Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

“He’s bringing ‘em around, shockingly enough.” Dag shrugged, rolling his eyes as he did it. “He’s got all the enthusiasm of a bulldog with none of the brains—and those are some dumb dogs, lady—but give the man his credit, he can talk a great line.”

“Of bullshit,” snorted Crandall, checking the contents of the packed duffels. “Lady, you need to disperse some of this stuff. No normal person’s gonna be able to carry a hundred pounds of MREs.”

And after that, it was all unpacking and re-packing and shouting questions or advice at each other across the dark, cluttered bay. It kept Amber’s mind nicely occupied until they were done and emerged into the cold, smoky light to find that Scott was still talking, although he was at least winding down.

Amber sat down on a bundle of tents to watch as he marched himself importantly among the masses, trying to win them over with talk of setbacks and the necessity of moving forward in the footsteps of their pioneer forefathers, who had also suffered unspeakable tragedy in the fulfillment of their goals, also undertaken in the name of Manifest Destiny. And because it was manifest, because it was true, because it was a goal set in their hearts by that higher power that all men, regardless of creed, aspired to, it was still a goal worth seeking.

“At any cost!” Scott thundered in conclusion, smacking his fist into the palm of his hand. “But never think that makes us unmindful of the cost. The cost will be counted, just as we remember and honor those who perished in the crossing of the ocean, who were buried alongside the ruts carved by covered wagons, and whose wooden markers were paved under by the rising streets of San Francisco! The people we have lost today are our fallen heroes, but we are the heroes who go on!”

To Amber’s mild astonishment, that actually worked. Not on everyone, of course, but he got some applause for that flowery heap of horseshit even while Scott was still pumping it out.

“What’d I tell you?” said Eric beside her, shaking his head. “I guess it’s true what my grandma says. God gives even the biggest fool one real talent.”

“What’s yours?” asked Amber, watching people line up to shake Scott’s hand.

“Hoops.”

“You wish, whitebread,” said Dag, who was just as white as a man named Dag Gunnarson ought to be.

Scott shook hands, patted shoulders, began to put people in a group.

“I’m ambidextrous,” Crandall announced suddenly.

“Oh yeah?”

“Selectively. Eating, smoking and jerking off.” He started to mime, re-discovered Amber in their midst and stopped, looking flustered.

“I ain’t blushing,” she said dryly and wasn’t. She’d heard worse—seen worse—in the stairwell back home.

Scott finally headed their way, with Nicci walking close at his side although she was quick to do her huddling next to Amber once she got there.

“We’re ready,” he said, giving the Fleetmen a stiff, soldierly sort of nod. “I haven’t done an official head-count, but there must be a couple hundred of them.”

“Yeah…” said Eric, eyeing the crowd. He shook his head. “They might all be willing to come live in the tents once they’re up, but I bet we don’t even get half that when it comes to carrying this stuff up that hill tonight.”

“So let’s hurry and get them set up,” said Amber, slinging her duffel over one arm and snatching up a bundled tent in the other.

“Just relax for a bit, Miss Bierce,” said Scott, also frowning back at the crowd now. “Let me talk to them some more and—”

“Do what you got to do, Everly,” said Amber, walking. “You can meet me there.”

She didn’t mean it any way but exactly what she’d said—do all the talking he wanted, get more people on board, meet her on the ridge—but he took it for a challenge and an ugly one at that. She heard him clapping his hands and shouting people into order and within a few minutes he was shouldering his way roughly past her to take the lead.

She thought about saying something (ah hey i didn’t mean it like that be cool you’re still the commanding space scout here so grow the fuck up and quit shoving), but in the end it was enough that they were moving. Amber reached out to catch Nicci’s hand and give it a reassuring little squeeze. They were moving and as bad as things were, that made her feel just a little bit better.

* * *

Much later, in the waning light of the alien, cloud-covered sunset, Amber finally took that head count. She couldn’t do anything else at the moment, not after that hike, except sit on the ground with her aching, rubbery legs splayed out before her, trying to gasp her lungs into working again.

She’d been the last to come into camp, except that wasn’t right, was it? ‘Coming in last’ implied there had been a line and she’d been at the end of it. Well, there had been a line, and she’d come in about three and a half hours after it, breathing so hard she could barely see and dragging her duffel by its strap. Nicci had been carrying the tent by that time, and Nicci was setting it up with the help of Mr. Yao and thank God for that, because Amber had spent the last hour of the hike thinking she was going to faint and now that she was here, if she had to stand up and move again, she damn well knew she would.

