Chapter XXXI: The Ogre and the Clock
I woke up shivering in the middle of the night. The funny thing about deserts is, no matter how hot it is during the day, it still gets cold as hell at night. Worse yet, there weren’t enough blankets for everyone. As the girl used to Chicago weather and who was probably immune to hypothermia, it fell to me to be the one to put on a single extra layer and just damn well bear it.
The Ogre kept moving until just before dawn, when Tillie and Laura finally ran out of endurance after eight hours of nonstop vehicle operation. They, at least, had had the advantage of cushioned seats and some level of insulation inside the Ogre’s cab. But we were all miserable by then.
And it wasn’t just because of the temperature, though that was a fairly large part of it. Steam carriages, though useful and convenient, aren’t quite up to the standard of Earth cars even at the best of times, being slow and always having the faintest scent of liquid coal hovering about them like flies. The Ogre, while incredibly reliable in dust-swept conditions, was not the best of steam carriages. By which I mean it stank, the coal fumes so thick in the air that you could feel their weight on you, and the constant hiss of the engines could drive a woman mad. Worst of all was the suspension, the way the engine made the hull constantly vibrate while every single pebble and crack we passed over translated into another jolt of motion. By morning, I felt like I’d just gotten finished walking all the way out there.
Food and drink were also in short supply as well, once again thanks to the limited time frame. Laura had actually been more concerned with weaponry and medical supplies until Tillie pointed out how long the trip would be. The only thing that we’d had the time to pack was a bit of bread and some butter, and only barely enough for all of us. Our drink was plain water, stored in what had once been a liquor jug, now bearing the faintest taste of something bitter and unwholesome. Hardly worse than undergrad, really.
As I ate, I suddenly realized that I had no idea how long I could actually go without food, or if starvation would even have any effect at all upon my ultra-resilient body. Maybe I’d just heal it like everything else. I looked around at the others, Unity and Delilah sitting with their knees up and nibbling on bits of food, and decided it was best not to take any risks.
There was so very little time to rest, though. For as miserable as the cold had been, the heat of the day out in the Desolation could be even worse, especially for the Ogre’s engine. As soon as Tillie and Laura were done with their naps, it was back on the road. As the sun rose, the vast expanse of the Desolation became ever so slightly less alien, no longer reliant on the faintest trace of moon- and starlight to define it. But the same heat and brilliance of the day that banished the twisted images of the imagination also left the landscape without even the slightest scrap of cover behind which to hide its secrets.
The Great Desolation was empty, poisoned. There were outcroppings of rock upon which not even lichen seemed to grow, and crevices in the dirt and sand which were overgrown with a frenzy of bizarre fungal life unlike anything else. I saw remnants, occasionally, bones of falts and the shells of great insects left scattered and devoured. Where had they come from? Were there herds which survived this terrain, thin and scattered and dry, and it was only an incident of luck which caused us to miss their presence? Or were these lone creatures born and bred on the more hospitable savannas to the west, somehow lost or driven out of their home to die in a place as inhospitable to them as the surface of the moon is to us?
The heat rose rapidly with the sun. No moisture in the air meant no moderating influence on the temperature as it climbed and climbed. The rocks and sand baked, the exposed metal surfaces of the Ogre turning into solar-powered stoves in the sunlight which grew only more direct with each passing hour. The three of us in the back, Unity and Delilah and I, ended up falling into what was more or less a stagnation of heat, lying restlessly in whichever part of the Ogre’s open back provided us the most shade and the most distance from the hot steam and burning fuel of the engine.
Unity, the lucky bastard, was able to squeeze herself in between two of our bags of supplies. Delilah ended up stripping down entirely, using the loosest layer of clothes as a blanket to keep her out of the sun. I ended up out in the open, half-awake and half-asleep, letting the sun bake me, secure in the knowledge that I’d been set on fire and survived.
That was more or less how for the next several hours of travel. We were all miserable, the Ogre continued its forward movement with admirable tenacity, and the worst part was still yet to come. I allowed my mind to drift, sometimes staring out at the endless horizon for hours on end, other times looking inward.
What should have been the biggest thing in my life had happened a few days ago. Gender is one of those fundamental things, like country of origin or religion or education, those boxes that define how you relate to the world. But I imagined that if I’d been forced to go on a mad dash into the middle of the desert with some steam-powered clunker on the desperate hope of stopping a mad scientist from completing her goals, and also I’d been male, it would have felt basically the same. And maybe that was the problem. Everything since that night had been one continuous battle between myself and my friends and Tersine’s seemingly unlimited resources.
Or maybe being a woman all of a sudden didn’t feel like much at all. Maybe gender was bullshit. I mean, I was on a whole planet where gender didn’t seem to really be a thing, so clearly the whole man-woman divide wasn’t as fundamental as some people had believed it to be. I’d sort of always accepted the idea that gender was a malleable social construct, but it wasn’t until I was lying in the sun, slowly becoming medium-rare, but as a woman now, that I really began to internalize it.
