Voices resonated from above, a frantic exchange of footsteps and orders as their keepers began to discover how wretchedly things had gone awry. By the time their trail was discovered, it would be too late. Through the web of passages flooded with compost and dirt, they were nearing the central foyer, and a long audience chamber.
“It’s just ahead,” Flynn confirmed, though he was surprised by how close. The rift opened almost as soon as he passed through the foyer, though the room beyond stretched much farther back. Whoever had made it—if it was a truly a thing that had been intentionally made—might have deliberately entered these chambers in such a fashion, approaching the court from a rift.
“It’s as though it faces me no matter which side I approach it from,” Chari observed, circling cautiously around it. “Where will it lead?”
“Like we’re gonna know?” Jean smirked.
“Come on!” Mack readied himself to hop through. “Let’s blow this mold-hole!”
He vanished, with Jean promptly following. Chari prepared to follow suit, but Flynn caught her shoulder and stopped her. “Fair warning: If you land face-first against a wall or something, don’t look at me. I don’t make them, I just find them.”
Rather than concern, Chari lit up with heartfelt gratitude. A weak “thank you” escaped her lips before she disappeared with such decisiveness that Flynn expected she had resolved already never to return. He lingered a moment longer, wishing Inquisitor Thunau would show up, just so he could see the look on her face as he stepped backward and disappeared from her world forever.
*
Mack watched Flynn come through, only to skitter on a patch of small stones and slip to his knees. It looked pretty painful, and the way he gritted his teeth and he tried not to make a sound confirmed it. They’d come out this time on an even field, but there were still all the little things to account for, like not knowing what your feet have landed on, assuming they’ve landed at all.
“You okay there, Flynn-o? Not exactly a tumble down a fountain, ya know.” Mack gave him a hand up, and Flynn hunched over, rubbing his knees.
“I’m okay,” he muttered as he staggered away from the rift. “I’m okay.”
As the passage closed, Mack saw a large, flat rock had been hiding behind it, plain but for the scorch marks lashed into it. The sun had risen what looked to be maybe twenty minutes ago on the small island they’d just arrived on. Nothing about the place went very far in any direction, and it was surrounded by ocean as far as the eye could see.
“Sooo … I think we’re back on Sechal,” Mack observed, based on little more than the color of the sun.
Chari was confused. “The same world we visited prior?” she asked Flynn.
“It might be,” he agreed. “If so, we’re far from the place we were before. I don’t sense those particular gateways …” He trailed off, looking into the distance. “But there’s another way off this island, very near. We won’t have to stay long.”
“Well, no hurry, right?” Chari wandered slowly off, becoming increasingly distracted. “Let’s just rest. Regroup. Take … all … this … in.”
“Tourist,” Jean snorted.
Mack drifted after the priestess-former, interested to see what she saw. She barely noticed him, entranced as she was by the not-TseTsu of her surroundings. The twig-like trees were a more familiar size, and the only ones for miles around.
Looking up, Mack realized there was smoke in the sky.
“Hey, guyses? I think I’ve located an amalgamation of housing units!” Gesturing vigorously, he directed the attention of his pals to a village atop a distant cliff.
“Think there’re still folks livin’ there?” Jean asked.
“The smoke and fire seem controlled.” Flynn didn’t elaborate, leaving the presence of people as a foregone conclusion. It was enough for the four, and they soon set out across the island, whose terrain was fairly barren compared to the continent they had visited before.
They didn’t have much food on hand, but some of the twiggy trees bore enough fruit that they could eat, if a little poorly. Even so, they feasted, three having barely eaten while caged. Chari, too, ate greedily, eager to fill herself with foreign food as though to cleanse some taint away. As they walked and talked, Flynn shared a less lie-filled account of their journey from Earth to TseTsu.
“Alright, I admit it,” Mack finally owned up. “I wasn’t really a ship’s cook. But it’s a dream that will one day be realized!”
