Calea lay on her back on the rocky hillside, winded and hurting, as the world erupted in chaos around her. All she saw at first was the sky, blue and cloudless. That horrid, filthy man’s first action had been to shove her, hard, and she’d fallen flat, her crutch spinning away. She didn’t know where it was. All she could manage at the moment was to lie on the rock and try to breathe.
“Nyasha, run!” Bron bellowed.
Calea hoped the girl would obey. At least one of them should reach their destination.
Then fury filled Calea, from the top of her head to the sole of her foot. What was she doing, lying around like this? She had to get up, she had to do something, she had to… She had to breathe. Pulling in air in hard-won sips, her anger fuel for her paralyzed limbs, Calea forced herself upright, fingers digging into a jutting rock to support herself. She groaned, pained and dizzy, but she would not lie down, she would not.
Bron was fighting, one against four. Calea had been so stupid not to recognize these men for what they were–vandals, thieves, brigands. Everything Dr. Burdock had feared, everything Bron had been watching for, and she had had no idea. She had simply been irritated at the interruption their presence had caused, the way they spoke and looked and were, so uncouth and savage. The only comfort in her stupidity was that Nyasha obviously hadn’t understood the threat, either. They had been stupid together.
One of the thieves was making off with the smaller bundle Bron had been carrying, the one that should have been Calea’s burden. Bron’s own pack had fallen off his back and was now on the ground, where he was trying to keep it, beating off the thieves who came for it. The vandals’ leader was at Bron now, swinging at him with a huge stick, and Calea was afraid. If that hit Bron on the head, if he went down…
But Bron grabbed the club in his big hands and wrenched it away, then struck back at the man. His knives were already gone from his waist. Calea hauled herself upright against the rock and looked around, trying to see what had happened to them.
Oh, how nice. The thief who had tried to steal Calea’s bundle was down and bleeding about twenty paces away, the items from the pack tumbled on the ground around him. Maybe Nyasha could get them.
Another vandal was leaning on the hillside opposite where Calea sat, and he was panting in convulsive jerks, clutching inconsolably at another throwing knife, which was… Great stars, it was in his chest. The thief’s face was pale, knowing, and the blood flowed and flowed. Calea stared at him, unable to look away. He was dying, and she was watching. It was as if they were both trapped in some horrible circle, staring at each other, neither able to escape the inevitable or even to look away. He was dying.
Bron shouted in pain, and Calea’s eyes tore away from the dying brigand and back to the fight. Bron’s arm bled from a slashing cut, new and awful and bright. But he held on to the leader with both arms, wrestling him down to the rock. Bron had him almost in a headlock; he was going to win that fight. But the other vandal, the fourth one, had a long, wicked knife, and he was raising it for another strike. Bron was vulnerable, his arms full, his legs spread wide for purchase on the rubbled path. The man with the knife had already gotten him once, and now he was going to stab Bron in the back.
“No!” Calea yelled.
Out of nowhere, her crutch flew through the air and struck the knife man upside the head. He toppled like a felled tree. And over him stood Nyasha, wide-eyed with horror and panting with adrenalin, clutching Calea’s crutch in pale-knuckled hands.
She hadn’t run, though she would have been wise to. Calea was almost absurdly grateful. It was a huge emotion filling her as completely as the rage at her helplessness had done, overwhelming and unfamiliar. She’d never felt anything like it.
Bron held his choke-hold on the leader until the brigand went down, slack and still. Then he straightened up and looked around, at the four downed thieves, at Calea sitting in the rocks, at Nyasha standing there still frozen with the crutch held angled from her shoulder like a batsman at a game.
“We’re…we’re all right,” Nyasha said wonderingly.
“Yes, we are,” Calea said more firmly.
The blood from the wound on Bron’s arm dripped into the grit and sand, bright and red and far too quick, like water from a bad faucet, leaking and leaking. He didn’t seem to notice at first, but stood swaying over the pack of food and other supplies he’d nearly given his life to protect. Its straps were broken. Sliced. They’d cut it off him and they would have cut him down to obtain it.
Who killed for food? Who attacked people for the mere things they carried? It was obscene. Calea couldn’t understand it at all.
“Bron, your arm.” Calea grabbed the rock with both hands, hauling herself up to her feet. She couldn’t go to him–still too clumsy, too weak on her new legs. “You’re bleeding. Bron!”
Bron looked down at the gash incuriously, raising his arm as the blood continued to drip down his forearm, off the knob of his wrist and into the ground. Nyasha made a high-pitched sound and suddenly broke her paralysis, running around the man she had downed to get to Bron. At least she tossed the crutch in something approximating Calea’s direction.
“Give me that,” Nyasha ordered Bron, hands already reaching to tear open the ragged cloth of his sleeve.
Bron held his arm out to her without comment, watching mutely as she bound the cut with bloody strips of the shirt sleeve. Calea found something to admire in the efficiency of Nyasha’s movements and the way she used what little material she had available to her to cover the gash very quickly. Then she realized that Nyasha’s hands were shaking, and what she had taken for efficiency was something closer to panic.
“We need to find shelter,” Nyasha said. Her voice trembled, too. “We have to…we have to rest.”
We have to get away from all of this blood, these bodies of men both living and dead, she could have said but didn’t. Calea heard it even so.
“She’s right,” Calea said. She bent down, stretching for the discarded crutch. The sun suddenly felt too hot, too bright, an all-seeing eye far above them watching them with judgment.
Bron stood there in the path, breathing. He did not object. Then they both saw him sway, back and forth, just once.
“Bron!” Nyasha grabbed his arm above the elbow, away from the cut, holding both him and herself upright. “Bron, we have to find shelter.”
He met her eyes. Calea watched, uncomprehending, as something happened between them, a moment of connection and understanding. It made no sense. They had known this girl for only a few days. Perhaps a week. And already Bron looked at her like that, like he knew her. It was…
It was the way he looked at Calea, come to think of it. She’d always hated that about him, from the very first day. That idiotic belief of his that she needed to be protected and he was the one who was supposed to do it. But why would he look at Nyasha like that? And…
And… Calea’s mind halted. It was true, wasn’t it? They both needed his protection, at least out here in a desert peopled with thieves and monsters.
Even if it was true, that didn’t mean she had to like it.
Nyasha looked at Bron, and Bron looked at Nyasha. Then he nodded, his eyes sparked, and he lifted his head. His legs were firm and steady again, and he bent to lift the pack with his uninjured arm. “This way.” He nodded off into the hills. “I know where to go.”
Nyasha paused long enough to scoop up the spilled items from the dropped pack, and Bron retrieved his knives. When the leader of the robbers started to stir, waking from unconsciousness, Bron kicked him hard in the ribs. The man stayed down. Then they walked into the hills, straight off the path, and didn’t look behind them.
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