Winterbay (2 page)

The Wind Traders weren’t Menagerie pirates—they came with a lot less guile—but they could still be a rowdy bunch. It definitely seemed odd that such a little girl could command a Landship’s crew’s obedience, but that misconception hadn’t lasted long. Olive’s fiery temper kept most everyone in line, and for those it didn’t, her skill and instinct, traits that made the
Wind Rift
’s runs very profitable, brought them around.

Mira had always liked Olive. Once the Captain came to trust someone, her opinions didn’t change, and it took a lot to rattle what she believed in. When Mira needed a quick way out of Midnight City, Olive had been there for her when no one else had. It was something she’d never forget.

Olive looked between Mira and Topher. “The others?” she asked in a way that suggested she already knew the answer.

Topher didn’t say anything, just shook his head.

“Damn it,” Olive cursed, looking away and back at her ship. “Down four crew, a busted starboard locking cap, and the stupid contract’s just starting.”

“
Hey,
” Topher said sensitively. “I’m not hurt, Captain, I can still pull my weight.”

“Wasn’t talking about you, Topher,” Olive said. When she turned back to him, it was with a different look than the harsh one from before. “Margot’s fading. You wanna say good-bye … you better do it now.”

It took a moment for the words to fully penetrate, but when they did Topher stood up without any thought to his leg, hobbling off down the hill as fast as he could, toward the Landship.

“The Tone?” Mira asked as he left.

Olive just nodded. The Captain was younger than Mira, but not by much. Seventeen, maybe sixteen, and Mira could see the telltale tracings beginning to crawl through her eyes, the black spidery tendrils that marked the effect of the Tone. Mira couldn’t feel the veinlike coils in her own eyes, or even see them in her vision … but she knew they were there, growing fast, and the spread would continue until they filled in completely and her mind wasn’t hers anymore. It was the dark reality everyone lived with now, thanks to the Assembly.

Mira stood up and tossed Olive the thick, metallic, threaded cap she’d watched people die for. Olive caught it with both hands and studied it coldly. “That’s one bit of good news.”

She turned and set off down the snow-covered hill, and Mira followed. As she did her eyes found the huge Landship that rested at the bottom, where the ground leveled out.

Landships were like boats on dry land, assembled from a variety of parts and carried by huge wheels across the ground. Giant sails propelled them, and they could house two dozen kids, sometimes more. Toward the west, where the plains gave way to the deserts and flatlands of the Barren, Landships were common sights. There were more than a hundred of them supposedly, each as unique as the last.

Mira never failed to be impressed by the colossal vehicles. They were a testament to the ingenuity and imagination of Earth’s survivors, and the
Wind Rift
had always been one of her favorites. Six massive wheels, three on each side, custom constructions of wood and steel, meticulously fashioned and welded, stood out prominently from the ship’s body. They were about ten feet tall by themselves and held the top deck of the ship probably twenty-five to thirty feet off the ground.
Wind Rift
had been assembled from a variety of repurposed wood and sheet metal, as well as train and boat parts. Two of the masts were formed out of old tires that held together long columns of barrels, a hundred feet tall or more, and the sails were made of all kinds of fabrics and silks that hung like cascades of color.

It was a hodgepodge of parts, all with different origins and looks, but somehow it all blended together into a beautiful, cohesive craft that was as much a work of art as a vehicle. Beautiful as it was, it was clearly damaged, and Mira could see where it was listing to the side badly.

Mira only understood that the ship had two locking caps, which kept the axles on each side attached to the hull and in one piece. The starboard cap had broken about a day outside Midnight City and forced them to stop. The only way to fix it had been to make a new part, and for that you needed a machine shop, which is why they’d ventured into the Des Moines ruins, and why they’d given so much to get that part back.

“What happened?” Olive asked as they walked.

“There was a Gatherer a few blocks from the shop,” Mira answered. “Or at least that’s my guess. Never seen one before, but it fit the descriptions. Thought we were far enough away to stay out of sight, but there were Mantises patrolling. One of them found us, called the others.”

