The lion charged. Fen did not try to dodge. The creature could win this war of attrition fought with speed and anger. He thrust a leg back as his old master taught him, brought the other forward, and aligned his body into a column, bringing his gnarled hands to the lion’s throat in time to stop it jaws from crunching his neck. The pair hung in space for a breath before slamming backwards into the earth.
The lion snapped and snarled atop its tormenter. Fen found himself laughing as he dug his hands through its mane, found its throat, and squeezed. He tightened his grip until he could not feel his hands anymore. No matter. He would win or he would die. The King of the Steppe snapped at his head. Fen ducked around each fatal bite, laughing so hard he could not make sounds, until the jaws found purchase in his shoulder. He felt each tooth slide into him as the crushing weight of the entire sky fell.
He threw his legs out, wrapped them around the lion’s body, locked his spurred ankles, and crushed the thing’s gore-slicked ribs. It snarled but released its heinous bite. He threw the remaining strength of his shoulders into the grip. The lion collapsed onto him.
They lay there for several minutes. He kept his tenuous but vital grip on the tired beast. Was it asleep, dead, or feigning defeat? Its growl rumbled through his hands into the structure of him. Swirling black galaxies studded with amber stars peered down at him from the lion’s frothing muzzle.
Part of Fen’s mind tracked a shifting theater of clouds above them. The sun remained hot and high but the day was moving on. Any detail of any thing could be seen, if he knew where to look. His pulse danced the springtime rhythm behind his quivering eyes. His tongue felt too swollen for the speech it made.
“I will let you go,” he said as the lion’s rough lips curled back to bare its teeth. “You will let me go.”
The beast stared. Fen replied by relaxing his grip. The lion whipped its head around and opened wide to show its enemy the world of teeth waiting inside its ridged maw. How many stupid challengers did those same teeth ruin, it mimed, but now you offer me a deal?
It neither lunged nor growled. He loosened more. The lion stood. Fen released his ankle lock, dropped, rolled away, and let himself breathe. The last of his strength was fading. Fresh blood ran freely down the ruination of his left shoulder. His fingertips slipped easily into the punctured skin. The lion smiled at him with wet teeth stained red.
“We are finished.”
He recovered the spear and headed west to where the sun would set. A figure waited far away towards the south and west, where he knew they knew he could not see through the day’s brilliance. It did not matter. It was time to return.
The lion watched him vanish into the shimmering horizon and then fled east. It chose a new home in the spring. Some things were worse than tigers.
◆◆◆
The sun flickered through tent poles when he reached the nomadic gathering. More people lived here now than ever before. There were too many to count. They came together here, for a day or a while, without knowing how long they would stay. This thing needed a name. He could not be the one to decide.
Children ran between the tents. He smiled at a darting lithe girl with loose flowing hair as gold as the glittering metal. She gasped and ran. He looked down. A cloak of dried blood stained his entire chest. The breeches were ruined.
He touched a hand to his festering shoulder and winced. The wounds needed cleaning. Already, the bacterial venom of the lion’s never-washed teeth tainted his blood. He would take ill soon. Fen coughed and his lungs rattled. He could not be ill again. Some things were worse than lions.
A thickly built boy on legs better suited for an ox chased after the girl. His wild red hair ran both before and after him, a shield more useful under a distant desert sun. Fen watched for the telling signs of the desert-born Armasar cousins of his mother. They looked enough like lions to spook a man who almost died hunting one just hours before. He hissed after the unaware boy.
He reached the center, leaning against a tent pole as the venom climbed his neck. It would reach his mind soon, then…, and then… there were worse things than dying, too. He would not lose his mind to the wild like his mother had chosen. The spear was too heavy to carry any farther. He knew he could not let it go. Then all of Hemanta would be gone.
The other hunters displayed their various kills. He judged by their washed faces, swollen bellies, and impatient grumblings that they waited a full day for him. This evening was the final hour. He glanced at the fading sun. It gave him enough time.
