PATCHER

by Martin Kee

  “I could be wrong.”

  Bex laughs. “Stop it. You’re not fooling me. You haven’t been the law in that town, for as long as you have, by throwing dice.”

  “I’m just saying the evidence points to that, but anything could have happened,” he says.

  She tilts her head. “Tell me. Indulge me. What other possibility? Let’s play this game.”

  She can see the apprehension in his face. Veerh doesn’t know her like this, never seen the Bex who shot a pack of stalkers and didn’t bother to harvest the husks, the Bex who almost ran off, leaving Vin alone in the desert.

  “Go on,” she says. “You convinced me one way. Now convince me the other.”

  “It could have been an official seizure,” he says. “It’s quite possible the Ameer himself arrived, delivered a decree, made his presence known. Rulers have been known to throw their weight around now and then. Maybe that’s what happened.”

  “It’s in the charter for the Tenders’ Guild,” Bex says, pausing just a moment to remember the text she’d learned so long ago. “You are the guardians of life, the keepers and protectors of every creature under the Godcloud. You exist so that they may populate and multiply, dying only as balance allows. To do otherwise, you should light yourself with flame and burn until nothing remains but ash.

  “So, tell me, Veerh,” she says with a cynical smile. “Did you see any burn marks? Any signs of self-immolation?”

  He doesn’t speak, only looks away, and for a second, Bex feels ashamed at her blatant cynicism, her inability to see anything but darkness and hatred. But she wants someone to suffer for this, wants someone to feel the same loss and betrayal.

  And isn’t it you? Aren’t you really mad at yourself? Aren’t you mad at the Tender who left a burning village carrying nothing but a weapon and an egg and a promise? Aren’t you mad at yourself that you broke the egg, that you brought Scoop to the village, that you gave that poor girl, Kloe’l the idea that Scoop’s kind might not be dangerous? Perhaps Tending really isn’t your thing?

  She doesn’t see Veerh reach for her, but she feels his knobby hand on her shoulder. She stares at her feet, blurred through tears. All the self-loathing and disappointment pours out in her slow, mournful song.

  “I’ve really made a mess of it all, haven’t I?” she says at last.

  “You made the decisions you thought were best,” Veerh replies.

  “No, I made decisions without thinking. I made all my decisions for the wrong reasons.” She points at the Preserver’s side. “I patched that without thinking. I brought Scoop home without thinking. I crushed my only egg without thinking. I’ve made every decision from that first mistake out of fear, fear that I had to fix what I originally did, fear that I had failed as a Tender. All this is because of that first failure. And now I’ve only made it worse.”

  “Stop it,” he says.

  She looks up at him. “What?”

  “You didn’t know this would happen. You didn’t know the Matron would betray the entire guild. You didn’t even know the guild itself was corrupt from the beginning. You were a small-time Tender apprentice, sitting in a shanty town off the Bone Sea coast and now you’re acting like you could have controlled any of this? Get over yourself, Tender. You couldn’t have stopped the machinery that’s moving now. None of us can. We’re just insects crawling around a rolling boulder. I’ve got no control over any of it. We’re just trying not to get crushed.”

  She sniffs. “Maybe. But I think about what could have happened, if I could have said something to stop any of it.”

  “You couldn’t. You never could have. I couldn’t, and Vin couldn’t. We’re not people the Ameer, or the Mayor, or the Matron listen to. We’re the noise, not the song.” He squeezes her shoulder. “You want to make a difference, stop putting yourself in those pouches. Tender, Preserver, Patcher… it’s all just badges people wear to make themselves feel better about the decisions they make. People wear badges because they don’t know who they are without them. Do you know who you are if you aren’t a Tender?”

  She thinks back, as far as her memory will allow, back to before the stories, back to her emergence. The earliest phase of life is one of almost animal existence. No thought. No ideas. No knowledge. Simple sustenance, hunger, contentedness and need. There’s no complex emotions of happiness, bitterness, no contempt. Does anyone know what they are then?

