When they’re past Keep’s hut and a few more cages, I breathe again. My heart’s beating like the party drums after a successful tug hunt. But I ain’t out of the desert yet. Perry agrees, doing his version of a nod, which is basically staying perfectly still and upright. Stay out of this, Perry! I think.
Perched on the roof of my cage, I feel precarious. It’s not that high, but with holes in the floor, it feels higher’n it really is. There’s a certain thrill to it, too, like all my innards are floating inside me, bobbing and bouncing. How to get down?
The smart thing to do, as Perry suggests, would be to slip through one of the square holes and shimmy on down the bars all the way to the ground. Challenging with one arm, but easier’n climbing up here in the first place. Sounds like a plan.
I start to carefully lower myself between the crisscross, keeping one of the bars under my armpit. As I scrabble at the thin air with my feet, Keep shouts, “Cage check!”
Cage check? What’n the scorch? I lose my concentration and my arm slips off the bar. I’m falling! At the last second, I grab and squeeze as hard as I can with my hand, making a fist around the bar. My feet swing underneath me as I hang on for dear life, rocking back and forth in the wind, which has been picking up steadily ever since I started climbing. A morning windstorm. Not unusual for this time of year.
While I hang, there’s grumbling and groaning as the whole place seems to come to life. Toward the end of my row of cages, I hear Keep rattling along the cage bars with some instrument, shouting out names and then waiting for a response.
“Koda!”
“Yeah.”
Ratatatat along the bars.
“Briggs!”
“Nope.”
“Shut yer tug hole! Smartass!”
Ratatatat…
You get the picture. He’s getting nearer.
My feet are swinging and I can’t reach the side bars. Can’t shimmy down. Can’t slide down. Can’t do anything ’cept hang and swing. My shoulder’s aching and I feel my sweaty hand starting to slide off the wood.
“Bart!”
A growl. Big Bart ain’t in the mood for talking.
Keep’ll pass his hut and then he’s to mine.
I got no choice.
Outta options.
Perry’s chanting, “Do it, do it, do it!”
I do it. I wait until my swing takes me into a more or less vertical position and then I release the bar and drop, trying to keep my legs bent slightly to cushion the fall. For a painfully short moment, I’m weightless, free, untouchable. And then the unforgiving ground touches me. Hard. Like a forearm shiver, but across the whole of my body. My feet hit first, pushing a shockwave up my legs and into my hips, spreading like wildfire from there. My knees give out, sending me rolling—not again!—across my cage. This time it’s only one roll though, one big flop, a stomach-jostling smacker that knocks all the air out of me. At least Perry is on the other side of the bars this time, unable to prick me.
Can’t breathe.
Can’t breathe.
I wheeze and gasp as I roll over to lie on my back.
Ratatatat! “Siena!”
Wheeze. Gasp. No voice. No breath. No way to respond.
“Siena!” Keep repeats.
“Here,” I whisper, like I’m back in Learning and Teacher is checking for skippers. But my voice comes out softer’n the rustle of windblown sand. Keep can’t hear me.
“I see ya there, Girl. I knows yer ain’t used to our ways ’ere, but it’s not difficult. I says yer name, and yer respond. Let’s try it again.”
Wheeze. Gasp. Lips moving but no words coming out.
“Siena!”
“Yeah,” I croak, my voice the timbre of a horny toad, my animal of choice for this evening. Perry laughs.
“See, not too hard, eh?” Keep says. He moves on to Raja.
My throat opens and I greedily gulp down the breezy air. My heart slows. My body aches. Perry mocks. Searin’ Perry.
“What the scorch are you doing over there?” Raja hisses when Keep’s moved on down the line. “I heard a thump.”
I clench my jaw. “Nothing,” I say. “Just sleeping. Or trying to.”
“Tugblaze. I heard you thrashing around in the durt like you’s fighting something.”
“It’s too dangerous to tell you, Raja,” I say, turning his words back on him. “If I told you, they’d kill you, and they’d kill me.”
I slump to the side, grinning in spite of the aches and pains and bumps and bruises. Determined to get a little sleep before Luger comes to collect me. A peaceful end to a very long day in Confinement.
Chapter Fourteen
It’s nice waking up in my own bed, watching through the window as the sun peeks over the horizon, spraying ribbons of red in every direction. A heavy bank of thick, yellow clouds moves swiftly across the sea of pinkish-reddish sky. It’s a very windy day. Through our door, which is open a crack, I can smell the windstorm that’s coming. Might even turn into the first sandstorm of the winter season. I can’t smell it yet, but if there’s a sandstorm coming, my nose’ll pick up on it soon enough. I been sniffing out storms my whole life.
Yesterday was a throw-a-way. I was too battered and sore and exhausted to do anything but sleep it off. I coulda just as easily done that in my cage, but I was sure thankful to do it here, on my tugskin sleeper.
I heard Circ come to call on me, but Mother turned him away, said I needed to rest. She was right. Thankfully my father wasn’t around when he stopped by—he mighta made a scene.
The crack in the door widens and my father’s heavy outline appears in the opening. His eyes are small, no more’n pinpricks. He grunts when he sees me awake. He didn’t say a word to me yesterday. I wonder if his grunt means today’ll be the same. I can hope, can’t I?
Nope.
He strides directly over to me, not even stopping to slip off his dusty moccasins. My Call-Mother’ll hafta sweep up the mess later. There’s a shadow on my face as he looms over me. “Youngling,” he says.
“Head Greynote,” I say, returning his formalness.
“Did you learn anything from your trip to Confinement?”
Scorch, yeah! Heaps! All about how people sent there are treated like animals, caged, poorly fed. About how it’s possible to escape if you’re all skin and bones, like me. And oh yeah, I found out about some ’spiracy with the Icies, how ’bout that?
At least that’s what I think. What I say is, “Yessir. I’ll be behaving from now on. Don’t want to go back there again. Never.”
Although I know I give the right response, he frowns, maybe sensing the deceit in my voice. “Good,” he says. “Don’t make me send you there again. The next time your stay might not be so short.”
As he starts to head for the door, I say, “Congratulations, Father.” He turns, looks back at me. “On Head Greynote.”
His face is flat. “It’s not an award or a celebration. It’s a duty. It’ll do you well to remember that.”
And then he’s gone, the flaps of his slitted leather shirt wagging about the moment he steps out the door, the wind whipping them into a frenzy.
It’s a very windy day.
I wonder what the wind’ll carry into the village.
~~~
“We’re leaving soon,” Circ says.
Yeah, I’m hanging around Circ still. I guess my father’s little lesson in Confinement didn’t really take. As long as I don’t get caught, right?
I nod. “And you’ll be back in three days?” I ask for the tenth time. A burst of sand shivers overhead. It never comes back down, carried along by the ever-strengthening wind. The trip back to the village’ll be awful, but for now we’re protected in our spot in the Mouth, dug in on the backside of one of the two big dunes.