was a faint buzzing sound, and something, like a bird or a bat, flew close to her face. It brushed alongside her cheek, the sound clearer, a thin hiss of displaced air. A long knife struck the dead wood of the tree and embedded itself, quivering.
Jet dropped to a crouch, looking up and around her, then scuttled alongside the truck. Her mother couldn’t have thrown it, could she? This wasn’t part of the game. They didn’t use real weapons, only sticks, rocks sometimes.
She was kneeling in the mud, her heart beating fast, moisture seeping through her pants, making them heavy. She shifted onto the balls of her feet.
Stay light, she told herself. Nothing moved on the mountainside. She didn’t sense anything, not a single living creature, nothing.
“Mom?” she tried to call but the word stuck in her throat. How stupid could she be? Whoever had thrown the knife wouldn’t miss again. Had her mother changed the game because it was the last time? She’d said “same rules as always,” but maybe someone else was out there.
Staying in one place is dangerous! Jet told herself.
She sprinted and jumped, catching the handle of the knife and pulling it from the wood. She landed among the boulders and moved quickly, with small, darting steps against the stone, until she was on a perch in the middle of the jumble, hidden from sight.
She turned the blade over. It was an army knife of some sort, long, its handle heavy. It would be easy for her to use, but then she almost dropped it, realizing that someone had meant to kill her. Why? What had she done?
No, it had to be her mother who was trying to scare her. But how could Jet play this game if they were using real weapons? Maybe her mother wanted to teach her to take her training more seriously. Jet had once heard a story about a crazy war vet living up in these mountains, a man who’d gone AWOL on a visit home, and who hunted anyone who came onto his land. Maybe that’s what was happening. Her mother might be in danger, too.
“Mom?” she shouted this time and moved quickly, changing her hiding spot. “Be careful!”
She placed her steps to leave the fewest traces. She ran along the side of a long flat boulder as big as a house, then crouched in a new hiding spot. There was no sound. Nothing. Who was out here with her?
“Mom,” she shouted again, “if it’s you, I don’t want to play. Stop trying to scare me.”
She changed places again and listened. Not a sound anywhere.
She knew every way up the mountain. The wind was picking up. Small clouds shuttled quickly across the sky, beneath the moon, their shadows gliding over the earth.
She concentrated her mind, listening, moving her senses out, watching the shape and hues of the landscape for traces of another person, the faintest pattern of footprints. But she sensed no one. Her mother had taught her to sit and feel everything for almost a mile around—birds, rabbits, people walking. The desert seemed empty, as if someone had cut Jet off from the world—or as if nothing was alive, or she wasn’t.
She had two choices, to be slow and cautious, or to find her mother before someone else did. As a cloud passed beneath the moon, she sprinted, running into its shadow. No one could beat her in a race, and she would be a hard target, weaving and leaping.
Her ankle twisted and her foot was pulled from beneath her before she could even feel the pain. She struck the mud face-first and rolled. It had been a sharp tripwire. She could feel the swelling in her ankle, the blood filling the soft leather of her moccasin boot. She wanted to cry, to scream her mother’s name, but stopping now could get her killed. She leapt behind another long rock and lay, trying to become invisible. The mountainside was irregular, an obstacle course of stone and fallen trees, of mud and sheer cliffs. Her mother had chosen it for this, to teach Jet all of the skills that her mother claimed she would someday need. Up until now, Jet never had.
Maybe that was why she didn’t cry now. The training. The lessons. The constant expectation that things would be more dangerous than they really were. She tried to sense what was around her, but her thoughts collapsed into fear. There was only her heart hammering in her chest, her body, her muddied arms and legs, her throbbing ankle, and her cold fingers still gripping the handle of the knife.
The wind was getting stronger. Jet took a few deep, slow breaths, as if pulling it into her body. It would help her. She had always been good in the wind. Her mother had taught her to move with it. She’d said it was Jet’s gift.
Ignoring the pain in her ankle, she ran again, this time moving with the wind, fitting her body to its contours so that she brushed past stones, through trees, not traveling directly toward the peak where she normally found her mother during the game, but letting the wind carry her along an indirect route no one could know unless they too were running in the wind.
Her feet danced from rock to rock. She avoided the moonlight, threading her body along shadows. The texture of the wind pleased her, and she almost forgot her pain. But she didn’t stop looking for the person who had thrown the knife and set the tripwire. She still couldn’t sense them or see any trace.
The low, flat peak of the mountain came into sight past trees and boulders, and moments later, something brushed against her thigh, catching in the cloth of her pants. Even as her fingers touched it, she knew what it was. A dart, its metal tip barbed, maybe poisonous. In her mother’s stories, they always were. She felt a sob building in her chest and tried to calm herself. Another one shot past and pinged off a rock. Where was her enemy? Above her, on the peak—that’s where he had to be.
Move with the wind. Feel the elements. As she ran, the deep hum of the earth reached up through the mud. The fluctuations of the wind propelled her stride. The heat in her chest, the air in her lungs, the solidity of her body—all this she could blend. But whoever was up there had incredible vision and aim. Another dart flickered past her face. Focus!
And then her mind calmed and opened outward, and she could sense the world again, the life out there, across the desert’s martian landscape that descended behind her. She knew each thing in its place. Lizards and snakes sleeping beneath rocks. Animals in burrows. A distant coyote sniffing the night air, sensing her. She had never felt this alive. Someone was on the peak, the presence faint, cloaked as if by an incredible act of focus, but still discernible. She directed her attention, searching into whoever it was.
Her enemy’s energy hummed with anger, with hostility. In the body standing on the peak, she sensed an intention to hunt and kill her. Just feeling it, she was terrified.
What choice do I have? she asked herself. I can’t just run away. Mom is out here somewhere. I have to do this. Stay calm!
Jet began to move again. Keeping close to shelter, she sprinted, twisting and leaping with the wind. She dimmed her presence, slowing her heart and breath even as she ran, to let her entire existence blur into the wind. It gusted hard, and she commanded her own life force to become faint, like a drop of water wiped along the surface of a dark window.
She didn’t head directly for the peak, but around the mountain, to a cleft she knew, just at the back, at the base of a stand of gnarled trees, their branches misshapen from the wind. It was the only way she could think of to invade the higher ground. She timed it perfectly with a strong gust, with the brief passing of a small cloud over the moon, with the distant cry of the coyote that she sensed ready to howl, and then she was twisting through the air, taking shape, her foot reaching for the earth as she swung the knife. The figure stood on the flat surface of the peak and spun toward her.
Sparks
