by Jenn Reese
Pilipo and Ehu murmured to each other, so low that their voices didn’t carry to Aluna’s special Kampii ears.
Daphine, who was no stranger to tense negotiations and who was no doubt using her scope to read their moods, kept talking. “We, the people of the surface colony, do not want breathing devices at this cost, brothers. The Deepfell are people, not animals, and deserve to be treated as such. To slaughter them for parts . . . would make us no better than the Humans who originally brought destruction to our world.”
“Come into the water and we’ll talk,” Pilipo said. “Just you, Daphine, and the gray demon.”
Daphine looked at Aluna. Aluna felt her heart break just a little to know that she still wasn’t important in her brothers’ eyes. But she nodded anyway. This meeting was too important to let her pride interfere.
“Fine,” Daphine said to Pilipo, Ehu, and the rest of the Kampii hunters. “We agree to —”
“Nooo,” Prince Eekikee said.
Aluna looked at him, aghast. He hadn’t changed his stance, and his smooth gray face and bulbous black eyes remained calm. What was he doing?
Eekikee pointed a webbed hand at Aluna. “Aluuuuna, too,” he said. “Or no taaalk.”
Aluna felt her mouth drop open. “It’s okay,” she said to Eekikee. “They’re my brothers. They still think of me as a youngling.”
“It’s not okay,” Daphine said. She nodded to Eekikee. “Thank you for showing me that. You heard Prince Eekikee,” she called to Pilipo and Ehu. “Aluna comes, too, or you can turn around and leave now, before anyone gets hurt.”
Aluna shook her head. Even after all these years, Daphine still managed to surprise her.
Pilipo waved his hand. “If you feel some strange need to bring Aluna, then fine. It makes no difference to us.”
“We’ll meet you halfway,” Daphine said. “Your hunters will stay back, and so will ours.”
“This is ridiculous,” Ehu said. “All the hunters are Kampii! If we fought together we could make easy work of these beasts and Peleke would have all the breathing — Oof!”
Pilipo had punched him in the stomach. Aluna just wished he’d done it sooner. How the same parents had spawned both Ehu and Daphine would forever be a mystery to her.
Daphine, Aluna, and Prince Eekikee dragged themselves to the water and eased back into its embrace. They swam slowly to the center of the watery portion of the cave to meet Pilipo and Ehu.
If Aluna couldn’t convince her brothers to join their alliance, then the day might end in blood. Which side would Daphine and Anadar choose? No matter how strong their alliance with Eekikee was, they might choose family. Aluna wouldn’t blame them if they did. This was a situation with no easy answers, no clear-cut right and wrong sides. Everyone was doing what they thought they needed to do in order to survive.
But if Aluna had learned anything during those long months in the desert with the Equians, it was that her word actually meant something. She could never harm her brothers or sister, but if she had to, she’d die defending the Deepfell.
DASH WHISPERED TO VACHIR and she reared onto her back legs with a scream of fury. He swung his blade down, slicing a wild dog across its flank. The animal shook off the wound, spraying blood, and growled. Vachir twisted and dropped her front hooves on the creature, snapping its spine. A clean, merciful kill.
“Thank you, friend,” Dash said, patting Vachir’s neck. Sweat dripped from his face and soaked into his shirt. He called, “Who needs help?”
“Last one’s mine,” Odd shouted. Dash saw him grab a leaping beast out of the air and slam it to the ground. The creature yelped and lay still.
Dash calmed his breathing while he surveyed the field of battle. Mags was tending to Pocket. The boy had acquired a small bite when the pack of dogs first attacked. Squirrel seemed untouched, just as she remained after almost every fight. He needed to watch her more closely and learn from her. Fewer wounds would make him a better warrior. He had been spending far too much time under Mags’s healing eye.
Odd grunted and wiped a hand down his tunic, smearing the splatters of red into ragged lines that only served to make his appearance more unwelcoming. Perhaps that was his goal. The rest of their kludge did not paint an intimidating picture. The dogs had expected an easy meal.
