by Huskyteer
“Are you okay?” Rakin asked.
“I’ve had worse,” the ranger hissed through his teeth. “They got me in the thigh and across the ribs. Thank god the bastards missed.”
Your average shrike can hit a rover moving at top speed with pinpoint accuracy, Khaal said in his mind.
“You shot one of them,” Rakin pointed out. He accelerated, racing the top of the dunes, following the rover tracks in the sand.
“Didn’t mean to. Couldn’t see it up there. Thought I was just firing a warning shot.”
Rakin thought about the dark shape falling from the ceiling, and then about the others Kamil had gunned down, the young shrikes collapsing like falling leaves. He realized that he was weeping, his muzzle stained hot with his tears, stinging where they touched his injuries.
Kamil looked over at him. “Look, kid, it’s okay. What you did was stupid, but you’re not the first dumb kid to get his paws on the keys and decide to take a joyride. Don’t worry about it too much.”
Confused, Rakin stammered, “They said that…that…”
“Oh god.” Kamil narrowed his eyes. “That talking one got to you, didn’t it? You can’t believe anything they say. The only reason they learn our language is to lie to us.”
Rakin slammed his paws on the wheel. “You killed them!” he cried. “They did nothing to you and you killed them. Their children—” He looked over and saw Kamil’s muzzle twist in disgust.
“Yeah?” he snarled. “And because of that, we got away. I hope. Any second now they’re going to come swarming out of that tunnel and they’ll be flying after us just as fast as they can. Anyway, so what? What was I supposed to do? Let them grow up to become adult shrikes? They kill us, too, kid. Maybe you forgot that. They’ve been killing us for hundreds of years before tonight. They’ve attacked the City. Killed other rangers. My friends. You wanna feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for them.”
“They didn’t want to hurt us,” Rakin said. His lips felt thick and slow. “They said they wanted peace.”
“They’ve said that before,” Kamil growled. He leaned back in his seat, groaning. “Like I said, you’re not the first dumb kid. Who are going to believe, your people, who care for you, who have taught you everything you know, who give you food and shelter and protect you, who come out to rescue you in the desert even when you’ve stolen from them? Or a cave full of monsters you spent half an hour in?”
“I…” Rakin faltered. How could his whole City be wrong? Who was he to say otherwise?
Kamil stubbed his toes against the box in the floorboard. “Ow. Damn it. What is this?” He reached down and pulled up the metal box. “What in blazes, kid?” He unhitched and pulled open the door, and before Rakin could shout for him to stop, chucked it out the back.
Rakin skidded to a stop in the sand. “What did you do that for?”
“Keep going. We’re easy targets out here.”
He started moving again, but slowly. “That was a message for the elders in our city! It was proof that they wanted peace!”
Kamil’s eyes widened. “What? Is that what they told you it was? Kid, that was a bomb.”
“A bomb?” Rakin’s heart skipped. “No, no, they said it was a message of peace!”
“And told you to take it to the government head, right? And then it would blow up and wipe out half the City. Take down a wall or two, maybe. Then they’d attack. There have been other cities.”
He looked over at the ranger, watching him carefully. “They said there were riches in it, too. It sounded like it was a lot, like it cost them a lot.” Kamil’s expression didn’t change, but his gaze flashed to the display, where there were a lot of numbers that Rakin didn’t know how to interpret. Coordinates, maybe.
“Course they said that. To make sure we’d want to open it. Just takes one person to get greedy and blow a hole in the City. It’s a perfect plan.”
Rakin thought of the huge cave, crawling with shrikes, with no machines, not even a source of light other than a little torch. Building a bomb required engineers, and he’d seen no engineering at all.
Kamil leaned back again and closed his eyes. “Listen, kid, what was your name again?”
“Rakin.”
“Rakin. Listen, Rakin, when we get back, there are going to be a lot of people interested in your story.”
“Am I going to be in trouble?”
“That depends.”
“Oh what?”
“On what you tell them. I can tell you’re upset, but you don’t want to go upsetting the people in the City too, do you?”
Rakin could see the lights of the City now, beckoning in the distance. “What do you mean?”
“Look. Being a ranger means I protect the City, not just from the shrikes and the modos and the bailwifs, but from fear. And people don’t need to be hearing anything about talking shrikes or bombs or messages or anything like that. It’ll make ’em scared. All they need to know is that the bad things are out there, and that the rangers are going to protect them. So when we get back, and people ask you questions, you tell them that the shrikes took you back to their lair and were going to eat you. They’ve done it to others. But then I found you and saved you. I gunned down two that had you and then took barbs in the leg and side. And you heroically drove me back.”
“Heroically?” Rakin repeated numbly.
“Yeah.” Kamil opened one eye and peered at him. “Yeah, heroically. You even shot one of them yourself, pow, right between the antenna. Got yourself your own kill. Just like a regular ranger, you are. Except for the crashing, but you didn’t have any trac goggles, did you?”
“No sir.”
“Right, if you’d had goggles, you wouldn’t have crashed at all, would you?”
Probably, Rakin thought to himself. “No sir,” he said.
