Текст книги "The Rift"

Автор книги: Chris Howard

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The ropes were made of woven cornhusks. I could feel them, crunchy and rough, biting into my skin as they strapped my ankles together and bound my wrists behind my head.

I blinked my eyes wide in the half-light. Rolled off my back and onto my side, wobbled there for a second. Then I hit the dirt face first.

I spat the grime from my teeth. Tried to arc up and stare around the dusty cell. Every part of me was aching and cracked, all dried blood and bruises. It hurt just to move my eyeballs around.

The cell was brown and black shadows, but there was a brightness spilling in from the far end, and I rolled myself towards it. Slowly. Painfully. Finally squirming up against the iron bars of a door sealed shut with chains and padlocks.

I pressed my head against the bars and peered out at a long, empty passageway, where flickering white lights twitched on the walls. I spied other doorways. More sets of bars.

“Alpha,” I called out, my voice all raspy, my throat swollen.

“That you, little man?” Crow’s voice seemed to come from a cell halfway down the passage.

“Where’s Alpha?” I moaned.

“In here someplace. Maybe. ’Less that bastard has her for questioning.”

“Questioning?” I whispered. I banged my head on the bars. What questions could Kade have for us? We’d been straight with him, hadn’t we? He’d been the one covering his tracks with lies.

“I’m so hungry,” I called out. My guts were so empty, it made me dizzy, and that made everything feel even worse.

“They brought me water,” Crow said. “Fed me corn with a spoon. They’ll be back, you hang in there.”

“No.” My arms were tingling. Bloodless. Bound too tight. “I don’t want their food.”

“Ain’t theirs, man. It’s GenTech’s.”

“I don’t want GenTech’s food, neither.”

“You gonna be hungry a long time, you wait for them apples to grow.”

“Been hungry my whole life,” I muttered. “Should be used to it.”

I struggled up next to the bars so my back was against them. I strained at the cornhusk ropes. No use. GenTech grown and poacher woven. I slammed myself at the dirt, then rattled the bars with my knees.

“Save your strength,” called Crow.

“For what?”

We were trapped down here beneath the cornfields. Locked inside this poacher den. And I cursed the filthy scum and their rotten colony. They were like the creatures at the Rift, I reckoned. Hardly human. And they had their dirty hands on the trees now. Every single one of those saplings. A hundred years of stealing from GenTech, and now they were stealing from me.

“They question you?” I asked, my head throbbing, my arms numb.

“Aye,” Crow said. “They poked at me. Picked at me all over.”

He meant his legs, of course. They’d made a freak out of him. I remembered how Kade had ogled the bark when we’d been freezing on the side of that lake. And I remembered how a poacher had once prodded Hina in the cornfields, his eyes full of disbelief at the beauty he’d found.

They just steal, I thought. They just scavenge. They’re worse even than GenTech. All they do is take, and they don’t give back a damn thing.

I sank back against the dirt.

“What they ask you?” I called out.

“About Promise Island, and how we ended up there. About your mother. And about your old man.”

“What you tell ’em?”

“Everything. You will, too. You’ll see. I’m telling you, don’t fight them. Not now. Gotta bide our time.”

“Yeah? That what you been doing?” I shouted. I mean, what a sick freaking joke. “Biding your time while you dragged your ass behind us?”

“Take it easy, Banyan.”

“We could have used some help, you know.”

“I couldn’t walk.”

“Walked good when you had the trees, though,” I yelled. “And you could have done something in the tunnel. You had Namo. What happened to you being a warrior?”

“They were gonna kill you, man. ’Less I gave up.”

There he went again, acting like he was my friend.

“So where is Namo, anyway?” I said, picturing the mammoth’s big, shaggy face and small, blinking eyes. Was he one more miracle the poachers would let rot in a cage?

“Wait,” Crow said. “I hear something.”

There was a dragging sound and the clink of metal. Sounded like padlocks crunching.

“Alpha?” I screamed, struggling back to the bars so I could see down the passageway. “You there?”

Two poachers hobbled towards my cell. They carried long cornstalks carved like spears, and they wore the gnawed scars of locusts, the mark of the swarms. Hell, one of them had a hole in his cheek.

They jangled at the chains and locks, then yanked the door to my cell open with a rusty screech. One of the men jabbed his spear at my throat while the other leaned down with a plastic canteen.

“Better drink, boy,” said the man with the spear.

I took a gulp of the water. Pumped up fresh from beneath that last damn peak, I guess. I sucked another gulp down. Then I sipped awhile longer. And when I’d gotten enough water in me, I leaned back from the canteen and spat in that poacher’s face.