I swear, if we’d kept going for another couple of hours, I would have convinced myself that all reality was an illusion and I was the only being that existed, hallucinating eternally in a vast and endless void. Thankfully for all involved, the Ogre suddenly ground to a halt.
I threw myself upright, a pounding headache and swirling nausea reminding me that it had been a while since I’d drank anything. I asked what was happening. Apparently, I was the only one who didn’t know; we had found a place that was out of the sun, and we were going to stay there until things started cooling down again.
That place turned out to be an enormous outcropping, something the size of a clock tower or a bit shorter than a high-rise office building, a huge pillar of ancient rock jutting out of a field of large boulders scattered about the flat ground. I just knew that if we’d had a geologist around she'd have been able to tell us something fascinating about how this thing had gotten here. Delilah said she remembered something like this from the journal. Olivia had called it The Clock, which didn’t really make much sense to me but whatever.
So we all scattered, distributing ourselves around the shaded area as best as we could. The rocks were still warm from when they had been exposed to the sun earlier in the morning, which made it a delightful place to pass out after drinking enough water to feel it sloshing around in me. There I stayed for some time until, eventually, I realized that Laura had come and sat down beside me.
The first thing we did was kiss. Then we did a bit more than kiss, letting our hands wander over each other’s bodies, feeling the contours through the thin fabric of our clothes. If we could have gotten away with it, I’m sure we would have done quite a bit more than that. But we were both exhausted, sweaty, and while the other members of the group were scattered, there was also nothing to block any kind of noise. I ended up sitting in Laura’s lap, my arms wrapped around her neck, my face resting on her chest.
“What happened to this place?” I said. “Something must have. This isn’t a normal desert.”
“It isn’t. The ground is… toxic. Wrong. We’re not even sure what it is, because if you take a sample of the soil and put it in a laboratory, there’s nothing wrong with it to detect.”
“So it’s contaminated? Some kind of heavy metal complex or organic something,” I said flatly.
“Something like that,” she said. “And the only animals that can tolerate it, well, they tend to get… odd. Deformed. Mutant. The types of creatures that can’t live anywhere else without getting out-competed by more sensible, normal kinds of life.”
“I wonder if it has anything to do with all the Forebearer ruins. Some sort of industrial byproduct, something their civilization made huge quantities of and dumped into the soil. Maybe that’s even what killed them, they ruined the landscape so much that they couldn’t feed themselves any longer.”
“Forebearers lived all over Imbrium, though,” Laura said. “The Desolation was heavily populated, sure, but they could have gone elsewhere. A lot of people agree with you about the other thing, though. We in the field call that the Runoff Theory.”
We fell into another long bout of silence. I nearly fell asleep, stopped only by a sudden coughing fit on Laura’s part jolting me back into full consciousness. Sleeping was a bad idea anyway; I tended to get an awful lagginess after I slept, a malaise which would do no good against Tersine. So I asked a question.
“Why did you want to study Archaeology, anyway?”
“I didn’t.”
“What?”
Laura sighed. “I came here before I started studying archaeology. Found out about it from some friends and decided, ah hell, why not? That’s pretty much the beginning and the end of it.”
“Then why did you come out here?” I said.
She didn’t respond immediately. Instead Laura squinted, gazing off into the far distance with a conflicted expression. “Lot of people have asked me that question. In the past I would’ve said something about liking the sound of the city, or being drawn by the adventure of living so near the Desolation. But I don’t think that’s true. I think it might be because of my first mother.”
Laura never talked about her parents. She never talked about her family, any sisters, about where she’d come from. I still didn’t know how she’d obtained the invitation to the Society ball that had gotten the two of us entangled in the first place. Her past was a total enigma to me.
“What makes you say that?”
“Could’ve joined the army if I wanted adventure. Could’ve gone into politics and been challenged to five duels a day. But my first mum’s a politician, and second mum’s in the army.”
“So even if you got your adventure that way, you’d still be… what, within their sphere of influence? Following in their footsteps?”
“Something like that, yeah. Fuck, maybe it would’ve even made them proud.” The corners of her mouth twisted into a sneer of disgust as she said the word “proud”, like it was an awful slur she could barely bring herself to speak. “My mum’s pride was worse than most people’s hatred ever was. Smug, self-righteous, egotistical piece of shit.”
She paused, looking down at me, then to the side, then to the other side. “I wish I had a beer.”
“It’s probably for the best that you don’t,” I said. “We are about to get into a fight for our lives, after all.”
“I’d be sober before we got there,” Laura said, rolling her eyes.
We both went silent again. I breathed long and deep and slow while I thought about what Laura had said, the comparison to my own history coming instinctively. “My parents were kind of the opposite. Never really cared that much about me either way. They were always gone places, or when they weren’t they were too tired to give me much emotion at all, positive or negative.”
