Kayleen glanced at the skimmer, where poor Windy stood cross-tied inside again for safety. “When Windy gets bigger she can help pull it.”
He glanced from the slender young hebra to the heavy skimmer. “If we can keep her alive long enough to get ten times her size.”
Which she never would. I stifled a laugh.
He turned to Kayleen. “What’s in the hold? Is there anything heavy and flat and at least three meters long?”
Kayleen screwed her face up. “The greenhouse pieces are long enough, but I don’t think they’re very strong.”
I stared at the skimmer, thinking. “Kayleen, the ramp? Will it come off?”
Her eyes widened. “I don’t know.”
Liam started for the skimmer. I glanced at Kayleen. “Look, I’ll watch the fire for a few minutes. You go see if you can help him figure that out.”
She stared at me for a second, as if she didn’t quite understand my words. “We have to know where to fly it before it will do us any good. We should figure out where we are going to live before we fix the skimmer. What if we get the ramp off and we can’t get it back on? The hold will be open to everything. The demon dogs might get all of our food. Or anything else out here. Maybe the paw-cats are bigger here, too.” She frowned. “But we could see if it looks possible. I mean, the ramp’s heavy enough. We’d have to dig out the crevice the wheel’s in—”
“Go,” I interrupted her. She sounded almost like her old self, babbling through a problem out loud. Maybe she had needed to get out of Artistos.
She took my hand, squeezing it, looking more—sane—than she had in days. “I’m sorry Chelo. I’m sorry I got us stuck here. But I had to do it. I had to.” Her eyes pleaded with me, and for a moment I felt my old friend by my side, saw her peering out of the crazy woman who had brought us here. “Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t.” I softened my voice. “Taking away our happiness won’t make you happy.”
She turned her gaze away, dropping my hand. I watched my friend—my kidnapper—as she walked away. Her shoulders slumped. Did she regret this? Right then, bathed in the stink of burning blood, I couldn’t quite forgive her. I turned my attention back to the rank-smelling fire and picked up a long stick to poke at it with.
They came back half an hour later. “I think we can do it.” Liam leaned in and grazed my temple with a soft kiss. “There’s a bolting mechanism—it’s pretty well hidden. We couldn’t free it, but I’m sure we’ll figure out a way.” He stared down at Kayleen. “Surely you see that we can’t live here. We can fly back tonight if we can get the skimmer out.”
I glanced over at the machine. I didn’t think it would be as easy to free it as he implied, but I held my tongue. The midmorning sun had pulled the chill out of the day, but interrupted sleep and hard work had left my back and arm muscles tight and twisted, and dried sweat clung to my skin.
The demon’s pyre burned to embers, to the bones of dogs and the bones of the bigger wood, while Liam struggled to get the ramp off. Kayleen wandered between the two of us, silent, stopping to whisper in Windy’s ear from time to time. When she stopped close to me, I looked for the Kayleen I knew to appear in her eyes again, but her gaze switched from unfocused to intent, never stopping on normal.
Free of fire tending in the now-punishing heat, I walked back to the skimmer to find Liam had given up on the ramp. He stood staring at a pile of altered metal he’d scavenged from boxes and the ruins of our camp last night. He shook his head at me. “Nothing looks big enough.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get it out.”
By late afternoon, we hadn’t figured out either what to put under the wheel to give the skimmer purchase, or how to pull it free. Liam stood staring at the sunken nose, sweat pouring down his arms. He kicked at a rock. “We’re going to need her to agree to fly it anyway.”
“She’s not ready to do that yet.”
“Damn her,” he replied. “We’d best find someplace to camp tomorrow. Close by.”
I moved next to him and held him, looking at the tilted skimmer. “Can we sleep in that thing?”
He shook his head. “It’s too canted. Windy’ll be on top of us. We’ll do what we did last night, but I’ll get Kayleen to set a bigger perimeter, and we’ll gather more wood. If we can’t sleep outside right next to the skimmer, how will we ever sleep in another camp? We can’t make one here; there’s not enough water. We’re going to need to spend the rest of this afternoon just getting ready for another uneasy night.” He fell silent for a long moment, looking up at the mountains. “But we can’t let this place beat us yet, not if we’re stuck for a while. We’ll just have one hell of a fire and stay alert.”