Dash counted five dead animals — two killed by his hand. The first had been a large beast the size of a newborn foal and the color of sunlit sand. They were refugees from the old Human cities, Mags had said. Not unlike their kludge.
Odd sauntered over, his breathing ragged, and clamped a bloody hand on Dash’s shoulder. “Good work. We each got two.”
“I try not to keep track,” Dash lied. Death counts were bragging rights to Odd. But these dogs were not evil; they were merely fellow creatures trying to survive. To Dash, they were two more weights tied to his soul. Someday the memory of those he had killed would grow so heavy that they would drag him under the sand and out of the sun forever.
“Clean yourselves up,” Odd told everyone. “We’re moving on before every living thing in this wooded nightmare smells the gore and comes looking for trouble.”
Dash nodded and got to work. He jumped from Vachir’s back and began running his good hand — the one still made of flesh — over her sweaty back and legs, assessing her for damage. She stood quietly while he performed this routine, although he felt her muscles bunch and twitch under his palm. Vachir had all of Aluna’s impatience, all of her wildness. Never had two souls been more perfectly matched.
He thought of Aluna and smiled. He would not have had to kill any dogs if she had been here, all flash and stormfire and ferocious skill. Vachir bent her neck and huffed in his face. He trailed a hand down her forelock and rested it on her nose. At least they could miss Aluna together.
“No injuries,” he informed Vachir, and started on his sword. Leaves were plentiful here, in the outskirts of the forest. He used a large, unbroken one to wipe the blood and fur from his blade. Sharpening would have to wait until later, when the kludge had found a safer camp.
Squirrel watched him work. The girl had grown even quieter since Zeelo’s death and had taken to wearing the old woman’s sharp metal teeth on a chain around her neck. Squirrel was the only one who had not welcomed Dash back to camp after the Silvae had taken the others. She did not fully trust him, nor should she. He was lying to everyone.
As they trudged through the underbrush in the growing dark, Odd ambled over and walked next to Dash and Vachir, as he often did.
“You did good,” Odd said by way of greeting. “Taught those pups a lesson.”
Dash was frequently unsure of how to respond to such statements. He understood Odd’s intent — to offer a compliment, to bond — but the sentiments were so unlike those Dash himself felt. He could not bring himself to partake, even though it would aid his cover. Perhaps silence would be seen as agreement, and they could both preserve honor.
Odd grunted. Dash had taken to cataloging the many meanings of the sound, as it seemed to change with its context. After dinner, such a guttural utterance might mean Odd was full. In the morning, the grunting usually accompanied the creaking of Odd’s bones as he stood. During battle or when Odd was practicing with his sword, the noise meant effort fully engaged. Truly, a person such as Odd needed no actual words; his grunts were as meaningful as a language.
Tonight, the grunt meant that Odd wanted to say something, but had not yet determined how. And so Dash walked and waited and honored the silence between them.
Eventually, the kludge found a suitable clearing and made camp. Dash slapped a mosquito on his neck — perhaps the tenth that had bitten him in the last hour — and built the fire as he had begun doing every night. He enjoyed the simple gathering and arranging of the wood, the first tendrils of smoke, so hesitant as they swirled upward. He loved watching the fire gain confidence and begin to assert itself against the night.
And in his head, he imagined hearing the songs and hoofbeats of his people as the
word-weavers took their turns calling to the sun.
Odd sat next to him as their food sizzled over the flames and clapped Dash on the back again. The maneuver was one of Odd’s favorites.
“Take the twin swords,” Odd said. “You said no last time, and I respect that. But you’ve been with us weeks now, even came back when you lost your friend and your pretty spoils. No member of this kludge doesn’t get what they deserve.”
Dash cringed. What he deserved was to be killed as a traitor.
“I don’t even like the swords,” Odd continued. “One’s too cold, one’s too hot. You have to clean them, keep the tech working, make sure you don’t mix up the fuel they need. Bah!” He tossed a twig into the fire. “Too much work for me, and no one else here knows the hilt from the . . . from whatever the pointy part is called.”
The swords of fire and ice. Dash had seen them sheathed on Odd’s hip during three fights now, and he wondered why the man had swung with his fists when two such weapons waited at his side, begging for their taste of battle.
