Iq'her

by Elin Wyn

  Why take the risk?

  “I don’t buy it,” Roddik said, voicing my suspicions. “What’s your name?”

  “The name’s Ilkay.”

  “And how did you manage to find us, Ilkay?”

  My brother lowered himself so that his eyes were level with Ilkay’s. “After the attack, I realized that someone must had coordinated the whole thing. I found a group that was leaving town to join up with you, but those damn aliens came and arrested everyone. Somehow, I managed to escape. I was alone, but I wasn’t about to stay in Nyheim and let the aliens lay their hands on me. And so I set out by myself, just walking in the direction the group I was with said you’d go.”

  “And you just came across us?”

  “I spent the whole night wandering.” Ilkay shrugged, some emotion finally showing in his face. What emotion it was, I couldn’t say. “I wasn’t sure how much of a head start you had, so I figured I should just keep walking instead of camping out for the night. I thought that, with some luck, I’d come across you. And now, here we are.”

  “Here we are indeed,” Roddik repeated, and I could tell he was weighing his options. He wasn’t entirely sure if he trusted the newcomer, but I knew he was intrigued about the possibility of having one more person in the group admiring him. His ego was growing with each hour that passed, it seemed.

  “Check my bags.” Ilkay pointed with his chin to the bags laid on the ground just a few feet away from him. In direct contrast with the rest of our group, this guy seemed to have come prepared. Just one look at his bags and I immediately spotted a sleeping bag and what looked like a foldable tent.

  When Roddik turned the bags over, dozens of cans of foods tumbled onto the ground. From meat to dried vegetables, this guy seemed to have come prepared for a long time in the wild. In his other bags were his camping gear, a few clothes, and the kind of tools a sensible person would have brought on such an expedition.

  I wasn’t sure if I trusted this new guy, especially because he seemed to agree with Roddik’s stupid reasons, but I did respect the fact that he had come prepared. Our little group desperately needed people with common sense, no doubt about that.

  “Not bad,” Roddik nodded with a satisfied smile, his eyes taking in the various tools and food Ilkay had brought with him.

  In the grand scheme of things, the fact one man had remembered to bring a few tools wouldn’t make a difference, but we weren’t in a position to turn our nose up at him. “Ilkay, I’ve decided you can stay.”

  “Thank you,” Ilkay replied happily, rubbing his wrists when Roddik’s men finally untied him. Standing up, he stretched his back and shook Roddik’s hand. “I’m looking forward to helping around here. What do you need me to do?”

  “Well, uh,” Roddik stammered, and it was more than obvious that he had no plan. For a guy whose sole purpose was to lead us, he seemed completely unprepared for it.

  Gritting my teeth, I realized I would have to fill in for him.

  “The plan remains the same, right?” I asked, turning to Roddik. I hated the fact I had to pretend my ideas were Roddik’s, but I didn’t want him to shoot me down just because he wanted to assert himself in front of his friends. “You said we should build a temporary site here, so I figure we should start gathering some wood for the structures.”

  “Right, exactly,” Roddik said, a grandiose expression on his face. It seemed as if he didn’t mind taking credit for my ideas. I didn’t mind either — the important thing was the group’s survival. “That’s the plan.”

  The first light of dawn crept through the trees. Roddik looked around, face stern.

  “Then let’s get to work.”

  Iq’her

  Working with the group wasn’t as much of an ordeal as I’d thought it would be. Then again, I had thought that joining them would be much easier, so I guess it all balanced out.

  I had been assigned the job of helping to create some temporary structures. Roddik had the brilliant idea — I was pretty confident Stasia had the idea and he took credit for it — to create a small temporary site here. “That way, when others join the cause, they can rest here before they make it to our real settlement,” he had said when he started ordering people around.

  As I worked, gathering branches, using my hatchet to cut down some saplings and some slightly bigger trees, I paid attention to the group at work.

