by K A Riley
He presses the tips of his fingers to his temple and squints deep enough to make his round face look like a throw pillow someone punched in the middle.
“Oh,” he says, snapping out of a daze and turning back to us, “since you asked, yes, this particular vulture is Jeff.”
I pump my fist and gloat over the accuracy of my guess.
Fueled by my triumph, I’m determined to get Jeff back to the Academy to be reunited with War. After all we’ve been through and after our many failures in what was supposed to be an easy-peasy mission, I feel like we could use a win.
But there are some major obstacles. We’ve got no money. Without our weapons, we don’t have anything to trade. Not that we’d trade our weapons, anyway.
“War’s going to be so disappointed,” Libra semi-sobs.
Bondo scootches up until he’s toe to toe with Libra. “Say that again.”
Now, Bondo presses even further forward. “He’s going to be so disappointed,” Libra says through a confused stammer.
“Who?” Bondo asks, his voice and his whole body pressing aggressively forward. “Who is going to be so disappointed?”
“War,” Libra says, leaning away from the encroaching boy. “Our teacher’s name is War.”
Whipping around toward me, Bondo raises his head, his face lit up in wide-eyed revelation, and he says, “He’s yours. No charge.”
“Wait,” Matholook says, his voice dripping with suspicion and disbelief. “You’re just going to give him to us?”
Bondo tilts his head toward Jeff. “He’s not mine to give. None of them are. These are wild creatures, always on the move. It’s how they survive. Sound familiar?” Jeff flexes his long talons and ruffles himself up into an alert stance from his perch on the hood of the truck. He stretches his wings out to an impossibly long length, and I can’t tell if he looks more like a skydiver who just released his parachute or the auto industry’s most ill-conceived hood ornament.
“Besides, and I’m quoting Jeff,” Bondo says with a knowing wink, “He just said to me the one thing—the only thing—he’s been saying to me for five years, the one thing I thought was his way of saying he was hungry for battle. Or that maybe he was just being overly hostile. Or that he was a shell-shocked veteran. Or else he was just plain crazy. But of course, none of that’s true, and none of that is what he meant at all. I get that now. After over five years, I finally get it.”
“So what is it?” Sara asks. “What’s the one thing he always says?”
“He says he misses War.”
33
Here
Jeff bursts into the air. But it’s not the easy, graceful flight of Haida Gwaii.
No. Jeff heaves himself up, his enormous wings kicking up a plume of stray feathers and a vortex of dust and sand. With his rubbery legs dangling below his round, sooty belly, he rises up over our heads, blocking out the sun along the way, and then he surrenders to gravity and plummets.
Dropping out of the sky, this time like a skydiver whose chute doesn’t open at all, he slows at the last second to a near-frozen, mid-air hover—wings spread wide, legs extended stiff as an airplane’s landing gear—and then plops down with a heavy thud onto Matholook’s shoulder.
Matholook lets out a squeal as one of the bird’s massive wings smacks him in the head and ruffles his hair. (Matholook has somehow perfected the art of stylish bedhead, but the impact of the snake-necked bird’s powerful wings takes it to a new level of mussed-up cuteness.) Matholook’s knees buckle under Jeff’s weight, and the tips of the vulture’s dirty yellow talons press deep into the fabric of Matholook’s compression top.
Our Academy uniforms are made of a synthetic carbon fiber matrix and have a paper-thin layer of built-in armor plating in a waffle pattern on the upper chest and down the arms. It won’t stop a bullet or anything, but it’s enough to prevent Jeff’s talons from going clean through the rounded chunk of Matholook’s shoulder.
The combination of surprise, pain, and embarrassment (plus, what I think I’m safe in assuming is the unnerving fact of being landed on by a vile-smelling, twenty-pound scavenger) knocks Matholook into a helicopter-armed stagger, and the vulture tilts to nearly horizontal and almost falls off before digging his talons in even harder. The rest of us, still shuffle-walking along in pace with the moving city, look on, terrified at first, but then we burst into peals of laughter as Matholook, wide-eyed and red-faced, struggles back to his feet with Jeff hissing into his ear and hanging on for dear life.
