by Scott Sigler
“I want to test the water at the top of the waterfall,” she says to them. “I’m not sure I can make it up there on my own, can you two help?”
Farrar’s wide chest puffs out. “Yes! We’ll help you.”
Coyotl makes a strange face, then glances at Bishop, who still holds me in his arms. Coyotl’s lip curls into a small smile just like Spingate’s.
“Sure,” he says to her. “Happy to be of assistance.”
The stone steps leading up are wide and dry. Spingate doesn’t need any help. She’s taking the others away so I can be alone with Bishop.
He’s still staring at me. He doesn’t seem to notice anything but me.
Farrar helps Spingate stand on a boulder. He starts up after her, but she pushes him—arms flailing, he splashes back into the pool.
Water dripping from her scraps of clothing, Spingate hops off the boulder and runs for the steps.
“Last one to the top is an ugly Grownup!”
Coyotl and Farrar chase after her, laughing, enjoying the new game. They catch her almost immediately, but don’t run past—they’re more interested in walking by her side than winning. Up and up they go, talking as they climb. I can’t hear them over the waterfall’s roar.
Bishop looks down at my foot. “Does it hurt?”
It doesn’t hurt at all.
“Yes,” I say.
He kneels in the water. His big hands gently grip my ankle. His touch…it makes something surge in my stomach and chest. Just like my rage at Spingate was instant and overwhelming, so too is this new sensation of heat, of thoughts lost in a swimming, dizzy whirl.
He leans in, looking closely.
“I don’t think it’s broken,” he says. “I should check your shin and calf…”
His hands slide softly up my leg. Fingertips press in; is he really seeing if I’m hurt, or is he pretending just as much as I am?
He glances up at me with those beautiful dark-yellow eyes. A warrior who will snarl and fight and kill, yet he has such pretty eyes?
The waterfall’s roar fills my ears.
My heart…each beat feels like it’s punching my chest.
Bishop’s lips, so pink.
He rises slowly, sliding his hands to my hips, then my ribs. I feel weak…boneless.
This is the boy who saved my life.
My mouth opens a little, I lean forward and down. My eyes shut…
His lips on mine. Soft. Warm. My world is the sound of crashing water and the feel of his mouth, the taste of his breath.
His hands on my face, sliding to the back of my head. Fingers in my hair. My hands shoot out, cup his cheeks, pull him closer. I feel the tip of his tongue touch mine.
Something hits the pool, boom, boom, an explosion of water.
Bishop pulls away, looks toward the heavy splash we just heard, putting his body between me and the unknown danger.
Farrar breaks the surface, gasping for air—a second later Spingate does the same. I hear a yell from above, look up in time to see Coyotl leap off the waterfall. His legs kick and his arms flail as he plummets down. He plunges down between Farrar and Spingate, who are already swimming toward us.
They jumped?
Bishop launches himself into the pool, heads for Spingate. She swims like a fish, already leaving Farrar behind. She doesn’t need help, but Bishop goes to her anyway.
Coyotl pops up, gasping, swims toward me as hard as he can. He’s terrified.
I look up at the waterfall, and I see why.
The late afternoon sun silhouettes something, a shape blurred by the nearly blinding light. Long, jointed legs—a segment pointing up connected to one pointing down—Matilda’s memories rush forward, flash an almost matching image of that rough, horrifying form.
They aren’t that big, they can’t be that big, but there it is, larger than Bishop and Farrar and Coyotl combined.
A spider.
My hand thrusts into the water, my fingers find my spear. I point the metal tip at my new enemy.
Spingate is the first out of the pool. She scrambles over the boulders, out of my line of sight. I can’t see her, but I hear her shouting.
“Run! That thing is chasing us!”
My feet won’t move.
Bishop, Farrar and Coyotl rush out of the water. They snatch up their weapons.
I stare up at the spider, a spindly shape blurred by the shimmering sun. Perfectly still one second, the next it’s scurrying along the top of the waterfall, each step kicking up a high splash of water.
