Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (19 page)

He clawed and fought, but the slide carried him
until it piled up on itself at the bottom of the slope. He felt their sharp
edges through his coveralls, their rough surfaces pulling at him as he slid.

Ethan was trapped, pinned between two huge
boulders, and buried up to his waist in the small pebbles around it. His right
arm was behind one boulder, extended up and away from him. The pressure on his shoulder
blade was incredible, surpassed only by the pain in his hyper-extended elbow.
His left arm was free, and he reached around himself and started digging,
trying to remove as much of the fine, slick rock beside and behind him as
possible.

Around him, he heard the voices of the team.

“Traore!”

“I’m here!”

“Come pull me out! I’m okay, but I’m stuck!”

Brynn’s voice. “Captain! Are you all right?”

“My leg’s broke and I just went surfing on a pile
of rock. I’m not all right. Help me get over there to Jade.”

There was the sound of shifting rock and scraping
boots. “Jade, can you hear me?”

Jade replied with the same sleepy quality in her
voice that she’d had since the crystal bridge. “I’m okay.”

Ethan heard the crash of a rock falling from the
ceiling somewhere near him. He couldn’t turn his head to see how close it had
come to crushing him, but he felt the rush of air as it hit, felt it shake the
slide and send trickles of pebbles flowing past him.

Ndaiye called out, “I’m free! Who needs help?”

“Over here,” Ethan called to him, and both
cousins came running. Traore shoved his pack under Ethan’s head to support it
and they strained against the chunk of rock beside him.

It was no use. More than half of it was buried.

“We’ll have to dig,” Traore said. They knelt on
either side of Ethan, their gloved hands shoving the rock out from around him.

It wasn’t unlike being in water, albeit very
heavy water. He felt it flow around him, sections giving way in eddies as other
parts were cleared. He tried to help with his left hand, but kept running into
Ndaiye, who placed a hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eye.

“Be still, my friend,” he said, “and let us help
you.”

***

When they regrouped at the bottom of the slope,
they were tattered and filthy, but all alive. The light on Ethan’s left
shoulder was broken, and he felt the dark more acutely. He also noticed a new
chill in the cave. He reached up to crank the heat on in his coveralls and
found them dead.

“Mine too.” Traore was looking at Ethan. “Back at
the Crystal Cavern.”

The slide had pushed them into a long, shallow
crevice, and the other side was a vast slope of smooth stone. It rose three
meters, and Ethan could see they’d have to have get up and let a rope down if
Maggie had any hope of scaling it. He started up, but there was no traction and
he slid back down. He tried again with the same result. How stupid would it be
if they had crossed chasms and outrun krech just to die stuck behind a smooth
slope? He kicked at the rock in frustration.

Brynn rose from the rock she was sitting on. “Let
me try. I used to climb all the time in the canyons when I was a kid.

“Sure.” Ethan stepped back. “I’ll stay close to
spot you, though.” She walked beside the wall, running her hand along it as she
went. Ethan walked beside her. She stopped at the steepest section. Ethan
brushed his fingers across it, trying to see what had caught her attention. It
was slightly rougher than the rest of the wall. He couldn’t see it, but he felt
it. Brynn reached high and hooked her fingers over a tiny ridge. She put the
toe of her boot against the wall and suddenly, with gravity-defying agility,
she was climbing.

From Ethan’s vantage point, it was as if she was
climbing by suction, or magnetism. He could see nothing for her to hold onto.
But she somehow found tiny crevices and rough patches enough to scale the face
and hoist herself up and over the edge. She sat above them, beaming down on the
team.

Ethan grinned up at her. “That was amazing,
Brynn. You’ve got a gift.”

“One.” She said, her pride evident in her voice.
She stood and walked farther up the slope, out of sight.

“The slope is much more gradual up here,” she
called. “I’m tying off the rope to a stalagmite. Just a second.”

Ethan backed up just before the end of the rope
whipped down. He took it and pulled hard. It didn’t budge. He jumped a little,
putting his weight on it. It was solid.

It took the team moments to get up the rock face.
Even Maggie, pulling herself hand over hand while pushing with her one good
foot, made it up with the help of the rope. At the top they found a gentle,
undulating slope leading gradually upward.