The man screwed the cap back on his canteen, and then he slapped me, hard. Bony fingers. Long, dirty nails. I didn’t cry out or nothing, though. I’d made up my mind.

I wasn’t giving these people a thing.

Crow’s eyes shone through the bars of his cage as I got carried down the passageway by those two poacher guards. The other cells were too dark for me to see inside, though. And when I called out again for Alpha, no answer came.

As we turned into a new tunnel, the guards dropped me on the ground and began dragging me behind them, gripping the ropes that tied my feet together and bouncing my aching head through the dirt.

I could see the crooked roots of corn plants in patches above us, sticking out through the ceiling like flaky brown plastic, peeling and thready.

And these poachers were as busy and unruly as that tumbled mess of roots. I watched them all as I got dragged through the tunnels. They were everywhere, scrabbling around in their shabby rags. Barefoot, most of them. Their skin stained with dirt.

Clumps of folk worked their fingers inside oily salvage. Hordes of little kids ran around, crap in their eyes and snot in their noses. It was chaos and noise, and the whole place stank of old piss and sweat, and I hated each one of them. These bastards had stolen any chance that we’d had.

The two guards pulled me though the tunnels, prodding folk aside with their cornstalk spears. And none of those ragged freaks seemed to even notice, just kept their heads down and their eyes turned as I was dragged through the dirt. They were too busy working by the light of their crappy lanterns. Too busy digging and hiding and hoarding their corn.

Folks were sweating as they chipped away at the walls. Making more room to scuttle around with their mine carts and shovels and pickaxes, hidden from the agents and safe from the swarms.

And the folks that weren’t digging were taking care of the poaching business. Stripping the husks off stolen cobs, boiling the GenTech-branded kernels in big vats of water.

There were women drying out the corn after they’d cooked it, sorting it in piles and boxes. There were others weaving tools and fabrics from the leftover stalks and husks.

And it almost reminded me of the Kalliq, the way these people used every bit, every precious last resource. But there’d been music and hope in the lives of that ice tribe. And there weren’t none of those things down here.

We entered a chamber that was more sprawling than the rest. Even busier, too. Crammed full of people and busting at the seams. I mean, you never seen so many folk jammed together. Was like the worst shantytown, but bundled up and shoved under the ground.

High ceilings in this chamber, and nothing but shadow up there, beyond the white lights. The lanterns were connected by red wires that wrapped around the walls in a thin strip, and below those wires curled that water pipe we’d followed straight into this trap.

Middle of the chamber, there were rusty ladders and a mess of scaffold, and that jumbled tower led all the way up into the dark. Alongside the scaffold ran a pulley system. Nearly a hundred feet to the top, I reckoned. And I figured they’d have hatches up there. Ways out. But I couldn’t see the folk working at the top of the scaffold. All I could see was the buckets coming down, filled to the brim with corn.

The guards hauled me through a crowd of scrawny poachers, and when I smashed into the side of an iron vat, boiling water splashed out, steaming on the dirt and scalding my skin.

But still, no one paid me no mind.

Then suddenly, the footsteps around me froze and all the work stopped. Even my guards quit moving.

For a second, the whole place was still.

Because a wailing sound was coming down from one of the side tunnels and echoing all around the chamber. And that sound weren’t human. Not even close.

It was the sound of our mammoth. My old pal, Namo.

And I swore to myself, if they were hurting him, if they were causing him pain, then god help who was doing it. Because I didn’t need another reason to hate these people. And I only needed one way to get free.

I got yanked to my feet by the guards. And up ahead, set in the dirt on a pair of hinges, was a door made of metal salvaged from the side of a crop duster, the faded GenTech logo in one corner of the once-purple steel. The guard with the hole in his cheek slammed a fist at the metal, pounding at the heavy door and shoving it until it creaked inward.

Then the poacher at my back shoved me forward. My legs were bound together so tight, I had to hop into the room.

And I mean, I call it a room, but all it was really was just a hole in the ground. There was a fire blazing in the center, flames crackling inside a ring of stone, and black smoke leaching up. And I counted nine poachers sat cross-legged in a circle around it.

Some of them had to turn around so they could face me, their eyes boring into mine as the old steel door got sealed behind me with a scrape.

I stared back into those wretched faces. Their features all creased and bitter. Chunks of skin missing. The women no fairer than the men. All of them were short-haired or greasy-haired or had no hair at all. Sunken eyes and scummy teeth.

They were like ugly brothers and sisters. Grown old before their time.

Except for one of them.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Kade made his most handsome smile as he looked at me. The red flames in the pit burned in his green eyes. He had on long robes made of cornhusks, the color of clay, but he hadn’t gotten himself a wash or nothing. He was still painted with grime and grit.