Mira was a passenger on the
Wind Rift,
not part of the crew, but she’d known Olive a long time and other Captains like her. She wouldn’t show it, not when her crew might see, she had to be strong for them … but she was hurt by the losses. Deeply. A Landship was made up of more than a simple group of survivors. They were a family, and today had been a tough day.

Two boys climbed toward them up the hill. Mira didn’t remember their names, but she’d seen them talking to Olive about the ship’s problems, which meant they were probably engineers.

“Is it true?” one of them asked. He was older, closer to nineteen, Mira could tell, judging by how full of black his eyes were. “Duncan and
—
“

“Yes.” Olive cut him off. “And we don’t have time to think about it. Assembly’s riled up six miles from here, so we need to get lost.” She tossed them the metallic part, and they caught it together, studying it.

“Are these threads reversed?” the younger one asked with a skeptical tone. “They don’t look reversed.”

“If they’re not reversed, just use grease,” Olive replied testily. “Or strip ’em all to hell, I don’t really care. We just need it to get us to the Missouri, then we can trade for a real one. Get on with it; we’re full sail in fifteen minutes.”

Olive didn’t wait for a reply, just turned and kept walking. The two kids hurried off, arguing about the best way to thread the wheel cap into the ship’s supports.

At the front of the
Wind Rift,
where the giant bow curved gracefully in a mixture of wood and metal, the rest of the crew was gathered around a girl with short blond hair, lying on the icy ground on her back, staring sightlessly upward.

Even from this distance, Mira could see that Margot’s eyes were open and unblinking—and that they were completely
black.
The crew stared down at her, their own eyes tainted with the same dark color, just not as fully. Not yet. They all knew they were looking at their own future. For some of them, it wasn’t that far off.

The Tone was the Assembly’s little gift to mankind, a mind-control signal broadcast only a few hours after their invasion. Most people who heard it instantly Succumbed to alien control and began a zombielike march to the nearest Presidium, the massive alien baseships stuck like daggers into the hearts of the world’s cities. For all its power, however, the Tone was not perfect; there was one distinct group it didn’t immediately affect. Anyone under the age of twenty didn’t have the proper brain chemistry for the Tone to take hold, it seemed, but it was a short-lived reprieve. The older you got, the closer you were to the time when your eyes filled with black, and all of what you used to be slipped away as your mind was replaced with … who knew what, nothing probably.

Mira stopped on the outskirts of the group. This wasn’t Mira’s crew, and it wasn’t her place. She’d left the equivalent of a crew back at Midnight City, forfeited her place in something like a family, but that was behind her now. Even though she planned to go back and fix what she’d broken, it would never be the same. Watching the crew of the
Wind Rift
say good-bye to one of their own somehow drove that point home.

Olive stood over Margot, staring down at her like the others. One by one, her crew took their gazes from the silent, unmoving girl and looked up at their Captain. When she spoke, her voice was distant and more than a little tired.

“I’ve had to do this seven times since I’ve run this ship, and I keep waiting for it to get easier, or to finally know what to say … but I never do. I just end up saying the same things as last time. That all we can do is try to make the most out of the time we have left. We can remember the ones we’ve lost. We can make the silence left by every one of them inspire us a little more. To work harder. To live more fully. I think if we don’t do that … there’s no point to any of it. I guess that’s the only revenge we get.”

The Captain let what she’d said sink in, and then took a weary step back. “The winds take us where they will … not the other way around. Let her up.”

As Olive spoke the last word, the kids holding Margot released her, and everyone watched as she almost instantly started to rise.

Mira hated watching the Succumbed. Their movement, slow and laborious, was purely functional, animation without any of the life inherent in the walk of someone whose mind and thoughts and memories were still their own, the movement you took for granted until it was gone. It was like watching some sort of mechanical version of a person, and the difference between that and how they used to be made the pain all the worse.

“Winds guide her…” Olive stated.

After a moment, the crew softly echoed the sentiment. So did Mira.

