Writers of the Future: 29

  Keera flinched, her face shuttering. “It’s my job now, by rights. You can’t change that just by shooting holes in a couple of trees.”

  Mara looked down at her sister’s hands, crooked into loose fists, tense and steady. She remembered how they had shaken after Keera shot the man whose body lay rotting in the razor grass. “I was meant to do it.”

  “I know,” Keera said. “I know! But you got out of it, fair and square, your damned eyes, and you can’t come back now. I won’t let you.”

  They stared across the dry ground, Keera tense and bright, a high flush of color in her cheeks, Mara just tired. Tired with the weight trapped in her gut, the weight of what she had done to her sister with her inability to do her damn job right in the first place. “You hate it,” she said. “I know you do.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “It should.”

  “But it doesn’t,” Keera said. She stepped away from Mara and picked up her rifle. “I’m going to go down the river road.”

  “No,” Mara said. “What would you do that for? It’s not safe.”

  “I have to know where the harvesters come from, don’t you see? And what if there are other people out there fighting them? We could help each other.”

  “There’s not,” Mara said. “Nobody comes here, and nobody who leaves ever comes back. That’s how it’s always been.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s law.” Keera turned and faced across the road, over the broad expanse of the river. The sun sparkled off it, clean and beautiful. “I’ve just got to know. About—”

  She stopped. Mara finished for her: about those men lying there dead.

  “I thought you just told me you were going to do your job,” Mara said. “Protecting the Goldwater.”

  “And I am,” Keera snapped. “I’m doing it. I’m figuring it out, and then I’m coming back.”

  Mara didn’t say anything.

  “If you want to put those rifle skills to the test, you can help Rey mind the place while I’m gone.” Keera bent, got her pack, and slung it over her shoulder. “I’m sure he’d be glad for the help.”

  “Does he know where you’re going?”

  “He knows I always try to do right by this town.” Keera’s voice had lost its edge. She sounded weary.

  “All right.” Mara closed her eyes for a moment, let everything go black. Would she have done the same in Keera’s place?

  “I came to ask if I could borrow that horse,” Keera said. “It’d make the trip quicker. Ours is a spooky little devil so I won’t take him.”

  ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES J. EADS

  “Take him. You can’t go on foot.” She moved off to the horse, tied at the edge of the clearing. On the way, she stopped next to her sister and softly rapped their elbows together. “Come back soon.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  They packed Keera’s things onto the gray in silence, and then Keera swung into the saddle and stepped the horse back toward the road.

  “I’ll figure it out,” Keera said. “Who the harvesters are, where they’re coming from.”

  “Be safe,” Mara said. “Shoot straight.”

  Keera nodded and moved off down the road. Mara stood for a long time, watching her sister and the horse grow small and indistinct in the distance. Then she wrapped up her rifle and walked home, alone and on foot. Everything was quiet except the sound of her footsteps on the packed dirt and the low burble of the river. In the trees, one bird called and another one answered it.

  A wind swept through the Lady’s crooked house, licking through all the open windows and sending doors swinging, open-shut-open. But the door to the Lady’s parlor stayed closed. That door had never been shut before when Mara came to visit. She stood frozen with her hand on the knob, then leaned in close and put her ear to the wood. But she could hear nothing inside. The Lady was very still, or she was gone.

  Mara opened the door and stepped into the room.

  The Lady came upon her in a rush of puckered bird skin and heavy green velveteen and an open beak, hissing and snapping. The Lady slammed Mara back into the doorframe, her hands digging hard into Mara’s shoulders.

  Mara choked and leaned her head back, despite herself. Her hands gripped and relaxed but there was nothing to grab, no purchase on the smooth wood. Her rifle at home and her knife still in her boot—not that she would dare use it on the Lady, who had healed her. She steadied herself and gazed into the gap of the Lady’s beak, the wide black hole that led into her gullet. Mara thought, Her fingers are so strong. She’s always looked frail, but she’s not. She’s not.

  “Why did you let her go?” the Lady hissed, her beak so close to Mara’s face, the sour blood stink of her breath gusting out.

  “Because I couldn’t stop her,” Mara said evenly. “And because she was right.”

  The Lady backed away. Her fingers left hot impressions in Mara’s skin.

  “I never took you to be simple before, girl,” she said. “What good could possibly come of this? You know as well as I do, no one ever comes back.”

  “No one has before. But Keera will. She’s strong, and she’s armed.”

  The Lady made some croaking noise deep in her throat. “And you think that will make a difference?”

  Mara held her gaze, then looked away. “She was right about the harvesters. We should know where they come from, and why they come. We need to know.”

  “You don’t,” the Lady said. She turned and went to the window, clacking across the wood floor on what could have been heeled shoes or taloned bird feet. “I’ll tell you now, girl: no good ever comes of looking for trouble where none exists. Things were fine as they were. Everyone in the Goldwater is happy. Your family kept everyone safe.”

