He twisted loose. “Green,” she yelled after him, as he went skittering this way and that among the higher rocks.
But he was gone, and she was sitting in the water, soaked and shaken to think that finally he had gotten away. She was jolted by the fall–embarrassed and no small bit angry that he had outdone her, her little brother.
But gone. They were free of him. Finally free.
She gathered herself up then and laved off her hands and muddy coveralls, settled herself finally to dry off and wait.
And when her brothers brought her father with them down the banks of the river, she rose up off her rock to meet them in the twilight.
“He pushed me,” she said as dourly as she could. “He hit me and he got away.”
She was not sure what to expect–focused only on her father’s eyes.
“Did he hurt you?” Jin elder asked, which question warmed her heart with a warmth she had hardly felt since she was small. There was concern there; care for her. He took her into his arms and hugged her as he had done when she was small, and in that moment she looked beyond him, at her brothers; and at Nine and his kin, with a warning and a triumph in her smile.
She was someone again, with Green gone. She looked at Jin Younger, and Mark and Zed and Tam, and they knew what she had done. They had to know, that she had not struggled half hard enough; and why. So she was one of them: co‑conspirator. Murderer, perhaps.
“You tried,” Jin elder said. But she had no twinge of conscience, looking up into his face, because, at least in intent, she had done that much.
“Go back with father,” Jin Younger said. “We’ll search further.”
“No,” Jin elder said. “Don’t. I don’t want that.”
Because he was afraid of this place, Pia thought; he took care for them now and not for Green. He had given up, and that was sweet to hear; that was what they had wanted to hear.
“I’ll look,” Jin Younger insisted, and turned away, up the bank, up among the rocks, never asking which way Green might have gone. It was the wrong way; and Mark went off that way too, toward the cliffs where Jin was leading. So she understood.
“We’d better get home,” Zed said. “It’s getting dark. He’s off into the wild places. And there’s no help in all of us wandering around out here.”
“Yes,” Jin elder said finally, in that quiet way he had, that resigned things he could no longer mend. For once Pia felt a shame not for him, for the simple answers her father gave, but on their account; on her own. Yes. Like that. After walking through territory that was a terror to him. Yes. Let’s go home. Let’s tell mother how it is.
Her brothers were in no wise bound after Green. They had no interest in Green. They had left themselves a maincamper up on the cliffs and night was falling; it was time to go get Jane Gutierrez down before she went silly with panic. Games were done. The night was coming. Fast.
And as for her brother, as for Green, spending the night out in the cool damp, slithering underearth where he chose to be–
She shivered in the circle of Jin elder’s arm, turning back to the way along the shore. Nine and his brothers had already begun to walk back, having nothing to do with her father, and less with their own; besides, Nine had reason to avoid her now. So Jin elder was their possession, theirs, finally, the way he had been before Green existed.
iv
The sun sank, casting twilight among the stones, and Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez walked briskly down the trail among the mounds. Her knees shook just slightly as she went, making the downhill course uncertain. Fear was a knot in her stomach; and she cursed the azi‑born, the beautiful, the so‑beautiful and so hollow. Stay away from them, her mother said–stay away. And her father–said nothing, which was his habit. Or he delivered lectures on ships and birth‑labs and plans gone amiss, and why she ought to think about her future, which she had no desire at all to hear.
Beautiful and hollow. No hearts in them. Nothing like them in the main Camp, no men so beautiful as Jin and his brothers, who were made to fill up the world with their kind. She wanted them; lowered herself to go off in the hills with them, like their own wild breed; and then their half‑minded brother took to the hills as crazy as everyone expected of him, and they left her–just walked off and left her, up in the wild and the oncoming dark, as if she were nothing, as if it was nothing that Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez came out of the camp and wanted them.
Anger stiffened her knees; anger kept her going down the road into the brushy wild below the cliffs. She walked among the mounds, guided herself by the little sun that filtered through the trees atop the mounds.
And suddenly–a moving in the brush–there was a boy. Her heart lurched, clenched tight, settled out of its panic. She stopped, facing the boy in the halflight, among the brush. His coveralls were ragged, his hair too long. But he was human at least. Weirds, they called them, like Green, who lived wild among the mounds. But he was only a boy, not even in his teens–and a better guide, she suddenly hoped, than Jin and the lot of his friends had proved.
“I belong in the camp,” she said, taking the kind of stance she used when she expected something of the azi who served. “I want to go through the maze. You understand? You take me through.”
The figure beckoned, never speaking a word. It began to move off through the brush as vague as ever it had been.
“Wait a minute,” she said; and panic was in her mind–wondering how she was going to explain all this when she got home. She was going to be late. The fugitive showed no interest in helping her and they would be turning out search parties when it got dark. It was already beyond easy explaining–I was lost, mother, father; I was fishing; I got back in the mounds–“Wait!”
Brush moved behind her. She looked about, saw a half dozen others, who held out hands toward her, silent. “Oh, no,” she told them. “No, you don’t…” Her heart was crashing against her ribs. “I’m going on my own, thank you. I’ve just changed my mind.” She saw the eyes of some, the curious intensity, like the eyes of ariels. Crazy, every one. She edged back. “I have to get home. My friends are looking for me right now.”
They came closer, a soft stirring among their ranks, some of them in coveralls and some in only the remnant of clothing, or in blankets and sheeting. And strange, and silent and without sanity.
She remembered the other one, the one behind her–turned suddenly and gave a muffled outcry, face to face with the boy, close enough to touch–“You keep your hands to yourself,” she said, trying to keep the fear from her voice, because that was her chiefest hope–that there were still the town ways instilled in them, still the habit of obeying voices that had no doubt when they gave commands. “Be definite,” her mother had taught her, special op and used to moving people, “and know what you’re going to do if they refuse,”; but her father–“Know what you’re poking your finger at,” he said, whenever she was stung. She stared at the boy, a wild frozen moment before she realized the others were closing from behind.
She whirled, one desperate effort to shock them all and find an opening; but they snatched at her, at her clothing–wrong timing, she thought in utter selfdisgust, and only half thought that she might die. She hit one of them and laid him out the way her mother had taught her, but that was only one of them: the others caught her hair and held her arms. And some of them had clubs, showing her what might happen if she yelled.
Go along with it, she thought; none of the Weirds had ever killed. They were strange, but they had never yet kept their minds at anything: they would lose interest and then she might get away.
They tugged her arms, drew her with them…and this she let happen, noticing everything, every landmark. Jin and his brothers would find her; or she might get away; or if she could not, then her father would come looking, with her mother and the specials who knew the hills and the mounds. The camp would come with guns; and then they would be sorry. The important thing now was not to startle them into violence.
The way they walked twisted and turned in the maze, among wooded ridges and through thickets, until she had only the sunset to rely on for direction. Now she began to feel lost and desperate, but something–be it common sense or despair itself–still kept her from sudden moves with them.