As Yousra watched them approach, she had a sudden, intense desire to cut each of them open, to discover—for herself—the truth of that soft inner core and how it had polluted her people.
Someone cried out behind her. She froze.
A figure broke away from the smoke near the ruined bridal tent and ran toward the Heroes. It took Yousra a moment to recognize the castrated Heroes’ man. Had they come for him? Why? Curse me for a fool, she thought.
The boy babbled something at the Heroes in his mushy language. He prostrated himself and sobbed. Great, heaving sobs.
A strange sound came from one of the Heroes in turn. A chuck-chuck-guffaw sound that Yousra realized was laughter. The Hero struck the boy across the face with such force that it propelled him across the dirt and into the smoking heap of another tent.
The Heroes continued their chuck-chucking and walked on.
Yousra slid farther below the lip of the crater. Squeezed her eyes shut. She heard the Heroes, not a dozen feet distant, crunching across the ruined earth. They spoke in tinny, garbled voices. She listened as they walked past her . . . and away.
She stayed huddled in the dirt until long after she saw their silvery ship shoot back across the sky over the village.
By then, dusk had settled across the world, and the massive glowing orb of the trade moon had begun to fill the sky, like a chalky skull writ large. As it rose, its pale glow chased away the dusk, blanketing the world in a harsh moonlight that was strong enough to hunt by.
Slowly, carefully, Yousra crawled from her hiding place and crept across the dirt. A little ways distant, she saw the still form of the Heroes’ man, crumpled in the dirt. She hesitated.
“Boy?” she called softly.
He did not move.
“Boy? Heroes’ boy?”
He lifted his head. His eyes were watery, bloodshot. The entire right side of his face was a black bruise.
“Come with me,” she said. “We aren’t safe here.”
He pressed his face back into the dirt.
Yousra gazed out beyond him to where the thorn fence had been. It was broken now. Bloody, tattered strips of it lay in wrecked clumps and tangles for a hundred yards in either direction. The fence would let in the contagion all around them. Even if she could bring herself to stay in the village, the horror of the contaminated world outside would overtake her. She was dead already.
Yousra watched the great God’s Wheel rise in the sky, the incredible patina of stars—gold, silver, blue, green—that lent pinpricks of jewel-like color to the moon’s white glow during the dry season. It was full dark, and the God’s Wheel had risen above the tops of the walking trees.
The sky was oblivious to her troubles. The sky moved on. She should too. She went back toward the heart of the village. Something cried out behind her. She gripped her machete. Her fingers were slick. She dared look in the direction of the sound. Saw the familiar outline of the Heroes’ man. He struggled toward her, clutching at his side. As he neared, she saw that though he was injured, he was not bleeding.
“Are you pleased with what your Heroes did?” she said. A hot surge of anger filled her. She raised the machete.
He cowered.
She stared long at his bruises.
“You,” she said softly, and lowered the machete. She pointed out past the thorn fence, in the direction the Heroes’ craft had gone. “You know where they are, don’t you?” His expression did not change. She jabbed her finger at him. “There was a river that used to flow through our village to another, many years ago.”
Her village hadn’t heard from anyone outside the thorn fence in decades.
“Heroes,” she said, and pointed again.
His eyes widened. That word, he knew.
“Take me to the Heroes,” she said.
He seemed to weigh his options in the chill glow of the tiny moon. His stare met the hilt of her machete. Then, a small nod. Barely perceptible. He began walking out past the ruined fence, toward a twisted tree.
“Wait!” she called. “Wait!”
She pillaged the remains of the village and found water bulbs, red flour, rain clothes, and a torn knapsack.
Yousra shouldered the pack and started off after the Heroes’ man. How long until she succumbed to some contagion out here? Until some insect or blight or fungus ate her from the inside? But how many Heroes could she take with her, before the end?
She raised her head and saw that the Heroes’ man had paused at the base of the twisted tree that once marked her family’s farm. Her heart ached. Not for him, or the lost farm, or her dead people, but for the hope of some uncertain future, something that wasn’t already written.
Yousra stepped forward, like hurling herself into some nameless void, and started across the contaminated world to meet him . . . and his Heroes.
“There is nothing out here but desert,” Yousra said, but the Heroes’ man kept walking. He ate and drank less than she did, and that was a boon, because as the long days stretched out, Yousra found that she needed more and more of both.
Their first night in the desert, she had come down with some contagion. It bloomed amber-white in her mouth like a fungus. She thought herself dead right then, but the Heroes’ man breathed into her mouth—she was too weak to argue—and the next morning the pain was less and the moldy fuzz in her mouth was gone.
Still, the man walked, and he said nothing. He had already tried and failed to go back to his people, so what did he expect to find way out here that would help him? All of her people’s settlements out this way were gone.
The world spun into light and darkness another dozen times before Yousra finally smelled something salty and full of death, a scent she had heard of but never seen. They followed a long-abandoned track through the desert, passing the ruins of what must have once been cities, but cities the likes of which Yousra had heard of only in mythic tales. Staggering juggernauts stair-stepped into the sky, or spiraled up from the sand in great, corroded circles. Bits of shattered glass and rotten metal lay scattered across the way. She could make out the softer valleys of the roads, and elevated walkways with crumbling arches.
