MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  Still, slowing him would help Gabe get there in time. In time for what, he wasn’t sure. The odds that this would succeed were slim to none. But it was the best idea he’d had, and if there was even a miniscule chance, he had to try.

  He drove with one hand on the wheel, holding his phone to his ear with the other. He had memorized the number of Bree’s hospital room phone during the long, quiet hours, and had called it en route to keep tabs on her. Joseph had demanded an explanation of Gabe’s plan, and he’d given a sketchy one, since the truth was he would have to improvise most of it on the spot.

  Bree’s condition was unchanged—she was still, although Inyan wasn’t. Loathe to break his only connection to her, Gabe described to Joseph what he was hearing on local radio.

  “Officials are going door-to-door to evacuate the man camp,” he said. “But it’s slow going. The men work staggered shifts, so some are sleeping, some are awake but off the premises. Nobody really knows who’s where. And some are probably high, or passed out from booze or heroin or both. No matter what, if he reaches that camp, it’ll be bad.”

  Drawing nearer, he saw Air Force jets streaking past overhead, heading back to Minot. Inyan was too close to town now for them to continue their hopeless efforts. Ahead, a trail of wreckage marked Inyan’s path: vehicles overturned, houses reduced to rubble, the ground chewed up as if by a gigantic plow. Then he reached a place where Inyan’s route and ND 23 coincided. “Hold on!” he shouted before dropping the phone into his lap. He braked and braced for broken blacktop.

  When he hit it, the truck skidded and ground to a halt, jolting him against his seatbelt and nearly twisting the wheel out of his hands. He took a couple of seconds to breathe, flexed his wrists, and carefully eased his foot down on the accelerator again. The truck shimmied, but started forward. If he drove slowly enough, he could negotiate the fractured roadway. The dirt shoulders lining both sides of the highway were churned up, too. He trusted their soft, exposed earth even less than he did the pavement, so he couldn’t get off 23 without backtracking for miles and miles. If he had any shot at all, he had to keep going, as fast as he could safely manage. He was only a few miles away now, and he’d do nobody any good if he wrecked the truck out here.

  After he’d picked his way along for a few minutes, he heard his crotch shouting at him. Joseph! He’d forgotten about the phone, but if he took his hands off the wheel for an instant he would lose control of the truck. “Hang on!” he shouted toward his lap. “Just a few minutes!”

  Now he was even more anxious, in case Joseph was trying to tell him something about Bree’s condition. He tried speeding up, just a hair, but it was too much and the wheels started sliding and catching on broken slabs of pavement. He slowed down again, and with his left foot kicked the side of the footwell in frustration. Finally, he reached the exit for 76th Avenue NW, allowing him to escape the ruined highway, and took that down to 35th Street. There he made a right and floored it again, picking up the phone once he was hurtling down the road.

  “Grandfather? You there?”

  “Gabe,” the old man said. “What’s going on?”

  Gabe reported his progress, then dropped the phone again while he swerved around an unmanned police roadblock on the westbound lane. A loaded van—probably evacuating workers from the camp—raced toward him in the eastbound so he had to yank the wheel hard to get back onto his own side.

  “Cops have the road blocked off,” he said when he lifted the phone again. “But there’s nobody at the roadblock so it’s not hard to go around. How’s Bree?”

  “The same.”

  “Shit.” Gabe had entertained visions of a sudden recovery, once the link between her and Inyan was broken.

  Then all that was wiped from his mind, as he realized that what he’d initially thought was a hill—he hadn’t stopped to wonder why there would suddenly be one, where there hadn’t been before—turned out to be Inyan.

  He drove toward the colossus, alternating between looking at him and at the road. Drawing nearer, Gabe realized the elemental was huge—bigger in person than on TV, bigger than he had imagined.

  Suddenly, his plan seemed foolhardy and pathetically insufficient.

  It was too late to back down now, though. Inyan had almost reached the man camp, where people were still being loaded into trucks and vans and driven away. Gabe skirted around a final roadblock, then made a screeching right onto 80th Avenue, the last road before Brendle’s Bay. After less than a minute, he turned off the road and onto the grass, which wasn’t manicured nearly as well as it had been in the resort’s heyday. Inyan had crossed 80th and was bearing down on the buildings.

