Outcasts (5 page)

They supported Gryf between them.

Ash and grease disguised the pattern of his paisley skin.
Kylis knew he was alive only because no one at Screwtop would spend any energy
on someone who was dead. When she was closer, she could see the ends of deep
slashes made by the whip where it had curled around his body. Blood had dried
in narrow streaks on his sides. His wrists were abraded where he had been tied
for the punishment.

“Oh, Gryf — “

Hearing her, Gryf raised his head. She felt great relief.

Troi and Chuzo stopped when Kylis reached them.

“The Lizard ordered it himself,” Troi said
bitterly. Screwtop held few amenities, but people were seldom flogged on the
last day of the shift.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I was too far away. Anything.
Nothing. What reason do they ever have?”

Kylis quieted her anger for the moment. She took over for
Chuzo. “Thank you,” she said, quite formally.

Troi stayed where he was. “Get him to the top, anyway,”
he said in his gruff manner.

“Gryf? Can you make it?”

He tightened his hand on her shoulder. They started up the
steep path. When they finally reached the top, the immense sun had set. The sky
was pink and scarlet in the west, and the volcanoes eastward glowed blood red.

“Thanks,” Kylis said again. Chuzo hesitated, but
Troi nodded and left. After a moment Chuzo followed him.

Gryf leaned heavily on her, but she could support him. She
tried to turn toward the shelters and their meager stock of medical supplies,
but he resisted weakly and guided her toward the waterfall. If he wanted to go
there first, he must think his wounds had been contaminated.

“Gods,” Kylis whispered. Clumsily, they hurried.
She wished Jason had heard her, for with him they could have gone faster. It
was her fault he was not there. She could not hold Gryf up alone without
hurting his back.

Gryf managed a smile, just perceptible, telling her, I hurt
but I am strong.

Yes, Kylis thought, stronger than Jason, stronger than me.
We’ll survive. They continued.

“Kylis! Gryf!”

Gryf stopped. Kylis let him, with relief. Jason splashed
toward them.

Gryf’s knees buckled. Kylis strained to keep him out
of the mud, away from more parasites. Jason reached them and picked Gryf up.

“Could you hear me?” Kylis asked.

“No,” Jason said. “I woke up and came
looking. Where are you taking him?”

“To the overflow pipe.”

Jason needed no explanation of the dangers of infection. He
carried Gryf toward the waterfall, swearing softly.

The cooling towers from the steam wells produced the only
safe water the prisoners had for bathing. It spewed from a pipe to a concrete
platform and spilled from there to the ground, forming a muddy pool that spread
into the forest. The water was too hot for anyone to go directly beneath the
cascade. Jason stopped in knee-deep hot water. They were all standing in heavy
spray.

Jason held Gryf against his chest while Kylis splashed water
on Gryf’s back from her cupped hands. She washed him as gently as she
could and still be safe. She found no parasites and none of their eggs. The
water swept away mud and sweat, turning Jason gold and bright pink and Kylis
auburn and Gryf all shades of dark brown and tan.

Kylis cursed the Lizard. He knew he would look bad in the
eyes of the tetra committee if Gryf were crushed or bled to death or went home
with everything but his brain. But he would look worse if he could not force
Gryf to go home at all.

Gryf’s eyelids flickered. His eyes were bright blue,
flecked irregularly with black.

“How do you feel?”

He smiled, but he had been hurt — she could see the
memory of pain. They had touched his spirit. He looked away from her and made
Jason let him turn. He staggered. His knees would not support him, which seemed
to surprise him. Jason held him up, and Gryf took the last thin flake of
antiseptic soap from Kylis’ hand.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

Gryf turned her around. For a moment his touch was painful,
then she felt the sharp sting of soap on raw flesh. Gryf showed her his hand,
which glittered with a mass of tiny, fragile eggs like mica flakes. Gryf used
up her soap scrubbing her side, and Jason got out what soap he had left.

“This cut’s pretty deep but it’s clean
now. You must have fallen and smashed a nest.”

“I don’t remember — “ She had a
kinesthetic memory, from running down into the Pit. “Yes, I do...”
It hit her then, a quick shock of the fear of what might have been —
agony, paralysis, senility — if Gryf had not noticed, if the eggs had
healed beneath her skin and hatched. Kylis shuddered.

