Not five days, not five months. “Five years?” she whispered.
Bitterness twisted his lips. “Some experiment, huh?”
“But . . . how? They said . . .” She’d long ago stopped believing she’d get out of this mess in a few hours. But five years?
“Like I said, it’s not for lack of trying,” Pierce added. He got up and drew a haunch of meat from a tarp-covered pile near her feet. As he impaled it on a spit, she realized the carcass of the rock dragon had disappeared.
While the meat cooked, he went through the jumble of components in her pack, noticing right off that she was missing some pieces. She told him about the cactus grass. He listened without comment, and she trailed off to a halt, feeling embarrassed and stupid. “I do have this, though.” She showed him the key-stylus-pen she’d made.
He took it from her, turning it between his fingers.
“Do you know what it is?” she asked.
“No.” He handed it back. “I had one, too, once. Never did figure out what it was for.”
“Then maybe it is significant.”
“I doubt it. They gave us a lot of useless stuff. Probably to confuse us. They’re like that.”
Pierce surveyed the remaining parts from her pack, then began fitting some of them together. Swiftly, one of the long-barreled hand pistols took shape. She didn’t recall seeing instructions for that in the manual.
“It’s a SLuB 40,” he said, handing the weapon over. “See here?” He pointed a grimy finger to the inscription at the barrel’s base.
Callie peered at it. “Those aren’t letters.”
“No, but it looks like ‘SLuB 40,’ so that’s what we call it.”
He started to assemble a rifle similar to his own, but ran out of pieces before he finished.
“Looks like the SLuB’s gonna be it. At least you’ve got plenty of E-cubes.” He scooped up four of the blue boxes. “They power everything else. Mind if I take a few?”
“Go ahead.”
Balancing two cubes on his thigh, Pierce slid another pair into his rifle’s side chamber, then replaced the cubes in his SLuB. By that time their dinner was ready.
The lizard meat had a strong muttony flavor. Callie would never call it tasty, but once she’d tantalized her stomach with the first bite, she all but inhaled the rest, even ate a second slice. As she wiped her greasy fingers on her jumpsuit, the comb-and-waxed-paper trill of a passing harry drew her gaze to the dark opening.
“They won’t bother us in here,” Pierce said. “Not at night.”
“And in the morning?”
“They’ll hunt a few hours past dawn, then swarm again for the day. We should be able to move out after that.”
They lapsed into silence. After a few minutes, Callie leaned her head against the rock and closed her eyes. “I assume I’ll be able to walk in the morning?”
“Should be, yeah.”
She sighed. Five years. Were there others who’d been here as long? Longer?
Her thoughts drifted to home. Lisa’s party would be well under way, her sister waiting with her latest stockbroker prospect for Callie. Eventually she’d call Callie’s apartment, and Mom would begin preparing her lecture on being considerate. By evening’s end they’d be miffed. But not worried. They knew Callie disliked the glittering, semiformal bashes. Even aside from the matchmaking, she resisted getting dressed up, had no taste for mingling over cocktails, and loathed the incessant one-upsmanship. Her conversations—if any—were brief, dribbling into awkward silences as she and the other party struggled to find a way of escape.
No, her family wouldn’t start worrying until morning, and the police wouldn’t start searching for twenty-four hours. By then Dr. Charis’s experiment would have vanished, likely leaving no clues and no one to question. Even if there was, what could the police do against beings who defied the laws of physics and zapped bodies through space in the blink of an eye?
Callie’s throat tightened. Tears blurred her vision. What she wouldn’t give to be home painting right now—her cockatiel pacing along the bookshelf—to hear Meg’s bubbly laugh and endure her latest dumb fad, to be able to clean the rat cages on Monday. Right now, she’d even prefer Lisa’s party.
Because deep down she knew there was a real possibility she would never attend another of Lisa’s parties again.
CHAPTER
4
“I wish I had a comb,” Callie muttered, pulling her fingers through the tangled locks of her waist-length hair the next morning. “They provided all this other stuff—why not that?”
