Mirage (8 page)

Not since Hoku had watched Aluna’s older brother Pilipo seduce an entire pod of Kampii girls had he been both so impressed and appalled at the same time.

“Why don’t we all sit and eat?” Calli said. “There’s plenty of food.”

Hoku frowned. If he tried to sit here and eat with the best-looking Equian ever, he’d probably blurt out one ridiculous thing after another.
Boys can’t live there
. What was that? How was that relevant? Was “the ocean is wet” coming next? Or how about “the sun is so bright”?

Dantai said something, and Calli laughed. Hoku looked at her sharply. Was she just being polite, or was she flirting? Dantai was older than she was, but only by a few years. And they were both the children of leaders, while he was only the son of two workers, the sort of people who gathered mussels and deboned fish and lived in a tiny nest carved into the sand-side part of the coral reef.

This was his fault. He’d been so happy being with Calli that he’d never asked what they were. Was he her boyfriend? Then again, she grew up in a place with no boys. Did she even know what that meant?

“Are you going to sit with us?” Calli asked Hoku. Did she really want him to sit? Or was that her way of telling him that he should go? Her eyes offered no hints.

He chewed on his lip. He needed to spend more time understanding people and less time worrying about tech. But not now. Now he needed to flee before he said anything else that betrayed his dull-witted brain.

“Actually, no,” he said carefully. “I’m going to look for Aluna.”

“Good idea,” Calli said quickly. Too quickly. Maybe she wanted him to leave after all. Calli added, “She’s always more levelheaded when you’re with her.”

And then a compliment. Maybe. Was she implying that he had a thing for Aluna? Because that was ridiculous. They’d go together like Great White and an octopus. Somehow he managed to find his way out of the tent without saying any of the bizarre things swimming around in his head and started to walk. He headed up a large path first, trying to stay out of the way of the bustling Equians.

Shining Moon wasn’t as big as Mirage, but Hoku liked the humble settlement a whole lot more. The tents came in bright colors, most painted with horses and stylized Equians. For some reason he didn’t mind them swooshed onto canvas in bold strokes. Smoke snaked into the sky from all over town, but it wasn’t the choking, soot-black kind. It came from cooking fires and kilns. He smelled sizzling meat and vegetables, saw Equians laughing as they stirred huge pots of soup or chopped tubers outside their tents. Unlike Mirage, this settlement felt alive and joyful, full of people who had made the desert into a home.

He turned the corner onto a smaller path and spotted a figure digging through a sack in the shade of a tent wall. He thought at first it was a Human and was excited to introduce himself. Then the figure stood, and Hoku caught the glint of sunlight off metal. Metal that shouldn’t have been anywhere near a normal face.

His heart thumped, and he stumbled backward. It wasn’t a Human; it was an
Upgrader
.

He should have called for help. He should have alerted the Equians of the danger. But all Hoku could do was stare.

The Upgrader stood two meters tall. Short white hair spiked in a line over the top of its head, and the skin around its eyes and mouth was wrinkled with age. It wore a tight, sleeveless shirt revealing arms covered in tattoos, embedded with glowing lights and miscellaneous hardware. He couldn’t even tell if it was male or female. Tools hung around the Upgrader’s belt, a dozen or more devices that Hoku didn’t recognize. Probably a dozen different weapons it used to kill its enemies.

One of the Upgrader’s arms ended in a metal stump, to which the creature was attempting to attach the strange multibladed piece of tech it had pulled out of the sack.

Hoku gasped, and the creature looked up, startled. “What are you doing here?” Hoku said. “Are you spying for Scorch? I’ll scream, and a thousand Equians will be on you in seconds.”

The Upgrader stared at him. Its mouth hung open slightly, and Hoku could see metal inside. Did it have teeth, or something worse? He started to back away.

“Aluna will be here soon, too. She fought a dozen of your kind in the HydroTek dome and killed them all.” Not technically true, but the Upgrader didn’t need to know that.

