Episode Four: The Prisoner

The camp had a repair shed.

Roland noticed it before the guard tower, and hated how relieved that made him.

A stripped engine rested on blocks beneath its open front. Two people argued over a length of pipe. Behind them stood shelves of parts sorted into wooden trays. Whatever else this place was, somebody had lost an afternoon searching for a fitting and decided never to do it again.

He could understand that.

He understood considerably less of the winged creatures on the ridge, the aircraft beneath camouflage nets, or the red banner hanging above the gate. The banner bore a black bird with swept wings.

The broad soldier spoke to the gate guard. Roland caught only pieces: shore, machine, prisoner. The meanings arrived a moment after the sounds, sometimes too late to help with the next sentence.

He listened harder. His head began to ache.

Inside the camp, a woman in a plain apron cut the cord between his wrists while two guards watched. She rinsed his burn, examined his ankle, and pressed gently around his ribs. Roland answered her questions badly until she gave up and used gestures.

She wrapped his ankle, dressed the burn, and handed him water. When he reached to drink too quickly, she touched the cup and made him slow down.

He wanted to thank her. The word he tried produced a look of mild confusion.

Then she moved on to a soldier whose leg had soaked the bandage beneath it. Roland watched her kneel beside the cot and understood that his attention wasn't a luxury she could keep giving him.

The guards brought him to a stone room with one barred window. His coat and its contents went onto a table. He sat on a stool. The door stayed open until a thin man arrived carrying a notebook.

He had graying hair, watchful eyes, and a grease stain on the cuff of a dark civilian jacket. He looked at Roland's bandages before looking at his face.

The broad soldier stood by the door.

“Kaelen,” the newcomer said, pointing at his own chest.

“Roland.”

Kaelen repeated it once. He pointed to the broad soldier. “Droven Karr.”

Droven inclined his head without appearing pleased or displeased. Names. Roland held on to them. Three names were better than no purchase on the world at all.

Kaelen tapped the folded sheet from the coat. He asked a question.

Roland understood aircraft and a demand directed at himself. It might have been who flew it, where he'd got it, or why he'd brought it here.

“I don't understand.”

Kaelen asked more slowly. This time the meaning formed while he spoke.

“Who sent you?”

Roland stared. The lips didn't match. He heard unfamiliar syllables, but the question was as clear as if he'd been asked in English.

“Nobody.”

Kaelen's eyes narrowed. He wrote something down.

“Where did you take off?”

“I don't know.”

“Where were you going?”

“The beach.”

Kaelen stopped writing.

Roland felt how ridiculous that answer was and couldn't find a better one. “The engine was on fire. I saw the beach. That's where I tried to go.”

Droven said something. A report about the wreck, Roland thought, although most of it passed too quickly to resolve.

Kaelen listened, then pulled a second stool close to the table.

“You didn't understand at the gate.”

“I still don't understand everything.”

“But you understand that.”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

The last word had come without meaning. Roland shook his head.

Kaelen wrote again. “Interesting.”

The word reached Roland with several possible senses attached to it: curiosity, trouble, something requiring investigation. He couldn't tell which the man intended.

“Your accent changes,” Kaelen said. “Between answers.”

Roland looked at Droven. “Am I speaking your language?”

Neither man answered immediately.

He touched his throat. The sounds he'd made had felt like the words he'd intended. He couldn't recall them separately now.

“I speak English,” he said.

Kaelen repeated the name without recognition.

“I work in a museum. Aircraft. Old ones. I was moving an engine, and something broke.” His fingers curled into his palms. “I woke up in the plane. I don't know how.”

The silence lasted long enough for him to hear footsteps outside.

Kaelen picked up the folded sheet. “Read this.”

Roland took it. The letters remained unreadable. He turned the page as though angle might help.

“I can't.”

“You can tell me a complicated story but you can't read a transit authorization?”

“Apparently.”

“Convenient arrangement.”

“Not from here.”

Something moved at the corner of Kaelen's mouth. It wasn't quite a smile.

He drew a rough coastline in the notebook, adding small islands and a larger outline beyond them. His finger rested on one island.

“Here. Cinder Isles.”

Roland bent closer. “What's the country?”

“Which one?”

“The one we're in.”

“Depends who you ask and whether they have a gun.”

Kaelen's finger moved to the larger shape. “Columbia. Their army marks its aircraft ALS. You're wearing their flight coat and carrying their authorization.”

Roland looked down at the coat on the table. A patched hole showed near the shoulder. Someone had sewn it carefully, using thread a different shade from the cloth. Someone had worn it before him.

“Was there another person in the wreck?”

Droven shook his head. Kaelen watched Roland instead of the soldier.

“Why should there have been?”

“Because I don't know whose clothes these are.”

“You understand that this makes your position worse.”

“I understand you don't believe me.”

“Those aren't the same thing.”

Kaelen folded the sheet and put it away. “Foreign Legion. That is who has you. We need to decide whether you've fallen into our hands or delivered yourself.”

Roland thought of the woman treating the wounded man, the parts trays, the rifles aimed down the stream. Being alive here depended on what these people concluded about him.

“The aircraft was already damaged,” he said. “The left side of the nose. There was fire, and the ordinary fuel was separate from the blue line.”

Kaelen's pen stopped. “Ordinary fuel?”

“I shut off a pipe by my knee. The engine stopped. The blue line kept feeding a collar. I found another control for that.”

“You broke the injection shutter.”

“I think so.”

“Which direction did you move it?”

Roland demonstrated. Kaelen watched his hand, then asked about the controls, the smoke, and the sequence. These were questions Roland could answer without inventing a place he'd come from.

At the end, Kaelen closed the notebook.

“An engineer who can't read his own release papers. A pilot who can't land. And a man who learns our language while I'm listening.”

“I told you I'm not a pilot.”

“You made that very convincing.”

Kaelen stood. He spoke to Droven too quietly for the meanings to settle. Roland caught one phrase: the Swallow.

Droven's posture changed. “Who is that?” Roland asked.

“Someone who may dislike this story less than I do.”

Kaelen gathered the coat and notebook. Droven remained at the door until he had gone, then brought Roland a folded blanket.

“Sit,” he said, slower than before. “Wait.”

This time Roland understood both words as they were spoken.

He pulled the blanket around his shoulders. On the table where the notebook had been, Kaelen had left a wet thumbprint in black ink.

There had been no Washington on the map.