The Sowing (31 page)

“Sorry,” I say quickly.

“No, it’s fine.” He looks like he wants to say something else, but instead he bites into the second pear, more cautiously this time, staring at me. I keep eating, but his eyes are relentless. When he finishes, he wipes his face off on his shirtsleeve.

“Remy, I—” He stops and stares morosely at the ground.

“What?” Suddenly my heart is pounding. Why?

“I don’t know, I just—fuck.” He stands up and glances around, looking everywhere but at me. “We need to move. It’s already almost high noon. We need to get as far away from here as possible by nightfall. I don’t want to be exposed to any drones while we’re sleeping.” I stare at him as he paces.

He grabs the bow and the few arrows and stalks off, and I am left wondering what on earth he was about to say. I decide it’s best not to worry about it now. I jump up and stuff the tent into my pack—it’s practically featherweight so there’s plenty of room—and follow his footsteps into the forest.

We track through the woods slowly and quietly, keeping the sounds of the river close to our left as we head south. Soren leads, bow at the ready, looking for something to shoot at, but it’s clear neither of us are any good at this. Our footsteps crackle through the underbrush every few seconds, and anything big enough to shoot probably has the good sense to stay far away from us. I’m not convinced we’ll be able to do anything with the bow at all. I’ve never been hunting before, and even though I know Soren’s been out on a few excursions back at base, I have no idea whether he’s ever killed anything or not. I probably would have heard about it if he had.

With dark thoughts of starvation echoing through my mind, Soren and I shuffle along through the day without much in the way of words. He stops at one point and holds his fingers to his lips, staring at something I can’t quite see. He points wordlessly through the trees, and I see it—a small deer, frozen in place. Behind me I can hear the river rushing, but otherwise everything is perfectly quiet. I don’t dare to breathe. Soren silently pulls back the bow and takes aim, and I watch him, tensing every muscle in my body, hoping he will make the shot. He stretches the bow a little father and then releases the arrow. I hear the
zing
as the arrow whistles off the bowstring and my eyes jump to the animal—which is bounding away into the woods, unharmed.

I swear silently and heave a deep breath. Soren heads off dejectedly to find his arrow, and then we track back to the water.

The rest of the day passes uneventfully, and we see no more animals worth shooting at. My stomach starts to grumble more and more as we walk along. Daylight is short this time of year, and dusk settles in quickly. As the sun sinks below the treetops to our right, we know we have to stop. We’re exhausted, anyway, from the lack of sleep over the last few days and the emptiness in our bellies. We don’t want to risk being exposed to drones from the air or being eaten by wild animals in the forest, so we opt for a site just away from the riverbank, shaded by trees and tucked behind some big rocks. Soren immediately starts gathering firewood.

“What are you doing?” I demand.

“Fire, Remy. For heat.”

“You want to alert anyone in the area to our presence?”

“There’s no one around. It’ll be fine. We need to stay warm.”

I shake my head vigorously.

“No. That tent will be well-insulated and there are heating packs and blankets in our packs.” I am firm and defiant. “If we had something that needed cooking, that would be a different matter, but we’re not going to risk bringing unfriendly eyes down on us just for a little comfort.”

Soren narrows his eyes at me, frowning. After a few seconds he turns back into the forest, maybe for a last shot at finding something worth shooting at.

I finish setting up the tent—which is so simply and elegantly designed it almost pops up out of the air without any assistance—and it turns out my warnings against fire were well-justified. The tent isn’t just insulated; it also has heating fibers woven throughout. Little fibers that use thermotunneling technology, the same way Chan-Yu’s heat gel did. Not long after the tent is up, Soren and I are snuggling together again, warm and toasty, and the sky outside is plastered with stars.

Soren does a strange thing then—before he closes his eyes and rolls over, he gives me a little kiss on the forehead and says, “Goodnight, Remy,” leaving me feeling as baffled as I did this morning when I woke him up. My wonderment doesn’t last long, though. I’m asleep in seconds.

