Rift by Kay Kenyon Read Free Book Online

their baggage. He hunkered down and waited for dark.
    The boisterous, hooting behavior he had seen in the marsh was gone, replaced with a more ominous silence. Perhaps intent on their meal, the clavers communicated in grunts and shorthand phrases, sometimes jostling each other with rough camaraderie.
    At the head of the draw were their pack animals—huge, stomping horses—and near them, stacks of their supplies, off-loaded for the night. The claver guard made a slow, lazy circuit of the hillcrest; compared with the sensors on Station hull, he represented no challenge. Years of breaking other people’s rules had taught Reeve that people usually saw what they expected to see, and since the members of this party were pursuing
him
, they wouldn’t expect to
be
pursued.
    While he waited, Reeve found himself studying the poles with the flat objects on top. When he recognized what they were, it felt as though he’d been struck in the chest. They were feet. Several of the poles had a severed human foot impaled, sole pointing up. Weak, he turned away. He knew where those feet came from. Damn them to everlasting hell. He didn’t let himself think about what else they had done to the bodies of his fellow Stationers, or Grame Lauterbach, poor bastard.
    Trembling with rage, he toyed with the idea of stealing those awful poles; his comrades shouldn’t have to suffer such outrage. But he wasn’t on Station anymore,and the stakes were higher than a dressing-down by the brass. Setting the fantasy aside, he turned his attention to the task at hand: theft and survival. Pulling his jacket around him, he moved off from the ridge, biding his time in the next gully until the night deepened and the fires burned down.
    Lithia’s moon popped above the ridge. Just a slice of light in the dark sky, it would not threaten his cover of darkness. Waiting for the clavers to bed down, Reeve gazed at the night sky—a vista familiar to him, the only one on the planet that could be. This was the sky as it should look, dark and fractured by star drifts. Seeing this canopy, he longed for Station, his thoughts returning to the moment of destruction, and to what had caused it. Perhaps the orthong vessel had opened fire. But in sixty years the orthong had never initiated an offensive against Station; the orthong remained a shadow threat. Grame Lauterbach said a ship was coming—had this ship fired on them? And could it be true that Captain Bonhert intended to destroy the planet?
    We got to kill her, Reeve. Promise you’ll never tell …
    He sat up, weary of these ruminations. Now that the camp had been silent for an hour or more, he crept closer to spy out the guard’s position. After a long while the claver made his pass by Reeve’s side of the gully. A predictable monitor, easily avoided.
    Reeve made his way to the far side of the defile and approached the horses. Their animal smell was powerful. When they stirred and nickered, Reeve understood they smelled him, too. Moving smoothly and with excruciating slowness, he crept to the pile of claver supplies, passing close enough to the horses to note their enormous haunches and bulging eyes. They were magnificent creatures, far grander than in the vids. Hurriedly pulling out his knife, Reeve slit the ropes binding one of the bundles, revealing coarse strips of afibrous material. One whiff told him it was dried flesh. He stuffed the strips into his field pack and went on to the next bundle, finding granules of some kind that might be edible. As the horses stomped and grew restless, he crammed his pack to the brim and strapped it closed. Then, thinking about the poles and their terrible adornments, he slit open a few bags with a slash in the shape of an X, so the clavers would know it was no animal that had bettered them.
Stationer, by God
. He began to move off, then turned back. On impulse he pissed on the remaining supply bundles, taking inordinate pleasure in it.
    Withdrawing back down the defile, he