  Veerh has closed his eyes again. Bex looks up at the clifftops, and wonders if he’s ever considered what he would be if he weren’t covered in spikes and blades.

  *

  “Are we lost?” he asks, but it’s not him and it’s not his voice. The words are strange on his tongue and he’s curious if Scoop feels the same.

  “No,” the other says, holding its head with both hands, wincing in pain. “I just didn’t expect to see something new. You know what I said. Everything new or undiscovered, this damn implant thinks it has to record.”

  “Can’t you just purge the memory?” he asks. “If it’s a memory overflow issue—”

  “It’s not!” the other snaps at him with eyes closed. “It’ll go away. Just give me a minute, okay? Go. Go try and make a campfire or something. Go collect firewood or fish. I don’t give a fuck. I just need a minute before my head splits open, alright?”

  “Yeah… sure. No problem.”

  He slinks away, but doesn’t do as he was told. Instead he reaches the camp and pulls something out of the largest pack. The skins that compose the pack are strange and artificial looking, maybe even machine-made—something Veerh hasn’t seen in a very long time. It’s a small tablet that seems carved out of obsidian. Veerh starts in amazement—it lights up. A flower blooms in the center. He stares in awe at the magic before him.

  This is clearly a dream. These things simply cannot exist, he thinks.

  Scoop taps at the screen and more images appear. Then moving pictures, pictures that are just as if Scoop were in someone else’s mind now. He is looking through a window, through another window, into someone else’s perspective. Voices talk in low tones, stuttering, and wavering. Fear. That’s the sound. It’s the sound of fear. Eyes look out through bushes.

  “Did you see that?” one whispers.

  “I saw it. Did you see how fast it moved?”

  “It had two legs. But how many arms? That wasn’t an animal. That was something else.”

  Now Veerh hears something even stranger, a voice, one of his people, singing to one another. Prepare the dart. I think I see two of them. We’ve an order waiting for the teeth, so make sure you remove them carefully. Poachers, hunting, hunting the people in the magic tablet.

  Veerh’s head spins at the mixed perspective, the utter insanity of voices talking to one another in different languages, different sounds. Every one of them is alien to him now, everyone a cacophony of strange noises and animal grunts, bird chirps and whistles. What are birds anyway? And how does he know that word? The bushes shake and Veerh wakes up.

  Veerh blinks, no longer in the dream, or the tablet, or in Scoop’s mind. He stares at the sky, at the Godcloud, disoriented and scared, his heart racing as he tries to remember who he is, why he is here, who is with him. Ah yes, Bex and her ox, asleep now at his side. They sleep together, the plainsteer leaning against her, she leaning against it. Her eyes are closed as the huge beast snores, pouched sides rising and falling. She has a thin blanket halfway over her, tossed away from fidgeting in her sleep. Veerh reaches out with a grasper arm to pull it up over her shoulders.

  He stares at her for a while, unsure why he is staring at all.

  He wants to be there too, curled in with Bex and the plainsteer, covered in a soft blanket, lulled to sleep by the gentle rise and fall of that beasts breaths.

  But I cannot. My body is not made for tenderness or delicacy or subtlety. I am a living weapon and that is all. I can keep people safe, but I can never open to them. To open up is death, a quick blade to the guts, a shiv to the spine.

  And yet he
still stares as the two of them sleep.

  Chapter 32

  CHAZ AND Kendal entered a section of deep, forest the night before. The trees here all seem half-covered with a kind of mushroom that falls in draping sheets. Small pink flowers bloom along their underside, and it’s hard for Kendal to not just sit and stare at them. The tablet has been perhaps the only thing able to tear his focus away from the strange plants.

  Footsteps. Kendal slides the tablet back into the hidden pocket in the hidden pocket as Chaz emerges from the brush. “Hey kid, we’d better get a move on while there’s still light.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  I could run, he thinks. But to where? They’ve traveled so far already. He isn’t sure he could find his way back to the village now even if he wanted to. Not that he wants to, not really. Chaz is bigger than he is, stronger too, probably outweighs him by half again as much. Even with the limp, the man could easily overpower him.

