Chapter 4
CHAPTER 4
Sarah
A crid air. No. Smoke.
I struggled to open my eyes, and once I did, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
At first, it was blurs of black and orange. My head swirled between the blobs for too long. When my eyes cleared, shock held me paralyzed. The ship had come apart when it crashed into the tall trees of the massive forest. I had expected it to hold together better than an airplane from Earth, but just like a plane crash on TV, there were pieces strewn in every direction for a long distance.
They should have been hard to see at night, but half of them were on fire, so that helped. I could even see some of the mercenaries—injured, some possibly dead. My vision was clouded now and then by occasional plumes of smoke as it rose high into the trees.
Where I’d landed.
Once I knew where I was, my body quivered, and I nearly lost my balance on the cable that dug into the middle of me. No thicker than my wrist, the cable was bound between two pieces of the ship that were pinned in two trees. I was folded in half over it, unsure of how I had managed to end up like that and grateful whatever trick of fate had arranged it but also wishing fate had been a bit more proactive about my safety.
Beggars can’t be choosers. My weight sagged the cable like an awkward smile. There I dangled. I guessed I was seventy feet above the forest floor.
“A hundred, at least,” Rex said in my mind.
My eyes widened in shock and I mentally replied. “You’re still here?”
He chuckled. “For the time being, it would seem.”
I was glad for the internal conversation—an external one would have had me take deeper breaths and I was afraid such a thing would roll me from the cable. I hoped not to choke on the next plume of smoke. Coughing could be the end of me.
Before all the smoke veiled the crash site, a familiar horde came to the crash, and it made Rex tense up. The jem’hora flock, coming for their victory meal of my would-be assailants.
He hissed in my head, “I knew this was all your fault.”
“Can you blame me?” I snapped right back. “You saw what your men were threatening to do to me—"
“Call them off,” he commanded.
“You don’t give the orders here, Rex.”
The eyeless birds set upon his severely burned and injured mercenaries, feasting. The men’s screams would have been enough to make me sick, if they had been coming from anyone else. Instead, their terrified screams made me smile. It was a relief to know they were being taken from the world. I hoped no one burned their bodies—the traditional funeral rite for a Ladrian on Halla, where they would then be born into the ether and become a ghost, like Rex.
The microplanet would be better off without them.
“Fine,” he said angrily. “I don’t give orders, but they’re devouring them in cold blood. You are too kind a person to allow this—"
“Cold blood is all those men ever had.”
Rex wanted to turn away from the sight. But he wouldn’t. Not because I stopped him, but because he thought to look away would somehow dishonor his men. Their deaths should be witnessed, in his strange code of honor.
“Why do you insist on watching this, if it upsets you so much?” I asked him in my mind.
His voice was far quieter than before. “Ladrians believe death is the next step in our life cycle, that we should witness and embrace death. We are born. We die. We become our ghost. And when our ghost dies—reborn to the ether, we like to say—we travel to the ether to be remade. Most of us, anyway. To witness death is to embrace everything a person was and to be with them as they take the next step.”
“Is that why Justice’s executions are public?” I asked, needing to think of anything other than my predicament.
Some part of Rex smiled. “His executions are public because he likes to show off. But originally, his father held public executions to comfort the doomed. So they would die surrounded by their community.”
Strangely beautiful.
As the jem’hora flock continued to feast on their meal, Rex said, “We should work on getting down from here.”
I looked to either end of the cable holding me up and swallowed hard. “I don’t know how. I’m ten feet from each tree, there’s no—"
“Let me do it,” he said.
He almost made me laugh. “Are you joking? You think I’ll give you control now ?”
“Unless you have some sort of gymnastics background I don’t know about, then yes, I do, because I am your only hope of getting out of here safely.”
I glanced down at the birds. “Maybe I can get the jem’hora to give me a ride down, like I did in the tree—"
“With their talons soaked in my crew’s blood?” Inside me, Rex shuddered. “Does that sound like a good plan to you?”
I sighed, careful and controlled. A billow of smoke wafted into my face, choking me. I fought to keep the spasms in my stomach from rolling me off the cable and almost failed.
“Sarah,” he intoned more sternly. “Please.”
“Why do you care? You’ll be fine from a fall.”
“Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. I have never heard of a ghost being taken the way you took me. I don’t know what the rules are. But I do know that if you fall with me in your body and your bones snap, then they can skewer me as much as they can skewer you. It might not be fatal for me, but it could be, and I do not want to take that chance. Let me help us get to safety.”
