by D. J. Butler
“Oh,” she said.
“What else is practically indestructible?” he asked, and then he wrapped the strip around her head. She heard the ffft, ffft of medical tape being torn off, and then Jak’s fingers, running tape under her jaw and attaching the makeshift hood firmly to her head. Her mouth and nostrils were free, but she was totally blind.
“The System,” she said. “And not just practically. I don’t know what you’re doing, but Cheela’s right. Your best bet is just to leave us here and run for the Wahai. By the time anyone finds us, you’ll be long gone.”
“Sure,” Jak agreed amiably. He grabbed Dyan’s upper arm and dragged her. She immediately barked her shins against stone and stumbled. Her caught her, and kept dragging, and she knew they were moving up the tunnel. “And what happens next?”
Next? “I become a Magister.”
“I don’t care about that. What else?”
“Outriders chase us!” Eirig called. He was behind them. “We become bandit lords, and marry beautiful princesses of the Basku or the Shoshan.”
“I don’t care about us, either,” Jak said darkly. His breathing was labored from the effort of climbing the slope; so was Dyan’s. Her heart raced. “What happens to Ratsnay Station?”
Dyan was puzzled. “Why should anything happen to Ratsnay Station?”
“When the Outriders come,” Jak spelled it out, “and my mother says she has no idea where I am, will the Outriders believe her?”
Dyan hesitated. “Maybe.”
“And will they believe that the good people of Ratsnay Station had nothing to do with my escape?”
“Maybe.” Her answer came slower this time.
“And will the System and its Outriders believe that the secret of their precious murderous Selection is a secret still? Or will they assume that they have to act to keep the secret?”
This time, Dyan couldn’t bring herself to answer at all.
“Exactly,” Jak said. He let go of her arm for a moment and she heard him scrambling. Then he grabbed both her shoulders from above and dragged her up a short ascent. “So when I disappear, the System might destroy Ratsnay Station, might it not? Not because the settlement is bad, not because it’s criminal … but because, how did you put it? You kill a sick animal to protect the flock?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Dyan objected.
“Sure it is,” Jak said. “Only you didn’t realize it.”
A breeze struck Dyan in the exposed lower half of her face, and she felt sunlight warm her skin. They were out of the cave, she inferred, and the footing immediately became much easier.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To solve the problem.”
Dyan’s feet crunched through plant growth of some kind every few steps, and she was grateful for her boots. Some of those plants must be cactus. “Are you going to trade me?” she wondered out loud. “For the Outriders to leave Ratsnay Station alone?”
“Something like that.”
She stumbled along for a length of time she had no way to measure, though it was long enough for her legs and feet to lose their stiffness and then begin becoming sore again. Jak and Eirig didn’t talk, and once, when she tried to ask a question, Jak shushed her back into silence. Finally, they stopped.
“I’m going to take your blindfold off,” Jak told her. “And then I’m going to stuff it into your mouth. You can understand that I’m doing this because I want you to see something, and I really, really want you to stay quiet. Can’t you?”
Dyan considered screaming, but as she hesitated Jak ripped away the hood and, true to his word, jammed it between her jaws. The tape burned as it peeled away from her skin, and then he wrapped more tape around her gag in three big loops to hold it in place.
After the shadow of the cave and the darkness of the hood, the desert sun blinded Dyan. She blinked away tears, gagged, and felt faint. Sweat streamed down her body under her long Outrider’s coat, and the sun scorched the back of her neck.
“Breathe through your nose,” Eirig advised her. “We don’t smell that bad.”
The laughter that improbably bubbled up within her at his wisecrack made her gag again.
“Shh,” Jak said, and dragged her to the ground.
Dyan looked around. The three of them crouched in a scalloped shell of sand, the upper seats of a natural amphitheater. Above them stretched sky, mostly blue and brilliant, though away to the west, coming off the Wahai, Dyan saw billowing clouds, heavy and gray with rain. They were heading her direction, she thought.
“Down there.” Jak grabbed her by the back of her head and focused her attention.
