Under Falling Skies

by Kate MacLeod

  If he turned out to be trustworthy. Scout couldn’t be sure until she met him.

  Scout looked down at the navigation screen, then got the rover rolling again in the direction of the flashing dot. Prairie Springs. Nothing more than an unremarkable little town in the middle of the grasslands. She had visited on a few occasions before, she seemed to remember, but she was only heading that way because it was the closest town to the hidden compound where she had waited out the storm.

  But she also knew Ruby, the woman who ran the public house in this town, and Ruby had access to the network run by all the public houses in all the towns. If anyone had seen her quarry, that network would know and could point her in the right direction.

  Scout sat back in her seat, starting to relax now that the trail was flattening out and the grass around her was changing from the stunted, scrubby tufts of the hill country to the tall, waving stalks of the prairie. She wanted justice for Gertrude, but that wasn’t the only reason she was going to find this guy. She also kind of hoped that if she showed up to the rendezvous with the fugitive in tow, Liam might be impressed with her skill and gumption, and he might be just a little more inclined to finish that other thing Gertrude had left undone.

  Gertrude had promised to take Scout off this world, to show her the galaxy. And now the thought that had never entered her mind before four days ago was her entire focus. She had to leave this place. And finding this man, this Farlane McFarlane, was her key.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  The sun was approaching its zenith when Prairie Springs finally came into view. Scout could just make out the roof of the public house—the tallest building in most towns—over the nodding heads of the tall grasses making a golden tunnel over the narrow trail. On her bike she’d be almost completely enclosed by the grasses, but in the rover she was higher, the tops of the grain still below even the level of her feet. Scout wasn’t used to this perspective, but she judged she had a few minutes yet before she reached her destination.

  Her stomach growled, frustrated at the all-coffee diet she had been subsisting on since before dawn. But Shadow had come up the steps some time ago to curl up on her lap and she didn’t want to wake him. She looked around the driver’s seat. The rover’s prior owners, the Planet Dweller Ottilie and her Space Farer companion Ebba, had lived in this vehicle full time, always on the move. Surely they had stashed some food up here in the cockpit?

  Scout found a little compartment under the console just to the left of her left knee and tapped it open. Sure enough: protein bars. Scout took one and tore off the label without glancing at it. The different flavors were beyond her palate’s ability to discern anyway. She took a large bite of the bar and tried not to involve her tongue much as she chewed it. The food was technically nonperishable, but in her lifelong experience, every bar tasted like dust anyway.

  Amatheon was in a perpetual state of being one good harvest away from real bounty. Even Scout, young and mostly uneducated as she was, knew that it was odd for an agricultural planet to import most of its food from other parts of the galaxy. Years of listening to grown-ups debate politics had yet to give her any answers as to why this was still the situation after more than a century of colonization. She doubted she would ever understand it.

  But it didn’t really matter. Whatever it took, when Liam landed at the meeting point in three days, she was going to convince him to take her away from here. This had stopped being her home the day her parents and baby brother died. All the years in between had been just her waiting to go.

  And she was so ready to go. She didn’t really belong to any particular place anymore. She had been born under the dome of a city, but that city was gone now. Obliterated. Nothing remained save a crater the prairie grass had not yet reclaimed. She had been just a kid when it still stood but she still remembered the gleaming whiteness of the city, the prefabricated buildings dropped from space and assembled on the surface. Like a child’s building blocks, they had only come in a few basic shapes but could be combined in infinite varieties. Cities had wide boulevards with fountains and overflowing planters, long straight roads lined with businesses grouped into districts, and endless twisting alleyways full of surprises both wonderful and otherwise.

  But towns on Amatheon weren’t simply small versions of cities. They had never been part of the prefabricated colonization plans. They had sprung up wherever people had gotten sick of life under the domes. Everything about the towns was different from the cities, starting with the fact that they were open to the world around them. Cities were accessible only through a small number of highly controlled gates. Towns, on the other hand, usually had a wall like Prairie Springs had to separate farmland from town and to keep the wind from filling the town with clouds of dust and wheat chaff. But in Prairie Springs, rather than a gate, there was a gateway, nothing more than an opening in the wall with no door and no guard.

  The gate into Prairie Springs was too narrow for the rover, so Scout pulled off the road to park out of the way against the wall. Gert sleeping at her feet made it difficult to work the pedals, but she managed a respectably neat stop before killing the engine. The sudden loss of the engine’s hum was almost deafening and woke both the dogs.

  Shadow yawned with a squeak, then hopped off Scout’s lap to stretch himself out. He had gotten a bit thinner over the last few days, but the muscles under his white fur were as tight as ever. He looked up at her, his dark eyes peering out of the bandit mask pattern of the black spot covering his head. Then he ran down the stairs to the back of the rover. Gert followed, the white tip at the very end of her tail a blur, the entire back half of her sleek black body wiggling back and forth as it powered that thumping wag.