So she counted people, just in case no one had done that yet, trying to fool herself into thinking that was contributing in some way. Altogether, herself and Nicci included, there were forty-eight of them, a sad fraction of the hundreds Scott thought he’d won over with his inspiring speeches (although, to give him his due, it had seemed like a lot more than that when they were passing her, one by one, all the fucking way across the burned scar of the ship’s final landing). Of that number, only eleven were women. There were no atheists in foxholes, it was said, and she guessed when it came to lugging crates uphill in the freezing wind on an alien planet, there were no feminists either. Maybe there’d be more tomorrow. Maybe spending the night in a burning ship would make more people feel better about coming out to the ridge.

Or maybe spending the night in a tent would make all of Scott’s people want to go back to the ship. And if that did happen, if they all left, would she go with them? Was it worse to do something she thought was stupid, like make herself at home in a burning ship, or something she already knew was stupid, like sit alone in the wilderness on an alien planet?

‘Wait for it,’ she told herself. ‘There are enough real problems here, little girl. Start making plans for those and stop worrying about what may not happen.’

“Amber?” That was Nicci, coming to fret over her. Probably wondering if she was having a heart attack or something. There’d been times on that hike that Amber had wondered herself. Even the Candyman’s humming little shots hadn’t made her feel like this. “Are you okay?”

“I’m getting there.” She smiled to show how much she meant it. Nicci flinched a little. Amber stopped smiling. “I’ll be stiff as hell tomorrow, but if they all go back to get more supplies and people and stuff, I’ll just stay here and…I don’t know. Guard the camp. From what, I don’t know, but…” Amber trailed off with a frown and looked around—at the ridge, at the scarred plains with the ship burning in the middle of it, at the sky. “Do we know yet if there’s any animals on this planet?”

“Mr. Yao was just talking about that,” said Nicci, sitting gingerly in the grass beside her. “And he says there’s plants, so we should expect there to be animals who eat them.”

Sensible. Although by that logic, if there were animals who ate plants here, there were probably animals who ate meat, too. Forty-eight unarmed humans made an awful lot of meat.

“But no one’s seen any?” Amber pressed, already thinking that even if there weren’t animals, that was a whole new kind of trouble, because those MREs wouldn’t last forever and she wasn’t exactly seeing fields of wild corn and apple trees out there in all that grassy nothing. “Not even bugs?”

“Well, yeah, bugs. The ground kind. And Mr. Yao says there’s a lake on the other side of the ridge.”

“So there might be fish?”

“I guess, but Mr. Yao says if there are animals, we might see their footprints and stuff down by the water.”

“Oh. Yeah, right. Makes sense.” Amber knew nothing about animals except the little she’d seen on television and in most of those programs, they wore clothes and talked. Times like this made a girl wish she’d paid attention in Biology to something besides Trevor Macavee in the second row.

Nicci drew up her knees and hugged them, shivering a little. They watched people mill around in the camp, opening packs, eating ration bars, lighting fires. Nobody seemed to be talking much, but no one was crying and no one was wearing that empty survivor’s stare. The outlook was just as bleak as it had ever been, but at least they had something to do.

That made her think of Jonah and so she turned listlessly that way, seeing nothing but the ship like a guttering torch in the growing dark. She wondered if he’d organized all the people Scott had only half-convinced into being his search and rescue team. She wondered if they’d found anyone alive to save. She wondered who he’d roll around with tonight to help him sleep.

She wondered if she was doing the right thing.

“Commander Scott wants to send you back,” said Nicci suddenly, softly.

Amber rolled her eyes, once more firmly in this moment, on this hill. “Crewman Scott can kiss my pudgy white ass.”

“He says there’s no room for stubbornness out here. He says if someone can’t do something to help, they need to get out of the way.”

“I was miles behind everyone else most of this damn day. I couldn’t have been more out of his way.”

But it bothered her. Because he talked a great line and people listened. And applauded.

“What does everyone else say?” she asked finally.

“Nothing much. Except Mr. Lassiter said that Mr. Lamarc told them to go with you, not him, and Ms. Alverez said she didn’t see him pulling people out of the ship when we were first waking up so he should just shut up, pretty much.”

