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Chapter 12: The Woman in the Reeds

Chapter 12: The Woman in the Reeds

The spearhead stayed level with Leon’s throat.

He kept his hands open.

The woman came out of the reeds one measured pace at a time. She was tall by any standard he knew, still a head shorter than the body he had been wearing for under an hour. Dark hair divided into practical braids and tied close along one side of her skull. A narrow stripe of green mineral under her left eye. Layered clothing — woven fibre, softened hide, and a rain-dark mantle cut to break the outline of her shoulders.

Nothing about her looked improvised.

The spear was stone because stone was the material available, not because the woman holding it lacked skill. He had seen the flaking on the point. Somebody had spent a long time learning to do that, and somebody else had spent a long time teaching them.

Then came five or six words, clipped at the ends, built out of sounds he had never heard in that order.

"I don’t understand."

Her eyes narrowed.

He tried German. Then English. Then Japanese.

The spear did not become more conversational.

He touched his own chest. "Leon."

Her glance went to his hand, then to the knife lying on the root.

He pushed the knife further away with the side of his boot.

The spear tip moved toward the black cube against his chest. Not touching it. Asking about it.

Leon shook his head.

Her expression changed by less than a millimetre, and the message was perfectly legible anyway.

That answer was unsatisfactory.

A low bark came out of the ferns to the east.

They both turned. Charcoal feathers moved between the stems and were gone again. The Utahraptor had not chased the false distress call indefinitely.

The woman dropped her centre of gravity and made two sharp hand signs. Leon understood neither, but the second one finished with her pointing at a limestone rise north of the cache.

Move.

He lifted the knife slowly, put it back on his belt, and shouldered the day pack. She watched every part of that.

Then she turned and ran.

Running in the new body was worse than walking, and considerably more impressive to watch from outside.

The first stride carried him further than he had budgeted for. The second nearly tangled his own feet. By the fifth his nervous system had begun to accept the extra reach, and he could feel every foot strike arriving through mud and root and stone as a stream of load data his old body had never bothered to send him.

The scout moved better.

So he stopped trying to outperform her and started copying her instead. He shortened his stride where the roots narrowed. He put his weight on the dry side of the moss. He let branches come back slowly rather than announcing his route through the forest for anything within two hundred metres.

The improvement was immediate. She glanced back once, registered it, and changed pace without comment.

Her equipment carried the same kind of accumulated reasoning. Arrow shafts matched for stiffness. The woven strap across her chest distributed load without fouling the shoulder. Small shells tied near one pouch had been packed with fibre so they would not rattle. Even the spear haft changed thickness where her forward hand sat.

Leon had arrived with industrial knowledge stored across terabytes. She was carrying generations of field testing in objects no textbook had ever catalogued. The imbalance between them was not intelligence. It was climate.

She never forced a path. She flowed through gaps he only noticed after she had used them, stepped on roots instead of mud, went under hanging vines without touching one, and changed direction before the foliage revealed why she should.

Leon had degrees.

She had not died here.

At the edge of a reed bed she stopped so abruptly that he nearly ran into her.

She crouched and pressed two fingers into dark mud, then lifted them to her nose. The predator’s track crossed ahead of them, and it was fresh enough to still hold water in the toe marks.

Off her belt came a small bundle, crushed leaves and animal fat and something sharp-smelling wrapped in porous bark, and she threw it hard, far downstream of the route they wanted. Then a carved reed whistle went between her lips.

The sound was not loud. It was the nervous call of a small feathered animal that had recently made a mistake.

The Utahraptor answered from entirely the wrong direction.

She gestured. Leon moved when told.

They crossed the open mud one at a time and went into a narrow cut between limestone shelves, where the rock blocked sightlines and pushed the wind away from anything approaching. Only when they reached a ledge three metres above the valley floor did she stop.

Leon bent forward with his hands on his thighs. His lungs recovered fast. His heart rate came down faster than it had any right to. The body was extraordinary.

The fact that the scout was barely breathing hard remained educational.

One finger went to his boots, caked to the ankle, and then to the tear across his right trouser leg where a thorn had gone through the fabric. Underneath it a shallow red line had already begun to close.

