Another long grueling day of pounding plants over the steaming cauldron and Jasyn swore she’d start screaming. The only break was the day it dripped rain.
She ran a finger under her wide collar. It didn’t itch or rub, it was just there except when she didn’t do what they told her to and the men used their wands. Then the collar sent waves of pain shooting through her. Her nerves still tingled from the bolt this morning.
She stood at the cauldron and pounded with the heavy stick. Roz wasn’t talking to her anymore, not after Jasyn had screamed at the golden man and been shocked. The others had warned her. She didn’t have their patience. She wanted out of the canyon, away from the endless pounding. She wanted to know what had happened to Clark. And Dace.
It had been too many days. Dace couldn’t still be out there. Jasyn hit the sludge in the cauldron and fought back defeat.
They’d floated messages on the stream, written on bark with her lipstick. And gotten nothing back. Ruttie had taken her com completely apart and hidden the pieces. All of Taffer’s ideas fizzled. His mind was long gone and the others wouldn’t see it. Taffer held onto hope like a shield. He refused to believe his hope was empty. They would never get off this world.
Jasyn wiped sweat from her face, missing a beat. The golden men weren’t watching. She got away with that small rebellion. She had to do something, soon, or she’d be joining Ruttie in his silence.
The day ended, just like all the others. They were herded back to their enclosure and walled in behind the thorns. Jasyn took her brick of food and sat as far from the others as she could get. She couldn’t stand another night of Taffer’s cheerful optimism. Their situation was completely hopeless. They were all going to die here. No one was going to escape. Ever.
Taffer wouldn’t leave her alone. He came to join her.
“You need to be patient,” he said, patting her leg.
“You’ve been patient for years and where has it gotten you?” She jerked her leg away, curling it under her. “Face it, Taffer, we are never going to get out of here. Never.”
She saw the bleak truth in his eyes. He knew it was hopeless. He knew he’d never walk free again. He hid it under a bright smile, his eyes blank again.
“We’ll get out, just you wait. Those messages have gotten through, they just haven’t found a way to reply. The stream doesn’t reverse directions. Don’t give up, Jasyn.” His eyes silently begged her to keep up the pretense.
She rubbed her hands over her face. “I don’t know how you do it, Taffer.” She dropped her hands to her lap.
“You keep hoping or you die,” he whispered. “Maybe tomorrow we’ll hear from them.” He smiled again and patted her leg.
He left her to fight off despair. She saw Roz watching her across the clearing. Roz turned her head away.
Night came, the clearing slowly darkened until the purple haze began to glow. Jasyn looked up, wanting to see stars. All she saw were the tree branches overhead and the force shield that trapped them at the same time it allowed them to live.
Morning came, the same routine. She trudged out with the others, silently filing past their guards and the wands. She went to her place in the clearing with the cauldrons and began pounding with the others. The blisters on her hands were healed, her muscles had toughened up. She fell into the rhythm of it and let her mind drift.
Time passed, without her being consciously aware of it.
The guards shouted. The rhythm was disrupted.
Their guards listened to distant shouts, their attention focused beyond the clearing. Jasyn pricked her ears. She caught phrases. Someone had escaped. Someone was loose. This could be an opportunity to run. She dropped her heavy stick.
The guards had their wands up. They drove her group out of the clearing and down a different path. She had no chance to duck away. They were herded a short distance to the mouth of a dark cave.
“Inside!” The guards shoved them when they didn’t move fast enough.
Other groups streamed in from different directions. Jasyn looked around wildly, searching for another green suit like her own. She was pushed inside. The guards had their wands up. The prisoners moved faster, dragging her with them.
The cave mouth opened into a fairly large cavern. The walls were rough stone. The floor was part sand, part piles of rock. A thin light trickled through the roof far overhead where the stones had cracked and let daylight through.
She was pushed aside, into an eddy behind one of the rock piles. She scrambled up, pulling herself on top of the rounded boulders.
More groups were shoved inside. The cavern was crowded, prisoners finding barely enough space to sit. Those first in were pushed to the back. Jasyn searched in the dim light for a flash of green. The guards shouted at the entrance. Daylight faded as a thick door slid closed, grinding through sand. It slammed shut, booming against the rock walls. The sound echoed in a sudden quiet.
“It’s bad,” the very old woman from her group said. Her voice rang out in the cavern. “Last time they put us here we waited days. Until they caught them and punished them. There was no food.” Her voice trailed off into mumbling.
Voices rose in a panicked wave of sound.
“Clark!” Jasyn shouted over it. No one answered. She hadn’t really expected it. Though it was dim, she hadn’t seen any sign of him. No one wore green quite like hers. She sat on the rock, above the sea of people. “Clark,” she said, quietly, hopelessly.
“Quiet!” Taffer shouted, his voice finally carrying over the noise.
People settled, voices fading. They looked expectantly at him.
“It’s a chance,” he said. “Did anyone get my messages?”
“Bits of bark with red writing?” A man stood up in the back of the cavern. “They came floating through several days ago. We saw them take them and burn them.”