****

I wake up the next morning to a dim yellow light trickling through my eyelids. The air in my nose is humid but clean and crisp, and as I realize that Soren’s body is pressed against mine, one arm slung across my chest, an odd feeling washes over me, a brightness and an energy that takes me a few minutes to place because it’s been so long since I felt it: happiness. The rejuvenation that’s come from getting a good night’s worth of warm, undisturbed sleep is overwhelming, and I can’t resist the urge to start moving. I crawl out from under Soren’s enormous body and stretch. I open the tent flap and feel a burst of chilly air across my face, refreshing me. The light is pale in the distance but yellow, and my mood brightens even further at the prospect of another sunny day.

“Soren,” I call. He stirs inside the tent. “Soren, it’s beautiful out here. Let’s go. We need to find that boat.”

My stomach is growling, but Soren is equally energetic when he gets moving, and we pop the tent back down into its place and pack it up. We head down along the riverbank, energized from sleep and not bothering to hunt today—we’re hoping we’ll find the boat sooner rather than later. But as high noon approaches and we still haven’t found it, we’re starting to get nervous. My belly feels like a sinkhole. I’m surprised it hasn’t started to devour the rest of my body yet. I imagine eating the leaves on the trees or trying to grab a fish out of the river with my bare hands when the dark thought occurs to me that we might have somehow missed the boat.

“What if someone else took it?” I mutter anxiously to Soren as I brush against his side, briefly outpacing him. “What if we never find it?”

“It’ll be there, Remy,” he says in his calm way, as though he’s looked into the future and seen that the boat will be waiting for us.

“What if it isn’t?”

“It will be.” His tone says
hush
. I continue in silence, dark thoughts seeping into my brain again like ink spilling across paper.

But then I trip abruptly and am pitched forward into a pillow of muck. Soren bursts out into laughter when I come up, covered in mud and no doubt looking like a bog monster, until he sees what it was I tripped on: some sort of rope lying on the ground, half-buried in the mud. He stares at it for a minute and then looks out at the water, and I follow his eyes. Something about the reflection of the water doesn’t quite look right, as though there’s a piece of the river missing. Instead of offering a hand to help me up, Soren stoops over next to me and grabs the rope, and as he picks it up, the missing piece of the river shifts and changes, and a boat materializes as if out of thin air.

“Cloaking,” Soren whispers, awed. “Deactivated by touching the fibers of the rope. Otherwise, perfectly hidden.” It’s a little thing, not much bigger than six meters end-to-end, but there’s a roof over the top and a pretty little deck, and it looks to be in pristine condition. There’s even a name painted on the side:
The Zephyr.

I pull myself to my feet and head to the water’s edge, splashing my face and wiping the muck off my clothes. Soren, meanwhile, hauls on the rope, pulling the boat in closer to shore. “The anchor must weigh fifty kilos,” he complains, and I catch myself admiring the contours and shadows of his body as he works. Soon, I hear the soft scrape of the hull against the sandy river bank.

On board, we find more than we could have hoped for. A bed, a stove for cooking, filtered water. A proper toilet and an actual tiny shower. Cured meats, jars of jam, dried fruits and vegetables, cheese, even a stale loaf of bread that Soren and I tear into and smother with raspberry preserves. We declare ourselves in heaven. In fact, we eat an entire round of cheese between the two of us. There’s also a much more sophisticated map on another V-scroll. This one is in 3D; it shows us exactly where to disembark along the river and how to navigate through the woods to get to the nearest Resistance base. The only thing they didn’t think to include was some sort of communications device. I wish for anything we had a radio of some sort, something to get through to the Director and Eli and my parents and just let them know we’re alive. But there’s nothing. I wonder how they could have forgotten such a key item. Or why they chose not to provide it.

Then I see it, another note from Osprey. This one, too, is bloodstained, though this time the droplets are much bigger and more obvious.

Hope this helps. No comm. devices for fear of alerting S drones. Keep to the riverbanks & keep cloaking on when possible. –Osprey

The bloodstains are worrying. I can only hope this Osprey person is still alive. But there’s nothing we can do but to take advantage of what he’s left for us.