Dash looked at the faces around the fire. Pocket was having a long, in-depth conversation with Squirrel, wherein the girl was not required to say anything for long stretches of time. Occasionally Mags tossed in a comment or a correction, a wise teacher letting her pupils learn for themselves.
These were decent people, and he was lying to them. To steal from them as well would compound his guilt past bearing.
“I am sorry,” Dash said quietly, “but I cannot accept the honor.”
“Sure you can!” Odd said. His bright-red hair had faded over the last few weeks and picked up a few leaves and twigs, but it still whipped around like a horse’s tail when he talked.
The big man jostled himself closer to Dash and lowered his voice, an uncharacteristic and unsettling move. “You probably guessed this, but I’ll never have runts of my own. Not meant for spawning, you see. Or for keeping things alive instead of making them dead. But you know what it’s like, wanting to see a wee fleshy thing with your nose, and that rush of warmth knowing that someday it’ll get your eyes, too.”
No, Dash most definitely did not know what that was like.
“What I’m trying to say is, that it does me some good to see those in the kludge taken care of,” Odd said. His voice had reached such a hush that Dash could barely make out his words. “Take the swords for me, if you can’t see fit to take them for more reasonable reasons. Maybe your honor’s got room for that.”
Odd meant it. Dash could see it in his furrowed brow and in the slight twitching of his wide, flat nose.
Dash stood. One moment he was comfortable on the ground, his legs crossed, his tired body at ease, and the next he was up, stiff-necked and tense. The kludge fell silent. Even Pocket, who, before that moment, had not stopped talking even long enough to eat.
“I must tell you something,” Dash said.
“You have words that need speaking, then get them out,” Mags said. “We got no secrets here.”
“Yes, we do,” Dash said. “We do have secrets. I have secrets.”
Mags’s hand slid into her pocket of needles. “You’re about to tell us you work for Strand, then you may want to rethink.”
They were all tense now. Squirrel bouncing on her metal feet, already meters away from the fire, Pocket reaching for something hidden inside his leg. Only Odd had stayed where he was. Then again, Odd himself was a weapon.
But Dash could not continue like this. Not when Odd was treating him . . . acting like Dash was his . . .
No. The lies had to stop. By the sun’s light, he would not lead good people unknowingly to their deaths, no matter how honorable his cause. Not even for Aluna. He only hoped that if he ever saw her again, she would understand and forgive him.
“I am not an Upgrader, and I do not work for Karl Strand,” Dash said quietly. “I have come here to stop him and to end the war before it begins.”
THE SCENE AROUND THE FIRE might have been a brush painting on the side of a tent, everyone still and unmoving, forever poised on the edge of action.
Dash knew exactly where Vachir stood, had calculated how many steps he would need to take in order to vault onto her back and flee from this place. He would not fight the kludge. He would not inflict any more harm upon them, emotional or physical. He would escape or he would die.
Mags was the first to speak, her voice slow and careful. “Well, now. This is interesting. Us taking you to Karl Strand, not knowing you intend to betray him. Wouldn’t look good for us, you putting him in chains while we stand by, dumb as anything.”
“You would likely be killed as traitors,” Dash said. Truth felt like sunlight, making his words light and easy. After so many weeks of trying to hide, he had no desire to return to the darkness. “Your association with me would condemn you instantly.”
“You were planning to let us die!” Pocket said.
“No,” Dash answered quickly. “I do not want you to die. I do not wish you any harm at all. But I will not let Karl Strand rule our world. Not while I still breathe.”
Odd grunted. This one did not sound good. “Best sit down, boy, and start at the start.”
Vachir sauntered up behind him, offering silent support. Dash reached back and patted her neck, then lowered himself down to his spot by the fire. “First, I must tell you that I am not an Upgrader. I am an Equian of two herds, Shining Moon and the newly born Flame Heart.”
“An Equian!” Pocket said. “But you’re not a horse. You don’t even have a tail!”
Mags shushed him. “What we look like isn’t all that we are. You should know that by now, Pocket, or we’ve done a broken job of teaching you.”
