Green Jack (15 page)

As was Jane’s
unhesitating help.

She might be a
particularly baffling Enclave girl, but she had a compass, and a
good knowledge of geography. Honestly, the most Saffron knew about
the Spirit Forest was that it was vaguely north-east. She might
have walked in circles for weeks. As a plan, it was kind of
embarrassing.

Jane led them
up the main street that cut through the Core and clear out of the
City through the suburbs and beyond. It had been a highway once,
when everyone had cars. She said it stopped at another small lake,
but they’d have to go around. There might still be villages
scattered about but freshwater lakes always belonged to the
Directorate. They’d have farm domes and soldiers and land mines.
The villagers were left alone if they stayed away from the water
and the Jacks; it was easier to turn a blind eye when they have
something to trade.

Saffron tried
to keep up but her tag was raw and hot. She was weak and it
infuriated her. They’d escaped the Dust but there was no escaping
the relentless sun, and there was no water. They’d emptied the
canteen hours ago. Sweat crusted salt into her eyelashes. Her arm
was on fire. She could barely lift it. She’d never be able to throw
a dagger like this.

“We don’t even
know if we’re going in the right direction anymore,” Saffron
muttered. She wished Killian was here. Or more specifically, that
she was back at home with him. She hoped Oona was all right. She
felt useless. Thorns grew inside her chest.

Jane tucked her
damp hair behind one ear. “The Spirit Forest is north-east and
that’s the direction we’re travelling in. I’ll double check with
the star positions tonight but the compass doesn’t lie.”

Saffron was
moderately impressed despite herself. “How do you know how to do
that?”

Jane shrugged
one shoulder. “We have mandatory survival training. Just in
case.”

The clay hills
undulated all around them, sky to sky. Layers of red clay and white
silt and dried nearly-blue mud stacked on top of each other. It was
beautiful, in its own way. Saffron wasn’t keen to die by beauty
though.

“We should keep
moving,” Jane said, coughing fine dust out of her mouth. “We need
to find shade. Can you keep walking?”

“Yes,” Saffron
snapped. “Of course I can.”

She took a
single step and her legs gave out. Her vision went grey and
spotty.

“You should put
on the mask,” Jane said quietly.

Saffron hissed
out a breath.

Jane held up
her hands placatingly. “I don’t want it.”

“I don’t want
it either,” she muttered.

“You should
still put it on. It’ll make you stronger.”

Saffron
clenched her teeth because she knew Jane was right. She’d avoided
it as long as she could. And since it felt like she was dying
anyway, what was the harm? She refused to acknowledge that her
fingers trembled as she fit the mask over her hair. She wasn’t
quite ready to put it over her face like a parasite. It felt like
dandelion fluff and burned wheat stalks on her head. She couldn’t
tell if it was trying to give her energy or suck her dry.

“Let me put
more antibiotic cream on your arm,” Jane said, fishing a tube of
white ointment from one of her many pockets.

“Seriously, why
are you still helping me?” Saffron asked. The cream was cool on her
raw skin. It soothed the itch if not the feeling of poison sliding
through her veins like worms.

“We have an
alliance, remember?”

“The alliance
is why I’m letting you help me, not why you’re helping me.”

“You’re letting
me help you because you have no choice right now. You can barely
move.”

They walked for
a long time until Saffron only knew the heat from the sun and the
heat under her skin. They finally stumbled onto small hills, narrow
canyons running between them like dry riverbeds. The shadow of
clouds raced over them, screening some of the brutal sunlight.
Saffron could almost breathe again.

Jane stopped at
a divot in the hard ground. A sheet of plastic was staked over it,
with a stone balanced in the centre to create a kind of hammock.
“What’s that?” Saffron mumbled through her chapped lips. “Animal
trap?”

“Solar still,”
Jane replied. “For gathering water. Which means someone lives
around here.”

Saffron
automatically fumbled for a dagger but it slipped through her
fingers. Sunlight and moving shadows and red clay made dizzying
pattern across her eyes. She had to blink several times before she
realized there was a coyote watching them from the crest of a
striped hill. His ears were pricked forward on alert, russet fur
short as a paintbrush.

