Were her people bothered that their leader sat with the strangers instead of among her own folk? A little, but they also understood that Brendol Hux was a powerful commander in his own right, and that leaders often spent time together making plans for the betterment of the people. They still had trouble understanding Brendol, sometimes, thanks to his sharp accent and some odd changes to his vocabulary. If anything, Siv said they felt some pride that a woman of the Scyre would be considered the equal of a wealthy, powerful general who commanded starships.
As for Carr, he was growing listless, staring off into space and swaying a little as he sat. He refused the jerky Siv offered him and nibbled only at some dried sea vegetable, gulping down his allotted sips of water. He had no bodily waste to add to the recycling unit, though, which was the sort of thing that was noticed when water was scarcer than usual. He was the first one asleep, falling to the ground in a puff of gray sand and snoring gently through swollen lips. There was nothing they could do for him—this was a new ailment, and their only hope was that it would go away on its own or be easily fixed by the medical equipment Brendol promised was waiting on his ship.
The next morning, Carr was even worse. His flesh was swollen and pale, all the blue veins of his body visible and throbbing near the skin. He reminded Siv of the creatures that sometimes washed up from the deep sea, ghostly white and partially transparent, gasping for breath and crushed by the very air. His gloves were too tight on his swollen hands and nearly had to be cut off with a knife. When asked how he felt, he couldn’t speak; his tongue and lips were too swollen. He could only shake his head. But the surprise and fear Siv expected to see in his eyes…wasn’t there. He seemed sleepy and resigned. They pulled him to standing, and Torben helped her propel him up the next dune, Siv’s every muscle burning as the injured man wobbled between them.
As Phasma crested the dune’s ridge, she was lit by the rising sun, half molten gold and half indigo shadow. She put up her hand to shield her eyes and screamed, “Enemies! Scyre, fight!” as she clutched her spear and reached for the ax hanging on her belt.
Siv and Torben had no choice but to drop Carr in the sand and run to Phasma’s side, drawing their own weapons. The troopers pulled their blasters and began firing down the dune, and as Siv hit the top with Torben on her heels, she saw the attack unfolding. Figures swathed in gray seemed to glide across the sand, pulled by huge lizards with pebbled gray skin. They skimmed over the ground far faster than the Scyre group could run, and they held long, shivering lances tipped with glassy blades.
Siv considered her blow darts, but she couldn’t find skin on the attackers and didn’t want to risk wasting the metal barbs. Instead, she pulled out her two curved scythes. The attackers were close now, six of them dragged by six lizards. A trooper’s blaster sent one of the lizards flailing down the dune, his master tumbling behind him. The five remaining skimmers didn’t swerve.
Phasma was closest, and she sidestepped the lizard’s lunge and swiped her dagger across the folds of its neck, slicing deep into muscle and making the creature scream. The skimmer behind it was able to nimbly leap off a flat piece of metal and run at Phasma on overlarge feet, and their silent fight drew everyone’s eye—until the next skimmer glided near. It got past the troopers, but Torben was running right for it. He slammed his club into the lizard’s skull, darted around it, and hacked into the skimmer’s chest with his ax. The figure fell down, and Torben put a huge boot on its gut, ripped out his ax, and yelled his battle cry, splattered in blood just as red as his own.
So these attackers were human, then. Probably. For all their strange costumes, they could die, and that emboldened the Scyre folk. Gold beetles erupted from the sand to lick up the blood, and Torben staggered back, hunting his next prey.
Siv let out her own ululating scream and ran down the dune toward one of the skimmers, ready to do her duty for her people. The lizard dodged sideways, great mouth open to show hundreds of serrated teeth. Siv skidded to her back and slid along the sand, slicing up the creature’s belly as she zipped underneath it and rammed her feet into the legs of the enemy pulled behind it. The figure fell over with an all-too-human curse. Before Siv could stand and continue fighting, little Gosta leapt over her, brandishing her blade, and stabbed down in a vital spot while shouting her war cry. That skimmer didn’t get up again.
