Bright Shards

by Meg Pechenick

  “Are those clean?” Sohra said enviously. “You’ve been hoarding clean clothes all this time?”

  “Holding them in reserve, yes.”

  “Are you holding anything else in reserve?” Saresh queried.

  I said under my breath, “Just an extra pair of gloves.”

  I wasn’t trying to be funny, or, for that matter, to be overheard. The evocation of our long-ago hour in the lounge, with its dream of shared adventure that had so improbably come true, was meant for myself alone. Hathan’s laugh caught me entirely off guard. I looked up and found him smiling quizzically at me. “You remember that story?”

  “Of course. It’s only been a couple of months.”

  “Do you know which glove it was?”

  “The right.” I answered without hesitation. I had been staring at the hand in question while he told the story, tracing the dark sweeping lines inked onto the back of it, wishing I could trace them with my fingertip. And maybe, while I was at it, peel off that pesky gold overlay.

  My eyes dropped to his hand again as he flexed his fingers thoughtfully. “That’s right. You know, I think you’ve been underselling human memories. Yours are quite accurate.”

  “They’re okay,” I hedged. Our companions, excluded from both the joke and the conversation that followed it, were looking interestedly between the two of us. I didn’t think I was imagining the sharpness in Saresh’s gaze.

  “What are we talking about?” Zey said brightly.

  “When Hathan lost a glove,” I said, and felt the blood rush into my face. In the months that we had known each other, I had called him by his given name precisely twice. The first time, just after an explosion ripped through the Pinion’s hull, I had been begging him to trust me. The second time, I had been trying to recall him to his senses during the Flare. I had done it now without even thinking. It had felt effortless. Natural. I wished with sudden fervency that the end of the Outmarch was still days off. Weeks, even. I liked the people we had become on Rikasa. I didn’t want to leave them behind.

  Hathan was saying unconcernedly, “My winter survival trial. I must have told you about it.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Zey said, and snorted. “Sock-hand.”

  “I’ll be needing those clothes back,” Hathan said, just as Saresh murmured, “Missing your kitchen detail, Novi?” All three of them laughed.

  On the other side of the communal shelter, Sohra was brewing tea, a floral blend we had sampled together on Arkhati. The air was filled with its fragrance. Ahnir had begun tuning his mandolin. The shadow of future loss fell over me, dark and chilling, just as it had in my last days on Elteni. I said good night in a voice that trembled only a little. Then I turned my personal tent to full opacity and crawled inside it. I lay there with my sleeping bag pulled up to my chin, tears running silently into my pillow, for a long time before the pensive notes of Ahnir’s playing finally lulled me to sleep.

  The next thing I knew, Sohra was shaking me gently awake. “Eyvri? The storm is passing. We should be able to see the Perch now.”

  I sat up, rubbing my eyes, and saw that it was morning. The rain had dwindled to an occasional spatter, and while the clouds were still heavy, they were pierced here and there by golden spears of sunlight. I shoved my feet into my hiking boots without troubling to lace them and followed Sohra out of the tent.

  The veil of rain had lifted. Across the valley a line of mountains rose as dark and straight as if inked in by hand on a paper horizon. I scanned their higher slopes for the Perch and found it almost at once, a roughly rectangular shining like a chip of mica on the shoulder of a peak slightly below our current vantage point. A single glance down over the tumbled rocks to the valley floor below and back up to that tiny glittering point told me what I needed to know. With mechanical movements I took my flexscreen out of my pack and checked the time. Six hours. Impossible. I turned to Hathan, raised my hands a little, then dropped them to my sides. “Well, we tried.”

  “We did,” he said, consulting his own device. “Outmarch Control is asking if we’d like to be picked up now.”

  “Not now, not ever.”

  “I didn’t think so.” He sent his response and put his flexscreen away. “Let’s see how close we can get.”

