“Well?” she prompted, handing him a sandwich.
He peered between the thick slabs of bread – one thing they had plenty of – and made a face. “Gross,” he said, a grin touching his lips. Nicole batted him in the shoulder. “Everybody’s okay. No more than the usual, except for Minkman. Said he had a broken finger on his left hand.”
“What did you do?”
Reza laughed. “I told him to use his right hand and not to worry about it.” Nicole frowned, sometimes not quite sure if he was joking or not. “Okay, okay. I splinted it for him, too. If he wants more than that before he can get to the infirmary tonight, he has to go to Muldoon, which he did not want to do. I can’t imagine why.”
“Bon,” she said. “Now, sit down and eat.”
“Oui, madame,” he said, this time with a perfect La Seyne accent. He plopped down across from her, somehow not getting dirt all over the picnic cloth. Taking a long swallow of water from his cup, he began to devour the first of three sandwiches and an anemic apple that served as dessert. The first day Nicole had offered to pack his lunch for him she had only made one sandwich, and Reza had been more anxious than usual to get back from the fields, this time to the dining hall instead of the library. He had never said a word about it, but she had felt awful when she saw how hungry he was that evening. She had not repeated that mistake since.
She stole a glance at him as he was looking off into the distance at something, the left side of his face turned toward her. Despite the scar that marred his skin, the keepsake left by the Kreelan warrior who had killed his parents, he was a handsome boy. He wasn’t gorgeous or glamorous as some children promised to be upon their entry into puberty, but his face and his body radiated his inner strength and spirit. His skin was a golden color, not all of it from the tan from his years of work in the fields. Nor was it quite the olive color often associated with descendants of Terran Mediterranean races, nor was it European. He was all of those, yet none of them. The same was true of his hair. Almost chocolate brown, bleached somewhat by the sun, it was thick and lush, almost oriental in its texture. Haphazardly cut close to his skull when she had first met him, she had taken it upon herself to give him a proper haircut. Now it tapered evenly in the back to his neckline, with his ears and forehead neatly exposed in what she jokingly referred to as House 48’s haute couture hairstyle.
“You’ll be leaving soon,” he said quietly.
“What?” she asked, unsure if she had heard him correctly.
“Wiley got your acceptance papers this morning from Lakenheath Training Center,” he told her, his eyes focused on the ground. “You maxed out on almost all those tests you took a few months ago. Made you look like kind of a hot shot, I guess. There’ll be a ship coming to pick you up on your birthday next week.” He smiled, still not looking at her. “You’ve reached ‘free fifteen.’” He finally looked up. His eyes were a confused mixture of relief that she had been accepted and sorrow that she would be leaving him, probably forever. “I… I wanted to tell you as soon as I found out this morning, but…” He trailed off. “I couldn’t,” he finally whispered. “I didn’t want to say it, that you’re really going to be leaving. But I couldn’t put it off any longer.” He offered her a sad smile. “Congratulations, trainee fighter pilot Carré.”
Nicole was speechless for a moment, her mouth working, but no words came out. The time had passed so quickly, her brain sputtered. It was too soon. It was impossible.
“Reza…” she managed. And then, like a dam bursting, she began to cry. She wrapped her arms around Reza and held him tight, overcome with joy that her future was not completely bleak, that she had something to look forward to. “Oh, Reza,” she exclaimed, her French accent nearly obliterating the Standard words, “this is so wonderful! We can leave this rotten place! And in only a few days! We…”
“I can’t leave, remember?” Reza reminded her softly, fighting to hold back tears of his own as he held her. He had lost so many friends to time and circumstance that he thought he would be hardened to this, ready for it when it came, when it was time for her to leave. But he wasn’t. He could never be ready for the things he felt now, inside himself. He knew she had to go, knew that it was the only thing for her. But it hurt so much to think of what things were going to be like without her.
