When I wake up, someone’s screaming.
“Omar! Fuck. It got Omar! Fucking, it fucking ate Omar. Kill it! It’s getting away!”
Bianca and I have as much trouble getting out of the sleep nook as we had climbing in, and we tumble onto the hard ground just in time to see the lower half of Omar’s body vanish into the night, in the jaws of a bison. Muscles ripple underneath ochre fur-covered plates, and a forked tail thrashes so hard it carves the air around us. The sled careens, in danger of tipping over, without anyone left to steer. Mouth lunges across Omar’s seat and wrestles with the steering levers.
Kendrick takes a shot at the bison, but misses. Omar’s face has a look of dismay, but not pain, as if the razor-sharp threads in the bison’s mouth severed his lower half too fast for him to feel anything.
The sled stops moving. Everyone just stares at Omar’s head and torso, then at each other. Mouth still leans over from the passenger seat, her hands shaking. She mutters something under her breath, and I realize that it’s a prayer in the original language, Noölang: something about the Elementals, and footsteps in dirt. Next to the driver’s seat, Alyssa’s hands splay, rigid as claws.
mouth
Mouth’s final memory of Omar would always be laughter.
She had been lucky to sit in the passenger seat, on watch, where she could enjoy a long conversation with three participants: Mouth, Omar, and the landscape. They had been reminiscing about a time the sled broke down in the marshes, and Omar had chuckled, remembering how upset they’d all been. And they’d pointed out things to each other, like the furrows in the stabgrass near the day that could be from some creature, or an air-pressure drop that could mean a storm. Plus all the native Earth plants that’d spread since their last trip—like the soybeans, engineered to flourish in local soil, which had mutated into something inedible. Mouth had been thinking that Omar, out of all the Resourceful Couriers, could have been at home among the Citizens. This warm feeling had pushed away some of Mouth’s remaining sickness from the failed Palace heist, like she still had friends and still belonged here.
And then the bison had cut Omar clean in half.
Now Mouth stumbled out of the passenger seat and fell on the clay ground, trying to get away from Omar’s unseeing gaze. She went numb, her vision unfocused, her ears hissing. No sense left but smell.
“Fuck no,” Kendrick was saying. “He was like a brother, he… This isn’t right.”
“He kept me from losing my shit out here, so many times,” Alyssa said.
“Omar… Omar was the heart of this group,” Yulya said. “He never once made me feel like the newest. Even after Jackie and Franz.”
“We need to keep moving,” Kendrick said. “If Omar was alive, he’d say we can’t stop here, where we’re easy targets for more bison attacks.”
Alyssa sighed. “We’ll give him a burial at sea. Mouth, you’ve driven this sled before, right?”
Mouth gave a toss of the head in the Argelan style, meaning yes. “But I don’t want to be in charge.”
Kendrick snorted. “Given that you almost got thrown out for breaking our most important rule, that seems wise.”
Mouth helped Alyssa and Kendrick to lift Omar’s torso, gently, out of the front seat, and wrapped him in some of the cloths secured at the top of their cargo. Every time Mouth glimpsed Omar’s face, she went hypothermic.
There was no time to clean Omar’s guts off the driver’s seat before Mouth sat and got them moving again. Alyssa slid into the passenger seat, cursing in Argelan. The day and the night loomed on either side, like old enemies that could wait forever for their chance to finish you off.
They stayed silent apart from the crunch of their boots and the chugging of the sled, until Reynold spat on the ground. “We’re so screwed without Omar. He was the only one who knew how to make this journey in one piece. Can we even find the boat without him? Does anybody else know how to reach our contact in Argelo?”
“We’ll figure it out,” Alyssa said in a lifeless monotone.
“He’s got a point,” Kendrick said. “What’s the point of hauling all this junk now? The one guy who kept the Resourceful Couriers going is dead.”
“Oh yeah, we’re done,” Yulya groaned. “We’re so done.”
“We’re still moving because we’re too dumb to realize we’re already dead,” Reynold said.
They all kept encouraging each other to panic, until everyone was shouting and crying at once.
“Whoa!” Bianca yelled from behind the sled. She rushed forward and tried to shoot her rifle into the air, but she’d left the safety on. “Whoa whoa whoa! Everybody shut up.”
They all went quiet, and turned to look at Bianca.
“I thought you dicks were supposed to be the greatest smugglers,” Bianca said. “You keep bragging about how you walked through the jaws of death so many times you became their personal dentists. I know it sucks, you lost your number-one guy, but he seemed pretty anal retentive. He must have left contingency plans, right? I bet this asshole knows what you’re supposed to do.”
Bianca was pointing at Mouth, who still felt frozen. Mouth shrugged. “Maybe I know some stuff.”
“See? This lying shitstain may have used me, and betrayed everyone, and gotten my friends killed over a damn poetry book, but she still has her uses.”
Mouth couldn’t look at Bianca, and not just because she had to watch the road.
“I didn’t get anybody killed. The cops were already on high alert when I went out to meet you. Someone else must have turned informant, or gotten themselves caught after curfew.”
“Not the right time to sort this out,” Alyssa said. “But Bianca’s right. We don’t just quit because we lost our leader. We’re smarter than that. We’ve survived so much already.”
“The Resourceful Couriers always complete the job,” Reynold said.
“So? Let’s complete the job,” Bianca said.
Everybody got back into position, flanking the sled, and put on an imitation of their usual swagger. They marched in silence, casting more watchful gazes into the night.
Mouth kept having bouts of lightsickness: stabbing pain behind her face that gave birth to white haloes, whenever she spent too long outdoors, with all this sun and shadow. She tried to concentrate on driving straight, but everything hurt. And then she realized Alyssa was looking at her instead of scanning for more bison, or axle-snapping craters, or those burrowing mud-crabs.
“What is it?” Mouth asked when the first glimmers of marsh appeared. Thank the Elementals, her head was clearing somewhat. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Just thinking,” Alyssa said. “I didn’t realize Bianca was one of those revolutionaries that you were using to get at your poetry book. And now all her friends are dead. And yet she saved all of us from self-destructing just now.”
“I feel bad for her too,” Mouth said. “I wish I could have helped. But loyalty isn’t some sugary confection that you hand out to everyone. And Bianca’s the one who chose to get dragged into politics.”
The marshes lapped at their wheels, and the people walking sloshed with every step. Here come the horseflies.
“Wasn’t your thing political too? Getting this book that belonged to your dead tribe?”
“That was cultural survival.” Mouth swerved to avoid a sinkhole. “It’s different. Politics changes all the time, and it doesn’t matter who’s in charge now versus a generation ago or a generation from now. But culture ought to last forever, if we protect it like we’re supposed to.”