Of Bone and Steel and Other Soft Materials, Page 2

it, but she needed the vision she no longer had. Vision the men hunting this boy wouldn’t have if she took their torches away.

  She shoved the boy toward dark blue of the far wall and pulled her pick-axe out of her belt. Pressing herself against the wall, Ryska waited just inside the door for the red blob to cross the room.

  Predictably for a sighted person, the man came into the room with his torch and gun first. Ryska didn’t bother trying to wrest the gun away from the big man. Instead she ducked low and swung her pick-axe into the white blob. Glass broke with an ozone-scented hiss and the man fell back, cursing and flailing wildly with his rifle.

  Ryska dashed across the room and caught the boy’s hand again, half-dragging him away through the building. She slammed back against a hallway wall as two more men came through a far door and sprayed bullets across the crumbling drywall.

  The only direction that was clear within her sensor range was a stairway going up just across the hall.

  “Stay low,” Ryska whispered to the boy, shoving her pick-axe back into its loop. She didn’t wait for his vibrating red nod but pulled him with her as she bolted like a crab across the hallway. White blobs and shouting almost overloaded her whiskers on the right side as she crossed the danger zone, but then the stairwell was in front of them.

  The boy stumbled over the first step. “Stairs going up,” Ryska whispered, reminded again that he was blind in here.

  The cold metal railing felt good on her scraped hand but the air was clogged with drifting light blue dust disturbed by their feet. The dust worried her. They were leaving tracks for the men to follow.

  The stairs opened up into another hallway. The floors in here were clear of debris, so the whole topography had a yellow haze over it. Safe and easy to move around meant it would be easy to follow them. Ryska shuffled her feet and didn’t see the same drifting bits of blue that signified the thick dust on the stairs. That was something, at least.

  Ryska pulled the boy along the hallway, running as quickly as she dared. The clink of boots on the metal stairs made her increase her speed. This wasn’t going to work. With the boy blind in the dark, she wouldn’t be able to outrun the men and now they were trapped in a building she’d never been inside before. There might not be another way down.

  She crossed into one room and then another, searching for a way back to the ground. The doors to the rooms were long gone, probably salvaged for timber and metal. The sounds of pursuit had faded beyond her hearing and she slowed, letting go of the boy as he stumbled again. His gasping breath would give them away if she didn’t let him rest. Govno.

  “What’s your name?” the boy asked, sinking down into a red puddle against one of the dark blue outer walls as Ryska paced the room, testing the boarded up windows and trying to think of a way free.

  “Ryska,” she said softly. She heard a shout, but it sounded as though it came from further away. Good. The men were moving in the wrong direction, unless they’d split up. She froze, held her breath and listened.

  The hushed rasp of the boy’s breathing was all she heard. Ryska slipped out her pick-axe and tapped the lighter blue section, a plywood sheet nailed across a door-sized opening on what she thought was the outer wall of the building. She managed to slowly pry away the edge and felt along the outside. There were the remains of a balcony out there from what her sensors were able to tell her.

  “I’m Toma,” the boy said, though Ryska hadn’t asked. “Toma Turzakov.”

  Ryska froze. Turzakov. It had to be a coincidence, but somehow she figured it wasn’t. “The Railway Demon?” she asked softly, easing the plywood back into place.

  “That’s what some call my papa,” Toma said with a tremulous hint of pride in his voice, the sound of a boy who’d been teased about his papa.

  A smile played at Ryska’s lips. Misha had used that same tone when they’d teased him about being the son of Trainer Kirakov.

  The Railway Demon was not a man to tease, from what she’d picked up in her quick bartering forays into Tynda proper. He controlled a syndicate that ran the railways and kept a stranglehold on what little timber Tynda still had after the world had broken and turned its crown to ice. She berated herself for even thinking it, but rescuing this little boy could come with big rewards. No wonder these men wanted him.

  She should leave the boy, the men wanted him alive, after all, so he wasn’t in real danger. With the darkness to her advantage, she could get away. Toma would be ransomed, though hopefully better than whatever had happened outside that got those other men gunned down.

  “Ryska?” Toma said softly, as though trying to determine if she were still there.