Their kills showed their impatience. Some brat a year or more younger than him stood beside his slaughtered jackal. Blood still ran from its broken jaw. Fen grinned at the boy. It was impressive enough. The jackal’s pride was it jaw. The boy tugged a bandage wrapped around the stumps of two missing fingers.
Twins, a man and a woman, stood beside a crucified bear. Fen let himself enjoy the image they meant to create. This towering monster waited in the Yuush to eat the world. He did not like their pride. The Emptiness That Awaits All Things was not to be mocked.
The only worthy opponent was the tall woman, Camdzic, who insisted on the contest despite her well-known talents. Scant wrappings of old hides hardly covered her lean body. He wanted to see those wrappings removed. She too brought jackals, three that he could count, but these three lived at the end of rusted chains wrapped around her long arm. She held the clattering reins with an ease he struggled to believe. He would have her.
Their eyes met and she released the snarling brindle hounds. They tore past the crowd into the waiting field, oblivious to the deaths their chained muzzles guaranteed. She followed her trophies towards the setting sun.
“The challenge was not to be mauled and return here empty-handed,” the twins said together.
They were Umman Manda. He spat. Those weirdlings lived too far east for him, just a few days from the boundary to the Kobold who lived beneath the earth. Jonah called that place Koreya. Fen did not care. He would never go to a place where people-eaters lived beneath the soil, in the dark, away from the sky. Their synchronized voices gave him pause.
“We bring you the mighty Ursa made real! The pride of Ancient Rus! Who has not stumbled on the bear as it feasts on gore and honey? Who has not lost a cousin to its jaws? Who believes this beast we slew would even struggle to eat a squeaking boy who returns empty handed? It would pick its curved teeth with his mutant bones.”
They did not know him. His name was known, surely enough, but why were they targeting him? Something was missing here. They tried to fill the emptiness with their false structures. He needed to see what space they tried to hide. The bear was a fine kill. They knew something was wrong. He would have sooner died among the grasses than return empty handed. The crimson banner of his chest told the whole gathering that Leyevi Fen found something, fought it, and lived. The gathered people stared at the jagged copper chieftain dressed mostly in his own dried blood, whose eyes looked beyond them to other places, who had never lost a contest. The twins knew that he saw what they were.
Heavy seal skins girded their bodies despite the blistering high summer heat when most folk lived naked or nearly so. Weapons jutted from their squat frames. Snares, ropes, bone knives, and wooden handles beyond counting poked from behind the seal skins. Sweat ran down their flushed faces. They were no more used to this dress, to this heat, than anyone else. They hid something.
His eyes found the wooden handles, though he did not know why. They were smooth, not designed to receive a person’s hand like each person’s own knife was, and connected to long shapes beneath the skins. Fen was familiar with the varied features of humanity. This was artificial.
Jonah’s voice washed through his delirium. The man aged quickly in the years since the sharp sparring began. Fen smelled fresh poultice on his fingers as he mashed herbs with a mortar and pestle. Lundoo, the curious healer from some place west of here but not so far as the Uralskiye, hovered over his pupil’s shoulder. Fen would need to know the recipe if
he wanted to continue hurting Jonah during training.
“Guns,” Jonah growled in his native tongue as Fen pushed poultice into his gaping shoulder. “Has Fen not seen them? Of course not. Such things are dead and buried. They are like the bow and arrow if the arrows were fire. The Hollow Folk made them to kill. They are a coward’s weapon.”
He faltered. Fen scooped another handful of the grimy green healing salve. He tried to imagine a weapon burning but not killing the wielder.
“They bring lightning,” Jonah said.
The venom in his blood stoked his heart to a pounding thrum. The Umman Manda woman broke unity with her twin. It was all mummery.
