Unsettling Futures - FICTION - The Acheulean Gift
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The Acheulean Gift was originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact's March/April 2021 issue. Many thanks to editor Trevor Quachri both for accepting it, and for giving advice on which New York City parks might most appeal to adolescents with a need for quiet.
Stone meets stone, the shock running up Jo's arms like close thunder. The chunk of flint, cradled in a fold of deerskin, fractures and splits.
"Is it a good one?" says Auggie. He's come up behind her, boots rustling the grass a little. It lets her know he's there, but doesn't break her concentration. Things like that are what makes him a good brother.
"Might be," Jo says, turning the flint side to side.
Mateo leans in from her left to see. He's been working on a Clovis point, chipping tiny stone flakes with a piece of deer antler. He pops out one earbud and bends down, and she can feel his breath, warm on her goose-bumped arms.
"Looks good," he says.
"Thanks," she says, nods at his spearpoint. "That looks great."
"It's just for fun," he says, setting it aside, picking up a flint blank from the Rubbermaid tub.
Half a dozen kids around the knapping pit are hammering away, shaping stones, tossing the larger bits into plastic bins. The trampled grass of the circle crunches underfoot, an abstract mosaic of flint and obsidian accumulated over three summers.
The scream of the camp's alarm shatters the quiet.
"Get down," Auggie says. His big-brother mode is gone, replaced with his camp director voice.
He doesn't have to say anything. Not to the Acheulean kids. The noise has torn a hole in the back of Jo's brain and let loose her panic mode.
She hits the ground by the log, ignoring for now the jagged chunk of rock poking her calf. She freezes. Her breathing is fast and steady. Every muscle is ready. If she feels the need, she'll sprint and hide again, her mind already cataloguing the nearby places of concealment -- a cluster of trees, an equipment shed, a patch of tall grass and brambles.
The alarm cuts off. In a clipped, urgent voice Auggie is demanding answers from his walkie-talkie.
Now that it's quiet, Jo can hear Mateo on the other side of the log, his breathing synchronized with hers. Around the knapping pit, they're all breathing to the same rhythm. All the Acheulean kids.
"False alarm," Auggie says. "We're doing a headcount, okay? But it's nothing."
Not the Children of Seth, then. Not one of the lone fanatics stirred up by some conspiracy website. Jo runs through a breathing exercise and her pulse slows.
Kim, Jo’s cabin counsellor, jogs up with Brayden, Jace and a few of the others to confer with Auggie. He draws them away and gives instructions punctuated with sharp gestures. Then he's back at her side.
"Jo?"
She straightens up, muscles shaky.
"I'm okay."
"Mateo? How about you?"
"I'm good, Mr. Gains."
Auggie goes around the pit, checking on all of them, one by one, as the hide-and-freeze reflex releases them. Then he's back at Jo's side.
Auggie clears his throat. "Walk with me?"
"What was that?"
"Not sure," Auggie says. "Probably turn out to be a bear trying to climb the fence or something."
She pockets the half-finished stone blank and follows him as he circles back towards the cluster of cabins.
He scratches the back of his neck and looks everywhere but at her. This isn’t about the alarm.
"Spit it out," she says, and punches his arm.
"Cyrus and Joyce emailed last night," he says.
Her face falls.
He pulls a printout from his pocket. She reads. She wants to go still as a fawn again, but there’s no hiding from family.
Her parents want to reconnect. Family therapy, Joyce writes. They've both quit drinking -- which Jo isn't sure was the problem, but couldn't hurt -- and they're 'recentering,' and a lot of other nonsense. The words orbit tightly around her parents -- they want, they need, they have changed.
Until the last paragraph.
We know we failed you. Cyrus and I are sorry. We know you have no reason to love us or even to like us. If you don't want to hear from us again, tell August and we'll cease contact.
"You're going to want to think about that," Auggie said.
"Nothing to think about," she says, shoving the letter back at him.
"Jo, this is serious. They were never like this with me. There were never any apologies, no…"
"You think they've changed? Come on!" She's shouting, other kids looking, but she doesn't care. "You didn't live up to what they wanted, so they made a new kid in a lab! And when I didn't turn out right… If they could have returned me to the clinic for a refund, they would have."
She hasn't seen her parents in almost three years. Not since family court, when Auggie won custody, leaving them gape-mouthed in shock next to their silk-tie lawyer.
