by Hugh Howey
Page 27
And so she learned. And the next day they forced her to suffer a nightmare. And the next day she learned some more.
And so it went for many sleeps.
And what they were teaching her was war.
22 · Drenard
Anlyn was glad she and Gil had only one shade bridge to cross, for his moment of panic had nearly gotten them both hurt—or far worse. She was already furious, her hot side dominating, as she dove into the shadowpath ahead of the next strong gust of wind. Before she could vent her anger, however, Gil fell to his knees before her, panting.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, over and over.
“It’s okay,” Anlyn said, though she didn’t mean it.
“I just got scared. ” Gil wiped at his face, a sheen of sweat mixing with his tears.
“We have to be more careful,” was all Anlyn could say.
He helped her up, and they walked together the last few hundred paces, a tense silence settling between them. Their quiet left just the canyon moans and the whipping winds and the flapping of loose bits of their Wadi suits to pace their march.
Anlyn let Gil walk ahead of her, perhaps to keep an eye on him, perhaps because her excitement for the Rite had abated. She took another swig from her thermos, careful to not drip any, and looked through the Wadi holes to her side.
The animals’ tunnels had grown in size over the last few thousand paces, moving from something a single fist could get caught in, to holes almost large enough for a young child to squeeze through. The wall was also quite thin, being a part of the narrow wedge that had divided the canyon in two. Some of the tunnels went straight through to the other side and were lit up almost all the way across. Anlyn knew that these were getting to be a better size for grasping eggs, but the canyon’s pocketed dead-end was visible just ahead, which should offer them a bounty and save them time in hunting.
“This is gonna be embarrassing,” Gil yelled over his shoulder. He held the egg graspers to his side, the pinchers clicking together nervously.
“You’re just now realizing that?” Anlyn asked.
Gil shook his head slowly. He stopped and waited for Anlyn to catch up. “Well, maybe I am,” he said. “All the other boys are gonna have stories to tell. ”
“We’ll make up something heroic for you,” Anlyn told her cousin. “C’mon, let’s go get our eggs. ”
“Anlyn?”
The voice came through a Wadi hole, high and tight, nearly lost among the cries of the wind passing across the face of the cliff. At first, Anlyn thought she’d imagined it.
“Anlyn!”
There it was again. Anlyn stopped and leaned close to one of the holes beside her.
“Hello?” she called into it. “Coril? Is that you?”
“Hey!” Her cousin’s voice came through with an echo and a crispness borrowed from the cool stone. “I’m on the other side of the wall!”
Anlyn ran back to the hole her cousin’s voice seemed to emanate from the loudest. “How are you?” she yelled. “Have you got your Wadi yet?”
“Go back another hole,” Coril shouted. “I saw you guys go past a second ago. ”
Anlyn looked ahead to see that Gil had already begun rummaging in one of the holes with his graspers. She moved back down the cliff face, peeking through caves high and low and looking for one straight enough to see all the way through.
“Go back,” Coril yelled.
Anlyn moved the other way and bent down. There, across from her and through a half dozen paces of stone, was Coril.
“Hey, Cousin!”
“Hey,” Anlyn said. “So where’s your Wadi Thooo?”
“I had one,” Coril said, “but he got away. There’s a ton of watering holes in a pocket canyon over here. You really should’ve come with me. We’d both have one by now. ”
“Probably right,” Anlyn said. “Well, I’m already half done with my water, so I’d better find an egg. ”
“Okay. Keep an eye out, though. The one I wounded went into this system somewhere. I heard him fighting with some females, so he’s probably pissed. ”
Anlyn looked away from her Cousin’s dim face to see if Gil had heard; she’d rather not have to deal with him if there was a male Wadi loose. She turned back to whisper through the tube to her cousin, only to see something dark descend across the hole. Anlyn leaned close, thinking Coril had pressed her face to the other side, when her cousin screamed. She let out a blood-boiling wail of fear and pain.
It was the sound of someone being attacked.
