by Chloe Garner
“Sleep well?” he asked.
“How do you know I was asleep?” she asked.
“You ate as much as you could stand as soon as I left, and then you slept it off,” he said. “It’s been your natural rhythm for as long as you’ve been a Pixie, whenever we’d leave you alone long enough to fall into it.”
She ignored how smug he was, finding a spot on the floor and pulling a mat of woven plant fibers across her lap. It was surprisingly warm. Jesse lay down on a stack of similar cloths, facing her.
“The man who came to find me, his name is Louis,” Jesse said. “His species are called Travelers, and they were some of the first to come to Yan. Big enough population that they don’t have to go off-planet to find spouses. Means they have roots here, which isn’t something many other people can say.”
Jesse paused, rolling onto his back.
“They’re trying to learn,” he said after a while. “Noth, the leader here, he is trying to ‘modernize’ the planet, bring in eco-tourists, industry, prosperity, really, except that it’s not really what most of the population wants. All of the soldiers are from off-planet, and Noth is importing huge stocks of weapons. Isn’t even trying to hide it.”
“Everyone’s just too busy with their own lives to notice,” Cassie said.
“Too busy to do anything,” Jesse agreed. “But they’re trying. Louis and his family, some of the other Travelers. They’re non-conformists, by nature, and some of them are willing to try to stand up to Noth, but they don’t really know how.”
Cassie thought of Maugh, sitting across the desk from her, and sighed internally. She couldn’t envision the man getting excited about anything outside of his little collection of plants from Anath.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Exactly what I said,” he answered, voice tinged with sadness. “I’m going to do what I have to to make sure you’re okay, and maybe we can help them later.”
“And how many of them are going to die in the meantime?” Cassie asked.
“You think I could stop it, just like that?” Jesse answered.
“I’ve found that underestimating you is usually a bigger risk than overestimating you,” she told him.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. She laughed.
“How would I know?”
“Exactly. I don’t want to leave them, but we have to get you sorted out, first.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
“I agree,” he answered, defiant. She grinned despite herself.
“I’m not just going to drop it,” she said.
“You aren’t going to win, either,” he answered. She settled against the wall, comfortable and happy for the moment, and she heard Jesse roll onto his other side, facing the wall. Her mind began to drift.
Her body went tense without warning and she nearly hit the ceiling before she got control again, straining in the dim light to pick out the motion or sound that had startled her.
“Jesse,” she hissed. He rolled back over and frowned to find her against the ceiling.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. There are people outside. Lots of them.”
He sat up and went to the window, peering out into the night.
“Soldiers,” he whispered back, closing the window most of the way.
“What do they want?” Cassie asked. Jesse glanced over his shoulder at her.
“Why, in your experience, do soldiers turn up at your house in the middle of the night?”
“In my experience?” she answered. “Because the bar kicked them out.”
He grunted.
“I’m going to the front room,” he said.
“They’ll take you, too,” Cassie said.
“I know. Louis isn’t going to keep me hidden. He just doesn’t have it in him. I’d rather they find me easily.”
“Jesse, don’t leave me.”
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, turning. She landed in front of him and he took her hands.
“Stay high,” he told her. “People don’t look up. Once they’ve got us outside and in the commotion, go out through the window and get someplace safe. Maugh will take care of you, if you go back to the sanctuary.”
“Jesse,” she said, her body quivering against her will. “Jesse. Jesse.”
Her breaths came in little gasps and the world got very small.
“Stay high,” he said again, then left. Cassie backed into the corner, feet finding her blanket and hiding underneath it as she pressed against the wall. There was a banging on the front door that nearly sent her out of her skin. Her breath caught and she bumped her head against the ceiling as angry voices in the front room met confused voices in the rest of the house.
Fear.
Rank fear in her ears, in her nose. She was numb with it, and she gasped once and stopped breathing again.
They were going to find her.
They would find her and they would cage her and break her wings. Her arms were too small, too fragile. They would break, too, and the men would throw her in a cell with broken arms and broken wings to sit in a corner and cry.
She gasped again, her ability to process the information that was coming to her caving in. The world grew smaller and smaller.
She had to get out.
A clean breeze from outside drifted in through the gap in the window, and only the most stern check on her discipline kept her from diving for it.
There were footsteps outside of the room.
She had to decide who was in charge, the Pixie or the Airman, the jumper.
The Airman won, but only because the Pixie wasn’t in any condition to put up a fight.
She stood behind the door as it swung open, taking two quick wingbeats to land on the top of the door, balancing as easily as on a tree branch with her wings stabilizing her without flapping. She was silent.
