We’re not a couple. We’re not together.
Why does everybody assume we are?
I mean, sure. I’ve already said I would love it.
But that might be my worst terror, the chance that I might slip up, come on too strong, say something the wrong way and wreck the friendship we have. I’ve seen crushes break into the open, and when they aren’t reciprocated, the friendship withers – or worse.
Nope. What I’ve got is 99 percent perfect. Who else could say as much?
Dinah has pulled an extra reflector roll from her raptor. “How much does Mouse need?”
“It’s a dragon,” I say. “Didn’t it evolve in the pits of hell?”
Thea and Lucy exchange a look in the dawn light. “We don’t know,” Thea says. “It’s our first time, too. We’ll give her the option this first day.” I get the distinct impression the two of them had an entire conversation telepathically.
Maybe they did. You never know with ley mages.
“Okay.” We tap pegs into the rockface a little way down from our tents and secure the reflector.
The dragon seems to know what to do. She humps along on her leathery talons and does a neat belly-crawl under the reflector roof.
She’s smart. I’m not sure why that should surprise me.
All right. Now the scorpions.
There are seventeen risk zones for scorpions and centipedes, and I run through them like a drill sergeant. Footwear, obviously. Folds of blankets. The tents are hot, but inside you swaddle in insulating layers, and the scorpions love the cool crannies.
Empty water containers. Empty any containers.
Boots, gloves. Helmets.
The point is, the scorpions are everywhere. This is their world. Thea and Lucy keep their composure quite well, considering how thick I’m laying it on.
“Now for the tough love,” I recite. Those long-ago training days are engraved in my brain. In order to build the necessary reflexes, you have to get stung the first time. If you don’t understand the agony, if your brain and limbs don’t truly understand the terrible poison pain, you won’t move fast enough when you hear the rustle or see something move out of the corner of your eye.
Which is why Dinah isn’t giving this part of the lecture – she doesn’t feel the agony, not like we do.
We hand Thea and Lucy freeze gel and a hypo. They take them somberly.
The sun is coming up. “Everybody, in your tents,” I say.
I check my own blanket, stuff my boots with my clothing, and close the tent before I hear the first agonized shriek from the double tent – and then the second.
Okay. They know now. There are muffled groans of pain and the crinkle of gel packs, and then quiet.
It is the first day.
The first time Dinah and I soloed a ride, we’d gotten stung, of course. I had just finished filling a canteen to keep in my tent. The agony hit like nothing ever had or ever would again. The first venom is the only venom; you forever imprint on that bolt of fire.
It was also the first time I saw Dinah’s magic in combat, as it were. She was struck right after me, but all I saw was a swiping motion, and then she was storming over to see if I was okay, instead of following the protocol I was so expertly demonstrating of writhing on the ground and foaming at the mouth.
It’s not that it doesn’t hurt her. It certainly harms her as much as anyone else. She has to be just as careful of necrosis and virus.
But she doesn’t lose the strength of her body, not even the strength of the very muscle that is hit.
Strength is her talent, and it can’t be touched.
And it lets Dinah, unlike myself, unlike most hellriders, unlike even the trainers, jump immediately back into battle against scorpions, or any enemy or obstacle, instead of nursing her wounds or reflexively flinching and shrinking from the threat. She runs for the flamethrower and clears them from the area.
I lay on my back in my tent staring at the fabric over me for a long time, and sleep eludes me. In the distance, sandstone crackles and pops as the desert heats up.
Certainly that first trip was when I fell for Dinah. But at what exact moment? Was it when she got me through my first scorpion sting with jibes and taunts so funny they wiped away my pain?
Or was it when she shouted with laughter as she cannonballed into an oasis pool, despite lashing brambles grasping after her?
Or maybe it was when she came up from under the water, still laughing, dark hair slicking to her shoulders, and caught my gaze – my utterly enchanted gaze – and swam over to kiss me full on the mouth.
How long had we known each other? Three weeks?
