Nashmarl screamed, certain the next shot would plug him through the back and melt his spinal column, but it didn’t come. He heard the cultured tones of the lieutenant now, berating the patrollers for wasting ammunition when a beating would have sufficed.
“Didn’t want to touch the freaks, sir,” someone answered.
By then Nashmarl had reached the shacks and the narrow, dark streets leading into Reject Town. He was still hopping, still desperate to get himself away and out of sight. His facial fur was wet with tears and streaked with mud. His injured foot came down to the ground as he tried to go faster, and a fresh jolt of pain shot up his leg like fire.
Foloth wasn’t even in sight.
Hating him, Nashmarl staggered behind a shack and dropped into the shadows, gasping and shuddering, certain he was going to be sick. He never should have come here, he told himself, moaning as he gingerly ran his hand down his leg to his foot. He never should have listened to Foloth, with his crazy ideas. He never should have left the camp while Mother was gone.
And he wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t deserted him. It was all her fault for going away and staying away.
And now he was here in this awful place, and Foloth had abandoned him too. Foloth had the pack with the last of their rations and the water skin in it. Nashmarl figured he could starve to death here in Reject Town before anyone would help him. This wasn’t like their camp, where folks might squabble but everyone knew they had to help each other. Here, there was no one to help.
And now he was alone, and hurt.
“What are you doing?” Foloth’s voice demanded. “Crying? We haven’t time for that.”
Nashmarl looked up, relieved to see his brother and furious at being caught crying. He slapped his hands across his face, smearing the tears and grime even worse.
“You left me,” he said in a bitter voice. “They shot me and you just ran away.”
“How could I help you if I got shot too?” Foloth asked him reasonably.
Nashmarl glared. His brother always had a logical answer.
Foloth nudged him with his toe. “Come on. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Let’s go.”
“I can’t,” Nashmarl said. “I’m wounded.”
Foloth crouched beside him and grabbed his foot.
“Ow!” Nashmarl yelped. “Take it easy.”
Foloth dropped his foot, letting it thud against the ground. Pain jolted all the way up into Nashmarl’s throat. He gasped, rigid with agony, until it eased off.
Blood pounded in his head, making him almost dizzy. He tried to kick Foloth, but his brother dodged and stood up.
“You aren’t hurt,” Foloth said without sympathy. “You aren’t even bleeding.”
Slowly Nashmarl unclenched the clods of dirt he’d gripped during the worst of the pain. With a mutter, he hurled one of them at Foloth, who didn’t duck fast enough. Dirt splattered across the front of his jerkin.
Foloth brushed it off and glared at Nashmarl. “Get up now, or I really will leave you.”
He turned and started away. Nashmarl glared at him, seething with resentment. He wished he could just sit here forever, letting Foloth disappear and never be seen again.
But finally he levered himself to his feet. His foot wasn’t bleeding, just as Foloth had said. It should have been, but Nashmarl could find no visible wound. His heel, however, was bruised and extremely sore to the touch. Maybe the patrollers hadn’t all been using lethal plasma force. Maybe he’d been shot with a stun bullet instead.
It still hurt.
Limping and cursing Foloth under his breath, he followed his brother deeper into Reject Town.
It took but a few minutes before Nashmarl was regretting ever coming into this slum too. Even Foloth had slowed down and was looking around with a grimace of disgust on his face.
Nashmarl had never been anyplace so squalid. He’d never imagined such filth could exist or that anyone would be willing to live in it.
Reject hatchlings, smeared with grime and wearing rags or nothing at all, ran from them, screaming.
A female trudging along with a water yoke across her shoulders saw them and stumbled to a halt so abrupt she sloshed water from both her pots. She turned around and trotted away from them as fast as she could carry her heavy burden.
Nashmarl stopped in his tracks. “Foloth, wait!” he called.
Reluctantly Foloth looked back. “What now?”
“Where are we going?” Nashmarl asked him. “What are we going to do here?”
