Ten low, p.2
Ten Low, page 2
‘Leave it,’ he gasps, when I touch the piece of metal. His voice is full of liquid. ‘I know it’s bad.’
I nod. Little use in lying to him.
His eyes find mine. ‘She will live?’
‘If she regains consciousness, and if there’s no damage to her brain, and if the wound does not fester—’
A bloodied hand grasps my sleeve. ‘She can’t die.’ He hauls himself towards me, using the last of his strength. ‘If you hurt her, you’ll pay with your life.’
‘I will not hurt her. I told you, I’m a medic. You have my word.’ I stare down at him. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’
For a moment he can only heave breaths. The stink of gore and sundered flesh fills my nose.
‘What’s the nearest town…?’
‘Redcrop. A day’s ride. Mining township.’
‘The Accord – have authority there?’
I laugh, humourlessly. ‘They like to think so.’
He sags back. ‘Take her there. Find a wire. She will know— what to do. She must…’
A noise catches my ears and I stop him with a gesture. In the distance, but coming closer, something is droning: the distinctive, double-cough of an overhauled engine. I swear and spring up.
‘What?’ the man asks, as I rip the tarp free and bundle it onto the mule.
‘Seekers, most likely,’ I say, piling everything into the medkit, ‘coming to scavenge the site.’
‘Seekers? Bandits?’
‘More like a cult.’
I see a light in his eyes, and know what he’s thinking; even a cult can be bribed, can be traded with.
‘Forget it,’ I say, ‘the Seekers are crazy. If they see you are hurt, they will kill you both and take your organs before they listen to a word you say.’
I bend to retrieve the unused bandage. For the space between breaths we are eye to eye. I see myself reflected there, and it’s a face I hardly know, the eyes shadowed and squinted tight, the skin wind-whipped and scar-peppered. The engines grow louder. A dust cloud appears in the distance.
‘Go then,’ he chokes, ‘take her, and remember your oath.’
I don’t argue. The options are two living and one dead, or three corpses, plundered by the Seekers. I know which one I prefer, and anyway, no matter who the child is, the tally doesn’t lie. I lift her awkwardly and wedge her among the bundles on the back of the mule. Then I’m in the driver’s seat, pulling the scarf over my mouth.
‘Tell her I died for her,’ the man’s cry comes over the noise of the dirt mule’s engine. ‘Tell her I didn’t know their plans. Tell her she must fight.’
I don’t answer, just take off towards the horizon.
* * *
I ride for Redcrop. There’s nowhere else. Much as I dislike being in a settlement, it is as safe as anywhere and at least I have a few contacts. As for the girl… I glance back to where she lies, slumped upon the mule.
Tell her I didn’t know their plans.
A shiver ripples across my skin, despite the heat. No child should have military tattoos, no matter how patriotic her family. They couldn’t be real.
Perspiration collects beneath my hat, dripping from my scalp into my eyes, so I stop the mule in a strip of shade cast by a boulder. The child mumbles as I lift her down, her eyeballs swivelling back and forth beneath the lids, as if reading from some giant book. Her skin is hot and dry, her breathing shallow. With a sigh, I feel for my pouch of beads. Don’t want to waste one, but it might be enough to wake her, and I need answers.
The instant it shatters between her teeth, her eyes fly open.
They are bright hazel-brown, the whites bloodshot. For a second they roam the sky, contracting in pain at the brightness, before settling on me. Something like fear crosses her face, still a mess of dried blood, and she opens her mouth to cry out, but chokes.
I grab the flask of water from my belt and hold it to her lips. She swallows greedily, stale as it is, until I take it away.
She gasps for a few breaths. ‘LaSalle?’
‘The large man with the red hair? He is gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Dead. He was badly injured in the crash. You remember the crash?’
The child winces, raising a hand to her head.
‘You were hurt,’ I tell her warily. ‘But I have stitched the wound. I believe you’ll live.’
The child blinks hard, her lips trembling – on the verge of tears. I sigh, relief surging through me. So she is just a girl, hurt and afraid, no matter what the tattoos imply. A military ward, perhaps?
