Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page B

a vast expanse of lamsinh rocks caught by the noon sun—all shades of the spectrum, from green to palest white; and a trembling in the air that mirrored that of her hands.
    â€œThere is no ship,” Akanlam said, and her voice was almost accusatory.
    Shaking, Rechan pulled herself upwards. “He’ll be deeper into the plateau. Where I carved him. We have to—”
    â€œElder Aunt,” Mau said, low and urgent.
    What? she wanted to ask; but, turning to stare in the same direction as Mau, she saw the black dots silhouetted against the sky—growing in size, fast, too fast . . .
    â€œRun”.
    She would have, but her legs betrayed her—a contraction, locking her in place, as frozen as the baby within her womb, as helpless as a kid to the slaughter—watching the dots become the sleek shape of flyers, hearing the whine of the motors getting louder and louder . . .
    Run run run, she wanted to shout to Mau and Akanlam—there’s no need for you to get caught in this. Instead, what came out of her was a scream: a cry for help, a jumble of incoherent syllables torn out of her lungs, towards the Heavens; a deep-seated anger about life’s unfairness she’d last felt when carving the ship. It echoed around the plateau, slowly fading as it was absorbed by the lamsinh stone.
    Her hand was cold again, her breath coming in short gasps—and, like an answer to a prayer, she saw the ship come.
    He was sleek, and elegant, and deadly. Banking lazily over the plateau—illuminated by the noonday sun, as if with an inner fire—he incinerated the flyers, one by one, and then hovered over Mau and Akanlam, as if unsure what to do about them. “No you don’t!” Rechan screamed, and then collapsed, having spent all her energy.
    Breath-sister . The ship—Sang—loomed over her once more.
    She’d forgotten how beautiful Sang was; how terribly wrong, too—someone that didn’t belong on Voc, that shouldn’t have been here. He should have hung, weightless, in space; instead he moved sluggishly, crushed by gravity; and his hull was already crisscrossed by a thousand fracture lines, barely visible against the heat of the stone. The lamsinh was weathered and pitted, not from meteorite strikes but from weapons—in fact, dusty and cracked he looked like a rougher, fuzzier version of the rebel flyers he’d incinerated.
    You need me, the ship said, and came lower, hull almost touching her outstretched hands. Let me give you your breath back.
    It was wrong, all wrong—everything she had desired, the breath she needed for her baby, the birth she’d been bracing herself for—and yet . . . “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “You’re a spaceship, not a flyer.” She was barely aware of Mau standing by her side, looking up at Sang with wide eyes; of Akanlam, spreading her tunic on the ground.
    I waited for you.
    â€œYou can’t—” But he could, couldn’t he? He could do exactly what she’d thought of, when she’d carved him—all her anger at the war, at the rebels, at the unfairness of it all—year after year of hunting down rebels because that’s what she’d wanted at the time; not a breath-sibling to help her with a birth, but someone born of her anger and frustration, of her desire to escape the war at any cost.
    Come with me.
    She’d wondered what she would do, were Sang to ask that question of her again, but of course there was only one possible answer. The world had moved on; she had moved on; and only Sang remained, the inescapable remains of her history—a sixteen-year-old’s grandiloquent, thoughtless, meaningless gesture.
    â€œYou have to go,” she said, the words torn out of her before she could think. “Into space. That’s what I carved you for. Not this—this butchery.”
    The ship came close enough for her to