Sent Rising (Dove Strong)

by Erin Lorence

  Frog Face hustled after Blonde Girl to the cave’s entrance. He paused on the slick stone lip. “We’re watching the cave’s entrance from our lookout above, so don’t even think about escaping. Or talking. Or whistling. We’re trained soldiers, and we don’t mind using our weapons like Commander Reed said. You coming too, Eli?”

  Eli with the long beard slashed the air with the complicated knifework of an amateur. “Don’t…make me…use this. Because I will.” He backed out of the cave with dripping pants.

  Wolfe’s shoulders shook. “Some of your people are real nut jobs, Dove.”

  Trinity’s wet fingers fumbled at my chin. They peeled up the lower edge of tape covering my lips.

  I gulped in a mouthful of ocean air and returned the favor.

  “Thanks, Dove. That’s more like it. What about our hands? We could free them. Those white bumpy things on the wall are rough enough to cut with.”

  “The barnacles? And then what? Once you’re free you’ll wrestle our guards for their weapons? Or maybe you’ll dive into the ocean and swim to freedom? Can you girls swim? Or even dog paddle?” He smirked. “No, didn’t think so. Might as well leave your wrists alone. They’ll just tape them together again.”

  “You can swim, Wolfe. Swim us to the beach.”

  “You mean tow you to the beach, Dove? Both of you? Around the rocks and breakers? No way. One of you’d panic, and we’d all drown together.”

  “Fine. If you want to stay and be Reed’s prisoner.” I plopped back down in the eddies of water. I couldn’t cross my arms, so I crossed my legs. “We’ll give up on everything in life that matters—on our families—and stay here forever. Because you’re a spineless slug. A snail who’s too afraid to swim.”

  “Yup.”

  My body tensed and shivered as the ocean in the cave rose up to my knees and stayed there. Was this Reed’s real, unspoken plan? To trap us three in a cave that would fill up with water until we couldn’t touch? I’d never been in the ocean before, but it held obvious power, even more than a train. How long until the power swept me off my feet and pulled me into its depths?

  Frog Face reappeared to check our bonds. It was good I’d left the tape loose on my mouth instead of removing it. After he beat a hasty retreat to dry rock, Wolfe sloshed over to the cave wall. He chose an area where barnacles clustered thick like a clover patch. The dull sawing of his wrist restraints echoed.

  I uncrossed my legs and moved closer. The white bumps looked like tiny, broken mushroom stems. But they made sharp indents against my finger when I pressed. “Wolfe, what was it you knew? In the CTDC?”

  The sawing slowed. “Diamond told you, huh?”

  I attempted to whistle the seven-note strain of “Jesus Loves Me.” He chuckled. “What I knew was that your parents weren’t in the CTDC. Don’t think they ever had been.”

  “Already knew that.” At least I’d guessed the last part.

  “And crazy-eyed Brae set me up. He was the reason I was stuck in there. And he got himself held in the CTDC too…on purpose.” He whistled the same seven notes. The song Zechariah Brae had sung with him last spring on Mount Washington.

  I lifted one knee from the chill of the water in an attempt to thaw it. Then the other. “Already knew that.”

  “He was responsible for the car crash the night we transferred...and for the guards with us dying.”

  “Knew it.”

  “How?”

  “Chaff told us.”

  “Oh, yeah. Traitorous giraffe.”

  Trinity snorted. She paused in letting the ocean drip off her downturned fingers like fast-growing nails. “Giraffe.”

  He grinned. “And I know that Reed’s planning something big. An attack on society of some kind.”

  “A hostage situation, I think.”

  “You knew because of Chaff again?” He bobbed his neck in an imitation of the long-necked mammal.

  “No.” Trinity turned her back to a waist-high wave that rolled in. “Dove stole the message from a guy in a garbage bag who wanted to throw her off his roof.”

  He threw his head back, laughing like an idiot.

  “Shish!”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “Quit laughing so loud or Frog Face will be back. Or Eli with his knife tricks. And I’m not your…just shut up and tell what else you found out.”

  “What else you want?”

  “Something I don’t know.” The unsteady movements of the ocean rocked me. Like Trinity, I turned my back to the cave opening. Better not to see the wild ocean, darkening as the sun lowered in the west. “Where is my mom? And Trinity’s? Are they in California?”

  “I don’t know. Except that...I think Reed knows where they are. Because he never talks about the Christians who’ve gone missing. Never wonders, ‘Hmm? Where could they be?’ It’s suspicious. I’d expect him to be threatening vengeance on all of humanity, but he hasn’t uttered one complaint about it in all the time I’ve been around him. Which, by the way, has been way, way too much.”

