Nox

"Anything?"

I lifted an eyebrow. "Was there supposed to be something?"

Cress sighed, then went back to... whatever it was she was doing with my control interface. All I knew was that it involved a bunch of shiny tools and one of the power cells from the military vehicles. When it came to this monstrosity of a body, I was only too happy to leave the mechanics to someone else. I was old fashioned. Give me a plain old compression engine any day. Glowing blue lights and metal that moved on command were all well beyond my comfort level.

I stared around at the rocky clearing Cress had decided to take a rest in. We had made it almost five miles after leaving the mine, following Cress around to the far side of the peak above the town the Coventry had wiped out.

Barely five miles, and the two girls from town were already limping and whimpering, and Beckett was white as a sheet. The girls were currently huddled next to each other on a nearby rock, and Dr. Starling and Jimmy were sitting with Beckett.

At this rate, it would take four days to cross the fifty miles of mountain standing between us and the Illyrians, if Starling was right about where their lines were.

There was a sudden zing of energy at the base of my skull and Cress jerked behind me, swearing under her breath and flapping her hand.

Starling glanced up from where he was giving Beckett a drink from a canteen. "You alright?"

"Yes," Cress snapped. "Fine." Then she smacked the back of my head.

There was a pop, my vision doubled, and a bunch of bright orange screed began rolling upward so fast I couldn't read any of it. "That did something," I said, helpfully.

She shuffled around to peer at my face, squinting into my eyes, then she started muttering something about command arcs, and grabbed a long, pointy thing from her little pile of tools, disappearing behind me again.

"So," Starling said, looking down at Beckett. "What do we have to expect from the mountains? Trolls? This looks like troll country."

Beckett smiled a little, and Jimmy rolled his eyes. "Naw, Doc, this is chaghara country."

"Wild dogs," Beckett croaked.

"Bears? Are there bears?" Jimmy asked, looking up at Cress. "I think there are bears. Khulu, too."

The older girl from town was staring at the three of them with huge, horrified eyes. "Khulu are just a myth."

"Not around here they're not," Jimmy retorted, suddenly not teasing at all. "You ever been on a hunting trip? No? I didn't think so. Howabout you just keep quiet about stuff you know nothing about?"

"Stop scaring them, Jamesh," Cress said quietly. Then she twisted something that apparently wasn't supposed to have come untwisted, because everything went dark.

I grunted. "Um." There was a jolt, and then, abruptly, I was looking at a glowing list of command channels I had never seen before.

"Got anything?"

"All I can see is a bunch of command lines," I muttered. "Is that a good thing?"

"Yes! Good. That's good... I think it's good. Maybe. Can you follow any of them?"

It was like reading the page of a book. The list stayed put when I moved my eyes. I tried looking at just one line for a moment and got nothing. "I don't know how to do that."

"Uh..." there was a tug and then a bunch of clicking.

On a whim, I tried moving a finger to where my eyes said the line of text was. The line blinked twice, and shot to the top of the 'page,' with a new cluster of related command lines beneath it. I was looking at a list of biological functions and fuel sources. "Wait. I got it."

"It might be working, then. I just reattached something that wasn't attached. So... Try accessing something you weren't able to before."

"Like what?"

"I don't know, dill weed, what weren't you able to do before?"

"Dill weed..." I snorted, but did as she suggested, flipping the 'page' back to the one I had been on before. I chose 'Systems,' then selected the 'Healing Protocols' line. 'Autonomous Healing' looked interesting. I put a finger on that one.

Cress let out a sharp gasp and scrambled backwards, away from me.

I couldn't do anything, my metal bones rendered immobile as my entire body began rearranging itself amid a flurry of blinking orange screed that erupted all over the blank plane of my vision. Pieces of me were zipping here and there, steel whispering over steel, things rejoining and melding back together. One by one a field of 'error' signals began winking out, leaks and tears disappearing, system reports adjusting.

And then, as suddenly as it began, it was over.

