by Hilari Bell
His other theory had to do with aliens, who, after they killed him, would revert to bird form and feast on his eyes. All things considered, he preferred drugs.
The girl’s eyes narrowed. “Honestly, I think you’re going to be worse than she was.”
“Who . . . that girl at the border? She knew who, what you are?”
And she’d still been alive when Jase saw her, which might be a good sign.
“Yes.” The magnificent brown eyes were alight now, with indignation and enthusiasm. “She accepted Atahalne’s quest, even though she had to run away from home and . . . hmm. Maybe I’d better tell you that part later. The leys have been—”
“I don’t care about the leys,” Jase said. “I’m too busy wondering if your spaceship can outrun a Tesla.”
He’d bet the Tesla could give it a race . . . till the batteries died. Then he’d be at their mercy.
“Jehoshaphat!” She stamped one small bare foot. “You want to leave, right?”
Was that some kind of alien curse? It sounded like something an old-time miner might say. But the answer to her question was clear.
“Yes, I want to leave. Right now.”
“Then pay attention! Your people have damaged your environment so badly that it’s mucked up the leys. In all the dimensions, not just this one. The tree plague was the last straw, and my people are sufficiently pissed about it that they want to let the plague ravage your planet and kill you all. The only way—”
“Wait, the tree plague? But they say it won’t spread out of the Tropics. It could never get this far north. And what do you mean, ‘your people’?”
Raven took a deep breath and began to mutter. Counting to ten in alien? Or just swearing? After a moment she turned cool eyes back to him.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “That bioplague, which your terrorists unleashed, will wipe out most of the forests on this planet unless the trees become strong enough to fight it off. And the destruction of the forests will radically change the atmosphere, killing most of the animal life. Human animals. So you’d better start listening.”
“I thought the trees were supposed to resist it,” said Jase. “Scientists are surprised it’s spread as far as it has.”
He wouldn’t have known that much, if his biology teacher hadn’t been fascinated by the microbial war playing out in the planet’s ecosystem. She’d talked about it at boring length.
“Exactly.” Raven sounded pleased. “The reason it’s spreading, instead of the trees fighting it off, is because the leys—”
“Magic leys,” said Jase sarcastically.
“The leys are too badly weakened to support them.” She was glaring at him now. “You don’t believe a word I’m saying, do you?”
“No,” Jase admitted. “Aliens . . . yeah, maybe. Magic, no. So you might as well let—”
“But you’re the one who has to heal the ley! Atahalne, who made that pouch, he died getting it to the south end of this ley. And Kelsa—”
“Died,” Jase said. “As in dead?”
“That was over two hundred years ago. But yes, he gave his life for this task. And Kelsa got arrested. She almost got killed healing it up to the border. She passed that bag, and Atahalne’s quest, on to you! There’s no time to find anyone else. You have to try.”
“No, I don’t. Particularly if it entails dying and getting arrested. Let her come back, and I’ll give her the dirt and she can finish whatever-it-is herself. If you need to get her out of jail,” he added, “my dad can refer you to a really good lawyer.”
Raven sighed. “I wish she could finish. She was a magnificent healer. She opened four nexuses, far more powerfully than I thought any human could. That she chose you is an honor, Jason Mintok.”
The way she said “human,” as if she wasn’t one, made goose flesh rise on his arms.
“Great,” said Jase. “An honor. Well, I decline. If she’s so special, let her do it.”
“I can’t,” said Raven. “It’s not because she was arrested; they’ve already let her go. But my enemies are too aware of her. They can track her, and stop her easily now. It was always a race, and they moved too quickly. They’re still moving, but they don’t know about you yet. If we move fast enough, you might be able to heal the rest of it before they can stop you. But we need to get started. Immediately!”
“Enemies? Never mind. I don’t even want to know. Let me go.” It was an order, not a plea.
“If I let you go, will you listen? Please?”
“I’m not listening now,” Jase told her. “Because I’m not going to do it. Whatever it is. Get the key and open the cuff.”