The slope turned out to be a dome which led
gradually downward on the other side. They passed through a short tunnel, and
then into a pod-like chamber, as nondescript as it was colorless. The walls
were neither white nor gray and the floor was littered with chunks of rock, but
no interesting formations.

Still, the floor was level and there were smooth
patches big enough to lie down in. The strain of the bridge and the rockslide
had sapped their strength and Brynn and Jade collapsed gratefully on the smooth
floor.

Traore was stomping his feet and blowing his
breath into his hands. Ethan felt himself trembling, too. The cold had sunk
through the coveralls, and he paced a little to keep his blood circulating.

“Coveralls out?” Maggie asked them. When they
nodded, she said, “Mine too.”

Ethan marveled at her composure. She revealed
nothing without intending to. How long had she been feeling the cold press of
the cave? How long would she have gone without telling them?

“This is the most depressing chamber yet,” Brynn
said sourly. “Did you ever read that old Earth book,
Bleak House
?” That’s
what this place reminds me of. I’m calling it Bleak House.”

“It’s just hard to compete with the Crystal
Cavern,” Ethan responded.

“That may have been the most beautiful thing I’ve
ever seen.” The wonder of it still resounded in Traore’s voice.

“Not me,” Ndaiye countered. “Sara is the most
beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Especially when she comes in from the Food
Production Division and takes her hair down outta her helmet. Mmmmm.” He sighed
appreciatively.

“That doesn’t count,” Brynn said. “Of course
people are beautiful. What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve seen that’s not
someone you love?”

Ethan tried to describe the true Alorans, energy
beings who he’d met on Beta Alora, and how their bodies shone with every color
imaginable. Color somehow seemed so important after these days underground.

“Sorry, Ethan,” Jade said, her speech slightly
slurred. “I can’t see an alien being beautiful. Doesn’t seem possible.”

Ethan sometimes forgot that most humans had
little, if any experience with aliens. He also forgot the human tendency to
dislike anything unlike you. He didn’t fight for his description. They couldn’t
know the beauty of the Alorans, the grace of the beings, without experiencing
it themselves.

Brynn broke into the awkward silence. “The most
beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is that butterfly we have here that migrates through
every autumn: the ellisa sunara. Have you guys seen them? They are about this
big,” she held her hands out, the size of a dinner plate, “and they’re golden.
Not just yellow, but metallic gold, with metallic blue under-wings. When they
fly, the sun strikes them and sends flashes of light all around.”

They were quiet, imagining the light flashing.
Ethan wished for a swarm of them now, a kaleidoscope of butterflies to brighten
this drab cavern.

“How about you?” Brynn prodded Maggie. “What’s
the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

Maggie was quiet so long that Ethan didn’t know
if she was going to answer. Finally, she croaked out a single word that settled
over them with finality.

“Earth,” she said, and it came to Ethan’s mind,
that last glimpse he’d had of it as McNeal had called him from the observation
deck to the passenger hold to be put into stasis. Glowing blue below them as
they moved away from it, their home had hung in Ethan’s mind and haunted his
stasis dreams.

“I miss the ocean,” Ndaiye spoke up. “That’s my
most beautiful thing besides Sara. The way the ocean pulls back and the little
seashells dance in the sand as the tide goes out.”

Ethan missed the ocean too, now that he thought
about it. Minea’s oceans were far away from Coriol, and because there were no
significant amounts of Yynium near them, there were no settlements, either. He,
like most of the colonists, had only seen the vast Minean seas on maps.

“I miss museums,” Jade said, shifting
uncomfortably. Ethan wondered if she was feeling cold. “And movies.” Ethan
missed them, too. The new colonies, with their unending work mining and
refining Yynium, had no time for producing entertainment. And the
Interplanetary Communication System was too overloaded and too expensive to use
to transmit anything so frivolous from Earth.

They did have the libraries from the Caretakers’
drives on other ships, but most people had no way to play them. Ethan thought
of Angela and Manuel, two of his passengers who had been in several movies back
on Earth but couldn’t find work here on Minea.

