Rift (14 page)

That got Spar’s attention. Cutting the meat into chunks and dropping them in the boiling water, he said, “More big-tech magic?”

“No big tech. But I got a knack for sneaking into places and not being seen. Or heard.”

Spar nodded vigorously.
“Now
we’re gettin’ somewhere.”

“I sneaked into the claver camp and stole their food. I stole into places on Station where they couldn’t see me, even when they were on the lookout for me. Part of it’s moving real slow. And part of it’s just a knack I have.”

“I can vouch for that,” Marie said in a droll tone. “We couldn’t keep the boy out of anything. I was for giving him the keys to Station and having done with it, but the brass had too much fun trying to catch him, I guess.”

“Brass is?” Loon piped in as she stirred the pot.

“They’re the ones in charge,” Marie said. “The chief zerters.”

Spar’s shoulders shook in a laugh. “I can see them brass tryin’ to find an invisible boy. Ha! Good on them!”

“Brass,” Loon said, “ran off and left us.”

“That’s right,” Spar said. Then in a lower voice he added, “That’s why those Mudders took the feet of your friends. For runnin’ to the big wheel and leavin’ us to starve.”

After that, they all watched the stew boil, each lost in private thoughts.

That night, Loon chose to sleep in the open, and Reeve and Marie had the tent to themselves for the first time since landfall.

“Marie,” Reeve said, speaking low. “There’s something I need to tell you. You awake?”

“Am now.” She turned toward him in the dark of the tent.

“I didn’t say anything before, because you were sick. But now … you should know.”

As Reeve struggled to make a beginning, Marie said, “Go on.”

“The shuttle crew didn’t all die. One person lived. For a while.”

“Who?”

“Grame Lauterbach.”

He told it then, Grame’s dark tale, as close to word-for-word as he could remember. He hated to put this on Marie, hated that it had been put on
him
. It twisted everything and made their trek more desperate than it damn well already was. Before, if they hadn’t been able to join their fellow Stationers, they would have died, or lived somehow for as long as they might. But now it was far more than just their lives. It was the very planet, the terrible and grand world itself, that Grame said was to be blasted apart, and everyone with it. And though Lithia was not a home he knew, it
was
his home, in a way he’d known just beneath the surface of consciousness, when, week after week on Station, he’d watched its great orb turning below him. But Marie, maybe Marie saw it as expendable. Maybe she’d take passage on the great ship and never think about a world with mountains and oceans and a scrawny claver like Spar and all his ilk.…

She listened in silence, never interrupting. He did wonder what she’d say. It was part of why he had waited to tell her, because though he was as close to Marie as to anyone, he’d never truly told her, not outright, that Lithia was the place that was
real
to him—that despite the Station exile, and despite her and Cyrus’ plans to Voyage On and search out new earths, it was Lithia he cared for.

He didn’t need her to agree with him that they had to thwart Bonhert. But she deserved to know.

“I’m going to stop him, Marie,” he said.

“He’s not an easy man to stop.”

“He killed Tina Valejo, too. Just pushed her off-Station. Why?”

Marie didn’t answer; she had no answers.

From the dark, a theory presented itself. A dark
thought: Maybe Tina was trying to stop him. And if so, there may have been others who wanted to stop him, others he needed to silence.

He spoke the thought, but in a whisper, to weaken its power: “Gabriel Bonhert destroyed Station. By the Lord … he killed them all.…”

“You’re wrong about that.” Marie didn’t want to believe it; nor did Reeve, for that matter.

He had known Bonhert for a bastard, but to destroy
Station
? Station factions couldn’t have prevented him from commandeering a couple shuttles, not if he had his supporters. But for God’s sake, why kill every living person they knew?

“He wouldn’t have the resolve to blow up Station,” came Marie’s voice.

“But he has the—
resolve
—to blow up Lithia?”

“That’s not the same. He’s indifferent to the planet.”

But Reeve’s mind was curling around that one dark thought. “Even if he didn’t have enemies on Station who would try to stop him, he still had to … do it. When the ship arrived, what if Stationers told what Bonhert intended? What would the ship think of having a planet whisked from their grasp? Maybe they’d pass on by—a good revenge on Gabriel Bonhert.”

“But surely he intended to bring everyone—everyone who knew his plans—on the terraforming mission. They’d all be off-Station. No one left to spill the beans.”

“He could never be sure who knew and who didn’t. Maybe Tina Valejo wasn’t supposed to know; maybe she was one of many.” He thought of Tina mouthing her screams, silently, bound for deep space. He thought of his father.…

“Bonhert seemed so passionate about reterraforming.” Marie’s voice was uncertain; she still didn’t want to believe it.

“He pretended to believe in it so he could prepare
for a mission down to the planet. My Lord, they must have been hiding their
real
research for years.”

“Why would he think the ship would be so keen on staying?” Marie asked. “Reterraforming was a terrible idea; scientifically, it didn’t measure up. He could have made his case to the new ship.”

Reeve was sick of talking. It was all clear to him. Enough talking. But he said: “Well, maybe he just didn’t want to leave it to chance.”

A poisonous silence descended. Finally, Reeve whispered: “So he believed in the stars after all. Just like my father.”

Marie snapped back, “He’s
nothing
like your father. Don’t ever say that.”