Dyan and her captors squatted behind a pair of shattered boulders, and below them lay a red slope. The slope gathered and dropped like an angled funnel into a narrow canyon, choked with stones and gray-green desert trees. At the mouth of the canyon, raggedly punctured and dark with what might be blood, lay a hat. Her hat, Dyan realized, or Cheela’s. Jak must have crept out and laid it there during the night, which surprised her.
But she saw something even more surprising. Her whip jutted out of a crack in the canyon wall. No, she realized, squinting. Not the whole whip, but only the handle. Which meant that the weight—her eyes flashed to the other side of the narrow canyon and spotted a counterpart crack—must be wedged into the wall on the other side. Which meant that an invisible ribbon of death lay across the canyon, six feet off the ground.
And then Dyan saw something that made her heart stop. Clopping steadily into view on his horse at the bottom of the canyon, stopping at her hat and looking down at it, came Wayland.
“Mmmmm,” she tried to shout, no! Her gag was taped too tight, and her hands were tied securely behind her back. She tried to stand, but Jak and Eirig both grabbed her and pulled her onto her back.
Dyan kicked, aiming at Jak’s face. She missed, and her boots slammed into the rubble, sending a shower of stones clattering into the canyon below. Jak drew back a hand to slap her and she lunged, rolling out from behind the boulder and skidding down the sandy slope on her belly.
“Mmmmm!” She strained against the gag. “Mmmmm!”
Footsteps behind her told her that Jak or Eirig or both were following her. She couldn’t see anything but the red earth slamming into her face, over and over again.
“Dyan!” Wayland yelled. “Gee yap!”
She heard the drum of galloping hooves in the sand.
***
Chapter Nine
Dyan tucked her head to one shoulder and kicked her feet against the ground. She intended to throw herself forward in a somersault, to get her face off the ground.
It worked, but the violence of her spin, its lack of balance and its rough forward motion, ripped skin from her face. She choked, face full of sand and blood, felt her hair yanked as some of it caught beneath her tumbling body, and then saw the flash of sky again as her back came down on the slope, hard.
Whumph!
Dyan’s lungs screamed. She couldn’t get air in fast enough through her nose alone. Wayland, she reminded herself. Sliding down, feet-forward and on her back now, she raised her head and shook it at her Crechemate, a big, violent, obvious NO.
Wayland rode through the whip.
The heavy boy’s eyes bulged in surprise as he died, but his forward motion kept both halves of his body together and riding in the same direction for several more lengths. Dyan skidded to a halt at the bottom of the slope, her ankles jarring painfully against sand-rooted tufts of desert grass. At the same moment, Wayland’s dead mount missed its stride and collapsed forward, slamming into the other end of the same bar of sand. Its head slid smoothly off its neck, rocketing past Dyan and skittering away up the slope. Wayland’s legs stayed in the saddle.
Wayland’s torso slammed into Dyan, knocking her back against the sand and pebbles.
Her vision spun.
“That’s how I want to go,” she heard Jak say through a whirl of color and a rushing sound that filled her h
ead. “In the arms of a pretty girl.”
“You dream such small dreams,” Eirig countered. “I’d like to die in the company of three, at least.”
They grabbed Wayland by his shoulders and dragged him off. Dyan sat up, smelling the reek of blood, stomach churning. Jak and Eirig dumped Wayland’s torso aside without ceremony, the heavy boy’s arms flopping like fish on the sand.
“That’s not quite how I imagined it would go,” Jak said. He seemed surprisingly ambivalent about his victory.
Dyan retched. Throwing up with the gag in her mouth, she immediately inhaled her own vomit and began to choke.
“It worked, anyway.” Eirig patted his friend on the shoulder.
Dyan threw up again, gagged, choked. She squirmed and kicked, and felt bile streaming from her nostrils.
Jak noticed. “Hey!” He threw himself to the ground and ripped at the tape. Dyan tried to breathe, but her airways were all plugged. She felt herself losing consciousness.
