by M. G. Herron
“I guess you can tell him yourself,” Quen said.
Rakulo cursed. “They must have followed Citlali back.”
Maatiaak stepped forward, holding Yeli before him, her hands bound roughly with coarse rope. He shoved her on the ground in front of him.
A shadow passed across the floor at the mouth of the cave. Rakulo glanced up. Someone had climbed the wall from behind and was now moving overhead.
“We’ve got you surrounded, Rakulo,” Maatiaak called. “Your only sensible choice is to surrender.”
Rakulo thought about taking the canoe into the river at the back of the cave and disappearing underground—but only briefly. He could no more turn his back on Maatiaak or leave his warriors to fight in his stead than he could change his height, or choose who his father was. Some things were up to fate. Others, the gods and men decided.
Yeli was a warrior. She held her head high even though she was bound and held hostage. Rakulo said nothing in response to Maatiaak’s ultimatum.
“I thought you might respond that way,” Maatiaak said as the moment of silence stretched out. “I brought someone else you know, in case you needed more convincing.”
Another man stepped forward, pushing Rakulo’s mother, Ixchel, before him. She was dirty and had scratches on her face. Her left eye was black and purple. Her wrists were caked with blood where she had strained against the restraints trying to escape.
She had not let them take her easily. Rakulo’s throat tightened even more. A high-pitched ringing rose in his bad ear.
Ixchel stepped forward, took a ragged breath, and shouted “Don’t do it, Raku! He’s—”
Maatiaak swung the wooden end of his spear and struck Ixchel across the back. The old woman stumbled forward, caught her ankle in one of the depressions in the limestone floor, and pitched to the ground beside Yeli.
“You bastard!” Rakulo shouted. His voice whip-cracked out of the cave.
Why did he have to bring her into this? Rakulo thrust the branches of their feeble camouflage aside and stepped into the open. Maatiaak grabbed Ixchel’s arm and hauled her back to her feet. Rakulo could see how it hurt her, and how her pain brought a vicious smile to Maatiaak’s face.
“Enough,” Rakulo said, more softly this time. He forced his concern from his face, and fought to keep his expression neutral. It would not serve him to show Maatiaak how afraid he was for his mother. Yeli was a warrior, but his mother was innocent in this fight.
“What do you want, Maatiaak?”
“That’s Chief Maatiaak, you insolent brat. Lay down your weapons. Xucha demands many sacrifices to make up for our negligence during your time as chief. No one turns from the dark god and gets away with it. If you come with us, I will let your mother live.”
He extended his spear so it was pointed at Ixchel’s back, who stood with one hip cocked, favoring her sprained ankle. She shook her head slightly. Tears ran down her face.
“Xucha has no right to demand anything,” Rakulo said. “He can’t put you in charge, and he certainly can’t force us to sacrifice more of our own people. That is our decision alone. Why do you help him? What has he ever done but bring more death to our people?”
“Xucha protects us! The gods give us this gift of bountiful land and sea. Is that not enough for you?”
“He keeps us trapped here, like penned animals! You’ve seen the Wall. How can this small patch of land be enough for you? Don’t you want to see what’s beyond the Wall? Don’t you want to know what else is out there in the world?”
“Xucha has shown me what is beyond the Wall—nothing but devastation. He guards us from it. He keeps us safe.”
“He lies to you, and you believe him,” Rakulo said. “Does Xucha tell you where to build your hut, or where to fish? Does he tell you what to name your children? Your own daughter is in that cave right now with two broken ribs—an injury dealt by Xucha himself. Is that how he thanks his loyal followers?”
Rakulo could tell that this was new information for Maatiaak. The man licked his lips and hesitated. He still cared deeply for his daughter.
But he seemed to come to a decision, and spat in Rakulo’s direction.
“If that happened, then she did something to earn it. What kind of traitor fights her own people? Eh?”
Now it was Rakulo’s turn to show Maatiaak a vicious smile. “What kind of traitor, indeed.”
