Render

by K A Riley

  Brohn and I continue to follow Render’s barely-visible outline as he slides ahead on silent wings. Once we’re around to the far side of the fence, away from the abandoned highway and deeper into the dark desert, Render slips an image into my head of a thin tree, scraggly and twisted, lying nearly on its side. We keep walking along until, sure enough, the tree appears just up ahead. It’s dry and in the throes of death, its spindly root system half exposed above the rocky red soil. Brohn asks me to help him, and the two of us are able to push the tree upright and then over a little more until it’s leaning against the chain-link fence. The purple lights of the laser-wire emit a dangerous-sounding buzz. I give the crispy, twisted tree a little shake and start to say, “Let’s just hope it holds us,” but Brohn is already scrambling up the thin trunk and swinging his legs over the top of the fence. “Hey!” I call out in an annoyed whisper. “Wait for me!”

  Brohn laughs and reaches a hand down to help me up to the top of the fence. With remarkable dexterity, he hurtles over the laser-wire and drops down to the other side, his boots kicking up a cloud of soft red dust that dances in the straggles of moonlight. As I attempt to duplicate his feat of nimbleness, I stumble and get the cuff of my pants caught on the sharp end of one of the broken branches. Wrenching myself free, I manage to perform the world’s most awkward, head-first tumble over the top of the fence. Brohn catches me on the other side and helps me keep my balance as I plant myself on the ground in front of him.

  “Thanks,” I say with a nervous chuckle. “You may have noticed I’m not quite as coordinated as you.”

  “Don’t mention it. But here’s a tip: next time you’re barreling toward the ground, try it feet first.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I tell him with a mock scowl.

  There are still no signs of life, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe this place really has been abandoned. I’m imagining rooms full of left-behind provisions and weapons. Brohn points to a shorter building about a hundred yards ahead and on the left. “Let’s check that one out first. Follow me. Stay low.” While we run in a half-crouch, Render soars up and lands on the top edge of the building’s roof as Brohn and I scuttle across the desert surface, coming to a stop under one of the windows of the building. Pulling himself up with his fingers braced on the outer window sill, Brohn is able to get up high enough to peek inside.

  After a few seconds, he drops back down.

  “Well?” I ask.

  “It’s nothing. I think maybe it was an old rail car. See, it’s up on blocks. Lots of red sand inside on the floor. Must be a door or window somewhere, though. Want to circle around front? See if maybe we can get inside?”

  “Let’s try the other building first,” I suggest. “I’d rather check them both out from behind before we try a full-on frontal assault.”

  Brohn grins and agrees. Ducking low, we scuttle over to the second building.

  This time, the window is far too high up for us to see in. Even if I got on his shoulders, there’s no way I could get high enough to reach the small square windows. Brohn suggests we sneak around to the front and see if there’s a door, but I recommend having a look inside first.

  “And how are we going to manage that?” he whispers, looking up.

  “We have a pretty clever drone,” I remind him.

  Render senses my need practically before I sense it myself. He flutters down and alights on the windowsill high above us to peer through the glass. Brohn and I stand with our backs to the building’s ice-cold metal wall, where I skim my fingers along the tattoos on my left arm. What Render sees comes back to me in waves of color, which I need a few seconds to sort out. He’s looking down into what appears to be an office. I see empty shelves. Empty weapons racks on two walls. A panel of viz-screens, lifeless and broken.

  I see a desk down below, with a man seated at it. Green jacket with brown trim. Brown cargo pants. Brown ankle boots laced to the top. An empty holster slung on the back of his chair. He’s got to be a soldier. Blond hair, thinning at the top. Pale hands with long, bony fingers. He’s wide-eyed and slumped over with a white coffee mug by his head on one side. On the other side, a pool of dark red blood soaks the desktop before meandering off in a trickle down one of the desk legs and to the floor by the man’s boots. Two other men, also soldiers, lie hunched against the far wall, their clothes soaked with blood. I blink my eyes, trying hard to sort out what I’m seeing as the images bounce in and out of focus.

  Half-tucked under the edge of the desk, I notice another figure. A girl around my age.

  I didn’t see her at first. She’s not moving. Hiding? No. Dead. Her eyes are open but blank.

  She died afraid.

  I drop down into a squat, my arms wrapped around my stomach. The impact of the scene, magnified in intensity by Render’s perceptions, hits me like a sledgehammer to the gut.

  Brohn drops to a knee next to me. “What is it?”

  “There are people in there,” I gasp, blinking and seeing through my own eyes again.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dead…Alive? What?”

  “Dead. Or else sleeping very heavily with their eyes open and a good chunk of their heads missing.” It’s a morbid joke, but dark humor is the only way I can deal with yet another awful scene. “Four people. Soldiers. And, Brohn…there’s a girl in there.”

  “Dead, too?”

  I nod, and Brohn takes a deep breath and grits his teeth. I know what he’s thinking, so I add, “I’ve never seen her before.”

  I can see the relief in his eyes as he asks, “Weapons?”

  “What?”

  “Did you see any weapons? Anything we can use?”

  “None that Render could see. Other than the bodies, it looks like the place has been cleaned out.”

