by Janean Worth
In a blur of fur and motion, the other tracken leapt at the pair from the side as the light illuminated its fellow, but it was already too late. Kara threw up her arm at the last second, and the tracken’s sharp teeth clamped down over her thin forearm instead of her throat. There was an audible crunch, followed by Kara’s scream of pain, right before the other tracken knocked the animal off of Kara.
Snarling viciously, the Enforcer’s tracken immediately attacked and the two beasts went at each other with teeth and claws, one trying to keep the other away from Kara, and the other trying to get at her to finish what it had started.
“Stop!” Mathew screamed, finally released from his shock, he dropped Gallant’s reins and ran forward, not knowing what he intended, but knowing that he had to do something.
But Otto was faster. In three long strides, the metal man reached the fighting tracken, thrusting a metal arm between them to grasp the attacker. Then, in a similar move as to what he’d done before, Otto hugged the snarling beast in a firm embrace. The animal snapped and yowled, trying its best to injure Otto, but all of its defenses were useless against the metal that formed the giant’s body. Otto deftly plucked a wire from behind the tracken’s ears, and immediately the animal lost its rage, going limp and quiet in his arms.
Otto released the beast gently and it gave a high whine, like that of a dog, sounding both apologetic and afraid at the same time.
Otto held the bloody wire aloft for a moment, then, in a gesture as close as Mathew had ever seen him get to anger, he dropped the device upon the floor and then stomped down on it, grinding it to dust.
“It will harm you no more,” Otto assured the beast.
At once, the other tracken sought its fellow and began to lick the wounds that it had wrought while defending Kara. The Enforcer’s tracken followed suit, both of them caring for the other’s wounds in turn.
Mathew stood beside Kara, mouth agape at the scene, then his attention snapped once more to Kara when she moaned softly.
He immediately felt chagrined. She was injured. He should have helped her immediately! What was wrong with him that he neglected to do such simple, honorable things like that? Kara never neglected to do those things.
He knelt by her side, pointing the light at her arm. “Here, let me see.”
She was cradling her forearm against her thin chest, and he could see that she was in agony. Mathew did not know what to do to help her.
She shook her head at him, tears of pain standing out in her eyes, making their dark blue color even more prominent. Her light brown hair and the side of her face was dusted with grit from her impact with the floor, and blood seeped out from between her fingers as she held her arm.
“Please, let me see. It might be broken,” Mathew pleaded, wishing suddenly that he had been the one to bear the tracken bite. It would be so much easier to feel the pain himself than to watch Kara feel it.
The tracken stopped licking its newfound fellow and moved to Kara’s side. It cozied up to her side, then put its big head down to her chest and began to lick at her arm.
Kara gasped in pain.
“Stop, you’re hurting her!” Mathew said, reaching forward to push the tracken away.
“It would be best to let the animal lick her wound. Its saliva contains pain-relieving properties,” Otto said from the darkness.
Before Mathew could contemplate this new wonder, the clawing at the metal doors became louder, and this time the door shook in its frame.
“If I am to keep you safe, we must go now,” Otto said.
Silently, Kara quickly held out her arm to the tracken, wincing as the animal cleaned her torn forearm with its tongue, tears dripped from the tracken’s eyes as the compassionate beast cried over her wound. After several moments of the tracken’s ministrations, Kara allowed Otto to pick her up and place her hurriedly in Gallant’s saddle.
Mathew hastily grabbed the Old Tech devices that Kara had dropped and then joined Otto at Gallant’s side. He stashed the devices hurriedly in the saddlebag closest to him and when he climbed up into the saddle behind Kara to help keep her steady, she leaned back against him and sighed.
“I’m okay. Don’t worry,” she whispered.
Mathew wasn’t so sure. Her voice sounded high and thin, and he could feel her body quivering in pain.
“I’m so sorry, Kara,” he said. “I should have stayed closer to you.”
“It’s alright. This is not your fault, Mathew,” Kara said.
He felt her sway in front of him, and he quickly moved his arms around her to steady her as Otto used the reins and guided the horse through the deeply shadowed building, the light upon the giant’s chest doing little to dispel the gloom.
“The Old Tech,” Kara whispered. “We need the Old Tech that I dropped.”
“I have it,” Mathew assured her.
It seemed that she had been waiting only to hear that information, because as soon as he’d uttered the words, Kara went limp. He had to grip her waist firmly to keep her from sliding off of Gallant’s back as her slack body shifted to the side.
Mathew felt his heart begin to pound in terror. Was she dead? Or had she just passed out from the pain? He didn’t know how to tell the difference.
He tried to listen for her breathing in the darkness, but the sound of Gallant’s hooves ringing against the concrete floor of the skyscraper blocked out any sound that Kara was making as she breathed. If she still breathed.
“Otto,” Mathew said, wincing as his voice seemed overly loud in the gloom inside the building.
“Do not fear, I can hear her heart beating. She is simply unconscious from the pain. I believe that her arm is broken,” Otto said.
Mathew suddenly felt like crying. But not for himself, this time. For Kara. She had already been injured and he knew that her hip pained her, and now her arm was broken.
