by Martin Kee
Chaz limps over to it and gestures to the meal.
“You can have some if you want,” Chaz says, seeing the way Kendal looks at the roasted animal. “I was surprised at first that the native species here are edible at all. You hear these horror stories of people on planets who find out everything is poison, or the proteins can’t be digested. So far I haven’t gotten sick at all, but my shit’s a little hard… sorry. Too much information. Guess I’m just happy to see another person.”
Kendal is already on the animal. He pulls a strip of meat from it and eats, still keeping a distance from the stranger. Chaz squats in the opposite corner, watching him.
“You’re starving. What the hell do you eat to live anyway?” Chaz asks.
Kendal chews and swallows. Chaz didn’t know to remove the udder before cooking it and now the stench is everywhere. Kendal is surprised he has any appetite at all, but he still wolfs down another bite.
“Don’t rush it, kid,” Chaz says. “There’s plenty more where that came from. If you know where to look this place is crawling with edibles. Just gotta be faster than they are, and smarter too.”
Kendal tears off another bite. The area is secluded enough, the forest dense enough, that Kendal can see how he missed this place. Even the smoke from the fire wouldn’t be visible except from farther up the hills and he knows for a fact that the residents don’t like to go that far up.
“Thanks for the food,” Kendal says, finally feeling a little more human. “And the air.”
His eyes drift to another limb on the ground. It looked like one of the Younger’s grasping arms, or any of the residents at the village. He feels cold.
“Don’t worry about it,” Chaz says. “Are you alone?”
Kendal shakes his head, then nods.
“Which is it? Yes or no?” Chaz smiles again, that unblinking smile that makes Kendal feel a little uneasy. Under normal circumstances he could see that smile being charming, handsome even. Here, with the dark beard and mud everywhere, it looks predatory.
And those remains...
“I’m alone,” Kendal says. He swallows in spite of the grisly remains nearby. “Is there anyone besides you?”
The man spreads his arms wide, turning from side to side. “Behold my kingdom.” He laughs. It’s a big laugh, a ballroom laugh. It seems out of place here on this alien world, with strange trees and mud and death all around. Chaz drops his arms, but the smile remains. “I’ve been moving through these hills trying to get north. You’re lucky that I saw you at all. After tomorrow I would have missed you completely.”
“What’s north?” Kendal asks.
The man blinks, and grins even bigger. He taps his temple. “So I get these headaches. Ever since I crashed. Like someone’s putting a sliver of glass behind my eye. The implant keeps seeing stuff it doesn’t know, so it tries to call the server. When the server doesn’t respond, it just shouts louder. It’s a real son of a bitch.”
“Sorry.” Kendal takes another bite, not sure how else to respond.
“Well, up until last night, I was getting pretty fed up with it. As you know, everything here, every bug, every animal, all different. The whole planet’s like one big Pick A Part junk yard. No two look the same. I was getting a little desperate, until just last night.”
“What happened?”
“I got a ping back.”
Kendal almost chokes on his meat. “The server?”
“That’s right.” Chaz grins again, eyes wide. “Faint, but there. I slept like a baby in spite of how excited I was.”
“And you think it’s the ship?”
“Could be. I don’t know what else it would be,” Chaz says. “It took some triangulation and math, but I think the signal’s coming from the north, or, you know. What I think is north. It could be south, or maybe this planet rotates on some weird axis. You know what I mean right? Tell me you know.” More nervous laughter.
“Yeah… yeah,” Kendal says the word. “Yeah.” He realizes he’s smiling back now. “You think the ship will fly?”
Chaz throws his head back, laughs again and Kendal finds himself feeling incredibly foolish and small. “No. Oh, hell no. It won’t fly. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use what’s left to call down a rescue. Maybe even find something there we can use.” He leans in and Kendal looks back at his dinner. “If I’m right, then we might be able to signal the orbital beacon. We do that and we can get off this rock for good.”
Kendal listens, but his mind is elsewhere, thinking back to the village, the place he’s lived up until now. He thinks of the Younger. He feels like he wants to tell her, say goodbye at least. What’s more important: getting home or saying goodbye in a language she doesn’t even understand? And what’s home? Jail time? Would it be worse?
“What’s wrong?’ Chaz asks.
“Nothing,” Kendal says. He looks up, smiles. “No, that’s great news.”
“Obviously, you’re welcome to stay here for the night. Unless you’ve got another camp somewhere.”
“Nope. Just been wandering.”
“Really?”
Kendal nods. “I’ve been sort of living off the land, you know?”
Chaz laughs again, slapping his knee. “Damn, kid. You’re a better survivor than I am.”
Kendal forces a smile in return, but it feels unnatural. Thankfully Chaz doesn’t even seem to notice.
Chapter 26
FROM A distant ledge, Bex watches the farm come apart. Animals rounded up and divided between the townsfolk, buildings scavenged and dismantled board by board. She’d spent so much time building and expanding Vin’s clinic into a preserve, she never imagined what it might look like if people simply destroyed it. A wall comes down, brought to the ground with ropes and Bex looks away.
