Kane Koanui's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Kane followed the ridge road at a crouch, keeping to the long shadow of the rock spine so the drones above would read him as stone. The enforcer with the yellow seven on its chest was somewhere behind him, sweeping the low country in a slow grid. He heard its hydraulics twice, both times far off. He moved when the wind moved the brush, and stopped when it stopped. An hour before dawn he found Unibot's tracks pressed deep into red clay, and then Unibot himself, standing under a leaning tree, waiting like a dog told to wait. Kane opened the back hatch and lifted the oilcloth bundle out of the coolant cavity. The three irons were still warm from the machine. He unwrapped them on the ground. Wood grips, steel needles, the faint circuit lines glowing under his thumb. He had the tools. He did not have the rite. That was the problem he had carried for a year and refused to say out loud. He knew the first mark. He knew maybe four strokes after it. The full sequence, the order, the prayers between each pass, all of that had been burned out of his family when the overlords came through. If he tried the ritual from memory he would cut a false pattern into skin, and a false pattern would shame the line worse than silence. He pulled the cyberdeck case from his pack and set it on a flat stone. He had loaded it with scans of every scroll his grandfather had hidden in the roof beams. Kane scrolled through cracked paper and faded ink until he found the passage he half remembered. It did not give the sequence. It gave directions. A cave, two ridges east, marked by vines that grew nowhere else on Heliox. The scripture called it the place where the first hand taught the second. Kane pointed east. Unibot lifted his head, red eyes steady, and started walking. Kane followed. They climbed through thorn scrub for two hours. The vines showed up before the cave did, thick green ropes spilling down a slab of rock that had no business holding that much water. Behind the vines, a low black mouth. Kane pushed the leaves aside and stepped in. The walls carried him. Petroglyphs ran from floor to ceiling in bands, each figure holding a tool, each tool held at a different angle. A great disc was cut into the far wall, rings of glyphs around a center point, the whole sequence laid out in order from the outer ring in. Kane sat down on the cave floor and started copying. He copied for the rest of the night. By the time gray light reached the mouth of the cave, he had the full pattern in his deck, stroke by stroke, prayer by prayer. He closed the case. Outside, somewhere down the slope, he heard the hydraulics again, closer than before.