Earth Thirst

by Mark Teppo

  “We will become something else,” I tell him. “We will find new names.”

  “Have you seen this?” he asks me. “Have you heard such a prophecy from the birds?”

  I shake my head. “That is all behind me now. Like everything else.”

  He laughs, a cold laugh of a man who feels he has no future. “So be it. Let us never look back again. We are Dardanoi no more, you and I. We are men of the west, and we will go as far as these timbers will carry us.”

  The wind blows us away from the war, and we try to forgot how to be soldiers, but our bodies know nothing else. The short list. Kill everyone else.

  I sigh, and the boat vanishes. I am standing on a cliff now, and the sun is a blazing fire in the west, its flames licking across the surface of the ocean. The people of the clans are behind me, chanting and beating their drums. I am naked but for a headdress of white feathers and a pair of wings made from palm fronds strapped to my arms. The ocean is far away, but I leap anyway, spreading my wings. I dive gracefully, and the cliff rushes past me. The updraft is warm and strong, and when I spread my arms, my palm-frond wings fill with air. I don't hit the water—not yet—the air carries me across the waves. Away from the volcanic cliff behind me. Toward the tiny spur of rock, jutting from the sea.

  I am flying.

  I am not afraid of the waves beneath me. They will grab me soon and try to drown me, but I'm not afraid of them anymore. It has been a long time since I fled Troy; crossing the Mediterranean seems so easy compared to the distance I have traveled to reach this rock, to stand before these people and show them how to fly. To show them their gods are real.

  I pull my arms in, and dive into the water. When I surface, I am not at sea anymore. I am in a bed with a woman. She is on top of me, her lips against mine. Her skin is warm and her mouth is wet. Her hands knead my arms and chest, and I wrap my arms around her. Her legs part, and she gasps lightly, her teeth pressing against my lower lip. My hands sink to her hips and I hold her close. We move back and forth, like waves against the beach, and she crushes her mouth to mine, our teeth clicking together. I want to bite her, but she won't let me go and so I bite her lip instead. She bites me back, and I moan as our blood mixes.

  I am hard inside her, and her fingers are raking across my skin now. I want to bleed for her…

  I sit up.

  When I look in the bathroom mirror, I see a face covered in sweat. There is blood on my lips. I taste it, and it isn't mine.

  Arcadians don't dream, and what I told Aeneas was the truth. I gave up being a seer when we left Troy.

  There are too many holes in my head. And they're growing.

  You're just a grunt. You follow orders.

  What have I done?

  * * *

  I find my optics and head out to get some air before the sun gets too high in the sky. Outside, the scrub grass glistens with dew and the gulls are calling out to one another across the bay. I walk through town, not really paying attention to where I'm going. I'm letting other factors guide me. The air, the light, the distant sound of surf and seabirds. This is how I used to do it when Aeneas asked me to seek guidance. If the birds and the wind were not forthcoming with insight, there were other, bloodier, methods that were, as a result, prone to violence and darkness. After our flight from Troy, I no longer wanted to use the old methods.

  I watch terns flit across the sky, trying to discern the patterns in the flight paths. A fat gull with gray pinfeathers squawks noisily at me from a wooden post as I pass. I walk on, and eventually I realize my destination is one of the moai. It sits on a low bluff near the edge of town, looking over the shallow depression of the bay and valley. There's a tiny café at the bottom of the hill, and a well-worn trail meanders up the slope behind the tiny building. I make the climb and stand next to the giant head. Seeing what it sees. How many are left? I wonder. They were the guardians of the island; they watched over the trees and the clans. And the outsiders came. The cult of the Bird Man came to the island—the tangata manu—and the clans found something to fight over.

  The Bird Man brought them jealousy, greed, and avarice—the age-old sins that could never be completely forgotten. How quickly they had fallen into savagery. And the moai were toppled; the clans did not want them to see what was the clans were becoming. They did not want the old gods to look upon the shining white feathers of their new god. Pull them down, the Bird Man had said to them, they may not look upon me. I am for your eyes only.

