“Do you really think fish eat beef? There has never even been a cow on this planet.” Heming crinkled his brow at Iris’s choice of food to attempt to entice the creatures that likely lived in the water.
“And there was only one human on this planet before we got here. And yet, we’re worried about them eating us. I think beef will work.” Iris rolled her eyes at Heming.
Iris waded out into the water. Vlad held his breath, hoping nothing would immediately attack her. Nothing did. Iris put the hand holding the beef jerky into the water.
“Here fishy, fishy,” Iris sang out to the water, waving her hand in the shallow pool.
“What if it isn’t fish you need to worry about?” Heming asked as Iris leaned over the water, dragging her hand and a piece of meat through the clear, blue water. “Perhaps the horrible, man-eating creatures living in this water see it as an insult that you’re calling them fish when they are more like giant, crazy insects.”
“Fine, then.” Iris changed her call. “Here fishy, buggy, snaky, animal of unknown quantity. I have some delicious meat for you. All the way from Columbina for your dining pleasure.”
Iris splashed through the water some more, doing her best to attract the fish or other creatures, though Vlad wondered if her flailing about might actually scare some of them away. The water never rose above her ankles, which was almost as reassuring as the lack of creatures who came after Iris’s food. If she had tried that on Columbina, the water creatures would probably have not only eaten the food out of her hand, but even the non-edible materials making up her hand.
“I think we’re good,” Iris said after a few minutes of attempting to get anything to eat the food out of her hand. She was, apparently, satisfied that she had done enough to attract any potential, man-eating creatures to her proffered snack. “Who wants to join me first? I think it should just be one of you to start. A sort of test case, to make sure it’s OK for humans. I’d rather lose one of you than all four of you.”
“That probably didn’t sound as good to us when you said it out loud as it did in your head,” Heming told her.
“Whatever. It’s the truth.”
“I’ll volunteer.” Vlad raised his hand. Before anyone could object, Vlad plunged into the water. It was partially for their benefit—he didn’t want any of them to try to talk him out of it—and partially for his on—he didn’t want to talk himself out of it, either. For the first few seconds as he walked to where Iris stood, still waving the meat under the water, Vlad held his breath, somewhat convinced that each step would be his last before an attack by some deadly, unseen creature in the water below.
But no attack came.
“I think it’s OK.” As Vlad spoke, Iris stopped waving the meat under the water and stood up, agreeing with his assessment.
Vlad watched as Beryl took a deep breath and prepared to follow them out. She touched the emerald around her neck, and then took a first step into the water. She took several more steps before Vlad saw her chest fall as she breathed again, though her hand still gripped her necklace.
Camp, seeing his two favorite people in the water, splashed in behind Beryl. The dog’s translator might not have been working, but anyone could see he did not want to be left behind if both Beryl and Vlad were going to cross the river—even though he, like every dog on Columbina, had a finely-tuned fear of any water not in a pool. Heming and Fawn followed the dog, neither looking confident in their steps, but realizing they had no other choice.
Slowly, the group walked across the river. At a few points, it came part of the way up Vlad’s shins, but it never reached his knees. Iris led the way, avoiding areas where the water seemed deeper. It took them longer than it normally would have taken to cover 1,000 feet of terrain, but they made it to the other side without so much as seeing anything in the water.
“That was kind of fun,” Fawn said as she shook the water off of her shoes.
“Definitely more fun than doing the same thing on Columbina, though I have to say it would have been far more exciting to do the same thing while dodging flesh-eating creatures,” Heming replied, pulling off his own shoes to get the water out of them.
Twenty or thirty feet upstream from where they had come out of the water, Camp sniffed the rocks on the far side of the river where they now all stood. Vlad watched the dog as he grew more frantic, his nose sniffing ever wider swaths of the rocky shore as he wandered further away from them.
“Iris, do you see what Camp is doing?” Vlad walked toward the dog. Unlike normal, his tail didn’t wag in a friendly greeting at seeing Vlad, but stayed down as Camp continued sniffing the ground. Vlad heard the rest of the group come up behind him.
“I think he lost the scent,” Iris said, confirming what Vlad had suspected. “No worries, we’ll just walk up and down the shore for a bit and see if we can’t pick up where they came out.”
Two hours and several miles up and down the shore later, Camp hadn’t picked up anything. With every footstep and the sun growing higher in the sky, they lost hope that he would find anything.
“Everyone, hold up,” Iris finally said. Even Camp stopped searching, sitting down as if he knew there was no way they were going to find what they were looking for. “I’m going to say what I know you are all thinking: we’ve lost the scent.”
With the statement, the already upset faces of the four humans looked even more dejected. Thinking that they had lost the trail was one thing. Iris saying out loud that they had lost the trail gave the situation a gravity it had not previously had. If Iris knew it was true, that was an entirely different matter than the four of them thinking it was true.
“We could keep searching,” Fawn suggested, her optimism, as always, intact. “He has to have come on shore somewhere.”
