by Karen Healey
He grimaced.
“I’ll get her,” Washington said quietly, and we went down the stairs together. She broke off to go into the infirmary—I caught a glimpse of Bethari and Tegan bent over the sickbed before I took off around the corner for my own bedroom.
Joph was sitting in the middle of the bed, clutching her red medicine bag.
“Why is there so much noise?” she asked.
“The fire’s come too close. We have to go; come on.”
“Go where?” she said, without moving. “I like fires. We’re not allowed to have them, though. Air pollution.”
Joph must have taken her pain meds while I was upstairs, and a high dose at that. She wasn’t worried about the fire; she wasn’t worried about anything. And that meant she wasn’t going to run on my word. We didn’t have time for explanations. I pulled her arm over my shoulder and yanked her up, steadying her waist with my other arm. We took a few stumbling steps that way, but her legs were like sacks stuffed with wool, and when she tried to move faster and put more weight on her left leg, it gave out entirely.
I scooped her into my arms, red bag and all, and ran through the halls, which were mostly empty of people now. My arms and thighs strained under Joph’s weight as I lumbered upstairs.
“Ow,” she protested, as her elbow whacked against the edge of the hole in the floor.
“Sorry,” I gasped. I saw the white-haired woman in the map room, industriously stuffing maps into the fire set there. Ridiculous, to burn that evidence when a major disaster was bearing down on us. The burning smell was even stronger, and the air in the house was thick with haze.
Outside, people were piling into vehicles and taking off quickly. A larger blue car was pulled up by the door, with Tegan and Washington carefully laying out Dr. Carmen on the backseat. Bethari was looking in the trunk, under the guise of dumping her bag in. She looked up as I came forward and pointed significantly, and I breathed a little easier, even with my long-legged burden. We had the EMP at hand.
Tegan helped me get Joph into the middle seat, pulling while I pushed; it was easier when Bethari climbed in the front seat and started telling Joph to move, because Joph actually made an effort when her ex-girlfriend delivered orders.
Lat was in the driver’s seat, drumming his fingers against the wheel. “Get in with us, Sergeant,” he said abruptly. “Your group’s gone.”
Washington closed the door on Dr. Carmen and came round to the front, moving Bethari into the jump seat in the middle. Hurfest squeezed in beside me, the doors slammed, and Lat guided the car around two in the driveway and hit the dirt road running. I caught one glimpse of the stone house that had been our all-too-temporary refuge over Hurfest’s shoulder. Then it was gone, swallowed by a curve in the road.
With four of us in the middle seat, it was a tight squeeze, and I regretted the new breadth of my shoulders. Washington twisted round from the front and handed out strips of toweling that had been dampened. I didn’t know what to do with them until I saw Tegan wrap hers around her mouth and nose.
Smoke inhalation, I realized, and made sure Joph’s cloth was on tight. Bethari had merely wet one end of her headscarf and pulled it over her face as she messed with the car computer, and I conceded, privately, that hijab could be useful after all.
Through the car windows, I could see little black dots floating down through the air. They looked like the snow I’d seen on ’casts if snow were black, and for a moment I was confused. Then one flared red and died, and I realized they were embers and ash. We went up a long hill, and I twisted in my seat, ignoring Hurfest’s grumble.
From this height, I could see what the landscape had obscured before. Behind us, maybe three or four kilometers back, was the fire. It stretched out for miles, an uneven and roiling mass of black smoke, with red and orange flashes of light at the base. The embers were soaring ahead, borne by the savage wind, and even as I watched I saw them smolder in dry brush, setting more of the land alight.
The smoke swept over the patched green roof of the stone house and swallowed it whole. Washington had been right; if anything, we should have left earlier. As it was, we were racing the fire, and the fire was winning. I didn’t think much of the chances of the people who’d left after us.
I turned around again. “It’s coming,” I said, my voice shrill in my own ears.