“We outnumber you three to one,” Maatiaak said. “Your refusal will only end in bloodshed.”
More needless death, Rakulo thought.
He wanted nothing more than to claw Maatiaak’s shortsighted eyes out, but what would that solve? Citlali lay helpless in the cave. His warriors were good for any two men, but three to one? They were outnumbered. And Reuben, who had obviously never been in a real fight in his life, would be slaughtered. Rakulo knew how sharp those obsidian spear tips were, how easily they sank into soft flesh.
Rakulo took a deep breath and held up one finger. Then, he went inside and found Quen and Reuben.
“Go in the canoe through the river to the Well of Sacrifices. Make certain that the plant there has been destroyed.”
Reuben’s eyebrows scrunched down in confusion. Rakulo pointed at the canoe and mimed cutting the veins they found in the earthen wall at the Well of Sacrifices.
“Ahh,” Reuben said, understanding shining in his eyes. “Yes. Yes!”
“I don’t want to leave you,” said Quen. “What if he’s lying?”
“Of course he’s lying. But you must do as I say. There’s only one way out of this. Maatiaak simply advanced our timetable. Please, you have to trust me. Destroy that thing. Make certain of it.”
Finally, Quen nodded. He and Reuben picked up the canoe and hurried to the low back of the cave, where it led down to the stalactites and the river below.
Relieved, Rakulo went back outside. Maatiaak still waited there with his hostages.
“Okay, Maatiaak,” Rakulo said. “Here’s our offer. If you let my mother and Yeli go, then I’ll jump into the Well of Sacrifices myself. If the gods take me, then you get what you want anyway.”
Maatiaak’s smile spread into a grin. To Rakulo, he looked like one of the skulls carved on the stone buildings in Uchben Na.
“But I want a promise from you in return,” Rakulo said. “If Xucha fails to take me, then you must lay down your weapons and agree to a truce. No more fighting amongst ourselves. Can I have your word on that? Or are you no longer good for your word?”
Maatiaak’s grin turned into a snarl.
“Those are our terms. Accept them, or fight us here and now.”
Maatiaak looked around at his men. They shifted their grips on their spears. A few nodded, encouraging him. Most simply waited for his decision.
They must think I’m a fool.
Rakulo’s confidence waned rapidly. His knife grew heavy at his belt but he forced his hands to remain open and empty at his sides. Seven men would be on him as soon as he lifted the knife. He might get one or two, but not all of them.
Someone walked up to stand beside him—it was Citlali. She stood proudly, her shoulders thrown back, more fierce than ever. In the sunlight, the bruise on her ribs spread spiderlike across her side and chest. No human could possibly have caused that wound—only one with godly strength.
“Do as he says, father,” Citlali said. “Or would you have your men kill your own daughter to satisfy your ego, too?”
Maatiaak looked away from his daughter. He couldn’t meet her eyes. At last, he hefted his spear and used the sharpened tip to cut Ixchel and Yeli’s bound hands free.
He shoved the women forward. They embraced Rakulo for a long minute.
“Let’s go,” Maatiaak said.
Rakulo gently separated himself from his mother’s tight grip, and walked over to Maatiaak. Men bound Rakulo’s hands tight enough to make him wince—but he did not cry out.
Like Citlali, Rakulo stood tall.
The others were led out of the cave and herded to
gether, then directed into the woods away from the cave at spear point, surrounded by the older warriors loyal to Maatiaak.
All except Quen and Reuben.
32
Star Shards
Eliana was carried through the dark rift and into a dim chamber filled with the smell of ozone. She couldn’t move her limbs on her own, couldn’t do more than take a small breath and hold it as they stepped into that strangely cold and heavy darkness.
Her body shivered involuntarily. She couldn’t clutch herself to warm her skin. She still felt the hard armored arms of Xucha and that suit he wore holding her up. Only her eyeballs moved. He took two steps, and paused. Panic rose to her throat like a choking ball of ice.
