Arming the priestess-former, he took the time to teach her posture—how to hold the weapon properly and where to keep her hands. He stressed even before telling her exactly what it did to never place her finger on the trigger unless she was prepared to fire. After showing her the safety, explaining the fundamental concept of ammunition, and every other delay he could think of, he had her aim the weapon at the base of a distant rock that spired a little above the others.
Chari struggled a little in just holding the thing, finding it difficult to aim because of its weight, but she would improve, given time. She startled back when a single bullet flew. The recoil was not fierce, but she had never experienced such a thing before. The rifle kicked from her hands and fell to the ground just after she did. If she had a tailbone, it was probably a little bruised from the landing.
“Ow!”
Flynn’s hand was already extended to help her up. Chari accepted with one hand while she rubbed her sore posterior with the other.
“Can’t you heal yourself?” he asked with amusement.
“It would have to be a severe injury to turn my magick against myself. The pain a healer experiences in closing her own wounds is more raw, more intimate. You feel the reverberation as every part of you mends, and it’s a pain better shelved in favor of natural healing, except when necessary.”
Chari bent over to pick up the rifle again, but her hands faltered and she placed one against the nearer ear, the shot still ringing in her drum.
“Here, Chariska,” Flynn invited her to follow as he climbed atop the rocks. “Let me show you something.” He led her along, taking careful steps to ensure that they didn’t slip. “So what you do is magick?”
“We’re told it’s a magick borne of faith,” Chari replied. “Any of the clergy can mend wounds, and it’s one of the first things you learn in joining. When the crusaders fought in distant lands to establish new grounds for the church, neophytes were often sent to care for them and soothe the bruises caused by the slings of desert folk like—” she laughed at this, “—I almost said ‘like your friends.’ But they’re really not, are they?”
“Did you ever have faith?”
“I believed there was a goddess when I didn’t know to think that I couldn’t. I don’t know when I realized the church’s teachings were a sham, to be honest. In time, I just accepted that everything I was being taught seemed disingenuous.”
It didn’t take long to hike to the pointed rock that had been her target. It had stood as a narrow, polished cone before Chari’s single bullet had ruined it, taking a large chunk out of the midsection. The stone remained erect, but the chunk that was missing revealed multicolored layers beneath it, edges sharp around a hole that was far larger than the bullet that had struck it. That the shot had been lucky was saying the least, but Flynn had heard it connect and knew it confirmed Chari’s innate talent as something that could be fostered.
Realizing the damage she had done, Chari moved in and placed her hand within the pit she had made, sliding her soft fingers against the coarse edges. She almost felt sorry for the thing, even though she’d been aiming for it and had affirmed more than once that she understood what damage she could do.
“You see now. More than hearing it, you know it. If this can be done to stone, just remember what it can do to a person.”
“I understand.” She bowed her head. “I’ll learn how to use it, though.” She smiled for a beat, then added, “You’re a great teacher.”
“No, I’m really not.” Although flattered, he admitted, “I just knew a great teacher, once, and I have a way of remembering things about people.”
*
Although she made every shot count, Chari soon ran out of bullets. Flynn watched her carefully, internally noting her posture and technique, and passing along all he’d chanced to learn while observing Rebecca’s tutelage. When the lesson was done, they returned to the camp to find Jean and Mack waiting for them to begin preparing supper.
“So you spent the last hour just shootin’ things?” Jean—who had burnt half the fish before Mack had taken over—sank her teeth into a large, blackened piece after asking.
“Hardly so much,” Chari replied. “I’m terrible, actually.”
“She’ll improve,” Flynn countered.
Picking up the weapon, Jean looked it over for a moment before tossing it roughly back near its owner. “Can’t believe ya brought that damn thing all the way from Earth.”
“That does raise the query,” Chari admitted, looking to Flynn. “If your handling of this weapon is so poor, why carry it for so long?”