Then she touched the green stripe under her own eye and pointed down at the valley.

Camouflage, Leon guessed. Or hunting. Or: I put paint on my face and you do not.

She pointed at the water pouch on his shoulder.

He took it off slowly. The spear followed his hands the whole way.

He drank one mouthful and offered it to her.

No. She smelled the opening, touched a single drop to her tongue, and spat it onto the stone.

The water had been sealed in Germany. It probably tasted of plastic and an impossible world.

Leon pointed at the valley floor, made a scooping motion, and then mimed being violently unwell.

She watched.

He held up the filter, then the pouch.

Her attention sharpened on the metal-and-polymer body of it. She reached toward the thing, stopped short of contact, and said one word.

"Keth."

Leon repeated it. "Kes."

She shook her head and said it again with the ending firmly in place. "Keth."

"Kesh."

This time she did not correct him — whether because he was close enough, or because she had already worked out how much of her afternoon this was going to be worth.

Tool, probably. Or made-thing. Or stupid stranger object.

He opened his notebook and drew three quick images: a stream, a stomach, a person doubled over. Then he drew the filter between the stream and a person standing upright.

Her eyes went to the page and stayed there.

Not at the drawing. At the graphite line.

She touched the edge of the paper with one finger.

Leon held out the pencil.

It went into her hand like a small awl. She tested the point against her thumbnail and drew a line on the stone, and her eyes travelled from the mark to the pencil and back.

Interest was competing with caution.

Caution won. She handed it back.

A scraping sound came from the cut below.

Tala moved to the edge and looked down, and Leon went low beside her.

The Utahraptor crossed the valley path underneath them. It stopped at the scent bundle, tore the bark open, and discovered that clever humans had supplied leaves instead of meat.

It produced a harsh coughing call that Leon would have described, in any other species, as swearing.

The woman’s mouth moved.

A smile. Very small. Entirely at the predator’s expense.

Leon experienced an immediate and completely irrational improvement in diplomatic relations.

The animal went south and did not come back. She waited another five minutes before she stood up, which told him something about the difference between his patience and hers.

Then she touched her own chest.

"Tala."

"Tala."

She tapped the braided reed cord tied around her upper arm. "Reth Aru."

The words were separated carefully, the way you separate words for somebody who is going to get them wrong.

Leon pointed at the cord. "Reth Aru?"

A head shake. Then she touched the ground and swept one hand toward the distant river.

A place, then. Or a people. Reed River, possibly. He wrote it down exactly as he had heard it, which he would later have cause to regret.

He touched his chest. "Leon Ren Falkner."

Tala blinked.

He said it again, slower. "Leon. Ren. Falkner."

She touched his chest three times, once per word, and then looked around the ledge as though expecting two more men to arrive.

Leon laughed before he could stop himself.

The spear came straight back up.

He raised both hands. "Leon," he said, pointing at himself. Then he pointed behind him, at a world she could not see. "Falkner."

Tala repeated the last one with difficulty. "Fal-kner."

Then she pointed at the valley and said something that ended as a question.

He understood the shape of it without any of the words.

Where are your people?

Leon looked down at the cube.

"Far."

That did not land.

He pointed at the horizon. Then further. Then up at the sky. None of it was correct, and all of it was a lie by simplification.

In the end he put one hand flat over his heart and pointed behind himself.

Tala studied his face for a while.

For the first time the suspicion made room for something else. Not belief. Possibly the recognition of a loss.

Then she saw the blood on the limestone.

Not his.

A dark streak crossed the lower path and went out through a gap in the reeds.

Her whole posture changed. She dropped to one knee, touched it, and smelled her fingers.

"Aru."

The word came out sharper than her own name had.

She pointed east, then made a sign Leon understood instantly — one hand gripping the opposite forearm, holding an injury still.

Another person. Hurt.

She looked at the medical pouch on his hip. Then at him.

The spear stayed in her hand.

But she turned her back on him and ran toward the blood.

It was not trust.

It was the first problem they both wanted solved.