Skyland Read Free Page B

docks today: the enterprising
villagers. The farmers' bags would hold little of value to steal,
but tucked away in the hidden pockets of village merchants, there
could be a million Suns worth of jewel chips or fragments of wood
and bone.
    He is waiting for the merchants. As if we have anything of value!
    Harper laughed.
    Zara looked sharply at him and he stifled
the absurd giggle that was threatening to take him over. It was a
nervous laugh, but also the shock that even here at his last
moments when there was nothing left to his life, there was still
someone who would pick that nothing clean.
    But even as he thought it, he knew that,
compared to this beggar, he was a miser. The fertilizer concealed
in his coat might as well be coins. And if nothing else, three
bodies would feed a patch of soil or the beggar himself if he were
hungry enough.
    "There are three of us," he said. "We'll go
across."
    This was no defense. Harper knew it. Raiders
did not rely on numbers. Their starved forms belied toughness and
speed learned from surviving violently. But there was no other
way.
    He stepped onto bridge. Zara held tight to
his hand.
    Step by step they walked across, avoiding
the eyes of the man squatted at the other end, but keeping him in
the periphery.
    Then the man looked up.
    Before Harper could look away, he caught the
eyes, crusty and bloodshot and oozing eye-pus. The scavenger
snarled, and Harper tilted his head.
    Something about that face was familiar.
    How do I know you?

 
     
    Chapter
Four
    in which there is
water (for strangers!)
     
    Harper could not look away.
    Broken teeth looked out from between lips
drawn back in a wordless threat. The narrowed eyes above the bared
teeth were dusty with sand caught in the eyebrows, the eyelashes,
the corners of the eyes, bloodshot and yellow.
    Don't stare.
    But Harper couldn't look away.
    The man twitched.
    Then he was up.
    Harper pushed Zara behind him as a fist,
thin and sharp like a knife, slammed into his gut. Harper flailed
his own fists about, useless and totally, totally clueless. His
hands were trained for tearing heads of kale up from the ground,
not for fighting. Another hit left him bent double, breathless.
Then arms like bare steel beams clenched down on him in a
headlock.
    He choked.
    Then the arms were gone.
    Off balance, Harper teetered, then his face
thudded against the dirt as he fell. He turned his head to see the
scavenger bounce against the ground five feet away. Literally. His
tiny body hit the dust again and he rolled away. Harper looked up
to see his father moving in on the prone man who picked his face up
from the dirt and looked at them with a menace that sucked the air
from Harper's lungs in a way the fists had not.
    Who are you?
    Tendons and muscles stuck out along the
man's limbs and up his neck. It looked like the ropes of his body
could have pulled him apart or snapped at any moment. The dry folds
of his wrinkled skin clung weakly to the bones and quivered with
his tension. Every phalange of the fingers that clawed the dirt
stuck out, and Harper wondered how they stayed together. The
reddened and oozing eyes glared at him.
    And Harper knew why that face was
familiar.
    The man spat on the ground.
    Harper's father pulled back his foot, but
the scavenger was faster than the kick. He jumped up and
disappeared into the long shadows of the city.
    "Thank the Sky!" an unfamiliar voice called.
"Are you alright?"
    Harper felt Zara's hands around his
shoulders and he pushed himself up off the ground. He heard his
father grunt in response to the strange voice, but Harper was still
trying to catch his breath. He looked towards the newcomer. A woman
stood on the bridge, halfway across, she was wringing her hands and
her eyes were wide. Just in front of her, a man was jogging towards
them across the bridge, sleeves rolled up, hands still in fists,
ready to jump into the fight.
    He slowed to a walk then stopped beside
them.
    "Looks like you're okay." He