PATCHER

by Martin Kee

  “Even if it can defend itself, there’s no reason to believe Scoop has done this,” Veerh says. “For one, the body is burnt. I fail to see how Bex’s Ward could have any access to fire at all.”

  “Tender Bex,” Den’k says, placing emphasis on the title as he turns to her. “In your report, did you not say that the giant in fact incinerated several stalkers upon your finding it?”

  Veerh stiffens. Bex is staring past the mayor, out the window and into the desert. She seems almost lost in thought for a moment, a mix of nostalgia and worry on her face. After a long moment, she nods.

  “Then wouldn’t it be a logical conclusion to suggest that your giant has this capability? What else would do this?” Den’k looks at the deputy. “It seems very clear to me.”

  Ca’aam turns his eyes to Veerh. “Well, he makes a point.”

  “It wasn’t Scoop,” Veerh says. “That’s my conclusion.”

  Even Bex seems startled by his verdict. The Matriarch’s eyes are set like small rocks in her face as she watches him. It’s hard to believe that a face like that ever showed grief for anything, and looking at her now, Veerh wonders how much of it had been forced to begin with.

  “That’s a bold assumption,” Den’k says. “We’ve shown you the evidence, Preserver.”

  “I see the evidence,” Veerh says. “That’s still not proof that our giant did it.”

  “Are you suggesting there’s more than one?”

  “Ask the poachers. They’ve killed them in numbers. Is it not hard to imagine that one of them might have escaped, that one of them has managed to elude the poachers and survived on its own?”

  Silence falls on the room and Veerh can see the doubt on their faces. It might be enough, he hopes to buy them time, perhaps to even allow for Scoop to return on his own. But then what happens to Scoop? He’s not even sure he can protect the giant from an angry mob.

  “If that’s the case,” Den’k says, “then perhaps a necropsy on the giant is in order.”

  “What?” Bex shrieks. She starts to move forward, but Veerh takes her by the arm, holding her back.

  “It’s clearly the only way to make sure,” Den’k says. “An arm is missing from the girl. We will simply open up the giant’s stomach and see if the evidence is clear.”

  “So you propose to kill Scoop to prove his innocence?” Bex almost laughs at the idea.

  “As of this moment, the giant will no longer be referred to by name. It is a suspected vicious animal and will be treated as such. The clinic will be under observation until we have the animal here.”

  Veerh wants to say more, but he can already see he’s lost. This was their intention the entire time—take the clinic from Bex, take Scoop for the rendering guild. Maybe without the girl’s death, it would have happened eventually anyway, but now this child is nothing more than an excuse to the Mayor. They never planned to provide a fair trial at all. How could Veerh have allowed this? Of course they wanted Ca’aam here as an objective witness. He can already see the way Ca’aam looks at him, looks at Bex, ready to intervene on the mayor’s behalf.

  He’s about to say something else, something to stall, but a knock on the door catches his and Bex’s attention.

  “I said no interruptions,” Veerh barks at Ca’aam. “Send them away and tell them that if anyone else even sets foot on the property, they’ll have me to deal with.”

  Ca’aam rushes to the door, swinging it open, revealing another local. He’s a farmer, judging from the seeder sprouting from his shoulder. He stands, eyes wide, panting as though he’s run halfway around the world. Pushing through the door, he rushes up to the Mayor. Behind him, as the door closes, people mutter and whistle, already having seen what he carries. And now that Veerh sees the familiar white tube, he feels his heart skip a beat.

  The farmer tosses the tube to the floor. He points at it.

  “That,” says the man, catching his breath. “That’s what the Patcher calls his umbilicus. I was out near the grove and it caught my eye. I ran back with it as fast as I could. It’s the giant’s, isn’t it?”

  Ca’aam, the Matriarch, the Mayor sees it, everyone in the town has seen it, and Veerh feels the eyes in the room upon him.

  “How do you explain this?” Ca’aam asks, and there’s something else there in his eyes now—ambition. “Please tell me how to explain this.”