And there, at the far end of the broken city, was a flat, shimmering plain of water, dark as a stormy sky. She had never seen a body of water so great. It stretched across the whole of the horizon. She could not see the other shore. It made a great, roaring noise.
The Heroes’ man picked up his pace when he saw it, and she had to slog to catch up. By the time she reached him he was already at the shoreline, his toes sunk into a battered beach made up of tiny fragments. Yousra scooped up a handful of the stuff and saw that it was made of shells, rocks, knobs of metal, and other, stranger kinds of materials, like ivory or obsidian, but softer. Many of the shapes were knotted and irregular. Far off, she saw great iron spires jutting out of the water; waves crashed against stone and metal structures, and something else—massive shimmering fins, like the hulking back of some great monster. She gazed across the water and saw more and more structures breaking the waves around them.
“Did the Heroes do this?” Yousra asked. “Did they sink this city? Is this our city or theirs?”
He did not answer. Instead, he waded into the water and went kicking out into it like he was made for the water.
Yousra walked up onto a weathered pillar and watched him swim out toward one of the great fins. Was this his plan all along? Some death rite where he drowned himself?
She looked behind her, into the wretched city, and back in the direction of her own ruined settlement. Her feet were beginning to itch already, probably with some terrible contagion. If she stayed here alone she was likely to die here as surely as she would have died in the settlement.
Better to die in the water, then.
Yousra jumped off the pillar and swam out into the sea after the Heroes’ man. The water was so clear she could see the ruins below her. They were not buildings, she saw now, but vehicles. She was not a good swimmer, but the day was clear and
the current was not too strong. When she needed to rest she clung to the big fin of some wreck and caught her breath. The wrecks below her were ships very much like those the Heroes piloted to every battlefield, only they were not silvery pods, but black, tentacled things with great soaring fins and rotten, fleshy-looking hulls.
When she reached the Heroes’ man, he was standing on top of the largest vehicle. The water washed over his feet, coming as high as his ankles. He got onto his hands and knees and pressed his palms to the surface of the ship.
Yousra dragged herself up next to him just as the skin around his hands puckered and pushed outward. He stepped back, bumping into her, and she caught him against her so he didn’t fall over. He was warm and trembling, and did not pull away as the flesh of the outer hull pushed outward and opened up above the surface of the water.
He finally left her arms and descended into the ship. Its surface changed, conforming to his feet and hands, making perfect holds for him.
Yousra followed, fearful it would only respond to him, but it conformed to her body, too, and as her head sank below the lip of the wound, it sealed behind her. For a heart-pounding moment she feared she had been eaten, left to suffocate in the darkness. But as the Heroes’ man walked ahead of her, the corridors lit up with green, bioluminescent flora. She marveled at the walls, and ran her hands along them. The man led her into the belly of the thing, a great round room. It was featureless save for a bulbous dais at the center of it.
“You know how to work this ship?” Yousra asked.
The man said nothing. He walked slowly around the room.
Yousra said, “Can you power it? We could fight them. We could destroy them, with this. Are these theirs? Can you use them? I know you understand more than you can speak.”
The Heroes’ man did not look at her. His shoulders tensed, though. She gently stroked his arm. “They did this to you,” she said. “They polluted you, then threw you away to your fate. You are as much their victim as we are. Help us beat them back and reclaim the world.”
He said something in his Heroes’ language. Stopped. Tried again, in hers. “World is large.”
“It is,” Yousra said. She thought of all the grotesque, mangled babies she had killed, the women gone to rot, the men gone to madness. “But if you can pilot these ships, we can teach others. We can make our own army, large enough to take back the world.”
Yousra didn’t know if that was true. She didn’t know the extent of the Heroes’ armies. They came from the sky, and the world was large. There could be thousands, hundreds of thousands, of them. More than that? She could not imagine numbers so large. But whatever the number, she would fight them. She would kill them as she killed the rotting, monstrous children they infected her people with.
He made a little whimpering sound. She opened her arms to him, and he pressed himself against her like a child. And perhaps he was; they all were, fearful children stunted by this mad war that neither understood. What did the Heroes want? She found, more and more, that she didn’t care so much about answers as revenge. She closed her eyes and thought of her smoking village, the scattered body parts, the huffing laughter of the Heroes.
“Come with me,” Yousra murmured in his ear.
He raised his face to her. His eyes were wet. She kissed him, softly, as she would kiss a sister or a child. Yet when he pressed back, his need was evident. His body was hot against hers, and she responded in kind, surprised at her own desire. She pinned him to the floor of the ship and nipped at his neck, and straddled his wiry thigh. When her leg rubbed between his, where his sex had been, he cried out, and pushed her away.
Yousra tumbled off him, sat hard on her rump, and came back into the world. Desire was a drug, a potent one, and it muddled all sense. It had been so long since it had carried her away that she felt drunk and disoriented now; it was like drinking a pot of liquor after a year of nothing but brackish water. Warm, delirious.
The man sat up beside her. He was breathing heavily. He did not look at her, but stared straight ahead, hands wrapped around his knees.
