Horizon (9 page)

A
LUNA STARED
at the creature’s grinning face, her heart heavy, her hands starting to clench, and tried to remember that these people had risked themselves to save her and Calli from what had seemed like a terrible fate. She should be grateful. She should thank them. She should try to recruit them for the war. But she really just wanted to punch this one in the nose. A few months ago, she probably would have.

“Thank you,” she finally managed. “Thank you for rescuing us.”

The air filled with hoots and whistles and caws. The tree people were cheering.

The leader emitted a series of notes, a birdsong, and the crowd settled back down. Aluna had thought that the tree people’s speech seemed simplistic, but suddenly she understood: their primary language was their birdsongs. They were actually quite well-spoken for a language they probably rarely used.

“I speak as Melody,” the leader said. He motioned to the group. “They sing as Harmony. Together we are Silvae.”

Calli gasped. “Silvae! One of my Aviar teachers mentioned them once. They’re one of the secret LegendaryTek splinters!”

“There were secret splinters?” Hoku asked.

“The ones LegendaryTek hid best of all,” Calli said. “No one even knows what they are, or how many. But my teacher’s grandmother had met a Silvae.”

“How many other secret splinters are there?” Aluna asked. They could also use more people to fight against Karl Strand.

“I don’t know,” Calli said. “That’s why they’re secret.”

The Silvae leader in front of them coughed politely. “I speak as Melody,” he repeated. “You speak as?”

“I’m Aluna. Calli has the wings. Hoku and Dash are the ones dressed as Upgraders,” Aluna said.

Melody, who Aluna was almost certain was male, repeated each of their names in turn. “Glints smash and burn, tromp and crush,” he said. “Good rescue from glints. Last rescue, not as good.”

“Last rescue?” Aluna said. “What happened on the last rescue?”

Melody shook his head slowly from side to side. “Glints with flames, trees on fire. Prisoners too big. Not shaped for treetops.” He motioned to another Silvae. It dropped down to its hands and pranced around on its webbing.

“A horse,” Dash said. “Your last rescue attempt involved horses?”

“That’s why they couldn’t take Vachir,” Calli said, laying a soft hand on Aluna’s arm. “It was too dangerous.”

“No,” Melody said. “Not a horse.”

Another Silvae joined the first in its pantomime. Aluna couldn’t tell if they were wrestling or just goofing around, but whatever they were doing, it wasn’t helping.

“Equians!” Dash said. “You tried to rescue the desert horse people!”

“Yes,” Melody said, grinning. The old man was clearly enjoying this game. “Horse people. Equians. Two people, eight legs.”

“Two,” Dash said. “Was one of them dark skinned and bald with a brown horse body? The other was the same color as me, short brown hair, with a black flank?”

“Who are you talking about?” Hoku whispered. “I don’t remember anyone who looked like that from Shining Moon.”

“Because they were gone before we got there,” Aluna said. Her breathing necklace pulsed faster. “Erke and Gan. Dash’s fathers! They left Shining Moon to look for him when Dash was exiled and didn’t return.”

She looked at Dash, wanting to see her own hope reflected in his face. But Dash didn’t look at her. He stared straight ahead at Melody, his jaw clenched, and waited for his answer.

Melody whistled to his people and listened as they answered with trills and hoots of their own. “Harmony says yes,” Melody said eventually. “Horse people were as you say.”

Dash closed his eyes and exhaled. “And what happened?” he asked. “How did the rescue go badly? Did you drop them? Did you . . . break them?”

Tides’ teeth.
Aluna wanted to reach over and take his arm, to remind him that she was there if he needed her. But she could tell by the way his whole body had started to quiver that he needed answers, not kindness. If she offered comfort, it might burst the fragile bubble he’d suddenly become.

“Break?” Melody said. He tilted his head to the side and whistled again. His people chirped back. It only took two flashes for this exchange, but it felt like years. “We could not rescue horse people,” Melody said, “but we did not break them. Glints took them to join glint swarm.”

“They’re alive,” Aluna said to Dash. “The Upgraders wouldn’t have kept them alive unless Karl Strand wanted them that way. There’s still time. We’ll find them.”

