“What difference does it make, mon ami?” Nicole asked, reluctantly putting her gloves on. “Rocks are rocks, non?”
“Sure,” he replied, “but you don’t normally bother clearing little patches like this just before the harvest. It’s easier to wait until the wheat’s been taken out so you can get the rocks through to the road.” He remembered how Muldoon had come to pick them up that morning in one of the huge combines, a first in Reza’s time on-planet. Neither the large buses that were their normal transport when working far from the house, nor Muldoon’s van could penetrate the wheat to get them to the barren quad where they now stood. They had to walk in from the road. And it wasn’t his full team, just the six of them.
She touched his shoulder. “Perhaps we should get to work, Reza,” she told him quietly, a tentative smile on her lips. “I think perhaps you have other things on your mind that make a little thing seem very big.”
Reza looked at her. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he sighed. Her leaving was indeed a big thing on his mind, and it did seem to make everything else – the bad things – worse. But a part of his mind still wondered why Muldoon had put them here. It was different, out of his normal routine, and that made Reza worry.
The morning passed without incident. Reza was working hard on digging out a particularly recalcitrant rock, simultaneously considering the feasibility of a lunch break, when he heard Nicole call to him from where she was digging a meter or so away.
“Reza,” she asked, pointing to the north, “what is that?”
He looked up, and his heart tripped in his chest. There was smoke. Lots of it. And close.
“Oh, damn,” he hissed, tossing down his pickaxe. His eyes swept the horizon around them, his stomach sinking like a lead weight over a deep ocean trench. Smoke billowed out of all the adjoining quads, as if nearly a combined hectare’s worth of wheat had simply decided to ignite.
And he knew that was simply not possible.
“Goddammit!” he cursed. “Drop everything and get over here, now!” he ordered the others, his eyes judging the flames while the touch of the air against his skin helped him gauge the wind. He knew that wheat that was ready for harvest would not normally catch fire too easily, but once it really caught – especially if there was a wind to drive it – it would burn as well as kerosene.
The others joined him and Nicole at a full run. Their eyes were wide with fear. Every child who had worked in the fields for very long knew the danger of fire. Whipped along by the winds, it killed or maimed hundreds of orphans across the planet every year. Those who died were generally the lucky ones, for the house clinics were ill-prepared to deal with major burns, and off-planet medical transport for orphans was hardly considered a priority by the bureaucracies that controlled the planet’s operation. The fires, a constant hazard throughout the year, were started by everything from lighting strikes to spontaneous combustion; any of a dozen causes. Not least of which was arson.
Reza called up an image in his mind of the field they were in, a process made difficult because he had not worked this area for nearly two years. Since then, it had been bursting with wheat, and the orphans had nothing to do with that; that was the Hallmark Farm Combine’s business.
“There should be a road about a klick south of here,” he remembered, the image of the arrow-straight track coming to him from a map of the area he had studied with Wiley a long time back. He looked in the direction he thought the road should be, and was relieved to see that smoke had not yet begun to boil toward the sky.
“We’re going to have to move fast,” he said, “or the wind’ll help the fire kill us. Come on!”
He led them in the direction of the road at a restrained jog so the younger kids could keep up. Moving through the tall wheat was tricky as it was, the stalks grasping at clothes and skin, fouling their legs when it was stepped on. The others followed Reza without complaint or argument, with Nicole bringing up the rear. Reza pushed the pace as fast as he dared, his biggest fear hearing the crackling of a blazing fire but not being able to see where it was coming from. Should they lose their sense of direction, they could find themselves trapped in the middle of an inferno with no escape.
Nicole, last in the line of fleeing refugees, kept looking behind them. Her eyes reflected the licking tongues of the flames now just visible over the tops of the wheat stalks, coming closer under the driving influence of the wind.
The child in front of her – a new girl, Nicole did not know her name – stumbled and fell to her hands and knees. Nicole helped her struggle to her feet, urging her onward. “Allez! Allez!” she cried, pushing the girl forward.
“We’re almost there!” Reza called from the front. He had spent enough time in and around the fields to have learned how to navigate with a sort of dead reckoning, using the sun’s position and his pace count to keep him on track. “Only about fifty meters left!”
A few moments later, he breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the regular outline of the road through the last layers of wheat. He stood to one side and passed the others of his team on through first, giving Nicole a quick hug as she emerged from the trampled trail behind them.
The road would not necessarily protect them from the fire, Reza knew. But at least they could move in a direction opposite to the one that the fire was taking, keeping out of its way.
“Oh,” Nicole gasped, her chest heaving with adrenaline and the effort of running what had seemed like such a long way, “Zut alors. I did not think–”
“Reza!” someone shrieked. “Look ou–”
The voice was suddenly cut off with a sound Reza knew all too welclass="underline" the smack of a powerful hand striking a child’s face.
Darting through the wheat to the road’s edge, Reza just had time to see the other children fleeing down the road past Muldoon’s van. The field master and three of his goons, his teenage hatchet men, stood in two-man cordons off to either side of where Reza stood, blocking the road. They had let the other children pass, even the one who had tried to warn Reza, because they were not of interest.
For that, at least, Reza was thankful. Without wasting another second, he disappeared back into the wheat, grabbing Nicole’s hand.
“Follow me!” he hissed, dragging her along behind him.
“What is it?” she gasped.
“Muldoon,” Reza replied, his breath a controlled heaving of his chest as he fought a new path through the wheat. He was desperate to avoid their pursuers, whose footsteps he could hear somewhere behind them, crashing through the stalks. “He brought some friends with him this time.”
Nicole quickened her pace.
Muldoon watched as the two older boys, whom the other kids called Scurvy and Dodger, chased Reza and Nicole through the field. Climbing atop a specially fortified portion of the van’s roof, Muldoon was high enough that he could see the bending and weaving of the stalks as his remote hunters closed on their quarry. The older boys were able to make better time through the wheat, especially with the trail the Gard kid left behind him. A smile of certainty crept across Muldoon’s face. Gard wasn’t going to get away this time, and neither was the girl. It had been easy to track their progress to the road. Now he would track them as his human hounds chased them down.
He glanced down at the other boy waiting below, whom he had dubbed Big John in honor of a certain very important part of the boy’s anatomy. Muldoon had given him his own special touch over ten years ago, and the boy had been unflinchingly loyal ever since.