  “Yes, Preserver,” the Mayor says from behind him. “Explain this.”

  He sees movement outside the windows. Some of the crowd have broken away, moving out behind the fence, towards the back pens. Veerh presses past his deputy to intercept them. When he arrives, Bex is already out on the back porch. A local creeps around the barn, pulling at the door, peering through cracks in the wall. Trinn, a weed farmer from the outskirts of town. Veerh knows him.

  I can’t keep this town under control any longer, Veerh thinks with dismay. They aren’t listening to me at all.

  “What are you doing?” He hears Bex yell at the farmer.

  The intruder spins, surprised, but unrepentant, casting a wary glance her direction. “Where is it?” the farmer asks. One of his plowing arms is unsheathed as he continues to stalk along the barn.

  “This is trespassing!” Bex yells, and Veerh watches helplessly as she starts to charge at the farmer. A scythe flashes just inches from her face, and she recoils.

  “Don’t come any closer, Tender,” says the farmer. “I just want to see this beast for myself. Someone said it’s run off, but I bet you’ve got it stashed here somewhere.”

  Something snaps in his mind, and Veerh rushes out of the clinic into the yard, putting himself between them. “That’s enough, Trinn. Go back to your farm for now. You can’t fix this.”

  The farmer withdraws his bone weapon, stepping back. But his eyes remain suspicious.

  “What’s she hiding?” Trinn asks. He extends a sub-arm and points a wiry finger at Veerh. “And what are you hiding as well? You’ve been funny ever since that creature showed up. Gone soft.”

  Veerh unfurls his blades to their full length, angling them in the farmer’s direction. “Would you like to test that theory?”

  Small eyes hold Veerh in defiant suspicion. But the old man doesn’t want a fight. He tucks his tools into his body and hobbles back the way be came, just in time for three more townies to emerge from around the back of the barn.

  “What did I say about entering the gate?” Veerh says. “Get out now. This doesn’t concern you.”

  They step back, but not fast enough for his comfort. Veerh finds something about the behavior unsettling. They don’t disperse. They look to one another, then back at him. A few look at the barn with curious eyes. One peeks into the gap in the barn door.

  They aren’t scared of me. The realization settles like cold water into his gut as he starts to see the picture forming in his mind. They’ve already decided, perhaps even before this incident, that Veerh is too old for the job, too soft. Maybe it’s guilt by association, seeing him spend so much time with the Tender.

  Another group of five or six townies enter the yard, followed by a few more. Some of them eye him and Bex, their weapons drawn just enough to be visible.

  Veerh steps towards Bex, drawing her back gently with a manipulator arm. She pulls away with a shrug, turning to him, reading his face.

  “We need to leave,” he says in a low tone.

  “What?” she says, surprised. “But you—”

  “This is becoming something I cannot contain.”

  “But…” She looks around at the people flooding into the yard, realization coming to her face. “Oh, no.”

  “We have to leave now,” he says, taking her arm again.

  “Bindo.”

  “What?”

  “My plainsteer. I can’t leave him.”

  Veerh sighs. “I’ll go with you.”

  “But what about Scoop?”

  “That’s where we’re going. We’re going to find him, to figure this out.”

  “What ab
out them?” she asks, pointing to the clinic where the Matriarch watches them from an open window. The grieving woman stands with a possessive air now, her beady eyes unblinking, unmoving.

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” he says. “Just come with me and let’s get your animal.”

  Four more townies stand in front of Bindo’s stable house, their backs bristling with plows and cutters, now poised as weapons. Two of them swivel towards him as he approaches, their gaze shifting untrusting towards Bex.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” one of them asks, a youngish boy with a large horn jutting from his forehead, separating the eye stalks he’s grafted over his face. He lowers the spike at her chest, eyes looking up past it.

  “This doesn’t concern you,” Veerh says.

  “I think it does. We seen what she’s got back here, and we want to know if it’s going to eat us next. We wanna protect ourselves.”

  “By preventing a Patcher from tending her flock?” Veerh asks.

  “By keeping her from causing more trouble.”