  “You guys are going to stay here,” she said to the dogs, who had both started jumping excitedly the moment she put on the old bush hat. Shadow sat down, his posture straight and formal. He knew what she meant. Gert just kept wagging her tail. It thumped so loudly against the leg of the kitchen table it must be hurting her, but she didn’t seem to mind. She looked up at Scout as if she really wished she knew what Scout meant.

  Scout sighed. She needed to make training this dog a priority. “Sit, Gert,” she said. Shadow stiffened his already perfect sitting form, but Gert missed the hint. “Never mind,” Scout said. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  She went over to the bunk beds built into the back of the rover and leaned into the bottom one. “Hello, Tubbins,” Scout said. The cat gave a soft mew. Scout gathered him up, pillow and all, and put him gently inside an empty plastic crate. She tapped the opening mechanism on the door with her elbow, keeping Gert back with her knee as the dog tried to get a better look at the cat in the crate in her arms. The cat hissed his displeasure. The two were most decidedly not friends.

  “Down, Gert,” Scout said. As soon as the door was open wide enough, she stepped out, dropping to the ground nearly a meter below. She turned back to the rover. “Stay, dogs,” she commanded, then jabbed the mechanism to shut the door. Shadow remained as he was at formal attention, but Gert stood at the edge of the rover with her head out the door until the closing metal hatch finally forced her to step back.

  Her eyes on Scout’s were full of abandoned hurt, then the hatch clicked shut.

  Crate in arms, Scout walked through the gate into the town proper. Prairie Springs had grown since she had been here last, new homes built from prefabricated panels crowding into the spaces between the older homes built from repurposed storage containers. The Space Farer logo that had once adorned the containers had mostly been scrubbed away, but a few faded stylized rockets remained.

  If things kept going like they had been, there would be a renewed zest among the Planet Farers for removing those soon. Scout hoped to be gone long before that point. She had seen enough Planet Dweller–versus–Space Farer conflict in the last four days to last her a lifetime.

  When she reached the public house in the center of town, she saw that the massi
ve doors angled into the ground on both sides of the base of the building had been thrown open wide to let air pass through. Scout could imagine that after four days of all of the townspeople huddling together down there to wait out the solar storm it needed a good airing out.

  A group of children streamed in and out of the open doors that led underground, carrying out old laundry and empty containers and bringing in canisters filled with water and food from the back of the public house. It used to be that the coronal mass ejection events only reached the surface during rare, powerful storms, every year or so. Now they were happening more and more often. They lasted longer and were more powerful, too intense to risk being caught out of doors as Scout so nearly had.

  This planet was scarcely habitable anymore, particularly not for a nomad like Scout. She couldn’t wait to leave it behind.

  Scout climbed the steps to the public house, pausing in the doorway to let her eyes adjust to the dark interior. A public house was always dark compared to the bright sun outside; having once been a separate compartment of the spaceship that had brought the first settlers to Amatheon, it had no windows. After the cities had been established, the empty compartments were dropped from orbit, scattered in a network around the cities to house the early explorers when they ventured out from under the domes. The satellites that created the protective shield against radiation hadn’t been completed in those days and it was crucial that the explorers always had a shelter close at hand in case of solar storms.

  After the days of the explorers, the compartments had briefly been supply depots, little used and in danger of being forgotten entirely. But just in the last few decades there had been a movement—nothing organized, just a general dissatisfaction with city life that led to more and more people living outside of the domes. The public houses with their ability to protect from coronal mass ejection events were the obvious choice for shelter.

  Now the towns had largely outgrown that confined space, spreading out into separate buildings, but the structure that no longer actually housed the public was still the center of town life. Now they were part meeting place, part general store, and part bar. Scout’s work delivering packages on her bike had largely been between such public houses. The proprietors maintained a communication network so shortages in one community could be alleviated by supplies from another.

  But they also used them for gossip.

  “Can I help you?” a woman asked.

  Scout’s sun-dazzled eyes took a moment to pick out the speaker, a woman with massive arms and red hair pulled into something between a ponytail and a bun. She was the proprietor, Ruby Collins. She had also once been one of Scout’s mother’s closest friends, back before she died.

  “Hey,” Scout said, stepping up to set the crate on the counter.

  Ruby peered at her suspiciously for a moment before her eyes lit up with recognition. “As I live and breathe, Scout Shannon!” she exclaimed. “I almost didn’t recognize you. I thought someone had stolen your father’s hat!”

  “It’s been a few years,” Scout admitted.

  “More than that,” Ruby said, coming around the counter to gather Scout up in a stifling hug. “You’re shooting up like a weed.” She released Scout from the hug but grasped both of Scout’s arms to hold her still as she looked right into Scout’s eyes. “You’re older in lots of ways, I reckon. You weather this last storm okay?”

  “Well enough,” Scout said. “I sheltered with some strangers with political issues they took out on each other.”

