Red Moon Rising

by K. A. Holt

  My eyes roll back in my head and I am fainting not from breathing troubles but from no breath at all. I am afraid the dactyl is flying us straight into space and the Red Crescent beyond.

  I can’t breathe.

  We are so high.

  One-two-three-four-five . . .

  But that’s as far as I get. My head lolls to the side, I catch a glimpse of the half-full cart sitting on the cooling flats like a dead beetle, and then there’s nothing.

  10

  THERE IS YELLING, BUT I can’t understand the words or sounds. Wind is beating my face with such ferocity I can barely open my eyes. I’m still tethered to Fist and the dactyl, but Fist has a hand gripping my knee. He’s shouting at me over his shoulder but nothing makes sense. I can’t decipher the vibrating words, but I can hear—and feel—the urgency behind them. I can see that in his squinting eyes and rapidly moving mouth he’s trying to impart something important. Maybe he’s warning me that we are about to crash into the Red Crescent, for it looms so immense in the sky I can see nothing else. The swirl of clouds on the enormous planet mimics my racing thoughts.

  I tear my eyes from the Red Crescent and look down. Dunes fly by. They’re as red as the blood that still flows freely down my arms and from my chest. The dunes look small enough to be night beetle nests. We are so high. I swallow and tighten my knees against the beast. We cannot be flying to the Red Crescent. That is impossible. I have not had rigorous study, but I do know humans cannot live in space. And I know there is space—however little—between this godsforsaken rock and that massive glittering expanse in the sky.

  It is somewhat calming to know we will not race into the vacuum that is surely only meters away. But where are we heading? Where is Temple? Is she hurt? And what of Boone? Is Papa dead? How long have we been flying? In what direction? Why can’t I see the other dactyls? I hazard another look down and see no homesteads, either. No blue glow of the cooling flats.

  I close my eyes against the brutal, slicing wind and for the first time feel the deep aching of my wounds. Or maybe it’s something else. Beneath my closed eyes I see Rory’s face. I see her pain from the shine tree needle, I see her trying to fight. I see the Cheese dragging her by one leg behind a horse.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  Rae. Do not think of Rory.

  I whip my eyes open, and water streams from them, but it is only from the howling wind, I tell myself. Only from the wind.

  Settling on the easiest of the questions racing through my head, I decide to determine where we are exactly. It would help to know how long I lost consciousness. It would help if I knew anything about the gum moon other than that it is smaller than the Red Crescent and that most lands on it are forbidden to Origin homesteaders.

  I look back down and only now do I realize why the dunes are so dark red, why the wind is whipping tears from my eyes and streaming them straight across my cheeks and into my ears.

  A storm is coming.

  No, not coming. A storm is here.

  It is dangerous to be anywhere outside when an electrical storm hits. Even being inside offers little safety during the worst storms. Being in the sky during one is unthinkable.

  I feel a tingle scuttle across my arms, see Fist’s long hair reach out to the sky, even in the harsh wind, and then the light is blinding. The crash is so gum loud I think it has surely made my ears bleed. The dactyl banks and suddenly the bloodred dunes are to my side instead of below me. My stomach lurches, and even though I can barely wrap my feeble mind around whatever is happening here, I am very thankful—at the moment—to be tethered to both the beast and Fist, who appears to be a very skilled rider.

  Fist shouts to me again and I shout back, “I don’t understand!” but the wind steals my words and throws them behind me like scrub in a whirling devil spiral. The dactyl rights itself. There’s another blinding bolt, another crash. The dactyl screams in protest and Fist screams something to it in return.

  Another flash.

  Another deafening boom.

  I remember that my gogs are hanging around my neck and I struggle to pull them up over my eyes so I can see through the slicing wind. In the distance is the gorge. The gorge! I have a moment of lunacy where I think of leaping from the beast and following the edge of the gorge home. But before I can figure out how to untie myself and survive a fall from the sky, the dactyl banks again and the compass in my gogs spins. We are now heading away from the gorge at a rapid pace.

