Sheila Finch by Reading the Bones

Author:Reading the Bones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-12-28T15:02:10+00:00

His mind woozy with fatigue, he stared at it, trying to remember the automap he’d consulted before the skipcar crashed. There shouldn’t have been a river that size anywhere near. How had he gone wrong?

“What do we do now?” Lita asked, her voice husky.

It was a fair question. New Bombay was gone. The Calcutta’s base was probably deserted but better than nothing if he could’ve been certain he could find his way across this country. Which apparently he couldn’t.

Then he thought of something. “You speak Frehti.”

A spot of color came and went on her high cheekbones. “Well, I’ve learned a little.” More than a little, I’ll wager, he thought. “Do you remember what the Freh sport said to us as we left the Residence?”

She frowned. “Something about his mother?”

“Not his mother. ‘The Mothers.’ I think it’s a title.”

“Well, where do we find them?”

“Under the bones,” the misshapen alien had said, and he’d imagined a graveyard of some sort. But now he realized it meant The Maker’s Bones, the sharp-toothed mountains to the north. They’d been heading north-west when the skipcar went down, crossing the foothills to get to the base. They needed to change course.

“North-east and uphill, I think.”

“Up there?” she asked, her voice full of skepticism.

“Could be our only hope for help.”

“Who’s to say these ‘Mothers’ will be friendly? The rest of the natives aren’t.”

“We don’t have a lot of options.”

She heaved a deep sigh for his benefit. “How far?”

“Far enough.”

He gazed up at the distant peaks. Perhaps a two day journey on foot, maybe longer because of the child.

The rain was bad enough here where the thinning trees still provided some shelter. Up on the ridge, they would be exposed to the full force of monsoon winds and torrential rain and the cold of high altitude at night. It would take all his strength to get them through this, but he had no strength any more. They needed—deserved—a far better guide.

Lita was right, whether the Mothers would shelter them was doubtful, but he couldn’t think of an alternative. And there was nobody else around to help them.

He selected a peak shaped like the broken tooth of a jungle beast as a reference point, then lifted Jilan off her sister’s back.

“Let’s get moving,” he said.

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