The Sowing (39 page)

“Ow!” I exclaim loudly, clutching my forehead. I look above me, but there’s nothing there, just more shimmering. I put my hand up and feel something metal, smooth and cold, dripping with raindrops. I use my hand to trace along it gingerly.

“Remy, what are you doing?” Soren demands, staring at me from a distance. “You look like a crazy person right now.”

“Can’t you see it?” I call back. “There’s something here. Cloaked. Can’t you see the shimmering?” I realize I probably sound like a crazy person, too. I look back at him and see him squinting at the air above my head.

“Well … maybe,” he concedes, and starts walking in my direction. 

“Keep your head down,” I implore. “If I could hit my head on whatever this is, you’ll probably be decapitated.” He nods and ducks down, walking idiotically through the woods with his knees half-bent.

“It gets stronger the closer you get,” he acknowledges. “I can see it now. Kind of like the air is shining, right?”

“Iridescent, almost,” I add, tracing along the smooth metal paneling with my hands. I arrive at something rounded, like the belly of a whale, and I put both of my hands against the metal. My fingers are cold, but I keep following the paneling, searching for any gaps, any openings, any distinction that might tell me what I’m holding onto. Soren’s doing the same, padding his palms along the invisible metal in the opposite direction from me.

Suddenly, one of us hits the trigger spot, because the cloaking disappears and the metal stops shining and materializes before us. We’re staring at one of the most beautiful airships I’ve ever seen.

“It looks like a bird,” Soren whispers, awed.

“It’s magnificent,” I agree.

We hear crunching leaves behind us and both of us jerk around, panicked. It’s just Bear. His eyes are on his feet, but when he looks up at us, his jaw drops.

“Whoa.”

“I know,” I laugh, feeling an odd warmth and excitement spread throughout my body. I bounce up on the balls of my feet. “Look at this!”

Soren walks over to the door and puts his palm on the small outline that appears to be a palm reader. The machine beeps.

“Palm print denied.” The words seem to emanate from the whole ship. My excitement dissipates almost immediately.

“What are we going to do with a ship we can’t get into?” I ask mournfully. Soren shakes his head.

“Figure out a way in. This treasure is too good to leave behind.” He starts tracing the ship, checking underneath it and examining the metal casing. “Remy, go check back on the boat and see if there are any tools—bring whatever you can find.” I nod and dart off as Soren’s voice fades into the distance: “Bear, do you know anything about airships?”

****

An hour later, darkness is falling, and Soren is prying a metal panel off of the exterior of the airship as Bear and I watch over his shoulder anxiously. Bear, it was no surprise, knew nothing about airships, and I was only able to find a laser knife, a screwdriver, a wrench and a pair of tweezers on the boat. Soren’s face fell when he saw my haul, but he set to work trying to find a way into the ship’s circuitry. The perfectly smooth paneling makes it hard to identify where any critical systems might be, and it’s not like any of us are engineers. I think of Eli and wish desperately that he were here. He’d have us in the airship in minutes.

We all breathe a sigh of relief when Soren pulls off the paneling around the scanner without any alarms going off. Inside is a clear glass pane lit up with blue, red, and green lights that create a complex web of shapes, concentric circles, and connecting lines.

“Great,” Soren whispers. “It’s all nano-circuitry. This will be harder than I thought.”

I sigh and wonder if we’re going to be forced to return to our humble water-locked abode once again. Soren starts moving shapes and colors around on the glass panel, rearranging things in various combinations, moving lines and shapes and colors.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Circuits like this work via combinatorics. What the palm scanner does is read the arrangement of lines and heat on the palm that’s being scanned and maps them to the ‘correct’ image stored in the system’s memory. On a circuit board like this, that will display as having found the optimum combination of shapes and lines to solve the problem of ‘matching’ the palm’s pattern to the stored image.” I nod and visualize a load of formulas flying at high-velocity over my head.

“So right now, you’re just moving things around trying to find that optimum combination?” Bear asks. I look at him in admiration. Did he really understand that?

“Yes.”

“How long will that take?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Anywhere from five minutes to five years.”

Bear and I look at each other, and I shrug helplessly.