  I had to admit that several of them had some legitimate survival skills. They knew how to look for the right type of wood to build with, how to take vines to use as tie-downs, and how to get the right mixture of mud and undergrowth to help strengthen the structures we were building.

  The more I watched, the more I thought that they could potentially stand a chance. The problem was that they were following Roddik’s orders, and that was about as stupid as you could get.

  There was only room for maybe four decent-sized structures in this clearing, and by ‘decent-sized’, I meant structures big enough for five or six people to sleep in. We weren’t talking actual homes, but one-room buildings with a dirt floor and not much protection from the elements, especially if it got cold. Roddik, however, insisted on trying to fit in a fifth structure, and then got angry when one of the structures went up where he wanted it to go, insisting that he had said he wanted it in a different place.

  It was his sister that kept people calm. She organized the people into different groups with different tasks.

  She had some of the bigger men go to cut down trees, while she sent another group to get vines. She then suggested that some of the shorter people work on the lower portions of each ‘building’ and then switch with the taller people, who would be mixing together the mud insulation.

  She had done well. She had also been the only one to suggest leaving to get some food. She had told her brother that she knew where to find some nuts, berries, and fruits for them all to eat.

  “I don’t want any goddamn fruits and berries. I want some meat,” he had yelled at her when she brought it up. “Where the hell do we find meat? Can you tell me that?”

  When she shook her head, he threw his hands in the air.

  “Then what fucking good are you?” He stomped away from her, calling together some of the bigger men and telling them to go hunting.

  “See?” he asked, turning back to his sister. “I just had the men go hunt for real food, not some pansy-ass berries or nuts. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking that we needed something to eat and I know where to find some,” she snapped back. “What if they come back with nothing?”

  “They’re the biggest, meanest guys we have. How are they coming back with nothing?” Roddik spat, shaking his head as if his sister was stupid. “God, you’re stupid sometimes,” he said, confirming to me that he really had no clue about anything.

  My blood thundered in my ears.

  How dare he speak to his sister that way? She had more sense in her hand than he did in his whole body.

  I felt my fingers twitch. I wanted to uncloak my holobelt and rip this little man limb from limb with my bare hands.

  But I had to keep my cover. I could not.

  Not yet.

  “We’ll go get fruits and berries with you,” a couple of the women said to Stasia. They left with her.

  I continued working on the small hovel I had chosen to work on. I put together, with some help, a couple of logs and positioned them into the hole some of the others had dug. These two small logs were going to be a corner.

  The nearly two dozen of us worked well, not counting Roddik, who just pissed everyone off. The whole team did a good job of digging holes and small trenches for each structure. The team cutting down logs were giving us a semi-steady flow of logs to lash together with the vines that were in ready supply.

  These people might actually be capable of surviving and creating a new settlement, but I wouldn’t put money on it.

  It was hard work, but oddly, I found myself enjoying it. For the next several hours, we w
orked hard and at a pretty good pace. However, things started to slow down towards the afternoon when we hadn’t eaten anything. The women had come back with a small supply of fruits, nuts, and berries.

  Roddik laughed at them. “You call this finding food?” he asked as he got into his sister’s face. “Really?”

  She glared at him, but kept quiet.

  “Figures you’d be useless out here,” he said. “Now get over there and help get the buildings up. You’ve slacked off enough.”

  How she didn’t yell at him, punch him in the face, or whatever to defend herself was beyond me. I could see some of the others already starting to glare at Roddik or shake their heads in sympathy towards Stasia.

  They knew the siblings better than I did. They must have seen this sort of behavior before.

  Stasia came to work next to me, helping me lash the logs together. We worked in silence, but every nerve of my being was attuned to her presence. I could smell her scent. I could hear her.

  From time to time, I snuck a glance to admire her. She caught my eyes once but I looked away when I thought I saw the beginnings of recognition. She let it go and I concentrated on work.

