"Why not?"
"Why not? Because your only friend just got shot down in front of you. Because they killed a third of our people and scattered the rest to the winds. Because we almost died ourselves, and what we saw will haunt me until the day I join Martin. So yes. Splendid idea. Let's rush right out and do it again."
"Then I'll go by myself. I'm better off alone."
"I'm sure you'll do very well. One little girl against an army of laser-wielding madmen."
Raina drew her tanto with a hiss of steel and ran the blade across the back of her knuckles. The pain cut straight to her core. She made a fist. Blood fell in slow drips to the thick white carpet.
"I'm going to kill him. Right now. While I still know where he is." She turned from the window.
Mauser moved in front of her. "Grief can turn a person crazy, Raina. Don't let it drag you into darkness."
She looked up into his eyes. "Get out of my way."
"So you can run off and commit suicide? Why don't you save time and cut your throat right here?"
Raina flicked the knife at his crossed arms. A red line appeared on his forearm. He yelped and danced back. She ran out the door and bounded down the steps. He called after her, but she was already gone.
She ran as hard as she could, crossing the main street and racing into the confused streets of a housing complex, meaning to lose herself from Mauser. Her whole body shook with the purpose of her mission. She held tight to her knife. After a couple of blocks, she stopped to listen for footsteps following her between the small white houses, but the only sound was the argument of crows.
She doubled around to come at the Dunemarket from the south, walking silently beside the walls of houses and shops. She stopped at each intersection to check the roads for scouts, then dashed to whatever cover was on the other side. She approached her house from the alley behind it. It was perfectly quiet. She went to her room to dress in black and get her spare binoculars. Back in the hall, Martin's door was open. She walked through the doorway, half expecting to see him there at his desk hunched over wires and circuits, fingertips black with oil, his hair greasy from not washing it for days.
But it was empty. As empty as everything else. She went to the kitchen for a Ziploc bag, then returned to his room and collected the stray hairs from his pillow. Maybe if she had a piece of his physical body, she could stop his soul from being dragged away.
In case Mauser thought to check the house for her—or in case Karslaw was torturing his captives to track down those who'd fled—she went outside, crept three blocks east, and holed up in an unfamiliar home.
She hid in the closet and waited for night to enfold her before returning to the Dunemarket. Two scouts waited at the head of the road leading down through the hills, rifles in hand. She backtracked to come in through the hills on the east flank, walking as quietly as she could, a snake among the palms. The eastern approach was unburned, but smoke continued to rise from the middle of the market, its cloudy strands turned silver in the moonlight.
"He can be yours," she whispered to the moon. "Help me take his life and I'll give you every drop of his blood. The mightiest warrior in the land. What could be a better gift?"
A gale of laughter swept from the market. Raina hunkered down, spooked. Was the moon laughing at her? Or in anticipation of its feast? But it made no difference to her mission. She advanced step by step until she crossed the final ridge and looked down on the market.
Tents were pitched across the road. Fires crackled on the asphalt. At first she thought they were using the bodies for kindling, but all she could smell was wood smoke. Troops stood around the fires drinking from metal cups. Talking. Laughing. Pointing off into the city. Many of the men were shirtless. She scanned them for Karslaw.
"Where to next?" a woman said, hoisting her cup over her head. Liquid sloshed to the street. "This time can we conquer somewhere with pool boys?"
Troops laughed. A tent flap unzipped. Karslaw strode into the firelight, chest glistening. His teeth glinted. "Our enemies are ruined. Our homeland is safe. Now we consolidate. We know our destiny, but now it's time to prove it to these people—and that our rule is welcome."
"I've had enough with their smoked fish, by the way," the woman said. "I think we should start demanding massages instead."
More laughter. Raina focused on their faces, searing them into her memory. If she got the chance, she'd kill them all.
Footsteps crackled through the leaves. Thirty feet to her right, a man staggered down the hill. A laser bounced on his belt. She waited for him to reach the road and join the others, then crept back up the hill and descended the other side to hide in the brush at its bottom.
