Kingdom of Cages(40)

“Thank you, Basante,” she whispered. It was going to work. They could still do it. The future had not been stolen from them yet.

Was the change permanent? Despite herself, Dionte searched his face, looking for some sign. Would he be able to think about these matters once she had left him? There was no way to know that yet. Yet.

“If you have doubts,” she said earnestly, “if you change your mind, you will tell me, won’t you?”

“Of course I will.” He squeezed her hand once again. “But I know you are right.”

“Thank you,” she said again. Then she made herself let go of his hand and stand up. “Now we both have our work to do. We will talk about the steps we must take after the administrators’ meeting.”

“I will see you there.”

They bowed to each other, and Dionte started down the path, her heart singing. It worked, it worked! The system was not complete yet. Time would reveal flaws and required additions, but there was still a little time. With Basante’s help she’d be able to make it all right. She could make them understand what was really going on. She could show them directly, without clumsy words, what they needed to do to protect their world and their family from the treachery of the Authority and the Called.

Smiling, she called up her schedule on her data display. Hagin Bhavasar, her birth uncle and the senior tender for the city-mind, was coming in for his check next week. She could review his records easily before then and make her preparations. There would soon be much work that they needed to do directly with Aleph, and it would be a great help to have Uncle Hagin in agreement with them before then.





CHAPTER FIVE





Stem





By the time she made it out of the forest, Chena was glad Mom had insisted she wear the stupid hat and carry a water bottle.

For a long time, the woods had looked just like they did around Off-shoot—an endless succession of thick, gnarled tree trunks hung with cablelike vines. Here and there, one of the giants had fallen and turned into a moss-covered hillock overgrown with ferns and saplings straining to reach the sunlight. She saw deer, squirrels, and quail. Once she even thought she saw a bear, but she couldn’t be sure.

Gradually the trees became smaller and more slender. The ground between them filled with all kinds of bracken and underbrush, turning the forest floor into a mosaic of greens and yellows dotted here and there with blue or white flowers. Sunlight brightened the world and started Chena sweating. Insects flew in clouds out of the undergrowth, but she seemed to be moving too fast for them to settle on her. Something else she was glad of. Bugs could be amazing to look at, but some of them bit.

Just one more thing nobody warns you about living on a planet.

She’d spent most of her free time during the month hanging around Offshoot’s tinky little library, trying to find a decent map of where the railbikes went and how far away the villages were from each other. But there didn’t seem to be a single complete map anywhere. She had to piece together the information she found, but there were still big gaps where she hadn’t been able to find out anything.

She talked to Sadia about it at lunch one day, but Sadia had mostly shrugged and told her that’s the way it was, and what did she want to go wandering around for anyway? There wasn’t anywhere better than Offshoot.

“What do you think you know about it?” asked Chena, leaning across the table. “You’ve never been anywhere.”

“Dad took me and Shond to Stem once,” she said, poking at her bowl of vegetable stew. “There’s a market, and we watched the dirigibles fly over that big lake.” For a minute, Chena thought she was going to say something else, but Sadia just scowled at her food. “Nothing to it.”

Chena straightened up and watched Sadia dig a piece of potato out of the stew and pop it into her mouth. “You were there once, you couldn’t have seen everything. There’s supposed to be a theater too.”

Sadia gave her a you’re-joking look. “It’s all the same people running the place. You think they’re going to let anybody have anything good?”

Which, Chena had to admit, made a certain amount of sense, but it still wasn’t the whole story.

Whatever that story was, though, Sadia wasn’t telling. So Chena guessed she’d just have to see for herself.

From her pieced-together map, it looked like Stem was about one hundred kilometers away from Offshoot. Chena had a decent idea of how long a kilometer was. Athena had been three kilometers from tip to tip and she had been able to run up a whole arm and back down again since she was eight.

On top of that, it turned out that riding was easier than walking. The railbike didn’t look much like the bicycles she’d seen in the rig games, or even the ones that were used to turn the compost drums. It had two wheels, all right, but they were clamped to the rail. A weird outrigger kind of extension clamped to a second rail to the right of the bike. But if you sat on the seat, held on to the handlebars, and pedaled, it went much faster than she could ever run. It practically flew down the ravines that had been cut by small streams flowing down toward the river. The movement pressed a fresh wind against her face, so she felt cool, at least in the beginning, even though the day was warm and still.