Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (31 page)

She sat down for a time where the bare, beaten earth of the compound began to sprout grass again. She kept her back to the buildings and tried to look relaxed, drizzling dust through her fingers and talking to herself. Now and then she glanced back till—at one glance—she saw the buildings, the yellow-clad bodies, but no rangers nearby or facing her.

Laura immediately ducked down and stripped off the yellow pajama top and pants. She was still wearing her own clothes underneath. She pushed the pajamas down the front of her pants, then rolled and wriggled away into the thin grass, headed for the scrub. As she went, she rubbed herself in the dust—her face and hair, her dark pants and pale shirt—till she was as dun-colored as the ground she crawled along.

For a long time she slid from bush to bush. Her bread-and-dust man now nestled in the small of her back, holding on to her belt. The heels of her hands, her fingertips, and the skin on her feet dragged on the ground till they were scraped and burning. Her palms filled with splinters of dead vegetation. She didn’t dare put her head up until she could no longer hear any noise from the Depot. Finally she got to her feet and, stooped over, hurried away.

It was hours before Laura let herself turn back toward the rail line. She took a course only tending in the direction where it lay. At every few steps she glanced around, looking for rangers on foot or riding on a handcar. When the handcar did appear, Laura was surprised how close it was. She threw herself down on the ground and lay completely still. Her bread-and-dust man tumbled off her back and lay still too, by her ear, with his cracked and drying hand against her cheek.

When Laura looked again, the handcar had traveled out of sight.

She went on, parallel to the railway. She just kept putting one foot in front of the other, hour after hour. She walked, straining her eyes, looking and looking for any sign, however far off, of The Pinnacles and the tower.

She slept for a time, but badly. She was thirsty and feverish.

A nosebleed woke her. The blood only oozed, sluggish and tacky. While she held her nostrils closed, trying to stanch it, her bread-and-dust man leaned against her knee and watched her.

“He knows where I am. Wherever I am,” Laura said to him, in a pinched, croaking voice she scarcely recognized as her own.

Eventually she got up and went on, not noticing that she’d left the small man behind till she felt him leap and cling to the leg of her trousers. She scooped him up and put him on her shoulder.

She walked. Nothing moved but her. Hours went by, transparent, emptied out, even of time.

Laura’s lips cracked. Her tongue gradually grew a coat of some thick, salty stuff. Then it began to swell.

Many hours later her bladder began to cramp. She fumbled at her trousers and squatted to urinate. It burned. There were only a few drops, and it went on burning deep inside her.

Laura sat down and cried—cried without producing tears.

The bread-and-dust man tugged on her hair.

She got up and went on.

Later—a long time later—Laura had a lucid moment. She thought: “I’ll die unless I let the rangers find me.” She lifted her head and took a good look around. She could see no sign of The Pinnacles, not even a smudge on the horizon. She turned and saw she had wandered close to the raised railbed. The steel lines were shining at her like water. She went toward them, clambered on all fours up the little slope and sat there, slumped.

Her bread-and-dust man scrambled off her and onto the railbed. He doubled up and pressed his whole little length against the steel.

Laura thought, “He’s listening for a handcar.” Then she lay down.

Someone touched her. It hurt. A hard something rasped across the stinging fissures on her mouth.

Wet parted her lips. At first she could taste only water on her tongue, then, as she took more, its true taste came—musty warm, stale water.

It was taken away from her before she was full. She croaked a complaint and drooped, her head lolling against the yielding, creaking arm that held her.

With a ghost of decision, she whispered, “I don’t want to be happy.”

She was lifted up. She was gathered in her loose skin, in her own weakness; she was gathered in his strength. She was lifted, cradled, carried in safety.

And they went so fast there was wind to cool her skin.

6

AURA AND NOWN EMERGED FROM THE PLACE JUST WEST OF THE RAILWAY BRIDGE OVER THE SVA. IT WAS
dawn, but the air seemed to cool only Laura’s skin, not to reach the parched, burning core of her body. Her chilled skin had formed a shell around her. She’d lost touch with the world. She was being carried, but the movement seemed to pantomime walking. Perhaps Nown was only pretending to move. Yet, when Laura opened her eyes, she saw that they were farther out on the tide-bared sands of the Inlet.

