The End Has Come (26 page)

“You wouldn’t have helped us,” Oni said.

“You knew?” Ishim said, looking at Karron, making it clear he was talking about the kids, not about the guns.

“Only last night. They weren’t our problem.” She lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. “Smugglers and questions, right?”

“We’re your problem now,” Oni said with the kind of smug smile only a child used to being the smartest person around could wear.

“And where do you expect us to take you? Ria?”

“We have been paid to take them that far,” Karron offered.

Ishim looked at Karron and shook his head with a small smile of his own.

“No,” Oni said. “Sanctuary.”

Karron laughed, the sound barking from her throat, surprising her. “That’s a myth. Hell, we told each other that myth in my crèche.”

Sanctuary. A place where they had tech that could take out the nanos. Tech to calm them, make a War Child normal again. A place where no one would make you kill, a place where no brothers or sisters went insane and had to be put down like rabid dogs.

A myth. A bedtime story told by motherless children. Told by killers.

“I have a map,” Oni said. “Give me your knife.”

Karron drew her knife, trying not to think of the throats it had cut today.

“Wait,” Ishim said, reaching for Oni as the boy cut into his own arm with a sure stroke.

Karron caught Ishim’s forearm and pushed him back. “He’s like me,” she said.

Oni pulled a small tube from under his skin. Already his nanos were closing the wound, the blood welling, slowing, and stopping even as she watched. He handed the knife back before opening the tube.

Inside was a map on thin paper. No, Karron saw, not paper. Leather of some kind. So thin that when he held it up in the firelight, the flames shone straight through. Illuminating lines. River lines. Numbers. A small star, done in red ink, like a drop of blood.

“Zouri to James, James to Dakota. Then west, to the Yellowstone and into the mountains. I have coordinates, see those numbers? Not a myth. It’s real. The ones who made us, they came from there. We were to be the new generation, the new kind of Child.”

“I am Eve,” Bee added. “I hate being Eve. Wanna be Bee. Bees can sting.”

“Jill and Nolan were from Sanctuary?” Ishim asked.

Karron was silent, still staring at the map, holding her breath, trying to decide if a legend could be real.

“No, they worked there. I don’t know what happened. Funding dried up. The Covenant doesn’t want more Children, I guess. They ended the program, and we were supposed to be destroyed.”

Karron tore her eyes from the map and looked at Oni. “History repeats,” she said softly.

“Marta, the woman you call Jill, she stole us. Said a baron would pay for us. She killed the others, but not before Sandy, the woman from Sanctuary, gave me the map and told me how to find it.” Oni leaned back against the piled blankets with a pained sigh and carefully rolled up the map.

The stew started to boil over. Karron turned away from the kids, from the map to an impossible place, and settled for dealing with dinner.

Later — her belly full of spring roots and rabbit — she stood at the edge of the river and watched lights smear across the darkening sky. Ishim came up beside her, making no attempt to hide his approach.

“Do we take them to this place, this Sanctuary?” he said.

“Tarik
is yours,” Karron said. She turned and looked at her friend. Her real words were unspoken.
Don’t make me decide.

“We been on the river a long time,” Ishim said. “Drifting up and down. Been a long time since I did anything but sail with my grief and try to outrun old memories.”

“We are alike,” Karron said, her mouth twisting into what felt like a smile. At least on the outside. “I like the river. Sanctuary is a dream, nothing more.”

“Maybe it’s time we stopped drifting,” Ishim said with a too-casual shrug. “Can’t just leave two kids on their own. But if you don’t want to go, we’ll set them down in Ria. That boy is smart as ten men. He’ll figure his way and take care of his sister.”

Karron nodded and looked back to the sky as Ishim moved back toward the camp. She walked to the very edge of the river. Water soaked through her boots, her toes going numb as she stood on the muddy bank. Oni and Bee. Children like she had been. Like she still was, in the bright moments she couldn’t quite seem to escape.

“Water, water, everywhere,” she murmured. Bending low, she dug her fingers into the mud and squeezed, feeling the gritty earth slide over her skin.

Sanctuary meant healing, meant being free of insanity, free of the things in her head. Myth. Myth like War Children were becoming a myth. Another generation, and they’d be as forgotten as most of the texts and histories from before the Ring, as much legend as the Archive was legend, as the great Wars would become in thirty or fifty more years.

Ishim was right. She had been drifting on the river. But now she had a brother and sister again. And they had a map. A map to a dream.

Karron bent down and let the river wash the last traces of grit from her hand.

Maybe it was time to dream again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Annie Bellet
is the author of
The Twenty-Sided Sorceress
and the Gryphonpike Chronicles series. She holds a BA in English and a BA in Medieval Studies and thus can speak a smattering of useful languages such as Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Welsh. Her short fiction is available in multiple collections and anthologies. Her interests besides writing include rock climbing, reading, horseback riding, video games, comic books, table-top RPGs, and many other nerdy pursuits. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and a very demanding Bengal cat. Find her on her website at anniebellet.com.

2055
Republic of Sacramento
Carrier Territories

Nayima’s sleep had turned restless as she aged, so the rattling from the chicken coop outside woke her before her hens raised the alarm. The intruder was likely either feline or human, and she hoped it was the former. A cat, no matter how big, wasn’t as dangerous as a person.

Nayima ignored the sharp throb in her knee when she jumped from her bed and ran outside with her sawed-off in time to see a hound-sized tabby scurrying away with a young hen pinned in its teeth, a snow globe of downy white feathers trailing behind. The army of night cats scattered in swishing bushes and brittle leaves. The giant thief paused to look back at her, his eyes glowing gold with threat. The cats were getting bigger.

