When I open my eyes I know at once that I’m no longer alone. Something is out there, beyond the firelight.
It’s them.
I can’t see them, but I sense them, clearer than ever before. The hairs bristle on my arms. They’ve surrounded me.
‘What do you want?’ I whisper.
The wind howls; whips out a tongue to lick the moisture from my eyeballs, cat-slinks around me. But that’s just the wind. They haven’t moved.
‘What do you want?’ I ask it again.
Useless to talk. They would not listen to anything I have to say. I’m not even sure they speak. Words are a skin to keep fear within the body, and they have no bodies, have no fear.
Whether they understand me or not, there is a shift, a change in the air as if they are pressing closer, and my heart starts to beat madly. They seize my attention, stretch it far beyond my normal capacity, stretch it out to the east where something waits, hot and sharp and urgent.
My mind rebels, catapulting me back into myself, into a confusion of images: cold metal piercing skin, pain on the wings of black birds, a figure gloved in blood…
I open my eyes. I’m lying in the dirt, the hat fallen from my head. Beyond the fire there’s nothing, just the night. Have they gone? Impossible to tell. They’re never truly gone, just as they are never truly here.
But they have left a feeling behind them: the conviction that past the plateau to the east, something waits.
I look up to see the ship fall flaming to the earth.
* * *
It takes me the rest of the night to reach the crash site. The glow lights the horizon pink as raw flesh. I travel as fast as I can, but the mule is sluggish, jostled by the wind, sand-scoured and grit-loaded. By the time I smell the smoke, night is losing its fullness and the wind is weakening, dragged to another hemisphere by the darkness.
I’ve seen wrecks in my time, in their many stages of tragedy, but never one like this. The destruction is total, every inch of metal a flame, every flame so hot it has scorched the sand to glass. There’s no telling what the ship once was, no telling how many souls it carried to this bright and violent end. I scrape at the dirt with my boot. Can’t linger here. A wreck like this will attract scavengers like the Seekers within hours.
What’s a ship doing out here, in any case? There are no ports, only the scattered townships of the Barrens. A navigational error? I squint up into the lightening sky. From how far has the ship fallen?
The impact crater is still hot enough to sear my face, and as I peer down I see that it’s useless. There’s nothing left, only blackened streaks and shards.
I start to walk away when my gut lurches, as if it’s trying to drag itself east. The images come on fast again: a bird with black wings, cold metal, bloodied hands… Spitting, I straighten up. They are obviously not finished with me.
I get back on the mule and drive away from the wreckage, towards the rising sun.
Morning in the Barrens is beautiful, but it comes with an asking price of hunger and cold, loneliness and near-insanity. A price that almost no one is willing to pay.
I have paid, many times over, but I don’t spare a glance at that hard-won beauty. Instead, I stare at the track that has carved its way through the dirt. At the end of it, beside the twisted remains of a lifecraft, two figures lie motionless on the sand.
In the few seconds before I reach them, I think about turning the mule aside, leaving the bodies and continuing on, into another future.
But I won’t, and they know that. They know my choice was made long ago.
Twenty paces away I stop, reaching for the knife at my belt. Gangs like the Seekers or the Rooks sometimes use bodies as bait. I edge closer.
The downed lifecraft is dull silver, new-looking, with no markings or badges to suggest what kind of ship it might have come from. That isn’t unusual. Ever since the war it has been standard practice to strip all lifecraft bare, in case of a landing in enemy territory. Not that Factus took a side; no one wanted it anyhow. Even the Free Limits had little use for a waterless wasteland where the enemy was everything and nothing.
Wisps of smoke coil from the ruined craft, and the whole thing stinks of hot metal and melting plastic. Gripping the knife, I lean over the figures. They lie huddled, so close together it’s difficult to tell them apart, covered in sand as they are. The larger one is a man, I think, cradling a smaller one. I nudge the man with my boot. When he doesn’t move, I pull off my ragged gloves to reach in through the smashed helmet of the flight suit.
His face is cold but there’s a pulse, faint and faltering. The helmet of the smaller figure is raised, a little. I worm my fingers through the gap and feel that the flesh there is warmer, the pulse stronger. The man’s arms did their job.
I brush the sand away from the suits, searching for identification. But they too are plain: no labels even. The man is solid and muscular and at least seven feet tall. It takes all my strength to roll him away. As soon as I do, a weak groan emerges from the shattered helmet. I ignore it, and ease the smaller of the two into a position better suited to breathing.
As soon as I touch the body, I feel slackness within the sleeves. Whoever is wearing the suit is small and slight. The man is undoubtedly an adult – could this be a child?
Swearing, I unclip the helmet from the suit. A child: what might that do for my tally? I don’t dare think about it