Soren and I immediately set about trying to figure out how to work the ship, which runs on a computerized system neither of us has ever encountered before. Instead of having an interface to talk to or give commands, there’s a slew of dials, knobs, and levers that seem to do things that have to be turned or twisted or flipped in a certain order. Soren figures out fairly quickly how to set the engines in motion and how to reel in the anchor, and we head off downriver. The rest of the controls remain a mystery, though. Eventually I realize that a few of them regulate the internal temperature of the boat. We can’t figure out which ones control the cloaking device, which is troubling. Besides the engines, that’s probably the most important thing. But there will be time for that later. Meantime, Soren cranks on the water heater, and in a half an hour I’m standing in a steaming hot shower and washing all the grime off of me from the last week—the sweat, the torture, the cold, the misery—and when I come out of the shower, I feel like a whole new person. 

23 - VALE

Winter 1, Sector Annum 106, 16h35
Gregorian Calendar: December 21
 

I shrug my dinner jacket on over my shoulders and look at myself in the mirror. I’m in my bedroom—not at my flat, but at my parents’ house, the chancellor’s estate.  My hair is still sticking out over my ears, so I drag a comb through the brambles to try to tame it. The picture of composure, elegance, and confidence. Marvelously deceptive. How fortunate I am that no one can see what thoughts lay beneath my pressed evening wear and calm visage.

I put my hand into my jacket pocket to check that it’s still there. The compass. I found it earlier this morning when I was going through my room to see if there was anything else I wanted to take. Tucked away in a box I hadn’t opened in years. It was Tai’s; before that, her grandfather’s. Tai used to carry it around like a talisman, and I always admired it. It’s a beautiful old thing, definitely pre-Famine craftsmanship. Just like Soren’s knife. It’s encased in gold, and the initials engraved on the bottom are elegant and stately. Remy gave it to me after Tai died, since I had been friends with Tai as well. She insisted Tai would have wanted me to have it, even though I protested. Of course, all that was before Remy decided she hated me.
For good reason.

 “Valerian?”

I start and turn around sharply, shoving the compass back into my pocket. My mother stands in the doorway, looking at me with an odd, furrowed expression on her face. I don’t want her to see the compass. When the Alexanders disappeared and public opinion turned against them, I knew my mother wouldn’t like it if I had an old heirloom of theirs hanging around. That’s when I hid it. And I certainly don’t want her to know I’ve got it in my pocket now.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Yeah, of course,” I say. I want to ask them about—about everything, but I’m not going to confront them until we get into the airship. That way, if things go to hell, I can get out and dodge through the throng of people at the Solstice Celebration.

I look her over—she is dressed in a floor-length, deep purple evening gown with diamonds sewn into the v-neck. Even at forty-five, she’s beautiful. I smile falsely and look into her dark brown eyes, her heavy lashes, and wonder how many crimes those lashes have batted away in the last twenty years.

“You look beautiful tonight,” I say, though I doubt she picks up on the sarcasm in my voice.

“Why, thank you, dear,” she says, coming over to kiss me on the cheek and straighten my collar. “The airship is ready.”

I look back at the mirror one last time. “I’m ready, too.”

I am ready, but my mother has no idea what I mean by that. Stashed inside my Sarus are two lightweight, waterproof backpacks with several sets of spare clothes, a week’s worth of food, a water purification bottle, our Bolts, a two-person tent, a month’s supply of mission-ready contact lenses, a Geiger counter, several lengths of thin, lightweight rope, and a hunting knife. And, of course, I’ve also got Soren’s knife, the one I took from him during the raid. Together, Miah and I have enough supplies for a week in the Wilds. With any luck, the celebrations, the speeches, the hashish, the alcohol, and the subsequent hangovers will give us at least eight hours to get as far away from the city as we can. We have no plans, no destination, and nowhere to go except out. Jeremiah wants to head for the nearest Resistance base, but I’ve been lobbying for tracking down an Outsider encampment. Either way, it doesn’t really matter. After tonight, we’ll be hunted. Traitors. Just like Remy and Soren.

My mother smiles and turns to leave, and I give my unruly hair one last pat-down before I follow her out. I take a deep breath.
Can I do this?

I trace her steps, walking behind her as we head out the back door to where the airship bay is. My heart is pounding, and I wonder if I’ll be able to bring myself to ask the questions I need to ask. Or to talk to them at all. At this point, I’m not even sure I can look them both in the eyes.