“I didn’t pull anyone out of the ship either,” said Amber, startled.

“Yeah, that one lady. From the room next door.”

“Oh. Yeah. Lawsuit-Lady.”

“That was Ms. Alverez.”

“Oh!” Amber looked at the camp again. “Which one is she?”

Nicci stared at her.

“I don’t remember what she looked like.” Amber hesitated, then admitted, “I don’t think I looked, you know? I was kind of…out of it.”

Nicci frowned, but pointed. Scott, not quite at the end of her arm, immediately noticed and looked their way. Nicci put her hands back around her knees.

Amber glanced at her and uttered a huffy, humorless laugh. “What, are you afraid he’s going to write you up for creating dissension in the ranks?”

“He’s in charge.”

“No, he’s not.”

“He says he is. No one says he isn’t.” Nicci chewed at her lower lip for a moment, then lowered her voice to say, urgently, “And he really doesn’t like you.”

“He can suck it up. We’ve got real problems to worry about. I am not in the mood to compete in his personality contest.”

“Well, Sabrina says—”

“Who the hell is Sabrina now?”

Nicci looked surprised. She raised her hand to discreetly point, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Over there, with Lani and Rachel, see?”

Amber looked, but saw only a loose knot of people—Manifestors, indiscriminate to her eyes—sitting on the concrete bags to keep off the wet ground. “Which one? The redhead?”

“No, the…” Nicci hunched and whispered, “The black lady,” before nervously looking to see if she’d been overheard.

“I think she knows she’s black by now, don’t you?” Amber asked, smiling.

Far from returning it, Nicci recoiled with a look of embarrassed horror. And what had she expected, really? Neither of them had much of a sense of humor, at least not around each other. They were sisters; they loved each other, and nothing made Amber feel better than to know she was taking care of her sister, just as nothing made her feel worse when she couldn’t. Amber had fed her little sister breakfasts and dinners, washed her clothes, walked her to school, but they didn’t talk very much and they didn’t joke around even when they did.

“Okay, so who else am I looking at?” Amber asked, pretending to care as she looked back at the other people where ‘Sabrina’ sat with ‘Lani’ and ‘Rachel’. “Do you know them all?”

“I think so.” Nicci hesitated a few glances that way, her eyes darting from face to face. “There aren’t that many.”

“I guess not.” But there was no guessing about it. Forty-eight people was nothing. It was less people than had shared a classroom with her in school, less than half of the number that worked with her at the factory, less than a quarter of those who had lived at the apartment complex. There was nothing amazing in Nicci’s knowing everyone’s name; it was, come to think of it, a little disturbing that Amber didn’t.

The wind blew. Nicci sat and rocked beside her, hugging herself and rubbing at her sleeves. The ship burned.

“Do you think they found anybody?” Nicci asked. “You know…alive?”

“I don’t know.” Amber’s gaze drifted up to the men’s dorm mods, still burning high and hot. “I kind of hope not. We may not have a doctor or a medico or anyone like that, so if someone’s hurt…and they’d have to be hurt…what could anyone do about it?”

Nicci ducked her head and rubbed her arms some more. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think they’ll find the beacons?”

Amber glanced at the burning ship and away again. The sky was now completely black, but the Pioneer gave them more than enough light to see each other by, even at this distance. If there were animals, either they’d stay well away or they’d probably go investigate there instead of here. She wondered if Jonah was prepared for that. She thought he probably was.

“Amber?”

“Nicci, you were sitting right there when Jonah and I talked about this. You know what I think.”

Nicci’s arm bumped hers. She’d started crying again, quietly this time. Amber watched Scott move around the camp—inspecting his troops, improving morale, being a dick—amazed that her sister could still have any tears left after all the crying she’d already done. They said catastrophe stripped away the masks. A person could be almost anything with enough time to prepare for the part, but it took a disaster to show the world who you really were. Maybe even to find out for yourself. And she sure didn’t need the ship to crash to know Nicci was a crybaby.

‘And I’m a bitch,’ she thought disgustedly, and held out her arm in a silent invitation for Nicci to come in under it. “We’re going to be okay,” she said as they huddled together in the grass. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’ll be fine. I’ll take care of you, you know that.”

“I don’t believe you!” Nicci sobbed.