“I have some friends putting together a little theater
production in Coriol,” he said. The statement was met with surprised silence.

“That would be fun,” Jade said. “I’d like to go
to that.”

Brynn poked Jade. “What’s the most beautiful
thing you’ve ever seen?” she asked. “You haven’t answered yet.”

Jade was quiet for a long moment, as if
considering something, and then she slowly reached into her pack. She rummaged
around and pulled out a small photoflat. Its screen glowed as she activated it.
When she turned it around, there was a picture of a pale red cavern with a tiny
figure inside. Ethan knew exactly what he was seeing. It was an in-womb photo
of a baby.

“When?” Brynn gasped.

Jade held her hand over her belly. “He’ll come in
about five months.”

Even Maggie was hushed.

Aria poled the boat
up the side river. The sun was hot on her neck and sweat trickled down her
back. She was glad the children were with Kaia today. Here, the landscape
changed dramatically. The foliage fell away and the gray limestone lay exposed.
Between the karst towers was a barren, pockmarked plain, punctuated by
petrified stumps and the slant of fallen, broken, stone trees.

Disembarking from the little boat, Aria picked
her way between the craters and trunks. She crouched down beside a smooth stone
stump and inspected it. As a botanist, she was drawn to the evidence of plant
life here.

But as she inspected them, she realized that she
had seen these trunks before, when she was with the children in the mountains.
These were the same trees they had found in the grove, the ones which had
brought her comfort with their swaying.

This had been a grove like that one. The trees,
now stone, had been hit with a barrage from above. From the pockmarks, it
appeared it had been a meteor shower. She imagined it then, the majestic trees
scorched and broken, smoke and fire stripping the vegetation from the
underlying limestone. Aria stood and walked in a wide circle, stepping over the
fallen trees and around the hollows in the stone beneath. Perhaps the river had
risen, too, and covered the area in sediment, because the trees were preserved,
perfectly suspended in the moment that their destruction had come. They had
just seeded. She saw the open flowers on the ends of their delicate, feathered
branches, frozen in ashen stillness.

Perhaps there were even seedlings around. She
stood, taking a deep breath of the cool air as she peered past them. At the
edge of the circular blast area, she saw what she was looking for. Immature
specimens, about half a meter tall. She walked to them. They were lovely,
frozen in spiky petrified rows. They had probably grown throughout the grove,
but when the meteors fell these small ones had been eradicated in the middle.
Here on the edge they hadn’t received the full blast. Aria sat on the smooth,
bare limestone to look closer.

She leaned down, running a gentle finger over the
still plants. Some of the plants, a little further out in the tiny grove, had
multiple leaves and she knelt, leaning over and placing a careful palm flat on
the ground between the plants to stabilize herself and keep from falling on
them. As she did, she pulled her hand back in pain and surprise. The ground
between them was sharp with tiny petrified seedlings that had pricked her palm.
A few were stuck a little way in her skin, like stone thorns.

Looking at her hand, she ignored the spots of blood
to focus on the seedlings. She rolled one across her palm. Aria’s eyes widened.
It was Taim—the same as the little plants growing in her cottage, on the train,
and across Coriol. Those tiny little plants were the seedlings of the huge,
swaying trees she had seen in the grove with the children and that had made a
grove here before they’d been destroyed by what seemed to be fire from above.

She’d read that Minea was occasionally prone to
localized, destructive meteor showers. Evidence of them existed all over the
planet, and she was standing where one had happened.

Aria heard a twig snap behind her and turned in
time to see a man angling away from her across the edge of the barren meteor
patch. His hair lay in coarse tangles down the back of his tattered jacket, and
he ran lightly on boots worn and split with use. He carried a large sack, which
bounced across his back as he ran.

“Hey!” Aria called. He glanced back and moved
faster. “Wait! I need help!”

At this the man slowed and turned, warily looking
across the petrified tree stumps toward her.

“I don’t want trouble,” he called, his voice
creaky. He was, Aria saw now, one of the Evaders, those who had walked away
from their debts in the cities and who lived off the land in the Minean
wilderness. She had known they were out here, but she’d never seen one.

