“I’m sorry.”
“Not good enough.” It was Little Wing answering. “You put your own interests above the safety of everyone else here. Choke on your apologies; they’re not bringing back the crew we lost.”
* * *
“Bloody dock,” Kindred said to herself now, recalling the plant’s name even as she began chewing the leaves, savoring the rich flavors that seemed to capture the heaviness of dirt, the levity of sky.
She couldn’t say how long it had been since anyone had last spoken. The numbing silence made the others feel impossibly far away.
Kindred hummed along to a fragmented melody in her mind as she chewed.
But the name gave her pause, and she followed her thinking, letting it wander before her.
What was bloody dock? Some attempt to chain and corral the wildness of the world into a handful of letters, a bare mouthful of sounds?
She thought again of Arcadia, the name itself both prison and bulwark against the madness of the prairie. A defense of language rather than wood and stone. A name to pen in forever, to sap the Sea of its infinity and grant it human purpose, human use.
And yet a name could be a tribute. Without bloody dock, would there be space between it and a strand of bluestem? Space between it and a sheaf of flat leaf? Would it exist outside of lettuce or prairie pate or any of the other thousand thousand plants insinuating themselves into the motion of the Sea, so many dancers moving in unison and yet worlds unto themselves? Without names, was the Sea only a roiling mass of much but not many?
Without names, would it be easier to forget a thing after it was gone? Or did names make the burying easier?
Kindred chewed and stared out into the Sea, grateful for its gift to her, wondering if she was the problem or if it was.
* * *
“Fail!”
“Fail!”
“Fail!”
In the cell, listening to the chorus of the Sea, Kindred began to lose her grasp of time. When each call came, she couldn’t tell if they were on the heels of one another or spread out, breaths or sleeps apart. But she could follow Little Wing’s frantic shouts for her crew, her friends, who would not answer.
Talent.
Quell.
Stone-Gwen.
In the prairie wind, out the prairie wind.
Kindred drifted. The Sea, the cell, pulled at the seams of her mind.
* * *
Kindred woke closer to the white line, unsure when she’d fallen asleep or when she’d moved. Her extended arm reached for the Sea, her fingers dangling dangerously close to the white line.
She did not move it back.
Still that melody—broken and off-kilter—played through her mind, echoing and loud, painful.
Her throat clicked as she swallowed, and a powerful ache stormed in her head. Her gift of bloody dock had been the only one the Sea had offered, and its effects were long gone. Sitting up proved too dangerous and nauseating a task. She didn’t know how much longer she could make it without water.
No shouts disturbed the Sea’s song; her crewmates had fallen silent. Kindred felt her cell holding its breath, uncanny in its quiet. Behind her, the man watched.
Her eyes felt like rocks in her head as she slowly focused on the Sea, seeing it not just as a haze of green, beginning to pick out individual plants again. An errant voice sounding in the back of her mind wondered if these plants would be the only real audience to her slow death there. Them and the watcher in the hallway.
Her gaze slowly, painfully rose, following the stems upward to the ceiling of the cell. Something was important there, something she couldn’t grasp. It was like seeing the face of someone from her past, someone she should know but couldn’t yet place. Tiny, tumorous growths beaded along the length of the plants, growths she couldn’t remember seeing before. Did she recognize them? From one of her books? Could they be harvested?
Increasingly stupid and impossible questions proliferated in Kindred’s mind as she stared at the grasses before her, her vision swaying sickeningly.
“Pass!” a voice Kindred didn’t recognize shouted from a distance, and then just a moment later, Little Wing’s voice.
“They’re coming for me!”
Kindred’s circular thinking stopped as she listened.
“The watcher and two more are coming in,” Little Wing continued, her voice somehow still strong. Kindred could almost hear the snarling smile in her voice. “They’re not going to like what they find. Come on, already!”
Distant sounds of fighting barely broke the sound of the Sea. The shouts were silenced too quickly for it to have been much of a fight. Little Wing let loose one final yell, more frustration than battle rage, and then she too was quiet. Cora the Wraith called for her, but no return came.
Kindred let loose a shaking sigh, too numb and sick to mourn properly.
Understanding like a lightning strike lit up her mind. Her confusion dissipated as Kindred dragged her eyes back to the plants before her. Back to the pebbled bits of something jeweling the stems before her.
The pebbled bits of dew.
Dew.
A harsh, dry laugh slithered out of Kindred’s mouth. Maybe they were coming for her next, to kill her as they’d killed Little Wing, but for this moment, she would live.
It took her three tries to sit up, the nausea threatening to pull her back under each time. But finally she rose, to one knee and then to a squat. Slowly, slowly she moved forward, one step, another, until she stood at the white line.
Beyond it, the Sea, its movement too unpredictable for this to be at all safe. Kindred thought again of that shape moving through the Sea just outside her cell. Was it a beast that hungered for meat? Did it wait even now just out of sight, watching her through the shadows of the Sea?
And if it didn’t grab her as she neared, the Sea itself might. Kindred watched the chaotic movement of plants, stems and leaves and vines like so many clutching hands.
Behind her, the safety of the cell. As she looked back, Kindred saw the watcher shift. He leaned forward slightly, as if this whole thing had just gotten more entertaining.
“Fuck. You.” Kindred whispered the words, suddenly hating the man. He’d shown no interest when she’d been forced to piss in one corner of the cell, hadn’t cared when she begged for water. But now that she wobbled toward what was almost certainly a sure death, he was interested.
In the prairie wind.
Kindred stepped.
Out the prairie wind.
Kindred stepped, fully beyond the line now, her vision a swimming mess.