“The years after she died are a blur. I was terribly alone, and because I was fast, I carried messages from camp to camp, helped plan strategy.” Her voice regained some its edge, became harder. “I wanted every one of the altered to die. I remember the day the Journey left. Stile and Eric and I were on the High Road, heading back into Artistos, which had by then been nearly abandoned. We heard the low-pitched rumble of the ship, saw it rise up from the Grass Plains, and we cheered. We yelled and screamed and jumped and shook our fists in the air, and then we ran back here, back home. The altered were gone!”
I knew the next part, so I said it. “But we were here.”
Nava looked over at me. “We almost killed you all. Akashi argued against it, and we were sick of killing, and we were tired.”
I wondered if she wished they had killed us. If she had suggested they kill us. She would not have held power then, not like she did now, but what had she argued for?
“And now, well, we died easily at the hands of your people. But there are only six of you. Seven, if you count Jenna.” She stood, pacing up and down, and then sat down again, tapping her feet. “Already, our data nets are stronger because of Joseph. Liam has shown leadership in his band, and Akashi tried to set him up as heir apparent. All that before you are even adults.” She spread her arms wide, a gesture of amazement. “We don’t want you to lead us. Now, we can tell you what to do, and you comply. But you will not be that way in ten years, in twenty.” She paused and swallowed. “In a hundred years.”
“We will not harm you.”
Now she sounded bitter, a little imperious, as if she had let down her guard and was now putting her usual personality back on. “Harm comes in many forms.”
“And what would you do with us, if you could?” I asked.
“I would send you away. Figure out how that damned leftover ship works, and send you away.”
It was, I thought, better than saying she would kill us even now. She couldn’t know how often I’d wanted to leave, how often I made games in my head of flying off and finding my own people.
She stood and started back, walking fast. I kept up, and as we reached the end of Commons Park, I asked, “So what exactly do you need from us on this trip? What will tell you we’ve succeeded?”
“Fix the data networks, and spend some time with Alicia, figure out how broken she really is.”
“If I do that, will you protect our rights? We’ve earned them.”
“You Chelo, you’re the leader. Earn your keep. Quit protecting Joseph and make him fulfill his potential. We need the networks back.”
I knew what she needed, but I didn’t know how to give it to her. Nor could I tell what Nava might give me in return, except that it sounded like it wasn’t enough.
10
Up the High Road
Joseph and I rose early the next morning and walked through thin morning mist to the hebra barn, following Tom. Kayleen and Paloma and Alicia were already there, nearly geared up. Kayleen and Alicia worked together to tie a saddlebag on one of the pack hebras. I stopped, suddenly struck by their similarities. They were the same height, just slightly shorter than me, and their matching light skin and dark hair made them a remarkable mirror image unless you counted the difference between Kayleen’s river-blue eyes and Alicia’s violet ones. Or—I glanced down—the difference in the length of their feet. I suppressed a giggle. Kayleen’s feet did look funny, but she was the only one in Artistos capable of shinnying up pongaberry trees without ropes.
Kayleen glanced over at me, a slight grin touching her face and lighting her eyes. “Hey sleepyhead, you missed the East Band. They trundled off at sunup.”
So Nava had not said good-bye to Ruth. “Well then, I didn’t miss much, did I?’” I glanced at Alicia’s startled eyes and rethought my flippancy. “If will be easier for us not to say good-bye to them.”
Alicia laughed, a strangled soft sound. “I do not care if I ever see them again.” As she climbed up on a stool to tie saddlebags on her near-black hebra, Ink, she added, “Except Sky.”
I found the hebra Tom had helped me pick out yesterday. Yellows and dry browns slashed Stripes’s dun coat. She watched my approach curiously, her deep brown eyes telegraphing intelligent appraisal. She was young, slightly fractious, as tall as Legs; I looked forward to finding out if she was as fast. She twisted her head back as I saddled her, nuzzling my shoulder, apparently approving of me. Everywhere I went, she watched carefully, as if she wanted to know my soul. I kissed her nose, missing Jinks momentarily.