Nayima had been saving that hen for Sunday dinner, but she was too winded to chase the thief. Now both knees throbbed. And her lower back, right on schedule. She fired once into the dark and hoped she’d hit him.

Fucking cats.

The dark was thick to the forsaken east, but to the west she saw the gentle orange glow from the colony in Sacramento, the fortress she would never enter. The town folk had electricity to spare, since their lights never went fully dark anymore. They were building a real-life Emerald City from the ruins, with bright lights and fresh water flowing in the streets — literally, after the levees flooded back in the ’20s.

By contrast, her tract, Nayimaland, was two-hundred acres of dead farmland she shared with feral cats made bold because food was scarce — taken by drought, not the Plague. The late State of California had yet more dying to do.

Nayima felt thirsty, but she didn’t stop at her sealed barrel to take a scoop. She couldn’t guess how long her standing water would have to last. Sacramento owed her water credits, but she would be a fool to trust their promises.

At the rear of the chicken coop, Nayima found the hole the cat had torn in the mesh and lashed loose wires to close it. The hens were unsettled, so she could expect broken eggs. And she couldn’t afford to cook one of her reliable laying hens, so she’d have to wait for meat at least another week, until trading day.

By the time Nayima came back to her porch, her two house cats, Tango and Buster, had gathered enough courage to poke their heads up in the window. For an instant, her pets looked like the thief cat, no better.

“It’s okay, babies,” she said. “One of ’em got a chicken.”

Buster, still aloof, raised his tail good night and went to his sofa. But Tango followed her to her bedroom and jumped beside her to sleep. Nayima preferred a bare mattress to the full bed that had been in this room — fewer places for intruders to hide and surprise her. She slept beneath the window, where she could always open her eyes and see the sky. Tango rested his weight against her; precious warmth and a thrumming heartbeat to calm her nerves.

“I can’t feed you all,” she told Tango. “I’m crazy for taking in just you two.” Tango slowly blinked his endless green eyes at her, his cat language for love. Nayima returned Tango’s long, slow blink.

• • • •

Nayima thought the jangling bells outside soon after dawn meant that a cat had been caught in a cage, but when she went to investigate, she found Raul’s mud-painted red pickup slewed across the dirt path to her ranch house. He was cursing in Spanish. His front tire had caught a camouflaged cage, and he was stooping to check the damage. At least a dozen sets of cats’ eyes floated like marbles in the dry shrubbery.

“Don’t shoot!” Raul called to her. He knew she had her little sawed-off without looking back. “You’ll blow off your own culo with that rusty thing one day. ¿Es todo, Nayima?”

Despite the disturbance and his complaining, Nayima was glad to see Raul. He looked grand in morning sunshine. Raul’s eyes drooped slightly, giving the impression of drowsiness, but he was handsome, with a fine jaw and silvering hair he wore in two long braids like his Apache forebears. Since reconciliation and the allotment of the Carrier Territories eight years ago, Raul looked younger every time she saw him.

Nayima had turned sixty-one or sixty-two in December — she barely tracked her age anymore — and she and Raul were among the youngest left, so most carriers had died before the territories were allotted. In their human cages.

Captivity had been their repayment for the treatment and vaccine from the antibodies in their blood. They were outcasts, despite zero human transmissions of the virus after Year One. The single new case twenty-five years ago had been a lab accident, and the serum had knocked it out quick.

The Ward B carriers Nayima had barely known still lived communally, or close enough to walk to each other’s ranches. But Nayima had chosen seclusion on an airy expanse of unruly farmland that stretched as far as she could see. In containment, she’d never had the luxury of community, except Raul. She had enough human contact on her market trips, where she made transactions through a wall. Or her hour-long ride on her ATV to see Raul, if she wanted conversation. Other people wearied her.

“Sorry — cat problem,” she told Raul. “Did it rip?” She had a few worn tires in her shed from the previous owner, but they were at least forty years old.

Raul exhaled, relieved. “No, creo que está bien.”

She squatted beside him, close enough to smell the sun on his clothes. She had not seen Raul in at least thirty days. He had begged her to share his house, but she had refused. She needed to talk to him from time to time, but she remembered why she did not want to live with him, and why she had slept with him only once: Raul’s persistent recollections about his old neighborhood in Rancho Cucamonga and his grandparents’ house in Nogales were unbearable. He always wanted to talk about the days before the Plague.

But after forty years, he was family. He’d been a gangly fifteen-year-old when the lab-coats captured him. Shivering and crying, he had webbed his fingers to reach toward her hand against the sheet of glass.

Nayima missed skin. She felt sorry for the new children, being raised not to touch. She absently ran her fingertips along the dirt-packed ridges in the tire’s warm rubber.

“Do you have meat?” she said.

“Five pounds of dried beef,” he said. Nayima didn’t care much for beef, but meat was meat. “In the back of the truck. And a couple of water barrels.”

Water barrels? A gift that large probably wasn’t from Raul alone, and she didn’t like owing anyone.

“From Sacramento?”

“You’re doing a school talk today, I heard. Liaison’s office asked me to come out.”

Nayima’s temper flared. She could swear she’d felt a
ping
at her right temple an hour before, waking her from fractured sleep. The lab-coats denied that they abused her tracking chip, but was it a coincidence she had a school obligation that day? And how dare they send so little water!

Nayima was so angry that her first words came in Spanish, because she wanted Raul’s full attention. He had taught her Spanish, just as she had taught him so much else, patient lessons through locked doors. “Que me deben créditos, Raul. They owe a lot more than two barrels.”

“You’ll get your créditos. This is just . . .” He waved his hand, summoning the right word. Then he gave up. “Por favor, Nayima. Take them. You earned them.” He tested the air pressure in his tire with a pound of his fist. “Gracias a Díos this is okay.”