jak stood and faced his prisoners. He looked tall, standing over them, and Dyan turned her face away.
“You look like you know what you’re doing with the medikit,” she said. She meant it as a compliment, though it sounded painfully tiny in the cave.
“In addition to carefully marking which of us should be slaughtered,” Jak told her, “Magister Stanton occasionally dispensed minor medicines. I think it made him uncomfortable that I paid such close attention to what he was doing.” He paused for long seconds. “Now,” he said slowly, “tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”
“Because,” Cheela growled, “when the Outriders catch you, they’ll make you wish you’d never been born.”
Jak’s laugh was hard and thin. “Too late. And if you mean they would kill me, that’s obviously already on the table.”
Cheela spat on Jak’s shoes.
“We could plead for mercy,” Dyan suggested. “For you, I mean.”
“Mercy for what?” Jak asked. He looked amused. “I haven’t committed a crime. All I did was do well on the tests in school.”
“Kidnapping,” Cheela suggested.
Jak ignored her and kept talking to Dyan. “You said it yourself, no one hates me, I’m not a bad person. The System just wants to kill me because I’m smart.”
“That’s not true,” Dyan said, too quickly.
“You’re right.” Jak bowed and grinned. “It wants to kill me because I’m smart … and a Landsman.”
Dyan had nothing to say to that.<
br />
Eirig popped his eyes open. “We may need them,” he said. “We may need hostages.”
Jak scrutinized the girls. “That’s a good reason to keep one of them alive,” he admitted. “I don’t see that a second hostage is going to make any difference, unless we literally use them as shields.”
“Please do,” Cheela snarled. “I’ll beg the Outriders to cut right through me.”
“I should warn you,” Eirig said, his voice heavy and slow, “it’s not as fun as it looks.”
And then his head tipped back against the stone and he began to snore.
“I don’t want you to die,” Dyan said. She hadn’t meant to say it, the words just popped out of her spontaneously. Before her mouth was even closed, Cheela shot her a look of pure disdain. “I mean, personally,” she added, trying to cover her mistake. “None of this is personal.”
“I, on the other hand,” Cheela said, “am taking this all very personally.”
“Good,” Jak countered. He threw a silvery microfiber blanket from one of the saddlebags over Eirig, and then settled into a seated position against one wall of the cave under a second. He snapped off the light stick, plunging them all into cool darkness. “So am I.”
***
Chapter Eight
Dyan awoke lying on her side, feeling dirty and stiff. The salty animal tang of bats filled her nostrils so much it seemed to her she could actually taste the little creatures on her tongue. Her neck was balled into a single knot of stressed tissue and the left side of her face stung from lying on sand and stone all night.
To her surprise, she could see.
Cheela slumped upright against a large rock, chin forward on her chest, sleeping. A silver-wrapped lump in the corner, just where Eirig had fallen asleep the night before, snored gently. There was no sign of Jak.
Dyan rolled onto her back and sat up. She ached, every part of her, saddle-sore or foot-weary or scraped or bruised.
The light, she realized, came from above, and it was daylight. The top of the slanted well in the bottom of which they lay was open to the sky, and when she craned her neck around to look, she could just see the tiniest sliver of blue. By the faint light she could see that the well was climbable, even comfortably so. She also saw clumps of brown lichen all over the walls that she hadn’t noticed the night before. They looked like leopard’s spots, and she was leaning very close to get a good look at one before she realized what they must be.
Bats.
She pulled away at the last second.
Dyan leaned down and squinted out the crack onto the ledge by which they had come into the cave. She could see daylight there, too, and no sign of the Landsman boy she had been assigned to kill.
Now was her chance to escape. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and exhaled. She tried to let all the tension and stiffness she felt flow out of her body with the air of her lungs, to deflate like a balloon, become limp and soft and relaxed.
When she felt so relaxed she was almost fluid, she tried to slip her hands out of their bonds.
And failed.
“Lying funvids!” she cursed.
Cheela jerked her head up. Even in the moment of her waking up, her eyes stared at Dyan with a hawklike expression that was hard to interpret as anything other than full of hatred. She looked around quickly at the cave and then back at Dyan. “Shh!”
Dyan nodded.
Cheela stood. She was wobbly on her knees, but she gritted her teeth with determination and pushed her back against the stone. Dyan followed her example, the effort bringing tears to her eyes. It felt like the long muscles of her legs ripped as she moved.
When they were standing, Dyan nodded her head at the crack exit and mouthed a message, Jak’s gone.
Either Cheela didn’t understand her, or she ignored Dyan. The Outrider-designate whispered back, very softly. “We kill the cripple and get out of here.”
“With what?” Dyan whispered back.
For an answer, Cheela raised one rider’s boot off the ground, showing Dyan its sharp and heavy heel.
Dyan flinched. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
Cheela shrugged. “Not my problem.” She stepped across the scratchy sand floor of the well and stood over Eirig. Leaning against the wall with her shoulder, she dragged back the microfiber blanket with her boot.
Eirig continued to snore. His clothing was crusted with dirt, and beneath the dirt on his face, Dyan saw bruises. He looked like a little kid, innocent and grubby. Cheela raised her leg to stomp on the boy—
“Bad idea.”
