The Owling, page 11
Right now, though, she wished they were big enough to carry her away, hide her wherever they took scraps of food, crumbs, and trash. A strange thought, perhaps, but no one would find her there — not her friends, not her father, and not Sola.
Especially not Sola. Oriannon stood in the quiet, feeding plastic scraps to the biomice, watching them scurry about. She heard water running in her father’s room, and it reminded her that their ride would be here in a few minutes. What else could she do but get ready herself? Slowly she shuffled to her own room, picked up Sola’s medallion from her dresser, and dangled it from her fingers.
“Here’s a good snack for you guys,” she whispered to the biomice, who still twittered around her feet. She dangled the medallion even lower, just out of their reach, as she thought of what her father had told her. Yes, she would pack a bag for that “vacation” he had mentioned. She just wasn’t sure where they could go to be safe and away from what was happening here. Certainly nowhere in Seramine. Nor on the opposite side of their small planet, as the Owlings were finding out. Not even a remote outpost like Asylum 4 was safe.
“Ori?” called her father from the other room. “Are you almost ready to go?”
“Just a minute.” Oriannon sighed before slipping the medallion back around her neck. Sola would expect it. Just for good measure, she quietly opened her drawer and slipped the Pilot Stone into her pocket — though she turned so that Sola and her Security people might not see what she was doing. They had probably seen and heard the whole thing with the biomice. But strangely enough, Oriannon couldn’t make herself care — until she saw her father again five minutes later as they climbed into a waiting four-seat lev-transport.
He still looked haggard. Though Elder Hightower had freshened up in pressed white linen slacks and a sky-colored violet pullover robe, his own dark expression had changed little. She knew better than to ask him about it a second time, and they rode in silence through the streets of Seramine to their appointment.
Play dumb, Brinnin had said. Oriannon wished they had a better idea, but for now she couldn’t think of one. So be it. She would go to the spaceport with her father, she would play dumb, and she would find out as much as she could to help her Owling friends.
Before it was too late.
13
Because we’re concerned for the entire planet, that’s why.” Sola demonstrated why she was so good in front of a cam, smiling broadly and standing at the top of a shuttle’s boarding platform, where she provided the perfect photo opportunity. “And I want to personally make certain each and every survivor is accounted for.”
With one hand Sola steered Oriannon’s shoulder while with the other she gestured casually to the gathered media, clustered down on the tarmac. Three meters of height gave her the advantage she sought, and she’d had a dark blue Coristan flag draped strategically behind them. All her props were in place.
“Now,” she asked. “Other questions?”
When she paused, the media shouted out a flurry of questions, and she seemed to pick one out of the air that Oriannon had definitely not heard.
“Yes, someone asked about Miss Hightower. Thank you for mentioning that. She’s coming along as my personal assistant on this trip, and of course you already know that she will bring her familiarity with the Owling culture and environment. It’s a very quick little flight, of course, but her father, Assembly Elder Tavlin Hightower, sends her off with his blessing.”
She waved at Oriannon’s father, standing at the edge of the crowd, and a couple of cams pointed his way for a quick shot. The media would probably not point out the irony of the elder waving good-bye to his daughter as she boarded the very same shuttle that had once belonged exclusively to the Ruling Assembly, but that had now been painted over in the gleaming black of Sola’s Security. Of course no one dared bring that up, the same way no one asked what had happened to the authority of the Assembly. It just wouldn’t have been right, or so it seemed.
In any case, the shuttle’s engines had begun to hum louder, a signal for them to hurry. Oriannon’s hair stood on end in the ion backwash.
“Miss Hightower!” a woman reporter shouted over the growing whine of the engines. “Oriannon! Are you going to be able to recognize Shadowside, after all the damage they’ve sustained?”
Oriannon tried to answer as they boarded, but the engine noise drowned her out. She tried again, but it was no good.
“Thank you!” shouted Sola, waving a final time with her on-camera smile. A flight attendant in bright blue coveralls pulled Oriannon back through the doors as they slowly came together with a hiss of air.
“I don’t know if I will,” Oriannon answered through the window, and she peeked through as everyone outside scurried for cover, including her father.
Sola, of course, was only just beginning her role as hostess to the media for the flight on her “new” shuttle. There was no mistaking how much she relished being the center of attention for ten hand-picked media reporters — all young men eager to ask her more questions.
“If you’ll come with me, boys.” She signaled for the gaggle of admirers to follow. “I’ll show you around. We’ve had this Security shuttle specially retrofitted for long-distance travel in comfort, with two complete levels, rest areas, a lounge, and a cruising range that’s been extended so that we can reach any of the orbiting moons we choose. It was rather, er, basic, before.”
The reporters followed her words pretty closely with recorders and cams. Of course, Sola expected nothing less.
“Now the galley is up this way . . .”
Oriannon let them get on with their tour as she found a seat and pressed her nose to the plexi viewport. Now she could barely see her father standing behind a fence, looking over his shoulder at her as a black-suited security escorted him from the scene.
