How many kilometers had she crossed, now, since Khulan’s death? Five hundred? No, much more. A thousand, easily. Sarnai hooted up at the sky as the lazy yellow sun crested the horizon. Whisky in a glass. A yellow-brown smear. She went to sleep that night exhausted and euphoric. She emptied out her waste and screamed at the sky because there were only her and the dogs to hear.
She had made it a thousand kilometers, easily. More than Khulan. More than many would have, she knew. And when the stink of the bear wafted in, she snorted and spat in its direction and waved her gun in the air, firing off plumes of flames.
“You can’t hurt me!” she yelled. “You can’t have me!”
It came for her at dawn.
Sarnai was sleeping fitfully. She dreamed of running. Running and running from something terrible. When she would look back, in her dream, it was only her Baba and Papa, but in that moment they were terrible beasts, frightening. She had never felt so terrified.
She woke violently to the stink of rotten meat. The bear’s face was just inches from hers, and it bawled when she opened her eyes, and she screamed and gripped the pistol and let off a snarl of flame into its face. The flames singed its fur and feathers, sending a heady stink into the air.
The dogs were barking and squawking, and she didn’t know how she had not heard them sooner, but the bear had crept upon her from the north, and the wind was coming from the south. The dogs had not noticed it. In that moment, she wanted to shoot them too, until the bear roared and snapped up one of the dogs into its great jaws. The bear was a massive thing, matted and shaggy, with a gory hooked beak and feet as big as Sarnai’s head.
The dogs let up a great howl and cry. Sarnai shot her pistol again, singeing the bloody dog’s hide instead of the bear’s. The bear swiped a paw at her and caught her on the arm, slicing clean through her environmental suit and carving into her skin. Sarnai shot again, and again until the bear retreated.
She screamed at it and called the dogs, but they were not lined up. She had to scrabble out of the sled and get their tack in order. Once she was back in the sled, she watched the bear standing on the next rise as it snacked on its doggy treat, its great beaked face smeared with blood and offal.
“Fuck you!” Sarnai screamed, and then, to the dogs, “Go, get!” and then the sled was moving again, following the sled track on and on again, farther and farther from the bloody snow and the promise of death.
The halfway point between the core settlements and Batbayer came upon Sarnai suddenly. She had completely lost track of time, and she wasn’t sure what she was seeing, even with the aid of the glitchy GPS.
The halfway house was little more than a humped shack in the snow, some old thing printed back when the first ships landed, and not upgraded since.
Sarnai was barely conscious when they arrived. She was aware of an old woman standing over her, tapping at her leg braces.
“When was the last time you emptied your bowels, girl?” the old woman said, and she put her gnarly hand to Sarnai’s forehead and sighed. “You’ve got an infection, girl. Come now. Let’s put your dogs to rest and get you tended.”
Sarnai bumbled out of the sled and into the hut, only half-aware of where she was and what was happening. The woman was much stronger than she looked; she helped haul Sarnai inside, and it must have been the old woman who tended the dogs, because when Sarnai next became aware of her surroundings, she was in a warm bed, and the old woman was prodding at her belly. “You’ve got a urinary infection,” the woman said. She had a face like a rotten apple, all puffy and pockmarked. Sarnai recognized a ruddiness to her complexion that indicated mercury poisoning.
“Not a big deal,” Sarnai slurred, and she wondered if the woman had given her something for the pain, not realizing Sarnai couldn’t feel anything.
“You could die from it,” the old woman said. “It’s serious enough. Hate to say this to a woman like you, all buff and beat up, but simple things kill.”
“A bear got one of the dogs,” Sarnai said.
“I thought so,” the old woman said. “I can smell the fear on the dogs. That bear is tracking you. You won’t shake it. You’ll have to kill it.”
“I have to make it to Batbayer. They are dying. Tumbledown.”
The woman tapped her leg braces. “You had it, the plague. Tumbledown.”
“A long time ago.”
“You know why they called it tumbledown?”
