Time Salvager (Time Salvager #1)(77)
He felt the familiar pull of anxiety as they were separated and she was led by both hands by that gaggle of old women back into one of those tall rusted relics of the past. His instincts were to run after her and snatch her from that group of old hens coaxing her away from him, shoot to the underground garage across the river where the collie was parked, and flee to some remote place far away from the searching eyes of ChronoCom and these savages.
Oldest Qawol waved him over and pointed toward the same group he had worked with yesterday. James kept his face neutral and held in his sigh. The other large party of men was venturing northwest to hunt for game in one of the skyscrapers. He would be much more useful running with them. But that would require a large degree of trust on both sides, something neither had at this moment, which relegated him back to digging ditches and damming rivers, crap work that was far beneath a chronman.
Ex-chronman. Even worse: fugitive.
“Your thoughts are loud, stranger,” Qawol said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I can hear your worry all the way from afar.”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Running minds never run nowhere,” Qawol said. “Josni says you worked hard with the others yesterday. He was surprised.”
“Why would he be?”
“People who have no intention of staying have no need to work hard for the tribe’s benefit. I do not anticipate you or the girl staying much longer.”
James stopped. The Oldest was right. Why did he break his back for them yesterday? He didn’t know. James looked back at the six towers that disappeared over the ridge as his group made its way down to the river, then he looked back at the makeshift dam they had erected yesterday. The whole wall looked ready to buckle. Being in that pit right now was dangerous.
It had leaked in a few areas and the supports—bunches of gray plant stems bound together—were bending and being pressed deeper into the mud. He watched as the first group of men jumped down into the ditch to inspect the braces, probably not realizing the danger they had just put themselves in.
He watched, alarmed, as one of the men knocked on the dam wall and then tried to readjust the slanted stem pushing against it. The wall sagged a little more. Three kinetic coils burst out as the glow of the exo crackled around him. Alarmed, several of the Elfreth nearby jumped back and pointed. Another standing on the far ridge aimed a rifle at him.
James gritted his teeth and jumped down into the ditch just as the stem supporting the sagging wall snapped and a torrent of water came rushing into the ditch.
TWENTY-NINE
CURE
Elise nursed the small fire tucked safely inside the ring of rocks and fanned it gently with a fan made from knitted insect wings that Rima had given her. Sammuia’s older sister had developed a fascination with Elise and was now resorting to nothing less than a string of gifts of silly trinkets and useful knickknacks to curry her favor.
As much as Elise had tried to tell the girl that bribery wasn’t needed to earn her friendship, Rima was persistent. The rest of the Elfreth seemed fine with the girl hanging around her, even relieved that she was so preoccupied. It seemed Rima had a reputation as a troublemaker among them.
Some of the gifts were very useful; for example, what looked like a hollowed-out half of an old carburetor that now served as a heating plate for Elise’s tests. Others, like this insect wing fan, were just pretty to look at.
Wait, no, she took that back. Elise switched the fan to her left hand, silently thanking it for helping keep the fire alive. It had taken her the better part of the morning on her rest day to get the fire started for the heating plate so watching it finally grow felt she had just climbed Mt. Everest.
Qawol had cut her off from using the tribe’s supply of oil, so in order to run her experiments, Elise had to gather her own tinder and figure out how to start her own fires. The first few days, James would just zap something and it would be—presto!—fire. He wasn’t always around, though, so she decided it was high time she learned how to make one on her own.
Sitting over the fire on top of a metal grate was one glass and three tin cups, borrowed from the cooks. She wished they were all glass so she could examine how the contents of the sludge from the river broke down, but she had a feeling glass-making was pretty much a lost art around these parts, like just about everything else.
“Should have paid attention to those blacksmithing and glassblowing classes at summer camp, Elise,” she tsked. “You’d be all set by now.”
She was delusional if she thought this stone age experimentation was actually going to lead to a cure for the Earth Plague, but she wanted to learn more about this exotic new world. She was a scientist after all, and this is what scientists did when they were curious, so she studied the sludge with what she had on hand even if that meant resorting to third-grade science projects. If anything, it helped pass the time.
Ever since the second week James and she had joined the tribe, her routine had become: get up before the sun rises, gather samples until dawn, work the assorted tribal chores, then spend the rest of the evening after dinner playing at caveman biologist. These exercises gave a little of her previous life back to her. They also reminded her of everything she had lost.
“You busy?” James said, knocking on the wall of her lab.
“Lab” was a really loose term. She had commandeered a burned-out residential guardhouse of an old complex downriver from the settlement. It had only two and a half walls, but the roof didn’t seem to be in any danger of collapsing. It kept her dry from the rains and offered just enough ventilation so she didn’t smoke herself out when some of her less-than-aromatic experiments went awry.