Mack hadn’t realized how weird Earth was until he discovered that Chari had no clue what a skyscraper or an internal combustion engine were. Flynn did his best to make sure she followed along, but the name “Civilis” grabbed her interest.
“It’s part of a network of prisons established across the land,” Flynn told her. “They share information, resources.”
“It’s a strange-sounding name.”
“They’re all like that,” Flynn explained. “Civilis, Orderus, Culturis, Societous … as I once heard it, the intent was to give each tower a name to inspire hope, using meaningful Latinate words.”
“Bet’cha can’t guess where things went wrong,” Mack teased.
Before Chari could even ask, Flynn told her, “It’s a dead and forgotten language. The names are all bastardized slurs. If one was in fact Latin, it was coincidence, I assure you.”
The story that followed—from their daring prison escape to their daring consumption of Sechal’s indigenous wildlife—Mack already knew. As the rifle bounced casually against Chari’s slender backside, he realized that Flynn hadn’t touched on the tangle with its owner. Jean noticed too. She gave Flynn a look, but said not a word.
“Having been imprisoned for so long,” Chari asked Jean, “why was it then you escaped?”
Jean grinned smugly while fishing around her coat, pulling out the item she’d generously offered as a weapon back at the temple.
“It’s that disgusting spork!” Mack observed.
“An’ just to show ya,” Jean said, stopping to kneel in the sand. She pulled down the collar on her coat, showing off the scar on the back of her neck. “They stuck something in me, right there. Some kinda tech. Worked my nerves an’ gave me a wicked fucking shock any time I tried to rattle things.”
“An IRD,” Flynn observed, “an Impulse Restraint Disc.” Everyone looked at him strangely, so he continued. “It’s … experimental. They’re not commonly used, since they’re hard to make and you’ve got to be really dangerous to qualify for one.”
Flattered, Jean twirled her spork proudly, then plunged it back in her coat.
Chari grimaced. “So you … you scooped that thing out the back of your neck?”
“She’s lucky that’s all she did,” Flynn said. “I’ve heard even professional removal can cripple the carrier.”
“That’s us then, yeah?” Jean asked. There was a common understanding that the entirety of their arrival here, now, hinged on that one chance fortune. “Real fuckin’ lucky.”
*
The village was built into a generously slanted hill, many of the dilapidated wooden houses propped up on stilts. Some were damaged beyond livability, and from a distance the town itself would have looked abandoned had it not been for the distant smoke that had drawn them in. There was no farming culture, just a scattering of wild trees showing signs of harvest. As they neared, the nets and lures and tanning pelts pinned to racks told of people who relied entirely on what the sea gave them. Flynn took care to don his spectacles once more, for whatever good it might do him.
“Be kinda a riot,” Jean chuckled, “if Flynn was the normie and we were the freaks?”
“I suppose it would,” Chari laughed politely, with apologetic glances to the butt of the joke.
Flynn half wished it was true. Having already suffered a torturer’s whims for being of unique interest, he needed to heal and rest, not endure the hurled stones of another prejudiced lot.
Upon arrival, calling the place a village felt too generous
. The homes were there, but all in all there couldn’t have been more than a dozen people living within, most handling menial tasks from mending nets to skinning fish. The catch was poor, enough for those who lived here and little more. A single little girl lay on her belly in the morning sun, drawing in the cold sand with a wet stick. There were no other children.
Already the four stood out from their hosts, who were dressed in aging skin and leather shawls. Though Flynn was receiving his share of unflattering looks, his allies were meeting equal scrutiny as they walked through the village. Had the villagers not been so few, and half his own numbers not so visibly armed, they might have tried something.
Ensuring his spectacles remained firmly in place, Flynn tried to focus on finding someone to query. Deciding on the fish-skinner, he asked, “What village is this?”
“Noria Peak,” the skinner replied. He was gruff, his face marked by a poor shave from his chin to atop his head. Though not especially muscular, he had the definition needed to do his work. Yet he, like the other locals, was naturally a little taller and larger than any of the four visitors. “We turned your kind away before.”
