Freefall

by Roderick Gordon

  “Two years old!” he gasped, and immediately checked the other labels. He found that they had approximately the same dates on them, give or take a few months.

  He sat back on the ground, dumbfounded, as several thoughts ricocheted through his head. He felt a surge of hope, because the very existence of these bottles demonstrated that even down here there were medicines to be had (modern ones, no less), which might help Elliott overcome the fever.

  But he was also deeply disturbed by the discovery. If Martha had known about these medicines, why hadn’t she said anything to him about them? Worse still, why had she been skulking around behind his back and hiding them from him? He couldn’t begin to comprehend why she would do that.

  He gathered up more of the loose pills and put them in the other bottles, then screwed on their tops. Deep in thought, he tucked all three bottles into his pants pocket.

  “C’mon, boy, time to get back,” he said to Bartleby. To avoid getting into further conversation with Rebecca, he marched quickly past her.

  “Find anything?” she called out.

  “Nah, nothing,” he grunted, keeping his eyes firmly on the path in front of him.

  “You’re just in time for supper. I made us some broth,” Martha said as Will entered the shack. She had her back to the room as she stirred a pot on the hearth, while Chester was seated at the table and already tucking into his food.

  “Did that Styx snake tell you anything else?” he inquired, not looking at Will as he drained his spoon of broth.

  “Yes, she did,” Will answered. “Something very weird.” He didn’t sit down but began to take the bottles from his pocket, placing them in a row on the table.

  “She’s a lying little viper, just like the rest of them,” Chester said scornfully, lifting his spoon to his mouth but not quite reaching it as his eyes fell on the bottles.

  “She’s not the only one who’s lying,” Will said in a low voice.

  Martha had been halfway to the table with a bowl of broth for Will. There was a crash as she simply dropped it, splashing broth all over the floor.

  Except for the odd crackle of the fire, there was absolute silence in the room.

  Chester looked from Will to Martha, who was holding mouse-still, her head down. “What the heck is going on here?” He pointed at the bottles with his spoon. “And what are those, Will?” he asked.

  “Medicine, apparently. Look at the date,” Will said, rolling one of the bottles across the table to Chester.

  Chester picked it up and studied the label. “Two years old,” he said. “And the label’s in Russian.”

  “Russian,” Will said. “Really?”

  “Sure. My grandmother was from the Ukraine. She taught me a few words,” Chester said, his expression one of complete bewilderment. “But what’s going on? Where did you get these?”

  Will snatched up another of the bottles and shook it so it rattled. “They had pills in them. At least they did until Martha sneaked them out of the trunks and buried them by the cavern wall. She buried them so I wouldn’t find them.” He glowered at Martha, who remained staring at her feet, then he suddenly clapped a hand to his forehead. “Of course, the stethoscope!” he cried. “It’s recent, too, like the pills! Tam was trying to tell me! He told me to listen to my heart. He meant the stethoscope!”

  Chester was on his feet now, eyeing his friend with alarm. “What? What are you saying, Will? Have you completely lost it? How can Tam have spoken to you? He’s been dead for months!”

  “Forget it — that’s not important,” Will said, his voice more controlled, although husky with anger. “What’s important is that Martha knew there was some medicine. Maybe some antibiotics that we could have used on Elliott. And she hid them from us, Chester,” Will said, facing the woman. “Why did you do that, Martha?”

  She remained silent, her head bowed.

  “Martha?” Chester mumbled. “Is this true?”

  Martha shuffled unsteadily to the chair at the head of the table and sank into it. She said nothing for a moment, sliding her thumb repeatedly in the palm of her other hand. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible.

  “When Nathaniel came back with … with cracked ribs … and the fever set in, he got worse and worse —”

  “Yeah, we know all that,” Will interrupted, no longer able to feel much sympathy for the woman.

  “I told you he found a metal ship. It’s about eight days away in the farthest of the Seven Sisters. While he …,” she said, her voice petering out.

