Текст книги "The Rift"

Автор книги: Chris Howard

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I came to a junction full of steam, then cut in the direction the steam blew thickest. It led me to the cave full of mud and algae and the saplings. The place the Healer worked her magic best.

I slipped inside the cave, my feet shuffling on the wet rocks. Had to wait till the hot mist cleared, but then I spotted them. They were deep in the wet gray mud, up close to the saplings, and the Healer was helping Crow get low in the pool. His bottom half was submerged by the time I reached them. The mud boiled and spat at his chest.

“What you looking at?” Crow grumbled, seeing me over the Healer’s shoulder.

“How’s it feel?” I said.

“Burns like fire.” He winced as he sank further into the slime.

“No pain, no gain.”

“Them the words you live by, little man?”

“Little man,” I muttered. Why couldn’t he just use my damn name?

“Maybe I should call you Tree King, eh? I seen you, top of that ridge. Took a big old leap of faith, no? Dropping off the mountain to take care of your trees.”

“Can’t say I planned on it.” I couldn’t tell if he was being serious. “But I guess you think that was stupid.”

“Nah. Give yourself a break,” he said. “You can’t be brave without being a fool.”

I glanced at the Healer, and she was beaming away like she usually did, though there wasn’t much hope she could understand a word me and Crow were saying.

“Fix him?” I pointed at Crow.

“Rest,” the woman said, helping him lie back so his body was floating in the mud but his head was supported.

“Better follow the doctor’s orders,” I told him, sitting on the rocks beside Crow as the Healer splashed out of the pool. “Though you are missing one hell of a shindig.”

“Shindig?” Crow closed his eyes. “You ain’t seen a thing till you seen Waterfall City.”

“I been there, remember? We built for those Rastas, my old man and me.”

“You might have been to Niagara. But there’s no chance you been in Waterfall City, not all the way. The ground in there’s too sacred. Crow will take you, though. He’ll get you inside. Before all this is through.”

“Except I ain’t going nowhere, remember?”

“The parties,” he mumbled. “You never seen nothing like it. And the women.” He opened his eyes for a second. “You never knew something could look so good.”

“I seen your Soljah women.”

“Not the one I’m talking about.” He was drifting off. Heading for sleep. “I’ll take you there, though. Someday. You and me. And the trees.”

“Told you,” I said, loud enough to keep him awake. “I ain’t leaving here.”

“Oh, I know what you said.” Crow pried one eye open and fixed it on me. “Some foolishness about this hole in the ground being Zion.”

“Let me see—it’s safe, plenty of food and water. No one starving. No one trying to kill us.”

“Not yet.”

“Look at this.” I scooped up a handful of algae. “Down in these caves, they got wild things still growing. What? You don’t like the smell?”

“I like the mammoths.”

“There you go.”

“Riding on its back, felt like I had real legs again.”

I wondered if that’s what had gotten his spirits up. Because Crow had been holding us back on the way up the mountains, slowing us down in the snow and ready to quit, but now he sure seemed fired up to keep moving south.

“They can heal you.” I pointed at the Healer as she tended the saplings. “She can work magic.”

“Maybe. But that’s no reason to stay here. There’s a whole world be needing those trees.”

“You mean Niagara needs them. Your world.” I stood up. “Not mine.”

I felt the Healer’s hands on me as I pushed through the steam and made for the exit. When I spun around, she was right there at my side. Hard to look in her eyes, though, all of a sudden, as if she was building some sort of wall to keep something from me.

“Must come,” she whispered, tugging at my vest. “You must see.”

“What about him?” I shrugged back at Crow.

“He rests.”

I lowered my voice. “But you can make him better. Right?”

“Come,” she said again, and I realized she’d lost all trace of her smile.

The Healer led me inside some sort of vault full of old world salvage. Cave stuffed with junk the Kalliq had rustled up from the depths or pried out of the ice. Hell if I know where they’d found all of it, or what they wanted it for. It was good scrap for tree building, but not worth burying in the ground.

The Healer found a flashlight on the floor and poked it around the place, illuminating the wreckage of a forgotten world. I couldn’t figure the rhyme or reason to what it was they’d collected. Some stuff was so rusty, I couldn’t even tell what lay underneath. There were old game machines and speakers, a fleet of motorcycles. Engines without cars, and cars without engines.

“What is all this?” I said, feeling the Healer’s eyes upon me. “What is it you want me to see?”

