Seventeen
Seventeen
J essyn sat in the back of the cave with the children and the woman—Manta—and tried not to make her impatience anyone else’s problem but her own.
It should have been easier. Manta kept the children in line, mostly.
There were two—boys with jet-black hair, pale skin, and freckles that made them seem related—who kept pushing back or sneaking away.
More than half the time Manta spent dressing the kids down, she spent on those two.
The others served a meal of local fruit and grains that looked like forage.
Jessyn offered up her own ration bars, and the kids fell on them with a gusto that left Jessyn thinking they’d been having forage mash for a long time.
Anything new was more than welcome. She hoped that would extend to her.
The plan to leave the cave appeared to have been put aside for the moment, and she wasn’t sure why or what the choice implied.
She would very much have liked to ask some questions, but the conversation that her life seemed to hinge on wasn’t one she’d been invited to.
Which pissed her off. But since Corvall, the black soldier-thing, had made the decision, she tried to be patient.
The other three—Omco, Garral, and Corvall—sat toward the mouth of the cave, talking and gesturing and drawing figures in the dirt.
The few times they were loud enough for their words to carry, they might just as well have been quiet.
Jessyn didn’t recognize anything they said.
The intonations of their voices told a story, though.
Omco and Garral had started off the conversation almost giddy, but over the hours they had grown tired and frustrated.
Corvall, on the other hand, had begun the session with a steady focus that hadn’t changed.
The dynamic among the three of them was clear too, once Jessyn watched for it.
Corvall would speak with Omco, then Omco and Garral would jabber at one another for minutes on end, waving their hands, repeating themselves, making diagrams and rubbing the dirt empty for the next illustration, with Omco directing maybe three-fourths of his attention to Garral and the rest to the stone-still, faceless Corvall who listened until the chatter started to grow calmer and then spoke again and wound the whole thing back up.
Jessyn started picturing Omco and Garral as birds in a cage, and Corvall as the bored child tormenting them. Corvall rattled the cage, and the pair squawked and fluttered and sang to each other until the alarm fell away, and Corvall shook the cage again.
Jessyn didn’t see how their conversation ended.
Manta had taken one of the kids back into the depths of the cave for something, and the two troublemakers started circling a girl with long, curly red hair.
The expressions on the boys’ faces were mirrors of Jessyn’s soul—irritation and boredom looking for an outlet.
When one of them pinched the girl, Jessyn clapped her hands and barked at them.
The two boys stepped back like they’d touched a live current, and Jessyn pointed to each of them in turn.
“Don’t start it, you little shits,” she said. “I’ve taken down worse than you.”
Of course they didn’t know what she was saying, but it felt good to say it all the same.
They backed away from their prey, and when Jessyn turned her attention back to the front of the cave, Garral and Omco were walking toward her.
Garral’s eyes were glazed and his shoulders hunched forward.
He dropped down beside her like a sack of flour.
“Tell me there’s some food left,” he said.
“There’s some food left.”
“Are you lying?”
“No, there’s actually some food left.”
“That’s wonderful.”
Manta, returning to the group, exchanged some words with Omco. It wasn’t a minute before both the men had ceramic camp bowls of food. Garral ate the fruit-and-grain mush using two fingers as a scoop. Jessyn held herself back until he’d gotten about halfway through.
“So,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”
“I haven’t been this tired since my qualifying exams,” Garral said. “That much translation work? I think my brain has a cramp. Seriously.”
Jessyn put a hand on his thigh. “If you don’t tell me what you found out, I will lose my composure. I’m small, but I’m capable of great violence. You know that, right?”
Garral laughed. From the other side of the group, Omco joined in. They reminded Jessyn of when she’d been a student at medrey at the end of her exams, drunk on exhaustion and relief that her efforts were over.
“Omco and Manta are tutors. The kids were all from the city I was surveying. When the Carryx came, they were doing field study and they didn’t get back in time.
Corvall was part of the army that fought the Carryx forces.
