Project Sapling: Part 2:12

Chapter 15

I was still there when the sun rose. ‘Sleepy’ had not returned for me until the first livid pinks and oranges started filling the sky, and by then it was too late to do anything about that.

MacKenzie sat up, rubbing at sleep-encrusted eyes, with a moan. “Morning. Greenjob, up.”

Oscar also groaned as he stretched into wakefulness, obviously stiff and sore from the night spent huddled on the ground.

With Oscar prodded awake, MacKenzie turned to me. “Damnit, did you sleep at all?”

I had drawn my knees up and rested my forehead on them, closing my eyes for a moment. The nights of walking on my own and then sleeping through the day had taken their toll on me, and I was now finding it difficult to sleep at night, even in the safety of a warm camp with others keeping watch. I had only been half-asleep the night before when the choppers had buzzed us, unable to find true sleep past the noise in my head and then listening to MacKenzie’s self-directed castigations.

“Noooo...” I didn’t even manage to end the word, so much as trail off into silence.

MacKenzie sighed, and turned to Oscar. “Okay, she needs to sleep for an hour or we won’t make any progress today. You hear that Cole? You’ve got an hour, make it count. Hand me that weapon, Bronson. You get to learn how to disassemble and clean it while Cole sleeps off her watch.”

I faded into sleep to the sounds of mechanisms coming apart and slotting back together. An hour wouldn’t be enough, but it would be better than the nothing I had already had.

I don’t know what passed between the two of them in the hour I slept, but it was over all too soon, and we were back on the march.

He was angry over something, that much I could tell. What it was I could only guess, but his face was all strained angles and tense muscles again, chewing on nothing at all in frustration. Knitted brows and narrowed eyes made the grin he slid over his face half a mile on all the more sinister, and I knew what was about to happen next before he spoke.

“So... I only got to pounce on the Princess twice before we got pounced for real. Does that mean I get two extra pounces today?” he asked, low and taunting.

MacKenzie smirked at him. “I don’t think I remember telling you that you get to ambush anyone today...”

“No, but it will be good practice, and practice is the thing that makes sure we don’t get killed in real life.” The continual taunting way he said it made it sound like he was quoting something back at MacKenzie. And then he screwed his face up into an ugly snarl, and growled at MacKenzie like an animal.

“FINE,” Mac barked, sidling away from him. “But keep on alert for Cascies. You pouncing at inopportune moments is exactly the sort of thing that could get us caught. If you see anyone around, do not engage. We’re within fifteen miles of a Cascadian base, so patrols are regular – hide, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir!” He replaced his menacing expression with a cheerful, friendly grin, saluted, and turned to jog on ahead of us.

“Creepy little fuck,” MacKenzie muttered, then shook their head and turned to grin at me, passing on the menace. “Come on, kid. Keep up.”

I followed, jogging up to walk closer to Mac.

A minute later, the question from yesterday resurfaced. “Wonder if he knows what a creepy little fuck he is?”

“YES,” I snapped, coming alongside, glaring. “Of course he does, and he’s using it against you!”

MacKenzie pulled ahead of me, pointing upward. “Against you, you mean?”

Before I could answer, he had dropped out of the tree I had been passing under, landing with both feet on my backpack again. I had been braced this time, and flung myself forward and too my knees, rolling him over my head with a shout of “OFF ME, Y’ASSHOLE!”

He came up with my gun pointed straight at me.

I stared, my vision going dark for a moment and overlaying the image of Eddie over-top of him, and I found myself in both places at once. This time something was different.

I lunged forward and pulled my assailant’s knees out from under him, throwing him hard onto his shoulder blades with a heavy “Oooft–”

Oscar’s voice was about half a country away from Eddie’s. I blinked, hard, several times, pulling myself back by the teeth out of the scent of nightkissed grass and Eddie’s deodorant and back to the smoke from last night’s campfire, basalt heating in the morning sun, and the odd, unfathomable, metallic sickly smell that I now knew was not Oscar at all, simply the thing wrapped around him. The bizarre nature of last night hit me again with fresh intensity. I was absolutely making a fool of myself...

“I heard what you called me earlier,” I said, then extended my left hand to him. His right was still wrapped up in what I had realized was a splint, and I wasn’t about to make him hurt himself. “And I forgive you.”

He stared at me for a long time with a puzzled, unreadable expression before reaching up and taking my hand. “Sorry...” he murmured, as I helped him to his feet.

