“They can talk?” Torben asked.
Another buzzing laugh. “There is little to discuss. It has been many years since sentient beings have approached the border of the dead lands. Churkk has been inactive for a long period of time. It is good for Churkk to have work again. If you are ready, Churkk will deliver a message.”
Brendol had been in conversation with his troopers, but now he stepped forward. “You have a message for us? From whom?”
“The question would be from what. Now that the signs have been scoured away by sand and wind, Churkk is the only warning. Do not enter the dead lands. There was a great accident, and the radiation remains. Those who pass this border will die within the week. No one enters. No one leaves. It is an elegant arrangement, but lonely. Perhaps Churkk is being punished.”
“Punished for what?” Siv asked. She had never spoken to an alien before. For all the times she’d fought against the Claws, she’d never conversed with Balder or learned anything of his story. Part of her was awed by her fearlessness now.
“The Gand should not leave Gand. It is not the way. But Churkk was young and the augury was clear. Churkk had to depart. Churkk has long expected the other findsmen to hunt Churkk down for leaving the sect, but every ship is shot down long before Churkk can be found.” The Gand laughed again, and Siv felt certain she heard more than a little madness as the beetles hurriedly bustled around Churkk’s face and resettled. “It is amusing, is it not, to want to be both found and forgotten at the same time?”
“You said radiation.” Brendol stepped closer, throwing Siv a warning glance. “And an accident. When was it?”
“Churkk does not know. Time passes strangely here. Churkk watched the latest star fall into the wastes, and although there is no gaseous mist here to show the right signs, the beetles talk to Churkk. They said people would come and horrible things would happen. Churkk has been very anxious for this eventuality to occur.”
“Horrible things?” Phasma repeated sharply.
Churkk laughed its unsettling laugh again. Siv couldn’t tell if it was male or female—if it even had a gender. She couldn’t tell if the Gand was old or young. All she knew was that it was sitting on something as tall as she was, making the Gand appear larger than it actually was. Up close, watching the beetles undulate, she saw that Churkk sat cross-legged, hands on its knees. It didn’t seem to have any weapons, but it was covered with beetles, wasn’t it? One flick of a finger, and a single insect could kill their entire party. And if the Gand could direct the insects, speak to them somehow…well, Siv resolved not to make Churkk angry.
“Horrible things will happen either way, if that makes you more comfortable with your fate. Churkk is here only to warn you. Beyond this fence, you have perhaps four days before the sickness will be in your bones. Churkk knows that there are medicines elsewhere that can easily cure such diseases, but Churkk doubts that such succor can be found beyond this fence.”
Brendol leaned toward Phasma, and Siv was close enough to hear their whispered conversation.
“He’s talking about radiation poisoning. That suggests there was either a nuclear weapon used here or an accident at a factory that made such weapons.”
“Did the map not name the Con Star facilities, General Hux? Perhaps there is a weapon, but perhaps there is also a facility that will have the medicines to cure the disease it causes.”
Brendol exhaled and scratched at his beard. “If we can get to my ship, the First Order will be here within hours. Our ships are equipped with medbays and cures for every known disease in the galaxy. It’s merely a game of numbers and time. I say we thank this freak for his time and keep moving.”
“You’re not concerned about the sickness? Or the augury?”
A snort. “I don’t believe in magic, Phasma. And even if I did, I wouldn’t take my fortune from a mad Gand alone in the desert. They are a strange people to begin with. I am confident the First Order can halt the sickness, should his warning concern an actual radioactive event.”
Phasma paused in that way of hers, when she was thinking through every strategy to its many possible ends. Siv well knew that Phasma’s brain was like a spiderweb, and that she would not make a decision until she’d considered every thread and its every connection. Holding up the quadnocs, Phasma looked through the fence to the sands beyond, then turned to regard the path behind. It was clear that no matter what challenges lay ahead, going back was not an option.
“Then let’s hurry,” she finally said.