"Well," Cress said, chuckling a little. "That just made my job a whole lot easier." She sat forward and grabbed another tool, pushing at something in my head.

The page of command lines was replaced by the rocks and fallen trees in the clearing. I blinked.

Starling was staring at me, his jaw slack. Then he cleared his throat, his gaze moving to Cress. "What do we really have to expect out here, Cressaida?"

She worked for a moment more, then said, voice low, "The farther north we go, the steeper the valleys will get. The rocks up here don't do much but funnel the water... and we're heading into the windward side of the range. The most dangerous thing we're going to face up here isn't wild dogs, or bears, or chagharas... it's the rain."

There was a quick popping sensation in my neck, and the next instant my weapons control system came up in a flicker of bright orange lines. "Wait! Stop —" I tried, but it was too late. A small tube sprang open in my right shoulder, and something spat out of it in a flash of blue, darting straight across the clearing.

With a loud thump, a rather large sapling disintegrated in a burst of dust and needles and wood chips.

All seven of us gaped at the shredded stump sticking up where the tree had been. Then we all ducked as splinters began raining from the sky.

Beckett whooped out a laugh, then started coughing.

It might have been funny if that blast hadn't been visible to anyone watching the mountains. I turned to look at Cress, jaw tight. "Time to go."

She met my eyes, her expression fierce. Then she nodded and started gathering her tools. "Right. Break's over. We need to make it to Roper's Ridge before nightfall."

>>>><<<<

Cress

Stupid. That had been stupid. I was stupid. Fishing around inside something that advanced with nothing but intuition and a turnscrew. I had no idea what I was doing, not really. I was no engineer. So what if I could take apart farming equipment? Farming equipment didn't come with explosives. Now, because of me and my turnscrew, we had to run and hope like mad no one had seen whatever that had been. A large tracer round? A tiny mortar? I could only be glad I hadn't activated one of the Mech's arm cannons.

As it was, Lolarose would have been splattered all over the place instead of the tree if the Mech hadn't jerked an inch to the right.

I glanced over my shoulder at the little group huddled around the dull glow of Mallush's ancient flameless camp stove. Becks and Jimmy were already asleep.

Ephie and her sister were sitting together, sharing a blanket, and I was fairly sure they were crying. Ephie had spent most of that forced ten-mile quick march down the valley complaining about how much her feet hurt.

I lasted a mile before I made her wear my boots. Two miles in, I was about to take my boots back, and the only thing keeping me from doing it was the fact that she walked faster with them on. I spent the last eight of those ten miles wishing it had been anyone but Ephinia Ormel hiding in that privy tank.

Why did it have to be the one person in Darkening I disliked the most?

It wasn't so much that Ephie was stuck up. She had always been that way, even when she was little, for certain sure that she would get whatever she wanted if she pitched a big enough fit. I doubted she could even help it. Her daddy owned the best shops and had given his little girls their every heart's desire since they were burping on their nanny's shoulder. No. I didn't mind that she was stuck up. It was that she took pleasure in tearing other people down.

My Momma had been desperate when she married the man I called Da. He was a no-good smuggling drunk, but she had signed up as a shipment bride to get free passage to the Colonies, so she had to marry him or the agency would send her back. He wasn't my daddy, though. Nobody knew who my daddy was. Momma never told me, either, and I stopped asking when I was young since it seemed to cause her pain. There was no question about it, anyway. I was about the color of a walnut and freckled like a goose egg, and my hair stood up in crinkly copper-brown corkscrews that turned bright gold after a summer in the fields. When both Jamesh and Beckett were born with Da's blue eyes and straight black hair, it just made it even more clear I was only their natural half-kin. Momma, with her wavy honey-gold hair and milk-pale skin had obviously done something naughty with a Ronyran, or even a Panopalesian, to get me with my coloring.

Darling, dear Miss Ephinia Ormel never lost an opportunity to point that out.

"Cressy, Cressy, big and messy, can't tell where she got her hair, found her nose in a garden hose, and just look at her spotty face!"

