(If you've waited for this part rather than come straight from Part 8 you should know I have added 300 words to the end of Part 8 - everything from the last    **** break.  Some strange Wattpad 'feature' is making the addition to Part 8 only show up for me if I reload the page ... which may mean that me telling you to reload the page will only show up if you reload this page    :D    oh well.)

Chapter 3 – Taking Truth

"What is it you want, Jenna?" Lilliana stood at the utmost edge of the Ansos pillar, a thousand empty yards behind her heels, Jenna's hands on her shoulders.

"Why aren't you scared? Do you think I won't push you over?"

"I told you. I don't know what you'll do. That's part of your fascination." Her hair streamed in the wind.

"But the drop doesn't frighten you?" It frightened Jenna, all that space to fall – it reached up for her, tried to haul her over.

"I'm old, Jenna. I've forgotten how to be scared. What is it you want?"

"I want truth! I want reasons. I can't be the first to ask?"

Lilliana smiled. "You're not the first to ask, but you're the first to ask me in a very long time. I'm hard to find, hard to remember. But you shouldn't ask for truth – truths are heavy burdens and sharp. They cut both ways and more besides."

"Men don't belong here. You watch us like bugs in a jar. You keep us trapped."

"Trapped? The trains will take you anywhere." The Old One looked over her shoulder, down at Ansos town and out toward the dry wastes beyond.

Jenna's fingers dug into Lilliana's shoulders. "The trains? I'd break them all, dig up every track. They're the bars of our prison. Everything men want can be bought for gold. We grub for shiny rocks and buy things we don't know how to make, things so far beyond our understanding that there's no point to invention. Men who have no idea how to make iron can buy guns that are shipped in from gods know where. We never change, or grow. Mankind wasn't mean to be this way."

"How can I learn what you are if you keep changing?" Lilliana asked.

"Tell me why."

"Why what?"

"Why everything."

"It will cost you." The smile left Lilliana. "There are rules. Balances. Each truth you take costs. It lessens the protection I can give you. In the end the truth will kill you."

"Protection from what, damn you!" Jenna's frustration bubbled through her, shaking her arms, shaking the child. Somehow her grip came free and although it was Lilliana who stood with her heels to the edge, it was Jenna who fell, screaming into a void, through dream stacked on dream, falling, falling toward the answer she had asked for, spinning into someone else's story, until with a thump she hit the sand.

***

Aska hit the sand with a thump. She ignored whatever root had snagged her foot, instead keeping her eyes on Hakka and the rabbit.

"He won't eat it all." Aska kept saying it to herself. "He won't eat it all." Her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth, glued there. She sucked saliva back. All of her ached with wanting, with a hunger that reduced her to one thought, one goal. "He won't—"

Her brother threw the rabbit skin down onto the pile of cracked bones. He wiped his mouth, narrowed his eyes at her, then hurried away between the tall rocks. Aska pounced on the skin. She could smell the meat – all gone now, rasped away by Hakka's rough tongue, nothing left but choking fur. One by one she picked through the bones, hunting any trace of marrow.

"He ate it all."

She started along Hakka's trail and stopped after three paces. Her feet ached from following him. With Mutti and Da gone to bones and death only Hakka smelled right. Only Hakka in all the world smelled of home, of her, and even he didn't care if she lived or starved. She dipped and drew in the scent of him from the marks his feet left in the sand. A thin line of the familiar. Faint, a rain would take the trail away and she would be lost entirely. Aska ached with more than hunger. She wished that trail could lead her back, through the weeks and months of the famine, back through years to the warm cave and the bed of grasses where she snuggled with Mutti. Her hands kneaded the sand, remembering the feel and touch of Mutti's soft belly.

Aska raised her head and winced at the sky, a faded blue, as if it had been left out in the sun too long. She let out a high howl and bent to the trail once more. She followed Hakka's scent off between the tall rocks.

