Alien Chronicles 3 - The Crystal Eye (36 page)

The stones thudded into him and Foloth with painful accuracy. He cried out, and heard Foloth grunt.

“Run for it!” Foloth shouted.

Together they spun around to go back the way they’d come, but their path was blocked by two more Rejects, who also threw stones at them.

Surrounded, Nashmarl and Foloth huddled together, while the Rejects closed in and the stoning began in earnest.

CHAPTER
•FIFTEEN

A call on Quiesl’s hand-link to Luthien got Ampris and the archivists smuggled into the city. Harval, the Aaroun, stashed them in the dank basement of an abandoned tenement. Although they were grateful for the hideout, within a day they were all growing restless.

“We must find a way to check on the Archives,” Quiesl said. “Perhaps if even a small part of it survived, we will be able to salvage something of—”

“No,” Ampris said. “It’s too dangerous. Right now they think all of you are dead. You’re safe as long as they go on believing that.”

Non sat in a corner, rocking himself from side to side the way many Myals did when seriously stressed. “I forgot the Poetics,” he said, not for the first time. He twisted his tail in his hands. “How could I overlook them? They were sublime, written in an age when the Viis could—”

“They were stored in a fireproof case,” Prynan assured him. “They will survive. All the storage on Level Two was fireproofed. Those items will be fine.”

“Not if the explosion destroyed the structure,” Quiesl fretted. He clasped his hands behind his back and wrapped his tail around his wrists. Back and forth he paced. “At tonight’s resistance meeting, I shall ask for assistance in visiting the site. We must start sifting through the ashes before more is lost.”

Ampris gave up trying to convince them that it would be futile to return to the Archives. They had spent their adult lives taking care of the place. They would need time to adjust to the fact that the Archives no longer existed.

“I’m going out,” she said.

At once, their discussion stopped. Quiesl and Non looked at her with expressions of worry. “Ampris, this is unwise,” Quiesl said. “You know what you encountered yesterday.”

She backed her ears, growling softly with frustration. She had tried to leave them on the river before Luthien’s cohorts picked them up. But Quiesl had protested, claiming that without her presence as leader the resistance groups might fail to help them as promised. Yesterday, while the archivists were getting settled here in this crumbling old building, Ampris had tried to leave the city, but she found her likeness—dredged up from old gladiator publicity records—being broadcast on every public vid. Warrants had been issued for her arrest, and citizens and abiru alike were urged to report any sighting of her.

Being trapped like this left her nerves frayed and her sense of worry stronger than ever. If she couldn’t get out of the city, how was she going to return to her family? She couldn’t just abandon them.

She had broken her promise to her cubs and to her friends. She had let them down. Although it had not been her fault, she felt ashamed. Ampris hated to fail at anything she did. If Harthril led them here to Vir, they wouldn’t last two days without coming to some kind of harm. How would she ever find them?

Now, she met Quiesl’s gaze with determination. “I have to check the city’s eastern gates. In case they’ve come through.”

“No one will tell you,” Quiesl said. “If any patroller sees you loitering there, you’ll be arrested.”

“Or shot,” Non added.

“I cannot abandon my family!” she cried. “If they come here, I’ll never know it. I have to do something.”

Quiesl put his hand on her arm. “At the meeting tonight, perhaps you can ask the abiru to watch for your friends. That is safer than you risking capture.”

She sighed, not liking the idea, and yet it made sense. Reluctantly she nodded. “Very well.”

The sun had dropped midway in the afternoon sky, the hottest part of the day. Elrabin trotted steadily along the road, ignoring the heat that made his skin feel like it was melting beneath his fur. He was panting, but not in distress. Beside him, Harthril strode along tirelessly on his long, thin legs. The Reject’s eyes were slitted against the glare of the sun, and his rill lay flaccid on his shoulders. Their shared water skin bounced on his hip, half-empty.

Elrabin kept an eye on it, and licked a rim of salt off his mouth. He wanted a drink with every pore of his body, but neither of them would stop for water until the sun started to go down.

Ahead, the walls of Vir loomed high. The cubs were only a half hour in front of them, and Elrabin was toying with the idea of stopping and waiting out the rest of the afternoon before going on to pick them up at the gates. There was no way Foloth and Nashmarl could get into the city. There was nowhere for them to go, now that they’d reached the end of this ill-planned journey.

