Chapter 47: A HALO-GRAM

By midday, they had been following the northern road for hours. The trade route stretched through pale sand and dry stone toward settlements farther north, but Sio had been too busy worrying about shelter, food and people trying to kill him to notice how much of the wasteland actually moved.

A caravan approached from the opposite direction, surrounded by animals so tall the merchants beside them barely reached their shoulders. Each moved on six narrow legs beneath an enormous fleshy canopy curved over its spine, green veins visible beneath the pale surface.

Sio slowed when the nearest animal leaned its absurdly long neck toward him. Its mouth opened, not into jaws at first, but into several soft tongues shaped almost like wet leaves. "What in the world is that?"

A passing merchant answered before Arch could. "Voolah."

Arch caught the back of Sio’s coat and pulled him half a step away. "Don’t stand close enough for a Voolah to taste you. Once it decides you have salt on you, getting rid of it becomes irritating."

Sio gave the animal more space. The Voolah stretched after him anyway, its leaflike tongues waving hopefully, but before it could reach him, a tiny tentacle slipped from beneath Sio’s collar and stole the dried fruit from his fingers.

Sio looked down at his empty hand, then at the cluster of eyes peeking innocently from beneath his chin. "You waited until I was distracted."

The baby creature chewed with no visible guilt. Angle called losing food to something born yesterday a parenting issue, which Sio decided was rich coming from someone who had contributed nothing to raising it.

The caravan continued south beneath its own moving shade, merchants and children walking comfortably beneath the broad Voolah canopies. Farther north, Angle stopped so abruptly that Sio nearly walked into him.

What had looked like a dead vine beside his boot suddenly rippled from head to tail and sank straight into the ground, its paper-thin body slipping between the grains until only a crooked seam remained.

Sio crouched automatically. "I wasn’t going to touch it."

"You leaned toward it."

"Looking and touching are different things."

The baby creature reached curiously from his shoulder toward the moving seam, and Angle gave Sio a look that ended the argument.

Small, long-legged scavengers followed the caravan tracks within the narrow bands of shade. From a distance they resembled scorpions, except each carried a transparent sac with a dark seed suspended inside. One caught a beetle and dragged it beneath a stone, where thin roots unfurled from the seed and wrapped around the struggling insect.

Sio stood back up. "That one can keep its secrets."

The northern trade settlement appeared before evening. It looked less like civilization interrupting the desert and more like people had learned how to settle inside it: low pale structures sunk partly below ground, cloth roofs across narrow streets, and shallow water channels beneath latticed covers.

Voolahs rested around the caravan yard with their canopies spread wide enough to shade entire stalls. One shopkeeper was loudly arguing with his Voolah after the animal stood and wandered away, taking half the merchant’s roof with it.

Sio liked the place immediately, though Arch clearly did not share the feeling. He had checked Baron’s sealed parasite several times since morning, and his attention kept moving between faces, rooftops and alleys.

"We buy what we need and keep moving north," Arch said. "Preferably without signing anything, insulting anyone important or accidentally adopting another organism."

Sio touched the baby creature curled around his neck. "One little guy calls me Papa and suddenly I have a reputation."

"You had a reputation before the little guy," Angle said, and Arch’s silence confirmed that far too quickly.

Food distracted Sio from defending himself. A woman beneath a yellow awning sold thick fried bread stuffed with spiced vegetables, and the baby creature emerged from Sio’s collar before his first bite.

The woman smiled at it. "Cute little thing. Yours?"

"Apparently." Sio tore off a piece while several tiny eyes followed his hand. "It hatched yesterday."

Her smile remained, but something behind it changed. Sio chewed, replayed his sentence and sighed. "I mean the little one hatched yesterday. Not me. Obviously."

Angle turned his face away while Arch became extremely interested in dried herbs at the neighboring stall, and Sio decided neither of them deserved food.

They found the bounty board while replacing supplies. Sio recognized his own face from several steps away and briefly hoped somebody else had been cursed with similar hair and poor life choices, but the purple mark beneath the eye ruined that possibility.

The number underneath had changed considerably. "Did I become more dangerous without anyone telling me?"

Angle found his own notice nearby. His bounty had increased too, although not enough to make him stare at the amount like it had personally betrayed him.

Arch remained several steps behind them. "Standing directly beneath your own wanted notice is generally discouraged."

"I needed to confirm they meant me." Sio pointed at the portrait. "Also, whoever drew this thinks my eyebrows are much angrier than they actually are."

