L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 35 Read online

  Mag stabbed her finger downward. “Come here. And don’t even think of leaving my sight again.”

  The kid stumbled forward, his arms held warily at his sides. He had the sense to be cautious. Good.

  “Go wash your face. Your father’s missing work as it is!”

  Mag pulled the kid into the lavatory and slammed the door. He sprang against the far wall, arms barring his face. From the shape of his eyes and his delicate nose, she guessed he was Keshian.

  Mag knelt. “Listen,” she spoke slowly, trying out her Keshrindi. “I won’t hurt you.”

  His eyes sharpened with understanding, but his arms stayed raised.

  She said, “There are people outside who want to …” Mag searched her vocabulary, “who want to do bad things to you.”

  He frowned and turned out his empty pockets.

  Had she just said someone wanted to rob him? She shrugged.

  “It’s your lucky day,” she told him. “I’ll take you somewhere safe. But you must act like we know each other, like we’re friends.”

  “Friends,” the boy said, using Mag’s native tongue, Darik.

  She slanted him a sharp look. Had he recognized her accent? She shrugged. It didn’t matter. She’d made her decision and she’d ride it out. She’d find the kid a youth hostel on the way out of town. He’d chosen to trust her. For his sake, she was grateful.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Lio.”

  She shook his hand. It was slick with sweat. “I’m Mag.”

  She re-pinned her hair, smoothed and tucked her headscarf, then marched back into the sunlight with Lio’s hand inside her own. The man in sunglasses had already backed away, as if sensing defeat. He made no move to follow as Mag buckled on her helmet and motored away.

  Lio locked his arms around her waist and the Firebrand growled with hunger for the open road. Mag bit her lip. The youth hostels in this border town would be just as sketchy as the fuel station.

  She twisted the throttle and let the town’s neon lights and stone spires blur into a dappled stream behind them. “You’ll stay with me tonight,” she told Lio.

  The Firebrand roared, and the kid dropped his head between her shoulder blades to brace himself for speed. Mag felt a crisp charge in the air: the promise of imminent, destructive change.

  The Firebrand overheated three times that morning, which was unusual, but she’d never liked the Palabi climate.

  At about noon, Mag gunned her throttle at a railroad crossing to clear the tracks just ahead of a train wearing rattling acid shields. Once across, Mag’s shaking arms forced her to pull over. Despite the close shave with the train, the jitters surprised Mag. A few long drags on a cig restored her calm, but Lio clung to her even with the Firebrand idling, his thumbs biting into her stomach. It was then that she realized he wore no helmet. She’d actually thought she was protecting him while she rode recklessly. Her cheeks flamed as she banked down the off-ramp to the next town.

  The mint tea she purchased from a street vendor was lukewarm, despite its “iced” claims, but even with its chalky residue from a cheap acid filter it was better than her canteen slosh.

  She walked Lio and the Firebrand past stalls of quick-harvest grains and outrageously priced cuts of meat. They passed two vendors in a shouting match. Mag’s ears told her that if the first paused long enough to listen to the second’s complaint, the matter could be quickly solved. She halted at a shop purveying breeches, chaps, gloves, and helmets.

  Lio pointed out a gray helmet emblazoned with a dagger on an aspen leaf. “Like you,” he whispered reverently.

  Mag snorted. It was cute that he wanted to match her, but LeafBlade brand didn’t come in child size. She parked the Firebrand and chose instead a scratched green helmet that had been discounted, then handed Lio her tea while she haggled. She was so absorbed with blocking the vendor’s clumsy empathic pressure toward a higher price, she didn’t notice Lio’s sulk until the purchase was tucked into her pack beside a bonus tube of silver decal paint. She’d still probably overpaid.

  She took her tea back and drained it. It had cooled nicely inside the air-conditioned shop.

  Lio’s mournful stare followed the LeafBlade helmet halfway down the street. The vendors were already rolling up carpets and boxing wares, though the afternoon was still young. Lightning forked in the distance. She sniffed and smelled ozone on the wind. Days or hours now.