  Another youth turns and moves around to Veerh’s side, flanking both he and Bex, trying to settle in one of Veerh’s blind spots. There’s a heavy rattle of bone plows clacking against one another.

  Veerh bares his teeth, rubs his own pair of bone scythes together. “Ask yourself if this is a hill you wish to die on.”

  Now all four of the group are looking at him, their weapons out, but their faces unsure. He holds them in his gaze and feels the plow-armed boy behind him shifting his weight. Nervous. The spear-headed boy in front glances at Veerh then at his friend.

  “Let’s go,” the spear-headed youth says. “Not worth it. This isn’t the right building anyway.”

  All four of them slink off and Bex looks at Veerh. “This is a nightmare,” she says. “Please tell me this isn’t real.”

  “Get Bindo,” he says. “We’ll leave out the other side of the stables.” They swing the door open and step inside. He lets Bex go, leaning against the door a moment, panting, listening for more trouble, more locals turned enemy. The metal latch slides closed easily enough—too easily—and Veerh wedges a bone spike into it and pulls. The metal bends, twisting against the latch. The tip of the spike snaps off, wedging in the lock.

  “What was that?” Bex asked.

  “Buying us time. Go.”

  Bindo greets them with placid brown eyes, chewing his hay in blissful ignorance as Bex runs up and hugs him. “I almost thought…” She shakes her head then grabs the bridle and saddle from the wall, equipping the animal with familiar, deft movements.

  Veerh catches this moment out of the corner of his eye as he rushes past her to the back door. The kindness. The connection between a Tender and her animal. He flings the door wide and the moment is drowned in light.

  Desert stretches forever away from the barn. The townies aren’t interested in this section of the farm. They are looking for wherever they think a giant could be hidden. Veerh listens: voices rise outside the barn angry and frustrated. Phrases like “hidden it” and “I knew it was dangerous” start to drift into the stables and he can see from Bex’s face that she’s hearing it too. Songs of alarm and anger. Songs of violence.

  Bex leads Bindo to Veerh, looks up into his face. The resolution there is heartbreaking.

  She already knows she’s lost, he thinks. She’s hardly been here a month and she’s lost and she knows it.

  “They mean to kill me, don’t they?” she asks.

  “They mean to arrest you.”

  “And Scoop? What if he comes back? What if… what if he’s dead?” She chokes a little on the word.

  “He’s not,” Veerh says.

  “How would you know?”

  “That’s an excellent conversation for the road,” he says, opening the door and stepping out into the arid plains.

  Chapter 25

  A DAY into his pursuit and Kendal realizes, with sickening clarity, that he is lost. The last time he saw the antelope-thing, it had snorted at him and headed even further into the forest, flicking its tail irritably. For all he knows it could be long gone or killed and eaten, maybe by those little cat things he hates. Wiping the mud off his arms and legs, Kendal pauses at a stream. He still sees tracks now and then, and thankfully there aren’t a lot of other animals with similar tracks. Still, it’s been a while since he last saw the animal.

  More worrisome is the fact that he’s gone pretty far into the forest, further than he’s been in a while. He turns, looks back the way he came, and sees only a wall of irregular bamboo in every direction.

  This is how people get lost, he thinks. He learned this at an early age. The brain forces you into a slow circle when you don’t have a solitary landmark. It’s all an illusion. So he figures it’s safer to just keep on tracking the animal, since it probably has a better sense of where to go than he does.

  The tracks, however, are getting older, the animal getting further and further away, and what started out as an attempt to correct his mistake, has now become his only lifeline to finding his way out of the thick woods.

  Kendal sucks on the breather, watching the air gauge flip and die in the red. Wind whistles through the leaves a hundred feet up, and he can just make out the swirling cloud that covers the entire land. Black spots creep in to his periphery. Sunlight filters through that opaque membrane, turning the sun into a vague ethereal sphere. One more breath and the needle dies. Inert. Dead, like him. He sucks on it a few more times, but it’s done. Kendal drops the breather in the mud and closes his eyes.

