by L M Feldt
“Get out of the water!” I scream.
The look in my eyes must have finally gotten through to her and she starts swimming toward me, but she doesn’t realize how close they are. She isn’t going to make it. A scream pierces the air and Naoaki starts thrashing.
“Just swim! Focus on me!” I yell.
I used to have to tell her to focus all the time when I was instructing her with her knives. It seemed to help then and now she swims more determinedly, lashing out at any creatures that get too close. She almost goes under once, but kicks out and frees herself from something underneath the water. She is making headway again…just a little closer. I can’t breath.
She keeps on, doggedly swimming and kicking. There is a fair bit of thrashing as she tries to fend off the creatures and swim at the same time, which only attracts more. Finally, I am able to reach out and grab a fistful of shirt. I get a bit of her hair too but she doesn’t seem to care about that as I haul her out of the water with the very last of my strength. I toss her small form up onto the dry red sand where Khane is waiting. He quickly dispatches a sinuous, inky body that has clamped onto her leg but the wide jaws have bitten down hard enough to anchor the head, and it is still attached to her.
“Get it off! Get it off!” Naoaki beats her leg against the ground, determined to remove the head by bits in necessary.
“Stop moving! Dammit, hold her down!” Aito pulls a leather pouch out of his harness while Khane and I hold Naoaki immobile. He drops a pinch of mercury salt on the shiny black head and instantly it lets go. The wide mouth gapes and a purple sucker trails out of the mouth, still moving, questing for Naoaki’s flesh.
“Ugh!” Naoaki scoots backward in disgust and rubs the circle of teeth marks where they have penetrated the leather of her pants. She is lucky to have gotten out in time.
Khane steps forward and kicks the head and the long body back into the water, much to everyone’s relief. They sink out of sight quickly and the water is once again smooth and undisturbed.
“Naoaki.” I stretch out a hand to comfort her but she immediately shrugs me off. She holds her knees tightly to her chest and a soft keening comes from her as she rocks back and forth.
I am great at teaching someone how to use their chosen weapon to their best advantage, what stance is best for their body type or how to fight someone larger or stronger. I am crappy at offering solace to someone in grief. Death is too much a part of my life and until now I have never put any energy into anything, beyond my friendship with Aito, that wasn’t directly related to survival. I ache for her and I am angry at my own uselessness.
“Naoaki, I’m sorry.” Aito offers his few words and then, solemnly, turns and continues along the path, away from the black pool of death. Micha and Jax follow him, quiet, a part of death and yet oddly separate from it. Reluctantly, Khane follows too, leaving me alone with Naoaki.
I settle near her and offer my companionship in silence, knowing there isn’t anything I can say that will help. Fish is gone. We sit for a while, and finally Naoaki quiets and stops rocking. I stare at the black waters, knowing I will not see Fish’s head pop up, but unable to quite look away either.
“Why didn’t you hold onto him!” Naoaki suddenly shouts. She shoots to her feet, her swollen eyes boring into mine accusingly. “You were right there, why didn’t you have a hold on him?!”
Speechless, I can only gape at her, my lips part with a defense ready…but nothing comes out. Angry and ashamed, I watch as she grabs her long red braid and hacks it off at the nape. Her fine, straight hair bounces with the sudden lightness, the ragged edge a stark line against the dusky skin of her exposed neck.
Long braid held in her fist, she shakes it as tears spill silently down her cheeks. She throws it to the ground and spits, then spins on her heel and follows the boys.
Astonished and upset, I watch the braid in a daze. Will it suddenly rear up and attack me? It sits in the sand like an arrow, pointing at me accusingly. I am frozen, stunned, wishing with everything I have for time to roll backward, for another chance to save Fish. But the black waters remain silent, the the braid inert, the red hair just a few shades lighter than the sand it rests on. I reach out and poke it with a finger. Nothing.
I am not sure how long I sit on that red sand, shoulders slumped. For a while I just can’t seem to find the will to get up. Eventually though, my back starts to ache and my butt hurts from sitting on the hard ground. I have to shift my position. The others haven’t returned so I take the path to the left and trudge after their footprints. I have let Naoaki down and worst yet, I allowed Fish to die. I am supposed to be the warrior, the security in this group and I have failed. It is a burden that presses down on me, unfamiliar and far heavier than Fish had ever been.