We finally managed to tie every lace, adjust every face harness and lead line. We mounted up and let ourselves out of the corral. Two extra hebras trailed behind Paloma as pack animals. Joseph rode Legs again, and Tom had chosen Sugar Wheat. As the six of us wound through town, heading for the park, Hunter walked toward us. He stopped to watch us approach, an appraising look in his light green eyes. As we came within easy earshot, he called up to Tom, “Be careful out there. Be sure you all stay safe.”
Tom nodded. “I will, sir.”
Hunter walked up to Stripes, and put a twisted hand on my foot, which was almost shoulder high to him with me mounted. This close, I could make out at least two scars on his wrinkled visage. “And you, take good care of your brother.” Not a question; a command.
I swallowed hard. Hunter had rarely spoken to me, nothing but polite greetings in passing or direct questions. “I intend for us all to get home safely, sir.”
He smiled then. “Perhaps you’ll do, after all. Show me, Chelo. No acting up out there. I want to hear that you four”—he swept his gaze across us all—“do exactly what Paloma and Tom tell you. No more, no less.” This time, his eyes stopped on Joseph. “Do you understand?”
Joseph looked down and mumbled assent, and Tom added, “We will be careful, all of us,” and lightly kicked Sugar Wheat into a walk. I looked back at Hunter as we rode away, feeling like I’d been given military orders, like failure would bring punishment. The man radiated quiet power and secrets. I shivered.
At Little Lace Park, we met up with the chaos of a roamer band preparing to leave for the winter. People from Artistos hovered around the wagons. Dogs barked, children called, goats bleated in protest as their owners tied them behind wagons. Hebras snorted and stamped in their wagon traces, as if to say, “All right, let’s go. We’re harnessed already.” Klia held hands with a young roamer, her dark hair and dark eyes flashing with laughter, then smothered by a kiss. A few places, town parents stood watching their roamer children prepare to leave for another full season.
Akashi, mounted, flitted from wagon to wagon, calling out questions, sometimes stopping to suggest an adjustment. Once, he scooped a toddler from under the belly of a fractious hebra and deposited it in its young mother’s startled lap with a barking order to keep track of her child. So he didn’t always keep his temper.
He stopped by us, briefly. He wore simple loose brown pants and a gray shirt. He looked more formidable in those than in his ceremonial clothes, perhaps simply because I had never seen him dressed like one of us. “You should ride near the front. The wagons will slow significantly near the top, and you needn’t wait for us.” He reached down to pet his excited young hebra. “I’ll send Liam along with you until the place where we part.”
Kayleen blurted out, “Can’t he stay with us? Until we’re done?”
Akashi fixed her eyes with his, then turned his gaze on mine. “He has responsibilities to our band.” A small smile escaped his lips. “But perhaps we will all meet on the trail. Who knows?” Then a tall young man called for him. Akashi smiled at Tom and Paloma, and nodded. “Good travel.” He turned and disappeared into the melee of near-readiness.
Nava found us there, and checked over everything we had with us twice. Once, I saw her stopped, watching me, her head cocked to the side and her lips pursed. At the last minute, after we’d mounted, she came and stood close to me and looked up, her face neutral, except for her eyes, which were uncharacterist
ically warm. “Good luck, Chelo. Take care of Joseph and Alicia. Obey Tom.”
There was no touch between us, but it felt as if a genuine parting occurred. It dawned on me that we had never touched. Last night, we had come close. She did not feel touchable this morning, either. It was food for thought as we started out near the front of the band.
The caravan took off in a cacophony of creaks and hoofbeats and final called good-byes. Liam’s mother, Mayah, waved at him as she started the lead wagon off. A few long noisy minutes later, the dragonbirds and blaze fliers screeched in fear as the wagons their cages were lashed to started off.
Close to town, the High Road rose slowly upward, cutting through the lower reaches of the cool shadowy Lace Forest. Joseph’s face was nearly as drawn and white as it had been the first few days after the earthquake, and his eyes looked dull, as if he weren’t looking out of them, but rather inside somewhere. He had looked more like himself the last few weeks, even at breakfast. What part of the trip gouged the laughter from him again? Perhaps it was one thing for him to stand up in the amphitheater and proclaim he’d go with us, and another altogether for him to face the data networks. Or perhaps it was simply going up the High Road, passing the place our parents died. I swallowed hard, suddenly scared, and reached down to stroke Stripes’s long neck, seeking calm in the touch.