“You wouldn’t want that kind of attention either way,” Laura said with a grimace. “It was never positive. If I fucked up, that meant I needed to try harder, be more like her. If I did succeed, that meant she was right all along. After a while you stop caring about anything at all anyway because you can just… feel her eyes on your goddamned shoulder every day.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I knew people like that back in Chicago. Folks who would work themselves to death because of stuff their parents had said without even—”
“Chicago?”
“Huh?” I said. “It’s where I was from. On Earth. We’ve been over this.”
“What was it like?” Laura said, looking down at me.
I shrugged. “Cold. Big. Kind of anonymous. Everywhere’s sort of the same on Earth, it’s called globalization, it’s a whole entire thing. So how did you—”
Laura’s hand went to my upper thigh and gave it enough of a squeeze that I jumped. My whole body felt like one long purr, aching for attention despite the fact that Laura and I had continued to have a very active love life. I replied to her by bending back and giving her a kiss on the side of the neck.
“I know what you’re doing. If it’s really that uncomfortable a topic you’re going to have to use your goddamned words and ask me to stop.”
Laura rolled her eyes at me, irritation flashing across her face. “What were you going to ask?”
“Well, I was just curious about the middle step? Did you, what, run away from home or something?”
She averted her eyes. “Maybe if I’d had a spine, I would’ve. First mother put enough money in the account for me to live off interest and then put me on the train to Rasslock. I went out here to make sure her letters wouldn’t find me. Even my escape went off half-cocked.”
I put my hand on her cheek and slowly guided her eyes back to mine. “Hey. Don’t talk about yourself like that. I can’t imagine how much courage it must have taken to go against her even that much.”
“But I didn’t, did I? I play at being some kind of rogue agent but when the sun comes down I’m still living off the family’s money.”
“Do the others know?” I asked. “In the university and that political group.”
“Cloudy-heads, we’ve started calling ourselves,” Laura said. “After that article.”
“Do the other cloudy-heads know about the fact that you’re still living off of your family’s money?”
“Maybe?” Laura said with a shrug. “They know my family’s noble. And it’s not like I’d say no if anybody asked about it.”
“Then it sounds to me like you’re not playing at anything,” I said. “Maybe the reason people think about you the way they do is because of how you actually are. Or need I remind you about how I had to sword fight you to get you to listen to how much I love you.”
Laura grunted. “I’ll think about it. Now no more talking, I’ve barely slept all day and I’m about to get myself killed for very little reason.”
…
It was late in the afternoon, with the sun sinking into a bank of distant clouds, when we finally arrived at the ruin in the Desolation. The residual heat was still intense, though mitigated by a merciful wind coming in from the north, and the sun’s rays were hardly slowed by the paltry cover, rendering the entire landscape in brilliant color and harsh shadow. For hours we had seen nothing but the endless rolling expanse of rock and sand. Then, suddenly, we crested a hill and found ourselves looking down at something impossibly old.
There was an odd optical illusion that made the ruin seem to almost fade into the background. The buildings were all made of local stone, mostly the same color as the denuded dust around them, and the predations of age had reduced the even patterns that usually marked out something built by human hands. If you let your eyes cross or your attention wander, you could easily mistake blocks of half-collapsed buildings for an unusually dense boulder-field.
Tersine was there and making no effort to hide herself. She had a small fleet of steam carriages to our one, all parked out by one edge of the ruin. You could faintly hear the sound of movement as well, her and her wolves always busy. As scary as this all was, it also meant we still stood a chance: once she’d found the map, I doubted that Tersine would stick around for long.
In order to maintain stealth, we were forced to circle around the ruin, maintaining distance, until we could park the Ogre at the exact opposite side of the site from Tersine’s vehicles. Talk had never been very common on the journey, not when the Ogre’s engine made it so difficult to be heard, but during that final approach we were all stretched so tightly you could’ve played music on us. The five members of this mad lunge all fell deathly still, all of us but the driver staring down at the ancient stones and waiting to be allowed to spring into action.
Finally, when the Ogre was as close to the ruin as we thought we could get away with, we stopped. There was only the briefest snatch of conversation: every word, even at a whisper, felt like it was an invitation to get caught.
The only way we were going to stand a chance was if we divided the search as much as possible. That meant the five of us would each be alone. The ruin wasn’t too wide across that you couldn’t shout and be heard, which meant that that was the signal that someone had gotten their hands on the map and it was time to get out of there.
I thanked Tillie for getting us this far. I thanked Delilah for all her help. Laura and I kissed each other on the lips, in case this was the last chance we would get. Then we scattered.
I have a bad feeling about this.
I wonder if Laura is one of Halflance's daughters.
Hmm. But surely Emma has mentioned her patron at some point to Laura...right?