Crecheling (8 page)

“I, on the other hand,” Cheela said, “am taking this all very personally.”

“Good,” Jak countered. He threw a silvery microfiber blanket from one of the saddlebags over Eirig, and then settled into a seated position against one wall of the cave under a second. He snapped off the light stick, plunging them all into cool darkness. “So am I.”

***

Chapter Eight

Dyan awoke lying on her side, feeling dirty and stiff. The salty animal tang of bats filled her nostrils so much it seemed to her she could actually taste the little creatures on her tongue. Her neck was balled into a single knot of stressed tissue and the left side of her face stung from lying on sand and stone all night.

To her surprise, she could see.

Cheela slumped upright against a large rock, chin forward on her chest, sleeping. A silver-wrapped lump in the corner, just where Eirig had fallen asleep the night before, snored gently. There was no sign of Jak.

Dyan rolled onto her back and sat up. She ached, every part of her, saddle-sore or foot-weary or scraped or bruised.

The light, she realized, came from above, and it was daylight. The top of the slanted well in the bottom of which they lay was open to the sky, and when she craned her neck around to look, she could just see the tiniest sliver of blue. By the faint light she could see that the well was climbable, even comfortably so. She also saw clumps of brown lichen all over the walls that she hadn’t noticed the night before. They looked like leopard’s spots, and she was leaning very close to get a good look at one before she realized what they must be.

Bats.

She pulled away at the last second.

Dyan leaned down and squinted out the crack onto the ledge by which they had come into the cave. She could see daylight there, too, and no sign of the Landsman boy she had been assigned to kill.

Now was her chance to escape. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and exhaled. She tried to let all the tension and stiffness she felt flow out of her body with the air of her lungs, to deflate like a balloon, become limp and soft and relaxed.

When she felt so relaxed she was almost fluid, she tried to slip her hands out of their bonds.

And failed.

“Lying funvids!” she cursed.

Cheela jerked her head up. Even in the moment of her waking up, her eyes stared at Dyan with a hawklike expression that was hard to interpret as anything other than full of hatred. She looked around quickly at the cave and then back at Dyan. “Shh!”

Dyan nodded.

Cheela stood. She was wobbly on her knees, but she gritted her teeth with determination and pushed her back against the stone. Dyan followed her example, the effort bringing tears to her eyes. It felt like the long muscles of her legs ripped as she moved.

When they were standing, Dyan nodded her head at the crack exit and mouthed a message,
Jak’s gone
.

Either Cheela didn’t understand her, or she ignored Dyan. The Outrider-designate whispered back, very softly. “We kill the cripple and get out of here.”

“With what?” Dyan whispered back.

For an answer, Cheela raised one rider’s boot off the ground, showing Dyan its sharp and heavy heel.

Dyan flinched. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

Cheela shrugged. “Not my problem.” She stepped across the scratchy sand floor of the well and stood over Eirig. Leaning against the wall with her shoulder, she dragged back the microfiber blanket with her boot.

Eirig continued to snore. His clothing was crusted with dirt, and beneath the dirt on his face, Dyan saw bruises. He looked like a little kid, innocent and grubby. Cheela raised her leg to stomp on the boy—

“Bad idea.”

The voice was Jak’s, and it was loud in the cave.

Dyan looked up and saw him perched above Eirig like a roosting bird. He had been hidden behind a rock, and now emerged to intervene. He held a spear in his hand. Once, Dyan would have laughed at the spear, which was the weapon of outlaws and cavemen in the funvids, but she had seen gentle, harmless Wayland poke one right through a girl the day before, and it didn’t seem funny now.

“Wait,” Dyan said. She didn’t know to whom.

Cheela stomped—

thwack!

Jak spun the spear and cracked the butt of it into Cheela’s forehead with a sharp blow that sent her reeling backward. She rebounded off the stone wall behind her and charged, growling, as if she might headbutt the Landsman. Jak kicked her in the face from his position on higher ground and then jumped down to their level.

“Stop,” Dyan pleaded.

Jak pushed her with one hand, knocking her sprawling. As Cheela raged and stormed at him again, he swept her feet out from under her with the butt of the spear, dropping her onto her back with an
oomph!
of air rushing from her lungs. He pointed the spear tip into her face.

“Are we done?” he asked.

“You don’t expect me to just give in, do you?” she wheezed between painful-sounding grunts.

