Cloud Country (6 page)

“And very beautiful.”

“Sure,” Saru said. But she couldn’t say one way or another. The song was already gone. A lost note or too echoed in her skull and nothing else. Her anger was returning, and her worries, and the concerns of a fugitive.

“Look, we need—”

“Listen,” John said, cutting her off. He closed his eyes and the grass wrapped around him, and he swayed like a tree again. Saru watched and listened, but nothing new occurred. Her stomach growled. A knot of grass formed next to her, wrapping into a vine that sprouted what looked like an albino pear. The pear wagged in front of her, an offering.

“No thanks,” Saru said, swatting the pear away. The pear plant disintegrated and a new one sprouted, this time with what looked like a banana.

“Really, I’m not hungry,” Saru said. And I’m damn sure not eating some random magic fruit.

The grass to the right of her parted to reveal a thin and winding creek. The water was clear and beautiful, sparkling as it caught the moonlight. A vine dipped into the water and a leaf sprouted to cup the water and bear it up to her lips. Saru’s throat grated with dryness, her swallowing rough and throbbing. The water looked so sweet, so pure.

“Again, no thank you,” she said, swatting the leaf away. The droplets of water splashed into the air and dissolved into moonlight before hitting the ground. Saru took this as a vindication of her decision.

“Hey,” she called to John. “Hey!”

“List—”

“No!” she said. “
You
listen. I can’t stay here. I can’t live here. I don’t want to be a tree.”

“We’re safe here,” John said. The vines withdrew. His face frowned into normal sadness, away from the artsy sadness of dead unicorns and fantasy pathos. “We have everything we need.”

“No,” Saru said. “We don’t. How about a magazine? How about a feed or some playing cards? How about something to do!” she yelled down at the grass. No plants sprouted. No video-game offerings. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

She put her hands on her hips, firm with decision. This was where they parted ways. She couldn’t stay here. John could. He was happy. She couldn’t drag him away. John seemed to realize it too.

“If you ask…” he said.

“No,” Saru said. “Stay here. Be happy or whatever. Make lots of meaningful decisions.”

“Are you sure you will not reconsider?” John asked. “If you could bring yourself to listen…”

Saru shook her head. John nodded.

“I want to give you something,” John said. He aimed his left hand at the grass and gestured up. A single vine sprouted and swayed in front of him. He brought his right hand to his forehead and a look of concentration crossed his face. Slowly, he drew his hand away from his forehead. A ghostly white thread followed the motion of his hand, and he teased it free, body shivering with the effort. He spun his hands in a glacial motion around one another, twining the pale thread from his skull with the pale thread of the vine, wrapping and weaving the two together, tighter and tighter, until the vine tugged free of the earth, and the two threads formed a spinning circle that shrank into the palm of John’s right hand. He beckoned for Saru to approach and she did.

“What is it?” Saru asked, mesmerized by the spinning circle.

“It is a glane,” John said. “It is like the flower you wear in your hair. This will strengthen your connection to me, and, by extension, the Gaespora.”

“And why do I want that?” Saru asked, annoyed. “It’s just more bullshit for me to deal with.”

“The glane is a prop for your mind. A physical mnemonic. It allows you to store and access information that is otherwise dispersed throughout the chaos of your chemical memory. The glane gives you control. The information in this ring will allow you to hear the voice of the Gaespora more clearly. It will allow you to see hidden things and use what gifts the Gaespora can offer. It will allow you to find me again should the need arise.”

“It’s a weapon?”

“It is a tool. The glane brings your connection from the unconscious to the conscious. It transforms the somnambulism of human default into
deliberate
action. Will you accept my gift?”

The ring dropped into his palm. He held it out to her. Saru took his hand, feeling the ring, running her finger around the edge. It felt strange, like the caress of the grass, and the feeling spread beyond her fingertips, branching through her whole body.

“But if I put this on,” she said. “I can never take it off.” She tore the white flower of the Slow God from her hair and crumpled it, tossing it away. “I’ve torn that thing out a hundred times and it always comes back.”

“It returns because your action is not deliberate. If you truly sought to banish the Slow God from your mind you would destroy the flower. If you truly sought to banish the Gaespora you could remove this ring.”

Saru stared at the ring.

“And this isn’t gonna fuck with me in any way? It won’t give away my position or let ElilE track me or control me?”

“No. The fears you express are not possible. If they were, they would be realized by the margin you share already. The glane gives you control.”

It was crazy and stupid and an unnecessary risk, but for some reason Saru trusted John. He’d been the only one of any of these mystical alien bastards to talk to her with anything approaching honesty. And who knew? Maybe there was a power there. Maybe there was something she could use in that little ring. And as much as she hated to admit it, the idea of being closer to the Gaespora was a comfort.