“Our kind?” Mack asked.
“Soldiers,” the man said first, before clarifying, “folks from other worlds.” He looked at Flynn in particular. “The one with the scales. You know who.”
“I really don’t,” Flynn said, but he could tell the man believed he did know and wouldn’t be pressed further on it.
“You do and we did, and you’re not welcome here.” His dull knife caught under a fish’s skin and he tugged and tugged again before it pulled through, in a motion that lost too much meat to the scales. He tossed the waste in a basket of chum.
Chari cut in front. “If you know we’re not from your world, then let’s shelve any pretenses. We don’t plan to be here long, and seek only food and night’s lodging.”
“After what your people took, you have the nerve to ask for that?”
“What’s this ‘your people’ business?” Mack asked. “Cause I, for one, do not like being categorized.”
“The one like him, the reptile,” the skinner replied, gesturing at Flynn. “Came in and took half our people. Near all of our kids, except Kelsy there.”
Flynn looked over, and saw the girl still playing in the sand in the same spot as before. Kelsy didn’t look a day over nine, but wore nicer clothes than anyone else in the village. He suspected they were hand-me-downs.
“Why not her?” Chari asked.
“Didn’t want her,” the skinner told them. “Can’t recall why. But they took the ginger girl Dela, her mother Awna, Kiwa and Romenna, and Rizzy the half-blind boy.”
“Half blind?” Mack piped in, sensing a common interest.
“Trako the Jittery stabbed the brat one night while he slept,” the skinner rattled off. “We gave him to the sea after that and the rocks chewed him up.”
“No one did that for me,” Mack pouted.
The skinner looked over the four, then reached into the basket of uncut catch and pulled out a modestly sized fish, holding it up before them.
“You four seem lost and stupid,” he said without a drop of pity. “I’ll give you food for the day if you promise I won’t see you tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or the day after—”
“Done!” Mack snatched the weakly twitching fish and hugged it in his arms. He walked away toward the village entrance, whispering, “There, there. Daddy’s got you now,” while stroking the unlucky catch.
The matter thus settled, Jean shrugged and followed her friend.
“I suppose that’s that,” Chari said to Flynn, and went after the others.
Flynn lingered, looking at little Kelsy as she drew in the sand, and studied the girl with more attention than he would normally spare. Behind her innocent smile, there was something sinister to her character that unsettled him. The skinner looked at Flynn with an annoyance that said, If you’ve come to take her, I at least want the fish back, but it won’t be enough. Uninterested in sheltering such a hazardous child, Flynn went after the others, leaving Noria Peak behind.
*
Flynn led the group back toward the sea, to where waves crashed against a looming wall of pockmarked boulders. The barrier, already elevated by the island’s lopsided geography, stretched along the shore in both directions, with numerous gaps where tidal pools formed and multi-legged creatures burrowed beneath the soft sand. Among these stones was a large, flat alcove of hard earth. It had natural coverage above and below, and the charred ground in a gentle concave told of fire that had been nurtured there once long ago. Two rock faces overlapped behind it, forming a wall to round the site out.
Picking up the pace, Flynn ran ahead. Although a stabbing pain blossomed in his ribs and his breathing labored for it, he ignored it as best he could. He had shared enough pain with Chari as it was; some things could be allowed to heal naturally. Flynn knelt and pressed his palm near the soot of the fire pit, sensing the way from Sechal. Finding it under this encampment did little to boost his spirits.
Mack caught up first. The fish having died soon after leaving Noria Peak, he’d given up trying to cradle it, and now carried the carcass like a sack of potatoes that bounced and stained his shirt with each stride.
“The opening is somewhere under here,” Flynn informed him.
After laying the dead fish on a rock, Mack hopped quizzically atop an adjacent boulder just off the plateau. “Under the rocks?”
“Maybe.” If the only other route from Sechal is buried … “I hope not.”
Chari didn’t say a word, but a hint of fear had come into her eyes. Short of settling for island life, the only other way would be to fall back to TseTsu and find another path beyond Cordom.
