Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

But after Mara had talked about honey, Mayor-Captain Sun Shah had given Mara a sail cart and told her to ride ahead to find who had made those cans.

And she had promised to do something the Zephyr almost never did: turn around and follow an unfamiliar road.

Emi took them into one of the larger yurts and gave them some kind of beef stew from a pot simmering away by a fire in the heart of the round, tent-like building. The walls were made out of a thick wool, but panels had been opened to allow a steady breeze to waft through. It carried the smell of charred wood and wetness.

Gillem all but drank the stew from his bowl, and Emi smiled slightly to see it.

“Growing boys,” she said to Mara. “Where do they put it all?”

There were fur-lined blankets for them to sleep in, and Emi made sure Gillem was tucked away. Mara waited, and watched the open panels move this way and that in the wind.

She felt very alone in the dark, far from the familiar creak of the Zephyr .

“I see you watching me,” Emi said softly in the dark. She sat by the embers of the cook fire. “You can leave, if you want. Go to your ship. I won’t stop you.”

“Some of your people looked angry.”

“Can you blame them? We’re still not sure how badly your fire set us back. All of our hard work, our planning for the winter… it might be all for naught.”

Mara looked down and bit her lip, a prickle of shame and fear passing through her.

“I didn’t mean to…” she trailed off.

“You have a quick mind,” Emi said. “You were in chains and scared. I should have paid closer attention, but my mind was elsewhere.”

“On what?” Mara asked.

But while Emi had thus far been quite open with Mara, the woman kept her troubled thoughts to herself, instead watching the coals. She poured water over the last of them and listened to the hiss as the mild red light ebbed away.

“Kites ,” Gillem said.

Mara blinked awake and scrabbled up to her feet. “What?”

“They’re up on kites, like people in the planes of old that you told me about,” Gillem said. He tugged on her hand. “Come see!”

Mara followed him outside, shielding her eyes with an open palm, and looked. Three children, not much larger than Gillem, hung in harnesses underneath massive kites just a few feet over the ground. They bucked hard against wires on the ground held by several of the adults of the community.

The two of them watched the kite flyers rise up into the air. A hundred feet. Two. Further and further. Higher.

“Why are they doing that?” Mara asked.

“They said they were looking for trading parties. And the Zephyr .”

But they knew where the ship was coming from, Mara thought; why did they need to see it? There was a puzzle here she felt she needed to solve, yet she didn’t know what the pieces even were .

She watched the tiny figures fly far overhead.

“Aren’t they amazing?” Gillem gasped.

“They are,” Mara agreed, letting go of the puzzle in the back of her mind to marvel at the kites. The wind that far up was strong, so strong the wire cables anchoring them to the ground buzzed taut.

Emi doted on Gillem for the next few days, making sure he had sweets and friends to play with. Brake-boys had time to themselves, and lessons on the deck from an old teacher. But here he got to run in the woods, splash in the stream, play chase.

“They’re nice to me,” he told her. “Not grumpy like you. And this is nicer than a brake box.”

She did not begrudge the boy his days of fun. In fact, she felt she could almost relax a little herself. Only some of the villagers’ food had been damaged—a rare stroke of luck.

“We will add foraging to our daily routine and make some trades to resupply what we lost,” Emi said. “Soon your ship will arrive. Our flyers will let us know when we spot it.”

Before long, Mara would be back on the deck. A sailor once more. She glanced up at the kites as Emi walked away from them.

“You know they have bigger kites packed away,” Gillem whispered conspiratorially with a grin. “We saw them when we were playing hide and seek.”

And then the pieces all fell together, like when she was playing with the cogs and springs of a machine and suddenly all the components lined up as they were supposed to. Mara could see it all.

Her mouth dried, and her knees buckled.

Mara put an arm around Gillem. “We have to run.”

“ What?”

“Run. We need to run. Now. To warn the Zephyr .”

“That’s crazy!” Gillem whined. “They fed us. They gave us a warm place to sleep. They did all that even after you burned their buildings down. These people are nice .”

Mara grabbed Gillem’s hands. “They’re nice. So nice. And so were my parents when they locked me up to try and force me to marry the ‘right’ person. They were nice when they stopped me when I came of age from ever going to the community library, as it was time for me to focus on my new role as a wife and mother to be. Do you understand?”

Gillem shook his head.

Mara leaned down to look him in the eye. “After the Vikings raided villages they went home, and they hugged their wives and kissed their children. They were nice. Serial killers, the old chronicles said they were always nice. Good isn’t the same thing as nice , Gillem. Emi is a raider. Everyone here is a raider.”

“You can’t know that.” Gillem looked at her with wide eyes.

“See all the yurts?” That had been eating at her since they’d arrived. “They’re light, packable, and right next to the heavy buildings made of lumber. And those were built to last, to stand here and never go away.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“ Yes it does ,” Mara hissed, and cursed the boy silently; Gillem had given up so much to them already. “Get ready, we need to leave tonight. Be ready.”

Fortunately Emi and her people had been so focused on being nice, they had left the camp sufficiently unguarded that Mara thought they’d be able to slip away easily.

“But I don’t want to leave,” Gillem protested.

“Be. Ready.”

There was an old sail cart in the corner of the village. Mara had paid close attention to where the road began, and where the sun had been. She knew which way to run, as well as any navigationist back on the ship.

Gillem followed her to it, nervous.

“You are not just a sailor,” Emi said, making them both jump. She held out a hand, and Gillem left Mara to go stand by Emi.

“Gillem,” Mara said softly.

Gillem couldn’t meet her eyes. He stood, half turned toward Emi, shuffling his feet awkwardly in the dirt.

“He told me everything.” Emi put a hand on Gillem’s head. “Such a good, trusting boy. Go on Gillem, go back to the tent.”

Gillem looked at Mara, then Emi, and then ran back to the tent.

Mara clenched her jaw. “Will you put me in chains again, then?”

“The last time I did that you burned down the buildings.” Emi folded her arms and leaned against the sail cart.

Mara swallowed. This was it. They were going to kill her. “Will you be good to Gillem?” she asked, her voice cracking slightly.

“He’s just a boy, of course we will.”

“You can’t take the ship. It’s too big, too well guarded. You’ll dash yourselves against the hull and die there. Even the way you hide to ambush folk, like you were doing back alongside the road, that won’t help you.”

She threw out her defiance with each word. But none of it made Emi even blink.