“When?” Taffer asked.
“Before the last rain,” the man said.
“No, what time of day did they come?” Taffer asked.
“Morning, right after they came for us.”
“Ah,” Taffer said, smiling. “Then we need to float them out as soon as they shut us in. You should get them before sunrise.”
“And do what with them?” The man put his hands on hips. “What good will it do for you to send us messages? We can’t send anything back.”
“You’re wrong,” Taffer said. “Do you have anyone with you who knows pulse code?”
“I do,” a thin woman said, standing next to the man.
“Becka!” Roz shouted.
“Roz?” The woman who answered Roz’s call rushed forward.
Roz caught her and hugged her. It started a general rush to find old shipmates and friends. Jasyn sat miserably on her rock. Clark wasn’t there. She didn’t know where he was.
“Jasyn,” Taffer said, appearing at her feet where she’d pulled them up onto the rock. “We’re holding a meeting. Ship captains, those in command, those who want to plan, are all invited.”
Others gathered to the side of her rock. Men and women, young and old, most wearing Patrol uniforms, some wearing various shipping company outfits. A very few wore suits like hers, independents.
“We need to work out a way to communicate,” Taffer said. “Sticks on sticks, pulse code.”
“Won’t carry far,” someone objected.
“How far does it need to carry? How far apart are the compounds they keep us in?” Taffer asked.
No one knew.
“So, first plan is to map out the area.” He knelt down and smoothed out a section of the sand. “They keep us here, in a compound. The stream travels this way.” He traced a curved line in the sand. “We work in a cooking compound here.” He stabbed his finger into the sand.
“I’ve seen you,” a heavyset man in a black uniform said. His voice was gravelly, as if it didn’t get much use. He added a whole network of lines to the map. “Trails,” he said. He continued the winding line of the stream. He added a whole series of holes, naming each as he stabbed it into the sand. They marked various work places, fields, and compounds.
The others crowded close, each adding their own information to the rapidly expanding map. Jasyn watched them, her eyes dull and uncaring. Clark wasn’t here. How did she know he wasn’t dead? She didn’t and she couldn’t find any more hope.
“What do we do with this?” a woman asked. Her silver uniform was ripped, her feet bare. She had brown hair liberally streaked with gray. “So we know where we are in this valley. It won’t get us out.”
“How do we take out the force shield?” another woman asked.
“We got some scans done before they got us,” an older man said. He wore the pale blue of Exploration, faded now to almost white. “There’s a tractor beam holding the ships down, besides the one that pulled us down. And some kind of interference with all signals.”
“What about the collars?” Jasyn asked. “How do we get out of here when they can kill us with those wands?”
Taffer frowned.
“They can knock all of us out before we can even reach them,” another man in the black of the Enforcers spoke up.
“We had someone try to cut his off,” a different man said. He wore dark blue, a merchant captain with gold bars on his collar. “Blew his whole head off.”
“So we need to find a way to short them out,” Taffer said. “We’ve got a com unit in our compound. Ruttie is working on a way to make it broadcast the right frequency.”
“Why don’t you just steal a wand and use that?” Jasyn asked sarcastically.
An insane, optimistic grin spread over Taffer's face, like a kind of manic disease. “Why don’t we?”
“They don’t ever let go of them,” one of the others said.
“Our guards are more lax,” someone else said, a thin woman dressed in red and black. “I’ve seen them leave their wands on a rock and take a nap. But the others watch. Maybe if we started a diversion, someone could steal one.”
“Do you have an engineer who can examine it?” Taffer asked.
The woman shook her head. “Nothing to take it apart with either, except rocks. But we’re upstream from you. We can tie it to a stick and float it to you.”
“We’ll be watching for it,” Taffer said.
Jasyn couldn’t believe they had taken her seriously. Steal a wand? Someone would die for it. She was certain of that. But they were all dead anyway so what did it matter?
“I think the generators are here,” the grizzled Enforcer said. He punched his thumb at a spot on the opposite canyon wall, far from any camps or work areas. “And they live here,” he said, stabbing another spot. “I’ve heard children there.”
“Has anyone ever seen a woman or child of theirs?” The woman in silver asked.
“Once,” one older man admitted. “Three women and five children. And twelve of the men keeping them close. That was years ago, when I first got here.”
They leaned over the map, making more plans until no more suggestions were made. It wasn’t much of a plan. The woman who had said she could steal a wand was from a group that stripped leaves from a fibrous plant growing next to the streams. The stems were fed into a machine that extruded white cloth. The cloth was fed into another machine that produced the white tunics. Her group was not as closely guarded, though they still wore the collars. They also moved more, following the stream and harvesting the plants one area at a time.
Jasyn sat on her rock, above the map, and wished the plan was better. Steal a wand, float it past three camps to hers, have Ruttie find out how it worked and a way to block it from working. And find a way to knock out the multiple force shields and tractor beams that trapped them here. And hope their ships still flew. As a plan it left a lot of holes to be filled. And a lot of unanswered questions. The only question Jasyn cared about was the one that made her heart ache. Where was Clark?