They returned to the compound, supporting Gryf between them.
The wall-less, stilt-legged shelters were almost deserted.

Jason climbed the slanted ladder to their shelter backward,
leaning against it for stability while he helped Gryf. The steps were slick
with yellow lichen. Kylis chinned herself onto the platform. In their floor
locker she had to paw through little stacks of Jason’s crumbling ration
bars before she found their mold poultice and the web box. She had been very
hungry, but she had never eaten any of her friend’s hoarded food. She
would not have had such restraint a year ago.

Jason put Gryf down between the makeshift partitions that
marked their section of the shelter. Gryf was pale beneath the pattern of tan
and pigment. Kylis almost wished Troi and Chuzo had left him in the Pit. The
Lizard might then have been forced to put him in the hospital.

She wondered if Troi or Chuzo might be helping the Lizard
make Screwtop as hard on Gryf as they could. She did not want to believe that,
but she did not want to believe Miria was an informer, either.

Their spider — Kylis thought of it as a spider, though
it was a Redsun-evolved creature — skittered up the corner post to a new
web. Kylis often imagined the little brown-mottled creature hanging above them
on her tiny fringed feet, hating them. Yet she was free to crawl down the stilt
and into the jungle, or to spin a glider and float away, and she never did. In
dreams, Kylis envied her; awake, she named her Stupid. Kylis hoped the web box
held enough silk to soothe Gryf’s back.

“Hey,” Jason said, “this stuff is ready.”

“Okay.” Kylis took the bowl of greenish mold
paste. “Gryf ?”

He glanced up. His eyelashes and eyebrows were black and
blond, narrowly striped.

“Hang on, it might hurt.”

He nodded.

Jason held Gryf’s hands while Kylis applied first the
mold, then delicate strips of spider silk. Gryf did not move. Even now he had
enough strength to put aside the pain.

When she was done, Jason stroked Gryf’s forehead and
gave him water. He did not want to eat, even broth, so they kissed him and sat
near him, for his reassurance and their own, until he fell asleep. That did not
take long. When he was breathing deeply, Jason got up and went to Kylis,
carrying the bowl.

“I want to look at that cut.”

“Okay,” Kylis said, “but don’t use
all the paste.”

The poultice burned coldly, and Jason’s hands were
cool on her skin. She sat with her forearms on her drawn-up knees, accepting
the pain rather than ignoring it. When he had finished treating her, she took
the bowl and daubed the mold on his cuts. She almost told Jason about Miria,
but finally decided not to. Kylis had created the problem; she wanted to solve
it herself if she could. And, she admitted, she was ashamed of her misjudgment.
She could think of no explanation for Miria’s actions that would absolve
her.

Jason yawned widely.

“Give me your tag and go back to sleep,” Kylis
said. Since she had been the first to get off work this time, it was her turn
to collect their rations. She took Gryf’s tag from his belt pouch and
jumped from the edge of the platform to the ground.

Kylis approached the ration dispenser cautiously. On Redsun,
violent criminals were sent to rehabilitation centers, not to work camps. Kylis
was glad of that, though she did not much like to remember the stories of
obedient, blank-eyed people coming out of rehab.

Still, some prisoners were confident or foolish or desperate
enough to try to overpower others and steal. At Screwtop it was safest to
collect neither obligations nor hatreds. Vengeance was much too simple here.
The underground society of spaceport rats had not been free of psychopaths;
Kylis knew how to defend herself. Here she had never had to resort to more
serious measures. If she did, the drill pit was a quick equalizer between a
bully and a smaller person. Mistakes could be planned; machines sometimes
malfunctioned.

The duty assignments were posted on the ration dispenser.
Kylis read them and was astonished and overjoyed to find herself and her
friends all on the same shift, the night shift. She hurried back to tell them
the news, but Jason was sound asleep, and she did not have the heart to wake
him. Gryf had gone.

Kylis threw the rations in the floor locker and sat on the
edge of the platform. A scavenger insect crawled across the lumpy floor of fern
stalks. Kylis caught it and let it go near Stupid, barricading it until the
spider, stalking, left her new web and seized the insect, paralyzed it, wrapped
it in silk to store it, and dragged it away. Kylis wondered if their spider
ever slept, or if spiders even needed sleep. Then she stole the web.

