The Sowing (30 page)

“Shoreline,” he says. “Not far off.” I follow his finger and see the trees arising out of the misty morning, and I can dimly make out the hovercraft waiting to cart the goods the rest of the way by land.

“Why do we have to swim?” I ask, miffed and not enthusiastic about the idea of getting back into the frigid water.

“Would you rather walk down the loading bay?” Chan-Yu asks without even looking at me. I frown. I don’t want to admit it, but he’s right. There’s no way for us to get off the boat without the crewmembers noticing us, especially now that it’s broad daylight. I avert my eyes out to the sea, glaring at nothing.  The idea of getting wet and cold all over again is not appealing, but we don’t have a choice. I strip off my clothes and stuff them in my pack like last time, and in minutes Soren and I are naked—again—and ready to go.

“Now,” Chan-Yu says, “it’s time.” Then he abruptly stands up off the edge of the lifeboat and hops up and into the air, over the side of the boat. Soren and I rush to the side, watching as Chan-Yu drops soundlessly into the water. There’s a moment of silence between us as we contemplate this.

“What the fuck? Do I have to do that, too?” Chan-Yu’s head bobs to the surface, and he waves at us to follow him in.

“Looks like,” Soren responds.

“Why can’t we take the damn ladder?” I grump.

“Because then we’d have to get back on the deck, Remy,” Soren says condescendingly. “Would you like to alert the crewmembers to our presence? It’s broad daylight. They’d catch us in an instant.”

Shit.

“You go first,” Soren says. “That way I can push you if you need an extra incentive.”

“Oh, please,” I sniff putting every ounce of disdain I can muster into that
please
. “I don’t need a push.” But inside my heart is pounding so fast I wonder if I’m going to go into cardiac arrest. I probably will when I hit the water. It’s got to be at least a ten-meter drop. I’ve never jumped from anything nearly this high without a parachute or a magnetic line in my hands. The waves are roiling and foamy, and I’m feeling sick to my stomach just thinking about it. I shoulder my pack ferociously, determined not to be a coward in front of Soren and Chan-Yu. I stand on the edge of the lifeboat and take a deep breath, trying not to think about how high up we are, how strong the wind is, or how cold the water will be. Would Tai have been able to do this? I wonder.
Tai was always adventurous. She would have loved it. She would have done it in a second.
I close my eyes.
Could Vale do it? Can I do it?

“Oh, for God’s sake, Remy,” Soren swears exasperatedly. I feel a light push in the small of my back and I yelp as I lose my balance and fall off. Everything in the world comes to an abrupt halt as I try to right myself, to make sure I don’t fall flat against the surface of the water. I flip over in the air and narrow myself into a dive. The water approaches slowly at first and then faster and faster, too fast and then finally with a sharp
pop
everything is icy and dark.

****

I could have killed him.

When he came up for air, I wanted to drown him, but he was laughing so hard he got a stitch in his side, and I actually had to swim over to him to prevent him from drowning. So instead of killing him, I guess I saved him, but we decided to call it even.

We followed Chan-Yu as we swam towards the beach, but then all hell broke loose. The sirens on the ship started blaring and the emergency lights started flashing. We weren’t sure if they had spotted us or if something else went wrong, but either way we panicked. Chan-Yu shouted something at us about the coordinates, but we couldn’t hear him over the waves and the sirens. He took off swimming towards the shoreline, and neither Soren nor I could keep up with him. We watched helplessly as he sprinted towards the port, knowing we couldn’t—and shouldn’t—follow him in that direction. He disappeared from view and we haven’t seen him since.

Now, I can barely feel my feet, my fingers are numb, and I can’t stop shivering. But I’m warming up as we move, running in a half crouch, trying to make ourselves less visible in the light of day. We stopped long enough to slip on our clothes, and then took off again. Our black clothes were helpful last night, but now we stick out against the dense vegetation and patches of sand. We don’t know if they’re following us or not, but there’s enough commotion in the distance that we know we can’t stop moving. We keep running, tracking along the water’s edge, hoping the waves will wash away our footprints. The beach is littered with driftwood and the detritus of abandoned boats that have washed ashore over the years. Keeping the beaches clean isn’t a priority on this side of the lake. Besides the few harbors near the factory towns and Farms, it’s been a no-man’s land for a hundred years.