Pocket stared at his hands in his lap.
“Here is what I am,” Dash said. “A person with the heart of a horse, the blood of the desert, and a desire not to see the world I love fall into the hands of the twisted man trying to control it.”
Dash did as Odd suggested and started at the beginning — even before his own part of the story, when he met Aluna and Hoku. He began with Karl Strand and Sarah Jennings being in love hundreds of years ago and losing their only child, a boy named Tomias, to a terrible sickness. He told them how Strand became obsessed with living forever and somehow found a way to survive centuries.
He chose his words carefully and spoke slowly, watching their reactions. Mags narrowed her eyes, Squirrel crept carefully back toward the fire in order to hear. Pocket seemed rapt, his jaw slack, his knees tight against his chest.
Dash told them about Aluna and Hoku and Calli, about HydroTek and Mirage and the Thunder Trials. He kept his voice even and soft, unaggressive, even when he got to the part where they donned disguises and decided to infiltrate Odd’s kludge.
“I knew it!” Pocket exclaimed. “I knew they weren’t really prisoners! The one with the tail fought good as Odd, only she pretended she couldn’t.”
Odd raised an eyebrow. “And what manner of magic made you keep your tongue, boy?”
“Hawk — I mean, Hoku — was so nice,” Pocket said. “I didn’t see what it hurt, helping keep his secret.”
“Stupid child,” Mags said. “A nest of vipers slithers into camp, and you want to pet them and feed them treats!”
“No, no, it wasn’t like that,” Pocket said miserably.
“Do not blame the boy,” Dash said. “No one can resist Hoku.”
“I could resist him,” Squirrel grumbled. It was the first thing the girl had said all evening, and she fingered the sharp teeth hanging from her neck while she said it.
Dash smiled. “We do not all have your strength.” He had wanted to call her friend, but stopped himself; he did not deserve that honor. And now, he had only one truth remaining until he was free of lies.
“The Upgrader kludge who came through the forest before us . . . they held two of my family as prisoners,” Dash said. “Although I wish to stop Karl Strand, you should know that my immediate goals are selfish. I want, more than anything, to save my fathers.�
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A heavy silence descended on the kludge. Night had come with its blanket of darkness, and the flames of the fire had shrunk to wisps. Dash had stopped worrying about being attacked — none of their body signals indicated that an attack was imminent. But he expected and perhaps even desired exile. He knew what it felt like, and it seemed an appropriate punishment for his crimes.
“You lied to us,” Odd said quietly.
Dash hung his head. “Yes.”
“You said you weren’t an Upgrader,” Odd said.
“I am not,” Dash agreed.
“You know what kludge means?” Odd asked. “You know what it means to us?”
Dash considered his response. “A kludge is your herd.”
“It’s our family,” Mags said. “Made up of bits and pieces, just like we are. An ugly mess most times, but stronger together than we are apart.”
“Don’t always work well, just like our tech,” Odd said. “Aren’t always the best mix, the shiniest people, but we come together and we do what we can to survive.”
“Like you,” Pocket said softly. “You’ve got a metal arm and no horse legs and friends with wings.”
“Flame Heart herd,” Dash said, his thoughts swirling through his head faster than he could make sense of them. “Flame Heart has Equians and Aviars and Kampii and Serpenti. It has me and Vachir.”
“Sounds like a kludge to me,” Odd said. “Not always pretty, these people and things we pull together”— he tapped his goggled eyes —“but somehow we work.”
“You’ve fought with us and for us,” Mags said. “You got your reasons, same as the rest of us, but it’s your actions we judge you on.”
Odd’s heavy hand descended on Dash’s shoulder. Dash welcomed both its weight and its meaning. Odd said, “We’re part of your kludge now, too, and you’re part of ours. No ceremonies, no songs. Don’t care who your parents were or who did your raising. Don’t care what blood chugs through your body or which parts are made of machine. Not what we’re about.”
Dash found himself trembling under the gaze of the people around the fire. The people who should be hating him and planning his punishment, but who were, instead, welcoming him closer. Telling him he belonged.