Fire Country

by David Estes

  When the black turns back to night, and I can see the stars again, I realize I gotta get up or I might never. Then where’ll I be? I can just imagine Keep looking in my cage the next day, seeing me sprawled out in the desert, dust on my lips, my arm hanging from my shoulder, limper’n a tug tail.

  I’m smart, so I use the prickler to help me to my feet, getting jabbed half a dozen times on the way up. “Thanks, Perry,” I whisper to the prickler. He deserves a name for all his trouble. After all, like so many people in my life, he’s helped me and hurt me. Either that, or I just like talking to plants.

  My sling’s a wreck, ripped in at least three places, two holes jabbed in it by Perry, who can’t be blamed, ’cause he hasn’t moved the entire time. Although I guess it could be argued that if he was really on my side he woulda moved. Perry, you baggard, I think, you shoulda moved!

  MedMa would be appalled at the state of my sling, so I do my best to rewrap it, which hurts worse’n a snap from Father’s snapper. But I get it done, let out a breathless sigh, exhausted from the strain of the last…how long’s it been anyway? I got no clue. I coulda blacked out for three thumbs of sun movement for all I know. Or just a few moments. More’n likely the real amount is somewhere in between. But which side’s it closer to? And what do I do now?

  I got a real problem. If I chase after Raja and the other prisoners with the tools, they might already be coming back, done with whatever it is they’re doing. But the thought of trying to squeeze back into my cage right now…I shudder.

  I’m out now so I might as well take advantage.

  You’re gonna end up back in Confinement, says Perry.