One of the ends of the cable wobbled as that piece of the ship shifted in the tree.
“Sooner rather than later, Sarah,” Rex nagged in my head.
Another wobble and the cable drooped a few more inches. I held on for dear life, before I finally, reluctantly relinquished control to Rex. A passenger in my own body, I watched as his nimble reflexes allowed him to inch us to the higher side of the cable. My heart surged with each movement.
From there, he told me, “You don’t want to see this.”
But I watched anyway.
Rex half-swung and half-dropped to a branch, before he leapt from the limb to a more stable branch and used another tree’s branches as braces to walk us to the trunk. Letting him use my body, I felt the shift in my weight, but not the leaps or the climbing. The gnarly bark felt as though it was covered in thick fabric—the vague shape of the texture, but not the roughness. From there, he carefully climbed down and eventually dropped us to the ground.
Once there, he gave me control back without a word, shocking me.
I had never been so happy to be on solid ground in my life. “Thank you for that.”
“You’re fortunate that me staying alive required your survival.”
When we had been high in the trees, the wreckage looked so small. On the ground, everything was far bigger. The ship’s pieces, those on fire and those that weren’t, some were four times my height. Bodies were everywhere. All dead—it seemed my birds preferred dead meat to living, so they had finished off anyone who was still alive, before they had started their meal.
“Scavenge the area for food and water,” Rex instructed. “The jem’hora haven’t eaten everything of value, I’m sure of it.”
I slowly nodded and looked around for a variety of supplies. There wasn’t much. Some bandages and a flask of something inedible, even by my standards. There were many comparable and similar things between Ladrians and humans, and I was not sure how many, but I hoped for one more.
“Is there a little black box in your ship?”
“A what?” Rex asked, confused.
“Something that sends out a signal, if there’s trouble,” I explained. “So rescuers can find the ship and survivors.”
“No, though that sounds like a useful idea,” he said thoughtfully. “Something from Earth?”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “So, no chance of rescue?”
“No. We’ll have to rescue ourselves. The Ladrian way of things.”
“Your people are a bunch of prideful bastards.”
He laughed loudly but did not disagree. I surveyed the damage my murder birds were doing and had done. The wreck had been enough to kill Rex’s men—I was sure they would have died eventually from their injuries. But the jem’hora made sure of it. Their beaks glimmered in the moonslight, flashes of red blood and silver feathers, of bones and entrails.
I was pleased to see them eat so well. The flock had more than earned their dinner. At the thought, part of me wondered what I was becoming. To relish in the carnage the way I was. Far from the simpering socialite I once tried to pretend to be for my ex. Coming to Halla had awoken some part of me—the same part of me that had stolen groceries for my hungry sisters during our childhood. The same part of me that did anything to survive.
“It didn’t have to be this way, you know,” Rex grumbled.
I had often thought the same of my impoverished childhood. My mother had worked two jobs to support myself and my two sisters, but it was almost never enough to keep us from being hungry or cold. With no education, there was little she could do about it. Though she had tried. But I grew up thinking that life didn’t have to be like that, and I had glommed onto the first wealthy man who showed me attention.
I turned inward to my passenger and said without guilt or contrition, “This is what you get when you fuck with me, Rex. Do not forget it.”
“Very well, then.” A hint of respect tainted his voice. “Time to head to Faithless.”
“Why not go back to Valor’s property?” I asked.
“If you would like, then I suppose we can. But we are a six day walk from his location, or a two-day walk to Faithless. Either way, you’ll start the journey by walking at night, through this forest, and while your birds are the helpful sort, I do not believe even they could shield you from all that could happen here. Particularly with no weapons, no shelter, no food, and no water.”
He has a point , I admitted to myself. I didn’t like it, but he was not wrong.
“I know I have a point,” Rex said, reading my thoughts. “For that matter, I know a shortcut that will take us directly to my manor in under four hours, but if you would prefer to take your chances with the drecks and other animals of the forest—"
“I don’t know.” Something about the shortcut made me nervous.
“I only bring up the shortcut out of concern for the vessel holding me captive,” he said, his tone wry.
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You were not able to scavenge much from the wreckage. Your body requires food and water and rest. Think about it this way. Would you rather travel four hours on foot or two days on foot, with no supplies?”
I closed my eyes and huffed. Then I tried to brighten my mood and smile, but it came out flat. “So, which way to your shortcut?”