Then, he dusted himself off, shot me another evil grin over his shoulder, and trotted on ahead into the spotty pines. Biting my lip, I watched him go, wondering what had changed in the hour I had been asleep. I sped up, trying to close the gap between me and MacKenzie, who had not stopped for our little drama, and was now quite some ways ahead.

***

Word had come in that a small party of Unified States trainees was passing through the area. Her recent promotion did not remove Caroline West from the duty roster for active patrols, so she had offered to swap shifts with Matthews and gone out with Edgars to see if she could investigate under the pretense of regular patrol. The dance of working within the web Grandad was weaving was always delicate.

There were some things that were just plain written into the regulations by this point, no matter what Edgars was ill-advisedly suggesting. Everything about Edgars was ill-advised, though. “Absolutely not. Out of the questions and against regulations. Also, a stupid idea regardless.” This was an arboreal patrol, meaning that Caroline was leading the way in a scramble from treetop to treetop, hopping from branch to branch on carefully-timed and placed feet.

“But why?” Edgars was clumsy in the treetops, a sure sign of someone new. “So easy. Just BAM. Dead Unifool. Or we drop on it and take it in for questioning?”

Caroline sighed, shooting an exasperated look back over one shoulder at the man. “Look, you saw the obnoxious green uniform. That means it’s either a cadet or it’s herding cadets. I get that you’re new to this side of the mountains, but we just don’t kill cadets here, or their minders, understand?” She sighed again. “That’s part of the deal. We don’t kill them, they don’t start things with us.” She jumped to the next tree, flashing a grin at him. “As for dropping on them? Do you want to end up gutted like those Millies we found yesterday? Most of these kids are delinquents and abuse victims. Don’t try it, Edgars, trust me. You don’t want it.”

He laughed at that advice. “I don’t know, hon. I think I could pr’olly take a cadet.”

Caroline laughed louder. “Not these, Edgars. Not these.”

***

Yes Staff Sergeant MacKenzie Sir had made me disassemble and reassemble the damn folding rifle so many times in an hour that I lost count, with increasing speed, until I got fed up and tried to put it away, at which point she pulled it back out and made me do it ten more times but blindfolded.

I had sworn at her and demanded to know why that was necessary, and her response had been a frustrated “It’s practice. Practice is the thing that makes sure we don’t get killed in real life,” and a sharp slap to the back of the head.

I was so tired of being slapped.

I did understand the purpose of this exercise, I just didn’t like it.

What I did not understand was her sudden fanaticism at making me do it now.

Her response to that question was another smack, and to remind me that we had been ambushed yesterday.

I didn’t need reminding, and responded with a reminder of my own that I had in fact been the only one to react to the ambush with a firearm.

Her response to that had been to order me to disassemble and reassemble that firearm as well twenty times, until I was so sore in the injured wrist that I was ready to scream and hit things, preferably her. But she was my training officer and had already shown a ready willingness to physically injure cadets who backtalked too hard, so I finished the task assigned to me in dower silence.

There was only one person left to take out my frustration on.

I landed on Cole the second time in a crouch, ready for her to pull the same trick again, but this time her knees folded under her and she collapsed to the ground. She wailed, turning into a long sob, and then an uncontrollable storm of hiccuping as she fell.

“Pathetic,” I muttered, through the hiccuping, still sitting on her backpack.

“Oh shut up!” she snapped, struggling to dislodge me.

I stood, and offered her a hand to help her up. She contemplated it with trepidation for a little too long for my tastes, my already fragile temper set over the limit by the morning’s endless repetitions, and when she finally did take it I went ahead and fulfilled her expectations, pulling her not only to her feet, but off of them and over one shoulder. I expected her to be angry. I did not expect a shriek of genuine terror and a call of “MAC!”

MacKenzie glared over a shoulder “Put her down.”

I dropped her, unceremonious, and she glared up at me with renewed anger.

Fine. Just as well, I guess. MacKenzie wanted to insist that this was a waste of my time. If this girl got angry with me on day three and stormed off into the bush, fine. I wouldn’t have to put up with MacKenzie’s continuing nightly encouragement to abandon her.

I walked away.

We came to the edge of the scrubby bit of forest we were walking through, and MacKenzie picked our path over the scabby bones of basalt sticking up out of the grasses to the next patch of pines.

I waved, and trotted onward, distancing myself from the others.

“Brace yourself,” I heard MacKenzie warn Cole, and turned back to see the girl’s bleak expression before trotting further into the wood and scaling a tree.