“For the village,” Sarnai said. “The first village it killed. Called Tumbledown.”
“No,” the old woman said, and as she took a cup into her hands, Sarnai saw a rash that spread up both her arms, turning her skin flaky. “It was a dark joke, from those who came to rescue them. They said they all fell down. Tumbled down.”
“That’s a bad joke.”
“We are not all good people,” the old woman said, proffering a cup. “But girls like you, they want to save everyone. They don’t want to just fall down, eh? They want to get up.”
“I can’t make it the rest of the way.”
“Of course you can. Batbayer is only sixteen hundred or so kilometers from here. Your dog team is nearly intact. It’s possible. The only thing that could get in your way is you.”
“And the bear,” Sarnai said. “You said, the bear.”
“The bear is just a bear,” the old woman said. “You’re a woman.”
“That’s worse.”
“Exactly,” the old woman said.
Sarnai blanked out then, from exhaustion or infection, she didn’t know. When she came to, she was able to sit up. The old woman had taken off her leg braces, and when she saw that Sarnai was up, she brought her a bowl of soup.
“You’ll need to cross the mercury sea, seven days out from here,” the old woman said, raising a spoonful of broth to Sarnai’s lips. Sarnai could feed herself, but she accepted the help because the world still felt so hazy. “That will be the worst of it, I think. That and the lonesomeness of it all. It is the lonesomeness that kills quickly. You have to beat your own head. That’s what will kill the bear and the despair.”
Sarnai crawled out of bed the next day. She dragged herself across the icy floor to where the old woman had placed her environmental suit. She pulled on the suit and then tackled the leg braces. She painstakingly snapped them onto her disproportionately skinny legs. The old woman was lounging on a low couch near the warm blue glow of the heat source. She raised herself up on one elbow.
“You’re going on?” the old woman said.
“No choice,” Sarnai said.
“There is always a choice,” the old woman said. “I chose to stay out here.” She pointed to a long scar on her head where the hair no longer grew. “See that? A bear once attacked me out there by the frozen lake. Wanted my fish. I said, fuck him. I tried to fight, but you know how that goes. I had to go still, very still, and it lost interest, but it did a good job fucking me up. I crawled in here and I sewed up my own head.” She tapped her scalp. “We are stronger than we can imagine, you know that?”
Sarnai grimaced. “I have lived in the core settlements most of my life.”
“Not all, though,” the old woman said. “And what does it matter? I was raised there. We all came from the sky. We all make our lives. Our own futures. Who will you be, when you die? I will be the woman who sewed up her own head.” She cackled.
Sarnai managed to walk out to the dogs and the sled. The old woman had unharnessed the dogs, and she did not come out to help Sarnai hook them back up. Sarnai brought them all back to the sled and laced them up. Her braces were moving more slowly. Her gait was herky-jerky, like a marionette on a string. But she didn’t want to take the time to rub the braces down and clean them, not when she was so close.
She clunked into the sled and called the dogs, and off they raced. It was not until she looked back that she realized one of the dogs must be injured. She saw little spots of purple blood in their wake.
The bear was going to come snuffling for them. The bear, the bear, the bear .
. . When she gazed back next, she thought she saw its hulking outline on the horizon, following the trail of blood. Faster, faster, they needed to ride faster.
The dogs raced up through low foothills and into a sparkling forest of jade and black stone. The dogs barely paid any mind to it, but Sarnai gaped. She had never seen such a thing. They raced and raced. She rode them hard, so hard that she lost one of the dogs, and she stared at its body the way she had stared at Khulan’s, but she could not weep because she was out of tears. When they bedded down that night, she swore she heard the bear chomping on its prize, sated for a day, just a day.
Sarnai arrived at the mercury sea in just six days, not seven, the bear always just over the last rise. She did not hesitate in ordering the dogs across the sea, though they balked. Their hesitation lost them their lead, and now when she gazed behind her, she could see, clearly, the hulking shadow of the bear. She yelled at the dogs to “Get, get!” and they did.