Nown sat her down by a channel of the river and slid her forward so that her feet dangled in the stream. Its cold burned her blistered skin. She cried out and tried to flex her knees but was too weak to withdraw her legs from the water. Nown held her in place until her feet went numb. Then he picked her up again and carried her back to the train stop by the bridge. He put her down on the gravel of the raised railbed and lifted the metal flag that would signal the next train to stop. He came back, hunkered down, and drew Laura into his lap. “I have nothing with which to wrap your feet,” he said, then, “From now on I’m going to put things that might be necessary to you into my body.”

Laura puzzled over this remark but couldn’t make any sense of it. Minutes later he said, “I’ve filled the water skin.
The tide is going out and the stream flowing seaward, but its water might be tainted by salt. I wouldn’t know. I can’t taste it.”

Laura tried to answer him but only croaked. It seemed to her in her fever that her sandman was brooding on his shortcomings. The water skin pushed against her. She fumbled for it with her hands and scabbed mouth, but it was too heavy for her to lift. Nown raised it and eased the nozzle into her mouth. The water was a little salty, but Laura liked its taste. Perhaps she needed salt.

“Not too much at once,” Nown said, and they had a little tussle, she clinging to the skin and he trying to take it away without upsetting her. The water gushed out onto her face and shirt. Laura felt the cascading coolness, then the panicked scuttling motion of the creature who—all this time—had ridden clinging to the inside of her shirt. Laura’s bread-and-dust man emerged, clambered up her, finding handholds on her collarbone, then the ends of her hair. For a moment he swung bumping against her jaw, then Nown closed a fist around him and plucked him from her.

The bread-and-dust man surveyed Laura, the rail line, and the Inlet from his perch in Nown’s fist. His mittlike, fingerless hands were folded across the top of Nown’s thumb. His flat and vestigial face looked mild and perhaps curious.

Nown stretched back the arm that held the little creature, then punched it into his own chest. Laura had one glimpse of a tiny, gaping mouth and kicking legs, then both Nown’s fist and the bread-and-dust man vanished, buried in the sandman’s chest.

“No!” Laura rasped. She was horrified.

“It is better if there are not too many of us around at one time,” Nown said. His buried wrist began to separate itself
from the sand of his chest, and he withdrew his hand, whole and empty.

“Is two too many?” Laura’s eyes were stinging, but no tears would come.

Nown didn’t answer her.

“Why did you do that?” She knew he could hear her, however insubstantial her voice had become.

“There were too many of us.”

“Is two too many?” she asked again, and again Nown didn’t answer her.

“Can you do that?” she said. “Destroy him? Don’t
I
have to do that?”

“It isn’t destroyed; it is only swallowed.”

Nown put his hand on the rail line. He announced that there was a train on its way. He set Laura on her feet by the train stop signal, then lifted her arm and hooked it around the signal pole. “Stay there. Stay standing,” he said, then he left her. He picked his way down the embankment and strode along a reed-lined beach beside one channel of the river. Some distance from her he hunkered down and wrapped his arms around his legs, dropped his face onto his knees, and imitated a tide-worn stone.

The train was a local headed toward Sisters Beach.

On a clear day the red painted steel flag of the stop signal was visible to the engineer from the lowest turn of the Mount Kahaugh spiral. He had miles to slow and stop. The Secretary of the Interior had a house in the Awa Inlet—and it was Doran who most often used the train stop. There was never any question that the train would pause, though stopping always put at least ten minutes more on a journey.

It wasn’t until he was going very slowly, and approaching the bridge, that the engineer spotted the small, ragged figure by the signal. As he pulled to a halt, he saw that it was a girl, her clothes torn at the knees and elbows and white with dust.

A conductor got out to inspect the prospective passenger. He took in her bedraggled appearance and lack of luggage. He went up to her ready to ask whether she even had the fare, but, when he reached her, he saw how young she was, and how she trembled, and how she was holding herself up against the signal pole. Instead of demanding money, the conductor placed his strong hand under one of her elbows. “What happened?”