Rebecca had blindsided him by her mere presence. Flynn shuddered to think that some of her blood might still be with him now, drawn in when he’d first retracted his stained claws.
“I didn’t mean to,” he whispered. Flynn collected himself as the others cast him worried looks. “It … it got tangled on me at a bad time. I have a history with it. With its owner, I mean.”
“Former owner,” Jean reminded him.
Flynn nodded reluctantly. “Former.”
“Who were they?” Chari asked.
“Her name was Rebecca Saul,” Flynn quietly admitted. “She knew me, so I murdered her.”
Chari fell silent. He’d touched upon the killing before, but hadn’t tacitly explained why he’d done what he had.
“Saul, huh?” Jean asked, clearly not caring.
Chari blinked, realizing, “So you do have family names? It seemed less strange when you were from the desert or the southern isles, but—”
“Close, but no cigar, Charsy,” Mack stopped her short, then clarified. “I’m just Mack. Jeannie’s just Jeannie, and he, I’m guessing, is just Flynn-o.”
Pondering this, she concluded, “I’ve become confused again. This Saul girl you mentioned—”
“Knew her family, her roots,” Flynn explained. “We don’t. Without our parents, our siblings, we don’t know where we came from. When the world our ancestors knew ended, we lost track of so much … even our own names.”
Reluctant to look Flynn in the eye after his confession, Chari nonetheless asked, “Even you?”
“My father was a grifter named Leroy. My mother … if she was only good for one thing, it was the kind of dirty magic she played on him. Anyone could see it but him.”
Intrigued, Chari looked to Jean.
“Nuh-uh, fuck that,” Jean retorted. “I ain’t sharin’ my life story for a dime.”
She turned to Mack, who shrugged. “Raised by circus folk.”
“Really?” Jean asked with a head-turn.
“Yeah. For a bit.”
“Crazy.”
A silence set in until Chari found the nerve to ask, “So who was Rebecca Saul?”
“Yeah, Flynn,” Jean echoed callously. “Who?”
A part of Flynn wanted to forget and bury Rebecca, but the better parts of him knew he shouldn’t. As she bled in his arms, she’d looked into his eyes and for the first time saw him for what he was.
“She was one of us. A half-human.” Jean snorted at the word, but Flynn continued, “When I met Rebecca, her little brother had recently died from sickness. Who he was and what killed him, I don’t know … I never cared to ask. To cope, she sank herself into keeping others like her fed, free, and safe. I spent nearly a year with her, helping where I could, talking every chance I got.”
“So what came of it?” Chari asked, curious and eager to follow as best she could.
“By the end of it, she left behind most of what she owned and joined a team of hunters working to capture the very people she spent so long trying to save.”
A web of silence fell over them. Flynn didn’t have to take credit for the deed he’d described. It was a foregone conclusion. Chari, having for the most part taken “half-humans” to still mean people like her, was disturbed. Jean was now clearly at odds with her previous acceptance of Flynn as simply a conman and struggling with a new desire to pulverize him. Before her fist could fully ra
ise, Mack caught it and pulled it down with both hands.
“So how good was the pay for a long job like that?”
“Not …” Flynn hesitated, knowing it was only the one-eyed Mack who kept Jean from hitting him, with a strength he couldn’t imagine the boy possessing, “… very. The commission wasn’t bad, selling the services of a fully trained specialist, but …” Flynn sighed, amused with himself. “I could have asked for more. I could have and I knew it and I didn’t.”
Jean, more interested now, hit the ground with her other fist. A few loose bands of earth rained from above. “Okay. Why?”
“I never had anything to work for,” Flynn said. “Every job I took gave me something in the moment, but I never looked past it. There was no big payday, no nest egg either. It was just every moment of every day.” His eyes captured the light of the fire. “It was easy, leaving Earth. There was nothing to leave behind.”
At that, having soured the evening, Flynn excused himself from further conversation.
*
Chari woke up screaming.