Shapes and angles began to resolve themselves into objects in the dimness. Ambient light glowed in the semi-circular chamber from a few sources, but very faintly, a tenth of the light of a normal room at home.
Her eyes darted about. As she took in the strange place—what she could see of it—her panic slowly subsided.
A green glow seeped under a doorway set into the far, flat wall. Another faint shine bled through the translucent skin of a mound on the floor to her left, at the edge of her peripheral vision. A chair? A couch?
Above that and across the wall, a bank of controls made a little alcove. The control unit reminded her of Amon’s holodeck for the Translocator but…very different at the same time. It was not made of plastic or metal, but of a living plant-like material. Bulbous growths emerged from the wall seemingly at random. She slowly came to understand that these growths were controls—nodes and levers and dials and buttons, but of a kind that she had never seen on Earth.
This was not a cave, or even a prison cell. It looked more like a shop. A lab.
Again she thought of Amon. Amon.
Being angry at him seemed, now, like a frivolous luxury. Would she ever see him again? Would she ever have a chance to apologize?
From the right, a crystal of some kind set into the ceiling emitted light. It shone down on three round metallic orbs lined up on a shelf—the devices that Rakulo called “Xucha’s demons,” arranged like basketballs on display in the fancy office of an NBA executive…only, no, that wasn’t it. Executive was the wrong description. Those things were weaponized robots. Lined up on a low shelf, the orbs were covered in oily black stains and scorch marks. Metal-handled instruments lay haphazardly among dirty and stained rags on a shelf below. One of the orbs had a huge gash in the top. A second orb was pocked with bullet-holes.
Several indentations, like spots for more of the machines, sat empty.
The final source of faint light came from the middle of the chamber, where the large carbonado that Xucha had taken from Lucas in the Translocator lab hung suspended in a beam of blue light.
Blue light sounds weird, but that was the best way she could think of to describe it, for the vertical beam seemed to both swallow the light and give it back in equal parts. The chamber was big enough that the area around the suspended meteorite was separated from the other equipment by thirty feet in every direction.
She absorbed this in the time it took for Xucha to cross the room and set her down, surprisingly gently, on the mound on the floor.
The mound reformed to her figure and seemed to move beneath her until it supported her whole body, like a beanbag chair—if a beanbag chair could move and seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting ever-so-slightly…
When the metallic orb hovering over Xucha’s shoulder floated away and set itself down on that shelf with the others, her temporary paralysis was released.
She shook her head reactively, hard enough that her neck twinged. Her whole body shuddered then, and her hands pressed down on the mound supporting her—its surface felt oily, but not wet, like the skin of some jungle reptile she had encountered in Mexico.
“Ugh.” The involuntary noise of disgust spilled out through her lips. She immediately regretted it, clamped her mouth shut, and held still.
Xucha watched her, waiting.
Eliana wanted to get up and sprint away. Every fiber of her being shouted at her to run. But when she turned her now-free head to look around the room, there was no rift, only the chamber shaped like a circle cut in half, with a single door that had no handle. The round walls were made of the same material as everything else in here—like tiny interlocking scales, slimy, but not wet, and undeniably alive.
She had the impression of being inside a massive lung. There were no windows. As she gazed around, the whole room seemed to expand and contract by millimeters—like the walls themselves were breathing. Xucha watched her, saying nothing. He cocked his head, and Eliana stared back at him.
“What do you want with me?” she said.
She swallowed and thought of her mentor, Renee, and of Amon. How would they act in this situation? She forced more steel into her voice.
“Tell me why you brought me here. I have a right to know.”
The form of Xucha, clad head to toe in seamless black, turned from her and held his hands out toward the column of light in which the meteorite hung suspended. His gloved fingers flicked through the light and caused the rock to rotate slowly, dancing in suspension. The beam of transparent blue light glowed brighter and seemed to bend around his fingers where they came into contact.
