“Not your aunt and uncle,” Karron whispered, her mouth moving but hardly any sound coming from her throat. The kids would hear her, if they were like she was.
“No,” Oni whispered back. “Help us?”
“How?”
“Kill them. They are going to sell us.”
She shook her head. “Not my problem,” she whispered.
“You are like us,” the boy said. Beside him, Jill stirred, and all three of them froze until she settled again.
“Not anymore,” Karron lied.
For a long moment they sat in silence, watching one another. Then Karron crept away, her heart in her throat, and went back to her own blanket. Her head buzzed and her adrenaline spiked and the nanos at the base of her skull woke up, reacting to her heightened emotions. She took careful, slow breaths and forced herself to calm.
War Children, they’d been called. The program was dead, dismantled and torched fifteen years ago. She thought she’d been in the last generation, the last raised in the crèche in Deecee. Genetically altered, infested with nano-tech that even the Covenant didn’t understand, trained from the day they could walk to hunt, kill, be soldiers at the front of the Covenant peace-keeping forces.
She’d seen the Academy burn, seen her fellow Children burn with it. Only a few escaped that she knew of and many of them had been hunted down or gone insane. If Ishim hadn’t pulled her from the river, she would have died as well.
It was luck and staying calm and quiet that had kept the nanos from driving her insane, kept her from being caught. She’d told Ishim what she was, but he didn’t seem to care. Karron had warned him if she went crazy, he’d have to put her down.
“If you go crazy, will I even be able to kill you before you get me?” Ishim had asked.
Karron had looked away. They both knew the answer was no. No one man alone could take out a War Child.
Now there were three of them on this boat, though what training the two kids had, Karron didn’t know. At Oni’s age, she’d already run her first mission. Was there a program again? Why were these kids traveling with the suspiciously normal-seeming man and woman who Oni said were going to sell them? Sell them to whom?
Too many questions get smugglers killed, Ishim would say. Karron stared up at the Ring and pushed the questions away as stones fell out of the sky, flamed bright, and died away.
The Missip branched into a hundred waterways as the Zouri joined up with it. Ishim and Karron knew many of those ways. Which ones were patrolled by Covenant boats or led to Covenant settlements, which ones were dead ends, which were safe for a boat with a shallow draft to pole down or steam up. Reeds and willow branches shivered in the cool spring air as they tacked west and north along one of these myriad of ways. By afternoon they would join up with a bigger branch of the Zouri and in another week they’d be able to steam toward Ria, the worst of the checkpoints and danger zones.
Ria itself was controlled by a Baron, one of the gang leaders set up by the Covenant to keep a semblance of order on this side of the Missip. Long as the trains ran on time and the tithes got paid, Covenant didn’t seem to care what else happened or how the Barons went about their lives.
Ishim was catching a nap and Karron had the wheel as she guided the ship, keeping the boat turned so the big sail held a bellyful of wind. This way would narrow too much for sailing soon and they’d have to break out the poles or risk the racket of the steam engine for a while. They’d decide when Ishim woke, probably with a shared glance, a look at the river conditions, and a nod. A decade and a half relying on each other made words irrelevant. Karron smiled to herself as a Kingfisher dove into the water ahead. Sometimes they’d go weeks without words.
Not like their passengers. Nolan and Jill talked to each other a lot and sometimes attempted to engage Ishim or Karron in small talk, more and more as the days went by. They said idle things mostly. When they spoke to each other, they used Esper instead of Covenant. Their accents in that tongue put them from the south, maybe from as far as Nawlins. She and Ishim never sailed too far south. Too many sharks and crocodiles, too much heat, unstable weather, and biting insects. Too many Covenant Peace Keepers. The north was safer.
Nolan had insulted Karron and Ishim the second day in Esper, calling Ishim a night pig and Karron his little white slut. Ishim didn’t speak Esper and Karron had decided not to respond, curious as to why the man went off on them with such a pleasant tone and a smile on his face. She’d figured he was trying to see if she spoke the language. Her training was still there, lurking beneath her skin like the nanotech. So she said nothing, just shook her head as though she had no idea what he was saying.
This morning they’d been whispering about a broken bridge. Their excitement, the anticipation they couldn’t keep out of their body language, it scared Karron. Felt to her like the thick heat before a bad storm, air crackling with energy as the world held its breath.
War Children. She hadn’t told Ishim. No way to tell him without chancing being overheard. The kids had stayed aft all morning, crouched together and watching the world with dark, quiet eyes that didn’t quite meet hers when she risked looking their way.
Wherever they’d come from, wherever they were going, they weren’t her crèche, her brothers and sisters. Not her problem. Killing took her away, took her to the warm place it was hard to come home from. She wouldn’t go there for strangers. She couldn’t.
The children as she’d known them were gone. These kids? Not. Her. Problem.
The wheel beneath her hands creaked and started to splinter. She forced her grip to relax.
Ishim woke, and they shared a quick meal of flatbread and dried fruit. Supplies were low and it hadn’t rained in a few days. They’d have to start boiling river water soon, or use the precious gallons of filtered water on their passengers. They had filter tabs, but those made water taste awful, and Karron’s shit turn to tar, so she avoided them unless it was dire. There was a settlement nearby, just upstream where their Covenant coin would spend. Fresh water, maybe fresh fruit and vegetables. Maybe even game meat. Karron was getting tired of fish and flatbread.
They doused the sails after losing the stern wind as the river narrowed, and pushed the boat with long poles through the smaller canal-like passage that should connect up to the Zouri tributaries. She hadn’t sailed this way since the previous summer, and the winter rains and flooding could have changed things. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Hours of poling felt good on her muscles, taking her mind off the kids. Something red caught her eye off the port side as she shoved the long pole into the canal bed. Metal, the remnant of a settlement here probably before the Ring, back when Earth had a moon and this whole land was called the United States. Fragments survived even in the wilderness, sometimes rising like the carcass of a long-dead beast from reeds and swamp.
Part of a bridge, Karron realized. She’d seen it before, the broken expanse stretching like an accusing finger pointing over the water. It hadn’t been red then. It was painted on the side toward her, bright and fresh.
She went still, pole in her hands nearly forgotten.
Ishim cursed and she made herself turn and look to the starboard side. Nolan had a .38 revolver pointed at Ishim’s head. The way the man held it, it was clear he had practice with a gun and was ready to kill.
“Pole over to the bank there by that bridge,” Jill said. She stood near the mast, another gun held in one hand, pointed down but with her finger near the trigger.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Nolan added.
Karron contemplated doing something stupid. The nanos in her head were angry insects begging to be let free. They buzzed through her, little twitches of muscle and thought which she had tried to euthanize with time and quiet.