Of Dreams and Rust (22 page)

“I will go say good-bye to him,” says Bo. “And catch up with you.”

Melik watches Bo stride after his little brother, but then Anni takes his face in her hands and kisses his cheeks before letting him go. “Fight well,” she says, then turns to me. “Heal well.”

I accept her fierce, sage-scented hug. “Thank you, Anni.” She releases me and clasps my hand, then leads me to Melik. She takes his hand and presses it to mine.

“Take care of each other,” she says, her voice strained. She turns abruptly and walks away.

Melik and I stare at our joined hands for a moment. He lets go first. “Are you sure you want to come, Wen?” he asks.

I rub my fingers over the spots he was touching, feeling the warmth fade. “I am sure.”

His mouth is a tight line as he nods. I follow him across the square toward the line of fighters with huge packs on their backs. The front of the line is already winding up a steep trail along the inner wall of the canyon. I keep hoping Melik will use this time to speak to me, that he will share what is in his head. Though we Itanyai tend to dwell within our own thoughts and keep most of them private, I have grown used to knowing Melik's mind—and I like it. I bite my lip, trying to think of how to ask, but he quickens his pace and catches up with a few young men and one young woman. They begin to converse in Noor, and I am left to myself.

I do not understand. But again I refuse to sulk. I am here to be the healer, and that requires all my focus. As we hike, I consider the supplies in my pack and develop a plan for triage. Melik wants to keep as many of his people able to fight as possible, so I will have to focus most of my attention on those I can save. Which means I will have to leave the gravely wounded to their fates. The thought does not sit well, so I turn my mind to hoping that Bo's strategy combined with Melik's will be devastatingly successful and yield few casualties.

Higher and higher we climb, like mounting an endless staircase. My breath huffs from my lungs and my thighs scream. I keep my eyes on the feet of the woman in front of me and let her steps set my pace. The sun beats down on us, and though the air is chilly, I sweat within my tunic and trousers.

Something heavy and clanking lands hard at the trailside, shaking the ground. The Noor woman and I fall to the trail, and for a moment I believe we are under attack—but then I see Bo rising to his feet. “I am going ahead,” he huffs. “I will see you at the end of the trail.”

He crouches, his metal limbs whirring, and then jumps onto the rock wall above us. The Noor woman in front of me whispers
“taslar”
as she watches his progress. He crawls like a spider along the wall before leaping forward again to land next to Melik, who is far ahead. As Bo lands, Melik swings around, his rifle slipping down his arm and into his hand, but then he rolls his eyes when he sees it is Bo. I hear Melik's harsh words from where I stand, telling Bo that he risks getting shot if he insists on sneaking up on people like that.

Bo laughs and walks next to him for a short time before leaping ahead again. I watch the sun glare off his armor until he disappears from sight, wondering how hot it must be in that suit. I hope he is drinking enough water, but I don't even know if he's carrying any.

As the sun descends into the west, we arrive at the spot Melik has chosen for battle. It is a spot in the canyon just to the east of where the ground is wide and flat. The concave rock faces to the west of this position give the appearance of a bowl, but we are in a narrow choke point. I smile as I take in the details of this location: the mostly dry riverbed with a trickle of water down its center, the flat ridges high above the ground. Melik was very clever to select this place. If we could stop enough machines here, it would make it very difficult for others to pass through. The scouts who left earlier have already set up large wooden crates on the ledges and have shoveled them full of dirt. The newly arrived fighters laugh and talk as they clean their rifles and make camp. Melik is standing next to a set of yellow strings. He shoos away a man who attempts to set up a campfire nearby, chuckling and mimicking a massive explosion. The man accepts Melik's teasing with good-natured grace and moves his fire several yards away.

My gaze follows the path of the strings, which diverge and disappear into cracks in boulders near the eastern part of the bowl, where the canyon opens up. The strings are fuses, and I am guessing the advance scouts have spent the last several hours packing blasting powder into holes and cracks they've chipped into the boulders with the pickaxes leaning against the wall near some of the supply packs.