“What the hell,” Saru said. She picked up the ring from John’s palm and slid it onto her left ring finger. Her head moved automatically, turning with a force beyond her control to lock eyes with John. His eyes were wide with shock.

“Oh,” Saru said.

“Shit,” John said.

“Oh shit,” said a voice that was both of them and neither.

Pain! And color and sound and pain! Saru’s organs twisting into knots, swelling and popping and writhing, skin ripping and splitting, skull shattering, brains become slobbering afterbirth. Pain and sound, and all the voices of Earth—newborn cries, cum screams, death rattles, swords thrust into skin, clanging shields, gunshots and cannon booms, screeching cars, wolf howls, snorting pigs, grunting lovers forced and receptive, wind and racing skies, crackle of flame and pain! The twisting of guts and wrung-out stomachs, skin stripped and stretched to dry in the sun, teeth chomping on sinew and fats, stuck gristle. Then the vast relief of slightly less pain, the greatest feeling in the world, receding, receding, and gone, the blissful forgetfulness that allowed hot stoves to be touched again and again, and knives to be drawn in anger to spill ever more death.

All was black, her vision, her every point of contact with the world now changed. She flew around the blackness a spectator, looking down and inward like a God, the petri-dish, outward-box narrowness of her flesh form forgotten. She felt herself swirling, twisting, wound and bound into the shape of the ring, so she
was
the ring and she rested upon John’s finger. She sensed that John was on the same ride, and he was bound too as a ring upon her finger, and they were bound together. It was clear that with all his knowledge of aliens and Gods and forces beyond her ken, that he was an ignoramus and a novice, playing with powers he did not understand. His harmless twisting of grass, the sharing of a trinket, was an act of mortal transformation, implications too great and terrifying to fully digest. And in that black nothingness, Saru—what recognizable part of her remained—wanted to laugh, demanded her lungs and her body back, so she could belt out a laugh at the cosmic inevitability of fucking up.

6. Fine Company

Someone was shaking her. Her eyes shot open and the stuff—
light
, that’s what it was called—streamed in, and the light brought along information that her brain turned into a shape: John, John, the bastard! And a tickle in her ear, the fibers inside of her were rattling, and her brain turned the tickle into a
sound
. Was that thunder? It sounded like thunder. It was a crash that was like crystals falling from the sky, ballroom chandeliers dropping and shattering, and all the aristocrats waltzing in a frenzy, spurred on by the roar and pretty dropping bits of light—
lightning
. What was she doing again?

There was a pain throughout her body and her head, a pounding that was weak compared to the pains she’d known. And then a pain in her stomach squeezed the air from her lungs, and belatedly she realized how necessary that air stuff was. Her arms jerked back and she bent over, and hot liquid gushed from her mouth. This was another familiar sensation—vomit. She was vomiting. Her mind walked back through her proud vomit history, hair dangling in toilet bowls in bars and apartments and sometimes gutters or the middle of the street if it happened to be a self-declared holiday. She’d vomited in basements and jails and fancy offices and paper bags and once in the middle of sex, right over the poor bastard’s face. She’d panicked and punched him, and knocked him out cold, because that’s what she would have done if he’d barfed on her. And then, with a mix of regret and can’t-hold-it-in-laugher, she’d grabbed her clothes and snuck out of his apartment. When had that happened? What was she doing again?

The last of the hot, once-vodka stew made its way up her throat and out her mouth, completing its portion of the adventure. Saru wiped her mouth and stood straight. The world stopped spinning. Her eyes drew the light into more shapes, and she saw she was standing in a desert, in a ring of dead grass, and that bastard, John, was standing next to her.

John looked pretty badly beaten up—bruises and cuts across his face, dry streaks of blood across his arms and legs and chest and belly. Saru looked at herself and discovered she was equally torn and bloody, a patchwork of cuts across her skin, and when she moved it caused highways of sun-crusted blood to crack and dribble fresh. There was a throbbing in her tooth, and when she poked it with her tongue it nearly made her throw up again. She could feel a crack in the molar, feel how it was split to the root, and it sent waves of nausea back down to her stomach. John was eyeing her with something between wariness and apology.

“I’m sorry,” he said, voice cracked and hoarse. Saru wondered how long they’d been lying out there, unconscious, baking in the haze. She didn’t remember John’s skin being so red, or hers, for that matter. It hurt like burning.

“Save it,” she croaked. She wanted to spit but she didn’t have the moisture. Her head was swimming; she couldn’t think. Sense trickled in. It wasn’t his fault. He was an idiot, just as much caught up in this bullshit as she was.

“I didn’t, I don’t, I thought…” he was yammering. His eyes were wide and his lip trembled. He looked like he would cry if he had any moisture to spare.

“Let’s just get back to the plane,” Saru said.