  We broke camp and began our descent. Nothing we had seen in the past two weeks came close to equaling its level of technical challenge. In full daylight, and with mostly dry footing, it was difficult; in darkness and rain it would have been suicidal, at least for me. Three times we were stopped in our tracks by vertical slabs of smooth rock, each at least two stories in height. My crewmates, exhibiting still-untapped depths of resourcefulness, produced an assortment of climbing ropes, which Khiva swiftly anchored into place and Zey just as swiftly retrieved after the rest of the group had made use of them. Watching my friend nimbly spider-climb down what had registered to my eyes (and fingers and toes) as a nearly featureless wall was deeply unsettling. He and Khiva were the most accomplished climbers, but all of my companions were highly skilled. I had to look away when Saresh and Hathan rappelled side by side down the third and longest rock wall in a furious race to the bottom. I wasn’t afraid of heights, but my prior rock-climbing experiences had all involved helmets and redundant safety systems. The cat’s-cradle harnesses Khiva had thrown together from skeins of what looked like parachute cord were probably stronger, but they didn’t look it.

  I couldn’t keep pace with my crewmates, but I thought I acquitted myself well enough. When my turn came, I stepped promptly off each ledge, only giving my harness a couple of surreptitious tugs beforehand. I dropped down a little more slowly than the others and expelled a sigh of relief as my feet hit solid ground for the last time. Hathan was close enough to hear it.

  “Still think the Outmarch is a nice hike through the mountains?” he teased.

  “It’s not so bad,” I said, trying to ignore the heat rising in my face, “for a soft course.”

  With that last rock face conquered, the worst of the descent was behind us. It was early afternoon. We took a short lunch break, which my crewmates filled with cheerful talk of the various amenities offered by the Perch. I didn’t say much. I didn’t begrudge them their anticipation. How could I? We had all been promised ten standard days soilside to spend however we wished, and they’d had plenty of time to plan theirs before I came along and signed us all up for a camping trip. Still, it seemed that their eagerness to complete the course was growing in tandem with my reluctance. When we’d eaten, we headed down into the trees that blanketed the lower slopes of the mountain. As the ground leveled out, and it became possible to move at a faster clip, I had to fight the instinct to dawdle.

  There was a river somewhere below us, winding its way along the bottom of the valley. I knew because I’d glimpsed it from the last high ledge. I had noted a place where the water made a lazy curve around a half-moon of pebbled beach that ought to mark an easy crossing, not to mention a potential swimming hole. I had already promised myself that, time limit or no, if I saw an opportunity to fit in one last quick swim, I would take it. I had just begun to glimpse the bright flicker of sunlit water through the trees, and to wonder whether the river would be warmer or colder in the aftermath of rain, when I stepped off a low ledge and broke my ankle.

  The stone that rolled under my foot had held steady for six people before me. It gave way the moment I touched it, and my leg gave way along with it. The pain was instant and sickening. I went down hard, the weight of my pack combining with Rikasa’s heavier gravity to propel me toward the ground with disconcerting speed. I couldn’t get my hands up in time to break my fall; my face and chest broke it instead. The impact stunned me briefly. After a few moments I began to gather myself onto my hands and knees. While I did so, I took stock of my injuries. In addition to the watery wrong feeling in my right ankle, I had cracked one lens of my sunglasses, torn my favorite hiking shirt, and gained a scratch on the bridge of my nose and another on my chest above my collarbone. As I levered myself
upright, noting the rock that would have broken my nose rather than scratched it had I hit a couple of inches to the left, I felt a sudden easing of pressure on my back. Someone was lifting my hiking pack away from my body. I freed one arm, then the other, and looked up to see Hathan setting the pack gently aside.

  He crouched down next to me. “Can you stand?”

  I doubted it, but I said through my teeth, “I’ll try.”

  He settled my arm across his shoulders and helped me to rise. When I was fully upright, I took a deep breath, set my right foot down—and gasped at the white-hot knife that pierced my ankle. It was no good. My Outmarch was over. I turned my face toward his shoulder and wept tears of pain and bitter disappointment. He drew me against his side in an infinitely cautious embrace. Bitterly I consigned the moment, along with that earlier one in which he had half carried me out of the lake, to the realm of romantic opportunities ruined by the insistence of pain.