  “Maybe he already knows where they are.” Hope made my voice rise. “Did he happen to mention the name of a place in all his talking? A city or town or anywhere?”

  He shook his head. “Only here...and Black Butte, but that’s—”

  I jumped, smacking my head against the low ceiling. “Black Butte. Trinity, that’s it.”

  “You think our moms and my dad are there, Dove?”

  “No, not at all! But that was the scribbled word on the message.” I thrust out my bound arms to show the one that used to wear the strip of yellow.

  Trinity looked at my bare skin. “The message that doesn’t matter and Reed threw away?”

  I dropped my arms and let the ocean sway me forward and then back. “Yeah. That one, I guess.” She was right. What did that message matter when my mom was still missing?

  The sawing stopped. Wolfe watched me through lowered lashes. The naturally upturned corners of his mouth now stretched straight. It made him look older and unfamiliar.

  I squirmed “What? What, Wolfe? Spit it out.”

  “Dove...there’s something else I know. But I don’t know if I should tell you now. Because it’ll make you feel rotten. More rotten.”

  “Rotten? What does that matter? Wolfe, don’t you dare not tell me something I—”

  “Rebecca’s dead. Stone...he killed her.”

  25

  Rebecca. Dead.

  His hands, free of their shackle, caught my arms and steadied me against the swell.

  “Sorry. I...I know. It’s horrible. Big time horrible.” His whispers in my ear came to me from far away.

  Trinity didn’t bother to whisper. “Rebecca’s dead? Who’s she?”

  Wolfe held on to me as if aware I might sink beneath the freezing water if he let go.

  “She was Dove’s good friend. And mine. A really smart chic who used words like they were a magic wand. Like, if she were here now, she’d go right up to those guards and tell them to put down their weapons and let us go. And they would.”

  “Oh. She must be the girl I was keeping my eyes peeled for in Portland.”

  A coldness worse than the ocean’s ice numbed me so I struggled to move my lips. “How...how do...you know she’s...gone?”

  “Reed asked Stone if he’d taken care of Dove’s well-spoken city rat for good. Stone looked him in the eyes and answered. He said ‘yes,’ Dove. And he was pale and shaky when he said it. Sick.”

  I’d only seen Stone look weak once—when dying from an infected bullet wound. But killing an old friend might also turn his stomach. So then, Wolfe told the truth. Rebecca was gone and had left this earth to join Gran in Heaven.

  I pulled away.

  I sensed Satan’s laughter as water lapped around my chest and attempted to lift me off my feet. My Enemy sent another wave, more powerful. Pulling me westward toward the deep ocean. I began to shake.

  Another horrible truth hit me. Reed absolutely wasn’t coming back to this cave.
r />   He had said he would return before high tide to transfer us to a new location. Yet Reed was a liar. A killer and a liar. He had lied, and Trinity, Wolfe, and I were going to die. Not from drowning, but from the cold. From hypothermia.

  I put my taped wrists against Wolfe’s shivering chest and shoved. “You’re free. Go! Swim away. Trinity and I can join Rebecca, but you can’t. Go home to your grandma and Jezebel.”

  Trinity plowed forward in a clumsy swish. “You really think the others aren’t coming back to relocate us?”

  “He killed Rebecca. Why not me? And you? And Wolfe?”

  Silence.

  Wolfe charged through the swells, dragging me with him. He pressed my hands and forearms against the barnacles, then dragged my wrists against their roughness. Up, down. Up, down. Stings raked across my half-dead skin.

  “Hold ’em up.” He lifted my arms off the rocks, and his hands enveloped the backs of mine. He yanked. And yanked again, the muscles in his arms flexing as if my wrists were two halves of a stubborn walnut he wanted to force apart.

  Rip. The worn area of tape became a separation.

  He dropped my free hands and glared down at me. “No one in this cave is hanging out with Rebecca tonight. You understand? Trinity. It’s your turn.”

  Before the water eased my arms’ sting, Trinity stood rubbing her wrists next to me.

  Wolfe bent over us, his face transformed by the black, downward slash of his brow. “We swim.”

  I shook my head and fumbled with the side wall at the cave’s mouth. “Trinity and I aren’t swimmers. We’re climbers. Give us a boost up so we can scout a different way out.”

  ~*~

  I shivered in the late afternoon sun and pressed my stomach tighter against the island’s warm slope. Four figures balanced near its peak with their backs to us, facing the turtle-shaped island beyond. The water had risen to cover the gray, reptilian-shaped head. Waves pummeled the last bit of shell.