  The creature aims its nose straight into the glow of the Red Crescent, which breaks through the storm clouds, and begins to climb yet higher. We are going into the storm, which doesn’t seem the wisest move, but I am not an expert on flying scaled creatures through electrical storms. I can only hope that Fist wants to keep himself alive, and thus me alive, as I am tethered to him. And yet, this seems like madness.

  Electrical bolts fly in every direction around us, making even the tiniest hairs on my neck stand tall. Wisps of gray clouds scurry past us as if they, too, are trying to escape. I can feel the thunderous booms deep in my chest, which I discover is still bleeding, but not as much as before.

  We climb and climb and I wonder if maybe Fist is trying to take us above the clouds. That would be smart, but the storm clouds appear to be endless. The bolts are coming faster and faster, until there is more time spent dodging them than flying straight. Fist must realize the futility of his attempt because he barks an order and kicks the beast and we descend in a dive that I fear will rip my clothes off and send them sailing out behind me into the sky.

  We emerge from the middle of the storm, and as the dactyl darts and dives to avoid more bolts I catch a glimpse of the ground beneath us. It is Old Settlement.

  Fist shouts orders and thumps the dactyl’s flank, not ungently, but with purpose. The creature swerves and darts away from the bolts and finally lands in a skidding plume of dust and scrub. The storm still rages around us, but we are on the ground again, and for that I am grateful.

  Fist quickly unties us and yanks me off the back of the beast. The dactyl screams in what sounds like fury and takes back to the sparking, fiery sky. Fist tightens his hand around my arm, so that it feels fairly glued there by sticky blood, and drags me behind a string of attached and abandoned Old Settlement buildings. This is not how I imagined learning about this place—at the hands of a murderous Cheese. I shiver despite the heat. If there are ghosts here, I pray that they are more merciful than Fist.

  Just as a bolt lands behind us and a crash rattles my teeth, Fist twists a knob and pushes open a door. He thrusts me inside a building, then follows, wrestling with the open door against the wind and then pushing it shut behind us.

  All is dark, except for what I can see illuminated from the flashes of the bolts.

  Oh, gods.

  I am trespassing on sacred ground. I am bleeding. I have been taken by the Cheese. But what I see before me is worse than all of those gum things put together.

  11

  IT IS A HAT, LYING upside down on a floor coated with inches of dust. Light flashes in from the windows and confirms my terror.

  It is not just a hat. It is Temple’s hat. It is torn. It is bloody. There is long blond hair stuck to part of it like a grotesque horsetail. Temple’s hat. Temple’s hair.

  Temple’s blood.

  I lean over and heave my meager lunch of biscuits all over Fist’s feet. Then, with no mind to what I’m doing, I strike him. A fist for a Fist. I haul off again and pound him in the throbbing oval on the side of his head, and as he takes a step back I slam him in the stomach. I run at him, full tilt, and knock into his scaled chin, feeling the sharpness of his skull bruise the crown of my head. He reels back and crashes into something I can’t see. I reach for my knife in my pocket and once again realize I am not wearing my apron. Gum stupid girl!

  The electrical flashes are coming less of
ten now and we are plunged into almost full dark. The windows are so crusted over with dirt and dust only the brightest light can seep through.

  Fist is only on the defensive for a moment. Soon he has regained his balance and lunges at me, twisting me around and throwing me up against a wall. There’s a crunching sound and at first I don’t know if it’s me or the wall. Then pain shatters through my body. Doesn’t he know you’re not supposed to hit girls? He’s not my father.

  Fist wrenches both my arms behind me and somehow—do the Cheese have three hands?—binds my wrists together. He whirls me around to face him.

  I spit at his smeared silver and gold paint.

  He smashes his fist into the side of my face and time slows. Stars explode into my vision, pain explodes even brighter. I fall to my knees, blood seeping from my mouth and dripping in long ribbons onto the shadowed floor.

  “You don’t. Hit. Girls,” I say, spitting blood at his feet.