So he’d given up on the skimmer for now.
He squeezed me close to him, almost too tight. “Three isn’t a big enough band to survive here easily. I just know it in my bones. This place is dangerous, and we don’t have animals or wagons or anything.”
We didn’t. But we had each other. And Kayleen, who remained a wild card.
7
KAYLEEN’S STORY
That night we built our fire even closer to the ramp than we had the night before. The three of us stood wearily around the flames, holding our hands toward the heat. It smelled clean, like burning wood and bits of brush, with no taint of blood. Unable to shower, I had still cleaned up with water from the closest stream, a shallow thing sure to dry up soon. I used my dirty shirt for a washcloth, and put on a clean pair of work pants and a clean dark shirt from the pile Kayleen had brought. But washing the stink of blood and sweat and fear away only made me feel a little better.
I watched Kayleen’s eyes. She had been all business through the afternoon, matter-of-fact and flat, showing no emotion. After dinner, she’d rolled up into a ball next to Windy, one arm over her face, maybe sleeping, maybe hiding. She’d just emerged a few moments ago.
Now, as she stared at the fire, not looking at either of us, her eyes bounced between the same flat deadness and periodic flashes of some emotion I couldn’t quite name. Maybe not remorse, but at least uncertainty. I wasn’t close enough to touch her, but I reached out a hand experimentally. She looked at me, then shook her head.
Liam was on my other side, closer to me than I was to Kayleen. He threw a small stick on the fire, then looked over at her. “Kayleen. If you really spied on us all year, you know that we matter to our families, to our band. They are safer when we’re there.” His hands twisted in his lap. “If we can fix the skimmer, I’m sure Akashi will let us keep you for the summer.”
“And then what?” she asked. Her voice was bitter. “Akashi can’t stand up to the whole Town Council. He can’t risk the band for that, or at least he wouldn’t.”
I cleared my throat. “We could have died last night. If Windy hadn’t warned me, we would never have made it inside the skimmer in time. If we all die, or if we get stuck here, one or all of us, we can’t be any help to them. Three of us isn’t enough to make a new town. Six wasn’t. You were part of that conversation years ago, and you wanted to stay in Artistos with Paloma.”
“And you were going to stay with me,” she said. She stood, shuffling in place, her head down so it was hard to see her face. “You couldn’t stand Nava either, or being there. And you left. You could leave. I couldn’t.”
I tried not to choke on the truth in her words. I’d gone willingly away to a loving environment, healing, barely thinking about my friend. Counting on Paloma to be enough. As if someone who wasn’t one of us could actually understand. “You could have asked for help.”
Kayleen didn’t answer. Liam stepped forward like he was about to speak, so I put a hand out, signaling him to be still. He hadn’t left her; I had. This was between us.
She stood for a long time, silent, staring out past the fire, into the darkness. Far off, demon dogs bayed, and Kayleen blinked, hard. “I want to be with you”—she looked over at Liam—“with you both.” She swallowed, running her hands through her h
air. “This is the only way I can do it. I feel better already. A little.” She finally looked back at me. “Just being away from Artistos helps. I need you to want to be here.”
“It’s too late for that.” I couldn’t want to stay, no matter what guilt gnawed at me for leaving her at all, ever. “I do care about you,” I said. “You aren’t the only person in my life who counts, though.”
She laughed. “But Liam’s here.”
Liam stepped around me to look directly at Kayleen. “I don’t want to be here.”
Her head came to his chin, and her slender body couldn’t weigh much more than half of what his did, but she stood her ground, firm. “I know that.” Her voice quivered a tiny bit. “I’m not going back now, not until I feel like myself. Do you know what I almost did? Do you know Klia?”
He shook his head. “I know who she is.”