•• Darrin ••
When Anlyn accidentally jumped into the Darrin system, she did more than simply jump into the middle of a civil war, she jumped into a universe of nightmares and pain. And the more she tried to avoid both, the more curiosity she aroused in her captors—and so the more things began to change for her. After another dozen sleeps, and another half-dozen untouched nightmares, the English they were teaching her began to hone in on its target. It veered away from the rudimentary basics of communication and made aim for a vocabulary of armaments and defenses. They taught her about missiles, about thrust velocities, about tracking systems. They taught her how projectiles flew and every way to defend against them.
The lessons frustrated Anlyn. It wasn’t just that she loathed technobabble, it was more that she wasn’t learning the kinds of words she needed in order to plead for her release. And no matter how hard she struggled to alter the course of the lessons, she found her instructors just as reluctant to budge. So she satisfied herself with what she could glean from the sentences they spoke between each other. Along with snippets she overheard in her cell, the instructors’ banter helped flesh out a language heavy on the hate. And in the meantime, she continued to allow the Humans to drag her into the room with the padded tables and strap her down. She even learned how to stay calm while the buckles were being cinched, how to make herself “swell out” so they didn’t feel so tight afterward. She learned to relish the few moments of peace she had lying there, face down, cheek to cushion, before each descent into the tiring chases.
She had no idea how long that routine went on before they showed her what she was really doing. It could’ve been for what she had come to learn was a “month. ” It could’ve been several of them.
Nothing seemed different about the apparatus. She still had to suffer the wires being clipped to her skin, each spot on her body sore and tender from the habit. The helmet came on last, Anlyn lifting her head so they wouldn’t do it too rough. But this time, instead of an immediate plummet into nightmare-land, one of the Humans in the white tunics knelt down in front of her.
“Red is for rockets,” he said in English. He held up a white card with a red rocket on it. Anlyn felt a wash of confusion at the break in the routine. It was reflected in the Human’s face as what she now knew to be annoyance. She nodded as much as the helmet straps would allow her, letting him know she understood.
“Good,” the Human said.
It was a word they used a lot, which made Anlyn doubt she truly understood what it meant.
“Blue is for bolts. ” Another card came up, this one showing a blast of plasma fire leaping out of a cannon. The barrel of the cannon and the plasma were both blue, even though she’d never heard of the weapons firing in that color. She nodded anyway.
“Green is for good. ” The last card came up. It was a drawing of a young Human, colored green, getting up from the padded table, his helmet coming off. He was surrounded by men in white tunics all beaming with joy.
Anlyn nodded. She realized why the bolt was blue and the rocket red. It was the same sort of tool they had used to teach her basic words, with the beginnings of each pair starting in the same manner. She expected some final instructions, but the man nodded to someone else and stood up.
And another nightmare began.
••••
Once again, Anlyn was launched
out of a Wadi hole, a handful of angry beasts on her tail. Over the past few nightmares, the scene had changed a little, perhaps as she learned new things to be frightened of. Now and then, the canyon walls were lined with bars; spitting Humans clutched them and waved their arms through the gaps to grab at her and hold her down for the Wadi. There was some of that in this dream, and even a Human or two chasing among the Wadi, but most of it was more of the same. It wasn’t until she had dodged around the first few creatures, sending them smashing into each other, that she noticed what had changed.
A bright circle loomed in one corner of her vision. It was outlined white and full of colored blobs. Anlyn puzzled over this, then felt something slash across the back of her leg. She stumbled, dodged out of the way, and went back to her zigzag patterns, cursing herself for her break in concentration.
She shook her pursuer and sent two others into each other. With a bit of space created behind, she took a moment to glance back at the circle hovering in the corner of her vision. There were even more blobs inside, just as more Wadi had appeared behind her. It didn’t take long for the pattern of shapes—the way they were moving, emerging, colliding, disappearing—to make sense. The blobs were the things running after her. She could see them all in one place, just like the ship’s tactical display from her rudimentary flight training.
The red ones seemed to go with the slower, dancing Wadi. They were the ones that could leap up a wall, circle around, then come for her in another direction. Slow, of course, was relative only to the blue Wadi, which came fast and in straight lines, or with just a little curve. These were the bolts. The others were the rockets.