“See! This grass rat has no words for us. His mind is broken like his body. It is time to go home to the Thundercloud and become a beast! A broken thing brings…”
A roar pummeled the Umman Manda, the crowd, the dirt, and the sky into submission. It rippled through all things. Fen’s lungs ached. He roared until the rattling thing in his chest tore loose, and then he yelled more. He roared until the lion itself would cower. Enough with this game, he roared. Enough with this childish contest to see who is most and who is least. Enough with killing things to prove you are mighty. The lion and the bear do not play games with the muskox. They kill it or leave it be, he roared. Enough. Fen grinned at the spear he still held and thanked his mother for all that she was.
Camdzic of the Steppe walked out of the orange light. She placed her hands on his face and kissed him through his blood, a warm, wet, intruding kiss that filled him with her. She turned back to the crowd, their palms pressed to their bowed heads in universal respect.
“Our champion!”
CHAPTER 14 - THE HEAVENS (FIELD WORK)
More stars twinkled in the evening sky than Eliza had seen since she was a little girl. Her father had taken her camping on his friend’s farm. She shivered in her sleeping bag, already griping about losing valuable study time for her AP History courses. She couldn’t have been too little, then. Fourteen, maybe?
Sioux Falls was not a large city by any measure but it seemed to take so little light pollution to drown the stars. What was the point of traveling a trillion miles to be obscured by a streetlight? She had never seen them in their full splendor, embedded in the evening sky like fiery diamond flecks on an endless velvet blanket.
The cold mattered less as the evanescent pink of their galactic arm grew in brilliance. How could there be so many stars in the sky? How did he know so many names? He could still remember them all, and their arbitrary constellations, then. He could still remember her name then.
She flung a pen at Tim. He startled and bumped his head on their office window. She laughed as he snatched at the pen and flung it back. She slapped it away.
“Stargazing again, young grasshopper.” She stroked an imaginary beard. “Among the stars the answers you seek are not.”
“Maybe they’re just pretty. You should take a look.”
“I’ve seen them. Looked at them every night for the last week. But they’re not helping us with this data or with Charlie.”
He looked from her to the window to his tablet. The device’s blue light reflected in his bloodshot eyes. They were always tired these days. He woke before she did to continue his physical therapy with the Grupo’s medical crew. They both worked past midnight every day as they tried to learn as much as they could, as fast as they could.
Rachana refused to waste any more time on them until they were caught up. Only her brief and fruitless conversations with Charlie, and their daily check-ins with the research team, broke the rigorous routine. Tim worked through all of it. The boy had grit.
“Maybe it’s time to call it a night? I’m already sounding like a bitch and it’s what… not even midnight? I’m at a good stopping point. Nothing fascinating to report beyond the usual what the hell. You?”
“Well, I dunno. Maybe…”
“Timothy Lewis Hempstock, we’ve discussed this. The only way to successfully integrate disparate data like this is to follow your hunches and serve them up for debate. You’ll be wrong 99 percent of the time. That’s fine. What did you find?”
He still waited. The stars were calling to him. What had he been thinking about? She knew how hard it was to look away from the window. The Grupo’s assigned labs sat high above the operational buildings that studded the belted valley floor. The electric world was hundreds of feet below them. Above them was the open sky. Somehow, she guessed because of their altitude and the total lack of humidity, the electric lights didn’t carry this high. They could see everything.
It was almost Charlie’s view. She was certain his room’s windows were just a few hundred yards farther around the valley wall. Their own view stared almost directly across the valley to the railcar’s distant access point.
She sat her tablet on a pile of printed reports from the 1930’s through 1950’s that filled their shared desk. The Grupo digitized the files a decade ago but she preferred to inspect the paper records. It put her mind in the right place. She spun her chair and kicked towards him.
“Talk while you drool over the stars. You’re integrating something. Let’s go. Talk.”
“It’s… it’s this window.”
She spun to consider it. A faint chill emanated from its smooth expanse. She smudged the perfect glass with her thumb.
“It’s a good window. Go on.”
He tugged at his t-shirt’s stretched sleeve.