Brendol nodded and turned back to the Gand, who hadn’t moved. Siv couldn’t even see it breathing and wondered what Churkk was made of, if it even had the usual organs and fluids that her detraxors would make such quick work of.
“Thank you for your warning, Churkk. We understand that this area is dangerous, but we have no choice but to continue in pursuit of our goal. Do you have any knowledge of the terrain or creatures that lie beyond the fence?”
Churkk’s great head wagged, sending the beetles scurrying. “You will go on, as the augury said you would. And what will find you will find you. Churkk knows what you will do, great General, and Churkk knows that you will reach your goal. The galaxy will take its toll, one day. Sometimes it is better to let a thing alone.”
“But none have passed recently?”
“Not in years. Decades.”
“And if anyone else tries, you will give them this same warning?”
“You do not control Churkk, and Churkk will say what the sands command. Churkk will tell whoever comes what they need to know. Churkk will tell them that only danger and death wait beyond this fence, the same thing that you now know, for all the good it did. Wisdom is wasted on zealots—that is one thing Churkk is sure of.”
“So we may pass?”
Churkk held up a beetle-covered arm, gesturing with a brown, three-fingered hand. “You will find a hole in the fence if you walk that way.”
Siv darted forward, leaving a bit of dried meat near Churkk’s seat but not close enough for a beetle to touch her. “Thank you, Churkk,” she murmured, bowing her head. Her mother had taught her, long ago, that there was some wisdom in madness, and that those who spoke with the beyond were to be respected and rewarded.
“When the time comes, keep walking,” Churkk whispered, soft as an insect’s buzz.
Siv nodded and turned back to her people, but her heart sank the moment she looked over her shoulder toward Gosta and their vehicles.
“Hurry!” she shouted. “They’re here!”
A GROUP OF MASKED WARRIORS RAN toward them, pulling something that resembled the sleds of the skimmers who had once attacked them. Siv couldn’t pick out anyone else in the throng, but she knew the figure being pulled on the sled as well as she knew anything.
“It’s Keldo.”
Phasma had her quadnocs up, and she had an even better view.
“Keldo, all of the Scyre, and all of the Claws. This is madness.”
“Looks more like revenge,” Brendol muttered.
The group was coming on quickly, sliding down the dune toward their vehicles, where Gosta was just exiting her GAV and looking back for the source of the noise. She must’ve seen them, too, as she spun back around and ran as fast as she could toward the fence, hampered by her turned ankle. Siv took a few steps forward to help the girl, but Phasma caught her wrist, the hard glove of the trooper uniform digging into Siv’s flesh.
“You can’t save her,” Phasma said. “We must keep going.”
Behind them, Brendol shouted, “They can’t be allowed to take the vehicles! Fire!”
The troopers put their blaster rifles to their shoulders, and they pelted the vehicles and the oncoming attackers with red-hot laserfire. The first GAV went up in a ball of flame that caught the second, and the third lost a wheel and listed sadly to the side.
“Phasma, help!” Gosta called, her arms outstretched toward the warrior she’d idolized.
But Phasma merely shook her head, her stormtrooper helmet
a flat white mask. Siv tried to pull away, but Phasma’s grip tightened.
“She’s one of us,” Siv begged.
“She’s too weak to go on.”
“Then we’ll carry her!”
Keldo’s warriors had almost reached Gosta, and the troopers focused their blasters on the crowd. Smoke filled the air, providing a hazy backdrop for exploding clouds of sand and blood-red lasers. Siv yanked and pulled, but Phasma wouldn’t release her. She couldn’t watch as the laserfire rocked into the mob of people she’d known all her life, as bodies cried out and screamed and fell, so she put her head down against the armor on Phasma’s shoulder, a strangely personal gesture that Phasma allowed.
When Phasma pushed her away, Siv turned around. Behind what was left of the mob, Gosta lay on the ground among a dozen other bodies. The girl wasn’t moving, her eyes open to the sky.
Little Gosta, the sweetest and most idealistic of the Scyre warriors, was dead.
“No!”