The connection kicked in another level of awareness for Anlyn. She suddenly knew what she was. She finally understood what they were doing with her. She looked down at herself, at her running form, and saw that she was red.
She was a rocket.
One of the Wadi swiped at her, punishing her for another lapse of concentration. Anlyn felt the gashes across her back; she felt herself wobble, losing momentum. She pressed on, drawing two of the red Wadi into the path of an oncoming blue one, the three of them vanishing from her nightmare and also from the display.
After that, she used the vectors from the circle to help her with the beasts chasing behind. She knew what the game was now. She wondered if people from some enemy prison were virtually strapped into the other rockets, the ones chasing after her. She wondered what that enemy was using to stoke their fears and make them strain as hard as she. She wondered if that was why she could always outrun them, finding that safe spot at the end. Maybe it was her extra fear that made her special. Maybe it was a lifetime of Wadis and Bodis and forever running.
And that made her wonder just what the safe spot was that waited for her at the end of each canyon run. What was the hole she dove into at the end of her nightmares? Just where was she guiding these rockets day after day, sleep after sleep? And why did she sense that they were safe places, but only for her?
23 · Drenard
“Coril!”
Anlyn peered into the Wadi hole, which was now unobstructed and lit with a dull glow. She could see out the other side and through to the brightly lit canyon’s far wall, but there was no sign of her cousin. She yelled Coril’s name through the hole again, and by the time her echo dissipated, her cousin’s screams had come to a sickening halt. Anlyn could hear the thrumming of her own heartbeat over the canyon’s cries.
“What happened?” Gil asked. He arrived by Anlyn’s side and peered into one of the holes.
“A Wadi—” Anlyn gasped. The rest of the thought remained unformed in her head. She looked upwind, back toward the distant nightside, and thought about how long it would take her to get around, even at a full sprint. She turned and scanned for the largest of the holes, but none were quite the size she needed to crawl through. She looked up and considered the ludicrous.
“What do we do?” Gil asked.
Anlyn secured her graspers to her sunshield and slung them both across her back. She reached for the highest hole she could grab, stuck her foot in another, and lifted herself up. The next hole was a lunge, but she got a firm grip and found a spot for her other foot. Higher up, the holes were smaller, but more tightly packed. The wall was completely shaded all the way to the lip; she hadn’t thought any further than that.
“What are you doing?” Gil yelled up after her.
Anlyn looked down at him through her feet. She was already quite a few paces up, enough to not want to fall. She was about to answer when Coril’s screams resumed. It sounded more like someone waking up in a nightmare than a person engaged in a fight for their life. After a few moments, the screams changed into more of the latter. There were shrieks of surprise and pain. Anlyn froze. She watched numbly as Gil dropped his gear and ran off toward the nightside, running with the same mad panic he had displayed earlier on the shade bridge. Anlyn cursed him and reached for the next handhold, clawing her way toward the top.
A dozen paces higher, she ran out of safe spots to put her hands; her arms were already sore and shaking from the climb. She wasn’t sure she could hold on with one hand to do what she needed next, so she reached inside a small hole up to her elbow and made a fist. Leaning back on her arm, she felt her expanded hand wedge itself tight, allowing her to hang from her bones and give her muscles a break. She let go with her other hand and found herself comfortably secure, if quite a ways up.
There was no way to grab the hot stone over the top of the canyon wall—that rock sat in the light of both Horis for day after day. It would melt her skin, right through the suit. She did know, however, that the suit could take the brunt of a full-on shine for a minute or more. She just needed a way to get across a few paces of rock without touching it. She reached behind her head and pulled the graspers off her shield, then stuck the long device inside a hole near her waist, leaving just enough sticking out to form a step. Anlyn pushed down on the arms of the protruding graspers, testing them. Satisfied the device would hold her, she lifted one foot and placed it on the graspers. Still leaning back on her expanded fist, Anlyn lifted her other foot and balanced fully on the small handle. With her free hand, she pulled her hood over the top of her head, all the way down to her eyes. She wiggled her chin in the lower half, then pulled the sunshield off.