  After a subjective eternity Ahnir said hesitantly, “Eyvri? Can I look at it?”

  I dried my eyes with my none-too-clean sleeve and transferred my arm from Hathan’s shoulders to his. He lowered me carefully to the ground again and began to unlace my right boot. At the first touch of his fingers on my sock-clad ankle, I was vividly reminded of his careful probing for broken facial bones after the Flare. He issued gentle instructions which I obeyed with only half my mind. My real attention was with Hathan, who had paced a short distance away and was speaking softly into his flexscreen. I couldn’t hear the words, but I knew what they signified. He wasn’t waiting for a diagnosis. He was calling for a medical evacuation. He knew it was over too.

  Ahnir sighed and drew my sock gently back into place. “I suspect it’s broken, but it’s almost beside the point, no? Broken or sprained, you can’t walk on it.”

  “No,” I agreed. There was no point in denying it. Standing had been agony. Walking was out of the question.

  Hathan finished his call and rejoined us. He addressed me without raising his voice; the others drew in to listen. “Eyvri, the Perch is sending a flyer to pick you up. You’ll be transported back to the resort clinic. Echelon medical personnel will determine whether your injuries are treatable on-site. If not, you’ll be flown south to one of the larger cities.”

  “Oh,” I said, a little taken aback. “Okay. What about the rest of you?”

  “We’ll finish the course on foot.”

  Zey said reassuringly, “We’ll see you in a couple of hours. You won’t even have time to miss us.”

  “I miss you already,” I said, and meant it. “If they send me to the city, can I bring a friend?”

  “I’m sure that can be arranged.” Hathan shaded his eyes to look up at the sky. “This must be your ride now.”

  “Fast,” I said. It came out as much breath as word.

  “Of course,” Saresh murmured. “This is their nightmare. You can be sure they’re ready for it.”

  I smiled crookedly at him. “We’ve seen a couple of nightmare scenarios. I’m not sure this one qualifies.”

  Hathan said, “The Echelon doesn’t know that yet.”

  “Want me to carry you to the shuttle?” Zey asked.

  “If you do that, they’ll definitely assume the worst. I can probably make it, if you give me a shoulder to lean on.”

  The shuttle that touched down a little distance from our group was white, with black markings and strikingly elegant lines. Zey helped me over to it. He had retrieved my backpack and was wearing it. My right boot hung from a strap, clipped to the same orange carabiner I’d used in the memory game. We went slowly. My breath hitched every time my right foot brushed the ground, but I didn’t make a sound beyond that. As we approached the craft, a panel retracted in its side, and a young white-haired medic stepped out. She wore Echelon colors, but her uniform was simpler in design than Reyna’s. Her right cuff was banded with a triple stripe of red, indigo, and purple. The colors, instantly evocative of the Rikasan landscape, suggested an Outmarch uniform to my eyes.

  “Translator?” she said curtly to Zey.

  “Nah, she doesn’t need one.”

  She absorbed that fact without blinking. “I’ll take over from here.”

  “Good luck, Eyvri,” Zey said. “Don’t let them take the leg. It’s probably still good for something.” He passed my backpack to the medic.

  She put it on, giving him a dark look as she did so, and draped my arm over her shoulders with conspicuous gentleness. We began our awkward tandem shuffle up the ramp. “Novi Alkhat,” she said as we went, “Outmarch Control regrets that your Fleet escort permitted you to be injured, but you’re in Echelon hands now, and we’ll keep you safe.”

  “I appreciate that, but I think I’d be better off in Echelon feet,” I said, and heard Zey laugh as he walked away.

