Powers (27 page)

By the time he crawled into the low narrow tent, she seemed to be sound asleep. He left the dim nightlight glowing.

Albert opened his left eye, just a slit, trying to figure out what had wakened him. Faint pre-dawn light shone through the tent, and the nightlight wasn’t glowing. She must have turned it off sometime after he went to sleep, probably going out in the night to pee, and the thought startled him more awake. Apparently his sleeping brain trusted her enough that he didn’t wake up for
that.

Either that, or his subconscious wanted to die . . .

He didn’t like the image either way.

Drips still tapped on the tent fabric. He couldn’t tell if they meant continued rain or just the trees dumping their overnight load. He could hear the river and stream out there, water muttering around rocks and logs. A brief stir of wind whispered in the branches, and more drips showered down on the rain fly. Nothing suspicious
there.

But something had changed and his “sentry” noticed it, that part of him that processed the world while the rest of him slept. It had poked him awake.

He lay there, both eyes open now, ears sorting through some early birdsong and the muttering river and the occasional touch of wind in the trees. And the quiet sigh of Mel’s breathing behind his right ear.

Mel’s warmth against his back.

That was it. He hadn’t had someone snuggled up warm against his back while he slept for, well, centuries. Now that he noticed it, he welcomed that gift against the dank night chill. She hadn’t packed any sleeping bags, no room in the backpack. She’d made do with a couple of those flimsy emergency blankets, aluminized plastic.

She probably hadn’t even woken up to move, just tossed and turned and rolled in her sleep and found some warmth and wanted it. It’s not as if the lumps under the tent made a comfortable bed—rocks and roots, and everything sloping down to the rear left corner, and he hadn’t had time or daylight or energy to find a better site.

Any port in a storm. Literally.

He felt her draw a ragged breath and let it out with a sigh and
also
felt her arm move with it, draped across him, and that told him she was awake. She couldn’t have done
that,
asleep, without him noticing. His “sentry” would have screamed out loud. She had to have moved slowly, gently, consciously, to avoid waking him.

Then his brain processed the faint sounds behind him, good thing his ears were still getting better, and the shudder of her breathing clicked with everything else. She was crying. Silently.

Probably remembering . . . Hani? That was his name, the artist? Or some other deep wound from the past. God, whichever god, knows
I
have enough of those. Some of which cut too close to this.

If I let her know I’m awake, I can think of at least twenty-five ways it will turn out bad. Including, if she’s anything like a human female . . .

The last time he’d tried to comfort a crying woman, they’d ended up doing things that both of them regretted. Not at the time, not the next day, but later. In his case, forever, or so close as to not matter.

I quit looking for human lovers.

He lay there for the next eternity, concentrating on slow breathing. Only allowing himself the small movements people make in normal sleep. But his right arm was going numb and his bladder and gut kept nagging, growing more insistent by the minute. That fish stew wanted to be released back into the wild.

He stirred a bit more, just what a sleeping man would do if a rock was poking in his ribs. Which it was. She jerked her arm back and eased away from him, silent, as far as the tight width of the tent would allow. He could pretend to wake up now. And do something about his bladder.

Keeping as quiet as possible, as if he was trying to avoid waking
her,
he unzipped the bug screen and the weather flap and slipped out of the tent and zipped them up again. Out from under the rain fly, he could stand and stretch and wince. His back still ached from falling asleep against that tree.

Fog, dead calm now, dripping trees, smell of moss and forest and river, but it didn’t seem to be raining anymore. He had enough pre-dawn light to pick his way across the roots and rocks and around wet dark tree trunks to the clump of bushes of the designated toilet. Something boomed wings overhead, sounded like a startled grouse, dumping a fresh shower of drips, and then rattled through the leaves to vanish in the silence. He got back to breathing again, and waited for his pulse to quit pounding in his ears. Maybe being deaf wasn’t such a bad deal, after all.

If
it was a grouse, it probably had teeth. And was carnivorous. This world
would
have carnivorous grouse. More likely, it had been a vulture of some kind, hoping those bodies in the tent would live up to their stink. But he wasn’t inclined to take a bath in the stream or river. Not after what he’d seen trying to steal his dinner.