We’ll never outrun that.
It stops at the stone steps. Long legs reach down, tap at the first switchback step. Reach, tap, pull back, reach, tap…
The spider turns away and is instantly gone from sight.
It wouldn’t use the steps. Why? Are they too steep for it?
Hands on my waist—Bishop flings me over his shoulder. In an instant he bounds onto the big rocks, then down to the vine-covered street.
“Bishop, let me go!”
He does, fast and firm. He’s terrified. As big as he is, that thing, that nightmare, is much bigger.
I see the backs of Farrar, Coyotl and Spingate. They’re running the way we came, headed for the shuttle or maybe the warehouse. But the warehouse is an hour away, the shuttle even farther. If that thing finds another path down from the cliff, we won’t make it—it’s far too fast.
There is only one place we can go.
I raise the spear high and scream with the same voice that rallied us in the Garden when we fought the Grownups.
“To me! To me!”
They all stop. Spingate and Farrar come running back, instantly trusting me. Coyotl pauses, turns to run away, stops, snarls, then follows Spingate and Farrar.
Bishop grips my shoulder. His touch was tender before; now he forgets his own strength and it hurts.
“Em, what are you doing? Didn’t you see that thing? We have to run!”
I whip my arm up, knocking his hand away.
The others reach us. They are on the edge of panic. That shape, the way it moved—it frightens us at a level we can’t deny.
I look each of them in the eye as I speak.
“We’re going to that gate.”
Coyotl shakes his head.
“We should have run,” he says. He gestures wildly with his thighbone, left, right, all over. “Now we have to hide in one of these buildings.”
“It took Spingate forever to get into the warehouse,” I say. “We can’t be caught in the open if that thing comes. The gate is close. If the spider can’t handle stone steps, it can’t climb the city wall. We shut that gate behind us, we’ll be safe.”
Farrar clutches his shovel to his chest.
“The door could be stuck,” he says. “Will it close?”
I have no idea if it will move at all, but I’m not going to waste a moment second-guessing myself.
“It’s our best chance,” I say. “Move!”
We run south down the vine-choked street, heading for the larger road that runs east-west. Spingate trips, regains her balance, runs hard at my side. She’s so slow.
Bishop stays beside me. I’m sprinting all out, yet he looks like he’s barely jogging. Farrar and Coyotl could easily run out ahead of us, but they stay a few steps behind, protecting our backs.
We reach the intersection. We turn left—away from the shuttle and the warehouse—and see the gate far off down the road. Tall doors set into a taller archway.
Bishop sprints toward it, red axe gleaming.
We chase after him, running as hard as we can. My lungs burn, my stomach clutches. Spingate stumbles. She’s already drained. I hold the spear in one hand, slide my free arm under her shoulder to support her. I have to keep her moving. She gets a burst of energy when we hear Farrar call out from behind us.
“It’s coming!”
I don’t look back. The door: it is survival, it is life itself. I run, part of me waiting for the spider-thing to bring me down from behind, fo
r the pointy legs to punch through my back and out my chest.
The gate looms closer.
Bishop is already there. He stands half behind the right-hand door, which is slightly open to whatever lies beyond. The wall stretches off to either side—high, impenetrable. He waves us in, desperate for us to move faster.
Spingate and I reach the doors: sheets of metal, as thick as my forearm is long. We rush through the opening. Coyotl and Farrar are right behind us. They drop their weapons, throw themselves against the door alongside Bishop.
I stand there, trying to breathe, as the three boys attack a metal slab that is four times as tall as they are. Their arms shake, their legs tremble, their feet push against vines that slip and slide away.
Over the boys’ grunts, I hear a faint grinding sound—the door is closing, but too slowly. As it moves, long vines bunch underneath it, thick stalks jamming between the bottom of the door and the street’s flat stone.
I rush back through. I use my spear blade to slice at the vines. Spingate joins me, chopping away with Farrar’s sharp shovel. Blue juice splatters and sprays. The smell of mint is everywhere. We cut, we kick, clearing space.