She took my hand and led me deeper into the tomb, following the beam of her flashlight as it danced upon the iron and copper, the steel and chrome. Damn fine salvage, some of it. Pop would have rubbed his hands together and called it the jackpot. Was a time I’d have done the same thing myself.

The vault was wider than I could see, and many times longer. We walked all the way down to the deepest-dark end. Then the Healer had me stop in front of what looked like a makeshift coffin, a box nailed together out of corrugated tin.

“Hold,” she said, handing me the flashlight. She got down on her knees, unfastening the hinges that latched the box shut, and when she peeled back the lid of that coffin, I damn near dropped her flashlight.

There was a woman in there. I could see the whole body. Her shoulders, her hips, and her legs. I could see her belly and face, her hands at her sides. All of it preserved, and solid as stone.

But it weren’t stone. It was wood. Knobby and thick and channeled, everything covered in scaly bark.

I sank down to my knees, slowly illuminating the dead woman with the beam of the flashlight, one piece of her at a time. And she was dead, all right. All the way through. There weren’t nothing growing. Nothing green or breathing.

“Who is she?” I whispered, glancing at the Healer.

“She is poison.” The voice came from behind me. I spun around with the flashlight and found the Speaker, scowling amid the junk. The woman turned to her sister and spat words in her own language. But the Healer just stayed crouching beside me, still staring down at the dead thing in the box.

“It is disease,” said the Speaker.

“No.” The Healer got to her feet and fastened the lid to the coffin back in place.

“It killed her.” The Speaker stepped closer, her eyes drilling holes into mine. “It is death.”

“Where did she come from?”

“She arrived here. Starving and injured. Wearing this.” The Speaker strode past the coffin and rummaged at the stacks of old scrap behind it until she found a fuzzy GenTech suit. Then she pulled out a long piece of plastic—a crappy white sheet, just like the ones GenTech had thrown over us when they’d dragged us to Promise Island.

“So she escaped,” I murmured, staring down at the closed-up tin box full of GenTech meddling.

I tried to imagine what the woman had once looked like, where she’d been from, who she had been. Now she was just a relic. A refugee of a warped experiment.

“When?” I said. “When did she get here?”

“Almost all seasons have passed. She came like you, in winter. Before the world melted last spring.”

Had she been one of the people my father had saved? Had she been set free by my old man before he got wrapped up in chains? Must have been. Hell, maybe she’d been one of the first to flee Promise Island after Pop’s uprising got started. Maybe she’d escaped with that old Rasta, the one me and Zee had stumbled upon all the way back at the Surge.

I thought about that old Rasta, the bark stitched on his belly.

“How’d this happen?” I asked, staring at the coffin, picturing the dead body inside.

“She was normal.” The Speaker tapped at her face. “Same. Here.” She pointed at her belly, then her arms and her legs. “Here. And here.”

“No bark?”

The woman turned around. Jabbed a hand at her mid-back, right near her spine. “Disease,” she said, turning back to face me.

So she’d been patched up. Patched with bark, like the old Rasta near the Surge had been. Fixed with GenTech science. Like Crow.

Like Alpha.

“Then what happened?”

“It spread.” The Speaker glared at me like the whole thing had been my fault. “In the spring.”

“Spread?” I said. “The bark spread?”

“Yes,” the Healer said softly.

The Speaker drew a line from her mid-back till it wrapped around her hips. She traced her fingers over her torso until her hands found her neck and her face. And then she made a strangling motion, covering her mouth and gouging at her eyeballs, squeezing her nose shut and plugging her ears. When she let her hands drop to her side, her face had turned brittle and breathless.

Just like drowning, I thought.

The bark would spread and pinch and seal you inside it. Then you’d drown, surrounded by the air you could no longer breathe. And the people you could no longer touch.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I ran out of that vault and sprinted blind through the steaming black tunnels.

The spring, they’d said. The woman had come, wrapped in purple fuzz and white plastic, and when the world began to melt, the small patch of bark on her back had spread. Like a disease.

I tried not to picture it. But I couldn’t stop the vision putting its claws in my heart. I grew thick inside, like the bark on that dead woman’s body, and the image stiffened inside me. Choking me as it poured down my throat.

I imagined Crow stood tall in the springtime, the bark from his legs wrapping up his waist and then strapping itself to his chest. It would coil around his lungs and fuse itself together, stitching his mouth shut as his arms fell like heavy branches.

No idea where I was running now. I just pounded on through the tunnels, shoving aside the merry Kalliq who bounced along and got in my way. The steam in my eyes. The stench of mammoth shit wafting up to greet me. It all made me feel so useless and sick.

