Arena

by Karen Hancock

  “Honey, he doesn’t give up.”

  Callie exhaled a long, slow sigh and pulled her hands from under her head, folding her arms across her chest. More than ever she wanted to leave. Pierce had. Rowena had. Why couldn’t she?

  Because, as much as she dreaded the climb and loathed Garth, she knew going back would get her nowhere. Pierce would probably sign up with the Manderian temple, and she wanted that no more than she wanted Garth’s attentions.

  She was still awake when Thor and Lokai returned, surprising her because she hadn’t realized Thor had left. They had their weapons with them, which, inexplicably, they passed to Garth in his tent before seeking their beds. She wondered about it for a while, but her thoughts kept returning to her own concerns, and finally sleep claimed her.

  She awakened to a groggy head, burning eyes, and a grim sense of foreboding. The clouds had lowered during the night, and the scent of moisture hung heavy in the air. Neither Pierce nor Rowena had returned, but no one commented. Within an hour they had all shouldered their packs and started up the cleft.

  At first the trail climbed gently through a boulder-clogged channel grown thick with willows, not much different from what Callie had first imagined. Garth was often out of sight, walking at the head of the line with Thor and Lokai, which suited Callie—bringing up the rear with LaTeisha—just fine. All too soon, though, the path left the comforting presence of the willows to climb the left wall of the canyon, angling across increasingly vertical faces. Callie hugged the inner wall and stared at the place where wall met trail, sometimes glancing up at LaTeisha’s back ahead of her, but careful never to look toward the trail’s edge. Even so, she sensed the well of space gaping at her side and clenched the shoulder pads of her pack straps as if somehow they could hold back the rising panic.

  Then they came to the bridge.

  The trail curved around the wall and through a U-shaped cut in a shoulder of granite. Four large iron rings, two on a side, had been secured to the rock as anchors. The bridge, a narrow, frayed-rope affair, swooped sickeningly from edge to edge. Only its upper handrails were visible from Callie’s vantage, and those dropped swiftly out of sight. As the first man started across, he seemed to step off into nothing. She watched him disappear section by section—legs, waist, chest, head— then reappear far out on the span, struggling to keep his balance on the swaying, undulating structure. Against the sheer rock face beyond him, he looked unbearably tiny, an insignificant mote suspended over a gulf of swirling lavender.

  Callie’s legs started to shake. Nausea clawed the back of her throat. The world spun, and the gargantuan space pulled at her, sucking her toward it like a black hole. Desperately she clutched the wall beside her, struggling to breathe. Her vision began to flash, and she knew if she did not get away from here right now, she would die. Gasping, she fled back to the boulders and the willows, where Garth found her a few moments later, sitting beside her pack at the road’s edge, hugging her knees and weeping miserably.

  “Callie? What are you doing?”

  He stood over her, rifle in hand. Whit, Lokai, and Thor loomed behind him. When she didn’t answer, he slung the rifle over his shoulder and squatted before her. “What’s wrong, babe? What’s happened?”

  She closed her eyes and turned her face from his, sick with shame. “I’m . . . not going with you,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “I can’t.”

  When he said nothing, Callie forced herself to look up, brushing the tears from her cheeks. “I’m going back to Hardluck.”

  He frowned suspiciously. “Because of last night?”

  “No.” She looked at the trees, the boulders, the sky. She wiped her face again. “Because I can’t”—her voice was high and shaky—“cross the bridge.”

  “What do you mean you can’t cross the bridge?” His frown deepened. “You gutshot a Trog at point-blank range, girl. Why can’t you cross a little bridge?”

  “Because I’m acrophobic.”

  He had no response to that. Behind him Thor hawked and spat. Whit shifted his grip on his rifle, leather armor creaking.

  Finally Garth exhaled in annoyance. “That’s it? You won’t even try?” Censure rankled in his voice.

  She averted her gaze. For a few minutes he squatted there, then opened his mouth to speak, closed it, lifted his hands from his thighs, let them drop back again. Finally he stood.

  “Okay. If that’s what you want, it’s your life.” He held out his hand. “But first give me your SLuB.”