“Oh come on,” said Amber, smiling to hide how deeply those surely thoughtless words had hit her. “When have I ever let you down?”

“When you brought me here!” Nicci shouted, turning heads all around the camp. “When you pushed me around and made me come here! I hate you sometimes, Amber! I hate you!”

And with that, she shoved herself back and out of Amber’s stunned embrace, stumbling back to the group. Amber tried to follow, but her legs collapsed under her, all the hurt in the world not enough to undo that hellacious uphill hike. She had to sit and watch as the people at the fire took Nicci in, patting at her back and rubbing at her arms and closing in around her until she was lost to sight.

Scott looked over at her across the tops of all their bent, consoling heads. She couldn’t tell if he was giving her a commander’s frown of censure or just an asshole-smirk.

She turned her back on him, on Nicci, on all of them. She watched the ship burn.

* * *

Nicci came back, of course. And there had even been a mumble of apology and lots of hugging, but the hugging felt forced and when it came time to make their beds, they made them well apart, even though sharing heat would have made more sense. The tent Amber had half-killed herself lugging up here had been given to Mr. Yao, partly because Mr. Yao had carried the much-heavier packs of rations and had already agreed to do it again in the morning, and partly because Scott decided he had the authority to pass out tents and was being a dick about it.

If it had been anyone else…but it was Mr. Yao, who had apparently been told during the many hours it took Amber to catch up that it was his tent all along, and so even though taking it clearly made him uncomfortable and even though he offered to let the sisters share it with him, Nicci and Amber slept outside in the grass under the thin silver sheets of the laughably inadequate emergency blankets. Amber kept waiting for it to rain, since that would have perfectly frosted the shit-cake and some part of her was still tensely waiting for the other boot to drop, but it never did. If anything, the storm eased up a little and the night would have been quiet, except for the constant rattle of the wind shaking the tents and all those emergency blankets. Between that noise, the burning ship (and the smell that came with it, that horrible sneaky smell that was like burnt hair and batteries but was probably charbroiled people), and the aching of her overused muscles, Amber didn’t think it was possible to sleep.

But she did.

And in the middle of that first night, when she had been so sure that nothing could get any worse, Amber woke up to the most godawful howling roar she had ever heard or could have imagined. She was on her feet in an instant, aching muscles or not, and so, it seemed, was everyone else. Half a dozen filmy silver sheets went flying as the people who had been wrapped in them scrambled free to stand, helpless, and listen.

It roared again, this time in quick, forceful bursts, as if God Himself were bent close to the ground and shouting, “Ha ha ha!” at them in an especially vindictive fashion. Then, quiet. They all looked at each other, waiting for the noise to be repeated, but the minutes dragged on and nothing happened.

“What the fuck was that?” Crandall asked at last.

“Sounded like a moose,” said a woman. Amber couldn’t see which one, but it didn’t sound like Lawsuit—like Ms. Alverez.

“It sounded like a fucking dinosaur!” Crandall corrected with a shaky laugh. “Jesus, all night long, I been thinking, ‘What next?’ Now I’m gonna be eaten by a fucking dinosaur. Why the hell did I join the Fleet?”

“The wind could be carrying the sound, right?” someone said. “From miles away, maybe.”

“It didn’t come from upwind,” said Eric. “It came from downwind. I don’t think sound carries against the current.”

A flashlight came on and there was Scott, standing at the lip of the ridge and shining it down at whatever was on the other side.

“Are you crazy?” Crandall hissed, jumping to snatch the flashlight away.

Scott simply pointed back at the Pioneer, which was no longer going like a Roman candle but still glowed out strong like the dying ember she supposed it was.

“They can see us,” said Scott. “Furthermore, the wind is blowing right across us and down this hill, so they can smell us too. As long as they can already see us and smell us, I’d just as soon see what’s out there, especially if it’s thinking about coming up here.”

He put out his hand. After a second or two, Crandall gave him his flashlight. Scott switched it on and aimed it back down the ridge.

Amber couldn’t help herself. She limped over and looked with him.

“Go sit down, Miss Bierce,” he told her, sweeping the light back and forth over the dark water that was down there—the lake Nicci had mentioned—either looking for whales or having trouble remembering where the shoreline was. Although honestly, one was as sensible as the other. There was no law saying alien whales couldn’t roar and she sure as hell didn’t know where the shoreline was.

