A Girl Called Badger (Valley of the Sleeping Birds)

by Colegrove, Stephen

  “Wilson!” The priest rushed up to him.

  “I knew you’d see us coming,” said Wilson.

  “Even my old eyes couldn’t miss that many dots coming from off-map. What in the name of three cats has happened?”

  “Our village is gone,” said Yishai. “Destroyed by Circle bandits … we’re all that’s left.”

  Reed looked at the wounded villagers with few possessions. At the barefoot children. He sighed and pulled on his beard.

  “Badger won’t wake up,” said Wilson.

  The priest knelt beside the stretcher and felt Badger’s pale neck for a moment, then pressed the code into her arm.

  “She’s still alive,” he said. “Barely. You can see the code doesn’t work, so there’s a mechanical fault or–”

  Wilson raised his palm. “Don’t say it.”

  “What did you find at Schriever?”

  “Not the sequencer. I think it’s gone forever.” Wilson lowered his voice. “What about these people, Father? They’ve lost everything. I know I shouldn’t have brought them here, but–”

  “We’ll talk about that later,” said Reed. “For now, have them follow us to the valley. The light is fading and children shouldn’t be out in this cold.”

  THE REFUGEES AND THEIR immediate needs disrupted Station like a fox in the hen house. The underground corridors throughout the village echoed with crying children, the hard slap of running feet, and the shouts from frustrated mothers.

  His mother had left to prepare food. Wilson sat at his desk in the rectory, surrounded by books and items he’d collected as an apprentice. Now they were just toys and trinkets.

  “Wilson.”

  Badger lay in the treatment room covered with monitor cables. Wilson wished that a kiss were enough to bring her back to life. But she wasn’t a sleeping beauty. She was only a pale, scarred girl close to death.

  “Wilson!”

  He startled. “Sorry. I’m just tired.”

  “You look it,” said Mast. He looked at the torn leather and scraps of wool on Wilson. “The boy who walked to hell and back. Tell me something I can do.”

  “Nothing right now, thanks. I just need to sleep.”

  “Are you sure? How about a haircut? A foot massage? A hug?”

  A smile flickered on Wilson’s face. He inhaled deeply and blew out a ragged sigh.

  “Thanks but no thanks,” he said.

  “You thought I was serious? That’s rich,” said Mast. “You must really be sick.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “We’re still waiting for you to punch out Reed for what he did to you and Badger.”

  “Well, you don’t get mad at a range lizard for having sharp teeth.”

  “No, I stab them in the face––is that what you’re planning?”

  Wilson shook his head. “I’m not taking any more orders from Reed, but it’s not because I’m boiling over with rage. I just don’t care. It’s hard to explain what happened after I was shot. I saw things from the past with my own eyes, and felt like a different person. That kind of experience doesn’t just go away. After what happened to my father … now I realize what’s important.”

  “I think I understand,” said Mast.

  After a long moment, Wilson cleared his throat. “There’s one thing you can do for me.” He slipped his pistol from the pouch and held it out to Mast hilt-first.

  “What? I can’t do that! Have some hope, Wilson. She’s still breathing.”

  “No, dung-brain. I want you to have it.”

  Mast waved his hands and stepped back. “A man’s gun is a man’s gun––you should know that. It’s bad luck to give it away.”

  Wilson sighed and slid the weapon into its leather pouch.

  “What I ‘should know’ about my life isn’t black and white anymore. My father should have been dead. The machine should have been at Schriever. I should have fought harder and smarter against the Circle. I wouldn’t have been shot and she wouldn’t have been––”

  “Stop beating yourself up about it, friend. Like you just said, those things aren’t important anymore.”

  “Right.”

  “If you need anything at all, let me know. I’ll come back in the morning.”

  Mast left and Wilson’s mother appeared with a tray of food.

  “Have some food, Cubbie,” she said. “Goodness, I never realized how stuffy and cramped with books your room is. If you’re not going to clean up this mess why don’t you come to my quarters? It’d be so much more comfortable.”