Still, he looked a couple decades younger than the other poachers in that circle, and his teeth shone as he took a fistful of popcorn and shoved it in his mouth. I held his gaze as he licked his fingers and chomped his jaws. His eyes swaggering in their sockets.

“Said you were a field hand,” I said. “In some cornhusk city.”

“I was.” Kade shook back the stiff sleeves of his robe and grasped his stump with his hand. “Until the blades took my fingers.”

“So, no poems. No bootlegging. You just squirmed your way down here with the thieves.”

“I told you, I traveled all over.” He grinned, his mouth swollen full of corn. “A man has to do something with his life.”

“This ain’t living.” I stared at the poachers who hunched around the fire pit. I watched them feeding the flames with cornhusks. The whole room smoky as it was foul.

“But it is you who is the thief,” said a woman with metal bracelets on her wrists and slits for eyes. “If everything that’s been said is true.”

“I ain’t a thief.”

“Yet you stole,” said another of the poachers. “On the island.”

“What I took weren’t GenTech’s to begin with.”

“Your father,” said the woman with the bracelets. “He was a scientist. He worked for the Executive Chief.”

“He was a tree builder. Worked for no one but himself.”

“But he worked with your mother once,” the woman said. “The Soljah told us. They both worked for GenTech.”

“What difference does it make?”

“You said these trees belong to you.”

“I said they don’t belong to GenTech. And what? You want to give them to the people you been stealing corn from for the last hundred years?”

The woman gazed at me for a moment. Then she gazed into the fire. “We are establishing where these things came from, and who will come looking for them.”

“Lord Kade told us these things will grow too strong for the locusts.” This freak looked even worse than the others, ribs sticking out like a bony fist, a crown of cornhusks on his head. “He said they’ll bear fruit.”

Fruit. Just the sound of the word made me spin with hunger. I watched Kade, still throwing back his popcorn. Lord Kade, I guess I should say. The punk that was a poacher lord.

“Hungry?” he asked when he saw me eyeing his corn.

“What about Namo?” I glared at him. “What have you done with him?”

“But what of this fruit?” said the guy with the crown. “Have you seen it, boy? Did you taste it?”

“Hell, yeah, I tasted it. Tastes like cheese and maple syrup and every other flavor GenTech figured out how to brew. And it sits like a rock in your belly. Fills you up inside for a week.”

“He’s lying,” Kade said. “The trees will grow apples. But he’s never seen one.”

“You sure about that, compadre?”

He started to say something about Zee, the things she had told him. But I cut him off sharp.

“Don’t even say her name, you son of a bitch. You betrayed everything Zee stood for.”

“You never even knew her.” Kade’s voice quivered with anger.

“Least I didn’t pretend to. Least I didn’t use her, like you.”

He shot to his feet.

“Sit down, Lord Kade,” said the woman with the world’s thinnest eyes. She turned to the rest of her cronies. “They belonged to GenTech. They must have been made to grow fruit.”

“But where do we plant them?” This from a man with a peeling red scalp. He dug his nails into the dirt beside him.

“A good question, Lord Baxter.” The man who wore the cornhusk crown let out a sigh. Like he was all worn out, sitting there on his skinny ass by the fire. “A great gift Lord Kade has brought us. But a great burden also.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll take them trees off your hands. GenTech won’t even know they were here.”

“Silence.” Bracelets held up her hands, showing us her creased palms, her fingers like claws. “For too long have we feared the might of Vega. For too long have we dreamt of overthrowing the masters of the fields.”

“Then this is our chance,” rumbled Baxter, rubbing dirt on his scalp. “If these are the only ones. The last trees.”

“He burned them,” said Kade, pointing his stump at me. “He burned all the rest.”

“And there were no others?” said someone who till then had stayed silent. “On the boat?”

“What of the Soljah?” piped up another. “Are there others like him?”

I thought of Alpha. The bit of bark stitched on her belly.

“We need the boy to tell us what he knows about growing them,” said Baxter. “The Soljah said he’s the only one that can.”

And what was this? What lies had Crow told them? Selling me out and screwing me over? Or was he trying to buy me some time?

“It’s not just growing them.” Bracelets glanced around the circle. “We need help protecting them.”

The man with the crown nodded as he watched the fire. “That’s why I’ve summoned our allies,” he said quietly.

The woman opened her eyes as wide as she could. “My lord,” she whispered, fluttering her bracelets. “I should have been consulted.”

Dude just shrugged.

“They will be here,” said Baxter, his eyes fixed on the flames. Fingers still rubbing his scalp. “Before evening shadows.”