I reached a junction I recognized, but I couldn’t go that way. Couldn’t face Crow.

And I couldn’t even think about Alpha.

I knew what it’d be like—the drowning. I knew that feeling all too well. Something clogging you up and cramming your insides. There could be nothing more wicked and no worse way to die.

Suddenly, I was crashing out of the tunnels and back into the bottom of the crater. The party had ended. The Festival of Lights all but burned out. Folks were fading into the holes in the rock, done for the night, and I glanced at the ledges that wound out of the earth above me. I saw stars, but no sky lights flashing. And too late, I turned back to the mud. Too late, because she’d seen me. I heard her hoot and holler, and then my pirate girl was running down the rock ledges towards me. Until she ran straight into my arms.

“Where’d you go?” she yelled. The music had stopped, but Alpha still seemed to be dancing. She reached her hands towards the sky, and she beamed and rolled her head back as she brought her arms down around me. I could feel her breasts shaking through the fur she wore. Her flesh warm and wet. She kissed me, and she tasted so smoky and sweet.

But I was numb. Cold. Like I was the one who’d turned solid.

Alpha pulled at me, easing us together.

“What’s wrong, bud?” she said.

I shook my head.

“This about Kade?”

Guess my head shook some more. Hell, I don’t even know.

“He’s all right, and that’s all. You don’t need to be jealous.”

“I ain’t jealous,” I whispered. I glanced around at the stragglers who had yet to retire. Too-tired angels. Eyes half closed and dreaming.

“So you want some privacy?” she asked, a sly look on her beautiful face. And her skin was so radiant. So perfect. And so precious to me.

She was too juiced up to see the panic eating at my insides. “Come on,” she whispered. “I know just the place.”

As we walked, Alpha tugged off her furry jacket and made me swap it for the shaggy pink vest they’d given me.

“That’s more like it,” she said, pulling the vest on, and she looked so much like she used to. Like she had when we very first met. And that crazy vest looked gorgeous on her. It killed me. I mean, I should have laughed. Should have laughed so loud that I howled at the moon.

Couldn’t even force a smile.

She led me upwards. Higher. Around and around the inside of the crater. We walked without speaking. Her hand in mine. Alpha hummed the tunes that the steel drums had been playing, and her voice sounded so pretty, it smashed a hole in my heart. I wondered how much longer she’d be able to sing and talk to me. How much time did we have left? Months? Weeks?

Till the spring, I thought. Just like before, when I’d been searching for Pop. I’d had until springtime. Only I’d found Pop early, and had still been too late.

When we climbed out of the crater and into the night, the strange world greeted us in silence. I stared up at the black sky and the distant stars, and I glanced at the frozen trees I had made. The branches had lost their sparkle and were so easily broken, and I knew they were just faking at something. Just holding on to what was not meant to last. Because in the spring, these trees would melt and they’d vanish, and just be a tale to be told.

But I remembered how this place made things whole again—the silvery mud had fixed me and Pop, flesh wounds and saplings. It had healed us, this Burning Wheel medicine straight from the earth.

The Healer could figure it out, I thought. Clutching for some hope to hold onto.

Yeah. She’d work it out. We just had to give her enough time.

Alpha pulled me into the trees, and we huddled beneath the canopy of a shimmering oak. Our breath puffed white, the air coarse and cold, but I was sweating against the thick fur on my skin.

“They’re stunning,” she said, staring up at the brittle limbs of the ice-carved trees. “Every one of them. Metal forests, ice forests. And next, it’ll be the real thing, right?”

She turned to a tall spruce, ran her hand at its frozen needles. “What kind’s this?”

“Evergreen,” I said. “Means it stayed the same through the seasons.”

“You build any fruit trees? Apples?”

I shook my head, and she turned to me, her hand finding mine. “I don’t want you to stop building, you know, even if there are real trees all over someday. You can’t ever stop.”

“Like anyone would give a damn if I quit.”

“I would. I couldn’t stand it—it’s a part of you, Banyan. A part that’s so special to me.” She leaned in close, shutting her eyes and lifting her face to the thin light of the moon, and the rays caressed her cheekbones and the tops of her shoulders, and I knew she was nearly as beautiful as the world was cruel.

“Aren’t you gonna kiss me?” she whispered.

When I opened my mouth, no words came. Our lips touched instead, sealing the words inside me, and as I kissed her, the words seemed to writhe in my gut. Because I’d meant to tell her. That had been my first instinct. But then I reckoned this was my burden, an ugly cross I should bear by myself. It was the least I could do, to protect her from knowing. I would keep her close by me, and try my best to snatch us ahold of some cure.