When he got back to the tent, she was up and out and had her shotgun stripped down and spread across a bit of plastic sheeting, drying the component parts. To hell with cleaning clothes and bodies and such. The weapon comes first. He remembered that.

He didn’t remember from
where,
though.

She looked up at the sound of his feet, reached into a pocket, and tossed him one small package and then another. “Breakfast.”

He caught them. Heavy. Unwrapping aluminum foil from the first one gave him a thick granola bar. The second offered a large flat chunk of bittersweet chocolate.

“Keep some snacks in the coveralls. That’s your half. I get really bitchy on a long shift in the field. Keep the blood sugar up, at least the rest of the squad won’t take a secret ballot on shooting me.”

How would we tell “really bitchy” from the ordinary day?
He ate “breakfast” and copied her, clearing and then field-stripping the pistol and drying it as best he could. He couldn’t remember ever handling this particular model of pistol before, but the metal told him to click
this
and slide
that
and push
there
to tear it down.

He didn’t find any visible rust. Yet. As far as he knew, she hadn’t packed a cleaning kit for any of the weapons, or gun oil.

She fitted a couple of shotgun pieces together with a snick of metal. “Don’t count on lunch, there ain’t no more. I’d been saving it for when we got across the river, but . . . things happened.”

Like, she’d collapsed.

Then, “How’s the Seal doing? Still holding together?”

He consulted with the ache in his upper molars. “Weaker. We’re a lot closer. General direction is upstream on the creek.” Which also was the direction of the sandalwood smell that wasn’t a smell. Whatever trick he’d been following, trap set by whoever, they had walked right into it. Had swum into it.

He thought about it for a moment, running memories back through his head. “I was kind of aiming for that feel, crossing the river. Tried to keep kicking in the right direction.”

Another click and another and another, and she had a whole shotgun in her hands. She started pushing shells into the magazine, snap snap snap. First one in the chamber, of course.

“You should have gone on without me. Find that thing. Fix it. You’ve lost one day, two? Jeopardized the mission.”

The mission outranks any soldier, any day. Or all of them combined. One reason why he’d always hated armies. Not a one of them agreed with the high value he put on his own skin.

What armies? Where?

Some of them had had guns. He remembered guns, various kinds, various eras. Some had carried spears and swords and bows. He couldn’t sort them out, put names and dates to them. What had he done for the armies before bronze and iron? Chipped blades and points out of flint? Carved really,
really
superior clubs out of blackthorn roots?

He shook his head. “Drop the Warrior Goddess Sacrifice bit. People matter to me.
You
matter. To me. If that Seal dies, we’ll deal with it. Even frigging
Legion
hasn’t ordered us to fix it.”

She stared at him. She stared some more.

“Thank you.”

That made him blink. “For what?”

“Pulling me out of the river. Feeding me. Pretending you were asleep.” Pause. “You jerked, just a hint of it, when you woke up. But I needed to touch someone. Hold someone. A warm, living someone. It’s been a long time.”

The loneliness of the long-distance god. Been there, done that.

Then, in an “If you ever mention this moment of weakness, I’ll kill you . . . ” brisk tone, “Pack up and get moving. We can’t waste time waiting for the tent to dry out.”

Yeah. Packing a wet tent is so much fun. It weighs three times as much as dry, and when you next set it up all that weight has turned to slime and mildew stink.

Another memory, unbidden and without proper provenance or attribution. I wish that damned Seal would collate the archives and unlock the index as well.

He studied her—eyes still sunken, cheeks less so, hair combed and glossy rather than the dead rat’s nest of yesterday. She seemed to be moving close to normal. Thinking close to normal. From what he knew of “normal” as that word applied to her.

“You well enough to hike? Climb? Looking across from the other side, this looked just as high, just as rocky.”

That got him a shrug. Typical. “I can hike. I can climb. Slope’s shallower on this side, inside of the bend without the river eating into it, and we have the creek to follow. Gentler climb.”