Pierce sat across the ash-filled fire ring, scraping the lizard hide. “What’d you say?”
“Nothing.” She tilted her head, and he disappeared behind a curtain of red hair. Her captors hadn’t supplied sleeping bags or toiletries; why expect a comb? Besides, they had claimed their obstacle course would take only a few hours. Issuing overnight gear would have made their victims balk.
Pierce’s knife rasped across the rough hide, and a fresh wave of sour-sock smell assaulted her. She flicked the curtain of hair over her shoulder. Sleep and the harries’ attack had made it a rat’s nest. It wouldn’t take long before it was greasy, matted and—considering how filthy her companion was—vermin infested.
The thought made her squirm.
Well, I don’t intend to be here that long. Dividing her hair into three sections, she deftly plaited them together, wincing when she touched the still-tender spots on the backs of her hands.
Pierce continued to scrape the hide, fastened now to a wooden hoop. Once he’d satisfied himself she’d be able to travel this morning, he’d turned to the lizard skin and his own silent thoughts.
His welts had disappeared, and his eye and mouth no longer drooped. In the morning light Callie saw he was only a few years her senior. The brown, scraggly beard obscured his features, but cleanshaven, bathed, and wearing decent clothes, he might not be bad looking. He looked up then, right at her, and she averted her gaze, face warming. Behind him the harries swooped through the emerald glade, their kazoolike trills rising and falling.
“It’ll be about an hour,” Pierce said, glancing over his shoulder.
Cautiously Callie drew her legs beneath her to stand and, forced to crouch beneath the sloping roof, walked the four steps to the cave’s mouth. Muscles quivering, she sagged onto one of the boulders, blinked away a swirl of dizziness, and peered into the glade. She blinked again. “It’s gone.”
“The sucker path? Nah. It’s still there. It’s just not even close to white anymore.”
“Yes, but—” She broke off. I didn’t believe you.
“My friends are camped up on the mesa, like I said. You can come with us.”
She twisted round to face him, hissing as the movement pulled the bite in her side. “I’d rather find the road again. I don’t suppose you’d help me?”
He snorted. “It’s miles out of my way, and I should’ve been back last night as it is. Besides, I told you—the gate roads are a waste of time.”
“I’d like to check that out myself.”
“Well, I’m not taking you back. The most my friends can wait is one more day.” He set aside the knife and picked at a fatty spot on the hide. “And there’s no guarantee the section you’re headed for even exists anymore.”
Callie hugged her legs to her chest, unwilling to admit aloud that he was right.
“Traveling the Outlands alone is a dangerous proposition,” he added, picking up the knife again.
“You seem to be doing well enough.”
“I don’t usually travel alone. And I’m not a rookie.”
Chewing her lip, she turned back to the glade. Harries swooped back and forth through the trees. They’d have killed her if not for Pierce, and distraction or not, his course of action did sound the most sensible. If there were as many gate roads out there as the manual indicated, sooner or later she’d cross another one, no matter which way she went.
There was the alien watcher t
o consider, as well.
An hour later the harries swarmed, their matlike forms turning the sky gray. One by one they glided in ever-tightening circles around the quivering knot of bodies in the middle tree, each finally jerked in to the others like filings to a magnet. In twenty minutes the sky was clear. Pierce waited another ten, and then they picked their way up the boulder-strewn slope to the canyon rim.
As she came over the top Callie staggered to a halt, astonishment sucking her breath away. A range of rugged, snowcapped mountains reared up to the left, presiding over an endless expanse of barren mesas, wind-scoured spires, and terraced sandstone cliffs. A hot breeze whipped her face, tousling tendrils of hair before her eyes. Clearly her Disneyland theory had to be revamped. This was no mere stadium, no “arena” in the usual sense of the word.
“Imagined something a bit smaller, did you?” Pierce stopped beside her and squinted at the vast landscape. The wind pressed back his brown hair, exposing a white wedge of untanned skin on his forehead. “I figure this Arena, as they call it, is about the size of the western half of the U.S.”
