“Carbon monoxide! Go through the wormhole!” Daisuke reached toward its scintillating safety.
And went down in a cloud of dirt as Anne tackled him from behind.
“What?” Daisuke rolled over. “Let me—”
“Stay down!” Anne shouted at him.
The wormhole’s light flickered like the light bar of an ambulance. The wind howled and Nurul reached toward the distorted image of her husband. His voice echoed through the wobbling hole in space and time.
The wormhole closed.
Rahman’s form shrank as if he’d fallen down a well. The kaleidoscopic torrent of color peaked and vanished, leaving nothing where the wormhole had been but purple afterimages and poisoned air. Weight, the full gravity of Junction, crashed down on them.
Their doorway to Rahman, Hariyadi’s body, and all their supplies was gone.
* * *
Sing stumbled as the ground lurched under her. It was as if she had just severed the stalk of a kelp-tree and was accelerating upward. The normal weight of things had returned, and the wormhole had fled. The Death Wind was upon them.
Sing looked down at the toymaker-food-maker she had spent so much frantic time disassembling for travel. Now she just dropped the useless thing. Her pitifully half-tamed toymaker tugged at the tether she’d tied around her wrist, and she gave it a petulant jerk. She shouldn’t have wasted all this time tending it, but the thought of arriving home after all these years as a real toymaker-wielder as well as a real wife, of redeeming some part of her lost life, had seemed so ripe. But that dream, however ripe, had been too high up the tree.
And what were Misha and the Them doing up there on the wormhole’s mound, anyway? Didn’t they know it would be hours before the Death Wind dissipated and the wormhole felt safe enough to return?
“All right, everyone,” she yelled up at the Them. “Let’s get to higher ground before we all suffocate and die.” Of course none of them understood her. They seemed to be arguing. Only Misha even bothered to look at her.
Sing waved. “Come on, love,” she called to him. “The Death Wind is coming! Death Wind! Higher ground!” She pointed uphill and spoke in the Them language. “Run. Run! Up! Go!”
Misha jerked as if someone had speared him. He looked around wildly, beard flying. Then he barreled down the mound. “Go!” he shouted. “Go go go!”
“It’s not that dangerous,” said Sing. “It was only bad for you yesterday because you went too far down—”
Her man barely slowed as he scooped her up in his arms. Suddenly, Sing found herself being carried up the mountain, her toymaker bobbing behind them like an eager dog.
“What are you doing?” Sing demanded. “I can walk by myself.”
Even if he had been able to understand her, Misha wasn’t listening. He was babbling to himself in the Them language, of which Sing only understood the words ‘Hariyadi’ and ‘dead’.
Sing looked back over Misha’s jouncing shoulder. Yes, Hariyadi seemed to be missing from the group of Them. They were only now walking down the mound, waving and yelling questions at Misha.
Small animals fell from their perches. Larger ones ran uphill alongside the Them. A tortoise-hog stumbled and fell.
“Faster!” Sing called to the Them.
“Hariyadi,” snarled Misha, as if to himself, “…dead.”
“What happened to him?” Sing asked. “Did someone kill him with an animal, like Pearson and Tyaney? What happened to Rahman?”
Misha’s feet slid over muddy rocks. They were at the edge of the Toymaker Country now, the balloon crowns of the kelp-trees swaying over their heads. Ripe Blood animals swarmed over the toymaker palisade wall, prompting a clicking, tapping chorus of alarm from its builders.
“Stop,” said Sing. “We’ve come far enough. The Death Winds never come up this high. We’re safe.” She wasn’t so sure about the Them, though. Daisuke, Nurul, and Anne were climbing much too slowly, swaying on their feet as if drunk.
Sing tugged on Misha’s arm. “We have to go help them.”
He only grunted and shook his head. Sing’s man set her down before contorting himself to fumble with something on his belt.
“Misha!” Sing said. “Anne, Daisuke, Nurul! Death!” Why wasn’t he helping his tribesmen? This was so unlike him.
Misha extracted something from his belt. Another Them artifact, all black and rectilinear. Sing flinched back, wondering if this was another gun, but Misha didn’t hold it like a weapon. Facing east, toward the Deep Sky Country and home, he brought the contraption to his ear. Squeezing it, he spoke, although not to Sing.