  “Shut up,” I whisper over my shoulder as I walk away.

  ~~~

  I ain’t got further’n a rock’s throw away from the edge of the Confinement cages when I see them. The glint of the bright moonlight offa the edges of tools tells me they’re coming back already. Either they’re real fast workers or I was in a pain-induced stupor for longer’n I thought. Too long.

  I grit my teeth and hustle back the way I came, around the edges of the cages, past the sleeping non-lifers. Then I’m back at my cage and I’m staring a torturous reentry right in the face. The gap I escaped from looks even smaller, like the cage has a brain and, upon realizing its flaw, recreated itself. There’s gotta be another way.

  Back at the front of the cage I stare at the mound where the big rock is covered. The clink of metal tools is carried to my ears on a gust of wind. Hard to tell how far away. Could be a mile. Could be a stone’s throw. If they’re a mile away, I could maybe dig up the rock, move it, slip through the hole, and pull the rock back into the gap. But the rock would be bare, instead of covered like it’s s’posed to be. The Keep would know something knocky was going on.

  Voices bounce across the desert like brambleweeds.

  They’re not a mile away. They’re back!

  I’m ready to rush ’round to the back, jam myself through the first gap that looks big enough, deal with whatever physical consequences I’ve got coming, but for some reason I stop to take one more look at my cage. I gaze from side to side, from bottom to top. I freeze.

  The top.

  It’s still got plenty of bars, and up there they’re crisscrossed, but each bar appears to be set further away from the one before’n the bars along the sides. Perhaps it’s just enough for a skinny lil runt like me to slip through without further shattering my already damaged arm.

  Clink!

  The sound is so close I could swear it was right next to my ear. I start climbing.

  It ain’t easy climbing with only one good arm, but I don’t weigh no more’n a bundle of vulture feathers. I jam my feet between two of the bars, trying to use the roughness of my moccasin bottoms against the roughness of the wood as a sort of fall stopper. My one good arm does most of the work while my broken one takes the rest of the night off. Well deserved.

  Perry’s just staring at me, like the shanker that he is. Thanks for the help, buddy.

  I grab as high as I can, pull with all my might, move my feather-light butt up a few feet, and sort of hop with my feet, almost like a horny toad—don’t laugh, that’s what they’re called—and then rewedge my moccasins to keep from falling. It’s slow going.

  Grab, pull, move butt, horny toad hop, wedge. Repeat.

  The voices get louder. Someone laughs. A gruff voice reprimands. Keep, trying to get control of his prisoners.

  I don’t stop for the voices, for the clinks, for Perry’s catcalls. Slow and steady, I keep moving until I reach the cross bar that means I’ve made it to the top. The lid on my cage.

  One leg over, then t’other. Take a breath.

  The voices stop in front of Raja’s cage. “You’re up next, dog! Get in!” Keep barks, sounding more like a dog himself. I freeze, look down, see Keep with maybe eight other prisoners. Raja drops to the durt, everyone watching him. I’m exposed under the soft glow of the moon goddess. If they look up, I’m knocked! Where are the searin’ clouds when I need them?

  Raja squirms like a worm underneath the bars. “Lock him in!” Keep growls, handing one of t’other prisoners a shovel. I’m dead-quiet, and to my surprise, Perry is too. Silent schemers. Placid plotters.

  When the big rock for Raja’s cage is in place and covered, Keep and the rest of them move on. I hold my breath. They walk straight on past my cage, not even giving it a casual look. I’m just a runty girl, couldn’t hurt a fly. ’Cept myself, I think, feeling my arm start to throb again.

  When they’re past Keep’s hut and a few more cages, I breathe again. My heart’s beating like the party drums after a successful tug hunt. But I ain’t out of the desert yet. Perry agrees, doing his version of a nod, which is basically staying perfectly still and upright. Stay out of this, Perry! I think.

  Perched on the roof of my cage, I feel precarious. It’s not that high, but with holes in the floor, it feels higher’n it really is. There’s a certain thrill to it, too, like all my innards are floating inside me, bobbing and bouncing. How to get down?

  The smart thing to do, as Perry suggests, would be to slip through one of the square holes and shimmy on down the bars all the way to the ground. Challenging with one arm, but easier’n climbing up here in the first place. Sounds like a plan.

  I start to carefully lower myself between the crisscross, keeping one of the bars under my armpit. As I scrabble at the thin air with my feet, Keep shouts, “Cage check!”

  Cage check? What’n the scorch? I lose my concentration and my arm slips off the bar. I’m falling! At the last second, I grab and squeeze as hard as I can with my hand, making a fist around the bar. My feet swing underneath me as I hang on for dear life, rocking back and forth in the wind, which has been picking up steadily ever since I started climbing. A morning windstorm. Not unusual for this time of year.

  While I hang, there’s grumbling and groaning as the whole place seems to come to life. Toward the end of my row of cages, I hear Keep rattling along the cage bars with some instrument, shouting out names and then waiting for a response.