“I agree,” Iris said, and the four dejected faces all lit up slightly. “But we have no idea where. There doesn’t seem to be anything harmful in the water here, so he could have gone upstream or downstream for miles in the water, trying to throw off anyone following him. He could even have gone upstream or downstream and emerged on the side of the river where we started. Nothing required him to have crossed and continued on this way.
“Remember, he doesn’t know for sure that we’re following him, but he does know that the Civitians are looking for him and trying to kill him. If Whit is smart—and he is—he will be more concerned with throwing them off of his trail than trying to leave a path for us to follow. That’s especially true because he gave us a clue to his whereabouts in his message to Beryl. If we can figure out what he meant in his message, I suspect we’ll know where he is without having to trek through the woods to find him.”
“It sounds to me like you’re saying it’s time we go to our second option,” Heming said, his voice betraying his unhappiness with that choice—or rather, the lack of choice they were now faced with. “Back to the Bird.”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Iris said. “But it’s better to get back there and try to figure out where he is than to waste more time out here on a wild goose chase. The longer it takes us to find him, the more likely it is that the Civitians find him first.”
There were some grumbles about the decision, but Vlad could see everyone knew it was the only choice they had at this point. They could spend days trying to find a scent that might already be gone. It was better to admit defeat quickly and move to an option that had at least some chance of success than to waste their time on something that now had almost no chance of success.
Iris was the first one to wade back into the water, their former trail just visible in the jungle across the river from where they now stood. Heming and Fawn followed her, leaving Vlad, Beryl, and Camp on the shore.
When the others were out of easy earshot, Beryl spoke. “I don’t like this, Vlad. I don’t like it at all.”
“You mean the decision to go back? None of us like the decision. I think that was fairly obvious,” Vlad replied.
“I don’t like that decision, but that’s not wh
at I’m talking about. It’s something else. Remember when we sent the first group up to meet the Earth AI back on Columbina?” Beryl didn’t have to tell Vlad how that had ended. Both of them had lost a parent in a matter of moments that day. “I feel like that now. Like something bad is about to happen, and I could stop it if I could just figure out what was wrong. But I’m just missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.”
“I think the words you’re looking for are, ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’”
No sooner had the words left Vlad’s mouth than Heming, already several hundred feet across the river, let out a blood curdling scream and fell into the water through which he waded.
Chapter Twenty
Fawn turned at the sound of Heming’s scream and began running to where she saw him flailing in the water.
Even as every part of her training taught her to run toward the injured person, Fawn knew it was probably not the smartest move. Whatever had caused him to let out the alarming scream was almost definitely not something any of them wanted to experience up close for themselves. But she couldn’t help herself. Someone in trouble needed her. It wasn’t just her training that made her want to help someone in trouble; everything in her history suggested she couldn’t help herself when someone needed her.
Despite the ill-advised nature of getting closer to whatever it was that had knocked Heming down, Fawn saw that she wasn’t the only one trying to reach Heming. She could hear Iris splashing in the water too. Even Beryl and Vlad appeared to have just left the shore so they could race to Heming’s side and hopefully help him out of whatever mess he now found himself in.
Hopefully whatever was in the water wouldn’t come for all of them.
Fawn saw she was going to be the first to reach Heming. She had the nagging feeling that whatever was in the water would likely make her its next victim. But this was her job now—to do whatever it took to keep the people on this mission healthy.
She just hadn’t though it would require so much dealing with killer animals.
Fawn had thought she had left that sort of thing behind on Columbina.
Within a few feet of Heming, Fawn stopped. He was lying a shallow part of the stream, his head resting on a rock that protruded out of the water while the rest of him seemed arranged on the rocks like someone splayed out on a bed in an attempt to take up as much room as possible. Fawn couldn’t see any outward signs of injury, suggesting that whatever had come after Heming, it had shocked him or poisoned him. Unfortunately, that could mean whatever had done this was small, even microscopic. And if it had shocked him using some sort of electrical energy, maybe it didn’t even need to be touching you to hurt you.
Still, the potential she might not be able to see what hurt Heming did not stop Fawn from scanning the water around where Heming now laid, seeing if she could find anything in it that looked threatening. There didn’t seem to be anything, which was almost more worrisome than seeing something lurking in the rocky waters.
As Fawn scanned the water, Iris caught up with her and went over to Heming. Fawn thought that the person who should have been doing that was her, but it was probably better Iris did it. Iris was, after all, not human. It was easy to forget that fact, but right now it meant that if there was something in the water near Heming, it was far less likely to hurt or injure Iris than one of them.
“What happened?” Vlad shouted as he and Beryl splashed up to where Fawn stood, watching Iris reach Heming and cradle his head. She was obviously looking for his vital signs, checking his breathing and his pulse.
“I have no idea. One minute, he was walking behind me, and the next I turned and saw he was flailing and in the water,” Fawn replied.
“He’s alive!” Iris said, relieved.
Suddenly, Heming opened his eyes and a smile spread across his face.
“He’s alive!” Heming repeated, except instead of the relieved statement that had come out of Iris’s mouth, the words came out of Heming as a clear imitation of any number of creepy actors who had portrayed Dr. Frankenstein in old movies.
