“You could have told me about the guns,” Karron said as she quartered the rabbit into the small kettle before adding precious pure water to the stew.
“You wouldn’t have helped us,” Oni said.
“You knew?” Ishim said, looking at Karron, making it clear he was talking about the kids, not about the guns.
“Only last night. They weren’t our problem.” She lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. “Smugglers and questions, right?”
“We’re your problem now,” Oni said with the kind of smug smile only a child used to being the smartest person around could wear.
“And where do you expect us to take you? Ria?”
“We have been paid to take them that far,” Karron offered.
Ishim looked at Karron and shook his head with a small smile of his own.
“No,” Oni said. “Sanctuary.”
Karron laughed, the sound barking from her throat, surprising her. “That’s a myth. Hell, we told each other that myth in my crèche.”
Sanctuary. A place where they had tech that could take out the nanos. Tech to calm them, make a War Child normal again. A place where no one would make you kill, a place where no brothers or sisters went insane and had to be put down like rabid dogs.
A myth. A bedtime story told by motherless children. Told by killers.
“I have a map,” Oni said. “Give me your knife.”
Karron drew her knife, trying not to think of the throats it had cut today.
“Wait,” Ishim said, reaching for Oni as the boy cut into his own arm with a sure stroke.
Karron caught Ishim’s forearm and pushed him back. “He’s like me,” she said.
Oni pulled a small tube from under his skin. Already his nanos were closing the wound, the blood welling, slowing, and stopping even as she watched. He handed the knife back before opening the tube.
Inside was a map on thin paper. No, Karron saw, not paper. Leather of some kind. So thin that when he held it up in the firelight, the flames shone straight through. Illuminating lines. River lines. Numbers. A small star, done in red ink, like a drop of blood.
“Zouri to James, James to Dakota. Then west, to the Yellowstone and into the mountains. I have coordinates, see those numbers? Not a myth. It’s real. The ones who made us, they came from there. We were to be the new generation, the new kind of Child.”
“I am Eve,” Bee added. “I hate being Eve. Wanna be Bee. Bees can sting.”
“Jill and Nolan were from Sanctuary?” Ishim asked.
Karron was silent, still staring at the map, holding her breath, trying to decide if a legend could be real.
“No, they worked there. I don’t know what happened. Funding dried up. The Covenant doesn’t want more Children, I guess. They ended the program, and we were supposed to be destroyed.”
Karron tore her eyes from the map and looked at Oni. “History repeats,” she said softly.
“Marta, the woman you call Jill, she stole us. Said a baron would pay for us. She killed the others, but not before Sandy, the woman from Sanctuary, gave me the map and told me how to find it.” Oni leaned back against the piled blankets with a pained sigh and carefully rolled up the map.
The stew started to boil over. Karron turned away from the kids, from the map to an impossible place, and settled for dealing with dinner.
Later — her belly full of spring roots and rabbit — she stood at the edge of the river and watched lights smear across the darkening sky. Ishim came up beside her, making no attempt to hide his approach.
“Do we take them to this place, this Sanctuary?” he said.
“Tarik is yours,” Karron said. She turned and looked at her friend. Her real words were unspoken. Don’t make me decide.
“We been on the river a long time,” Ishim said. “Drifting up and down. Been a long time since I did anything but sail with my grief and try to outrun old memories.”
“We are alike,” Karron said, her mouth twisting into what felt like a smile. At least on the outside. “I like the river. Sanctuary is a dream, nothing more.”
“Maybe it’s time we stopped drifting,” Ishim said with a too-casual shrug. “Can’t just leave two kids on their own. But if you don’t want to go, we’ll set them down in Ria. That boy is smart as ten men. He’ll figure his way and take care of his sister.”
Karron nodded and looked back to the sky as Ishim moved back toward the camp. She walked to the very edge of the river. Water soaked through her boots, her toes going numb as she stood on the muddy bank. Oni and Bee. Children like she had been. Like she still was, in the bright moments she couldn’t quite seem to escape.
“Water, water, everywhere,” she murmured. Bending low, she dug her fingers into the mud and squeezed, feeling the gritty earth slide over her skin.
Sanctuary meant healing, meant being free of insanity, free of the things in her head. Myth. Myth like War Children were becoming a myth. Another generation, and they’d be as forgotten as most of the texts and histories from before the Ring, as much legend as the Archive was legend, as the great Wars would become in thirty or fifty more years.
Ishim was right. She had been drifting on the river. But now she had a brother and sister again. And they had a map. A map to a dream.
Karron bent down and let the river wash the last traces of grit from her hand.
Maybe it was time to dream again.
Annie Bellet is the author of The Twenty-Sided Sorceress and the Gryphonpike Chronicles series. She holds a BA in English and a BA in Medieval Studies and thus can speak a smattering of useful languages such as Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Welsh. Her short fiction is available in multiple collections and anthologies. Her interests besides writing include rock climbing, reading, horseback riding, video games, comic books, table-top RPGs, and many other nerdy pursuits. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and a very demanding Bengal cat. Find her on her website at anniebellet.com.
CARRIERS
Tananarive Due
2055
Republic of Sacramento
Carrier Territories
Nayima’s sleep had turned restless as she aged, so the rattling from the chicken coop outside woke her before her hens raised the alarm. The intruder was likely either feline or human, and she hoped it was the former. A cat, no matter how big, wasn’t as dangerous as a person.
Nayima ignored the sharp throb in her knee when she jumped from her bed and ran outside with her sawed-off in time to see a hound-sized tabby scurrying away with a young hen pinned in its teeth, a snow globe of downy white feathers trailing behind. The army of night cats scattered in swishing bushes and brittle leaves. The giant thief paused to look back at her, his eyes glowing gold with threat. The cats were getting bigger.
Nayima had been saving that hen for Sunday dinner, but she was too winded to chase the thief. Now both knees throbbed. And her lower back, right on schedule. She fired once into the dark and hoped she’d hit him.
Fucking cats.
The dark was thick to the forsaken east, but to the west she saw the gentle orange glow from the colony in Sacramento, the fortress she would never enter. The town folk had electricity to spare, since their lights never went fully dark anymore. They were building a real-life Emerald City from the ruins, with bright lights and fresh water flowing in the streets — literally, after the levees flooded back in the ’20s.
By contrast, her tract, Nayimaland, was two-hundred acres of dead farmland she shared with feral cats made bold because food was scarce — taken by drought, not the Plague. The late State of California had yet more dying to do.