Saluki was impaled on a spar of browned hyperfiber.
Broq’s legs were severed, and in a numbed anguish, he had dragged himself to the legs and pressed them against the wrong sockets.
But the siblings were the worst. Dream had slammed into an iron slipfault, and her brother then impacted against her. Flesh and bone were mixed together. Slowly, slowly, their carnage was separating itself, their healing barely begun.
Washen repositioned Broq’s legs. Then with Diu’s help, she eased Saluki off the spar and set her in its shade to mend. And with Diu keeping watch over the siblings, she searched the wreckage for anything useful. There were field rations and field uniforms, but the machines wouldn’t operate. She tried to coax them awake, but none of them was well enough to declare, “I am broken.”
If there was luck, it was that the crust seemed stable for the moment. They could afford to do nothing but heal and rest, eating triple shares of their rations. Later, Saluki even managed to find two pop-up shelters and their survival packs, plus a full diamond flask of champagne. Hot as the ground, by now. But delicious.
Sitting in the shadow of a pop-up, the six captains drank the flask dry.
Pretending it was night, they huddled and discussed tomorrow, options named and weighed, and most of them discarded.
Wait, and watch; that was their collective decision.
“We’ll give Miocene three days to find us,” said Washen. Then she caught herself trying to access her implanted timepiece, out of pure habit. But every one of her implants, every minuscule nexus, had been fried by the same electric fire that had ripped them out of the sky.
In a world without night, how long was three days?
They made their best guess, then waited an extra day, in case. But there wasn’t any trace of Miocene or any other captain. Whatever had crippled their car must have left everyone else powerless. Seeing no choice in the matter, Washen looked at each of her companions, and she smiled as if embarrassed, and she admitted to them:
“If we want to get home, it looks as if we’re just going to have to walk.”
Twelve
Do something new, and do nothing else, and do that one thing relentlessly—particularly if it is painful and dangerous and utterly unplanned—and your memory begins to play one of its oldest, sneakiest tricks.
Washen couldn’t remember being anywhere else.
She would find herself standing at the base of a tall newborn mountain, or deep within some trackless black-bellied jungle, and it was as if everything she remembered about her former life was nothing but an elaborate, impossible dream, more forgotten than remembered, and those memories, at their heart, utterly ridiculous.
This hike was a deadly business. Covering any distance was slow and treacherous work, even when the captains learned little tricks and big ones to keep themselves moving in what they prayed was the right direction.
Marrow despised them. It wanted them dead, and it didn’t care how it achieved their murder. And the hatred was obvious to everyone. Washen felt its mood every waking moment, yet she refused to admit it, at least in front of the others. Except for cursing, which didn’t count. “Fucking mountain, fucking wind, fucking shit-cating fucking weeds…!’ Everyone had their favorite insults, saving the most savage words for the worst challenges. “Stupid shit iron, I hate you! Hear me? I hate you, the same as you hate me!”
Each day was a hard march punctuated with the constant search for food. What they had eaten before as a ceremony became their standard fare: they caught giant insects, ripped loose their wings, and broiled them over hot fatty fires. The strong meat held enough calories and nutrients to put the captains back to full size again, and very nearly their old health. Washen slowly learned which insects tasted the least awful. A desperate descendant of hunting apes, she taught herself the bugs’ haunts and the best ways to catch them, and after what might have been the first year—or a little less, or maybe a little more—Washen didn’t fall asleep hungry anymore. No one had to live famished. Promise and Dream sampled the lush vegetation, vomiting what was bitter beyond words, but mastering the slow careful cooking of everything else.
Where the tongue adapts, the soul follows.
Early in that second year, there was a good day. Genuinely, truly good. Simple wakefulness began it for Washen and the others. The captains’ first meal was filling. Then the six of them began to jog toward the horizon, their few possessions carried on their hips and their wide wet backs. They were retracing their flight path. Without digital maps, they had to rely on shared memories of odd volcanic peaks and twisted black gorges and the occasional mineral-stained sea. Marrow enjoyed draining its seas and detonating its mountains, and that brought confusion, doubts, and delays. Where new barriers had been heaved skyward, they had to make long detours. At the first sign of being lost, the captains had to stop and reconnoiter. Without stars or a sun, there was always the risk of becoming profoundly and embarrassingly lost. But on that very good day, they held their course throughout. Diu found a knifelike ridge where field boots found easy running, and the sky was pleasantly overcast with a thin cooling drizzle falling over them, keeping them nearly cool. Pressing until comfortably exhausted, they ran to the next landmark—a vast black escarpment that loomed over them by days end.
Camp was made in the deepest shadows of a likely valley. A rainwater stream danced down a jerky narrow bed probably not fifty years old. Rainwater was always better than springwater. True, they could taste the iron in every swallow. And there was usually a sulfurous residue. But it wasn’t the mineral-choked, bacteria-choked stew that came from underground. In fact, it was cool enough for bathing, which was a genuine luxury. Washen scrubbed herself raw, then dressed—except for her battered boots—and she stretched out beneath an enormous umbrella tree, studying her long bare feet and the busy water and noticing an unexpected emotion that was inside her. It was an emotion that seemed, against all odds, to resemble contentment. Even happiness, in a diluted fashion.
Diu appeared. One moment, Washen was utterly alone, and then Diu came from no particular direction, the top of his uniform removed, dangling behind him like the spent carapace of a growing insect. Under one arm, he carried his dinner—a beetle-like apparition, black as band iron and longer than a forearm—and he turned and smiled at Washen in a way that implied that he already knew where she was. He smiled, and his dinner moved its eight legs in a steady, complaining fashion. He ignored the legs. Stepping closer, he offered a nebulous laugh, then asked, “Would you like to share?”
For a captain, he was pretty. Diu had a pretty chest, hairless and sculpted by the last hard year. And his gray eyes had a sparkle that only grew brighter when he stepped into the shadow of the umbrella tree.
Washen said, “Fine. Thank you.”
Diu just kept smiling.
For an instant, Washen felt uncomfortable, ill at ease. But when she searched for reasons, she discovered only that here was another one of those odd moments that she couldn’t have predicted. A thousand centuries old, yet she had never imagined that she would be sitting in a place like this, under these hard circumstances, staring at a man named Diu, her mouth genuinely growing wet from the anticipation.
For a well-cooked beetle, or for something else? Washen surprised herself, admitting to both of them, “I can’t remember the last time I was this happy’ Diu giggled for a moment. “It’s been a good, good day,” she confessed. He said, “Yes,” in a certain way.
Then Washen heard herself saying, “Tie your friend down. For now, would you?” Then she threw him her best handmade rope, adding, “Only if you want. If you don’t mind. I want to see you out of those clothes, Mr Beetleman.”