To his astonishment, she went to the rock where the bird had placed the key and picked it up. No difficulty finding it, Jase noted. Almost as if she really had put it there herself—which was flat-out impossible, no matter what he thought he’d seen!
She stepped forward and inserted the electronic key into the slot in the middle of the wide plastic band.
“I suppose instant cooperation was too much to hope for.” She turned the key and the magnetic clamps popped open. “But at least promise that you won’t destroy the dust in that bag. Or give it to my enemies. To anyone but me. It holds human magic, created for this purpose alone. I don’t think any human now alive knows enough about this ley to re-create it. So it can’t be replaced.”
“Sure.” Jase rubbed his wrist gingerly. The bruises were already darkening. “You can have your damn pouch back, anytime. Just keep out of my way.”
He stalked back toward the trail. He could feel her eyes on him, but she didn’t follow. Maybe she planned to pick up a ride at the trailhead parking lot. Maybe she could com someone to come and get her. Maybe she planned to fly!
The thing that worried Jase most, as he reached the trail and hurried down the mountain, was that he half believed that last answer was the real one.
***
Hallucination. It had to be.
Jase drove home and hit the button that raised the garage door. Both his mother’s and his father’s cars were gone, but he waited in his car for five full minutes. If his . . . problem was caused by fumes the stuff emitted, he wanted to give the air in the garage plenty of time to clear. He was fairly certain it was safe, but he still held his breath when he went into the garage and dragged out the recycling bin. Jase picked through it till he found a plastic tub with a lid that seemed to be airtight. Then he went into the kitchen and armed himself with a plastic bag and a pair of salad tongs. Thanking God his mother wasn’t home, he took a deep breath and entered the garage. His lungs were straining by the time he’d maneuvered the pouch into the plastic bag, and he had to run outside to breathe before he returned to press the seal closed, dump the whole thing into the plastic tub, and snap the lid down.
Then Jase went out to breathe again, and let the air clear a little more before he parked the Tesla inside. With the pouch isolated he felt fairly safe . . . assuming this wasn’t one of those drugs that stayed in your system and kept giving you hallucinations weeks or years after you took it.
If touching the stuff had messed up his brain then it was way too late to wash it off, but Jase hit the shower anyway. Under the warm stream, with no more strange visions troubling him, he finally began to relax.
What the hell was he going to do next? He should probably have his mother take him to a doctor to get checked out. But if he did that, he might get arrested for carrying the pouch away from the border. If the stuff would pass out of his system naturally, or cease to affect him now that he’d stopped breathing the fumes, it would be stupid to spend several years in jail.
He should have known it was a hallucination the moment a gorgeous girl—a gorgeous Native girl—made a play for him. But it felt so real, so pleasant . . . till it turned into a nightmare. Why would anyone take drugs?
He got out of the shower and treated his damaged wrist. Holistomax was the best nonprescription salve on the market, but it would still be days before those bruises fade
d, and the marks would be impossible to explain to his parents. If it was winter he could have worn long sleeves, but in mid-June that would be too suspicious. Jase finally wrapped a bandage around his wrist, and decided to tell his parents he’d scraped it hiking in the woods with a girl. It wasn’t quite a lie, and the girl part would explain the hiking part sufficiently that they probably wouldn’t ask many questions. Any questions except Who is she? Is this serious? Will we get to meet her?
Jase shuddered at the very idea.
That solved all of his problems except what to do about the drug. Promises to psychotic hallucinations didn’t count, but to flush the stuff he’d have to take it out of containment. And what if it poisoned the water system? If he buried it, some dog might dig it up and a kid could find it. And what was it doing to Ferd’s cousin Manny, and his chemist friend?
Jase was reaching for his com pod to call Ferd when it beeped, and Ferd told him that Manny’s friend had completed his analysis and wanted to see them.
***
Even in the Tesla, it took almost half an hour to reach Alaska University Anchorage in rush-hour traffic. Manny—darkly Hispanic to Ferd’s freckled Caucasian—took them straight to the chemistry lab where his roommate, Georg, awaited them.
