Beat (11 page)

I wanted to punch the raspy-voiced blond man. What a bug-eater.

Stan called three of the men with weapons and sent them back out to patrol the forest. I assumed they were to take the place of him, Dolfo, and Mat.

Mat helped me sit on a small chair that looked like it folded up. “Wendy,” he called out. “Bring your kit.” He helped me out of my zip and dropped it to the ground.

A blond woman, her hair just short of her shoulders, jogged over a moment later. She was young, maybe three or four years older than me. She carried a black case with a soft covering. Snapping it open, she kneeled in front of me. “What’s the damage?”

“Not sure,” Mat said, touching the woman gently on her shoulder. “His right arm might be broken.” He bent and examined my elbow. “It’s torn up pretty bad.” He grimaced. “We didn’t help. Tried to bind him but he collapsed and screamed.”

As Wendy bent to examine my arm, I felt myself start to shake. The adrenaline from the pain and fear of the last half hour had obviously faded. I clenched my jaw, trying to hold myself together.

“What happened?” Wendy asked. She was trying to be gentle, but every movement of my arm felt like I was being stabbed.

I tried to explain, but couldn’t get the words out. I cleared my throat. Swallowed. “I fell. Hit my elbow.”

“What else?”

I met her gaze. She had lifted my shirt. Black and purple spots the size of small fists covered my torso. Wendy moved behind me and pulled the shirt higher. “Pull your left arm through.” She sounded like the Meds in New Frisko: zero sympathy.

Wendy worked my shirt over my right arm and dropped it to the ground on top of my zip. “You’re covered in bruises. Scrapes, too. A couple of cuts. Bullets, it looks like.”

I hissed as she touched a few spots on my back and neck. “Good to know,” I said. “Any painkiller?”

“Sure,” Wendy said. “But what happened?”

Was she serious? She was going to keep me in pain until I told her the story? “I had to get out of New Frisko. The Enforsers didn’t want me to.”

“Why? What’d you do, kill someone?” Wendy had made her way all the way around me and now crouched in front of me.

A beat. Then another heartbeat. Bren. Again, I couldn’t speak. My face heated up as the image of Bren’s dead face hit me. Yes. I’d killed someone. Grief and guilt made me want to curl into a ball. I looked away, my vision blurring.

“Hey, no. No, sorry,” Wendy said. Her hand, hot and gentle, touched my knee. I looked down at her arm. It looked strange. “I’m sorry. It’s okay.” I heard her pull something from her open case. “Here. This will help the pain.”

The sharp jab of the needle was almost undetectable against the flood of agony that still throbbed in my arm. “Can you move it?”

I was glad that her questions had stopped and that she had given me the shot, but I almost regretted that she didn’t ask more. The need to unload the burden of last night was suddenly almost too much. “No, not much.”

“There’s a lot of swelling, but I don’t feel any major break. We’ll image it in a few minutes.”

“Do you still need me?” Mat asked. I glanced up at him. He was watching a group of men, with Dolfo and Stan at the center, who were talking near one of the tents.

“Not for now.” Wendy offered Mat a warm smile. He touched her shoulder again and moved away. “Is that kicking in?” She searched my face.

Miraculously, the painkiller she’d given me had brought the agony in my arm down some. I didn’t dare move the arm for fear the pain would come back. “I think so.”

“We’ll give it another few minutes, and then I’ll image it so we can figure out what’s going on in there.”

“Okay.”

Her eyes, dark green, held mine tightly. “You’re going to have to tell us what happened sometime. You need to be ready.”

I nodded. The pain dropped another notch. “Okay.”

“Let’s start with your name,” Wendy said.

“Nik.” I glanced around the campsite. People had gone back to their tasks but were no longer taking down the campsite. They were moving slowly, and everyone looked my way every few seconds. “Nik Granjer.”

Wendy put her hand back on my knee—there was still something strange about her arm—and she stood. “I’m Wendy.” She followed my gaze and then turned to me again. “We’re Wanderers.”