“Is there any other possible way to open the lock?” I ask.

“Unless you somehow manage to figure out whose ship this is and get a digital read of his or her palm print, then no, there’s not.” Soren’s entering his I’m-working-in-a-state-of-Zen-concentration mode, which is usually closely correlated with him being a sarcastic asshole. I walk off and let him work.

I head back to the ship to grab some food, seeing as how I’ve barely eaten anything all day. I cut a few pieces of cured meat and bite in with relish, savoring the salty, earthy flavor. The energy burst is immediate. I grab some cheese and the rest of the hunk of meat and wrap it in a towel to take back to Soren and Bear. No doubt they’re hungry.

When I emerge, it’s too dark to see, so I rummage through the packs Chan-Yu left for us and find two bio-powered torches and bring those with me. When I get back to the airship, I find Soren still staring at the glass circuits, moving things around with his fingers, changing the alignments and combinations. Bear is sitting on a moldy old log, and I join him. His lanky legs are tucked up beneath his jacket to stay warm.

“Has he even moved?” I ask, offering him some meat.

“No,” he answers, taking a bite. “Hasn’t hardly even looked away mor’n once.”

I cut a big slice of the meat off and walk over to Soren. “Need a light?” I hold out the torch. 

“No thanks, I can see fine,” he responds without looking at me or making any effort to take the lamp from me.

“I brought you some food from the ship, are you hungry?”

“No, thanks.” When I see that nothing more is forthcoming, I shrug and head back to Bear.

“He gets like this when he’s working on something,” I say to him. “When he was playing music or working on a math problem, or even playing chess, he would dive in and wouldn’t come up for hours.”

“Maybe one of us should keep watch on him, and the other should keep an eye on the boat?” he suggests nervously. It’s a good idea. We shouldn’t leave the ship alone, and Soren’s obviously deadly focused on one thing only.

“You want the boat or Soren?”

“I want Soren,” he says. I don’t blame him. He’s lost his only friend in the world today and probably doesn’t want to be alone right now—even if his only companion is an enormous blond robot.

“Holler if something’s wrong, okay?” I instruct him. “We’re not far away from each other. I’ll come running if I hear you.” He nods. I hand him the spare torch. It’s odd, feeling like the leader. I’m so used to being led, looking up to other people, following orders. For once, someone else is looking up to
me
.

“You do the same,” he says, setting his mouth in a fierce line.

I head back to the boat and settle down in the same position I was resting in this morning, at the crack of dawn, when Bear and Sam snuck up on us. I keep the torch on next to me, the slanting beam flickering off the river, staring out into the darkness just like this morning.

I keep watch over the boat for what must be several hours. Impatience comes and goes, and I stand up and pace every now and then, checking our packs for anything I might have missed, something that would help us break into the airship—anything at all, really. I’m not tired, even though it’s getting late and I’ve been mostly awake since the crack of dawn. The numbness from earlier has worn off completely, and now I’m restless. I want to be home, I think. I
just want everyone to know I’m all right. I want to tell my parents, tell Eli, that I’m alive.
I fight the urge to tell Soren to stop working on the airship, that we need to keep moving, but I know if we can break in it will save so much time, so many days of walking through the woods, through unknown, potentially hostile land—

“REMY!”

It’s Bear. In an instant I’m off, leaping the gunwale like a hurdle in Eli’s training drills, clutching the pocketknife from Chan-Yu’s pack, and tearing through the woods towards the clearing.

“He did it!” Bear shouts enthusiastically at me, materializing out of nowhere and startling me so much that my first instinct is to slap my hand over his mouth from behind and hold him still for a second. My blade is uncomfortably close to his face, but I don’t care.

“Not so fucking loud,” I swear, my voice a low growl. “Do you want to get us killed?”

Bear’s eyes are wide and full of surprise as he shakes his head vigorously
no
. I release him.

“Sorry,” he says, rubbing his cheek and glaring at me, half awed, half indignant. “What are you so afraid of?”

“Everything,” I spit back, furious. I spin off and head into the clearing with the airship.

