Chapter 16
If he needed to do anything, it was to heal, to get fitter, to become fighting ready. That wasn’t going to happen by itself. He found Sassik sitting in a circle of other warriors – both male and female.
“You’ve recovered, Saw, from your fit of fucking?” The others chuckled or eyed him curiously. “Though I see you bleed again.” He touched his brow.
When he wiped a finger above his eyebrow it came away red. “I’ll see Largo.”
“You might want to be less enthusiastic for a few days. Sit?” He patted the concrete block he sat on – yet another remnant of the destruction wrought here, long ago. The entire clearing was littered with random pieces of the buildings.
“I hoped we could go look above, climb.” He raised the gun to indicate the tiers of the most collapsed building that lay slanted at a forty-five degree angle. The direction Zarr planned to go in soon, he’d heard, yet beneath it through an underground tunnel.
Sassik turned and looked. “There? If you want to hunt, there are brays prancing about above. Always a few.”
Brays? He studied the building slope and spotted a leaping creature the size of a deer. From his implanted language memory, those were something like goats in their habits and happily climbed mountains, as well as buildings that looked like mountains.
“We can hunt. Sure.”
“You bleed you still hunt? Tough man, hey?” Sassik shrugged, rose, and plucked his own gun from where it’d balanced against the block. “If you don’t care about a little blood, I will teach you more about shooting.”
As they headed toward the tiers, Sawyer mulled over why Sassik and Dayne had almost adopted him. They were too congenial. For sure they wanted something from him, but then, he was the same. He needed to learn and they had the expertise. There were probably secrets here but airing secrets too early might get someone hurt.
His muscles were paining him after only five stories. He paused and looked down the tumbled slope. Moving up the tiers, you had to negotiate the collapsed floors. Some of them remained intact. Some walls held rooms as they once were, though the inner doors went nowhere in all those he’d seen – blank rubble only. He’d stepped on what had been beds, storage cabinets, tables. Though weather-beaten, coated in dust, animal droppings, leaves, and mold, the old furniture and household items were often recognizable. Aerthe was another world, but people needed the same things to live comfortably. Only once had his boot rolled on bones – legs sticking out from under the rubble. The people here had escaped or their bodies had been so decayed and scattered by time, the elements, and animals, that little of them could be identified.
A lock of his hair fell in front of his eyes and wet blood shone. “Let’s stop a moment.”
“You want to rest?”
“That and I want to cut my hair.” Sawyer unsheathed his blade. “Tired of having it long. Besides the doc cut a chunk off it already.”
“Give me that. I will do this. You’d only remove an ear.”
Sassik’s hand was out and he gave him the knife. If the man had wanted to do him harm, he could’ve a hundred times already. He sat on a pile of compacted debris.
“Short, maybe like this.” He put finger and thumb about two inches apart.
“It will be uneven but better than dropping in your eyes.”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing with that woman? You seem to fuck her with a lot of anger.”
“So?” He heaved up his shoulders. “She’s mine.”
“I find slaves work best, even fuck better, if given some care.”
“Let me get the revenge out of my system. Maybe I will care then.”
His hair began to fall as Sassik sawed through it.
Sassik was right.
Though it depended on what he wanted to do with Ari in the long run. Wasn’t killing her, obviously. Was he selling her? Keeping her? He needed to figure this out. Keeping her depended on getting her trained to not to want to run or maim him.
She hadn’t lied about JI. Putting mittens on her would be placed on the back burner then, unless she played up again. Keeping her if she could fix the robots on this world would be advantageous for him, her owner. If...
If a lot of things. She was a puzzle, even if a highly satisfying fuck.
The hairstyling proved to be painful when Sassik pulled at the wound, but the chunks of black hair dropping at his feet kept him sitting. The layers of his recent past were down there.
“Done.” Sassik stepped back, handed over the knife. “That shininess in human hair is strange. Like little stars.”
“Little stars?” He shook his head and snorted. That description made him think of movie stars and he probably looked as if he’d been chewed up by a lawnmower.
No mirror, and staring at the flat of the blade didn’t show Sawyer much more than a blur. He felt it instead, hand roving over his scalp – delicately roving on the right behind his ear, where the wound had reopened.
“Feels good.” It did. Losing the hairstyle he’d been forced to bear as a slave underlined that he was free.