The sled slipped across the sea, the dogs barking and yapping as they went. She consulted her GPS, pleased to see that despite her delay, she was making excellent time. She was only five days from Batbayer, maybe six. Her supplies would last that long, and most of the dogs would, too. Sarnai called again to the dogs. The mercury sea was vast. They had been out on it for an hour. She squinted, and her head throbbed. Her headache was coming, soon. She slumped back into the sled.
That’s when the lead dog yelped.
The lead dog, Khulan’s dog, the dog whose name was, appropriately, “Oh shit.” Or perhaps just “Shit.”
The dog yelped, then squawked. The others tried to bolt, and in their panic, they were able to haul the lead dog out of the mercurial lake. But as Sarnai sat in the sled she felt the ground beneath her slip, then crack. She managed to get herself half out of the sled before the ice snapped and the sled began to sink.
“Fuck!” Sarnai breathed, clawing the side of the sled. She huffed herself onto the mercury ice, but her legs dragged her down. Her leg braces. Goddamn, those braces. Sarnai began unbuckling the braces from her legs as she scrambled for purchase on the ice behind her. The braces slipped free of her legs and plunged into the metallic sea, sinking faster than the sled. Sarnai clawed her way up the ice, making little hiccupping sounds of distress until she was well clear of the hole.
When she raised her head, she found herself gazing directly into the face of the bear, a dozen paces distant. It inhaled deeply and then started toward her. She grimaced. “Life,” she murmured, “is cruel and gross and awful.”
The bear did not hear, did not care. She reached for the fire pistol, but it had been attached to her leg braces, which were now likely floating beneath the surface of the sea. She sucked in a long, slow breath. The bear advanced.
Sarnai cast about for a weapon. The sled was half submerged in the slushy mercury sea. It was then that she saw the machete that Khulan had been using to cut at the creepers. She had stashed it back in the sled, and it glimmered at her now in the smeared yellowish light of the rising sun. Sarnai scrambled for the machete just as the bear broke into a run.
She grabbed the machete by the hilt and swung it full force into the face of the bear as it bore down upon her. Her swing caught the bear’s massive beak. It reared back, yanking her arms with it, but she hung on and pulled the machete free. The bear’s bulk had yanked her out of the sled and up onto the ice.
The bear came at her again. She held the machete close to her chest. The bear impaled itself on the blade, but with such force that it knocked the air from Sarnai’s lungs. She rolled to the side, trying to pull the machete with her, but it was lodged in the rolling fat of the bear’s chest. The bear stank of death; its own or hers?
Sarnai screamed at it and lunged for the hilt of the machete. She yanked hard, using all the strength in her upper body that she had honed for years while others used their legs, and she pulled the machete free. She swung again, more powerfully this time, and the blade sank again into the bear’s flesh. The bear roared and grabbed her by the shoulder. It shook her, hard, and the machete tore free once again. She slammed the machete into its shoulder, again and again, screaming as she did it. The bear broke away from her and trundled away, snuffling as it did.
She tried to catch her breath. How was she going to make it another five or six days across the tundra without the sled? Behind her, the sled remained half-submerged in the sea. The dogs were barking and yelping while half of their number paddled in the mercury sea, rolling along its surface, spinning and turning as they floated along. Was this what had happened to Erdene and her dogs? Was Sarnai going to die out here the way they had?
Sarnai lay in the snow, watching the angry bear snuffle and snort. She empathized with it, but out here it was her or the bear, and she knew which she chose. She gripped the machete. Her legs were soaked in freezing mercury. How much longer until her suit gave out? But what did that matter? Whole settlements were dying. Human life on this planet might die out altogether. What did it matter how many limbs she had left? They were only for show, anyway. It was time she became what she was, instead of what made people comfortable.
Sarnai snarled at the bear.
It raised its head and roared at her.
She raised her machete.
Batbayer was a coastal city clinging to the edge of the sea. From four or five kilometers distant, it looked like a dead place, its long-houses layered in snow, its fires snuffed out.