Gosta held out a hand to help Siv stand, and when she looked around, she saw that the Scyre warriors and their trooper guests had utterly destroyed the attackers and their lizards. The fight had been unusually quick and brutal. No enemies were left breathing, which meant no answers would be had. Where had these attackers come from? What did they want? Had their people traced the path of Brendol’s ship across the sky, and were they, too, racing there to claim the bounty?
It couldn’t be helped. At least the Scyre folk had won.
“Well, that wasn’t too bad,” Siv said with a smile, but she didn’t get to enjoy the victory for long.
“Quick. The detraxors,” Phasma barked.
Siv hurried to the lizard she’d just gutted, pulling the first detraxor from her bag and jamming the spike deep into the creature’s muscle. Considering the bloodthirsty beetles already scurrying into the bleeding cavity, she had to be quick. As soon as it was working, she went to the figure Gosta had just felled. Although she recognized that time was of the essence, she had to see who would be providing the life-giving essence for the salve that would protect the Scyre warriors on their journey. To Siv, this wasn’t just a physical act; it was a ritual. Tugging at the wrappings on the figure’s face, she didn’t know what she would find—an alien species, a mutated human, something native to Parnassos that they’d never seen wash up on the rocks.
But it was a human like any other. A young woman, just like her. Medium-brown skin, hair long and plaited under her wrappings. Clean and healthy. No visible signs of trauma or disease. Even the woman’s teeth were intact. Siv closed the woman’s brown eyes and said the quick prayer the Scyre folk always said when they harvested minerals and liquids from a body.
“Thank you for giving me life. Your today protects my people’s tomorrow. Body to body, dust to dust.”
Before Phasma could bark at her again, she jammed the next detraxor into the meat of the woman’s thigh and set it running.
The Scyre folk and the troopers had taken no damage, and it was deemed a great victory. The nutrients and water skins they’d claim from their assailants would save their lives and possibly help nourish Carr back from whatever trauma he was suffering. Siv collected her first detraxor from the now desiccated lizard, traded the full skin for an empty one, and jammed the machine into the next lizard. As both machines did their work, she joined the others in hunting among the human bodies for spoils and bags of water. They were careful to scrape the beetles away, crushing the pernicious things when necessary and never letting them get anywhere close to their skin.
Each of their attackers carried pouches that hung over each hip, and although the Scyre folk didn’t recognize everything within the pouches, they took them and grew determined to understand how to live in this arid place. The most valuable thing found in each pouch was a dried cake of densely packed minerals and salts that reminded Siv a little of the detraxors’ rich essence. The sleds the skimmers had ridden would be a great boon, allowing them to drag their packs effortlessly over the sand instead of carrying the weight, now increased by several skins of water. The lizards were an especially rich resource, and Gosta was already slicing off strips of their dried meat for the road.
“Oh! We can pull Carr,” Siv said, suddenly remembering that she and Torben had been forced to drop their fellow warrior to rush to their leader’s side during the fight.
Torben nodded and followed her back down the other side of the dune, dragging a sled behind him on its rope. Carr was just a dark lump at the bottom of the valley, fallen on his side, his breath ragged and troubled and his heartbeat swiftly fluttering.
“Carr, are you wors
e?” Siv asked.
A low groan was the only answer.
“Flip him over.”
Torben gently turned Carr over so that he was facing up and helped him to sit. Carr seemed twice the size he’d once been, his body swollen and his flesh thin and pale and stretched. Siv reached for his bare hand to hold it and found that his fingernails were gone. They’d popped off and fallen to the sand.
“Stay with us, old friend,” Torben said, so gentle despite his size and might. “We’ll drag you behind us, we’ll be your own personal sled lizards, and then Brendol Hux will fix you and take you up into the stars.”
Carr moaned again and tried to close his eyes, but the lids wouldn’t slide down over his bulging orbs.
“Hurry,” Phasma called from the top of the dune. “The detraxors are full and ready to be moved, and we need to leave before someone comes looking for these people.”
