Dave Butler Writes

“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, ankle-deep in their own fragmented offspring, and below them lay a red slope.  The slope gathered and dropped like an angled funnel into a narrow canyon, choked with boulders 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 spotting 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.

And then Dyan saw something that made her heart stop.  Clopping steadily into view on his horse at the bottom of the canyon, stopping at her hat and looking down at it, came Wayland.

“Mmmmm,” she tried to shout, no!  Her gag was taped too tight, and her hands were tied securely behind her back.  She tried to stand, but Jak and Eirig both grabbed her and pulled her onto her back.

Dyan kicked, aiming at Jak’s face.  She missed, and her boots slammed into the rubble, sending a shower of stones clattered into the canyon below.  Jak drew back a hand to slap her and she lunged, rolling out from behind the boulder and skidding down the sandy slope on her belly.

“Mmmmm!”  She strained against the gag.  “Mmmmm!”

Footsteps behind her told her that Jak or Eirig or both were following her.  She couldn’t see anything but the red earth slamming into her face, over and over again.

“Dyan!” Wayland yelled.  “Gee yap!”

She heard the drum of galloping hooves in the sand.

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“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 just 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 with a monofilament whip.  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 Snake 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?”

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Jak slammed the medikit against a boulder.  With a hiss, it popped open.

“Nobody’s going to die of infection,” he announced, coming up with a tube of topical antibiotic.

Cheela closed her eyes and feigned sleep while Jak knelt to care of his friend, but Dyan couldn’t look away.  She saw now that Eirig had a tourniquet around his arm, and that the wound at the end of his stump was bandaged with strips of wool that had been torn from Jak’s shirt, and were now soaked through with blood.  Jak peeled away the bandages, smeared antibiotic ointment over the wound, and then wrapped it in gauze from the medikit.  Eirig bit his lip the entire time, in obvious pain.

“On the plus side,” the injured boy said, “it’s a clean injury.  No bone fragments or anything.  You have to admire the precision of an Outrider’s bola.”

“Outrider-designate,” Dyan said.  She said it automatically, not meaning anything by it, but Cheela obviously took offense.  Without opening her eyes, she kicked Dyan hard in the shin.

“You’ll want a painkiller,” Jak said, digging through the medikit again.

“I’m fine,” Dyan said, though it smarted enough to bring tears to her eyes.  “I just wish my hands were free so I could rub it.”

“I’d rub it for you,” Eirig offered.  “You know, if I had two hands.”

“Funny,” Cheela snarled.  “I’d have thought one hand was enough to accomplish everything a guy like you ever does.”

“Painkiller’s not for you,” Jak said, popping open a canister of pills.  He tapped two of them out into his palm and gave them to Eirig, who swallowed them.

“Thanks.”  The injured boy leaned against the wall of the cave and closed his eyes.

Jak stood and faced his prisoners.  He looked tall, standing over them, and Dyan looked away.

“You look like you know what you’re doing with the medikit,” she said.  She meant it as a compliment, though it sounded painfully tiny in the cave.

“In addition to carefully marking which of us should be slaughtered,” Jak told her, “Magister Stanton occasionally dispensed minor medicines.”  He paused for long seconds.  “Now,” he said slowly, “tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”

“Because,” Cheela growled, “when the Outriders catch you, they’ll make you wish you’d never been born.”

Jak’s laugh was hard and thin.  “Too late.  But if you mean they would kill me, that’s already on the table.”

Cheela spat on Jak’s shoes.

“We could plead for mercy,” Dyan suggested.  “For you, I mean.”

“Mercy for what?” Jak asked.  He looked amused.  “I haven’t committed a crime.  All I did was do well on the tests in school.”

“Kidnapping,” Cheela suggested.

Jak ignored her and kept talking to Dyan.  “You said it yourself, I’m no criminal, I’m not a bad person.  The System just wants to kill me because I’m smart.”

“That’s not true,” Dyan said, too quickly.

“You’re right.”  Jak bowed and grinned.  “It wants to kill me because I’m smart… and a Landsman.”

Dyan had nothing to say to that.

Eirig popped his eyes open.  “We may need them,” he said.  “We may need hostages.”