‘There’s a cut on your head,’ I say, trying for simpler words. Alone for so long, I’ve forgotten how to speak to anyone, let alone a child. ‘And I think the crash may have bruised your brain. You will probably feel sick, for a while. Do you understand?’
She seems to see me for the first time, taking in my face, my clothes, the dirt mule behind us.
‘You won’t hurt me?’ Her voice is high and frightened. ‘Or sell me in a market?’
‘No.’ I sit back. ‘I’m just a medic.’
She sniffs and nods. ‘Help me stand up?’
‘Be careful.’ I lean down to take her arm. ‘If you do have a concussion—’
In a flash, my arm is twisted and I’m flung off balance, landing face down into the dirt. I roll onto my back, snatching out my knife by reflex, but a small fist knocks it from my grasp. I try to cry out when something slams down on my throat.
It’s the girl’s boot. She stares down at me, her lips curled into a snarl.
‘You won’t kill two of us, carrion.’
As blue and yellow stars start to fill my vision, the wind blows, brushing sand across my face and for a second, less than a second, I feel them.
They are like a creature with a thousand eyes, hungrily tracing every outcome, showing me innumerable realities, too many for my mind to bear.
I am dead in the desert, the child driving the mule away. I throw her off with such force that her head strikes a boulder. I am dead, the wind drying my corpse to leather. I drag her across the sand, me, her, each of us the victor, the victim…
I shoot out an arm and I see every conceivable movement gather around it, a blur of limbs and chaos, impossible to track, until – like a clear signal from static – I see my own hand grab a fistful of dust and fling it into the girl’s face.
She falls back. Before I can get to my feet she lunges again, this time with the knife in her hand. I scramble away, body a mess of adrenalin and not enough air as she attacks in frenzy, aiming to kill.
But they have shown me this path, and as I crash into the dirt mule, I know what to do. I reach behind me, groping for the medkit. Metal meets my fingers and the moment the girl leaps, I strike.
The knife falters two inches from my heart. The girl’s lips twitch in a snarl, before a convulsion shakes her body and she glances down at the syringe protruding from her neck.
‘Y—’ she begins before the knife falls from her grip and she crumples, lifeless, to the ground.
* * *
I don’t allow myself to sit and breathe until the child is restrained and tied as securely as I can manage, even though she won’t wake for hours. In my panic I gave her enough tranquilliser to suppress a grown adult, and there’s a chance that it could kill her.
Her small face twitches as the drug makes its way through her system. Cursing myself, I fetch the canteen of wastewater from the mule. My brain thuds with questions, with the thin air and the ebbing adrenalin and the lingering horror of their presence. Wetting a rag, I begin to wipe the dried blood from her face.
At first, her features appear unremarkable: skin sallow with blood loss, round cheeks, pointed chin. But as I clean the mess away, I see the undeniable evidence of what she is. Although she’s young, thirteen at most, her face is deeply lined. Between the heavy brows and around her mouth are creases usually seen on someone who has lived through years of hardship. Her physique too, is unnatural. She’s lean, but not through malnutrition and labour and ill health, like most on Factus, but sinewy, with hard muscles beneath the skin of her arms and legs.
Some part of me still hopes that I am wrong, that she’s just a poor sick child after all. But when I clean the last of the blood away from her temple, there’s no denying it. There’s the tattoo – the double triangle and three thick lines – proclaiming what she is.
I shove myself away. My own temple throbs, as if the skin there – a faded pink scar now – is reverting to newly seared flesh; as if my hand has only just dropped the hot iron. Covering my face, I try to find some control, try to wrest myself back from the woman I once was, the woman who only a few years ago might have taken up the knife and used it without question.
I close my eyes. The Free Limits are finished. The woman who fought and killed for them is gone. Now, the tally is all that matters and it demands that the child, whoever she is, whatever she is, must live.
Besides, I have a promise to keep.