I had found a secure branch about eight feet up a sturdy pine when I heard the sounds of someone else in the trees above me. Forcing myself as close to the trunk as possible and willing myself to be unseen, I glanced above myself in time to watch a tall, thin native woman in Cascadian fatigues jump into the tree a few yards above me, followed by a stocky blond white man in identical uniform. For a moment, she hung there, standing on a limb above me, looking back at the man following her, and I stared. No, surely I was making things up. There was no way. She looked similar enough, that was fine, but there was no way this was the younger officer who had been in attendance at my trial? This woman was Cascadian...

And then she spoke, and my reality shattered into thousands of tiny pieces.

The content of what she said didn’t matter – an order to grab a different, sturdier branch.

Or maybe it did? I don’t know if a different phrase would have gone to the same places, sparked the same fires in the spots where memories lived.

What mattered was that I knew her voice. I would never be able to forget her voice. I didn’t remember what her face looked like outside of photographs – and fine, yes, this woman looked enough like those photographs to be her ten years on, and her voice...

The certainty that hit me made me sway where I stood, and cling tighter to my tree as the pair of them moved on. I watched her go, suddenly sure. There was no doubt – that woman was my sister.

Which meant my sister was alive.

My sister was alive.

And she hadn’t come back for me.

She had left me alone, with our father, after the night of blood and screaming and fear, and she had not come back.

Until now, it had been a tragedy. She had enlisted in the hopes of sending home money to provide for me, and gone into the river with two Cascadian officers protecting a comrade.

And now?

What now?
I swayed where I stood, frozen and unsure where I was or what I was doing for a while.

I was brought back to earth by a panicked scream in the near distance. Cole was almost as recognizable by voice already as my own sister, even just screaming. A moment later, MacKenzie passed beneath me.

Oh no.

I dropped out of the tree with an ungainly thump, hands pulled tight up to my chest and twitching with agitation. “Was that her?” I demanded, looking around in vain to try to find the absent Cole

“That wasn’t you pouncing her?” MacKenzie demanded right back, though that should have been obvious.

I took off at a dead sprint back the way MacKenzie had come.

***

By the time Caroline had registered what was happening, followed Edgars to the ground, and blurted out the restraint spell, it was too late.

She had warned him that it was likely these recruits were the ones responsible for the bloody mess that had been discovered the day before. Why he had decided that dropping on the isolated straggler was a good idea when she had been expressly telling him not to do so was beyond Caroline, but now Edgars wasn’t her problem any more. Now her problem was the viciously-stabbing fourteen-year-old girl straddling the corpse that had been Edgars a few moments ago. Clearly it was more specifically this recruit who was responsible for the absolute worst of yesterday’s carnage.

The stiffening air around the little blonde recruit slowed her motion, and crawled down her throat blocking her noise. Caroline was able to swoop down and take the knife from her hand and pick the girl up a moment later. Swiftly stripping the still weakly-struggling recruit of everything on her person and leaving it with Edgars’ corpse, she vaulted back up into the trees with her captive. Before she could do anything else, fast approaching footsteps made her press her back into the tree-trunk, holding tight to her captive still, and barely breathing herself as the source arrived below her.

“Shit.” The teenaged boy who skidded to a halt below her was clearly distressed and shaken already, and then he took in the scene in front of him. “This is all my fault. I’ve gotten her killed.” He crouched to examine the place where Caroline had dropped the girl’s bloodied knife and the pair of lighters from her pocket, biting at one hand. “Whatever happens to her, it’s all my fault...”

Caroline’s head swam. She had recognized him.

A second soldier arrived below her, and Caroline’s racing mind registered that she knew this one, too, in fact.

“We’re changing course,” her little brother informed her Unified contact, through his hand, which he wasn’t supposed to be biting, that was a Rule...

“Damn.” MacKenzie crouched as well to examine Edgars’ body. “Who attacked who, the kid or the Cascie?”

“Doesn’t matter. She lost.” He held up the lighters in evidence. He hadn’t spoken at his trial, and Caroline realized she had no idea what she had expected his voice to sound like – still like the little boy who mostly spoke in cat? Like his bully father?

“Right.” MacKenzie shook her head. “You sure you want to go after her? You can just keep going, I told you we have channels to go through if cadets are taken by Cascies.”

“Something’s wrong, Mac. You said they wouldn’t engage us, but here’s proof of engagement from the Cascies – what’s happening? What if she gets hurt? I don’t like this. If I’m your little brother, then she’s my little sister. I have to go get her, Mac.”

“You do realize she’s older than you, right?” MacKenzie did not sound particularly worried.