After about an hour of riding up through the thick Lower Lace Forest, we burst into the open. To our left, cliffs a few feet taller than our heads followed one side of the road, a gray wall lined with wild mountain-fern and blooming yellow fox lilies and tiny sprays of purple cliff-hugger. To our right, Artistos spread below us, a checkerboard of color from the edge of the cliffs below us to the next cliff, which in turn fell down to the Grass Plains, sun-kissed and glowing yellow-green in the midmorning light. Beyond the plains, the sea enclosed the entire western edge of Jini in hot electric-blue.
Sun glinted off the fat silver spire that was the New Making. In my head, I saw it rising up away from the plains, trailing smoke and fire, heading to Inhabited Space, to a place we’d find our people. Heading home. New Making was a distant dream, a tease, a painful reminder of our difference, a promise that might never be kept. I tore my eyes away from the ship. My focus needed to be on the here and now. I had no idea how I could meet Hunter’s and Nava’s and Akashi’s expectations. I glanced again at Joseph, chewing my lip. It was not all up to me.
The roamers’ wagons creaked and complained as we wound up a steep grade. Drivers called back and forth to each other. Two or three hunting dogs kept quiet watchful pace, running up and down beside the caravan, skillfully avoiding the hebras’ sharp hooves. The cliffs towered far above us, throwing shadows across the wide road, and a thin line of trees hugged the cliff base, fed by a largely unseen stream.
Liam caught up with us, looking from one to the other as if checking our feelings. His voice was soft but firm as he said, “The rock fall is two bends ahead.” We pushed in front of the wagons, so we could move through alone.
Liam rode near me, his face quiet and composed. As if the mantle of Akashi’s calm was falling onto him now that he was on the road, roaming. Alicia flanked Joseph. Tom and Paloma and Kayleen came up behind us, and so we rode four and three abreast, Joseph and I surrounded by our friends. Paloma started a song, and Liam joined, then Alicia, and we wound our way up the narrow twisted trail to the rocks that had killed our family. All of the joy of traveling left me then, and a deep heaviness filled the places it had been.
The rocks were so large it seemed they must have been there for years, always been there, except for the deep raw gouges in the ground behind them. The dark and jagged cliff face next to us looked like an open wound compared to the normal monotonous grays of the cliffs. Periodically we had to pick our way past dirty webbed root balls as tall as the hebras’ heads, or jagged trunks of trees the rock fall had pulled across the road. To find a path wide enough, we followed the East Band’s wagon prints, which doubled almost sideways twice.
Liam led us. Joseph closed his eyes and swayed, and Tom rode up next to him, watching him quietly. At least twice, I thought Joseph would slide from Legs’s back. He slumped, and wobbled, and had no color. Legs’s head twisted back from time to time, as if he, too, worried about Joseph. I wondered what specific memories assaulted him.
Tears dripped down Kayleen’s cheeks.
I tried to focus only on my friends, my brother, on Stripes’s ears, tried not to see the gray-brown rocks. Near the end, I too closed my eyes, trusting Stripes to follow Liam. Then I felt her pace quicken, and looked.
Before me, the trail wound properly, barely disturbed. We kicked the hebras into a slow gallop. The litter of rocks was spaced out, fist-sized, and the hebras avoided them easily. Joseph held his own, leaning forward over Legs’s tall withers, one hand on the saddle bump in front of him. Legs’s cat-scar showed clearly, a dark moon-sliver shape against his grass-colored coat. Tom kept Sugar Wheat near Legs, his eyes on Joseph.
As we put distance between us and the rock fall, my mood lightened. We were away. Tasked, about to be tested, but absent from Artistos and accompanied only by the two original humans who liked us best of anyone. Sure, Paloma and Tom were our keepers. As Nava’s husband, Tom would report back on us. Still, if I had to choose, only Gianna might have been better support than Tom. Besides, Tom was strong and knew how to use his stunner. We might need that skill. In spite of the fact that Nava thought they were good choices, I was glad these two were our keepers. However we solved our problems, we did not have to hide ourselves. Much.
