Chapter 11
Hela slept with the quill under her pillow again, so the feeling of an incoming message draws her out of sleep. She sits up in bed, that annoying pulling sensation in her fingertips.
She sits down at her desk, quill in hand.
It looks like a feather made of metal—-modeled after an eagle feather, she thinks, though she isn’t sure.
It’s designed for elixir messages, so it won’t actually stain whatever she writes on; it’ll just make the text of the message visible to her.
When she holds it, she feels the elixir in her blood waking up.
Spider veins of white light wrap around her hands, and she writes.
Dear Dreadful,
You come highly recommended by a friend of mine as a trustworthy and capable Scout, and I am hoping you’ll agree to a find--and--retrieve of low to moderate risk.
The package in question is small and not in Talusar country, but in the Barrens—-however, I am not in a position to make the journey myself.
If you are amenable to this request, I will forward you the details as soon as I am able.
Sincerely,
Dr. Canterbury
As a rule, Hela doesn’t like to do retrievals. They usually involve going into Talusar country, and she has no interest in going anywhere near the people she left behind as a child. But she makes exceptions for the Barrens, and she could use the money.
She sweeps the quill across the desk to erase the message, and then scribbles her agreement.
Scouts use aliases, and so do those who hire them, given how legally questionable their requests usually are.
Scouts tend to choose adjectives, but she doesn’t know what “Dr. Canterbury” is supposed to tell her about the person requesting this job.
Still, her reply is tied to the original message. It’ll get where it needs to go.
She sets the quill down. The trailer is empty—-Elegy must have left for the Octopus already.
But a pot of coffee waits for Hela on the stove.
She was a little nervous to live with her sister again as an adult—-what if they fought like they did when they were teenagers?
—-but it seems like the time in the military did Elegy good.
She’s neat, wakes up at dawn, and never forgets to make enough coffee.
Hela’s joints creak as she crosses the trailer in pursuit of a mug.
Hela’s Finch is old and beat--up, but it still flies in a straight line, so she hasn’t bothered to replace it. Of the two of them, Elegy is the one who loves a shiny new gadget; Hela will use something until it breaks, and often even after that point.
She ignores the puttering sound it makes as she dips down to fly low over the empty land.
No land is truly empty, of course; even a desert has bunchgrass and brome and creosote.
But from above, this land is yellow brown and smudgy as an oil painting.
She’s searching for a cave opening, as Dr. Canterbury instructed.
This is her fifth pass over the coordinates he gave her; he warned her the location of the plant wouldn’t be exact, but this is getting ridiculous.
As she turns the Finch to take her sixth loop around the area, she sees it: a dark patch in the land beneath her, like a sunspot in the corner of her eye. It’s worth a try. She guides the Finch toward a rocky area that seems sturdy enough to hold it.
She pops open the driver’s side door and climbs out. It’s like climbing into an oven, the air hot and close. She drops to the sandy soil and presses one hand over her left eye. She learned that trick from Keen Ahn—-get one eye used to the dark before you walk into it.
She grabs her all--purpose bag and locks up the Finch, even though there’s nobody out here for miles.
Dr. Canterbury didn’t tell her anything about this plant other than the fact that it glows in the dark, and she probably doesn’t need to know anything else.
Before she left, she looked up bioluminescent plants, and as far as she can tell, they don’t exist. Bugs, sure.
Plankton, yes. But plants? Not without the intervention of science.
She’s not sure what Dr. Canterbury is into, and at this point in her Scout career, she knows better than to ask. Maybe this is a secret Cedrae or Talusar government experiment; maybe he discovered a brand--new species; maybe he’s just lost his mind. It’s not her job to guess.
She steps into the cave, and uncovers her eye. It’s disorienting at first, seeing muted cave interior with one eye and total darkness with the other, but she steps farther, letting the cold, damp air envelop her.
She’s six steps into the cave when she sees a soft green glow up ahead.
She keeps her steps slow, careful. There could be a sharp drop or a pit in the rock up ahead. But the good doctor told her light would only scare off the plant’s bioluminescence, so she can’t exactly take out a flashlight and start waving it around.
She reaches it, and drops into a crouch. The plant is about the size of a fern, its leaves large and flat near the root and tapering at the ends. A vein of color runs down each one like a trickle of water.
“Well, damn,” she says.
Good thing she packed a trowel.
She didn’t bring a pot, so she wraps up a big ball of dirt—-and the plant itself—-in an old T--shirt she finds in the footwell of the Finch, and buckles it all in like it’s a baby.
As soon as she steps into the light of day, the plant’s leaves pull into a teardrop shape, showing her their dull purple undersides.
But there’s not much she can do about the sunlight.
She flies back to Twentynine, which takes about an hour.
The trailer was never supposed to be a permanent home—-it was Keen’s Scout base, where he kept all of his weird “artifacts” and the salvage he wasn’t able to get good money for.
But when he died, Hela and Elegy agreed that El would get Keen’s Losan apartment and Hela would get Twentynine.
And El’s sure as hell not going back there now, to the apartment she shared with Shir.
Hela is the one who packed it up for her after he died. Actually, for those first few weeks, Hela did damn near everything for her sister, because Elegy could hardly tie her shoes.
Not that she minded. When Hela was eleven, she came to Losan in mourning, having been sent away from her home and cut off from her parents in one fell swoop, and it was Elegy who took care of her, Elegy who taught her English, Elegy who first called Hela her sister.
All Hela has done the past few years is return the favor.
She’s careful with the plant bundle, hugging it close as she unlocks the door to the trailer and then nestling it in the empty sink. There’s an old pot behind the house where she used to have a cactus; it’ll do, for now.
She’s got dirt in all the creases of her hands and under each fingernail when she notices the note, written on the window over the sink in erasing marker. It’s from Elegy.
Hela—-
I’m doing something stupid. I won’t be back for a few days, but don’t forget—-that military tracker is still embedded in my shoulder. So if you need to find me, call Primary Ciro Arias and tell him I said it’s another King’s Canyon.
I’m sorry in advance. It couldn’t be avoided.
Love you,
El
Hela stares at that “love you” like it’s a curse. They never say “I love you” to each other. But Elegy used to say it every time she was about to go on a particularly dangerous search and rescue mission.
“Fuck,” Hela says to the kitchen counter. She braces her dirt--streaked hands on the edge of the sink, and then kicks the cabinet beneath it so hard she leaves a dent.