"Not telling you what to do," Auggie says. "Just giving you the option. You okay?"
She puts a hand back in her pocket and traces the smooth facets of the stone, still warm from the shaping blows.
"Yeah. I'm fine."
When the chow whistle sounds, she wraps the stone in the deerskin and carries it with her, tucks it into her wooden cubby in the art building. The other nooks are full of similar projects, half-finished or completed. There are spear points and arrowheads and little flake scrapers and hammer stones. But most of them are as big as two fists, teardrop shaped, lethally sharp along their flattened edges. Acheulean hand axes. Jo thinks they look like like sleek alien spacecraft, ready to knife through the atmosphere.
But the only aliens here are the kids who make them.
Breakfast is huevos rancheros, buckwheat pancakes, organic juice, and talking about nothing much with Nattie. Mateo and Roddy sit down with them too, their conversation punctuated with snorts of laughter. Jo tries very hard not to stare at Mateo, and mostly succeeds. But when they're all scraping the last crumbs from their plates, Mateo looks at the girls. At her.
"Are you guys coming on the fishing overnighter?"
Nattie gives a one-shouldered shrug. "Maybe." Nattie hates bugs, and would spend all her time in the art room and the knapping pit if she could.
"Hope so," Jo says.
Mateo just nods, and smiles at her, and she smiles back, and barely hears another word.
After breakfast there's half an hour of chaos. Everyone is changing clothes, finding lost hiking boots, sun hats, keys for the boat shed. Jo hasn't mislaid anything, unfortunately, which means empty time. The email from her parents worms its way back into her thoughts, starts gnawing.
She can do something other than let them get to her.
The flint axe in the art room is almost done. It will feel good in her hand.
Stone therapy, they call it. It helps all the kids here. The knapping pit is never off limits.
Jo rolls her stone back and forth, measuring its weight and balance, feeling gravity tug its center of mass. She turns it to its unbroken side, and brings down the hammer stone.
The shape is emerging. This will be a good one, a proper hand axe. Genes lie at the core of her ability to make the stone, the unexpected gift the clinic left in all the modified children. It's as instinctive as a wasp's drive to build a nest. But Jo has enhanced her skill with long practice.
The modified archery range is empty. There are no bows or arrows here, just big heavy hay bale butts marked with red-circle targets.
The axe is sharp all around, nowhere to grip it hard. It lies cradled in Jo's hand, still warm from creation, like a living thing. She takes that hop-skip step forward, twists at the hips, and her arm swings out, a motion 1.4 million years old. The axe spins through the air.
The sharp edge slices through paper and straw, burying itself deep near the center of the red target.
If the archery butt had been a Pleistocene mammal, the axe would have cut hide and muscle, maybe chopped a sinew. The animal would have limped away, chased by a tribe of hominins, shock and blood loss dragging it to the ground.
Jo's never killed anything bigger than a trout, and doesn't want to. But making the axes feeds something in her. So does the throw, the twist of hip and shoulder that comes as natural as breathing.
Auggie is there again.
"Can I have a try?"
She shrugs. There are plenty of axes in the plastic pails by the range. Some kids make one every day.
Auggie holds the stone the way she's shown him, brows furrowed in concentration. He does the hop-skip almost right, but his release is off. His stone wobbles through the air like a startled chicken and ends up point-down in the dirt. No million-year-old genes to guide him.
"You're getting better," Jo says.
"Incorrect."
"No, really."
"I don't know how you guys do it."
"Neither do we," she says.
They throw together for a few minutes. He’s waiting, but she’s not ready yet. She can’t form her thoughts about her parents into words not wrapped in rage. Auggie lets it be.
Later that day, in the shade of pines by the lake, Mateo cradles a tablet in his hands. Roddy leans over from behind the bench.
Jo strips off her lifejacket and hangs up her canoe paddle. The muscles of her arms feel like old rubber bands. She and Nattie won the undeclared race back to the dock, and now they're paying for it.
Nattie catches her watching the boys, throws an elbow into Jo's ribs. "Plenty of room on the bench," she says.
"He's busy."
"Not too busy for you." Nattie's from New York, six months older than Jo and turning fourteen in September. She insists she knows all about boys.
And maybe she's seen how Jo was quiet all day, and has been trying to push her out of a black mood. Jo gives her friend a quick hug.
