by Hugh Howey
Often, as Anlyn lay on her padded table, she considered giving in to the wires and their electricity. She wondered if there would be enough pain to kill her, even though she doubted it. She would have gladly martyred herself if she’d thought it possible. She would have steered her guided missile right back around on the very installation they held her in—if only she knew which Wadi hole represented it. But her fear and the pain kept her forever running.
Over time, the nightmares changed. The Wadis completed their morph into scrambling, spitting Humans. The canyon labyrinths became mazes of cell-lined corridors. All that remained constant was the primal fear of bad things descending upon her neck and the allure of finding that safe place. It was always about that safe place, even long after she understood what sort of explosive death it meant for someone else.
Along the way, Anlyn forgot who she was. She forgot where she came from. A pampered childhood spent skipping through rooftop gardens with her cousins became a dream, something that couldn’t possibly have ever actually happened. Not to her. Wadis became something mystical that haunted her occasionally in nightmares, not something that she had once hunted. Bodi nearly transformed into the memory of someone she would seek solace beside. Nearly.
Anlyn lived in a shell. She curled into a ball when she was left alone. When called upon, she did what was expected of her with all the pent-up ferocity she could muster. She was an animal, docile and meek if untouched, embroiled and calculating when threatened. Those who could use such a thing mastered the art of threatening her and aiming her rage.
It all came to an end with little warning. Looking back, Anlyn could possibly see that her pursuers had become fewer in number, but it was all as much a blur as the blue bolts. One day, all she knew was that there were no more nightmares to make. The war was over. Now there were just papers to sign.
Anlyn was brought along to the ceremonies as some sort of display. They led her out in front of the dignitaries, and she rattled her chains dutifully. The electricity her handlers could send through her shackles kept her in line.
One of her original captors—one of the Humans in black who had watched the Bel-Tra ship disappear—seemed to be a major player in the treaty proceedings. His suit shimmered and caught the reflection of the bright stars, the alien constellations barely visible beyond the overhead dome, occluded by the new debris field Anlyn had helped create. The large gathering of Humans all stood on what was left of one of the orbital stations and seemed pleased with themselves for what their efforts had won: Two belts of barren rock, chunked and splintered and all but uninhabitable.
Some of them, of course, had won something more. Part of what Albert—the man in the shimmering suit—had won was Anlyn. After papers were signed with many pens and much smiling, he took her in the inferior ship he had bartered for to the inferior asteroid he had bartered for and bragged about having bartered so wisely.
He would be right in the long run. It didn’t take long before Anlyn’s finely honed skills and reflexes were translated to ship flight. Soon, Albert’s home and spacecraft began their steady incline of upgrades as Anlyn wrangled in more customers than any dozen pilots combined. Before long, she was the most feared thing in the most fearsome corner of the Milky Way, a thing rumored among its inhabitants but hardly believed. She was whispers in the darkness that sent chill bumps up the arms of other pilots. She was the sort of bluff that caused nervous laughter among hardened men, eyes glancing around to see if anyone believed, or if anyone else could smell their fear.
The years went by, and Anlyn gradually morphed into a thing that lived in other people’s nightmares.
All of it made possible because she could never escape her own.
•• DRENARD ••
Anlyn was leaning over Coril’s motionless body, her heart bursting with sorrow, when the Wadi lunged at her from above. She turned as soon as she heard its claws cracking stone. It flew at her in a flash of shimmering scales, catching and scattering the very shade. It landed all-claws before she could turn to defend herself, slicing into her back through her thin Wadi suit.
The toxins leapt through her veins, jolting tired and numb limbs alive with the bite of their poison. Anlyn lurched to the side, her body spasming and jerking reflexively.
The Wadi lost its grip and skittered across the rock. Anlyn spun around and tried to locate the beast before it struck again. She moved to the other side of Coril and tugged at the lance pinned beneath her cousin’s body. It wouldn’t budge. She tried to roll Coril away when the Wadi once again became an airborne blur.
