Standing nude beside the lake, she examined herself for injuries or hitchhikers.
It had been weeks since she’d taken the skirt off, and it left a dark black line across her stomach where the belts rested. She frowned at the grime, all the small scratches and dirt smears covering her, as well as a handful of grey dots: ticks. As soon as she saw them, she thought of the tall grass by where she had to shoot the monster.
“I hate these things. They’re stupid. I’m supposed to eat the bugs; they’re not supposed to eat me!”
Her dip in the lake delayed, she built a fire out of small twigs and branches, then sat on the ground beside it while heating the blade of her knife. One by one, she pressed the tip of the heated knife against the swollen tick bodies until the nasty things let go and backed out of her skin. She plucked them off and tossed them in the fire. Two on her right leg, three on her left―one even had the temerity to have crawled up under her skirt and lodge itself in her hip.
She found another on her left side. Fortunately, a few minutes of feeling around her back didn’t find any suspicious protrusions, so she got lucky: no ticks on her back or anywhere she couldn’t reach. She picked at her scalp for a few minutes and found one more. After burning it off with the knife, she stabbed that one so it popped, then held it on knifepoint in the flames until it caught fire.
Finally tick free, she doused the flames, stashed her knife with the rest of her stuff, and marched across the dirt to the water’s edge. With Dad only warming the tub once every two or three months, she liked to go outside to have a ‘rain bath’ whenever the weather offered one. He didn’t like getting wet, but he’d hover in the cabin door and let her enjoy the water, as long as she didn’t get too far away.
She crept up to the edge and stuck her toes in, squealing at the cold. Bit by bit, she forced her way past the initial shock. Some of the streams she’d waded into over the years made this giant bathtub feel warm by comparison, so she advanced, feet disappearing into the mud at the bottom. Ooze squishing between her toes got her cringing and laughing. She eased herself deeper, inch by inch, until finally deciding to get it over with and jump headfirst.
Wisp hit the water with a soft splash and glided forward for a few seconds. Standing in a downpour had been one thing, but this enormous puddle beat it. She had―sort of―gone swimming before, but in a slow-moving creek that didn’t get any deeper than her hips. Dad made it a point to teach her in case she ever needed to know, since he felt it stupid to fill her head with knowledge on how to survive and omit something so basic as swimming.
The cold water stung at the tick bites, but she savored the minor pain as a sign of cleaning. If any of the spots still bled when she got out of the water, she’d press some yarrow powder in. That stuff burned, but it would stop the bleeding.
She surfaced for air and dove down again, awestruck at being in water over her head. It continued to get deeper toward the middle, which reaffirmed her idea that she’d found the world’s biggest puddle. For a little while, she stayed close to the shore where the water remained shallow enough for her to stand. There, she focused on washing, wiping away the past few months of dirt with her hands, since she hadn’t brought along the soapwort powder from Dad’s shelf.
When she could no longer find any smudges, she dove again, paddling for the deeper reaches. Fish came by to check her out, darting side to side. The tiny ones moved like little bullets, mere flashes of silver in the murk. She played with them, trying to swim along with their schools, pretending to be another fish, albeit one that had to surface for air every minute or so. Eventually, she approached the middle of the pond, and a metallic glint flashed from the depths.
Wisp popped her head above the surface, took a huge breath, and paddled downward toward the glimmer until the shape of a large machine came into view. A tall fin at the rightmost end caught the sunlight filtering through the lake, gleaming where paint had been scraped off. The opposite end had a narrow point, behind which perched an oval glass bubble. Small plants clung to its outer surface, while fish darted in and out from large holes. Behind the glass dome, the edges tapered wider, becoming flat sections in a somewhat triangular shape. One had the letters USAF on it. Oh, that’s a flying machine. A war bird. Why is it at the bottom of a puddle? She kept swimming down until she hovered next to the bubble by the pointy end.