“Just wanted to prove you could be a ranger too, I’ll bet.”
“Yeah.”
“Right, and thanks to you, now we know where they’re nesting, so we can go in and clean them out. The desert is going to be much safer thanks to you. Maybe you’ve even saved a few lives here today.” Kamil paused. “That sort of thing is worth a recommendation, don’t you think? I’m sure if I told the elders I thought you’d make a great ranger, they’d listen. I could tell them that.”
“And what if I tell people what really happened?” Rakin asked.
Kamil’s tone was casual and friendly. “A few people might believe you, I guess, and get scared or upset. But nothing would change. It wouldn’t be the sort of thing a ranger would do. More the sort of thing an engineer pup who likes to steal rovers might do. And you really want to go saying that maybe the shrikes are our nice cuddly friends? Sounds like dissident talk to me. What do they do to dissidents these days?” He asked the question as though it were purely theoretical musing. “They don’t shoot them, I think. Not anymore. Hm.” He flashed Rakin his charm smile. “But you’re no dissident. We both know that. You love the rangers. You get it. People need heroes. Makes ’em better people. And you can’t have heroes without monsters, can you?”
Rakin sighed, fixing his gaze on the growing cluster of lights in the distance. His mind spun. Kamil had gunned down the shrikes. But the shrikes had attacked the city before. And maybe his people had fought the shrikes before then. But the shrikes were venomous, barbed, fanged, winged, built for killing. There had been other cities, Kamil had said. Everyone knew someone the shrikes had killed. And the shrikes probably hated his people for killing them. What happened first? Rakin wondered if it mattered. He ramped over the top of a dune and sailed down the other side. The city lights dipped out of sight and then rose again. They landed with a thump, and Kamil grunted in the seat. “You handle this thing like a pro, kid. You know that? Like a real pro.”
* * * *
Rakin stared out across the square at the crowds of people assembled, cheering. He ran his tongue along the new metal teeth that had been fitted for him on one side. They were larger, sharper. They made him look a
little more dangerous, he thought.
Kamil stood next to him, speaking into the microphone. His leg and side were bound in thick bandages. “And thanks to Rakin here having my beacon when they took him to the lair, we were able to go in and wipe out the whole colony of shrikes,” he said. “Hundreds of them. The skies are going to be a lot safer for a long, long time.” The crowd burst into deafening cheers and applause.
The mayor stood on Rakin’s opposite side, dressed in his official finery, a beam of pride on his greying muzzle. “And it is because of young Rakin’s bravery and heroism, as well as his great service to our City, that I am pleased to offer him a new position of employ among our elite protectors in the ranger service.”
Rakin smiled up at him, overwhelmed, his tail giving a slow wag. It was everything he’d always hoped for. He felt sick to his stomach. He wanted to lean over the side of the stage and throw up. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “It’s a great honor.”
“Only as befits such great bravery,” the mayor said. “Few have ever ventured inside a shrike lair and lived to tell about it. You must have been very frightened.”
“I was,” Rakin said, “but it wasn’t like what I expected.” He saw Kamil’s eyes narrow.
“No?” The mayor said in a tone of public interest. “We’ve only seen dead shrike before. Tell us all what it was like to be inside their lair. What were they like up close, living and breathing?”
Rakin hesitated. The image of Kamil gunning down young shrike flashed through his mind. He stared out over the crowd holding their breath, hanging on his words. There were his parents, his mother with tears shining in her eyes, his father with his chest thrust out in pride. There was Haytham staring up at him with open jealousy. There were his schoolmates, some assigned to cooking, some to construction, some to guarding the battlements. None of them were rangers, but every single one of them had looked up to Kamil, had dreamed of being him one day. He could see the envy in their eyes, staring at their old schoolmate standing up on stage between the mayor and Kamil, the great ranger, hero, protector of the city. He couldn’t imagine what it would have been to grow up without that, not to know that there were brave warriors standing between you and terrors of the night. He looked for Khaal, and didn’t see him. Why hadn’t he come? Rakin thought, then, of something Khaal had told him that first night. A true engineer can see the truth, he’d said. He doesn’t get dazzled by the fiction. And what was the truth? The truth was that the city’s hero had murdered innocents, had thrown away a possible overture toward peace without, as far as Rakin knew, mentioning it to anyone. The truth was that the shrikes were people, and now hundreds of them were dead, and Rakin didn’t really know why. The truth was ugly, confusing, complicated.
“Well, son?” prompted the mayor, putting one paw on Rakin’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “What were they like?”
Rakin leaned toward the microphone. The speakers rang loud with feedback when he spoke. “Monsters,” he said. “They were monsters.”
RAINFALL, by Kandrel
It was raining when we finally ran out of water. Not that rainfall helped us any, though. When I say it was raining, I mean that it was raining up in the overseer’s district, number three. That rainfall then filtered down to district eleven, which dripped down to one twenty seven, and by the time it reached us here in in two forty three, it was brackish and vile and contained all the invisible evils of decay from the opulent upper districts. Down here in two forty three, it wasn’t water anymore—it was poison.