I heard the way she said the last word. It was how people of New Frisko said they were “Friskans.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. I sighed as the pain in my arm settled to a dull throb.

“We don’t belong to a city, or any person. We live the way we choose.”

That sounded incredible. “But they let you?”

“They try to find us,” she held up her left wrist, and I realized why her arm seemed so strange-looking. “But no Papas means no tracking device. And no knockout.”

I glanced at my left arm. “I don’t, either. Have the tracker, I mean.”

“I know. If you did, you wouldn’t be here. We scanned you.”

“I took it out before I left New Frisko.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Really? Good with tech? You might come in handy.”

A little seed of hope planted in me. “I can stay?”

Wendy pulled a complicated-looking device from her bag. She unfolded a cuff and slid it up my arm, widening it as she pushed it. “I don’t know. That depends on a lot of things.” She held the cuff just above my elbow. The device activated with a soft beep.

This was her imager. I’d never seen one so compact. The ones that the Med Teks in New Frisko used were much larger.

The group of men, now including Mat, Stan, Dolfo, and three others, approached and stopped in front of me.

“Who are you?” This was asked by the shortest of the men; he had to be shorter than me by an inch or two. His reddish-brown hair was long but well kept. He had a narrow beard just under his lip that went in a straight line down his chin and stopped right above his Adam’s apple.

“Nik Granjer.”

“You came from New Frisko?” I wondered if this guy was the leader of the group.

“Yeah.”

“Why?” His blue eyes were the color of an early twilight sky. “Why did you leave?”

I swallowed, fighting back the image of Bren on the street. “Something happened. I couldn’t stay.”

“What happened?”

“Small stress fracture in the ulna,” Wendy said, standing. “That’s why it hurts so much, but it will heal okay if you keep it immobile.” Her eyes met mine.

Grateful for the moment she’d given me to gather my thoughts, I decided to tell the whole story. “I might be immune to the Bug.”

Several of the men exchanged looks, their expressions unreadable.

“What?” I asked. Wendy was studying me with a strange expression, almost pitying.

“What’s your name again?” Mat said.

“Nik.”

“Nik.” Mat let out a breath. “Look. There’s no Bug. It’s gone.”

“No, it’s not.” I tried to keep the tremor I felt in my chest out of my voice. “It’s not.”

“Yes, it is,” Wendy said. She crouched again and started working on my injured arm. “You saw that we don’t have those festering Papas. No Papas, no knockouts. Nobody out here dies of the Bug and we don’t care about our heart rate.”

“Forget it,” Dolfo rasped. “Tell us why you’re here.”

I leveled a glare at him. The Bug had to still be in the air. Why else would Bren have died?

“Nik,” the short man said. “We need to know what brought you out here. It’s a dangerous thing to trust people here in the wilderness.”

He talked funny. He didn’t sound natural, more like the way a programmed bot would speak if the programmer wanted to make it sound human.

The leader crouched next to Wendy, using a penetrating gaze to try to get my attention. My teachers had been trying to do that for years; it didn’t work. I didn’t mind telling these people my story, but this guy kind of got on my nerves.

“My name is Gabe,” he said. “I’m the leader of this triune. It’s my job to keep everyone here safe. I want to help you, but these people,” he stood again and gestured at the campsite, “are my family. They come first.”

I nodded. “It’s okay. I’ll tell you what happened.”

As I spoke, Wendy continued working on my arm. She stopped for a moment, giving my leg a squeeze as I related what had happened to Bren. I tried to keep that part brief, but I still had trouble getting through it.

Within a few minutes, more of the people had come, some of them bringing extra chairs. Everyone was sitting by the time I got to breaking into the Enjineering Dome. A few children played near a big tent. One of them glanced at me with the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. I looked back at my audience again. I decided to leave out specific mentions of the CyJet. I wanted to trust these people, and most of them seemed nice and even normal, but Gabe made me nervous. He’d even said that trust was dangerous. Having the CyJet as my secret backup felt like the smart move.

