Chapter 57: The Long Way Round
The flock came after them, of course it did.
The first one hauled up short at the canopy line, wings cracking open, killing its own dive because there was no room left to complete it. The second committed. It came in through the gap the road had cut in the trees, at speed, and it was magnificent for about a second and a half, and then the tip of its left wing found the trunk of an oak that had been standing there for two hundred years.
The sound was not a good one.
The wing folded the wrong way at the shoulder and the whole bird went over sideways with it, turning end over end through the lower branches, shedding feathers the entire way down. It went into the ground somewhere in the dark of the woods and did not come out again.
Above the road, the wheel of birds rose, and reformed, and did not follow. Instead they came back down on the heroes still standing on the asphalt, hitting the line in twos, splitting it apart at the seams.
Meanwhile Theo lunged forward through the hurricane of assault, dodging with astounding precision, and leaping off the asphalt like he had springs in his legs. He covered a yawning distance and landed in a roll on the slope past the shoulder, in wet leaf litter and half-buried roots, and went down into the forest after the van.
Lance grinned at the rest and waved too.
"I guess I’ll catch you guys later, don’t die. We should have a long talk about this strange gate."
He said, and descended on a skateboard of ice.
Jupiter Lady shot back from another dive of the birds, casting a mad gaze at the patch of empty air where Lance had been standing a second before. She had not seen the hero in particular, but the way he moved. She could tell that he was the one.
What she did not understand though.
’Why did he have to run? Weren’t they transporting a sick person? He could have just fought, that bastard.’
She clicked her tongue in irritation.
"Those people are a breed, I’ll never comprehend, I got pulled in the middle of something important for this nonsense?"
***
The cut was a logging road that had not been logged in nine years, and it did not want them.
It ran north-west into the trees with a spine of rock down the middle of it and a rain channel gouged along one side, and every hundred metres it offered something new. A boulder the size of a filing cabinet. A stretch of black mud with two feet of standing water in it, skinned over with green. A birch that had come down in the spring and lay across the whole width of the track with its root plate torn up into the air, so that the lead vehicle had to nose off into the ditch and come back up again with everything inside it leaning.
The convoy took it at eleven kilometres an hour, because eleven kilometres an hour was as fast as the van could go without killing the woman inside it.
Doctor Nischov had one hand on the array housing and one hand braced against the roof, and he had been in that position for nineteen minutes. His forearms had stopped reporting anything useful somewhere around minute twelve.
The problem was not the machine. The machine was rated for transport. The problem was that it was rated for transport on roads, and the tilt cutout would trip at twelve degrees, and every time the rear wheels came off a rock the whole cabin went to fifteen and then sixteen, and when the cutout tripped the suppression field would drop, and if the suppression field dropped for more than about forty seconds the thing inside Thalleria Greenwood would wake up before she did.
So Doctor Nischov was holding the housing off its mounts with his shoulder and his forearm and counting the interlock lamp.
"Slower!!" he shouted to no one in particular, since the driver could not hear him.
"Slower! Slower!! You unspeakable— slower."
He had done a great many things in forty-one years of medicine. He had not previously done this, and he was sixty-three.
He looked down at the woman on the gurney between his elbows. She was very still, with shallow, even breaths, and her hands lay open on the blanket where somebody had left them. The monitor kept its slow green rhythm as though none of this were happening at all.
"You are not going to remember any of this," he told her. "That is the one mercy in the entire situation, don’t blame me if I hold a grudge later in the future."
The van went over something and the whole world went sideways and the interlock lamp flickered amber, and Doctor Nischov swore in a language his mother had been proud of, and put his other shoulder into it.
The lamp went green.
***
Of course, what Theo had not seen coming was that another episode was going to take Sesan four minutes after the road ran out.
It came without warning.
She simply went rigid against the door with her jaw locked and her whole spine arched, and then the cold came off her in a wave that put frost across the inside of every window in the vehicle at once, a hard white bloom that grew visibly, like breath on glass except that it did not fade.
Having watched Thall do this a couple of times, Estea barked.
"Down! Get her down on the floor."
Theo already had her.
He got her onto the mat between the seats with his coat under her head, and turned her onto her side, and then went through the medical case until he found her drug and got it into her mouth.
After that, there was nothing to do, which was the worst of it. You cannot hold somebody through this. Holding them is the one thing that hurts them. All you can do is take the hard corners of the world out of reach and kneel there with your hands open and useless while the person you married comes apart in front of you.
The temperature in the cabin went down by a lot. Frost climbed the seat rails and crusted the buckles. Uthed’s breath came out white and stayed white in front of his blindfold, and he did not move from where he sat.
Theo did not feel any of it. He was aware, in some back room of his head, that the skin of his forearms had gone hard and pale where the cold was worst, and that the system had put something up in the corner of his vision and he did not read it. He knelt on the floor of a lurching vehicle with his hands open and he talked.
"It’s alright. Sesan. It’s alright, I’ve got you, we’re going home. There’s a lake. You’ll see it in about an hour, and it goes all the way to the trees on the other side, and I’m going to put a chair on the porch for you, and you can sit out there as long as you want and nobody will come and tell you to go inside."
’She can’t hear this.’
Even though he knew she couldn’t, he said it anyway, with regret and pain bubbling in his throat.
"Nobody is going to tell you to go inside ever again."
Estea watched him from her chair with the blanket over her dead legs and her hands closed on the armrests hard enough to whiten the knuckles, and she said nothing at all, and her face did not move.