He was maybe thirteen and much thinner than he should have been. Something else was wrong with him, too. His black hair was falling out in patches, and his eyes had bags so dark they looked almost like bruises. He stopped short when he saw her. For a moment, they locked glances.
Incongruously, as she stared at a boy who was going to die seven hundred years before she was born, Freddy thought of Roland and Mel. She didn’t mean to. She tried to think of them as little as possible. Remembering hurt too much, and it sometimes brought the anger back, too. This time, it didn’t. This time, the anger just didn’t come. Everybody should have somebody … right? How is it fair that he doesn’t have anyone? Why was I so mad all the time about having all those people?
Freddy smiled.
The boy hesitated for a long moment, then smiled back. It wasn’t exactly a happy smile, but something flashed briefly in his eyes.
He turned and went back into the cave soon after. Freddy was pretty sure he half raised his hand to her just before he was swallowed by darkness.
*
Josiah didn’t like borks very much. Instead of eating his, he was poking at it experimentally. “It’s basically rubber. It even tastes like rubber. I find this era problematic.”
Freddy had been delaying eating her own bork as well. She had learned the hard way that the correct choice between caterpillar stew and nothing was always caterpillar stew, but that didn’t make the bork any more appealing. She weighed the food in one hand and the gun in the other and wondered idly what would happen if she shot the former with the latter.
“Do you like it here?” she asked Filbert, the question coming out of nowhere.
Filbert cocked her head. “No computement.”
“You know,” said Freddy. “Do you like it? Do you ever wish you could move to one of the African city-states? They’re supposed to be nice and safe.”
“That’s simple mythifying,” Filbert replied, shaking her head. “This be the real.”
“I was rather hoping this bork wasn’t the real,” said Josiah with exaggerated gloom.
Filbert’s world, thought Freddy, was smaller than she knew. She saw it as huge and nuanced and satisfying, and in the end, it didn’t amount to more than a series of pointless battles in an ancient, crumbling cityscape. How could she possibly be satisfied with it? Didn’t she know how much else was out there?
Freddy said, “I bet the city-states are real, too. I bet they would be interesting to see.”
“Just a story,” said Filbert. “I know a better story.”
It was dark and still and lonely, though not as dark as it could have been; Freddy, looking up, saw a dazzling full moon. The wind rustled the grass. Freddy glanced over at Josiah, who was gazing thoughtfully down at his bork. She expected him to say something sardonic, but for once, he was silent.
12
Three was never far away when they jumped. Freddy spotted light glimmering beyond the scrub to what, given the position of the moon, was the north. “Let’s go.”
“Wait,” said Josiah.
Freddy watched him. Even in the bright moonlight, she couldn’t be sure of his expression, but she thought he looked oddly apprehensive. “Wait why?”
“I don’t remember this,” he said. “This is wrong.”
She shook her head. “You weren’t always there.”
“No. I can feel the time. This is wrong,” said Josiah. “It’s too early. This is before I ever met … us. Long before. This is … I don’t remember this at all.”
“We still have to deal with it,” said Freddy. “There are people over there.”
“I think we should stay here,” said Josiah immediately.
She stared at him. “We have to find Three.”
“It’s wrong,” he insisted, but when she tucked the microgun and the bork into her bag and began to move towards the light, he followed.
His apprehension had affected her. Instead of approaching the light openly and trusting that Three would explain things to whomever else was there, Freddy moved cautiously and as quietly as she could over the plain. Even before she was close enough to see what the light was, she could hear one voice speaking and the occasional murmur of other voices beneath it. The speech patterns were different from anything she had heard before. They seemed … truncated. Guttural. It was a woman speaking. “What’s she saying?” Freddy whispered.
“Things,” said Josiah, and closed his mouth firmly.
Freddy eased in behind a dry little bush and peered out towards the voices.
The light was a campfire. There were perhaps twelve people grouped around it, about half of them children. The moonlight and firelight conspired to show Freddy that these people were dressed roughly in what were probably animal skins. They had more clothes than Ban, but Ban had dressed as she had because of the heat. It wasn’t so hot here. It may have been a warm day, but the air was growing noticeably cooler even now.
The woman speaking looked very young, no more than fifteen or so, though Freddy found ages weren’t always easy to estimate in certain periods. The other people listened to her raptly. Every once in a while, one of them would say something, and the girl would reply.
“Three?” said Freddy.
Josiah said, “I don’t know. How should I know? Why are you badgering me?”
She turned to him, startled. “You know all the Threes.”
“It’s too early,” he snapped. “I don’t understand what’s happening!”
Josiah always understood what was happening. She looked at him properly. He was pale and perspiring, and his eyes had gone huge.
Freddy glanced back towards the fire. “Can you understand what she’s saying?”
“Yeeeeeesssss,” said Josiah reluctantly. “Just. But I don’t remember this.”
“You’ve said,” said Freddy. “Just tell me what she’s saying.”
He paused for so long that she turned to look at him again. To her amazement, he was trembling. “Josiah, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I … nothing. She’s telling them a story.”
He hesitated again, then went on. “I don’t think she meant it to be a story at first. They keep asking her questions. They call her ‘Mika.’ It means … it means ‘wise child.’ They think she’s a sort of shaman, born with special knowledge. They’re asking her why the world is the way it is.”
“Like a creation story.”
“Yes, exactly, but it’s … new. They haven’t heard it before. She’s … I think she’s…”
“Making it up,” said Freddy.
“No!” said Josiah, a bit too loudly. Freddy glanced over at the campfire, but no one had noticed.
She said, “I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. All the Threes are creative, right? They all make up stories.”
“I don’t know her. She can’t be Three,” said Josiah desperately.