In that moment he knew the truth about his feelings. He loved her. He knew he was only a barely pubescent boy with emerging hormones, but he knew in his heart that it was true.
Her voice faded away as the realization forced itself upon her like Muldoon’s groping hands.
“Mon chère,” she whispered, the joyful tears suddenly becoming bitter and empty. “Oh, Reza, what will you do?”
He tried to smile, failed. “The same as I always do,” he choked, shrugging. “I’ll make do somehow. I’m just happy that you made it, Nicole,” he told her. “As much as it’s going to hurt to see you go, I’m so glad for you.”
They held each other for a while longer, trying to forestall the bittersweet future that vowed to separate them, brother and sister in a family bound together not by blood, but by trust and love.
Finally, without saying another word, they rose unsteadily to their feet and got back to work.
***
Muldoon let the field glasses he had been holding to his eyes slap against his chest, the once bright finish of the instrument long since corroded by hours of being held in his sweaty palms.
He spent a goodly portion of his day watching Gard and his crew from an unobtrusive distance. He especially enjoyed watching the French girl. Yes, he thought, licking the sticky sweat from his lips, especially her. After the confrontation that very first day, Muldoon had been forced by Reza’s tactics to leave them more or less alone. He had taken out his frustrations on his usual victims, although he had never thought of them as such. To Muldoon they were only young children who should have liked him, but did not for some inexplicable reason. But the lust in him for the little wench from La Seyne refused to die. If anything, it grew the more he tried to satisfy his urgings in other ways.
Muldoon had received word through his grapevine that Nicole would be leaving soon, and the diabolical device that served as his brain was churning through possibilities, looking for options, an opening.
Yeah, he thought to himself, feeling his crotch begin to throb, I’d like to explore an opening, right between the little bitch’s legs. And he would not mind sticking it to her little boy benefactor, either, he thought as his teeth ground together in frustration. Just before he choked the life out of the little bastard.
He turned to get back in the van, his mind still churning, looking for a scenario that would work. He was not worried about the house administrators, or even the Navy ship coming to get the girl. It was the kids themselves, plus the joker that was the old man. Muldoon had always thought him a senile idiot, at least until he had tried to push the old Marine around, threatening him after Wiley had witnessed one of Muldoon’s little indiscretions. The ground had never hit Muldoon that hard or fast. When he came to, the old man was sweeping the floor nearby as if nothing had happened. He was a wild card, and one thing Muldoon despised was unpredictability.
His mind began to bubble with frustration. He was usually so good at making plans quickly, and he kicked one broken-arched foot at the steppe grass, watching the dust trail away like smoke.
Like smoke.
And then it came to him. “Oh, that’s just rich,” he told himself, chuckling softly as he swung his bulk into the driver’s seat. “Brother Muldoon,” he said, “you certainly do have a way.”
He started the engine and drove off, heading for the compound to make the arrangements for the French girl’s coming of age.
***
Reza frowned. “That Muldoon,” he muttered under his breath. “What an idiot.”
It was the day before Nicole was to leave. The two of them, plus four others from Reza’s team, had been assigned a ridiculously small quadrangle to clear. But it was not th
e area’s size or shape that puzzled Reza, but the location: on all four sides there were quads of wheat that were almost ready to be harvested. Genetically modified over decades from original Earth stock, Hallmark’s grain grew taller than Reza could reach with his arms extended over his head and produced four times as much grain per hectare. Normally that didn’t matter to him. But now, standing inside this quad, it was impossible to see anything past the wall of gently waving stalks, and it made Reza nervous.
“What difference does it make, mon ami?” Nicole asked, reluctantly putting her gloves on. “Rocks are rocks, non?”
“Sure,” he replied, “but you don’t normally bother clearing little patches like this just before the harvest. It’s easier to wait until the wheat’s been taken out so you can get the rocks through to the road.” He remembered how Muldoon had come to pick them up that morning in one of the huge combines, a first in Reza’s time on-planet. Neither the large buses that were their normal transport when working far from the house, nor Muldoon’s van could penetrate the wheat to get them to the barren quad where they now stood. They had to walk in from the road. And it wasn’t his full team, just the six of them.