It’s not a graceful moment—either for Matholook who groans upright and scrunches his head to the side to make room for the thick-bodied beast or for Jeff, who inchworms his way down to Matholook’s outstretched forearm, clenching and clamping the fish-hook talons on the ends of his pink, segmented feet along the way in an effort to find a steady purchase.
He’s used to perching on War’s Rocky Mountain mogul of a shoulder or clamped to his sequoia forearm, and poor Matholook, slender and toned, just doesn’t have the same amount of real estate.
“Looks like you have a friend,” I point out.
“A heavy friend. I thought they were supposed to be hollow-boned.”
“He’s a hefty fellow,” Bondo agrees. “For scavengers like him, the Atomic Wars, spiking temperatures, and the tribal conflicts that killed off so many people as a result, turned much of the country into, well…a buffet.”
Matholook makes a gagging noise, and he squints his red, watery eyes. “Ugh. Great. And on top of that, he stinks.”
Bondo puts his hand next to his mouth and pretends his shout is a whisper. “That’s his excretion you’re smelling.”
“Excretion?” Libra asks.
“His urinary and defecatory discharge.”
“I’m sorry. His what?”
“His pee and poop.”
Matholook looks around on the ground, snapping his head left to right and raising his boots one at a time off the ground and inspecting them for vulture excrement.
“No, no, no,” Bondo says, shaking his head hard and snorting up a chuckle. “You didn’t step in anything. It’s called urohydrosis. Basically, he urinates on his legs.”
“What!?”
“To cool off. Some vultures urinate on their legs as a way of redistributing or suppressing heat.”
Matholook grimaces but otherwise takes this revelation in stride.
Ignacio, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as poised. Shrieking like a bunny in a blender, he flaps his hands and high-steps as he continues forward, asking over and over, “Why? Why? Why?”
It’s funny watching him perform the miraculous, instantaneous transition from tall, oily-muscled warrior to hyperactive, squidgy nipper.
“Everyone does what they need to do to survive,” Angel Fire reminds him.
“If I ever wind up getting to the point where I’m pissing on my own legs to survive,” Ignacio says, “go ahead and let me die.”
“Will do,” Sara promises.
“Don’t worry,” Arlo tells Ignacio. “I won’t let her kill you.”
He says it as a joke. But I believe him.
With Haida on my shoulder and with Jeff on Matholook’s forearm, we’re getting even more stares than before as we continue along.
At least no one’s whipping those stinging little white pebbles or balls of aluminum foil at us like they did when we first arrived.
“How much longer to the Security Garrison?” Libra asks. Her ponytail has come undone, and her thick, dark hair is speckled with golden flecks of sand.
Angel Fire points to a narrow laneway between two rows of yellow and green, rhino-sized machines, all of them grinding along on studded black treads. “We’re near the very front of the fleet. Security Garrison is just up ahead. Past the lane of Compactors and Levelers over there. See that armored truck?”
Libra shields her eyes with her hand. “The big gray one?”
“Yes. That’s where your weapons are.”
As we reach the top of a slight incl
ine in the desert terrain, a girl and a boy—no more than ten or eleven years old and both with thick black glasses and long blond hair in matching French braids—scurry up frantically, skidding to a stop directly in front of Angel Fire. They walk backwards, eyes wide, as he leans forward, and the boy whispers something into his ear.
Angel Fire stops in his tracks, causing all of us to stop, too.
Since we’re walking between vehicles and in the general direction of the moving army, we have a few seconds before the row of treaded Excavators behind us runs us over.
Angel Fire’s sudden stop is such an abrupt break in what has been our nearly constant motion that Libra, walking just behind him, slams into him hard enough to stagger him forward a full two steps and knock him into the blond boy. Blushing and apologizing, she reaches out to steady Angel Fire and asks if he’s okay.