"Go!"
"You just love the drama."
"Yes! Feed Nattie more drama! Now get going!"
The late afternoon heat is intense, rising in shimmering waves from the rocky ground. The air is thick with the smell of pine sap and dust.
"What are you looking at?" Jo says.
Mateo looks up, smiles. Roddy rolls his eyes at his friend.
"Someone uploaded one of the doc’s old commercials, with outtakes. You ever seen those?"
She shakes her head. Mateo hits a button and the video skips back to the start. Jo sits down, shoulder not quite touching Mateo's.
It's Dr. Richard (Ree-shard, French, insistently pronounced) on the screen, familiar from so many repetitions of similar ads at the trials. Richard's neat beard is streaked with just enough grey to suggest gravitas. He's wearing a white lab coat over a blue denim shirt.
"I'm Dr. Quentin Richard. You have questions about the state of the world. About your children's future. About… fuck. You hold those cue cards like you hold your dick when you're pissing, for Christ's sakes! Again!
"I'm Dr. Quentin Richard. You have questions about the state of the world. About your children's future. How can you raise them to be good stewards of this planet when society, when the family structure itself, is breaking down? The bond between parent and child, of love and obedience, shatters under the weight of modernity."
An abrupt cut to a new shot, Richard in a mountain meadow, wearing a puffy vest and flannel shirt. A woman touches up his makeup. He shoos her away and stares at the camera.
"This is the world we were meant to inhabit, the natural environment, full of the joy of the moment. Once, humans were part of a circle of being with their fellow life forms. When humanity first crossed the Pyrenees, it was not as squabbling hordes, but as cohesive family units, bonded by an almost psychic understanding." He pauses, hands clasped. "Did we get the boom mike in the shot again? I swear to Christ…"
Another cut. The camera pans over cave paintings, bison and red-backed horses, rhinos with proud horns and flanks trailing thick fur.
"A decade of study has allowed me to reconstruct the genome that created that ancient society. Our ancestors lived in harmony with one another and with the world they depicted here, in artworks that would not be equaled until the Renaissance.
"When humans gave up the hunter-gatherer way of life, they lost those vital holistic connections. Genetic and social breakdown went hand in hand. But thanks to the miracle of modern genetics, the Acheulean Institute can again restore that lost balance for a new generation…"
Mateo glances over. "It's pretty much the usual pitch after that."
"It's actually less stupid than the ones than ran in California," Jo says. Those had leaned hard into the mystical side. Her mother had been a fan. At six, Jo had flung a deck of Zener cards out a second floor window to stop the daily drills.
Those memories used to always make her grab for a stone. She's had a lot of therapy, since she's lived with Auggie. The settlement pays for it. She can cope better now, with the crowds, the smells, the car alarms and horns. Fewer days spent cowering. Fewer panic attacks, chest so tight she thinks she's dying. She doesn't feel, quite so often, that every fast movement seen from the corner of her eye spells the end. She has techniques to help her cope.
But when things are really bad, the stones are still the best way. Hands work and the mind goes quiet.
"We've got a hike in ten," says Mateo, his shoulder doing an apologetic shrug. "You okay?"
She nods. "Definitely coming on that fishing overnighter," she says.
He smiles.
She's halfway to the pit when she sees the head on the post.
###
Auggie is not shouting. He's biting off every word into the phone, his fury contained like steam in a boiler. Jo can see the effort from her perch on his office chair.
"We have cameras. Yet no footage? There's nothing on the servers?" A pause. "Not since the alarm this morning. Well, what exactly are we paying you for if we can't even rely on your cameras when there's an alarm?"
The head sits on a black plastic trash bag in the middle of Auggie's desk. Nattie could have done a better job on it. She goes to a fancy boarding school in upstate New York and takes a lot of art classes. Knows how to sculpt wood with a chisel, even. This thing is just papier maché, still wet, slumping slightly to one side as it settles. It smells of glue and damp newspaper and poster paint.
It's an ape-man. Wide ears, broad mouth set in a pale muzzle, brown head. Grinning teeth divided by vertical lines pressed into wet paper with a popsicle stick.
It doesn't look anything like her. None of the Acheulean kids look any different from unmodified humans.
This is meant to show what they look like on the inside.
Auggie has hung up with the security company and is back with the sheriff.
