Rootless - Howard Chris. Страница 21

It was near dawn by the time I’d wrapped the finishing touches. Alpha was working below, and the sun had just started to blur the horizon, painting the eastern edge of the earth with a smear. I watched the pink embers grow and hover, the sun bubbling up.

“Here it comes,” I yelled down. And I drew the tarp back from the face that was now cloaked in iron threads, watching as Alpha studied her thousand reflections in the splintered rays of dawn.

She pulled herself up the ladders and scaffold, moving effortless and alive. And when she reached the top, I could smell the taste of her sweat mixed with leather and steel.

“Can I touch it?” she said.

“Go ahead.”

She ran her fingers over Hina’s glittering face and tapped each one of her reflections, laughing when she glimpsed me behind her.

“It’s incredible,” she said.

“I like seeing you in it.” It was like the words got spoke before I’d thought them. Like my mouth had played a trick on my brain.

“That so?” Alpha turned to face me.

My skin prickled, being right up close to her. My bones felt heavy and loose. And my mind started racing and my heart beat fast, hard to know which was quicker.

“So,” she said. “You’re done.”

“I reckon.”

“You reckon.” It was like she was bitter about something. I started to speak, but she cut back in. “Relax, bud. I’ll get you back to the road and you can keep on drifting.”

“I ain’t drifting,” I shot back at her. “I got a father to find.”

Alpha laughed again, but her laugh had lost its juice. She went and sat on the edge of the scaffold and peeled off her boots, dangling her feet over the top of the forest. And I stood where she’d left me, staring down at where the ferns gave way to the crumbled old streets.

“So you’re always gonna live here?” I said. “In Old Orleans?”

“There’s worse places.”

“You seen ’em?”

“Not unless they’re between here and the forty.”

“So you never really been anywhere.”

“Where else is there to go?” She said it like she was all done talking, but I thought about the sprawl and the Surge and the endless miles of dirt between them. And I thought about the electric lights, the skyline of Vega, like concrete mountains all sparkled and bright. And above it all, just the steam rolling down and the ash blowing off the lava that pours out of the Rift.

“Niagara’s worth seeing,” I said. “The Soljahs got a whole city built behind waterfalls. It’s something to look at, anyway. Though with the water crashing, you can’t hardly hear yourself think.”

For a moment, I thought about telling Alpha about the trees and Pop and the old Rasta with the bark in his skin. The GPS numbers and the Promised Land. But how could I trust her? I reckoned she’d be loyal to that captain of hers, and there wasn’t room in this for an army of pirates. And besides, I didn’t want to become just Alpha’s ticket to something. She’d offered to help me out, get me back to my wagon. And it had been since Pop had been taken that I’d seen a helping hand.

“So what happened to your sister?” I said, sitting down next to her, trying to get her to look at me.

Alpha let the question hang for a moment. “Starved.”

“Shit.”

“She’d barely started walking.”

“You couldn’t get her nothing to eat?”

“It weren’t that. Corn made her throat swell tight. Once my mom was gone, there wasn’t a thing I could do.”

“So it weren’t your fault.”

“Don’t make it easier.”

“My mother starved,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I was just a nipper. Our wagon broke on the Thousand Mile Road, and my dad was gone too long trying to scavenge up parts. Said he staggered back to find my momma starved to death and me just barely breathing. And sometimes I think about what she must have done. Giving herself up so I could keep hanging on. Gotta be that’s the worst way to go.”

“All the ways are the worst way,” Alpha said, and it’s probably true.

I waited for her to say something else, shoot me a glance. But she just stared down at her toes and the treetops, her face glum.

I watched the sun come higher. I turned to the west where the world was still black and shadowed. But then I froze. Because there, creeping out of the edges of night, was the biggest damn vehicle I’d ever seen.

It was like a city on wheels. Trundling toward Old Orleans on tires that looked too big to ever be in a rush.

“What the hell is that?” I whispered, standing.

“Looks like you’re staying another day.” Alpha knelt alongside me. “Can’t be out on the plains when they’re prowling. They’ll be here by nightfall, though. Every year, son of a bitch is right on time.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? King Harvest. Ready for the trade.”

“What is it you trade him for?”

“Our freedom,” she said. “Give him enough bodies so he won’t take our own.”

I knew it was a day of endings, one way or another. The sun already seemed too high, like it was arcing too fast. And there was not a damn thing I could do about it. By nightfall, King Harvest would be at Old Orleans, and I had till then to rescue Sal, or there’d be no knowing the right place to go. No way to find Pop.

I followed Alpha off the scaffold, unbolting and tearing apart our metal tower as we descended, my work finished. Almost.

“You said she used to light up,” I said.

“Used to.”

“Then I better see if I can wire her right again.”

Alpha set to scrubbing the shine back to a mess of ferns, and I laid fresh cable through the undergrowth, running it from an old generator to the base of the statue. Hina’s foot was arched up with the heel high, and you could access the inside by crawling up through the ball of the foot. I grabbed wire and tape and my headlamp, scooting myself inside the metal and searching for circuits to patch.

I pulled myself up, tracing the curve of her calf, the straight line of shin, running new wire where she needed it, taping her electrics back together like they were veins in her skin.

As I climbed through the statue, swinging between her hips and crawling down along her dancing leg, following the tunnel through her outstretched arms and working my way up where her brain would be, I came to know the work in a whole new way — seeing the statue from the perspective of the creator, learning the steps by which she’d been built. The seams and the joint work, the weld marks and support beams.

And there was something routine about being inside that statue. Something familiar about it. Every builder has their own way of bending the rules, each takes their own risk with their rhythm. And I knew the work I was studying. I knew the caution, the passion and style.

Of course I knew it.

I’d seen it mirrored in my own building. Reflected in every tree I’d ever built.

And as I lowered myself down, descending the thigh and dropping to the ground, I was sure of it. Sure as you can be about anything.

The statue could only be the work of one builder.

And that builder had been my old man.

When I crawled back out into the forest, I felt like my blood had drained out and grown thick in my shoes. I stared up at the sky but the sun was gone, disappeared behind a layer of gray that billowed and curled and smudged the world with its fingers.

“Rain clouds,” Alpha said, watching me. “We should head back.”

“What all do you know about the guy who built her?” I said, when I could speak again. I tried packing my tools with my hands all shaky and weak, but then I gave up and left the tools piled at the base of the statue.

“Some people say he took her to Vega,” said Alpha. “To play those numbers and strike it rich.”