Aska hurried, her stomach tight with hunger, across the dusty ground between the arroyos. The creeks might have run dry but the deep scars they cut through the land at least offered shade and shelter. And perhaps, crouched and shivering between the rocks, with fever-bright eyes, there would be another skinny rabbit waiting to be eaten. She ran faster, both for the rabbit that wouldn't be there and because of the shadow that passed over her. For an instant an eagle had moved into the line that stretched from the hot eye of the sun through countless miles to burn upon her back. She saw the shape of its wings around the shadow of her head. The thorns of a mesquite bush tore at her. She screamed, imagining claws.

"Don't take me don't take me don't take me." And she dropped into the next dry gulch, slithering, sliding in dust and stones, coming to a boneless halt in the shade lurking at the very bottom. "Stone. Stone. Stone" Aska let her skin darken and grey. She hunched tight, rippling her flesh into ridges and crags. She had no energy for anything more. For the longest time she crouched there thinking only "Stone. Stone. Stone."

When cramps forced her to, Aska uncoiled and let her flesh take its usual form. Aska coughed. She held her palms up for inspection. They felt worse than they looked. A few scrapes and scratches, red but not bleeding. She wondered if she could bleed, thirsty as she was. Maybe the eagle left her for that reason. Maybe it knew she was all used up. She took Leelee from the cord around her neck. The dolly looked as thin and worn as Aska felt, but she held it close to her face and breathed in the faintest memories of Mutti's scent. She had no tears, she was too dry for that, but she pressed the dolly to her, closing her eyes, pressing hard as if it were a doorway that she might somehow push through, as if it were her only escape.

Eventually the arroyo led out onto an area of the badlands that stretched away to the desert, a hot white line on the horizon. Nothing lived out there. Nothing could live. Mutti told her of a green land after a thousand miles of sand. A cool green land full of fat and stupid rabbits, where the streams always ran and the gods were kind. "Take me there," Aska would say. Mutti always hugged her close and promised she would not go there without Aska.

A wind picked up, in fits and starts, laden with grit and desert heat. Aska slitted her eyes. She could make out a scattering of huts amongst the scrub and cactus to the east. Hunska for sure, her own kind. No other people were so careless in their building or so allergic to neighbours. She had seen the taur camps on the edge of the west-range, their hide tents in tight and regimented clusters. And on the margins of the desert the domen slept on the dirt, so close they could scratch each other's itches.

Aska followed Hakka's trail through the scrub. She wondered that he would go so close to the hunska. Even if these had been cave-hunska like them there would be nothing offered but hissed threats and sharp claws. The closest hut-hunska came to charity was letting you live.

Nearer and Aska could see the loose fences where animals might be penned, the coops for chickens, storage jars leaning by hut doors. She couldn't see any chickens, or goats, or lids on the jars . . . but the animals might be hiding, the jars might be full. Your stomach will tell you those kind of lies if you mistreat it.

Aska slowed. She would try to pick up Hakka's trail further east. She held Leelee to her mouth and whispered. "We can't go closer. They'll take us for thieves."

Before she could turn away the wind brought a smell that made her mouth flood. Her tongue had been dry enough to rasp over her teeth – now it swam. Blood. Hakka must have made another kill.

She ran then, sometimes stooped on two legs, sometimes scampering on all four, Leelee bouncing on her chest. "He won't eat it all," she said. "Not all of it. He won't eat--"

Hakka lay face down, his head half buried in the sand drift around the base of a creosote bush. His arms reached in awkward angles. The sand around his face held a dull red colour and crimson trickles oozed down the sides of his neck from a fist-sized depression on the back of his skull. Aska could see shards of bone, white in the tarry mess. Even now, as the howl rose through her and a hot weight of grief pressed her to the ground, her stomach growled and pulsed and her mouth ran with saliva.

Horrified she turned and fled, expecting each moment the cry of 'Thief!' and for a stone to wing out of the distance and bring her down too.

She ran blind. Her eyes full of dust and of the tears she thought could no longer come, she ran for the desert.

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Coming in short burst like this the story may seem rather disjointed, moving as it does from one set of people to another, but the pieces do tie together quite swiftly and hopefully those who read them in quicker succession will see that, and those who don't ... will have faith  :)

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Gunlaw now has a Goodreads listing. Go there and rate it if you like it - help spread the word!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26002086-gunlaw