“No trouble,” Aria said, taking careful steps
toward him and holding up her hands. “I just need help.”

“What’re you doin’ out here? You work for Saras?”
he asked, a jittery tension crossing his features.

She shook her head. “I don’t work for Saras.” She
was, for once, glad of that fact. “My husband disappeared out here. I need help
finding him. Have you seen a ship?”

He wasn’t running, but he looked like he might. “Your
husband work for Saras?”

“No. He doesn’t.”

This seemed to calm him, and he took a step
toward her. “I haven’t seen ‘im.”

Aria realized, suddenly, how much she was hoping
he had. Her disappointment must have shown on her face.

“It’s wild country,” he said apologetically.

Aria nodded. “I’m starting to see that.”

The man hesitated, then swung his sack to the
ground and rooted around in it. He came up holding a strange yellow fruit, its
skin speckled with orange smudges.

She smiled. “A kwai fruit!”

The man seemed pleased. He took a few more steps
toward her and held it out. “Take this. I’m sorry about your husband.”

Aria took it, smelling its thick, sweet scent.
She suddenly realized she was hungry. When had she last eaten?

“How do you eat it?” she asked.

The man removed another from the sack and held it
up to demonstrate. Then he bit into it. She heard the snapping sound of the
skin and saw the juice trickle into his beard. She held hers to her mouth,
breathing in that robust aroma, and took a bite.

She couldn’t help but slurp to keep the sweet
juice from being wasted. The flesh was firm and tender, and the underlying tang
of the fruit countered its remarkable sweetness. Aria laughed a little at her
own voraciousness as she finished it off.

She saw him slip the pit from his into one of the
pockets of his faded vest and he held out a hand for her pit as well. She
handed it to him. “Do you cultivate these?”

He nodded. “I do.”

She smiled. “I was a botanist back on Earth. I
just grew some Earth wheat in my house back in Coriol.”

His eyes widened and he took an involuntary step
forward. “Earth wheat? Real Earth wheat?”

She nodded. “It’s my own strain. High in protein.”
She closed her eyes. “I’m dreaming of a loaf of whole wheat bread sometime in
the future.”

The man looked at her a long moment. Then he
spoke gruffly. “I’m Hank,” he said, his voice softened by his gray beard. “What’s
your name?”

She smiled and held out a sticky hand. “Aria.”

He shook it and they both chuckled and wiped
their hands on their jackets.

“Listen,” he said, glancing around, “what would
it take to get some of that wheat?”

Aria considered. “I don’t have much. I brought
some from Earth, you know, to remember it by. I didn’t realize there wouldn’t
really be an exact equivalent here.”

“Huh.” He made a disgusted sound. “A lot we didn’t
realize about things here.”

She nodded encouragingly, and Hank went on.

“I came here to be a miner. Didn’t know they’d make
ya use picks and shovels, and that no matter whatcha did they’d never pay you
enough to repay them.”

Aria grimaced. It was a familiar story.

“You can think what you want,” Hank said, “but I
walked away from it. Left my key on the table and my red uniform in the closet.
Don’t take nothin’ from nobody anymore. I can make it on my own out here.” He
hesitated. “Well, mostly. I do a little tradin’ to get stuff I want.”

“Who do you trade with?” Aria asked.

“Other Evaders, like me.” He gestured toward a
narrow cut between two peaks. “Headin’ to the market now. You can come, if you
won’t say anything about it back in the city.” Saying the words out loud seemed
to make him more anxious about that possibility, and he gathered his bag
quickly. “Or maybe you’d better not come.” He took a quick step away.

“Hank,” Aria said, her voice clear and calm. She
tried not to let him see how much she wanted to meet others out here, to see if
they knew anything about Ethan. Hank turned back toward her, searching her face.
“I’m not going to tell anyone. I’ll keep your secret.”

His eyes narrowed and he studied her a long
moment.

“A’right then. Keep up.”

It was a challenge keeping up with him. He
scrambled between the peaks and through a boulder field. She followed him for
what she guessed was about a kilometer before he parted a curtain of hanging
vines and entered a brilliant, sunlit valley the size of a warehouse. The sun
was directly overhead, and there were twenty or more people in the shade of the
vines around the edge, sitting on blankets on the ground. They had a
fascinating assortment of items spread around them.

