Rift by Kay Kenyon Page A

fell so hard the breath left him. For long moments he lay there, the sun glaring through his closed eyes, his lids popping with light-show squiggles. Before long a huge, hulking shadow fell over him, which finally resolved itself into three figures standing together, one tall, one middling, one short.
    “No manners,” the tall one said.
    “Sky Clave,” the short one said.
    “Even so, he’ll learn a civil tongue.”
    “You plan to beat him until he eats dirt?” the middling one asked. “What’s the mannerly way of saying
No thank you
?”
    “Ain’t heard
No thank you,”
the tall one muttered. “Ain’t heard
Thank you
, neither, come to that.”
    Reeve heard himself moan. He rolled onto his side, pressing the hot side of his face into the grass, spitting out a salty wad of saliva. Marie was next to him, pressing something cold onto his jaw.
    “The scarecrow’s stronger than he looks,” she said.“He could kill you. So make nice, Reeve. We
need
these people.”
    “We don’t need them. They’re crazy; they’ll slow us down.”
Yonder, by the soil
, indeed. The compass of a half-wit.
    “So what’s the hurry? You got a hot date?” Her face was coming into focus, her short hair framing her face in a bright back-lit nimbus against the sky.
    Got nine weeks left
, came the thought.
Then he sinks the pellet. World’s end
.
    Marie’s tone turned earnest: “Listen to me, Reeve. We
do
need them. They know the land, the clavers, the edibles. They can fight, and, sorry to say, all your scrapping on Station never taught you to kill. Until you learn to kill, don’t insult the killers.”
    He hauled himself to a sitting position. Spar and Loon were heading down to the shoreline.
    “Whose side are you on? He damned near took my teeth out.”
    “Lord above, for a fool! It’s not about sides, it’s about survival.”
    “Shit.” Reeve staggered to his feet. “I can’t believe you sometimes, you and your old-woman worries.” He stomped off down the hillside, aiming for the shore but avoiding Spar and Loon.
    The beach was wide and covered with green slime. His boots made squishing sounds as he strode out across the festering mass of algae, rank in the midday sun. He shouldn’t have said
old-woman worries;
that was as rude as he’d been to Marie his whole life. The words had just spewed up from deep in his body where he’d stored a week of grief and fury. Grief for his father, and all they had said to each other over the years—and all they had not said—and grief for all his lifelong companions on Station. The fury was for Bonhert. He breathed deeply, drawing in the putrid air, fanning the coals in his heart. He walked faster,slapping his feet down into the green muck, watching its surface part with gelatinous surges.
    He was helpless. On foot in a poisonous land without maps, sidelined by a chance encounter with an addled crusader and his loony-queen. It made a mockery of his vow to stop Bonhert, to expose him for a murderer and traitor. Spar was right—he was just a boyo, now mucking about a rotting shore, stamping his feet.
    Turning to face the pulpy water, Reeve gazed out over the Inland Sea, letting the breeze pull some of his anger away. He found himself wondering if perhaps they
could
devise a seaworthy craft and navigate this place. He strolled down the long slope of the beach to the edge of the water. If he remembered his Lithian maps, the Inland Sea jutted into the continent at least five hundred miles from the Tethys Ocean. At its western terminus lay the outfall of the Tallstory River, from whence they might navigate to the Gandhi River, one of the great rivers of the world, cutting down through the Rift Valley. So waterways led him to his goal, or within reach.…
    His eyes caught a hump of motion a few yards down the shoreline and he wandered toward a small object draped in scum. It rolled forward and backward with the waves. He bent down and with both hands scooped up a heavy ball in his