  “Koda!”

  “Yeah.”

  Ratatatat along the bars.

  “Briggs!”

  “Nope.”

  “Shut yer tug hole! Smartass!”

  Ratatatat…

  You get the picture. He’s getting nearer.

  My feet are swinging and I can’t reach the side bars. Can’t shimmy down. Can’t slide down. Can’t do anything ’cept hang and swing. My shoulder’s aching and I feel my sweaty hand starting to slide off the wood.

  “Bart!”

  A growl. Big Bart ain’t in the mood for talking.

  Keep’ll pass his hut and then he’s to mine.

  I got no choice.

  Outta options.

  Perry’s chanting, “Do it, do it, do it!”

  I do it. I wait until my swing takes me into a more or less vertical position and then I release the bar and drop, trying to keep my legs bent slightly to
cushion the fall. For a painfully short moment, I’m weightless, free, untouchable. And then the unforgiving ground touches me. Hard. Like a forearm shiver, but across the whole of my body. My feet hit first, pushing a shockwave up my legs and into my hips, spreading like wildfire from there. My knees give out, sending me rolling—not again!—across my cage. This time it’s only one roll though, one big flop, a stomach-jostling smacker that knocks all the air out of me. At least Perry is on the other side of the bars this time, unable to prick me.

  Can’t breathe.

  Can’t breathe.

  I wheeze and gasp as I roll over to lie on my back.

  Ratatatat! “Siena!”

  Wheeze. Gasp. No voice. No breath. No way to respond.

  “Siena!” Keep repeats.

  “Here,” I whisper, like I’m back in Learning and Teacher is checking for skippers. But my voice comes out softer’n the rustle of windblown sand. Keep can’t hear me.

  “I see ya there, Girl. I knows yer ain’t used to our ways ’ere, but it’s not difficult. I says yer name, and yer respond. Let’s try it again.”

  Wheeze. Gasp. Lips moving but no words coming out.

  “Siena!”

  “Yeah,” I croak, my voice the timbre of a horny toad, my animal of choice for this evening. Perry laughs.

  “See, not too hard, eh?” Keep says. He moves on to Raja.

  My throat opens and I greedily gulp down the breezy air. My heart slows. My body aches. Perry mocks. Searin’ Perry.

  “What the scorch are you doing over there?” Raja hisses when Keep’s moved on down the line. “I heard a thump.”

  I clench my jaw. “Nothing,” I say. “Just sleeping. Or trying to.”

  “Tugblaze. I heard you thrashing around in the durt like you’s fighting something.”

  “It’s too dangerous to tell you, Raja,” I say, turning his words back on him. “If I told you, they’d kill you, and they’d kill me.”

  I slump to the side, grinning in spite of the aches and pains and bumps and bruises. Determined to get a little sleep before Luger comes to collect me. A peaceful end to a very long day in Confinement.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It’s nice waking up in my own bed, watching through the window as the sun peeks over the horizon, spraying ribbons of red in every direction. A heavy bank of thick, yellow clouds moves swiftly across the sea of pinkish-reddish sky. It’s a very windy day. Through our door, which is open a crack, I can smell the windstorm that’s coming. Might even turn into the first sandstorm of the winter season. I can’t smell it yet, but if there’s a sandstorm coming, my nose’ll pick up on it soon enough. I been sniffing out storms my whole life.

  Yesterday was a throw-a-way. I was too battered and sore and exhausted to do anything but sleep it off. I coulda just as easily done that in my cage, but I was sure thankful to do it here, on my tugskin sleeper.

  I heard Circ come to call on me, but Mother turned him away, said I needed to rest. She was right. Thankfully my father wasn’t around when he stopped by—he mighta made a scene.

  The crack in the door widens and my father’s heavy outline appears in the opening. His eyes are small, no more’n pinpricks. He grunts when he sees me awake. He didn’t say a word to me yesterday. I wonder if his grunt means today’ll be the same. I can hope, can’t I?

  Nope.

  He strides directly over to me, not even stopping to slip off his dusty moccasins. My Call-Mother’ll hafta sweep up the mess later. There’s a shadow on my face as he looms over me. “Youngling,” he says.

  “Head Greynote,” I say, returning his formalness.

  “Did you learn anything from your trip to Confinement?”

  Scorch, yeah! Heaps! All about how people sent there are treated like animals, caged, poorly fed. About how it’s possible to escape if you’re all skin and bones, like me. And oh yeah, I found out about some ’spiracy with the Icies, how ’bout that?

  At least that’s what I think. What I say is, “Yessir. I’ll be behaving from now on. Don’t want to go back there again. Never.”

  Although I know I give the right response, he frowns, maybe sensing the deceit in my voice. “Good,” he says. “Don’t make me send you there again. The next time your stay might not be so short.”

  As he starts to head for the door, I say, “Congratulations, Father.” He turns, looks back at me. “On Head Greynote.”

  His face is flat. “It’s not an award or a celebration. It’s a duty. It’ll do you well to remember that.”

  And then he’s gone, the flaps of his slitted leather shirt wagging about the moment he steps out the door, the wind whipping them into a frenzy.

  It’s a very windy day.

  I wonder what the wind’ll carry into the village.

