by K. Eastkott
Jade didn’t dare breathe. She was finished if Rena discovered her. There they were, alone together, miles from anyone who might have saved her. Rena stood up and walked over to the group of pines. She sat down on one of the trunks. Now all Jade could see was one wide blue thigh blocking a narrow crack between the trunks. Rena farted. What had Jade done to deserve this? She could barely control herself, just knew that she must. If Rena discovered her, she would be history.
31. Death Island
With one watchful eye on the horizon—he could not afford to be caught by another squall—Kreh-ursh studied the patch of brown as it drifted closer. Maybe it was one of those floating weed islands brimming with vegetation, even wildlife—just like a real island—that occasionally appeared on Shah.
The weather was picking up, claiming more of his attention, the wind rising, pushing Kreh-otchaw-oh along faster. The breeze was southerly, allowing them a fast tack westward. He reefed in further. Kreh-otchaw-oh’s sail and rigging functioned but needed more work. She was maneuvering too sluggishly.
Soon, he realized he would pass close by the dark shape, which had now become a wide mass extending over a large stretch of water. Not a floating island, he hoped it was nothing that might foul Kreh-otchaw-oh’s hull. If he could just tack past, allowing a safe margin on its north side. He reefed Kreh-otchaw-oh in tighter, so she began to lean over to the side, her outrigger rising from the water as the wind swelled her sail into a pregnant crescent moon. He grabbed a spare pole that was stored in the bottom of the boat and bound it tightly to the handle of his paddle, which was attached securely to the stern as a rudder. By holding the end of the pole at arm’s length, he was able to stack out over the water and could still work the rudder.
The brown mass came closer. Its glistening surface hugged the waves, smoothing and rounding them, rolling and sliding thickly on the ocean’s back. He would have to pass within several canoe lengths of it. It was dark, flickering with rainbow reflections, and sluggishly fluid—like mud. Soon he noticed that its surface was pricked by bumps, odd protrusions, shapes like small hillocks, even bushes or bare branches sprouting from the mass. It looked almost like a dead forest, gradually rotting, decaying in primeval slime. And the smell was hideous.
Then he saw movement. A shape fluttered. He gasped. He recognized that creature. His stomach turned over. Still alive, trapped in the stinking slime, it struggled to stay above water. Feebly it strained upward, thrashing sodden wings, shrieking to escape. As he watched, it made a last leap upwards. Ssccrreeeaaaggghhhh!! Its call was shredded on the ocean breeze. Then it was swallowed below the surface, not to rise again.
His canoe surged past at a few boat-lengths’ distance. Now horrified, he saw other creatures trapped in the muck, floating half dead or lifeless: a family of rruush-oh stranded on the surface like a colony of oversized mushrooms, their fine, silver parachutes stained a poisonous brown, flapping emptily in the wind; a Shah-skur lying dead across the surface, its elegant, acrobatic coils reduced to one lank S-shape, its scales like broken brown teeth. The dark sludge was a graveyard for all the sea’s life, creatures from above and below the surface trapped and killed in its clutch.
Kreh-ursh felt sick. From where had this island of death appeared? He was chilled numb, sitting there in his boat, yet anger burned deep down. It began to form at the base of his gut while the wasted wildlife slid by, a dull sheen of death staring out from lifeless eyes.
He swore revenge. He would redeem each and every death he saw here, find the cause, and destroy it—even if it took a lifetime. Was this why he wanted to become Shahee? Was this what he must face? Confronting such horrors, healing such ravages: It looked a far bleaker future than he had imagined. Despair coated the cold iron of his anger, but the rage remained huge.
Kreh-otchaw-oh cleared the death slick, and then the clouds once more opened and it began to pelt down. The wind dropped. Within moments he could see little but rain driving in sheets across the sea. Kreh-otchaw-oh was thrown up and down on the swells. The ocean turned black, wave crests flashing silver. Lightning struck from the sky, followed by a long, rolling peal of thunder. Kreh-ursh began to get nervous. A bolt might strike the highest point in the surrounding area in its effort to reach the earth. Right now, sitting in a canoe in the middle of the ocean, he was the highest point around. He lowered the mast, covered the open boat with the sail, and crouched inside, concentrating on just keeping his craft end-on to the high, choppy waves that buffeted them. The air had turned chill. Soon he was shivering. He wrapped himself in his sleeping mat, trying to keep warm.