Torben nodded to Siv, who pulled the sled closer. Carr shuddered and groaned, and Siv stopped tugging on the sled to focus on him. He was quivering, shaking all over, his eyes wide open and his lips and swollen tongue struggling to speak.
“What is it?” Siv asked.
In response, Carr rolled his eyes toward her and shuddered. His skin trembled, too swollen to touch. He gave one last moan and exploded in a cloud of water. It was as if his skin had dissolved, and liquid splattered Siv and Torben and sank into the sand, coloring it a deep black. There wasn’t much blood, and his organs appeared to be shriveled, dark things connected by pale-blue tubes and nearly translucent bones. As Siv stood and stepped back, watching in horror, the ground around Carr’s clothes erupted in beetles bursting out of their cones of sand and licking at the water with their long proboscises.
“Up! Get away!” she shouted at Torben, who was frozen in shock and grief.
The big man stood and stumbled back as yet more of the bright beetles, hundreds upon thousands of them, ripped out of the sand to gorge upon the water that had been their friend and fellow warrior. Beetles sucked on his shrunken organs and tried to scuttle up Siv’s legs to lap at the liquid soaking her pants, but she knocked them off and ran a few steps farther back.
“Both of you, come away.”
Siv and Torben looked up to find Phasma at the top of the dune, haloed in morning light as she watched them, ax and spear still in hand. Brendol stood by her side, his head canted curiously as he watched the horror unfold.
“But Carr,” Siv said.
“He’s gone now. He can’t be reclaimed. He can’t nourish his people. Now it’s up to us. We must prepare what we can and go.”
“At least he’s in no more pain,” Brendol added, but his words sounded hollow and cloying. He hadn’t lost any of his people, and Siv suspected that if he had, he wouldn’t have mourned them.
Never had Scyre folk died without in turn nourishing their people. Even those who fell into the ocean were thought to feed the creatures there, and those creatures eventually died and washed up on the rocks where the Scyre would use them for clothes, food, and moisture. But Carr was simply gone. There was no prayer to say over him that worked.
“Thank you…for being you,” Siv said, standing over bones wrapped in wet clothes and covered in frantic, vicious beetles.
“Yes, thank you,” Torben added before putting a hand on her shoulder and gently urging her up the dune. “Carr was a good friend and a fine warrior.”
For all the hills they’d climbed in the desert, that one was the hardest. When they finally struggled to the top, Siv saw that Phasma had moved some steps farther away and was squatting with Brendol in hushed conversation.
“This one’s done,” Gosta said, gesturing to the second lizard, which was now no more than a loose skeleton wrapped in leathery hide and dry as the air itself. The detraxor was full and purring, and Siv knelt to switch out the skin and place the siphon in the next lizard. As she worked, she described every step for Gosta, showing her how the pieces of the detraxor fit together and how they had to be cleaned. No one else among them knew how to work the machines or concoct the salve, and she had to pass this knowledge on. It was dangerous, here among the dark sands, and Siv might be the next to fall to some unknown terror. With no child yet to pass on her knowledge as her mother had passed it on to her, she would teach Gosta all that she knew. That was all they had, in the Scyre: one another, and hope.
WHILE SIV AND GOSTA WORKED ON claiming as many nutrients from the fallen as possible, Phasma directed the rest of the crew in harvesting the meat of the lizards and adding the light layers of clothing the attackers had worn to their own costumes.
“If we look more like them, perhaps they won’t attack so quickly next time,” she explained, slipping her arms through wispy gray robes the color of the sand.
Their next focus was on the troopers, covering their armor with cloth so they didn’t stand out against the stark landscape. Brendol Hux was an odd figure, his sharp black clothes hidden under long robes and tied with a sash around his paunchy belly, a feature none of the Scyre warriors had ever seen on another human. In the Scyre, ribs were countable and stomachs were convex.
As they stripped the bodies down to skin, they found a carved wooden box hanging around the neck of each of their attackers. Phasma opened one, and everyone was amazed to see yet another beetle like the one that had bitten Carr.
“What is it?” Gosta asked.