“Isn’t there something that we can do?” Mathew whispered, his throat tight with emotion. “I cannot bear to see her suffer more, Otto.”
“Fear not, Mathew. The tracken’s tears are already helping her, and she will feel much better when she awakes.”
“But, you said her arm was broken. How can the tracken’s tears mend that?”
“Have you not wondered why your serpent bite no longer pains you?” Otto asked instead of answering.
“Yes, but I just thought that it wasn’t as bad as I’d first thought,” Mathew said.
“No, it was the tracken’s tears that healed you, just as they will heal Kara,” Otto said.
“But, don’t we have to set the bone or something? So that it will be straight?”
“No, when I held her, I saw that the bone is not out of alignment, it is simply cracked in half. It will heal correctly if we stabilize it when we are safely away from the Fidgets and Enforcers. Until then, you must try not to jostle it overmuch.”
Mathew nodded in the darkness, knowing that the metal giant would sense his motion somehow, even in the absence of adequate light to see.
“Is it safe to take us back to the orangery, Otto? So that Kara can rest and eat before we journey to the Sovereign’s House?”
Even saying the word House made Mathew shudder in dread. He could not believe that he was going to go to the very place that he was most afraid of going. But, he knew that Kara was right, and that it was the right thing to do. It was what their Creator would want. Now he understood Otto’s quote from the Book. Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.
The fatherless Strays needed someone to defend them, and the afflicted tracken needed someone to do justice and free them. It was not the right thing to allow the Sovereign to make slaves of the fatherless and mistreat his Strays so monstrously. It was no justice at all to leave creatures such as the tracken to suffer under the Sovereign’s rule as they did.
“Yes, Mathew, we can go to my Creator’s orangery, where Kara can mend,” Otto said.
Mathew sighed in the darkness. He hoped some time in the or
angery would be enough to mend her. He feared that he could not do the right thing without her help.
Chapter Ten
Kara awoke with a start. She was lying on her back on something soft. Above her, a thick glass ceiling reflected the orange and gold glow of a small fire and all around her the air was redolent with the scent of flowers and fecund earth.
She sat up quickly, her heart pounding a bit, feeling anxious and disoriented. Jax darted to her side and crawled carefully into her lap, snuggling up next to her belly with a tiny yip of greeting, as he often did when she awoke in the mornings.
Kara was comforted by the familiar gesture from the little fox. She reached down to pet his soft, luxurious fur, and then, seeing the torn and bloodied sleeve of her shirt, remembered the attack by the tracken.
She gasped in remembered pain, but then realized that there was none. Her arm did not hurt at all! The jagged tears in her flesh, where the tracken’s teeth had ripped at her, had healed to small, scabbed-over lines. She flexed her fingers experimentally. Still no pain.
She patted Jax, hugging his slight body to her belly, and then looked around for their tracken friend, the one who had prevented further attack. Though the memory was unclear and fragmented, she vaguely remembered Otto telling Mathew that the tracken’s tears would heal her. She wanted to thank the animal for helping her.
And, she wanted to thank Mathew and Otto for their care as well. It had been years since someone had taken care of her. When she’d been on her own in the wilderness, passing out from pain would have meant her death. She almost could not believe her good fortune in having someone to be concerned for her needs. Someone who had protected her while she had been helpless. A wave of gratitude overwhelmed her for a moment, and she felt tears come to her eyes.
“Are you hurting again?” Mathew asked from behind her.
She had not heard his approach, and she jumped slightly.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to startle you,” Mathew said. “I brought you some fruit and nuts.”
“Oh, Mathew. I can’t tell you how much…” Kara’s throat closed with such strong emotion that she could not continue. She choked on the words and felt the tears escape her eyes, and though she was embarrassed at this display of emotion, she could not seem to stop.
Mathew was immediately at her side.
“You can’t tell me what? Please, let me help you, Kara,” Mathew pleaded. He dropped the small bundle of food that he’d been carrying, and reached out tentatively to touch her arm.
“Oh, Mathew. Thank you,” Kara whispered, the words coming out in a rush as she forced them past the lump in her throat. “Thank you for not leaving me back there with the Fidgets.”
Mathew jerked his hand back, looking as if she’d slapped him. His face blanched a little, losing some of its healthy color.
“You honestly think that I would leave you back there for the Fidgets to eat?” Mathew said, his voice shaking, his eyes looking hurt and slightly confused in his dirty face.
“No, no, Mathew, I don’t. I didn’t. I just wanted to thank you for taking care of Jax and me. It has been so long since anyone took care of me. So very long,” Kara reached up to scrub the tears from her face with the back of her hand. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I am just so grateful.”
Mathew stared at her for a moment before he nodded, seeming to accept her garbled apology. “You’re welcome Kara. You need to know that I would never leave you behind for the Fidgets. Or anything else. Ever.”
Kara nodded, now feeling even more uncomfortable with her show of emotion. “Thank you for the food, too.”
She reached over to pick up the bundle of food and withdrew a plump orange, marveling at the heavy weight of the fruit and the fresh citrusy scent it gave off.
“Where are the tracken?” she asked, trying to alleviate the awkward moment that now hung between them.