Elrabin cast a sideways glance up at Harthril. “Nearly there,” he said, panting.

Harthril blinked but otherwise did not waste his breath on talking. His pebbled skin was wrinkling and growing darker from sun exposure. Otherwise he just seemed to absorb the heat, no matter how intense it became.

“Want to stop for a while?” Elrabin asked. “We can let ’em prowl around the gates and get turned back in our direction, see?”

Harthril’s stride never faltered. He said nothing.

Elrabin groaned to himself and kept trotting. “Guess we don’t quit now. Guess we don’t let the guards shake ’em up like they deserve.”

Harthril glanced at him stonily. “Thieves,” he said.

Elrabin rolled his eyes. After the first few days, he’d figured the Reject would get over the theft of his food, but Harthril had a one-track mind. Forget that Elrabin had questions as to what the Reject was doing with food hoarded from the rest of the group in the first place, or where he got it from. Harthril answered only what suited him, and so far he’d said about three words since they’d set out on the cubs’ trail several days ago.

They’d caught up with the runaways in a matter of hours. Whatever head start Foloth and Nashmarl had, they’d squandered it like the irresponsible cubs they were. They stopped to rest too often. They wasted time hunting for water when they still had a supply. With the food rations they’d taken, they did not have to stop to hunt. As a result, they could have made excellent time across the Plains if they’d been diligent about it.

Elrabin thought about Ampris, who had limped along in the burning heat with inadequate supplies, who had stopped and hunted when she must have been exhausted. Every night, he and Harthril camped fireless and silent near the cubs, guarding them in the darkness while they chattered and laughed heedlessly. Elrabin thought of their mother camping out here alone and friendless. Every day he expected to stumble across her bones bleaching in the sun. So far, that hadn’t happened, but it didn’t stop him from worrying about her.

Or from wanting to blister the backsides of both her cubs.

As soon as he and Harthril first caught up with the cubs, Elrabin had wanted to grab them by the scruff of their necks and work them over. But Harthril had stopped him, suggesting they let the cubs make the entire journey to Vir on their own. Hoping the cubs would learn a few lessons along the way, Elrabin agreed.

But now, as they drew near the city and skirted the outlying clusters of fueling stations, roadside black marketeers, and straggling traffic, Elrabin told himself the cubs would have learned a lot more without those food rations. Every time he stepped over an empty packet that had been tossed down, he growled to himself and promised them a kick for it.

Now, he shot Harthril another glance. “You sure you don’t want to take a break here? We can wait for the others to catch up.”

Luax and Tantha were shepherding the rest of their group, coming very slowly and with great caution, perhaps a day or two behind.

Harthril did not even blink this time. He just kept striding along.

Ahead, Elrabin heard shouting and the sound of shots being fired. Instinctively he stopped in his tracks, but Harthril began to jog. Growling and muttering to himself, Elrabin hurried to catch up.

He saw the gates, closed right now with a line of traffic waiting for clearance. He saw patrollers clustered at the checkpoint, shouting and opening fire on the pair of lanky cubs, who were scrambling for safety.

Elrabin’s heart nearly stopped. “Hey!”

Harthril gripped his arm, holding him back when he would have dashed straight to the trouble. “Wait,” the Reject said.

“That was a plasma slug,” Elrabin said, horrified by the danger the cubs were in. He might not like either of them, but he owed it to Ampris to keep them safe. “We got to get them out of there.”

“How?” Harthril asked, still holding him back despite his struggles. “Look, they are running. They are safe.”

Elrabin watched the cubs streaking across open ground, but they headed into the slum area like Skeks scuttling for the sewer. His heart sank. “The little fools. How we going to get them out of there?”

Harthril stood watching until the cubs were out of sight before he dropped his blue-eyed gaze to meet Elrabin’s. “Maybe we don’t get them out. Let them stay there.”

“That’s Reject Town,” Elrabin said. “You’ll fit right in, but they never will.”

Harthril’s rill extended behind his head. “Rejects will take care of them. Then there is no more trouble they can cause us.”

Elrabin backed his ears angrily. “Quit talking like that.”

“You really want to save them?”

“No,” Elrabin said, deciding to be honest. “But I have to. I gave Ampris my word.”

“What does word mean to a Kelth?”

Elrabin bared his teeth, deciding that sometimes he didn’t like this Reject very much. “Hey, don’t take it out on me.”

