Fire Country (13 page)

While I hang, there’s grumbling and groaning as the whole place seems to come to life. Toward the end of my row of cages, I hear Keep rattling along the cage bars with some instrument, shouting out names a
nd then waiting for a response.

“Koda!”

“Yeah.”

Ratatatat
along the bars.

“Briggs!”

“Nope.”

“Shut yer tug hole! Smartass!”

Ratatatat…

You get the picture. He’s getting nearer.

My feet are swinging and I can’t reach the side bars. Can’t shimmy down. Can’t slide down. Can’t do anything ’cept hang and swing. My shoulder’s aching and I feel my sweaty hand starting to slide off the wood.

“Bart!”

A growl. Big Bart ain’t in the mood for talking.

Keep’ll pass his hut and then he’s to mine.

I got no choice.

Outta options.

Perry’s chanting, “Do it, do it, do it!”

I do it. I wait until my swing takes me into a more or less vertical position and then I release the bar and drop, trying to keep my legs bent slightly to cushion the fall. For a painfully short moment, I’m weightless, free, untouchable. And then the unforgiving ground touches me. Hard. Like a forearm shiver, but across the whole of my body. My feet hit first,
pushing a shockwave up my legs and into my hips, spreading like wildfire from there. My knees give out, sending me rolling—not again!—across my cage. This time it’s only one roll though, one big flop, a stomach-jostling smacker that knocks all the air out of me. At least Perry is on the other side of the bars this time, unable to prick me.

Can’t breathe.

Can’t breathe.

I wheeze and gasp as I roll over to lie on my back.

Ratatatat!
“Siena!”

Wheeze. Gasp. No voice. No breath.
No way to respond.

“Siena!” Keep repeats.

“Here,” I whisper, like I’m back in Learning and Teacher is checking for skippers. But my voice comes out softer’n the rustle of windblown sand. Keep can’t hear me.

“I see ya there, Girl. I kno
ws yer ain’t used to our ways ’ere, but it’s not difficult. I says yer name, and yer respond. Let’s try it again.”

Wheeze. Gasp. Lips moving but no words coming out.

“Siena!”

“Yeah,” I croak, my voice the timbre of a horny toad, my animal of choice for this evening.
Perry laughs.

“See, not too hard, eh?” Keep says. He moves on to Raja.

My throat opens and I greedily gulp down the breezy air. My heart slows. My body aches. Perry mocks. Searin’ Perry.

“What the scorch are you doing over there?” Raja hisses when Keep’s moved on down the line. “I heard a thump.”

I clench my jaw. “Nothing,” I say. “Just sleeping. Or trying to.”

“Tugblaze. I heard you thrashing around in the durt like you’s fighting something.”

“It’s too dangerous to tell you, Raja,” I say, turning his words back on him. “If I told you, they’d kill you, and they’d kill me.”

I slump to the side, grinning in spite of the aches and pains and bumps and bruises. Determined to get a little sleep before Luger comes to collect me. A peaceful end to a very long day in Confinement.

I
t’s nice waking up in my own bed, watching through the window as the sun peeks over the horizon, spraying ribbons of red in every direction. A heavy bank of thick, yellow clouds moves swiftly across the sea of pinkish-reddish sky. It’s a very windy day. Through our door, which is open a crack, I can smell the windstorm that’s coming. Might even turn into the first sandstorm of the winter season. I can’t smell it yet, but if there’s a sandstorm coming, my nose’ll pick up on it soon enough. I been sniffing out storms my whole life.

Yesterday was a throw-a-way. I was too battered and sore and exhausted to do anyth
ing but sleep it off. I coulda just as easily done that in my cage, but I was sure thankful to do it here, on my tugskin sleeper.

I heard Circ come to call on me, but
Mother turned him away, said I needed to rest. She was right. Thankfully my father wasn’t around when he stopped by—he mighta made a scene.

