But she had nothing else to give. She held the vial over her altar—letting it sync again with the coding from her land’s grains—then mixed the powder in a mug of water and hurried back to Alexnya.
“Drink this,” she said, holding the mug to Alexnya’s lips. The girl gasped and turned her head as if being near the liquid hurt her.
“Why is it hurting her?” Jun asked, blocking Alexnya’s mouth with her hand so Frere-Jones couldn’t try again. “I thought the medicine helped.”
“It does, but the grains always resist at first,” Frere-Jones said. “When I gave it to my own son years ago he… went through some initial pain. We usually only give small doses to new anchors at puberty to calm the explosive growth of the grains in their bodies. But if we give Alexnya a full dose for the next few days, it should kill the grains.”
Jun frowned. “How much pain?”
“I… don’t know. But if we don’t do something soon there will be too many grains in her body to remove.”
Frere-Jones didn’t need to tell Jun what would happen if Alexnya became anchored to this land. The anchors from the lands surrounding Frere-Jones’s wouldn’t take kindly to a day-fellow girl becoming one of them.
“We shouldn’t have come here,” Jun said, standing up. “Maybe if we take Alexnya away from here before the grains establish themselves…”
“Taking her from the land will definitely kill her—the grains have already anchored. We need to remove them from her body. There’s no other way.”
“I’ll drink it,” Alexnya whispered in a weak voice. She glared at Frere-Jones in fury. Frere-Jones prayed the grains weren’t already sharing the land’s stored memories with this day-fellow girl. Showing Alexnya what Frere-Jones had done. Revealing secrets known by no one else except her son and Chakatie.
Despite her hesitation, Jun nodded agreement. She held her daughter’s spasming body as Frere-Jones poured the liquid through the girl’s lips. Alexnya swallowed half the medicine before screaming. Splashes and dribbles on her leather shirt and pants glowed bright red as she thrashed in the bed for a moment before passing out.
Frere-Jones and Jun tucked Alexnya under the covers and stepped into the den. Takeshi stood by the fireplace holding their youngest son and daughter.
“Will she make it?” Jun asked.
“I don’t know,” Frere-Jones said. “She’ll need another dose before the medicine wears off or she’ll be as bad as ever. And that was all I had in the house.”
Frere-Jones glanced at the altar, where the red sands squirmed in a frenzied rush, climbing over the figurines as if outraged they couldn’t eat stone. She noticed Jun staring at her back and realized the woman had seen the laser pistol she carried.
Frere-Jones handed the pistol to Jun. “Use this if needed,” she said. “Make sure none of you touch the grains in the altar—if you do, every anchor for a hundred leagues will know there’s a day-fellow family here.”
Jun nodded as Frere-Jones pulled on her leather running duster. “When will you be back?”
“I don’t know,” Frere-Jones said. “I have to find more medicine. I’ll… think of something.”
With that Frere-Jones ordered the grains to power up her legs and, for the first time in years, she ran across her land. She ran faster than any horse, faster than any deer, until even the fairies which flew after her could barely keep up.
At the land’s boundary Frere-Jones paused.
She stood by Sandy Creek, the cold waters bubbling under the overhanging oaks and willows. Fairies flew red tracers over the creek, flying as far across as they dared without crossing into the bordering land. On the other bank a handful of blue fairies hovered in the air, staring back at Frere-Jones and the red fairies.
Usually boundaries between lands were more subtle, the grains that were tied to one anchor mixing a bit with the next land’s grains in the normal back and forth of life. But with Sandy Creek as a natural land divide—combined with Frere-Jones’s isolation from the other anchors—the boundary between her and Chakatie’s lands had grown abrupt, stark.
One of Chakatie’s blue fairies stared intensely at her. Chakatie knew she was coming. Frere-Jones wished there was a caravan nearby to trade for the medicine. Day-fellow pharmacists were very discreet.
Still, of all the nearby anchors Chakatie was the only one who might still give her medicine. Chakatie was also technically family, even if her son Haoquin was now dead. And she had a large extended family. Meaning a number of kids. Meaning stocks of medicine on hand to ensure the grains didn’t overwhelm and kill those kids when they transitioned to becoming anchors.
Still, no matter how much Frere-Jones had once loved Chakatie she wouldn’t go in unprepared. She was, after all, her land’s anchor. She stripped off her clothes and stepped into the cold creek, rubbing mud and water over her skin and hair to remove the day-fellow scent. She activated the grains inside her, increasing her muscle size and bone density. Finally, for good measure, she grabbed a red fairy buzzing next to her and smashed it between her now-giant hands. She smeared the fairy’s glowing red grains in two lines down both sides of her face and body.
Battle lines. As befitted an anchor going into another’s land in the heart of the night.
Satisfied, she walked naked onto Chakatie’s anchordom.
Frere-Jones hated memories. She hated how the grains spoke to her in brief snatches of memories copied from Haoquin and her parents and grandparents and on back to the land’s very first anchor.
But despite this distaste at memories, they still swarmed her. As Frere-Jones crossed the dark forest of trees and brambles on Chakatie’s land, she wondered why the grains were showing her these memories. The grains never revealed memories randomly.
In particular, why show her Haoquin’s memories, which the grains had so rarely shared up to now? Memories from the day she met him. Memories from their selecting ceremony.
Frere-Jones tried to stop them, but the memories slipped into her as if they’d always existed within her.
Frere-Jones’s parents had died when the grains determined it was time for their child to take over. Like most anchors they’d gone happily. First they drank medicine to dull the grains’ power to rebuild their bodies. Then they slit each other’s throat in the land’s graveyard, holding hands as they bled out and their grain-copied memories flowed into the land they’d protected.
At first Frere-Jones had accepted her role in protecting the land. She safeguarded the land from those who might harm it and carefully managed the ecosystem’s plants and animals so the land was in continual balance.
But a few years after becoming anchor a small day-fellow caravan defiled her land by cutting down trees. Frere-Jones eagerly allowed the grains to seize control of her body. She called other anchors to her side and led an attack on the caravan. Memories of the pains her land had suffered before the grains had arrived flowed through her—images of clear-cut forests and poisoned soil and all the other evils of the ancient world. In her mind she became a noble warrior preventing humans from creating ecological hell just as her family had done for a hundred generations.
Only after the caravan was wiped out did she learn that a day-fellow child, gifted with a new hatchet and told to gather dead branches for a fire, had instead cut down a single pine sapling.
Outraged at what she’d done, Frere-Jones attacked the other anchors who’d helped savage the caravan. The anchors fought back, slashing at her with claw and fang until a respected older anchor, Chakatie, arrived, her three-yard-tall body powered to a mass of muscle and bone and claw.
Chakatie’s land neighbored Frere-Jones’s land, but Chakatie hadn’t aided in the attack on the caravan. Now this powerful woman had stepped among the fighting anchors, a mere glance all that was needed to stop the other anchors from attacking each other. A few even powered down their bodies.