He pulled free of Harthril’s grip and smoothed out the wrinkles in his dirty coat. “You coming?” he asked.

Harthril flicked out his tongue, but when Elrabin trotted toward the slum, Harthril followed.

The slums were bad, all right. It took Elrabin one glance, and one whiff, to know that this part of town was a lot worse than the stinkhole where he’d grown up. He took in the front-edge businesses, gambling dens, dust drops, and brothels, and his instincts went on alert. He quickened his pace.

In minutes, he heard the sound of commotion—angry shouts and yells of pain. He jabbed Harthril in the ribs. “That’s Nashmarl’s voice. Come on!”

Together they ran down one of the narrow, twisting streets and came upon the cubs, surrounded by Rejects who were stoning them and shouting insults.

Elrabin didn’t have to count heads to see how seriously he and Harthril were outnumbered. But if Elrabin had never learned how to fight well during his time as a servant for gladiators, at least he had learned how to fight dirty.

Baring his teeth, he rushed forward, fast and furious, giving no warning, and bowled over one of the Rejects from behind. Grabbing the sack of rocks from the startled Reject’s hand, Elrabin rolled and came up lightly on his feet. Already he was reaching into the sack, and as Harthril clubbed another Reject down from behind with his walking staff, Elrabin started pelting the Rejects with stones.

Startled, they turned and ran in all directions, disappearing quicker than he’d have thought possible.

Elrabin glared around, expecting them to come back with reinforcements, and dropped his sack of stones on the head of the Reject he’d knocked down. With a moan, the Reject slumped in the mud and did not move.

Harthril was already bending over the cubs, who were lying on the ground curled around each other.

Elrabin hurried over to them and saw that both were still conscious. Foloth was bleeding from a gash on his forehead. Nashmarl was whimpering and clutching his stomach.

The cubs stared at him and Harthril as though they couldn’t believe their eyes.

“How did you get here?” Foloth whispered.

Elrabin’s ears were working back and forth, straining to listen in all directions. “Never mind,” he said gruffly. The cubs were alive; he’d worry about details later. “Get up, both of you. Time to clear out of this place before trouble comes back.”

Harthril grabbed Nashmarl under his arms and set him on his feet. Elrabin tugged Foloth upright.

“Quick now, and no talking,” he said.

Elrabin listened, heard someone coming, and took off in the opposite direction. The fact that it happened to be deeper into the slum instead of out of it made Harthril hiss a warning.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Elrabin said, shooting him a glance. “Trust me on this one. This happens to be my area of expertise.”

With that boast, he led them on a winding progress through the slum, directing them with a confidence that was mostly for show. All the time he continued to hear sounds of pursuit. His shoulders stayed tensed for an attack that didn’t come.

Several minutes later, they reached the banks of the river. Elrabin stared at the stinking mud, with its mounds of dead fish. Garbage was being dumped in the riverbed, and trash lay scattered in all directions. The water itself was seriously polluted. Elrabin stopped short and started to revise his plan until he glanced over his shoulder and saw a gang of angry Rejects behind them, cutting off the way back.

“Now what will you do?” Harthril asked him in disgust.

Elrabin bared his teeth. “Just keep your tongue in your mouth, and you’ll see. Come on!”

“I can’t. It hurts too much,” Nashmarl whimpered, but Harthril shoved him along when Elrabin started down the bank.

Foloth followed on Elrabin’s heels in silence. He was still bleeding, but his gash didn’t look too bad. Elrabin wasn’t going to take the time to wrap him up now.

They squelched across the mud, which was slick and soft beneath scrim puddles of water and foam. Where the city wall curved to fit the bend of the river, the water grew deeper until it came up to Elrabin’s knees. He splashed along steadily, keeping his gaze on the base of the wall.

“Hey!”

Harthril’s warning came just as a stun bullet plopped into the water only a few centimeters away from Elrabin. Yelling, he jumped sideways and ran for the base of the wall. No more bullets came at him, yet he didn’t stop until he was huddled a hand’s breadth away from the stone. That close, he could feel the whining friction of the security field. He panted and swiveled back his ears as the others joined him. Tilting his head, he tried to look up at the top of the wall where the patroller who’d shot at him was standing, but couldn’t see him at this angle. That was fine with Elrabin. He figured the patroller could no longer see
him
either.