“A weapon,” Phasma guessed, snapping the box shut. “The beetle bites someone, and whatever they inject into the body silently destroys the flesh and organs. An easy and elegant way to kill unsuspecting enemies.”
“Clever,” Brendol mused.
“Dangerous.”
Phasma tossed the closed box down the dune, where it tumbled into obscurity. Since Torben had nothing to contribute to the harvesting, he stomped on beetles while he kept watch for more raiders. Every time a drop of blood from a kill hit the sand, one or more beetles burrowed up to gorge on it, and Torben pulverized them with his club or stomped them with his great boots, leaving shiny gold husks covered in thick, black goop that attracted yet more beetles. As time went on and the detraxors did their brutal work, the beetles seemed to be crawling in from far away, making long streaks of gold across the sand, and the troopers joined him in crushing them. As they cut strips of desiccated meat from the last of the lizards, there were so many beetles that stomping them wasn’t enough.
After Brendol smacked one off his robe, he grimly announced, “It is time to go.” Phasma nodded and did not argue, Siv noted.
There was no question regarding whether they should follow the sled tracks that were being swiftly obscured by wind. They had no time to find out where their attackers had come from. This was a rescue mission with the sole purpose of getting Brendol Hux to his ship, not a raid or even a scouting errand. The warriors, so inquisitive about this new part of the world, didn’t have the luxury of curiosity and would have to hope the attack had been pure coincidence. Phasma scanned the desert with her quadnocs, following the sled tracks over a dune, off to the right. Siv knew her well enough to know she was marking the spot in her mind, adding it to her flawless mental map of the planet’s topography.
Loading Carr’s pack and the bags of the raiders onto two of the sleds, the group took off down the other side of the dune and headed onward toward the fallen ship. The curl of white smoke had long since disappeared, but Phasma and Brendol both agreed they were headed in the direction where his ship had crashed. Torben pulled both sleds as Siv and Gosta shouldered the packs containing the cleaned and ready detraxors and their skins. For all that no one would ever welcome an attack, their quick defense and fighting skills had earned the water and nutrients they had so sorely needed for their journey. Overall, it was considered a good omen, and everyone felt confident, if wary, that should more of the skimmers appear, they would be prepared to meet the challenge.
Siv looked back over her shoulder to the bodies on the dune, sand already shifting to cover what was left of their skin and bones
. Lizard and human alike, they would soon be lumps and then merely smooth sand. She was glad she couldn’t see down into the valley to the remains of her friend. And she couldn’t help wondering how many dead things slumbered under the glittering gray dunes.
Poor Carr. In all her twenty years, Siv had never seen a Scyre member die in such a strange and discomfiting manner. Even those lost to the sea fed the sea creatures, and it was considered a valiant and natural death. But here, in these strange and endless sands, Carr’s bones wouldn’t find their home in the hidden caves of the Nautilus. His remains would slowly be hidden by sand and forgotten forever, surrounded by enemies and emptiness. It was a lonely place, and his good nature and hearty laugh would be sorely missed around the campfire.
Still, life in the Scyre was rough and short, and Siv had seen many friends die. It was considered weakness to mourn too much, so she turned her face to the hot sun and followed Phasma onward to their destiny.
—
For the rest of that afternoon, they saw nothing but sand and dunes. Up each dune they trudged, pulling their sleds and carrying their packs and carefully sipping the smallest amount of liquid. At the crest of the dune, they couldn’t help halting, scanning the area ahead for something, anything, that was not sand. Again and again, they were disappointed. All they saw were endless gray dunes rising in endless waves against an endless sky of molten blue. Gray clouds bunched, far off, darkening the horizon back the way they’d come. The Scyre seemed doomed to dwell under an oppressive pall and the threat of thunder. But here, just a few days away, not a single cloud dotted the sky; there was nothing to provide either shade or the hope of water. The air wavered over the sand, the dry heat bouncing up to burn Siv’s eyes. The land itself drove them forward, spurring them toward the promise of Brendol’s ship and the imagined peace and coolness of space.