“If you don’t want the girl, consider me as a potential buyer, and since you don’t exactly have any money...”
He studied Sassik. The man was serious. “I’ll think on it,” he said more curtly than he’d intended.
Sassik nodded, his expression grave. “Of course. Let us go upward. The more sun, the more plants grow, the more we will find to hunt. I see your weapon already changes. This is good.”
It did? He peered at the metal.
Color was rising between and beneath the fancy bits like the little bronze-toned wheels and the switches he needed to ask about, since he didn’t know what the hell they did. The barrel and the broader flat surfaces showed spots of red and faint lines of curling brown.
“Yeah, I see, and I also see a lot of things I know nothing about. How do you load it? You know, how do you get the bullets in?”
If nothing else it’d distract him from thinking about how he was free yet was imprisoning her.
One button slid out a magazine type affair where black projectiles slimmer than he’d imagined the gun used were stored. They were, apparently, powered by some substance called shoom, which was inside them, as well as the waik crystal. The blue crystal was stored in a flip-out pocket, on the opposite side to the magazine.
“This is why you need to meditate,” Sassik explained. “Without it bullets don’t fly well.”
The waik crystal did that? He peered at the irregular translucent stone. “And these power your trucks too?”
“Yes. A bunch of them. Not just one. Come.”
They trekked upward, high enough for Sawyer to feel the sun beating on his skin. Only a few stories were between them and the land above – evidence the Swathes had turned this country upside down. The top of the city was close to ground level, though climbing down into this chasm of dead buildings was hazardous. The last few stories on all sides were sheer or of such jagged topography that a climber would be lucky to survive.
Where immense, glass-like pieces had shattered hundreds of years ago, shards lay scattered like dirt-smeared diamonds. He found a skull with a shrub growing through the foramen and eye sockets. As far as he could tell, people here had similar anatomy to humans. Could they breed with humans? It was a question he must ask some day. If cross-bred babies were possible, he’d bet a million people would be making them for profit, what with the magic sex appeal.
He could sell a ride on his cock, if he were so inclined to prostitute himself.
On the other hand, own a human female...make a mint. Someone would be doing that already. He’d rather Fern be a rented-out body than a corpse.
He stopped a few times on the way up to catch his breath. They shot some prey – brays and smaller things like rabbits on flamingo legs.
Speaking of corpses, Sawyer halted with his foot crushing some fragile thing that may have been a toy...with every step they were treading on the corpse of a dead civilization. The Scavs were the descendants, and all they’d inherited were the picked-over bones. A sobering thought.
On the way down, bearing the gutted bodies of their kills, they came upon a mechling. It too was dead.
Sassik picked up the thing by one limp, unfolding metal limb. It hung as a dead rabbit might, only it shone where sunlight found the domed, red carapace. He’d seen many mechlings on the swathe, and this one resembled a beetle half the size of a vacuum cleaner.
“Unusual.” Sassik leaned in and sniffed, as if a mechling might have scent. “Only ever seen one of these before. Though I heard they were being found on the plains. Defunct ones.”
“You didn’t notice the ones on JI? He uses them for power and armor. I want to show him this. I know the Mekkers had started disposing of what they called the sun-mad ones. The day they sold me, I heard that.”
“Ahhh. I wonder why. No one can get inside them, open them. If your mech can even do that, it will be worth it.”
“In what way?”
“Who knows. They are a puzzle. Weapons? Tech? Power cells. I know they power up the swathe somehow. We’ve gathered much knowledge of the Mekkers over the years, we just cannot use it.”
That he had heard. The Mekkers had come down from the stars, or so the legend went. If they were starfarers, it would be reasonable for their tech to be unfathomable to the people here, even if they built skyscrapers and star-shaped windows.
The use they might make of JI. No wonder Zarr was drooling and impatient. JI might be the seed of knowledge they needed to defeat the Mekkers. Except, it’d seemed as if Zarr only wanted JI for his military capabilities.
Sawyer paused with his foot up on a crumbled wall at the edge. His forearm rested on his thigh and the stock of his long gun was planted on the floor to the left. He leaned out enough to see below. The building had cracked open – they’d have to divert. Air and open space before him, then half a mile away was the opposite building.
Another century and this destroyed city would be rotten – full of dirt, animals, and overgrown by plants.
If only the Scavs hadn’t sunk so far below the level of what they had once been, JI might have been their salvation.