Foloth looked at him impatiently. “We’re going to find someone who can get us inside the city. I want to see the imperial palace.”
“Well, you’re a long way from it right now,” Nashmarl said.
“Over that wall,” Foloth said, pointing at the pale stone rising above the roofs of the rickety shacks around them. “Mother said it’s on the side where the river runs.”
“You’re crazy,” Nashmarl said. “We can’t even get through the city gates, much less close to the palace. What would you do if you got there, anyway?”
“I want to see it,” Foloth said.
“No, you’re hoping to see the Kaa again,” Nashmarl said. “Ever since you saw her, you’ve been unable to think of anyone else.”
“She was beautiful,” Foloth said, his eyes lighting up. “Like a vision, all in gold. Her skin was the color of the sun, and her eyes were like fire. She was wearing a gown like the sky itself. The cloth shimmered with colors. There were jewels sewn on it, and—”
“You’ve said all this a thousand times already. I don’t want to hear it again.”
“It was a sign,” Foloth said gravely. “A sign of destiny.”
“Whose destiny?” Nashmarl asked scornfully, pulling his feet from the mud. The stench made him feel sick. He wanted out of here. He wanted to go home.
Foloth was staring around them at the squalor and poverty with grave interest. “I think Mother was born in a place such as this. And then she was taken to live in the palace. I think my seeing the Kaa means that we’ll also go to the palace.”
Nashmarl stared at him, unable to believe what he was hearing. “Is that why we’ve come all this way? Is that why we’ve been beaten and shot at?” he demanded, his voice rising to a shout. “You really have gone crazy. And I shouldn’t have come with you.”
“Then leave,” Foloth said coldly. “I don’t need you.”
That hurt, like a stab over the heart. Nashmarl glared at Foloth to hide how wounded he felt. “I don’t need you either,” he said angrily. “And I don’t want to be a Viis. They’re cruel and vicious, just like Mother always warned us.”
“Mother doesn’t know everything,” Foloth said. “And she doesn’t tell us everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s a hypocrite,” Foloth said, stepping closer. “Warning us about the Viis, always criticizing the Viis, when her real opinion is very different.”
“I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
“Where is she?” Foloth asked.
“I don’t know!” Nashmarl replied in frustration. “Maybe she got hurt, or maybe she’s been arrested.”
“Or maybe she’s gone back to her Viis lover and abandoned us,” Foloth said.
His voice was very hard and cold when he said those words, words that shocked Nashmarl into silence.
Foloth glared at him, and his dark eyes were almost black with resentment. “Don’t look so surprised,” he said to Nashmarl. “You fool, how do you think we came into being?”
Nashmarl turned away from him, not wanting to talk about it, not wanting to think about it. He was crying again, and he didn’t want Foloth to see.
“Oh, yes, cry about it,” Foloth said with scorn. “I wish I hadn’t brought you. Especially now that you’re causing me this much trouble.”
“Trouble bigger than you think,” said a voice neither of them recognized.
Startled, Nashmarl spun around and found himself looking at the hostile faces
of four Reject adult males. Each one was carrying a mesh-sided sack full of stones.
“Lots of trouble, you coming here,” the Reject said. Blue-skinned with lavender shading at his throat, he had no rill at all. “Abiru thieves, coming here all the time, stealing our food, taking what is ours. Get out!”
Foloth backed up, pressing against Nashmarl, who had to step aside. Together, both cubs retreated from the advancing Rejects.
“Please,” Nashmarl said, his voice quavering enough to shame him. “Don’t hurt us. We’ll go.”
But the Rejects were already reaching into their sacks. When they threw the first barrage of stones, Nashmarl knew what the sacks were for.
The stones thudded into him and Foloth with painful accuracy. He cried out, and heard Foloth grunt.
“Run for it!” Foloth shouted.
Together they spun around to go back the way they’d come, but their path was blocked by two more Rejects, who also threw stones at them.
Surrounded, Nashmarl and Foloth huddled together, while the Rejects closed in and the stoning began in earnest.