  A man in a black jacket with gold thread cuffs monitored the traffic from a street corner. That would be a peacekeeper, employed by Nalib Rinwahl, one of her clients in the upcoming negotiation. Power and strength were Rinwahl’s trademarks.

  Mag buckled the helmet onto Lio and fought the urge to twist hard on her throttle. If the rains broke in the next hour, recklessness wouldn’t get them to Ellawi in time. Nothing would save them if the storm hit them on the open road.

  The highway grew more pocked and oilier with each mile, worming like a ravaging parasite into the humid gut of Palab. The smell of animal carcasses rose with the heat, and the still-living beasts prowled the roadside, lean bodies sharp against a blue sky that was starting to turn a disturbing shade of purple. Mag pulled over once to tear off a sprig of wild sage and tuck it inside her visor where its scent repelled the stench of death.

  She’d charged twice her usual fee to account for the travel and low-visibility clientele of this job but, more than that, she’d charged extra for having to travel near the storm’s onset. Then again, she might have charged four times her standard, had her references not been fouled by two failed negotiations in a row.

  She’d lost her latter-half payment for both of those gigs, and had barely managed the bills to repair her hip, a casualty of one job’s violent implosion.

  She knew her problem’s source, but like a loose bolt without a wrench, she couldn’t reach in and fix it. Mag had lost her grip six months earlier when she’d received news that Nika had died of infection after a cut-rate abortion. Just like that. Words on a screen. Little sister gone.

  She should have taken a break, but she’d needed the money. So she’d entered those last two jobs with deadened reflexes and paid for it dearly.

  When the job from Rinwahl and Nasheed had hit Mag’s inbox, she’d groaned at the Palabi address, but reminded herself she was still far from being able to afford a storm bunker. She’d accepted.

  After another three-hour ride, she and Lio stopped briefly for jerky strips, bread, and water, then pushed on. When the sun had sunk almost to the horizon and Mag felt sand between her teeth, she checked her mileage and pulled off at the next campground. When she twisted to look at the kid, she saw bloodshot eyes, skin like a dried apricot, and trail of crusted blood at the corner of his mouth. Not one complaint.

  At the campsite’s check-in box, she inserted her coins and a red cube tumbled out of the lockbox’s base with her campsite number. A small cabin would have been nice, or even one of the sturdy canvas tents, but after-hours entry removed such options.

  “We’ll be roughing it,” she told Lio. She switched to Keshrindi when she saw his blank stare. “We’ll sleep outside tonight. No one will trouble us here. The eyes and ears of a crowd—”

  “They guard us,” he broke in, finishing her sentence in Darik. “For now,” he continued, still in Darik, “we speak your words. I understand enough.” Pride quirked his mouth.

  “Fine by me.”

  They washed at the campground restrooms and Mag moved her holster to a conspicuous position on her good hip. She walked with the Firebrand and Lio past amber-orange flames and the sweet mesquite smoke of late lingering fires, nodding to fellow travelers. Mag had noticed more pink rivulet-scars on faces and hands than when she’d traveled to Palab a year before; one in three now bore some mark of storm rain.

  At the campsite, she pushed the cube into its metal socket and a solar orb cast a thin glo
w onto the gravel lot, sweeping the base of a red cliff at the far end, the edge of a woven tent on the right, and a battered aluminum trailer with hand-painted Hinshee proverbs on the left.

  Lio chucked gravel at the cliffside and watched the dust puff. Light twinkled on his throwing hand, a bracelet. Not diamonds. No one put diamonds on a kid this young. Unless it wasn’t his.

  After wiping down the Firebrand, Mag spread out her kerchief with flatbread, dates, dried apples, jerky, and water.

  Lio eagerly folded his legs under him. As he chewed, Mag let the humming generator from their neighbor’s trailer drown her words.

  “I have some questions, Lio. But first, I’ll be up front.”

  He frowned, then asked with a full mouth. “In front of me?”

  “Up front. Honest,” Mag said.

  He nodded.

  “I want to help you, but helping costs money and I don’t have extra. Do you have anything you could sell? Like this?” She pointed to his bracelet.

