The sun climbed ever higher in the sky, its bulbous red mass condensing to a tighter, whiter heat as it ascended. Scout could feel it behind her, pounding on her back as she leaned over the handlebars of her bike. The air was still night-cool and filled with the smells of the tiny flowers that bloomed on the vines that strangled the tumble of boulders around her, their probing tendrils digging ever deeper into the splits in the rock faces. But the flowers were closing against the coming day and the coolness of the air did little against the heat Scout was creating pedaling her bike up the steep hillside path. Now that the nighttime insects had ceased their buzzing choruses, the only sound was her own labored breathing and the occasional skitter of loose rock cascading back down the hillside behind her.
She was drenched with sweat, could see it falling in drops to briefly make clean streaks in the red dust clinging to her handlebars and coating the tanned skin of her hands and forearms. She ignored it all—the drops of sweat, the rising sun, the building sticky dryness in her mouth—and focused only on pushing one pedal down, then the other. It was a lurching sort of progress up the last bit of hill, the slowness combined with the weight of her saddlebags challenging her balance even as the tires slipped over the layers of dry, dusty clay.
It would be easier to get off and walk the bike the rest of the way up, but she never did. That would be giving up. And Scout never gave up.
At last she reached the top of the hill and put one shaking foot down to rest on the seat for a moment. She pushed back her floppy bush hat—once her father’s snap-brimmed bush hat—and let it hang from the string around her throat as she pulled the water bottle from its holder on the bike frame. She only took a few drops, holding them in her mouth to wet the saliva paste that clung to her tongue. She had breathed in enough dust that her mouth tasted like the red clay of the trail. In her younger days she had taken enough headers to know that taste well, earthy but metallic. It always fought her attempts to rinse it away. She knew now not to even bother. She’d be tasting clay until she was in town. But then she could have a tall glass of darkly sweet jolo. The jolo’s effervescence would take the taste of road clay out of her mouth even before the sugar-and-caffeine high started hitting her.
She slipped the bottle back in the holder and re-gripped the handlebars but paused as the sun behind her finally crested the hill, spilling its golden rays down the far side with its sparse covering of crabgrass, then down to the prairie below. The grain was fully ripe, knocking away its own chaff as the heads atop the stalks rasped together, filling the air with dust that sparkled in the sunlight. The fields themselves looked like they were on fire; the stalks darkened to a dusky red and the heads of grain a brilliant orange. The colors started to mute even as Scout watched, the sun behind her rising ever higher.
For a moment, it was quite beautiful. Breathtaking, even.
But it wouldn’t last. Another hour or two and it would be too hot to move out here, the world nothing but a yellow-white glare. Scout wiped her forehead on the dirty sleeve of her faded shirt—also once her father’s—then carefully replaced her hat, drawing the string tight under her chin. Then she turned on the bike seat to look back down the way she’d come, whistling low and loud.
Girl appeared first, her oversized paws sounding like a horse galloping on the hard-packed road. Scout had no idea what mix of dogs had made her, but the parts didn’t seem to be cohering particularly well and she suspected her parents had been very differently sized. Girl ran up to Scout and touched her nose to Scout’s knee but danced away before Scout could bend over and pet her head, running back the way she’d come and hunkering low on the side of the path. The clod of crabgrass in front of her nose was nowhere near large enough to conceal her, and her glossy black fur stood out starkly against the red of the clay and the grayish green of the sparse plants around her. Girl didn’t seem to realize any of this. She radiated confidence in her success at not being seen.
Girl wasn’t the brightest of dogs.
At last Shadow appeared, a trim rat terrier with the black spot that covered the top half of his head making him look like he was wearing a bandit mask, albeit a bandit mask that included two cinnamon-colored eyebrows. The white fur on most of his body was untouched by the dust that coated every centimeter of Scout’s sweaty body. Scout knew if she slapped Girl’s sides that the air would fill with a reddish cloud of clay dust, but not Shadow’s. That dog was a master at staying clean.
At least that had been true before Girl had come along.
He knew she was there, his trotting steps slowing as he approached the top of the hill. The path was too narrow to avoid her and he slowed nearly to a stop, then changed his mind and decided to try for a sprint. Girl hopped out from behind the crabgrass. Shadow twisted to avoid her tackle and continue his trot to Scout’s side, but he failed to avoid the black paw that descended onto his back, leaving one large red footprint on his otherwise pristine fur.
“Sorry, buddy,” Scout said, brushing him off and unhooking the other bottle from the back of her bike seat, letting him take a few licks from the end before giving Girl a chance. “You guys ready?”
Shadow licked his lips but then froze, ears perked. Scout paused as well, trying to hear what had put Shadow on alert. There was the rustle of the barest of breezes through the crabgrass—or was that a breeze? She listened to the rustle, felt the scarce stirring of air over her hot skin, and wasn’t sure they matched.