  The Lady’s shoulders shook under the heavy cowl of her dress. Mara watched her for a moment, not speaking, before she realized that the Lady was crying. But her black bird’s eyes didn’t make any tears.

  Mara lifted herself off the doorframe and went a little farther into the room. In the quiet, she could hear the wind outside. “Lady,” she said. “Are you crying for Keera?”

  The Lady lifted her head. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s one of my people. Like you are, and everyone down there.” She gestured out the window with a loose hand. One of the many rings she wore slid off her finger and dropped to the floor. She didn’t bend to get it. “I care about all of them. You don’t understand, girl, how much I love you all.”

  Mara stayed quiet, working her jaw.

  “You don’t understand,” the Lady repeated.

  “But Keera will be back,” Mara said. “I know it.”

  The Lady’s neck shrank back into the cowl of her dress and her shoulders shook in another dry sob. “I will watch for her,” she said, her voice strange and choked.

  Mara stepped up and stood beside the Lady at the window. She wondered how to comfort her. If she even could. But the Lady seemed barely to notice her. She stood shrunk in on herself, plucking at the sides of her dress with her hands crooked into claws.

  After a while, Mara turned to go.

  “Your eyes,” the Lady said.

  Mara stopped.

  “Are they still well?”

  “Yes,” Mara said. “They have been well since the last time I saw you.”

  “Good. Very good. I’m glad,” the Lady said.

  “I can’t thank you enough for your treatment.”

  The Lady said nothing to that, and kept on looking out the window, so Mara stepped to the door and opened it. There was a cl
ean streak on the doorframe where her back had wiped away the dust.

  “It’s well that you can see,” the Lady said abruptly. “Because now you’ll have to do your sister’s job, won’t you? All alone.”

  Mara stood there for a moment, and then she said, “Yes.”

  “You’ll do fine.”

  “Until Keera comes back.”

  “Of course,” the Lady said.

  Mara slipped out the door. The wind kicked flecks of dirt into her eyes, and she blinked against the sting. She walked away from the house slower than she’d walked coming there.

  One of the clockwork finches swept down out of a sheltered place in the eaves as she stepped onto the bluff. It swooped overhead, fighting against the wind. “We’re all watching for Keera,” it said.

  “My thanks.” Mara didn’t stop for it, but kept on toward the trailhead.

  “Of course, it might be better if she didn’t come back.” The finch trilled a laugh.

  Mara bit her cheek, a spike of pain and a rush of blood in her mouth. “Shut up,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I always know what I’m talking about. My dear mother told me ‘Never tell lies,’ didn’t she?” The finch settled on her shoulder and its wings brushed her hair. It crowded in to speak directly into her ear. “Bad things happen to creatures that lie.”

  “Go away,” she said, whirling to dislodge it.

  The finch lifted into the air. “What do you see, Mara?” it said. “What do you see?”

  She rushed down the trail, nearly running. She heard the finch behind her for a long while, until she got far enough and the wind carried away its words.

  Mara walked the edges of the turnip field in the half light of dusk, so the shadows splayed long down the furrows and she couldn’t see so well that the weeds were growing up, choking out the plants. She didn’t make it out to the field as often as she should anymore. It was hard to manage it by herself.

  But everyone was safe, everyone was fine. She should have been happy. The wedding her neighbor had mentioned was the next day, off in town. A cattleman’s son and a weaver’s second daughter. Mara and Rey would go, wish them luck and happiness.

  But Keera hadn’t returned.

  Mara scuffed her toe in the dirt and kicked out a stone. It skittered across the edge of the field.

  It was true that Mara had trained for this job all her childhood, until her sight went bad before her sixteenth birthday. She knew how to handle herself. Everyone in the Goldwater was as safe as they’d ever been.

  But she didn’t feel right. The waiting set her on edge. Every morning, getting up and not knowing if she’d see Keera and the gray horse trudging home.

  She couldn’t be certain if she was looking forward to that day, or dreading it.

  She looked up to judge the light in the sky. Less than an hour until full dark. Even so, she stepped over into the soft, turned dirt of the field and planted herself in the middle of a row. She found a tall weed, and pulled it out. She pulled weeds until well past dark, until her hands were black with dirt and sticky with sap. Until her mind filled with the monotony of the task, and she didn’t think about anything else anymore.

  The married couple jumped over a broomstick, held by a pair of their closest neighbors. Everyone cheered, circling in a dizzy spin. Mara clapped, too, and Rey beside her. She didn’t know the girl well, or the groom. It didn’t matter. They were Goldwater; they were home.

  “They look so happy,” Mara said, watching the rosy bloom across the young bride’s face. The girl grinned and grabbed her new husband’s arm, staggering with weakness from the heat of the room—or maybe just pretending so.

  “They do,” Rey agreed. “I wish them the best.”

  He sat with his hands clasped across his knees, and he didn’t smile.

  Mara chewed on the side of her lip, then rose to her feet, letting the crowd in the middle of the barn sweep her up. “Do you want to dance?”

  “No,” Rey said. “You go ahead.”