“That doesn’t belong to you,” Eliana said. “You stole it.”
What does that thing even do?
Xucha dropped his hands from the spinning rock and turned back to her. Eliana pushed off the mound, which hardened when she pressed into it, and stood.
“My people,” Xucha said, “learned how to harness the power of star shards millions of years before your species crawled out of the ocean.” His metallic voice resonated clearly in the chamber, coming not from him but from the walls themselves.
Eliana couldn’t help a wary glance around the chamber. “Star shards?”
“A rough translation. That is what we call them.” He gestured to the meteorite. “Forged by intense heat at the center of a star when it explodes, the shards are cast outward into the universe. My people have been using them to travel between galaxies for aeons. This is quite a small one.”
Star shards…what Audrey and Amon would give to hear that!
It seemed clear by this point that Xucha didn’t intend to hurt her—if he wanted her dead, he never would have brought her here. She had seen those men he killed in the Translocator lab, six mercenaries beheaded by a single sweep of the orb’s lasers. That didn’t mean she was safe, but it did mean she had some time to figure out what he wanted.
You have to keep him talking.
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked again.
“Because you have made an impression upon me,” he said. “I’ve been watching you since you first arrived with this little shard.” He held up the object where her ring was now embedded. It was made of the same material as the walls—it had been grown around the ring. He had not even bothered to remove the carbonado—the star shard—from the gold ring in which it was mounted. The object must allow him to control the shard somehow. Could Eliana use it?
I bet he never lets that thing out of his sight.
“I knew you couldn’t have come here on your own. When you first arrived, I decided to wait and see what happened. My patience paid off. When you departed last time, I traced your path to that other machine. What do you call it?”
There was no sense in lying about it if he knew. “It’s called a Translocator.”
He nodded. “A primitive version of our starpaths.” His hand reached out to touch the shard in the light beam once again, caressing it lightly.
“Is that so?” she said. She took a casual step closer to him. He turned away to look at the meteorite. Apparently, he thought she was no threat at all.
The metallic voice coming from the walls took on a musing tone. “It surprises me, how your species has evolved. You were always been highly susceptible to disease, weak of flesh, and short of life span. Evolut
ion has not been kind to you. But instead of going extinct, like I suspected you would when I first encountered humanity, you seem to have thrived. To develop this kind of technology… How many of your species are living on that planet?”
Your species?
Eliana had suspected he wasn’t human, but this confirmed it. So what was he? He had two legs and five fingers on his hands, didn’t he? Was she wrong in thinking about him like a male? She had just assumed his gender, from the bipedal structure and flat chest and narrow hips…
Eliana looked at Xucha’s hands more closely. Actually, his hands had four fingers, she saw now. Again, that sense of unnatural revulsion returned, like she’d seen a particularly creepy spider. She never had reason—nor opportunity—to look at Xucha’s hands before. Her encounters with him had always been brief and violent, and usually at night. Did he keep this place dim because he was a nocturnal creature?
She had so many questions.
“Who are you?” Eliana asked. “How did you learn to speak my language?”
He tapped the side of his reflective black helmet. “My armor translates for me. Your fragile vessel would not be accustomed to the speech of my species.”
That made some sense. It must be how he spoke the native language of Kakul, as well. Her anthropological curiosity kicked into high gear.
Where did Xucha come from? What kind of society did his people create? And what did he want with the Kakuli people?
Xucha interrupted her racing thoughts. In the blink of an eye, he’d darted across the room to loom over her, his night-black suit glimmering from the reflection of the many ambient lights in the chamber.
“As for your other question…”
He shoved her back onto the mound, which reformed to her body and caught her. Xucha gestured, and it spun her around to face the wall. At another gesture, the swirling patterns on the wall began to glow. Three tentacles, like the ones that Rakulo and Reuben had found and severed at the sinkhole, but thinner, lighter, with split ends, whipped out from the wall and wrapped themselves around her wrists, her ankles, her throat.