CHAPTER•FIFTEEN
A call on Quiesl’s hand-link to Luthien got Ampris and the archivists smuggled into the city. Harval, the Aaroun, stashed them in the dank basement of an abandoned tenement. Although they were grateful for the hideout, within a day they were all growing restless.
“We must find a way to check on the Archives,” Quiesl said. “Perhaps if even a small part of it survived, we will be able to salvage something of—”
“No,” Ampris said. “It’s too dangerous. Right now they think all of you are dead. You’re safe as long as they go on believing that.”
Non sat in a corner, rocking himself from side to side the way many Myals did when seriously stressed. “I forgot the Poetics,” he said, not for the first time. He twisted his tail in his hands. “How could I overlook them? They were sublime, written in an age when the Viis could—”
“They were stored in a fireproof case,” Prynan assured him. “They will survive. All the storage on Level Two was fireproofed. Those items will be fine.”
“Not if the explosion destroyed the structure,” Quiesl fretted. He clasped his hands behind his back and wrapped his tail around his wrists. Back and forth he paced. “At tonight’s resistance meeting, I shall ask for assistance in visiting the site. We must start sifting through the ashes before more is lost.”
Ampris gave up trying to convince them that it would be futile to return to the Archives. They had spent their adult lives taking care of the place. They would need time to adjust to the fact that the Archives no longer existed.
“I’m going out,” she said.
At once, their discussion stopped. Quiesl and Non looked at her with expressions of worry. “Ampris, this is unwise,” Quiesl said. “You know what you encountered yesterday.”
She backed her ears, growling softly with frustration. She had tried to leave them on the river before Luthien’s cohorts picked them up. But Quiesl had protested, claiming that without her presence as leader the resistance groups might fail to help them as promised. Yesterday, while the archivists were getting settled here in this crumbling old building, Ampris had tried to leave the city, but she found her likeness—dredged up from old gladiator publicity records—being broadcast on every public vid. Warrants had been issued for her arrest, and citizens and abiru alike were urged to report any sighting of her.
Being trapped like this left her nerves frayed and her sense of worry stronger than ever. If she couldn’t get out of the city, how was she going to return to her family? She couldn’t just abandon them.
She had broken her promise to her cubs and to her friends. She had let them down. Although it had not been her fault, she felt ashamed. Ampris hated to fail at anything she did. If Harthril led them here to Vir, they wouldn’t last two days without coming to some kind of harm. How would she ever find them?
Now, she met Quiesl’s gaze with determination. “I have to check the city’s eastern gates. In case they’ve come through.”
“No one will tell you,” Quiesl said. “If any patroller sees you loitering there, you’ll be arrested.”
“Or shot,” Non added.
“I cannot abandon my family!” she cried. “If they come here, I’ll never know it. I have to do something.”
Quiesl put his hand on her arm. “At the meeting tonight, perhaps you can ask the abiru to watch for your friends. That is safer than you risking capture.”
She sighed, not liking the idea, and yet it made sense. Reluctantly she nodded. “Very well.”
The sun had dropped midway in the afternoon sky, the hottest part of the day. Elrabin trotted steadily along the road, ignoring the heat that made his skin feel like it was melting beneath his fur. He was panting, but not in distress. Beside him, Harthril strode along tirelessly on his long, thin legs. The Reject’s eyes were slitted against the glare of the sun, and his rill lay flaccid on his shoulders. Their shared water skin bounced on his hip, half-empty.
Elrabin kept an eye on it, and licked a rim of salt off his mouth. He wanted a drink with every pore of his body, but neither of them would stop for water until the sun started to go down.
Ahead, the walls of Vir loomed high. The cubs were only a half hour in front of them, and Elrabin was toying with the idea of stopping and waiting out the rest of the afternoon before going on to pick them up at the gates. There was no way Foloth and Nashmarl could get into the city. There was nowhere for them to go, now that they’d reached the end of this ill-planned journey.
Elrabin cast a sideways glance up at Harthril. “Nearly there,” he said, panting.