Suddenly, lightning flashed, and he gasped. Believing he had been alone on the empty sea mere moments before, he felt his heart stop: Another craft was outlined in the blue light. The unknown canoe was closing fast. Black and rain-lashed, it crested the next high wave and dropped swiftly down the wave’s slope toward him.
32. Dusk Rendezvous
Rena’s farts pummeled Jade like a raging storm, the poisonous gas leaching down between the tree trunks. An analysis of the odors coming from the older girl’s bowels suggested that whoever cooked for her had even less skill than Jade’s mom. The main ingredients seemed to be burnt garlic and an element that could only be rotting, barbecued rat.
Then the whine of a dune buggy filtered through the trees. Rena got up, and a tiny amount of fresh air wafted in. Jade gasped. The engine roar lurched closer until a large rubber tire skidded to a halt nearby.
“You took your time, Screwie. We said seven.”
The drawling voice that answered Rena was one Jade recognized: “Relax, he isn’t here yet. So what’s the problem?”
“Got any beer?”
“Security staff shouldn’t drink on duty. Here.”
Jade heard first one can pop open, then another. Screwdriver sat on the buggy tire. A moment later there was a thunk! that sounded far too close for comfort. Turning her head slightly, she saw a worn screwdriver, its blade sharpened to a vicious point, quivering beside her ear like an arrow in the tree trunk. A hairy forearm passed close beside her face to retrieve it. Seconds later, another thunk sounded, and the screwdriver again landed in the wood. Jade was now thinking wistfully of Rena’s farts. With Screwdriver there, she had managed to control her hardworking bowels, but Jade would happily have had that foul stink instead of Screwdriver’s amateur knife act. She prayed, as the blade thunked a third time into the trunk, that Screwdriver had been practicing hard.
From away under the pines came a loud grunt and crash, as if someone had walked into a tree. It interrupted Screwdriver’s knife-throwing act.
“The Head.”
“I can hear a car, too. That has to be him. Hurry up, Head!”
An older boy the size and shape of a brick outhouse stumbled up through the trees.
“Sorry, guys. I got lost. Did you see me walk bang smack into that tree? Broad daylight and everything! I was looking the wrong way.”
So now they had an entire reunion… of the Adams family. Maybe they called him the Head because of how his shoulders sloped straight up into his hairline with no visible neck, so the upper half of his body looked all head. Then again the name could be ironic, as he was not renowned in Mauri Cove for being an intellectual giant. Jade suspected Rena had picked him for his unquestioning loyalty.
“Just in time—he’s here already.”
The quiet purr of an engine could be heard gliding down the jetty road.
“Okay, Head. Remember—keep your lips shut, even if he speaks to you directly. I’ll do the talking.”
Rena shot her empty can with some misplaced instinct right into the hole where Jade was hiding, hard enough to leave her face bruised for a week. Screwdriver copied her, but there was a clunk. Rena howled.
“Gee—sorry, girl. I missed.”
Tires crunched to a halt on the jetty road. A car door clicked, and footsteps approached. The gang of three walked to meet the new arrival. Taking advantage of their absence, Jade stretched cramped m
uscles, craned her neck slightly, and peered out to see who it was. The figure who entered the clearing, squat in a gray suit, was Dr. Hagues, CEO of Synengine Energies, Inc.
33. Understanding
Before Kreh-ursh had time to react, the dark canoe had coasted down the wave with an eerie swiftness and was alongside. Taashou grabbed his craft, and bound it to hers. She had abandoned her ceremonial mask, was dressed in a plain gray shift under her blue cloak, soaking hair tied tight behind her neck. Rain and spray had drenched her completely, but she appeared impervious, allowing the water to lash her face and body as if numb to the cold. She scrambled into his canoe. He stared in shock. How did she find him, alone in a tiny boat in the ocean in the middle of a storm? But she was not there for social conversation:
“Kreh-ursh!” Her eyes bored into him as her mind hit his with more intensity than he had ever felt. “The Death. Did you see it?”