She pulled me towards her. Tighter. Pressing her body against me. She was so soft and so warm in the cold sharp night. And when she tugged open her vest, the moonlight slipped down her body.

It should have been everything. It should have felt like every dream I ever had, coming true. The huge moon and bright stars, the trees and mountains. Two hearts beating, and two bodies moving as one. My hands on her hips. Suddenly knowing what I was supposed to be doing, feeling such purpose. It should have been perfect. But it was ruined. Twisted and tainted. As if the purple fist of GenTech probed in my belly, snatching out all my goodness and switching it for spite. GenTech and their backwards science. Their power to give life and then steal life away. This was their fault. All of it. And I should never have hunted them trees to begin with. I should have stayed in Old Orleans and just been happy only ever wanting this girl.

I kept kissing Alpha until I was drunk on her kisses. Until my brain quit hurting and my heart slowed down. And my mind grabbed hold at that one thought before it drowned in all of them. The one thought that just might keep me afloat.

I thought of the Healer and her moss and mud potions. There would be a cure, and she’d find it. It had to be so. If this was a disease, we’d make a remedy. And I’d not lose Alpha. I swore that inside me, right next to the secret that made me so heavy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I woke up the next morning to a kick in the shins.

“Come on, hotshot,” Kade said. He was standing above me, and Zee was stood right beside him. “They’re waiting.”

“Who’s waiting?”

“Your friends,” he said. “The old fossil and the rest.”

I stood up, uncoiling my limbs from Alpha’s. The two of us had been sleeping in the cave I’d started to call my own, and I stared down through the steam at her, wishing I could shut down and start over.

But this nightmare weren’t one that let you wake up.

“What do they want?” I said.

“Called a meeting.”

“Who? The Elder?”

“Not the Elder.” Kade stuck his thumb at his chest. “Me.”

“Well, you can go on without me. I got nothing to say to you.”

“It isn’t me that wants you there. It’s them.”

I spotted Crow in the corner, leaning on the wall.

“You in on this, too?” I asked him.

“We just been talking to them,” Crow said.

“Sure you were. Without me.”

“What’s going on?” Alpha stumbled up, all bleary-eyed as she got to her feet.

“I don’t know,” I said. “No one’s telling me a damn thing.”

Folk were bunched around the mud pit and had started to line up along the rocky steps and ledges. Reminded me of the party for the North Lights, the whole tribe crowded inside the crater, except last night, everything was music and dancing, and now the place was silent and still.

The five of us stood huddled together, half blending in on account of our shaggy fur clothes, and half sticking out like the sorest of thumbs. I mean, every eye in the place was upon us, everyone wanting to see what was about to go down.

I was mighty curious myself.

The Elder entered from one of the side tunnels. She was flanked by the twin sisters, and all the Kalliq got clear out of their way.

It weren’t just those three women that got folk moving, it was what the Healer held in her hands—the seven saplings, bundled and wrapped with thin copper wire. And the clump of Pop’s remains at the base of them was all plastered in mud, shrunken to the size of a child now, deformed and fibrous and tiny.

I found the Healer’s eyes, and she smiled at me, her gaze soft and warm as a sunbeam. Them saplings were really looking like trees now, I thought. Young trees, still little, but nearly three feet high.

When the three women were stood before us, the Elder began speaking, slowly clicking and tutting in her strange native tongue.

“Earth is living,” the Speaker translated. “Living thing, like a mammoth. Like human or tree. It breathes and suffers, shivers and screams.”

The Elder stooped to the rocks and pounded the stone with her gnarled old fist.

“It has been shorn and beaten.” The old woman smoothed the stone with her wrinkled palm as the Speaker continued. “Yet still, it breathes. And so the Wheel turns.”

The Healer stepped forward and carefully placed the bundle of skinny trees at my feet.

“The Elder wishes you speed on this journey,” said the Speaker, as the old crone straightened up her crumpled body and looked me straight in the eyes. “She asks the Lamplight to shine on your quest.”

“Quest?” I said. “Hell, I’m all done questing.”

I’d thought the place couldn’t get more quiet.

Crow started to say something, but I cut him right off.

“The way south is blocked,” I said, spinning around to face him. “You all said so.”

“But there’s another way.” Kade stepped in front of the others, like he was shielding them from me. He pointed at the Elder and the twins. “Your ladies here told me all about it last night.”

“And where was I?”

