The boys recovered quickly, but we were halfway through by then. Cu sprinted ahead with Mali and Mark. Ule and the girls doubled back to pull three red-jersied toughs off Crispin’s back. Tua kneed a young one in the groin, but his older, bigger buddy grabbed her around the neck, lifting her off the ground with a roar. She arched her back and flipped out of his grasp, landing on one knee in front of me. I grasped her arm. Sam’s driving momentum hauled her up.
“Go!” he shouted. Tua sprang free and forward.
Moussa cleared a path for Omea, who had her hands full keeping Jane from turning back in panic. I slowed to help her.
“No!” Sam dragged me onward. I glanced back. Pen and Songh pulled Jane along with them.
Ahead, Ule held off several branch wielders with his knife. He danced at them in a fury, legs spread, jabbing his eight inches of lethal metal as if it were something more organic. “Come on, you mothers!” he screeched. “I’ll slice your domer balls off!”
Tuli and Lucienne marked time in the path, their long skirts hiked up into their waistbands. They closed protectively around Omea and Jane. A soccer boy snatched at Omea’s hair. Tuli lunged. Another smaller blade caught the dying light of the flare. The boy yowled and jerked away bloodied fingers. He stared at his hand in shock and backed away as the fight surged around him.
“Go!” yelled Sam again. Tuli and Lucienne leaped ahead. Omea doubled her speed. We were almost past them. A red shirt loomed up beside us, large and angry, clumsily swinging a branch. Sam yanked me, swerved aside. Behind us, Pen caught the blow in the stomach, caved and went down. The red-shirt laughed. It was the big one who’d grabbed Tua. He didn’t look much like a teenager to me and I began to wonder about this soccer team. He hauled back his branch for another blow at Pen but Songh flew at him like a wildcat, fingers grabbing, nails clawing. Pen staggered coughing and bleeding to his feet just as the red-shirt flung Songh to the ground. Moussa fell back and picked the boy out of the path as if he were an empty sack. Still another blade flashed in Pen’s hand, opening up a long gash in his attacker’s chest. Pen ducked back, then plunged in for a second cut.
“Go!” ordered Sam.
“Gonna write my fucking name!” Pen screamed.
“Pen! Go!”
Pen backed off, scowling at Sam. The red-shirt bent and fumbled at his sock. His torn shirt front was shiny with his blood. His hands shook. I thought he would topple over but he came up sharp with a knife of his own.
I screamed with what breath I had left. “Pen!!”
Pen leaped aside. The knife grazed his shoulder blade, slicing his sleeve. He turned in midair and crouched. “Blade!” he warned as he was grabbed hard from behind.
The red-shirt was no longer roaring or clumsy. Two of his fellows held Pen fast. He shifted his knife in his hand and moved in. “Little Outsider piece of shit…”
Sam’s blade was in his hand and out of it so fast I didn’t see it until it was sunk to the hilt in the red-shirt’s back. The man staggered, his teammates gaped in disbelief and Pen twisted out of their grasp. He ran straight for the red-shirt, knocked him down and yanked the knife clear in one smooth movement.
“Go!” he yelled to Sam.
I stared at the man writhing on the ground, at the dampness spreading across his back.
Sam jerked me forward. We ran.
There was no one ahead of us, no way to know if the others had made it out. The path lamps had been extinguished. Terror propelled me through the first several hundred meters of darkness, until I was winded and my legs ached.
“I need to stop,” I panted.
“Forget it.” Sam grabbed my arm. “Look behind you.”
They pounded after us through the trees—eight, ten of them at least. Pen pulled up alongside, running easily though his face and arm were smeared with blood. “Fuckin’ assholes!”
“All right?” Sam asked.
“Flesh wound. I’ll split off when we get out of the trees.”
Sam nodded. “See you at Cora’s.”
I knew I couldn’t make it that far. “Isn’t there someplace closer?”
“You name it,” returned Sam grimly.