Hours later, the last of the smoke cleared from the sky, revealing the stars beyond. She slunk back up the hill and knelt behind a palm trunk. Through her binoculars, the camp was motionless. The fires had burn to low red embers. The tent flaps were zipped. Many of the Catalinans slept in the open, blankets spread beneath them. At the side of the road, a young man was wrapped up in the blanket Jill had been using for her stall earlier that day. There were guards posted at the entrances to the market, but everyone at the tents was asleep.
And she knew which one of them held Karslaw.
She moved down the hill as quietly as she knew how. She loosened her knife in its sheath, but waited to draw it. The steel was so fine it would catch the moonlight like her dad's nets had caught the silvery bonito.
At the shoulder of the road, she paused and looked over the sleeping soldiers. Drunken. Useless. If she'd had a few more people with her, she could have laid waste to them all. She stepped into the gravel. A man rolled over and stared right at her.
"Who the fuck?" he said.
She leapt forward, knife snicking from its scabbard. The man screamed. She plunged the knife into his neck. He gargled blood over the blade. Across the road, men and women stirred, fumbling for guns and eyeglasses, firing questions back and forth. Karslaw's tent was fifty feet down the road.
"Holy shit!" a woman yelled. "Right there!"
She ran back up the hill. Two lasers chased her, scorching the grass. She jagged to her right and another beam blazed through the space she'd just vacated. The weapons cast cold blue light between the palm trees, throwing the world into icy shadows.
Men ran behind her, calling to each other through the darkness. At the bottom of the other side of the hill, she cut sidelong through the brush, emerging into a strip mall parking lot. She sprinted across the street into another block of laundromats and liquor stores and a Brooklyn pizzeria. She didn't stop until she reached the cavern of the Home Depot a mile north of the market.
She hid in the gloom, watching through her binoculars. Far down the street, a lantern bobbed along, carried by three questing soldiers. They never came close enough to spot her.
She burned with shame. She had failed her father. Karslaw's tent had been right there. If she had run to it, she could have reached it before the Catalinans knew what was happening. She could have rushed inside and taken Karslaw's heart, and then her father would be free, and perhaps a better man would take care of her mother, and Raina herself could have died.
Why should she fear so much to die? She was hardly scared of any other thing. She thought she wanted nothing more in the world than to feel Karslaw's blood. Yet the thought of spilling her own scared her even worse. It was a flaw. One she needed to correct.
She circled back to the Dunemarket, approaching through the western hills. Down below, lanterns lined the street. Men stood at arms, gazing into the night, guns on their hips. She waited all night for them to go to sleep, but she never got the chance. With the men still at watch, and the first hint of dawn peeping from the east, Raina withdrew and crossed the couple miles to the house she'd run to with Mauser.
Inside, he sprawled on the lush living room rug. Dawn broke through the window. A pretty blue bottle was tucked in the crook of his arm, spraying blue-tinted sunlight across the ceiling. He sat up, re
d-eyed and puffy-faced.
"Did you get him?"
Raina stood there, useless. "No."
"Well, that's a hell of a shame." He held out the bottle. "Fancy a drink?"
"No."
"It's pretty good. See?" He tipped it back and drank, then set it down, wincing, working his mouth to get past the taste. "All right, so maybe it doesn't taste good, but it makes you feel pretty great. It's like a magic potion. They used to use it for medicine, you know. Today's modern doctors could learn a thing or two."
"I killed one of them," she said. "Then the others woke up. I had to run."
"Gosh, are you all right?"
"I could have killed him. Karslaw. But I would have died too, so I ran away. Why did I do that? Why couldn't I kill him?"
Mauser rousted himself from the floor and peered in her eyes. "Maybe because it is incredibly hard to bring yourself to kill."
"I've done it before. So have you."