“That one’s not
wild,” Saffron noticed a collar of braided leather and bones around
its neck. “Which means we’re not alone. Don’t make eye contact,”
she added. There were wild dogs in the Core sometimes, and everyone
knew not to look them in the eye. She tried to say more but her
lips were swollen, her words bloated, her tongue shrivelled. It was
all wrong. She was dizzy, disoriented, dazed. The leaves in her
hair were crumbling to ash.

The coyote
stalked closer, sunlight flashing off the copper worked into his
collar. There was a leather satchel of sorts strapped to his spine
and water sloshed invitingly when he paced closer. His shadow
stretched across the clay, touching her.

As if it was a
signal they’d been waiting for, more coyotes materialized out of
the narrow dusty valleys. Beside them, two men and three women
armed with bows and spears. And behind Saffron and Jane, suddenly,
a woman with a spear worked with bronze, vulture feathers, and
coyote teeth. Dots of white paint followed the curve of her lower
lashes.

“Stand down,”
she ordered.

Saffron would
have made some kind of an answer, preferably with a knife, but she
was sliding into the red earth, like a melted candle. Fire raced up
the wick of her arm. Jane stood over her and Saffron could see the
fine tremors going through her limbs. She wanted to tell her not to
worry, the tag would kill her before the others could. If Jane was
smart, she would barter her survival gear for her life. Or her
gifts as a Numina. But Saffron couldn’t say any of those things.
She could only watch, screeching internally with frustration. She
was as ensnared as one of the coyotes would have been in a steel
trap. She could practically smell the blood; understood perfectly
the compulsion to chew off one’s own limb.

“I’m Jane,”
Jane replied. Her voice sounded as if it was coming out of a
tunnel, like the damp echoing passages that led into the markets.
“This is Saffron. We mean you no harm.”

“The solar
stills belong to us,” the woman snapped. Her dress was loose, long,
and the colour of sand. There were tattoos on her fingers, more
dots and lines like rings.

“We didn’t
touch anything,” Jane said quickly. “We’re just lost.”

Saffron wished
she could kick her. You didn’t go around announcing your
weaknesses, even when they were painfully obvious. Maybe especially
then.

The woman made
a sound of disgust.” “I am Shanti. By the laws of our people, if
you are lost and ill, I must offer you three days of
hospitality.”

One of the men
strode forward and scooped Saffron up. She moaned, partly in pain,
mostly in humiliation.

Shanti smiled.
“After which time we are free to kill you.”

Chapter
24

Jane

As they crossed
the hills, more solar stills pockmarked the strange landscape. It
made everything more alien, as though they had somehow crossed to
the moon even though no one had been to the moon in a long time.
People barely crossed rivers, never mind the sound barrier. There
had been talk years ago of a relocation, of ships sent to orbit to
ensure basic human survival of some kind. It had never
happened—they couldn’t even figure out how to keep the satellites
working. But one could be forgiven for not knowing that with the
red dust on their boots and the hot dead air all around.

Smoke from
cooking fire wreathed a cluster of brightly coloured yurts on
wooden platforms set over the narrow red crests of the hills.The
setting sun cast long darts of light off spear points, sword tips
and arrowheads. Jane felt her lack of combat experience keenly, as
keenly as she’d felt watching that boy die in that basement
auditorium.

The village was
set out in two concentric circles of yurts, the surrounding gullies
and crevices filled with thriving gardens. Tall feathered corn
stalks moved gently, peas and squash shoved between them. There
must have been accessible ground water nearby, and they would have
stolen the soil, or bought it off an illegal caravan.

They crossed
over a series of painted wooden bridges that bisected the hills and
connected the yurts. A spear poked Jane in the back when her gaze
lingered too long on the bright red of tomatoes in the gully
gardens. They were taken to a small yurt bleached white by the sun
and devoid of any decoration. It glowed like old bones. Inside, the
walls were painted with symbols and patterns that whirled like star
constellations, a secret language easy to see and difficult to
understand.