“So I found another way out and ran for it. I got on my cycle,” the lie hurt a bit, but there was no other way to explain how I’d come so far. I talked about finding a place to hide and taking out the tracker and the knockout from my Papa.

“Why didn’t you just take the whole thing off and toss it?” Stan asked. “Easier that way.”

“Yeah,” I said slowly, thinking fast. “But I thought they might take a while looking for the tracker, since it’s so small, before they realized they weren’t following me anymore.” I stopped. That made sense, right? It only took me a few more minutes to tell the rest of the story. “I rode fast the entire night. I haven’t slept or eaten. My cycle died a ways back.”

I hoped they wouldn’t ask too many questions.

By the time I was done, my right arm was wrapped tightly in a bandage that seemed to be hardening by the minute into a light cast. The cast went all the way up past my elbow, locking my arm into a bent position. Wendy had also tied a sling around my neck to hold the arm up.

“You rode nearly a hundred kilometers in one night?” Gabe’s voice dripped with doubt.

I looked at my Papa. “A night and half a day, yeah. I didn’t want to be caught.” I swallowed, taking a slow breath to calm my pounding heart. “I still don’t.”

“With a broken arm?” Dolfo smirked.

I glared at him. “I don’t pedal with my arms.”

A moment of silence lengthened into a minute. Some of the men glanced at each other, but everyone waited, clearly deferring to Gabe.

He finally sighed. “And why did you come south?”

“Anjeltown. I thought I could figure out if I was actually immune there, where nobody knows me.” It was nice to tell a simple truth. I was glad I hadn’t lied much and wondered again if I should have lied at all.

Gabe just gave me a bad feeling.

“And you just happened to find us?”

“I saw the smoke. It wasn’t hard. I was at the stream over there,” I pointed with my chin back toward the road. “If you don’t want people to find you, maybe you shouldn’t have a fire.”

Gabe’s eyes widened. Then he smiled, although the smile got nowhere near his eyes. “It’s certainly true that our fire was not up to our normal standards earlier.” He gave a boy a couple years younger than me a pointed look. “Not everyone has mastered the art of the smokeless fire yet.”

Now that the story was over, people had started filtering off. Soon only Gabe, Dolfo, Mat, Stan, and Wendy remained.

“Well, Nik,” Gabe reached for and grabbed Stan’s arm and nodded at the bearded man. Stan walked toward one of the five or six tents. “We have no reason to disbelieve your story.”

I had no idea how to respond to that. “Uh, good?”

“You must be hungry,” Gabe said. “Mat, Dolfo, would you please get Nik some lunch?”

Mat gave Gabe a quizzical look but obeyed. He and Dolfo made their way to the fire.

“Thanks,” I said.

“How is his arm?” Gabe turned his strangely insincere gaze on Wendy.

“It’s not a bad break, but it will take a while to heal all the way. The cast should stay on for a couple of weeks. He had a pretty bad gash on the elbow, but that’s clean and closed now.” Wendy walked slowly around me. “He’s covered in all kinds of bruises, a few from rubber bullets, others from who knows what. A couple shallow cuts from what I guess were bullets. The real thing. Nothing to be done for those, and they’ll heal soon enough.”

Gabe extended his arm expansively. “Welcome to the Wanderers. We are the Hawk triune.”

“Triune?” My legs were beginning to cramp up, so I extended them, needing to adjust my balance so the small chair didn’t fall over.

“That’s right,” Gabe said. “Wendy, thank you. If you would help break camp.” Wendy took her satchel and headed off, giving me an encouraging smile as she went. Gabe turned back to me. “Triunes are how the Wanderers organize themselves. Triune means three in one. We are three families who have come together to live our lives with one purpose: to live our way, free of the oppression of the New Chapter.”