"I don't think that makes it any easier. Anyway, you're not talking about killing a person, you're talking about killing yourself in the process. And you know what you are? A little survivor. The notion of suicide runs against everything you've got inside you. There's nothing wrong with that. If you were the kind of person who could sacrifice yourself to kill him, you would never have made it here in the first place."
She shook her head. She was tired and her head hurt. She took the bottle from him and drank. It burned her throat, but she felt a little better almost right away.
"So what?" she said. "If I can't do what I'm supposed to, then I'm worthless."
"Or human." He laughed to himself, then saw her face. "Hey. You're not worthless. You're the reverse of worthless. Worthful."
"It's been so long. My dad's still dead. My mom's still gone."
"Yet despite your best efforts, you remain stubbornly alive. After the worst life can throw at you. Perhaps there's a lesson here."
"What's that?"
"That life goes on. Even when you don't want it to. That even if the thing you hold dearest is taken from you, you will survive." Mauser's eyes brightened. He paced around the room, gesturing at the dawn beyond the windows. "It's magical, isn't it? No matter what happens to us, we sail on through it. We're invincible. Immune to everything but death. That's why you fear it, Raina. It's the only thing you can't conquer."
She shook her head. "But it still hurts."
"Because you keep bashing your head into its walls." He crossed the beam of sunlight cutting through the window, swaying toward her. "Let's get out of here. Me and you. Run away to some place peaceful. You don't have to die here and you don't have to hurt. All you have to do is leave."
Her resolve shrank until it got so small it felt like she could pick it up and throw it out the window. She stepped toward Mauser. But as her resolve left her, so did her strength. She staggered to the floor, folding like a jackknife, hugging her knees to her chest.
"I can't!"
He touched her shoulder. "Sure you can. Just get up and walk away. You can walk, can't you?"
Tears burst down her face. She shook her head, rocking on the ground, wailing, remembering her dad smiling at the sun on the sea, her mom waving to them from her chair by the shore. She remembered stalking rats among the pillars of the pier and eating them raw out of sight of the gulls and the dogs. She remembered her first family dying one by one in bed, blood oozing from their mouths and eyes, coughs echoing through the house until she came home from the store to a swift and awful silence. Everything she loved had been taken from her. Perhaps the answer was to stop loving.
The thought sliced straight to her heart. Her first family was long dead. So was her second father. Her second mom was captive, as good as dead. Martin was lost, too. All she loved now were memories. Dreams. Spirits. What was left to fear? She had already lost everything—except her life and her purpose.
One could be taken from her. The other could not. Every spirit inside her spoke up at once, a babel of discordant voices. The rabbits told her to be swift. The cats told her to be stealthy. The dogs told her to be persistent. The fish told her to seek strength in numbers. The people told her to trust no one but herself.
Every one of them agreed on one thing: she must be stronger than she ever knew how.
Her shoulders stopped shaking. Her tears dried up. She unfolded her limbs and stood. Mauser smiled and held out his hand.
She slapped it away. "I won't stop until Karslaw is dead."
The light faded from his eyes. His smile shriveled. He looked tired and suddenly sober. He lowered himself to the ground and drank from the big blue bottle.
"Then there's only one thing left to do," he said. "Rally the troops."
"What troops?"
"Everyone who just lost their loved ones at the Slaughter at the Dunemarket." He reached into his pocket and fished out a small metal object. It was round and smooth and a scintillating silver-gray that reminded her of the forge-line running down the length of her tanto. "Oh, and while we're at it, why don't we give that lily-skinned weirdo a ring? I don't think he liked the islanders any more than we did."
32
Like every young boy, Walt had once dreamed about what he'd do if he were ever stuck on a desert island. Like every boy, most of those dreams had involved wearing an eye patch, not being bossed around by his parents, and lots of beachside snoring under a palm frond umbrella.
He wished very keenly he'd been a more practical kid. Because here he was, stuck on a semi-desert island that wasn't exactly in the middle of nowhere but wasn't within swimming range of anywhere else, and he didn't have the first clue how to get off it.