  “Yes,” Will pressed her.

  “While he could still speak, he gave me directions so I could fetch some apothecaries’ supplies from it.”

  Will and Chester exchanged glances.

  “You mean medicines,” Will said.

  “Yes, medicines,” she confirmed timidly. “But it’s a long journey and I strayed off track. I also lost some of the medicines when the Brights attacked. They nest by the ship and I only just made it out of there.”

  “Brights?” Chester mouthed silently at Will, who just jerked his head in response.

  “Go on,” Will urged her.

  “Nathaniel was dead by the time I came back,” Martha sighed. “But even if I had been in time for him, I couldn’t tell what the medicines do, or how to use them.”

  “Yeah, but maybe Chester and I can,” Will said sharply. “And you still haven’t explained why you lied to us, Martha.”

  “Because … because I didn’t want you to get hurt. I couldn’t lose either of you, not like I did Nathaniel. I couldn’t go through that again,” Martha croaked, on the verge of tears.

  Will pointed in the direction of Elliott’s room. “In there, our friend is fighting for her life, and your lies might very well have killed her,” he said. Then he addressed Chester. “OK, this is what we’re going to do — we’re leaving right now for the metal ship.” He went over to where Martha had left her crossbow and snatched it up.

  Martha had seen what he’d done from the corner of her eye. The act in itself was significant enough — he didn’t need to add anything. She sighed again. “I’m sorry, Will,” she said. “I won’t let you down again.”

  “Chester, why don’t you get Elliott ready,” Will suggested. “Martha, I want you to pack up all the food you’ve got in the place.”

  “I need to pick some Aniseed Fire from my garden,” she said, rising slowly to her feet, then going to the front door. The boys watched her as she stopped halfway down the garden path and began to harvest her plants. As she lopped their stems, the vivid blue glow the Aniseed Fire emitted was instantly dulled, slowly fading away to nothing.

  “That was awful,” Chester said. “But I can’t believe she lied to us.”

  They continued to watch the rather forlorn and lonely figure as she bent over her plants, dressed in her threadbare apron, with her red, straggling hair flopping over her face.

  “Just a sad old lady,” Will murmured. He pulled his shoulders back as if trying to put the whole episode behind him. “Why don’t you try to read what was in the bottles,” he said. “I’ll get our kit ready, then we’re making tracks.”

  “And Rebecca?” Chester asked. “What do we do with her?”

  “Count me in — I’d love to help,” Rebecca said as she mounted the steps of the front porch and entered the room. Will immediately looked down at her ankles and saw that she’d removed her leg irons. “You know I’m really good at organizing things, don’t you, Will?” she added gently.

  Shaking his head in disbelief, Will took a moment to answer. “So … so you could have escaped whenever you wanted. But you didn’t.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” she replied. “There’s nowhere for me to go.”

  Will noticed Chester had clenched his fist, and was worried what he might be about to do. Just then an amazingly powerful gust of wind swept through the garden, ruffling the plants in their beds.

  “Feels like a Levant’s blowing up,” Rebecca said.

 
As a shutter banged somewhere in the shack, Will spoke quietly. “Every time one of those winds comes along, something terrible happens.”

  “Oh, great,” Chester muttered.

  The wind raged around Dr. Burrows and the Rebecca twin. Caught in an exposed position in the middle of a wide tunnel, there was nowhere they could go to escape it as it grew more and more fierce. The small campfire between them was almost extinguished by the violent flurries, but they were hardly able to see this, anyway, as a sandstorm of black dust suddenly enveloped them.

  Dr. Burrows had rolled onto his front and wrapped his arms around his head to protect his face from the dust. As he lay there, spitting grit from his mouth, he finally admitted to himself that he’d had about all he could take from the Styx girl. The pressure from her to come up with results was relentless. He couldn’t just snap his fingers and somehow find a feature that tied in with the map on the stone tablets. It made him livid. He was an archaeologist, not some scout in the mold of Davy Crockett.