No sooner had dawn’s light broken than she awoke on the bedrock, startled and panicking. Within moments, her terror subsided and she fell back, bumping her head on the stone, but shedding tears more from mirth than pain. The damage was already done, however, and a weary-eyed Jean lifted her head up long enough to growl before burying it back in Mack’s torso, which she’d been using as a pillow. The latter lay wide awake, and Chari suspected that he wished to exchange his and Jean’s positions. Flynn stared right through Chari with those animal eyes before he turned away and went back to sleep.
Chari was conditioned to wake with the sun, and soon rose and began her day. Bereft of priestess duties, she left her sandals behind, hiked up the wraps around her legs, retied them in place, and climbed down the rocks to the shore below to catch what she might for breakfast. Dozens of crustaceans skittered along the shore, and she suddenly wished she had a better idea of how the fishermen took their catch. Having only ever needed to take what she wanted, Chari had put little thought into how those things were gotten or made.
For a moment, she felt inspired and picked up a large rock to smash one of the crabs with, but when it came time to deliver the killing blow, she found she didn’t have it in her. Killing felt hypocritical now, after spending years of her life preaching against it. She hadn’t forgotten the double standards that women like Inquisitor Thunau lived by, nor she herself, who had had fresh meat most of the days of her life. She recalled the rifle, back at the camp. How childish, to train with something that could be used to kill and find not the nerve for it.
Chari felt mocked by something so tiny, which had none of the woes and worries that she did. Contempt for the crab built as it shuffled back and forth, until finally she found the courage to let the rock drop. The creature beneath broke and cracked but didn’t quite die. Feeling worse, she lifted the rock up again. She wanted to touch it, to apologize—she even considered healing its injuries. But to have one’s whole body crushed and survive … it would hurt her as much as it had hurt the creature. If killing was cruel, even to survive, so too was letting something suffer because she lacked follow-through.
The second time, Chari was decisive and ensured her victim was dead. Moving on to a new crab, she did it again, and again. The act got only a little easier, but she had to make sure everyone was fed. By the time an hour had passed, she had gathered enough for the group, and a ball of seaweed as well. Flynn had come down just as she was finishing, and she lit up in wishing him “Good morning!”
“Calmed down?” Flynn asked, amused but groggy.
“Enough,” she said, embarrassed. “I … I forgot where I was, at first.”
Despite her rightly warranted misgivings considering what she’d learned of him the night prior, Chari forgave him, at least as far as was her right. In the heart of it, she owed him too much not to. She had attempted to end him in her own way and would have left his friends to suffer torture and death. She could only judge rightly the actions she’d witnessed, and could only hope he would forgive her in kind.
*
The sun rose at a pace appropriate to Sechal and in the hours that followed, the four shared the breakfast Chari had gathered. The morning’s palette was unfamiliar, but it gave what was needed to start the day.
Flynn had confirmed the rough angle of the only other passage from Sechal, and knew it to be somewhere below the fire pit, for what little good his estimations did. While the others finished eating, Flynn climbed along the rocks to take a look around. The exertion took its toll on his wrists, shoulders, and arms, all still recovering from the Inquisitor’s handiwork. Taking care lest his grip weaken and slip, he was grateful that Thunau hadn’t resorted to more insidious techniques before he’d figured her out.
The dark spaces in the wall of boulders that lined the island’s northern beach all seemed to lead into cramped stone and shadow and little more than what the crashing tide could slip between.
Where is this way out? he wondered. Were these rocks even here when it was first made?
Though the possibility existed that these conduits between worlds were natural phenomena and nothing more, they seemed too deliberate to be happy circumstance. The odds were better in that case that the trio would have been dumped in the vacuum of space than on another living, habitable world. The Jemina Mountain exit and the fountain in Cordom alike suggested that the portals did not accommodate changes in the terrain. If the path he was looking for was truly underground, would they have found themselves buried alive if they had come out through it? Or would they have simply merged into the stone in some sort of scientifically implausible mess? Experiments and study would be required once they found more stable ground, assuming the search didn’t kill them first.