"There has to be some kind of CSI thing you guys can do. Test for DNA or something. No, I am not an expert, that's why I'm calling you!"
"Auggie," she says. His voice is getting louder. He catches himself, returns a thin smile.
"I'm just saying, the campers are worried. The staff is worried." He thumbs off the phone.
"It's the Children of Seth, isn't it?"
"We don't know that. Hell, they barely exist anymore."
"Auggie, I'm not stupid." Bad with crowds, prone to panic in groups of more than thirty people, sure. Not great at spelling, but that's her ordinary human genes, nothing to do with the Denisovan and Neanderthal and Homo-but-not-sapien Dr. Richard tweaked into them as ova.
He shakes his head.
"Just doesn't feel like them," Auggie says. "Like, there'd be Bible verses attached to the head if it was them, or a pamphlet or something. They were never subtle."
They both remember the time someone doxxed her parents' address to the Children of Seth. Two dozen angry, shouting people had piled out of a van and marched up and down the sidewalk outside the mansion gates, every day for weeks. Auggie had already emancipated himself by then and moved out. He'd seen it on TV. But Jo had seen it from inside the house, head resting on her hands and looking out her bedroom window. From up there it had been little white rectangles bobbing on the far side of the pink stucco wall surrounding the yard. The shouting and chants had broken into fragments, just angry syllables carried on the wind.
"And it’s not an insider,” Auggie says. “We screened everyone. No one here is linked to those fanatics."
"Right. Why stick up a monkey head when they could have just torched our cabins in the middle of the night? Much more efficient."
"Ha ha, thanks for that nightmare." He sighs. "I'm more worried it could be an experiment." Auggie jerks a chin in the direction of the counsellors' cabins. "A lot of them came from universities. Anthropology programs, neurology and med school students. Psych majors."
"Someone wants to see, what, how we react under pressure?"
"Maybe. I try to filter out the ones that want to put you guys in mazes. There's a couple… I'm going to have a talk with the staff, when we're done."
"Auggie?"
"Yeah?"
"You're not going to cancel the fishing trip, are you?"
"Thinking about it."
"I was really looking forward to it, that's all," she says.
"Jo, even if it's just one creep with a messiah complex…"
She doesn't say anything. The image of flames licking at cabins was not entirely a joke.
But Jo is also thinking about last year's fishing trip. They pitched their tents just up from the sandbars, in the shadow of the pines. There was a lot of running around and splashing in the river and a lot of kids got their lines tangled on rocks or snags. No one caught a damn thing.
That night they'd lit a fire in a ring of stones on the beach, eaten chicken just a little too black on the outside. The sun had gone down over the western mountains. They'd sat by the orange embers and watched the moon climb the sky.
Mateo hadn't been there the year before. Or Nattie, there'd been a thing with her parents' divorce and she'd been in a hotel in Sydney with her mother and her mother's lawyers.
"If we don't go, they've won," she says.
"We win if you all live through the summer," says Auggie. "Don't look like that, please. No kicked puppy face allowed."
"I'm just saying…"
"I haven't ruled it out, all right? It's not officially cancelled. And it's not officially not cancelled. It's just…" He throws his hands up. "We'll be fine. The sheriff will take care of it."
He's camp director again, a hundred things to do. She gives him a hug before he's all the way out of big brother mode.
Outside, camp is still in semi-lockdown, kids moving in pairs only between cabins, nobody on the lake swimming or in the canoes. They've done this before. The last time was when one of the Children of Seth people tried to scale the entrance gate, two years before. He was just hanging a banner, but the sheriff carted him away for trespassing. They haven't been back since.
Unless they have. Unless they were more subtle. Slipped into the middle of the herd, poised to bring them down from within.
Jo imagines flames reaching for the black Montana sky. She imagines the smell of combusting gas and smoke in the middle of the night.
Is she afraid of fire because of some stray gene of Dr. Richard, she wonders. Or is that just part of being human?
###
Jo watches Mateo take his turn at the archery range. The point winds up embedded in the center of the straw butt, just below the paper target's bullseye.
"You practice at home?" she says.
"Nah," he says. "We live in the city. Nowhere to practice, during the week. I do some throwing when I go up to my grandparents' place, in Connecticut. They've got about ten acres."
He talks about his grandparents, about their big white house on a circular drive, about the horses. Most of the Acheulean kids come from money. Richard’s clinic was not a charity.