And we were kissing frankly, frantically, wide shocked eyes on eyes, hands intertwined, tongues dancing as if we’d known each other’s mouths for eternity.
Was that the moment? It was the beginning of something, for me.
But we’ve never so much as hugged since. It is not spoken of.
So, it isn’t the something that I might have briefly imagined. It isn’t that. But it is amazing. What I have is amazing.
It will have been a long, hot and painful first daysleep for Thea and Lucy, so I don’t clang around with breakfast pots as darkness falls. Dinah, too, tiptoes out and starts breaking down tents.
She’s at her mellowest at dusk, Dinah is. She sleeps hard, like a cat, and she wakes cheerful and ready for food.
I know Dinah. Dinah never changes.
She’s even worn the same nightshirt since we were in training, a patched sleeveless sheath, red and royal blue with cartoon aliens and bold lettering with words like BLAM! and POW!
A kid’s pajamas, but she has nothing like a kid’s body. She has a taut energy, long muscles and small breasts, and if she were anyone but my best friend, I would be all over her.
To other riders, the ones that tease me, it’s Charlie’s crush. They don’t know how much more I really want. I want it all. I want what our kiss foreshadowed, back at that pool. I still do.
Dinah slips her nightshirt off in the darkening cool as if no one will see her, and I look away and fill a caffeine canteen from one of the raptor belly containers. Another thing to show the newbies when they emerge.
I eye the dragon, which is waiting quietly under her reflector, her face oriented towards the quiet double tent.
For an evil creature, it seems pretty docile.
Dinah is still walking around bare-skinned. “You’re going to get bitten somewhere personal,” I say. As she fills the other canteens, I’m starting to put out pans of breakfast food, and seconds later we both smell it.
Hell skunk.
We need to get moving. Hell skunk won’t kill you, but you’ll wish for death for a very long time. “Someone needs to wake up the big tent,” I say, reversing my motions and packing up pans and breakfast and everything into one compact package.
Dinah grins and bounds over to the tent. “Hey, lovebirds,” she says in a goofy singsong.
The dragon’s eyes shift, shimmering like fire with the last reds and oranges of sunset. She clearly is paying attention to Dinah’s fast approach. Would it view Dinah as a threat to its – owner? Master? Friend?
The dragon doesn’t move, watching with what I can only describe as interest. I remember once somebody came through Transit Station with a tame parrot. Not from any place in the hell lands – a regular parrot. I’m having the same reaction now. This beast is, at some level, smart and aware.
“Ah, fucking – ” Dinah swats a scorpion off her upper arm, and her shoulder swells instantly like a water balloon.
“Get some clothes on, you lummox,” I say.
Lucy and Thea, both looking half-dead and miserable, emerge.
“Sorry you missed breakfast. It’ll probably still be edible at our first stop. Get your gear and mount up. Dinah and I will pack up everything else.”
“Isn’t she hurt?” Thea stares at Dinah’s arm and nakedness like she’s not sure which is more alarming.
“She was dropped
on her head,” I say. I start pulling rock clips and folding reflectors. When I’m on, I can break camp in under two minutes – two-and-a-half with a dragon.
“What’s that smell?” one of the escorts mumbles.
They don’t need as much babysitting as I feared, even as we enter less well-known territory. Getting through the lag from flipping one’s sleep schedule always takes a couple of days the first time, but once they are more comfortable with riding, Dinah and I again feel safe scouting ahead and letting them and the dragon lag behind.
They’re hellriders, after all, not children.
We’re well off the beaten path six nights into the run, and have started leaving beacons for Thea and Lucy to follow. They in turn pick them up and stow them. We have comms, too, though the signal seems more unreliable than ever.
When the raptors have to slow their pace in order to pick a path through a bouldery section, or there’s a risk of sinkholes, Dinah and I get a chance to talk off comms.
“I bet she’s named her raptor,” Dinah says. Thea, she means.