  She bent over him and slid one hand into his hair and felt him sigh heavily with relief. His hair was tangled but soft and smelled warm and human, a little like bread left in the sun. Her fingers conjured the memory of another boy, another soft head of hair.

  “It’s blond. That means yellow, like butter.” Luka laughing as her fingers tugged on his hair.

  “I remember,” she said, trying not to sound petulant. She did remember some things from before the virus took her eyes. The domes of Kazansky Church, like fluffy blue and pink-red candy rising up against a grey sky. She even vaguely remembered the sky, a huge expanse of shifting colors above, blinking with stars in the darkness, deep and cold.

  “Now you’ll remember me, too.” Luka smelled like honey, probably from stealing packets from the Trainers lounge inside the Lab.

  Remember. Her fingers curled tight and Toma gasped, pulling away from her hand. She couldn’t forget. Not with their ghosts living in her heart like bright after-images of the stars she could no longer see.

  “Ryska?” he said again, this time with a little fear in his voice.

  The Lab was gone, their program shut down in a hail of bullets and screaming children. For a moment the skin behind her goggles burned as sealed tear ducts tried to bring tears to useless eyes that had long ago been removed. Her whiskers twitched and for a spare second the small red shape of the boy seemed to multiply and become two little boys huddled in front of her.

  “I’m here,” she said, unsure if she spoke to Toma or to Luka’s memory. “Tell me, quietly and quickly, what happened to get you here.”

  A shuddering breath from Toma and then she felt him shift and straighten, curling his knees into chest as he became an even denser red shape. She knelt beside him, her head turned toward the doorway so that she’d have maximum reception for her whiskers if the men came this way.

  “I was at school and then when Dimah picked me up she was scared.” Toma took another breath. “There was a strange man with a pock-marked face in the car and he wasn’t Grigori, my usual guard. He made Dimah drive out of the city, to this warehouse and then...” Toma broke off in a gulping sob and Ryska could almost taste his tears as he struggled to go on.

  “Dimah’s dead.” Ryska made it a statement, not a question.

  She felt him nod as he continued, “They held me in this room, six of them I think. Then they said they were going to take me to my papa but they shoved me in this trunk and it was really cold and dirty and they drove forever. We got here I guess and then the men took me out of the trunk and I was happy because I saw that Sergei was here so I thought maybe he’d take me home but then the pock-marked man argued with him and then everyone was shooting so I ran and saw you.” He pushed it out in a rush, his voice rising and then abruptly breaking off as he reached the end.

  Ryska rose to her feet. It was about what she’d suspected. No help would be coming for this boy anytime soon. The ransom or whatever it was had gone wrong.

  “Toma,” she murmured. “I need you to trust me. I’m going to get you out of here and back to Tynda.”

  “Why? Because of who my papa is?”

  The question and his slightly suspicious tone surprised her. She revised her estimation of his age upward and felt something akin to respect for the boy. He’d followed her without question up until now, but was mature enough
to recognize she had no stake in his survival.

  She debated for a second and then told him the truth. “You remind me of...someone I loved.”

  “Like your brother or something?”

  “Yes,” she said with a sad smile, “exactly like that.” And because of who his papa was and the reward she might get, but Ryska felt that the boy might take offense to that and she dearly needed his cooperation.

  “Okay,” he said.

  She reached down and felt along his rustling parka to his hand. “Come with me,” she said. She showed him by touch where the opening in the plywood was. “Crawl through there. It’ll be cold out there, but stay against the wall and don’t move, no matter what you see or hear. I’ll come back for you when I’ve dealt with those men.”

  “Are you going to kill them? You have a gun?”

  “No, no gun. Leave it to me. Just go out there and stay close and quiet.” Ryska held back the plywood as he crawled obediently through.

  Was she going to kill those men? She didn’t want to. The Trainers had always been disappointed in her when it came time for the hunting tests. She hated to even kill a rabbit and couldn’t imagine taking down a man like the Trainers said they’d have to someday. She hated the hot touch of fresh blood, the metallic taste of it, the slipperiness. She’d hunted out of necessity as she rode the railcars on and off making her away from where the destroyed