She takes her turn, and her good stone clips the edge of the center mark.
"You're pretty good," he says.
"I dunno."
"Practice a lot?"
"Since I moved in with my brother, yeah."
"He got a big place?"
She laughs, puts a hand over her mouth to stifle it. If she snorts when she laughs he'll never look at her again, not from under those thick black eyelashes.
"Sorry," she says. "No, Auggie has a little apartment. I sleep on a foldout couch. He got me a membership at this archery club, they let me throw."
"I thought your dad was some big Hollywood lawyer," Mateo says.
"Where'd you hear that?"
"I dunno. Around."
She's going to kill Nattie.
"I haven't lived with them in a while."
"Oh."
"They weren't happy with what they got, y'know?"
"I know about that," says Mateo.
"You live with your parents?"
"Yeah. They'd never say anything out loud. My dad, like, never talks about anything. But when I was little there was a lot of crying and yelling. And I went to a lot of different doctors, did a lot of tests. Sort the numbers, memorize what's in the box, do this VR sim."
Jo nods. She went on the rounds, too. They intensified after the Richard Institute closed down and the doctor vanished for seven months, pursued by subpoenas and arrest warrants. She'd been seven.
"Now they act like nothing's wrong," says Mateo. "But sometimes they look at me like…"
"Like they don't know if we're really people?"
For a second, he looks like he wants to cry. She reaches for another topic.
"How do you handle it, living in New York?" she says. "I can barely deal with L.A., and that's mostly just, like, cars everywhere."
"Headphones," he says with a grin. "Big noise cancelling ones. And sunglasses, ball cap, hoodie." He mimes pulling the brim low over his eyes. "I look like a terrorist when I go for a walk."
"That's it?"
"Carry my security blanket," he says, patting one of the hand axes sitting on the log next to them. "Planes are the worst. Can't take it in my carry on."
"I guess they frown on giant flint death frisbees, huh?" she says. He laughs, and she feels like she just climbed a mountain.
"Yeah. But the city, you can get used to it. Take breaks, get off the street, somewhere quiet for a while. Forest Park is nice."
"You ever…" She's never told anyone this, not even Auggie. Not even her therapist. "You ever pretend they're a herd of animals?"
He cocks an eyebrow at her.
"Like, you ever just imagine they're antelope or bison, just snuffling along, on their migration. Just dumb animals. And you're in the middle of them, just moving quiet, like they haven't noticed you yet?"
She feels stupid saying it. Until he nods, slow and solemn.
"Yeah, sometimes," he says. "Like you've just got to walk softly, so they won't see you. So they won't stampede."
###
They arrest the guy the next morning just south of the gate.
Auggie makes the announcement before breakfast starts. Police caught a trespasser at the fence the night before. Local, intoxicated. He didn't get more than ten feet onto camp property before he was stopped. There'd been a quiet stakeout, apparently.
Later, she walks with Auggie to the archery range again.
He holds the axe well, but his step into the throw is off, and it dives for the earth just ten feet in front of him. He retrieves it and tries again, this time getting a wobbling trajectory that misses the nearest butt by several yards.
"Do you need any help?" she says.
"You just want to show off."
"Being better than you is not showing off."
"I'm that bad?"
"It's pretty dire."
"Well, show me then."
She tucks the new axe in one of the big reinforced pockets of her shorts and chooses a different one from the pail. Arm moves, feet hop, and it's slammed edge-on into the butt.
"That's how a caveman does it," she says.
"Cavewoman," Auggie says. "Caveperson?"
"Acheulean-American," she suggests.
"We get the next census, I'm writing that in for you."
He doesn't ask if she's okay. They just throw stones for a while.
"I'm leaning towards a yes on the fishing trip," he says.
"Yeah?"
"I'm probably just being paranoid," he says. "They got the guy, right?"
"For once, you're right," she says. "We should mark this day on the calendar. Celebrate it every year. 'Auggie was right.'"
"Oh, I didn't say you were going. Everyone else."
"Everyone but me?"
"Literally everyone. Me, the counsellors, all the young campers, the cooks. You can just sit here and eat beef jerky and think about being nicer to your big brother who can't throw for shit."
"Auggie? Thanks. Seriously."
He puts an arm around her shoulders, and she doesn't shrug it off when some of the other kids walk by.