She touched his shoulder. “Perhaps we should get to work, Reza,” she told him quietly, a tentative smile on her lips. “I think perhaps you have other things on your mind that make a little thing seem very big.”
Reza looked at her. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he sighed. Her leaving was indeed a big thing on his mind, and it did seem to make everything else – the bad things – worse. But a part of his mind still wondered why Muldoon had put them here. It was different, out of his normal routine, and that made Reza worry.
***
The morning passed without incident. Reza was working hard on digging out a particularly recalcitrant rock, simultaneously considering the feasibility of a lunch break, when he heard Nicole call to him from where she was digging a meter or so away.
“Reza,” she asked, pointing to the north, “what is that?”
He looked up, and his heart tripped in his chest. There was smoke. Lots of it. And close.
“Oh, damn,” he hissed, tossing down his pickaxe. His eyes swept the horizon around them, his stomach sinking like a lead weight over a deep ocean trench. Smoke billowed out of all the adjoining quads, as if nearly a combined hectare’s worth of wheat had simply decided to ignite.
And he knew that was simply not possible.
“Goddammit!” he cursed. “Drop everything and get over here, now!” he ordered the others, his eyes judging the flames while the touch of the air against his skin helped him gauge the wind. He knew that wheat that was ready for harvest would not normally catch fire too easily, but once it really caught – especially if there was a wind to drive it – it would burn as well as kerosene.
The others joined him and Nicole at a full run. Their eyes were wide with fear. Every child who had worked in the fields for very long knew the danger of fire. Whipped along by the winds, it killed or maimed hundreds of orphans across the planet every year. Those who died were generally the lucky ones, for the house clinics were ill-prepared to deal with major burns, and off-planet medical transport for orphans was hardly considered a priority by the bureaucracies that controlled the planet’s operation. The fires, a constant hazard throughout the year, were started by everything from lighting strikes to spontaneous combustion; any of a dozen causes. Not least of which was arson.
Reza called up an image in his mind of the field they were in, a process made difficult because he had not worked this area for nearly two years. Since then, it had been bursting with wheat, and the orphans had nothing to do with that; that was the Hallmark Farm Combine’s business.
“There should be a road about a klick south of here,” he remembered, the image of the arrow-straight track coming to him from a map of the area he had studied with Wiley a long time back. He looked in the direction he thought the road should be, and was relieved to see that smoke had not yet begun to boil toward the sky.
“We’re going to have to move fast,” he said, “or the wind’ll help the fire kill us. Come on!”
He led them in the direction of the road at a restrained jog so the younger kids could keep up. Moving through the tall wheat was tricky as it was, the stalks grasping at clothes and skin, fouling their legs when it was stepped on. The others followed Reza without complaint or argument, with Nicole bringing up the rear. Reza pushed the pace as fast as he dared, his biggest fear hearing the crackling of a blazing fire but not being able to see where it was coming from. Should they lose their sense of direction, they could find themselves trapped in the middle of an inferno with no escape.
Nicole, last in the line of fleeing refugees, kept looking behind them. Her eyes reflected the licking tongues of the flames now just visible over the tops of the wheat stalks, coming closer under the driving influence of the wind.
The child in front of her – a new girl, Nicole did not know her name – stumbled and fell to her hands and knees. Nicole helped her struggle to her feet, urging her onward. “Allez! Allez!” she cried, pushing the girl forward.
“We’re almost there!” Reza called from the front. He had spent enough time in and around the fields to have learned how to navigate with a sort of dead reckoning, using the sun’s position and his pace count to keep him on track. “Only about fifty meters left!”
