The Heat Reader

Note: The events of this short story take place in the year 1936 during the Second Italo-Ethiopian war. Its the first story in an anthology of short stories that deal with alternate history dealing with superhuman individuals.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

My name is Yohannes, and I am an Arbegna, a Patriot, in the resistance against Mussolini’s ferenghi. The Italians have been in our highlands for months now, bringing tanks and poison gas, claiming they will civilize us Habesha. I have spent two years in the rugged highlands of the Amhara region, ambushing their patrols and making their occupation as costly as possible. I trust only what I can feel: my rifle’s wooden stock worn smooth against my palm and the soil of my homeland pressing against my soles. Pragmatism keeps men alive in this war.

So when Commander Bekele pointed to a barefoot village girl barely fourteen years old and said, “She will guide us through Fascist lines,” I nearly laughed. But I had seen men shot for less than insubordination. I checked my ammunition, adjusted my pack, and fell in line behind this child who stared at the ground as though reading invisible footprints. Faith is a luxury for those not carrying rifles.

The dust was a constant companion, clinging to our skin, caking in our throats, and blurring the line between the scorched earth and the relentless sky. In this endless march across a land that was no longer ours, the only constant was the fear and the silence. As seasoned fighters, we had learned to trust our senses: the whisper of the wind, the glint of sun on metal, the distant scent of smoke. But my commander, a man older and wiser than me, had told me to trust something else: a young girl named Abaynesh. She was a mystery to us, a small figure wrapped in thin cotton, her movements possessed a fluid quality, like the mirages that danced on the distant ridges. She carried no rifle, no compass, only a small pouch and a gourd of water. The six of us, seasoned fighters, moved like ghosts behind her, but she was the only one who truly seemed to belong to the silence of this place.

The first sign of her strangeness came when the sun hung directly overhead, turning the rocky gorge we traveled into a furnace of reflected light. We were following a narrow, winding trail through a rocky gorge when she stopped so suddenly that I nearly walked into her slight frame. She didn’t look back at us, didn’t make a sound. She simply held her arm out, palm flat, a universal signal to halt. I peered around her shoulder, my eyes scanning the shimmering horizon for any hint of the enemy. Nothing. The gorge stretched ahead, empty and silent except for the faint whistle of wind through the ancient stone. Not a whisper of smoke from a distant cooking fire, not a single metallic glint, not even the disturbed flight of birds that might indicate recent passage.

“What is it, girl?” I whispered, my voice a dry rasp.

She shook her head, her gaze fixed on a patch of uneven ground just ahead. “They were here. The heat… it is a deep scar on the ground.”

I bit back a cynical laugh. A deep scar of heat? We were in the hottest part of the day, with the sun beating down on stone. The whole world was a “scar of heat.” But my commander’s words echoed in my head, and I signaled for my men to wait. Minutes stretched into an eternity. Just as I was about to dismiss her superstition and press on, a faint shadow appeared on the path ahead.

It was an Italian patrol: three soldiers in dusty uniforms, a sleek scout dog straining at its leash, and the glint of a machine gun mounted on a motorized vehicle. They weren’t coming toward us; they were heading in the opposite direction, their dust cloud still lingering in the air. The path they were on was the very one Abaynesh had told us to avoid. They were out of our sight within minutes, but the realization of how close we had come was a cold shock. Had we been ten minutes earlier, we would have walked straight into them.

The second time was even stranger. We were scouting a known ambush site, a place where Italian forces often set up landmines. Abaynesh walked with a different rhythm now, her feet moving with a strange, deliberate delicacy, her head tilted slightly as if listening to something only she could hear. I followed her, my heart in my throat with every step. She would suddenly step to the left, or take a wider path around a seemingly innocuous boulder. My men exchanged nervous glances, but no one dared to question her. We were all too aware of what lay beneath our feet.

I followed directly in her footsteps, my heart hammering against my ribs. Behind me, my men did the same, creating a single-file line of nervous fighters stepping only where she had stepped.

She stopped at a small rock formation and pointed. “They’ve been here. There is no warmth from their boots, but I can feel the change in the earth.”

I knelt and used the tip of my bayonet to carefully scrape away the dirt. A moment later, I found it: There, barely visible even when I knew where to look, was a tripwire no thicker than fishing line, connected to what I could now see was the metal rim of a buried mine. My blood ran cold. There was no way she could have seen it, not from where she was standing, not from a distance. The only explanation was the one I refused to believe. She hadn’t seen it; she had felt the absence of something normal.

By the third day, my cynicism had been completely worn away. We were not following an ordinary scout; we were walking in the wake of someone who perceived the world through senses that existed beyond normal human boundaries.

The final revelation came as we sheltered in a system of ancient caves. We had just settled into what I thought was a secure chamber when Abaynesh suddenly became alert in a way I had never seen before. Every muscle in her small frame went taut, and her head turned toward the cave entrance with predatory focus.

“They’re coming,” she whispered, her voice barely a breath. “Many of them. They move in a line, keeping close together.”

I heard nothing, but something in her certainty made me trust completely. She guided us deeper into the caves, through passages that seemed to branch randomly, until she finally led us into a narrow chamber that felt more like a tomb.

We waited in absolute darkness. Then, impossibly, I heard them: Italian voices echoing through the cave system, growing steadily louder. They entered our original chamber with casual confidence, their equipment rattling, their conversation echoing off stone walls. The smell of their tobacco drifted to us through the connecting passages.

For what felt like hours, they searched methodically. Their flashlight beams occasionally swept past our hiding place. At one point, they were so close I was certain discovery was inevitable.

Then, as suddenly as they had come, they left.

We remained motionless for another twenty minutes before Abaynesh finally stirred. “They were never truly hunting,” she said quietly. “They were going through motions, not seeking with purpose. When men hunt in earnest, they move differently.”

I stared at her in the darkness, trying to process what she had revealed. She hadn’t simply heard them coming or made a lucky guess. She had been reading something about them that was completely invisible to the rest of us, sensing their emotional state, their level of alertness, through some impossible sensitivity to qualities I couldn’t even name.

We reached our destination at sunset on the fourth day. As we finally rested around a carefully shielded fire, I found myself watching Abaynesh with wonder and unease that I couldn’t shake.

She sat slightly apart, her small frame finally at rest. Her eyes were closed, her face peaceful in the flickering firelight, but even in repose, she appeared to be listening to something beyond normal perception. In the dancing light, I could see the faintest movements across her skin, as if she were constantly responding to currents in the world that none of us could detect.

She was an enigma born from the desert itself, and I had been granted the privilege of witnessing something that challenged everything I thought I knew about human limitations.

As I settled into my bedroll that night, I knew that my understanding of the world had been fundamentally altered. There were people walking among us who were connected to the physical world by senses so profound they bordered on the mystical.

The world, I realized, was far stranger than any of us had ever imagined.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Link to next part: https://medium.com/@yazdanalikhan005/the-potters-testimony-bc15465b4783