Chapter 32: Jak
Kamura had found a seep, a tiny spring. The water trickled out of a fracture in the rock, maybe a pint an hour. It was enough for each of them to drink deeply and to refill their reeds. But that had been two days ago, and they were on the third night of their trek now.
Jak led them slightly south of where he thought Tekena lay, hoping to strike one of the farming villages at the outskirts of the city. Once among the farmers, they could buy or steal what they needed. After that? He shook his head and brushed his lank red hair out of his eyes. It was too soon to think about what they’d do after that.
Jak glanced up at the sky, taking their bearings. He navigated by the stars and by the Twins, Liss and Leath. Although not full yet, both moons were in the sky again and gave enough light to see the way. But the double shadows were tricky on the uneven ground, and they all stumbled and fell more than once during the night. With blind determination, they struggled on, scuffling through the smooth patches of sand between dunes, avoiding the occasional rock outcroppings.
Hunger was a painful knot in his gut, but the thirst was worse. He’d drunk as much as he could before they left the seep, but that was days ago. Still, he marched and helped the others where he could. There was nothing else to do, nothing but lie down and die, and he was too stubborn for that. Jak tried to stay close to Tessa, but he kept losing sight of her as his thoughts wandered in a daze of sweat and thirst.
. . . beach sand, hard under my bare feet . . . waves wash in and seaweed swirls around my ankles. My father’s hand, warm in mine. . . . Today is my birthday, and my wish is for a day at the beach with my Dad. No Felix to steal my toys, no sisters to make fun of me, no mother’s anxious voice forever wrapping me in a tight coat of anxiety, just me and my Dad at the beach.
"Look, Dad, a rapilli shell," I say. I pick up the long tube of dark blue-gray nacre striped with white and show it to him.
"That’s a big one," he says. "How many stripes does it have, Jak?"
I count them carefully, proud of my new skill.
"Four," I answer, "four stripes, so this shell is four years old, just like me."
He smiles down at me. "Time to eat son, let’s find . . . .
The voice faded, and Jak found himself on his face in the sand. Not beach sand. Desert sand. The Waste on Shadriss, he realized, not the ocean beach on . . . on, on home. It was his own memory, a memory of his father, of a very precious moment of his childhood. So, why couldn’t he remember the name of the world?
"Jak, get up!"
He shook his head and tried to see who was calling him. Had his mother come to the beach after all? No, that wasn’t his mother’s voice.
"Jak!"
He heard a woman cry out in pain, and he realized he was gripping her arm, hard. He let go.
"What? Who?"
He shook his head again, trying to throw off the memory that weighed him down. He was on face down on the sand. Had he fallen or had he lain down?
"Didn’t mean to hurt you," he mumbled.
"You haven’t done any permanent damage."
Tessa, the woman was Tessa. How could he have forgotten, even for a moment? Jak sat up and looked around. The desert was empty, just him and Tessa alone among the dunes. In the distance, he heard chirp of small lizards.
"Where are the others?"
The others, Kamura and Toko, not his sisters, not his lying older brother. The mobbie and the Terran girl, where were they?
"They went ahead. I stayed with you. I couldn’t get you to wake up. Toko sent Kamura back a while ago to say they’d found the river. She brought water."
"The river? Water!"
"Yes, here. Drink."
She handed him one of the reeds. The strangeness wouldn’t let it hurt him. He had to hope that they were still far enough from town for it to be safe for Tessa to drink. Hand shaking, he sloshed a little of the water over the top and down his chest before he got it to his mouth. Nothing had ever gone done more sweetly. He drank half of what was in the reed and then made himself stop.
"There’s more," Tessa said. "You don’t have to save it for me. We aren’t far from the river now."
"More water later," Jak said. "Drink too much now, and it’ll all come back up."
"You haven’t drunk any water since we left the seep, have you, Jak?" She punched him on the arm, hard. "You can’t keep doing this to yourself! You take a shot from Bolon’s blaster, you get bitten by a moki, and now I find you haven’t been drinking your share of the water. Not even your body can keep taking that kind of punishment."
"It’s over now," he said, wrapping his arms around her. "Hush. It’s over. If we’re at the river, Tekena isn’t far away."
"Yes, the river. The Lady Ur alone knows what sort of pollution is in it, but it’s water, and we have to drink." She helped him to his feet. "Think you can make it?"
"Sure. Easy."
He could go anywhere so long as Tessa was beside him. He took a step forward and staggered, almost falling again. Tessa drew her arm around his waist, and Jak leaned on her as they stumbled across the sand. Soon he smelled the water, felt the touch of moisture on his skin, and tasted it in the air. They quickened their steps until the two of them moved at a shambling run.
At last, they pushed through a stand of reeds and splashed into the cool shallows of the Ur. Jak downed a few more gulps of water, and then stopped. After so long a thirst, more than a handful or so would tie his insides in knots. But he knelt in the shallows, too close to shore for banderri, and poured water over his head. It wasn’t enough, so he lay down in the water on his back, splashing like a kid in a puddle, like the boy in his memory. Tessa knelt beside him, laughing at him. With a grin, he pulled her on top of him and splashed water onto her, too.
They were both laughing when he thought to look around for Kamura and Toko. Muddy water dripping from his hair, he sat up, holding Tessa in his lap. The double light of the Twin moons played strange tricks with the shadows, but Jak saw that they were in the no man’s land between the farmers' fields and the Waste.
"We’d better find those two," Jak said.
Together, they waded to the shore. He felt stronger already. Once again, his recovery time was a fraction of what it would have been for a normal man. He glanced at Tessa. How well had she come out of their ordeal?
She was drawn, her delicate face marked by fatigue. Her high cheekbones stood out sharply with deep hollows under them. Yet overall, she seemed to have suffered no great harm. Food and rest were what she needed—what they all needed. Now that they were near a village, they’d soon have both. They found Kamura and Toko crouched among the reeds nearby. One of the small riverside villages lay just beyond them. Jak dropped down until he was shoulder to shoulder with Toko, and Tessa knelt at his other side.
Omniphage Invasion Page 32