I couldn’t. Who would take us in, an apprentice out past curfew and a man who could and would bury his knife in a guy’s back from fifteen meters? I told myself, just keep running, the boys behind will tire or give up. But they were young and athletic, used to running. And they were angry. As we broke out of the park, Pen’s swerve off to the right drew three of them after him. I glanced back. Seven still in pursuit, gaining slowly.
Trash littered the dark streets, broken glass crunching underfoot and a strange slickness here or there. We weren’t the only ones the soccer boys had gone after. I slipped in a patch of wet. Sam caught me roughly. “Stick with me for a while, love. We’re gonna try and lose ’em.”
“Don’t know… how much longer…!” A needle of pain inched up my side.
“Long as you have to, you want to be alive tomorrow.” He spoke in the easy rhythm of his stride. “Told you you needed exercise. And don’t talk. It makes you tense. Breathe deep and slow. Come on, this way.”
We pounded around a corner. Sam turned hard left into a narrow alley behind a row of houses, then veered right after the second house. We ran in silence across the soft velvet grass of well-tended lawns.
Sam slowed behind a hedge and looked back. “Good. They split up at the turn. Gets it down to four.”
The lawns were full of trimmed bushes and little decorative fences, obstacles to trip the unwary and exhausted. I found them all. Sam led me back to the road, loping along still barely winded. My lungs were on fire.
“Sam… I can’t… it hurts.”
“You can. You must.” Running beside me, he pressed his hand to the small of my back. I could feel the warmth of it even through the sweat and the pounding of my pulse. “Concentrate. Forget the pain. Think about rhythm. The comfort of repetition. Think about… why you’ve got to keep moving. About how I’ll feel if I have to leave you behind.”
New strength surged through me. “Would you?”
“Heroics are for the stage, Rhys.”
I remembered the blood welling thick and slick from the red-shirt’s back. This man would leave me to save himself. I concentrated on that, and the knife-cramp in my side eased off to background noise. Then I made the mistake of asking, “How much further, you think?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes.”
Panic. Pure and simple. I searched the darkened windows with desperate eyes. Each light in an upper bedroom seemed a distant and unattainable sanctuary. I knew I was done for. “Maybe I could… hide somewhere… You could—”
His hand urged me forward. “No. Concentrate, damn it! Be somewhere else. Imagine… yeah, imagine the roughlands… big, open scrub desert, full of red rocks and snakes… you’re there… it’s wide to the horizon, the sky overhead so blue it makes your eyes water.”
I knew that sky. I’d seen it in my mind already.
The pressure of his fingers never slackened. “Picture it. You’ve been checking the traps… been a good day… nothing in ’em too weird to eat, nothing too sick… so intent on this good fortune, you don’t notice half the Possum gang getting the drop on you. Then it’s too late. Can’t hide or make a stand. You’re small and there’s six of ’em… can only sling the mess over your shoulder. Try to outrun them… ’cause they’d like what you got there, too… and they’re hungry enough to kill for it. But you’ve got a head start. So you run… it’s five, maybe six miles back to the lookout… first place you can count on any help… and that only your sister, but she’s a good shot… she can drop ’em from a distance. The sun’s still high. Wouldn’t be bad but for this… load on your back and the stock of your rifle… slamming your hip with every step… you’re gonna just slip around this rock here, then straight on homeward… whatever happens, you know you can’t stop…”
We took the turn flat-out. His voice faded under the rhythmic slap of f
eet against dry-packed dirt. I was barely aware when the touch at my back fell away. I sweltered in the fierce desert sun and settled the load forward on my shoulder, ignoring the metallic jab of the rifle against my ribs. Alone under the blue, endless sky, I ran, unthinking, inspired by the sudden baying of the hunting pack behind me, caught up in the machine of my body, seeing only blue until something rose up hard in front of me and something softer snatched at me and pulled me through.
Voices, one breathless like me. “She alone?”
“He’ll be out there drawing them off.”
“Shit.”
“He’ll make it. You did.”