There was a mound of silver on the horizon that she guessed was the oil station, and she started wincing her way over. The sand was hot and burned her feet. She tried to hop, but it caused the crust of her cuts to sting, and so she wound up half hopping, half limping, half dragging herself along. She looked back after about ten feet and saw John was following, dazed, shuffling, automatic. He looked like a wild hermit, or a crackhead. It was clear the pain of his physical state wasn’t getting through whatever mental bull hickey he was stuck in. Her own brain wasn’t doing much better. Everything felt weird, like her skin was too tight, and she didn’t have enough arms, and thoughts were coming from places like her eyes and her feet and the sky, and her brain was just there as a routing station, sending them to whatever dangling body part was in charge of whichever stupid thought.

“Come on!” she called back to John, but it came out like a whisper. She stopped and waited for him to shuffle next to her, and then whisper-yelled it again in his face. He just looked at her, blank. She wanted to slap him.

“John? You there, buddy?”

“What’s the point?” he asked, looking past her, to some imagined person who cared. “Why bother?” He sat down, but Saru grabbed his arm and leaned back before his ass could touch the ground. They hung there like a suspension bridge.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Saru hissed. “There’s no way you’re going to drag me out into this desert and put magic rings on my finger, and then give up just because it didn’t turn out the way you thought.”

John smirked up at her. Her grip slipped and he fell, laughing, to the ground. His laughs came like the croaks of some demon frog, and they enraged her. She kicked at him with her bare feet, and he shielded himself clumsily, laughing harder.

“Yeah! Laugh it up, asshole! Laugh it up!”

Saru screamed and kicked him in the face, and he dissolved in laughter, rolling onto his belly and pounding the ground with his fists. It seemed his laughter echoed, bounding off the distant hills, vibrating the air, shaking the world around him. The sky was growing dark and the air chilly. She kicked him harder—I’ll kick out every fucking laugh you got, buddy.

“You don’t get to give up!” Saru screamed. “I didn’t want to come here. I don’t give a shit about this place or Tessynixibitch or your fucking space war or whatever the fuck you’re doing!”

Thunder boomed from the sky, a blast that startled her to a crouch. Wind tore across the desert and whipped the dust into a frenzy, so it stung their cuts, and gagged their mouths, and grated against their eyes. Black stains of shadow dripped across the horizon. The thunder roared louder. Saru scrambled to her feet.

“Shit,” she tried to say, as the dust dove into her mouth, and she spat and coughed. She yanked John to his feet and slapped him in the face, and ran towards the pile of silver in the distance. She still held his hand, but it only took one good yank for him to follow and race ahead of her, and then she growled and sprinted after. The sky was growing darker and darker, and there was something infuriating about his naked ass—the ass that had gotten her in so much trouble—floating tauntingly a few feet ahead.

Now the sky was nearly black, and they tripped and banged against things that filled Saru with hope and dread as the plane grew nearer—and also the danger of impaling herself on a spike or breaking her toes on a cinderblock. They raced and ignored the pain of their cuts old and new, the scraping of their feet, the banging of their shins against drums and bricks and piles of old beams, whipped forward by the booming laughter of thunder above, and the wind cackling at their backs.

They reached the plane, John diving in the open door, Saru a second behind, shoving his cheeks in over to the pilot’s side, slamming (slow-gliding) the door behind her. It was quiet in the plane, the wind a whistle outside, the thunder just a groan. The wind had dragged in about a foot of sand. John slapped at the controls, and Saru wondered if the plane could even take off in these conditions. Her question was answered in seconds, as the controls hummed to life, the walls went invisible, and the junkyard wobbled away.

Saru gripped the edge of her seat, sucking in breaths. A far-off splotch of lightning spread across the sky, illuminating the clouds, slicing towards them. The walls of the plane dimmed and then went black, and still the lightning was visible. With a crackle and a spark, the walls snapped back into visibility, sensors overloaded by the light, and Saru was staring at the lightning through the windshield. John seemed to be in shock or brain dead or something. He leaned on the control column, keeping their plane in circles, so even at its leisurely pace the lightning crept closer.

“Let’s get out of here!” Saru yelled, but John didn’t seem to hear. Snarling, she shoved him aside and grabbed the control column herself. Fuck! She yanked the control column hard to the right, and the plane jolted away from the storm. She slammed the throttle, so the ground blurred, and the lightning shrank to prickles in the rear-view camera.

“You done feeling sorry for yourself?” Saru asked John. His head was buried in his hands, body tucked into a ball. “You want to take over or switch places? Hello?” She poked him and then punched him in the arm. Reluctantly he took the controls. He pressed a few buttons and the controls disappeared completely. The plane leveled out and he shriveled into sulking again.