“You asshole!” Iris said, standing up and letting Heming’s head drop back to the rocks of the stream. If she cared whether it banged into one of the rocks, she certainly didn’t seem to show it.
Heming sat up, looking extremely pleased with himself.
It took Fawn a moment to realize what had happened.
Heming had faked the attack.
“Oh, come on,” Heming said as everyone else glared at him. “It was funny.”
“It was not funny!” Iris fumed.
“OK, maybe ‘funny’ isn’t the word I wanted to use. How about, it lightened the mood around here. It’s been like the walking dead since Iris said we had to go back to the Bird. It’s not like I want to go back any more than the rest of you, but at least we don’t need to look like someone just killed the dog.” Camp tilted his head, sensing they were talking about him, but unable to understand what they were saying.
“Next time you want to lighten the mood, how about you tell a joke instead of making all of us think you’re being eating alive or poisoned or something else horrible?”
“Jokes are boring. Think of how relieved you’re all going to be now when we start off again. You probably won’t even think about having to walk by the Caterkiller nest until we’re practically there.”
“Jesus, Heming, did you really need to remind everyone about that?” Iris looked like she wished something actually had taken out Heming. “And it’s not a nest, it’s a rookery!”
“Fine.” Heming put his hands on his hips, like a child who knew he had to go to his room but was not happy about complying with the order. “I’ll stop faking being eaten or poisoned or otherwise injured by creatures that may or may not exist under the water where we are walking. Are you happy?”
“No, I’m not happy. Have you seen what sort of a mess we’re in? But I will gladly take whatever positives I can from our situation, and you taking our task of finding Whit seriously is a positive.”
Heming stood up from the warm waters of the river and started walking toward their destination on the other shore. Fawn saw it was more of a stomp toward the other shore than a walk, again like a child who had been punished.
Five steps into his mini tantrum, Fawn watched Heming step on a large stone that gave way as he put his weight on it, the rock tumbling downstream several feet in the swift current. Heming lost his footing with the moving stone, and Fawn saw his momentum send him backwards, as if he was going to fall down.
For a second, Fawn thought that Heming would be able to save himself from falling. He put his hands out and seemed to regain his balance. But in doing so, he overcompensated and started tumbling forward. This time, he couldn’t save himself before he fell, head first, to the rocks in the water below. He head fell underwater and the river rushed over it, treating it like any other object in its relentless trip to the ocean.
Unlike the first time he had fallen in the stream, though, this time he was silent.
The only sound Fawn heard was the thump of his head hitting the rocks on the riverbed.
A Fawn reached him, she saw the water near his head turning red. Fawn couldn’t see any injury, but she didn’t have to. She knew without seeing the injury that the red spreading in the water was Heming’s blood. If there was anything in this water looking for meat, the blood would surely attract whatever that was sooner rather than later.
This was definitely not a joke.
Chapter Twenty-One
“It’s bleeding a lot because it’s a head wound, but it doesn’t look that deep.”
Beryl watched Fawn quickly but caringly touch Heming’s limp body. Beryl had not had many occasions to see Fawn in action, though she had been the recipient of Fawn’s care long before they had come to Libertas and long before the Earth AI had come to Columbina. At the time, Beryl had not been in any shape to appreciate what Fawn had done for her. With Heming’s injury, it was like a switch had turned on in the normal
ly quiet young woman, and she had taken charge of everyone, including Iris.
As for Iris, she hovered over Fawn, not saying anything. That seemed strange to Beryl, but perhaps whatever help Iris could provide was limited by her inability to access all of her memory and the ship in the sky far above them. When they had been fighting the Earth AI back on Columbina, Iris had seemed to know what was wrong with them even without being near them, as if she was able to monitor their health remotely. Vlad and Heming’s brother, Mannie, had been seriously injured. Before they had even seen the wound, though, Iris had told them what was wrong with the boy.
Beryl had been meaning to ask Iris about that, actually. It was just that a lot had happened in the meantime to prevent her from remembering to do so.
“His neck seems OK, so I want to get him moved out of the water. We haven’t seen anything threatening in it, but there’s a lot of blood here now.” Fawn motioned to Vlad to come help her. “If there is something that wants to eat a person in the water, I’m guessing that blood will attract it sooner rather than later.”
Fawn directed Iris and Vlad to lift Heming up out of the water. As soon as they did, water poured off of his body, mixing in with the blood from a large gash on the back of his head. Most of the rocks in the water were rounded, but Heming’s head seemed to have found one of the few sharp rocks that could leave that sort of a wound.
“Take him to the other side of the river,” Fawn ordered the pair. “It’s not much further than the shore we just came from, but it will put us that much closer to Whit’s compound and the Bird if there is something else wrong with him.”
Iris and Vlad carefully picked their way among the rocks of the river, now well-aware of the potential for injury if they took a wrong step or one of the rocks moved. They still moved quickly, though, both also aware of the fact that they were carrying someone bloody across a body of water that could very well contain animals that wanted to eat something bloody or something carrying another bloody thing.
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