Part 3
“No you don’t.”
Rice had her by the arm before she could get far. Gray struggled, tried peeling his fingers off of her, but he was not letting go.
“Rice!”
“It won’t help anything! You’ll just get yourself killed.”
Gray watched the flare smoke disappear with the next gust, and she sat down. Rice soon joined her. They stared at the hills together in the late afternoon sun, shining like polished brass against a backdrop of rosy mountains.
“Why?” Gray said after a while. “Why now?”
“I don’t know. I’m just told to make these things happen, never told why.”
The wind blew dust in her eyes and she squinted.
“What do we do now?”
It felt so strange to remember, over and over, that there was nowhere she had to be, no scheduled duties, no ruck. The emptiness scared her, and Gray suddenly found herself desperate for something to do. But camp getting wiped from the map right before her eyes, the horror of it, wanted to chain her to the rock.
“We should go. C’mon.”
Hesitation.
“Gray.”
She let herself be led away, and together they headed north-west, into unfamiliar hills and a few miles afield from the firefight raging on in the embrace of the mountains.
/* /* /*
It was some hours before they found the spring, deep in a narrow cleft in the foothills, and by then the human was exhausted. It wasn’t much more than a muddy spot on the ground, but when he dug away at the dirt a puddle formed, which he bent forward to drink from.
Gray had to sit and catch her breath. Her skin radiated heat in a dangerous way, and the earth was still too warm to lay on. But Rice had a remedy: at the top of a pile of sand, he pulled aside a thick shrub to reveal an opening in the rock. It was just tall enough for a human, and the giant had to stoop to fit.
“It’s cooler in here,” he said. “Can you walk?”
Barely. Gray nodded, and made her slow way up to him just inside. Rice crouched and produced a small flashlight so that they could peer into the darkness. After confirming that there were no recent signs of habitation, he instructed her to strip and lay on the ground.
“You’re sunsick,” he said. “I’ll get you water. Keep talking to me, don’t fall asleep.”
He left quickly, tearing off his gear as he went.
She looked around a little, and even in this state she noticed this cave was more of a uniform tunnel. “What is this place?” Her voice was weak.
“It’s a prospector’s mine,” he called out to her from the puddle outside. “There’s a handful of them in the area, much older than the war. There’s even one further up the canyon with a mine cart still in it. It’s remote, though, and I need a rope to get there.”
“That explains it.”
It was a familiar sort of space, and she recognized it from the several years of her own childhood spent deep underground looking for bits of phosphorus or titanium, working by candlelight because the company was too cheap for electricity. She could tell that this was an old mine, though. The air was stale, and the dark had a watchfulness to it, like it had long since been reclaimed by the earth and taken on life beyond the hands of its maker.
“Explains what?”
She looked down into the inky blackness of the passage, listening to her breath. It mesmerized her, and she stared until colors started to swirl in her eyes.
“Gray? You still with me?”
“Yeah.”
Rice came up and knelt beside her, a looming shadow that was becoming all-too familiar. He pressed the mouthpiece of his water bladder to her lips and she drank deeply.
/* /* /*
That was where they fell asleep together, splayed on his bedroll with nothing on between them but her underwear and their skin barely touching for the sticky heat.
At some point in the night they were woken by the sound of thunder, lightning falling across their bodies in harsh, brief silhouette. They laid in silence as the rain came in shortly after, and when they woke up the next morning, it was still coming down. The gulch outside had transformed into a rushing stream overnight, brown with silt.
“Where do we go from here?” she asked.
Rice sat just inside of the mouth of the tunnel, gazing at the rain. He was out of smokes.
“It’s better to go north than east,” he rumbled. “East of the mountains gets so hot you won’t last half a day without water.”
“Are you coming with me?”
Rice studied her feet for a little while before turning his blue eyes back outside.
“I’ll take you as far as the pass at the Rocks. I’ll make sure you get out safely. Someone probably wouldn’t mind a trained shot like you to bring up the rear of their—“
“You’re scared, aren’t you?”
He thought for a moment before rising, blocking the entrance with his bulk, and stepping out into the rain. Outside he stood, naked in the downpour, and turned his gaze upward toward the leaden sky.
“You smell that?” he called to her. “Who would’ve thought wet dirt and granite could smell so fucking nice. Come out here, the heat’s finally died down.”
Gray stepped out into the rain, skin turning to gooseflesh at the sensation. It was good, so, so good, and she couldn’t help but gawk up at the sky like he had, and open her mouth to catch some of the falling water. The muddy stream came up to her ankles, sluicing past them and disappearing down the edge of the lower rockfall, sounding far more torrential than it was. Her toes sank into mud.