Jak scrutinized the girls.  “That’s a good reason to keep one of them alive,” he admitted.  “I don’t see that a second hostage is going to make any difference, unless we literally use them as shields.”

“Please do,” Cheela snarled.  “I’ll beg the Outriders to cut right through me.”

“I should warn you,” Eirig said, his voice heavy and slow, “it’s not as fun as it looks.”

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“Step away from the tree, Dyan,” Cheela said.  She stood squarely downhill from Dyan, her feet planted apart and under her shoulders, her long coat pulled back behind her, her fingers flexing above her belt.  “You too, Jaik.”

“Jak,” he said.

“You’ve been watching too many funvids about Outriders,” Dyan told her Crechemate.  “You don’t need to call me out, whatever problem you think you have with me.”

Cheela was quiet for a moment, which was ominous, given that her back was to the fires and her face was entirely in shadow.  Then she hiccupped.  “I’m not calling you out,” she replied.  “I’m calling out the tree.”

Dyan scrambled out of the way.  Jak was a little slow to move, and wore a puzzled look on his face, so she grabbed his wrist and pulled him with her.

“You’ve been drinking!” she accused Cheela.

Cheela ignored her.  The dark girl in the Outrider get-up stared down the tree stump fiercely.  “You’ve escape for the last time, you damn dirty renegade,” she growled.

“Duck,” Dyan whispered.

“What’s she going to do?”

“Just in case.”  She pulled Jak with her, down into a crouch.

“Draw!”  Cheela shouted.  The big-eared boy Milt fell back in surprise, she grabbed a bola off her hip, instantly elongating its monofilament cord with the slightest pressure from her fingers as she simultaneously whipped the weight-end of the bola around once, releasing it in the direction of the tree—

and the bola disappeared into the shadow of the grass, hitting the hillside with a soft thump.

“Got you, you dirty dog,” Cheela muttered.  She pressed a button in the bola’s holster and the bola flashed red in the darkness so she could find it.  She passed to the uphill side of the tall stump and bent to pick up her weapon.

“So… you missed,” Milt sneered.  “Gee, that was amazing.”

Cheela said nothing.  Standing uphill of the tree, she reached out one arm, leaned against the trunk, and pushed it over.  The log, sliced in two with an utterly clean precision typical of monofilament instruments but otherwise impossible, tipped forward—

            whumph!

and slammed to the ground right beside Milt.

“Holy Mother!” Milt snapped.  “You almost took my toes off!”

Cheela looked at her fingernails with exaggerated indifference.  “You want to see something even more amazing?” she suggested.  “Find me a big rock.”

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“What I want to know,” Deek said, bumping into Dyan’s back and clattering to a halt, “is what kind of Mechanical I’ll be.  I mean, I accept that I have to be specialized, but if I’m going to do just one thing for the rest of my life I want to do something really cool.”

“Like hydroponics,” Wayland puffed, catching up.

Deek shot him a glare like a rattlesnake.  “Do I look like a Landsman?” he snorted.

“Weapons?” Shad asked mildly, pulled at Dyan’s hand again to lead them all forward.

“Meta-Systems,” Dyan guessed.  “You want to know how Buza works.”

Deek blushed, pointing his beaky nose and emerald eyes at his walking slippers.  “Well, yeah,” he admitted.  “If that’s not too much like being a Cogitant.”

“I don’t think so.”  Dyan smiled at her Crechemate, and he smiled shyly back.

“No, the thing that’s too much like being a Cogitant,” Cheela said, with a sharp edge to her voice, “is Magister.”

Dyan shrugged and tried to pretend there wasn’t envy in Cheela’s words.  “Hey, I’ll probably get a Creche straight out of the Nursery,” she said mildly.  “I’ll be wiping snot out of kids’ noses and pulling them out of Buza River while you’re chasing rustlers and runaways in the Wahai.  Doesn’t sound much like a Cogitant to me.”

“Kind of it does,” Deek muttered.

Cheela smiled teeth.  “I’ll dedicate my second kill to you,” she offered, “my lowly Magister friend.  My first kill, of course, I’ll have to dedicate to my Crechemate Shad.”

“Kill or capture,” Shad reminded her.  “Kill or capture.”

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