Lat didn’t waste time responding. His eyes were narrowed, and he was coaxing more out of the electric motor than it should have been able to give him. Bethari had set up the car’s computer to bounce through several proxies instead of revealing our location to anyone who cared to look. She gave him terse status updates from the satellite footage, guiding him through the twisty country roads.
Tegan reached over Joph’s lap and took my hand in hers. She was staring straight ahead, the strong bones of her clear features muffled in her damp towel, but I could see her lips moving underneath it. She was praying.
It was harder to get angry about her beliefs now.
The car jerked violently as Lat swung the wheel and pulled us off the road onto a field baked dry. I saw why as we bumped over the lumpy dirt—a stand of eucalyptus trees by the side of the road had caught fire, sparked by a floating ember, and one of those trees had fallen across the road, blocking the path. The turn and the uneven ground cost us speed. Lat muttered something in a language I didn’t recognize and turned back to the road.
The noise was tremendous, louder than a train, louder than the engine of the jet I’d flown in to Australia. My family was wealthy compared with almost everyone else in Djibouti, but not wealthy enough for air travel; it had been the first time I’d ever been in the air. Probably the last, too. I brought Tegan’s hand to my face and pressed my cheek against her palm. My eyes were stinging from smoke irritation, and every breath I sucked in seemed drier. I was sweating, but my exposed skin was dry, the heat sucking the moisture away as soon as it touched the surface.
Half an hour to Bendigo by road. Half an hour to safety, if Bendigo was safe. How long had we been driving? Even at the speeds Lat was pushing out of the car, how long did we have to go?
Through the driver’s windshield, I saw red light flare ahead. Another fire across the road. But this time there was no handy field to the side. Lat cursed viciously and shouted, “Get down!”
His voice cracked on the words. I had time to grab Joph’s head and force it down, time to feel Hurfest hurl his body on top of mine, and then, somehow, Lat forced the car to go even faster. Something struck the undercarriage and scraped hideous sounds out of the road. The engine whirred. I could smell the stench of burning hair, as the heat sizzled at my arms.
This is it, I thought, oddly calm, and then whatever branch or rock had blocked us gave way, and we leaped through the flames.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Poco a poco
We made it to Bendigo.
“No one’s fighting for their houses,” Tegan said, as we drove through the empty outskirts of the town. She sounded puzzled.
“In your time, they could use water to soak the roofs,” Washington told her. “Now all the available water is for the fire brigade. Everyone else gathers in a clear space and hopes that the wind will change to spare their homes.”
The population had gathered on the local rugby grounds, on the east side of the town. Once, people had played on genuine grass, but as the droughts went on and the rivers dried up, they’d had to lay down a synthetic substitute instead. It was fireproof, which as far as I was concerned made it several grades better than the real thing.
Tegan and I kept our cloth masks on, just in case, but the police officers and volunteer fire-brigade members waving people into the grounds had much more important things on their minds than looking out for a pair of famous runaways. “Any injured?” one woman with a flashlight asked. “Smoke inhalation, second- or third-degree burns?”
“Only minor scorching,” Lat promised.
I winced and hoped she wouldn’t take too close a look at the blank
et thrown over the woman lying in the backseat. Dr. Carmen was conscious, but keeping very quiet. Her injuries would demand medical attention immediately, and other, much less welcome attention would follow swiftly afterward.
“Then you might need to wait. Emergency cases go to the white tent if it gets worse, all right?” The woman pointed out a spare patch of ground near one set of goalposts and told us where to pick up some water. If she bothered to think about us at all, she probably took us for vacationers who’d chosen a bad place for a break.
We stayed in the car, but opened all the doors to get what cross breeze we could. “I’ll get the water,” Washington said, and strode off to the field next door, where volunteers were handing out big bottles, guarded by armed police. No one wanted water riots tonight.
“Hurfest, how’s the arm?” Lat asked.