I wander alone for a while, my feet treading the red sand, following but not really seeing the others’ footprints. I wonder what Fish had been like before. By the time I’d met him, I suspect the change was already well begun. I had carried him on my back for nearly a week and yet I knew very little about him. This revelation saddens me further. I had regarded him as an imposition more than a person with hopes and values. And now, because of me, he is dead.
A few pools open up along the way, each a different color, but none show any signs of life, friendly or otherwise. Tiny, wingless birds run up and down the stone walls which have changed to a porous, gray stone. There are more of the spiny plants and tiny blue flowers. The birds are about the size of my thumb. They are so small, yet completely fearless of the giant passing close by. Their tiny claws easily grasp the stone and they race along the front of it with focused energy, hunting for bugs. They are a fascinating distraction.
Then I hear yelling and quicken my pace, dreading what I will find. Coming around another bend I burst into a wide open space broken up by short stone outcroppings of black rock and pools of pale green. There are more variety of plants here and even a few small trees to provide shade.
Naoaki is yelling at Micha, hands fluttering as she unconsciously signs while she shouts. I have missed what she'd said, arriving in time to hear only Micha’s response.
“I can’t.”
With a final cry, Naoaki storms off, threading through the clumps of boulders to another open space I hadn’t noticed. Slowly, I move to join Khane and Aito. They have their legs dangling in one of the pools, pants rolled up, boots off. They sit on the edge, not speaking.
“Hey, Keira.” Khane pats a space next to him. He hands me a bottle filled with water and an oddly shaped oblong I can only assume is a fruit or vegetable of some kind. “Aito saw some of those funny birds eating them.” He shrugs, indicating I suppose that if the birds are healthy than it’s edible, or at least not very poisonous.
I take the yellow pod and bite down. I am ravenous and eat every bite of the starchy, warm sweetness. It tastes vaguely of lemon and something nutty. I spit out the pit, hungry for more.
“They come from those weird green squiggly plants.” Khane points.
I am still hungry but I feel so wretched about Fish and Naoaki that a sort of lethargy has rooted me to the ground. The goofy looking plants seem so far away…. The moment the word ‘goofy’ pops into my head it makes my throat close up tight. I’d often thought of Fish as goofy, with his strange glumpy slouching. And now Fish is gone. Khane squeezes my knee and gets up. He gathers a handful of pods from the odd bush and drops them in my lap.
“Look, nobody blames you.”
“Well, Naoaki sure blames me.” I wipe some yellow pulp off my chin and look at him like he’s crazy.
“That’s guilt making her mad. She let you take the bulk of the responsibility for her cousin and now she’s using you again.” He shrugs. “Give her time, she’ll come around.”
I am not so sure. He didn’t hear what she’d said to me or see her cut her long braid and throw it to the ground in front of me. She hates me, and to be fair, I would have felt the same way in her place. I glance over at Aito, wondering what is going thro
ugh his mind right now. He doesn’t seem to be feeling the loss of a companion like the rest of us.
Instead, it looks like he is drawing equations in the sand with a stick, his mind a million miles away.
Micha gravitates to our loose group. None of us have treated him like an outcast despite his spooky twist. I hope he is getting more comfortable with us. It will be better for the group if we can function without too much discord. I glance at Jax, the rot of it’s corpse like body suspended in whatever strange magic resides in Micha’s twist. In truth, I don’t find his death calling any stranger than my knives mutating into a pair of steel wings. I know he genuinely cares for his remnants and I suppose it is this show of affection that forgives all the strangeness of his partially decayed pet.
Jax settles at Micha’s feet once he’s chosen a rock not too far and not too close to us. He looks like a lost little boy and I am reminded that we are all below the age of sixteen. Twists grow up fast by necessity.
“You ok?” I ask him.
I’d seen Naoaki rage at him and storm off somewhere. It isn’t a great leap of logic to figure out what she’d wanted of him. Micha shrugs and strokes Jax’s head.
“It’s the right decision.” Khane speaks up, offering his support.
