But that guess was completely wrong.
His hilly end of the island stood on the horizon, the eastern region just out of view. The thick column of smoke sprang from a single blaze, and its position meant either that the sea north of his territory was on fire—a strict impossibility—or the Nots’ lands beyond were caught up in some unlikely, tremendous blaze.
He leaped to his feet.
That’s when the Nots saw him. And that’s when they began to scream—a single reflexive chorus splitting the air, everyone using one of the few words that had arisen during these last hundred millennia:
“Eater-of-Bone!” cried the little creatures. “Eater-of-Bone!”
11
Twenty-seven humans.
More than once she counted the running bodies, never believing the tally but the impossible number always waiting at the end of her count.
Twenty-seven, and every last one of them was an adult.
Not in any experience of hers, nor even inside any old, unlikely story, had she heard of so many people sharing one another’s air. Except for Mercer’s fables about lost colonies and left-behind worlds, that is. How could so many mouths find enough food? How could so many skulls share the same destination? And her best guess was that there were six or maybe seven women, which meant the extra men were laying awake nights, plotting ways to win or steal what was as valuable to them as any nourishment.
She watched how they ran, studying their gaits and weighing their packs by the bounce. Every last one of them carried guns, usually a long rifle, and they kept their distance from one another, as if expecting somebody to fire on them any moment. They were determined people with a goal, a mission. They had to be running toward Mercer’s half of the island. But no, that reasonable, wrong assumption was soon thrown aside. They were steering for the Nots, and in particular, for those long fingery bays where the big stone buildings stood just above the high water mark.
The strangers never looked back.
What mattered to them lay straight ahead.
But even when she was certain that they couldn’t see her, she remained behind the parasite plant, counting her breaths and watching the runners grow too tiny to see anymore, and that’s when she finally eased out into the open again, staring at her bulging pack.
Except for the guns and ammunition, she left everything.
She didn’t run as fast as the others, and she followed a different line, retracing her own steps as the sun lifted and the heat lifted and the sea’s skin responded by growing fiercely hot and dry beneath bare toes. The day reached noon. The Nots would be outside now, basking in the sun. Every so often, she changed her mind and told her legs to stop, and when they refused, she became confused. Where was her trusted fearfulness hiding? How would returning accomplish anything at all? But she was relieved as well as puzzled. Fanciful, improbable plans swirled inside a head that had never been so rested or well fed, and she kept returning to the simple faith that her intuitions actually knew what they were doing.
The first explosion sounded like the crack of a dried pegpoke.
She stopped running and listened, and just when she decided that the sea was making the snapping noise—a consequence of tides and currents abusing the thick skin—she saw half a dozen flashes of light and the bright yellow lick of flames rising up from the shoreline.
The Nots’ buildings were burning.
She knelt on the sea and watched, silently telling herself to turn now, turn and go back. The mainland beckoned, and a life of relative wealth and constant invention.
But then a traitorous thought pushed her back onto the suicidal path.
She imagined Mercer.
This creature that she barely knew was inside her. She could see him, and she heard his smooth old voice talking to no one but her. He was weepy and furious about what was happening to his Nots, to his island. One life had spent eons in a tiny place, and all those habits had gathered on the soul because of it … an illusion of eternity that meant more to him than any sensible notion … and she had absolutely no doubt how he would react to this brutal assault.
More buildings began to burn.
Even across such a distance, she heard the Nots’ wild screams.
She rose again, and her shoulders slumped, and she managed to take half a dozen steps backward. Then a single fanheart dove out of the smoke-pierced sky, spotting her and diving close to shout nothing that made sense and that she understood nonetheless.
Again, she ran toward the island.
She felt trapped inside a strange woman. Reasonable terror and brilliant cowardice had been tossed aside. With the fanheart circling overhead, she finally reached the shore. The tide was high. Open, weed-choked water lay between her and a mudstone bank. She didn’t hesitate, feet plunging into the warm deep edge of the sea. One arm pulled and both legs kicked, and she held the stubby rifle high until her left foot kicked the sharp lip of bedded stone, slicing open the skin behind her toes. Then she hurried up the bank and into the great forest that welcomed her with shade and the rich smell of burning flesh. Kneeling for a moment, she pushed at the cut until it was healed. The wind was blowing down the length of the island. Through gaps in the canopy, she saw black smoke and glimpses of an afternoon sun. Obviously her enemies knew much about the island and its inhabitants. An army like this could be everywhere, but she filled only one little place, forever shifting and never unaware. When she reached a familiar trail, she paused long enough to convince herself that only her feet and Mercer’s had passed this way. Then she crept down to his front door, discovering that each of the booby-traps remained active, untouched.
She disabled them, and before she entered, she set them again.
But waiting beside the door itself—that great slab of ruby rock—sat a little wooden box that she didn’t recognize.
She began to step back, and then thought better of it.
Standing on the only ground she trusted, she called out. Ten times, she risked making the kinds of noise that should have drifted through the house’s breathing holes. Mercer would have heard her with her first word, and where was he? Gone already, she decided. But she yelled an eleventh time regardless, and that was when a body kicked the ground behind her, and his careful, very soft voice asked, “What are you doing?”
She turned.
He was dressed for war. A huge man with muscles and tough bone, he nonetheless looked tiny inside unfamiliar armor and beneath the various munitions. Steel boots covered his feet. The ancient mask was as clear as clean water. His face was exactly as she had expected: A tight jaw and the red beard and the squinting, uncompromising eyes, little beads of sweat running through the whiskers and the throat jumping a little as the voice said, “I thought you’d left me.”
“No,” she lied.
Dark, skeptical eyes stared at nothing but her eyes.
“I did leave,” she finally admitted. “But I changed my mind.”
He insisted on saying nothing.
“I saw them coming,” she explained. Then she reported their numbers and the equipment that she had seen and the arrow-certainty of their motion.
Mercer’s only response was a slight silent nod.
Once again, she looked at his gear. Where did all that shiny armor come from? She hadn’t seen it hanging in the armory, she realized. And his rifle was different from the others, although she couldn’t decide exactly what made it so unlikely. So strange.