We hear yelling carrying over the water, and a dog barks in the distance. A boom echoes out, and we drop to the ground, panicked. Quiet. Breathing hard. The dog barks again, and we look at each other.

“Chan-Yu?” I whisper.

He stares into the distance. “If it is, we can’t help him.”

I grab his arm. “Maybe he’s helping us.”

He scrambles to his knees and then crouches in the sand. “If he’s buying us time, then we better not disappoint. You ready to run?”

“Yeah. But where do we go?” I whisper. The whining sirens are still audible in the distance—we’re not far enough away. Who knows when they will come upon us and drag us back to the capital, to Corine’s waiting arms and Philip’s instruments of torture? Or will they just execute us on the spot?

“The coordinates,” Soren responds. “Whatever they are, they sound important. Get out the v-scroll.”

I pull out the small, thin filament paper and unroll it. It’s blank. I stare at it for a few seconds as Soren and I lie in the mud and wait to see if something will happen. When nothing changes and the paper remains stubbornly empty, I swear.

“Why couldn’t he have just told us the damn coordinates?” I mutter, but as the words slip out my mouth, the scroll animates and the nanoparticles begin rearranging themselves, dispersing throughout the paper in a seemingly random pattern. It must have been voice activated, I realize, and I wonder how Chan-Yu got a sample of my vocal pattern to code to the v-scroll. After a few seconds, the picture comes into focus. Chan-Yu’s “coordinates” don’t look anything like coordinates at all. It’s a map. There’s the port behind us, along with the lakeshore, a sketch of the forest terrain at our side, what appears to be a river, and a spot along the river marked by the word OSPREY, whatever that means. The name sounds ominous. But it’s the only definitive marking on the map, aside from the port, and it looks like our destination.

“Is that where we need to go?” Soren asks.

“I guess. Looks like it’s our only choice. We need to get moving before they send drones up and down the coastline.” Soren nods his assent. I scan the v-scroll quickly to make sure I know where we’re going, and then roll it up and stuff it back into my pack. I seal it up and together we head down along the coast in the direction of the Osprey.

****

Several kilometers later, we arrive at the mouth of a river. We’d long since given up running, as the fatigue from the night before came back with a fury and the adrenaline of the chase dissipated. The noises of pursuit have faded completely. If Chan-Yu helped to provide a diversion, he’d done his job well. There’s no way to tell if we’re being followed by drones, but I suppose if we were, we’d already be dead.

According to the map, the Osprey site is downriver a ways, and if the map is at all to scale, it’s probably at least fifteen kilometers further. My heart sinks. I’m starving, and Soren looks equally downtrodden. We haven’t eaten anything but Chan-Yu’s nut bars in close to three days now.

“We have to eat something,” he says quietly.

“Know how to fish?” I mutter. An idea suddenly occurs to me. I shrug my pack off my back and break the watertight seal, checking to see if Chan-Yu put any food in there for us. There’s two more nut bars, several full water bottles, and a small pocketknife, but much to my dismay, that’s all there is. Soren’s pack is similarly equipped. With a sinking heart, I unwrap the bars and devour them both in seconds. I crack open one of the water bottles and drain half of it as Soren does the same. It feels amazing to have something in my stomach, but when I’m done, I realize how ravenous I really am.

“Didn’t he know how hungry we’d be?” I grumble.

“Maybe he only had so much Outsider food, and he knew we wouldn’t eat anything from the Sector. He probably gave us all he had.”

That thought doesn’t make me any happier—or less hungry.

“Maybe there’ll be food waiting at the Osprey?” Soren says hopefully.

Maybe someone’s waiting to kill us at the Osprey,
I think, but I recognize that thought as irrational and push it away. “I wish you had your knife.” The hunger is overpowering.

“Even if I did, we can’t make a fire here; we’re still too close to the port. So we couldn’t eat anything I killed. We need to keep going. Let’s find out what’s at the Osprey.”

The bars give us enough energy to keep moving, and we trudge along in silence, chilly but grateful for the sun’s warmth. I keep my eyes on the ground, looking for anything that might be edible but finding nothing worthwhile.

