Chapter Seven

 

We all pile into the helicopter, alongside a group of young Zantites wearing fluorescent orange vests. The seats are big enough that Brill and I share one, buckling into the same belt, so they can get one more searcher aboard. I don’t recognize any of the faces.

A couple of Tawny’s camera drones fly in like mosquitoes. They bob against the ceiling. I try to ignore them.

I whisper to Brill, “Where’s the rest of the people who went out there with you?”

“Leapt right off the cliff to search in closer to the point.” He gestures out the window. “They were all freaked out. Apparently, accidents like this just don’t happen.”

“Are you sure it was an accident?”

I’m wondering about the rest of the crew, pero an odd look crosses Brill’s face. It’s a lot like the way he’d looked this morning when he caught me staring at Kaliel’s bare chest. I try to read the color of Brill’s shifting eyes, pero it’s like brick-tinted sand, some complex blend of emotion I can’t tease apart. He obviously thinks I was asking if he knew more than he was telling. And I hope that color isn’t a shade of guilt.

I know Brill’s killed a handful of people in self-defense. Dealing with space pirates and gray traders is dangerous work. He’d never commit murder, though.

And yet, I find myself staring at his jacket, where he keeps the heavy, lethal weight of his gun. Jealousy is a powerful motive, and I know Brill already wasn’t happy seeing me around Kaliel again. Could I have pushed him too far?

Brill’s eyes darken. “You don’t really think I offed Dork Face?”

“Did you?”

“No!”

“I believe you.” I put a hand on his. He doesn’t move it, pero he keeps looking at me strangely.

Mertex points down at the landscape as we turn, flying over the channel leading between the southern island and the northern two. From up here, it really does look like an open jaw edged with sharp teeth. “The currents around the point tend to whip things through here. They’re going to drop us off at intervals, then the chopper is going back out to look over the ocean.”

“Sounds like you’ve done this before, su,” Brill says.

“Not in a long time. But everyone has to serve on the rescue squad in their last year as a learning pod.”

I take a closer look at the rescue squad in question. One girl raises an arm towards her face, as if to adjust the goggles perched on her forehead. She’s missing the hand, and obviously not used to it yet. I gasp. These are the kids who were fighting on the beach. I try not to stare. No lo sé how rude that is in Zantite culture.

The chopper comes down low over the water. The channel is wider than it looked from higher up. I can see the shore on this side, pero not that of the southern island.

The one-handed girl and the Zantite sitting next to her move to the open doorway and leap out of the helicopter, into the agua.

A minute later, a speaker crackles at the front of the chopper. “Safe and ready to proceed.”

The chopper moves on, dropping two more pairs of rescuers. I am not dressed for diving. I can already feel myself walking in squishy shoes, chafing from wet jeans.

“Don’t look so nervous,” Mertex says. “We’re the shore crew.”

The helicopter hovers over one of the “teeth” and the guy sitting nearest the doorway throws out a nylon-looking ladder. He turns back to us, “Your turn.”

We climb down the ladder and the helicopter moves on, leaving us in a wild, beautiful place, part-beach, part-riverbank, with stumpy lavender-barked trees and tangled yellow vines trailing down into the water, all decorated with driftwood and shells and tumbled bits of glass.

“Stay close, you guys. It would be embarrassing to lose part of our rescue party.” Mertex scans the area like Kaliel might appear if he looks hard enough. “If you see any mounds of dirt, or any giant green eggs, leave them alone.”

“What are they?” Brill asks.

Mertex shudders. “Yawds are vegetarians, and they’re shy, so as long as you don’t disturb their nests, they won’t stomp on you.”

“Good to know.” Brill takes a few steps down the shoreline, then hesitates, waiting to make sure we’re following him.

We walk for a couple of hours. I’m thirsty. I should have brought along some of Tawny’s bottled agua. Mertex didn’t bring any water either. Apparently Zantites can go longer without rehydrating.

“Babe.” Brill hands me a bottle of agua he had tucked in his jacket. I drink it greedily, while he sips at one of his own. An animal jumps in the channel, making a splash about ten feet out. Brill grabs my arm. I freeze, afraid I’m about to be Zandy-gater food.

Brill brings his face close to my ear, like he’s brushing my cheek with un beso. “Someone’s following us.”

In the stillness behind us, a twig snaps. We stand still, listening as Mertex keeps getting farther away in the other direction. I catch a flash of orange caught on a fallen tree that’s half in and half out of the water. Pero, nothing else looks out of place and no other noise comes – for minutes. And Murry doesn’t come back looking for us.

“Maybe it was an animal,” I suggest softly.

“Maybe,” Brill says. Pero, he doesn’t look convinced.