  “We’ll have to get used to being cramped, mother. Where do you think everyone is going to stay?”

  “You’re right––I didn’t think about that. If any of them know how to work I can finally get some help in the shop.”

  “Mother, I guarantee they can work.”

  Loud voices echoed from the hallway and Reed and Yishai appeared at Wilson’s door.

  Yishai shook Wilson’s hand. “Thank you for bringing us here, Your Grace.”

  “Please don’t call me that.”

  “I’m sorry. If you’ll excuse me, both of you,” said Yishai.

  The bearded tribal bowed out of the room and Wilson heard the double doors of the tunnel open and close.

  “It’s been decided,” said Reed. “The villagers will stay here.”

  “Do they know about the rules?”

  “Yishai says it won’t be a problem. Given the circumstances, they don’t have much of a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice,” said Wilson.

  His mother sniffed. “You’ll have to change the partnership rule. There aren’t but a handful of men in this group.”

  Reed sighed. “Always with your feet squarely on the ground, Mary. I hadn’t even thought about it.”

  “Well now you can. Cubbie, all this excitement has tired me out. Good night.”

  Wilson stood up. “Wait! I have something to say.”

  “What is it?”

  “I need to tell you–”

  He felt Reed’s eyes on him.

  “–I just wanted to say I missed you.”

  His mother hugged him tightly. “I missed you, too.”

  The inner door clanked and she was gone. Wilson lay down on his bed as Reed lingered in the doorway.

  “Carter told me what happened to your father,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Wilson shook his head. “He was dead for years, so nothing has really changed. The past just caught up with the present.”

  “If I could change what happened––

  “I know.”

  “You seem different, Wilson. I can’t explain it.”

  “Do you want me to throw a tantrum and storm out of here? That’s what the old Wilson would do, right? It wouldn’t solve anything. I could slam a million doors and it won’t stop time or wake up Kira.”

  Wilson left his bunk with a creak of springs and walked to his old desk. He touched a carving he’d made on the flat surface years before.

  “I took your father to the Tombs.”

  Wilson dug his fingernail into the wood. “Tell me what’s down there.”

  “Death,” said Reed gloomily. “Ghosts of the past.”

  “We’re way past the point of flowery phrases,” said Wilson. “I want the truth, not fairy tales.”

  “I don’t know what the truth is anymore,” said Reed. “These stories are passed down for a reason, and in many cases there’s a hard nugget of fact buried inside.” He sat on Wilson’s bed. “From a lifetime of experience, I know that superstition watches over the Tombs better than any man-made rules. Normal people enter only twice. First to have the implants added, and finally when they’ve perished. There are no exceptions.”

  “Why not?”

  Reed frowned and pulled on his gray beard. “The reason has become lost with time. As you know, a handful of priests and apprentices have entered the caskets and never returned. The stories describe them as evil miscreants who snuck into the area and now haunt
it as ghosts. Even if these explorers had good intentions, they must have suffocated or perished of thirst.”

  “I’m not frightened of the caskets. I’m frightened of not doing anything.”

  Father Reed laughed. “Now there’s the apprentice I remember! You’re just like a dog with a bone when an idea takes hold, especially one that’s dramatic.

  “It’s not dramatic, it’s what I have to do.”

  Reed shrugged. “To come back alive you’ll need my help.”

  REED DONNED A YELLOW suit and helmet for the ritual. Wilson helped him to strip Badger of the monitor cables and dress her in a crimson jumpsuit. The yellow suit would have been too thick, so Wilson kept on his normal clothes. They carried Badger outside on a medical stretcher and avoided the quiet groups in the center of the village.

  On the dark path to the Tombs not a single person crossed their path. Wilson thought it was better that way.

  Reed entered the code in the outer door. Inside, the lights of the entrance chamber glowed red, the same as Wilson remembered. A metal square in the floor with warning labels and yellow and black striped edges. The door across the room with a lost passcode. The faded “Restricted” label on the wall.