“And we’re supposed to cross it in a couple of hours?”
“If that’s what you’re thinking, Miss Hayes, you’re in for a major disappointment.” Slinging his rifle over one shoulder, he started across the sandstone, paralleling the mountains.
Maybe time’s skewed here, she thought as she hurried after him. Maybe five years here is only a few hours back home.
Pierce set a brisk pace, but Callie matched him easily. She had taken pride in being one of the strongest girls in the university hiking club, often outdoing most of the guys. Feeling the need to redeem herself after the bumbling of yesterday, she kept abreast of him and spoke conversationally.
“So if you’re not looking for a gate, what are you and your friends doing out here?”
“Hunting. Townspeople will give fifty E-cubes for a dragon horn.”
“Townspeople? There are towns here?”
“Lots of ’em, once you get past the Outlands.”
“And where is that?”
“Couple hundred miles that way.” He waved toward the vista on their right. “These mountains are the Arena’s outer boundary. Everything’s inward from here.”
They walked in silence for a bit, and then she said, “What about that Benefactor the manual talks about? The one that’s supposed to help you get through the Gate?”
He grunted.
“It plainly says you need his help to get through it.”
Pierce kept his eyes on the rumpled terrain. “Too bad it doesn’t say what he looks like or where you’re supposed to find him.”
“Well, I’d think somewhere around the Gate—”
“Like sitting under it?” He flashed her a disgusted glance. “Lotta good that does if you can’t get up to it.”
“Maybe he’s the one who—”
“Besides, how could one guy be in fourteen places at once?”
“Maybe it isn’t one guy.”
“It specifically states there is only one legitimate Benefactor.”
“He wouldn’t have to be in fourteen places at once. They probably know when someone’s approaching.”
“Oh, and they just beam him to the right place, is that the idea?”
“You don’t have to be snide about it.”
He shook his head. “You’re just a rookie. What do you know?”
“At least I’m not choking on cynicism.”
“Wait a few years.” He paused, then added, “You’d better walk behind me. A person can stumble into lots of nasty things out here if she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
Stung, Callie dropped back.
They hiked all morning, saying little. Not only did the wind make talking difficult, but Pierce’s unflagging pace became a challenge for her, after all. He only stopped to point out potential dangers—and he had not exaggerated the perils of the mesa top. Stretches of apparently solid ground hid holes of “dry quicksand” that could swallow the unwary traveler in less than five minutes. A head-sized rock tossed onto one such deceptive pan vanished in an instant.
Then there was the redclaw—low thickets of thorny, ash-colored branches from which stretched hidden runners. Each ended in a woody, football-sized pod that lay open and ready for action, its jaws snapping shut with enough force to drive their serrated edges into the demonstration branch Pierce used to trigger it. After that the runner slowly retracted, dragging its prize toward the distant thicket to be digested. It presented little threat to a man with a SLuB, but the pods were devilish to pry loose from one’s boot.
There were also a number of cacti, from ankle to shoulder high, all equipped with poisonous spines. The plumes of cactus grass, called fountainweed, she had already met.
As for the fauna, the primary predator in this region was the rock dragon. A big female with as many teeth as a crocodile stalked them for an hour before Pierce dispatched it. Callie watched in morbid fascination while he deftly skinned it out.
She learned that the red crustacean-insect things were sand mites, and they flushed tens of them at a time from the grass throughout the morning. Pierce shot every one of them, and finally Callie asked if he was trying to impress her or something.
“They’re drawn to your book,” he explained, ignoring her jibe. “If I didn’t shoot them, they’d be climbing all over us.”
They stopped for lunch near a seep in a bank of tiered sandstone. Pierce stomped through the surrounding weeds, flushing out mites and killing them before he settled beside her on a flat stretch of rock. “There’s probably a den nearby,” he said, portioning out flatbread, lizard jerky, and dried fruit. “There usually is around water.”
