Obsidian and Stars (Ivory and Bone #2)(25)

Lees and I drag the kayak and the rest of the supplies to the tallest grasses and try to stash it all out of sight. Before we hike away, I grab the most valuable items—the waterskin, a net, the atlatls, the darts. I toss it all into a pack that I sling over my shoulder, grab my spear, and lead Lees up the path to the cliffs.

We stay low, hiding behind the tall grass. The dunes rise to the base of a towering wall of rock—the cliffs we saw from the sea. From a gap in the dunes, I notice the mouth of a cave, partially blocked by large boulders that must have fallen during last night’s quake. A woman lies beside the rocks, so close I worry she might be pinned. My eyes scan the area around her. She’s alone. Whatever I hoped to gain by staying out of sight, I throw it away when I rush to the woman’s side. Lees calls my name as I dart into the open.

“Stay there,” I say. “Stay out of sight. I just want to see if I can help.”

From up close, I can see that the woman’s arm isn’t pinned under the rock she lies beside, as I’d feared. Instead, it’s propped against it to elevate a bloody wound on her wrist that’s bound and wrapped with leaves of a plant I don’t recognize. These unfamiliar leaves lie across the woman’s face and neck, blood caking where it seeped around the edges. I lean over her chest, watching for any indication of the rise and fall of breath.

As my hand hovers over her, a stone cracks against my wrist. It bounces away, but before I can look up to see where it came from, another lands hard against my head, just above my left ear. White light sears across my vision and I drop to one knee, slumped over the woman on the ground.

“Don’t touch her!” The voice is young and female, and comes from a ledge partway up the cliff. I look up and see the girl—small and skinny—and I think it must be the same person I saw running away with our food. Her eyes wide like a startled deer, she picks up another sharp rock and cocks her arm back. I jump to my feet. I don’t know what she thinks I will do—what she hopes I will do. Whatever it is, she doesn’t expect me to pull the sling from around my waist and load it with the rock she just threw at me.

She doesn’t wait for me to take the shot. Before I can rotate the sling even once around my head, the girl is racing toward me, tackling me to the ground.

“Stay away from my mother!” She scratches and snarls at me, pulling my hair and slamming my head against the ground, but she’s small and I easily throw her from my chest. Before I can get to my feet, though, Lees has emerged. She grabs my spear from the spot where I dropped it and points it at the girl on the ground.

“It’s all right,” I say, thinking the spear might terrorize this child—she can’t be older than Lees and Roon—but she ignores it. Instead she scrambles over the ground to the woman’s side.

“Don’t worry,” she whispers. “I have more for you.” Her hands clutch at something on the ground around her—more leaves, apparently dropped when she fell. She scoops them up and presses them to the woman’s face. Folding the woman’s limp arms across her chest, she drapes the leaves on the woman’s hands and adds more to her wrist. The leaves are dry and wilted, and when an arm slides to the woman’s side, they float up on a current of air before wafting back down to the ground. “Mother,” the girl mutters, clutching at the leaves. “Hold still. You have to let me help you.”

I’m not sure what’s worse. That the girl’s mother has died, or that the girl stubbornly refuses to let it be so. I watch her working, peeling back a blood-soaked leaf from the woman’s face and smoothing another in its place.

I come up behind her and set a hand on the girl’s shoulder. I notice her knee protruding through a tear in her pants. An angry abrasion covers the bottom of her exposed thigh. She must have been with her mother when the cave collapsed. I wonder how bad her own injuries are.

“It’s too late,” I say. But she tugs her shoulder from my grasp.

“It’s not. I can save her. I can save her. . . .” Slumped over the body of her mother, her voice becomes a jumble of murmured words of comfort for the dead woman on the ground.

“It is,” I say again. “There’s nothing more that can be done.”

The child never looks up, so dedicated is she to her work. I watch her, and an unbidden memory comes to me like something long forgotten rising from the bottom of a dark lake.

I see a girl, climbing from a kayak steered by her brother as it docks on a strange beach. The boy calls to the girl, but she won’t listen. Instead, she runs headlong into the water toward a kayak that is coming in behind them from the sea. Other boats are there—her clan climbs to the shore, shaking with exhaustion, but she notices no one. Her eyes are on one boat—one double kayak—where her mother lies in the rear seat as if she’s sleeping.

The girl reaches her mother’s side. She runs a cold wet hand across the woman’s cold wet face. A sudden flash of fear burns through her as someone lifts her from behind.

Her brother carries her, kicking and flailing, to land. He drops her on the sand and orders her not to move. “Watch your sisters,” he says. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

The rest . . . That’s what Chev had called her. But I knew what he meant. He meant our mother. He meant he would take care of our mother, because she was dead.

The girl still crouches in front of me, but her edges smear as my vision blurs. Hot tears run down my face.