“Um,” I say. “Didn’t you name yours?”
“Not something goofy,” says Dinah. “The dragon is Mouse. Wait, it gets better. The first name Thea had for the dragon was Marigold. Lucy won’t let her forget it. What do you suppose she’s calling her raptor? Peanut?”
I shake my head. “Whereas,” I say, “your names are so badass. What was that first one – Bruce?”
“He was very Brucy.”
I try to remember what I named my first raptor. Something royal, I think. Consort Harold? Not quite – something like that.
“I’ve killed a lot of dragons,” Dinah suddenly says.
I briefly wonder how good a dragon’s hearing is, and how far back the others are from us. I resist glancing over my shoulder. But that’s silly. It’s not as if dragons understand conversations.
“But this one, it feels different.”
“It’s not spraying you with acid fire?”
Dinah laughs.
Even with Dinah being Dinah, these nights stretch out into a sameness. Pitch camp, charge solars, break camp, treat stings, marvel at how Mouse is growing. By now, you’d be hard pressed to distinguish Thea or Lucy from any other sand rider.
When an aquifer or a mineral vein pings my dowsing sense we enter its waypoint on our tablets like we’re supposed to. Sometimes I push my helmet visor up and shout, “check it out?” And Dinah leans forward in her saddle and races me to it.
It’s not against the rules, exactly. On regular missions, it’s tacitly encouraged. On secret missions, I have no idea.
This time, it’s gems pinging me. I’m pacing the sabkha by the time the others catch up to us, and I can dimly hear Dinah shushing them. The dragon hunkers onto the cool of the sandflat and lays still. Clever girl.
I have to concentrate. I am getting spessartine or andradite, both types of garnet, both valuable to the guild, particularly the andradite.
Garnets are important. They enhance magic, or they do once the guild infuses your gear.
Little girls even wear fake garnets when they’re playing at What mage type will you be?
I set my back foot, mutter a word, and drop the pendulum onto the sand.
“Is she supposed to drop it like that?”
Dinah’s leathers creak, someone grunts, and there’s silence again.
I take the angle between my set heel and the pendulum in the sand. It points 35 kilometers out in the deep dunes. A dune mission would be a different thing altogether. If there are garnets, these are not easy to verify, let alone reach, not on this run. But I log the waypoint.
Stay useful to the guild.
I put the pendulum back between my breasts. As we prepare to mount back up, Thea happens to find herself next to me. “Garnets?”
“It’s one of my specialties,” I say, and turn away. The guild is definitely breathing down my neck, then, and I do not want that tension to break into the open, where it would complicate an already complicated situation.
Surely Thea already knows what I can and can’t find out here. So if she has a particular side-mission in mind, but wants to be coy about it, I can play dumb as well as the next rider.
And if she’s upfront about it, fine. Regular finder’s commission, regular rates, through channels. I’m not her friend, she’s not my boss.
ACT II
The hell desert rises up to bite you in the ass when you least expect it.
Oh, did you forget it’s a hell desert? Sure, everything wants to kill you in a conventional desert, what with the running out of water and baking to death.
Now add in rads, mutated scorpions, skunks, and other demon spawn, that’ll get you up to purgatory desert, maybe.
Hell desert has bigger problems. It has hellholes.
I get a whiff at the start of our twenty-third night of travel, not even enough to mention. But an hour later it’s unmistakable. This particular blend of sulfur, ichor, and charred air is etched in my brain.
When it’s within view, I call a halt. The horizon is a black ridge limned with orange magma. Above, the stars are splashed across the night sky.
Hellholes are poorly named. They are more like standing waves of earth and reptilian flesh that sweep across the earth’s surface, liquefying everything in their path, and leaving in their wake vast tar pits seething with vipers and worse.
Unlike the way a tsunami follows an earthquake, the hellhole obeys no recognizable pattern. It’s more like a brushfire, random and very, very much in our way. The only good thing that can be said about it is that it moves slowly, and eventually dies out.