Then the clang of metal, angry shouts behind. My knees caving in. A hopeless warring for breath. Hauled up and pulled along, my numbed legs dragging on wood, fumbling up stepped stone. At last the welcome of a giving surface and collapsing, heaving, gasping, dying from the agony in my lungs, the fire in my side.
Other voices. A woman. She forces liquid into my mouth. Probably I won’t die, I think. But I do faint.
* * *
I woke up alive, in a wide, soft bed.
A lamp glowed comfortably in a corner of a big, dim room. I was in somebody else’s nightgown and my hair was damp. My body was unmanageable. Rolling over was a major effort. I rested after accomplishing it and studied the Gothic groin vaulting overhead until I could actually imagine standing on legs like the ones I had left. I struggled up, groaning, and staggered about on the thick carpet until my knees bent in the right direction, then limped slowly to the window and looked out onto treetops and the night-lit waters of a moat. The nightgown was sea-green silk and much too short for me.
Cora’s. I was at Cora’s.
Hinges creaked across the room. Sam stood in the tall doorway, balancing a tray on spiked fingers like a basketball. He saw the covers tossed aside, discovered me leaning by the window, and set the tray down beside the bed. “How’s my jogging partner?”
I had no reply, having just then understood that the problem was not that I might fall in love with this man, this knife-wielding stranger, but that I already had.
He saw it immediately, read it in my silence and the softening of my eyes, the whole story I’d already written, right down to the deeply tragic farewell in a month’s time when he went on tour. He smiled easily, then came over, and took my hands, unfolding the tight fists I’d made. He pressed his mouth to my palms with infinite gentleness. “You know, they always tell actors not to play the end of the play while they’re still in the first act.”
“They say the same thing to designers.” I bent my forehead to his shoulder, fighting the urge to flatten myself against him, to hang on for dear life. I told myself, It’s unseemly to want someone this much. “Is everyone all right?”
He nodded, brushing hair back from my ear. “We were last. We got the brunt of it.”
“How far did we run?”
“Oh, maybe four or five.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Told you there’s nothing like a little exercise before bed.”
I touched the fresh scratches reddening his jaw.
He jerked his head disgustedly. “When it got down to two behind, I dropped back to beat the shit out of ’em. Tripped over some citizen’s prize rosebush. Pretty fuckin’ dumb. Had to do some fast scrambling then. You made that last mile on your lonesome, Rhys. Congratulations.” He eased his arms around me and drew me against him. “How do you feel?”
“Sore. Every muscle, every joint.”
“I can fix that.”
“You’ll teach me the healing trance?”
“I had something more collaborative in mind.”
I laughed, desire bubbling at my throat like song. His hands beneath the green silk were sure, his kiss slow and easy. I was relieved to have run out of excuses for resisting the heat between us. Desire is so much easier than love.
“Would you really have left me out there?”
“Well, now, we didn’t have to test that, did we?”
* * *
I had so many questions. He even answered a few of them, mostly the trivial personal ones, but talking, it turned out, was not the best thing we did together. I’d never had as good as he gave, or given as good as he got. I told him I loved him, that I’d never feel alive again without him inside me, the silly things you say when you’ve fallen very hard for the first time.
“Hush now,” he said. “Of course you will.”
Later, I ran my hand lightly over the scars ridging his lower back and thought of Crispin’s flawless silky surfaces. Sam’s body, like his character, had edges, hard planes, and knots. He was all over sun-browned but for a paler shadow at his groin. “You look like you’ve walked into trouble all your life.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
The slick, damaged skin numbed my fingers with sympathetic pain.
“Planter’s whip,” he said matter-of-factly. “Before I met the Eye. Would have healed clean otherwise.”
I gathered my own memories of him torn and bleeding in Cora’s kitchen. I was jealous of any pain he’d suffered before I was there to comfort him. “When was that?”
“Soon after, I met Mali and Ule in a bar down by the port, where you can still smuggle yourself onto the island if you’re fast and clever. Mal was talking politics. I was trying to pick his pocket. Ule’s knife talked me out of it.”