  She looked up in surprise. “Why?”

  “Just give it to me.”

  Puzzled, she drew the weapon from her waistband, then hesitated. He seized her wrist and jerked the weapon from her grasp. “We’ll need this more than you will, babe.” Tucking the gun into his waistband, he picked up her pack and handed it to Thor, who slung it over his shoulder.

  She leapt to her feet. “What are you doing?”

  He walked away, Thor and Lokai following. Whit frowned at her, then at Garth, as if he might protest, but in the end he followed the others.

  “Wait,” she cried. “You can’t do this. What if the Trogs come? I don’t have any water. Garth!”

  “Come and get it,” he called back at her.

  She followed a few steps, then stopped, pounding her fists against her hips and screaming epithets at him. He ignored her and walked around the bend. She stared after him, sobbing with frustration and fury and desperate fear. He’d left her alone in the middle of nowhere with no defenses and no provisions.

  I have to go with him, she thought, walking a few feet up the trail.

  A vision of the rope bridge stopped her. Pressure built in her chest, a sharp, expanding pain that crawled up into her throat. Around her the willows and rocks pulsed in the damp morning air, shimmering as if reality was twisting out of its boundaries. He left me . . . with nothing. . . . The pressure exploded all at once in a scream of rage and desperation, echoing off the rocks and coming back to taunt her. She screamed again and again, until her throat was raw and she realized she couldn’t just stand there and scream. She had to think.

  Why? What good will it do? I’m going to die out here. Never see my family again. Never marry. Never have children. “Stop it!” she cried aloud. “Think.”

  She’d go back to Hardluck. The road appeared well used. It undoubtedly led there. The clouds would keep her cool, and she could drink at the river they’d forded yesterday. But, oh, Lord, how would she ever cross that torrent alone? She thrust the thought from her mind. If she started now, she might reach the town by afternoon, since she wouldn’t have to work through the brambles. It was going to be okay. It was.

  As she turned Callie spied the Watcher crouched on a rock twenty feet off the trail. The dark eye pits sucked her gaze into them, holding her cold and motionless. Then the mocking laughter bubbled up in her head. Her stomach boiled with nausea, and she had to wrench her eyes away, had to force herself to breathe again and walk down the trail.

  It will be okay, she told herself. It will.

  The thorn-wall tunnel was less intimidating by day than it had been at dusk the night before. Light filtered through the woven branches, and a chorus of twitters, rustles, and cracking twigs provided a welcome sense of company. Callie took comfort in the rabbits and squirrels darting across her path and tried not to dwell on the fact that, should she encounter Trogs, she’d have no place to hide.

  She’d walked some ways when a distant crashing brought her to a standstill. Shortly the new noise stopped, too, and when it did not resume, she continued on. Probably just an animal—and not even a predator, since no predator would make so much noise. Besides, it was far away.

  But then it started again, closer than before, a staccato of snapping twigs somewhere ahead. She slowed and considered waiting while whatever it was went its way. Again the crashing stopped, making her wonder if she’d somehow been sensed.

  The silence lengthened. Impatience gnawed at her. The lo
nger she waited, the greater her chance of meeting up with something unpleasant. Whatever was ahead was on top of the brambles anyway—perhaps it had gone to sleep or changed course and left.

  She eased forward and was well past where she judged the unseen intruder to have stopped when the ruckus erupted once more, now directly overhead. It so startled her she cried out, and immediately the sounds ceased. Aghast, she stood motionless, willing whatever it was to go away. Instead, a rush of breaking twigs and falling debris preceded the emergence of a nightmarish face through the branches—red and misshapen, one round eye staring right at her.

  Swallowing a scream, she whirled and ran.

  “Callie?”

  The voice sounded hoarse, but familiar.

  “Callie, wait!”

  An avalanche of snapping sounded behind her as astonished recognition brought her to a halt. When she turned back, he was limping after her. Trepidation warred with hope. His face was unrecognizable, the left eye a closed, puffy lump, colored black and purple and bright red. His swollen lips were crusted with white, the lower one split and blood-caked. Shiny bruises lashed cheekbones and jaw, and one ear swelled shapeless and purple. Nevertheless, the voice was right.