“I’m going to check out that orange thing.” I take off my shoes, roll up my jeans and wade out into the water. Even though I haven’t gone deep, the current is strong. I grab onto the tree to keep from falling in.

An orange life jacket, crudely hacked down to Earthling size, is caught in a mass of dirt and sticks. It has to be Kaliel’s. I work my way over to it, and shout, “Maybe he took it off!”

Kaliel could be somewhere out in the woods, hurt or lost. Maybe that was him earlier, cracking that twig.

“Maybe,” Brill calls back from the bank.

The agua gets deeper fast. The bottom half of my jeans get soaked as I grab the life jacket and yank. The mass of sticks crumbles, releasing it. I turn back towards the bank, holding the life jacket up.

Brill gives me a thumbs up.

Then he gasps.

Behind me, three pale green eggs, each the size of a laundry basket, are rolling from within the half-rotted foliage towards the water. Brill is a blur as he races past me, trying to catch the eggs before they fall. He gets his hands on the bottom one before it even gets wet, but the next one bumps hard against it, and there’s a sickening crack.

I manage to push the two whole eggs back into the nest. Brill lets the ruined one fall into the water, where the current drags it down-channel.

He looks in distaste at the goo covering his hands, then washes them in the water. Brill eats eggs – sometimes. It depends on what kind. “Shtesh! There was exactly one thing Mertex told us not to do.”

“I know. Where is…” I let my words trail off. I don’t care anymore where Mertex went.

Down below the nest proper, half-submerged in the agua, there’s a terrolting pile of bones, about the right size for a Zantite child – or a human. I can’t see the skull clearly enough to make out the jaw. “Dios mio! I thought Mertex said these things were vegetarians. There’s a person’s skeleton here.”

“It could have killed someone that invaded the nest. People here have to be tempted to harvest such big eggs.” Brill moves up next to me. “Erkh.” His eyes shift gray, then a purple so dark it’s almost black. “That can’t be Kaliel. Unless there’s a type of fish in this channel that can pick bones to polished in a couple of hours flat.”

As if to prove him wrong, a thumb-sized seahorse with a human-ish face swims out from under the bones, gnawing on one of the ribs with needle teeth while blinking warily at us with bright blue eyes – almost the same shade Brill’s eyes get when he’s really happy.

I think I’m going to be sick.

I put both hands over my mouth and breathe slowly through my nose, trying to keep myself from throwing up. After a few breaths, I decide I’m going to be OK.

I’ve seen those creatures before, for sale at spaceport fish markets, and even dead, they weirded me out.

“Wal. We need to get a DNA sample.” Brill reaches through the branches toward a double-bone that looks like part of an arm, which has separated from the rest of the skeleton. The branches shift as Brill leans against them. “Shtesh! My hand’s caught.”

One of the thinner offshoots has slipped between his wrist and his proximity bracelet, a silver band that works as an anti-theft device for his ship. It’s a solid piece, on tight enough that someone would have to cut it if they wanted to take it off him.

I move to help him, pero the hairs at the back of my neck start to rise, like someone’s watching me.

There’s a melodic song, like an oboe or a low-pitched bird, coming from shore. I turn. At the base of the fallen tree, still on dry sand, there’s an overgrown sea otter. It’s maybe five feet tall at the shoulder.

It’s like something out of an antique science fiction flick where they couldn’t afford to build aliens, so instead they just superimposed an out of scale image of a gila monster or a lobster or whatever to look like it was menacing the poor, screaming Earthlings.

Incongruously, I want to laugh.

Then it moves.

“Brill!” I shout, pero the animal is already leaping fifteen feet across the dead tree, grabbing onto the wood and slapping at me with a thick whip of a tail as the tree breaks into pieces. The bit I’m standing on rolls. Ay! No!

I take the blow full in the stomach and splash into the water, hardly able to breathe. Brill’s arm was still caught. He rolls under.

“Mi vida!”

I fight panic. He’s not likely to run out of air. I’m the one in more immediate danger.

The two eggs float out of the mess, and the otter monster looks from them to me and back again.

I try to get up out of the water, pero my movements are slowed by the sand.

This time when it leaps, the yawd hits my back with its front feet. My stomach can’t keep up as I fall. My scream turns into a strangling gurgle as my face hits the water, gets ground into the sand.

The yawd holds me under with its body weight. I already didn’t have much air and my lungs protest this refusal to breathe. Oy! I am going to drown two feet from shore.

My heart’s pounding. My vision sparks. My hands clutch at the sand, and I accidentally grab onto a sharp shell. With a slice of pain, my blood’s in the agua.

The otter monster pulls back, and when my ears break the surface, I can hear it singing reproachfully at me for bleeding too much while it is trying to kill me.

I scramble towards the bank. The yawd lunges again.