The words were in Them, and Sing didn’t understand anything. Who was Misha talking to? Was he praying?
If so, the only answer to his prayers was a Death Wind monster, breaching the fog layer that capped its murky home. Misha didn’t seem to notice this terrible omen. He squeezed his artifact again and spoke, but it only hissed at him like a waterfall. Misha held up the device like he wanted to smash it on the ground, but seemed to think better of it. He clasped it to his belt and looked downhill at the other Them.
Daisuke and Anne had put their arms around Nurul, hustling her away from the Death Wind. They seemed to be all right. In any case, they had enough breath in their lungs to scream abuse at Misha for not helping them.
“I agree with the Them,” Sing told her husband. “That was a selfish, cowardly thing you did, running away like that. Do you want your tribesmen to die? Do you want me to divorce you?”
But Misha wasn’t looking at the Them anymore. He was staring at her, eyes bulging from his wildly hairy face.
“Sing,” he said. “I go up. I fly. You help.”
Sing took a step back. Her husband looked ready to smash someone’s skull open. “You help,” he insisted. “Help fly.”
“What are you talking about?”
He spun around and pointed at the bobbling balloons of the kelp-trees.
“You want to balloon away,” said Sing. “No, it’s too dangerous. I was crazy to try it, even when I was an unmarried woman.”
“I fly,” he insisted. “Go up.” He patted the blocky artifact on his hip. “Talk.”
“You want to talk to who?” Sing slashed her hands through the air, her toymaker tugging at her wrist. “It doesn’t matter. Your real tribesmen are down there and they need you. There’s no one to talk to up in the sky but the Yeli and the Death Wind monsters.”
Growling in frustration, Misha ripped his utility knife from its sheath and ran past Sing.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Sing shouted, but her husband smashed his way through the wild toymakers’ barricade and just about launched himself at a large kelp-tree stalk.
“Curses!” Sing sprinted after him, but she was too late. Misha’s wickedly sharp Them knife had already sawed through half the stalk that tethered the balloon, as well as his body, to the ground.
Sing scrambled up the stalk, adding her meager weight to his. “All right,” she said. “I’ll help you. We need to cut loops for your feet and hands. And we need two stalks. You understand? Two. One for each of us.” With a tongue-clicked command, she made her toymaker harpoon the largest nearby stalk and winch it within arm’s reach.
Soon, they were airborne.
* * *
Daisuke’s vision was dark. His ears roared with blood. His heart swelled. His lungs spasmed and screamed for breath.
He did not breathe. He was the Iron Man of Survival, and he would pass out from oxygen deprivation before he let himself give in to the poisoned air around him. This was like when he’d fallen through the ice of that lake in Russia. No, it was like when he’d gone cave diving in Mexico. No, it was worse. Holding his breath and climbing this mountain was the worst thing Daisuke had ever done. And given that he was surely about to die, this was the worst thing he was ever going
to do as well.
Welcome, gentle viewers, to the pinnacle of my career.
He fell forward.
And was caught again by Anne.
Her warm, solid back bore up under him, her strong legs carried him another step. Daisuke was reminded of riding a porpoise, although he wouldn’t tell her that.
“You can breathe now,” Anne said. “The woodland creatures have stopped dropping out of the bushes.”
Daisuke breathed. Stopped. Tumbled to the ground with Nurul and Anne in a heaving tangle. He opened his eyes.
Stars and wormholes shone between rushing clouds.
The winds were changing. He was alive. Misha and Sing had abandoned them. Anne carried him around like he was some useful but cumbersome piece of equipment. And Nurul, he realized, was weeping.
Chapter Sixteen
Airborne
“Why did this happen?” Anne panted.
“I couldn’t stop him,” wailed Nurul. “Misha just shoved me out of the way and ran into the forest.”
“No, I don’t mean people,” Anne said. She looked down at Daisuke, who was lying on the ground, barely conscious. Hariyadi was dead or at very least gravely wounded, trapped with Rahman on the other side of a vanished wormhole. “Wormholes can close. It must be some kind of safety cutoff. That flashing light was a—”
“Rahman’s in there!” Nurul nearly spat the words.