  And to be fair, he needs Chaz, needs him to keep from getting lost. Even following a lunatic in the wilderness is preferable to being on his own and lost for good. Chaz’s voice startles him, shaking him out of his thoughts.

  “Well, don’t keep the day waiting.” Chaz is packing up, collapsing the tent. It takes no time before they are on their way.

  The images from the tablet remain vivid in his mind as Kendal follows the man.

  “You’re slow today,” Chaz says over his shoulder. “Usually you’re leading the pack once you know which way we’re going.”

  “Which way are we going?” Kendal asks.

  Was that hesitation? He isn’t sure. Chaz smiles. “Not far at all now. The pings are getting clearer. So, something has to still be working.”

  “If it wasn’t working, you wouldn’t hear the ping, though, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you definitely hear a ping.”

  “What’s with you?” Chaz asks. “You’re all kinds of questions.”

  “Just nervous I guess.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” Kendal begins, but there’s the sound of a snapping twig and they both freeze, holding their breath. After a long moment, they relax a little, but Kendal notices Chaz fondling the gun he’s got in his belt. How many charges are left in it, he wonders. Enough to kill him if he tries to run?

  “I guess I just hope the ship is there, or some of it,” Kendal says at last. “I mean, we’ve come all this way.”

  “It’s there. I can hear it.” Chaz taps his temple. “And trust me, when we do get off this rock, you’re going to be glad you came along.”

  “I don’t know if I want to go back to Earth.”

  “You won’t have to. There are other worlds, ones where a few bucks goes a long way. You want to live like a king when you get off this rock?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Patents,” Chaz says. “Everything here, the plants, the rocks, the ragdolls. They’re all new. There are companies—outlying pharmaceutical corporations, engineering firms, chemical manufacturers—who would kill to get their hands on a fraction of these patents.”

  “It’s not yours though,” Kendal says. The air here is humid, and Kendal can’t tell if it’s that or if he’s sweating just from being nervous.

  “What?” Chaz frowns.

  “I mean, it belongs to the company, right? Aren’t we still employees?”

  Chaz just laughs. “As far as I’m concerned the company has a few options: They can allow me to do my own freelance patent filing, or they can let me sue them for dumping us on this God-forsaken mudball in the first place. The company can suck my balls.”

  Kendal laughs in spite of himself. “How many patents have you collected?”

  “So far?” Chaz winces. “A lot. More than I can access right now. If I can offload some of it to the ship’s server, or at least find something to upload the data to, I could tell you. It’s a lot. Hundreds probably.” He winces again. “Getting close.”

  They burst through a barrier of brush, thick vines and branches when Kendal hears the birdsong. Shit. He freezes, looks down at two pairs of small black eyes staring up at him.

  They’re juveniles, from what he can tell, untailored and pink. They’re playing with some sort of toy that looks a little like a dreidel on top of a flat stone. It’s still spinning when they look up and for a moment it’s just them, him, and the spinning top. Rural kids, he guesses. Ragged clothes, one extra arm in back, probably used for tilling. There’s a dozen of them back at the town.

  They stare up at him, young brains trying to comprehend what they are seeing, how anything so tall could exist. It’s clear they’ve never seen a human before. It also means there might be a farm nearby or another village.

  Kendal whistles his name call, holding up a hand in greeting. The top falls with a clatter on the stone. The two kids dart away towards the opposite side of the clearing. The first one dashes into the brush. The second one, slower and younger, reaches the edge of the clearing when something massive emerges. Chaz grabs it with both hands, lifting the squealing child up into the air. It flails with arms and that extra tool, slashing at his hands. Chaz is wearing work gloves. It all happens so fast, Kendal just stands there stupidly, staring as Chaz walks the terrified, struggling creature over to him.

  He’d never realized that for his tired posture, Chaz is actually a pretty muscular man. Strong forearms flex as he wrestles the struggling child, keeping it a safe distance from his face.