“What do they want, your Heroes?” Yousra asked. She reached for him, gently, and stroked his jaw. He flinched, but did not pull away. The skin there was fuzzy. He was too young for a proper beard, or perhaps his kind did not grow them as well as hers. Perhaps all their men were this hairless. She wondered, for the first time, if the Heroes’ men left on the field were lost children, like the monsters she murdered out by the thorn fence.
He took her wrist, not ungently. “No knowledge,” he said.
“They tell you nothing?”
His lips firmed. Not a frown, not quite. He touched his temple. “No knowledge,” he said.
“You must remember something,” she said. “You yelled at those Heroes. In the village. What did you tell them?”
He stood and walked over to the dais at the center of the room. He placed his hands in the middle of it, and the room became translucent.
Yousra gasped and scrambled up. The ocean surrounded them, full of derelicts and grimy whorls of rusty filth. It was only now, with a clear view of the ocean, that she realized there was nothing living here in the sea, either. It was as dead as the rest of the world.
The Heroes’ man stepped up onto the dais. He pointed at Yousra, said, “Yours,” and then a fine mist of fleshy webbing descended from the ceiling and enveloped him.
Yousra shrieked and fell back against the transparent wall. She had a moment of vertigo, her mind fearing she would be cast out to sea, but the wall held. The webbing fully enveloped the Heroes’ man, rooting him into place like another fixture of the ship. But as it did, the ship itself came alive around her. The translucent walls flickered with blue and yellow lights. The ship shuddered; great gouts of the disturbed sea bottom clouded the water all around them.
Yousra climbed toward the dais. She touched the outline of the man’s foot, now covered by the ship’s flesh. The ship lurched again, and she stumbled back. The ship rose from the bottom of the sea, up and up and up. As it did, the motion of it stabilized, and Yousra walked closer to the transparent wall and gaped as the ship parted the waves and came up over the sea of dead.
She gazed back at the Heroes’ man, and the great dead village behind them. Why had the Heroes abandoned the ships here, if they could pilot them as easily as this man? Surely he was piloting it in some way. It seemed a terrible waste to leave all of this here.
The walls shimmered, then went opaque. The darkness was abrupt. Yousra feared they would fall out of the sky. Then, blinding white light. She raised her hands to her face. When the light dimmed, she pulled her hands away, and saw that the city below them had been transformed. Now it was a bustling metropolis with great tangled buildings grasping toward the sky. Massive floating bridges moved over the ocean. Ships like the one she rode in traversed the air all around them. She thought herself mad until she noted the position of the God’s Wheel in the sky. It was in the wrong position. She was not looking at a current vision, but a past one. Somehow the ship had captured it; perhaps the ship was a living thing, and had remembered. Was the Heroes’ man tapping into that memory?
As she watched, a great rain of fire came down from the sky and destroyed the peaceful city. The bridges exploded. The ships turned and fought while the city burned. And then came the Heroes’ ships, the familiar shiny silver arrows.
The Heroes decimated the people. The ships that were being attacked fled to the water, seeking reprieve. Most were destroyed.
Then blackness. When light returned, the walls were again translucent, and the city was old and dead again, and the God’s Wheel was in its proper place.
Yousra felt a terrible fist of dread in her stomach. She turned back to the Heroes’ man, suspended now, merged with the ship.
“You’re not one of the Heroes,” she said. “You’re one of these people. Some other people they destroyed, like us.” Of course the Heroes had not piloted these ships; only people from this city could pilot them, the w
ay the Heroes’ man was doing now. What a fearful, sick game the Heroes played, sending their own captives to Yousra’s people. What did they expect to happen? They knew Yousra’s people would torture them, murder them. She felt foolish, then. Why would the Heroes infect their own men and condemn them to such a fate? No wonder the man looked so much like her people. They were not so different, just separated by time.
What baffled her was that the city below had very clearly been dead for centuries. And though Yousra’s people had been known to live for a century and a half, this man was clearly very young. Where had he come from? What had the Heroes done, to keep him so young? And why throw him out now?
Yousra pressed her hand to his form again. “If there are more of your people, we can find them,” she said. “They can pilot the ships. We can seek revenge, together.”
The ship was hovering above the ocean now, motionless. The suns were lowering on the horizon. Yousra waited. What did she have to offer him? He had a ship, and a world that had been dead for longer than he had been alive. What must he have thought, awaking to find himself dumped in her village and castrated?
But she firmed her resolve. “I’m not your enemy,” she said. “The Heroes did this to us both. They pitted us against one another. They will not expect us to work together.”
Yousra considered the flesh of the ship. Clearly these were organic things, and she knew how to heal, and birth, and kill, if necessary. “If these ships are alive,” she said, “they could be changed. Transformed. Perhaps we don’t need to find your people to pilot each one. Perhaps there is a way to link them, and feed them.”
The ship began to move.
Yousra turned to watch as it sailed over the ocean, back toward the city. It settled down in a great, dead patch of ground opposite the road, close enough to the sea that the waves lapped at its sides.
“Are you with me, or do you want me to get out?” she said.
Meet Me in the Future Page 30