* * *
I make sure to arrive at the trade post in the twilight, when the winds are picking up and no one cares to look too closely at the shape on the rear of my mule, covered with the tarp. It’s reckless, but there’s no way I’m going to take the child into the settlement until I have some answers. Too much attention. Some bad part of my brain whispers that she might wake and escape on her own and so spare me a decision I don’t know how to make.
The trade post is outside of Redcrop proper, separated from the settlement by fields of sickly-looking century trees and ghostly agave. Townsfolk prefer it this way. It keeps uncertainty out of their lives, along with scratchtooth drifters and wreckers, bandits and scavengers, the desperate and the damned who come trailing suspicion and violence from the Unincorporated Zone.
Redcrop is a faithful, fearful town: they take no risks and brook no questions. Questions lead to uncertainty, uncertainty opens the door to doubt and so, to them.
Different in the cities; there, hundreds of people make thousands of choices, every day. It’s enough to keep them at bay, people reckon, gives them enough to feed on. But out here in the wastes people are few and choices are scarce, and if you let yourself doubt – if you let chance into your life – you’ll shine out like a beacon through time and space and they will come to feed.
Or so it goes. All folk ever have are stories. Farms too near the Edge destroyed utterly by one bit of bad luck after another, brawls that somehow turned into massacres, folk who ran, maddened, into the desert and were never seen again. No proof. Just thin-air superstition – the Accord said – stoked by mercenary peacekeepers and vice wardens for the purpose of extracting money from the fearful.
Only people with choice but to ride the wastes alone told stories of meeting them and surviving. People like me.
With a sigh, I climb off the mule. I have no intention of lingering, not with an unconscious and murderous child bound and hidden on my vehicle. Another dose of the sedative sent her under when she began to kick and twitch at dusk. I didn’t like it, but neither did I want my throat cut.
The post is already ringed with vehicles; dirt mules in far better condition than my own, old delivery quads and charabancs, even a battered ex-army transport painted silver and black, the words VALDOSTA’S VIPERS emblazoned on the side. A travelling sideshow, no doubt. At least people will be distracted.
I whistle. The shadows move and a shape comes forwards: a teenager with a bald, patchy head, wearing huge, tattered gauntlets.
‘I will be an hour,’ I say, digging beneath my clothes for a bead. ‘I want the mule guarded well.’
The boy nods and drags a piece of gristle from a pouch to hold up in the air. A skeletal vulture sails down from the veiled sky to land on the front of the mule. I leave the boy securing the bird to the handlebars, while it stabs, oblivious, at its payment. Shouldering my pack, I hope that – for the sake of her eyes – the girl-child doesn’t wake.
Hat down, I duck between the sheet metal gates and into the trade post compound. It’s the dinner hour, and pungent century smoke mingles with the hot smack of planchas, and the odour of boiled onion powder and protein cooked in whatever sort of fat can be spared.
Folk sit in tight groups around the food station, smoking or chewing, picking crickets’ legs out of their teeth and gawking at each other’s plates to check they haven’t been cheated on their meal. The sight of the food, basic as it is, is enough to make my stomach yawn with hunger, after weeks of old field rations.
But business first. Glancing over my shoulder, I approach the door of Sorry Damovitch’s place.
Inside, it’s quiet, just those who can’t afford to eat and instead pummel their guts with mezcal. Sorry himself is at the edge of the room, shoving leaf fibres about the floor with his foot in an attempt to clean up some spill.
As I walk to the bar, one of the drinkers looks up: a large individual with a mottled pink face that speaks of hard drinking. Their straw-coloured hair is dark with grease, in a military cut short enough to show the three-dotted tattoo of a private of the Accord. As I pass, they push their stool back to stop me. Their expression turns sour as they take in my hat and the scarves that wrap the length of my throat.
‘Wasss your business?’ comes the slurred challenge. Before I can answer, Sorry himself shuffles forwards, his hangdog face drooping further at the prospect of violence.
‘Please,’ he implores, holding out a hand towards me, ‘for your own safety, go outside. I will serve you from the back door. What do you want?’
‘Just the usual,’ I say.