“I hope you are right,” Dash said, his voice a painful mix of hope and despair. “Erke is strong. He once survived a full month in the desert by himself after a sandstorm. But Gan . . . Gan is not like that. I fear for him.” He looked at Melody. “Do you know where they are? Does
swarm
mean they are with Strand’s army?”

“Army swarm, yes, but where? Swarm is huge, sprawling, hungry,” Melody said. “Swarm started small, used to nibble at Song’s edge, a caterpillar snacking on a leaf.” He shook his head angrily. “Now swarm has grown vast. Swarm devours. Trees fall, animals flee, birds fly away. Song shrinks, curls up on itself, starts to die.”

The Silvae keened when Melody stopped speaking, their birdcalls anguished.

“Join the Equians and Aviars against Karl Strand,” Aluna said. She spoke in a loud voice, trying to sound like the leader she wanted to be, not one who’d recently watched her plans crumble around her. “Help us fight Strand and his glints. Help us save our people, and the Song. We want to stop the war before it even starts, but if it comes to fighting, you would add much strength to our side.”

“No, no, no. We have Melody and Harmony. Song needs no other voices,” Melody said. “When glints enter Song, we hinder and poke, trip and rescue. When glints leave Song — these trees, this sky, that breeze — we do not follow.” He motioned to all the people around him. “Silvae do not leave Song. Silvae do not fight wars.”

“You’re already fighting a war,” Calli said. “You’re just not acknowledging it.”

“Harmony defends Song and Song only,” Melody said. He pointed a twiggy finger at each of them. “When war is done — fields of dead, red rivers, weeping young ones — Silvae and Harmony will remain.”

Aluna clenched her fists and looked away. Melody was almost as closed-minded as her own father. The Silvae had survived on their own for hundreds of years, and even now, faced with the destruction of their beloved forest, they insisted on fighting alone. And probably dying alone, too.

But the Silvae had rescued them and had left Odd’s kludge alive. They clearly valued life. If she spent a few days here, maybe she could convince Melody to see things a different way.

“You will go now,” Melody said abruptly. “We take you where you want.”

“What? Take us where?” Calli asked.

Melody pointed east, west, south. “Wherever, but not to swarm,” he said. “You pick and we take you to Song’s edge.”

“They’ll take us to the edge of the forest in any direction we choose,” Hoku translated. “Except the one direction we want to go — toward the army.”

“Even if we got to the army, we would not pass as Upgraders without Odd and his kludge,” Dash said. “They would take Aluna and Calli and we would not be strong enough to stop them.”

Hoku plucked a twig off his shirt and broke it in half. “Dash is right. We can’t find Strand on our own, and walking into the army by ourselves would be suicide.”

“Can we just go back to the kludge?” Calli asked. “We could tell them that you and Dash stole us back from the Silvae.”

“Odd is too smart,” Hoku said. “He thinks we can fight, but he’ll know Dash and I aren’t strong enough to win you both back ourselves. I couldn’t even beat the Silvae choking me at the camp.” He rubbed the angry red welt across his neck. “And Pocket knows our secret. With us gone, there’s no reason he wouldn’t tell the kludge everything he knows.”

“I agree,” Dash said. “Odd and Mags do not fully trust us even now. If we came back without injury and with our prizes . . . they would never take us in.”

Aluna’s tail ached. She’d been balancing on it for a while, leaning on the others when she needed to, but trying to stay upright by herself. And none of them had slept yet, not after a full day of hiking through the forest and a full night of being lifted into the treetops.

“Melody, we’re too tired to travel tonight. Will you let us sleep?” she asked. “We will know which direction we want to go in the morning.”

The old Silvae’s face twisted, and Aluna feared he might say no. But then Melody mumbled, “Bad rescue,” and began calling to his people.

“But my fathers,” Dash whispered to her. “We need —”

“We need rest,” she said firmly. “We can’t be smart if we’re too exhausted to use our brains. Tomorrow we’ll figure it all out. I promise.”

“The Dawn-bringer speaks, and I will listen,” Dash said.

Aluna sensed an odd hitch in his voice. He would do as she asked now, but for how long?

