Twelve
Twelve
J essyn walked blind. The man had taken off the blue jacket and gestured for her to cover her head with it.
At first, she’d just buttoned it closed and put it on like an oversized hat that mostly rested on her shoulders.
That hadn’t been good enough for him. He’d come behind her, put the knife against her spine with one hand, and with the other, tied the sleeves of the jacket around her neck.
The world had narrowed to the gray-blue of sunlight filtered through the cloth.
It stank a little of unwashed body, but at least he hadn’t insisted she use his undershirt.
As she walked ahead, he kept one hand on her shoulder, guiding her down paths that felt natural under her feet. Uneven, anyway. Every now and then, he said something, but she didn’t understand the words.
At first, she tried counting her steps in her mind.
Even if the path they took curved, she’d at least have an estimate of how far from the pear grove they’d traveled.
She got into the three thousand four hundreds before some errant thought—what were the man’s hiking boots made of, they had looked like real or simulated animal leather, but which animal—intruded, and she lost count.
She tried to pick it back up, but then wasn’t sure if she’d really been in the four thousand three hundreds, and she didn’t know how long her stride was or what she’d do with distance information, even if she had it.
She tried listening, hoping for sonic landmarks—running water, the call of some particular bird that she could navigate back from. Everything was lost in the mutter of the cloth rubbing against itself and the suffocating rise and fall of her own constrained breath.
Twice, she slipped on soft ground. Once, she stepped in a puddle or a stream.
The man’s voice spoke to her each time, and she thought he sounded encouraging.
She grabbed onto the thought that if he’d wanted to kill her, he could have done it at the grove.
She knew enough about violence to recognize her own wishful thinking, but she clung to it anyway.
If he understood that she was with the Carryx who had just murdered his planet, he could be planning anything, up to and including torturing her for information she didn’t have and couldn’t share if she did. She was sweating. It stung her eyes.
A different voice called out, and the man tugged at her shoulder like he was pulling her reins. He shouted something back, and the new voice—it was definitely coming from ahead of them—replied. It sounded feminine and distressed.
“I’m Jessyn,” she shouted through the muffling of her blind. “My name is Jessyn Kaul. I’m not responsible for any of this. None of this… None of this is my fault.”
The woman’s voice came again, from closer this time.
The man’s reply sounded angrier, his voice rising and the syllables sharp.
Jessyn’s belly felt tight and a wave of nausea ran through her.
If they decided to stab her, the first sign of this would be the knife already in her back. She pressed her eyes closed.
“It’s all right,” she said, and repeated it— It’s all right it’s all right it’s all right —like she’d lost control of the thought, and it was running free without her.
The jacket came off her head, and the fresh air felt cold on her skin.
The woman was younger. She had a wide, generous face and dark hair that fell in greasy ringlets.
Her eyes were a brown so light Jessyn wanted to call them yellow.
She was frowning, and Jessyn didn’t know what she was frowning at.
When Jessyn nodded her head like a little bow, the woman nodded back.
Behind her, the knife man said something longer and more detailed than he had up to now. The woman blew out a breath that inflated her cheeks, then spat on the ground. Her expression was impatient, and Jessyn felt the urge to apologize.
The woman turned, walked a few steps, and then looked back. Her gesture meant come along , so Jessyn did.
Cliffs rose above them to the east, pale stone against the afternoon sky.
The trees were oak and ash, she thought.
Or something near enough to them that they might as well have been.
The sun was higher in the sky than she’d expected, and the breeze smelled like there was water nearby.
A lake, a river. Something. There weren’t any lakes or rivers on her map.
She didn’t know for certain, but her guess was that they’d left the evacuation zone far behind.
She was in enemy territory. The thought almost made her laugh.
The woman led her to a place where the cliff face buckled, leaving a wide overhang deep with shadow.
It reminded her of her own little camp, huddled in the shelter of stone, but this shadow seemed darker.
Deeper. The woman walked into the black like a stone dropped in the ocean, and the cliff swallowed her up.
Jessyn ducked, following her into the cave.
The man came behind, his jacket in one hand and his knife in the other.
Ahead of them, the woman became a silhouette, black against charcoal.
So there was some light ahead, even if Jessyn couldn’t see the source yet.
The smell of sulfur and shit was faint enough to be more irritation than assault.
And there was something else, a scent she knew but didn’t have a name for.
It took her back to the transport out from Anjiin.
Too many bodies held too close together for too long.
The cave smelled like a prison. Her steps faltered.
Her heart was racing, and her mind felt like it was filled with cotton. Her hands were shaking.
The man muttered something, and when he touched her back between her shoulder blades, urging her forward, she yelped.
The cave was getting both smaller and frighteningly vast at the same time.
If she were lost in it, could she find her way out?
The small still part of her that watched the rest thought Oh, a panic attack.
That’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve had one quite like this before.
The thought was as powerless as a whisper in a windstorm.
And then the woman was back. The light was brighter.
Jessyn could make out her features, could hear the soothing tones of her voice even if the words were gibberish.
The woman took her hand, holding it between both of hers, and stood there, looking into Jessyn’s eyes for what felt like hours until the adrenaline started burning itself out.
The woman said something that sounded like a coo with a hiccup in it.
“I’m all right,” Jessyn said, and managed a weary half smile. “It’s been a weird day.”
The woman smiled back, and that was enough that Jessyn could take another step.
Then another. And then she was walking down a passage that curved to the right, and into a chamber that eons of water had carved out of the limestone, the walls pattered by the process of erosion until they looked like pale veins or tentacles made from stone.
The light came from three blue-green metal tripods with glowing cylinders at their tips set up around what was clearly a camp—a dozen brown and green bedrolls laid out in rows, a little wider and shorter than Jessyn was used to, but recognizable all the same.
A short metal table with a large, boxy device.
A misshapen black object about the size of a man leaned against the wall.
And, at the edge of the darkness deeper in the cave, smaller shapes. Eyes.
A child’s querulous voice called out, and the man answered in reassuring tones.
First one, and then three more, and then another six, the children came out from the cave’s depths.
At a guess, she’d have put them all around ten or eleven years old.
They were dressed in dirty shirts and beaded vests like the man wore.
There wasn’t a single dominant phenotype—round faces and thin, pale skin and dark, eyes and noses of every shape and size.
One little girl with black hair, bronze skin, and hooded eyes that could almost have been Jessyn’s relative.
Their expressions were open, curious, frightened.
Human. She felt something shift in her chest, and she was weeping.
Not crying, not sobbing, just leaking tears from her eyes. She sank to her knees.
The first child to come to her was a boy with brown hair and a single, heavy brow. He walked toward Jessyn slowly, his eyes narrow and filled with distrust. She tried smiling at him, but he scowled back, angry and on the edge of violence. His hands were at his side in white-knuckle fists.
You just saw your world destroyed , she thought . You just lost your families and the people you loved. There was hatred in his eyes.
“Yeah,” she said. “I get it.”
The boy didn’t reply. Of course he didn’t.
A conversation broke out—man, woman, and children all seeming to speak over each other.
The language was like listening to a brook, liquid and beautiful, and utterly incomprehensible.
Jessyn waited and she hoped. One of the children whined and stamped her feet, and the man snapped back impatiently.
The woman seemed to take the man’s side, and then another of the children yelled something.
If all this had been something Jessyn understood, it would have been a school field trip or a religious children’s retreat that had been lost in the invasion.
The adult chaperons hiding their wards from the Carryx soldiers.
Trying to stay small. Trying to stay alive.
Trying to figure out what to do with the human woman who had come from the enemy ships.
“Jessyn,” she said, and pointed at herself. “Jessyn.”