We are at least fifty to sixty feet off the canyon floor, like being at the top of Gochan One. I lean over a ledge and see why Melik is concerned about putting men down there—it would be so easy to be shot or crushed, by metal feet or falling rock. My gut clenches as I consider that Bo wants to be down there. If he dies, I will feel the weight of his loss in my soul.

I keep my pack on as I walk slowly around the ridge, searching for Bo. Finally I spot his squared footprints in the dirt and follow them around a bend. From there they disappear, and I climb over the rocks when I hear cursing and metal clanking behind a boulder a few yards away.

Bo crouches in a flat, dusty area, sweat dripping from the exposed half of his face. His whole body is shaking. I scramble over the rocks and drop my pack. His head jerks up, and his face is pale with strain. “Leave me alone,” he whispers.

“Absolutely not,” I say, marching over to him. “You are destroying yourself. Tell me how to get this thing off you.”

“No,” he breathes.

I kneel in front of him and touch his face. “Look at me,” I say gently, stroking my thumb over his clammy cheek. His brown eye meets mine. “You must take care of yourself, or you will not be able to fight.”

He lets out an unsteady breath. “I don't feel safe—”

“Bo, please. Do you feel safe with me?”

His chuckle is hoarse. “Never. But I do trust you.” He closes his eye. “With some things. Help me undo the arm first?”

He murmurs instructions and I follow them carefully, my fingers slipping over gears to find latches that disconnect the framework over his human arm from the shoulder of the suit. It is tricky, slow business because I am scared that the spiders on his armor will awaken and slice off my fingers. Finally I open the arm like a clam and find his naked, trembling limb inside. His fingers twitch as I carefully pull the metal arm loose and set it on the dirt.

“No,” he snaps, then clamps his eye shut and softens his tone. “Please. Do you have a blanket in your pack? If the exposed gears get grit in them, it will wear them down.”

I retrieve my sleeping blanket from my pack and lay it over the ground, then set his metal arm on it before returning to him. Next he has me take off his helmet, but he asks me to leave his mask in place. His ebony hair is plastered to his head. I smooth damp strands from his face as he tells me to open the chest plate. He has strapped his tools, a bottle of machine oil, a length of cable, and a sack of spare parts across his ribs, over a dirty, sweat-stained undershirt. There is a small compartment beneath the armor over his abdomen that holds a loaf of flatbread and strips of dried beef.

With his teeth clenched, he stares at the rock wall as he explains how to unhook the armor from his machine limb, the one that's connected to his body at the stump of his amputated left arm. We leave that in place, since he's accustomed to wearing it and I believe he needs it to feel whole. Once his upper body is freed from its metal cage, Bo himself removes the metal frames over his legs. His flesh hand falters over the latches, but his machine hand is smooth and skittering and sure. His worn trousers are cleaner than his shirt, but still damp with his exertion. His ankles are swollen and bruised, and so is his wrist. There are worn, blistered spots at his elbow and along his collarbone. If he removed his pants, which I know he will not, I am sure I would see more blisters and bruises—signs that this metal skin he wears is eating him alive.

“How long have you been wearing this?” I ask, trying not to wrinkle my nose at his smell. He left the Ring almost a week ago for my sake, something he said he would never do. He came after me because he was unwilling to let me go. And as angry as he is at me, he is still my friend, still my Bo, my Ghost.

“I tried to take it off last night,” he mumbles, his eyelid drooping with fatigue. “But I couldn't quite manage it. I am sorry. I know I am a filthy mess.”

I take a cloth from my pack and pour a bit of water from my canteen over it. “Let's clean you off, then.” Moving slowly so that I can sense his needs, I peel the soggy shirt from his skin and run my cloth over his flesh. He shivers as my fingers pass over his bare stomach and lies back on the blanket. As the sun dries the sweat from his hair, I clean his body, my jaw tight with anger as I see what he has done to himself. “Bo, you must spend more time out of these frames than in them.”