  Gabe had to get in front of the elemental, between him and the man camp.

  But he misjudged Inyan’s reach and speed.

  One second he was racing past the giant, and the next his rear wheels lifted momentarily off the ground. As the VW’s front-wheel drive fought to pull the truck away, he saw Inyan’s huge hand filling the rearview. The elemental had bent down and reached for the pickup, just getting a two-finger grip on its tailgate. Now the tailgate was gone, ripped off like paper, but the truck was charging forward again.

  He raced past Inyan by about sixty yards, then came to a shuddering stop, killed the engine, and brought the phone to his ear. “I’m here,” he said.

  “Bree is agitated again,” Joseph reported. “Her arms and legs are moving, her head’s turning from side to side. A minute ago she bent forward at the waist. I don’t know if she is connecting with Inyan again, or if it’s something else.”

  “Could be,” Gabe said. “Keep me posted. I’m gonna try something.”

  He snatched up the smudge feather and bolted from the truck. Inyan had been walking in a straight line, so Gabe positioned himself along that line, knelt down, and lifted the feather high. The wind tried to whisk it from his fingers, but he held on.

  Inyan kept coming. With each powerful footfall, the earth shook. Gabe waited, trembling.

  “They’re together,” Joseph said in his ear. “I can see him on the television. You, too, I think. She’s moving in time with him, and I can’t hold her still. She’s become too strong.”

  Gabe didn’t respond. He gripped the feather’s quill as tightly as he could. Still Inyan came.

  What was it Crazy Horse had said at the Battle of the Greasy Grass? What the white folks called Custer’s Last Stand? Then he remembered. “Hokahey, today is a good day to die!” he shouted at the oncoming titan.

  Inyan took another step. One more, and Gabe was done. What had he been thinking? How could a single feather stop a spirit made of stone?

  But Inyan didn’t take that last step. He halted where he was. Feather still held aloft, Gabe tilted his head and met Inyan’s gaze. The titan looked at the feather, then at him. For a moment—just the briefest instant—Inyan’s hard edges seemed to soften, and Gabe saw not a stone-skinned thing with lapidary eyes, but Bree, titanic Bree, beautiful Bree, smiling down at him, her warm brown eyes holding his.

  Just as quickly, she was gone and it was Inyan again. A stone fell from his right hip, hitting the grass and bouncing. Another, from his left shoulder. Several dropped from a knee and, as if their striking the land had set off a chain reaction, a rain of rocks tumbled down.

  Inyan was coming apart, piece by piece, the rocks returning to the earth. Some struck Gabe on the rebound, hard enough to bruise but not to really hurt.

  “Grandfather!” he shouted into the phone. “It’s working! We did it!”

  But Joseph didn’t answer. Gabe wondered if his phone had lost the call and was about to redial when he heard the old man cry out. Then Joseph began a muttered prayer, in the old tongue. Gabe only recognized it as a prayer by the rhythm, not the words.

  Inyan’s deconstruction had sped up, the falling of the rocks a torrent now. Many of them hit Gabe, but he didn’t want to move, or lower the feather. Not until it was all over.

  Then it was. The last of the stones reached the groun
d, bounced, clattered off one another, and stopped. Even the wind briefly stilled.

  And through the phone, at that same moment, he heard the loud, steady tone of Bree’s hospital monitor flatlining, like a knell signaling the end of the world.

  The end of his world.

  Tears blurred Gabe’s vision, but he didn’t have to look far. The lapis lazuli lapidary sphere that had been one of Inyan’s eyes had rolled almost right to him. He jammed the phone in a pocket, then crouched beside the sphere, feeling stiff grass brush his jeans, feeling wind on his cheeks and sun on the back of his neck. People were shouting, but they sounded incredibly distant, more like fading echoes than human voices. All he saw was blue: rich, deep, so vibrant it was almost alive, a blue the sky could aspire to but never quite achieve.

  With his right hand, Gabe picked up the sphere. Smooth, polished, heavier than it looked, its weight felt comforting, somehow. Familiar, as if he’d held it before.