“I can’t agree with this course of action.” Kade had sat his ass back down, and now he stared across the flames at Baxter and the guy with the crown.

The old prune lifted up the cornhusks on his head and scratched his thin white hair. Then he put the crown back on and closed his eyes. “I, too, wish this could be a prize for us alone. But we must share the spoils, if we are to survive.”

“There are other ways, Lord Orlic,” said Kade.

“None that offer safety. We need their help.”

“Who?” I said, unable to keep quiet any longer. “Who you counting on?”

“An old friend.” Orlic opened his eyes, fixed them upon me. “Or friends, I suppose, is more accurate. Pray you’re still alive to meet them when they arrive.”

“I don’t pray for nobody.”

“Very well.” Orlic let out a big sigh, then straightened his crown. “Guards, bring the boy closer. It’s time we found out what he knows.”

CHAPTER FORTY

The guards dragged me inside the circle. Right up close to the fire.

“But I can help you,” I told them, starting to get panicked. “We should all work together. Share the prize, like you said. Share the burden.”

“Yes. Lord Kade told us how you intended to divide the trees.” Bracelets wagged her finger at me, rattling her jewelry. “Pirates and Rastas. Bootleggers. The Samurai Five and the Salvage Guild. No mention of the poachers, who refuse to trade for GenTech’s corn, and who battle agents every day of their lives.”

“Battle? I’ve run into you people topside,” I said, remembering what had happened in the cornfields, when poachers had got their hands on me and Hina, and a poacher had shot Alpha in the gut. “All you do is take. And then you scurry back in your holes.”

“Enough,” said Orlic from beneath his crown. “We’ll not argue with you. You will tell us what you learned from your parents. You will tell us how to keep the young trees alive.”

“I’d tell you to go to hell.” I stared at all those rag-and-bone lords. “But it looks like you’re stuck there already.”

The boss man lowered his head, so all I could see was the cornhusks on top of it. And the others followed suit, bending their chins to their chests, like they were afraid of seeing something. Hell, I got plenty afraid, too.

Then the guards grabbed my fists and twisted me up off the ground a few inches, ripping the scraps of clothing that hung on my ribs.

And then, inch by inch, they pressed me forward. Edging my guts to the flames.

I wouldn’t scream, I told myself. Not for them. Not for nobody. But the fire bit into me. It gnawed and sizzled, more sharp than hot. And I thought of Zee. Pictured her body spinning towards the lava, her hair blown out in strands around her like spokes on a wheel. And I’d told her I’d take care of the trees for her. I had promised I would. So now I was letting her down in death, as I’d failed her in life. And she’d wanted me to trust people, but I’d trusted Kade, and this is where it had got me.

The pain howled brighter. Fiercer and louder. But I grit my jaw and clamped every part of me shut.

“That’s enough,” said Orlic. The guards pulled me backwards, and I let myself breathe. “You must tell us, boy. Tell us these secrets you know.”

I glanced down at my belly—bright red and scorched white and blistered. I choked back tears. Then I turned to Kade.

“Damn you,” I croaked. “We could have made things different.”

“He won’t tell you,” Kade muttered, refusing to look at me. “Unless it’s to spare someone close to him.”

“Which one?” asked Baxter.

“The only one we’ve not questioned.” Kade stood, straightening his crispy robes around him. “I’ll bring her.”

“The girl?” someone asked him.

“Yes.” Kade stared at me as he said it. “His girl.”

I had secrets, but none the poachers wanted. I didn’t know a thing about how to get them trees to grow. But Crow had given these freaks something to sink their teeth into. Maybe he was trying to get rid of me. Or maybe he’d thought it might keep me alive.

And it might, I reckoned. If I could think of something, I could trade these bastards for knowledge, and maybe they’d let us go.

But could I leave here without the trees?

I didn’t know what should matter most. I didn’t have time to plan or no one to talk to. I was stuck, held tight in cornhusk ropes. Facing cornstalk spears and that fire, sweat pouring off me and dripping into the flames.

And when Kade got back, he had Alpha gripped before him. She was tied up like I was, and I could see she’d fared no better than me.

I called to her. But she was blurred and busted, her eyes hardly open. She had a gash on her head and blood on her arms.

Kade wrangled her up beside me, right next to the fire. She had rags wound around her breasts and her belly, and Kade had one of the guards hold her up so he could start to unwrap her. Unpeeling the scraps from her beautiful skin.

I knew they’d see it. Once her rags were unraveled and her belly was revealed. The poachers would see the bark GenTech had spliced to her stomach, where she’d been shot by a poacher—hell, it was their bullet meant she’d needed patching up at all. And now these scum would poke at that bark with their filthy fingers. Study it with their underground eyes.

