Episode Three: Behind Enemy Lines

The wet sand was cold enough to make Roland's hands clumsy. He needed shelter, but he couldn't yet put his full weight on his right foot.

He sat beyond the tide line and examined what he could. His ankle was swelling beneath a heavy boot. He loosened the laces without taking it off. A cut on his forehead had stopped bleeding. The left sleeve of the strange coat was scorched, and the forearm beneath it bore a red burn no larger than his palm.

His chest had hurt before he got into the aircraft. He remembered the engine crushing it. Now he could press his ribs and feel separate, ordinary places where the harness had bruised him.

No one survived being trapped that way merely by moving somewhere else.

He pushed the thought aside because the tide was advancing.

The wreck stood twenty yards away. Its cockpit remained above water, but smoke seeped from the nose. A small orange flame flickered within it whenever the wind changed.

He wanted to go back for something useful. A compass. A knife. A radio, if the machine had one. The fire decided for him.

He searched his coat instead. There were gloves, a length of soft cord, and a cloth packet containing two hard square biscuits. A small folded sheet carried the same hooked letters he'd seen in the cockpit. The only marks he recognized were three capitals beside a crude winged emblem.

ALS. He didn't know whether the coat was his, whether the food was safe, or whether those letters meant anything. He put everything back in its pockets.

“Hello?” he called toward the cliff road.

The shore offered surf in reply.

He'd seen chimneys. People had built the aircraft. Whatever the creature and its rider were, somebody had made a saddle for them. He needed those people more than he needed to understand the suns.

He stood using a length of broken driftwood. His ankle tolerated the first step and objected to the second. He took the third anyway, aiming for the stream. Its shallow channel cut a slope through the cliffs that might lead up to the road.

He had gone perhaps thirty yards when a sentence appeared in the air.

FOREIGN RESONANCE DETECTED.

Roland stopped.

The words stayed in front of him when he turned his head. They weren't on the beach. They occupied some closer place he couldn't reach by looking at it.

Classification unavailable.

Establishing interpretive framework…

He shut his eyes. The last line remained, thin and pale against the darkness.

“Who's doing that?”

Nothing answered. When he opened his eyes, the words faded.

He waited for more. A direction would have helped. So would an explanation. Neither came.

The crash, the coat, the impossible sky: he couldn't make them into anything coherent. The message at least implied he was foreign to something. That wasn't much of a discovery.

A stone clicked above him.

Three figures stood on the road. Two carried rifles. The third held a long pole with a broad metal point.

Roland lifted his empty hand. The driftwood was in the other.

“I'm hurt,” he called. “I don't know where I am.”

One rifle moved to cover him. Its owner shouted a short phrase.

Roland didn't understand. The figure with the pole began descending the slope. He was larger than the others, broad enough that the heavy coat he wore seemed an economy of cloth. Scars crossed his face. A row of small metal plates protected his throat.

He spoke again, lower this time.

The sounds were unfamiliar. Behind them, something in Roland's head supplied a meaning.

Stay.

It was a meaning without an English voice, more like remembering why a person had raised a hand. Roland stayed.

The soldier glanced at the driftwood. He shifted his grip on the pole, and Roland understood that waiting wasn't enough.

He dropped the wood. His ankle folded under him. He caught himself on one knee with a gasp.

Both rifles snapped higher.

“I fell,” he said, raising his hands again. “That's all. Please.”

The broad soldier gestured to the others without looking away from Roland. One went toward the aircraft. The second remained above the stream with her rifle steady.

Roland waited on his knee while the soldier examined his face, his coat, and the burn on his arm. Close up, the man's proportions were stranger than his size had first suggested. His hands were thick, his jaw wide, his movements economical. He looked human enough that Roland wanted the difference to be nothing more than a difference.

The man asked a question. Roland caught no meaning except a sharp attention directed at the coat.

“It was on me when I woke up.” He knew how that sounded. “I don't know whose it is.”

The soldier reached for his pocket.

Roland held still while the folded sheet was removed. The man opened it and studied the emblem. Then he looked toward the wreck and called to the soldier there.

The reply included ALS. Roland recognized the letters as a sound this time.

The broad man's expression changed. Not surprise. Confirmation.

He took Roland's wrist and rolled the hand over, looking at the scar, the clean palm, the small patches of grease beneath the nails. He examined the other hand as carefully.

“Mechanic,” Roland said. He mimed turning a tool, regretted moving, and stopped. “Engines. I work on engines.”

The soldier listened. Nothing suggested he understood.

Cord appeared in his hands.

“Wait. I won't run.”

He caught the meaning again when the soldier spoke: hands together. There was no explanation accompanying it.

Roland offered his wrists in front of him. The binding went on firmly, with enough space that his fingers didn't tingle. The man checked the fit and helped him stand.

Above the road, a huge animal shifted into view.

It had been lying behind a low wall. Now it rose onto two powerful hind legs, balancing a massive head with a tail longer than a car. Its scales were dark gray. A leather harness wrapped its torso, and baggage hung from either side.

Roland stopped breathing for a second time that morning.

This one didn't have wings. The man with the pole watched his reaction. Then he offered his shoulder.

Roland stared at the animal, at the rifles, at the cord around his wrists. Resistance wouldn't take him anywhere he wanted to be.

He accepted the help. At the road, the soldier steadied him beside the wall. The armed woman brought a short ladder from the animal's baggage. Roland realized they intended him to ride.

“That isn't necessary,” he said weakly.

The animal lowered its head and sniffed his coat. Warm breath stirred his hair. Its eye was a deep yellow with a round, dark center. Something wet clicked at the back of its throat.

The broad soldier placed himself between Roland and the teeth. He said a word to the creature, touched its neck, and waited until it backed away.

Only then did he guide Roland up the ladder.

The saddle had no convenient place for a prisoner. Roland sat on a rolled blanket behind it while a second cord secured him to a handhold. The soldier climbed in front of him and lifted the pole into its bracket.

When the animal moved, every step carried them farther from the wreck.

Roland looked back once. The tide was inside the cockpit now. Smoke drifted over the water, and the first thing he'd tried to understand in this world was already being taken apart.