Rift (53 page)

Inside, the dwellings were ransacked, reduced to piles of furniture, heaps of clothing, and broken mementos. Raiders had been here, perhaps those who traded with the jinn, bringing this booty to the Jupiter Dome on overladen rafts. It was a dreary sight, but for now nothing could sour the prospect of a night’s sleep
under cover. Reeve reached out to touch Loon’s arm, hoping that Spar would grant them time alone together. She smiled at him and darted off, sorting through the chaos for preserved food and
Reeve’s air—
her term for the breathers.

When he and Spar followed her to the inner courtyard of one of the homes, they found her standing very still. The garden was crowded with filament-like grass, topped with nodules that bowed the strands over. Loon pointed to movement in the grass.

There, amid the Lithian grass, a round object twitched on the ground. About the size of a large man’s fist, the ball was pockmocked in a regular pattern. It lurched to the side a few inches, then pivoted back, rocking on the ground as though trying to dig a hole. Perhaps it was a robotic gardener, though if so it had done a miserable job the last few hundred years. They backed away, not liking the look of the thing.

When they retraced their steps to the street, they found dusk beginning to settle over the city, with steep shadows sucking the last of the warmth from the day. Just as they were standing at a street intersection hesitating about which direction to go, something struck Loon. She reeled, holding her neck, where a little blood was seeping. A ball hovered nearby, at neck level. It had bitten her.

Spar’s stave knocked it against the building across the street, his reflexes as fast as ever. When Reeve determined that Loon was all right, he joined Spar at the wall to examine the downed sphere, which lay dented in the rubble of the street.

“Voider,” Spar said. “I heard of these, yes, sir. City folk used ’em to keep out riffraff. You thought twice before you raided here.” He winked at Reeve. “One of these up and takes a chunk out of you, if it don’t like you.”

Loon wiped off the blood and shrugged at them.

Spar probed his teeth for the last of the rat meal.
“Their poison don’t mean much to Mam, I reckon. Or maybe it’s gone wobbly over time.”

“I think it followed us from the courtyard,” Reeve said. “Suppose there’s more of them?”

“With the luck we been havin’ we best make ourselves scarce.” Spar spat into the street.

They quickly made a choice for shelter, ducking into a two-story construct set back from the street and covered in front with a vine-choked portico.

Finding a room less in shambles than the others, they barricaded the door and lay down to rest. A separate room for privacy seemed an unlikely prospect under the circumstances, but Reeve hoped Loon might find a way to finagle privacy for herself, and then … Before Reeve had long to connive the matter, however, he found himself falling into an exhausted stupor. At the edge of consciousness, he could hear Loon rustling about, poking into corners of the room. Once she crouched nearby and whispered in his ear, “The good soil, Reeve. The good soil.”

Later, he dreamed of her hand coming up to his lips, with a pinch of bright red loam. When he tasted it, it was an explosion of flavor, and it ran, laughing, into his veins. Then he looked at Loon as though for the first time and saw, under the shallow upper strata of her skin, a crisscrossing pattern of fault lines.

2

The sun was barely up, but Loon had been tracking the wolves for an hour. She knew they smelled her. As usual with wild animals, it was a smell they couldn’t identify, and so far these two tolerated her at a distance. She wasn’t sure what they found to hunt in the barren streets, and in truth they were threadbare specimens. If she could bring them both down with her sling, Spar and Reeve would feast today and pack extra for up-valley. She watched as the animals nosed into
piles of rubbish, once fighting over an old shoe, or perhaps playing with it. Crouching down, she sampled the packed-down soil of the street. Just a tiny bit, but it was a sheer and deep pleasure.

This,
this
was what it felt like to eat the good soil, to let its pure extracts truly feed her for the first time. She resisted the urge to run through the patterned streets and scale the nearest climbable thing.
Run
, her body said.
Jump!
It would be fun to sprint until she dropped, to spend the energy saved up in her muscles. She wasn’t sure that energy was an entirely good thing. Her legs sometimes felt like they didn’t belong to her: She wanted to run when she knew she must creep, to leap when she must crouch. Patience, patience.

The thought of Reeve and their night together filled her with happiness. She replayed his tastes in memory, marveling at the complexity of him, the foreign world of his body … then her mind raced ahead to the next task. She would find Reeve’s air for him, so he could swallow the tube and keep indigo from claiming him. He was young to be coughing. But he was—had
been
—a zerter, and was weak like all zerters because of living in the sky tube, with no good soil to sustain him.