  With flicks and trills of his tongue Fist shouts at me, grabs me by the hair, and yanks my head back so that I’m looking into his face. He pulls my hair tighter until I cry out, and he keeps shouting, his black eyes reflecting the bolt flashes, though I would not be surprised if they flashed on their own. The necklace of shriveled ears shudders at his collarbone, and I wonder if one of them belongs to Boone. I close my eyes before I am sick again.

  He releases my hair and my head sinks back down. I spit more blood and maybe part of a tooth into the dust. Another flash reveals Temple’s hat not three hands from me. The hair is not so much as I first thought. Neither the blood. Perhaps she is still okay. Wounded, yes, but alive.

  Fist grabs my hair again and this time pulls me to my feet. He shouts at me some more, then clamps a hand on my arm and yanks me forward through the darkness. The air is so close and stifling it is like walking through a room of secrets that have somehow taken solid form.

  The storm has all but stopped now and we are drenched in darkness. I hear a crack and then an orange glow lights up Fist’s sweating and scaled face as he turns to me. His voice is lower, but still seems angry. Words I can’t understand come vibrating at me like shards of metal. Why is he mad at me? Didn’t he expect me to fight back? I would just as soon have been left to my own devices at the cooling flats. I did not ask for this. Not on purpose, at least.

  Fist waves the light in front of my face and I recognize it as a kind of glowing flare, but without fire. A chemical reaction, Aunt Billie told us years ago when we had several of the things. They had been brought up from the Origin on the wings of angels. It looks like the Cheese have found a use for them, too. I wonder if they also use angels for goods deliveries.

  He is saying something to me in his rough voice and gesturing with the fireless flare. I stare at him dumbly, for I’m not concerned with what he’s trying to say. I am struck by my surroundings. With the eerie orange light showing me only small glimpses here and there of the room we’re in, I am still numbed by what lies before me. An expanse of tables, much smaller than our table at home. Chairs knocked over on the floor, or stacked in the corners. A long, tall table-type thing spans one whole side of the room, with tall chairs bolted to the floor in front of it. Behind the long, tall table is a wall of shattered glass, and along this wall of glass are shelves, some broken, some not. On the unbroken shelves are bottles filled with liquids of varying colors.

  Fist stops trying to talk to me and goes behind the long, tall table. He takes one of the bottles off an unbroken shelf and brings it around to me. He pushes me into a chair and it is only then that I realize how tired and weak I truly feel. I am warm, too, which is not unusual, and yet this sweaty warmth is bothersome, and itchy panic rises within me. Am I feverish? Nothing good comes of fevers. If I have learned anything from Aunt Billie working as the township’s physician, it’s that fevers are a sign of infection, and infection is a sign of bad gum news when the only true medicine you have is ancient and limited.

  Fist grabs me by the hair again, but gentler this time. With his other hand he rips the remains of my tattered shirt off, leaving me in only my bloodied, sleeveless shift. My wounds are fully exposed now, as I feel the rest of me is, too. Even more heat rises to my face.

  He releases my hair and squats in front of me. He holds up the bottle and tilts his head to the side. His eyes close and then open, staring at me intently. He says, “You. This. Hurt.” His mouth stumbles over the words, but I understand them. I open my mouth to respond, but before I can he’s standing as fast as an electrical bolt, one hand grasping my hair at the scalp, the other pouring the liquid from the bottle across my shoulders. It is like the suns themselves have set fire to my flesh. I cry out and struggle to leap from the chair, but Fist holds me fast by the hair, with a knee across my legs. He pours most of the contents of the bottle over my wounds as I shout and hiss at the pain.

  Surely, we are in an evil apothecary shop.

  He then wrests my head back and pours a slosh across my split lip and into my mouth. The liquid slips down my throat even though I resist, and I splutter and cough as it burns a path into my belly.

  I feel a quick heaviness in my arms and legs, a cloudiness in my brain, and I wonder why Fist would have risked so much to drag me into an Old Settlement building only to poison me in the end. When he is satisfied that I am tortured enough, he takes a large gulp from the remnants of the bottle and sighs deeply. Not poison, then. But what is it?