  Lio swallowed his food, then clamped his hand over the bracelet. “This is my luck,” he said determinedly. “My stars of—of when I was born.” His voice shook. “My mother gave it.”

  “Okay. It’s lucky. I get it.”

  “Luck is everything,” he said.

  “How did you come to Palab?”

  “I ran.”

  “On foot?”

  “Yes, on my feet. I am fast.”

  “Was someone chasing you?”

  His eyes didn’t leave her face, but a part of Lio slid into shadow. He said, “They come for my mother, in our home. She was sick. Could not go, but she told me run. She told me promise not stop until I see gold dome.”

  The old site of Ajrah’s Gilded Palace. So this woman had made her son flee.

  “Was your mother in trouble?”

  He looked away. With flushed cheeks, he said, “She is good person.”

  Mag was silent.

  “She was good person,” Lio said. “They drained her.”

  “Spirit’s blood,” Mag cursed softly. “I’m sorry, Lio. I’ll stop prying now.”

  He looked up at the darkening sky. The clouds were beginning to pile in the distance, but the wind was low. Not tonight.

  “Here,” Mag offered, digging in her pack. She slid her echo tin out of its wooden box and placed it in the center of the emptied kerchief. “Courtyard in Milyan,” she whispered into the box.

  The shiny sides flipped down and a small globe, bright as a blue day, burned in the open.

  Lio’s head whipped side to side as the walls around them sprang to soft, colored life. The box projected a bubbling stone fountain and the slap of water on flat stones. The cliffside, trailer, and tent flaps were eclipsed by bright awnings and spotless storefronts selling richly dyed clothing, fruit in bright neat rows, and a bakery window piled high with sugar-dusted puffs. The sky above them glowed luminous.

  Lio opened his arms wide and laughed.

  Mag smiled. She’d captured the scene herself when her purse had been fat enough to keep two young women in Milyan for a full dry season. Though hard times had often pressed her to sell the echo tin, she’d always found means to keep it. It stored up to fifty scenes. This courtyard was one of her favorites.

  Illustration by Aliya Chen

  While Lio amused himself by poking at items in the three-dimensional projection and watching his hand pass through, she laid out her statements from Nasheed and Rinwahl to study.

  From what she’d gleaned during preparatory interviews, the two duja tycoons had made a deal a few years ago, with Rinwahl controlling sales of the addictive duja north of the Hebra River while Nasheed sold to the south, but something had soured. Citizens had been killed in crossfire, and her clients now faced a government ultimatum they couldn’t afford to ignore. Mag smirked as she read Nasheed’s handwritten comment: “I was happy to hire you after hearing your former client Jave Nillim say you pinned his collar with a blade-tip pen when he repeatedly broke your ground rules. You have a knack for making people listen.” The story was true, and though it hadn’t been her most levelheaded choice, calculated risks were often necessary.

  Duja sales were illegal in Palab, but due to low levels of violence and generous contributions to the government, Rinwahl and Nasheed had kept free of official intervention until this recent rash of killings.

  She looked up. Lio was poking his head out of the echo tin’s projection the way a cornered rabbit might peer out at a fox. Whether he was a refugee, or fugitive, or something else, he wasn’t about to tell her. She only knew he’d lost his mother. Gentle pity filled Mag’s chest. She heard Nika’s voice mocking her, “Bandage up that bleeding heart.” Though she felt sorry for Lio, if the kid had been Mag’s client, her instincts said to fact-check every single thing he said. She returned to her notes.

  When Lio seemed sleepy, Mag leaned over the tin and said, “Night mode.” The Milyan scene faded, replaced by a faint golden glow. “Two guests. Set perimeter alarm.”

  The tin chirped softly.

  Mag rigged sky-cover from her travel tarp and gave her riding jacket to Lio. She wriggled into the smelly woolen jumper she’d stolen from her father on her last day home and promised herself that when she reached Hotel Alikesh, she’d use the in-house laundry to transform herself into the mediator her clients expected.

  The night was quite warm for early spring, another sign of the storm front.

  Mag rinsed her mouth, brushed her teeth, then checked on Lio. He’d already curled up beneath the tarp and was zipping himself into her jacket with his knees tucked. He looked like a leather egg.