I turn around and hit the beast square in the nose with the shell’s sharp side. It screeches as it moves backwards, taking the shell with it, the massive tail thwacking at the ruined nest, which comes apart, sending debris and bones – and Brill – shooting down the channel. The yawd grabs the shell with one paw-hand and pulls it out of its own nose.

I try for the bank, but I can’t keep my feet under me. The current catches me, dragging me into the middle of the torrential flow. I’m flailing, even though that’s the worst thing to do. I force myself to stop, to let the current drag me until I manage to catch onto a floating piece of the tree and get mi cabeza above water.

“Bo!” Mertex’s voice is coming from above the channel bank. He’s hanging upside down from a rope trap, and I put together a plausible scenario: a local hunter’s living out here, trying to trap yawds. His kid finds the nest and decides to steal one of the eggs. And is never seen again. Which means that Kaliel isn’t dead. Necessarily.

One of the drifting eggs has fetched up against another one of the “teeth,” and the yawd turns towards it.

Pero, I’m still being whisked along by the unforgiving current.

“Babe!” Brill’s managed to get up on the bank. He’s holding the end of one of the yellow vines, and the rest of it fans out across the water’s surface. I have to let go of the log piece to grab it, and I bob under. Panic bubbles through my chest.

My fingers tangle in the vine, and my shoulders protest the tug as Brill pulls me free from the current. Pero I get my feet under me, find stable sand, take some of the pressure off the vine. It still breaks with me chest-deep in the agua, pero I’m on the sheltered side now and I’m able to make my way to the bank.

“Thank the Codex!” Brill pulls me out and crushes me against him. My back hurts so bad I whimper. He lets go. “You hurt?”

“I don’t think anything’s broken.” I run a hand along his uninjured cheek. “You?”

“I lost the bone, and I feel guilty about destroying a family of yawds.”

I sigh. “We have to get past mamá yawd to rescue Mertex. And then we have to find my boots, because they’re my only pair, and no one here sells my size.”

“Not a problem, Babe.” Before I can protest, he’s scooped me up and we’re racing through the scrub trees.

I would complain that I don’t need carrying, pero there’s not really a path here, and I’m barefoot, and a lot of poky-looking plants are blurring by. He sets me down near Mertex and races off to get my boots.

I move over to the rope securing Murry up there. “I can’t undo this knot.”

“Here!” Mertex tosses down a Zantite-sized pocket knife. “Hurry, please. That bird’s been circling for a while now.”

I open the knife and start cutting through the rope. “How’d you even wind up there?”

A huge bird squawks and wheels in the sky. Mertex makes a hiss-splatting noise at it, and it changes course.

“I thought I saw a piece of yellow fabric, like Kaliel’s suit. Turns out it was a hkkvaka wrapper, open in the middle of a trap.” Murry’s face is getting a bit green from all the blood rushing to it, and the cut on his forehead has started seeping again. “Yawds like sweets. People who camp in this area are advised against bringing them.”

“Good to know.” I’ve almost cut through the rope. “I don’t know how to put slack in this, so get ready to fall.”

“Anything’s better than being up here.”

The rope snaps, and there’s a thud, then Mertex says, “Oww!” Once he’s righted himself, he blinks at me. “Why do you look so cold?”

I guess I am shivering a little. “Because humans don’t handle dunking in frío rivers very well. We have less insulation than you, and unlike Brill, there’s no natural antifreeze in my system.”

Mertex blushes. He has firsthand knowledge of how handy Krom antifreeze can be. “I never have apologized for what happened to his face.”

“You were trying to kill him, mijo. In a blast freezer, inside a vat of chocolate.”

“But he was fine. Except his face.” Now that’s Zantite logic for you.

Brill reappears, carrying my boots. “I thought I made it clear I was over it when I helped you get off that warship. But thank you. Apology accepted.”

“I’m glad I failed,” Mertex says. “Because otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten to know how cool you are. But I still can’t believe I didn’t get executed for it.”

“Which is why I don’t hold it against you, su.” Brill holds the boots out to me, clearly done talking about it. “Reshdo, Babe.” Here. “Or should I help you put them on? Like Cinderella?”

A month ago, Brill didn’t know who Cinderella was. As I take the boots, I tell him, “You’ve been watching too much holofeed.”

I examine the boots to make sure nothing has crawled into them. Gracias a Dios, my socks are still in there – and nothing else.

Mertex picks up his radio, which is lying near the brightly printed candy wrapper. “It was still so cool, watching the warmth come back into your face. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It wasn’t so litoll for me,” Brill says. “And I’d prefer not to think about dying, especially when I was just holding a bone that might belong to a friend of mine, so can we talk about something else?”

Eh? Did Brill just call Kaliel an amigo? Am I still misjudging how he sees things?