Reeve had thrown aside his blanket and was shoving his feet in his boots. Sleep was impossible now. As he left the tent, he muttered, “I’m going to kill him.”

“Yes,” he heard Marie say. “I suppose you are. You have to try.”

2

When the Stationer collapsed, Spar took over the pole, dipping it to the bottom and pushing the raft forward. The four of them had taken turns at poling. Now there would be only three of them to work. It was Reeve-boy’s turn to be sick.

The old woman named Marie called it
mike robes
. But Loon had seen the like before. It was orthong poison, and there was only one cure she knew of once a thong wound turned black. She scanned the hill country around them, looking for the platform trees. The grasses still covered the land, punctuated in these parts by black skeletons of trees, clumped into copses, as though death brought them together for a last comfort. This Loon had seen all their long journey that the small things endured and the big gave up and died. The grasses, the insects, the rabbits—they were as her
father described the old world. But this sea, and the tall trees, and the big-game animals—these changed or sickened as Lithia became new.

And now the Reeve-boy was lying on his back, taken ill. Maybe the orthong hadn’t spared his life after all. Better if it had killed him on that beach than to let him die the death that puffed you up into a black bag.

Old Marie shaded his face with a cloth as he rested. Her wrinkled but baby-white skin was starting to blister from the sun, giving her a mottled orthong look. Perhaps the lights of the tube they lived in did not darken their skin, and now they were truly like babies, born into this world with no defenses. Still, she hoped the Lady would be kind to them, strangers that they were. It was a thing Loon knew about, being a stranger.

In Stoneroot Clave she had been an outcast. Her father would not let them beat her, but, in secret, the other children pelted her with small stones, calling her Dirt Face and Mud Eater.
Crazy child
, the adults said when she refused to eat, and she took the name they gave her, Loon, because it was one less thing to fight about. Her mother would never have allowed it while she lived, but after Mother was gone, she begged her father to call her Loon, and he relented. But when he said
Loon
, his voice made it beautiful, like a musical note, and his eyes saw into her heart. When it was his turn to die of indigo, he told her she must leave. She was no longer a child, he said, and the clave grew crosser with her as she shunned their meals and thrived. Sometimes to please them, she would eat in their presence, but her vomiting afterward put them in a rage. Even Father couldn’t save her from every beating.

At last he extracted her promise to flee the clave. He set fire to their hogan, with himself inside it, and in the commotion of the blaze Loon crawled away into the hills. She hid up in the cliffs, keeping watch on the
distant flames. She didn’t think they would pursue her, and she was right, but she waited for a few days anyway, hoping for some proof that her absence was noted.

Now Spar was poling through the frothy sea. They steered their course close by the shore where their pole could reach the bottom. Hunks of the stinking suds mounded up onto the front of the raft and, to avoid being buried, one person always worked to free the bow of crud. Marie came forward to relieve Loon of that chore. The old woman was strong and not afraid of work, which was why they kept her. Now that Reeve-boy was sick, Loon waited for Spar to argue for leaving him behind, but he forbore, and this she took for a sign that Spar had warmed to Reeve. She hoped it might be, for she unaccountably liked this boy, and not just for his yellow tent, which was a wonder, but for the things he said, and his bravery with the orthong, and because he was handsome, with his deep brown eyes, the color of good soil.

Freed of the green scum work, Loon crawled back to sit by Reeve. She peered past the white cloths Marie had placed over his wound. Underneath, despite the ointment Marie applied, Loon could see the center of the wound turning purple. Marie’s grease was not working.

“Don’t touch the bandages,” Marie said from up front, adding “Mam,” with a glance at Spar.

Loon faced her. The old woman could not tell her what to do. If Loon gave the word, Spar would knock the woman into the water to test how she swam. If she sank, they’d know another thing zerters couldn’t do.

Instead, Loon turned away to watch the shore roll by, the scalloped edges of the Forever Plains, all green, with no hint of the splotches of red she searched for.

Up ahead, the sea cleared of gunk. In its choppy mirror, the sky looked broken, with shards of clouds
rocking in troughs of blue. Spar poled them with good speed in this new open waterway.

“Blue water,” Loon told Reeve-boy.

He opened his eyes. “Thirsty.”

She fed him water from the pouch Marie kept putting pellets into to kill the mike robes.

When he slept again, she announced to Spar, “I will swim.” Then, as he turned away for modesty’s sake, she stripped off her clothes and dove in. As hot as the day was, the water was cold, and her body vibrated with the shock of it. She swam with powerful strokes, in the way her mother had taught her long ago in the lakes of the Stoneroots. Exulting in the press of water all along her body, she dove for the darkness and then curled back up to the sun, with the sense of flying like a bird through the blue.

She felt her legs caressed by sea plants, great ribbons of silk floating in sun-soaked water. She held her breath as long as she could, nosing through the slippery growths, tinged red in their center veins. Rising to the surface, she treaded water. Spar held the raft nearby and waved to her. She waved back, then flipped into the sea again, drilling her body into the depths, reaching for the bottom, and a handful of sand. A fish was slurping its way along the bottom, creating a cloud of debris near its mouth. Ah. Here was a creature that tasted the soil and found it good. Perhaps Loon herself was a sea creature, then, or kin of fishes, since no other creature she ever met would feed on the soil. If so, this creature might know best where to dig her next meal. She rose to the surface, the sand streaming from her fingers.