Harthril blinked but otherwise did not waste his breath on talking. His pebbled skin was wrinkling and growing darker from sun exposure. Otherwise he just seemed to absorb the heat, no matter how intense it became.
“Want to stop for a while?” Elrabin asked. “We can let ’em prowl around the gates and get turned back in our direction, see?”
Harthril’s stride never faltered. He said nothing.
Elrabin groaned to himself and kept trotting. “Guess we don’t quit now. Guess we don’t let the guards shake ’em up like they deserve.”
Harthril glanced at him stonily. “Thieves,” he said.
Elrabin rolled his eyes. After the first few days, he’d figured the Reject would get over the theft of his food, but Harthril had a one-track mind. Forget that Elrabin had questions as to what the Reject was doing with food hoarded from the rest of the group in the first place, or where he got it from. Harthril answered only what suited him, and so far he’d said about three words since they’d set out on the cubs’ trail several days ago.
They’d caught up with the runaways in a matter of hours. Whatever head start Foloth and Nashmarl had, they’d squandered it like the irresponsible cubs they were. They stopped to rest too often. They wasted time hunting for water when they still had a supply. With the food rations they’d taken, they did not have to stop to hunt. As a result, they could have made excellent time across the Plains if they’d been diligent about it.
Elrabin thought about Ampris, who had limped along in the burning heat with inadequate supplies, who had stopped and hunted when she must have been exhausted. Every night, he and Harthril camped fireless and silent near the cubs, guarding them in the darkness while they chattered and laughed heedlessly. Elrabin thought of their mother camping out here alone and friendless. Every day he expected to stumble across her bones bleaching in the sun. So far, that hadn’t happened, but it didn’t stop him from worrying about her.
Or from wanting to blister the backsides of both her cubs.
As soon as he and Harthril first caught up with the cubs, Elrabin had wanted to grab them by the scruff of their necks and work them over. But Harthril had stopped him, suggesting they let the cubs make the entire journey to Vir on their own. Hoping the cubs would learn a few lessons along the way, Elrabin agreed.
But now, as they drew near the c
ity and skirted the outlying clusters of fueling stations, roadside black marketeers, and straggling traffic, Elrabin told himself the cubs would have learned a lot more without those food rations. Every time he stepped over an empty packet that had been tossed down, he growled to himself and promised them a kick for it.
Now, he shot Harthril another glance. “You sure you don’t want to take a break here? We can wait for the others to catch up.”
Luax and Tantha were shepherding the rest of their group, coming very slowly and with great caution, perhaps a day or two behind.
Harthril did not even blink this time. He just kept striding along.
Ahead, Elrabin heard shouting and the sound of shots being fired. Instinctively he stopped in his tracks, but Harthril began to jog. Growling and muttering to himself, Elrabin hurried to catch up.
He saw the gates, closed right now with a line of traffic waiting for clearance. He saw patrollers clustered at the checkpoint, shouting and opening fire on the pair of lanky cubs, who were scrambling for safety.
Elrabin’s heart nearly stopped. “Hey!”
Harthril gripped his arm, holding him back when he would have dashed straight to the trouble. “Wait,” the Reject said.
“That was a plasma slug,” Elrabin said, horrified by the danger the cubs were in. He might not like either of them, but he owed it to Ampris to keep them safe. “We got to get them out of there.”
“How?” Harthril asked, still holding him back despite his struggles. “Look, they are running. They are safe.”
Elrabin watched the cubs streaking across open ground, but they headed into the slum area like Skeks scuttling for the sewer. His heart sank. “The little fools. How we going to get them out of there?”
Harthril stood watching until the cubs were out of sight before he dropped his blue-eyed gaze to meet Elrabin’s. “Maybe we don’t get them out. Let them stay there.”
“That’s Reject Town,” Elrabin said. “You’ll fit right in, but they never will.”
Harthril’s rill extended behind his head. “Rejects will take care of them. Then there is no more trouble they can cause us.”
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