The End Has Come

One shot for Jill, giving the woman a third eye and a baffled expression before she toppled over. Two shots for the man who had jumped to the deck. One shot for the man climbing over the railing.

Karron gained her feet and ran to the rail. The final man wasn’t trying to climb up anymore. He sloshed and slogged to the firmer shore, trying to run. She raised the gun. Two shots left, if the weight was right, if it was as she remembered.

“Karron.”

Ishim’s voice broke her focus. The big man moved up beside her, carefully making noise and staying out of striking distance.

She kept her eyes on the escaping prey.

“Karron,” he repeated. “Look to the sky.”

Her arms shook with the effort of holding the gun without firing; Karron forced herself to look up.

“Ringlight,” she murmured. “Sunlight. Earthlight. Ringlight. Sunlight. Earthlight.” Over and over until the words became nothing but breathing.

Karron lowered the gun.

The man was gone, lost to the brush. She could have hunted him down, but the light was fading inside. She was tired, the buzzing in her head growing quiet as the moment passed.

“Help him,” Bee said, the little girl’s voice strained but strong.

“They are like me,” Karron said. “He’ll live. Get powder for the bleeding. He’ll live,” she repeated. “He is like me.”

Ishim went for the first aid kit. Karron went for the bodies. She cut their throats before she hauled them over the side, shoving away her aroused, visceral reaction to the salt and copper scent of blood.

They’d have to scrub the boards. The blood would stain. The coin would buy paint to hide the stains. Karron kept her thoughts flowing, simple, calm thoughts. Lists of things to do. She ignored the kids as long as she could, getting the boat unhooked. Oni would live. Ishim would help him.

Oni slept in a pile of blankets, Bee holding his hand. Ishim and Karron didn’t speak, just poled further up the channel. They would skip the settlement.

“He’ll need a good meal,” she said eventually, as the sun set and painted the Ring orange and pink.

“There’s an inlet ahead. I can hunt.”

“I’ll hunt.”

The rabbit was slow and fat on spring grass. Karron used a thrown rock to bring it down. The hard earth beneath her feet felt strange as she made her way back to the river.

Ishim had brought the kids down off the ship and started a fire on the driest bit of land they could find. Oni’s color was better, his eyes bright and clear.

“You could have told me about the guns,” Karron said as she quartered the rabbit into the small kettle before adding precious pure water to the stew.

“You wouldn’t have helped us,” Oni said.

“You knew?” Ishim said, looking at Karron, making it clear he was talking about the kids, not about the guns.

“Only last night. They weren’t our problem.” She lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. “Smugglers and questions, right?”

“We’re your problem now,” Oni said with the kind of smug smile only a child used to being the smartest person around could wear.

“And where do you expect us to take you? Ria?”

“We have been paid to take them that far,” Karron offered.

Ishim looked at Karron and shook his head with a small smile of his own.

“No,” Oni said. “Sanctuary.”

Karron laughed, the sound barking from her throat, surprising her. “That’s a myth. Hell, we told each other that myth in my crèche.”

Sanctuary. A place where they had tech that could take out the nanos. Tech to calm them, make a War Child normal again. A place where no one would make you kill, a place where no brothers or sisters went insane and had to be put down like rabid dogs.

A myth. A bedtime story told by motherless children. Told by killers.

“I have a map,” Oni said. “Give me your knife.”

Karron drew her knife, trying not to think of the throats it had cut today.

“Wait,” Ishim said, reaching for Oni as the boy cut into his own arm with a sure stroke.

Karron caught Ishim’s forearm and pushed him back. “He’s like me,” she said.

Oni pulled a small tube from under his skin. Already his nanos were closing the wound, the blood welling, slowing, and stopping even as she watched. He handed the knife back before opening the tube.

Inside was a map on thin paper. No, Karron saw, not paper. Leather of some kind. So thin that when he held it up in the firelight, the flames shone straight through. Illuminating lines. River lines. Numbers. A small star, done in red ink, like a drop of blood.

“Zouri to James, James to Dakota. Then west, to the Yellowstone and into the mountains. I have coordinates, see those numbers? Not a myth. It’s real. The ones who made us, they came from there. We were to be the new generation, the new kind of Child.”

“I am Eve,” Bee added. “I hate being Eve. Wanna be Bee. Bees can sting.”

“Jill and Nolan were from Sanctuary?” Ishim asked.

Karron was silent, still staring at the map, holding her breath, trying to decide if a legend could be real.

“No, they worked there. I don’t know what happened. Funding dried up. The Covenant doesn’t want more Children, I guess. They ended the program, and we were supposed to be destroyed.”