###
It's Nattie who catches the first fish, surprising her into squeals of laughter.
"Reel it in!"
"Help me!" she yells, and Jo braces the rod while Nattie remembers which way the reel goes. By the time they get the fish up and out of the water Mateo is there with a net. Nattie surprises them all by hitting it sharply in the head with a rock, then pulling out the hook.
Only three fish are caught, which is still a camp record. There are only twenty of the older kids, four counsellors on the sandbar next to the canoes and the beached zodiac. They build fire pits and set out grills and pans, and Kim supervises the cooking. Soon they're prying fine, glassy bones from the fish's flesh and eating it with plastic forks.
Jo closes her eyes to savor the last bite. It tastes like sunlight on cold water.
The sun is going down by the time they're done cleaning, and they do watch the moon rise over the far woods. It looks bigger than it does back in the city.
At some point, between Kim's campfire songs, Jo’s hand steals into Mateo's, and their fingers intertwine. They glance at each other, and he's smiling, and Jo suspects she's grinning like an idiot.
She doesn't want to sleep, but weariness hits her hard, and long before midnight Kim and Trace and the other counsellors shepherd them off to their tents.
Jo stays awake for a while, looking out through the mosquito-mesh window at the stars, listening to Nattie's soft snores and the quiet song of river over stone.
She wakes to screaming.
Feet flail at the side of the tent, shoe tread flashing past the mesh window.
Nattie sits up, blinking. Jo worms her way out of her sleeping bag and fumbles for her phone. No reception this far from the camp, but she wants the light.
Before she can find it, the tent's flap is unzipped. A flashlight pans over them.
"Nope, neither of these," a man shouts. He leaves. Ignores them.
Competing impulses compel her -- freeze and hide, or rush out to help the others.
She isn't sure which instinct is human, which is older.
She finds a flashlight, and so does Nattie. Without saying anything, their other hands close on stone axes, the blades held loose at their sides as they slip out of the tent.
Outside, it's chaos. Beams of harsh, white light slash the campsite. Other kids stand by their tents, ignored. Four or five men in black balaclavas move through the camp. They're dragging kids with their arms bound behind their backs. Declan, he's one of them, a year younger than Jo. They're taking Judith, too. She’s crying, hair plastered to her face.
And they have Mateo. It was his feet that hit their tent. Two men are holding him by the shoulders, but he keeps kicking, flinging his weight into the air, trying to break free.
One of the men lets go of Mateo's arm, jams something into Mateo’s side and there’s a sharp electric crackle. Mateo doubles up, slumps, clutching his stomach and gasping for air. They drag him again.
"Where's Kim?" says Nattie, and it's a good question. Where are Kim, and Trace, and Arne, and the other counsellors? Dead?
Or are some of them, Jo sickly suspects, wearing black masks and helping drag away four kids?
Someone inside the camp put up the monkey head. Someone shut down the cameras. Maybe the head was a distraction, Jo thinks. What else could you have done with the cameras off? Planted trackers on the camp boats, sent messages, accessed the office computers? Communicated with kidnappers eager to grab a few kids from very rich families?
These ideas come in a confused jumble, as the figures in black finish dragging Mateo to the beach. There's a boat there, a big Zodiac with fat, black, inflatable sides.
The stone is in her hand. From thought to action is just a fraction of a second.
Her arm twists, and her aim has never been so true. Her axe flies in a perfect arc, edges traced with starlight, and tears a ragged gash in the rubber hull.
The thump and hiss send the heads of all four kidnappers' heads twisting. A foot-long cell in the Zodiac’s side has collapsed. There's a burst of profanity. One of them raises a gun, the flashlight braced to one side, aimed straight at Jo.
"Back off, kid."
"It's too late," she says. She knows she's right.
All around her, an arc with her at the center, are the others. Twelve, thirteen years old, but in the starlight they're just a bunch of rangy dark shapes, arms loose at their sides, hands clutching black stone.
"Let them go," she says.
"I said, back the fuck off!"
But his voice isn't screaming 'predator,' in Jo's head anymore. She's scared, but the speed of her heartbeat is only half from fear.
They're all breathing to the same rhythm. All the Acheulean kids.
Nattie is next to her, and presses another stone into Jo's hand.
"You can't get away," Jo says. "It's over. Let them go."