“Funny,” Jak said, his voice flat. “That’s
exactly
what you seem to expect from me.”

“Kill me, then,” Cheela pushed him.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Jak said. He dug into Eirig’s purse at his belt and came out with the little canister of painkillers. “I should have done this last night.” He knelt, straddling Cheela’s stomach to pin her, and set aside his spear. Shaking out a handful of pills into one hand, he dug under Eirig’s blanket and produced a flask of water. “Breakfast time,” he deadpanned.

Cheela spat at him, pointlessly. She was almost his size, but he had her tied up and trapped. Jak forced the pills into her mouth, clapping the water to her lips immediately after. She gagged and struggled, but had no choice but to swallow or drown.

Watching her Crechemate forced to drink, Dyan realized how thirsty she was.

When the flask was empty, Jak stood up.

Cheela gasped for air, and rolled over onto her side and retched, but the pills stayed down.

“That was four times what I gave Eirig,” Jak observed, “and he’s still out cold.”

“Umm umm mot,” Eirig objected sleepily, but he didn’t so much as roll over.

“She could die,” Dyan pointed out. “She could overdose and never wake up.”

“True,” Jak agreed, flashing a grin that showed all his teeth. “Or someone could drag her out of her home under false pretenses, lead her out into the desert and try to chop her in half. Life’s hard like that, isn’t it?”

Cheela cursed him as he stooped and worked at waking Eirig, but he ignored her, and after a couple of minutes of struggling, she passed out.

“I had weird dreams,” Eirig confessed, when Jak pulled him to his feet and shook off the last of his painkiller-induced slumber.

“Oh yeah?” Jak asked. “Were you on the run in the Snaik River valley?”

“Worse than that,” Eirig said. “Someone chopped my arm off.” He raised his stump as if to do something with his missing hand and shrieked.

Jak laughed. “Curse you, Eirig,” he said to his friend. “Can’t you take anything seriously?”

“What would be the fun of that?”

Dyan felt a sharp pang in her heart. She looked down at Cheela, snoring on the cave floor. Cheela wasn’t her friend. At best, she realized, Cheela was her Crechemate, companion, and team member. Often, she was a rival. At worst, she was openly Dyan’s enemy.

But Wayland and Deek were her friends, she thought stubbornly. And what was Shad? She missed them all, and she missed Magister Zarah.

“We take this one with us,” Jak said.

“My name is Dyan,” she reminded him.

“I don’t care what your name is,” he told her. “You don’t
have
a name, as far as I’m concerned. You’re our hostage and our shield.”

“What about Cheela?” she asked.

“If you mean the other one,” Jak said, pointed at Cheela’s snoring form, “we leave her here. She won’t wake up before we’re back, and if we get into trouble, just maybe we can still use her as a bargaining chip.” He picked up one of the microfiber blankets and tore at it, pointlessly.

“Where are we going?” Dyan asked, nervous to hear the answer. The Wahai, she imagined. Or maybe back to Ratsnay Station, where she’d be killed. “You won’t be able to tear that, you know. It’s practically indestructible, which is why it’s so great.”

“Is it so great, then?” Jak sneered at her. “Hmmn.” He draped the blanket over a boulder and stepped away from it. From the purse he pulled out one of the bolas.

“Uh, careful.” Eirig backed into a corner of the cave and picked up one of the spears, like that would help him if the bola went bouncing around the chamber.

But Jak held both the body of the bola and its counterweight carefully, and slowly drew the counterweight out two feet. In between there was nothing visible, but Dyan knew—they all must know—that there was a microscopically thin but extremely tough filament, so thin that at mere contact it would slice steel.

Jak gently looped his hands behind the corner of the microfiber blanket, and using the bola like a knife he slowly sliced off a long strip of it. When the blanket piece fell to the floor he slid the bola shut and grinned vindictively at Dyan.

“Oh,” she said.

“What else is
practically indestructible
?” he asked, and then he wrapped the strip around her head. She heard the
ffft
,
ffft
of medical tape being torn off, and then Jak’s fingers, running tape under her jaw and attaching the makeshift hood firmly to her head. Her mouth and nostrils were free, but she was totally blind.

“The System,” she said. “And not just practically. I don’t know what you’re doing, but Cheela’s right. Your best bet is just to leave us here and run for the Wahai. By the time anyone finds us, you’ll be long gone.”