They watched as what had once been Margot slowly began to walk east, carving trails through the patches of snow that dotted the ground. They watched until she became nothing but a shadow in the afternoon haze that disappeared within a grove of spruce trees, and when she was gone, one by one, they tore themselves away and got back to readying the
Wind Rift
for sail.

As Mira headed back toward the ship, she rubbed her arms, trying to push away the chill in the air. Spring was coming. It should be getting warmer. Somehow it didn’t feel that way.

Instead, the air felt full of ice.

Lines

The
Wind Rift
rumbled eastward along the rocky ground of what used to be northern Illinois. The sun had almost finished its arc of the sky and was aiming to bury itself in the horizon in less than an hour. When that happened, the Landship would probably stop. Traveling by moonlight wasn’t unheard-of, but the farther east a crew went, the more obstacles and uneven ground they encountered, things that could result in far worse than a broken wheel cap.

Mira had only traveled on a Landship three other times, and she always marveled at how smooth the ride was. It wasn’t like sailing over a lake by any means, but it was definitely much less rough than you’d expect from a giant craft rumbling over rocky ground. Of course, that had a lot to do with the Subsumer artifacts attached to its massive frame, which absorbed most of the ship’s bouncing and rocking.

Mira stood at the bow, watching the ground race by below. Landships had their helm at the front, as opposed to nautical ships. It was a necessary adjustment; steering a large craft on land required a very clear line of sight, and since she’d been on board, Mira had seen the
Wind Rift
navigate around tractors, sudden tree groves, lines of old telephone poles and wires, and small ponds hidden behind overgrown grass. A boy named Casper, the ship’s helmsman, was behind the wheel, which, as was the Landship tradition, came from an old nautical ship.

“Is forty her top speed?” Mira asked.

“Oh, no.” Casper smiled. “Get yourself a nice flat stretch, like in the Barren, a fully charged Chinook, the
Wind Rift
can do eighty easy. Some can do even faster, just depends on how they’re built.”

“How often do you go that fast?”

“More than I’d like to,” Casper replied, this time with much less mirth. “Menagerie don’t use Landships, they chase you with dune buggies and gyrocopters.”

“But you still outrun them?” It was something Mira had always wondered about. How did the Wind Traders elude the pirates that stalked them? Speed alone wouldn’t be enough.

“Got our own set of tricks,” Casper answered, the smile returning. “Every Landship does. Since I’ve been at the helm, the Menagerie have tried to board us nine times. They ain’t succeeded yet.”

Olive’s voice interrupted them from below. Mira saw her climbing up the polished wood stairs that led down to the main deck. “I’ll take the wheel, Casper. Need to clear my head.”

“Captain.”

Casper stepped away and disappeared down the stairs. Olive replaced him, her hands sliding familiarly around the wheel, feeling the ground rumble right up the ship’s giant axles through the Subsumers.

Mira watched Olive exhale a long slow breath, her eyes scanning the ground ahead, looking for hidden obstacles in the tall grass. It probably
would
clear a person’s head, taking the helm, assuming all that responsibility. Mira had a similar release of her own. Whenever she needed to get her mind off something, she made artifact combinations. Complicated ones, three and four tiers, over and over. It let her focus, by necessity taking away a bevy of thoughts that she otherwise probably would rather not face. Mira had been making a lot of artifacts lately.

“Thinking about Margot?” Mira asked softly.

“I wish that was all of it, but the truth is there’s a lot riding on this run.” Mira could sense that whatever the ship’s current contract was, it was weighing on her. “We’re going east, past the Mississippi.”

“I didn’t think Landships could go that far. Ground isn’t right or something. Not flat enough.”

“It’s true. You can paint yourself into a corner there pretty quick, but it’s not impossible. More about pathfinding than on this side.”

“Whatever it is, it’s worth it?”

Olive glanced away from the horizon long enough to give Mira a disappointed look. “Of course it is.”

Landship Captains were known for gambling and taking risks—it came with the territory—but Olive had always been more prudent than most. The figure Casper had mentioned before, about the Menagerie trying to board the
Wind Rift
nine times, was a low number by Landship standards, and a testament to Olive’s tendency to think things through before committing.