“Well…with our supplies?” Anne didn’t know if that was much comfort, but it made Nurul let go of her.
The journalist turned away, face crumpling, “Oh, Rahman, I’m sorry. Oh, Colonel!” She burst into tears.
Anne felt as if she’d been smacked on the back of the head with a cord of firewood. She was never great at making people feel better, and that was without the added confusion of partial carbon monoxide poisoning.
At least it wasn’t ongoing. She had Nurul, and the barely conscious Daisuke had managed to climb far enough away from the valley that they could breathe safely. The wind was dying down as the temperature inversion clamped back down on the poison-spewing biome in the valley. The stars were back out. The Lighthouse biome shone across the valley.
“Why did Misha and Sing run off?” she asked. “Do they want something from the toymakers?” Something more important than helping me figure out how we’re supposed to survive now?
“No,” Nurul said savagely. “Misha abandoned us!”
Something large swept over their heads.
Anne’s tired eyes tried to focus on the bulbous, dangling object. A flying jellyfish? A toymaker man-o’-war, bigger than any they’d seen so far? No. It was Misha, hanging from the hydrogen-balloon tips of a cluster of kelp-trees. Note the bulbous tips, she thought. Extra hydrogen storage for some sort of specialized fruiting bodies? In the half light of the wormhole across the valley, she could see Misha waving goodbye.
“That dog!” Nurul was on her feet, face nearly unrecognizable with rage, shaking her fist at the departing Russian and shouting words Anne had never heard before.
Anne’s fingertips and nose tingled. She wanted to slump down next to Daisuke and sleep, but Nurul, still yelling like a lunatic, was stomping toward the forest.
“Come!” That was in English, presumably directed at Anne. “Grab a tree!”
Another ballooner occluded the stars over them. Sing rode higher in the air, her tame toymaker trailing her like a baby duck.
“We’re going to lose them,” Nurul called from between the stakes of the toymakers’ fence.
“You’re thinking of following them?” called Anne. “In balloons?”
“Yes. Right now. So move quickly or I will leave you here.”
She hadn’t gotten a great look at Misha or Nurul’s rigs, but Anne could guess how they worked. You get together three or four medium-sized kelp-balloons, tie them together, cut hand- and footholds into the stalks, sever the holdfasts, and off you go.
It was a lot harder to do than to think about, especially after she’d dragged the unconscious Daisuke up the hill. Anne lost a couple of balloons to twitchy, slime-slick fingers before she got herself and Daisuke tied up securely. Hopefully securely. I suppose we’ll find out.
“I’m ready when you are,” Anne called to Nurul, whom she couldn’t bring herself to abandon.
“Finally!” Nurul cut away the stalks anchoring her to the ground. Anne did likewise and the dark forest floor dropped out from under her. The stalks of the other kelp-trees, still holding firmly to the boulders of this mountaintop, slid past her, along with their commensal communities of climbing log-worms and billowing windsock-eels. Then Anne and Daisuke cleared the canopy and the wind caught them.
The valley spread out under them, blobby peanut-bushes in the darkness below and ahead the bright, intricate filigrees that spread out from the Lighthouse wormhole. Anne worked her fingers into the strips of tough, gummy material she’d cut from the kelp-trees’ stalks and swung her boots in the stirrups. Daisuke slept, trussed up like a roped steer. Everything seemed to be holding. Over the stink of the drying nutrient fluid from inside the trees, the wind carried hints of alien spices. Scents from other biomes swirled around Anne and Daisuke. They were airborne again.
* * *
Daisuke felt no wind. It was the strangest part of ballooning, feeling nothing, even as you looked down at the whipping trees. Or in this case, the currents in the mist of the Death Wind biome, where it bulged and folded like a blanket thrown over a sleeping ogre.
Water droplets hung in the cold air of the temperature inversion that protected oxygen-breathing life in this valley. Occasional eddies cleared the air enough for Daisuke to see pyramids of steel wool, twisted leaden columns, and lacy tripods that could be animals, plants, or sculptures. All these growths coursed with streams of black liquid.