“I’m sorry, Father . . .” she rose to her feet, but the grav field kicked in and she was jerked back into the seat. Red takeoff lights flashed as the shuttle jumped straight up from the pad. Now there was no turning back, even if she wanted to.
“Does it look like anything you remember?” One of the reporters, a dark-haired guy from Media712 with very straight, white on-camera teeth turned to Oriannon as they disembarked the shuttle less than an hour later. But she couldn’t answer; she could hardly swallow as she took in what she saw.
How to describe it? A bomb had gone off here — if not literally then nearly so. And they’d found a perfect place to land, if the word “perfect” could be used in a horrible situation like this. Instead of touching down at the base of the cliff, the way Oriannon had expected, they’d found a clear area right up in the middle of the city, in what used to be the city plaza.
Only this hardly resembled the plaza anymore, with smoking piles of rubble, charred timbers, and broken doors. This looked nothing like the once-bustling Owling city of Lior, where little children had run up and down quaint, crowded walkways carved into sheer cliffs, or played in fountains that ran with warm spring water. She remembered so much life and light in each tiny home, the way they glowed like holiday lights in windows. Many homes had been tucked into caves and crevasses, many more balanced precariously on cliffs. She remembered mothers chatting from window to window, and fathers sitting out on stools, talking and drinking tea or playing their peculiar board game with polished white and blue stones.
Now Oriannon saw none of that. No shops and no schools. No snowy white owls sitting on perches tethered with tiny leather leashes. No homes and no Owlings. Only destruction and the awful smell of death that made her want to cover her face.
She heard a distant screech, and looked up to see a hunting owl still circling the city, waiting for the owner who would never again call him home. She whistled twice, the way she had heard Owling men do to bring the birds back down to their perches. But the wary bird only cocked its head and remained at a safe distance high overhead.
“I don’t blame you,” she whispered up at the bird. “Stay away from here.”
In fact, barely enough remained to show that this had once been a living, thriving place. The owl’s shadow passed over a broken pile of rubble, and with a powerful flapping of wings, it moved even higher, disappearing into a bank of fluffy gray clouds.
Now the sunlight those poor Owling people had celebrated only days before muscled between the clouds to cast lifeless shadows on half walls and shattered roofs. Here, out on the ruined plaza, Oriannon could almost hear the echo of the dancers, holding hands and winding around and around, with Jesmet smiling and clapping his hands.
Had it really only been two weeks ago? She wondered where Jesmet was in all of this, or how he had let this happen. Oriannon would have liked to have asked him, if he’d still been around. But now the deserted ruins only echoed with the haunted voices of memories, like unwelcome ghosts in a nightmare from which she could not wake. Even the Pilot Stone in her pocket seemed cold and lifeless for the first time since she’d pledged to keep it.
“Whew!” Another reporter wiped his brow as he set up his cam, ready for filming. Now the suns beat down on him as well. “Not much left, is there?”
Oriannon felt her head spin, and not because of the heat reflecting off the rocks. Rather, she couldn’t stop thinking of what the place had once been. Here lay shards of a beautiful green mixing bowl with a pattern of white birds on the side. There, charred pages from a book blew over the cliff and fluttered out of sight. Very little else remained to remind her that Owlings had once lived, laughed, and celebrated here.
She picked her way through the rubble to the place where Wist’s crooked little cliffside home had once stood, where her friend had lived with her grandfather Suuli. All that remained were piles of stone and splintered timber, tumbled and burned. She bent to pick up a small piece of polished wood, scorched around the edges but delicately curved in a way that reminded Oriannon of a musical instrument. An erhu, perhaps, like the one Wist had played. Perhaps it had belonged to her Owling friend.
She turned the scorched piece around in her hand, trying to hold back the emotions, feeling suddenly almost as scorched as the wood itself. Strange — though she supposed fire might have broken out when the earthquakes hit. The only thing was, she had been here when those quakes had first shaken the city. Yes, Lior had seen damage, but nothing even remotely like this. She stopped a tech specialist as he hurried by on his way back to the shuttle.
“Excuse me.” She held out the charred wood. “But do you know what could have caused this?”
The tech hardly slowed down.
“Besides a disruptor beam, you mean? A high enough setting can set a fire. But . . . hard to say without running tests.”
“Wait — ” Oriannon couldn’t imagine who would order such a thing. Not even Sola. “Isn’t there some way to tell for sure?”
“Sorry.” He looked over to where Sola was standing in front of a ruined building. “I really can’t say. But take my advice and leave it alone. Things are getting strange these days. Just do whatever she wants you to do, then forget it and go home. That’s my approach.”
Oriannon nodded as she slipped the wood in her pocket. Forget it? Not possible. If there really had been a fire up here, or if a disruptor had been used to destroy Lior, she would find out.
“Oriannon!” Sola waved at her to join the larger group, which was assembling again. “I’ll need you over here with the rest of us.”
Oriannon followed a couple of reporters as they all gathered around. They shaded their eyes as several smaller transports landed next to their shuttle. More reporters?
“Here’s what you’ll be including in your reports.” Sola scurried about like a mentor on a field trip, handing each of the reporters an e-tablet. All of them accepted the gift, though some with a puzzled expression.
