by Chloe Garner
Jesse smiled.
“I come as diplomat. What I didn’t know when I left Calenna was that there aren’t two sides in this war.” He glanced at Benth, next to him. “There are three.”
Benth frowned, and Klath leaned forward.
“Let’s see how good you really are, Palta.”
Jesse shook his head, managing to be paternally disappointed even with just his head out of the water.
“You’ve fallen a long way in this war, Adena Lampak. Threats, secrets, hiding and hoping. This isn’t like you.”
“Neither is murder,” Klath answered. Jesse nodded.
“You’ve been hatching eggs just fine ever since you got here,” he said. “Mab hoped the poison would stick around a little while, but he underestimated the caretakers. They managed to hatch infants despite it, once you got away from him.”
“We thought we’d had a breakthrough,” Klath said, slumping slowly back into his throne. “That we were saved.”
Jesse nodded, casting another glance at Benth.
“But when you brought word of the hatches to Mab, he turned you away, didn’t he? Maybe killed the messenger?”
“Killed the proof,” Klath said. “Said if we ever returned to the Commander’s court again, they would wipe out the colony.”
Cassie heard Pane stop breathing.
“The Commander saw this?” Benth asked. Klath looked at Benth for a long time, then turned his head, finding another Adena Lampak across the room.
“The Adviser stopped us,” the other Adena Lampak said. “We came with a new-hatched infant, risked the swim, and he stopped us before we could speak with the Commander. He took a knife and slaughtered the child in full view of the court, and dumped him out over the rail.”
The ripple of anger was primal. It was the same feeling Cassie had had, the last time she’d seen Aland. The passion of the species was overwhelming, under all of their reasoned debate.
“Never,” Benth said. “The Commander wanted to save you. He wanted to win the war so we could bring you back. So we could find…”
“The solution,” Pane said, bitter. “They’ve been hatching, Benth. It was all a lie.”
“I can’t change what came before,” Jesse said. “But the predator wave is coming and it will wipe you out if you don’t make immediate preparation to leave.”
The condemnation was immediate and came from all sides.
“That’s not possible,” Klath said. “Even in the days of our ancestors, they never would have attempted such a thing with as many caretakers and infants as we have here.”
“And how many of your colonies were wiped out when the predators came?” Jesse asked. “How many times were you pushed to the brink of extinction by your stubborn refusal to flee?”
“How well did fleeing work for Elsa?” Benth asked.
“What’s happened at Elsa?” Klath asked.
“We destroyed it,” Pane said, his voice dull. “Nothing but sticks in the sky.”
“Where would we go, anyway?” Benth asked.
“Calenna,” Jesse said.
“The entire Southern army is converging on Calenna as we speak,” Pane said.
“So we need to move faster,” Jesse said. “They’ll go around the predator wave. We have a very, very small window here. But we can end the war today.”
He looked around the room.
“Don’t you miss the sun? The security of the towers? Teaching your children to walk?”
“Cooked food?” Cassie murmured.
“Our children will never walk,” someone else said.
“What?” Jesse asked.
“The caretakers won’t allow any but the parents to cut the children,” Klath said. “A few have been cut, but most have not. None of them above the age will ever walk in air.”
Jesse’s eyebrows knit, pained, and he sighed.
“I am sorry. I cannot change what is done.”
“Benth,” Pane said, soft. Benth’s head came around and the two of them held a silent moment of conversation, then dove away. Cassie tried to follow them, visually, but the marbled light under the water cast too many shadows and played too many tricks.
“The children that have been born are lost,” Klath said. “Feral, many of them. Born to be warriors but untended by any but caretakers. They do not speak and they will never walk in air. They hunt like nothing we’ve seen in many generations, though.”
It might have been the smallest spark of pride.
“They’re fast, then,” Jesse said.
“Fast as adults,” someone said.
“We can make it,” Jesse said.
“Everything we hold dear will die,” Klath said.
“Not with me here,” Jesse said. Cassie recognized that tone.
“And who are you?” another voice asked.
“When I choose to be, the greatest general this planet has ever seen,” Jesse said.
They had an arsenal.
Cassie shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet she was.
They built a crude platform that would float well enough, a place to hide infants out of the reach of the predators as well as a faster way of getting Jesse and Cassie across the stretch of ocean between the colony and Calenna.
It also served to carry everything that the Adena Lampak would use, fighting, but that was too cumbersome to swim with. So Cassie found herself sitting on a ten-by-ten barge built of wet sand and sitting on a precarious bubble of air. Jesse assured her that they knew what they were doing, that it would hold together. Then he told her not to wiggle around too much and ruined any comfort he had given her.
He and Klath sat on the front edge of the platform as they began their journey.
Cassie was grateful to be out of the water, but she wished she could have done more. Jesse’s hands were never idle, as he spoke or wandered the raft shouting at Adena Lampak as they surfaced, trying to get the formation right. Cassie had asked him if she could help him and he grimaced.
“You ever try to explain how to create a ballistic rocket to a five year old?” he asked. “If all you had to use was old soup cans?”
“Just the other day,” she answered.