Jase had expected an acrid chemical scent, and test tubes, and beakers bubbling over open flames. Instead, the lab held a lot of scanner-looking machines and a bank of microviewers. It smelled of floor wax.
Yorg, whose photo ID badge said his name was Georg Ridders, was studying something on one of the viewers when they came in. “Ah, there’s another! Thirteen thus far!”
“Hey,” said Jase uneasily. “You don’t have that stuff lying around loose, do you? I mean, suppose it emits fumes or something?”
Ferd cast him a curious look. Jase hadn’t told him about the incident in the woods because, on the slight chance the girl really did exist, it made him look like an idiot. But hadn’t some of the other kids seen Raven too? Mick certainly had, and Rochelle said everyone was talking about her. Unless he’d hallucinated that whole day? Was he hallucinating now? The thought made his brain boggle.
“You don’t have to worry about that.” Georg lifted his mild blue gaze from the scanner, blinking Jase into focus. He must have been using close-vision to enhance even the magnified image on the viewer. “No fumes. No physical effect at all. And it’s still the most weird of samples I’ve ever seen.”
“Weird, as in high street value?” Ferd asked hopefully. “I mean, you can’t know about the physical effects if you smoked it, say, or—”
“It’s not a drug,” said Georg. “It’s mostly sand, very rounded, more than what you see with most beach sand. The unusual part is the pollens! I’ve counted thirteen different species so far, and there may be more. But the most ’treme part—”
“Pollen?” Jase asked. “Like ragweed and stuff? Can that give you hallucinations?”
“No,” said Georg. “I keep telling you, it’s not a drug. But when I send these pollens through the biomolecular dater, I find that all of them are over two hundred years old! The small leather fragments in the sample are also from that same era.”
“Um . . . does two-hundred-year-old pollen have any street value?” Ferd asked. “Lab value?”
“Not really. Oh, if you put it out on the nets some archeo-botanist might pay a few hundred dollars, but it has no value except for the unusualness factor. Which is high! I would have said that you could sell this pouch Manny has told me about to a museum, for an authentic medicine bag from the late eighteen hundreds should have some value. But the ashes mixed into the bag are modern, so a museum would ask many awkward questions about provenance and probably not be willing to buy it, since the bag has clearly been tampered with in modern times.”
Late eighteen hundreds . . . assembled by a shaman called Atahalne? The fine hair on the back of Jase’s neck was trying to rise, and he rubbed it.
“Could those ashes be from something that could cause hallucinations?”
Georg rolled his eyes. “Not. A. Drug. Get it? Human ashes, from the cremation of a man who died less than two months ago, according to the biodater. And how they got mixed in with two-hundred-year-old pollen and sand is very much a mystery. Where did you get this?”
Ferd looked worried. “Human ashes? Like, maybe someone murdered someone and burned up his body to conceal the crime? Can you tell who it was from his DNA? We don’t have to take this to the cops, do we?”
Manny snorted. “Bro, if someone cremated a body to conceal the deed, they’d scatter the ashes, or dump them in a river, or bury them—not mix them into a little pouch with ancient pollen and stuff.”
“Besides,” added Georg, “DNA does not survive cremation. I’m doing chemical analysis here. This man—it was a man, by the way—had very late-stage cancer, and had been treated for it with modern medications, which did leave traces in the ash. I can’t say for certain that cancer killed him, but if it did, it would have done so swiftly. But whose ashes were they? And why did someone add them to what looks to be an authentic antique medicine bag? Where did you get this?”
His mild eyes were alight with curiosity.
“We found it in a ferry locker,” Ferd said. “On the top shelf, in the back corner. Like someone who’d used the locker before had maybe missed it. We thought it might have been a drug drop, but . . . No street value at all?”
“None,” said cousin Manny firmly. “And no murder either, you freak.”
“Are you sure there’s nothing that could cause hallucinations?” Jase asked. “What about the remnants of the cancer drugs? If someone breathed them in, for instance. Or touched them?”