Before he was able to speak, she had answered her own question, plucking the death island image from his mind like a flower off a plant, examining it, and tossing it aside. Then she had no more use for words, no time. Her mind opened—he felt it like a busy network of tunnels diverging, curving, and joining before him—and drew him in. Possibilities stemmed like passages to each side, above, below. Yet as if in a dream where you struggled to advance, he could not move freely. She prodded his mind, not so much inviting as herding his consciousness into her mental space, directing him toward a particular zone. While rain lashed his face and his limbs trembled, he remained oblivious to the storm’s violence, falling deep into the shahiroh’s inner world.
Below, he saw a land arrayed in all its length and breadth. His own. Geh-urbh-Geh-ot’s twin peaks formed a center point; around them swirled mountain ranges, hills, forests, deserts, and grasslands. Shah, the wide sea, stretched blue-green to the east, dotted with single islands and speckled archipelagos.
In a rush Kreh-ursh and Taashou, like birds, zoomed in toward the volcano island of Kaa-meer-geh, saw a gathering—the shahiroh. This was the second time he had been treated to a vision of the red rock isle where the shahiroh lived. What did this all mean? The blue-robed figures were intent on a task. He could not see as much as feel the force of their minds gathered, focused on a single objective.
Images rose toward him as Taashou let him view more. Again he saw the death island rolling over the sea, sucking creatures to their doom as it floated menacingly along. Then the island was gone, and he was rushed into another vision—a desert. This barren tract was recent, the result of a great drying out—trees and greenery had been starved, killed; the sky was pale, the color of bleached bone. He could not see what was causing it—the damage—but he saw dying animals, trees withering, drought reaching out its grasping fingers. Somehow the water had been sucked away.
The vision changed, and he saw more mountains, as in his previous vision of Geh-urbh-Geh-ot. Yet here were many more, a whole land made of shining snow and ice: the most beautiful sight he had ever seen—harsh and violent yet pure and untouched as a primeval dawn. Though this land, too, was changing, withering. It was cracking, breaking up into pieces, dying. The sky sucked in poison, and the landscape melted. The vision stretched to include the whole world, and now storms raged across its face. Deserts were sucked up by tornadoes and thrown like blankets across entire forests, smothering them. People in villages and towns died from disease and poisoning. Others watched from high land as their homes were flooded by rising tides. Still others starved as their crops withered and failed, sometimes poisoned, sometimes destroyed by drought or flood.
Then that door shut on him, and he was pushed farther into the labyrinth.
He was in space, bodiless, in a perception of reality he had never known. He felt Taashou’s mind next to his, within his and around, conscious of how they linked. The two of them formed part of a wide net, like a fishing net, but including everything imaginable within it. Other worlds were there, too, stretching out into endless space, but meanwhile contained within each other, like an infinity of baskets, one placed inside the other, intermeshed and interwoven in a way he could conceive but not picture—yet each replete in its own capsule of time.
Then he saw, sensed, a link, where one world seemed momentarily to brush another in time and space. It formed like a tunnel or bridge, a gossamer spider’s thread linking the two dimensions. They opened, united, were briefly one. Their substance flowed together, each feeding the other, as though the separate realities were fertilizing, pollinating each other for a time before the link snapped and the two universes parted again, became individual bubbles, isolated yet connected within the same ocean.
The rift.
This was the rift, her mind speech informed him. He saw the bridge form again, between two other unknown worlds. And again. Each time, the worlds seemed to brush. There was a point of contact. Out stretched the gossamer tornado bridge, and those worlds communed with each other for a spell before contact was broken. Focusing again on his own world, he saw the bridge linking them with another place—and now he sensed that sickness, a basic imbalance affecting his own world, flowing in from outside. And matter—his ocean replete with its kree-eh shoals—being sucked out. The source was that foreign world, yet all worlds were connected. The rot, he knew, was now part of his own.