Until we come to a hanging waterfall, that is, cut off by the glaciers. I’ve seen those in the fjords and mountain valleys . . .

He rolled up the rain fly and moved on to knocking down the tent, packing the pots, shaking out and rolling up the plastic sheets. That float of hers, the gas cartridge was used up, no more instant inflation, but it had a nozzle and valve to blow it up with good old-fashioned lungpower. Maybe she could talk her winds into doing the hard part. Anyway, he let the gas out and rolled it up and packed it, too. Might meet another river. Not that he liked the thought of swimming with this world’s fishes.

And yes, when he hefted it, the pack weighed about five pounds more than when he’d last put it down. About five pounds of water weight, and they couldn’t even drink it. His hip twinged at the thought of hiking and climbing. He buckled the waist-belt anyway and headed upstream along the creek, toward his sense of the broken Seal.

She’d been pacing like that caged leopard again, waiting, not trying to pretend that packing was a two-man job. Now, moving, out in the open, she kept stopping and listening. With the air dead calm, maybe her winds didn’t want to talk to her? Then he heard it—a low thumping growl through the fog, a boat headed upstream against the heavy current. No reason to think they were searching, but . . .

Following the creek had brought them back into view of the main river. The sides of the ravine had narrowed to force them out into wading cold shallows—too steep and too tangled with brush for them to sneak along on either bank. He picked his way over slippery rocks, plunging into knee-deep icewater, using each bush and low-hanging branch as cover, glancing back into the fog. He could see the river. The river could see him. At least he’d had the sense to buy a gray jacket.

Never
had
liked standing out in a crowd.

Mel’s uniform coverall, dusty blue, had gathered enough dirt and soot and lichen-smear to pass as camouflage. She crouched, froze, and turned into a rock on the stream bank. He ducked behind a tangle of . . . mountain laurel? Something with glossy leaves that loved the wet, anyway.

A ghostly lump nosed out of the fog, dark hull with white at its nose—bow-wave. A smaller lump stood up from the bow, in front of the mast and boom for loading. Lookout—should be concentrating on the river, watching for the next channel buoy, watching for any washed-out tree trunks or snags riding the current. Should
not
be worried about rocks and bushes on the side creek.

Albert concentrated on being a bush. Nothing more than a bush. Gods are hard to see. Everyone knows that.

The lump inched upstream, slow as a walking pace against the strong current. He could see the wheelhouse now, faint red through the fog. Nothing here but rocks and brush and trees . . .

Gronk, gronk, gronk,
three blasts on the ship’s airhorn, Albert’s heart almost stopped as the blasts echoed back from the gorge’s rocky walls. But the bulky shadow faded, easing further out into the current. They had to signal before rounding the curve in the river? Damn sure you wouldn’t want to meet another ship in the middle of the channel, and radar wouldn’t be worth shit in this gorge. Radio might not work, either.

Or—belt
and
suspenders. You don’t take chances on that kind of thing.

The shadowy bow passed out of sight behind a tree. Each inch of the hull passed out of sight, taking a minute for each foot. The wheelhouse grew faint as the ship eased over to the far side of the channel, must be some rocks that forced them out into the fiercest current.

The wheelhouse vanished. Albert straightened up and dared to breathe.
Gronk, gronk, gronk,
three more blasts, fainter, echoing again, signal for the next curve. All in a day’s work for the pilot and helmsman.

Had the boat signaled like that, the other day? Headed downstream? He’d thought he heard crows, deafness wearing off.

The Buddha tells us to live here now. The past and future are Maya, illusion. Be here now.

Here and now, Albert’s feet were freezing. So much for the battle to keep clothes dry. He climbed over the next rock, and the next. His hip complained. A bend in the creek put the river behind them, out of view. The ravine widened a bit, and he could pick his way through shallows along the bank. He looked back. She splashed through the same holes, over the same rocks, teeth gritted and shotgun held in her right hand as she braced or grabbed branches with her left. She seemed to be moving okay. Gods heal fast.