He doesn’t seem to hear her and instead asks the girl and the boy—he calls them “Grace” and “Reece”—for confirmation. They answer with a vigorous nod, and he asks a second time if they’re sure.
“Being only slipping past,” the girl stammers, looking back and forth between Angel Fire the boy, who are both a full head shorter than she is. “Mucho trampa éjercito.”
“Muy peligrosa,” the boy whispers. His lower lip quivers, and he doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. “Military Garrison permiso mobilized? Very rapido!”
The campers, rigs, and RVs continue to move around us. It’s a disorienting feeling to be standing still and even more disorienting to feel like the world is still moving around us.
“What’s going on?” Arlo asks.
Angel Fire’s mouth moves, but no words come out. He clears his throat and tries again. He even adjusts his fat-knotted tie, as if the length of cloth is constricting his neck too much and impeding his ability to say what he’s trying to say. When he does speak, this time, the authority and the eccentric personality spectrum—from threatening to joyful—we’ve seen in him so far is long gone. For the first time, he sounds like he looks: an inexperienced, isolated, in-over-his-head fourteen-year-old boy, who just got overwhelmed by the size, scope, and the reality of the rest of the world. “It’s here,” he announces, from his frozen-in-mid-step stance.
“What’s here?” I ask. I’m more than a little anxious now, and I seem to be the only one interested in getting ourselves armed and out of here before it’s too late. “You said the Security Garrison was just over there.”
“No—no. Not that.” He points straight ahead. Up until now, our line of sight has mostly been limited to the trucks, towering cranes, buses, RVs, campers, motorhomes, construction vehicles, and the other wheeled and treaded rigs all around us. Being near the front of the fleet, though, we can now easily see the open desert—with its buttes, mesas, canyons, open plains, and wavy dunes—laid out before us.
The endless thrum of the vehicles behind us and the sweeping expanse of the exposed wasteland in front of us makes me feel like we could take a few steps past the single line of giant, vanguard motor-graders in front of us and fall off the edge of the world.
“That war…the war you’ve been hearing about…,” Angel Fire mutters, directing our gaze toward the vast valley ahead and the steep, flat-headed mesas on either side.
“Yeah?” Ignacio asks, peering into the distance. “What about it?”
“It’s here.”
34
Enough
Next to me, Ignacio says, “Uh-oh.”
Coming from someone as die hard and gung-ho for battle as Ignacio, those are probably the two most terrifying syllables I’ve ever heard.
Libra squeaks out a pathetic, “What? What is it?” as she tries to peer past Ignacio’s broad-shouldered body. She even reaches out a hand to try to nudge him to the side, but he’s frozen in place, and doesn’t budge.
Next to me, Matholook tenses up enough to cause Jeff to go all hissy and quivery on his forearm. The bulky bird opens and closes his talons, nervously kneading his curved claws into Matholook’s arm.
On my shoulder, Haida raises her head and gurgle-clacks a litany of agitated barks toward the sky.
Even Sara, usually indifferent at best and unapologetically scornful at worst, clenches her fists and her teeth and lets out a sort of half-groan.
Arlo reaches back for his scythe, which, of course, isn’t there. He turns to me with a blush and a helpless shrug.
I can’t do anything but share in his helplessness. Angel Fire just announced the beginning of a war, and here we are, oblivious, weaponless, and strolling casually along as tourists without a care in the world.
Until that single word “war,” that is. That’s about the biggest care in the world anyone can ever be unlucky enough to have.
Everything we’ve done over the past twenty-four hours was supposed to do one of two things: prevent a war from happening or else prepare us for when it did. And yet, here we are, unprepared, and we’ve apparently prevented nothing.
We shouldn’t be here. We should be a million miles away. We should be sitting in front of Kress and her Conspiracy right now, rattling off all the intel we acquired after our easy-peasy successful mission. Instead, we’re on the front lines of the Army of the Unsettled, without Mattea, without weapons, and without any contingency plan for getting away.
