And this had gone on for a week, progressing with a grim sort of calculating passion. Word traveled. No cruelty or expense was spared in the searching. Men who’d never met Danny, who’d never heard his name or seen his face, poked into every hole they could think of, rode hard, marched nights, put their own lives at risk for him just because that was what men (if not always corporations) did: They took care of their own. This, they thought, was what made them better than the abos. Danny was human, and no one wanted to think what might’ve been happening to him in indig hands. No one wanted to think that his fellows would do any less if it were him in duress and them left to look.
The pilots, of course, searched twice as hard. They were in the air around the clock, spotting and marking terrain, attacking everything that moved. They appreciated the help to the tune of owing all involved more favors than could possibly be repaid. But for all the cost, vigorous brutality, and appalling acts committed in Danny Diaz’s name, it came to nothing. After a week, the search was called off at Ted Prinzi’s insistence.
It was a decision that made him no friends, but deep down, all the pilots knew it was the right choice. It was a big country they were covering, and one that the natives knew better than anyone. If they didn’t want something found, it generally didn’t get found.
So Ted had grounded everyone, threatened a general confinement to quarters after some of the men got it in their heads that there must’ve been a spy among the camp wogs, and began trying their unskilled hands at interrogating the dishwashers and postriders and laundresses. Some indig huts were burnt, a couple of the locals were killed. And when those men were pulled off the indigs, they spoke about what they were doing as though it’d all been very sane, rational, even important, in words that weren’t even words, and sentences stripped of all meaning by their grief.
Carter hadn’t been involved in that, but only because he’d already voluntarily confined himself to quarters, along with Fenn, Porter Vaughn, and Billy from first squadron, in order to wake Danny—a period of mourning that had taken the form of a drinking contest and ended badly all around. Things at that point had started getting very weird. The jargon of retribution blew around the camp like bullets. And then, two days after they’d given up all hope, Danny came home. Or what was left of him did, anyway.
It was a ratty mob of Workman’s light horsemen who brought him in. They’d found his corpse being carried in a caravan they’d raided two nights prior, far to the north, and had ridden day and night to deliver him. They’d come with prisoners as well—three of them—and through translators, the pilots learned that Danny had been picked up away from his plane as he’d been making for cover, then tortured for most of the week by indig elders and wise men.
That much they could tell by the condition Danny’s body had been in. He’d been very systematically beaten, flayed, and brutalized. Most of his bones had been broken. He’d been primitively blinded, likely by having his eyes burnt out. His fingers and toes were missing, as well as some other bits and pieces. There was indig chicken scratch burned and cut into his graying skin, sigils that the horsemen wouldn’t even look at, let alone read aloud. And at some point, he’d been split open like a fish, throat to belly, then crudely stitched back together. That was the part that Carter’d remembered most clearly: the incision mark, in a Y, just like a body carved up for autopsy. Everyone was wondering how much of it he’d lived through and praying to their human gods that it wasn’t very much.
In a fury, the company men had turned on the three prisoners from the caravan and demanded to know why. And how. They wanted details to justify the terrible things they all wanted to do to the prisoners, were going to do to them regardless, and were shouting—at the prisoners, at Workman’s light horsemen, at their own translators and at one another. It was madness. They learned that it wasn’t out of blind cruelty that this had been done to Danny. Neither was it in revenge or out of plain malice. The indigs who’d taken him had been curious, more than anything, and however vicious their methods, they’d had a reason for what they’d done.
They’d wanted to know where Danny’s wings were. How he became like a bird. They’d been trying to make Danny teach them how to fly.
Carter could still remember that morning. The strangest details had stuck with him. He remembered the day and the hour and the light. He remembered the sound of the abos all talking at once. Like stones in a can. He remembered the sweet smell of their horses, ridden half to death and washed in sweat that stank vaguely of what he imagined damp hay would smell like (as if he’d ever smelled such a thing), and a little like high-grade machine oil—plasticky and warm.