  He carried it to his truck and placed it carefully in the seat next to him before he started the engine. Then, he held the feather out the window, released it, and watched it tumble away in the wind. Within seconds, it was out of sight, headed to wherever the wind took such things.

  Jai found the note in the Escarpment’s box at the traders’ mercantile of Sidila Windward Port and thought it was a bill.

  “Son of a—Kiev! Kiev!” She shouted down at the ship, which was docked about thirty paces below the mercantile’s outer walk-way, down from the other wind-ships because they were all jealous, bottom-feeding refuse-dwellers. “What did you buy? I’ll kill you!”

  Standing on the Escarpment’s deck, Kiev, oblivious, continued to coil up the extra ladder line, staring abstractly into the distance, enjoying the bright sunshine and the cool breeze while everyone else doing business on the dock stared in affront.

  Everyone tended to stare anyway. Jai and her crewmembers Kiev and Latal were kinet, from the mountains to the east, far beyond the archipelagos and their calm seas. They were built for cold weather, with dark brown skin that was thick and tough to survive ice-storm wind, and tall broad-shouldered builds, and manes of wiry dark hair. The rest of the wind-ship crews and the island dwellers tended to smaller statures, lighter colors, or obvious relationships to sealings and waterlings, with atrophied gills, feathery protuberances that had once been fins, and decorative scales.

  “Kiev!” Jai shouted again and tore the seal on the folded note. “Stop ignoring me,” she muttered, distracted as she began to read.

  Illustration by ROBERT ELROD

  It was in Kedaic, the trade language most commonly used on the islands, and it was not a bill.

  It was a request to take a salvage commission from someone called Vreshian. Jai didn’t much like salvage jobs, and she hated working for new people. But then, with their current state of both lack of money and lack of employment, she couldn’t afford to be choosy.

  Jai absently scratched her lip under the curve of her tusk. That was something else the other crews tended to stare at. Kinet had short tusks curving down on either side of their noses, and while Jai’s were slender and etched with designs in red and particularly lovely, most of the archipelagans seemed not to care for them.

  The note specified that Korfla, the mercantile’s supervisor, would have the details and hold the payment. This was a standard procedure, and therefore reassuring, but still. New people, Jai thought.

  Kiev appeared at her elbow, having finally climbed up the ladder to the walkway to see what the yelling was about. He was small for a male Kinet, barely Jai’s height. “What is it?” he demanded, exasperated.

  “A commission, perhaps.” Jai handed him the note and stepped out from under the little awning that was supposed to protect the wall of message boxes from bad weather, but which was mostly useless. “Korfla!” she yelled at the mercantile’s supervisor. He sat out on the balcony of the level above, supervising, one supposed.

  Korfla was Emara, from the coast of a freshwater sea to the south somewhere, and had light blue skin and a bony ring all around his skull, and a polished pearlescent dome where the top of his head should be. It had taken Jai a bit of looking at him to get used to it. She supposed he had the same reaction the first time he saw someone with hair and an actual skull, so she didn’t feel it unfair. He was wrapped in a red robe and watching her with an expression one could only read as annoyed. “What, Jai?”

  “There was a commission note in my box.”

  Korfla sneered. “I don’t care about your box.”

  Korfla always looked and acted as if he was trying out for the villain role in one of the traveling Karamed entertainments. He was too lazy to be an actual villain, and also far too honest, which was why everyone wanted him to be the mercantile’s supervisor. Jai changed tacks. “Did a trader named Vreshian leave a commission packet for me?”

  “Ah, that’s right,” Korfla said, dropping the sneer. He twisted around to dig in the waxed leather cases beside his chair. “Here it is.”

  Jai climbed up to Korfla’s perch, just big enough for his chair and a chart table. She rifled through the packet he handed her, lifting her brows at the amount of payment listed. It sounded like a relatively simple commission. And looking at the specifications, she could see why he had chosen her ship. “You do not know this Vreshian, then?”

  Korfla made a gesture of indifference. “He’s new. A metals dealer, I understand, from the Gabishon. They need metal there, for the building of a city across a sea gorge. Apparently, he’s been trying to have this salvage done but the last ship he commissioned didn’t fulfill, and didn’t even come back to cancel.”