“They’re fishing,” Mathew said.
“They’re what?” Kara asked, thinking that she’d misheard.
Now Mathew grinned. “They’re fishing. Come see.”
He rose to his feet and held out his hand. Jax yipped again and leapt off of her lap when she shifted her weight, racing into the tangle of shrubs and trees nearby. Kara took Mathew’s hand and rose.
“This way. You’re not going to believe it,” Mathew said.
He led her out of the orangery into the wide entryway that they’d walked through on their first visit, and Kara once again marveled at the vastness of the huge building that housed the orangery.
The open entryway above her head towered at least three stories high, ringed by an intricately carved wooden balustrade on each level, and from her vantage point near the exit to the orangery Kara could just make out the gilded ceiling high above that had been stamped with some sort of repeating pattern. The dust on the marble floors quieted their footsteps as they crossed it, and Kara took a moment to look around at the small amount of furniture that remained in the room, leftover, no doubt, from those who had visited the building before The Fall. There were several small tables placed against the walls at intervals around the entryway, some still containing odd objects that she didn’t recognize upon their surface and others holding enormous crystal vases that must have once held flowers.
Mathew led her down a stone staircase, around a dark corner, and into a room that Kara could never have imagined. It was like a tiny indoor lake, but surrounded by stacked stone walls and bordered by a decorative stone path.
Lily pads floated upon the surface of the water at the far end of the water, illuminated eerily by some type of odd glowing blue and green stones set into the ceiling of the room. A small waterfall gushed from the far wall, which was made of more stone and seemed almost to be carved from the bedrock of the Earth, the water gurgling as it tumbled over a collection of large stacked boulders.
Fish, silvered with blue reflections from the softly glowing phosphorescent stones above, darted below the surface of the water in large groups, flashing quickly up from the dark bottom of the pool and then disappearing once more into its depths.
In the still shallow waters at the edge of the pool, the two tracken were romping back and forth, making a sound that almost resembled children’s laughter. They were playing, splashing each other in delight, and every so often, one of them would dip a large paw into the water and scoop out a fish, which it would flip onto the stone pathway that bordered the water.
“What is this place?” Kara asked in wonder.
“Otto said that it is a fishery, made by his Creator to provide travelers with fresh fish if they desired it. He said that it taps into an underground aquifer, whatever that is, which provides a constant source of fresh, circulating water as it travels in and out of the pool where the fish are contained. He said that the fish survived here after The Fall because the stones filtered out the impurities in the water.”
“It is…” Kara gazed around in awe, unable to find a word to describe her amazement. “It is fantastic.”
Mathew nodded in agreement. “Let’s go gather some fish. I’ll cook them for your supper. I’ve built a small fire in the orangery.”
“I saw it,” Kara said. She stared at the tracken playing in the water and wondering if she could bathe in the pool later, when they were gone. It had been ages since she’d had a proper bath.
“And there’s even more I want to show you. Earlier, I found so many things in the building, left from the time Before. Some of them are amazing. And Otto has a surprise for you, too. With it, I think we might have a fighting chance against the Sovereign.”
Kara couldn’t believe their good fortune. Whatever it was that Otto had, it must be truly astonishing for Mathew to now have such hope for their success. The Sovereign was very powerful, and she knew that he would not allow them to free his slaves without a fight.
Mathew left her standing there, gaping at the beauty of the fishery, and went to gather up the fish that the tracken had flipped out of the water. Then, to her amaz
ement, he gave a sharp whistle and addressed the tracken.
“Zandra and Razer, do you want me to cook your fish too?” he asked.
The tracken both bounded out of the pool, and then shook water from their coats with vigor, flinging droplets all over Mathew. One of them made the laughing sound again as Mathew gave them both a mock scowl, and Kara grinned. The animals were acting like happy children.
“Okay, I guess that means no. I’ll leave you to eat them raw, then.” Mathew laughed as he walked away from them.
When he came back to her side and handed her a couple of fish, Kara took them gratefully. It had been a long time since she’d had roasted fish to eat.
“You’ve named the tracken. How can you tell them apart? And which one is which?” Kara asked.
“The one that has been traveling with us, I named Zandra. She is the one with the white patch of fur on her chest, see?” Mathew pointed to the animals as they leapt back into the water. “The other one, the one that bit your arm, I’ve named Razer. You can recognize her easily because she has part of an ear missing, poor thing. She’s very sorry that she hurt you, by the way. She cried many tears over your arm while you were unconscious.”
“She did?” Kara asked, looking down at her mostly-healed arm. Knowing what the Sovereign had done to the tracken to make them act so viciously, Kara could not hold a grudge for the injury that Razer had done to her. The animal was not at fault, the Sovereign was.
Mathew nodded. A fish flopped out of his hand, and he bent to pick it up. “C’mon, I can’t wait to show you what else I found.”
Mathew took off toward the stairs, and Kara followed, still in awe of all that had happened while she’d been unconscious. Silently, she thanked the One True God for his blessings. It meant so much to once again have someone who cared for her. It made her heart ache with gratitude just thinking about how they had gotten her away from the tracken that had been attacking her and saved her from the Fidgets when she’d passed out from pain.