  “Fine.” Mara let her feet carry her, away from Rey and his solemnly bowed head, away from the bench where she’d sat all evening and into the crowd of her people. Someone took her hands and twirled her, and her feet knew what to do even if she did not.

  “It’s good to see you here,” the man dancing with her said. “We don’t see enough of you and your sister, for all you do.”

  “You know,” Mara said, following the flow of the dance. She swung under the man’s arm and came up on the other side. “We do what we must. There’s not much time for anything else.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  The steps of the dance swung her away and into the arms of another partner. This one smiled politely and didn’t seem to care much who she was.

  She danced for a long while.

  When the night grew dark and everything was winding down, Mara stepped outside and found Rey sitting alone on a stump. She went to him.

  He looked up. “Have a nice time?”

  “I did. It’s good to be friendly with the people in town. You must have seen some old friends.”

  “Yeah. But that was a long time ago.” He got up and brushed dirt off his pants. “You wanna head back?”

  “Sure.” She twisted her hands in her skirt, feeling suddenly guilty for the flush in her cheeks and the pleasant tired ache in her feet.

  Rey nodded at her and they started walking. A few other couples walked by them and waved, and they waved back. But soon enough they lost all the townsfolk, and they were walking by themselves on the path to their farmstead. And the night was so dark, so still.

  “I didn’t mean to make you come, if you didn’t want to,” Mara said.

  Rey turned to look at her, startled from some thought. “No, it’s all right. I’m just in a mood.”

  “Sure,” Mara said. “Because you couldn’t be dancing with Keera.”

  Something in her gut twisted sharply when she said it.

  “I just miss her, is all.”

  “Right,” Mara said. “I miss her too.”

  Rey frowned, then his face smoothed out. He grabbed Mara by the wrists and tangled his fingers in hers. “Come on, then, dance with me.”

  “What, here?” She looked down the empty road, dark and quiet.

  “Sure, here,” Rey said, and pulled her into a quick waltz step. Mara laughed and followed his lead, winging down the path with his arm snug around her waist.

  Her smiled faded when she noticed the fixed set of his grin, and the stiffness of his shoulders under her hand. But they still danced.

  “You two make a fine pair.”

  Rey stopped dead and Mara just a hair after him, dragging out of his grip. The hand that he’d held was warm, and she gripped it against her stomach as she peered out into the darkness. They had danced almost all the way to the crossroads between their two houses. “Who’s there?”

  Quiet in the dim of the crossroads, just barely visible by the glint of the moon off all that metal, sat the clockwork finch. When it saw that they had spotted it, it shuffled its wings back and forth with a tinny clink. “All apologies for disturbing your frivolities,” it said.

  Mara walked closer to the little bird. “What is it?”

  “A harvester,” it said. “Coming by the river road. Tomorrow.”

  She looked up at Rey, and he stared back at her without expression. She nodded. “All right,” she told the finch. “We’ll take care of it.”

  Mara and Rey walked a little farther up the river road this time before settling in to a good-looking spot, all bushes and low-hanging br
anches. It wouldn’t do to go back to the copse they’d used before, wouldn’t do to establish a pattern. Routines made people sloppy.

  “So there’s only the one,” Rey said. “Shouldn’t be bad.”

  “No.” Mara adjusted herself in the underbrush, made sure she had enough room to move and aim and fire without being seen. “Don’t you wonder why one would come alone, though?”

  He shrugged. “It’s still a harvester. Who knows what even one of them could do?”

  “They die as easy as anything else.”

  Rey had nothing to say to that. They settled back in the bushes and waited, rifles over their knees. Something splashed in the river and Mara startled up to look at it—the river ran so shallow this time of year, anyone could walk in it—but it was only a fish jumping, its tailfin slipping back under the surface and the rings of its splash warping and disappearing into the current.

  “Be still,” Rey said softly. “I think I see something.”

  She squinted down the road and was still. Dust coming.

  “You ready?” Rey said.

  “Of course.” She breathed out between her teeth and put the butt of the rifle’s stock to her shoulder. They waited in silence. Not even birdsong. The sound of Mara’s own pulse strangely loud in her ears, pounding high in her throat.

  The harvester rounded the bend. A thickset man on a gray horse. His scythe rode naked on his back, the blade shining in the sun.

  “Got it,” Mara said. She aimed a little high to compensate for the distance. The trigger at half pressure. Breathe out, fire.

  The stock thumped into her shoulder and the shot cracked out. The man slumped in the saddle and the horse shied violently, scooting sideways into the trees. The harvester’s body slid from the saddle and landed crumpled on the edge of the road, twitching.

  “Good shot,” Rey said.

  “Thank you.” Mara looked at her hands. They didn’t shake. She laid her rifle down. “Let’s go pull him off the road.”

  The harvester had fallen on his shoulder, his face in the dirt. Blood streaked the ground and Mara’s hands as she went to turn him over, but there wasn’t much of it. His scythe had jammed up through its bindings in the fall and its crescent blade stuck out over his back like a wing.