She needed to start making peace with this idiot.

“What do you think we should do?” she asked.

He gave her a long, narrow stare that faded out at the end into uncertainty before making a few more passes over the lake. He finally found the bank, but between them and it, the grassy slope seemed entirely empty. “I…I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Whatever it was, it seems to have moved on. But if there’s mud down there—”

“Yeah, there is. We checked it out earlier. I almost lost my boot.”

“Then it might have left footprints. They won’t tell us much, but we can at least get an idea of size.”

“Good point.” He gave the grass one more sweep with the flashlight and then nodded—a firm, commanding nod. “Okay, Bierce. You’re back on the team.”

She opened her mouth to point out that, as far as she was concerned, she’d never been off the team, but mutely closed it again. Just like when Nicci had come shuffling back with her half-hearted, “I didn’t mean it, Amber. You know that,” Amber just nodded and kept her fat mouth shut.

“Listen up!” Scott was saying, now oblivious to her and her status on the ‘team’. “We’re going to go down and check it out. Now we’re not going to go look for it,” he said as people began to rumble out their first startled mob-protests. “We just want to look at the mud and see if it left any footprints.”

The rumbling died down.

“I’m not saying everyone has to come along,” Scott continued. “But if there are prints, I think we’d all probably feel better for knowing exactly what they look like. And if there aren’t, I’d personally feel better knowing that you all saw there was nothing instead of me just saying it and you all thinking I’m covering something up.”

“Don’t be paranoid, man,” said Dag, patting his shoulder.

“I’m not, I’m just being careful.”

“Plus, I’d really like it if we all stayed together,” said Eric, switching on his own flashlight and coming to stand at Scott’s side. “So let’s do this smart, people. Stay calm, get your boots on, find yourself a buddy and stick close to someone with a light.”

And the Fleetmen were the ones with the lights. The four Fleetmen…and Scott, of course. His own little army. And she had to remind herself all over again to be nice.

She limped back to her blanket, which was weighted down at one end by her duffel bag and at the other by her boots but was still flapping and crinkling like crazy in the middle. She rolled it up, packed it away, put on her boots, and then, for no real reason, picked up her duffel bag and slung it over her shoulder.

“What are you doing?” asked Nicci, alarmed, as if the idea to carry all her shit around with her at all times were a direct order she’d been caught disobeying.

“I just don’t want it to get lost,” said Amber. She knew that was a stupid answer, but mumbling ‘I don’t know’ and putting her duffel down again seemed stupider and people were watching.

Nicci tied her boots nervously and packed up her own blanket. When she too picked up her duffel bag, some of the other people around them did the same thing.

The Fleetman whose light they were sharing, Dag, watched them with a puzzled smile and finally aimed his flashlight at Amber. “You know, we’re coming right back.”

“I don’t want to lose anything.”

“Like what?”

An emergency blanket blew suddenly and noisily between them before being yanked up into the sky and lost.

“You were saying?” Amber prompted.

“Smart ass.” But Dag cupped his mouth and shouted, “Remember to pack up your blankets if you don’t have a tent, people! Keep your stuff together! Let’s go!”

They made their way down to the water in the dark. And it was dark, much darker than it had been up on the apex of the ridge, where the sullen red glow of the smoldering ship had been their nightlight. It was a lot steeper on this side as well, so they went slow. It seemed like hours before they actually reached the water’s edge and saw with their own eyes that the many tracks left in its muddy bank were all made by their own boots. Even after they spread out and searched, just exactly the way Scott had assured them they would not do, they found nothing.

“Well, we might see something in the morning,” Eric began as he and Dag slogged their groups over to join with Scott’s. He said something else after that—Amber could see his lips moving—but he made no sound.

All the sound was gone. Even, for that split-second, the wind. But that was all the warning she got. And then she was in the water.

She thought she’d been pushed—the name Everly Scott leapt to the top of a short list of suspects—and while that thought certainly brought out a lot of anger, outrage and confusion, it didn’t come with fear. She didn’t gasp or try to scream; she knew she was underwater, even as she was curiously unable to process that the water had lit up brilliantly orange and churned out of all visibility.