  Lio fell asleep quickly and spent the next half hour filling the makeshift tent with noisy, unapologetic flatulence as if to say, “Don’t get attached to me. I promise constant irritation.”

  An hour later, Mag rolled away, desperate for clear air. The desert night was thick with the scent of night-blooming cereus and the taste of coming rain.

  She hurled a pebble, listened to it dust-skip, then lit a cig and brought out the tube of silver decal paint. She loosened the tiny paint brush taped to its side and held Lio’s child-size helmet at arm’s length. After a moment’s study, she began.

  The instant Mag woke, she felt the void. She reached for her pack. Canteen and food gone, wallet empty, and both the riding jacket and boy had vanished.

  She crouched, blinking, then mechanically closed the echo tin and packed it away. No one had snatched him. The tin’s alert hadn’t marked his exit. Lio had wanted to go. She looked at the small helmet she’d painted with an imitation of the LeafBlade logo. She’d meant to surprise Lio with it in the morning. She cursed herself for being a sap.

  Mag washed at the restrooms, finger-combed her hair, replaced her scarf and allowed herself to mourn her riding jacket for one caustic minute. Then she smoked a cig and, when she was sure she’d calmed, returned to the campsite.

  At least she’d tucked the ignition key into her bra. He hadn’t had the nerve to grope there. And the crescents were still hidden in her money belt.

  Mag took her time packing up, then as she picked burrs off her boots, a motion caught her eye. A face watched her from behind the Firebrand. She bolted to her feet, neck hot.

  Lio’s face was crumpled. He pointed to her campstove and she saw coffee boiling in a pot. The pickings of her wallet sat beside Lio’s shoes. He mutely offered a bunch of wild yellow primroses.

  She waited for a blubbering excuse, but instead Lio met her eyes and said, “Before the sun, I walk away for one hour carrying your things. They much heavy in my hands, so I come back.” He squared his shoulders. “Decide I am not thief.”

  He held out the riding jacket to her. She drew the leather to her nose, then pushed her arms into the sleeves and crossed to the coffee. She poured a cup and took three slow swallows, letting him stew in his guilt.
r />   “My world runs on second chances, but not third ones.” She cleared her throat. “If you weren’t so cute, I’d have already shot off your thief’s hand. Also, primroses are my favorite, you little shit.”

  He grinned. Sheet lighting flashed behind him in the morning haze.

  She raised a finger. “One more chance.”

  Lio nodded, then unclasped his bracelet and held it out.

  Mag pushed it back. “You need all your luck out here.” Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she showed him what she’d painted on the helmet.

  “Beautiful!” Lio shouted, cramming the helmet onto his head. He caught her in a wild hug, then seemed to remember himself. “Thank you,” he said, bowing ceremoniously.

  “You’re welcome.”

  As she made a final sweep of the site, Mag’s fingers brushed her matchbook, tucked inside her jumper pocket. What kind of eight-year-old thief knew how to start fires without tools? Exactly how worried should she be?

  As she was securing her pack on the Firebrand, Lio touched her arm.

  “Maglin Grayhawk,” he began, sobriety plain in his green eyes, “I want to ask. If you … if you help me to learn who I do and am better.”

  Mag flinched at his use of her full name. Then she remembered he’d ransacked her wallet. So the kid could read Darik as well as speak it.

  She said, “By ‘learn’ do you mean ‘school’? You want a teacher?”

  His face brightened with relief. “Yes! A teacher.” He swallowed, then said with deliberation, “For me.”

  Mag noted his strange intensity, then squatted to bring their eyes on level.

  “If this job goes well, I’ll have enough for room and board in an Ellawi bunker to wait out the storm. I’d wanted a spot with a private kitchen. But if I don’t really need that kitchen, I could find space for two.”

  I must be losing my mind, she thought. I’m making a generous offer to a kid who just tried to steal me blind.

  But the words continued pouring. “Maybe, once the storm has passed, I could find you a school with late enrollment.” Mag activated the Firebrand’s choke. “How does that sound?”