“Come on!” Jak yelled. Eirig jumped in, ripping tape from Dyan’s face and, when Jak pulled off the last of the tape, tearing the wadded microfiber strip from her mouth.
Too late. Dyan drifted in gray nothing. This is dying, she thought.
Somewhere, far away, she heard yelling and thumping noises. She felt calm and peaceful, released from all the fear and trauma of the prior several days.
Was this how it had been for Wayland? she wondered.
Was this how it would have been for Jak?
She coughed, spitting lumps of something onto the dirt into which her face was pressed. Air flooded back into her lungs, and it felt cold.
“Again!” Eirig yelled. “I think she just took a breath!”
Something heavy was on top of Dyan. It pummeled her between the shoulder blades and she coughed once more. This time her cough sounded wet, and she retched, spitting bile in a puddle around her own face.
“Stop!” Eirig cried. He pressed his dirty face down close to hers. “She’s breathing,” he confirmed.
Dyan wept. Emotion roiled through her in thick currents, all mixed together so she couldn’t separate the fear from the pain from the hope from the despair.
Jak, who had been kneeling over her, fell aside onto the sand, cursing faintly. “Sorry,” he muttered softly. Dyan couldn’t even be sure she’d heard him correctly. Then, louder, “I didn’t mean for it to be like that.”
Dyan bit off her sobbing. “You meant to kill him. Don’t pretend it was an accident.”
“I meant to kill him,” Jak agreed. “But it was painless and quick, and I only did it because I had to. And he killed my friend. Jone never harmed a fly in her life, and he poked a spear right through her.”
“Don’t act like you have the moral high ground.” Dyan let her face lie in her own vomit. “He didn’t have a choice. He never had a choice.”
“Neither do I,” Jak spat. “But I still have to deal with the consequences of my actions. And so did he.” He pulled Dyan to her feet.
“Ah, look, you’re a sight,” Eirig chided her. He dug into Wayland’s saddlebags and found a water flask. Holding it to Dyan’s mouth, he helped her rinse and spit into the sand several times.
“I won’t gag you again now,” Jak told her. “The others are miles away, so there’d be no point in screaming. Let’s get back to the cave and collect your friend.”
“She’s not my friend.” Dyan felt numb.
Jak nodded slowly. “Let’s get her anyway.” He turned and took a step towards the dead horse, bending to collect its saddlebag.
Dyan ran.
She lurched and staggered, almost falling at every step, but she propelled herself forward with all the force she possessed. Not to escape, not to get away—
she ran towards the whip.
“Jak!” Eirig yelled. The one-armed boy dove for Dyan, his hand outstretched. He almost grabbed her, but his fingers managed only to hook into the big hip pocket of her coat, tearing the threads and ripping the pocket clean off. His hand banged into her ankle, knocking her slightly sideways, but Dyan stayed focused on her goal. She couldn’t see the line itself, of course, but she stared at the whip handle, willing herself to pass it, to end her own suffering.
This was a choice she could make, and a consequence she was willing to suffer.
Jak slammed into her from behind, pounding her face down again into hard sand.
“Blazes!” she cursed him.
“Yeah,” he agreed, breathing hard. “And worse.”
“You’re just going to kill me anyway,” she mumbled into the sand.
“True,” he admitted. “But not right now. I might need you still.”
The boys dragged Dyan to her feet together, gripping her tightly so she couldn’t run. Her will was spent anyway, and she didn’t try. Not even when Eirig stooped over Wayland’s body, picking up his saddlebags and hat and kicking off his own tattered shoes in favor of Wayland’s boots.
He saw her looking at him and shrugged apologetically. “My shoes are in bad shape,” he said. “And the walking’s rough around here.”
Dyan nodded. Numb.
He put Wayland’s hat on Dyan’s head. “And your skin’s already turning red.”
Jak led them back up the canyon onto the mesa and Dyan didn’t look back. She stumbled, trying to collect her thoughts and feelings while her legs marched mechanically. Jak walked a meandering path, sticking as much as possible to the top of large stretches of slickrock, and out of the sand.