“Keep your eyes open,” he said. “And don’t go jumping in.”
Cassie bit back a few mal-formed retorts and he moved on. Pane surfaced next to the raft.
“Cassie,” he said. She came and knelt next to the edge.
“This is my child,” Pane said. He hefted a squirming shape out of the water, half-eel, half-manatee, with huge black eyes and the ability to coil around itself three times over.
“Flexible,” Cassie said.
“We are, at this age,” Pane said. “He will never walk in air. His organs formed underwater too completely.”
“I’m sorry,” Cassie said.
“He’s still young enough that he might tolerate time in air, with the right support,” Pane said. “Will you hold him?”
Cassie almost leaned back over her heels.
“Are you sure?”
Pane passed the writhing child up to her. It was like trying to hold a wet fish, in every possible way. It flipped out of her arms, squirming for the edge of the craft, and Pane flipped it back toward Cassie.
“I don’t want to hurt him,” Cassie said.
“You won’t,” Pane said. “He should calm with time. The shoulders, there,” Pane said as Cassie struggled to scoop the doubled-over piece of solid muscle off of the deck. She found the more solid structure running across the top of the child’s frame and got her hands wrapped firmly around the points of its shoulders. Its tail flipped to the other side. “When he calms, you should be able to support him in your arms. He should lay flat, if he can, like in a cot.”
Cassie nodded.
“Talk to him?” Pane asked. Cassie looked up. The Adena Lampak took a quick glance in the direction from which the predators would arrive, then looked up at Cassie.
“He’s never heard our speech,” he said. “Our caretaker would
n’t let anyone else take him away. It’s impossible to force them to do anything they don’t want to without hurting them, so the colony just let them raise the children as they saw fit. He may never walk in air, but Benth and I would like to be able to talk to him.”
“Children learn speech young, here?” Cassie asked. Pane nodded.
“He may never understand the higher concepts of language. We don’t know. Children haven’t been raised feral for so many generations of Adena Lampak that no one remembers.”
“We’ll have ourselves a nice talk, then,” Cassie said as the child slapped its tail broadside across her face. Pane gave her one last, anguished, look, then turned to go.
“Pane?” Cassie asked. The Adena Lampak turned back. “Boy or girl?”
“Girl,” Pane said. “Like me.”
And then she was gone.
Cassie had never been much with children. She had babysat a few times for younger relatives and neighbors, during daylight hours when a pre-teen could be trusted to make sure no one was bleeding or missing. Her uncle had had a baby, and they’d put it in her arms at altogether too young an age, and she’d often looked back at that moment, wondering exactly what it was they’d expected her to feel. It had been awkward and ill-fitting, and she’d given the squaloring infant back as soon as it didn’t feel like she was acting like she was afraid of it.
Then her parents had died and she’d joined the military, and she’d stopped thinking about it.
The Adena Lampak child was very much a different kind of unfamiliar, and she had the same instinct to get rid of it as quickly as she could do, gracefully. It ran S’es over itself, then, as Pane went completely out of view, tried to bite Cassie.
“Hold on, now,” Cassie said, holding it away from herself. “That may be what all toddlers do, but your teeth are sharp.”
It tried to bite her again and she flicked its face.
No one was looking.
It blinked at her, stunned.
“You’re smart,” Cassie said, raising her eyebrows. “Your parents are smart, your people are smart, and therefore you’re smart. Where I come from, a guy bites you, you bite him back. And that’s the only warning I’m going to give you.”
The long, flat tail flapped down across her arm, curling around her elbow, and the child stared up at her, nose working at the air.
“Better,” Cassie said. “Your parents are taking a huge risk, trying to get all of us to Calenna. If this works, they’re going to be heroes. It would be best if they had a well-behaved child. You’re going to get a lot of attention, whether you want it or not.”
The child’s tail curled tighter around her elbow, and Cassie shifted, leaning against a pile of weapons.
“I’m not sure what else to tell you,” she said. “You haven’t seen much of the world, but neither have I. It seems like a pretty neat place, when nothing is trying to eat you. And Pane isn’t trying to drown you.”
The child wriggled, not maliciously.
“You really aren’t that ugly,” Cassie said. “When you stop acting like a big baby.”
“He is a big baby,” Jesse said, wandering by again. “You wouldn’t actually bite him, would you?”
“Course I would,” Cassie said. He snorted and moved on.
“That’s Jesse,” she said to the baby. “He’s about as whiny as you are.”
“You should keep him wet,” Jesse called. “His skin won’t be used to drying out.”
Cassie made her way to the edge of the raft again, unhappy with how much it eased under her as she walked, and splashed water onto the infant. At the moisture, she again began to writhe, trying to get to the water. Cassie dropped her on the deck and chased her for a ways. Jesse laughed.
“You knew that was going to happen,” she said.
“Always does,” he said. “They always want to go back. But it’s still true. You should keep him wet.”
“Her,” Cassie said in English. He nodded.
“I see.”
Cassie got the baby wrangled back down, sitting against the weapons again and tried to figure out what to say next.
The call came from one of the scouts.