  A large airplane shatters the quiet morning as it comes in for a landing at the airport behind me. It is a different airline than the one we came on from Adelaide and Tahiti. This is the connecting flight that goes east, all the way to Chile.

  “Which way should we go?” I ask the sullen moai, which does not respond. Mere's words last night stun, more so because there was great truth to them. I'm not a planner. That was never my role. I would read bird sign once in a while, and the rest of the time, I simply followed orders. I did not question. I did not deviate. I was the one who could be counted on to complete the mission and come home.

  I did it for hundreds of years. Across many continents. Under countless banners and generals. I served Mother, wherever she needed me. I did what she asked; in return, she healed my wounds and took the pain away.

  The plane taxies down the runway and slows to a stop before the tiny terminal. There are only two gates, servicing the two directions the planes fly. East or west.

  When Troy burned, we fled west. We had no choice. West was where the open water lay, where undiscovered regions awaited us. We fled the burning wreckage of our past, and became something new. The sun set in the west, and we followed it until we found a new home.

  And where is my home now? Arcadia is closed to me. Troy has been lost for millennia. Home is where the hearth is. Where the family is. I have neither. “What does that make me?” I ask the giant head.

  I rest my hand on the cool stone of the moai, feeling the texture of the weathered surface. It is a reminder of a different age. One that has atrophied and become fossilized over the last hundred years. The old gods are gone; the new ones did not dwell long among the people either. The island has been abandoned. The soul is gone. All that remains is an empty husk.

  We become strangers, in the end. The world changes and we slip out of place. Nothing more than solitary wanderers who don't know where to go. Or who they are anymore.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I enter the hotel through the front, a lazy mistake, and as soon as I clear the door, I catch the lingering aroma of tobacco. Gauloises Blonde. I make a right-hand turn into the tiny gift shop and busy myself with examining the dizzying array of plastic and foam moai trinkets. Through the wire mesh of the display rack, I scan the lobby and spot the woman from the parking lot of Eden Park—the one who had waited outside the rental for her companion to make a call. She's sitting in one of the comfortable chairs opposite the main desk, pretending to read a magazine. Her eyes betray her, flicking up and scanning the room every time she turns the page.

  The only reason she didn't make me immediately is because her attention was focused on the elevator and the stairs. There's no one else around in the lobby and, even though she didn't see my face, she saw me go into the gift shop. I can't leave without her getting a good look at me.

  She never saw me at Eden Park, and I consider if it is possible that she knows my face. The guy in the passenger seat of the car at the hospital parking lot has seen me. He might be able to ID me from airport security footage, if they've got it. But it'll be a shitty picture at best, meaning the woman in the lobby will second-guess what she sees.

  That'll be enough.

  I walk out of the gift shop and stroll slowly across the lobby, giving her time to get a good look at my profile, and as I approach the elevator, I divert to the stairs instead. Once through the ground floor door, I dart up the steps to the second-floor landing. I open the door and wait, listening; in a few seconds, I hear the door open down below. I leav
e the stairwell, letting the second-floor door shut noisily behind me. Just so there's no confusion where I've gone. There's a narrow alcove across the hall that contains an ice and a vending machine as well as a door marked “Employees Only.”

  When the brunette comes through the stairwell door, I grab her roughly. One hand on her throat; the other on her wrist. She's got a gun in her hand, and my grip keeps her weapon low. I drag her across the hall and ram my shoulder against the marked door, splintering the lock. Beyond is a narrow closet, lined with racks of cleaning supplies and linens. I spin her against one of the racks, stunning her. She gets her act together fairly quickly, and starts to raise her gun. I intercept her motion, snapping her wrist and peeling the gun out of her hand. She starts to cry out, but I grab a pillow off a nearby shelf and press it firmly over her face. Using her own gun, I put a round through the fluffy layer between us.