Veerh walks beside her as they head north through the desert. He doesn’t speak until the farm and the town are out of sight altogether, lost behind a dune.
“They never would have let you keep that farm the way it was,” he says.
She scowls, not answering for a while. Somewhere in his tone there is the song of sympathy, but all she hears right now are the words and they sting.
The Preserver clears his throat. “The townies are what they are,” he continues. “They were only going to watch you build up a collection for so long before deciding they all wanted a part of it. Some would consider it wasteful to hoard so many animals.”
“I was doing it for them,” she says. Behind her Bindo snorts as if agreeing. “I did it because without fresh breeding stock that town is doomed, just like all the other towns.” She nods towards a ghost town in the distance, now nothing more than a few sand-covered foundations. Everything else has been carried off. “They’ll end up like that.”
“They’ll do what they’ve always done,” Veerh says. “When you live day to day, it isn’t practical to try and see too far into the future. People are starving now. They need salvage now. You’re asking them to go against their very nature.”
“I wasn’t asking anything of them,” she says. “If Den’k had protected it like he was supposed to, they could have had livestock through future generations.”
“How are they supposed to plan for future generations when they can’t even feed themselves today?” Veerh says. She can hear the frustration in his tone. Finally he shakes his head. “Townies are all the same. Thinking only of tomorrow, not a week, not a month, not a year from now. Your way of thinking is a luxury. Is it any wonder they resent the Tenders?”
“We try and protect the future.”
“You’re a bunch of hoarders,” he says and the word stings. “People starve and the Tender’s guild sits on a stockpiles of animals, potential Donors. All that meat and equipment, weapons and utility just sitting there, doing nothing.”
“It’s not doing nothing!” Bex can’t even bring herself to look at the soldier. “We give back. We conserve, and when we have enough, we give the surplus to the people. That’s what we’ve always done.”
/> “The people don’t always want to wait for you to decide when they get to eat,” he says. “People would rather take matters into their own hands. The Tender’s guild was great once, my ancestral memory recalls this. It does for you too, I imagine. You feel it. You feel how they once ruled the world, gave wealth to the people, fed the hungry. The Tenders owned everything from Bone Sea to the Red Mountains of Tusk. But those were fat times, Tender. Those were ample times, when people had enough to wait for the next supply.” He gestures to the barren land with one arm. “This… this is not a fat time.”
“And do you know why?” Bex asks.
He turns his spiky head toward her, all blades and stitches. “Because times change.”
“Because people were greedy,” she says. “They weren’t fine with waiting for the supplies they needed. They wanted more. Then Poachers began to sell them what they wanted, fed the demand. People saw that and began to realize they could have more if they were willing to pay. Then the merchant lords rose up, people who owned more than they needed, but were willing to fill those demands regardless if the land could support it.” She spits on the sand. “People got greedy, Veerh. That’s all.”
“People are desperate.”
“People are desperate because they were greedy. Now there’s nothing left.” She falls silent as they walk through the straggling scrub and shifting sand. Running, always running. Bindo snorts again behind her, grasping at bits of brush and leaves as they walk.
Veerh stops and turns to look at her. “Why did you take him in?”
“Who? Scoop?”
He nods. “What made you so certain he wasn’t completely dangerous?”
Bex has to think about this one. “He was an infant. How could he be dangerous?”
“Are you certain?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? What else could he be? Veerh, I watched him emerge from the egg. I saw him come into the world. Trust me, I know.” She starts walking again, then turns. “Why do you care? You just want to bring him back anyway.”
“What?” The Preserver looks genuinely surprised.
“That’s the whole reason you brought me out here, to help you bring him back. Why else would you come all this way?”
To her surprise, the old soldier huffs and starts walking again. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“But you do, don’t you?” She tags along behind him. “Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Stop playing around! You do think he did it?”
The Preserver keeps walking, his stride picking up.
“Do you even know where he is?” Bex runs to catch up. “How? How do you know?”
He spins and there’s something in his face, not just anger.
He’s scared.
“No,” Veerh says. “I don’t think he did it.”
“Then that means there are more like him, more alive.” It fills Bex with a kind of strange hope. Yet if there are others, more deadly, willing to kill—what kinds of monsters are these? What have I unleashed on the world?
“He didn’t do it,” Veerh says, now more confident that he’s looked away. “He was asleep when it happened.”
“How do you know?” She stops again. “Were you spying on him?”
“Don’t ask me how I know,” he says. “All I can tell you is that he didn’t do it. Shouldn’t that be enough for you?”
“No,” Bex says. “We need proof.”
“You can’t prove it.”
“Why not?”
He stops, holds up an arm where the patch she had set rests underneath. It’s the same patch Bex had applied a month ago, the one to save his life, taken from Scoop. But now, the skin seems off somehow, gone bad. Yellowish flakes fall away. She blinks, remembering now where the patch came from.
“It didn’t take.” She looks up at him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“It took,” he says. “Trust me, it took.”