  “You were a good student,” said Reed. “I never expected things to turn out the way they did.”

  “I didn’t either.”

  Reed bent to the metal square on the floor and opened a small panel. He turned his wrist and a small console rose from the floor, then Wilson flipped up the screen and typed in the commands. He closed it and the console descended.

  A klaxon coughed and began to whine somewhere beneath their feet. The floor vibrated.

  Reed watched him carefully. “Did you forget something?”

  “Oh! I’m sorry.” Wilson pulled the rolled-up manual from his pocket. “It’s a book about the implants.”

  “Remarkable. No, that’s not what I meant. You’ve forgotten the ceremony. The one who makes the journey has to take something they valued.”

  “What did you send with my father?”

  “One of your sketchbooks from years ago. I found it in your room.”

  “Thank you,” said Wilson. “But neither of us are dead, so that old superstition doesn’t matter.”

  “As you wish.”

  The metal floor panel slid apart and a huge rectangle speared up. The black casket turned ninety degrees and split apart to reveal a shallow, flat bed.

  “Do you have all of your tools?”

  Wilson checked his belt. He had a set of small screwdrivers, a hammer, a foot-long pry bar, pliers, and a knife.

  Reed handed Wilson an old pencil and a few sheets of paper. “Take this.”

  Together they lifted Badger onto the slab. Wilson used a measuring tape on the folded-out wings and Reed double-checked his calculations.

  “Luckily you’re a pair of skinny young chickens.”

  Wilson nodded. “I guess this is farewell.”

  “Keep your farewells to yourself. I’ll call for the casket in one hour.”

  “How can you bring us back?”

  “Don’t worry, it’s a console command. Return or send a message with the paper. If I don’t hear anything, I’ll come back in the morning.”

  Wilson shook Reed’s hand and climbed onto the slab. There was just enough room to lie next to Badger and not be crushed by the closing wings of the casket.

  Reed opened the panel in the floor again and twisted the controls. The wings began to rise with a loud mechanical whine. He shouted something but the sound completely covered his voice. The black wings shut over Wilson and everything was quiet.

  Reed watched the casket rotate to the vertical position. It dropped through the floor and the warning panel slid shut.

  “I was wrong,” the priest said to the silent metal square. “You took something.”

  TWENTY

  As the machine rumbled into the earth Wilson focused on his breathing and heart rate. He couldn’t see the panel in front of his face but certainly felt it. His nose and forehead bumped against the hard surface with every jolt.

  After a few minutes the casket rotated back to the horizontal and he was flat on his back. The vibrations continued and Wilson counted to himself. At three hundred and twelve everything stopped.

  The silence made him sweat, but not because he was nervous. He’d forgotten to calculate how long the air inside the casket would last.

  Wilson ran his fingers over the smooth panel. The tip of a fingernail caught on a razor-sharp line in the center. He wedged a thin screwdriver into the seam then the flat end of the pry bar. In the tight casket he couldn’t put any leverage on the bar.

  His heart started to beat faster, but he remembered the strength trick. He breathed out and whispered the poem, then twisted the bar with his hands. A gap opened and stale air rushed inside.

  Wilson put his hand in the crack and shoved the panel up and to the left. The panel snapped and fragments pinged away in the dark. As he sat up from the casket a line of golden lights flashed along the wall.

  The smooth ceiling of a tunnel curved only centimeters from his outstretched fingers. At his feet and beyond the casket a metal track led to a small circular hatch. Wilson twisted his body to look at the front of the casket. Between the light-dark-light flashes he saw another door blocking the tunnel.

  The air hummed loud enough to make his teeth hurt.

  “Lay down. Clean cycle startup,” said a voice like the snapped branches of a falling, long-dead tree.

  Wilson lay beside Badger but kept the pry bar ready. A hiss filled the tunnel and Wilson covered his face from a stinging mist.