Kade glanced at Alpha, then winked at me. “You were busy, bro.”

I turned to look at her. “That’s what it was all about? Keep me busy so Kade could talk you a way out of here?”

Alpha pushed past Kade and walloped me, smack in the mouth. “How can you say that?”

“You all tricked me.” I wiped a little blood off my lip.

“No, we didn’t,” she said.

“Come on,” Zee whined. “Banyan. It’s time to go home.”

“Home?” My voice echoed back at me, but I yelled even louder. “I ain’t got nowhere to go back to. And neither do you.”

Crow shook his head. “Other people need those trees, man. Just as much as you do.”

“Don’t tell me what people need.” I glared at him. “You’d all be dead if it weren’t for me.”

“Easy, bro,” said Kade.

“Shut up, you stumped junky bastard.” I turned to him. “I’m sick and tired of you getting your digs in. And I don’t give a damn if you think you’re better than me.”

“Don’t call me that,” he whispered, his eyes turning to tight little holes.

“We all just damaged goods? That it, Banyan?” bellowed Crow. “And now you got yourself a new family?”

“Family? That’s a joke. Hell, I’m the one made sure this lot didn’t leave your ass in the snow.”

“That ain’t true,” snapped Alpha. “You know that ain’t true.”

“And maybe we should have left you,” I told Crow. “You were the one wanting to quit, after all.”

“Pull yourself together,” Alpha said.

I wanted to tell her about that piece of bark on her belly. The disease that would spread in the spring. But I couldn’t say it. I had to keep her from knowing. I had to keep her safe, and to do that, I had to keep her right here.

“I’m tired,” I said. “So tired. Killing and dying and nothing but trouble.”

Kade’s disdain flashed in his eyes, and he turned to the others. “Then let him stay here, if that’s what he wants.”

I took a step towards him. “And what? You think I’m gonna let you take the trees?”

“Not all of them. Hasn’t your big brain worked it out yet?” He nodded at the Elder. “We’re leaving one with them. Trading them. A mammoth for a tree.”

My feet froze solid on the stone. “You got no right.”

“And what gives you all the rights?”

I glanced behind me at the Healer. Then I turned to Alpha, took her hands in mine.

“But you gotta stay here,” I pleaded. “You have to stay here with me.”

“No, bud. Please don’t.”

“I need you.”

“I can’t.”

“You’ll die,” I said, then I stared at Crow. “You will, too. You gotta stay here with me now.”

“What is this?” said Kade. “Come on, leave them alone.”

“I promise.” I turned back to Alpha. “You’ll not make it.”

Kade tried to push past me, reaching for the trees, but I shoved my shoulder into his chest, driving him backwards.

“Why won’t you stay?” My eyes begged Alpha’s.

“Why won’t you leave?”

“I love you. You know that.”

“Then come with me,” she said.

“No.” I punched Kade in the gut, getting him away from me. “You have to trust me, Alpha. You have to let me take care of you.”

For a long moment, her eyes dug inside mine, like she was sorting through each thought in my head.

“All right, bud,” she said. “If that’s what it takes.”

They all looked as surprised as I was. Even Kade was taken aback. And I just stood there, breathing hard, my face flushed, with Alpha stood right beside me, taking my hand in hers.

But what about my sister? I’d said I’d keep her safe. Get trees growing around her. And what about Crow?

I stared up at him, but he shook his head at me, and then looked away.

“Sorry, man,” he said. “Guess I be seeing you in the next one.”

“You think you can walk out of here? You should stay, and you know it. They can heal you.”

“I don’t need to walk out of here,” he said, making a sad smile. “We get a mammoth, no?”

“That’s right.” Kade straightened himself up, his eyes like poison. “And let’s get on with it, shall we?”

I glanced at Zee, but she wouldn’t look at me. She just shuffled closer to Crow, leaning against those tree-legs of his as he reached down and put his hand on her shoulder.

So that was it. They were leaving. They were going to keep on without me, and keep on with Kade. Hell, I wasn’t the one who’d found a new family—they were the ones replacing me, and they’d probably never look back.

“We trade?” said the Speaker, and I spun around to face her.

“There’s a way for them to go?” Screw them, I thought. Screw both of them for selling me out to some junky. “They can head south?”

“We show you.” She nodded. “After we trade.”

I stared down at the clump of trees on the warm rocks before me. Then I glanced at the Elder’s huge eyes, the map of lines on her face.