  After she falls down, I go through her pockets and take what I find.

  The closet door doesn't latch, but it closes enough that no one will notice the broken jamb unless they are actually trying to open the door.

  As I take the stairs up to the fourth floor, where our room is, I examine her phone. In the photo log, there's a grainy picture, pulled from some security feed somewhere. My face.

  Secutores knows who they're looking for.

  * * *

  Mere is standing in the bathroom of the hotel room, wrapped in one of the complementary robes. She is bent over the sink, her hair still wet from a shower, and she looks up as I come in, her eyes cataloguing the objects in my hands.

  “Where did you get that?” she says, eyeing the pistol. Her fingers are probing behind her left ear, and she winces as she finds something tender.

  “We're being watched,” I say, as I enter the bathroom and dump my collection on the counter.

  “It's Secutores, isn't it?” she says. “Shit, I knew it.” She drops her head, pulling her hair to the side. “When I was showering, I felt a weird bump,” she says, showing me what she's been trying to feel. Behind her ear, near her hairline, there is a tiny scabbed ridge. The surrounding skin is red and irritated since she's been worrying it.

  “They chipped me, didn't they?” she says.

  I run my thumb across the bump, nodding. “That would explain a few things, wouldn't it?”

  “Yeah, it definitely would.”

  One of the items I took from the Secutores agent had been a folding tactical knife. Rifling through the pile, I retrieve it and flip it open. “This is going to hurt a bit,” I say.

  She grips the edge of the counter. “I know.”

  Blood wells out as I make a tiny incision. I catch the rivulet with my thumb, and my teeth snap together, grinding against one another as I hold myself in check. Her breath hisses, and I grab a washcloth to apply pressure against the cut. “Sorry,” I mumble. Her blood is all over my thumb.

  “It's—Silas,” she says sharply. She stands up, snatching the washcloth out of my slack hand. She presses it against her neck with one hand, while grabbing my wrist with her other. “Silas!”

  “What?” I say dumbly, still staring at my thumb. My tongue has forced its way through my clenched teeth, and I'm breathing heavily.

  “Look at me, you knuckle-dragger!”

  “That's—” I snarl, and as I tear my attention away from the glistening crimson coating my thumb, I snap out of my hyper-focus.

  She is still holding on to my wrist. “Lower your arm, Silas,” she says. “Look at my face.”

  I do, though my gaze flickers toward her neck when she lowers the washcloth. There's a smear of blood across the side of her neck, and it is almost too much.

  “Eyes on me,” she snaps. “Focus.”

  A growl rises in my chest as I comply, forcing myself to look away from her neck. My shoulders are twitching.

  “As long as I have this thing in me, Secutores knows where we are,” she says. “We have to get it out. Now. You have to focus.”

  I move my arm and her fingers tighten. “Okay,” I say, effortlessly pulling free of her grip. “I hear you. Let me do it.” Taking a deep breath and marshalling my restraint, I indicate she should turn so that I can do what needs to be done. She nods and holds her hair out of the way again. I place my thumbs on either side of the cut and massage her skin, feeling the shape of a foreign body. When I squeeze my thumbs together, more blood flows but a tiny cylinder floats up and protrudes from the slit in her skin. I tug it free and step back. It's a small transmitter, slippery with blood, and I drop it on the counter.

  Grabbing a larger towel from the nearby rack, I move away until my back is against the bathroom wall. Focusing on her reflection in the mirror, I keep my attention away from what my hands are doing. They're turning and twisting over each other, trying to get the blood off before I lose control.

  Mere glances at the blood-stained counter and the tiny transmitter as she presses the bloody washcloth against her neck. “What sort of range does this thing have?”

  “Hard to say without opening it up,” I say. “But it's definitely some sort of tracking chip.”

  She checks on the bleeding and satisfied that it seems to have slowed, she nods toward the pile of personal effects on the counter. “A watcher?” When I nod, she puts down the washcloth and starts rifling through the pile. “Did you…?” She shakes her head. “Where were they?” she asks instead.