Slowly she straightened, took the dogs’ bottle away, and set a foot on the pedal, ready to send herself down the steep slope but not pushing off just yet. Girl looked at Shadow, who was still on high alert, every muscle in his body flexed tight, his tail quivering. He took a step forward and Girl followed, but then he stopped again and she sat, looking back at Scout for guidance.
Scout gripped the handlebars, but her hurry to get across the prairie before the heat of the day was gone from her mind.
Rebels hid in these hills. She had never seen them, but everyone knew this was where they lurked, waiting for their moment. Scout had been crossing these hills delivering packages and messages for six years now. She knew every slope of these hills, near the path but also further north, where the hills got higher and rockier. There were caves in those taller hills. She had sheltered in them more than once waiting for killing heat or drenching rain to pass. She had seen signs of other travelers in some: abandoned food packaging, the remains of a fire, once even a perfectly good blanket left behind in a dark corner. She still carried that blanket with her in her saddlebags.
But she had never seen a rebel.
Scout made a slow scan of the world around her, eyes searching every shadow, every suggestion of a hollow in the slope of the hill. There weren’t many jobs that took her out this way, and she jumped on every one she could. The rebels watched these roads; they had seen her dozens of times now. They must have formed some opinion of her, her obvious usefulness as both a messenger that passed unnoticed and an acquirer of hard-to-find things. Was this the day they finally approached her? She was sixteen now, surely they would approach her soon . . .
Shadow gave a low growl, so deep in his throat it was a vibration she felt more than heard. He took another cautious step and Scout unsnapped the cargo pocket on her right thigh, eyes still sweeping the desolate world around her as her fingers chose one of the round, perfectly-sized stones. She pulled her slingshot out of its loop at the back of her shorts and set the stone in place, drawing back the band but leaving the weapon only half-raised as Shadow’s growl first faded, then resumed with even more intensity.
Girl had lain in the red clay dust to wait for something to happen but she sat up again now, smelling the air in the direction Shadow was slowly stalking towards. Shadow growled again but Girl drowned him out with a single bark. She was still a puppy, not yet grown into her monstrously huge paws, all awkward gait and floppy ears, but her bark was deep and fierce, as if she were a hound from hell. It made every hair on Scout’s body stand on end, and she wasn’t even the one being barked at.
“I know someone’s there,” Scout called, although she wasn’t sure of that at all. Sometimes the dogs got all hyped up over nothing. That usually ended in Shadow’s repeated barking annoying Girl so much that she wrestled him into silence.
There was no answer and Shadow’s growl faded off to nothing, although he was still clenching all of his muscles. Girl flopped back down, watching Shadow closely in case he started barking again and she had to tackle him.
The sun pricked hotly at her shoulders and Scout put the stone back in her pocket and tucked the slingshot away. She was about to call the dogs’ attention back to her when suddenly Shadow was barking like mad, charging forward. There was a runnel, the scar from a past torrent of rain that cut down the hillside, twisting through larger tufts of grass. He raced downhill to the thickest of the tufts and Girl followed, barking her deepest hellhound bark. Scout fumbled for her slingshot but it was tangled in her shirt and she had to look away from her dogs to free it.
She jerked the slingshot loose from her shirt, got the stone back in the pouch, and raised it to fire all inside of one panicked breath.
The dogs were standing their ground, barking like mad.
The grass shook and a woman appeared, but not a woman Scout had ever seen before. No, she would’ve definitely remembered this person. Not because she was taller and broader across the shoulders than most of the men Scout knew. And not because of the braid of copper-colored hair that swung past her hips, a braid thicker than Scout’s wrist that lit up in the sun like the grainfields below.
No, it was the clothes. Not even the richest families in the city had such clothes. The sleek shininess of her leather pants showed not a bit of dust clinging to them despite the fact that she had just been crouching in a ditch. The long white shirt that covered her from neck to wrist and down to her knees was equally unsullied, almost too bright to look at in the sunlight. The fabric was opaque enough to keep the sun off but floated around her in the barely perceptible breeze like she had spun it out of a cloud. She pushed back a wide-brimmed hat, and if she was looking at Scout or the dogs, Scout couldn’t tell because she wore two round lenses just large enough to cover her eyes, their surfaces reflective like mirrors. No frames that Scout could see, just lenses right in front of her eyes.
The woman stepped out of the ditch, the shirt billowing behind her but not quite tangling on the brambles that grew on the edge of the ditch. Two belts crisscrossed over her hips, both covered with more gadgets than Scout had ever seen. She couldn’t possibly guess at the use of more than a few of them, but they all looked perfectly new, just like the clothes.
No one on the surface had so much tech, so much new of anything. Not even the Space Farers when they came down to the surface had such beautiful things. She was like a goddess sprung to life out of the side of the hill.
The woman rested her hands on her hips, near enough to those gadgets but not reaching for anything. Not yet. Scout kept her slingshot aimed at the woman’s throat. The woman raised her hands palms forward but still kept them in easy reach of those belts.
“Well, kid,” she said, her voice throaty with a hint of sarcastic humor. “You got me.”