The voice was Jak’s, and it was loud in the cave.
Dyan looked up and saw him perched above Eirig like a roosting bird. He had been hidden behind a rock, and now emerged to intervene. He held a spear in his hand. Once, Dyan would have laughed at the spear, which was the weapon of outlaws and cavemen in the funvids, but she had seen gentle, harmless Wayland poke one right through a girl the day before, and it didn’t seem funny now.
“Wait,” Dyan said. She didn’t know to whom.
Cheela stomped—
thwack!
Jak spun the spear and cracked the butt of it into Cheela’s forehead with a sharp blow that sent her reeling backward. She rebounded off the stone wall behind her and charged, growling, as if she might headbutt the Landsman. Jak kicked her in the face from his position on higher ground and then jumped down to their level.
“Stop,” Dyan pleaded.
Jak pushed her with one hand, knocking her sprawling. As Cheela raged and stormed at him again, he swept her feet out from under her with the butt of the spear, dropping her onto her back with an oomph! of air rushing from her lungs. He pointed the spear tip into her face.
“Are we done?” he asked.
“You don’t expect me to just give in, do you?” she wheezed between painful-sounding grunts.
“Funny,” Jak said, his voice flat. “That’s exactly what you seem to expect from me.”
“Kill me, then,” Cheela pushed him.
“I’ve got a better idea,” Jak said. He dug into Eirig’s purse at his belt and came out with the little canister of painkillers. “I should have done this last night.” He knelt, straddling Cheela’s stomach to pin her, and set aside his spear. Shaking out a handful of pills into one hand, he dug under Eirig’s blanket and produced a flask of water. “Breakfast time,” he deadpanned.
Cheela spat at him, pointlessly. She was almost his size, but he had her tied up and trapped. Jak forced the pills into her mouth, clapping the water to her lips immediately after. She gagged and struggled, but had no choice but to swallow or drown.
Watching her Crechemate forced to drink, Dyan realized how thirsty she was.
When the flask was empty, Jak stood up.
Cheela gasped for air, and rolled over onto her side and retched, but the pills stayed down.
“That was four times what I gave Eirig,” Jak observed, “and he’s still out cold.”
“Umm umm mot,” Eirig objected sleepily, but he didn’t so much as roll over.
“She could die,” Dyan pointed out. “She could overdose and never wake up.”
“True,” Jak agreed, flashing a grin that showed all his teeth. “Or someone could drag her out of her home under false pretenses, lead her out into the desert and try to chop her in half. Life’s hard like that, isn’t it?”
Cheela cursed him as he stooped and worked at waking Eirig, but he ignored her, and after a couple of minutes of struggling, she passed out.
“I had weird dreams,” Eirig confessed, when Jak pulled him to his feet and shook off the last of his painkiller-induced slumber.
“Oh yeah?” Jak asked. “Were you on the run in the Snaik River valley?”
“Worse than that,” Eirig said. “Someone chopped my arm off.” He raised his stump as if to do something with his missing hand and shrieked.
Jak laughed. “Curse you, Eirig,” he said to his friend. “Can’t you take anything seriously?”
&nb
sp; “What would be the fun of that?”
Dyan felt a sharp pang in her heart. She looked down at Cheela, snoring on the cave floor. Cheela wasn’t her friend. At best, she realized, Cheela was her Crechemate, companion, and team member. Often, she was a rival. At worst, she was openly Dyan’s enemy.
But Wayland and Deek were her friends, she thought stubbornly. And what was Shad? She missed them all, and she missed Magister Zarah.
“We take this one with us,” Jak said.
“My name is Dyan,” she reminded him.
“I don’t care what your name is,” he told her. “You don’t have a name, as far as I’m concerned. You’re our hostage and our shield.”
“What about Cheela?” she asked.
“If you mean the other one,” Jak said, pointed at Cheela’s snoring form, “we leave her here. She won’t wake up before we’re back, and if we get into trouble, just maybe we can still use her as a bargaining chip.” He picked up one of the microfiber blankets and tore at it, pointlessly.
“Where are we going?” Dyan asked, nervous to hear the answer. The Wahai, she imagined. Or maybe back to Ratsnay Station, where she’d be killed. “You won’t be able to tear that, you know. It’s practically indestructible, which is why it’s so great.”
“Is it so great, then?” Jak sneered at her. “Hmmn.” He draped the blanket over a boulder and stepped away from it. From the purse he pulled out one of the bolas.
“Uh, careful.” Eirig backed into a corner of the cave and picked up one of the spears, like that would help him if the bola went bouncing around the chamber.
But Jak held both the body of the bola and its counterweight carefully, and slowly drew the counterweight out two feet. In between there was nothing visible, but Dyan knew—they all must know—that there was a microscopically thin but extremely tough filament, so thin that at mere contact it would slice steel.
Jak gently looped his hands behind the corner of the microfiber blanket, and using the bola like a knife he slowly sliced off a long strip of it. When the blanket piece fell to the floor he slid the bola shut and grinned vindictively at Dyan.