Or maybe not liquid. Daisuke didn’t like the way the stuff sometimes flowed uphill, or the spiny globs that swelled on the upper surfaces of the plant-things. He also didn’t like thinking about how it would only take a gust of wind blowing in the wrong direction for the alien biome to belch up a suffocating wad of carbon monoxide.
Instead, Daisuke turned his attention upward. Anne was wound into loops in their kelp-tree stalk, her big boots just a few centimeters above his head. He examined those worn gray treads, crusted with layers of the mud of five different worlds, and wished he hadn’t shown Anne his true face. Now she thought he was paranoid. An untrusting and untrustworthy manipulator. To win back her good opinion of him, Daisuke would have to put on the show of his career.
Daisuke attempted a smile. Anne couldn’t see it, but she would be able to hear it in his voice. His face muscles stretched. Unnatural, he decided, but no more unnatural than usual.
Now, what would the Iron Man of Survival say to her?
“Is everything all right?”
“I wish we could make this thing go faster,” Anne replied. “Can we, I don’t know, spread sails or something?”
“No,” Daisuke said. “The wind is moving at the same speed we are. If we had a propeller, we could make our own wind but….”
“So we have no way to catch them up. Or even stop ourselves from being blown way the hell off course,” said Anne. “This was a stupid idea, wasn’t it? Since when does Nurul give the orders in our party, anyway?”
Daisuke prodded his persona for something encouraging. “We will use the resources of Junction to survive and to explore!”
“Not really?” Anne said. “I’m beginning to think we should have stayed in the Oasis biome.”
You’re right, Daisuke thought, but said, “You wanted us to stay together.”
“I guess I did,” said Anne. “Now I wonder if we aren’t all just marching into the lion’s mouth together. Can you see Misha anymore?”
Daisuke looked out across the mist toward the suspended figure of Nurul and, much farther away, the
hazy blot that was Misha and Sing. “Yes,” he said. “I will reach the binoculars in my utility belt.”
“Careful,” said Anne, feeling the vibrations of his work. “Jesus, Dice.”
“I am very careful.” Daisuke managed to extract the binoculars. “Yes. I see Misha and Sing. The little man-o’-war is between them. I think I can see a string or cord? It connects Sing to the toymaker, and the toymaker to Misha.”
“Of course she’d know how to get around up here,” Anne said. “Or do you think Sing was kidnapped by Misha?”
“Maybe she is the leader here, and Misha is following her. We will find out when we land.”
“If we survive the landing,” said Anne.
Daisuke buried his true emotions under a mound of fake enthusiasm. “Of course we will!”
“Daisuke, I…. Huh.”
The skin on his neck prickled. He had learned to dread that little expulsion of breath. Floating above a cloud of invisible, poisonous gas in an improvised balloon, Anne had just seen something interesting.
“What is it?” he said.
“Look at Nurul. Train your binoculars on her.”
Daisuke did so. “She’s looking downward.”
“Yeah, yeah. Look at the mist under her.”
Where a black bulk swam like a killer whale under a kayak.
The binoculars slipped from between Daisuke’s numb fingers. Swinging on their loop, they tugged on his wrist until he recovered and fumbled them back against his eyes. The monster was still tracking Nurul.
“Another one of those things we saw from the plane, isn’t it?” Anne asked.
“Another two.” Daisuke had found Misha’s and Sing’s balloons, as well as the companion shadowing them. “Misha and Sing have one too.”
“We don’t, though?”
Daisuke dropped the binoculars again. Then he remembered Anne’s habit of making statements with the intonation of questions. He peeked downward and saw nothing in the mist under his trembling feet.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Anne muttered to herself. “You don’t just evolve flight for no reason. Is it some predator adapted to taking down these balloons? But in that case, why isn’t anything hunting you and me?” She sounded almost disappointed. “We’re hanging lower in the air column than anyone. I suppose it wouldn’t be a predator per se if it ate floating plants. Maybe just a very aggressive herbivore? Sky hippos? Mist buffalo?”
Junction Page 25