But that in itself helped refine his decision-making. If he didn't have a plan, the first thing was to buy himself time to form one. He needed to find water and he needed to find food. Once he had that in hand, then he could worry about how to cross miles of open ocean when he didn't have so much as a loincloth to his name.
Something to cut things apart, and something to tie them back together. Other than food and water, that was all you needed to get back on the path to civilization. Before he left the small beach, he searched it front to back, eyes sharp for the glint of broken glass or metal. He found only a plastic bag and a chunk of a large, solid shell. He took both. It was a start.
When Lorna dropped him at the beach, it had appeared to be fronted by sheer cliffs, but on its north end he found a natural path leading up to the heights. His feet were bare and he stepped carefully up the trail. He would very much like some shoes. He didn't like the idea of paddling twenty miles with open cuts on his soles.
The path flattened out. He stood on a vista overlooking a spread of brownish grass and brown-black rocks. A ridgeline ran north-south down the middle of the island, which looked no longer than a mile from one end to the other, and less that in width. In summary, small and brown. Not great prospects for finding running water.
Sea lions honked to the southeast. With a big enough rock, he could probably take out a pup. But he had a better idea. Up north, a cacophony of birds called into the wind. The dirt was mostly occupied by grass, most of it half-dead, but a few weeds and flowers poked from it too, as well as occasional succulents, fat-leafed and waxy green. He filed that away and continued toward the birds. An empty can of Coke was half-hidden in the grass, smashed flat and sun-bleached. He shook off the dirt and added it to his bag.
Something poked into his heel. He winced, then sat down and pulled his foot up to his face. A splinter lay embedded in his skin. From a strictly medical perspective, he wasn't certain whether it was best for a barefoot person to leave it be or remove it at once and risk a bigger, nastier cut, but he didn't like the idea of being in pain with every step. Not when he had so much work to do. He tried to tease it loose with his thumbnail. When that didn't work, he got out the shell and used its chipped edge to scrape the splinter free. There was no blood and little abrasion to his skin. With any luck, he would resist infection. All that time in the jungle had to have b
een good for his immune system.
The sun warmed his skin. There were a few squat trees along the edge of the cliffs. Their main branches looked thinner than his wrists, but if he could find enough, he might be able to conjure up a raft.
Birds cried ahead. The rock climbed in terraced slabs, terminating in cliffs overlooking the shores. Above the terraces, gray and white seabirds called to each other, flapping their wings, pecking at the soil. Walt walked up with his arms spread above his head, hollering senselessly. Birds took to the air, wheeling over their nests. He got down and gathered their speckled eggs. The birds squawked, swooping at him. He filled both hands and walked away, wary for dive-bombers. At a safe distance, he knelt beside a flat shelf of black rock.
The eggs were maybe half the size of a chicken's. The inside of the first looked just like something you'd take home from a supermarket: a round yolk, lots of gloppy clear stuff that was about the same consistency as the aliens' blood. He'd drank raw yolks as a hangover cure before. He swallowed the egg without a second thought. It tasted good. A little richer than chicken eggs. A hint of fish to it, too.
The second egg contained a fetal chick. He groaned. There was no way he could make himself eat that. Its tiny beak. Its blind eyes like little black yolks of their own. He would have to be a hell of a lot hungrier. It squirmed in the ruin of its shell. He glanced over at the birds. They couldn't take care of something this small. Feeling like the worst person in history, he picked up a rock and put it out of its misery.
After that, he didn't want to open the third egg, but it wasn't about what he wanted anymore. He was naked and the sun was too hot and he was losing water from his body with every breath of air and trickle of sweat. If you want to make a staying-alive omelette, sometimes you have to bash a baby bird's brains out.
Among the remaining clutch, he opened six more yolks and two more fetuses. There had to be a way to figure out which were good before you broke them open. Shake them or something. He resolved to give that a try next time. He hoped the negative karma he'd accumulated in the meantime wouldn't manifest in a case of salmonella.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 101