A thick layer of algae had grown all over the outside. After swiping a clear spot in the green muck on the side of the glass bubble, she peered in at a seat with a person. He had a funny ball-shaped hat on, a flap over his face attached to a hose. It covered everything but the eyes of the skull inside it. A small fish had tucked itself inside one of the eye sockets.
Wisp waved at the shrine. Hello. I can’t visit too long because I need to breathe. I hope you are happy in the Other Place. Did you see the Fire Dragons? Did you try to stop them? Is that why you fell out of the sky? She waited a few seconds, but he said nothing. Her need for air soon became impossible to delay. Tell Mother I love her, please.
She pulled her legs up, planted her feet on the side of the machine, and kicked off, launching herself straight up. Her first gasp of breath made her light headed and filled her vision with dancing spots. I stayed under too long. She stretched her legs and arms out, letting her body float along the surface, gliding wherever the breeze or the water wanted to take her. The wind, which had been warm before, brushed her skin with chill. Weightless, she drifted, enjoying the tranquility. If not for the fear of slipping under and drowning, she’d have tried to sleep.
Her thoughts eventually went back to the somber message she’d found on the paper. I wonder if the Fire Dragons lived in the Eagle’s Nest. Somewhere below her lay the shrine of a man who had been alive when they burned the world. Dad had once spoken of soldiers, a type of person who had something to do with shooting people and the world burning, but she couldn’t remember exactly what. She daydreamed of a great flaming dragon surrounded by a cloud of war birds, raking its giant claws and sending one of the metal flying machines hurtling down into the puddle. While floating like a bit of driftwood, she tried to remember if any of her books had a name for such a place as this.
“Lake,” said Wisp. “A giant puddle is called a lake.”
A moment of guilt at wasting time nibbled on her heart.
“Mother? Am I wasting time? Am I being bad?”
Only the watery gloop lapping at her ears replied. Mother remained silent as ever.
I’m not bad!
Smiling, she stretched out and allowed herself to enjoy a swim.
The Boy
-19-
Tiny fish came up to nip at her from below, like a thousand tickling fingers. Wisp giggled and squirmed until she couldn’t take any more. She twisted over and dove under again, exploring the lake bottom. Chased by the tiny nipping fish, she glided over old furniture, a car or two, and even an ancient porcelain bathtub covered in brown slime. The freedom of swimming melted away her worries and offered a reprieve from the persistent summer heat.
Wisp spent a little more than two hours playing in the lake before deciding to float on her back again and rest. Diving down to explore the bottom and rushing up for air over and over again had been tiring. As best she could guess, the day held four more hours of light, so she should probably get going again. It would take her a little while to dry off before she could get dressed, so she ought to leave the water soon. An argument went back and forth in her head. Part of her didn’t want to get out of the water yet, while most of her wanted to find Dad.
A distant, high-pitched cry came out of the woods.
Startled, Wisp rolled over to tread water and stared into the trees from whence the sound had come. Nothing appeared obvious, but since she had no weapons on her, she did not want any monsters to see her. She swam fast toward the closest hiding place, a cluster of large rocks with a tree jutting up out of the water not far from the bank. Unfortunately, she’d gone most of the way across the lake, so she wound up nowhere ne
ar her stuff.
The cry repeated, along with the shouts of men’s voices, all angry.
She glided up behind the tiny island on the side that concealed her from the bank, and clung to the rocks. Slimy underwater leaves coiled around her legs and brushed at her back. Soon after she ducked down, a child burst out of the trees with two men chasing. The other child wore a tiny, dark skirt and nothing else. Light brown hair, puffier than hers but not as long, trailed like flag in the air. The two chasing men both had the leather armor of marauders, and did not appear friendly.
Unarmed and naked, Wisp tucked herself tighter against the rocks and held absolutely still. She wanted to help the other child, but she had no means to do so. If the marauders noticed her now, she’d only get taken away too.
The men gained on the other child, whose head came up shorter than their shoulders. She guessed the other girl to be about her age or perhaps a year older. The lead marauder flung himself into a dive, tackling the girl to the ground.