The soldier stuck his head into the room, sweeping it in a glance and checking behind the door, then entered, kicked the pile of blankets a couple of times, and left, pulling the door closed behind him. Cassie knelt on the floor behind the door for a long time, recovering as the voices in the rest of the house grew more frantic. She felt very exposed and very fragile, but her mind was better under control.
She made her way to the window, peeking out over the ledge at the guards that were surrounding the building. She could hear all of them, their little shifts and self-murmurs as the action took place in the house. There was a commotion out front, and the guards turned to see what was going on.
This was her window. Her moment.
She had to get out.
And in that moment, she couldn’t do it.
Her feet glued themselves to the floor and her knees pressed in tight against her shoulders. She could no more stand and fly away than she could read minds or breathe underwater.
There was more noise, yelling, and her brain pulled out the word ‘Palta’ on the way by. It might have been in Jesse’s voice, but she couldn’t be sure because of the foreignness of the language. The guards drifted toward the front of the house, making themselves available if things went bad, but mostly just curious.
Cassie sprang.
The window eeked open anther inch and her head fit through, then her shoulders slipped out. She had to reorganize her wings to pin them flatter against her back, but her body was lithe as a cat. She was free and up on top of the house before she had time to process the mechanical motions required to get out of the window. She pressed her body flat against the thatching that kept water off of the house and waited.
There was more noise. More yelling. More anger and more fear.
Cassie crept to the edge of the roof, peeking down into the courtyard where the soldiers had congregated the household.
There were five of them, in all. Two were clearly children. Cassie could see people watching furtively through windows in the neighboring houses, but no one came out. No one said a word.
Cassie hid in dried grass.
One of the guards was talking to an electronic device. He approached Jesse, saying something to the two soldiers holding the Palta. Louis tried to intercede, but it was clearly futile.
“No tricks,” the one on the communication device said. Jesse shrugged, just resettling his shirt from where the soldiers had pulled it off kilter. Cassie couldn’t understand Jesse’s reply, but it was deadly serious. Someone pulled his arm away from his body and put a blade to his forearm. Cassie turned her head away as they skinned Jesse’s arm. She understood why they had to do it; Jesse kept his tricks literally up his sleeve, and they had to disarm him. There was a very good chance that this was the only way to do it, but it was still more than Cassie could bear. She crawled away, curling up in the straw and doing everything she could to keep her sobs silent.
The box of fruit from Maugh lasted two days.
Cassie hid in the woods, eating and sleeping and crying, unwilling to go back to see the four-footed alien who couldn’t understand her. She avoided the village as much as she could, but she would sneak in at intervals to check whether Louis and his family had returned.
They didn’t.
At the end of the second day, she finally sat herself down. The aimless frenzy of the previous two days had worn her out, and she had a moment of clarity to work with, so she took full advantage.
She had to put together a plan. Just sitting up in the trees, waiting for something to change was the definition of bad soldiering. She was better than this. Ten years of training, and there she sat, using up her rations and not making any progress toward a solution.
She needed to find Jesse.
She needed to find his… arm computer thing.
She needed to get them out.
And then she needed to punish the men who had done this.
And to do that, she needed a plan.
Or at least the beginning of one, and a commitment to making it up after that.
She was going to go with that one.
Finding Jesse had to be the first, and hopefully easiest of those.
As the sun went down and the village grew quiet, Cassie eased her way through the buildings to the courtyard in front of Louis’ house. Most of the scent there had blown away, but the fragments of the story were still there, written hard into the dirt.
Fear. Anger. Jesse. He had his own particular scent and mix of emotions, more complex that most of the other people who had been there that night. She couldn’t quite tease them apart, but she didn’t need to. She could follow it.
Trying not to feel like a scent hound, she walked across the courtyard on her toes, drawn on by the faint glimmer of smell that was Jesse. It went by a direct path out of the hamlet to a point nearing the edge of the woods, then stopped. Feeling the lift of air under flat palms, she worked a circle, trying to figure out where they’d gone.
That was it, though. The end. They just vanished. Slow, she realized that the soldiers would have access to portal technology with or without Jesse.
Her hands dropped to her sides with a sense of defeat.
Jesse could be anywhere.
In the universe.
Devastated, she fled into the woods, spending much of the next day wandering aimlessly as she tried to figure out how she would find him.
She had to find him.
In the end, it was her hunger, more than tactical necessity, that drove her back to Maugh.
He was welcoming, if more shy than the first time.
He let her alone for a while, letting her roam and eat without interruption, but he eventually came to find her, peering up at her with his strange, dark eyes as she sat in a tree feeling sorry for herself.
“What do you want?” he called. Cassie turned to look down at him. Her implant had picked up the meaning of the words slow, but it was getting there. Unfortunately, she had no words to return. She stared at him for a moment, wishing she could push her questions into his head, then sighed and plucked a cluster of berries, pulling them into her mouth one at a time as she tried to come up with a plan for finding Jesse.