Soren, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen, but the hatch of the door to the airship is open, so I bound over and hop inside. He’s sitting in one of the two pilot’s seats, his back to me. The basic interior lights are already on, and the glass control panel is lit up with a few pulsating lights, but I can tell by the silence that the engines aren’t running yet.

“How’d you do it?” is my first question. I know he’ll want to brag about how he cracked it. Sure enough, he swings around in the chair with a triumphant grin on his face.

“It was just like a Rubik’s cube, all I had to—”

“A what?”

“A—it’s this puzzle where you have to—oh, never mind, it won’t make any sense unless I show you.  Bottom line is it was just a puzzle, where anytime I moved anything, something else changed, but all I had to do was figure out the parameters and which movements would affect the rest of the puzzle and how. It’s all about optimization. So, for instance, if I expanded a pair of concentric circles, the green lines would change to blue, and if I contracted them—”

“Spare me,” I cut in, sitting down eagerly at the copilot’s seat and running my hands along the smooth glass panes of the control panel. “Congratulations, but I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Soren,” I say, turning to him with a smile lining my face, “we can go home in this!” I feel like a beacon of hope has descended upon us.

“That’s the plan,” he says, grinning just as enthusiastically. “Do you know how to fly?”

My beacon flickers.

“No … don’t you?” I ask. The smile slides off his face.

“No.”

The beacon dies.

“Are you shitting me?” The anger I felt with Bear just moments ago quickly resurfaces.

“We spent five hours trying to break into this damn airship only to find out that neither of us can fly it?” The beacon of hope is devolving into a maelstrom of rage.

“Remy, calm down. We’re intelligent people. We can figure it out,” Soren says matter-of-factly, and his tone is so condescending that it actually does calm me. It’s like we’re back at home, at the Resistance base, going at each other over totally stupid things again. It’s comforting, in a way. Soren turns back to the controls and starts touching things on the glass panel, which right now is dark.

“Maybe there’s an instruction booklet,” Bear pipes up from behind us, who has evidently joined us on the ship. I fight the urge to laugh.

“Okay. I’m calm. Sorry.” I find my smile again.

“Even when we were in the Sector I never flew a plane,” Soren mutters. “They were always on the city-wide nav system.”

“And Firestone does all our flying for us now.”

“Yeah.” He’s running his hands all over the glass, touching all the lights, looking for anything that will power up the ship. There’s a small pulsating green light across from him, and I reach over him and press that one out of curiosity. The interior lights come on and I can hear the soft hum of the energy cells activating. Soren glares at me and turns back to the panel.

“Hey, nice,” Bear says.

“Bear, do us a favor and go get all the food from the boat, as well as our packs and anything you need, and bring it all over here.” Without so much as a grumble or a complaint at being ordered around, Bear hops outside and disappears. Soren and I exchange surprised glances, and I shrug.

“I guess he’s used to being ordered around a lot,” I offer.

“And doing heavy labor,” Soren adds.

It takes us about fifteen minutes to figure out how to get all the control panels and display systems operating, but by the time Bear has schlepped everything into the airship, we think we’re ready to give this flying thing a try. As soon as Soren closes the pod door, though, a message starts beeping on the communications feed.

“Valerian Orleán, please report. Valerian Orleán, indicate location and status.”

My heart goes stiff and cold and every cell in my body seems to be frozen in confusion and agony. Soren, too, is totally immobile, his face tense, and both of us stare at the comm feed. The voice is rough and full of static, but audible.

“Why’s the ship talking about Valerian Orleán?” Bear demands. 

“What the hell?” Soren swears under his breath. 

I can’t even speak. 

28 - VALE

Winter 2, Sector Annum 106, 04h02
Gregorian Calendar: December 22

The familiar voice behind me turns out to belong to Jahnu Nair, Moriana’s cousin, and it’s no wonder I couldn’t place it. I haven’t heard his voice in three years, and since then, it’s dropped at least an octave. Last time I saw him, he was an awkward, plump kid that Moriana was always babysitting. Turns out, he’s not plump or awkward anymore. And I recognize Kenzie Oban—I remember her as a tall, fit girl with startlingly red hair. She, Eli, and Jahnu are all together, along with someone I don’t recognize, a man with dark black curls and a lazy, slouching expression, and they look none too happy to see us.