“Kalliq will trade you one mammoth.” The Speaker held up a single finger and pointed across the mud pit at a half-dozen of the critters. They were lined up in a corner, their purple fur bright in the shadows. Then the Speaker held up her other hand and pointed at me. “You will trade us one tree.”

I stared down at the saplings. I swear the quiet in that crater rippled across the stone walls.

“Safe,” the Healer said. But I couldn’t look at her.

I turned to Alpha, then Zee. I glanced up at Crow.

“There’s seven,” he said. “You got more than you need.”

I scowled. “How do you know how many I need?”

“It’s a trade,” said Zee. “We give up a tree, and we get a mammoth. And then we’ll be on our way.”

Just like that. I mean, there you have it. I was the sort of brother you just leave behind you, no problem at all.

“How about you take the one tree?” I said. “And I keep the rest here.”

“Come on, man.” This was Kade. “Don’t be greedy. You have your girl. You have what you want.”

“Give us four, Banyan,” said Crow. “And you can keep three.”

“No. You can have three. One for each of you backstabbers. And that’s the last damn offer I’ll make.”

“But what puts you in charge?” The words sounded like they were acid on Kade’s tongue.

“You want to ask these people what they think? They could keep them all and not show you the way. All I have to do is say the word, and that’s how it goes down.”

“So why don’t you?” Kade said.

“Because I’ll be glad to get rid of you.”

“Fine.” Crow’s voice boomed. “We take three.”

I turned back to the clump of saplings.

My mother had told me they’d spread once they got going. Four of them, here with the silver mud, they’d multiply and grow up real good. And I had Alpha beside me. We just needed the Healer, needed her to find a cure for my girl.

I stepped towards the tiny bundle of trees. But my guts gripped tight. “I don’t know,” I whispered, my back still to the others. “I don’t think I can do it.”

“Do what?” asked Kade. Snarled up and impatient.

I stared down at the twiggy mess of limbs and the muddy, used-up chunk at the base of them.

“I can’t break up the bones of my own father.”

I tried not to think about it, but how could I not? Where was Pop’s guts? His heart? Had it all shriveled inside him and disappeared?

“It’s trees, bud,” Alpha whispered, sounding about as sick and tired of me as she could. “You can’t think of it like a person. It ain’t your dad anymore.”

“Then you do it,” I said, turning to her. “You break off three of those saplings and give them away.”

“Fine.” She strode forward, cracking her knuckles. And I started to get sick. Tears blurred up my eyeballs. My chest thumped with each hollow beat of my heart.

She was right, though. It was trees now. Not a man any longer. Not Pop.

I tried to stare at the mud pit, but I couldn’t. Just kept thinking of how what was left of my old man’s hand had stretched out of that mud, holding a busted tree towards me.

Alpha was on her knees now. Her hands separating the saplings, uncoiling them from the copper wire and rooting through the limbs, trying to find which ones to spare.

“Stop,” I called as she went to twist-snap a sapling.

Everything hung suspended.

Alpha turned to me, her fingers still deep in the thick of things. Her hands all covered in mud.

“I should do it,” I said, taking a step forward.

“It’s all right, bud.”

“No,” I said. “No, it’s not. But it should fall to me.”

I waited till she’d stepped aside, then knelt down to that stump with the shrubby crown. I glanced back at Crow, and his eyes were hard to read. Then I found Zee, and there were tears streaming all down her face.

I looked to the Speaker and her beautiful sister. I studied the Elder, her face like the earth, all cracked and riddled with unspeakable age. And then I stared up, high up out of the crater. I stared out of the earth and kept my eyes on the sky. I never looked down the whole time I did it. I just felt for the first weak spot, a place where there had once been a hip and a socket, but now the muscles were puny and withered and stubbled with bark. I felt up to the base of the sapling. The thin roots of the limb that had sprouted from Pop’s leg. I kept my eyes skyward. Yanked hard and twisted.

And then I pulled the tree free from the rest.

The Kalliq gasped in unison, making one big whisper as I broke the tree free of my father, and the blood spurted six feet in the air. The blood sprinkled and splattered, and I felt it upon me. Hot and red. Pop’s blood, and my blood—the same blood that flowed in my veins.

But I didn’t falter. Didn’t stumble. Still staring up at the top of the crater as the blood ran warm down my face. And when finally I could make a sound, my scream wasn’t of anguish. It was fear, through and through.

Because here they came. Descending into the crater and trapping every one of us. A hundred King Harvests. Goggled faces and gray rubber suits. Guns glued to their fingers and opening fire. Coming to shatter the one place on earth I’d wanted to be.