  And to cap it all off, Dr. Burrows felt thoroughly intimidated by the Styx soldier. Just under the surface of everything the girl said was the veiled threat that the ghoulish soldier was going to do him harm. To say that it made Dr. Burrows feel extremely uneasy was an understatement.

  Talk about a complete reversal of the parent-child relationship: Now Rebecca was the one calling all the shots — he had no real say in anything. No. It had all become too much for Dr. Burrows. So much so that he was willing to take his chances on his own. And, most important to him, Rebecca had forgotten to take the tablets away from him for “safekeeping,” as she put it. He patted his pocket to assure himself they were there, and smiled.

  Knowing the impenetrable dust cloud would mask his movements, he began to crawl slowly along the ground and away from the fire. He made sure he hooked the water bladder as he went — he would need it to keep himself going.

  After a short while, he stopped crawling. He still couldn’t see very far in front of him, and the wind filled his ears as he listened. Deciding that there was no way his departure could have been observed, he got up and began to walk. Nearly bent double from the force of the wind, he walked straight into what felt like … a man.

  Next to the man was a vague smear of light, and in this light, between the thick swirls of dust, he glimpsed a face.

  “Did you get lost?” Rebecca yelled over the squall.

  Dr. Burrows had walked smack bang into the Limiter, and the Styx girl was standing right next to him.

  Grabbing his arm, she spun him back in the direction he’d come from. “It’s not wise to move around in this,” she added. After a few steps she sat down, pulling him with her. “Don’t want to get yourself hurt, Daddy, do you?” she said.

  15

  WILL WAS PACKING the last of his kit as Chester came out onto the porch.

  “It’s the weirdest thing …,” Will started to say, looking mystified.

  “What?”

  “Well,” Will continued as he pulled his headset from a side pocket of his rucksack and regarded it, “I just tested this to make sure it’s ready … and it’s completely dead.”

  “Are you sure?” Chester asked.

  “Absolutely. Not even a glimmer,” Will replied.

  “Maybe you left it on or something, and the element burned out,” Chester suggested.

  “No, I’ve taken really good care of it,” Will answered. “I hope your rifle scope is OK — at least one of us needs to have night vision.”

  Chester fetched his rifle and pointed it down the garden.

  “I can’t believe it!” he exclaimed, lowering the weapon to examine the scope. “It’s not working, either.” He turned the knurled focus ring on the scope and tried it again. “Nope. Zilch!” Frowning, he looked quickly over at Will. “You don’t think the Rebecca twin …” He trailed off.

  Will considered this for a moment. “Nah, it can’t have been her. I know she’s been off her tether, but my headset was in Elliott’s room, and there’s always one of us in there.”

  “Well, if it wasn’t her,” Chester said, shaking his rifle as if it might make the scope function again, “aren’t these things powered by light orbs and meant to last for years? Isn’t that what Drake said?”

  “I think so,” Will exhaled, shutting his eyes for a second. “Typical — just when we need them.” He snapped his eyes open. “Let’s just hope that we don’t run into any trouble along the way.” As they returned inside he glanced at the pill bottles on the table. “Any luck with those?”

  Chester went over and took one of them in his hand. “Yes, this had aspirin in it,” he said without any hesitation.

  “Wow! That’s just incredible!” Will exclaimed. “You can actually read Russian! I’m impressed!” Then he noticed that Chester was smiling at him.

  “Will,” he said, directing his friend to the very bottom of the label, “if you look down here — in among the Russian words — it says Aspirin. In English.”

  “Right … missed that,” Will mumbled, feeling more than a little foolish.

  From the lettering on the pills, it didn’t take long to identify which of them were the aspirins. Then Will and Chester debated whether it would be too risky to give them to Elliott, particularly since the pills had spent a good week in the soil and some of them had begun to go a little fluffy as they were affected by the moisture.

  In the end, they decided that the aspirins might do more good than harm and help take the edge off her fever. And if it prevented another of the spasmodic fits, then they felt they had no option but to give it a shot. So they dissolved a few of the pills in a canteen of water and made Elliott drink it.