  Chaz grins. “Looks like we found dinner.”

  “Put it down.”

  Chaz blinks, tilts his head.

  “Put it down? You have a knife?”

  “No. I mean let it go.”

  Another blink. “Kendal…” He winces as the child chirps something. To Kendal it sounds like the word for Help or Family but he isn’t sure. Chaz squeezes his eyes tighter at the sound though, then brings the child up to his face, screaming, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

  The child chirrups, freezes. A small stream of urine runs down Chaz’s wrist and arm, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Go get a knife,” he says, still squinting through his migraine. “I only have a few charges on the gun left. There might be more of these things.”

  “These are just children,” Kendal says. “They’re babies.”

  “Great. Not much smaller than the other one.”

  “What other one?”

  “Never mind. Just go get it or I’ll make this thing shut up the hard way. You ever tried killing one of these things? Of course you have. You said so. You’ve seen how hard they are to kill. Have to burn the little suckers or they keep growing everything back. Hell, they’ll grab a twig and use it to plug a hole in their side.”

  Kendal runs to the pack lying just beyond the tree line, his mind spinning. One before? Just children. Just little babies, and he said there was one before? How many has he killed? How many farmers and civilians and doctors has he killed… and eaten?

  He sees the knife, but he doesn’t want it, doesn’t want to be part of this, doesn’t want to even know Chaz anymore. He turns and Chaz is still wincing, looking away from the now still, but wide-eyed ragdoll.

  “It’s not here,” he lies.

  “Look harder.”

  Kendal shakes his head. “We can’t kill it.”

  “Of course we can. They certainly kill us.”

  “Not these. They’re just babies, just little kids.”

  “Yeah. And then they grow up into those other ones, the killers.”

  “No.” He palms the knife, slips it into his sleeve. “These are just farmers.”

  “What?” Chaz’s eyes widen. “What did you say?”

  “They’re just farmers, Chaz. Probably a village not far. They are just someone’s kids.”

  “How do you know they’re farmers?” A stroke of realization crosses his face. “You whistled. You whistled to them.”

  Kendal holds his breath. The man’s face is unreadable. “You whistled somethin
g to them. What did you say?”

  Kendal feels sick. Lying while back on the ship was easy, to pretend and make everyone think he was someone else. But here, now, with a tiny life on the line. So much harder to keep down the awful feeling of being found out.

  “Just put it down. Let it go,” he says.

  “What did you say to it?”

  “Put it down first—”

  “What. Did. You. Say. To. It?” Chaz grinds his teeth with every word, and Kendal thinks that if he doesn’t say or do something fast, the man might just squeeze the guts out of the kid like a rabbit.

  “I said my name.” he says.

  “Your name.” Chaz’s face slackens like a man slow at getting the punchline of a joke. “You have a name?”

  “Well… I think that’s what it is.”

  “They? They?” Chaz takes a step forward, the child dangling in his grasp.

  “The ragdolls, yeah.” He holds up a hand. “Look, just put her down. You’re hurting it. I’m sorry I lied but it didn’t seem like much of a lie at the time. She isn’t even one of the dangerous ones, just a farm girl.”

  “How do you even know it’s a girl?”

  “You can just tell—look. Let her go and I’ll tell you everything.”

  Chaz turns the captive child to face him, studies her face, and for just a moment, there’s hope. Maybe he’ll understand. Maybe he’ll see that they aren’t all enemies. The child twists its head around to Kendal and chirrups again.

  “Say something,” Chaz says.

  “What?”

  The man thrusts the child at him. It smells like fear and piss. “Tell it something. I want to hear you talk to it.”

  Kendal tries to calm himself. He takes a breath.

  “Well?” Chaz asks.

  “I can’t whistle when I’m nervous.”

  “Try, shithead.”

  Kendal tries to remember the tune the Younger sang to him a few times when she seemed to be trying to calm him, the song she sang when he woke up from the confrontation with the poachers. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, but just whistles best he can.