Mirage (16 page)

“I can wait on the food and water, but not the clothes,” he said. He walked around Tayan but stopped when he stood in front of Tal. “Thank you for your assistance, friend,” he said to her. Then he touched his fingers to his heart and bowed as low as she’d ever seen him bow. Tal responded by huffing air into his face. Dash smiled. “It’s good to see you again, too.”

When Dash had once again tied his hair into its accustomed tail and donned his head wrap, they set off. Slower than Aluna wanted, but probably faster than was good for Tayan.

Tayan walked between Tal and Dash, protected on both sides. Aluna floated around, first walking next to Tal, then finding her way to the other side of Dash. His mood seemed lighter now; his eyes held more spark. She guessed that surviving a death sentence might make you playful as a porpoise, even under bad circumstances.

“Thank you,” he said when she fell in beside him. “For rescuing me.”

“It wasn’t just me. Hoku was brilliant, and so was Calli,” she said. “Besides, I haven’t rescued you yet. Not entirely.”

“Yes,” he said. “You have.”

They kept walking, and despite everything, Aluna felt light as a bubble rising in the waves.

“F
INGERS!”
Rollin yelled for the third time.

Hoku pulled his hand off the sheet of metal just as the slicing light cut through it.

“You’re too far away to use the slicer. Too far away up here,” Rollin said, tapping her temple. “Do something else. Something not involving sharp, pointed, hot, or otherwise dangerous tools. Unless maybe you want to design new fingers next?”

He sighed and shut off the slicer. It was almost dusk, but Tayan and the other Equians hadn’t returned. They should have been back hours ago. A net of anxiety had fallen on the whole settlement. Everyone was talking about what might have happened.

Well, everyone except Rollin. She’d assigned Hoku a series of mindless tasks: cut strips of metal, coil wire, uncoil wire, solder strips of metal back together. She didn’t seem to care about Tayan or Dash or much of anything besides the tech in her tent. But he had to admit, he’d have gone wild with worry if she hadn’t kept him so busy.

Rollin stood hunched at the desk dedicated to “fiddly bits and micro-making”— the place where she worked on tiny tech. Once she started a new project, she could focus on it for days. He made sure to bring her food and water when she got like that. And to sneak as many looks over her shoulder as he could.

Now, released from his senseless slicing duties, he surveyed the room, looking for something harmless to occupy his time. He spotted a squat machine covered in loose wires hunkered at the back of a table. It had the same configuration of knobs that Calli’s radio had, plus a keyboard, a viewscreen, and a few more knobs of various shapes and sizes. Was it some sort of communication device?

He made a path to the table by moving three sacks of miscellaneous parts, a humming machine with no apparent purpose, and a stack of old, crumbly suntraps. The wires strewn across the machine were buried in sand and dust and seemed impossibly knotted. He lifted the whole mess of them off the artifact and dropped them to the floor.

“Commbox,” Rollin said without looking up from her work. “Most of the settlements got ’em. Smaller units than those in the big cities. Not that useful when you only have one. Talking to yourself gets old, yeah?” She laughed at her own joke. Apparently that part of talking to yourself
never
got old.

“So it works?” He reached over and twisted a knob. The commbox whirred to life, sputtered, and choked back to silence.

“Nope,” Rollin said.

He rolled his eyes. She loved to answer his questions when he already knew the answer. He was probably supposed to learn to stop asking dumb questions that way, but so far, it hadn’t worked.

A quick examination of the commbox led him to a series of tiny screws keeping the faceplate in place. He headed back into the chaos to look for a screwdriver small enough to fit.

A shadow fell across the tent’s entrance flap. “It’s Calli. May I come in?”

Hoku smiled. Hearing Calli’s voice still did that to him.

Rollin huffed. “Why not? The basic’s no good to me or himself today. Not without a brain.”

Calli lifted the flap and entered. “Oh, it’s very . . . full . . . in here.” She tried to snug her wings to her back, but it was no use. If she moved around too much, she’d be knocking gizmos off their ceiling hooks and toppling them off their precarious stacks.

“Hey,” Hoku said. He tried to make it no big deal. That’s what Aluna’s brothers always did — they pretended they didn’t care one way or another if the girl they liked paid attention to them.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Calli said. “The khan has sent out a search party. I . . . thought you should know that I told them what direction to look.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad they’re doing something. I feel so useless.”

Rollin snorted.

“What are you working on?” Calli asked, pointing at the newly visible artifact. “Looks like a commbox. We have one of those at Skyfeather’s Landing.”

“You do? Do you know how it works? Can you help me fix it?”
Barnacles
. He’d channeled Aluna’s brothers for approximately thirty seconds before lapsing back into himself.

“Ours hasn’t needed fixing since I’ve been alive,” Calli said. “We only turned it on a few times a year, to talk to the Aviar colony in Talon’s Peak. But it can’t be much different from my radio, and I got that working by myself.”

“Don’t you have to get back to Dantai?” Hoku asked. He hadn’t meant the question to sound so . . . well, the way it sounded — equal parts jealous and afraid.

Calli tilted her head, clearly uncertain about what his question really meant. “Dantai and most of the others are preparing for the Thunder Trials. Even the khan is on the practice field — although I wouldn’t want to be his sparring partner. Not until Tayan returns.”

Rollin turned. “The khan fights? At his age? Ridiculous! What fresh foolishness is this?”

