Reading the Wind (Silver Ship) (3 page)

The cliff fell down away from us, yielding a long view. Artistos already seemed small from this height, the neat rows of houses and big oval of Commons Park looking like children’s toy blocks, or a painting on a wagon side. The Lace River looked like a small winding snake, and smoke puffed from the industrial area on the far side of the river. I took a deep breath, happy to be away from the noxious smells of the town. I hadn’t noticed them often when I lived there, but now that visits to Artistos were rare, its smelter and mill smell had become noticeably
aromatic
.

I closed my eyes and took another deep breath of forest and running
water and sweaty hebra, of the oil used to lubricate the wagon wheels and of the goats and chickens we brought with us from Artistes. Only then did I look out over the grass plains, to the empty concrete pad, even smaller and further away than Artistes. The silver ship, the New Making, had sat on the pad until the year I was seventeen. When Joseph flew away.

Perhaps Akashi sensed my feelings. He climbed up on the wide seat next to me. “Still hard?”

The first year, he and Liam had stopped here with me. I had cried on their shoulders for hours at the loss of Joseph, of Bryan, and of Jenna. “Not as hard as it used to be.” I swallowed and gave Akashi a soft smile. “He should be getting to Silver’s Home any time.”

“I’m glad you stayed. You’ve been a help.”

Praise from him still made me warm, even though it was no longer rare. “Don’t worry, Akashi. I’m happy.” I sighed. “I know I did the right things—the best ones, anyway. It just doesn’t stop me from wondering what it’s like on the ship.”

Akashi laughed. “Don’t worry too much about the paths you don’t go down.” His expression turned serious. “Besides, you’ll probably outlive us all, and it’s hard to imagine any paths closed to you.” He climbed down from the wagon and took my hand, briefly, squeezing it. “Call me if you need anything.”

I smiled. “Sure. Thanks for stopping.”

“Are you and Liam going to the cave tomorrow?”

I nodded. “Yes. Sasha promised to drive my wagon for the day we’ll lose.”

“That’s good for her. She’ll do well.” Akashi walked off to check on the other wagons. Two boys, Justin and Amil, came over to Stripes and stood in front of her with a skin of water. She drank noisily, shaking her head up and down and splashing.

The boys, one tall, one short, laughed and wandered off, and a few moments later the long train of twenty-two wagons started back up the hill. New growth had covered the raw scars left by boulders and trees as they’d tumbled and fallen over the cliff face, and butterflies flitted through the bright yellows and whites of the spring flowers. I sang my way through the tumbled stones and the bones of the old rock fall. As I sang, I silently wished my adoptive parents, Therese and
Steven, good journeys. They had died here. I sang for them, to show them I was healthy and strong.

T
he next morning, just before dawn, I poured myself a cup of sun tea made the day before, now cool and tart, and pulled out a handful of small dried apples from last year’s harvest. As I ate, light slowly faded the stars. This must have been the time of day Jenna most often snuck into the cave herself. She had shown it to us just a few days before she and Joseph left. It had once been a war base for our altered parents, and Kayleen used to joke that we were probably born there. During the years Jenna had spent living by herself on the outskirts of town, she had gathered many artifacts from the war, altered weapons and altered communication devices and altered tools and clothes. Our legacy. Much of it stashed in this cave.

Sasha’s footsteps crunched across the road. Her dark eyes glittered with excitement. She greeted me warmly. “Good morning. How are you?”

Her excitement made me smile. “Great.” I reached for a dried pongaberry, shrunk to half-size and flat. “Would you like to help me harness Stripes?”

She took the berry from me and went to get Stripes, her dark hair contrasting with Stripes’s dun base coat and the yellow and light brown stripes that gave the hebra her name. Stripes bugled a soft greeting to her, and immediately nudged her for the treat. Greedy beast. Sasha fed her the berry delicately and then led her back. She had helped train Stripes to the wagon, and she and I had spent many days gathering pongaberries and twintree fruit and wild onion.

As we each picked up one end of the shoulder and chest strap to drop it over Stripes’s head, she asked, “Where do you go? You always leave on this day and come back sometime the following morning. Is it so you and Liam can have quiet time together?” There was a hint of mischief in her voice. “I bet you two can run fast enough to get to a lake cabin in less than a day.”