To avoid leaving tracks, Dyan realized, and she looked down at her feet.
Her trousers were soaked in blood. Wayland’s.
She started to cry.
“It’s not that bad,” Eirig said at her shoulder, and then he laughed. “Ah, who am I kidding? How could it be any worse?”
Jak stopped and squinted at both of them. With his eyes mostly shut against the sun, his brown skin looked like the bark of a tree. He looked like he fit into the desert, like he was a wild thing, like if he just lay down he’d disappear into the sand and she’d never see him again.
She stopped crying. To avoid seeing her bloody legs, she turned and stared at the rolling red-brown horizon.
“We passed a spring on the way out here,” Jak said slowly. “Let’s stop there and clean up.”
They crawled around the skirts of an immense knobby tower of stone, and at the far side of it, as Jak had promised, a trickle of water seeped from its base. The water ran through a series of sinkholes, each large enough to swim a pair of horses, towards a gap in the slickrock that Dyan guessed must be the canyon through which the river flowed.
“I’ll untie you,” Jak told Dyan, “if you promise you won’t do anything stupid.”
“If doing stupid things is the test,” Eirig quipped, “you’d better tie me up. I never should have come after you in the first place.”
“I promise.”
Dyan hadn’t realized how numb her arms felt until Jak untied her hands. The sudden return of blood to her limbs tickled, then stung like a swarm of bees crawling through her veins and stabbing her at every tiny, furry step.
Jak directed her to the second pool. “We’ll want to drink out of the first pool,” he said, and then he positioned himself between her and the river.
Dyan shrugged out of her coat and laid it aside. “You don’t trust me.” She hesitated, and then began to strip out of the rest of her clothing. Her trousers especially were so stiff with dirt and blood, she thought they’d stand up by themselves. When she was down to her underwear, she slipped into the water.
The freezing cold of it shocked her. She thrashed her arms and legs for warmth and gasped for breath, and when she had recovered her self-control she saw that Jak still stood guard, resolutely looking the other direction.
She dunked her head under the surface of the chilled pool, sighing with her whole body as the coldness of it gave relief to her scraped and tender skin. “I guess I must look pretty terrible,” she said.
“Don’t
worry about it.”
Dyan submerged herself again, enjoying the feel of the cold water prickling her scalp. She emerged from the water and deliberately looked away from Jak. She rubbed her arms and legs with her hands, scraping off sweat and dirt as best she could.
She splashed to the edge of the pool and dragged her trousers and shirt into the water. It isn’t Wayland’s blood, she told herself. It’s just dirt. It’s just another kind of dirt, and it will wash out.
“You’re going to be walking in wet clothes,” Jak told her. “I’m not waiting around for your things to dry.”
Dyan shrugged and arranged her cleaner shirt on the stone at the edge of the pool. The rock was warm and the sun fierce, and she thought the garment would dry quickly. They weren’t made of microfiber cloth, but of a fine, elastic weave that breathed, insulated, was sturdy, and cleaned well.
“Sounds fine to me,” she said. “Sounds cool.”
He shook his head. “You’ll chafe.”
She laid her trousers out beside her shirt. Not all the marks had come out of the thin, tough fabric, but the spots were more indistinct now, and looked less obviously like blood.
“You’re going to kill me,” she said calmly. It seemed like a fact now, unavoidable and almost meaningless. “Chafing won’t bother me long.”
Jak snorted, glared at her, and looked away again.
“Are you going to kill me last?” Dyan asked.
“Do you think you can talk me out of it?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Just curious to know what I should expect.”
“I don’t want to kill you at all,” he said. The earnestness of his voice made her look at him, and he was looking back. He looked serious. He looked sad. He looked desperate. “I have to do what I can to protect my mother.”
“I don’t have a mother,” Dyan said, automatically. “Or anyway, I have one in a biological sense, but I don’t know her and I doubt she knows me.”
“That’s how it is for you Systemoids, then?”
Dyan nodded, and found herself humming. She let herself enjoy it. The haunting, unknown familiarity of the tune was strangely comforting.