  “Air cycle startup.”

  Wind roared through the tunnel and rustled his hair. When it stopped, Wilson heard a grinding sound at the head of the casket. The tunnel brightened with a red glow and the entire casket jerked forward.

  A number of narrow tracks covered the ceiling of the red-lit room. Long silver spikes unfolded and moved along these tiny railways like the ripped-off legs of a ghastly metal spider. One leg followed the path of the casket from above and held a cylinder, the end glinting with lights and tiny, circular windows. Wilson looked to his left and saw rows of black caskets, most with open wings and exposed beds.

  “Keep still,” said the dry, broken voice.

  “What if I don’t?”

  Static noise filled the room, and sounded almost like a sigh.

  The casket bumped along with Wilson and the still-unconscious Badger, constantly followed by the mechanical spider-legs. After passing through another tunnel and into a dim chamber, all movement stopped. Spider-legs whirred along narrow tracks on the ceiling. A dozen circled the casket with sharp needles and dangerous-looking blades.

  The black panel over Badger folded away and Wilson peered over the edge.

  “Can I get out now?”

  “Be my guest,” said the voice.

  Wilson dropped down to a tiled floor, slick and pale gray in color. White panels along the walls illuminated a large number of medical beds and tables loaded with strange silver and white equipment. Pinpoints of green or red glowed and darkened from a few machines like a breath of light. Some of the equipment Wilson recognized from the lab at Schriever.

  He put his hands under Badger’s shoulders and started to lift her from the casket.

  “Wait,” said the voice. “I have to do a body scan.”

  Wilson laid her down and stepped away. “Don’t hurt her or you’ll be sorry.” He felt silly as soon as he’d said it––how can you threaten a circuit board?

  “Just trust me,” said the crackling twigs.

  The silver spider legs zipped into action and attached wired contact patches to Badger’s head, chest, and arms. With a needle, one inserted a clear tube into the cubital vein on her right arm. A spider leg with a glowing sphere hovered over Badger’s head and slowly glided down to her feet.

  “I can’t see what’s wrong,” said the voice.

  “What?”
>
  “She’s not well, I can tell you that.”

  Wilson wandered a circle around the casket. “I don’t understand. All these machines and that’s all you can say––she’s not well?”

  “You got it, boss.”

  “I don’t believe this. You’re not really a machine, are you?” asked Wilson.

  “I could be.”

  Wilson sighed. “She needs resequencing, whatever that is. I thought we might find something here.”

  “Oh, I get it. That’s why you two went east.” The voice paused. “There’s something coming up as a sequencer over here.” Two spider-legs flew across the ceiling and quickly returned with a large cylinder between them. Like a smooth silver barrel, it was hollow on the inside.

  “Oh THIS,” said the voice. “I’m definitely losing my mind. I should have smashed it to bits years ago.”

  “Please don’t, she needs it.”

  The metal spider-legs lifted Badger’s hand and slid the barrel of the resequencer over her left arm, completely obscuring it. The legs attached cables to points on the device and tiny yellow lights began to flash in the center.

  “This will take lots of power,” said the voice. “Is she worth it?”

  “What! Are you serious?”

  “No sense of humor, I see,” said the voice. “Now down to the gritty-nitty, as they used to say.

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Now here’s something … I’ll read it out loud because you probably know more about these things. The system is asking me, ‘Do you want RS3 to shut down all version 4.30 integration with mobile framework S4 Bryant Chen?’”

  “I don’t know,” said Wilson.

  “I need a yes or no answer.”

  “Yes!”

  The spider-legs folded into the ceiling and the lights snapped off, turning the room pitch black apart from tiny needles of light on the sequencer. These lights changed from flashing yellow to a steady green.

  For a few seconds, the cylinder hummed around Badger’s arm like a furious bee. As the lights snapped back on, the spider-legs dropped from the ceiling and took the sequencer away.

  Wilson touched her pale hand. “Wake up, sleeping beauty.”