Carl Hurfest had been the only one injured as we burst through the flames. He’d flung himself over Joph, Tegan and me—whether to try and protect us, or just because he was slow to get down, I didn’t know, and wasn’t sure if I cared. The burn on his right arm looked like a bad case of sunburn—darker than the surrounding skin, and starting to wrinkle around the edges. He inspected it with a detached air and then shrugged. “If you fetch me a fork, I could see how cooked journalist tastes.”
Bethari giggled and then crushed the sound with both hands. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I just… out of all the people trying to get us, I never thought we’d have to worry about the weather.” She laughed again, her voice high and climbing.
“This is a deadly land,” Lat said, which he probably meant to be a sobering reminder. Instead it sounded pretentious. Hurfest and Joph started giggling, too, and I was hard put not to join them. Tegan ducked her head to hide a smile.
Lat stared at us as if we were all infinitely confusing and then shook his head. “I’m going to steal someone else’s computer and check in with the other groups,” he said. “Hurfest, Bethari, you’re with me. You four stay here.”
He vanished into the night, seemingly unaware that he was still wearing only sleep shorts. Bethari rolled her eyes and followed him.
“You four stay here,” Tegan said, in a deep growl, and I did laugh then, Joph joining in until we had laughed most of the terror out. It was all right for Lat and Washington—they were warriors, trained to face death and recover swiftly. We civilian folk needed a few moments to adjust to the aftermath of deadly peril.
“As if I could walk,” Dr. Carmen said, flipping the blanket off her face and sitting up. “Phew.” It was the first time I’d heard her voice in person; it was a pleasant contralto. I bet she could sing.
“Are you feeling all right?” Tegan asked anxiously.
“I’m fine. Let me see the medical supplies?”
I fetched the bag from the boot and deposited it politely on her lap. She poked through, making pleased noises, and commended Joph on her insight. “I think I’ve got everything I’ll need here.” She fished out a blue bottle and tossed it to Joph. “I think these are yours.”
“More painkillers?’ I asked.
“My antiandrogens,” she said.
I knew that Joph had… what was the polite phrase? Been born with a male body? But she was so solidly a girl in my head that it was always weird to be reminded of it. Whatever my face did, Joph smiled peaceably at me and dry-swallowed a pill without ceremony.
“Thank you, Abdi,” the doctor said. Her eyes measured me again, flickering to Tegan and then back to my face. Her introduction to me had been me fighting with Tegan in the infirmary. What else did she know? Had Hurfest—or Lat—told her what I’d been doing with her foster daughter on that table?
And how would she react to me wanting to take Tegan to Djibouti?
My best bet was a consistent demonstration that I was a nice, polite young man. Fortunately, I really was young, and mostly polite. Nice was a little harder to fake.
“You’re welcome, Dr. Carmen,” I replied, and took the proffered bag.
“Call me Marie,” she said. “Tegan told me your plan. It sounds practical.” That measuring look was still there, though.
“If they’d left Bethari here, we could go now,” Tegan said.
I didn’t bother remarking that we could go without Bethari, since she wanted to stay in Australia so badly. Tempting, but the suggestion would only start a fight. And I really didn’t want to leave her to Lat’s mercy when he discovered us vanished.
Besides, we needed to know where to go, first.
“Do you have any suggestions for somewhere we could hide, Marie?” I asked.
“No, I don’t remember everything I told them, but it would be safer not to depend on me as a source of safety.”
I winced. “Joph?”
“The compound was the only place I knew.”
“Tegan?” I said, without much hope. All the places she’d known—if they still existed after a hundred years—would be in the city, and we needed to head for the coast.
She shook her head. “Sorry. I haven’t really had time to find hidey-holes.”
“Bethari’s contacts,” I thought out loud. “Are they all Save Tegan contacts, too, or can she approach a couple of people who are largely unconnected?”
“You’d have to ask her,” Joph said doubtfully.
Tegan grinned at me. “Look at your brain, ticking away. You’ll figure something out. Just as well, the details are your specialty, not mine.”
I laughed, probably more than the joke deserved. “Well, while Bethari’s gone, I may as well scope out the camping ground.”
