Jump Zone: Cleo Falls (10 page)

It still didn’t make sense to him. Filling in thousands of miles of roads was too labor intensive a task to justify the benefits.

“The second reason is more practical,” she said, a hint of pride in her voice. “One of our biggest natural enemies is fire. During dry spells, a lightning strike can destroy hundreds of acres of forest. The rock channels are a barrier of sorts, so that a big blaze can never really take out more than a single area.”

“That makes sense.”

“We have dedicated maintenance crews that check each rock line a few times a year, just to make sure it doesn’t get overgrown. And I guess, if you want to call this the third reason, they’re a great navigation tool. They provide markers, map features, helps us figure out how far we have to go or how far we’ve come.”

Or they could have put up signposts, which made more economical sense, but he kept quiet, opting for an acquiescent nod. It all felt like a colossal waste of time and money, but what did he expect from ignorant savages? Except Cleo, of course. She was clearly on the intelligent spectrum of savage.

“You ready?” she asked, kicking loose dirt over the remaining embers of their cooking fire.

Libra secured his backpack to his shoulders. “When you are.”

Cleo hopped across the creek and glanced above, scanning the sky before she re-entered the thick of the forest.

“You keep doing that,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Looking up.”

She kept walking, but a misstep told Libra that he’d hit on something worth digging in to.

“I’m navigating by the sun.”

“Bullshit,” he said the moment she reached for her pendant.

“Pardon?” Her eyes were guarded, her knuckles white against the black stone.

“You’ve been searching the skies,
obsessively
, for the past few days.”

“We’re due for a storm.”

“Is that right, now?” he pressed. “There hasn’t been so much as a cloud up there for days.”

“The wind shifted. I can smell rain coming.”

“You’re lying.”

Her nostrils flared. “I am not!” She turned her back and resumed walking. “I’m looking for rain cl—”

“Cleo!” He shook his head and expelled his breath. It was getting to him, the lies, the deception, and mostly the suspicion in her eyes… It was eroding his psyche. “Look at me.” She turned with a harrumph, crossed her arms over her chest, and thrust her hip to the side. But she kept her eyes averted.

“Look. At. Me.”

When she finally turned her brown eyes on him, her mouth was pursed in challenge. And he was quite certain she was staring at his nose, not into his eyes, but it would do. Someone around here needed to start telling the truth. And it couldn’t be him.

“Why, Cleo?”

Her shoulders popped up in a petulant shrug. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

She regarded him for a moment, and Libra could see a play of un-translatable emotion in her eyes. Whatever it was she had to say was beginning to make him nervous.

“Come on, Cleo. What’s up?”

“Have you ever seen a…” She toed the ground. “Do you know what aer-o-planes are?”

A tendril of dread unfurled in his gut as she pronounced the three distinct syllables. Libra didn’t like where this was going. “Uh, ye-ah, of course.” He’d tried to sound casual but his intention backfired and his tone dripped with sarcasm.

“They haven’t flown in almost a hundred years, since the Polar Wars,” she said, refolding her arms. “How am
I
supposed to know if
you
know your history? You didn’t know anything about the grid!”

As much as he wanted to end this conversation right here, right now, he had to know. It couldn’t be a coincidence. “I’m sorry,” he offered, tempering his agitation.

“Never mind,” she said.

“No, go on.”

She eyed him. Libra relaxed his facial muscles best he could. “Please.”

“I know this sounds crazy, but… I saw one, Libra. A couple of nights ago.”

The trees seemed to close in on him, turning his vision to green swirling specs. He looked toward his boots in hopes the ground would stop spinning. Cleo had just knocked the wind out of him.

Fifteen

“Y
ou what?”

Zhang hell!
Here was the part where she told him she watched him jump out of that plane and knew exactly what he was up to, then took his knife, which he stupidly—
stupidly
—let her hang on to after lunch, and drove it through his skull before he took another breath.

“I know, I know what you’re thinking,” she said, reaching for…

Libra braced.

…her head to rap her knuckles against her skull. “You’re thinking I’m a complete nutcase. I can tell just by your look.”

“No, it’s just…” He exhaled forcefully, unaware he’d been holding a lungful of air. “No, I don’t.”

Her shoulders deflated with a heavy sigh as she dropped her arms. “The other night, just before I—I mean, the reason I—”

Cleo’s head shook back and forth in a struggle to find the words to explain. It was so unlike her to stutter, to look unsure, that it gave him a paradoxical glimmer of hope.

“Okay, look,” she finally said. “What I told you about falling in the river wasn’t exactly true.”

“I didn’t think so.”

Her eyebrows shot up.