She grew worried. She knew Gryf could take care of himself.
He always did. He had probably never really reached his limits, but Gryf might
overestimate even his strength and endurance. He had rested barely an hour.

Kylis fidgeted for a little while longer. Finally she slid
down into the mud again.

Water seeped quickly into new footprints in the battered
earth around the shelters; Gryf had left no trail that she could distinguish
from the other marks in the clay. She went into the forest, with some knowledge
and some intuition of where he might be. Above her, huge insects flitted past,
barely brushing clawed wingtips against the ferns. It was dark, and the star
path, streaked across the sky like the half-circular support of a globe, gave a
dim yellow light through broken clouds.

Kylis was startled and frightened by a tickling of the short
hair at the back of her neck. She flinched and turned. Gryf looked down at her,
smiling, amused.

“Kylis, my friend, you really needn’t worry
about me all the time.” She was always surprised, when he spoke, to
remember how pleasant and calming his voice was.

His eyes were dilated so the iris was only a narrow circle
of light and dark striations.

Every few sets, someone died from sucking slime. It grew in the
forest, in small patches like purple jellyfish. It was hallucinogenic, and it
was poisonous. Kylis had argued with Gryf about his using it, before her
sentence in the sensory deprivation chamber showed her what Screwtop was like
for Gryf all the time.

“Gryf — “

“Don’t reproach me!”

“I won’t,” Kylis said. “Not anymore.”

Her response startled him only for a moment; that it
startled him at all revealed how completely drained he really was. He nodded
and put his arms around her.

“Now you know,” he said, with sympathy and
understanding. “How long did they make you stay in the box?”

“Eight days. That’s what they said, anyway.”

He passed his hand across her hair, just touching it. “My
poor friend. It seems so much longer.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s over for me.”
She almost believed the hallucinations had stopped, but she wondered if she
would ever be certain they would never return.

“Do you think the Lizard sentenced you because of me?”

“I don’t know. I guess he’d use anything
he could if he thought it’d work. Never mind. I’m all right.”

“I would have done what they want, but I could not.
Can you believe I tried?”

“Do you think I wanted you to?” She touched his
face, tracing bone structure with her fingers like someone blind. She could
feel the difference between the blond and black hair in his striped eyebrows,
but the texture of his skin was smooth. She drew her fingers from his temples
to the corners of his jaw, to the tendons of his neck and the tension-knotted
muscles of his shoulders. “No one should make friends here,” she
said.

He smiled, closing his eyes, understanding her irony. “We
would lose our souls if we did not.”

He turned away abruptly and sat down on a large rock with
his head between his knees, struggling against nausea. The new scars did not
seem to hurt him. He breathed deeply for some time, then sat up slowly.

“How is Jason?”

“Fine. Recovered. You didn’t have to take his
shift. Lizard couldn’t let him die like that.”

“I think the Lizard collects methods of death.”

Kylis remembered Miria with a quick shock of returning fear.
“Oh, gods, Gryf, what’s the use of fighting them?”

Gryf drew her closer. “The use is that you and Jason
will not let them destroy you and I believe I am stronger than those who wish
to keep me here, and justified in wishing to make my own mistakes rather than
theirs.” He held out his hand, pale-swirled in the darkness. It was long
and fine. Kylis reached out and rubbed it, his wrist, his tense forearm. Gryf
relaxed slightly, but Kylis was still afraid. She had never felt frightened
before, not like this. But Miria, uncertainty, seeing Gryf hurt, had all
combined to make her doubt the possibility of a future.

Gryf was caught and shaken by another spasm of retching.
This time he could not suppress it, and it was more severe because he had not
eaten. Kylis stood by, unable to do anything but hold his shoulders and hope he
would survive the drug this time, as he had all the times before. The dry
vomiting was replaced by a fit of coughing. Sweat dripped from his face and
down his sides. When the pitch of his coughing rose and his breath grew more
ragged, Kylis realized he was sobbing. On her knees beside him, she tried to
soothe him. She did not know if he was crying from the sickness, from some
vision she would never see, or from despair. She held him until, gradually, he
was able to stop.