  The logs we were working on now were going to go up top to act as a roof, and they were the last two we needed. She tugged the vines nice and tight, tied them off, and I helped the men hoist them up and onto the hovel. They shifted slightly, but held. A couple of the smaller people got onto the shoulders of the stronger ones and lashed the roof together nice and tight. Then they began throwing some mud and sod onto the roof to help fill in the holes. It wouldn’t be rain-tight, but the roof, along with the tree canopy above, should help to keep most of the rain away.

  “You people should have done better,” Roddik called out to us. “We’ve only gotten two buildings up and I wanted at least four. This is pathetic.”

  One of the others called him out. “Well, if you had helped, we might have gotten another one finished.”

  “Who said that?” Roddik yelled, spittle flying from his mouth as the crazy in his eyes was apparent.

  This one is absolutely out of his mind, I thought as I stood there. I risked a sidelong glance at the person that had spoken. It was one of the men that had started the day at Roddik’s side but ended the day trying to stay away from him.

  No one answered him. He fumed for a minute before the hunters returned…empty-handed. “What do you mean ‘there was nothing out there’?” he yelled. He started cursing and flinging blame around at ‘those goddamn alien fuckers’.

  The women that had gone with Stasia volunteered to go back for more fruits and nuts, taking a few extra people with them before Roddik could yell at them. I went to go sit down against a tree, and ‘accidentally’ picked one close to Stasia and Roddik.

  “We should have spent more time planning this,” I heard Stasia say as calmly as she could.

  “What good would that have done?” Roddik snapped.

  I heard Stasia let out a sigh and imagined seeing her breathe to regain her composure. “If we had put together a proper plan, one that used some patience and took some time, we could have already had this place built and stocked, or at least we would have had packs ready for everyone to grab on their way out of the city. Then we would have food and drink right now.”

  Well, we did have drink. There was a small stream only a few yards from the clearing with nice, crisp, clean water. Too bad the stream was too small to have fish in it.

  “Whatever. If people just did their damn jobs and these damn aliens weren’t stealing our food, this wouldn’t be a damn problem.” A rock flew past me and I imagined Roddik being more of a petulant child than a frustrated adult.

  “Yeah, you keep saying that,” she said. “But, if we had a better plan, we would be able to work better together and we would have gotten more accomplished.”

  She was right. I’d had the exact same thoughts earlier.

  For me, this was yet more proof that Stasia wasn’t involved in the attack on Rouhr.

  She was just dragged along due to some overarching need to be loyal to her family.

  He didn’t deserve her loyalty. He certainly didn’t deserve her love anymore. He treated her terribly and my hand itched to strike back in her defense.

  No one deserved to be treated the way he treated his own family.

  There had to be a way to get Stasia away from Roddik.

  She deserved to live a life that didn’t involve cleaning up her brother’s shit.

  And I intended to make sure she had that life. That she had everything she wanted.

  Stasia

  Kneeling on the ground, I used the hatchet in my hands to hack at the bush in front of me. Arkadian berries usually hid deep inside these thorny bushes, and they were a staple of the dry season. If I was going to find any food, these berries were my best shot. I had already found some a few hours ago, but I still needed way more.

  “Great,” I sighed as I saw the few berries that hadn’t fallen to the ground. Instead of a deep red, they were more of a sickly brown. I plucked one and it simply crumbled to dust under my fingers. It seemed like General Rouhr had been telling the truth — plant life around the city seemed to be dying.

  More than that, I couldn’t help but notice how few of the small animals that had always inhabited this part of the forest remained. Maybe it was because they couldn’t find as much food to forage, but whatever the reason, even the animals were abandoning this place.

  Defeated, I got to my feet and started making my way back toward the camp. I’d already known that foraging wouldn’t be easy, but I never imagined I would be returning with nothing but a couple of berries. The situation was even more worrying than I had thought initially. The food we had brought with us wouldn’t last long, so we desperately needed to find a way to keep ourselves fed.