“I came of age on conscription day. Everyone is older than I am. But we move like family.”

Frantically working to get the restraint spell lowered before lack of oxygen set in and actually get the still-struggling girl in her arms tied up properly, Caroline seriously considered dropping from the tree right there, returning the frantic cadet in her arms, embracing the boy below her...

Edgars’ steaming corpse stopped her. If she tried now, there was all likelihood that she would be shot on the spot as an enemy. Nothing for it but to hold still, and try to hold the girl in her arms still, and try to keep the day from going even more pear-shaped.

“Well, come on then, grab her pack and that prize rifle of hers and lets go – we can bivvy in Coulee town. Leave that fucking sprayer and the Fuego, it’s too much gear.”

The relief of the pair moving onward was short-lived. Before Caroline could descend from the tree and head directly back to Coulee, another pair of soldiers boiled out of the underbrush. This time, it was not as simple as a pair of children in uniform.

“Dude, what gives?” demanded the smaller of the Melonheads who had just appeared ten meters away. “Edgars was supposed to have lead the girl lieutenant here by now.”

The other one laughed. “Horndog pr’olly stopped to take her for a ride and ain’t done yet.”

“Well I wish he would finish up quick and – hey! Three kegs of Fuego! Sweet! Uh... Dude...” They had discovered Edgars body.

Caroline, still in the tree above them, swore silently. Of course. Of course they had Millies infiltrating their ranks. Of course Edgars, unusually forward with her and clumsy in the trees, was one of them. Of course this had been a trap...

“I think it’s a good thing we’re a little bit late, dude...” The smaller one was staring in utter shock at Edgars’ eviscerated body. “Do you think the girl lieutenant did this? Damn...”

“Dude. What did he do, try to fuck a wolverine? Yeauuugh.”

“Maybe the girl lieutenant is secretly a were-panther? Dude...”

***

I had known by weight that the feet landing on me had not belonged to Oscar. Whoever this was had to be twice his size at least, and while Oscar was frustrating and a little mean, he wasn’t intent on violence the way this man definitely was, if the hands twisting into my jacket were any indication.

I unzipped the jacket, shucking it and everything on top of it in a single movement, grateful for once for the oversized object, and scrambled out from under him. I had reacted without thinking, years of pent-up pain welling up my throat in a scream I knew the others would hear as I twisted, reaching to once again pull out the boot-knife that had served me so well over the days in the field, and sink it hilt-deep into the stomach of the man coming after me. Whether they would respond, I doubted, but they would know, at least, that this was happening. Let them live with that.

By the time I realized there was a second soldier, the man now underneath me had stopped twitching. I had not stopped, could not stop, stabbing him, until the air itself had hardened around me like ice and stopped all motion entirely, from the frantic slashing of the knife to my breath.

“Shhh... Hold still...” One hand grabbed my right arm, the other my left ankle. For a second I thought it was Oscar, but the voice wasn’t quite right, if just a few oddly accented syllables away... A face came over my shoulder as the arm now holding my right hand wrapped around me, taking the knife away. “Give me that.” For a startled moment I thought I was wrong and this was Oscar, but another blink told me otherwise. “You don’t need that knife. Calm down, Princess.” Had I heard her say that, or imagined it in his voice? She – definitely she, I could feel that much as she picked me up and carried me like a child against her chest – crouched to enfold me in an iron grip before leaping up into the tree above us in an inhuman bound. “There’s a good Greenjob...”

All I could do as the world started to go black at the edges was desperately struggle for breath, wisps of air whistling down my windpipe barely keeping me conscious. I could hear, incredibly, the sounds of Oscar and Mac below me, bickering, and the panicked breathing of the Cascadian officer who held me as my comrades assessed the grizzly scene.

I fought against the hard air, attempting to call out to Oscar, but nothing came. A moment later, they were gone, leaving the clearing below us and taking my gear with them.

Only one thought stood out in my mind: He had come running as though drawn to my screams by a magnet, and was insisting that they come find me.

The officer holding me had bound and gagged me before releasing what I was now realizing was an actual honest-to-god sorcery keeping me still. Before she could move from our tree-trunk perch, another set of voices broke through the underbrush and started babbling below us. I could by now move to look down, and instantly recognized the stupid melon helmets of the BC Militia. And they were identifying the man I had just killed as one of their own. Did that mean that I was being held captive by ‘the Girl Lieutenant’?