“Why were you doing that?”
His oh-you-innocent look was back again. “I was hungry.”
“Oh.” I added thief to the list of reasons I should be having nothing to do with this man.
“Not that he looked so ripe or anything. It was mostly for the practice. Thin guys like him are the hardest. So while Ule was deciding how many of my fingers to cut off, I told Mali the only reason they’d noticed me at all was because I’d liked what he had to say and listening threw me off my rhythm. Turned out the troupe had just lost someone. They were looking for a quick pair of hands. I thought it sounded better than running shell games on the docks. Mali took me home to feed me and I never left.”
“When was this?”
“Ten, twelve, a lifetime ago.” He stretched, gathered me into his arms. “Come here to me. What’re you doing so far away?”
I nestled happily. “That story, the one you told me while we were running?”
“Wasn’t sure you even heard me.”
“That wasn’t Tuatua… ?”
“It wasn’t anything… a story, to keep you going. Worked, didn’t it?”
I lifted my head from his chest and tried to stare him down. He brushed hair from my face as if I were an importunate child, but there was a glint in his eye I didn’t understand.
“I’m not sure you’re ready for it yet, that’s all.”
“You’ve been Outside. I guessed that already.”
He chuckled. “You mean like, once or twice? Is that the scariest thing you can imagine?”
“Sam. Please.”
“Okay. But don’t blame me if you don’t like what you hear.” He eased me off his chest and turned to rest his head on his elbow. “I needed an image to keep you moving, so I was thinking of times I’d been running scared like you were, and what came to mind was being six or seven on what used to be my family’s cattle station in the Outback.”
“You mean, Before? You’re not old enough to—”
“After. Just listen. At first they pretty much left us alone out there, but the big famine finished that. My dad hung on as long as he could and when they finally killed him, the rest of us threw in our lot with the local tribesmen.”
I sat up. “Your father was killed?”
“One of the white gangs. I never knew which.”
“Gangs? You mean, Outsiders?”
He shoved upright, grabbed my head between his hands. “Don’t talk, listen! Let go of these kiddie bedtime stories! This is truth I’m telling you. Try to hear it!” He released my head, aware that he’d frightened me. “The real Outsiders are no
t those poor fuckers who hang around the domes for the charity. They’re all those people whose lives went on while civilization-as-we-knew-it crumbled around them: the farmers, the rural poor, the nomads, the tribal peoples, people who didn’t even know the domes were going up until they were already shut out of them, people who suffered and died by the millions but whose lives were so glancingly connected with so-called civilization that they had a chance of surviving without it. Or so they thought.”
He sat back, putting a distance between us. “And some of them did. So now there’s the people inside and then there’s everyone else out there, trying to put together some sort of a life for themselves. I never—are you listening?—never saw the inside of a dome ‘til I went on tour with the Eye. If anyone’s an Outsider, Rhys, I am.”
I said, “I don’t believe you.”
He sighed. “No, I guess not. I sort of hoped you would, but what’s one man’s word against a lifetime of domer conditioning?” He relaxed against the thick pile of pillows. “You wanted the ‘what,’ love, and here I am giving it to you. All of it.”
I was angry. “You think I’m gullible.”
“I thought you had an ear for the truth.”
“If this was true, we’d know about it! We’d—”
“What? How? You never go out there.”
I shuddered.
Sam leaned forward. “Those few who do know keep the truth to themselves to assure their control of the world’s resources. Think about it! The domes are a mega-cartel’s dream, a perfectly closed system. Nothing goes in or out without their say-so. Why do the planters want to dome Tuatua? Why is your power-broker Brigham on our ass? He and his CDL don’t want what’s closed to be opened. The planters want what’s open to be closed!” He stared at me, to be sure I was listening, then smiled, a tight proud private smile, and in his hand was the little wooden sphere with the twelve tiny figures, rolling round and round. “Nonetheless… over forty years the system’s sprung a few leaks. The Eye is one of them.”
Harmony Page 38
