“I don’t know what either of those things are. Come.” Nox held my arm. “My transport isn’t far.”
I dug in, refusing to move. “That isn’t possible. There is an ambassador on every planet affiliated with the Union.” And at last count, everyone was affiliated.
“You speak words I simply don’t know. What I do know is the Reamers may soon return to the wreckage, and if they find us, they will attempt to kill me—and likely will succeed since I am alone—and take you back to use in the most deplorable ways.”
His words brought out images that made my head spin. Yes, I knew what those ways were.
His long legs ate up space better than mine, but he slowed so that I could keep up. That part wasn’t odd at all. People had been slowing down for me and treating me with kid gloves all my life. No, the strange thing was that this time, I didn’t mind it. He didn’t seem inconvenienced or begrudging, and his preternatural patience soothed some of my worry.
Not that I was going to lollygag. I couldn’t quite stop my brain from imagining those deplorable uses by…Reamers, was it? I had no idea what a Reamer was, but the way Nox had said the word made me never want to encounter one.
He pulled up short next to a hunk of heat-welded metal that at first, I thought was just another piece of wreckage. But the closer I looked, the more I could discern this wasn’t part of just one wreck. It was a soldered-together vehicle with metal bits from at least three distinct sources, and instead of landing gear, it had tracks, like a robot server at a cocktail bar. Only, well, bigger than a cocktail bot.
Nox lifted an overhead accordion-style door and pulled out a short set of metal steps. At his gesture, I climbed into the dark cabin, and he followed. There was a bench spanning the width of the transport, and I sat there, letting my eyes adjust to the change in lighting.
After dropping his bag on the bench by my hip, Nox moved past me and into some sort of cockpit-like control area at the front and started flipping switches. The patchwork transport rumbled to life, which sounded more like a beast growling than the sleek whine of an ion engine coming online. Combustion engine, then? Who even used those anymore? Come to think of it, hadn’t they been outlawed throughout the Union?
Maybe the better question wasn’t where I was but when I was, because it felt like I’d fallen from the sky and into the last century.
I could only see the back of Nox’s head at first, but when he drew some curtains back—made out of the same soft green cloth that still covered both our faces—dingy light flooded the cabin. I peered outside just as the transport lurched into motion.
Without looking back, he said, “Under your seat is a container with more of that salve. If you slide the lid aside and put your hands directly into the solution, I believe it will help.”
How kind. But really, I had a high pain threshold, and his first application of the goo had taken away the worst of it. “How far is your home from here?” I asked.
“Only three kilometers, and the terrain is flat.”
Another sensation of time travel assailed me. I knew what a kilometer was, but only because I’d taught an academy course in old-Earth folktales. Transportation technology had become so swift that most transit distances were described in terms of time. Nexus, the capital world of the Union, had a mathematically perfect orbit that was close enough to old-Earth’s as to fit neatly into three hundred days in a year, thirty hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour. Brent swore three was a holy number, but pretty much everything was about faith with him. It did make the math easy.
We seemed to be creeping over this planet’s surface, so even though a kilometer was a fairly short distance, by my best guess, our travel time would be…ten minutes? “I can wait till we get there. Your treatment back at the crash site really helped. Thank you.”
He said something under his breath, but it sounded grumpy, so I didn’t ask for clarification. Doctors, in my experience, hated when I refused treatment or pushed the limits. But I’d been in this body longer than they’d been studying it, and I knew what it could handle.
I peered out the dirt-filmed window at the end of my bench. A tower of smoke rose from the wreckage, but we were moving steadily away from it. There was, as I’d already experienced, a lot of sand or dirt in the air, and much of the rolling topography was sand-dusted. I could see the odd shrubbery here and there, and some interesting reddish rocks roughly the size of this transport. As we got closer to Nox’s home, the wreckage smoke grew smaller and the shrubs became more frequent. It was hard to see clearly, but I thought some of them might have white flowers.
When we slowed and then rumbled to a stop, I turned and looked out the front window, and the sight that met my eyes caused me to gasp.
Chapter One
He’d called where we were headed a City-State. I knew what a city was—I’d been in more than I could count in my life—and I knew what a state was. Usually we placed the in front of it. The State. It referred to the government and what they wanted. This place where we headed was completely unrecognizable to me. I’d never seen anything like it.
The buildings were old, beaten up by weather, or maybe other things, and falling apart. Most had been patched with various bits of metal or wood, and they were tiny compared to the skyscrapers I was used to. There were no roads, no highways, just trucks and tank-like vehicles like this one going all over the place. What had happened here? Had it been through some kind of…quasi-apocalyptic event?
Dirt lifted into the air, and for a second, seemed to form a twister before it dissipated and floated on like the whole thing had never happened. I’d been going along because I had no other choice. Injured. Terrified. I didn’t think I’d grasped the severity of my situation here until that very second. I was somewhere foreign, and everyone I’d been with was dead.
My watch! I’d not even considered it before. There was a universal contact button on it. I could reach Brent, and he’d come. Or he’d send people. Wherever I was, my brother would find me. But when I looked at it, I found the watch was cracked. Shattered would be the better word. These things were supposed to be resistant to being destroyed, but I supposed that didn’t apply to falling out of the sky.
“Excuse me, Nox.” My voice shook. “I…I need you to explain to me where I am. Please. Right now.”
He glanced back at me. “I found you in what will be the field of battle, and now you are safe in our City-State. Where else would you be?”
That told me nothing. “No. What planet is this? What is its designation?”
“I’m sorry, Bianco.”
“Bianca,” I corrected him, and he winced.
“Apologies, Bianca. It is a foreign name to me. I apologize, Bianca, I don’t know what a planet is or a designation.”
I was in so much trouble.
“Okay. How about a bigger city? Bigger than this?”
He shook his head. “There aren’t bigger cities. Why would there be such things?”
It was possible he was completely crazy. Or maybe he’d never left this strange corner of his world. If either of those things were true, I had absolutely no idea what to do about it. The vehicle started to bounce on rough terrain, and I held on for dear life, which made my hands start to burn again. Where was that jug he’d mentioned?