  And then I realize. Spirits. Like Papa drinks in the evenings of the nights he snores louder than usual. “For the constitution,” he often says. I guess whoever abandoned these buildings had many constitutions to build, for there’s enough of a supply of spirits to last a thousand summers.

  Fist now inspects each of my wounds with one hand, while still clamping on to my hair with the other. Grunting a sound that I hope means I won’t die from my wounds, he pulls me to my feet. I am dizzy from the spirits, or from the blood loss, I don’t know, but I have no choice but to follow the Cheese as he pulls me roughly behind him, the orange fireless flare leading us out of this room.

  The next room is empty but for a pile of . . . something . . . in a corner. Fabric of some sort, I cannot tell. Fist walks to the pile, and, yes, it is a bunch of stained and ripped shirts and pants. There are also discarded vials and needles, empty medicine packets stamped with the Star Farmers seal. But how can that be? Homesteaders have never been allowed in these buildings.

  Fist pushes and kicks at the pile until I see that underneath is a hatch, just like the hiding pit at home. I wonder if he means to take us into a pit to hide from the storm. It seems to be over, but they are known to flare back up and last for days.

  Fist lifts the trapdoor and descends a rickety set of metal stairs, pulling me in behind him. The stairs go some distance. This is no mere pit. By the time we hit soft dirt my heart is stopping and stuttering from the exertion and from the feeling of darkness closing in on me. Just when I’m afraid I will cry out from the dark, Fist holds the glowing orange stick in front of my face and gestures for me to stay. He then begins climbing back up the stairs.

  What?

  Is he going to leave me down here? Alone? With no light?

  I scramble for my gogs, knowing the night sight will only last seconds. They can barely hold a charge on normal days, and today the suns were blocked by those awful storm clouds.

  I click on the gogs and see Fist climbing the stairs. I zoom in, watching his lean bronze back covered in silver and gold spirals as he ascends. His clothes are a shirt and pants combined into one piece. The back and front of the shirt part are open, showing the paint. And the material fits him tightly, almost like a stocking for his body. It’s made of a material I do not know. Perhaps dactyl skin.

  Fist reaches the top of the stairs and pushes his head and torso up through the trapdoor.

  “You gum Cheese!” I yell. “You can’t just leave me here!”

 
I can’t see what he’s doing, but he’s not climbing all the way out. The muscles in his back contort. He’s pulling something. And then the trapdoor closes and he begins climbing back down the stairs.

  He was covering the trapdoor, I think. Just like at home. He’s not leaving me. I am awash with relief. It makes me want to laugh in a terrible way, to be relieved to still hold company with the Cheese who has wreaked such havoc upon me and my own.

  My gogs fail and I slide them back down around my neck. I can hear Fist’s footfalls clanking down the stairs, chasing away the crawling darkness. The faint orange glow shows his feet, clad in strange shoes that mold to his toes, showing each digit individually, as if he is wearing no shoes at all. In sharp contrast to the rest of his brutally elegant appearance, his shoes are so ugly they are almost indecent. But practical, I guess. Not nearly as heavy or sweaty as boots, and still offering protection from the blistering sands.

  Fist appears at my side and takes my arm. He leads me a few meters ahead and the walls begin to close tightly around us. We are in a tunnel.

  There is no end in sight.

  12

  FIST HAS PUSHED ME AHEAD of him to lead the way, I guess so I don’t try to turn around and run the other direction. He has given me the fireless flare to hold. It only lights a small distance in front of my feet, so I move slow. Plus, I am weak from my injuries and from the spirits, so I’m not sure I could move fast if I wanted to.

  I walk, trudging ahead. The tunnel has widened around us. It’s big enough for me to ride Heetle through, and only have to barely duck my head. I wonder if, wherever we’re going, I will see Heetle again. And Temple and Boone. Maybe even Benny, whom I don’t remember at all.

  And Rory. Of course, Rory.