  The lightheadedness isn’t as bad as he thought it would be, just a gentle dizziness, like being drunk. The world swirls a little, but not unpleasantly. In a way, it’s calming.

  The thing he’ll miss most is birdsong. Not the alien language he hears thrown around at every corner, but actual birds. He misses lying in the grass and looking up through branches, watching a sparrow or a dove, listening to the simple call of a starling or a goldfinch. Hell, he’d settle for a grating crow right now, or a throaty raven. All he hears out here are bugs, the buzz of tiny wings, the chirp of small grass beetles.

  A shadow descends, spreading from the encroaching blackness. As he draws his last breath, something covers his mouth and nose. A nice fantasy, the illusion of air.

  But it’s real.

  Air.

  Kendal’s eyes snap open and he stares into a strange new face.

  It takes his mind a moment to wrap around the pattern he’s seeing. It’s not his host, not even one of the residents here. Too large. The eyes are too symmetrical, the nose long and sharp, the cheeks and jaw covered in thick brown beard. The eyes, black as coal, peer into his.

  The moment lasts for less than a second before Kendal shoves the mask away, scrambling across the mud to get distance. Panting, he stares back at the creature hovering over what he’d thought was his final resting place.

  “Shit kid,” the man says. “You sure move fast.” He smiles, holding the mask and canister in his hands like some strange monkey god.

  Kendal crouches, his mind racing, his chest heaving, the adrenaline making his skin feel prickly and cold. His head throbs. But the man just eases down, putting the breather on the ground beside him. He smiles like they’re old friends.

  “Sorry I startled you,” he continues. “You looked like you were having some difficulty with the breather and all.” He taps Kendal’s device. “Shit, this thing’s empty. I’m amazed you lasted this long.”

  “Who are you?” Kendal asks.

  “Oh, you can speak.” The man grins. His eye twitches and his hand goes to his left temple, pressing on it. “I guess we’ve never met, maybe passed in the hallways on the ship.”

  “You were on the Luxemburg too?” Kendal asks, then feels silly.

  “Where else would I be?” The man smiles, but he’s still wincing and pressing two fingers against his head, massaging the spot. “I’m as surprised as you.”

  “How did you find me?” Kend
al asks. He feels his chest tighten and he looks at the breather there on the ground. The man sees his gaze and slides the device along the dirt a few meters.

  “Pure luck. I was stalking some food and then I heard you. Lucky my gun was low on charges or we might be having a different kind of conversation.”

  “You have a gun?”

  “Might as well be a paperweight now for all the power left in it,” the man says. “Sorry. Manners. I’m Chaz. Chaz Carrillo. I worked in AnA.”

  Kendal digs deep in his memory. Assessments and Appraisals. They were the guys who prospected the planets, reported any potential assets to the Company. A patent man. He nods.

  “And you?” Chaz asks, still closing his eyes. “And take the oxygen. I have a spare. You look like you need it more than I do.”

  Kendal crawls up, takes the device. He slaps his own mask on it. Staring at the old oxygen sac, he wonders if there’s still any use for it at all, decides there isn’t and tosses it into the bushes. He breathes deep, feel his head start to clear.

  “Kendal Harris,” he says through the mask.

  “Nice to meet you, Kendal Harris.” The man smiles. It’s a peculiar, overly enthusiastic smile. Toothy. Kendal wonders if it’s just because he’s been looking at the wrong faces for a month.

  “I never thought I’d see another person again,” Kendal says.

  “You and me both.” Chaz stands, yawns, blinking and making a face that looks like he just smelled something strong. “Sorry about that. Damn implant trying to find the server. My camp’s back this way. You hungry?”

  Kendal feels his stomach gurgle at the thought of food. He nods and follows.

  “It’s not pretty, but it’s good for now,” Chaz says as they enter the clearing. There’s a small lean-to constructed from leaves and branches in one corner and a small fire at the center, cold now. Beside it are the remains of what looks like the antelope-thing Kendal was chasing. It certainly explains why he couldn’t find it.