The crack in the door widens and my father’s heavy outline appears in the opening.
His eyes are small, no more’n pinpricks. He grunts when he sees me awake. He didn’t say a word to me yesterday. I wonder if his grunt means today’ll be the same. I can hope, can’t I?

Nope.

He strides directly over to me, not even stopping to slip off his dusty moccasins. My Call-Mother’ll hafta sweep up the mess later. There’s a shadow on my face as he looms over me. “Youngling,” he says.

“Head Greynote,” I say, returning his formalness.

“Did you learn anything from your trip to Confinement?”

Scorch, yeah! Heaps! All about how people sent there are treated like animals, caged, poorly fed. About how it’s possible to escape if you’re all skin and bones, like me. And oh yeah, I found out about some
’spiracy with the Icies, how ’bout that?

At least that’s what I think. What I say is, “Yessir. I’ll be behaving from now on. Don’t want to go back there again. Never.”

Although I know I give the right response, he frowns, maybe sensing the deceit in my voice. “Good,” he says. “Don’t make me send you there again. The next time your stay might not be so short.”

As he star
ts to head for the door, I say, “Congratulations, Father.” He turns, looks back at me. “On Head Greynote.”

His face is flat. “It’s not an award or a celebration. It’s a duty. It’ll do you well to remember that.”

And then he’s gone, the flaps of his slitted leather shirt wagging about the moment he steps out the door, the wind whipping them into a frenzy.

It’s a very windy day.

