"Brindlestar"

Left foot, right foot. Pause and listen. Left foot, right foot. Pause and listen.

Mira had learned the pattern of safely traversing Helfang Forest from her father, and even though she had no fear of being attacked by a giant leechlion or a Barbary raptor—not this close to Brindlestar—she kept to the pattern she had learned long ago. Her heavy moccasins slipped silently across the white forest floor, the snow clinging to the rough leather of both her feet and her breeches.

She heard a heavy sigh behind her. Jair, on the other hand, didn’t see the point of caution, and for every careful step she took through the woods, he scuffled two steps in the snow.

“This will take us forever, you know,” Jair said, his thin voice cutting through the silence of the forest.

Mira shook her head. “Jair, it’s a wonder you haven’t been eaten before this,” she said. “I bet every longtooth within thirty sectors knows that you’re coming.”

“Yeah, well, if we lived in New Athens like most people, we wouldn’t have to worry about longtooths, er longteeth.”

“Plural is longtooth,” she said. “Now let’s be quiet or you will be someone’s lunch.”

“Lunch? I’m hungry,” he said. “When do we stop to eat?”

“There will be plenty to eat when we get to New Athens,” she said quietly, still looking around her. “You haven’t been to a Brindlestar Festival before. Knowing how much you like to eat, it’s something you will never forget.”

“How old were you when you were at the last Festival?” he asked.

“Just about your age,” she said. “Now shush. We’re almost there, but there still could be wild things around here.”

“I’m not worried, not even if there was a specter around,” he said. “I’ve seen you shoot. You never miss.”

Mira glanced back at Jair and smiled slightly, then glanced at the bow on her shoulder. Jair was right; she never missed. But that didn’t make her any less wary. Being wary is what kept you alive in Helfang Forest. Father had taught her that, sometime before he had been killed himself.

Athena’s flivver dropped from the skies silently, invisibly, just a sector from New Athens. She smiled to herself as she thought how ironic it was. She was originally from a city that was her namesake, and yet she was here to take something that belonged to them.

The camoed flivver could hardly be seen in broad daylight. Here, in brindle light so close to the azimuth of the three suns that served this bleak planet, the flying vehicle could only be seen if you were standing on top of it, or if you had an electronic sensor, which she did.

Still thinking about her name and the name of the town, she looked up at the weak light of the three suns: Paris, the yellow dwarf that signaled the onset of a three-year winter; Hector, the gas giant that brought four years of scorching summer; and Achilles, the one people never thought or talked about anymore, the dangerous one. Even now, she saw its pale blue outline on the horizon. Achilles, the death bringer, the tower toppler, the wave crasher. Every child on the planet learned to pray that Achilles would be held away one more season. And for close to a hundred years their prayers had been answered. What they didn’t know—and Athena did—was that scientists had been the ones to answer their prayers. And the cost of answering their prayers had been a thermonuclear detonation.

It was still a couple of hours before the Ascension and the beginning of the Brindle festivities. Athena forgot about astronomy and focused on her job. She pressed a button on her Doppler suit and disappeared from view.