Shanti thrust a
small glass in her hand. “Drink,” she said brusquely before
stalking out.

They had placed
Saffron on a narrow cot and she was trying to sit up, a similar
glass in her hand. She looked dizzy and the liquid sloshed over her
hand. Jane crouched next to her to help her steady it. She sniffed
it carefully and forced a bright smile. “Probably not poison.”

Saffron gave
her a ghost of a smile. “Now you’re learning.”

Jane tasted her
own drink—it was tepid water flavoured with mint leaves and
lavender blossoms. The smell transported her back to the Enclave
gardens, to mint tea at the Collegium, and on the train. Everything
in her ached with homesickness, sudden as a flu.

“If you’re
mooning over a boyfriend, I’m going to let them kill you.” Saffron
had one eye cracked open. “Anyway, crying will only dehydrate you.
So cut it out.”

“I wasn’t
crying,” Jane replied. “Not really. Isn’t there anyone you
miss?”

Saffron glanced
away. “Drink more flower water,” she said. “Only one of us should
be weak as jacking kitten. And apparently, I’ve got that covered.”
Even saying that much exhausted her. Her lips were faintly blue,
even though the dim shadows were stuffy. Jane bit at her own lips
anxiously, chapped and sunburned. There was no magic to fix this,
no omens to lead them out.

No time.

The door opened
to a flash of sunlight and red clay and Shanti returned with a
young girl, about thirteen years old, and a woman with skin as pale
as Shanti’s was dark. She ought to have been burned in the
relentless red sunlight but the only red was in her violent
hair.

“Move aside for
Elisande,” Shanti ordered. The red-haired girl didn’t bother with
words, just shoved Jane aside.

“Is she your
queen?” Jane asked, detecting a certain arrogance she knew very
well from the Directorate parties her mother attended.

“Anya, is my
spear-sister. Elisande is our shamanka,” Shanti replied curtly.

Jane was
surprised that the young girl was the shamanka. She would have
expected a shamanka to have wrinkles as deep as the Badlands crags.
White paint dotted her hairline and above her eyebrows, dividing
her face down the line of her nose. Her hair hung with bones
wrapped in red thread and coyote fur. She stood for a long moment
over Saffron’s bed, barely blinking. Jane shifted closer but
Shanti’s spear hit the back of her knees, crumpling her onto the
heavily patterned rug.

“Her soul needs
to be fetched back,” Elisande said impatiently. She touched
Saffron’s braids and the brittle leaves turned to dust. Elisande’s
eyes narrowed, tracing the pattern of woven vines and thorns. She
said something in a language Jane had never heard before and
suddenly she was being propelled outside with an unceremonious toss
of Shanti’s hand.

“Wait,” Jane
struggled. “She’s my friend.”

“And you can’t
help her. But Elisande can.” Shanti shrugged. “Sit down and wait
here, or walk away and let the Badlands claim you.”

Jane was
getting heartily tired of meekness and patience being the only
choice that was made sense. She wanted to scream, make fire from
her fingertips, open the earth until everything trembled. Instead,
she crossed her ankles like she’d been taught and smouldered
inside. She wondered if this was how Kiri felt every day: defiant
and frustrated. She’d always put it down to temper and a certain
carelessness for others, but now she wasn’t so sure.

She glanced at
Shanti who stood silently at the yurt doorway. She only knew about
Ferals from Directorate warnings and the disdainful hushed voices
of her teachers when she was little. She could feel numen thrumming
through the earth here though, and they were trying to save
Saffron. They couldn’t be that bad, could they?

“Is Elisande an
Oracle?” She asked hesitantly. “Or a Seedsinger maybe?” The gully
gardens were fairly impressive, after all.

Shanti glanced
at her. “A what?”

“A Numina,” she
explained. “Someone who works with Green Jack numen, and plant
magic.”

“We all work
numen, just some better than others,” Shanti shrugged. “Magic is
everywhere. Always has been.”

Jane tilted her
head, intrigued. “Is that what you believe?”

“It’s what we
know. Don’t the Cities know it too? We just never needed magic
enough to pay attention to it before the Cataclysms and the
famines.”