“Sure,” Jak agreed amiably. He grabbed Dyan’s upper arm and dragged her. She immediately barked her shins against stone and stumbled. Her caught her, and kept dragging, and she knew they were moving up the tunnel. “And what happens next?”

Next? “I become a Magister.”

“I don’t care about that. What else?”

“Outriders chase us!” Eirig called. He was behind them. “We become bandit lords, and marry beautiful princesses of the Basku or the Shoshan.”

“I don’t care about
us
, either,” Jak said darkly. His breathing was labored from the effort of climbing the slope; so was Dyan’s. Her heart raced. “What happens to Ratsnay Station?”

Dyan was puzzled. “Why should anything happen to Ratsnay Station?”

“When the Outriders come,” Jak spelled it out, “and my mother says she has no idea where I am, will the Outriders believe her?”

Dyan hesitated. “Maybe.”

“And will they believe that the good people of Ratsnay Station had nothing to do with my escape?”

“Maybe.” Her answer came slower this time.

“And will the System and its Outriders believe that the secret of their precious murderous Selection is a secret still? Or will they assume that they have to act to keep the secret?”

This time, Dyan couldn’t bring herself to answer at all.

“Exactly,” Jak said. He let go of her arm for a moment and she heard him scrambling. Then he grabbed both her shoulders from above and dragged her up a short ascent. “So when I disappear, the System might destroy Ratsnay Station, might it not? Not because the settlement is bad, not because it’s criminal … but because, how did you put it? You kill a sick animal to protect the flock?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Dyan objected.

“Sure it is,” Jak said. “Only you didn’t realize it.”

A breeze struck Dyan in the exposed lower half of her face, and she felt sunlight warm her skin. They were out of the cave, she inferred, and the footing immediately became much easier.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To solve the problem.”

Dyan’s feet crunched through plant growth of some kind every few steps, and she was grateful for her boots. Some of those plants must be cactus. “Are you going to trade me?” she wondered out loud. “For the Outriders to leave Ratsnay Station alone?”

“Something like that.”

She stumbled along for a length of time she had no way to measure, though it was long enough for her legs and feet to lose their stiffness and then begin becoming sore again. Jak and Eirig didn’t talk, and once, when she tried to ask a question, Jak shushed her back into silence. Finally, they stopped.

“I’m going to take your blindfold off,” Jak told her. “And then I’m going to stuff it into your mouth. You can understand that I’m doing this because I want you to see something, and I really, really want you to stay quiet. Can’t you?”

Dyan considered screaming, but as she hesitated Jak ripped away the hood and, true to his word, jammed it between her jaws. The tape burned as it peeled away from her skin, and then he wrapped more tape around her gag in three big loops to hold it in place.

After the shadow of the cave and the darkness of the hood, the desert sun blinded Dyan. She blinked away tears, gagged, and felt faint. Sweat streamed down her body under her long Outrider’s coat, and the sun scorched the back of her neck.

“Breathe through your nose,” Eirig advised her. “We don’t smell
that
bad.”

The laughter that improbably bubbled up within her at his wisecrack made her gag again.

“Shh,” Jak said, and dragged her to the ground.

Dyan looked around. The three of them crouched in a scalloped shell of sand, the upper seats of a natural amphitheater. Above them stretched sky, mostly blue and brilliant, though away to the west, coming off the Wahai, Dyan saw billowing clouds, heavy and gray with rain. They were heading her direction, she thought.

“Down there.” Jak grabbed her by the back of her head and focused her attention.

Dyan and her captors squatted behind a pair of shattered boulders, and below them lay a red slope. The slope gathered and dropped like an angled funnel into a narrow canyon, choked with stones and gray-green desert trees. At the mouth of the canyon, raggedly punctured and dark with what might be blood, lay a hat.
Her
hat, Dyan realized, or Cheela’s. Jak must have crept out and laid it there during the night, which surprised her.

But she saw something even more surprising. Her whip jutted out of a crack in the canyon wall. No, she realized, squinting. Not the whole whip, but only the handle. Which meant that the weight—her eyes flashed to the other side of the narrow canyon and spotted a counterpart crack—must be wedged into the wall on the other side. Which meant that an invisible ribbon of death lay across the canyon, six feet off the ground.