Flynn looked back toward his allies at the campsite, trying to determine how far below the high ground their exit was. As he studied the location, something became visibly strange about the back wall, particularly the overlapping stones. He hiked back over with careful footsteps, the sea pushing weakly against him as he hopped down to the campsite.
“—so Jeannie an’ me are lugging this tire along the highway, and all I’ve got is this dirty towel to wave to try and … hitch a ride …” Mack’s story trailed off as Flynn strode decisively by, unintentionally snaring their collective attention.
“You find somethin’?”
Ignoring Jean’s question until he had some answer to give, Flynn approached the wall and examined the split running along two of the stones. A thin gap ran between, barely enough space to stick one’s fingers in. Kneeling, he leaned close and waited.
A sound like breath whispered from the deeper shade.
“There’s wind down there,” he realized aloud.
“Wait, there is?” Chari was first to stand up.
“Wind’s good?” Mack asked.
“It means there’s passage beyond those rock walls,” she replied.
Flynn attempted to push the stone and to no one’s surprise, it didn’t budge. He beckoned to Jean. “Give me a hand.” Catching himself, he quickly added, “The old-fashioned way.”
Dismayed that she couldn’t take the direct approach, Jean nonetheless moved alongside him, bracing against the ground and pushing her right shoulder hard against the boulder. With his right forearm and left palm flattened against the rock, Flynn gave it his all.
“Ya sure ya don’t want me to just crash this whole thing down?” Jean grunted through clenched teeth, her words labored.
“Can you do it without caving the whole beach in?” Flynn replied with near-equal strain.
“Maybe!”
Lacking confidence in Jean’s ability to direct force, Flynn pushed on. There was no point in asking Mack or Chari to help—neither had the upper body strength to make a real difference. But that wasn’t enough stop Mack from moving in and ducking low between the duo, pressing his entire back against the stone. His contribution was more than he should have
been able to give, for the boulder began sliding along the sand, slowly but surely.
Though his attention centered on the labor, Flynn happened to glance down long enough to see the nodules on Mack’s forearms and the backs of his knees pulsing under the strain. The way through was soon breached enough that a body could slip through with some effort, and that was enough for them. They caught their collective breath while Chari applauded politely.
*
The bones of small animals crushed underfoot—there were so many of them that it was unavoidable. The cavern smelled faintly of stale decay, the worst of it fortunately long gone. Charred remnants of rope lay just beyond the boulder, and Flynn suspected that whoever had last sealed the cavern passage had pulled the boulder shut behind them, burning the cords used to bury any trace of the way ever having been there. As they descended by the light of makeshift torches, the tone and texture of the wall varied greatly, marking different periods as sea level had climbed and receded over the island itself. As they neared the bottom, the intervals closed and the changes became more rapid, with many different tones stacked atop one another in a meter’s span.
“What do ya think they’re hidin’ down here?” Mack asked.
Chari, in her sandals, walked more delicately than the rest. Tiny bones scratched at her exposed feet, and she audibly shuddered with every scrape. “I don’t think they’re hiding anything. The marks of concealment are really very dated and—” another crunch and a shudder “—whatever lived inside here was locked away long ago.”
“Noria Peak was hardly new either,” Flynn agreed. “Those people are settled in.” He nodded. “You’re right. Whatever’s in here was most likely forgotten.”
Though dark, the sea caves were far from dangerous to navigate, the path descending as often as it wound. There were no breaks in the ceiling for outside light to seep through, but illumination soon came from the path ahead. It was not a long walk to the bottom, and the passage soon expanded. A great maw opened to the sea, stalactites and stalagmites adorning it like great teeth. Skewered upon them were the remains of a large vessel; flooded and no longer seaworthy, its sides had been punctured long ago, chocked with growths upon the shells of growths. It would demand a truly brave arm to dare reach inside.
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