Phasma still had Siv’s wrist, as if correctly guessing that Siv would be compelled to run toward the younger girl. Not only because there might be some hope of saving her, but also because to die alone without helping her people would leave Gosta’s spirit uneasy and Siv’s responsibility undone. Siv’s fingers itched for the detraxors in her pack, for the calm she felt when she completed her holy rite, and her arms ached to hold the girl close and tell her she had been a good and brave companion, a worthy warrior of the Scyre. But Phasma was tugging Siv away, toward the rent in the fence, and soon Torben joined in, pulling Siv unwillingly along, murmuring apologies and kindnesses that did nothing to soften the blow of her loss.
All those bodies—or at least many of them—had received the gift of the detraxors, proudly wearing green stripes of the oracle salve, and now they would never contribute their own proper shares. When she’d chosen to side with Phasma and leave the Scyre on this quest, Siv had known she was abandoning her people, denying them the protective balm they needed to survive and stay healthy. She’d planned to return before they began to suffer, to help them build a new life in the stars with better medicines than anything she could provide. Now her people were dying. Guilt rested heavy on her shoulders, and it felt like a thirst that could never be slaked.
Siv’s feet moved in the sand as if it were quicksand. She ventured a last look back at Churkk, where the Gand lay dead, toppled on the ground and leaking a fluid that wasn’t blood. The beetles that had bedecked him ignored his moisture, leaving his face and body to feast instead upon the destruction rendered by the blasterfire. Underneath the beetles, the insectoid alien had worn the blood-red robes of the Arratu, his segmented feet bare and his three-fingered hands open to the sky. Siv looked to Brendol, his blaster still in his hand, but there was no way to know if the strange guardian’s death had been collateral damage or a purposeful execution.
Torben and Phasma dragged Siv away for real now, each grasping the top of one of her arms. Her detraxors weighed heavy on her back, to see so many nutrients lost. When the shimmering gold beetles boiled up out of the sand to cover Gosta, Siv finally turned away, shaking her arms loose, and found her legs again. The last thing she saw was the crowd of Scyre and Claws, those who hadn’t been hit by blasterfire and claimed by beetles, running across the sand, war cries erupting from their masks as they pulled Keldo’s sled behind them. She had shared his bed but never seen his mask before, and from this distance she couldn’t tell what might’ve inspired it. Harsh slashes of black, white, and red were surrounded by a mane of black feathers. The sight was enough to get her running.
They jogged parallel to the high fence, passing sign after wind-scoured sign, until they came to a rip in the metal wires. One of the troopers held it back while everyone crawled through, and Torben was nearly too big to fit. Siv was worried the loose wires would cut him and call forth the beetles, but Phasma silently shoved him aside and dug a deep furrow in the sand to make more room. Once they were all through, Brendol held the two pieces of fence together and slapped some sort of binder around the wire, holding it tight.
“It won’t last long,” he said, echoing Siv’s thoughts, “but it will slow them down.”
Once inside the fence, nothing seemed different from the other side. The sand was still gray, the sun still beat down, and the air didn’t feel any more dangerous than it had before they’d crossed the border, as Churkk had called it. But Siv shivered anyway, sure to her bones that something was desperately wrong here. The words the Gand and Brendol Hux had exchanged—weapon, radioactive, nuclear —were on repeat in her mind as she probed the environment for some new sensation that would inform her of what to fear. Phasma guided them in the direction of Brendol’s ship, and as Siv had never doubted her leader’s unerring navigation, she didn’t doubt it now. She took her place, after Phasma and before Torben, running easily and deeply feeling the empty spots in their formation that should’ve been taken by eager Gosta and cheerful Carr. They had left their land as five warriors, and even if the dead lands didn’t live up to their threat, they would only ever be three. Four, maybe, if Brendol’s medicine was as good as he promised it was and the child could survive whatever poison had destroyed this place.
