Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2) (6 page)

Aria’s heart was thundering as she stepped out
into the cool spring morning. She had forgotten all about Polara’s apple until
she was at the door, and she wouldn’t go crawling back to the register to give
that krech another scrip.

Polara chattered about the new blossoms on the
trees as Aria pulled her quickly down the sidewalk toward the industrial
district. Two blocks away from the store she realized the unlikelihood of
finding who she was looking for. She turned to walk back to the cab platform
when a flash of dusty red caught her eye. She almost ran across the street,
pulling Polara with her into a little alleyway between the shoe store and the
clothing store.

The young miner looked up in surprise as she
approached, then looked away to hide his tear-stained face. Polara pulled away
from her mother and ran to him. Aria watched as the little girl gently took his
hand and gazed up at him. He didn’t pull away, just looked down at her with
incredibly sad eyes. Polara, ever empathetic, put his hand to her cheek.

Aria pulled out the two rangkors and held them
out to the young man. Briefly, his eyebrows drew together in suspicion, then he
broke into a smile.

“Dama,” he said quietly, freeing his hand from
Polara to take the tubers. “Dama engala.”

Aria smiled wonderingly. “You speak a different
language?” she asked.

The boy blushed. “Usually only at home.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. Ethan would be
excited to know another old Earth language had survived.

“It means ‘thank you,’” he said.

“You’re welcome.” Ever since Polara and Rigel had
come into the world, Aria saw them in everyone’s children. She imagined this
boy’s mother for a moment. She was probably at work in the mines as well,
wondering what was keeping him from his shift and worrying what might have
happened. “Will you go to work now?”

The boy looked at his watch and his eyes welled
up with tears again. He shook his head. “I’ll never make it. It’s a ten minute
walk.” He made a disgusted grunt in his throat. “It’s my third time being late.
They’ll dock me a week’s pay this time.”

Aria called to Polara. “Can you run, little one?”
Polara nodded and Aria called to both her and the young miner. “Come on, then!”

She must have earned his trust, because he
followed her without question. Aria looked down the street as they emerged from
the alley and ran for a cab platform. She pulled the door open and Polara,
sensing her mother’s urgency, threw herself in the circular back seat and
scooted around to the far side. Aria slung the groceries in on the floor and
pulled Rigel’s backpack off, clutching him on her lap as she slid in, too.

She barked, “Take us to the mine!”

The boy slipped in and pulled the door closed
just as the cab sped off toward the Industrial District.

Aria watched the buildings speed by and glanced
at the boy. A hopeful light had crept into his eyes and he was obviously
thrilled by the cab ride. He caught her eye.

“Why are you helping me?”

Aria hugged Rigel a little. “Because I hope
somebody will help my boy someday, when he needs it,” she said. “And because I
think you were trying to do some good yourself by standing in that line. Nobody
likes rangkor enough to eat that many by himself.” She gestured at his armload
of tubers.

He smiled, but it was a sad smile. “They’re for
my family. We won’t get any more scrip for three days, and there won’t be
anything left we can buy after work.” He shook his head quickly, agitated. “I
can’t hear my little sisters cry for food one more night.”

His words hit Aria in the stomach. A long-ago
feeling twisted her memory. She wished Ethan was here. The mine came into sight
through the window of the hovercab.

“Can I ask your name?” the boy said. “Maybe I can
pay you back for these someday.” He looked hesitantly at her. “And the cab
ride,” he added hastily as the cab stopped.

“It’s Aria Bryant. How about yours?”

The boy spoke quickly. “I’m Daniel Rigo.” He
jumped out of the cab, running with the last of the stragglers to the gates of
the mine.

“Where to now?” the hovercab driver asked.

“Just wait here a second,” Aria replied.

She watched as Daniel checked in seconds before
the whistle blew, ending the break. He turned and tossed her a wave, smiling
broadly. She saw his mouth make the words
dama engala
: thank you.

***

Daniel threw a wave at the kind woman, Aria, in
the hovercab, and walked past the foreman into the mine just as the whistle
blew. He stopped to stash the rangkors in his mother’s lunchbox in her cubby at
the mine’s mouth, then pulled up his mask as he walked to the check boards.
They were wide pieces of smooth green Minean wood, with rows of small nails
covering them. On each nail hung a small metal triangle stamped with the words “Saras
Co. Mining” and each miner’s identification number. The miners called them pit
checks because the underground parts of the mine were called the pit and the
little tags gave an easy way to see who was underground. He’d reached for his
so many times that it was no chore finding it among all the others. He slid it
on the clip on his chest and headed to the tram line.

He hated Gaynes. Hated the way he made people
grovel. Hated the way he needled people. Hated the way he made everyone feel
small.

Daniel’s father had been the opposite. Thorian
Rigo had been big and made others feel big, too. He had joked with everyone,
and when you were talking to him, you were the most important person in the
world.

Daniel felt tears slipping out of his stinging
eyes and ducked, blaming it on the wind from the tram ride.

Marise was peering at the tram as it hissed to a
stop. She put her arms around him for a long moment. He knew how worried she
must have been, but she didn’t say anything, simply laid a hand on his cheek
and turned back to her work.

“I got some rangkors,” he said. “Plenty.”

Marise hugged him again, spontaneously. “I don’t
know how. I heard what happened at the market. But you’re like your father,
Daniel. You always find a way to take care of us.” She kissed him quickly and
the two found their way to the section of open vein they’d been working on
before the break.

Daniel swung the pick and popped out a chunk of
Yynium. He’d gotten pretty good at dislodging chunks that weren’t too big,
because the next step was for his mother to load the chunk into the tram. He
hated to see her strain to lift them, and she was furious if he stopped to help
her carry one.