Is this was it was like to have somebody? They made a strange pair, but the coarseness of his entire being, his body and thoughts and words, was not at odds with her. It wasn’t even his size, or his pheromone, or his razor-sharp senses that for now were occupied with marveling at the rain like a child. Rice, and all the sons of the Algorithm, were an attempt at something new, and it was that newness that drew her to him. The world was home to humans for untold generations; Gray knew rain deep in her bones, but maybe Rice didn’t. He was an outsider, even the desert, and it could never be any other way.
The human kissed his hipbone. When he hoisted her up she wrapped her legs around his ribs and crushed them together, mouths tangling.
“Take me as far as you can.” Gray whispered it like a secret. “I’ll need your protection.”
When his hand moved under her, slipping aside the rain-soaked garment clinging to her core, the human sighed.
/* /* /*
It rained for the whole day, and by the end of it hunger gnawed at them both. The next morning Rice went out, scrambling up the side of the canyon to hunt for something where it was drier. He returned two hours later with nothing, and this had him on edge.
Gray had spent the prior evening tying their clothes together and washing them in the rain, stomping out the blood and sweat and replacing them with dark silt. When it was time to leave, they were dry.
Rice knelt with his pack, though, frowning at it.
“What’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer, instead reaching in with one big hand and pulling out a slim black panel, attached to the top of which was the short antenna. He ripped cables out from it until it was free except for one: the earpiece. After getting one last look at it, he threw it into the darkness where it landed with a clatter.
“When they come looking for the transponder, I’d rather not be wearing it.”
The weather was good, sky dotted with clouds, and soon they were off again, headed north-west by game trail. When they came across a fat rattlesnake, Rice made quick work of it, stopping only once they reached some shade to clean and cook the kill over an alcohol stove no bigger than the palm of her hand, bite by bite. Gray could have eaten the whole thing, but after he passed her three large puffs of white meat, she assured him she was full, and silently he devoured the rest before continuing on their way.
It would have been much quicker to descend into the lowlands to make use of a road, but that way safety was only had in numbers or speed, and the pair had neither. After two days and precious little food, they came to the great swath of floodplain where it all began, the place where Fox called home for five years. The arroyo, nearly a mile wide, cut deep into the hills so that they had no choice but to cross it.
Rice surveyed the land in a new way, and Gray had to ask: “This isn’t your territory anymore, is it?”
“No. We’ll have to pass quickly or we’ll be noticed by the sentinel. In fact, he’s probably already looking for me. C’mon.”
He took a step, but something in the basin flashed with reflected sunlight, and she stopped him. Gray pointed, and he pulled out his binos.
“People,” he said, adjusting the focus dial. His eyes narrowed into them. “No… corpsmen. A dozen, maybe.”
Breath caught in Gray’s throat. “Can you see their colors? Are they Fox?”
“We’re too far away.” He put the instrument away and shouldered his ruck. “C’mon, we’ll be able to keep out of sight easy enough.”
“Keep out of sight?”
“They’re not your friends anymore, Gray. They will kill you.”
The trail they followed grew unacceptably steep and narrow, and the two found themselves climbing down the ridge and getting dirt down their sleeves. They worked their way to the floor of the arroyo carefully, as kicking up too much dust would give them away.
Once at the bottom, Rice covered his head of dark hair with the shade cloth, and after a wordless nod they darted out across the floodplain. But Gray’s curiosity got the better of her, the ache for old camaraderie, and they were a scant hundred yards away from the group of corpsmen when she caught Rice’s belt loop to him.
“What are you doing?” he hissed. “We have to move!”
“Give me your binos.”
“They won’t fit you.”
“I’ll look with one eye then.”
Gray held her breath as she propped the heavy pair of binoculars up on a rock and pressed one open eye to the lens. The angle wasn’t good, but it was enough, and she recoiled with a gasp. They were still too far away for her to read the lapels, but they were close enough for her to recognize faces.
“Holy shit,” she panted. “It’s brown toon. It’s…”
But a twig snapped somewhere and the giant shoved her to the dirt on instinct. Sider in hand he whirled around, and a few yards off, ducked down, was another familiar face.
Another Rice.
Wild-eyed, Gray looked him over. His hair was different; longer and pulled into a knot on his head. It didn’t appear that he shaved nearly as often either. And there was a jagged scar along his jaw.
“You’ve got gall coming here 402,” the strange Anak rasped, and lifted his own sider to meet them. Without otherwise moving, his scorching blue eyes darted to the human laying prone on the ground. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Gray, was it?” He chuckled quietly, and it was an ugly sound. “How’s Finch? She still Fox’s resident shark, or did she finally get her deathwish?”
Gray balled her hands into fists.
Rice’s face was a mask of silent fury, and she was surprised when he spoke with measured calm. “You pull that trigger and they’ll be all over us.”
“I’m aware of that. Which is why you’re going to come with me. If you do, I’ll even let the ‘yuman go.”
They stared each other down for a few very long moments.
“What’s it gonna be, Rice?”