That hurt enough on its own, but it was the stabs at Momma that got me riled. Words never made much sense to me all lined up on a page. I could see alright, but keeping letters straight was like trying to catch a whole school of fish in my fingers. I started off in the same year as Doc, but as time wore on Momma had to keep holding me back, and I wound up struggling along in the back of Ephie's class. That spoiled little puffadder made the mistake once of whispering that my beautiful, intelligent, graceful mother wasn't much of a schoolteacher if her own daughter wasn't any good at learning.

Ephie got a purple eye, I got sent to stand in the corner, and that still about summed up our relationship.

I was staring at Ephie while remembering all of that, when she lifted her head and caught me at it. Her pretty face folded into a belligerent pucker and I looked away, dislike crawling through my middle all over again.

Staring out over the valley bottom sprawling far below us, I took a sip of the tinned soup I had cracked open and set to heating over Mallush's camp stove. It tasted pretty good, considering how old it had to be. Old coot had probably given us all dysentery.

Footsteps sounded behind me. The crunch of gravel beneath boot soles. Then Doc came to stand next to me, his own mug of soup in his hands.

Silence descended.

An owl hooted from a scrub pine not too far away. Another hooted back.

"It's beautiful out here," Doc said quietly, gazing at the vast sweep of velvet blue sky in front of us.

The blue was still tinged pink along the western edge, a scud of storm clouds picked out in shades of magenta and lavender. I eyed those clouds. They were rolling toward the south, but that didn't mean there wouldn't be something more coming this way in the next few days.

"You know, you always were one to stand around, staring into outer space," Doc said suddenly.

I glanced at him sideways.

He was trying not to grin as he offered me a flask of something Mallush had probably brewed in his cellar. "Here. Found this in that pack over there... Should warm you up a bit... Actually, the first time I ever saw you, that's what you were doing. Staring into space. Literally."

I shook my head, smiling as I took the flask.

"Your mother convinced my parents somehow to send me to an Altyran-speaking school, and it was the first day I was allowed to go. Your mother had arranged one of her nature lessons... It was quite the excitement, going up to the Promontory at night to see the meteor shower. I had to finish my chores before I could go, and I was late because I had to walk. When I finally got there, the lesson was over, and all the smaller children were running around, clamoring for the hot apples they were to have as a treat. But in the middle of all the chaos there was this one girl in a white dress, just standing quietly on the observatory platform, looking through the telescope. And that girl got to see a whole bunch of meteors falling, all by herself."

I paused with the flask at my lips. I remembered that night. That had been the first time I had laid eyes on him, too. I thought he was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen. Then he had shown up at school the next day, and I found out that beautiful boy was far too smart for his own good. He had gotten every answer right, in every subject, while I wasn't even able to read more than a few words at a time without looking like an idiot.

He hadn't teased me, at least. In fact, he had been the school clown, always making everyone laugh at him. And then he had passed up a year, then another, and then he was gone, and I was still there, struggling along.

Doc cleared his throat. "I thought you were incredible, then. I don't think I've ever told you that."

No. He hadn't. I took a large swallow of Mallush's grog, then handed the flask back. "Yeah, well...thank you..." I mumbled, "But now I'm just old and tired, and far, far away from that little girl in the white dress."

"Mmmhmm," Doc took a swig, then gestured with the flask. "That's actually rather funny, because you've always been the most intimidating woman I have ever met. Strong, independent... Fearless... I don't know what we would have done today without you. Died, probably. Thank you for saving my life. I didn't get a chance to say that either." He tucked the flask in his jacket and turned to leave, taking a few steps before glancing back over his shoulder. "Your mother would be proud of you, Cress."

My heart was skipping erratically, and not just because of Mallush's awful rotgut.

Doc gave me a small nod, then continued on into the clearing in the trees where we had set up camp.

Blast that man. I swiped a hand at my watery eyes, then jerked around to look down into the valley again.