“Why is it here? That’s dumb. It’s here to help make the room a room. But I mean… why is this room here? Why is the Grupo here?”
“They’re, ah, how did Rachana phrase it? Established as a research colony to provide the intimate rigor required to protect Charlie and the world from each other.”
“Yeah. That. Why does he need protecting?”
She began counting on her fingers.
“The existence of government, for one. He’s the wet dream of black ops teams everywhere. Two, and on a related note, the serum. I still can’t believe they haven’t named that shit. But it’s a serious tool and weapon. Three, the guy himself. He’d end up being dissected in a lab somewhere. Four…”
Tim’s rough calluses brushed against her knuckles as he pushed her hand away.
“Does he seem like the kind of guy who needs a lot of help? Like he wants to be researched on? Do you think he even understands what they’re doing to him? Do you…” he cut his eyes to the door as his voice dropped, “do you believe their story about how he founded the Grupo?”
She laughed. It was the wrong response but she couldn’t help it. His eyes were too doleful, too somber, and she had too much cocoa today. It was so much better than coffee that she wondered just how refined the coca leaves really were. He retreated.
“I… sorry. I’m sorry, Tim. That was super rude. I’m tired. That,” she brushed her shirt, sat up straight, and shifted her voice to what she thought sounded most professorial, “was hardly proper.”
He threw another pen. She flung herself backwards in the chair as she held the captured projectile against her heart.
“So you don’t believe the Grupo?”
“No. It’s more about Charlie. You talk with him more than I do since he likes you and all, but…”
“He’s just connecting to me because I remind him of someone else. I think.”
“He still likes you though.” Tim glanced back to the brilliant sky. “It’s just, he doesn’t go together with the Grupo. Like, he appeared out of nowhere in the 1920’s and funded this group so that they could do a bunch of studies on him? That’s not even talking about how old that makes him.”
“Yeah, I struggle with that too. The age, I mean. But there’s no reason for the Grupo to fabricate the records. He’s obviously some kind of mutant sub-species. Plus we don’t really know how old he was when all this started…”
“That still makes him 120.”
He shifted in his chair to straighten a leg. She wished he would stop wearing gym shorts. The
scars on his knees looked like worms burrowed beneath his skin. Besides, the Grupo offered them clothes better suited for the mountaintop. She enjoyed her new hiking boots and cold weather gear more than jeans and a t-shirt. It felt like action.
“I don’t have a snappy answer for that.”
“But you’ve thought the same thing, right? He doesn’t fit. He paid for a group to start experimenting on him? How is he paying for this? Incan gold? And the whole story. He’s commandeering this ship so that he can go live by himself in space? But Rachana acts like he wants to die. Like it’s a sure thing. Why wouldn’t he just, you know…,” he mimed cocking a pistol and shooting himself.
Eliza flinched. She hadn’t meant to and she tried to hide it but she knew he had seen it.
“I’m sorry. Was that…” he looked at his mimicked pistol and then remembered to put it away. “All I meant was, why doesn’t he just kill himself? There have to be easy ways.”
“Well, I dunno. That’s a good…”
“That’s how I found this.”
He handed her his tablet. Three files waited in an archive marked Weird. She opened Attempt 1 - 1918.
A series of sepia images scanned from old photos loaded. They showed a cliff looking down on an empty valley, a mile-high view of a distant beach, and what looked like a medical chart with a handwritten language she didn’t understand. She toggled the screen to zoom. It was Spanish, kind of, from a hundred years ago written in doctor’s handwriting and with some letters that didn’t look right. Shorthand, maybe. Didn’t she know that cliff?
“I don’t understand.”
“Check the next file.”
She clicked out and chose Attempt 2 - 1945.
More scanned photos. The quality was better but they were still meaningless. They showed a rickety dock, several boats searching a black sea with spotlights, a bundle of tackle and junk caught in a fishing net, and a crude drawing of what looked like oceanic currents. There was another medical chart. The handwriting was better but still meaningless.
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