His fingers skim my arm as I hand him my canteen. He drinks slowly before sinking back to the blanket. “How much advance warning do you expect us to have before the machines arrive, Wen? An hour? More like a few minutes. It takes me several to get the armor on.”

“I would help you.”

He shakes his head. “Please. Do not force me to argue with you about it.”

I stare at his half-face, wanting to rip his mask off. Before I met the Noor, I was never aware of how much we Itanyai leave unsaid, how rarely we seek help when we need it, but now my head is pounding with that knowledge. “You are beautiful and fine without the metal,” I say, my voice catching. “I like you better without it too. The parts of you I love the most are made of flesh, not steel.”

His eye shines before he blinks the surprise away. “Don't say those things to me. You don't mean them.”

I slap my palms onto my thighs. “Are you accusing me of lying?”

He shuts his eye. “Wen, what's the use of saying it? You married Red, and then you say words like that to me and I can't stand it.”

I cover my face with my hands. “It was the only way the Noor would allow me into their village. Would you have had me wander alone with no place to stay?”

“Honestly? I'm not sure which is worse.”

My hands fall away and I stare at him. “I'm not even sure if we are married,” I say quietly. “I'm not sure how it works. They have such strange customs here, and your arrival interrupted whatever was happening.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “I will not lie and say I'm sorry.”

I'm sorry. I bow my head, wiping grime from the backs of my hands. “Well, at least you will speak to me,” I say, clearing my throat to conceal the tremor in my voice.

Bo's fingers close over my wrist. “Is he mistreating you?”

Melik is treating me no way at all. Those words almost come out of my mouth, but it would be shameless and cruel to complain about this to Bo. I pat his hand. “This is not for you to worry about.”

His machine arm twists and his metal palm plants itself in the dirt. It pushes him up to a sit. “Do not speak to me like I am a child,” he says, low and rough. “Is . . . he . . . mistreating . . . you?”

“No,” I whisper.

“But you will come with me when this is over. You will return to the east, where you belong.”

“Yes.” At this point I'm not sure Melik would notice.

“Good. It will be as if this ridiculous marriage never happened.”

My stomach drops at his harsh words, and my heart follows it down when he snaps, “How long have you been eavesdropping?”

I turn to see Melik standing next to my pack. “I just wanted to see how you were doing after the hike,” he says to me in a flat voice. “I did not mean to interrupt your . . . conversation.”

“Melik—”

He puts up his hands. “It's all right,” he says quietly, then turns and heads down the rocks toward the trail.

Behind me, Bo is cursing and clanking as he pulls the metal frames over his legs. I move toward him, meaning to still the frenetic movements of his hands, but he bares his teeth at me. “Leave me alone,” he barks, his voice harsh with humiliation. “Get away from me.”

I shrink back at the vicious rumble of his tone, grab my pack, and scramble down the rocks away from him. Not wanting to appear in front of the fighters looking like I'm about to sob, I head farther down the trail, away from the camp, until I find a little nook between two boulders. I scoot inside and pull my knees to my chest, then lower my head onto them and try to slow my breathing. I hurt someone I care about no matter what I do.

Footsteps crunch up the trail, and I raise my head to see Melik standing in front of me. He peers at me for several long seconds, then sighs and tucks himself into the nook beside me. Together we stare across the canyon. “What was last year like for you?” he asks.

My eyes slip along the desolate peaks above us and the sky beyond them. “I was half here and half there.”

He pulls at a loose thread along the seam of his worn, dusty trousers. “And when you were there, you were with him.”

I lower my head to my knees again. “Obviously, he survived the building collapse.”

“Obviously. Many other things are obvious as well.”

I imagine what Melik must have witnessed just now, me with my hands on Bo's half-naked body, us talking about my maybe-marriage, and I cringe.

“You have shared many hours with him,” Melik says quietly. “Far more than you have with me. And you know each other. You understand each other.”

“Do we not understand each other?” I murmur, even though I know the answer.

“There are things I will never understand, Wen. Like there are things you cannot possibly understand, even if I explained them.”

“Even with time?”

“Even if we had time, I think not.”