Wasteland of flint

lifted her head. Her eyes opened wide, staring up at the blue-lit ceiling.

'Huhhh…' She doubled over, hacking violently. Hummingbird crouched down, supporting her arms. 'Uhhh…it's too hot. Too hot.'

Gretchen shoved the blankets aside, panting, her hair lank with sweat. Without thinking, she tugged the collar of her suit open, gasping for breath. Hummingbird scooted back warily and stood up, a worried frown on his old face.

'I can see,' Gretchen said abruptly, her hands raised and trembling in the air. She stared at Hummingbird. 'I can see your face, a sun hiding in clouds, your eyes brilliant jade, your face marked with red bands.' Her expression twisted in horror, pupils dilating. Sweat flushed from her skin and ran in thin silver streams down her neck. 'You're not a human being!'

'I am,' Hummingbird said, remaining very still. 'You are seeing the nechichiualiztli – a mask of purpose and duty – not me! You must be careful or this kind of sight will blind you. Can you see your own flesh, your own hand?'

Gretchen looked down and her face contorted, the skin stretching back from her teeth. She began to shake, muscles leaping under the flesh like snakes squirming in a calfskin bag. 'I can see I can see I can see.'

Hummingbird moved carefully to the side, quietly, without disturbing the air. 'What do you see?'

'Nothing! There is nothing there! Darkness!' Gretchen was shouting, though her whole body was frozen into trembling immobility.

'Where is your hand?' Hummingbird said, his face close to hers, watching the flickering tic-tic- tic of her eyelids from the side. 'See your hands. Here they are. You can see them.'

Gretchen's neck stiffened like a log, the tendons and veins standing out like wire. 'My hand is gone. I am gone. There is nothing here. Nothing here.' Her voice had the quality of a scream, though it was soft, not even a whisper.

'Remember your hand, remember what you saw when we were sitting in the desert? Do you remember how clear it was, your hand, so fine and distinct?'

'Yes. Yes. I remember.' Gretchen slumped into his waiting arms, her body loose, each muscle exhausted. By the time he laid her down, she was sound asleep. Hummingbird breathed out, a long, slow, even breath, and a fine mist of smoke hissed from between his teeth, settling over the woman's body.

Sometime after midnight the sound of the wind changed. Hummingbird roused himself from meditation and padded to the window. The rattling hiss of sand against the porthole had tapered off. He could see the sullen flash of lightning far away.

'Hmm.' The old man checked Anderssen, sleeping deeply under all the blankets he could find. Her skin was cold and clammy. Worried, he fished a stout wrist out of the covers and examined the medband with an experienced eye. Her body was suffering a toxic reaction, so he keyed a series of dispense codes into the metal bracelet and then tucked her hand away, out of the chill air.

The pressure doors on the main airlock had frozen shut, forcing the nauallis to detour around through the machine shop and out through a hatch jammed open by a chest-high drift of sand. Squirming out into the night, Hummingbird took care to adjust his goggles to the near-absence of light.

The smaller buildings – the lab bunker, the ice house, the sheds for the tractors and carryalls – had vanished under lumpy dunes. Hummingbird turned right and half-walked, half-slid down into a trough in front of the main building. He headed toward the hangar, peering out at the sky and horizon.

There were no stars. The storm had lifted for the moment, but it had not passed. Stray winds eddied between the buildings, throwing sand at his legs. Out on the plain, he made out vague twisting shapes. Lightning stabbed in the upper air, flickering from cloud to cloud. In the intermittent, brilliant light, Hummingbird made out roiling, swift-moving clouds rushing past. A white-hot spark flared in the middle distance and the nauallis saw, throat constricting in atavistic fear, a monstrous funnel cloud snake down from the boiling sky.

More heat lightning flared above and the bloated tornado danced across a range of dunes a half-dozen kilometers away. Millions of tons of sand sluiced up into the sky, the entire ridge vanishing. The air trembled, a shrieking sound rising above the constant wind, and Hummingbird began to run.

The main door of the hangar building was stuck again, the bottom of the articulated metal plating buried in a meter of sand. Hummingbird dodged around the side, feeling the ground shake, and found a service door that opened inward. The reflected glare of lightning threw the entrance into deep shadow, but Hummingbird did not hesitate. He threw his full weight against the locking bar and was rewarded with a deep-throated groan of complaining metal. Two hard jerks managed to unlock the mechanism and he stumbled inside.

Less than a kilometer away, the funnel raced past, shaking the air with a stunning boom. Sand rained down from the raging sky. Hummingbird shoved the door closed, fighting against dust spilling in between his feet. Luckily, the pressure door had a counter-rotating weight and once in motion the door closed itself.

The still, quiet darkness of the hangar was a bit of a shock. The heavy walls muted the roar and thunder of the storm to distant grumbling. Hummingbird switched on his lightwand and made a circuit of the big room. Both Midge s were still in place, wings folded up, engines and systems on standby. The faint smell of idling fuel cells permeated the air. More out of habit than anything else, the nauallis shone his light inside the cockpits, into the cargo compartments, ran his hands across the engines and peered underneath.

And he stopped. His light shifted back, focusing on the forward landing gear of his Midge.

Most of the wheel was invisible, obscured by a dull gray coating – as if the quickcrete floor had grown up to engulf the landing gear. Hummingbird circled around to the front of the ultralight and found all three wheels encased in stone.

'Well,' he said, jaw tightening. In the questing gleam of his lightwand, he saw Anderssen's Midge was similarly afflicted. He lowered the light, clicking his teeth together in thought. 'I'd better check my boots again.'

The funnel cloud broke apart far to the south of the camp, splintering into dozens of smaller vortices and then dissolving into a rush of sand and grit and sandstone fragments. The storm continued to move west, obscuring the plain with towering walls of dust. Clouds thinned, but did not part, over the camp. Stray winds gusted between the buildings, though in comparison to the violence which had just passed relative quiet reigned.

Russovsky stood on the crest of a dune, tangled blond hair whipping around her head, eyes fixed on the low, rounded shapes of the camp buildings. She wore neither mask nor goggles, though the apparatus of a rebreather and recycler clung to her back and chest. The once-glossy black skin of the suit was matted and dull, abraded by the constantly prying wind. Her boots had crumbled long ago, shredded by rocks or eaten away by the tiny, blind maiket.

At a distance, she could feel the presence of the human machine like the warmth of the sun-which-kills, hot and sharp, pressing against her face. The pattern of its movements, the residue of its passage, was clear in the air and upon the ground. There was familiar comfort in the humid smell humanity left behind, the traces of exhalation and sweat mixing in the cold sharp air. Far different from the clean, distinct impressions of the hathol or the furry blaze of the deep-dwelling firten.

A rumbling crack echoed from the north and Russovsky turned her head – a slow, methodical motion – to feel the twisting power in the storm building again. A vortex was building in the upper air, swirling currents rushing into a knot of power building from hundreds of kilometers in every direction. Soon the wave front would smash across the plain, pummeling everything in sight with unbounded rage.

Russovsky felt steadily building disquiet – not at the pending violence, for the pattern of the storm was as familiar to her as the shape of the camp buildings or the spreading stain of the hathol in the dune below her feet – but at a sense of disassociation creeping through ordered, clearly defined thoughts.

Black clouds staining a clear blue sky. Plunging ebon tendrils which flattened and distorted in the summer air, driven by winds at great heights.

Her memories of the-life-before were dying, fading, replaced by confused, diffracted images of things she was sure did not exist in her world, events she had never experienced herself.

A night sky so flushed with stars, night was barely different from day. A bloated, dim sun the color