Anlyn tried to move, but the creature was faster than the wind. The Wadi slammed into her chest, knocking her backward. Snapping jaws came for her neck, teeth scissoring open and shut in anticipation of her flesh.
Anlyn’s arm was pinned. She yanked it free, but her hand caught on something—her thermos. She yanked the small cylinder free and shoved it in the animal’s face, and the Wadi bit down, crunching through the metal skin and leaking what remained of her water.
The Wadi shook its head, the thermos caught on its teeth. Water sprayed out into the sunlit part of the canyon, evaporating as soon as it hit. Anlyn scrambled away, eyeing the creature and the pinned lance. The Wadi took a step forward; it rested one paw on Coril’s back and tried to use another to pull the thermos off its fangs. Anlyn didn’t think it would take the animal long to figure it out. She moved to grab the tip of the lance, but the Wadi howled in its throat and swished its tail at her. Anlyn glanced around but didn’t have her grippers, her shield, or anything.
She looked up. The edge of her shield was still sticking out over the lip of the wall, high above.
Anlyn turned and grabbed the holes in the cliff. She climbed up, willing her weary limbs to operate, ignoring the burning gashes on her back as she stretched out for the next hold. She lunged from one to the other, scaling the shady portion of the wall as fast as she could. She only glanced down when she heard her empty thermos clatter across the rock. The Wadi howled, its jaws free, and then shot up the wall after her.
Anlyn climbed even faster. Dangerously fast. She reached the edge of the shade halfway up the pocked rock and continued on, careful now to keep her body and knees off the steaming wall. She felt something brush against her foot—she pulled her leg into the sun, then looked back. The Wadi hung from a hold down in the shady part, its head bobbing from side to side as it rocked on its eager arms. Anlyn remained still, watching it. They both studied one another. Anlyn’s legs trembled with fatigue. Her suit began to heat up in the light of the Horis.
The Wadi broke away first. It darted into one of the holes.
Anlyn froze. She heard the clicking of claws deep within the hole near her head. She looked up at the shield, its razor-sharp edge poking out above. She thought about how hot it must have already gotten from sitting there so long. The clicking near her head grew louder, the Wadi worming its way through the warrens. Anlyn let go of her hold and grabbed a lower one. She raced down the wall like it was no more than a ladder, reckless and brushing against the blistering rock, the suit melting and sticking to her flesh in ever more places.
She ignored it. When she hit the shady portion, she began a half-fall, half-plummet down the face, clutching at holds just to slow her descent. Her boots hit the rock floor with a jarring thud, forcing her knees up into her chest. She dove toward Coril as a frustrated wail erupted from above. Throwing her weight into her cousin’s body, Anlyn rolled Coril to the side; she grabbed the large Wadi lance, unsure of how to even wield it. Lifting the sharp end—unable to pick it all the way up, her muscles were so weary—Anlyn kept the hook on the rock and rose shakily, looking to the sky—
The Wadi Thooo was a blur of falling claws and open jaw. Anlyn braced herself; she pulled the lance between her and the Thooo. She felt a jolt of electricity as the Wadi screamed, its open throat yelling right by her ear.
But the scream was one full of rage and fear—a wail of the dying.
Anlyn fe
ll to the rock, exhausted and unable to hold the lance.
Something heavy collapsed on top of her, moving and groaning. She pushed herself away and scrambled deeper into the shade. When she looked back, eyes wide, fear still gripping her throat, she saw what she had done: She saw the Wadi lance had pierced the wild animal’s stomach and had erupted out its back. One last wicked groan, and then its twitching arms fell still. The Wadi was dead.
Anlyn Hooo had killed it.
••••
When Gil finally reached her, Anlyn was passed out, her head resting on Coril’s back. She had fallen asleep in the shade, her body too weary to move, the last of her adrenaline scurrying away.
Gil woke her and held his thermos to her lips. He was panting heavily from his long run around the wedge-shaped wall, his breathing dry and labored. Anlyn took deep gulps from his thermos, then pushed his hands away so she could breathe. She watched him survey the messy scene scattered around her.