Aria walked through the market in wonder. There
were fruits of all different kinds, meat, castoff clothes and camping gear, and
even homemade goods like cookies and decorations made from natural or found
materials.

She saw their suspicion as she approached, but Hank’s
reputation seemed secure, because a wave of his hand put most of the other
vendors at rest.

He stopped beneath a canopy of leafy vines and
reached in his sack, procuring a faded tartan blanket. He laid it out and
carefully arranged his fruits—not just the kwai, but also long purple fruits
and bright green gourds, red berries and white ones, and two huge orange
blossoms dripping with nectar.

“It’s as sweet as Earth’s honey,” he said,
holding one toward her. She held out a finger and he let a golden drop fall on
it. Putting it in her mouth, she was taken back to the smell of honeysuckle
from her childhood and its sweet taste in the air.

“I’m the fruit man,” he told her as he turned his
attention to his customers. The other vendors descended, trying to convince him
how much he needed their goods and trying to downplay his wares as they traded with
him.

Aria watched in amazement as they haggled back
and forth, coming to a mutual agreement about what each item was worth. It was
so different than the experience of Gaynes’s market in Coriol. She admired it.

Finally, as the sun moved past the valley, the
Evaders began to pack up. Aria realized she was missing her chance.

“Hold on! Hold on!” She caught up to them and
asked about Ethan. No one had seen him, or the ship, but they did talk her out
of her jacket and the pocketknife she’d brought along, trading her for several
delicious fruits, nuts, and gourds gathered from the forest around them.

Most were kind, as well, telling her not to give
up looking, that it was a vast place and he could be alive. Look at them. Some
of them had been living out here a long time. Hank had been here twenty years.

Hank helped her carry her produce and find her
way back to the boat. There was a gleam in his eye as he said, “Aria, before
you leave, I want to know if you’ll think of a trade for some of that
wheat—just a few grains. I think I could get it to grow.”

Aria thought about it. Suddenly, the thought of
all this food, sitting out here while people in Coriol were starving, sparked
an idea in her.

“I’ll work out a trade with you. But it may take
a little more than just wheat. Is there anything else you need?” She gestured
back toward the market. “Or that they need?”

“Sure, there’s a list of stuff we’re always on
the lookout for.” He ran a hand down his beard. “Razors, scissors, knives,
ropes, warm clothes, water carriers like bottles and jugs.”

A plan was forming. “Is this a good site to meet?
Is it safe for you?” she asked.

Hank’s eyes darted away toward the forest and she
knew he was looking toward his home. He nodded.

“Okay. I’ll get you anything you want from the
city. But I need as much fruit as you can give me. And I need you—all of you—to
keep an eye out for Ethan.”

Hank seemed to consider for a moment, then stuck
out a hand. “Deal.”

***

Kaia breathed in the sharp scent of Zam as she
waited in the hallway for Polara to come out of her classroom. Rigel was
sleeping in his stroller, and she pushed it slowly back and forth a little. The
school was small, even by Minean standards, and only a fraction of the children
in Coriol attended it. Saras had no qualms about employing children over ten
years old, and parents needed all the scrip they could get to pay off their
heavy debts.

It was a tidy school, though. Even now a Saras
cleaning crew was scrubbing the windows at the other end of the hall, scraping at
the little green plants, which Aria called Taim. The plants seemed intent on
filling up Coriol. The crew, silhouetted against the brightness of the window,
looked ominous, somehow. Kaia turned to peer in the open door of Polara’s
classroom instead, hoping that the little girl didn’t see her. She knew that
Polara would likely run straight to her without regard for her teacher’s
discipline plan. She always liked to see Polara learning. She was such a
bright, inquisitive child and everything held fascination for her.

Today, though, Kaia saw the little girl sitting
at her desk, resting her chin on her crossed arms. She didn’t look bored,
exactly, or sleepy. Kaia tried to come up with an accurate word to describe
Polara’s blank expression and slumped shoulders.