The Girl and the Stars
“My brother?” She held a hand to indicate his height. “Where is he?”
The others looked down, their mouths in grim lines. Yaz grew suddenly cold, stomach knotting, a twitch coming to her cheek. The scar-faced woman shook her head. “Hetta got him.” She pursed her lips in the direction of sympathy. “Nearly got me once.” She indicated the parallel lines scored across her face as if torn by claws. “Nearly got you too.”
“No.” Yaz drew a breath, understanding. “That was Jaysin. Zeen is bigger.” As she said it the anger rose in her again. Little Jaysin, timid, eager to please, now torn apart and half-eaten. “The giant didn’t have Zeen. It was Jaysin’s head on her belt.”
“Gerant,” the young man with the light said.
“What?”
“Gerant, not giant. The ones that grow too big. They’re gerant.” The harsh shadows made something sinister of his face.
Yaz shook her head. She didn’t care about that. “My brother?”
“He must have come down somewhere else,” the woman said. “The shafts change between gatherings. We can’t cover them all. We didn’t expect anyone out here, but Hetta must have known somehow. She’s cunning, that one.”
“The taint told her.”
Yaz glanced back. It was one of the younglings that had spoken, a fair-haired boy now holding his hand to his face in mimicry of Hetta’s black stain. Yaz had never seen hair so pale before, but then she had seen a dozen new things in less than an hour. She turned back to the woman. “My brother. Zeen. He’s all I care about.”
The woman nodded, biting her well-bitten lower lip. “The other search parties might have got him.”
“Or the Tainted did,” whispered the young girl standing beside the fair boy.
The woman shrugged. “We’ll join up with the rest of the Broken and find out.” She held up a hand as Yaz started forward. “Once we’re sure the regulator has finished.”
“He has,” Yaz said. “The Ictha were the last clan. And I was near the end.”
“Three Ictha.” The man with the light looked at the woman. “I can’t remember the last time there was even one.”
The woman shrugged again. “Two now. Or maybe just one. We’ll go find out once Petrick is back.”
“The boy who attacked the giant?” Yaz asked. “Gerant.” She corrected herself at the young man’s frown.
Back down the tunnel something rattled. “Speak of the devil.” The woman nodded to the girl who had whispered about “the Tainted.” “Jerra, go let the rope down.” The girl ran off into the darkness. “Check first!” the woman called after her. “And don’t fall down the hole.”
The woman turned back to Yaz. “I’m Arka. That’s Pome.” She motioned toward the hard-eyed young man with the star. There were other names but somehow they didn’t stick. Zeen was the only name she wanted to hear.
The girl, Jerra, and the boy Petrick, who close up didn’t look much older, came hurrying back, the girl clutching the rope. Yaz wondered how it had been secured. Her mind always threw in tangential questions at unhelpful moments.
“Hetta?” Arka asked. Yaz saw the cannibal’s mouth descending toward her leg again, drool hanging from pointed teeth.
“Still raging.” Petrick grinned. “I lost her in the threads. The new girl stuck her good. Hand and foot!”
Yaz frowned, her hand returning to her side where her knife should be. Even now the loss weighed on her.
“And the pools? Any more arrivals?”
Petrick shook his head. “Think that’s our lot.”
“Let’s go then.” Arka led the way, Pome at her side, holding his light-stick aloft as though he were some grand official at a clan ceremony.
Yaz followed, her mind still spinning. Twenty years. That’s how long Arka said she’d been down here. Twenty years. It was as far beyond Yaz’s imagination as a tree. Or the thin green belt the gods were said to have put around the world’s waist, a place where the oldest tales said there was as much life on the land as in the sea.
* * *
ARKA TOOK THE group along a series of tunnels. Many were clearly the work of meltwater but others seemed to defy logic, rising, falling, and twisting in a way that flowing water never would, and yet smooth and round, bearing no mark of pick or chisel.
Yaz jogged in the middle of the band. The Broken they had called themselves. Her new clan, she supposed, bound together by the fact that they had survived the drop and wished to keep on surviving.
The darkness gave way to a dim and diffuse illumination as the ice began to be populated once more by the tiny stars. The others seemed to take the same comfort in this that Yaz did, even though they must have seen it every day for years. Little Jerra paused to gaze into the ice and dark-haired Petrick had to give her a tug to get her started again. “Slowcoach.”
“Everyone’s slow next to you.” The girl blinked, glanced at Yaz, and carried on.
Shortly after that, Arka sent Petrick ahead to warn of their arrival. The boy scampered off at speed and was soon lost in the gloom.
The further they went the more dirty the ice beneath their feet. Eventually they emerged into another rock-floored cavern, not so large as the one in which Yaz had escaped Hetta but still large and better lit.
The air here was warmer than in the tunnels and the soft drip of meltwater filled any brief silence. A crowd of maybe four dozen of the Broken stood in an arc around the entrance, lean, grimy, their clothes cloaks of woven hair over old hides and crude patchworks of small skins. Here and there points of light winked among their number, tiny ice stars sewn onto clothing or dangling from an ear.
More than half of those gathered were huge. Not as big as Hetta maybe, but larger than anyone Yaz had ever seen before. More gerants, given time to grow. For a moment she wondered what they found to eat, and what had originally worn the skins they dressed in.
Between the Broken’s reception party and Yaz a group of four new arrivals huddled together, wet, shivering, some clutching injured limbs or sporting angry red marks that would be black bruises soon enough. Zeen was not among them.
Yaz turned back toward the tunnel, meaning to leave. “Let me pass.” She advanced on the boys blocking the passage.
A hand clamped on her shoulder. “You can’t go!” Arka tried to pull her around. “You have no idea where you are or what’s out there.”
“Zeen’s out there.” Yaz jerked free of Arka’s grip.
Pome, the young man with the light-stick, slipped between her and the exit. He stood nearly a head taller than her, brown hair scraped back. His mouth held a brittle smile that put her in mind of the hook-eels that play dead right up until the moment they’re hauled into a boat then unsheathe a hundred claws and start to thrash. “Tarko is going to speak to all the wets. After that he will decide what to do about your brother.”