“She… Klia was the last straw. Last year, she refused to even talk to me, to acknowledge my presence. But I could hear her. I could hear what everyone there said, anytime they were near a node. So the data chattered in me, and the town chattered in me, and I couldn’t turn any of it off.” She stopped and stared at me, as if willing me to understand.
How could I? What would it be like to have so many conversations in your head? But I nodded.
She continued. “She told her father, who is in line for a Town Council position, that he should kill me. She said they don’t need any holier-than-thou special people to help with anything, and insisted I’d go crazy just like Bryan and start beating people up. She said she’d seen me clench my fists around her, and that I was like a paw-cat living in town.” Words tumbled quickly out of her mouth now. “He told Klia she had to wait, but he didn’t tell her no. He didn’t tell her no. And I wanted to kill her right then, to go down there and rip her throat out.” She paused, breathing fast, looking at each of us for a moment.
The Kayleen I grew up with would never have wanted to kill anyone. Never. Maybe it had been shame that kept her from asking me for help.
Kayleen continued. “I’ve hunted, like you two. I never told anyone, but I’ve done it, run out of town as fast and far as I could and killed djuri. I even killed a baby paw-cat.” She pushed up her sleeve, showing a long scar on her forearm. “See—it scratched me before I killed it. I could have killed Klia. If I’d stayed there long enough, I would have killed her or someone else.” Her hands shook, and her eyes were bright with unshed tears.
Her pause stretched into a long silence. I shivered at the image of her hunting a paw-cat. What need drove her to put herself in so much danger? Finally, I stepped in close to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t turn into it, didn’t step away, just stood, quivering.
Liam watched us both, looking awkward and stiff. I pursed my lips. Couldn’t he see her pain? I swallowed, willing him to unbend.
He didn’t change his position or his gaze. He was close enough for me to hear his breath quickening as whatever inner thoughts that warred in him escalated.
And Kayleen watched him too, still standing with my hand on her, still not turning into it to let me hold her. Her shoulder felt like a rock. I spoke to her, keeping my voice soft and slow. “Did you tell your mom? Did you ask anyone for help?”
Her lower lip quivered and she unclenched her hands, leaving them hanging loosely at her side. “Paloma is one of them. She wouldn’t hurt me, she loves me. But she doesn’t understand. She can’t. I don’t even know if you can since you’re not Wind Readers. For the first whole day that I can remember, there aren’t a thousand thousand messages screaming at me through the air. I can only feel the perimeter and the ship, and they’re like nothing.”
We were all in the middle of tough choices. Some kind of hunting bird screeched off to our right, and something small gave a death cry, making me shiver. There had to be a compromise. “Liam?”
He didn’t stop staring at her. “What?”
“We can’t make her take us back. Until she does, we’re stuck here. This is a hard place. Kayleen can’t make us happy to be here, and we can’t become happy to be here. Not easily.” I swallowed. I didn’t want to even try to be happy here. “But can we promise to stay for a few days, get some breathing room?”
He turned and looked at me, his eyes bright and hard in the firelight. “Do you expect me to be happy about that?”
“No.” I said it softly, holding his eyes with my own.
Kayleen stood silent, waiting. Firelight played on half her face, touching her dark hair with gold. She licked her lips, then stepped back, giving him space.
I watched him, his jaw tight, his eyes still on me. I smiled, softly, willing him to see that giving her even a small concession in some way gave us more power. He turned to her. “We’ll find a place to camp tomorrow night. But I’m not giving up on fixing the skimmer, and I want your help.” He looked over at me. The price of backing down shone in his eyes, like a pool of loss that he couldn’t quite cry out. “I don’t want to winter here.”
I nodded, thanking him silently, mouthing the words, “I love you,” so that only he could see. A slight smile warmed his lips for just a second before he turned back to Kayleen.
She took a deep breath, blowing it out slowly. “Thank you.”
At least she had it in her to see what he gave her. The demon dogs bayed again, still far away. Windy bugled, and Kayleen turned to look at her.
Liam looked over toward the foothills where the high calls of the dogs came from. “I’m serious. I don’t want to winter here.”
Kayleen nodded, then turned and walked to Windy, burying her face in the hebra’s neck. I watched her go, wishing she had let me hold her instead of going by herself to Windy.