Melody led them to a cluster of webbed hammocks nestled under a massive branch. “For sleep,” he said.

“Thank you, Melody,” Aluna said wearily. “And . . . please, think about what we said.”

Calli and Dash helped her hop onto the closest hammock, but she couldn’t balance, even with their help. She fell, grateful that the thick fibers of the web were softer than their strength implied.

“Are you okay?” Calli asked.

Aluna nodded. Her hammock swayed in the breeze. “I’ll be okay if I never have to move again.”

“Not for a few hours, at least,” Calli said. She put her hand on Aluna’s shoulder, then jumped easily over to the next bed.

Dash took the hammock farthest away. He always did this, always distanced himself from them when he was upset. Or — her chest tightened — was he angry with her for making them sleep? She couldn’t blame him if he was. She’d been so furious when she’d found out that Fathom had her sister, Daphine. Hoku and Dash had argued for reason and strategy, and she’d ignored them. She’d rushed off to fight her battles by herself and almost gotten them all killed.

She’d made the right decision tonight; she just hoped Dash would be able to forgive her for it.

When Aluna awoke, she found darkness still clinging to the trees and Dash sitting a meter away, cleaning the blade of his sword. Calli and Hoku were still asleep, and at least one of them was snoring.

“I did not mean to wake you,” Dash said quietly. He was wearing his Upgrader leathers, the fake metal splint around his mechanical arm still in place.

“You didn’t,” Aluna said. She could hear her pulse echoing in her ears. She sat up and dangled her tail over the edge of her bed. “Are you going somewhere?”

“Yes,” he said. He finished wiping down his sword and hit the button that retracted the slender blade into the hilt. “I’m going back to the kludge.”

“We talked about this last night,” Aluna said. “We can’t go back. They’ll never believe you and Hoku could extract us from so many Silvae.”

Dash stowed his weapon in his satchel and secured the latch. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, so he plucked a leaf from a nearby branch and began to shred it.

“They will not believe all of us could escape, but they might believe that I could,” he said. “Just me. Alone.”

Aluna swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “You . . . want to leave us?”

He looked up at her, his dark eyes barely visible in the faint light. “No, of course I do not
want
to leave . . . all of you. But think about it —”

“Your fathers,” she said.

“The location of Karl Strand.”

“And Vachir.”

“And Vachir,” Dash agreed. “I could save people we both care about and perhaps finish our mission. Your plan was a good one, Aluna. I would see it to its end.”

She looked away, pretended to study the dirt and grime stuck in her fingernails. “It wasn’t a good plan if it leads to this. To us not being together. We’re stronger as a team.”

“We are an infinitely impressive team,” Dash said. “But my fathers left the desert to save me. I must do no less for them.”

Aluna put one of her dirty hands up to her forehead and closed her eyes. Everything was unraveling so fast. Their plan was ruined. Vachir separated from the group, and now Dash. Losing him felt worse than losing her legs.

“Please tell Vachir that I would have come back for her myself,” Aluna said quietly. She felt tears form in her eyes and kept her hand in place to hide them.
Weak. Useless.
This was not how she wanted Dash to remember her.

“I will tell her, but she already knows this,” Dash said. “She trusts you with her life.” Aluna looked up in time to see a small smile form on Dash’s face. “I know how she feels.”

“I won’t ask you not to go,” Aluna said, her voice gruff.

“I know,” Dash said. “You have honor even when you wish you did not.”

He leaned over and for one endless moment, Aluna thought he might kiss her. Tides’ teeth, she wanted to kiss him. To kiss him and hold him and never let him leave her side.

She leaned toward him and pressed her forehead against his, felt his warmth soak into her skin, let wisps of his cool hair brush against her cheeks.

“Be safe,” she whispered.

“I will if you will,” he said.

She stared into his eyes and felt the rest of the world wash away. If they saw each other again, she would kiss him. When their friends were safe, when Karl Strand was gone, when there was time for such a selfish thing.

They pulled apart slowly, as if they were fighting the tide. Aluna watched him secure his bags and smooth down his hair, pleased that he seemed as flustered as she felt. When he was finally ready, she nodded just once and he was gone.