“But Lat told us to stay here,” Tegan said.
My good humor vanished as abruptly as if she’d popped a balloon with a pin. “I heard him,” I said, and walked away.
The atmosphere in the grounds was heightened but not particularly grim. There hadn’t been any confirmed deaths this evening, and most of the inhabitants of Bendigo were only at the refuge as a precaution. Unless the wind started blowing northeast, their town would survive the blaze. The prevailing mood seemed to be hopeful; people felt that so far this summer, they’d gotten off lucky, and the weather might continue to be kind.
I kept my mouth shut, marveling at the capability of people to accept anything as normal. In Tegan’s time, such enormous, life-threatening bushfires had been rare but increasing in severity. Now they came every summer, multiple times; it probably hadn’t been a good idea for Hurfest to plan a revolution during the fire season.
Unless he wanted army resources tied up in rescue efforts and government infrastructure overloaded with relief requests.
Then it was probably a very good idea indeed.
I shook my head as if I could dislodge my reluctant admiration for the man’s planning. I didn’t want to be impressed by Carl Hurfest. But it was politically pragmatic thinking, the sort my mother had raised me to consider. There was room for idealism in her world—and Hurfest’s, obviously—but it had to be carried out in a practical manner.
I gnawed at my lip. My mother was nothing like Carl Hurfest, not really. She’d taught me to think this way so that I could survive in the maze of political machinations. Hurfest was using pragmatism at the cost of innocent lives.
But I couldn’t shake the notion that she might admire his methods, too.
The medical tents were surrounded by the densest concentration of people, functioning as a social hub as much as a treatment center. Volunteers sorted through people efficiently, triaging the injured and moving their supporters aside. I drifted through the mass and listened, keeping my face hidden behind my towel. I didn’t look unusual; with the scent of smoke still poisoning the air, most people were in masks or something like them. And I needed to get some sort of a handle on how successful Hurfest’s planned coup was likely to be with Australia’s citizens.
Unfortunately, all anyone seemed to want to talk about was the fires. I was just about to break my cover of silence and ask a few leading questions out of sheer impatience, when my ear caught a
word guaranteed to make me pay attention.
“—think about the Resolution?” I heard. I sat down on the grass and turned slightly, trying to observe without being noticed myself.
The speaker was a tall man with a long beard, his hair caught up in a turban. “Personally, I think it’s a bunch of bullshit,” he said importantly. “All those public funds tied up in a fool’s mission.”
“They’re not using public funds anymore,” a woman in a pink dress said mildly. His wife, maybe. “It’s all private donations now.”
“People with the money to waste on starship donations could find better things to do with that money,” Long Beard insisted.
“It is their money, though,” Pink Dress told him. “Did you see they’ve decided on the planet? Keolanui D. One huge continent, plenty of fresh water, plenty of native flora, but no large animal life.”
“A proper mickey operation, if you ask me. How can they get a starship to Keolaney whatever if they can’t even hold onto their, what do you call ’em, youth ambassadors?”
“Those poor children,” Pink Dress sighed. “Kidnapped by terrorists; they must be so scared. Tegan’s had enough to deal with.”
I tensed, then forced my shoulders down. Just a typical Australian boy, bored by the need to leave his home for the day.
“It’s the refugee children I feel sorry for,” another man broke in, pushing his fair hair away from his face. “Some of them were born in those camps. Can you imagine? The chance to get on board the Resolution must be such a relief.”
I chewed on my tongue so that I wouldn’t break into the conversation, to tell Blondie exactly what I thought of the Resolution’s cryocargo.
“I wouldn’t bring children into the world if I lived in such circumstances,” Long Beard declared.
“Their parents might not have had much choice,” Pink Dress pointed out.
“Well, that’s exactly the problem! Why wasn’t government funding going to better birth control? How come honest Australians get hit with tax increases for having more than two kids, but these thirdies can have as many as they like on the public dollar?”