It doesn’t appear to help. Micha looks miserable and I wonder at his life before Banishment. His social skills are even more rusty than mine. Had he left any friends behind? Somehow, I don’t think so. The way he is taking Naoaki’s anger to heart makes me think he has never had a spat with someone close. Not that I think he feels close to Naoaki, but she had been the nicest of all of us to him.
Micha seems to decide that our efforts at cheering him up are so much hot air. He hums to Jax and they leave, finding a spot around the other side of a clump of black stones, far away from us.
“He’s not dead. I don’t think anyway.” Aito finally speaks up.
“What are you talking about?” I ask him testily. “You think he wanted to be eaten by slimy, snaky black eel things.” Aito has a brilliant mind but sometimes he can be a real idiot. No one would choose that.
“I’m not sure, quite.” He goes back to his formulas in the red sand. I can just hear him whispering to himself as the shadows lengthen.
It’s going to be a long night.
Fourteen
I scratch my nose and peer through my lashes at the pools of green. They glow faintly at night giving off a pale, hazy light, just enough to see basic shapes by. Nothing moves.
My side is sore, I must have been lying without moving for some time and the red sand isn’t the softest bed I’ve enjoyed so far. I shift to my other side, re-tucking my feet under Khane’s warm legs and he pauses in his soft snoring for a moment. I badly want to snuggle close for warmth but my ego keeps me huddled where I am. What has woken me?
I stare at Khane’s back, a dark form against the pale green light. I know Aito is on his other side, curled in a tight ball. I haven’t seen Micha since we’d settled down for the night, off snuggling his remnant I suppose, a meat jerky pillow. Is the remnant warm or cool to the touch?. Naoaki still hasn’t made an appearance and that has me worried, but aside from the swimmers in the black pool, we haven’t seen anything dangerous. It is quiet… so why am I laying here with my eyes open instead of sleeping? Expanding my senses, I finally hear the thing that had woken me. The humming. Micha had seemed so steadfast when he’d refused Naoaki. I groan, she must have worn him down, gotten him to do it while the rest of us were asleep.
“Khane.” I shake his back. “Khane, Aito, wake up. Micha’s trying to raise Fish!”
I finally get them both up and we hurry down the path, or try to. Once we are inside the twisty maze and the glow from the pools has faded it is much slower going. I can see just fine, but it is impossible to run quickly while leading two blind people. They stumble along after me, one hand on the person in front and one out feeling for the rough stone walls. Finally, we spill out into the clearing with the black pool, the strange humming buzzing loud in my ears.
The moment I’d realized what was happening I’ve been imagining every kind of horror: Fish the remnant - partially eaten, bits missing or hanging by a thread; Fish the undead - with staring black eyes and swimmers glued to his body. I am both disgusted and relieved to find a circle of half eaten swimmers swarming Micha’s turning form. No Fish.
I spot Naoaki, back pressed to the stone wall, as far from Micha and the black pool as she can get. Her arms are wrapped tightly around herself and she is crying. My heart breaks for her. It is wrong, trying to bring a person back from death, but I understand what has driven her to this point. We all have had so little in this life, to loose Fish is to loose everything, the last tie to whatever makeshift family she’d once had.
I go to her, grabbing her in a tight hug, holding her tighter still when she starts to struggle. Her sobs grow louder, her anguish a physical thing. I wait, there are no words for a situation like this, no comfort I can offer to ease the pain beyond simply caring. Finally she slumps, spent and lets me take her weight. I hold her close and watch as Khane and Aito get through to Micha. His twist hasn’t worked, or rather, it hasn’t raised Fish. They help him push the dead swimmers back into the inky pool, too recently dead to disappear in a puff of ash I guess. I wonder what killed them.
The sun has lightened the sky to a pale salmon color, enough for everyone to make their way back to the green pools without my aid. I hold Naoaki close, keeping her upright, though she moves sluggishly. I hope that when the shock of what she’d tried to do wears off she doesn’t turn to anger again. It’s an easy choice when confronted with pain but it could become poisonous over time. We are too small a group, especially now. More than ever we need to function as a team, work together, or we won’t survive.