A few moments later, he breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the regular outline of the road through the last layers of wheat. He stood to one side and passed the others of his team on through first, giving Nicole a quick hug as she emerged from the trampled trail behind them.
The road would not necessarily protect them from the fire, Reza knew. But at least they could move in a direction opposite to the one that the fire was taking, keeping out of its way.
“Oh,” Nicole gasped, her chest heaving with adrenaline and the effort of running what had seemed like such a long way, “Zut alors. I did not think–”
“Reza!” someone shrieked. “Look ou–”
The voice was suddenly cut off with a sound Reza knew all too well: the smack of a powerful hand striking a child’s face.
Darting through the wheat to the road’s edge, Reza just had time to see the other children fleeing down the road past Muldoon’s van. The field master and three of his goons, his teenage hatchet men, stood in two-man cordons off to either side of where Reza stood, blocking the road. They had let the other children pass, even the one who had tried to warn Reza, because they were not of interest.
For that, at least, Reza was thankful. Without wasting another second, he disappeared back into the wheat, grabbing Nicole’s hand.
“Follow me!” he hissed, dragging her along behind him.
“What is it?” she gasped.
“Muldoon,” Reza replied, his breath a controlled heaving of his chest as he fought a new path through the wheat. He was desperate to avoid their pursuers, whose footsteps he could hear somewhere behind them, crashing through the stalks. “He brought some friends with him this time.”
Nicole quickened her pace.
Muldoon watched as the two older boys, whom the other kids called Scurvy and Dodger, chased Reza and Nicole through the field. Climbing atop a specially fortified portion of the van’s roof, Muldoon was high enough that he could see the bending and weaving of the stalks as his remote hunters closed on their quarry. The older boys were able to make better time through the wheat, especially with the trail the Gard kid left behind him. A smile of certainty crept across Muldoon’s face. Gard wasn’t going to get away this time, and neither was the girl. It had been easy to track their progress to the road. Now he would track them as his human hounds chased them down.
He glanced down at the other boy waiting below, whom he had dubbed Big John in honor of a certain very important part of the boy’s anatomy. Muldoon had given him his own special touch over ten years ago, and the boy had been unflinchingly loyal ever since.
Big John mutely
smiled back.
Reza wove through the wheat in an intricate pattern that he had learned from other kids when playing in the fields. That was in the days before Wiley had convinced him to spend that time in the library, earning himself a ticket off of Hallmark that few of the other kids would ever receive.
While it appeared to Muldoon that Scurvy and Dodger were gaining, Reza was keeping them at about the same distance, but at a cost. He and Nicole, already flushed from fleeing the fire – which still boomed and crackled around them – were getting tired. The weaving that confused their pursuers also meant that Reza and Nicole had to take at two or three steps to Scurvy and Dodger’s one or two, the time being made up by the older boys hunting around for their path after missing one of Reza’s sharp turns. Worse, Reza now had no idea where they were.
“Reza,” Nicole gasped behind him, “we cannot run forever!”
“Don’t stop!” he ordered grimly. His legs and lungs were burning as hot as the flames that consumed the wheat around them. Some of the smoke was now settling toward the ground, causing him to gag. “Keep going!”
Without warning they burst into an open quad. Reza, his legs accustomed to trampling through the wheat stalks, lost his footing and fell to the ground, skinning his palms and knees.
“Damn!” he cursed, grabbing Nicole’s hands as she helped him up.
They were only thirty meters or so across the quad – less than a quarter of the way – when their pursuers appeared behind them.
“Give it up, maggot!” Scurvy cried. His acne scarred face was flushed with the exertion of running. “Game’s over.”
“Save it, Gard,” Dodger chimed in. His lopsided eyes, one placed nearly two centimeters higher than the other, were bright with anticipation, and his brutishly large hands flexed at his sides. “You’re good in the wheat, man, but you’re dead meat in the open.” He smiled, showing perfect vid-star teeth that were completely out of place in his lumpy face.
In Her Name Page 6