“We won’t chance it,” Flynn assured her, though it was hardly a promise he could guarantee at this point.
*
While the news of the gate’s inaccessibility brought some apprehension, they had not planned to leave right away regardless. After the previous day’s stresses and the fact that they didn’t know what was to come, it was not unreasonable that they should at least rest for the night. A nearby pool of freshwater and the abundance of local plant life assured they wouldn’t starve.
While Jean and Mack left to gather wild fruit, Flynn began slicing the fish with his claws, wrapping the meat in leaves to be cooked later. He was content with his thoughts, ponderings how to extrapolate the rift’s location, but it was Chari who broke the silence, her thoughts returning to the home she’d so recently abandoned.
“I confess, I crave to know how they’ve taken my leaving. It must be nearly evening now, back there.”
“That all depends on what the Saryu leaders tell their people,” Flynn replied. He had little in the way of empathetic support. He had quit Earth with nothing to leave behind; she had left so much.
“Inquisitor Thunau spied me,” Chari replied. “She’ll have figured out my transgressions of faith. She’ll have my home searched, my attic seized. She’ll find the icons and idols I placed away—”
“You’re mistaken.” Standing up, Flynn balled the skin and bones and threw them hard as he could into the sea. Shaking the viscous fluid from his hands, he explained, “Thunau believes too much in what she does. You’re more useful to her as a saint than a sinner.”
“I haven’t done anything to be sainted.” Amused, Chari had missed his meaning.
“Even if your impiety were announced, it would never be allowed that it started before the three of us arrived,” he told her. “We took you. That’s the story, whether through pity or coercion. The unfaithful stole you or killed you and hid you away.”
“Another lie and the Inquisition continues,” Chari realized. “Goddess … even in leaving I’m their tool.”
As ever, there was a story to sell to make people behave as wanted. Chari needed a distraction from this reminder, and Flynn’s attention seized upon the rifle at her back. It had its own stories, but only one was useful here.
“Why don’t I teach you how to use that?”
She glanced back in momentary confusion, having forgotten the weapon was there, then set it aside and loosed the strand of beads holding her shoulder covering in place, parting the strips of cloth and exposing a red blemish in her fair skin. “I’m a sorry one, aren’t I? I can’t even carry the thing without bruising.”
“You’ll get used to it, if you choose. If you don’t want it, you can leave it behind.”
“My whole body aches from the day’s walk,” she replied. “But if I’m to survive and keep the freedom I’ve found, I can learn to handle this.”
Flynn had spied a marker earlier that would make good target practice. He led Chari along the rocks, asking as they hiked, “Do you still have those keys?”
Bemused at first, she produced the prison ring from the manor. Taking them and the rifle as they neared the marker, Flynn opened the cylindrical apparatus and—ensuring she could see what he was doing—placed the clacking keys inside. He shut the compartment, then activated the attachment and promptly placed the rifle into Chari’s hands. She held it, wide-eyed with uncertainty as the device whirred.
“It’s going to warm up a bit,” he warned, “so make sure not to hold it too close to your skin.”
Obediently, she held it a little away from her chest, where she could still feel a soothing heat emanate. A pleasant tone accompanied a computerized voice: “Process complete. You may now begin killing.”
A wry smile crossed Flynn’s face; he had forgotten the gallows humor that the munitions conversion unit had been designed with. However bad the joke was or wasn’t, it had completely gone over Chari’s head.
“What did that mean?”
Taking the weapon back for a moment, Flynn checked the cracked readout on the backside of the barrel. It confirmed that eleven rounds were in the chamber; the keys had probably topped off whatever material was left over from the last time Rebecca had loaded the thing. Another display confirmed that power was at 96%, hardly lower than when he’d acquired it for her—although the MCU could last for a long time on one battery, it suggested just the same that she hadn’t used it all that much. Now was not the time to be either sentimental or hurried.
Outcasts of the Worlds Page 18
