She wanted to see the ocean. The old, shattered skyscrapers. She wanted to see the prairie grass and buffalo surge around the massive wheels of the ship.
Getting captured by raiders was not in her plans.
“Don’t say anything about the Zephyr to these people,” Mara warned him. The landship they called home was well defended, but she didn’t want to be the one that led raiders—or whatever these people were—to it. She’d first thought of them as raiders, but the small circle of fifteen or so yurts and handmade wooden buildings she’d seen when being taken here didn’t look like the fortress of some raider stronghold.
Gillem balled up against the wall and turned his back to her.
Mara began to study the locking mechanism on her handcuffs. They were pitted, and yet machined so well she knew right away they were artifacts from the time of plenty. How many people over the centuries had been trapped by this exact pair of cuffs?
There were scratch marks around the keyhole; someone had once tried to pick the lock.
And probably failed.
Mara couldn’t find anything to try the lock with, so she paced back and forth through a beam of sunlight that came through the window that was just annoyingly out of reach, dragging the chain around the tile floor behind her.
What did the burly old engineer Evgeny keep telling her? Think through the problem, examine all the resources at your disposal, then try something. He had said that to her just a week ago, as they stood on the rear of the Zephyr and eyed the wooden palisades bolted onto the sagging roof of the ancient Legacy Mall together.
“Those braces look ready to fail,” Mara had muttered to him. “The concrete’s rotted. The raiders will have them, next fall, if they don’t repair them.”
Evgeny had agreed, so Mara pushed further: “We should stay and help them, their offer to us was generous.”
“It was,” Evgeny had agreed. “Though, it was so generous they would have changed their minds about giving us a third of their crop next year.”
“It’s that or starve.”
“So,” the old engineer had said with a grin, “it was never really an offer. We can hardly afford to give them all our resources. There is little enough in this world.”
Mara remembered that she had folded her knees up to her chin. “All we do is guard what we have left, while everything around us slowly fades away.”
And then a loud crack from one of the stays as the third of the four great sail-masts sagged to its side had made her jump.
“The way of the world,” Evgeny said sadly, not even surprised. He’d been monitoring the stress fractures and predicting this for months. “But here on this ship we don’t slow down for anything. We can’t afford to get trapped anywhere. Not when it’s all dying.”
No one came for them.
Mara tried to listen to the muffled conversation outside the wooden walls, but it just sounded like chatter. It didn’t seem like it was about her and Gillem at all.
Then everything fell quiet as the voices moved away.
“Give me your glasses,” Mara said, kicking at Gillem to get his attention.
“My glasses?” Gillem blinked owlishly at her.
The beam of sun had shifted closer to the pillar they were chained to. It was a thick slab of wood.
“Yes, your glasses.”
They were Gillem’s greatest possession, glasses that had been handed down and traded across towns and no few generations, and mounted in new wooden frames. But he loosened the rubber band and handed them over.
“What are you doing?” he asked as Mara held them up to the sun. “Don’t do that, you’ll burn your eyes!”
“Exactly.”
She gathered straw from the dirt floor, ripped cloth from their sleeves, and within a half hour, had flames licking hungrily up the wooden beam.
“You’re going to kill us!” Gillem wailed, pulling all the way to the end of his chain and away from the fire.
The fire spread up the pillar, and then onto the roof. She hadn’t expected it to happen so fast. She’d wanted the pillar to burn through just enough that they could pull free of it. Now the fire began to catch the roof and spread overhead, and smoke started filling the room. But fire wasn’t the only thing spreading; Mara felt a surge of fear tingle through her whole body as well.
She yanked at the chains, looking for weakness in the wooden beam. But it remained solid.
Gillem screamed for help, and Mara couldn’t get him to shut up, though he eventually started coughing too much to shout.
“Stay low.”
She had to project a confidence she didn’t have as they tried to breathe air through their shirts.
And then, mercifully, the beam cracked.
Mara and Gillem burst out of the burning building dragging their chains behind them, and they found people struggling to pull hoses and hand pumps into the center of the village. The fire blazed along the top of two nearby buildings, wooden structures with walls starting to bow inwards.
Four men had grabbed one of the nearby yurts by the walls to drag it across the dirt away from the embers. Children sobbed in the distance, and Mara felt baleful glares aimed at her.
“I don’t think they’re raiders,” Gillem whispered, looking around them.
“It doesn’t look like it,” Mara agreed, holding him behind her and trying to shield him.
The older woman who captured them was no longer wearing a suit decorated with bushes and leaves but heavy robes. She ran up to them, tears wet on her cheeks.
“Those were storage buildings,” she said. “That’s our winter food burning!”
If she’d been a raider, she would have killed them where they stood. Mara knew that. Instead the woman pointed Mara to the iron pump. “Don’t just stand there—help undo what you’ve done!” the woman shouted.
Mara did not argue, but began to man the lever, pumping as if her life depended on it, knowing that it very well might. Old canvas-reinforced hoses led off through the village to a nearby river. The other hose, held by women trying to get near to the burning storehouse, finally gushed water.
Mara kept at the pump until her hands blistered and the old woman finally pulled her away and bandaged her palms.
“We’ve saved what we can, the rest will have to just burn out,” she said softly.
Mara sat with Gillem on bundles of supplies singed black, and the woman, who Mara was beginning to think of as a leader in this community, sat with them. Her name was Emi, and her cloud-gray eyes pierced Mara as she stared at them both.
“We put you in there because we weren’t sure who you were, if you were a danger to the community. Turns out, you are very dangerous.”
“You chained us up,” Mara said defiantly.
“How did you do all this?” Emi waved her hand at the ruined buildings.
“She used my glasses,” Gillem muttered angrily.
Mara kicked him.
“Why are you here?” Emi asked. “What are you doing in my town?”
The exasperation in her voice made it sound like she was trying to figure out how a dog had gotten into the trash and made a mess.
“The sails broke,” Gillem said. Mara hissed at him, and Gillem recoiled.
“I said not to talk about—” Mara started.
But Emi interrupted, sitting between them on the bale and putting a gentle, motherly hand on Gillem’s shoulder.
“Sails,” Emi said. “How interesting. Tell me more about these sails.”
Mara tried to lean back and glare at Gillem behind Emi’s back. But the woman sensed the movement and shifted to block Mara.
“We thought you were raiders, but you’re not, and we hurt you. I’m sorry. It’s the Zephyr,” Gillem told Emi. “It lost its sails and it’s turning around to come this way for trade.”