  ~~~

  “We’re leaving soon,” Circ says.

  Yeah, I’m hanging around Circ still. I guess my father’s little lesson in Confinement didn’t really take. As long as I don’t get caught, right?

  I nod. “And you’ll be back in three days?” I ask for the tenth time. A burst of sand shivers overhead. It never comes back down, carried along by the ever-strengthening wind. The trip back to the village’ll be awful, but for now we’re protected in our spot in the Mouth, dug in on the backside of one of the two big dunes.

  He looks at me with one dimple. “We’ve gone over all this. It’s an investigation. We’re not going to war.”

  I raise my chin. “Oh, you think I’m worried? No, no, I just know I’m going to be bored stiffer’n a day-old dead burrow mouse with you gone,” I say, giving him my best champion’s smile. Although I’ve never been a champion and probably never will, it don’t hurt to practice.

  He laughs, short and high-pitched, humoring me. “Don’t get into any trouble while I’m gone or I won’t be there to visit you in Confinement.”

  “It seems I only get into trouble when you are around,” I say, ramming my knee against his. “And for your information, I had two other visitors’n you, my mother and Lara. So I think I’m covered there.”

  His eyes widen. “And you didn’t tell me this earlier?” He’s turned grumpy on me.

  “We’ve only been setting here for one thumb of sun movement, maybe less. And I’m telling you now, ain’t I?”

  Circ shrugs, bashes his knee against mine and I wince. “Ouch! Sear it all to scorch, Circ, that hurt like a machete blade.”

  His hands are on my knee in an instant, rubbing and massaging it. “Sorry, Sie, I didn’t realize I cracked you that hard.” His touch feels warmer’n a hot summer’s day.

  “No, it wasn’t that,” I say. “I’m just a tad tender.” I keep my eyes down, on my knee where he’s rubbing it, but I can feel his frown all over my face.

  “Why’s it tender?”

  I say nothing.

  “Sie? What is it you’re not telling me?”

  Like I always do with Circ, I spill my guts. I hate dropping all these boulders on him just before his mission, but I never could keep anything from him. Nor do I want to. It’s nice having someone who knows my every thought. Secrets’ll chew you up inside, swish you around, and then spit you in the dust. Maybe even stomp you down a bit. Right away, I feel better after I tell him.

  “Holy jumpin’ prickler roots, Sie!” Circ exclaims when I finish. “You jumped from the roof?”

  I blink. Now that he says it that way, it all sounds pretty wooloo, like maybe something I dreamed, or made up. With a shrug, I say, “Uh, yeah. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Wow! First the thing with the Killers, and then this. You’re getting bolder by the day. Maybe it should be you going on this mission.”

  Despite the obvious exaggeration in Circ’s declaration—females ain’t allowed to go on missions as they might get hurt and not be able to Bear—it makes me smile from earlobe to earlobe. “You’re just blustering now,” I say. “You’re full of air and sand, just like the wind.”

  “We’ll see,” Circ says, grinning back. “Any
way, whaddya make of it all?”

  “All of what?” I ask. Our knees touch again and Circ stops rubbing my leg.

  “I dunno. Everything. What Lara said. Your mother. Raja’s talk of a ’spiracy.” Coming from his mouth, it does sound like a lot. An awful lot. I feel tired again.

  I take a moment to think. Then I start slow, taking it piece by piece. “Lara says a lot of stuff, most of which I don’t understand. I don’t know if I ever will or if I should even take her seriously. I mean, could she really be working with someone outside of the village? How would she even meet someone outside? My mother though, what she said took me by surprise. I never heard her talk like that. I can’t help thinking she’s losing her mind being Called to my father.”

  “You think it’s the Fire?”

  My head jerks toward Circ’s, his question taking me by surprise. “What? No. Of course not. She’s perfectly healthy.”

  Circ chews on his lip. “Sorry, it’s just, she’s getting old. Like both our parents. The Fire’s inevitable.”

  “I—I know that,” I say. Keeping it internal, I think Do I? My parents have always been there, since the very beginning. It only makes sense that they’ll always be there, just like Circ’ll always be there. I slam the gate down on those thoughts. It’s my heart speaking. Foolishness. My brain knows everybody dies, usually sooner rather’n later. Like Circ said, the Fire’s inevitable.

  Trying not to think about the Fire, or whether my mother is going wooloo, I move on to my next point. “There must be something of a ’spiracy,” I say. “Raja had no reason to lie. And I did see them hauling off with all those tools.”