He lowers the arm, but she reaches for it, raising it gingerly back up so she can see. “It’s going bad. Probably toxic.” She swears under her breath. “I might have been able to patch it better, but I was already so upset after the poachers and…”
She sees something in his face, and for just a moment, Veerh looks smaller, younger. He looks lost.
“What?” Bex says. “What is it?”
“It took. It’s just that…” He bares teeth a moment, frustrated, the words all jumbling in his mouth. “I don’t know how to explain. But it took.”
He tugs his arm away and continues marching inward, towards the mountains. Bex watches him go a moment before calling out.
“Where are you even going?”
“He’s headed north,” Veerh says.
“Who is going north?”
“Scoop.” He yells without so much as a glance her direction.
“But how do you know?”
The warrior doesn’t answer, just continues up and out of the valley. Bex waits for him to stop, but when he doesn’t, she charges after him.
“Don’t run from me!” She says grabbing his arm. “How do you know?”
He whips around, eyes blazing. Those eyes, divided by a sheer blade, bore into her, and for a moment, Bex sees the younger soldier, the one willing to kill. She imagines how he might have been on a battlefield and the thought makes her shrink back. She waits. After a moment he cools.
“I do not run,” Veerh says.
“Then what is it? If we’re going to fix this together, you need to tell me.”
He points to the mountains. “Up there, past the Tender’s Guild, deep in the mountains. That is his goal.”
“Why?” she asks. “What is up there?”
“I… I don’t know.” He laughs and for a moment she can see just a small opening in his personality, a softness under the bravado and stoic posturing. “I wish I knew, but I don’t. It’s important though, and he’s going there.”
“What’s there?”
Veerh shakes his head. “It’s big. Something big. And high up, close to the Godcloud.”
“How close?”
He shrugs. “I don’t have all the answers.”
“You aren’t even telling me how you have the answers you do have!” She sighs in frustration. “Who told you this?”
“Scoop did.”
Chapter 27
KENDAL DREAMS of escape, of searching, of loss. He dreams in abstract, parts of stories with confusing patchwork narratives. He walks in the desert, tracking something, following something. An odd familiarity hits him when he looks into the eyes of the person he’s with. It’s the Younger, the doctor and her ox. They seem much taller now, or maybe he is shorter. She smiles at him in a way that seems unusually familiar and normal.
He’s had these dreams in the past, dreams where he’s lived someone else’s life, where everything round him feels as familiar as home—only not his home, not his friends.
“What do you mean he told you?” the Younger asks him. “He can’t talk.”
“I just know, okay?” Kendal says. His voice sounds strange in his ears, a kind of bi-tonal birdsong, and yet, in his dreamlike logic, he understands what he’s saying. “Look, maybe it has something to do with the patch, maybe with something else. But I just know he didn’t do it.”
“That poor girl.” She looks away for a moment, an expression of profound loss. “It’s my fault, you know. She was curious about him. I told her they were harmless. She must have thought he… or the other one was friendly. I—”
He reaches out to comfort her, his hand some nightmare alien construct of bones and blades. A ball of spikes unfurls and touches the soft flesh of her arm with awkward compassion—a knife caressing a water balloon. He pulls back suddenly.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing.” He looks away. “It comes and goes.”
“What does?”
“Nothing. I’m awake now. We should go.”
“We should go. Hey, kid. Get up. We should go.” An
other human voice. Kendal feels his eyes flutter open. For a moment he’s lost all sense of who he is, where he is, what he is. He floats to the surface of consciousness, flailing as hands grab him and demon voices fade from his mind.
He looks up into a bearded face and for a short second thinks it’s his father. Then he sees the eyes, those black crazy eyes. Eyes that have lived on a strange world too long, seen death and loss first hand. Chaz smiles, but it still does nothing to soften those crazy eyes.
“You ready to hit the road?”
Kendal sits up on his mat of leaves, looks around, rubbing his eyes and yawning.
“That must have been a crazy dream, kid,” the man says. “You almost kicked out the campfire.”
“Sorry,” Kendal says. He can see the muddy troughs in the dirt and leaves where he must have pretended to run in his sleep. The fire is still burning and Chaz has placed a kettle over it.
“I’m making tea,” he says. “It’s nothing fancy, but it should help us wake up. That meat’s going to spoil, so we’ll probably need to kill something along the way.”
“How far is it?” Kendal asks.
“The ship?” Chaz flashes another one of those smiles at him. “If I told you I didn’t know would that scare you off? I turn my head this way and that. Sometimes the signal is better one direction, so I headed that way.”
“So you aren’t sure.”
“Nope,” he says. “But it beats sitting around with our thumbs up our butts, right?”
Kendal can’t help but smile a little at that statement. It’s felt like forever since he heard another human voice, had a conversation, laughed at a joke. “I guess so.”
“You guess?” Chaz barks out a laugh. “What kind of person would want to live on this rock? The animals are all too small, and too weird. The people are just…” He makes a face. “Like walking nightmares.”
“You’ve seen them?”
Something dark seems to pass over Chaz’s face as he looks down at the fire. He stokes it. “I had a partner here,” he says. “We were going to settle at the next stop, after our contracts ended. That’s her breather you’re using.”