Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

“You’re clever, but you still don’t see the things in front of you when it comes to the real world outside the comfort of your ship. They won’t attack like that.” She pointed up into the air. “No—they’ll fall down out of the sky and be on your decks before anyone even understands what is happening.”

Mara tried to hold back bile bubbling up in the back of her throat. “No…” she trailed off weakly.

“Great forts with their stockades full of the strongest fighters have fallen to us when we glide out of the night.” Emi shook her head sadly. “The thicker the walls, the more complacent.”

“And these folk?”

“They had no walls. They were honey traders. Trying to build a small world for themselves at the halfway point. One of our kites spotted the clearing.” Emi shrugged, the motion somehow suggesting the rest of the sad story.

Those poor traders. Mara couldn’t stop thinking about them. This whole place was a graveyard.

Emi walked past her. Mara flinched. Emi paused and ran a finger along her cheek. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m a warrior, not a murderer. To face someone in a battle, where we each have a chance to kill each other or surrender, that is a different thing.”

“Death is death,” Mara said. And sweeping in from the sky to surprise someone, that wasn’t a noble face-to-face fight. “You want Gillem because he’s small; you’ll use him on the kites.”

All around her, Mara suddenly realized there was a lot of movement happening for the late hour: Emi’s people were breaking down the yurts. They were all getting ready to move, and packing things onto horse-drawn carts.

“You can come and join us, after the attack,” Emi said. “But I think you might prefer to keep going north. The honey traders—they were too dug in for us to attack. They might take you in.”

“You’re a waste,” Mara said to her. “You can only think to take. You can’t see the world in a way where you get something and someone else does too, you can only imagine that if you get something, someone else has to lose.”

“There’s not enough to go around,” Emi said. “It’s just the way the world is.”

She handed Mara a small bag with food in it, and then got into the sail cart.

“People like you, they destroy each other until there’s nothing left,” Mara said. “And you drag the rest of us down with you.”

“I see the hatred in your eyes. If you choose to join instead of heading north, that must be gone when I see you next. If it isn’t, your fate will be that of everyone else aboard your ship.”

Raiders in bulletproof jackets rode off into the night, and they took the kite lines with them. In the dark, the wings of the kites were shadows flitting about under the clouds.

There was no way to warn the ship.

For a moment, Mara despaired. Maybe she should take the bag and flee.

But then she took a deep breath. Think through the problem, examine all the resources at your disposal , then try something . Evgeny taught her that when repairing the ship, and he needed her help more now than ever.

Mara began ripping through the crates and bundles of supplies that Emi and her raiders had left behind, things not valuable enough for them to take with them as they wandered the country to maraud.

She stopped when she found stacks of light, beautiful paper. The same paper she’d admired and purchased for sketching.

The ship just needed to be warned. They would have a chance if they just looked up.

The Zephyr came through in the morning, trundling implacably on. There were new scars on the hull, and a few missing faces. A scout on the forecastle shot at Mara when she waved to be picked up, but Evgeny cuffed them on the side of the head and shouted for her to grab at a rope they lowered. Mara ran alongside the ship to catch it, and they hauled her aboard.

“I knew it was you that warned us,” Evgeny said, something like pride in his voice as he grabbed her shoulder. “Floating arrows in the night sky, making us look up.”

Working calmly and quickly with twigs and paper, Mara had built lanterns. Floating paper lanterns. Square, wobbly, ungainly, and with large arrows painted on their sides.

She’d hung tiny burning plates underneath to heat the air inside.

“Half of them were blown into the trees,” Mara said.

“We only needed to spot one and wonder what was in the sky,” Evgeny said.

The remains of two broken kites lay on the deck. There was blood staining the wooden frames. Mara picked up a piece of one of the wings.

“The boy who left with you?” Evgeny asked. “What did they do to him?”

“He chose to go with them. They were nice to him, he said. Where are they—the raiders?”

“They ran back into the woods. We’ll take a different route west, not come back down this way,” Evgeny told her.

“It’s good they were stopped.” Mara looked out at the trees. “People who think like them, they’re the reason we spiraled down this far.”

The Mayor-Captain came to see Mara in the evening, when all the solar lamps were taken down from where they hung on the rails to line the walls. A great honor. And Mara got to provide some valuable intelligence: She told her that the aluminum and honey were still farther north.

But Mara was already looking further ahead than that. Imagining kites, maybe bigger parasails made with silks from the southeast. They could reach the stronger winds that always lived up by the clouds. It would be more dependable than the swooping masts they used now.

And a faster ship would mean more trade. They could build on that. Bring communities closer together. Outrun any trouble.

Mara ran a finger over the kite’s cloth.

They stood in the shadow of the grand past, but a future was worth building toward.

“I can build you greater sails. We won’t be repairing an old ship; I can remake it into something better,” Mara told the Mayor-Captain. “But I want you to do something for me.”

Evgeny gaped. Mara had only been on the ship a few months. Yes, she’d saved them, but to ask such a favor was impertinent at best.

“What would you ask of me?” Shah asked.

“We need to help Legacy Mall or those people won’t be around when we come back to trade with. These raiders will destroy them. We need to rebuild more than just the ship.”

They needed to rebuild a world.

Mayor-Captain Sun Shan rested her elbows on the railing. “They can’t pay us what they promised,” she said.

“I wanted to join the Zephyr to get away from everything. But you can’t run away from the entire world, can you?” Mara said. “If we help those people, they’ll help us build another ship, using my sailing method.”

“We’ll have to stay put for a while,” Sun Shah said. “I don’t like stops.”

“Leave me to build the ship and I’ll catch up.”

Sun Shah looked at her sideways. Then grabbed her face with two hands. “First, child, before you promote yourself to captaining a ship of your own, fix my sails. Then we shall talk.”

She kissed Mara on the forehead and left. And Mara stood on the shifting deck, looking up at the masts.

Up into the sky.

Maureen F. McHughis a Hugo and Tiptree Award winner. She is the author of four novels, including China Mountain Zhang and Nekropolis . Her collection Mothers & Other Monsters was a finalist for the Story Prize, and her second collection, After the Apocalypse , was one of Publishers Weekly’ s Ten Best Books of the Year. She teaches screenwriting and new media at University of Southern California, School of Cinema Arts.