by R. Z. Held
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Eriope muttered under her breath. Having drawn ahead of Carex by half a stride, she was the one to test the fence’s metal links, pulling at them to see what enhanced strength might accomplish.
Making a hell of a silhouette, they all realized a little bit too late. The approaching group of fighters gained speed, flashlights snapping on as they erupted into shouts of fear and anger as if they’d just spotted the boogeyman.
Which, remembering her old view of Installs, Genevieve supposed they had. On frontier planets, Installs were used as shock troops, their wings, their eerie silence, their seeming invulnerability played up. Idyll was too newly conquered for the occupying force to include locals who would need Install oversight, as Carex had mentioned, so she wouldn’t be surprised if Installs had been withdrawn and attained a half-legendary status thereafter.
All three of them started climbing at once, of course, but there was the barbed wire to wrestle aside at the top. With the cat out of the bag, Pyrus landed in the same manner as Eriope, but Carex and Genevieve didn’t have any choice. She launched herself for Pyrus without pausing to second guess, and he caught her around the waist and cushioned her landing, as easy as breathing. He’d have done the same for Carex, she was sure, but Carex didn’t give him the chance. Carex took all of his landing in his legs, cursing under his breath as he staggered forward a few steps to lean on Eriope to rebalance.
The others had better instincts and took off immediately, but Genevieve had to turn around to see their pursuit first. Perhaps part of her couldn’t really believe that her own people were coming after her. But Pyrus dragged her along and deeper, more animal instincts kicked in. In the twilight, people with guns were coming for her.
And shooting at them now. Wildly, out of range, her system assured her, but still, the sound was impossible not to react to. She had to run.
They crossed a dirt road with the chatter of gunfire following them, and made it into a band of trees. It proved to be only a windbreak: tall, leafy, but ultimately too thin to last more than a breath before they burst through into exposure again.
Up ahead was a barn, the only real cover they’d reach before the fighters made it over or through the fence. The coms didn’t take breath away from running, but no one bothered with them anyway, aiming their path simultaneously with a communication deeper than words. As they stumbled over uneven footing in the fallow field before them, each of Genevieve’s breaths came harder and harder, tearing at her throat on the way down. She couldn’t run flat out for this long, in fact not for one more second. The only reason she made it the last few meters to where Eriope had kicked open the door was Pyrus kept her going in some sort of controlled fall that left her collapsing onto him in the hay-dust-spangled darkness beyond the door. He held her up, but his attention was on the door behind her.
Eriope was making an examination of the door, palm pressed flat against the wood, and she hissed with frustration.
Still panting, she skirted equipment along the wall as shouts grew closer. No time—but there it was. No ladder, but the hay loft was definitely there. Disused, which was even better. She should still have one exertion in her—she crouched, and jumped, getting her fingertips on the beam.
Carex cursed incredulously from beneath her.
Carex planted himself to stare up at her. Still dubious as hell, but she noticed he’d at least abandoned the truck, while the other two had their weapons out, still chasing that doomed plan.
The sound of crunching wood overlaid the end of her sentence, so one of the two had clearly gotten the gist even before she had to pause. Pyrus gave Genevieve a frown and shake of the head when she reached hands for him, so she backed up into the low hay-dust topography of the boards and let him boost himself up. Eriope did the same a few moments later.
The shouts were close enough now to distinguish words sometimes, at least for her and Pyrus. It wasn’t anything illuminating, mostly “this way” and “do you think they—?” Genevieve flattened to her belly and edged toward the back wall, eyes on the boards to make sure she wouldn’t come to rest over a knot that might show skin or light clothing to someone looking up from below. Dust kicked up around her and the others doing the same, tickling and scratching at her throat and her back throbbed a steady protest even when she stopped moving.
Then the door slammed open and she could only freeze. Clamping down with manual control through her system to breathe shallow and slow, stop any sneeze before it started, at least gave her something to focus on as Idyllians—her people—stamped around the floor below.
“You saw a coat flapping, not wings—”
“I know damn well what I saw, it was an Install—”
“Why would an Install run away? Or be alone?”
“—three of them.”
“I counted five. That’s enough Installs to really fuck things up—”
“Come on, we’re wasting time. Those fuckers can run fast, and they went right out the back again—”
“—piss yourself because of a fucking coat—”
Genevieve closed her eyes, because she couldn’t see anything beyond the upper story wall directly in front of her anywa
y. Slow breaths. A beat of pain in her back for each beat of her heart. Don’t look up, don’t look up.
And they didn’t. The overlapping voices dwindled as their owners pushed through the gap in the boards or circled around the outside of the building. She had her system throw up a rough floorplan, plot everyone’s locations as they finally, finally moved away.