The brown-haired child let off an ear-piercing scream, but the tone of it conveyed anger more than fear.
Alas, despite her struggling, she couldn’t push herself off the ground with the marauder on top of her. The second man skidded to a halt nearby and tried to collect the child’s flailing legs, winding rope around her ankles while the first marauder grabbed for her arms.
Wisp shivered and lowered herself deeper into the water so it came up to right below her eyes. She couldn’t let the marauders see her, no matter how guilty she felt about not helping the other child. If she let herself get taken, not only would she be in big trouble, but Dad would be in trouble too, since she couldn’t help him.
An enraged man’s howl from the tree line made both marauders pause. The one attempting to bind the girl’s legs let go of her and pivoted toward the woods at the same instant another man came sprinting into view, shirtless, muscular, and waving a huge knife around over his head. That weapon looked even bigger than the one she’d found in the ancient’s place, yet this man swung it like it weighed nothing.
“Aaru!” shouted the large man.
“Da!” yelled the girl.
The marauder with the rope dropped it and pulled a big knife from a sheath on his belt, though it looked only half the size of the one coming at him. Marauder Two put a knee on top of the girl to hold her down while pulling a bow off his back. While the charging man’s giant knife came down into a sparking collision with Marauder One’s blade, the girl twisted up and grabbed a knife from the belt of the man on top of her. As fast as she swiped it, she jabbed it backward, stabbing his thigh.
Marauder Two screamed and pounded a fist into the child’s head.
The large, bare-chested man roared and spun his whole body with another swing. Though Marauder One got his blade in the way again, the force of the strike knocked him off his feet. Ignoring the punch, the child twisted the knife, roaring in anger. Marauder Two jumped away from her, reaching for an arrow. The girl ripped the knife out of his leg, sprang to her feet, and slashed it across the man’s throat. He dropped the bow and clutched at his neck, gurgling while the big, shirtless guy kicked Marauder Two in the side, rolling him over before chopping the huge blade down on the back of his head.
Wisp couldn’t see much from her angle, but the wet crunch made her cringe.
The other girl spun in a flurry, moving almost too fast to follow. Three more slashes did little to the man’s thick leather chest armor, but she finished off by jabbing the knife straight into his left eye. There, she left it and backed off, her bare chest heaving from rapid, deep breaths. The marauder didn’t even reach up to grab the knife, simply falling over to the side and not moving anymore. Jaw set, the brown-haired girl glared down at the man she’d sent to the Other Place.
“Aaru?” asked the big man. “Are you hurt?”
The girl shook her head. “No, Da. No hurt. I hurt him.”
“Son.” The big man patted the girl on the head, grinning.
The child flung herself into an embrace, clinging to the man. Even on tiptoe, she barely stood as tall as the dark spots on his chest. “I’m okay.”
“Check them,” said the man.
The girl nodded. She crouched by one marauder while the man dragged the other one closer.
Wisp relaxed, uncurling herself. Still clinging to the rock, she let her body drape in the water, pulling herself up a little higher to watch as the two picked over the marauders and stripped all their possessions away. She couldn’t pull her eyes off the other girl, never having seen another child before. Dad had once referred to her as ‘scrawny,’ but never explained what he meant. This brown-haired girl had a thicker body, especially her upper torso and shoulders. While the other child scurried around the body picking at it, it became clear she didn’t wear a skirt, but rather a small pair of pants with short legs that bared most of her thighs.
They collected the marauders’ things into a pile, which the man bundled together and picked up like a sack.
“Pee,” said the child, pointing almost right at Wisp.
She ducked down.
The man nodded.
Wisp slowed her breathing, trying to stay small and quiet as the other girl approached the edge of the water and hooked her thumbs into the top of her pants. When the other girl shoved them down, Wisp almost gasped out loud. Something did not seem right about her. She had… an eleventh finger or something sticking out between her legs. Even odder, a stream of bad water came out of it.