“Dantai and Tayan were supposed to champion Shining Moon in the Thunder Trials, at least in the warrior arts. But Weaver Sokhor convinced the council that it would better display their strength, and bring more honor to the herd, if the khan himself took up his sword.”

“Weaver Sokhor wants the khan dead,” Hoku said. “No one will argue if High Khan Onggur does it in the middle of a contest.”

“Hold your tongue, or someone will chop it out for you,” Rollin hissed. “What you say is true, and all the more dangerous for being so. Think the thoughts, boy, but don’t let them reach your mouth.”

Hoku’s face flushed with heat, but he only nodded.

Calli lowered her voice when she spoke again. “I heard Dantai say that some of the messenger birds are missing. I wonder . . . if a certain weaver might already be in contact with the High Khan or Scorch.”

Rollin sighed. “That’s not much better, girl, but points for effort. Don’t either of you go into spying.” She turned back to her fiddly-bits work. “Truth has a way of showing itself. Suppose we’ll see for ourselves soon enough.” And then Rollin fell back into her work. She may as well have disappeared off the face of the Above World, for all she paid attention after that.

“Come on,” Hoku said. “I’ve got a screwdriver. Let’s see what’s inside the commbox.”

Calli nodded and carefully maneuvered to the table. As they bent to work, Hoku remembered their time together at Skyfeather’s Landing, when he’d just discovered the immense possibilities of Above World tech and Calli had been there to get him started down the right paths. For the first time the entire day, his body relaxed. Aluna was out there somewhere, alive. He knew it. And if she was alive, there was a good chance that Dash and Tayan were, too. He needed to let go of the worry. To focus on the things he could control. He needed to learn as much about tech and artifact-making as he could. He and Calli needed to figure out the bizarre twists and turns of Shining Moon politics. And together, they had to find some way to help Shining Moon beat Red Sky in the Thunder Trials, so they could kick Scorch and Karl Strand out of the desert.

But for now he let himself be in the moment. He had tech at his fingertips, just itching to be fiddled with, and he had Calli at his side — talking fast, biting her lip, being brilliant, and smelling like feathers and sunshine, no matter what time of day it was. He’d been so uncertain of everything since they got to Shining Moon, so sure Dantai would sweep Calli away with his muscles and braids and “I know what it’s like to be a leader” talk.

And maybe he still would. But that didn’t change what was important between Hoku and Calli. That didn’t hurt their friendship at all. Nothing could.

He finished with the last screw, and Calli helped him lift the face off the commbox. They set it down behind them on the wobbly stack of cracked suntraps.

Calli began pointing at parts immediately. “That’s the transmitter, I’m almost positive,” she said. “And this is the receiver. Or at least it should be. The transmitter sends our voices to an ancient artifact floating in the sky, which bounces them to other places. The receiver is our ears. It hears whatever someone else sends to the sky artifact. We should check for loose wires first — that would be the easiest problem to fix. And then we should double-check the power source. If it’s spotty, it could be causing a short when you turn it on. . . .”

He smiled and dug into the tech, testing wires and pushing parts more firmly into place. He interrupted Calli with a few ideas of his own but in general was happy to let her voice wash over him like waves at high tide.

I
T TOOK HOKU AND CALLI
three days to get the commbox working. It turned on and off when they wanted it to, and they were able to talk into its audio input and hear their voices on Calli’s radio when they aligned the frequencies. Whether it worked across vast distances would remain a mystery.

Calli shut the machine off with a sigh. “Better save the energy for something more useful.”

“That’s thinking with your head. Good bird,” Rollin said.

“No. Leave it on,” Hoku said. “There’s almost no chance we’ll hear anything, but if it’s off, that chance drops to zero. It’s worth the energy. I’ll go without a fan, or whatever I need to. But please, leave it on.” He reached over and turned the knob. The dull hum of fuzzy noise made him breathe easier.

Rollin put down her tools and looked up at him. “That
sounds
like thinking with your head, but it’s really thinking with your heart.”

Hoku stuck out his chin. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” she said with a shrug. “Just a rare thing to see — thought I ought to point it out.”

Three days. The search parties had come back covered in sweat, half dead from dehydration. The iron trail that Tayan left had long since been blown away, but it didn’t matter. Aluna had the only metal scanner calibrated for iron. Without it, the searchers had no chance. It was like trying to find a single specific shell on the vast ocean floor.

“Aluna and Dash are okay,” Calli said for maybe the twentieth time. “They’re both warriors. They’re both smart. They’ll find a way to survive.” She didn’t even look at him when she said it. At this point, he figured she was mostly trying to convince herself.

Hoku knew that Aluna was still alive. She’d faced far worse than a desolate landscape and some sun before now. Anyone who grew up with a father like hers could handle adversity. Her family practically fed on it. If he ever made it back to the City of Shifting Tides, he’d be sure to thank Elder Kapono, Daphine, and every single one of Aluna’s annoying brothers.

Calli made a stool out of the dead suntraps and began slowly shifting through frequencies on the commbox. It whined and keened in the process, but Hoku found the noise soothing. They may not be racing across the desert on four hooves, but they were doing something. They were looking.

He pulled out a small sack with the project he’d been working on — an arm shield. Ever since Rollin’s first lesson, when Hoku had refused to make a weapon, the idea for this shield had been swirling around in his brain. If he could get it to work, it could change the course of a whole fight.