I laughed, saved from answering by Liam’s enthusiastic, “Good morning!”

It took us a few more moments to extract ourselves. The morning shadows were still long when we started off, purposely heading in
the wrong direction. After about ten minutes of easy loping, warming and stretching our bodies in the cool air, we turned up, still angling wrong, increasing our speed, racing each other. Redberry bushes and grasses slapped my legs. Spiky trip-vine and stinging ivy threatened to tangle our feet. Where the trees thinned to scrub, we turned almost back on ourselves, heading for the top of the ridge that separated the High Road from Little Lace Lake. We stopped at the high point, breathing hard from the long run and scramble.

He put an arm around me, holding me close, his breath only a little hard. “I love being out here, with just you and the wild.”

I laughed at him, my face warm from more than just the run. “We’re always in the wild.”

He shook his head. “Maybe it’s leaving Artistos. I’ve never liked town.”

A pair of knotted twintrees—one taller than the other—twined around each other like lovers below us. Liam leaned down and kissed me, and I returned the kiss, fiery and hard. A tempting distraction.

But the cave called. I pulled away gently and gazed up at him. “Let’s go.”

We approached the cave from the top, dropping down, my feet stinging as I landed on the smooth floor. I reached up for the shelf we kept our flashlight on.

My hand came back empty.

“I have it.”

Kayleen stood just inside the shadowed darkness of the cave’s mouth, sunlight touching her face and darkness filling the void behind her. Her legs were spread wide and stiff, her dark hair combed neatly around her face. The dark blue of her eyes glowed nearly black, glittering and feral, a contrast to her unusually neat appearance. Her voice went with her hair rather than her eyes, too sweet for Kayleen, as if she were speaking a line she’d practiced over and over: “Hi. I knew you’d come here. I wanted time to talk to you. I’m sorry for being rude last night.”

Liam sat cross-legged on the floor, like he sometimes did when talking to a misbehaving child. Kayleen responded the same way children responded to the gesture, sitting herself, fairly close to him but opposite. I sat, too, so we made an uneasy triangle on the cave floor.
I blinked at her, unsure what to say. I finally just said, “I’m sorry. I care about you, and I came looking because I hadn’t seen you.”

Only then did she look directly at me. “Do you really miss me?” she asked.

“Of course I do.” How could she question that?

Her voice was even and sweet, cool. “I bet you don’t. You didn’t even look for me the first day you came down this time.”

“I had to help set up for Trading Day. I watched for you all day.”

“You’re in love. I see it in your eyes.” She glanced at Liam, the wildness in her eyes shaded with longing. For a moment she looked as vulnerable as a baby hebra before it stands the first time. I fought back a stab of hot jealousy.

This was Kayleen, and I loved her. But I would not give up my happiness for her.

Her eyes fell away from Liam and her gaze stuck itself to the smooth and nearly featureless cave floor. Her words spilled out low and fast. “I’ve been coming up here every few nights this spring. We can’t take years to learn. I have to do whatever Hunter and Nava and the other Council want, and even Mom won’t help me fight to change it. She says we have peace and we should keep it.” She looked at me. “I’m sick of acting like Nava’s slave.”

Liam leaned forward, closing the gap between them, putting a hand on Kayleen’s shoulder. “No one has seen you come up here?”

She snorted. “I can doctor the nets so anyone watching after the fact sees me in Artistes when I’m really here. I come here all the time.”

I tried to keep from looking startled. Kayleen had always been compliant. “It’s dangerous,” I cautioned.

She shot me a disapproving look. “I’m
very
careful.”

Liam dropped his hand, sat back, and turned the conversation. “What have you found?”

The feral look returned for a moment, raising the hair on the back of my neck. The cave held whole rooms of weapons, and generally we left them alone.

But Kayleen headed toward the room she had moved the skimmer into two winters ago, under cover of a storm. We followed her down a short, wide branch just to the right of the cave entrance, and entered an equally wide doorway

Although Liam didn’t say anything, I could feel him questioning the wisdom of following Kayleen. I had no answer; I didn’t trust the Kayleen who walked in front of us, purposeful and sure of herself in this place where Liam and I always walked carefully.