In silence we eat a breakfast of yellow pods, each lost in our own thoughts. Naoaki refuses food at first but eventually Aito wears her down. I stand and let him take my place. I am relieved to relinquish Naoaki to his care. It is stressful and wearing to comfort someone in so much pain. I’d done what I could for her but now, just for a bit, I need time to myself.
I wander aimlessly, searching for a small space to call my own. I find a small green pool far enough from the others, screened by large black rocks and surrounded by the squiggly yellow pod plants. It is as much privacy as I will ever get so I strip down and wade in. I haven’t bathed in roughly a week and the water feels cool against my hot, sticky skin. It is heavenly and I can finally breath without the heavy weight of responsibility pressing down on me. I grab handfuls of red sand and scrub until my skins glows. Whatever minerals make the water green also sooth my skin and tame my wild mane. I stretch out, floating and think back to life in the compound. It is a lifetime ago and so much has happened that I could never have dreamed of. I miss my morning ritual of adding ink to my tat. I miss a soft bed too. But something has changed for me. Some of the anger has faded, I realize. I am no longer constantly at odds with a faulty system, full of pent up frustrations, and against all expectations I am outside the city walls still alive. I am no longer training to survive, I am surviving and it is a notable distinction.
The decision to keep heading toward the light we had seen from the cliff top and hopefully, a city, is unanimous. What other choice is there really? We cannot just wander without direction out here in the wilds. So, we keep our heading pointed west, alert for danger and deeply aware that our water finding twist is no longer with us. Our survival now depends on our ability to search out water sources on our own and while we have been lucky so far, I am not feeling as optimistic as I had been. Aito and Naoaki lead, she a silent, invisible runner he directs forward to check out possible danger, while he keeps a constant eye on the position of the sun to keep us on track. Micha and Jax follow them, silent too except for the occasional clicks and whines that make up Jax’s vocabulary. Micha responds to the remnant with a pat or a nod, rewarding it with attention. Khane and I bring up the rear, watchful for danger.<
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It feels strange at first to be traveling with nothing on my back. Strange and sad. I wonder if we should have gotten Fish to drink the black water, maybe that was why he needed that pool? We will never know now, he’d been too far gone by the time we got there to tell us how to help him.
The terrain has changed, the maze of pools has opened up to softly mounded hills and the trees are tall, thick towers with heavy foliage and wide spear shaped leaves. The upper canopy blocks out most of the sun’s light making it more difficult to trace our route but also offering welcome shade in an otherwise oppressively hot climate. I keep a watchful eye, but my mind drifts. My attention turns not to recent events but to the library back at the compound. Aito had not been the only one to sneak into the archives and the forbidden rooms. Initially, I had gone because I reasoned that anything worth locking away was important enough for me to get a look at. Also, it meant thwarting the minders, which was always high on my list of fun things to do. I was surprised by what I’d found, however.
The Archives didn’t resemble the library in any way. I had expected old books, dusty tombs filled with important knowledge, maybe maps or something on survival in the wilds. Instead, I’d found a lab with rows of screens and keyboards with letters that could be depressed. It had taken all of my patience to finally figure out how to access information. I’d typed ‘twist’ into the centered box and up flashed a stream of possible search options; turned, warped, mar, faulty, wrong, evil, sick, monster. I clicked the blinking green ‘monster’. Another group of search options flashed up and mixed in with a lot of words I didn’t recognize was an image of a small boy dancing with monsters. He was dressed like them, with claws on his feet and hands, though I thought the disguise a tad obvious. He wore a crown on his head too which sparked my curiosity. It was a picture book about a little boy who was naughty and after being sent to bed with no food he travels to faraway lands and makes friends with monsters. It was sweet and sad at the same time for reasons I couldn’t identify. I’d immediately seen Aito as the little boy, breaking rules, dressed up like a twist but not really one at all….making friends with monsters….with me. In some ways it had defined our relationship. But all that is so long ago now. I am not the dangerous, anger filled mutant with thick barriers built around her heart. I am someone new, someone strong and not so full of rage. I sense that I am still raw and unfinished… but I have survived a week outside the walls and been given the chance to discover who I really am.