  “Good heavens, Pierce! What happened?”

  He stopped before her. “Thor and Lokai jumped me last night. Brought me out here and dumped me. Maybe they were afraid I’d retaliate, though what they thought I could do unarmed is anyone’s guess.”

  It had been Pierce’s weapons they’d passed to Garth last night, not their own.

  He touched light fingers to his injured eye. “Looks pretty bad, huh?”

  “I had no idea skin could turn such colors.”

  “So what’re you doing here?”

  Shame swept her. “I’m going back, too.”

  He frowned. “Without your stuff?”

  “Garth has it.”

  His gaze probed her, seeing the truth she wasn’t telling. “He left you out here defenseless.”

  “He said they’d need the stuff more than I would.” Bitter anger twisted in her chest. How could he have said he loved her last night and do this today? She’d been such a fool!

  Pierce swore softly. “He’s lost his mind.”

  “He wants to get home,” Callie said.

  “Is that supposed to be an excuse?”

  “An explanation. Can we go now?”

  He regarded her evenly, and she was seized with a compulsion to explain about last night, how it had been Garth’s idea, not hers—that she’d had no idea what he’d intended when she’d gone with him to that pond. Except that wasn’t entirely true, so she said nothing.

  At length he exhaled. “Yeah.”

  They reached the river before noon. By then it was hot, the clouds having shredded away as the day progressed. A cable rigged with a small raft served to ferry travelers across the river’s sparkling green surface, and soon they were in the opposing bramble tunnel, confident the road did indeed lead to Hardluck, though they wouldn’t be going that far.

  By early afternoon they’d left the road and bushwhacked their way to what they assumed was another branch of the Fire River. Meandering in multiple streams through a broad, graveled bed, it ran relatively shallow here. The near bank descended in wide tiers, the far rising in a line of red cliffs.

  “There should be a gate road on that bluff across the river,” Pierce said, gesturing.

  “What about supplies?”

  “I think there’s a Safehaven, too.”

  “You think?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve never been in it.”

  They crossed the river where it was forty feet wide, calf-deep, and moving at a good clip. Its rocky bed made for slippery footing, and Callie held tightly to Pierce’s hand as they lurched and slid their way across. Then, midchannel, he froze, that blank, faraway look on his face. She peered downstream in alarm but saw nothing. When he finally moved on, Pierce tugged at her to hurry. Slogging out of the water, they clambered over the boulders along the river’s edge, careful to avoid the massive redclaw pods hidden throughout the tumble. Overhead a few puffy clouds played with the sun as Pierce stopped at the base of the far bank, studying the twenty-foot-tall face of ridged rock.

  “It looks lower downstream,” Callie said.

  “We can’t go downstream.” Tension clipped his voice. “Come on.”

  He led her upstream along the bank to a rock slab lying aslant the cliff, which he climbed to take a look around. “There’s a cut in the bank up the way,” he said, descending to her side. “We might get out there.” He flinched and his eyes went blank again—Callie’s pulse accelerated—then his fingers closed around her hand. “We’d better hurry.”

  She swallowed. We have no rifle, no SLuB, no protection at all.

  They slid and jumped and bounded from boulder to boulder, then ran down a sandy side wash, willow branches slapping their arms and legs.

  Callie saw the cut up ahead, the one Pierce must have seen from the rock. No sounds had erupted from behind, so the Trogs must not have spotted them. They might just make it.

  Something snagged her left foot, and she flew forward, face and hands driving into the sand. The wind knocked out of her, she lay gasping and spitting sand as the world seemed to slip by. Abruptly she realized it was slipping by—she’d blundered into a redclaw pod.

  “Pierce!” His name came out a croak—she dared not risk a full yell. Grabbing at spindly weeds, which broke off in her hands, she twisted onto her back and tried to brace her free foot against a boulder or stump to stop herself—couldn’t. Ahead she saw the gray leaves of the plant’s central body, smelled its sweet-vomit stench. Her fingers clutched a willow branch that bent but held, and immediately she felt a pull in ankle, hip, and shoulder. Pain flared up her leg and back. The branch tore her palms, slid through her fingers. . . .