“I know you’re working hard to present this horrific story,” she explained, “so this will make it as simple as possible for you. Each one is different, and my staff has carefully prepared it with your needs in mind. No need to worry.”
So that’s how it works, Oriannon thought as she watched the reporters set up, and she could hardly keep the disgust from showing on her face. Sola chooses them. Sola brings them here. Sola tells them what to say.
And by then, it was no surprise when Sola handed another e-tablet to Oriannon.
“What’s this?” Ori did her best to stay in character. Act dumb.
“Just take a few moments to read it over and memorize it,” Sola explained. “I’m sure you’ll have no problem.”
Memorizing wasn’t the problem. When the reporter with the cam focused on her, Oriannon thought about what she was saying while her knees went soft and her voice went shaky.
“All right, dear, you don’t have to be so nervous.” Sola motioned for the cam to stop. “You’re the spokesperson for all of Corista’s youth, remember? Why don’t you take a deep breath and let’s try it again. But this time, I’m going to bring in the boy, so let’s do get it right.”
The boy? She wasn’t sure who that would be, but now it was starting to make more sense. Oriannon nodded and looked around for help, wishing for an interruption. Playing dumb didn’t work anymore. So when the cam’s red record light started to flash, she took another deep breath and launched into the prepared script.
“We’re here on Shadowside,” she told the camera, “in the ruins of what was once a busy Owling city. I’m Oriannon Hightower, and I was held here before the planet’s axis shifted and earthquakes destroyed this place. But thanks to . . . Sola, there are survivors.”
Survivors in this case meant the little boy they’d brought off one of the other vessels. As Sola would put it — their “guest star.” The cam panned across the ruins where Sola was on her knees next to a frightened little Owling boy, trying to smile him into submission.
This is where the other narration would come in, edited later to explain how Sola never gave up, and personally clawed through one of the ruins to find the little abandoned boy. Oriannon knew the words; one of the other reporters was pacing up and down behind the camera, practicing quietly.
The more Oriannon saw of this circus, the more sick she felt for letting herself be a part of it. The only good news came when the camera stopped and Sola hurried off for a drink of ice water, leaving the little boy wide-eyed and on his own. Oriannon approached him slowly.
“Hey, little guy.” She crouched down to his level. He couldn’t have been more than five or six. “What’s your name?”
At first he wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t answer. So she slipped the medallion off her neck and offered it to him.
“You ever seen anything so pretty?” she asked. “My name’s Oriannon.”
Finally he looked up at her with his big, dark Owling eyes — eyes with a deep sadness that reminded her of Wist, even a little bit of Jesmet himself.
“Olim,” he finally whispered.
“Olim? That’s a nice name.”
But he recoiled when she reached out to straighten his dark tousled hair — as if he was used to people who would hurt him. She pulled her hand back but still held out the medallion.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Olim. Here — it may not be as pretty as a Trion necklace, but mine’s at home.”
His eyes widened even more, if that was possible.
“Trion?” he finally whispered, and he cautiously accepted the medallion.
“Not this one,” she admitted. “I got my Trion necklace from . . .”
She hesitated, remembering that every word they said could be overheard somewhere else. But as the little boy fingered the medallion, it slipped from his grip, tumbling far down a narrow crevasse that had broken through the plaza tiles.
“Oh, no.” The boy reached for the medallion, too late, and it clattered far down into darkness. “Oh, no!”
He looked at her once again with eyes of fear, shrinking away as if she was going to beat him.
“It’s okay,” she told him over and over. But when he started to cry, she finally gave him a hug.
“Trust me,” she whispered into his ear. “You did me a favor. And you know that Trion necklace I told you about? I got it from Jesmet himself.”
At the name of Jesmet, Olim pulled away with a look of shock. But Oriannon wasn’t about to explain it all now. She held a finger to his lips instead.
“Shh,” she whispered. “It’s a secret about Jesmet, okay?”
He studied her face for a moment before nodding grimly. She believed he would keep it secret. She also believed he might have more of a story to tell — if she could only find a place to talk to him, away from Sola and her paid reporters.
“Good.” Oriannon held up her hand in a pledge. “So listen to me. I promise I’ll try to help you if I can. Maybe we can find your mom and dad. Deal?”
He looked at her with his head to the side, as if trying to decide if he could trust her. Finally he smiled faintly and accepted her pledge with two hands.
“Deal.”
When she looked down at his feet, she saw that he wore ugly electronic security anklets to keep him from running. That had to mean he’d already been processed through Security back in Corista. She groaned in frustration, heard a clicking sound, and looked over her shoulder to see nearly every cam had been filming them.
Oh, no. Her heart nearly stopped. Even in trying to help the little boy, she hadn’t been helpful after all. They’d been filming. Had anyone been able to tell what Oriannon said ? She straightened up, careful not to signal to little Olim that something wasn’t right.
“No, that’s great!” Sola called out as she hurried forward. “Don’t move. These are just the kind of shots we were looking for.”