When his eyes fell back to hers, the two of them sat in silence, looking at each other, no words large enough to fill the mood. Gil gave her more water, which Anlyn accepted eagerly. She held his hand while she drank, then he helped her sit up.
“What now?” Gil whispered. He worked the cap back on the thermos, his hands shaking and a paler shade of blue.
Anlyn looked back at Coril, the youth and vitality of her small frame incongruent with its stillness. All she knew was that she needed to get her cousin home, but there was no way she could do it alone. She looked to the Wadi, which was just as motionless as her Cousin, the lance still shoved through its body. From tip to tail, it was almost two paces long. Big, but not so big she couldn’t carry it.
“What do we do?” Gil croaked.
Anlyn turned to him. “We do each other a favor,” she said sadly.
25 · Darrin
Anlyn’s homeworld of Drenard had forever been shaped by its cycles, by the slow orbit of its two great stars swirling around each other like two beads on a circle. Known as the Horis, these twin suns dominated her planet’s environment, its weather, even its culture. They burned one half of the planet and left the other to freeze. They would slowly wobble across lands out on the border of the planet’s habitable halo, parts that burned at times and cooled during others. There, the rocks cracked open and the blowing sand found wounds in which to sift. It was these unpredictable parts that Drenards looked upon with skepticism and worry, more perhaps than the frigid night and burning day.
Those changes occurred over a Hori cycle, the time it took for all things to come back around to where they had started. It was a cycle of burning followed by a cycle of cooling. Some temperate average may have been held over time but rarely in any one moment. And so Anlyn’s burning years, her great and wasted adolescence, ended how they began: With two ships matching move for move, one trying in vain to latch on to the other.
Only this time, Anlyn was flying expertly amid the rubble of Darrin, not above her home world of Drenard. And unlike her mad run from Bodi—her desperate escape from her father’s death and her forced marriage—this time Anlyn was the hunter rather than the hunted.
She closed in on the old GC-290 ahead of her, leaving Albert’s many competitors behind. It had become a familiar sight: Her ship chasing down the customer of Albert’s choice while the rest of the pack scavenged for leftovers. Anlyn went into each pursuit with a detached calm. Her body had shriveled on a Wadi’s diet of water and nothing else, leaving her fractured and tormented mind to wither. She had her fear, her sensitivity to pain, and her fine war skills etched back to razor sharpness—but only shadows and ashes of her true former self. The long burning had charred her down to her blackest essence.
She was halfway to the GC-290, only a few other pilots keeping up, when she realized she actually needed to concentrate. The pilot of the 290 had nearly shaken her by setting up a false pattern. He had teased to port before juking starboard, the sort of habitual twitch even expert pilots had a difficult time avoiding because they were normally unaware of their own tells. After a few false habits like this, the pilot did the opposite, which sent two of Anlyn’s companions into one another and nearly made her lose ground.
The skilled fighter in her awoke, coming out of its autopilot daze. It had been many years, going back to the civil war, since she had faced a worthy adversary. Anlyn pressed in further, ignoring the complaints and grunts from Albert in the nav seat as excess Gs wracked his body.
The 290 pilot changed tactics again. He was employing a vast array of strategies in rapid sequence. There was skill in the maneuvers, but a hint of desperation as well. He wasn’t trying anything long enough to see if it would work, preferring instead to toss all his tools out into space, hoping one would fit and secure his escape.
Anlyn knew the strategy was foolish; regardless, she couldn’t help but admire the shape and precision of each tool. This pilot wasn’t playing around if he was trying to make sure he attracted the Darrin salesman with the best gear. Anlyn pushed hers and Albert’s top-of-the-line grav suits to their limits as she pulled in tight to the 290. She darted around it, mere paces away, doing what Bodi had once tried so many sleeps ago. She readied the airlock to grab on.