The other child stood at full height, throwing bad water into the lake.
Wisp peeked down at herself, and her clear lack of anything protruding out down there. Did the Tree Walkers steal mine? Why does that girl have one? If that had happened, it would’ve had to have been long ago when she’d been small, too small to remember now. She stared at the other child. Except for where the pants had covered skin as pale as Wisp’s, the other child had a rich, brownish tan. Nowhere near as brown as Dad, but much darker than Wisp. She couldn’t stop staring at the extra finger, wondering what the heck she was looking at.
The other child finished and snugged her pants back up.
Wisp continued gawking in confusion, unsure if she had been wounded long ago, or the brown-haired girl had a deformity. The big man put an arm around the other child. The way they looked at each other made her think that the man had to be the other girl’s dad. A glimmer of hope that they might be nice got her pulling herself up out of the water. She slipped up onto the rock behind the tree, bracing her weight on one knee so she could stretch taller and wave, but couldn’t manage to make a sound. Fear rushed in out of nowhere, chasing her back into the water out of sight. No… she couldn’t risk contact with other people until she at least had a knife, or better yet, a gun.
Those people appeared friendly with each other, but they might not be nice to someone they didn’t know, and Dad always told her people would want to hurt her. She could only trust him.
The man hefted the bundle over his shoulder while the child took the pouch of arrows and the bow. He ruffled the child’s hair, chuckling, and the pair walked back into the woods together.
She again stared down at herself. It doesn’t look like a scar. I gotta ask Dad about it when I find him. Dad… When they’d gone to the Jeep place, he had let out bad water, and, just like that other child, stood tall the whole time. If he had one of those little tube things, that would explain how he let the bad water out without messing his jeans. What if that other child had already started becoming a dad? Wisp had always expected she’d become a dad, too, but not until she’d gotten much taller, like seventeen years or so old. The other girl couldn’t have been too far from her age, so how had they started to turn into a dad already?
After waiting a few minutes to make sure the people didn’t come back to the shore, she pushed off the rock and swam out toward the middle of the lake, heading for the spot on the other side where she’d stashed her things. On the way, she thought about that other child, replay
ing her memories of every motion and gesture. From experience, she knew people came in two types: men and girls. She understood that Dad had once been a child, but she had never seen anyone near her age before, only other men. Stranger still, despite Mother being a grownup, Dad always referred to her as a ‘she.’ That perplexed her since ‘she’ meant girl, which meant child. While swimming faster for shore, she tried to make sense of what she’d read in her books.
Dad had never once mentioned anything about how that stuff worked, how girls became men or where children came from. Well, how children became men didn’t take a lot of thought to figure out: time passed. But at what point did a child decide if they were going to be a mother or a dad? Or did they decide? Would she eventually sprout an eleventh finger before becoming a dad? And why did that other child have one already?
She put her feet down in mud as soon as the water became shallow enough, and trudged out onto the shore, shivering from the crosswind. Wisp examined her body for a while, studying her overall shape. Her arms and legs were thinner than the other child’s, her shoulders rounder. The most obvious differences included her not having a tube thing and a narrower chest.
All the chaos of the past few days missing Dad and running around the woods fogged her thoughts. She sat in the grass by the upside-down machine, letting the wind dry her off. One tick bite on her shin kept bleeding, so she dug out the little bottle of yarrow powder and whined at it. It took a bit of convincing to get herself to open it, take a pinch, and press it into the bite.
Wisp clenched her jaw to hold back the scream. The yarrow powder burned, but within a few seconds, the bleeding had stopped. She lay back in the grass to dry off, and let her brain wander, thinking of her many books and trying to make sense of words that she had no reference for. There had to be a word for it, a girl who turns into a man. She felt certain she’d read it often. Quite a few of her books had kids in them, but the ones Dad let her read never explained the eleventh finger (or lack thereof) thing. She’d always thought all children looked like her. She swung her feet back and forth, making faces at the clouds.
The Forest Beyond the Earth Page 16