They lost. He and a group of other soldiers were trying to escape.
I don’t know how many, but their ship was forced down, and he’s the only one that’s left. ”
“What is he?”
“A man,” Garral said. “He’s human. Like us.
He’s in… living armor? Something like that.
He lost a leg and an arm in the crash, and the suit is rebuilding him, but there’s not enough resources to do the job, so he’s down to…
you know. That. The other side of the war has humans.
There are other species too. Allies who are working against the Carryx. But humans are part of it.”
“How does Anjiin fit into it?”
“I don’t know. They hadn’t heard about us.
At first, Corvall didn’t believe we were working for the Carryx.
Apparently, it’s more common for the Carryx to torture prisoners to death.
He was surprised to hear that we were being domesticated.
Do we have any of the ration bars left? This is great, but protein would be better. ”
“Here,” Jessyn said, handing one to him. Her mind was elsewhere.
“The people from the city,” Garral said.
“The families of all these kids? They’re dead.
The Carryx killed them all. Corvall found this group hiding, and in the absence of another mission, he’s been trying to protect them.
I get the sense that his resources are almost used up, and he’s running on borrowed time now. ”
“So what’s his plan?” Jessyn asked.
“There is no long-term plan, as far as I can tell. It’s just wait and hope that the Carryx go away without glassing the place for good measure.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“I mean, not much? Most of the time, I told them a lot about Anjiin and the world-palace. Corvall wanted to know where it was, but I wasn’t much help. I could tell him it had an oblong moon that was a little bigger in their sky than the sun, and that seemed exciting to him.”
“Huh,” Jessyn said. “I hadn’t noticed that.”
Garral’s frown was a question.
“The moon on the world-palace,” she said. “I looked at the sky there a lot, but I never thought about the moon.”
“I didn’t see out a window until just before we left,” Garral said.
“It made an impression. Omco’s a language tutor.
That’s why he knew some ancient languages with a lot of cognates.
Corvall doesn’t have a clue what I’m quacking about, but Omco and me, we can almost work each other out most of the time.
That’s why we didn’t keep you in the loop. It wasn’t personal.”
“We didn’t leave. When you saw the number system, we were about to leave, and we didn’t. Why did they stay?”
“I told them it was safe here,” Garral said. “If you’d wanted to bring the Carryx down on them, you would have done it instead of calling me, and you didn’t. It’s the biggest reason that they trust us.”
“Us, great. What about the rest of everyone? What if Third Gardener and his pet knife-dogs come looking for us and find them?”
“Why would it do that? It seemed pretty clear that if we went past the evacuation line, we’d be on our own.”
Jessyn felt a stab of impatience. “This seems like a good time to think about the stakes more than the odds.”
“Fair point. I’ll talk to them about it, but in the morning? We need the rest. I need the rest. Did I mention I was exhausted?”
“A couple times.”
He took her hand and squeezed it. Then held it. It felt perfectly natural, like the touch was normal. Something they always did.
One of the kids started crying. Omco sat beside him, murmuring through the wails and patting the boy’s back.
For a moment, Jessyn was back in the first days after the fall of Anjiin.
She remembered the weird drive to find a pattern, to find normalcy, and the times when the grief would break through and overwhelm her.
Garral had followed her glance, and his expression showed he was having the same thoughts as her. “Can you imagine going through it all when you’re not even a teenager yet?” he asked.
“They’re going to have to get a lot tougher if they want to live through it,” Jessyn said.
“Did you?”
“Did I get tougher, you mean? Or did I live through it?”
Toward the mouth of the cave, Corvall stationed himself.
As still as a statue, he faced the entrance.
She had the impression that the soldier and his living armor could have stayed there motionless as a stone for years conserving the last dregs of whatever fuel the suit and its occupant ran on.
Manta was starting to encourage the kids into the bedrolls while Omco held the weeping boy and rocked him gently. The wails had turned to whimpers.
“They’ll be killing the lights soon,” Garral said. “We should get ready to sleep.”