Whatever time-place that is, Nata is sure Mam has somehow returned to it but has been unable to return as promised. Now she is going to find that whistle, and she is going to blow it herself.
People will kill what they do not understand, Mam used to say. They will flay it with their tongues if their hands are tied.
When the sentries catch up with Nata it is too late: the dune song has already begun.
It is almost the end of night when the whirlwind first starts to appear. Its coming is announced by a faraway lament, a deep-throated complaint, serving as the right augury for the arrival of feet and torches at the exact place where Nata and Tasé succumbed to fatigue and made camp.
The Chief has come along with the sentries. The light of the torch and shadow of his cloak darken his face in a manner that is representative of his heaving chest and his thoughts so clear they could’ve been bellowed: There will be no mercy this time.
“Take them,” is all he says.
There is a spat, sand flying in all directions, torches wavering in the wind of coming dawn, but all is soon settled. Nata is at one end, subdued; Tasé restrained at the other.
The Chief faces him first, stooping to his height. Then he raises his hand and deals Tasé a big slap in the middle of his face. There’s a snap of cartilage.
“Just offer me,” Tasé says, his voice loud for the first time, his speech bubbling with blood and snot and spittle. “Offer me, so this nightmare can end for the two of us.”
The silence that passes is filled only by the picking up of sand into dust, the whirlwind now visible in the distance, gathering force, a storm within a storm. Against the backdrop of the orange horizon of the rising sun, it is a roaring ghoul of black wind.
“No,” the Chief says, looking at the cloud as it approaches. “No.”
And in the midst of all this, with no one paying attention to Nata at all, she finds her opening.
She darts, moves too quickly, out of reach of the sentries’ arms, too quickly for their legs to find purchase in the silty sand. She flits with smaller feet, one step, five steps, and soon she is too far. The shouts behind her curse, yell, call her crazy, mad girl, selfish, putting Isiuwa in jeopardy, but she is deaf to them because her eyes are fixed on the glorious, glorious light ahead.
For the first time, she sees the whirlwind through her own eyes, and not through the eyes of Mam’s stories. The Chief is right in calling it the breath of the gods, because it holds within it a crackle, light and lightning, embraced by wind roiling within itself, gloved in sand and dust and debris. It moves like a cloud would if it were angry. It roars mightily now, up close, as if made of mouth alone. Sand hisses in its wake, an unending flute, an orchestra of whistles, a posse of snakes.
Glorious.
She halts then, right in its path, and turns, the wall of light and sound and dust right behind her. The Chief and the sentries have stopped chasing, standing well out of the path of the wind, Tasé held down between two sentries. This far out she cannot see their faces, but by the light of their angled flames, their postures say it alclass="underline" that she is a waste of existence, that she has ruined all the good work Isiuwa has done.
Yes, she thinks. Yes.
But: Tasé.
She takes a step forward, two, hoping he understands it. She takes another step. The wind comes behind her, but she steps forward again, buying time, reminding herself she can do better, be better. Her Mam tried, but she can try harder.
Please, please, she thinks, watching him, static between the two sentries. Please.
And as if he hears her, at the very instant she starts to feel the hairs on the back of her neck stand in response to the crackle of the wind, Tasé moves. He slips, lithe, darting, the sentries too shocked by everything to react properly. He ditches his top cloak as he speeds across the sand, his skin black and melding with the night. His father, the Chief, follows, lumbering along, screaming his name, the fires of the sentries bobbing alongside him.
Yes, Nata thinks. Yes.
The whirlwind of time, of gods, of opportunity, of liberation, leans down right then and embraces her. Sand fills her eyes, her mouth, her nose, her ears. Her skin tingles softly, and she feels her feet leaving the ground.
But she sticks out an arm all the same.
It feels like ages, and like a faraway thing, when a sandy hand grasps hers. She pulls—to herself, to the Mams who dared to leave before, to the future, to power.
They rise, together. She knows it is together because she knows the weight of defiance. She offers herself to the wind and they slip, slip, losing all sense of time and space. They become nothing and everything, and all is possible in the breath of the gods, a breath that is now theirs to breathe. Wherever it would take them, they do not know, but at least one thing is sure: that their tongues and their bodies and their hearts will belong to them.
The Work of Wolves
TEGAN MOORE
Tegan Moore (alarmhat.com) is a writer and professional dog trainer living in the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys eating noodles, hiking in the rain, and reading scary stories. She has published short fiction in magazines including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, and Tor.com and runs the Clarion West One-Day Workshops. You can follow her obscenely charismatic dogs @temerity.dogs on Instagram.
I am a good dog.
The scent trails are already as broken by the wind as the apocalyptic neighborhoods they lead through, and smoke from a fire half a mile southeast adds another layer of complexity. Following one trail is like following the roots of a plant wound tight together in the dirt.
No, better: It is like sorting through the fallen trees after this storm. Difficult to tell where one tree begins and the other ends, what belongs to what, and where the different parts are from.
That’s a very good Is Like. I save it to keep it with my other good ones.
The sector clear, I send the final readings back to Carol via DAT. She’s behind me with the field assistant, standing on the hood of a car. I can hear the distant, quiet tick of her DAT receipt.
“Sera,” she calls out, “slow down and stay within my visual range.”
Carol should hurry and follow me per standard procedure instead of yelling from the hood of a wrecked car. I don’t have time to wait for her.
Barometric pressure dropping, I ping back to her DAT. I see her hand touch the receiver in her ear from the corner of my eye as I trace the foundation where a prefabricated house once stood. Significant enough to indicate further storms approaching. “Sera,” my DAT says, but I also hear Carol’s voice carry over the rubble field of tangled two-by-four framing, shingles peeled from rooftops, tatters of furniture, and twisted textiles. She struggles down from the car into the wreckage. “Stay in range, goddamn it. Slow down!”
Carol is now too far away to direct or even accompany my search. I don’t need her direction, but the more distance between us, the greater the chance of a missed opportunity. She is slow, perhaps deliberately slow. What does that indicate? Will this also negatively impact the speed at which she acknowledges my alert?
I jump up on an intact retaining wall where I can catch the breeze’s fresh edge. From here it’s easier to see the destruction for what it was before the storm: broken stumps where dogs might have lifted their legs, sidewalks where bicycles and skateboards ruckled along, driveways. Here and there a few houses stand, debris piled at their foundations. In a few days those piles will become a haven for rats and mice. In the distance there are a few humans, nontargets I’ve already cleared from my cache. People who lived here, who now pick through the storm’s detritus. I want to give them an Is Like, but there’s no time. I am working. My priority is to do the best job possible.