Unknown - The_Growing_589064

With an effort she pulls herself back to the present. Warnings, she reminds herself, come precisely because they can be heeded, because evil can be averted. She forces her to eat her supper, while the conversation flows past her—her father and Maggie now in earnest discussion of a trade agreement between the Base and the Rivers settlement, Manny and Tacoma answering questions about the relative benefits of reclaiming a half-dozen more windmills versus attempting to reconnect the grid to serve both the Base and Rapid City. Kirsten, beside her, touches her arm briefly. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, sure, I just—”

“Weren’t there for a bit,” Kirsten completes her sentence for her, softly.

“It happens. I’m fine.” Koda smiles at Kirsten, and at her father, meeting his concerned gaze again, letting him see that she is with them again.

His eyes promise a later talk, but for the moment the world slips back into normality around her. Kirsten’s hand brushes hers under the table, deliberately, and Koda looks up to catch the faint blush suffusing the other woman’s face. Like her father’s, the green eyes say later.

And there will be a later. I swear it.

Deliberately, Koda’s fingers close about Kirsten’s, holding fast for all their lives and future.

*

The hall clock chimes nine as Dakota slips quietly through the door. Her patients are all settled for the night, meds given, dressings changed as needed. The kitchen and the rooms she can see beyond stand dark; a sense of solitude, comfortable after the crowding of the evening, lies over the house. Wanblee Wapka has gone to bunk with Manny and Tacoma in the BOQ, and to have a look at how his son and nephew are healing. Maggie, as she has done almost every night for the last couple weeks, has announced her intention of working late. In the last few weeks, Hart has grown increasingly remote, and almost all of the day-to-day running of the Base has fallen to the Colonel and one or two junior field officers. Lately she has been home only to eat, to shower and change, returning to her office after supper to coordinate supplies, assign personnel, worry about the android forces still lurking beyond their perimeter and eventually catch a few hours’ sleep on a field cot set up in the narrow space between desk and window. Part of the change is the weight of command; another, equal, part, Dakota suspects, is tact. With Maggie out for the night, Koda has a room and a bed that she need not share. Or that she can share, if she chooses, without intrusion. That has not become an issue yet; Kirsten still sleeps and works in the small guest room, sorting through endless strings of code in search of the sequence that will, finally and permanently, incapacitate the droids. She is there now, her presence and Asi’s small eddies in Koda’s awareness.

The air has grown chill, and Koda moves to close the window over the sink. The breeze stirs the curtains against her face as she reaches for the sash, and on it comes the sound of frogs singing by the stream that flows through the woods, point counterpoint to the soft whinnying of a screech owl. Stars spill across the sky, undimmed by the customary glare of the city or the Base, a white blaze that, were it not for those few lamps burning in windows and the occasional sweep of headlights, might cast shadows across the back yard. Sweet and familiar, the night air carries the smell of water and wet earth and green things growing.

Normal. Since the uprising began, this is the closest an evening has come to normal.

There is a restlessness in her tonight, born of the premonition of impending loss; born, too, of this night poised on the edge of spring. If she were home, she would take Wakinyan Luta away from his mares for an hour and ride until she tired. But she is not home, has no idea when she will ever be home again. Slowly she pulls the window down, shutting out the night and its voices that call to her. There is work to be done here and now.

Flicking on the light, she opens the large box Wanblee Wapka has left standing by the hall door. On top lie several layers of clothes: underwear, socks, shirts, jeans, all pressed and neatly folded. Below them are half a dozen books, obviously chosen carefully from the shelves of her own home: Paz’ biography of Sor Juana de la Cruz, in translation; a copy of the Iliad whose front cover buckles loosely where it joins the spine; a slim book of poetry in German. Kneeling by the box, her clothes set neatly on the dining chairs, she lets the last book fall open in her hand, to the introductory poem. Its sparse language evokes the vast spaces of the Central European plain, the figures of an Ice Age tribe huddled around the fire against the unseen things of the night, a teller of tales lingering at the edge, making the magic of words only to fade again into the darkness and the empty land.

Am rande hocktder Maerchenerzaehler. . ..

Her eyes skim the page to the end:

Heiss willkommen den Fremden.Du wirst ein Fremder sein.Bald.

Warmly welcome the stranger.You will be a stranger.Soon.

The sound of soft footsteps comes to her from the corridor. “Dakota? Is that you?”

“I’m here. In the kitchen.” She closes the book and sets it on the stack of clothing to be carried to what is now her room.

Kirsten appears in the doorway, her glasses shoved up onto the top of her head, her eyes weary. Koda glances up at her, taking in the slump of her shoulders, the small lines at the corners of her mouth. To Dakota, it is one of the sweetest sights she’s ever seen. Even dog-tired, Kirsten has an aura of strength and vitality about her that speaks deeply to Koda’s soul. A powerful, intense intelligence, honed to a razor’s edge, blazes even from tired eyes. The innate goodness within, and the beauty without, shine rose and gold, like the setting sun on a warm summer’s day. She wonders, briefly, why it has taken her so long to truly see this—or if not to see, then to admit. “You need a break,” she says aloud, shrugging mental shoulders over questions she might not ever be able to answer.

“I feel like my damned neck’s already broken.” Kirsten scrubs her knuckles over the tight muscles running from her shoulders up to the back of her head. “Those techs Maggie lent me are worth their weight in microchips, but looking for a micron sized needle in a planet sized haystack is what headaches are made of. When it gets like this I’m afraid I’m going to look straight at the smoking gun and not recognize it. And the whole world will slip back to living in caves and hunting with bone spears because I’m too tired to know what I’m looking at.” She smiles, then, a sparkle of life coming to beautiful jade eyes. “I’m optimistic, though. We’re making damn good progress. If we’re lucky, and the creek don’t rise, as my dad used to say, we might have some preliminary data within the next couple of days.”

“Good news for sure. How about the search for the mole? Any progress?”

Kirsten’s smile fades. “No. Maggie’s up in arms, professionally, of course, but her job’s even harder than mine, I’m afraid. We’re keeping this on a strictly ‘need to know’ basis. She hasn’t even let Hart in on it.”

“Trust no one.”

“Except for me and thee,” Kirsten jokes, smiling again. Then she winces as a bolt of pain shoots up her neck and takes up residence in the back of her head.

Rising to her feet, Koda slides her hand along Kirsten’s shoulder and up her neck. “Oh yeah,” she says. “You could bounce tennis balls off that and never feel it. How about some chamomile tea?”

Kirsten’s mouth purses in distaste. “How about a shot of Johnnie Walker?”

“If we had any.” Koda grins. “How about some horse liniment?”

“You don’t—you’re kidding me, aren’t you?”