It sounded like paradise. As Gabe continued, I watched as everyone pitched in to break the camp. They must move their campsite every day. The tents were incredible. They were all the same, and each one stood at least two meters tall. At their base, they had to be at least six meters on each side. They looked like the back of a creature we’d studied called an armadillo, with long, curving, articulated panels extending from the ground on one side of the tent to the ground on the other side. The pieces gave the tent a domed appearance, which must have been great against rain.

It looked like one tent had been completely emptied because as I half-listened to Gabe go on about the freedom of the wilderness, I saw a woman step on a small, hand-sized pad attached to the front of a tent. Before doing so, she had closed the front of the tent so that it was all smooth, curving pieces of some kind. It wasn’t just fabric; it had to be some kind of synthetic material that could stiffen up somehow. When the woman stepped on the pad, the tent shook a couple of times. The articulated panels seemed to loosen, and then the bottom-most front panel slid up into the next one. Then those panels, which now looked like one panel, slid up into the next one. And so on, until the entire tent had collapsed steadily into one thicker panel that sat on the ground.

Then the last, much thicker, panel folded in on itself twice. All that was left was a rectangle the size of a cycle wheel and a ground cloth. The woman seemed to have no trouble lifting the tent rectangle, and she stowed it in a nearby pack.

“What all of this means,” Gabe said. He wasn’t even looking at me. “Is that Wanderers are very protective of their freedom. We get together once every year to counsel, and sometimes we cross paths with other triunes, but usually we are on our own. Which is how we like it. And we stay under the radar of Enforsers and Ranjers.”

“What’s a Ranjer?” I wanted one of those tents. Maybe I could start a family and become part of a triune. I couldn’t imagine a better life. No blaring Speekers, no Admins. No boring classes.

“An Enforser whose job is specifically to patrol the wilderness, looking for Wanderers and escapees from their cities.” Gabe’s expression said a lot.

Escapees like me. There were more like me.

Dolfo showed up then with a lightweight plate filled with some kind of glistening, dark material, what looked like tomatoes, and what I guessed was cheese. A fork and knife were stuck in the dark material. Dolfo handed the plate to me with a smirk, lifted his eyebrows at me, and then departed again.

“Please,” Gabe said. “Enjoy your lunch. We will be leaving shortly.” He wandered away.

Stan was right behind Dolfo with a cup in his hand. “Here you go.” His voice was soft, as if it had to fight through his thick beard.

I sipped the drink. It was sweet and tart. And really good. I took a few gulps and had to fight the urge to slurp it all down. I set the cup on a flat rock near me and gobbled the tomatoes and cheese. The tomatoes were strong and so full of tomato water that some dribbled down my chin. I’d only seen cheese in pictures, so I was surprised by how thick the flavor was. It had looked like a basic protein paste block. I poked at the dark stuff. It was rectangular and firm, but also kind of soft. It looked like it had been cooked over a fire. I stabbed it with the fork again and pale red juice dribbled out the holes left behind.

Awkwardly using my left hand, I cut the thing with the sharp knife. I blinked drowsily. I needed more sleep. Spearing the chunk I’d cut off the weird stuff, I popped it in my mouth with a little fear. Kind of salty; firm, yet easily chewed. I’d never had anything like it.

“What is this?” I asked nobody in particular, since everyone in the camp was occupied with other tasks.

A little girl who was passing by just then glanced at me. “Deer, duh.” She laughed. “Didn’t you ever eat deer before?”

So surprised that I almost choked, I coughed. “Deer?” I knew what a deer was; we’d learned in Ekology.

“Sure! It’s too salty today, but that’s ‘cause Ana made it, and she cooks bad.”

I was eating deer meat. It was good. I took another bite. This was nothing like the protein pastes we got in New Frisko. I hoped I could stay awake long enough to finish it.

The little girl dashed away. I swigged more of the drink and cut the deer meat into a few more chunks.

Why was I suddenly so sleepy? Must have been because of last night’s insanity. The last morsel of deer meat was just as delicious as the first.

When I woke up maybe an hour later, I found the last bite still in my mouth.