If that was true, then my actions may have just saved this woman a whole future lifetime of hurt and humiliation. If I lived long enough to speak out loud to her, I would make short work of letting her know that I knew that she owed me something big for that.

MacKenzie’s words from the day before were ringing in my head. Do not hesitate to engage these fuckers, they don’t take prisoners we can get back. If the Cascies take you that’s different...

I could feel the Girl Lieutenant relax and begin to breath again as the pair of Melonheads retreated into the undergrowth, taking my painfully-acquired gasoline and sprayer with them as they did.

She dropped from the tree, slung me bodily over one shoulder in a grotesque imitation of the action Oscar had taken earlier, and booked it back toward her base.

She barked a few quick orders to the soldiers on the gate she entered, took me into a building, and left me on the floor of a little concrete cell with a steel chair bolted to the ground under a hanging, bare lamp, locking the door behind her.

I had been angry, kicking so hard I had managed to break free of the ties she had used to secure my ankles halfway there and trying my best to kick her in the face for several miles, but my best efforts were of naught, and here I was.

Now I was scared. I had hoped to speak to the woman who had captured me, but that opportunity had not come up, and I was now bound and gagged in a cell with no idea how long I would be there, and no indication that my comrades would be able to find me or extricate me, even if MacKenzie didn’t manage to convince Oscar to just leave me here and deal with extracting me later by official channels.

I knew what that meant.

I knew that was no guarantee of coming back to the Unified States as a whole and able soldier.
I knew that these were the people who had taken my Daddy’s arm before sending him back to us.

I knew, as well, that where there was one well-groomed plant, there had to be others. The BC Militia had placed at least one mole on this base, there had to be others. And if the Girl Lieutenant had been lured out to be taken to a trap and come back without the man who had been leading her, then any of his comrades here would be suddenly very keen on getting answers from anyone they could.

The door opened.

Tall, thin, blond, vicious.

Could have been Eddie’s older brother by the look on his face.

Topiary.

I was fairly certain I knew what was about to happen. It wasn’t going to be pretty, and I probably wouldn’t survive the next few hours.

I forced myself up and over and out as he picked me up and placed me in the hard steel chair. Backwards and above, I turned away from the body and inward, down, back to more pleasant moments, away.

Madison Burns stretched on the side of the university field-house track. Long limbs and that halo of black curls held back with the Goldrush yellow headband. She turned to smile at me, the smile that said she knew I had been looking at her long, sleek legs, how the skin gleamed under the sodium lights and her muscles jumped when she hit that juuuust riiight spot of the stretch.

He had finished tying me to the chair, bound at all four points, and slapped me across the face, twice, hard. “Tell us the intended whereabouts of your compatriots!” he barked.

I shook my head, answering quietly. “I’m alone.”

I kissed her...

“I don’t think so.” He shucked his jacket, examining his fingernails.

I had started to shake.

“Daddy will be so angry that I’ve fallen for a darkie girl...” I had blurted it out without forethought, without any thought, and the look on her face was worse than if I had slapped her.

He slapped me again.

“Why the hell would you say that?” Her voice broke, and I knew I had made a terrible mistake.

He pulled a large folding knife out of one hip pocket, smirking at me. “Now, let’s start over again. Tell me where your friends are heading?”

“I don’t have any. I’m alone.”

She slapped me, for real, so hard I was jolted to the side.

He opened the knife, still smirking evilly at me. “Someone had to stripe you like that, kid. Don’t you want to get back at him for that? Come on, tell me? Where is he?”

“I’m alone. I’ve been alone for days.” My nose was bleeding, and my voice sounded thick from it.

She walked away, out of the glow of the streetlight. I knew I wouldn’t see her again.

“Sticks and stones, daddy?”

“Just told you, I’m alone. No one.” My left leg wouldn’t stop bouncing from the pain of the cut, and the rope tying that leg to the chair leg was slipping steadily upwards.

“Still not buying it.” He examined the edge of his knife, the blood beading down it. “So. We have a choice. Which eye would you prefer I remove first?”

Daddy had slapped me harder than Madison had. “Depraved little slut!”

“But Daddy I only kissed her! And I... I love her...” I trailed off into sobbing as he slapped me again, still screaming.

“HELL! You’ll burn in HELL!” He had continued screaming, calling Madison horrible names I was glad she wasn’t there to hear and condemning me for fornication and miscegenation.

He had stopped asking questions, and was focusing instead on carving carefully into the skin around the outside of my left eye. I kept myself forcefully outside of it, letting the body do what it would from the pain.

And then, the lights went out.