  Jai nodded absently. It seemed a huge undertaking, and Vreshian would have a great deal of return for this much metal scrap. It explained the generous amount of the payment, which would be locked in Korfla’s strongbox until Jai and Vreshian both agreed the commission was finished, or both agreed to cancel it.

  Korfla poked at her with his cane. “Will you go? You’re blocking my view.”

  “Right, right, sorry. And thank you.” Jai swung down and walked out to the edge of the walkway. Kiev trailed after her, still frowning at the note. It was a calm day, the clouds a brilliant white against the blue sky, clear enough to see waves breaking against the distant reefs. The two tiers of wind-ship docks extended down from the mercantile’s platform and curved around, mimicking the terrain of the island behind it. They were floating about a hundred paces in the air, above the surface of the shallow sea. The flying island itself was a bit higher; the mercantile and its docks extended out from the side. The island flew of its own accord, and the platform stayed aloft because of the tiny fragments of the flying island heart-rock buried in its structure.

  About thirty or so wind-ships were docked along this side, spaced out along the upper and lower tiers, carefully leaving enough space between themselves and the Escarpment to reveal their jealous prejudice. The Escarpment was a small example of its kind, only fifty paces long from bow to stern, with a hull constructed of light lacquered wood that was nonetheless extremely strong. Its only sail was a fan-shaped one that opened out from the single mast. The other wind-ships at dock were larger, with more sails in elaborate configurations, more cargo space. Many of these wind-ships had been constructed in the Golden Isles, and all were powered by a tiny piece of that same flying island heart-rock, which kept them aloft and drew them along the lines of force that crisscrossed the Three Worlds. Kiev, skilled in the manipulation of metal and heat that was well-known in their own mountain country, had added improvements that made the Escarpment’s stern bulky and oddly shaped.

  It was those improvements that had probably caused this Vreshian to choose them to make his offer to. He must believe the first ship had failed the commission because it was unable to haul that much metal. But the Escarpment’s crane and winches were powered by ilene, a mineral mined in Jai’s native city, and could haul far more weight than any other wind-ship she had ever seen.

  “Why us?�
�� Kiev said as he folded the note. “Because we’re cheap?”

  “Because we’re strong.” She clapped her hand on Kiev’s shoulder. They needed the money badly. She just hoped they were strong enough.

  Wind-ships often flew through the night since there was little worry of running into something, so by the time the evening bell rang at the mercantile, the Escarpment was well underway.

  Jai helped Kiev set the course, then went back out on deck to watch the sunset. Shiri, her third crew member, stood there, leaning on the railing. He said, “It’s probably a ruse.”

  Shiri was of a species native to the Ataran Sea. He was short, with gray-green skin and silvery gray hair, and gnarled wrinkled features that made him look old and wise, which was definitely not the case. Like kinet, his kind was not much seen on the flying islands either, as they were mainly water-surface dwellers and worked as servants in the archipelagos. Shiri would be a terrible servant but made an inventive and energetic deckhand. Also, he and Kiev had fallen in love.

  “A ruse?” Jai asked, wondering if there had been some ongoing conversation that she hadn’t been listening to. “What is a ruse?”

  “Maybe this Vreshian is an air pirate and wants to steal a wind-ship,” Shiri said with a stubborn air. “He’s sending us to an isolated place, in the middle of nowhere. Otherwise, why choose us? Why not a general call?”

  A general call was a request for cargo carriers to bid for shipments. You had to move quick and be lucky to get business that way, and Jai was quick but often not so lucky. And most of the local Ataran merchants considered the modifications made to the Escarpment as dangerous at best and an abomination at worst. Which was also why it was unlikely anyone would want to steal the ship, precious as it was to its crew. “I think you’re mad with… madness,” she finished, not able to think up a suitable affliction for Shiri. “It’s an isolated spot because if it wasn’t, someone would have taken the metal already.” That was what salvagers did, search isolated spots for useful things. “And he can’t do a general call because the metal is so big a wind-ship or sailing barge not powered by ilene can’t tow it.”