We rode until we could no longer hear the sounds of the wagons, until it was just us and our hebras and the pack hebras stringing behind Paloma. The ride became my focus, as if being on Stripes’s back emptied me of both the sorrow of the rocks and the pleasure of our new freedom. We slowed only when the trail became too steep for the animals to make speed, winding back and forth up the last hill before the two lakes. The sun beat down on us. The long pull up the switchbacks felt like a long rocking dream, one hebra footfall in front of the other.
“How do they get the wagons up this?” I asked Liam.
He laughed. “With difficulty. There’s worse later. The people will walk this section, leading the hebras. There are places on this trip where they’ll even have to unload the wagons.”
At the top, in a large clearing beaten down by wagon tracks and hoofprints, we stopped for a last long look over Artistos and the plains, waiting for the wagons to catch up. Trails wound up the mountains in three directions. Here we would split off from the roamers and head for the lakes and the shattered data network around them, while the roamers took a separate path to continue their work and eventually reach their wintering grounds on the other side of the mountains. The straightest path showed the tracks of the East Band; beaten dirt, muddled hoofprints, and thin steady wagon tracks.
The road intersected another stream by the clearing. We dismounted to rest, watering the hebras and snapping lead lines to their leather face harnesses to let them graze. Tom and Paloma wandered off a little ways, heads together, and the five of us, all the altered here, sat on a long rock shelf by the slowly running water. I wondered briefly how Bryan was doing and sent him a silent wish to fare well.
Kayleen wiped at her face, clearing the tear tracks, and looked at Liam. “I wish you could go with us.”
“I know. But Akashi needs me. Besides, I have to return the dragonbirds. We all take care of our own finds. And Akashi wouldn’t change Nava’s orders.”
I remembered Liam’s comment about Jenna. “Liam, where does Jenna meet with you?”
He shrugged. “Where she wants. Always this side of the mountains. She believes she needs to stay close to protect you.”
“We hardly see her,” Joseph said.
Alicia brushed a strand of dark hair from her face. “We never do. She is mostly a story to me.”
Liam laughed. “Well, she’s no fool. She knows Akashi will not hurt her. Ruth might be a d
ifferent story.”
Alicia threw her long hair over her shoulder. The purple bruise on her face still stood out, but her eyes glowed with more energy than I had ever seen in them. “I’m happy not to be with my band.”
“Is that enough for you?” I asked. “Being away from them?”
She looked down for a moment. “No. Bella was mean, but she only did what Ruth told her. Michael did what they both said. But Ruth…I want Ruth to be punished, to feel like she’s dangerous and must be watched, to feel like she made me feel.” She twisted her dark hair around her thin fingers. “But this is more than I had hoped for. Maybe I had lost all my hope.” She paused. “I didn’t expect anyone to stand up for us, except maybe Akashi. But Tom stood up for me, too. I hardly know him.”
Liam watched her carefully, a small frown marring his features. “Most people don’t hate us, Alicia. Paloma and Akashi, for example, are pleased we can do the things we do. And I’m glad you are away from the Easters.” He glanced at me. “It was more than Akashi hoped for as well.” His eyes flicked to Joseph. “However, it is clearly a test. I wish I could go with you.”
We sat quietly. I watched Liam, trying to remember every nuance: his long hands resting carefully in his lap, the bronze of his skin as the sun shone down on it, the way the light illuminated some strands in his dark blond hair so they looked almost white, the ridges and valleys of his biceps and shoulders. I didn’t want him to go.
Tom and Paloma walked back to us. We ate apples and drank water, mostly quiet. Stripes came over and sniffed the apples. She raised her lip, exposing her teeth. I laughed. “No. Apples are not good for you. Earth food gives hebras bellyaches.” She gave me a baleful glare before turning back to the grass at her feet.
I pointed to a thin dark slash on a rock near us. “What made that?”
Liam looked at me curiously. “Us. That’s from an altered’s weapon. You’ll see many signs of the war out here.”
The Silver Ship and the Sea Page 14