We could hear the trickle of liquid running down the rails. It dripped and splashed and plonked, and when it was done, it disappeared noiselessly between the plates of the floor. It was torture to hear it so close, yet know that what it had become wasn’t for me. All we had left was tonight’s ration. It was in a clear plastic bottle, sitting in front of the fire. We’d done everything we could to draw out what little we had—rationing and substituting with old bottled drinks left around the district. We’d even tried distilling what was dripping down, but some chemicals from the upper districts must have leaked into it. Even boiled and caught, it was undrinkable.
Matt stared disconsolately at the last of our reserves. I sat next to him and placed a companionable hand on his knee. “We have to do something, Matty.”
He glanced up at me, then back down towards the fire. I think I caught him nod. We were all thirsty, but he was thirstier than most. He insisted we split evenly, but whereas I was a little weasel, and Tegi was a sprightly little vixen, Matt was a tiger. Big, hulking, brute of a tiger, though most of the muscles he’d once had had sloughed from his form until just the bones remained. Even then, they were big bones, and I knew he couldn’t survive with just an equal third.
“Matt you have half. I swear I felt bloated last time. I don’t need that much—”
“Of course you did, Jay. You felt bloated because your stomach has shrunk and you gulp instead of sip.”
My belly gave a grumble now that he mentioned it. I was hungry, too. We had all the food we could ever want—Yellow and Blue, and spicy Red. We had a stack of herbal Green, and a whole warehouse full of my favorite: Orange, which tasted savory and sweet at the same time. We had the stuff in spades, heaped crate upon crate in little individual packets, stuffed away in abandoned warehouses, all available any time we wanted it. Just add water.
“Sorry.” Matt apologized, and I squeezed his knee. It wasn’t his fault that I was hungry. In the battle between hunger and thirst, thirst would always be the clear victor. Unfortunately, my hunger was a sore loser.
As the last residents of district two forty three, we took the most pragmatic approach to our lives and lived like nomads, moving from one abandoned house to the next, scavenging for whatever took our fancy. This week we were living in the old hab complex, with plush beds so large we could lose ourselves in their expanse. It also held an entertainment center with sim-pods and gambling for old mass-credits. Matt had hacked the machine on our first night, and we were all technically now multi-trillionaires. We’d celebrated our newfound wealth that night by mixing up some Orange. That had been my last meal. Tegi had been sick after that, and we’d given her extra water to replace what she’d lost. That had been the last of our reserves. Now all we had left fit into a single bottle.
When Tegi emerged from our temporary abode, she did so with a slightly lurching pace. Even if she denied it—which she would—she was still not doing so well. Without a word, she joined us at the fire.
“Is that the last—”
“Yeah.” I answered her question before she finished it. If no one actually put it to words, maybe it wouldn’t be so much of an emergency.
She warmed her hands. It wasn’t cold, but she was shivering. “You shouldn’t have wasted it all on me. I would have been—”
“You wouldn’t.” Matt turned to face her and took her hands. “And you still need more.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You won’t.” It wasn’t just friendly concern. Before the district had started to dismantle, Matt had been a physician. Tegi bit her lip.
“We need to do something.” I piped up. It’d been hunting around in my head for a while, but when I’d seen the bottom of our canister when I dipped in for the last of the water, I knew it was time.
“We’ll do another search tomorrow. We’ll find something we’ve overlooked.” Matt shook his head. He knew what I meant, but he refused to accept it. When our district had started to shut down, Matt had been hit hardest of the three of us. I was a bit of a loner, and Tegi used to hit the Moan every night. Sometimes I wondered if she even realized that everyone else was gone. Matt, though, he knew it. I could see it in the way he stared off into the shadows when he thought I wasn’t watching. It was that blank-eyed gaze, when he was remembering… Remembering what? I wish I knew, but I’d never ask. The ghosts that haunted us here tormented our tiger the most. Matt had loved his friends—still did—and they weren’t here anymore.
I le
t it be for now. We could enjoy our water in relative peace. There’d be time to talk about important things when our lips weren’t parched and cracking and there was at least something in our bellies to keep them from aching.
We had our rituals, and water was the holiest of sacraments this far beneath the sun. Matt took the stopper off of the bottle and held it up to the fire. I could see the last of the liquid splashing around inside. He held it to his lips, and with a quick flip of his hand, half a mouthful disappeared. He didn’t swallow—not immediately. Instead, he let it wash around in his mouth. With lips still closed, he passed the bottle to me. I did the same, and savored the way the tough and dry sensation faded from my tongue and gums. It was a sharp feeling, even though the water was tepid. By the time I could swallow, there wasn’t much water left that hadn’t already been absorbed.
When I opened my eyes again, Tegi was portioning the water into three equal glasses on the table. She was careful, down on her knees so she was staring through the glass to make sure they were equal. She glanced up at me, then at Matt. His eyes were still closed, still enjoying his first mouthful. Tegi bit her lip, then poured the last little bit into one of the glasses. They were uneven now, one clearly higher than the rest. I grabbed quickly for one of the low ones while she did the same, leaving the over-full glass for Matt. I had already taken a sip by the time he opened his eyes. There was nothing left to compare against even if he wanted to.