  “No luck, huh?” I heard someone ask me, right when I reached the clearing, and I turned around to see Ilkay looking at me. He was a tall man, and his strong frame had given him a semblance of respect among the other men in the group...still, there was a kindness in his eyes I hadn’t expected from someone that introduced himself as an alien-hater. It struck me as familiar.

  It couldn’t be…

  Could it?

  “No,” I sighed.

  “Nothing?” Ilkay asked.

  “The ecosystem is all out of whack.”

  “It is,” he nodded. “Even the animals seem to have started moving on. Even game will be scarce.”

  “So, you noticed, too.” Running one hand through my hair, I wondered how much time it would take before the others would start noticing it, as well. Would they rebel against Roddik? Would they want to return to Nyheim? That’d be an ironic ending for this situation, no doubt about it. Especially because none of us could return, even if we wanted to.

  “Aren’t you going to join them?” Ilkay asked me, pointing toward the fire my brother had lit in the middle of the clearing. He and his friends had dragged a few tree stumps there, and they were sitting close to the fire while going through our food reserves.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied. “I’m not in the mood for a night of alien-bashing rants.”

  “I see,” he whispered. “Well, as far as I’m concerned, not all aliens are bad. I do get where Roddik’s coming from, although his views might be a bit extreme.”

  “You think?” I snorted, raising both eyebrows as I looked at him. Why was he telling me all this? He had seemed like a regular alien-hating apologist when he was trying to convince my brother to untie him, but now…

  “What are you really doing here, Ilkay?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking him. Still looking at him, I pointed toward the group where my brother was. “You’re not like them. You’re a smart guy. So why in the world would you want to join us?” I met his gaze and held it, and there was something… something about him that I liked.

  “Maybe I thought you needed some help,” he said.

  I simply replied with a nod, not knowing what
else to say, and then Ilkay turned around and headed toward the group. I watched him go, not knowing what to make of him. He didn’t seem to be a bad person, but I couldn’t help but feel he wasn’t telling us the whole truth. There was more to him than met the eye.

  Sighing, I tried to clear my head.

  Why was I worrying about one guy when this whole thing was a mess? Ilkay was the least of my problems. Shaking my head, I moved away from the group and went toward the edge of the clearing. The shadows were growing long, and the sun had already started dipping over the horizon. Soon enough it’d grow cold, and I needed a fire of my own. Sure, I could share a fire with Roddik and the guys, but I preferred my own company.

  I gathered a few twigs and some dry moss and, after digging a small hole, I use a lighter to get the fire going. A few minutes later and the flames were already reaching high, the sound of crackling wood making me smile. I built a small shelter with a few branches, nothing more than a basic lean-to, and then sat close to the fire as I observed the group.

  Aside from Roddik’s fire, there were a few others on the edge of the clearing. Most people were chattering happily, a few deep laughs drifting into the air from time to time. Everyone seemed happy with their newly acquired sense of freedom, but I couldn’t stop myself from wondering about what lay ahead. There was no doubt in my mind that things would soon start going downhill. The idiots weren’t even rationing their food.

  “You’re screwed, Stasia,” I said out loud, closing my eyes as I leaned back. Roddik’s settlement was nothing but a pipedream, and this group would meet a tragic end. I could help them, sure, but could I stop them being a band of idiots? I seriously doubted that. In the end, Roddik’s plan was doomed and there was nothing I could do about that.

  Maybe I could still save myself, though.

  I could sneak away during the night...

  There was no way I could go back into Nyheim, so I discarded that option right away. The moment I stepped foot inside the capital city, I was pretty sure I’d get arrested and processed as one of Roddik’s accomplices. And, in a way, wasn’t I one? I had escaped the city with him, after all, and I was living among his ragtag group of rebels. There was no way in hell anyone would believe me if I tried to say I wasn’t a part of my brother’s plans.