As Callie poured him a handful of cookie pellets from her second Snak-Pak, she asked why the sand mites wanted the manual.
“To eat it. I think they like the ink.”
“So they bite.”
“A big one can take off your thumb. They get agitated enough and a den of ’em will clean your bones in half an hour.”
They ate in silence after that, Callie nervously eyeing the weeds.
When he finished, Pierce stretched out and fell instantly asleep. She regarded him with amazement. Surrounded by perils, and he just switches off? Of course, he had lived five years in this world. Maybe it was safer by day than by night. Now there’s a cheery thought.
She ate the last of the pellets, then stretched her shoulders and pulled off her soft-soled boots to massage her battered feet. Though the boots showed surprisingly little wear, they provided neither support nor protection against the hard ground, leaving her toes bruised, her heels aching, and the balls of her feet already blistering.
Rubbing the arch of her right foot with both thumbs, she squinted across the down-sloping mesa. In the distance loomed the blue-shadowed face of another canyon wall. Beyond that, the red and ochre plain stretched to infinity. There was no sign of any gate, though without her glasses, she couldn’t be sure.
The vista reminded Callie of a family vacation taken before her parents’ divorce. It had been desperately hot and the car must have overheated, because they’d stopped in the middle of nowhere. She remembered how the air had danced and jittered over the dark, empty road as it ribboned through a vast white salt pan.
Mom had panicked and blamed Daddy. Why couldn’t he think for once? Why couldn’t he be responsible? He’d slapped her silent. Callie remembered how red and sweaty Lisa’s face had been, her eyes round and wide as she’d watched her parents argue. Mom stomped off to the other side of the car, but Daddy gathered Callie and Lisa on the shaded side of the car and drew them stories in the salt. He often entertained them with his stories, drawn as eloquently with his finger in the soft white sand as with pen and paper. Once the car cooled, they went on. And afterward Daddy had made a painting of that day—white ground under a hot orange sky with a tiny car and four tiny people beside it. He’d called it “Breakdown.” Only recently had Callie understood the me
taphor he’d intended it to be.
Grimacing, she put away the past and pulled out the manual.
Pierce sat up fifteen minutes later. His eyes flicked to the book, his expression stony. Then he said, “This would be a good time for you to try out the SLuB.”
“Try out the—but—”
“Killing and bloodshed don’t appeal to you, huh?” Irony laced his voice. “Well, that was home. This is here.” He reached across her to snag her pack and pull out the SLuB. “You should know how it works.”
He showed her the black ON button beside the trigger. “You line up peg and notch on your target to aim. Fire in short bursts or it’ll overheat. The blue E-cube is your power source. When it turns pink, you have to replace it.”
He popped the cube out in demonstration, snapped it back in, and offered her the piece.
She eyed it distastefully.
He cocked a brow.
Well, he had a point. Right now she was totally dependent on him. If they ever did see another road, she wanted to be able to go to it with or without him.
Gingerly she took the weapon.
He showed her how to hold it and how to stand, adjusting her hands and shoulders until she had it right. His touch and nearness made her acutely self-conscious, and she was relieved when he stepped back and permitted her to shoot.
She wasn’t as bad as she expected to be, and even Pierce seemed impressed. When they finished, he suggested she keep the weapon out, so she slid it dutifully under her belt—
And noticed her manual scuttling across the ground toward the sandstone bank.
As she leapt after it, understanding caught up with perception—a sand mite had it, lofting the slim volume with dark blue pincers. She followed the creature around a bend in the rock and saw it was headed for a large hole in the bank ahead. Pierce yelled something, but her attention was focused on the manual. Without thought of what might lie in that hole, she dove for the manual and caught it on the threshold. The mite released one claw from the prize to snap at her. Sitting down hard, she dodged the snapping pincer and worked to pry the other off the book. Abruptly the creature let go and clamped on to her thumb. Gasping, Callie dropped the manual.
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