A new sound—a horrid whine.
Far down the street, I see it coming. My skin shivers and prickles. Dark yellow, with thin strips of green and brown. Three-jointed legs moving so fast they are blurs, little flecks of torn vine tossed high in their wake. The hungry whine echoes through the streets, bounces off the ziggurat walls. The spider runs with a wobble, a halting hitch—one of the legs is lame, maybe.
If it reaches us, it will tear us to shreds.
I grab Spingate, shove her through the slowly closing door, then squeeze through the narrowing gap myself. On the other side, I stand next to Coyotl, hurl all my strength at the door. Spingate does the same.
The massive hinges screech and howl, seem to fight our desperate effort, but my toes find purchase in the plant-juice-slick stones and I feel the slab of metal moving. The door’s grinding grows louder, but so does the spider’s whine.
Bishop’s extended arms tremble with effort. Sweat pours off his skin. His voice is a roar of command.
“Everything you’ve got! Godsdammit, push!”
Coyotl and Farrar groan with effort. Spingate screams, a combination of fear and frustration and rage.
The door picks up speed.
I hear the spider’s hard feet clicking against the stone street lying beneath the vines, a harsh, rapid drumbeat of oncoming death.
The hinges give a final, tortured shriek—the door clangs shut with a reverberating gong that hangs in the air.
Everyone sags, even Bishop. If the spider can get through these doors, we don’t have the strength to run, let alone fight.
The whining sound stops.
I keep my hands pressed against the door. I hear and feel a scraping coming from the other side, hard-shelled legs scratching at thick metal, searching for a way through, a way to get at us.
The scraping stops.
That whine again. Faint…then fading…
Then nothing.
Is the spider gone? Or is it standing there, motionless, waiting for us?
“We’ll rest here for a minute,” I say, as if we could do anything else.
Farrar falls to the ground. Coyotl slumps to his butt, his back against the door. Bishop’s hands are on his knees, his stomach heaving in and out as he tries to get his breathing under control. Spingate seems the least winded; her hands are on her hips, her lips are pursed.
“Spin, what happened back there?”
She laces her fingers over her head.
“At the top…jungle on either side of the river,” she says, forcing words through deep breaths. “Trees…real trees, not the vines. Coyotl went in…for a closer look. I was testing the water. He came sprinting out…shouting at us to jump. I saw what was behind him…it almost got us. But…it wasn’t a spider.”
“What are you talking about? We all saw it.”
She closes her eyes, shudders.
“Five legs…not eight.”
Her correction angers me. Like the number of legs matters?
Bishop stands straight. He gleams with sweat. “So it attacked?”
Coyotl sees that Bishop is standing, struggles to his feet. “It came after us. Maybe I should have fought it…I wasn’t afraid, but there was Spingate, and…well, I wasn’t afraid.”
Still lying on his back, Farrar raises a hand. “I was. Glad we jumped into the pool, because when I saw that thing I think I peed in my pants a little.”
Coyotl glares at him.
Bishop nods. “It scared me, too.”
His admission of fear seems to relax Coyotl. If even Bishop is afraid, then running away from the spider couldn’t be such a bad thing.
I put my shoulder to the door again, give it a little push to make sure it’s really closed. It is. At my feet, I see mashed vines, blue-smeared curving lines on the stone where the door scraped against it.
No way I can relax, not even a bit, but with the door shut I have a moment to think.
I turn and rest my back against the door. In front of me, trees, more than I could ever count.
Before us lies a dense jungle, growing up and through and around blackened, burned, crumbling, vine-choked six-sided buildings. Trees also grow out of giant, plant-covered holes in the ground. There are long, open spaces that were maybe once roads, but it’s hard to tell with all the holes and trees and the endless yellow vines that cover everything.