  “What now?”

  “I think we should circle around,” I reply, struggling to get my breathing back to normal. “Maybe try getting inside.”

  “Kress, you can barely even stand right now. We need to…”

  “What?” He’s staring at me in a weird way, like he’s both frightened and fascinated.

  “Your eyes.”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re still black. You’re still connected to Render. You need to disconnect. We have the info we need.”

  I hold my hand up and ask Brohn to give me a second. I start to disconnect from Render, but he won’t let go. My mind starts swirling, and our thoughts spill over into each other like two rivers at a confluence. He circles high in the air, his black form invisible in the night sky. He issues a sharp series of kraas! and what sounds like his gurgling version of a running motor.

  “He’s warning us,” I whisper to Brohn. “This way. There’s someone over in the lot by that truck.”

  “Then shouldn’t we be going the other way?” he asks, his voice layered with tension and total disbelief. Brohn’s brave, not crazy. With three dead men and a dead girl inside the barracks and the possibility that their murderer is over on the parking pad just across the way, Brohn’s instinct is to get back to the others, re-group, and come up with a strategy to account for these new circumstances.

  I don’t totally disagree. “But Render thinks we’ll be safe,” I tell him. “Trust us.” I use the word us without even thinking about it. We’ve become one, the raven and I. One mind. One entity. At least for the moment.

  “Okay. Lead the way. But slowly, please.” I can hear how hard it is for Brohn to follow my lead, not because he’s reluctant to let me take charge, but because his protective instinct is strong. Giving up control is hard for him if he knows my life is on the line, and I have to admit that I love him for it.

  15

  With Brohn close behind, I lead the way around the second building, across about a hundred yards of rutted desert sand, and over to the edge of the parking pad. Other than the big truck we saw from the other side of the fence, the pad looks deserted. I’m just starting to wonder if Render s
ounded a false alarm when I hear a woman’s voice followed by the clang of metal over by the truck. With Brohn’s knife as the only weapon between us, we inch around behind the huge transport and peer around its hulking rear fender.

  A man and a woman are busy cranking a thick bolt near the bottom of the truck with a large red wrench.

  Silently, Brohn darts his eyes between me and the two figures in the distance. It’s his signal that he’s going to confront them. I open my eyes wide and shake my head violently, my not-so-subtle signal that that’s a terrible idea, and we’re likely to end up dead. I’m about to whisper to him that we should maybe follow his original instincts and gather up Card, Rain, and Manthy before we leap into a confrontation with two potentially very dangerous strangers in the middle of the night. It’s possible that Brohn’s forgotten our similar encounter with Asha and the two men in the desert, but every second of that memory is burned into my brain.

  Brohn moves too fast for me to stop him. Before I can say a word, he steps out into the dim light cast by the flickering fixture at the top of the nearby wooden post and calls out to the two people.

  “Hey!” he barks. “What are you doing?” His deep voice rumbles with authority from deep in his chest. If I didn’t know him and he snuck up on me like this, that voice alone would make me want to put up my hands and do whatever he says.

  The man and woman whip around, clearly startled and unsure whether to confront us or turn tail and run. For the first time I can see their threadbare clothes and dust-crusted jackets. They’re definitely not military.

  They must have come to the same conclusion about us, because they seem to relax as Brohn and I step fully into the light.

  “Who are you?” the woman asks, looking around the shadowy parking pad. “Where’d you come from?”

  “You first,” Brohn orders. He’s got his knife out, but he’s wisely got it hidden behind his hip. No sense escalating the situation unnecessarily or giving away a strategic advantage.

  “Are you with the Eastern Order?”

  The woman holds up her hands. “What? Definitely not! I mean, I used to work for…”

  The man shoots her a look that seems to say, Shut your mouth right now.

  “What are you doing on a military base?” I ask.

  “We could ask you the same thing.”

  I decide to take a chance and lead with the truth.

  “We escaped from a government military facility. Like this. Only a lot bigger.”

  “Escaped?”

  “We were being recruited.”

  “Recruited?”

  “For the war against the so-called Order,” Brohn says.

  “So you are soldiers.”

  “No. We were being trained to be soldiers. But it turns out we were fighting for the wrong side.”

  “If you’re not government and not the Order…”

  “Let’s just say that we’re in favor of fighting for ourselves instead of dying for someone else.”

  “Seems we have something in common,” the woman says. The man next to her looks tense as his eyes skim over me and Brohn. The woman whispers something to the man, and he leans his big red wrench against the side of the truck. “We’re part of an underground resistance ourselves,” she says.

  “Resistance to what, exactly?” Brohn asks.

  The woman laughs. “Resistance to the end of our democracy as we know it. Ever since the Eastern Order supposedly invaded, we’ve stood by while our rights slowly got sucked away. There’s a movement. An underground. We’re dedicated to ending the war by revealing it for the sham that it is.” She taps the side of the big truck with the palm of her hand. “Just going to ‘borrow’ this transport here for the cause.”

  “Unless you plan on trying to stop us,” the man says with a defiant sneer, though behind his eyes I can see fear.

  The woman tells him to back off, and he does.

  “We’re not the enemy. In fact, we’re the good guys. I promise.”