  “Lobby. Standard stake-out. Waiting for us to come downstairs.”

  “So they don't know which room we're in?”

  “Or they don't want to corner us here,” I point out. I try to remember if I had seen anyone loitering around when I had gone out for my walk. Were they covering the side exits too? I point at the tracking chip. “If they're keying in on that, we have a slight advantage now. They know where the chip is, but they don't know that it isn't in you anymore. If we leave it here, they'll think we're still in the room.”

  “How long will that illusion last, do you think?”

  “Long enough for us to get to the airport.”

  “And then what? There are two flights out of here per day. One heading for Tahiti, and the other one goes east. To Santiago, Chile. It won't be hard to figure out which way we've gone. If they don't grab us as soon as we walk out of here.” She shakes her head. “It'd be easier if we could just fly out of here ourselves.” Her mouth quirks into a tiny smile. “Too bad we can't turn into sparrows. And fly home.”

  Sparrows.

  I recall the painting on the wall of the crypt beneath the laboratory. Tiny birds wreathed in flowers.

  “Hyacinths,” I say. “That's it.”

  “What's it?” she says, but she's talking to my back as I leave the bathroom. “What are you doing?” she asks as she follows me.

  “I'm looking for the folder that comes with the room,” I tell her. “The one that has the room service menu and the listing of all the other services the hotel offers.”

  “Why?”

  I find the leather-bound folio, and start flipping through it. “Because there's always a page filled with market speak about the hotel, and it always contains some reference—”

  A buzzing noise interrupts me, the sound of an angry bee caught in the bathroom. “The phone,” Mere says. “I'll get it.”

  I nod and stand there, holding the folder, staring at the page. The words are bending out of whack, and I struggle to bring them back into line, just as I'm struggling to bring my memory back.

  What I need is in my head. I just can't get it ordered correctly. I can almost see the shape of the puzzle. I almost know where the pieces go.

  Mere returns from the bathroom, holding the Secutores agent's cell phone. “Text message,” she says, showing me the display.

  It's a message from someone named Albatross, and it reads: “Sr loc?”

  “Situation report,” I translate. “And asking about her location.”

  “Sent a few minutes after nine. Do you think it's routine?”

  “Top of the h
our check-in?” I shrug. “Probably.”

  Mere's fingers fly over the phone's quartet of control buttons, easily navigating the maze of submenus. “Yeah,” she says. “On the hour. One word responses. Zero. Zero. Zero. Down. And then nothing before that for something like twelve hours.”

  I nod, following the sequence. Down was the note that she had arrived on Easter Island. “Text zero back. Keep it simple.”

  Mere does so, and then starts looking at other screens. “These are cheap phones,” she says. “Ah”—she finds something of interest—“here's her contact list. Albatross. Bear. Caribou. Dingo. Falcon. Gopher.” She ponders the list. “No ‘E'?”

  “She's ‘E,'” I intuit. “Albatross is her commanding officer.”

  She giggles slightly. “Do you think it was assigned?”

  “What was assigned?”

  “That code name.”

  I think about it for a second, recalling albatrosses of legend and those that found their way into literature. “Probably not.”

  The phone buzzes in Mere's hands and she nearly drops it. “Shit,” she reads the message. “It just says ‘Loc' again.”

  “You didn't answer all of the question the first time,” I say.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Tell him something.”

  “Like what?”

  In the maid closet. Second floor. I shake my head, putting that suggestion away. “Type ‘pissing,'” I suggest.

  Mere smiles. “‘Pissing,'” she says as she works the phone's keypad. “And I'm adding ‘K?'” She hits send.

  “Good idea. That'll explain the delay.”

  She checks another menu. “That's the only one who has been texting. Albatross. God, what a goofy code name. A big white bird, hanging around your neck.” She shakes her head.