The Upgrader closed its mouth, looked back down at its arm, and continued to screw the device onto its body.

“Name’s Rollin,” the Upgrader said. Its voice rumbled mechanically, and Hoku still couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Maybe such distinctions didn’t matter when you were more metal than flesh. He decided to go with female. “Scream your dunderheaded face off, if you want,” Rollin said. “Give the four-feets a good laugh.”

Hoku had expected gouts of flame, whirring blades of death, or a lightning-fast sword plunged at his own heart. He was unprepared for apathy.

“Are you here to kill everyone? Are you working for Karl Strand?”

The device on Rollin’s hand clicked into place. The tiny blades started spinning. Hoku held his breath. Rollin pointed the arm at her own face and sighed.

It was a fan. Her implement of death turned out to be a fan.

“Hot one, yeah?” Rollin said. “Of course, they all are, out here. Gritty bit of business, living in a wasteland. But the four-feets seem to like it well enough. Figured I’d grow to love it, too.”

“So . . . you’re
not
working for Scorch and Karl Strand?” Hoku asked.

Rollin adjusted her fan-hand so the air was blowing straight up her nose. “I’m working for the Equians, as I think is obvious on account of me being here in this sun-blasted place,” she said. “Even a
basic
like you should grasp the logic.”

“I guess I thought you were all working for Karl Strand.” Even as Hoku said the words, he could see how simplistic his assumption had been.

“So everyone who wants a little glint and hum, a little whir and fizz, is evil, then?” Rollin said. “I guess you’ll tell me that all four-feets are good, and all basics like you are good, too? Add a little shimmy-pop, and we go from Human to bad?”

Hoku scratched his cheek where a line of sweat had started a slow trek down his face. “Okay, you have a point,” he said. He thought back to the City of Shifting Tides. They’d certainly had their share of thieves and killers over the years. And some of the Elders weren’t exactly “good” either. “I guess I just haven’t met any Upgraders who weren’t trying to kill me.”

Rollin stared at him, then burst out laughing. Her mechanical voice fluttered up a full octave. “Well, you have now, Basic. You have now.”

Hoku tried to laugh with her, to be polite, but only managed a strained chuckle. Then, the most wonderful thought in the world popped into his mind.

“Wait. You work for Shining Moon?” he asked, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

Rollin nodded. “I work for them now. Used to work other places, but they got too bloody for an old Gizmo like me. Nice place here, if you don’t mind the smell of horse. Lots of tech to fix and fiddle with. Grub’s no good, but everything has a price, yeah?”

Hoku blinked. An Upgrader — a
friendly
Upgrader. Right here, where they were going to be for two months until the Thunder Trials. He took a step closer, ignoring Rollin’s surprise, and held out his hands.

“Teach me,” he said. “I want to learn about tech. I want to learn everything. How that thing on your arm works, how to build a suntrap, how to fix artifacts. Everything you can teach me, I want to know!”

Rollin’s jaw hung slack again. Hoku pressed on. “I want to learn how to talk to computers, how to mold metal into the shapes I want, how to build wings so I can fly with Calli. I’ll work hard. I’ll study. I’ll do whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.” He took another step closer, until he could almost feel the air from Rollin’s fan.

“Take me on as your apprentice.” He looked in her eyes and saw that one of them was fake, an artifact with tiny diagrams dancing across the lens. His heart raced.
“Please.”

Elder Peleke had always said no. Hoku wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t old enough, wasn’t from the right kind of Kampii family. But Elder Peleke knew nothing about science and tech compared to the Above World people. This was Hoku’s chance to finally learn. To finally do what his heart and mind had been driving him to do ever since he was a youngling.

Rollin closed her mouth and looked down at her fan. The air made the hairs in her shaggy white eyebrows dance as if they were alive.

Please-oh-please-oh-please
. . .

