(available in current Anthology, PANGAEA).
He emerged from behind a stand of sea stone, a lean and scarred but powerfully-built fellow with gray stubbled hair, a jaw too squared for the lines of his face, and a smile that revealed more teeth on the top than he was able to match on the bottom. Missing front teeth tend to make people look stupid, an unfair fact of life, but there was too much understanding in his eyes for me to make that mistake of him; his mind was working, measuring me and Partyka and reading our impulses as soon as we had them. He was barefoot. He wore a canvas shirt too large for him, the cords that were supposed to be tied across his chest frayed and dangling in a manner that suggested he hadn’t bothered to tie them for quite some time. His pants were similarly frayed at the ankles. The clothes had the greasy, transparent look clothing picks up when it hasn’t been cleaned, or changed, in a while. They were bright yellow, and as easy to identify to anybody growing up within sight of the prison’s lights as the sudden shadow of a predator would be to any little fish trolling the shallows in search of the detritus left by others.
Driven by shock, Partyka said something stupid and obvious. “That’s a prison uniform.”
“Nothing gets by you,” the gap-toothed man said.
We had not heard of any prison breaks on the mainland, where the great iron bells rung when a convict goes missing are loud enough to be heard here so far across the water. We had indeed never heard of any fugitive mad enough to flee not deeper into the interior, despite all the barriers that would stand between him and a successful flight to places where no one might know him. But there was no other reason for the man’s dress, for his smile, for the way his cold eyes measured us.
Partyka grabbed me by the wrist and tried to pull me back into the forest. But even as we darted for the trees, three other similarly-clad men emerged from the tree line, trapping us with the harbor at our back. One was a giant, with bulging arms and a gleaming forehead; another, who only came up to his chest, had the slack-jawed, semi-dazed gaze of the simpleton. The fourth was the most scared looking: a boy, not much older than us.
Somehow, I feared the simpleton most. He had the look of a man who smashed skulls and experienced bafflement when red stuff came out. But I headed in his direction, judging him to be the weak point in this four-sided cage. It turned out that if the creator had short-changed him in mind, she had given him compensating gifts in reflexes. He quickly shifted to intercept me, and I had to back off, as did Partyka. The net contracted, my promised and I left back to back, trapped animals surrounded by a closing pack.
“Don’t hurt us,” I said.
Their leader, the gap-toothed man smiled, showing rotten gums. “Now, why would we do that?”
(end excerpt)
Read PANGAEA to see how it turns out!
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