“Your friend was taken,” Maugh said. “What are you going to do?”
By the time her implant had finally translated the last of his simple question, Maugh had given up on her and begun to leave. She flitted down to the path behind him, staying out of arm’s length, but catching his attention. He turned, giving her the strange expression she was currently taking for a frown.
“What are you going to do?”
The words, being repeated, translated more quickly, but she was still slow. She felt like Lassie. Yes, Timmy fell down the well; what were they going to do about it?
He watched her for a minute as she struggled, then finally held out her hands to either side, helpless.
“Can you get home?”
She shook her head and he made the frowning motion again.
“Yes or no?”
“No.”
He knelt, laying two legs on the ground behind him and bending the other two up to his chest.
“You can stay here as long as you need.”
“Help,” she said. It was a random one-off fire from her implant, and her head hurt like it had misfired at the same time, but it was the word she needed. Maugh made the funny face-wince and tapped his front feet on the path in an anxious fashion.
“There’s nothing I can do.”
She ground her teeth, full-body instincts urging her to flee, to find the farthest corner and hole up there until it was over, and mind wanting to shake the Stelf, to make him understand what she needed. A location. A map! Directions on how to get to the prisoner-holding facility. Blueprints would be great, but she understood those might be hard to come by. No self-respecting dictator makes his prison floorplan public knowledge. Unless this was a baby dictator, one with little experience and a particularly sheepish populace to work with. But with all the information in the universe…
“Just tell me where they’re holding him,” she growled in English. “Surely you can do that.”
Unless he couldn’t. It could be a secret facility, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with portal technology being what it was. She refused to consider it. Tree-huggers would certainly know where they had cut down a swath of forest for a giant prison block, right?
Certainly.
“I can’t help you,” Maugh said again, slowly, as he inched away without standing.
Coward.
Knelt down, he was as tall as her, but he slid backwards as if she were standing over him with a bullwhip.
“I can’t.”
“For crying out loud,” Cassie said in English, losing her temper. “You’re the size of a bull. Don’t you try to hide from me behind those tiny little spectacles, I can tell that you’re from a planet where there has been war for a thousand years and only the big and dumb survived. You’re seriously afraid of them? Sitting here in your little glass house with your trees from a planet you know nothing about, pretending the world outside doesn’t exist? Get mad!” He inched away faster as her words poured out, sounding like chipmunk chatter even in her own ears. “Do something! Is this your home or not? Stand up for yourself!”
“What do you want me to do?” he cowered. If she could hold on to the anger for long enough… but no. It was slipping away.
Spent, she fled, listening with grim sadness as she scuttled away in the other direction.
She woke up from another long nap in quasi-darkness.
It was the sound of footsteps that had woken her. Soft, four-footed steps. She rolled, weaving her wrists under her chin to watch Maugh approach. He looked up at her timidly, great, blue horse face anxious as it had ever been.
“Do you understand me?” he asked in the dusk.
“Yes,” she answered, the word stored from earlier that day.
“What can I do?”
She was sad. In the hours she had spent eating, she hadn’t been able to come up with any way of communicating what she needed, or convincing him to help her at all
.
He waited a long time, then tried again.
“Do you know what you want from me?”
“Yes.”
“Come with me.”
This was almost enough to send her skittering in the other direction, but she steeled herself, keeping to the trees as she followed him back to a larger, paved pathway. He had arranged something there on the ground for her. It took her a moment to recognize it as an array of drawing implements and a thick stack of paper - tree bark? woven material? she couldn’t tell. He stood over it, and she landed on the path several yards away, motioning with her arms that he should back away.
“Don’t trust me, do you?” he asked.
“Yes, no,” she answered, hoping that was good enough. His response might have been a laugh. He took a number of steps away, and she approached the stack of paper. It was so obvious, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it. All she had to do was tell him, in pictures, that she needed him to tell her where they were keeping Jesse and how to get there.
She frowned, getting a good grip on a waxy lump that was much too big for her hand, and waiting for inspiration to strike.
It was harder than she thought to ask even such a simple question in pictures, and it had been years since she had played such a game.
Finally, she gave up and drew a prison. Great big rectangular building with bars for windows. She showed it to Maugh and he took a step forward, looking at it.
“I don’t know what that is.”
She put it down and drew a chain gang of stick figures, with a ball dragging along behind them on the ground.
Maugh looked at this one for longer.
“That can’t be what you want,” he said. She sighed, wondering what he had interpreted it as.
Finally, she drew a globe, with outlines of continents, then put a big dot on it and a lot of arrows pointing at it.