Rollin shook her head, but when she lifted it back up to look at him, she was smiling. “Tell you what, Basic. You can start by finding me some grub. Real grub. I have special teeth for eating the grass the four-feets like, but I’ve got a craving for meat. You find me some of that, and I’ll teach your little heart to pieces.”

Hoku grinned so wide that he thought his face might split in two.

“You want mustard on that?”

A
LUNA MANAGED
to get most of the debris out of the horse’s mane and tail before it grew too restless to stand still. The whole while, she talked to it. Mostly about the City of Shifting Tides and her family. She hadn’t intended to talk about her father — she was happiest when she never even thought about him — but the desert had apparently made her soft. Sometimes she almost missed the sad, faraway look in his eyes.

“There,” Aluna said. “The worst is out. You need to stop rolling around in garbage.”

The horse snorted and lifted its chin defiantly.

“Oh, I’m only being silly,” she said quickly. “Roll around in whatever you want. There’s not a lot to do out here in the middle of nowhere, unless killing scorpions counts. One of those little desert shrimps almost got me yesterday.”

The horse lowered its head and huffed. Aluna was starting to get a sense of its moods. This one meant, “I’m still a little irked, but not really mad.”

“I need to come back here with a brush,” she said. The horse glowered. Aluna added, “If you want to be brushed, of course. I know what it’s like to be groomed against your will.”

The horse shoved her head against Aluna’s arm and nibbled on her tunic, right near a huge stain acquired somewhere during their trek from Mirage. Aluna had somehow forgotten that she, too, was filthy. The sun had crept slowly across the sky and now hung centimeters above the distant mountains. She had very little time to get back to the tent and clean herself up before the Darkest Night celebration began.

“I’ve got to go.” She dragged a hand along the horse’s shaggy neck and marveled again at the feel of its coat beneath her hand. “Come with me? There’s room in our tent. You can even sleep there if you want. Hoku and Calli won’t mind.”

The horse whinnied and stepped back nervously.

“I’m not going to force you,” Aluna said. “I won’t ever make you do something you don’t want to do. Just think about it, okay?”

The horse’s tail swished as it considered. Finally it shook its head. Still no.

Aluna considered skipping the evening’s celebration to stay with the horse. She could find a brush, or maybe even convince the horse to take her for a ride. But it would be polite to participate in the Shining Moon’s celebration — even the Kampii had special rituals for the one night a month when the moon disappeared from the sky.

Still, nothing could make her forget about Dash. The entire settlement would be enjoying the festivities tonight, and she wasn’t sure if her spirit could pretend to be that light. Maybe she could make an appearance and then slip off to find Dash. He shouldn’t be alone.

She turned to the horse. It seemed to know that Aluna was planning something; it slitted its eyes while it stared at her, much as Hoku sometimes did. The two of them would probably get along great.

“I’ll find you again,” she told the horse. “If you let me?”

The horse huffed and nodded and stamped a hoof in the sand.

Aluna bowed to it, turned, and headed back. She only turned around once, to see if the horse was following. It wasn’t. In fact, it had completely disappeared.

Equians bustled through the settlement’s streets as she made her way to the tent. She paused outside, surprised to hear laughter and a male voice that she didn’t recognize coming from inside. She shoved the flap out of the way and strode in.

Calli and an Equian male sat on either side of a picked-over tray of food.

“Oh, Aluna,” Calli said, scrambling to her feet. “Is Hoku with you? He said he was going to find you.”

The girl’s face flushed red as she babbled, but her companion remained unflustered. He stood slowly — probably the reason most Equians didn’t sit very often — and offered a bow.

“Dantai khan-son,” he said. “You must be Aluna. Calliope has spoken highly of you.”

Aluna raised an eyebrow at Calli, but the girl quickly looked away.

“Swift currents, Dantai khan-son,” Aluna said to the Equian, falling into a more formal Kampii greeting. She normally thought long hair and braids were impractical and unnecessary, but she had to admit that the Equian wore them well. “Am I interrupting . . . ?”