Shostakovich’s Eternal Questions— “Why? And “For What?”—rattle around unanswered in my head.
When I was growing up in the Tower, my dad used to have this funny phrase for being embarrassed at being surprised. He called it, “Being caught with your pants down.”
I always thought that was kind of a dumb saying. If you get caught doing what you’re not supposed to be doing, you probably have more important things to worry about than whether or not your pants are up or down.
But now, standing here like a bunch of idiots, the phrase finally makes some sense.
I really do feel naked. Vulnerable. Exposed.
As we all freeze in a cluster around Angel Fire, we inch closer to each other, as if out of some primitive protective instinct as we follow the index finger at the end of his extended arm.
“It’s here,” he repeats, louder this time. “They’re here.”
Because we’re on the top of a slope toward the front of the moving army, with most of the larger vehicles far behind us or fanned out in flanking positions on the sides, our view is mostly unobstructed.
In the distance, under a slowly rotating cloud of churning smoke, the silhouettes of hundreds of jeeps interspersed with thousands of marching soldiers come into focus.
At first, I blink my eyes hard, thinking I’m seeing the space between low-hanging clouds and a long chain of jagged desert rocks. This country is big enough to have things like that: illusions where you can’t tell the tops of mountains from the bottoms of clouds.
But no. This is no illusion. It’s an army. A big one. And it’s on the move.
“It’s the Devoted,” Libra says.
I say “Matholook?” out loud as if his name were a question, but I don’t actually ask him anything.
“This is it,” he mumbles. When I ask him to say that again, he gags on his breath. “This is the move we’ve…they’ve…the Devoted have been planning. It’s their next stone in the river. The next step. Their path forward from the conflicts of the past. This is the war they’ve been hoping for. Waiting for. This is the war they’ve been fighting for.”
“What the frack do they want?” Libra cries.
Matholook shakes his head. “Not much. Just…everything.”
It’s a single word, but the way Matholook says it—filled with fear, regret, confidence, and desperation—it might as well be an entire dictionary.
Without taking his eyes off the terrifying phalanx curving all around along the horizon in front of us, Arlo asks what he means.
Matholook doesn’t answer, but I think I know.
Like all the Devoted, Matholook is a historian. So I know he’s read, studied, talked about, and anal
yzed everything about every war that’s ever been waged. I once sat in one of their classes, so I’ve seen their methods in action.
At the Academy, we’re being trained to understand the scope and limits of our Emergent abilities. We’re being prepped to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves. And, perhaps most important of all, we’re being taught who and why we are so we can do our part to wrench the world from the grip of all the dictators and self-serving despots, who would just as soon see the planet and everyone on it suffer and die before risking losing their hold on power.
Not the Devoted. They see themselves as part of a chain. That’s how they always describe it: stepping stones going across a river of violent rapids and unpredictable currents. The more they know the path, so they say, the better they can follow it.
Unlike most people in the world, they don’t follow a leader or a cause. In many ways, their approach is even more dangerous. They follow what they consider to be an eternal, unwavering course, a course that leads from stone to stone, from war to war.
The Unsettled move so they can live from one day to the next. The Devoted live to move from one war to the next.
And we’ve just gotten sucked along with the Unsettled right into the jaws of the next war.
We weren’t supposed to be here for this. We were supposed to gather intel, report back to Kress at the Academy, and hopefully steer clear of this whole mess.
“But if we can’t,” Kress explained to us before we set out on this mission, “if we can’t steer clear, then we need to be sure not to get so caught up in the middle of it that we lose our advantage of distance.”
I assumed she meant our advantage of living in hidden isolation behind a Veiled Refractor in the Emergents Academy at the top of a mountain. Or, she could have been talking about our distance as Emergents in yet another war being waged between saber-rattling Typics. She could have even been referring to the distance we need to keep between ourselves and people like Epic, who just want to get their hands on our DNA to satisfy some obsessive urge to answer all the mysteries of the universe.