And then they would most likely burn her for her secrets, I reckoned. Just like they’d burned at me.

“It’s all in the timing. In the spring,” I lied, picturing the body in the caves of the Kalliq. The dead woman encased in a wooden shell. “You got to know when to plant them.”

Kade quit what he was doing. A single scrap of clothing clung to Alpha’s body. Like a bandage hanging on a wound.

“When?” said Baxter.

“The first full moon after the snow melts.” I just kept making stuff up. “Certain time of night.”

Orlic nodded, like what I was saying made perfect sense to him. “Tell us more.”

“Not till you let her go. You can keep me here,” I said. “You let her go, and I’ll help you.”

“And give up the one way we can get you to speak?” This was Bracelets. I could feel her thin slice of eyeballs upon me. “You are in no place to negotiate. But we know now how to make you see reason. Guards, help Lord Kade take them back to their cells.”

They threw Alpha in a cell, and then hurled me back inside the one I’d woke up in. I landed on my back, staring up at the dirt like I was stuck in a grave.

Kade strode into the cell and slammed the door shut.

“Leave us,” he told the guards. “I have a debt to settle with this one.”

He wound the chains back in place, fumbling around one-handed until he got the locks sealed. Then he stood over me, blocking the light from the doorway. My eyes got used to the dark quick, though, like I was subterranean already, as used to life underground as these filthy poachers.

I watched as Kade reached inside his cornhusk robes and pulled out a small nylon pouch and dropped it beside me. Then he reached into his robes again and plucked out a knife.

“What you gonna do?” I whispered. “Kill me?”

“And let you off easy?”

“Can’t believe you waited this long. That’s what you been itching for, ain’t it? Except you needed me. Needed all of us. Acting all high and mighty all the damn time, when you’re the lowest sort of scum after all.”

“So this is it?” he said. “That’s all the fight you have in you?”

“Untie me, you cheating bastard. I’ll show you a fight.”

He knelt beside me. Took the knife to the back of my head and started slicing apart the rope that bound up my hands. My wrists popped free, and I waited as Kade set to cutting the ropes from my ankles. But soon as my legs could move, I swiveled up and bore down on him, pummeling my fists in the knots of his spine.

He spun and wriggled, and I had him pinned down, but Kade was stronger than me. He got the knife between us, grasped in his one bony hand.

“You messed with my sister. And you was gonna burn my girl,” I said. “So go ahead and stab me. I’ll kill you with my bare hands and that knife in my gut.”

“No,” Kade whispered. His face all wrong.

I punched him in the mouth. “That’s for lying to me.”

Then I punched him again. Harder. “That’s for Alpha.”

Again. “For Crow.”

I pulled my fist back. “And this one’s for Zee.”

But I remembered my sister pulling at me when I’d been beating Kade on that cold beach full of skulls, at the side of the lake. And it distracted me, remembering Zee. Feeling the look that had shone in her eyes.

And then I heard Kade. Hissing and cussing.

“Keep quiet,” he kept saying. “Get off me. They’ll hear.”

I wrapped my hands around his neck. “Drop the knife.”

He took the blade and stabbed it in the dirt.

“Let me speak.” It was like I’d squeezed the words out of him. His face was all twisted and red. “I had to make certain. Put on a good show. We can’t have them doubt me.”

I took my hands off his throat. How do you trust someone who’s been so full of lies?

“I was gone so long.” His voice was all shredded, and he sucked at each breath. “And I’m young. Just a nobody. It’s only the trees that got me onto the Council.”

I watched as he pulled himself back to the wall, wheezing and choking. He’d started sweating, and he smeared a dirty hand across his brow.

“Come on,” he said, trying to breathe normal. “Save your anger. You have to see what I’m doing.”

“But these are your people.”

“The trees.” He shook his head. “They’re not safe.”

I crept to the cell door and peered out through the bars. I called for Crow. Alpha.

No answer at all.

I rubbed my ankles, worked at my wrists. Then I glanced back at Kade.

“So spit it out, Cornhusk.”

“We have to save them,” he said. “The saplings.”

“You’re gonna give them up?”

“I want one of them. You aren’t leaving me with nothing. But the rest can’t stay here. Not now.”

“Why? These old friends of Orlic’s that are coming?”

Kade covered his face with his hand.

“Who is it?” I asked him, and he made a moaning sound. “Tell me, damn it.”

“He made it,” Kade said.

“Who?”

“He got out of that crater.”

“Harvest?”

Kade winced when I said the man’s name.