But as the silvery sled came barreling down the low rise, there seemed to be signs of life, still. A long curl of smoke to the north. Snowy paths that had been clomped flat and dirtied by the patter of many footsteps.
Sarnai reined in the bear she had hitched to the front of her sled. “Ho now! Ho!” she called, and the bear responded, if not to her command then to the bit in its mangled beak.
Behind the sled, the six dogs that remained of her team took up the rear, squawking and barking as they caught the scent of Batbayer. Sarnai urged the bear forward, and together they careened down into the village, so fast and furiously that she had to throw out the sled’s jagged anchor because she feared the bear would not come to a halt.
The bear reared up at the stony gate, roaring and snarling. Sarnai sat in the belly of her sled, soaking in her own urine. She had not dared stop to cath. Now she found herself without her leg braces, stuck here at the gates of the city she had come to save.
Sarnai pulled herself out of the sled. She rolled out onto the icy ground and crawled on her elbows to the gate. The bear snorted at her. She waved her machete at him, urging him back. Then she raised her fist to the gate and knocked.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the gate opened. Sarnai set her gaze on those who greeted her. They were just children, not much older than she had been when the plague claimed her family.
The oldest, a girl, started when she saw Sarnai and said, “Oh no! Do you need help? The plague is here. You’re in danger here.”
And Sarnai laughed. “I don’t need help,” she said, and she laughed again, so hard and long that she could not catch her breath. “I don’t need help. I’m here to help you.”
As Sarnai had predicted, the serum was ruined by the time she reached Batbayer.
But she was not.
There were still some elders alive, and they knew how to synthesize her antibodies at the little medical bay they had set up with the expansive view of the frozen sea. Sarnai spent longer there than she intended, but it was worth it. She got to watch the spring roll in and soften the seas. The little heads of spring flowers pushed their way up through the snow. While there would never be a true thaw on Narantu, there was a spring, and it was beautiful. The light was warmer, brighter, and those who remained in Batbayer came alive with the light and the green growing things.
While they could not print leg braces for her, they were able to give Sarnai a rolling chair and a new environmental suit, and she cried when she got them, though she could not articulate why. She rolled herself out in the chair along the heated and
treaded paths, which made her way easier, though not easy. She wheeled herself up onto a concrete slab that overlooked the sea, and she could not help but think of all those creatures that would no longer thrive in the spring. They were the foxes and bears, so well-suited for the worst this world could offer. But in their place, other creatures were uncurling from their long slumbers. Creatures better suited to this softer weather.
Sarnai inhaled deeply and wheeled herself back down the path, toward the infirmary. On the way, she passed the cemetery, where the ashes of those who had perished were spread or buried, and their grave markers left for future generations. Who was to say, who must go and who must stay? The world decided. There was a bitter anger in that, that something as pitiless and uncaring as the world decided one’s fate. But it was not for the core settlements to decide, or the village elders, or anyone else. Just the world. Only the world.
She used the handrail next to the path up to the infirmary to help herself up the shallow rise. The world might decide her life or death, but the settlements still played their part in making her feel welcome or not.
Once inside the airlock, she removed her respirator and pulled back her hood. She wheeled herself over to the bed on the other side of the infirmary, where the last of those who had contracted tumbledown lay in recovery. The little girl was just eight years old. She sat up and gazed out the window, hands in her lap. Her expression was familiar to Sarnai.
“You look like you are in need of hope,” Sarnai said.
The girl turned her gaze to Sarnai, and her lips trembled, and Sarnai noted that the girl’s left arm was still in her lap. The girl would not be able to move that arm any more than her own legs in the months and years to come. Sarnai wondered if she should tell her about the sex, or the cath, or the bag, and she decided not to. Those were already things the girl was learning to live with. The rest would come in time. For now, it was enough to live.
Sarnai wheeled herself up to the girl’s bedside.
“Atasha,” Sarnai said. “Would you like to hear a story?”
Meet Me in the Future Page 22