A broad, sun-darkened man beside the public water channel laughed under his breath. Two curved hooks hung from braided cords at his belt, but Sio paid more attention to the fried bread in his hand.

"Where did you get that one?"

The stranger pointed across the market. "Red awning. Pepper filling."

"Finally, useful information."

Sio started to turn, but the man looked from him to the bounty board and slowly stopped chewing. "Well," he said, reaching for one of the cords at his belt. "That saves me some walking."

Sio stared at him. "You were more helpful when you were just telling me where the bread was."

Movement spread around the market. A woman beside a Voolah stopped adjusting its harness, a thin man near the water barrels rose, and someone on a rooftop shifted forward until a short spear became visible across his knees. Nobody looked angry, which somehow bothered Sio more than if they had.

The broad hunter unhooked one of his cords. "Nothing personal. Your bounty feeds people for a long time."

"I keep hearing that immediately before people try to hurt me." Sio stepped back as Angle moved closer on his right. "It’s making me suspicious of polite people."

Arch’s attention was already elsewhere. A young man in a pale coat sat on the railing above the water channel, and Sio had noticed him earlier without remembering exactly when he had arrived.

Unlike everyone else, he wasn’t watching the bounty board.

He was watching the baby creature.

The first hook came before Sio could think much about him. Sio opened a portal in its path, sending the curved metal beside a support post where the cord wrapped around the wood and jerked the hunter sideways.

The woman near the Voolah rushed Angle while the rooftop hunter stood. Arch intercepted the thin man, and the market scattered with the practiced speed of people who had apparently seen Wayfarers ruin shopping before.

A second hook flashed toward Sio’s shoulder. The baby creature reacted first, spreading over the side of his neck and upper arm until the metal scraped across its shifting surface and slid harmlessly away.

The pale-coated man leaned forward for the first time, his attention sharpening as the baby creature pulled itself together. Several of its eyes remained fixed on the hunter.

"That wasn’t in the report," he murmured.

Sio heard him despite the noise. "What report?"

The man finally looked directly at him. "A useful question."

Arch heard it too. He pushed the hunter in front of him aside and headed for the railing while Sio redirected another attacker through a portal and deposited him in an empty patch of sand.

Arch reached for the pale-coated man’s shoulder, but his hand passed straight through.

The stranger’s body broke into overlapping pale images before settling again. Sio stared at the railing beneath him and only then realized it had never bent under his weight.

The stranger glanced down at Arch’s arm passing through his chest. "Faster than most."

"Who sent you?" Arch asked.

For less than a second, the man looked toward Arch’s coat, directly at the place where the parasite vial was hidden, before his attention returned to the baby creature.

The ordinary bounty hunters were still trying to reach Sio for the money on the board. This man had never looked at the bounty once, and Sio finally understood why that had been bothering him.

"You didn’t come for the money."

"No." The stranger studied him with renewed interest. "But they did."

Sio opened a portal beside the railing and shifted the exit behind the projection. "Then what did you come for?"

"To see whether several pieces of information were still accurate." His eyes moved toward the baby creature. "Most were."

Sio followed his gaze. "And him?"

Something changed in the stranger’s attention, subtle enough that Sio almost missed it. "He wasn’t there."

Arch stepped partly between them. "Who are you reporting to?"

The edges of the pale coat had already begun dissolving. "Someone who values accurate information. Unfortunately for them, today made mine more expensive."

Sio moved through his portal, but his hand passed through the fading projection. The stranger watched him for another moment and said, "Take care of your little passenger, Sio. Curiosity becomes dangerous when enough important people share it."

Then the image vanished.

Behind Sio, the broad hunter finally pulled his hook free from the post. "Whatever that was, your bounty is still good."

Sio looked at the hunters surrounding them, then at the empty railing. The baby creature crawled onto his shoulder and stole the last piece of bread from his hand.

"You have terrible timing."

◇ ───────────── ◇

Far away, the final ripple faded from a shallow bowl of silver liquid. The pale-coated man opened his eyes beside it and flexed fingers that had never entered the northern settlement.

Across the room, someone waited beyond a single lamp, while a charcoal rendering of a tiny segmented parasite lay on the table between them.

"The boy is there," the broker said. "So are the two traveling with him."

The figure asked whether the information had been accurate, and the broker leaned back slightly. "Mostly."

He remembered the small creature spreading across Sio before the hook landed, the eyes opening along its body and the way it had moved to protect Sio before the boy could even react. A faint smile appeared as he looked toward the person waiting in the dark.

"Your report was missing something alive."