I find myself stumbling, hazy-eyed, aimlessly following Soren’s lead. The minutes slide by in a fog, slowly turning into hours. Every step is like lifting a fifty-kilo weight attached to my feet, and by the time the sun is high in the sky, I might as well be delirious. I hope I don’t start hallucinating again. That last time didn’t turn out so well for us. But then again, maybe it did—after all, if Corine didn’t want us dead, Chan-Yu might never have rescued us and we might still be stuck in that cell, starving and at the mercy of Philip and that ugly, old general. If we were still there, though, maybe they would have fed us by now.

“Remy.” Soren’s voice jolts me back to the present. “I think this is it.” He’s staring at the v-scroll—I don’t remember giving it to him—and looking up and around every few seconds. I survey the little patch of river we’re in. “This looks like the notch in the river the map indicates. There are three sharp bends before the Osprey site, and we’ve passed three bends.” He’s been counting? I come over to his side, and he holds the v-scroll down a little lower so I can see it. Standing at his side, it surprises me how tall he is. “I think this is where we are.” He taps the map where the Osprey site is.

“Okay. So what’s here?” He shrugs.

“I don’t know. Let’s have a look around; see if we can find anything.”

He starts walking away from the river a bit, squinting at things on the ground and looking up into the trees. I have no idea what he’s looking for, but I follow suit, peering around and exploring the spot. I examine various pieces of driftwood, the lapping water against the riverbank, and the stones that litter the water’s edge. I pace downstream a bit, squinting at the trees, when something out of place catches my eye. It’s grey and stony and blends in perfectly with the rock that it’s perched on, but it looks more like paper. I edge closer and look at it hesitantly, afraid to touch it in case it triggers a bomb or something. It’s nothing like the color of a normal v-scroll, but the fibers look the same, and it’s certainly too thin and too regular to be anything found in nature. Tiny flecks of red dot the filament—blood?

“Hey, Soren,” I shout. “Check this out.” He’s at my side in seconds, and together we examine the strange paper. “Should we touch it?” I ask nervously.

“Why not?” he says, and lifts the rock that’s tamping it down, preventing it from blowing away. As he does, just like with Chan-Yu’s v-scroll, the fibers and filaments come to life. This time words, not images, materialize on the map.

To the Resistance fugitives,

I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you in person. Chan-Yu instructed me to prepare the next stage for your journey, and though I hoped to be able to do that personally, that is not to be. The boat I had planned to bring for you is more than a day’s journey by foot downriver, but now you have no choice. Follow the river and you’ll find the boat. Once you’re there, the river will lead you safely down in the direction of the nearest Resistance base. There’s a more-detailed map on the boat that will help you navigate there. The best I’ve been able to do for you is leave a tent and a bow in the hopes that one will provide shelter and the other food.

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do more.

Best of luck. I hope we may meet sometime in the future.

Osprey

“What kind of a name is Osprey?”

Is that
really
Soren’s first thought? “Who cares?” I hiss. “Let’s find the bow.” Food is all I can think about.

We start to canvass the area, but this time the search is easy. A little ways up, hidden behind an enormous tree, is a small pack containing the tent and a few pears. Leaning against the tree next to it is a beautiful wood-carved bow, a magnificent thing that I hope desperately Soren can use. I’ve only ever used the composite ones we practiced with back at base, and those look completely different. There are only three arrows, so we’ll have to be careful not to lose them.

Soren suggests we keep tracking downriver so we don’t waste time finding this boat. My thoughts are on food, and I insist we try to at least kill something before we continue.

“No. We don’t have time. Let’s eat these and keep going; we don’t have time to hang out and hunt.”

I am silent. He’s right. But I’m hungry.

Soren hands me a pear. I bite into it hungrily; it is perfectly ripe and juice spurts out and trickles down my wrist. After one particularly noisy slurp, I briefly avert my attention from my own fruit and turn to look at him. He has juice all over his chin and mouth and it’s dripping down onto his jaw. I can’t help but break out into laughter.

“What?” he demands.

“You look ridiculous. You’re covered in pear juice. There’s even a seed stuck to your chin,” I laugh, and reach to flick it off. He recoils at first from the unexpected gesture, but I get my fingertips to the seed and gently wipe it off. He looks at me with an expression so peculiar that I worry I’ve offended him.