Saru stared at John in disgust for a few minutes and then followed his lead. She rested her head on the dashboard and let her stomach settle. Her body was still doing strange things, her skin hot and then cold, her organs wandering around and jiggling at the slightest movement. She couldn’t touch anything without sensations and flashes of memories that didn’t seem to belong to her. Even the touch of her ass against the leather was causing a parade of images—tigers in domed preserves, laser-shot and skinned by hand, their skins hung up and tanned, and bent around the shape of a seat.

Saru stared out the window at the gathering dark. A smattering of pale stars shone across the sky; they made her think of freckles. Was it still the same night? No, it was a new night. They had been lying in the desert a whole day. Or had it been more time? Multiple days, or weeks, spent with (or inside of) Tess? It was too hot, suddenly, the plane was too small. She pressed her hand against the window and then smacked it. There. She needed to be there. Outside. Anywhere. It was too hot in here, too small, too suffocating. There was a pressure in her chest, an urge to cry, a knifepoint of despair worming its way to her heart. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. But she could. The stars were taunting her, leering with mean, playground faces.

Beeping filled the cockpit, shrill, demanding, and the wooden dashboard panel snapped back. Displays winked into existence, far more than had been there before, showing numbers and readings, outside camera views, and flashing red lights. John sprang to life and attacked the controls. The flashing stopped, and the beeping, but the instruments still glared their warnings. A blip had appeared on what Saru knew from the feeds to be radar, and the blip was big, bigger than what she thought was reasonable, taking up half of the display. One of the other displays blinked and thousands of lights appeared across it forming a pattern—stars or…she connected the dots in her brain and saw the shape. It was a ship, or a plane, or a castle in the sky, huge and getting bigger as it neared.

“The autopilot,” John whispered. He gave Saru a look of horror. “I wasn’t thinking. I put on the autopilot. It locked onto the location the Hathaway Security message was broadcasting and—”

“It’s okay,” Saru said, through grit teeth. “Just get us the fuck out of here.”

John jerked the control column. The stars became rays as the plane spun around, and skipped away at what Saru guessed was the speed of light. The force pressed her into her chair. She felt her skin stretch back, the blood draining to her back, her thoughts pressed back, everything in her body trying to get as far
back
as possible. The giant plane that seemed to be the cause of all this shit was shrinking with distance, and that would be a victory if the flight weren’t killing her. There was too much blood crowding in her head, it was going to pop like a tomato, brains all over the window, what a mess to clean.

Her hands smacked at John but had no power, her arms flopping like socks and sliding to dangle at her side—not enough blood maybe? It was all in her head. How did arms work anyway? It was getting harder to see, a blackness snaking around her periphery, slicing away inches of vision, and what remained was wavy and watery.

Saru swiveled her head to the side, a motion like rolling a great stone with all her might, where a display was demanding attention. It showed a plane that looked like a crow with upturned wings, and lots of little barrels and dicks that could only be guns and missiles. A fighter, she guessed, a warplane, chasing them. Could they outrun it? Could they even go any faster without turning themselves to soup? The view of the pursuing fighter switched. She saw some sort of automatic filter being applied to the image, and then a yellow beam flared from the fighter’s nose.

Their plane bucked and the lights flickered. A laser? Was the fighter going to blow them up? She wanted to laugh at this but she couldn’t get the air out of her lungs. Of all the ways to die, shot down in a plane had never made her list of likely candidates. Oh man, should’ve saved some of that champagne, could’ve crashed this bitch in style. We coulda held hands and sung a song!

The yellow beam flared from the fighter again, and their plane lights blinked out. Saru felt a tickly lightness in her groin that was almost a sex pleasure, as the plane slowed and slowed and sloooowed. The lights came back on, dimly, and the plane hovered. All the controls were black and dead. John was stabbing at them frantically.

“Shit, shit, shit!” he was yelling.

“What is?” Saru managed. Her head pounded, nausea rushing with the blood around her guts, climbing the ladder of her spine and throat. How was John not pudding? It was training or something, that control he and his friends had over their bodies. Or maybe he was just tougher.

“It is a hacking beam,” John said. “The fighter has control of our plane.”

“What do we do?” Saru asked. “We do wedowedo,” she repeated for no reason.

It was calm for a moment, floating there, bobbing in the sky, and then the plane began to move, drifting back in the direction they’d come. The plane swiveled around and she saw what looked like a city skyline perched on the horizon, lights in neat up-and-down rows like skyscrapers, blue and white and yellow and red carving rectangles and circles and stubby wings out of the darkness. Lines and highways of lights branched out like the spiral arms of a galaxy, moving in slow procession in and out of the vessel, and as they neared Saru saw these parading lights were other planes, corvettes and yachts and sedans, and even warships, all caught and hijacked and fed to the great beast in the clouds—a Hathaway Security aircraft carrier.