  The Levant Wind had all but died down by the time they went through the barricade, with just the odd gust blowing on their backs. For several hours, the tunnels were wide and relatively level. Will prayed that the whole journey would be this easy.

  Because she knew the way, Martha took pole position. Next came Chester and Will, carrying Elliott between them on a makeshift stretcher. Elliott was swaddled in a blanket and tightly bound to the stretcher so that she could be hauled up vertically if the situation demanded, but for now the boys were trying to keep her horizontal to lessen the trauma of being moved.

  Will glanced back at Rebecca, who was bringing up the rear with Bartleby loping alongside her in his long, loose gait. At her own insistence, Rebecca was carrying a huge proportion of their provisions and water in two rucksacks, one on each shoulder. Given her slender frame, this would have been a tall order on the surface, but the lack of gravity meant she could manage it without too much difficulty. Nevertheless, Will still couldn’t help noticing how her limp seemed to be more pronounced.

  “I’m not sure how she’s coping,” he said quietly to Chester.

  “As well as can be expected, I suppose,” Chester responded as he looked down at Elliott.

  “I meant Rebecca,” Will corrected him.

  “Oh, her,” Chester replied peevishly, his whole manner transforming in the blink of an eye. It was obvious he couldn’t care less. “Will, don’t be taken in by her. I tell you, it’s all one big act.”

  Will thought for a second. “If it is some sort of trick, what could she possibly want from us?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Chester said. He was on edge — he didn’t like it that Will was giving the girl free rein. Will knew that if Chester had had his way, she would have been chained up again — properly this time — and left behind to rot in the log store.

  “I don’t think she’s up to anything,” Will said after a few paces. Although he wouldn’t have dreamed of breathing a word to Chester, he was incredibly confused about his feelings. Since she’d turned up at the shack, Rebecca hadn’t shown any of the brutal characteristics of her people. In fact, she seemed to be distinctly vulnerable, and a world apart from the Styx and their insectlike cruelty.

  He so wanted to believe that everything she’d told him was true — that she’d been forced to follo
w orders on pain of death. Maybe he wanted to believe her a little too much. Rebecca had been a godsend to Will before they’d left the shack, helping him plan what they needed to take and organizing the rucksacks to the nth degree in that efficient way only she could. It was as if he’d done a backflip over all the atrocious things he’d experienced at the hands of the Styx in the Colony and the Deeps and somehow his sister had been restored to him, the sister he knew from the good times home in Highfield. Admittedly these were few and far between — and perhaps they were all the more intense in his memory exactly because of that. And perhaps he also wanted to believe in her because, with his father gone, she was all that remained of his Highfield family. Apart from Mrs. Burrows, of course, who was a vague and distant figure on the fringes of his recollections.

  “Right now, I’m more worried about Martha,” Chester said, breaking into Will’s thoughts. They both peered at her rotund outline up ahead. “She’s not herself at all,” Chester continued. “She’s hardly said a word since we left the shack. I know it was wrong of her to lie to us, but I can kind of understand her reasons.”

  Will gave a half articulated “yes” in response. He wasn’t going to forgive the woman in a hurry. “What she did was selfish. She chose our lives over Elliott’s. How can that be right?” he said.

  “It’s not,” Chester replied slowly, as if he was still weighing whether to remain angry with Martha.

  “Speaking of Elliott,” Will said, “isn’t it time for another dose of aspirin?”

  “I’m sure we could all do with a pit stop,” Chester agreed.

  Having shouted to Martha to come back to them, Will slipped off his rucksack and extracted the canteen containing the aspirin solution. He passed this to Chester, who shook it thoroughly, then removed the top and began to tip a few measures into Elliott’s mouth.

  “It’s definitely doing the trick,” Chester said, placing a hand on her forehead as he poured a little more of the fluid between her cracked lips. “She’s much cooler.”