They went down a long dune, and the land flattened out a little, as it had here and there throughout their travels. Judging by the disks she’d seen at Terpsichore Station, Siv thought this meant that long ago these areas had been naturally lower, true valleys and craters that had once held water and plants. At first, there was no sign of any such topography, but as they went on, strange shapes and shadows began to appear in the monochrome gray. They began to pass tall posts, each leaning sideways like a broken finger reaching from the ground. Farther on, a peculiar skeleton of metal rose proudly from the sand, looping and whirling like the spine of the giant eels that washed up on the rocks sometimes at home.
“Were they animals?” she asked.
Brendol had fallen behind, slowing them all with this lack of physical conditioning, and he held his side and wheezed as he spoke. “Amusements,” he said. “They once guided vehicles that people rode for fun. An archaic form of entertainment on planets without enough technology to stimulate the populace from inside their own homes. This planet had much land and little sense.”
As they went on, forced by Brendol’s reduced speed to slow from a jog to a fast walk, Phasma moved to the rear. She couldn’t walk more than a few moments without spinning to scan the horizon behind them. Keldo and his people hadn’t shown themselves yet, but they’d be following. In such an empty, deserted place and with the beetles and who knew what other horrors hiding under the sand, there was nowhere to hide.
Dusk fell, and they hurried toward a series of bleached white structures poking up from the sand like shattered teeth. Although their walls seemed sound, there were no roofs to the buildings, and sand filled them inside, dusted high into the corners.
“Homes,” Brendol said before Siv could ask. “And we’d best shelter in one tonight. We can’t go much farther without rest. If the other group has been on foot this whole time, they’ll be no better off.”
Siv knew well enough that Brendol’s we actually referred only to himself. The Scyre warriors were more than capable of walking for several more hours, and the troopers were in excellent physical condition. But Brendol wasn’t made for Parnassos. When he pulled down his goggles and fabric wraps to rub sweat from his forehead, his reddened face was bleached white around the edges; there were deep-purple hollows under his eyes, and his muscles quivered. His hand hadn’t left the stitch in his side, and he stumbled every few steps, although there was nothing to impede his footwork. He must’ve recognized how dire his situation was, as he allowed Siv to swipe thick lines of salve across his cheeks.
“There.” Phasma pointed to the last structure in the grouping, which sat a little higher and had part of what had once been a roof.
“PT-2445 will take first watch,” Brendol said. “We’ll switch every two hours. After the third
watch, we’ll keep going.”
Casting nervous looks at the sand behind them, they walked through the empty doorway and spread out around the building, which was divided into many rooms, all filled with sand. Although it was clear the rooms had once been tall enough even for someone of Phasma’s stature, the sand had filled the structure so that its walls were just tall enough to provide a decent backrest for Torben, with perhaps a meter of space until jagged metal support beams poked out of the uniform white. Siv went to a corner, sitting down hard and pawing through her bags for the reassuring touch of her detraxors. It was her duty to make sure everyone had a last application of oracle’s salve before sleep claimed them, and the ritual of the task calmed her.
Torben sat down beside her, and she gently drew lines of salve on his cheeks and forehead. They were near Brendol’s ship, and whatever hidden dangers lurked in the dead lands, she longed to protect him.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
“Body to body, dust to dust,” she replied.
Her mother had explained that it was part of a far older ritual, but the ceremonial words always made her feel tied to the planet and to her own lineage, for all that her mother was the only relation she remembered. When she offered the tin of salve to Brendol and his troopers, she received brief thanks from Pete and Huff, both out of their helmets, but Brendol only nodded, which would’ve been a rudeness worth fighting over back home in the Scyre. As she approached Phasma, Siv realized that she would never again smear the lines on Gosta’s cheeks, fussing over the girl and reminding her to drink enough water.
Phasma was the only one sitting outside the building, her back to what would’ve been the outer wall. She still wore her helmet, and Siv’s curiosity about the impact of Wranderous’s beating continued unabated.
When she held the tin out to Phasma, Phasma took off her gloves, scooped out her portion, and paused for a moment, as if she’d forgotten what to say. When her words came, they were clipped and atonal, the very mimic of Brendol, if he’d been polite enough to say them.