He lets out a breath.
‘Doc. You look—’ He shakes his head. ‘Next time, take the hat off, yes?’
I nod, though I’d do no such thing. A shorn head like mine gave nothing away, but the scars on my temples certainly did. People don’t like not knowing which side you were on. I follow him towards the bar, the drunk continuing to protest my presence with not-so-muttered threats.
‘It would be best to avoid Loto,’ Sorry murmurs. ‘The Accord revoked her pension. She’s been drinking snake wine since noon and is not to be reasoned with.’
‘How have you escaped her wrath?’ I ask, nodding at his neck, where two neat scars from a prison collar were all that remain of his former internment.
His thin lips lift in a smile. ‘Such is the luck of the landlord.’ He places a tumbler before me. ‘Friend to all, while there is a cup to be filled.’
I watch as he takes a bottle from beneath the bar and pours a few fingers of mezcal into the glass. Ordinarily, it’s a stupid idea to drink the stuff – who knows what bacterial horrors have been stuffed into bags and thrown into the vats to hurry fermentation – but I know Damovitch keeps a good batch for those who would not forgive being poisoned.
‘It is on me,’ he says softly. ‘For the last time.’
I drink. It’s appalling and makes my eyes sting, but it’s better than the jars of snake wine that line the bar; coiled creatures barely visible through the murky liquid.
As I peer at the drowned snakes, Damovitch places a little dish of worm salt and a lump of tinned orange in front of me, giving me time to find my tongue. For a while I just listen to the clang and hiss of the food station outside, to the roar of engines from the stable, the crying of the vultures and the distant desert wind rattling the sheet metal of the fence. I suck the smoky, biting salt from the orange, the combination making my mouth sing, and as always, wonder how much I can say.
He isn’t trustworthy, Sorry, but he is at least predictable in his cowardice. He was a Limiter too and in prison had been a Five, so the story went. He contrived to have his sentence cut by apologising so profusely for his actions during the war, that even the prison chaplain had become irritated and petitioned the governor for his early release just to be rid of him. The governor agreed, on the condition that Damovitch shed his sentence name of “Five”, along with the prison collar, and be forever known as “Sorry”.
A fair deal, I think, watching him sprinkle more worm salt into the dish. It suits him, and besides, prison governors have handed out far worse names to convicts on release. Better to keep the number. Better to bear the shame and the sneers than allow them to give you a name.
I drain the glass. The girl has a name, one that I’m afraid to discover.
Just dump her here, the woman from the past whispers. Leave her like the man said. She does not deserve your help.
‘Sorry,’ I call. ‘How much do you remember about the Accorded Companies?’
Damovitch’s face takes on the squeezed, fawning look it does when he’s trying to think of an answer that will not get him into trouble.
‘Ahh,’ he says, grabbing the bottle. ‘War’s in the past. We’re all just citizens, now.’
He tries to pour another slug of mezcal, but I put my hand over the glass.
‘Where were you stationed?’
‘Nowhere special,’ he mutters, ‘on Jericho first, Felicitatum, that is.’
‘Which faction?’
‘The Nightwatchmen.’ Glancing at Loto, he raises his voice. ‘I didn’t fight, not really. I was in logistics, but even for that I am sorry. The Free Limits tricked me into joining, with their promises of open trade and their fancy words. They took the best years of my life.’
I look him dead in the eyes. He shuts up.
‘What do you remember about the Minority Force?’
‘The war kids?’
I nod. ‘The ones the Accord brought up through training camps.’
‘I—’ He swallows. ‘I don’t know. FL always said they were monsters, tortured and augmented ’til they weren’t even kids no more.’
‘The Minority Force were our greatest asset!’ The chair falls to the ground as Loto stands, her eyes blazing. ‘They were our greatest achievement. And you call them monsters?’ A glob of spittle hits the bar, several feet to Sorry’s left. Loto’s eyes fill with tears. ‘Those kids were the bravest of us all.’
‘So what happened to them?’ I ask, hoping Loto will take the bait.