There's a scuff of shoes on soil and another stone flies through the dark, another cell of the pontoon deflates. The half circle edges closer. Their prey is wounded, struck twice, its hide pierced. Jo half expects to see black blood clouding the river.
"Why do you think the next one will hit the boat?" Jo says.
The one with the gun -- the only one with a gun, Jo thinks -- pushes the pistol against Mateo’s face. Mateo is still groggy, leaning away from him.
A sob of fear rises in Jo's throat, and she pushes it down. She takes a long, shaking breath. Her hands quiver.
"If you kill him, you'll die here," she promises. "If you don't let him go now, you'll be trapped here. If you let them go, you get to leave."
"Go back to your tents!"
The gun moves, swivels away from Mateo to sweep across the group. Before he’s drawn it back to Mateo, Jo is moving. Twist of hip and shoulder.
The stone catches the man high in his chest, just under the collarbone. Lodges there with a wet crunch. Mateo stumbles free of his grip, the gun clatters to the rocks.
The other three kidnappers hesitate for a second. Around her, arms are raised, stones ready to fly.
The ones masked in black grab their wounded and retreat to the damaged boat. The engine roars and it wallows out into the river and away. They leave the campers, all of them.
They run check on Mateo and the others. With the sharp edge of a stone axe, Jo cuts through the zap-straps holding his wrists together. Then there's nothing to do but wait for dawn, and rescue.
###
Auggie doesn't want to let go. He's holding her way too tight.
"Air! I need air!" Jo manages, smiling, but he doesn't laugh. He does let her go, holding her shoulders, looking into her eyes, as if he has to check every five seconds that she's still there, still alive.
They're back at the camp office, and most of the police are gone. Word is they've picked up two of the kidnappers already, in a truck heading east towards the state line. Another was dumped at a rural clinic by his friends; he’s in intensive care with a collapsed lung and three shattered ribs.
They know who at least one of the others was. Kim was missing when they counted up the counsellors, the only one not hog tied and gagged with duct tape.
"Are you okay?" Auggie says for at least the twentieth time.
"I'm fine. Everyone is fine."
"If you need to talk to your therapist…"
"When I get back home. Yes. It's like, three days until the camp's over."
He leans back, not just looking at her now, but studying her.
"You really are okay, aren't you? Weren't you scared at all?"
"Of course I was!" she says.
"Tell me, Jo," he says.
"You'll think it's weird."
"No."
He will. She knows he will. And she can't quite put it into words yet. The feelings as they closed in on the kidnappers.
"I don't want to go back and live with Joyce and Cyrus," she says.
Auggie lets out a shaky sigh that's almost a sob, and she hugs him. She didn't realize how scared he was. "Stupid brother."
"They can give you things that I can’t"
"No. Nothing that matters,” she says. “But, I think I might go visit? See how they're doing. Maybe they are better."
"We'll call them, okay?"
“Yeah. Everything will be okay.”
She doesn't say the rest. It’s too strange to share with Auggie now. Maybe ever. She doesn’t tell him that when she’d brought down a human being with her axe, she’d been perfectly calm.
In the moment she had released the stone, she had tasted fire-cooked meat in the back of her mouth. She had envisioned a great beast heaving its final breath through blood-flecked lips. Had known where the sharp edge of her axe would split tough hide. Could feel the impact of flint on bone, hear calcium crack and scent marrow.
They had changed, from child-prey, fearing teeth in the night, to something else. Family. Adults. Hunters. Long ago, maybe, one word held all those meanings, bound tight as sun-dried tendon.
In that moment by the river, guarded by flint and kin, she’d found a sharp new tool within herself, as true and old as stone.
The Acheulean gift, at long last granted.
The End
Obligatory self-promotion corner
I posted earlier this week about how I think it's more anxiety-generating than helpful to encourage all authors to promote their work for Hugo awards season. But at least one person actually expressed interest in seeing this story, and with Curious Fictions sadly gone, it wasn't anywhere online anymore. So… here it is, my only fiction publication of 2021! I'm still pretty proud of it. I hope you enjoyed it too.
You can read a little bit more about the ideas behind this story at the Analog blog.
Remember, if you liked it, share it with your friends, preferably by creating a cave-painting adaptation of it in a crevasse in the depths of the French Alps and waiting 15,000 years for archaeologists to discover it.