A light flicked on, Kayleen’s work. Her abilities felt like magic, even though I knew from working with Joseph that they reflected a connection between microscopic data readers that sang in Kayleen’s blood and any altered technology tuned to her or others like her. A common genemod, but Liam and I did not have it, and there was no way to get it here, where everything altered was despised, and information about genetic engineering scrubbed from databases. Envy crossed my heart, followed by the memory of what those skills had cost Joseph.

I stood in the doorway, eyeing the skimmer, the Burning Void. Tiny sister to the New Making, the silver cylinder gleamed brightly even in the relative dark of the cave, twice as tall as me, twice as wide as tall, and so long I could have laid down in it ten times. It sat high on five wheels, two near the front, two near the back, and one just below the nose. We could walk under it and hardly bend.

As we approached, the silver passenger ramp unfolded and set down with a soft click on the cave floor.

Kayleen climbed up the ramp easily, as if she were intimately familiar with the machine. Liam followed her, and I followed him.

I drew in a startled breath at the young hebra with bright brown side-stripes who stood unsteadily between the door to the cargo bay and the last row of seats, blinking at us. She had been cross-tied to the last row of seats, with only a meter or so of room to move around. This must be the hebra Paloma talked about, but what on earth was she doing in the skimmer?

Kayleen sat relaxed, one leg thrown lazily on the seat in front of her. She smiled at me. “Sit down.”

“Is that Windy?”

Her eyes widened. “How did you know about her?”

“Paloma told me about her. That’s why we went to the barns to look for you.”

Kayleen frowned. Relaxed body position or not, she felt like a snake about to strike. I glanced from the hebra to the open door, still standing.

“Hang on.” She licked her lips and her fingers went to her hair as if to knot themselves in it, something she often did, but she put them back in her lap. “I’m closing the door so I can let Windy loose to meet you.”

The soft whine of whatever mechanism controlled the ramp became background noise as the hebra bugled.

I glanced at Liam in time to see him to take two steps toward Kayleen. He stood over her, looking down, and I recognized the set of his stance from hunting, from the moment before he sprang into a chase. “Stop!” he commanded.

Kayleen smiled, looking up at Liam. The feral look in her eyes actually matched her expression this time, and as she raked her gaze across me I felt like prey. Me. Her best friend.

She flashed a map of Fremont from above—a satellite shot, on the wall screen in front. It rotated, the picture first showing Jini, where we were, and then sliding to hang above the only other land mass of any consequence, the continent Islandia, almost half a world away and closer to the equator.

The ramp clicked closed.

Liam stared down at her, stance frozen, his eyes wide and his jaw tight.

She looked up at him, apparently unconcerned. In a measured soft tone she said, “Too late.”

A
s soon as Kayleen uttered the phrase “too late,” I knew what she meant to do. Even knowing, disbelief closed my throat.

Liam’s face transformed into one I had never seen, anger tightening his skin and lacing his muscles so they jumped. His dark eyes turned nearly black. He stepped toward Kayleen, leaning over her, strange and terrible and unlike himself. If Liam were anyone but Akashi’s son, I’d have expected him to strike her, the anger poured from him so strongly.

Kayleen held her smile, her gaze on Liam, her body completely still, neither provoking nor backing down. They held that pose for three long breaths, not moving.

We killed animals when we hunted, but we protected each other. Always.

The baby hebra, Windy, bugled and struggled to back away, finding only smooth silver hull behind her, her cloven hooves slipping and scrambling. She shook her head back and forth like a rag on her long neck.

Liam took a step back.

Kayleen leapt up, vaulted one-armed over the last row of seats, and landed lightly next to the bleating hebra. She put a hand out, flat, in front of Windy’s nose. Small soothing noises rose from Kayleen’s throat. Her body language became the tough alpha of a trainer, tempered by a soft tone in her voice. Windy bugled again and then gathered her splaying legs under her, standing, shaking.

Another long beat of silence, all of us breathing, no one speaking.
The cabin felt small and close, the air thick with the mingled stink of fear and anger and upset hebra.