“Who fishes at the top of a waterfall?” he said, his confidence recovered. “You just don’t seem that incompetent.”

“I’m not, normally! I was kayaking down river. I’ve shot those rapids a hundred times! I know how far I can go, how close I can get to the falls,
safely
, before hauling out. But I was in a hurry and the sun had already dipped behind the tree line, and I pushed on a little farther than I should have. And there’s been a lot of rain lately, so the river is swollen and moving a lot faster than normal.” She hesitated, her fingers toying with the leather string around her neck.

“Continue,” he pressed. He fought his impatience, fought the urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she spewed every detail. Heart thumping, he had to find out how much of the truth she knew.

“I was just angling toward shore and that’s when I saw it—this weird flash in the sky. I looked up, as crazy as this sounds,” she said, meeting him with an earnest stare, “I swear to you and the deities of our forefathers, I saw the sun reflecting off a giant metal bird. It was different than the history module images, but I know what I saw. An aer-o-plane!”

Libra’s mouth filled with moisture. He turned and spit into the bush as a tendril of dread bloomed into a thick, choking vine that wrapped around his heart and lungs. He tried to relax but could feel his facial muscles tense up like a lock.

She must have taken his silence for shock.

“I couldn’t believe it, either,” she said, shaking her head. She became more animated, began using her hands to illustrate as she rushed to get the rest of the story out. “It was so big, I mean, so small, way up there, but it must have been so big for me to see it! And it was just a split second, but in that moment I took my eye off the river to look up, my bow slammed into a pile of rocks that I swear came out of nowhere. Before I could backpaddle, I got slammed sideways and was pinned against them. When I pushed off, I flipped the kayak, and because I was caught in an eddy, I couldn’t right the damn thing before my breath ran out. I managed to release the cockpit cord and slide out, but the current got me. It was so fast and I was so tired from paddling all day that I just couldn’t manage to swim against it. The rest, you know.”

Yes, the rest he knew.

Libra fought against gravity, to remain upright when he really wanted to double over in pain.
He
was the reason she went over the falls.
He
was the reason she almost drowned. He was the reason she
did
drown. The image of her, limp and blue in his arms, swarmed his vision until he thought he’d lose his lunch. The gash on her leg, the bruised cheek, the scraped forehead…  He looked at his hands, feeling like he had beat the shit out of her.

What are the chances that she would be out there, miles from any settlement, to witness that moment, that perfect alignment of altitude, sun, and wings. More amazing was the fact that she didn’t see him floating through the air, though it would have been difficult considering his ’chute was made to blend with the twilight sky.

Libra reached up to wipe away a rivulet of sweat that rolled down his temple. Though Cleo stood in front of him, the picture of health, he couldn’t get the sound of the painful retching as her body fought to expel the river water from ringing in his ears.

He blinked a few times, tried to focus on the here and now, tried to ignore the acid churning in his gut. 
It’s not supposed to be this way. I’m not supposed to give a zhang for this savage.

He should never have agreed to this ridiculous mission. And now he had no choice. He needed to get it done, get it over with, get back to the city, get out of her life. Get
her
out of
his
. Why, for hell’s sake, didn’t he tell Achan to stick the money up his ass and do his time in the colony? Hard labor never killed anyone.

Though guilt could.

And Achan played on that too.

“These people killed your father, and by extension, your family. Libby may have survived if he’d been home to look after her. You’re mother might not have turned into a dependant. We aren’t savages, boy. We don’t believe in that eye-for-an-eye crap, but you owe it to them to get revenge on the family who irrevocably damaged us.”

Cleo looked up at him with those big, unsure, honeyed eyes, waiting for some kind of response. He wanted to blurt it all out—the lies, the truth, the entire zhanged-up situation.

Donning a mask of indifference, he glanced up and shrugged, falling back on what he did best. Bluff, lie, deceive...survive. “It was probably lightning.”

“Libra,” she said, twisting her fingers around her black stone. “I know lightning when I see it, and that was most definitely not lightning.”

“Maybe it was a flare. Someone was lost,” he said, pushing past her on the path. He couldn’t stand the way she looked at him, couldn’t get out of this godforsaken land fast enough. “But there’s no fucking way it was an airplane.”

“I know what I saw,” she said quietly from behind him. He heard her disappointment, knew he’d let her down.

It was too much. The tight hold he’d had on his cover began to unravel and he couldn’t deal with warring emotions pulling apart his guts.

“No, you don’t know, Cleo,” he said jabbing his finger toward her. “You’ve never even seen a zhang-damned
aer-o-plane
before, so how would you know?” he mocked. “There aren’t any museums in the northern wild. You’re living centuries in the past! You don’t even have a transportation system, so what do you know about planes, about anything?”