  Then Pierce was there, chopping at the runner with a long knife— where had he gotten that?—in swift, powerful blows. Purple juice welled from the woody stem. The pressure on her leg released, and Callie sagged against the sand, dizzy with the pain. She shook her head to clear it, then sat up to attend the pod, still clamped to her foot. Pierce already crouched beside it, knife in hand.

  A thin, distant shriek brought both their heads up.

  Callie kicked frantically at the pod.

  “Wait,” Pierce said. In seeming slow motion, he inserted his knife tip between the pod’s serrated lip and her instep, then twisted outward, away from the boot, sawing laboriously through the fibrous material.

  Another howl split the air, closer now.

  The knife broke free of the pod. He returned it to its initial place and sawed toward her toe, paralleling the boot. Meanwhile, Callie stuffed her fingers into the first slit he had made and peeled off a chunk of juicy green flesh. He finished the second cut and pulled the top part free. She ripped off the section on her heel, and the final piece fell away. Stuffing the knife into his boot, Pierce pulled her up, and together they raced across the sand, jumping hidden pods and keeping to rock when they could.

  In moments they stood at the base of the cut, finding it not nearly as deep as they’d hoped. The bank sloped away from them, about fifteen feet high now, not exactly vertical, but close. Deep slashes, clefts, and gleaming knobs scattered its horizontal striations.

  “Can you get up this?” he asked.

  She swallowed heavily. It wasn’t that high. And there were good hand- and foot-holds.

  Behind them the howls sounded again, much closer.

  If I keep pressing at the problem, I’m bound to master it, she told herself. This’ll be just like the ladder in the stable. She licked her lips. “Sure.”

  “You go first, then. I’ll hold them off if need be.” He had the knife out.

  Resolutely Callie mounted the rock. Just find one handhold and then the next. . . . It’s not that bad. No reason you can’t do this. No reason.

  She reached overhead, feeling for a crack, and started to climb
. The stone bulged in her face, brushing her nose, forcing her head back at an awkward angle. She heard Pierce start up after her. An image of what lay below drifted through her mind, and the fear began—a curdling deep in the pit of her stomach, a tremor tickling her limbs. Sweat slicked her brow and upper lip, stung the cuts on her cheeks.

  Another howl ululated up the riverbed.

  She reached with her right foot for a hold, found a knob about knee height, and was easing her weight onto the swell when it gave way, pebbles cascading down the rock face. Clutching the cliff with both hands, eyes tightly closed, she scrabbled with her dangling foot, found a hold, and clung, panting.

  You’re okay, she told herself. You’re almost to the top.

  Taking a trembling breath, Callie forced herself to open her eyes— the worst thing she could have done. She was looking down, and the ground seemed a hundred feet away. Adrenaline fired in hot prickling waves. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. Not again. Please, not again. I have to do this.

  Her palms were slick with sweat, her fingertips slippery on the stone. The soles of her boots teetered on their purchase as memories of the Disneyland Skyway resurfaced—vivid and awful as the day they were born—the small car swinging in the breeze as her panic rose along with her father’s rage.

  “You’re doing fine, Callie,” Pierce murmured from somewhere below and to the right. “Don’t stop.”

  She couldn’t open her eyes. Couldn’t move her arms or legs. Couldn’t do anything but cling to the wall in desperation. I can’t do it! I can’t do it! The words shrieked like a whirlwind through her mind. A violent trembling overtook her.

  Oh no . . .

  Her foot slipped from its knob. She clutched harder to her handholds, but her efforts only made her situation worse. Both hands began to slide off the ridges they clung to. Then the other foot gave way— and she was falling.

  Images whirled through her mind—the Skyway’s chrome railing, the puffy clouds, the dark things pulling at her as she cried and clung to her daddy’s arms. They could not make her lose hold of him, would not. She would hang on with all her might. . . .