When they finally collided, and Lady Liberty’s hull latched on to a ship identified as “Parsona,” Anlyn felt the tension of piloting drain from her limbs. Her job was over and Albert’s about to begin. It had been an unusual skirmish, a challenge to awaken something within her, some worm of her former self wiggling deep beneath the ashy layers. She didn’t feel quite alive, but she sensed the stirrings of something that could be once more. At the very least, she felt some of the stiff tension exiting her body, perhaps leaving room for an old vitality to return.
What Anlyn didn’t know—what she couldn’t know at the time—was that her feelings of release were far more than mere tension leaving her body. The moment she locked with this other ship signaled the momentous end of one great cycle for Anlyn Hooo.
And the silent, inauspicious beginnings of another.
•• DRENARD ••
Anlyn and Gil stopped half a thousand paces from the Wadi shelter. Anlyn lowered the Wadi she had been carrying, and Gil did the same with Coril. There was no way she could’ve carried her cousin so far; she wasn’t even sure she could make what few paces were left.
Gil bent over, exhausted, and rested his hands on his knees. He coughed several times into his fist, wheezing for breath. “Are you sure about this?” he asked, his voice nearly lost on the wind.
Anlyn nodded. She was sure.
She stepped in front of Coril’s still form and crouched low. Gil lifted Coril and rested her on Anlyn’s shoulders. The extra weight on her open wounds—the deep claw gashes in her back—made each of them sing out, sending a chorus of cold pain down through her arms. Anlyn ignored it. She held her cousin’s wrists in one hand and wrapped her other arm behind her bent knees. Shifting the weight more up her neck, where so much seemed to already weigh on her heart, Anlyn tensed up wiry muscles already weak from so much ordeal—and gradually, haltingly, stood.
“You’ve got her?”
Anlyn didn’t waste her energy nodding. She took her first lumbering step forward. As she fell into a numb, silent routine of step after step, Gil hurried up beside her, the dead Wadi slung easily over his shoulder.
They were a hundred paces away—close enough that Anlyn could count down the end of her heartbreaking, trying ordeal—when her aunt and several other Rite counselors burst through the door of the shelter. They ran out, the worry visible on their faces even from so far away. When they got closer, that worry morphed into fright and disbelief. Coril’s closest uncle clasped his hands over his face, then ran up to Anlyn and seemed about to remove her burden.
Something in Anlyn’s guise, however, held him back. Instead of moving to help, the counselors formed a rough circle, a bubble respecting the Rite. Anlyn trudged the last dozen paces as moans and wails from her elders joined those from the dist
ant canyons. A door was held open, which she stumbled through. She collapsed to her knees on the worn carpet and twisted to the side to lower her cousin flat. The adults went to Coril immediately, even though there was nothing they could do for her. Gil fell to the carpet beside Anlyn and sprawled out, his chest heaving from the long hike with so heavy a burden.
When Anlyn looked up, her aunt Ralei was standing before her. Tears streaked down the woman’s face, flowing around an expression of shock, or shame, or something of both. When their eyes met, Anlyn knew the ruse of Gil’s Rite would not last. The new hardness she felt inside her was reflected in the way her aunt stood before her, her adult carriage tense with respect. As the Counselors removed the Wadi from Gil’s shoulder, they too looked from it to Anlyn, then to the drying, heat-scabbed wounds across her back, exposed beneath her shredded suit.
The room stood silent, stuffed with sorrow and thick with somber respect. It pressed in on Anlyn, as stifling as the canyon heat. It filled her lungs, stung her eyes, burned her wounds with the stitch of healing.
The severity and importance of the moment—the loss of her cousin’s life mixed with the awesome power of her own survival—concocted a rapturous joy smothering under a blanket of regret. Anlyn was too happy to cry, too sad to smile, too guilty to exult. She felt near to bursting with all the conflicting emotions.
And in that moment, it suddenly occurred to Anlyn that whatever happened next, whatever followed for her, it wouldn’t be anything like all that had come before.
She was sure of it.
Part XXI – The Prophecy
“Things don’t come true. They are true, or they aren’t.”
~The Bern Seer~