  “Then we really are on the same team,” I say as I drop my shoulders and take what I think must be my first real breath since we stumbled into this place. “We’re trying to get to San Francisco.”

  The woman laughs and slaps her hand on the side of the truck, harder this time. The sound of her palm echoes in the quiet of the desert night. “Then you’re in luck. Just so happens that we can get you halfway there, at least.”

  “We’re on our way to Salt Lake City,” the man says. “There’s an underground there.”

  The woman gives us a long once-over in the pale light. She steps forward, and Brohn and I brace ourselves for an attack, but she just extends her open hand. “Vail,” she says. “And this is my husband, Roland.”

  One at a time, Brohn and I exchange handshakes with the couple. Any thoughts I had about a repeat of our horrifying experience in the cave are quickly washed away. Vail and Roland are about as normal and friendly as anyone we could have hoped to meet, all things considered. Vail’s shoals of soft brown hair are pulled back in a loose ponytail tied off with a red leather band. The laugh lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth suggest someone who’s managed to find joy wherever she can in the world. Roland, thin-lipped and balding, seems a bit more somber, but his eyes twinkle with undisguised affection and unqualified love when he glances over at his slightly taller wife.

  “How’d you get here?” Brohn asks. He looks out over the fence. “There’s nothing around for days.”

  “We stowed away with a military caravan until it stopped in Denver. Then we ‘borrowed’ a skimmer, but it broke down maybe twenty miles from here. We had intel about this little temporary military pit-stop, so we hiked the distance, and here we are.”

  “What about them?” Brohn says with a flick of his thumb back toward the army barracks where I saw the dead bodies.

  “Who?”

  “The soldiers,” I say. “The dead soldiers and the girl in there.”

  “Dead soldiers? What girl?”

  “You must’ve checked out the barracks before coming over here,” Brohn says, his voice flickering with suspicion.

  “Of course. We went into both of them. Searched for weapons. Supplies. Anything we could get our hands on. Didn’t find anything, though.”

  “Wait,” I say, stepping in front of Brohn. “You’re saying that you didn’t see the dead man slumped onto his desk in there? Or the other two up against the wall? Or the girl?”

  “Girl?”

  “Yes,” I nearly shout. “The soldiers. The dead girl under the edge of the desk.”

  Vail gives me a curious look and steps toward the truck. She reaches down into a long silver tool box. At first, I tense up, thinking she’s reaching for a weapon, but she stands up and shows us a handful of small metal micro-drills. “All we found were these. Going to see if we can get this transport started up. Should be enough to restart the solar cell. Not sure how we’re going to de-activate the grav-pads, but we’ve got to try. As far as we know, this truck’s the only dead thing here.”

  “So you really don’t know anything about the soldiers and the girl? You didn’t see anything?”

  Vail shakes her head, and Roland says it sounds like we’ve got a mystery on our hands. “Are you sure you saw something?”

  “We’ll show you,” Brohn says. “Follow me.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he jogs back over to the barracks, and we follow him right up the front door, which is slightly ajar.

  “This is how we left it,” the man says.

  Brohn ignores him, flings the door open, gestures inside, and says, “See?”

  I step inside with Vail and Roland right on my heels.

  The desk is there. The chair. The shelves. The empty gun racks on the walls. And the broken panel of viz-screens. But there’s no coffee mug. No blood. And there are definitely no dead bodies.

  Brohn’s face goes into a knot as he whips around to face me. “What the hell—?”

  “He was right here,” I say
as I walk around the desk and put my hands on the back of the chair. I kneel down, looking for pools of blood that just aren’t there before skipping around the rest of the room. “And two more here. And the girl over here.”

  I take in a sharp breath, wondering if I’ve lost my mind.

  “And you saw these people?” Vail asks.

  I’m about to say, “Yes” when I realize that that’s not entirely true. Technically, Render saw them. But I see what Render sees, so it’s the same thing. Isn’t it?

  I stammer something about thinking we saw someone, but it was dark, so maybe it was just our minds playing tricks on us in the dim light.

  “Pretty detailed tricks,” Roland mutters, but Vail shushes him.

  “Sorry,” I say, shooting Brohn a look. “I guess I must have imagined it.”

  We head back to the transport with Vail and Roland, clearly not satisfied with my weak explanation, leading the way.

  “What happened?” Brohn whispers to me as we pad along behind them. “Did you see bodies or not?”

  “Render saw the bodies,” I whisper back with a certainty I don’t really feel.

  “What’s the difference?”

  When he asks that, it occurs to me for the first time that something’s happening with Render and me. Something I can’t explain, as though together we’re an evolving entity, growing, morphing, and potentially turning into something no one has seen or even imagined before. I don’t really understand what it is that we saw. But I do know it was real.

  Brohn’s question is simultaneously empowering and terrifying, and I’m glad he doesn’t insist on an answer.

  Instead, we arrive back at the truck where Vail tells us she’s “kind of sure” she can get it started and asks if we’d like a lift. “If we can get to Salt Lake City, we can get you some supplies. Help you on your way. The truck holds eight. Two up front. Six in the back. So there’s plenty of room for the four of us.”