The company had maybe four dozen warriors and a couple hundred caretakers, with the dozens of infants they’d hatched since their exile, and Jesse and Klath had spent most of the twenty hours they’d been traveling trying to figure out how to deploy them best. Jesse had devised a search pattern for scouts that kept them close, but covered a lot of ocean between them and the front edge of the predator wave.
The scout yelled from far ahead, jumping smooth arcs out of the water as he scrambled to get back to the main group.
The rest of the scouts heard the splashing and yelling and came back, surrounding the raft. Warriors handed up infants onto the raft and Cassie spent the next period of time trying to keep all of them in air as Jesse marshaled the Adena Lampak into position. They had to keep moving. Stopping to fight would make them more effective against the wall of meat-eating animals headed at them, but the current driving huge shoals of fish along behind the tides would drive the predators to them, as well, and there was no holding ground against it.
The caretakers would seek safety, trying to take the infants with them, and a large portion of the warriors would be tasked with just keeping them all together. That was how they lost most caretakers during migrations, Cassie learned. During confrontations with predators, if the warriors could stay between the predators and the caretakers, they were reasonably successful, but the caretakers would bolt, sometimes to the extent that the warriors couldn’t find them after the fight. More often, though, they’d end up somewhere that they were exposed and the warriors couldn’t protect them.
With threats everywhere, and lightning-quick infants to deal with, no less, the Adena Lampak were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to save any of the caretakers, much less all of them. As the scout returned and Cassie tried to grab an infant by the tail as he flipped across the deck, she could hear the level of anxiety rise. They were warriors, well-trained and well-disciplined, but they had steep odds against them.
Jesse stepped back as the Adena Lampak dove, finding their positions in the moving army that surrounded the column of caretakers and rogue infants under the platform. Every few minutes, an Adena Lampak would bring Cassie an uncut toddler, writhing and fighting, as they caught them. The caretakers were too disorganized to put up an organized defense against snagging the babies, but the babies themselves were hard to catch. The ones that were left probably weren’t going to be caught.
More than one got away.
Cassie had been trying to build some kind of fort in the center of the raft using the spare weapons, but the babies blitzed those like they weren’t there, in some cases, dragging the weapon shafts with them as they rolled away. Cassie was glad she was barefoot, because she stepped on more than one tail, at first on accident, and then intentionally as the squirming hellions got too close to the edge. Her ankles were covered in bite marks by the time the first predators got to the company.
A huge fin, six feet out of the water, pointed itself directly at the raft and cut a wake through the water, diving maybe thirty yards out. Cassie found herself frozen, watching the silver skin slide through the water.
“Cassie,” Jesse said. She looked over at him. “We’re going to be okay. You and I. I promise. Help them.”
He pressed a metal knife into her hand - a rarity next to the stacks of bone and coral weapons. It would go through soft, boneless flesh like jello.
She closed her hand around it, glad to be armed, then found the safest place she could to stash it against her hip and went chasing after another infant as it barrel-rolled toward the edge.
They were drying out. She’d asked Jesse what would happen to them, just lying on the deck in the sun, and he’d told her it couldn’t be helped. Some of them might take injuries. Keeping them off each other was ideal, but there simply wasn’t the space. Every one of them she caught, she
had to toss onto the pile in the middle, which resembled a wrestling match of blue and gray octopi. It was the best she could do.
There was a surge of water under the raft that pushed it sideways, and Cassie stumbled, catching herself on the sparse open decking with less than catlike reflexes. An Adena Lampak infant stared up at her, then bit her wrist and made a break for it.
“Cassie,” someone called. She went to go get another infant from a warrior.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
“We turned it aside,” he answered as she mastered the baby. She did her best not to tuck them under her elbows until the adults weren’t watching any more. She felt awful, but they were safer on the raft than in the water, and this was what it took.
“It was huge,” Cassie said.
“It isn’t the big ones that pose the biggest threat,” the Adena Lampak answered. “Some of them breathe air. Be on alert.”
Cassie nodded, and the Adena Lampak dove again. She checked on Pane’s daughter where the infant lay coddled in the deflated air skin. She appeared to be sleeping. Every one of these babies belonged to someone, but that one was special, and Cassie wasn’t going to feel guilty about it.
They were still moving, Cassie was pretty sure, but they’d slowed. Jesse shouted to Adena Lampak as they stuck their heads above water, getting information and giving directions. Klath had joined the rest of the warriors in the water when the scout had first sounded the alarm.
“Get down,” Jesse called to Cassie a moment later, as a school of fish started jumping out of the water. Big fish. The kind deep-sea fishermen went after. Half a dozen rained down on the platform, producing a gurgling noise as the air below it shifted, and a number of infants attacked them, moving like seals toward the gasping fish. Cassie rolled several of the fish back into the water, watching the sleek, black backs of whatever had driven the fish to jump in the first place as they passed behind the raft. There was an explosion of purple in the water as one of the creatures ventured too close to the raft, and the pod turned on the raft. More fish jumped, and Cassie knelt on the deck, pushing another infant away from the edge.