She had allowed her attention to drift. What was this? One of the wolves was down, lying in the street. She crouched behind a wall and watched. Ah. Here was a voider, hovering over the wolf, darting now and then at the other wolf; then, when it made a quick sprint away, the ball put on a burst of speed and hit the animal square on the flank, bouncing off it and rolling away, as though it had spent its last breath. The second wolf staggered away, down the street.

Loon tucked her sling into her belt and watched for a few minutes to see if the voider would rise again. When it did not, she began looking for something to drag at least one wolf home on. This search took her
into a small side street where she found a length of tarp that would serve for the animals, one at a time.

When she emerged back on the street of wolves, the creatures were not alone. A large, egg-shaped thing floated in the air above the first wolf. If this was a voider, it was surely a powerful one, as big as a beef calf. It slowly settled onto the ground, and a flap opened in its side. From this hole dozens of voiders emerged like a swarm of bees. Even more astonishing, legs protruded from the egg and latched onto the wolf, dragging it inside the belly. Then the egg rose, hovering as though smelling her. Loon hid under her tarp, curled up like a turtle. Perhaps it was looking for the body of the other wolf. Or perhaps it was looking for her. She could hear the whine of its motors as it passed by.
Oh please, Lady Over All
, she thought,
let me not be food for the wolf-eater
.

She had wondered if the Lady would listen to such as her, a creature neither this nor that. She wondered if, instead of the Lady that Spar had taught her to love, the orthong god was now hers. Or no god at all. Finally she gave up praying and cautiously peeked from under the tarp.

The great egg was just disappearing down a side street, trailing smoke with the unmistakable smell of burning flesh and hair. The smaller voiders followed it like ducklings after their mother.

The downed voider still lay immobile across the street. Loon doubted the ball could fell her, but she didn’t want it to call its mother. After many minutes Loon worked up the courage to set off in search of the second wolf, hoping she could get to it before the egg did.

3

Reeve had finally broken into the house information net. Its one functioning node was in the kitchen,
where a screen resolved into a barely readable image above a sinkful of broken crockery. The voice interface wouldn’t talk back to him, but it would present visual data, including, at the moment, a simple map of the city.

Spar peered over Reeve’s shoulder. “Ask it ’bout them body snatchers,” he suggested.

“No,” Loon said, shivering at the thought.

Though slow and at times faltering, the kitchen screen divulged that the voiders were extensions of the urban police system. It seemed to Reeve that they had now degraded to random killing. From the wall around the city Reeve deduced that the townspeople had for a time held out against marauding clavers. If this were true, the cremation machines might have been busy in the old days.

Reeve’s jaw ached after gorging on boiled wolf, chewing the stringy meat until he could eat no more. The three of them had cut the remaining carcass into strips and packed it into satchels they’d found in the house, along with the best warm clothes they could find and other provisions for the journey north. The task now was to discover the most direct route out of the city to minimize contact with the voiders and any other aggressive defenses the Rheans might have devised.

A coughing fit seized Reeve for a moment, doubling him over. When he pulled his hand away from his mouth, there was blood on it.

Spar looked at the blood and pursed his mouth. “You usin’ up your lives too fast, Reeve.”

“It’s not my lungs,” Reeve said. “Teeth.” He pulled back his gums and pressed on his teeth, where his bleeding gums were showing evidence of scurvy.

Spar smiled a halfhearted smile, showing his own teeth problems, which were either worn, missing, or blackened. “Well, all you need is a couple good ones,” he said.

Loon examined the blood on Reeve’s hand, wiping it onto the sleeve of her shirt. Then, looking past Reeve at the kitchen screen, she frowned and pointed. As Reeve turned to follow her gesture, Loon asked, “This?” She was pointing to a schematic line that seemed to bisect the screen from one corner to the other. A written caption at one end of the line read:
LAKE VISHNU
.

Reeve hadn’t noticed it before. “Information,” he said to the computer. “Lake Vishnu.”

The screen coalesced into an image of a green line departing from the city and connecting to a large, narrow lake. Calling up more information, Reeve’s pulse spiked at the next screen of information: a travel timetable.

“There’s a train or transportation system of some kind connecting to a Lake Vishnu …”

“Yep,” Spar said, “I heard of that.”

“What, the train?”

“Nope, the lake.” His chin worked back and forth a moment as he thought hard. He glanced up at Reeve. “It’s south of Rhea, that lake.”