When we first landed, I thought the sprawling city was a ruin, taken by the hands of time. What I see now shows me I was wrong. The city we landed in isn’t ruined, it is merely abandoned and overgrown: most of those four-sided buildings are still standing.
What I look at now is something else altogether.
These six-sided buildings weren’t abandoned.
They were destroyed.
We walk through the jungle.
The curving wall is on our right, tall and constant, covered with layers of thick vines. Following it takes us mostly south and a little east. We hope to run across another gate soon, but we have no way of knowing if we will, or if it will be open. I’m very worried—we’ve eaten what little food we brought with us, and we’re already out of water.
Keeping the wall on our right means the thick jungle is on our left. Tall trees with dark-yellow leaves, green or brown trunks. Plenty of vines there, too, dangling from branches and covering the collapsed buildings. Blurds—some as big as I am—dart in and out of the trees, or fly full speed into the deep canopy where they vanish from sight.
The heat is worse here than it is in the city. It’s so humid. It seems that every other step squishes into mud, which hides jagged old sticks and a brown plant that has sharp thorns. Each time we step on one, we have to stop so someone can carefully pull thorns from the soles of our feet. That slows us down, makes me hate the Grownups anew—they dressed us up like dolls, so couldn’t they have given us shoes?
The sun is descending on the far side of the city. The wall casts a growing shadow upon us. I don’t want to be outside when night falls, but it looks like we can’t avoid that. Animal noises reach out to us from deep in the jungle, the cries and howls of creatures that might be waking up from a day’s sleep to hunt when darkness fully sets in.
So many questions. These six-sided buildings, scored and gutted, covered by the undying jungle—how far do they reach? Does this massive wall go all the way around our ziggurat city?
Spingate gestures to the sprawling ruins on our left.
“Maybe a big fire burned them all,” she says. “Or it could have been a meteor shower, rocks hitting so hard they made craters, caused explosions that started fires.”
Bishop laughs at this. “Spingate, are you joking?”
“Not at all,” she says, bristling that he would doubt her. “Rocks can come from space at high speeds, partially burning up as they hit the atmosphere, and—”
He hol
ds up a fist, which means we’re supposed to stop. We do. He faces her.
“You really don’t know what caused all of this?”
She seems defensive. “No. Do you?”
Bishop nods. “War.”
One word. So simple. And from looking at the devastation around us, so horrible.
We start walking again. It seems so obvious now—how could I have thought so much damage came from anything but war? Destruction, killing…just like on the Xolotl, but at a scale that is hard to conceive. How many people died? Thousands? Millions?
On one side of this wall lie endless ruins and carnage. On the other, untouched buildings damaged only by plants, only by time and neglect. It doesn’t take a genius like Spingate or Gaston to figure out what happened. My kind destroyed a city so they could build their own in the same place. Even down here, we can’t escape the Grownups’ violent touch.
Bishop raises a fist. We stop.
He crouches down, stares off into the darkening ruins.
“Em, come here,” he whispers.
I squat beside him. He points to a ruined building. Three of its six vine-choked walls have collapsed. There is no roof to stop the young trees growing tall from within.
Bishop leans close to me. “Do you see it?”
I look, but see nothing that should cause concern. “It’s a ruined building. We’ve passed hundreds of them.”
His eyes narrow, like he’s disappointed. My heart plummets—I can’t stand the idea that he thinks poorly of me.
“Not the building itself,” he says. “Look just above it.”
Now I see it: against the barely lit sky, a thin column of smoke rises up from somewhere beyond that building.
“A campfire,” he says. “Someone is out there.”
People. People who are not us. We’re not alone after all.
Bishop looks at me. Once again we’re close enough to kiss, but this isn’t the time for that.
“I’ll go look,” he says. “See what’s there.”
“No, it’s too dangerous. What if it’s another spider?”
He considers this carefully, then shakes his head. “The spider didn’t try to open the door. It easily outweighs all of us combined. All it had to do was push, but it didn’t even try. If it’s not smart enough to open a door, it’s not smart enough to build a fire.”