“I’ve seen pictures,” she shouted. “We’re not dumb,
urbanite.
We have teachers, doctors, statesmen—” She pulled her shoulders back and added, “And
warriors
, who’d kick your ass for your insults.”

“You’re right, Cleo,” he replied, his voice thick with condescension. “Nothing but a bunch of savages.”

Murdering savages.

Sixteen

L
ibra crashed through the forest like a hunted buck and, though she knew he didn’t have a clue where he was going, she followed. As long as he went in the general direction of the nearest grid line, she’d let him satisfy his need to stomp and charge. He clearly thought she was an incompetent guide if she was seeing mythical planes in the air.

She thought about stopping, going her own way, but he wouldn’t even notice.

She should. Leave him to make his own stupid way to the Cut. Maybe even detour right into the path of a hungry polar grizzly. Against her better judgement, she plowed on behind and tried to sort out what the hell just happened.

They’d been getting along so well, at least she thought so, and despite her niggling distrust, he was an overall decent guy. But his reaction to her plane story was a complete puzzle. It was so out of character, so over the top! Doubt and disbelief she expected, but the way he shouted, with his reddened face and jabbing finger, left her cold and feeling like an ignorant fool. If he’d told her he saw a woolly mammoth grazing in a field, she may have told him to stop snacking on fermented berries, but get angry and call his entire culture stupid?

Cleo couldn’t understand why his reaction shook her so. Her chest felt so tight, even the clear Taiga air couldn’t dislodge the stones sitting at the bottom of her lungs. Her eyes stung with unshed tears of…of… Not sad, weepy tears. Cleo Rush didn’t cry. Ever. It was more a feeling of disappointment and betrayal.

Her heightened emotions were most likely the sum effect of the last few weeks—from the exhaustion and extreme high of winning the gruelling trials of the leadership competition to the depths of the lowest lows when she’d realized that Jaegar had to leave, not to mention where he damn well went. Then there was the whole drowning thing, getting tied up by an outsider, and lest she forget the most serious: breaking an indefensible tribal rule which was going to get in her in a shit-load of trouble with the elders. Perpetuating harm toward a leader, sitting or elect, was taken very seriously; hence the rule that the three runners-up in the leadership competition must undergo memory-death, thereby eliminating any threat.

Drugging her father’s tea with a three-day sleeping potion was the only way to ensure her head start in getting to Jaegar. Technically, even though she committed the act as leader-elect, she could be sentenced to true death.

Death. Again. Seemed like a running theme for her. Been there, done that, and she wasn’t eager to try it again for many years. For the love of ducks, no wonder she was a mess.

Cleo refused to credit her vacillating emotions to the man who walked forty paces ahead. She stuck her tongue out at his back.

Don’t trust outsiders.

Thankfully, Lewin Rush would never learn of her stupidity. How naïve to think she could know someone,
trust someone,
after only a few days.

Urbanite.
In this case, it was synonymous with idiot. Damn him, carrying on like a seal-starved polar grizzly. What a difference from yesterday, when he looked at her with such mind-blowing intensity, her nipples tightened into hard little diamonds. Or this morning when she awoke wrapped in his arms, their bodies pressed together. She’d dreamt of his kisses in her hair.

Libra was right… She was an ignorant, stupid girl from the backward Taiga.

Lost in her own self-pity, Cleo didn’t notice the root sticking out of the ground. She stumbled forward, throwing her hands out before her face connected with the dirt.

She leapt up, pride driving her fleetness. Her palms stung from the impact. She picked out the tiny imbedded sticks and pebbles, then spit on her hands and rubbed them against her thighs. It didn’t help. Now they were sore
and
streaked with dirt.

He
hadn’t even turned around to see if she was okay. She could have bumped her head, been knocked unconscious, but did he once check his back? It was a damn good thing for him that she’d lost her knives. She mimed pulling a blade from her weapons harness, closed one eye, and locked on target. Drawing her arm back, she flung the blade forward, almost hearing the
whoosh
as it travelled through the air and embedded itself in the back of Libra’s neck. Bull’s-eye!

Now that he was imaginarily dead, Cleo looked down and concentrated on the tips of her sandals as they shuffled along the increasingly rocky path. She gave herself a mental cuff upside the head. She needed to keep her mind on task, not on him.

So why couldn’t she cover ten feet without her thoughts eddying around him and only him, replaying every comment, every movement, every tidbit of personal information he’d shared since the moment they met. Libra, the oddly named Sagittarian.