Georg laughed. “You’re joking. There aren’t enough toxins in this whole sample to cause so much as a twitch in your blood chemistry, not even if you mainlined them. The pollen is so old, it probably wouldn’t even make you sneeze. Well, maybe if you sorted it out from the sand, and snorted the whole thing. But I assure you, that’s all it would do. The only thing of value here is the antiquity of the pollens—which could be worth a few hundred if you could find a buyer. And that’s something I might be able to help you with . . . for a percentage, of course.”
He looked hopefully at Ferd, who launched into negotiations.
Jase left them to it. If the stuff wasn’t drugs—and Georg sounded like he knew what he was talking about—then what had he seen in that sunlit wood?
Georg asked to keep the sample he had, since he needed to work up a complete list of the pollens for any potential buyer. Ferd told him he could, as long as he remembered that they had a lot more of it and promised to cut them in on the deal. Usually the prospect of making several hundred dollars would have interested Jase almost as much as it did Ferd. But now . . .
Either he had a brain tumor that was manifesting in some very strange ways, or he had seen a girl turn into a bird. If it wasn’t for the contents of that pouch, Jase would be comming his doctor to schedule a brain scan right now. But as it was . . .
Two-hundred-year-old pollen and leather. Just the kind of ingredients some ancient shaman might have assembled for healing a planet. Mixed with the ashes of a modern man. Jase had no idea how that had happened, but the combination was almost weird enough to make him believe . . .
Could Raven have been telling the truth?
Chapter 4
If she had been telling the truth, if shapeshifters and leys and magic might be real . . . well, Jase knew who to ask.
At dinner that evening he told his parents, “I’m thinking of driving out to visit Gramps and Gima tomorrow. Is that OK?”
His father’s face tightened. It was a subtle expression—most people wouldn’t have noticed—but Jase had been watching for it.
“Don’t you have homework this weekend?” his mother asked. “I thought you had a break coming up.”
“Not for two more weeks.”
Unlike the public schools, which sensibly let kids out to take advantage of the summer and let
them study in the winter, Jase’s private school ran all year, with periodic one- and two-week breaks. Their only concession to Alaska’s seasons was to schedule more of those breaks when the sun shone. Not nearly enough of them, as far as Jase was concerned.
“It’s been a while since I’ve been there. And I’m all caught up with homework.” He’d spent what was left of the afternoon making sure of that, since he’d known his mother would ask. “I’ll be back Sunday evening at the latest.”
One advantage of a driving job in a state where all the cities were most of a day’s drive apart was that even his mother had become accustomed to Jase being away overnight. But that didn’t diminish the curiosity in her eyes.
“Last time you saw Gramps and Gima, you said you wouldn’t go back till your grandfather sent you an engraved invitation. And that was just four months ago. I’m glad you’re going, of course, but . . . Wait, that girl you went hiking with. Was she Alaska Native?”
“Yes.” Jase’s face grew warm, though it wasn’t even a lie, exactly. The blush only reinforced his mother’s analysis, and his conscience panged when he saw how pleased she looked. She’d been trying for years to mend the rifts in her husband’s family, or at least keep a com line open. She’d been upset when Jase said he wasn’t going back—though she should have known he didn’t mean it.
“Let us know where you end up for the night,” she said, and then started chattering about a new exhibit in the gallery where she worked—to cover the fact that his father hadn’t said a word.
***
The drive from Anchorage to Valdez took six hours, at the best speed Jase dared make. It was drizzling when he reached the coast. It usually was, and that was still better than in southern Alaska, where it rained all the time as far as Jase could tell. He pulled a raincoat out of his trunk and locked up the Tesla. The next water shuttle to the resort was due in twenty minutes, which wasn’t bad, considering it ran every two hours.
It was a tourist boat, double hulled for extra stability, which was hardly needed in Prince William Sound. But the last part of the trip was open to the chop from the Gulf of Alaska, so Jase found a seat in the center of the lower deck. He got seasick in anything worse than the slightest motion.