Two question marks lingered, two people quiet enough her system couldn’t track them completely away, so when no one else in the hayloft moved, Genevieve maintained her stillness as well. The fabric of her duffel was rubbing her abused back raw where her jacket wasn’t zipped all the way up, however, and she finally had to sling it off or scream. And she almost did scream because she’d apparently been bleeding and the duffel ripped off the incipient scab along with it.
She gasped instead, pressed her forehead to the boards as a few tears pittered to the wood as well. Pyrus was at her side the next moment.
Eriope sent back a thin laugh and crawled to the opposite side of the loft to give them better data to triangulate with, and everyone pooled their data into one map, silently urging the question marks to resolve. Now, they waited. Genevieve would be fine.
But certainly not comfortable.
***
The Idyllians fucked around for hours, coming in and out of range until gradually sawing crickets and the very distant susurrus of Delta’s traffic took over as the main sound blanketing them in the darkness. There came a time when someone had to be the one to decide the risk of someone patrolling close enough to see them was outweighed by the need to get somewhere clean to see to her wound, and Genevieve figured that would have to be her.
She went for her duffel first, but Eriope took that away from her, and Pyrus had jumped to the floor—no one to see his wings this time—before she arrived at the edge. This time, she almost overbalanced him when he caught her, and the awkwardness over the pain and home-not-home of it all brought her to the edge of tears. She shoved Pyrus away quickly because as much as she wanted to be held, this was not the time.
Her enhanced low-light vision wasn’t good for color differentiation, but the truck looked to have an honest layer of grime over a light color. A family vehicle, as it had a row of back seats at the expense of the length of the bed under the canopy. The driver’s door was unlocked, but Genevieve didn’t give silent thanks for her luck until she’d stepped up with one foot and pressed the starter to have the system light up, which meant the key was somewhere in the vehicle, probably in the center console. The barn door had been locked, so there was no reason not to leave it convenient, but you never knew.
She settled in, hissed as her back got near the seat, sat forward again, and brought up the street map on the display to find the nearest hospital, then thought better of it.
Pyrus took significantly more staring down.
All right. Eriope was waiting for them. Genevieve kept the headlights off, so they should hopefully be able to keep a low profile until they made it to a road with other traffic. But if someone was outside, they’d be unable to miss the crunch of the tires on the farm roads, even with the electric engine. If they were going to run for it—drive for it—a second time, she’d better be ready.
They trundled out of the doors and Eriope swung up into the back seat with a smooth motion that showed how comfortable these ex-soldiers were with any kind of vehicle in another context, lest Genevieve generalize too much from one blind spot. And then they were bumping over the swath of grass in front of the barn to the ruts of the dirt road.
Genevieve needed both hands for the wheel, sitting bolt upright to keep her back from the seat, but with each few meters, a feeling of slotting into place took more and more hold of her. She remembered this, deep in muscle memory, and it all came together and the truck more or less moved under her control and it all felt right in a way she hadn’t known to miss.
Fortunately, the night left the roads quiet so she didn’t have to merge or dodge assholes, and the dark veiled most landmarks she might have recognized, rarely as she’d visited Delta proper before she’d had to leave. She could hold a feeling of home—shorn of angry fighters with guns—to her chest.
***
The hospital she’d chosen entirely by geography looked busy enough, but not swamped. As near as she could judge. She’d never been to a Delta ER of an evening on a—she didn’t even know what day of the standard week it was, she realized. But she’d never been to a Delta ER any day of the week. She parked, ignoring the posted signs about restrictions and fees. Hopefully when the farming family tracked down their vehicle, the h
ospital wouldn’t charge them.
Outside of the truck, her brief bubble of comfort popped abruptly, leaving her to an exhaustion that was becoming intimately familiar. Eriope hissed in surprise on coming around the vehicle to see her back, which Genevieve took to mean blood was soaking through the bandage and her jacket both. The seep she was monitoring from her system was ever-present. Carex more or less shouldered her onto his support first, which should have ceased to surprise her by now, but still did, and Pyrus supported her other side.
They headed into a deserted hallway, Eriope leading the three of them, with low, channel-fed direction from Pyrus about what kind of facilities to look for. Equipment and supplies in this section it appeared, fortunately, rather than rooms with occupants, and the lights were at night conservation levels. Or perhaps it wasn’t fortunate: they were avoiding notice, but at the expense of a steadily lengthening walk to get to the kind of facility Pyrus wanted.
It dawned on Genevieve, slowly, that all the notices and signs were in Idyllian. Of course. As had the street signs been. But that had taken time to soak in. Suddenly, up ahead the sound of another heavier, outside door opening and shutting, and a voice speaking in Idyllian too, giving it a familiarity that grabbed at her gut.
