Unknown - The_Growing_589064

The way takes them down the mountainside and onto the miles-long expanse of the dry lakebed. The dark gathers around them, rose and gold along the line of the western hills gradually giving way to deep blue that blends into black at the zenith and stretches behind them to become indistinguishable from the last slopes of the Nightingale range. The moon, one night off full, rises bright enough to cast shadows along the alkali-pale flats. Heat, absorbed during the summer day, radiates upward now, mingling with the already-cooling air of the evening. The breeze, slipping over the line of hills from the west, smells of water, and more faintly, dark earth and salt. Moving at an easy pace, the horses’ hooves clatter against the hard surface. Morgan leads, the weight of her pale braid bouncing between her shoulders to the rhythm of her mare’s gait. She chants as she rides, something Koda cannot quite make out, though she thinks she hears the words “Isis” and “Demeter.” Kirsten follows, her hair a pale halo in the moonlight. Koda rides rearguard, her rifle slung over the saddlecloth in front of her. Asi trots along beside them, breathing easily. The wolf is an endurance runner, and for all his faithful breeding, the wild has begun to surface in the big dog, as if the genes of his ancestors have only been lulled by ten thousand years of domestication, lying dormant until the turn of an age in which humans no longer rule the earth. The dog, the horse, even the comfort-loving cat, may once again become something no living member of her own species has ever encountered in the flesh.

And we’re losing our domestication, too. Warriors and shamen. Tribes of women. Warlords. We are being drawn into our own past, dragging the remains of our technology behind us.

The alkali lakebottom gives way to loose scree, and Morgan picks their way carefully through it, setting them on a path that winds through low hills and then rises, climbing the mountain slope. Columbine and Indian paintbrush grow close along its margins, leaving space for two horses to pass abreast; pine branches, low enough to sweep an unwary rider from the saddle, obscure it from above. Barely visible in the shadows, Kirsten slows to lean down and rub covertly at her left calf, shifting slightly on the horse’s back to ease what seems to be a stiffening back muscle. Koda knees her mare and pulls even with her lover. Careful to keep amusement out of her voice, she whispers, “Sprain something there did ya, Annie Oakley?”

Even in the dark, Koda can see the frown that knits Kirsten’s forehead, then the rueful smile. “That obvious, was it?”

“’Fraid so. I’m flattered, though.”

The smile breaks into a grin. “You damned well better be. I wouldn’t bust my butt like that for just anybody.”

“Such a nice little butt, too. Is it sprained?”

“My butt?”

“Your knee.”

“Nah, just pulled. I’m fine.”

Asi, doubling back from where he has been ranging ahead of Morgan, weaves between their horses’ legs, whining. The Amazai herself has halted. “You okay back there?”

“Cramp,” Koda says, tactfully omitting whose. Morgan touches her heel to her mare’s flank, then, and turns her head to lead them up a branching pathway, narrower yet, that leads upward at a steeper angle. Twice along the way, she gives the low, rolling call of a screech owl, and is answered. The second time, when it seems to Koda that they must be about halfway to the crest, Morgan says, “This used to be a park campground, but we’ve blocked the main access on the other side. Nothing gets up here we don’t know about, and nothing at all with wheels.”

Which may or may not mean that they have no vehicles. They could always be stashed lower down. Most state and national park had motor pools and the gas to fuel them. Unlike Ari Kriegesmann, Morgan and her sisters do not seem to be the kind to waste resources unnecessarily. They might, though, be persuaded to part with one in an excellent cause. A nice Jeep could put Koda and Kirsten on the Mendo coast in—three hours? Four?

Pipe dream. They’d be gunned down, by droids or hostile humans or both, before they got halfway there.

The path takes a final hairpin turn, then opens up to lead under a gate carved from knotty pine. Two torches flank it, and its sign, just visible in the dancing shadows, reads, ‘Welcome to Free Sierra.” The letters are rough, cut into the arch over the original name of the park. And the red light shows something else; Kirsten, who must see it, too, jerks hard on her horse’s reins, then knees her again as she pulls up. She is, perhaps, not certain what she is looking at. Koda is not certain, either. Not entirely.

A round shape hangs from each gatepost. The red light strikes a steely gleam from the one on the left, outlining its bare metal dome. On the other side, the torch draws the shape in dark hollows; two that might be eyes, another that might be a gaping mouth above a caked and matted beard. With the sweet night air comes the smell of rotting meat. So much for ambiguity. No lilacs blooming in the dooryard here.

“Hell of a No Trespassing sign you got there,” Koda says quietly.

Morgan shows her teeth in something that is not quite a smile. “Yeah. Got ‘em both on our last raid. Reno.”

Which means that these women either do have vehicles, or whoever they took down in Reno did not. Kirsten, who has quietly nursed her sore muscles on the ascent, says, “On who?”

“A clinic. You know about that?”

Koda answers, carefully, “We know that women have been kidnapped for breeding in jails, sometimes in birthing centers, women’s clinics. Stuff like that.”

They pass a couple of low signs, illegible in the dark except for their white arrows pointing directions to the various park facilities. Morgan leads them to the right where the path forks, and says, “Yeah. Stuff like that. They had another place in Reno, where they took the kids they didn’t kill. Right off, anyway.”

Koda sees the flinch in Kirsten’s shoulders, remembering the death-pit in Craig, the ruins of the clinic in Salt Lake. Morgan, though, seems disinclined to answer questions. Up ahead, the path fans out into an open space where white smoke rises up into the moonlight above the embers of a fire. Cabins line the perimeter, small oblong log structures with coarse screening in the windows. Here and there he yellow glow of a kerosene lantern silhouettes women’s shapes as they move about in their lodgings; one, as they pass, seems to be tucking a child into bed. Looking up at the sound of the horses’ hooves, the women wave as they pass, calling greetings to Morgan. One, leaving her cabin with a guitar slung over her shoulder, pauses to stare at Kirsten and Koda; Morgan answers her unspoken question with a wave of her hand and a brief “Later.” To Koda she says, “I’ll show you where the stables are, then where you can bunk. Come join us around the fire after you get settled; there ought to be some stew or something left in the pot.”

The stables, obviously designed to accommodate only a handful of horses for the amusement of riders on family outings, now house mostly hay, grain and tack. The horses themselves are tethered along a picket line behind the building. Koda counts thirty-two as she and Kirsten lead their mounts to one end to remove their saddle cloths and rub them down. Add to that the ones left behind in the hills across the dry lake and those likely to be on patrol in other directions, and you get forty riders, a formidable warband when the population of the continent has been reduced by 99 percent or so. Most are mustangs, but one or two show signs of more aristocratic breeding: a chestnut walking horse with white socks and blaze, a couple Appaloosas. Almost all are mares, two of them beginning to swell with foal; a few are geldings. They whicker softly as Koda passes, one nuzzling at her back pocket where she has stashed a trail bar. Kirsten, following her gaze, says, “I guess the ‘no man’ thing extends to the critters, too. Maybe we should worry about Asi.”