A mine was a funny place: loud with the ringing
of the picks and the reverberations on the glassy Yynium vein, loud with the
crash of the ore being tossed into the trams, loud with the coughing and
shuffling of the miners. But all these sounds were dampened by the immense
weight of the stone above them, the narrowness of the drift, and the hovering
darkness at either end of their work section, past the tall blast lights that
stood precariously on their tripod bases. It was as if, at any moment, the
clamor of Yynium extraction might be snuffed out like a flickering lamp and all
that would remain would be silence.

Some days they talked. Today, though, they worked
in silence. Daniel was lost in his memories of the market. He wished he’d punched
Gaynes through the bars or that he’d simply taken the rangkor tubers and walked
out.

But being locked up wouldn’t help his family. He
knew that. What made his heart beat faster and his teeth clench as he swung the
pick again was that Gaynes knew it too.

The tram on the way out of the mine was always
exhilarating. Even after a long day’s work, when Daniel’s shoulders and back
ached, and his hands throbbed from the percussion of steel on stone, he loved
the feeling of going up and out of the pit. When, on the last long slope out of
the mine, the tram bogged down and slowed, straining under the weight of the
miners and the pitch of the track, he always felt a twinge of apprehension. And
then, above them, rising like Candidus, the Minean moon, was a patch of sky
that brought his heart to his chest every time.

He glanced around to see if the other miners felt
it. But most of them had their eyes closed against the wind or were dozing from
their exhaustion. Only one other miner was looking. Only one, whose clear blue
eyes caught his and shared with him the moment of liberation from the pit:
Zella.

***

Daniel’s mother was chatting with neighbors as
they walked home, and they quickly outpaced him, leaving him walking the long
road alone in the crowd. That didn’t last long, however. He heard a lovely,
bright voice next to his shoulder.

“I love coming out of the mine, don’t you?” Zella
slipped her arm through his as they walked easily together. She was almost his
height, and as they walked she reached up and pulled off her bright head covering.
Her light curls cascaded down around her shoulders, and Daniel’s breath caught
in his throat.

“I do.” Daniel glanced away, his cheeks coloring.
He suspected she knew how he felt—how Pete and Hadib felt, how every guy who
knew her felt—about her.

But Zella didn’t let on. She took a drink from
her water bottle, and Daniel heard it swish empty as she did so. She shook it. “All
out. Good thing it’s the end of the day!” He nodded. “Remember how, back on
Earth, lemonade was so delicious on a hot summer day?”

Daniel did remember. He had manned many a
lemonade stand with his cousins during his childhood. “It was.”

Zella leaned close. “I don’t think I could drink
it without gagging now.” She shook her head in disgust. “Too much Yynium-ade.”

He knew what she meant. Even with the masks, by
the end of the day, the miners’ mouths were so coated with the lemony dust that
every sip of water tasted like it. He laughed. “Don’t say it too loud. Saras’ll
have us running Yynium-ade stands at the next Lucidus festival.”

“Did you see it?” Zella asked, and Daniel tried
to pretend she was just talking about Lucidus.

“Yeah. I was lucky to be on the swing shift
yesterday, so I got to go out for a minute in the morning and take the little
girls. A lady named Joyce in our building even let them use her bells to ring.”

“They must have loved that.”

“They did.” Daniel thought about how they had
held the bells in a reverent way, looking at their reflections in the shiny
surfaces. He needed to get them back to church, so they could play hand bells
once a month. There was so precious little in their life that was beautiful, so
little music. He could add a little more by not sleeping in on worship day
every month.

He felt a jerk on his arm and looked down. Zella
was expectantly waiting for an answer, but he hadn’t heard her question.

“I’m sorry. I was thinking about my sisters. What
did you say?”

“That’s okay. I was just asking if you saw the
spot?”

Daniel nodded. “I saw it.”

She squeezed his arm. “Tell me about it! I was
working the day shift, so I didn’t see it!”

The memory of the shadow passed through Daniel’s
mind. “It was . . .” He tried to think of how to make it sound
exciting. “A dark dot. It just,
fshew,
” he shot a pointed finger up and
across the sky, then regretted it as he felt the pain in his shoulders, “streaked
across Lucidus, then it was gone.”

Zella shuddered, an excited little tremble. He
admired her enthusiasm, even after a whole day underground. “What do you think
it was?”

Daniel shrugged. “Most people say it was a part
of the orbital defense system that just so happened to line up this year.”

She looked disappointed. “I guess.” Then a
mischievous spark came into her eyes. “Or maybe it was a spaceship, come to
rescue us from the mines.”

“Maybe,” Daniel said doubtfully.

“Or a meteor,” she said. “Did you make a wish?”

Daniel sighed heavily. They were reaching the
edge of the Industrial District, and he turned toward their tenement. The dull
gray buildings rose around them, blocking out all but small slices of the clear
sky.

“I make wishes every day,” he said wearily.

They walked in silence a moment, the wave of day
shift workers swelling around them as it met the wave of swing shift workers
heading out of the city. Soon, the crowd was crushing, and Zella clung tightly
to Daniel. It was the first time he’d enjoyed the crowd.

They found building G and she pulled him onto the
sidesteps, where they sat and breathed out the last of the day’s stress.

“What do you wish for?” she said, softly. “When
you’re making all those wishes?”

Daniel looked down at her. Zella shone with
chalky Yynium dust, grey bits of stone mingled with the sparkling orange
Yynium. Her eyes, bright blue as the slices of sky, captured him and he found
himself talking.

“I wish my mother didn’t have to work. I wish my
sisters could stay home with her instead of going to the school. I wish I could
design hovercars and work in an office. I wish you—” He stopped.