  “Sounds miserable,” Ruby said, then tapped the crate. “What’s this?”

  “Just a cat that fell into my care. I can’t keep him, of course. The dogs are more than enough work. I have two now. I was hoping you might know someone who’d take him? He’s old but healthy. Goes by the name Tubbins.”

  “Hello, Tubbins,” Ruby said, reaching into the crate to pull out the large orange cat. Tubbins was purring loudly. She turned him around in her hands to look into his yellow eyes. “I reckon I can take him. Could stand the company. It gets too quiet here at night now that the kids have grown.”

  “Thanks,” Scout said. That was one responsibility she could check off her list.

  “How much you want for him?” Ruby asked.

  “He’s not mine to sell,” Scout said. “But I was hoping you could help me with another thing.”

  “Surely,” Ruby said, cradling the cat in her arms and scratching all around his ears. Tubbins purred in perfect bliss.

  Scout took the tablet off her belt and set it on the counter, then pulled a single round reflective lens out of her pocket and placed it over her left eye. She closed her right eye as she tapped her way through the tablet’s menus. Ruby was frowning slightly as she watched. From what she could see, Scout was tapping away at a blank gray slab.

  Scout found the photograph she was searching for and turned the tablet to face Ruby. She plucked the lens from where it had adhered to her face and held it out for Ruby.

  “You have to look with this,” she explained.

  Ruby looked skeptical, but she took the lens and copied Scout’s gestures. “Where did you get this?” Ruby asked, fascinated. Scout knew the feeling. This technology was far beyond anything they had on their remote, rural planet.

  “It was sort of a gift from one of the strangers I waited out the storm with,” Scout said. “Have you seen the man in the photo?”

  Ruby was looking around the room, watching as the display inside the lens fed her impossible amounts of information about the world around her: how far away everything was, the temperature and humidity of the air, the time of day to the nanosecond. Scout nudged the tablet a little closer and Ruby finally looked down at it. It looked like a featureless stone tablet to Scout now, but she knew that Ruby, with the lens on her face, could see the image of a man staring up at her.

  “Can’t say that I have,” Ruby said after a moment’s consideration, plucking the lens from her face and dropping it next to the tablet. “Farlane McFarlane. Sounds like a fake name. He’s distinctive-looking, though, isn’t he? With that twist to the end of his nose. Let me ask the network,” Ruby said, disappearing into her office behind the counter, the cat still nestled contentedly in her arms.

  Scout put the tablet and the lens away, looking back over her shoulder as something momentarily blocked out the sun streaming through the doorway. Someone must have just walked past; there was no one behind her now. Scout pushed back her battered bush hat to run a hand through her short blonde curls that had been molded down with sweat. She had only been out of the controlled environment of the rover’s interior for a few moments and already she was a stinky mess.

  “I’ve got a lead for you,” Ruby said, emerging from the back room and pouring the cat back into the pillow-lined crate. “You know Flat Valley, just north of here?”

  “I think so,” Scout said, although she wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter; she wasn’t alone on her bike anymore. The rover’s navigation system would tell her the way.

  “Yolanda in Flat Valley knows your fellow. He’s not what you call a regular, but she’s seen him more than once. No one there knows who he is or what he’s doing for a living. He comes into town for supplies now and again. Just food, nothing suspicious, but they don’t like strangers in those parts. It’s a bit north of here.” She gave Scout a significant look and Scout nodded. She knew what Ruby was saying. North meant further from the cities. The people out that way tended toward a certain stubborn independence. They had fled from the people who had fled the cities in the first place.

  “Thanks,” Scout said. She started toward the door but turned back. “Say, Ruby, did you guys feel an earthquake about midmorning?”

  “An earthquake? Here?” Ruby asked.

  Scout nodded.

  “We don’t get earthquakes in these parts.”

  “That’s what I thought. Still, something weird happened on the road here. Any strange rumors from the hills?”

  “Just the usual,”
Ruby said. “Bandits robbing folks. Rebels doing whatever it is that rebels do. If that’s the way you are going, you take care.”

  “I will,” Scout said. “It was good seeing you.” She didn’t add, “one last time.”

  Scout settled her hat back on her head before stepping outside, hands in her pockets as she walked back to the town gate.

  Beyond the town walls, the villagers were running farm machinery, harvesting the overripe grain. The constant whir of the motors filled the air, punctuated by bursts of thrashing sounds as the grain was pulled through.

  Then Scout heard something else, something not quite drowned out by the roar of the machines.

  Something was wrong. Her dogs were barking. Not happy barks or even warning barks. These were barks of raw panic.

  She pulled her hands from her pockets and broke into a run.

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  About the Author

  Photograph © 2016 Jonathan Conklin

  Kate MacLeod lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her husband and two sons. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Persistent Visions, Mythic Delirium and Abyss and Apex among others.