“Reading about these,” Thea says, looking through binoculars, “did not prepare me.”
She’s probably just recognizing the writhing, smoking mass at the crest of the earthen wall, lit from behind with its hellish glow, actually comprises thousands – millions – of worms, snakes, and indescribable larval things, each one bigger than one of our raptor constructs.
Mouse flings herself upward and soars over the hellhole and looks back at us as if to say she’s waiting, what’s the hold up?
But it doesn’t matter if the tar pits beyond that wave stretch for 100 meters or one hundred times that, it can’t be crossed, not by our raptors.
Dinah laughs up at Mouse. “Hey, Charlie, can you imagine if we had four of those, and bigger? With saddles?”
“You’d just fall off,” I say. I knew she’d be thinking of riding it. The dragon soars in lazy circles above the hellhole, lit orange by the fires below.
She’s not rideable, certainly not, but for the first time I wonder if having a flying team member might be useful. For mapping, scouting?
She’s not a team member.
“Is she coming back?” I say.
Thea puts her hands to her mouth and emits a loud whistle, and Mouse folds her wings tight to her body and bullets back to where we’re waiting on our raptors. A wash of warm air gusts over us as she pivots at the last second and lands lightly.
“Show-off,” says Dinah, without a trace of irony, though she actually looks impressed.
“Stay close,” Thea says, and the damned thing actually sits, like an obedient hound.
We withdraw a kilometer or so, and pitch camp. Even if the hellhole advances in this direction, we’re good here for days and days. And over the course of the day period, between catnaps, we strategize.
Comms to station are out, which is making Thea fretful, but it means comms among the four of us will be spotty, too. We also can’t count on the hellhole burning out.
We have to go around.
Westward, we’d run into the main travel routes down to Sand City, so that’s not an option. Hunched over a crude map scratched on a sandy slab, we contemplate the terrain eastward.
“What about the tunnels?” says Dinah.
“I thought those were just rumors,” I say.
“I bet they’re real,” she says, scraping a line onto our diagram. “They could ge
t us under the hellhole. All the way to the city wall, maybe, in complete secrecy.”
“How sure are you?” asks Thea.
“Absolutely not at all,” I say. This is slipping out of control, and all based on station gossip, murky scout reports from before our time.
“So we check it out, at least?” says Lucy, but Thea catches her eye and then it’s the wonder twins doing their telepathy-adjacent thing.
“Faster if we stay behind,” Thea says after a moment. “If you find tunnels, or even just a way around the hellhole, we and Mouse will join you.”
Much faster, yes. But it feels like Thea has stacked the deck, somehow. For what purpose, I can’t imagine. However, it’s not the worst idea, even if it means letting the cargo out of my control. When was the gormy thing ever in my control?
Maybe choosing the least bad idea is what makes a leader. No matter who comes up with it.
“Okay,” I say, keeping my misgivings to myself. “Dinah and I will head out at dusk.” And as I say it, I realize how glad it makes me. Away with just Dinah.
As we set extra water taps for Lucy and Thea, and agree on a comms schedule, Dinah seems to catch my mood, my frazzled mix of worry and anticipation. “Lovebirds want to be alone anyway,” she says with a broad wink at Lucy. “And lucky you,” she says, turning to me with a little curtsey, “you get me.”
My pulse trips, but it’s just Dinah being Dinah.
She digs around in her raptor’s belly and emerges with flares, an armload of beacons, and a small flamethrower, and places them with the newbies’ supplies. She shoots me a jaunty grin. “You never know when a flamethrower will come in handy, Char.”
“We also have a dragon,” Lucy points out. Thea grins.
“Ooh, right!” Dinah says. “Okay, partner – ready to dowse some tunnels?”
We mount up. “Try not to die, girls,” I say, and we don’t wait for the reply.
Dinah hits the side of her raptor to race forward. She doesn’t care about the dangers. She just likes to run.
Through the End Page 2