Liam enclosed me in his arms, leaning his chin on my head. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he whispered.
I glanced at Kayleen and Windy. “We’ll do it together.”
He squeezed me harder. “Might be the only way.”
8
EXPLORATION
Kayleen’s voice—singing just outside the open tent door—woke me from dreams of chasing Windy endlessly around the perimeter, never reaching her. Golden dawn light threaded its way in through the shredded tent windows. I pushed myself up, blinking sleepily. Across from me, Liam’s covers lay tumbled into an untidy lump over his empty cot.
We’d made it through the night without losing a second round of gear. Maybe we had earned enough respect for one night’s peace.
I crawled outside to a warming morning with clear blue sky directly above us and out toward the north ocean. South, piles of white clouds blanketed the mountaintops.
Liam walked toward me, lugging a bucket of water he’d filled from the closest stream. He set the bucket down in front of Windy, who plunged her long nose into it and drank noisily.
Kayleen squatted near the dying fire, cooking goat’s-milk pancakes and singing one of the songs we had loved as children, about a djuri baby lost in the woods, having adventures. I shook my head uncertainly at the signs of fragile domesticity on both of their parts, and walked to the stream to wash. The shallow water ran down from the mountains through a small depression, singing lightly as it tumbled over pebbles. The cold water stung my fingers.
“Come on!” Kayleen called, setting out three plates of hot pancakes, cold djuri jerky, and some dried apples from Artistos’ stores. As we sat down, she asked, “Which way shall we go?”
At least she was asking and not telling. I squinted at her face. She looked relaxed and happy; no sign of the crazy Kayleen who had kidnapped us showed. She didn’t stare at us—either in mistrust or with naked need written all over her.
“Not in the direction of the demon dogs.” Liam took a bite of pancakes, his brow furrowed. I’d heard the dogs again during my watch last night, far off, but either the fire or the previous night’s explosion had kept them away. Their calls had all come from the low hills between us and the mountain, to the southwest. Liam set his fork down. “We’ll go toward the forest,
where there’s likely to be more game.” He pointed southeast, toward the mountains still, but about forty-five degrees away from where we’d heard the dogs.
I swallowed, wanting to go in the opposite direction entirely. “Wouldn’t we be better off heading toward the north shore? On our way down, it looked like there were plains, and we’d be able to see anything coming our way better.”
Liam continued as if I hadn’t even spoken. “We should leave as soon as possible.”
I cleared my throat, demanding his attention. “I don’t want to go into the hills. It’s safer in the open.”
Liam looked at me as if I had two heads, and it suddenly dawned on me that it wasn’t about the direction of our travel at all. He expected to make the decisions.
Kayleen appeared to share my observation. She stopped midbite, her fork poised in the air. “Wherever we go, we need access to wood. We’ll need wood to build a house and corral. And we shouldn’t go too far. If we can’t get the skimmer unstuck we’ll need to carry everything.”
I grinned, pleased she understood about making decisions together. “But you also need to keep Windy safe from packs of those demon dogs,” I countered. “And we can see them better if we’re in the open.”
Liam waved a hand back in the direction he’d first proposed. “We won’t go more than a half-day’s walk anyway, so we can come back here at night. I don’t want to leave the skimmer unattended.”
I frowned at him. “There aren’t any people on Islandia. The Burning Void should be safe enough.”
“I don’t know yet if there is anyplace safer for us to be.”
He still wasn’t getting it. “We need to make decisions together.”
Liam raised an eyebrow at me. “And that means?”
“That means you sound like you’re telling us what to do.”
He stared out over my head, his jaw tight. I spoke softly into his stubbornness. “You are the most experienced of us, being raised in the roamer band. I listened to you there, because you are Akashi’s second. But Akashi doesn’t lead by giving orders unless it’s an emergency. We’ll generally follow you, and we’ll listen in an emergency, but we all get voices in major decisions.” I’d be damned if I was going to train Liam to give me orders.
Reading the Wind (Silver Ship) Page 6