“Not so ‘fair and balanced’ today, are you,
urbanite
?” she said, intending to flick eye-daggers and surprised that he no longer occupied her line of sight. Cleo found him halfway up Raccoon Ridge, a mountainous obstruction with a ridiculously steep incline, difficult and dangerous to climb. Which is why there was a perfectly good path that veered around it.

Libra had nothing to grip but a few misplaced saplings that found shallow life in the cracked stone—nothing to break his fall if he slipped.

If time wasn’t of the essence, she’d enjoy watching him ascend, just to see him come back down when he realized the other side was a sheer cliff.

She growled with impatience, cupped her hands to her mouth, and yelled, “You can’t go that way!” The rest she huffed to herself. “You dumb
outsider.
”

Libra paused and turned slightly, acknowledging her warning. The dumb-bug ignored her and kept going.

Cleo let out a deep sigh and watched him try to gain a foothold on the angled slope. By the time she’d caught up, he was almost to the top, but the loose shale was severely inhibiting the climb.

“Be careful. It’s slippery when it gets wet,” she mumbled. He didn’t believe her when she said it was going to rain, so why bother shouting the warning.

Feeling righteous, she stuck to the footpath as it forked west. Once he made it to the top and realized that he couldn’t go down the front face, he’d figure out how to follow the ridge westerly until, lo and behold, it came out on the very same path she was already on. Only he’d be exhausted from clinging to shale and a good half hour behind her.

“I should have kept my damn mouth shut about the aer-o-plane,” she mumbled. Of course he didn’t believe her. Aer-o-planes hadn’t flown since the fossil fuel depletion. By the middle of the Polar War, even combat flying had ground to a halt, reducing the war to a fierce and bloody ground operation that lasted for another decade.

But it
was
a plane she’d seen. It had to be! She’d only confided in him because she thought they shared…what? A journey, a friendship, a connection? And maybe a small part of her hoped he’d validate her claim, that maybe the urbanites had developed a new energy technology that made air travel a reality again.

Fool.

She assumed he broke contact the moment he woke that morning because he was embarrassed that he was practically groping her in his sleep. Now she knew better; he was horrified at touching a Taiga woman, a
savage
.

How long had she lain, enjoying the feel of his body against hers, wishing she had the nerve, the confidence to turn in his arms, slip a knee between his legs, and sleepily bury her face in the crook of his neck? Thank goodness she hadn’t. The humiliation would have been devastating.

Cleo’s head perked up at the sound of a rumbling boom in the distance. Thunder. She couldn’t help feel a little smug after he resolutely refused to believe her. Who was the fool now?

She walked and stewed, every distant rumble pushing her feelings of righteous victory.

What the hell did an
outsider
know about survival? Adventure, ha! Why do they even bother coming up here? They should stay in their precious cities with precious universities and corporations and choke on their Nutrishit.

Before she knew it, the better part of an hour had passed. Cleo looked up as she rounded the edge of the escarpment, just to make sure he’d found a path down from the ridge. She could feel an “I’m first!” bubbling to get out
, if
she decided to speak to him at all.

She scanned the side of Raccoon Ridge, but there was no bobbing blond head in sight. Her heart tripped a little faster as her eyes swept the terrain again, more slowly, searching for some sign of him coming down, through the scrubby trees, some sign of him at the top.

Nothing. No Libra.

She really
didn’t
want him to be ripped to shreds by a polar grizzly. Not until he got her to Gomeda, anyway.

Cleo squinted, a hand across her forehead to fight the nonexistent glare, but there were no signs of man nor sated beast.

She paced back and forth along the curving path, straining her neck, trying to see around the natural obstacles in her line of sight. Cleo swallowed, trying to prevent the frantic worry that made her jaw tighten and her mind bounce to horrible conclusions, all of them ending at Libra’s broken body.

“Libra?” she called. An anxious echo mocked her.

This was ridiculous. Worrying was not productive and, by its very nature, counterintuitive to everything she’d been taught. She expelled her breath and, with it, her growing panic. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on breathing, letting the sounds of the forest consume her. She was searching for footsteps, his voice, that little clanking noise his pack made whenever his left foot came down.

Nothing. Nothing but another rumble of thunder, louder this time.

Her eyes snapped open and the panic rushed back like a tidal wave.

She should have insisted he take the path. Should have warned him shale and raindrops do not mix.

And what if he tried to get down the cliff? Could he be that stupid?

She placed her hands across her stomach, felt it roil like she’d eaten rancid squirrel.

“Libra!”

Imagining him lying at the bottom of the cliff face, broken, shattered, bloody, just for the sake of getting there ahead of her, Cleo ran.