I wonder what the wind’ll carry into the village.

~~~

“We’re leaving soon,” Circ says.

Yeah, I’m hanging around Circ still. I guess my father’s little lesson in Confinement didn’t really take. As long as I don’t get caught, right?

I nod. “And you’ll be back in three days?” I ask for the tenth time. A burst of sand shivers overhead. It never comes back down, carried along by the ever-strengthening wind. The trip back to the village’ll be awful, but for now we’re protected in our spot in the Mouth, dug in on the backside of one of the two big dunes.

He looks at me with one dimple. “We’
ve gone over all this. It’s an investigation. We’re not going to war.”

I raise my chin. “Oh, you think I’m worried? No, no, I just know I
’m going to be bored stiffer’n a day-old dead burrow mouse with you gone,” I say, giving him my best champion’s smile. Although I’ve never been a champion and probably never will, it don’t hurt to practice.

He laughs, short and high-pitched
, humoring me. “Don’t get into any trouble while I’m gone or I won’t be there to visit you in Confinement.”

“It seems I only get into trouble when you
are
around,” I say, ramming my knee against his. “And for your information, I had two other visitors’n you, my mother and Lara. So I think I’m covered there.”

His eyes widen. “And you didn’t tell me this earlier?” He’s turned grumpy on me.

“We’ve only been setting here for one thumb of sun movement, maybe less. And I’m telling you now, ain’t I?”

Circ shrugs, bashes his knee against mine and I wince. “Ouch! Sear it all to scorch, Circ, that hurt like a machete blade.”

His hands are on my knee in an instant, rubbing and massaging it. “Sorry, Sie, I didn’t realize I cracked you that hard.” His touch feels warmer’n a hot summer’s day.

“No, it wasn’t that,” I say. “I’m just a tad tender.” I keep my eyes down, on my knee where he’s rubbing it, but I can feel his frown all over my face.

“Why’s it tender?”

I say nothing.

“Sie? What is it you’re not telling me?”

Like I always do with Circ, I spill my guts. I hate dropping all these boulders on him just before his mission, but I never could keep anything from him. Nor do I want to. It’s nice having someone who knows my every thought. Secrets’ll chew you up inside, swish you around, and then spit you in the dust. Maybe even stomp you down a bit. Right away, I feel better after I tell him.

“Holy jumpin’ prickler roots, Sie!” Circ exclaims when I finish. “You jumped from the roof?”

I blink. Now that he says it that way, it all sounds pretty wooloo, like maybe something I dreamed, or made up. With a shrug, I say, “Uh, yeah. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Wow! First the thing with the Killers, and then this. You’re getting bolder by the day. Maybe it should be you going on this mission.”

Despite the obvious exaggeration i
n Circ’s declaration—females ain’t allowed to go on missions as they might get hurt and not be able to Bear—it makes me smile from earlobe to earlobe. “You’re just blustering now,” I say. “You’re full of air and sand, just like the wind.”

“We’ll see,” Circ says, grinning back. “A
nyway, whaddya make of it all?”

“All of what?” I ask. Our knees touch again and Circ stops rubbing my leg.

“I dunno. Everything. What Lara said. Your mother. Raja’s talk of a ’spiracy.” Coming from his mouth, it does sound like a lot. An awful lot. I feel tired again.

I take a
moment to think. Then I start slow, taking it piece by piece. “Lara says a lot of stuff, most of which I don’t understand. I don’t know if I ever will or if I should even take her seriously. I mean, could she really be working with someone outside of the village? How would she even meet someone outside? My mother though, what she said took me by surprise. I never heard her talk like that. I can’t help thinking she’s losing her mind being Called to my father.”

“You think it’s the Fire?”

My head jerks toward Circ’s, his question taking me by surprise. “What? No. Of course not. She’s perfectly healthy.”

Circ chews on his lip. “Sorry, it’s just, she’s getting old. Like both our parents. The Fire’s inevitable.”

“I—I know that,” I say. Keeping it internal, I think
Do I?
My parents have always been there, since the very beginning. It only makes sense that they’ll always be there, just like Circ’ll always be there. I slam the gate down on those thoughts. It’s my heart speaking. Foolishness. My brain knows everybody dies, usually sooner rather’n later. Like Circ said,
the Fire’s inevitable.

Trying not to think about the Fire, or whether my mother is going wooloo, I move on to my next point. “There must be something of a
’spiracy,” I say. “Raja had no reason to lie. And I did see them hauling off with all those tools.”

“Tell me again what you heard Greynote Luger say to Keep,” Circ says.

“Nothing that made sense at the time,” I say. “Just asked about how the work was going. Keep said the Icies were happy, but that he needed more lifers to do the work ’cause they were dying on him.”

“And what did Luger say?”

“He said he’ll see what he can do.” I play with a loose strand of hair. Circ kicks at the sand, digging a hole with his foot. We’re both thinking real hard.

“So you think the work that Luger was talking about is what the prisoners were doing when they went off in the middle of the night?” Circ asks, jamming his heel into his hole like a pickaxe.

“It’d hafta be, right? What other work would prisoners be doing? And Raja went with them. He was a lifer, Circ. Stuck in Confinement for the rest of his life, all ’cause someone framed him for murder. Or so he says.”

“Do you believe him?” Circ looks up from his digging, his eyes big with interest. Beautiful, too, if I’m being honest. So deep and brown and mine to look at all day if I want to. Or at least until he leaves on his mission. “Sie?” I’m staring at him and I look away.

“Uh, yeah. I believe him.”

I can tell Circ’s eyes are studying my face and I feel my face go warm. A blush. “Siena?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say, making eye contact and feeling my face go even redder. There’s a look on Circ’s face I never seen before. It’s hard to describe but it’s like fire country after the spring rains. Vibrant, pure, alive. He wants to say something, but his lips are closed. They’re so close to me. I guess they always are when we sit here, but I never really noticed ’fore. Now it feels like they’re right on top of me, like if I just leaned in a couple of inches, turned my head slightly, I could—

“I’m lucky to have you,” Circ says. “You know, as a friend.”

I feel a jab to my stomach but no one’s hit me. It’s his words. I’ll take the first part but skip the second if you don’t mind. “I’m the lucky one,” I whisper.

He leans in, turns his head, his lips closer and closer and closer still, and then brushing past me as he embraces me in a classic Circ hug. Warm and tight. I’m hurting a l
ittle inside, but I hug back, ’cause I need it now more’n ever. ’Fore he leaves on his mission. Toward the borders of Killer country.