  The medic smiled too, just slightly. “I’m afraid the on-site facility at the Perch isn’t equipped to clone Vardeshi feet on cue, let alone graft them onto human tissue.” She helped me settle onto a stool in the flyer’s tiny cabin, arranged my right leg as comfortably as possible, and set down my pack before signaling to the pilot to take off. “But,” she went on, taking her own seat, “we should be able to re-knit a torn ligament or fractured bone for you without any trouble.”

  “Seriously?” I said, startled.

  “Yes. The updated list of basic medical techniques approved for humans includes both of those procedures.” She held up a syringe. “May I inject an anesthetic?”

  “Please.” I sighed as cool relief washed through my leg. “Re-knitting bones is a basic technique, huh? How long does it take?”

  “Anywhere from twenty minutes to a few hours, depending on the severity of the break. Ligaments are a little faster.”

  “And when would I be able to walk on it?”

  “That also depends on the extent of the damage.”

  “My hadazi had surgery on Arkhati,” I said, recalling Saresh in his hospital bed, “to reconstruct his leg. He walked the next day.”

  “He’s Vardeshi. The treatment was designed for our bodies, not yours. To my knowledge, only two humans have undergone bone-reconstruction procedures. Both of them responded well, but it’s still only two cases.” She rose from her stool, slung my pack on, and reached out a hand to help me up. I took it, belatedly registering that the flyer had landed. The pilot had been navigating by instruments throughout the short flight, and other than the swiftly changing readouts on the front display screen, which I still couldn’t interpret, there was no visual or physical cue to accompany our touchdown. I leaned gratefully on her strong arm as I shuffled down the ramp.

  Shuttles arriving at the Perch landed on an enormous hexagonal platform built slightly upslope from the structure itself. My first clear view of the building through the shuttle door brought a wave of intense disorientation. Seen from the other side, its shape was all wrong, and the many mirrored facets I had been scrutinizing in miniature now towered overhead, rising to a height of several stories. I shook off my confusion and went to greet the collection of Outmarch staffers—or so I inferred from their striped cuffs—who waited on the edge of the platform to receive me.

  I saw at once that Saresh had been right. They had been bracing for the nightmare scenario. Their relief at finding me conscious, calm, and articulate was unmistakable. A volley of names and titles ensued, most of them flying harmlessly over my head. I managed to retain the two most important ones. Director Anziar, overseer of the Rikasan Outmarch, had cropped black hair and looked improbably young for her role. Specialist Reyansh, chief physician, was a gray-haired woman who looked to be in late middle age.

  My memories of Specialist Irnik were sufficiently fresh to make me wary of her, but she greeted me cordially enough, and looked me in the eye while she did it. If her plans for me included syringes or cold showers, she was canny enough not to mention them. She did insist on ferrying me to the Perch clinic on a chair-shaped version of the hoversled I had used to transport heavy items up and down t
he corridors of the Pinion and the Ascendant.

  I stopped protesting when the friendly medic, who was still at my side, quietly observed that the anesthetic she had administered was a Vardeshi formulation with a numbing effect, and I might inadvertently do further damage to my ankle by walking on it. Her name was one of the ones I’d missed, but I asked for it again on the way to the clinic. “Tenvi Lanakh,” she said, and I worked on committing that one to memory too.

  Tenvi and Specialist Reyansh floated me into the Perch and through a network of twisting corridors. I looked around eagerly, both to satiate my curiosity—this was the first Vardeshi building I had ever seen—and to distract myself from the fascinated glances of passersby. I saw a blend of textures. The floors were a matte blue-gray substance resembling concrete, while the walls were synthetic wood, interspersed with sections of bright metallic paneling. The corridors were high and surprisingly narrow, leading to a feeling of confined space I didn’t associate with the resorts of home. There wasn’t room for Tenvi to walk beside me, so she followed behind, guiding my hoverchair with one hand. I saw no windows at all until we approached the rear of the building, and the ones there were viewport sized. The glass, or glasslike substance, set into them was amber. It dimmed the incoming light and warmed it, giving the place a dreamy, ethereal feel. That, at least, was spalike, I thought.