34. Dr. Hagues
Rena’s gang towered over Dr. Hagues. As if to give himself the advantage, he walked straight up to the group of trunks where Jade was hiding before turning to face them. Though scant yards away, Jade had to strain to catch what he said. Hagues barely raised his voice above a whisper.
“I’m glad you could come, Rena, lads.”
“I wa…” the Head began, but Rena cuffed him, and he was silent.
She spoke instead: “We’re here to help you out, sir.”
“Do you kids know why we chose to build our laboratory here at Point Mauri?”
“We are so grateful for that, Dr. Hagues, your company taking the initiative of bringing work into the area… lowering unemployment…”
“Yes, yes, naturally. But that isn’t the reason. This area is swarming with environmental groups… Only a very dimwitted businessman would dream of setting up here. But look out there.”
They looked, as did Jade.
“It’s that current, the river mouth and ocean current… so perfect for our needs.”
“What you explained the other day, Dr. Hagues—that’s certainly ingenious, how you’ve managed to calculate the risks and can keep our area so clean and picturesque. The greenies certainly can’t argue with that.”
The two boys nodded. When the Head went to speak, Screwdriver pricked him with his weapon.
“And beyond, what do you see?”
“Ah, the sea?”
“Yes. That marvelous, never-ending, barely touched resource. But something else.”
“I can’t see anything,” growled Rena. Jade could tell she was rapidly losing patience with Hagues’ enigmatic approach.
“Out there, where you can’t see anything, are certain coordinates, which I discovered many years ago…”
“Didn’t know you’d been to Mauri Cove before, sir.”
“I haven’t. I’m not really a biologist, you know, more of a physicist. Those coordinates make this the best spot for my enterprise.”
Rena’s eyes lit up. “You don’t mean the research station out there, do you?”
“I do. Do you see that storm brewing out there, kids?”
“Of course, sir.”
Dr. Hagues laughed. “Well, I created that!”
All three, along with Jade in her hiding spot, were shocked.
“That storm is going to make me extremely rich. It could make you kids rich into the bargain. If you stick by me.”
“We’re with you, sir,” said Rena, and the other two nodded.
“In these early stages, it’s all a bit messy. Eventually, we’ll get a pipeline in—much cleaner—but until then, you remember your job. Keep people away. If you t
hink there’s the slightest suspicion…”
“I understand, sir—we call it off.”
“Don’t be dim! I have far too much money invested in this. Just do whatever you need to keep snoopers away. Both from the river and the research station. Outage is at seven next morning—it’s tricky, but we need to use the tides. And we can’t afford to have any early morning anglers mucking up my plans.”
Dr. Hagues took a bunch of keys from his pocket, slipped an L-shaped tool from the ring, and passed it to Rena.
“You’re the only one I want in my lab… Understand? Your buddies’ job is to keep that river clean… No fishermen, nothing. Use the launch we use for the harvest. It’s powerful... straight from the showroom. So I don’t want it knocked about. Remember, I’m paying you for absolute discretion. Report to me in the morning, once outage is done.”
He left them, walking with quick steps back to his car. They were silent until his car purred into life and cruised away up the jetty road. Jade remained mystified. She waited. Yet it was only as they were jumping into their buggy that Rena said, “You guys be on the river by five, okay? Outage: seven. Give it a couple of hours to flow down the river. The tide turns at eight-thirty and should wash it all out. Problem solved. But keep people away till at least twelve if you can... Got your fancy dress? Remember: NO snoopers.”
They roared off, and Jade crawled out, so stiff she could not stand, but she didn’t even notice the cramps. Her mind reeled with what was planned on the river early the next morning.
Jade followed the shore around until she came to the beach. Though it was two hours before high tide, waves were worrying the seaweed and invading the rock pools. She squinted at the sun setting over the hills behind the house, thinking she should be getting back home. Still, she sat down on the beach and stared out to sea.