Then something struck her in the back of the thigh and she realized that she wasn’t the only one in the water. She arched instinctively, trying to surface, and instead bumped painfully into a rock. Her world spun; she was upside-down, absent all sense of gravity and perspective. She twisted clumsily and got her feet against the ground, knowing that the water couldn’t be very deep this close to shore, that she should be able to just stand up, but although her legs straightened out, she remained submerged.

It was then that several revelations came to Amber: the slight ache of her lungs as they began to make their first complaints for air, the orange murk that had been perfectly normal water just an instant ago, the shadowy figures of other people struggling in the pond around her—any one of whom might be Nicci—and over all things, the terrible roar that was not merely the sound of water in her ears after all, but something else, something bigger.

Something burning.

Underwater, she had no idea how deeply, Amber jumped. Her feet left the ground, but her reaching hands did not break into the air. She’d never learned to swim, never had the opportunity and never really felt the lack, but now here she was and she had the rest of her life to learn. Amber kicked upwards, directly into the path of a flailing arm that punched into her stomach. Bubbles spilled out of her mouth in a watery cry, but there was no new air to pull in. Panic flared, hot and tight inside her aching chest. She lost her last hold on calm and began to thrash, clawing at the water above her without any sense of rising, right up until her face broke out into the wind.

The hot, glowing, smoke-thick wind.

Amber gasped in new breath, but it burned in her lungs. Her second was mostly water. She sank briefly, came up fighting again and was driven under a third time by some screaming lady trying to use her as a float. She didn’t want to hurt whoever it was holding her down, but she was underwater, where restraint meant drowning. She broke free with several clumsy punches and grappled her way to the surface once more.

Only now did she see that she had not merely fallen into the lake, she had somehow been thrown in and thrown pretty damned far. She oriented herself to the shore through a screaming mass of splashing limbs, but managed only a few clumsy strokes before she stopped again and this time, turned around.

The light. The smoke. The roaring.

The ridge they had crossed over was burning. The flames blew sideways in the wind, flapping like party streamers, beautiful. The sky—the whole sky, as much as she could see in the treeless expanse of the hilly plains—was on fire. Heat blasted at her face, chapping her lips and searing at her eyes even as she choked on water.

Like the moment between standing on the shore and finding herself submerged, the next little space of time just seemed to melt away. Amber was not aware of swimming, but she must have done so because she had been ten meters or more out into the lake when she breached and at her next dim moment of awareness, she was only knee-deep and sloshing her way onto the bank. She grabbed the first duffel bag she saw and then two more before she found the one that was probably hers, but she didn’t let any of them go. Their weight and the wind made her stagger at every step, but she fell only once and landed with her face in some kind of rough, smelly hole. Pushing herself awkwardly up in the mud, she could see dozens of short, pipe-like openings all around her that she was pretty sure hadn’t been there before.

They were boots, she realized. Everyone’s boots, stuck in the mud. Her own boots included. They had all been blown out of their boots.

Her first steps were toward the ridge, but she made herself stop. There would be nothing left to see, not if the whole fucking sky was on fire. There would be nothing left to see and she knew it.

She knew it because there was nothing to hear beyond the ridge except the roaring of the fire. No screams. No cries for help. No coughing. Just the fire.

In the crowd, in the panic, she heard Nicci scream her name. Even when she could make out no other single sound, she heard that. Hearing it pushed all the rest of the world out of focus and into it at the same time. She turned her back on the burning sky and fought her way through the tangle of wet, panicked people, shoving them into the water or into the mud until she could catch at her baby sister’s arms and pull her protectively close, just as if her arms were some shield against the heat that had already dried her hair and her clothes and wouldn’t need more than a few minutes to boil away the water in the lake and burn the skin off all their bodies.

But she held Nicci anyway, bellowing into her ear that it was all right and she was there and to close her eyes and keep them closed. She knew it was all over, but she wasn’t scared. There wasn’t time. The same numbness that kept her from understanding how she’d gotten into the water or how she’d gotten out kept her nicely cloaked against the horror of being burnt alive. She could only hope it wouldn’t take long.

But the wind changed. Suddenly and forcefully, it blew back against the ridge, pushing both the heat and the smoke entirely away and replacing it with choking cold.

Amber staggered in the wake of this new wind, trying to clear her lungs of the sediment made by water, smoke and heat. She didn’t feel very successful and the effort left her throat, chest and, oddly, her eyes feeling scraped and bruised. Cold, clear air cut at her lungs, making her cough even harder.