  The newcomer who’d joined our three guards pointed a tan-clothed arm at the bumpy strip of beach in the distance. A low voice spoke slow and clear.

  “Commander Reed sent me with his message. You are to stay here. Don’t retreat to the beach or head to the camp without him. He’s been delayed by local Heathen, but you’re safe if you stay here with his prisoners. The water is already receding, and your path to the beach will be clear by the time he returns.”

  Blonde Girl nodded and gestured at the waves with the gun. “Yeah, OK, we’ll wait for Commander. But if the water rises any higher, the rest of the rocks to the beach will be covered, and we’ll be stuck here. In the dark. The sun is going down.”

  “Shall I report that you’re disobeying orders?”

  The gun wavered. “No. No, don’t tell him that.”

  “Then you’ll be sensible and wait?”

  Three heads bobbed.

  “Yes, we’ll be sensible.”

  “Sensible. That’s what we are.”

  “Hey, now!” The beard trailed over the man’s shoulder as he lurched forward, his knife in his hand. “But where are you going? I thought we were all going to be sensible and stay here? You get to leave?”

  The messenger paused on the dry portion of turtle’s shell but continued to face the beach. “I’m the commander’s messenger and not his guard. He’s waiting for my return. What shall I report about his prisoners?”

  “They’re here,” Frog Face croaked. “Secure. But they might drown soon if he doesn’t hurry.”

  “Something he’ll be glad to hear, I’m sure.”

  I tightened my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. Without a sound, I slid backward with clumsy movements toward the cave opening. Wolfe’s chilly hands grabbed me off the rocks. They lowered me into the shocking water and then hauled my cousin and I toward the back of the cave—away from the open ocean and its impatient tug.

  “Can you make it? Are they all sleeping so you can get past them to the beach? Or is there a back route you can take?”

  “No.”

  Trinity shuddered in front of me. “G-good news th-though. W-water’s going down.”

  Droplets flew from Wolfe’s hair with his shake. His palm splatted against the wall. “That white line means the water’s going to rise that high. Another foot at least. When that happens, the current will pull us out. So, we swim. Now.”

  A giant swell struck and lifted me off my feet.

  My arms flailed, and I kicked something solid beneath the surface. A creature. Like a shadow, its long, black body glided next to my legs. I thrashed as it curled around my knees.

  Splash! No chance to scream. My limbs froze rigid with shock. Liquid salt filled my mouth.

  26

  The creature trapped me beneath the water’s surface. It latched onto my face and forced something solid between my lips. Hard plastic.

  Clean oxygen poured down my raw throat and into my lungs.

  I quit clawing. The tentacle appendages against my chin didn’t belong to a sea creature. They weren’t even tentacles but hands. Human hands I couldn’t see through the gloomy murkiness, but I felt them now. Fingers gripped my arm while others fed me oxygen.

  The human towed me through the ocean, which tugged over my slack body. My surge of adrenaline ebbed away. I didn’t fight whoever held me. If I did I would drown.

  I clenched my eyes shut and inhaled easily. The coldness overwhelmed my body until I couldn’t feel anything but a heavy blanket of sleepiness.

  My head broke the surface to brightness. My lids struggled to open. Salt stung, smudging the ocean before me. The neck and head of a person in odd fitted black, like the rubber of a tire, bobbed into view. A blurry hand waved and held up its thumb.

  “Enough! Let go! Get off...I can swim.” A fuzzy Wolfe bolted through the water, away from another bobbing, black-covered figure.

  I squinted at a blonde, round thing. Trinity’s head. Through the haziness I saw her claw at a small, dark blob against a white oval—her face? She flung the donut-sized, black blob away. Her oval and Wolfe’s tan one bobbed closer. “D-D-Dove?”

  “What’s wrong with Dove?”

  “I think she’s cold,” said a familiar voice. No clue whose, though.

  “I’ll take her to shore. I can swim faster than you even without flippers. You help Trinity.” Wolfe’s blurry face loomed over me, vibrating like the rest of the world.

  “I got you, Dove girl.” His voice faded. Snatches of words reached me in the growing darkness. “C’mon...OK...join Rebecca.”

  27

  A persistent rhythmic drumming woke me.

  “Stoooop.” I tried to cover my ears, but a cocoon kept my arms smashed against the sides of my frozen body. Wolfe’s teeth grimaced down at me through the warm gloom, fragrant with oranges.

  I struggled to sit up but couldn’t. Besides the annoying cocoon, my body shook worse than a bunny’s in a thunderstorm. I clenched my jaw so my teeth wouldn’t knock together, but the steady beat continued.

  “Enough drumming for a second.” Wolfe tossed a chunk of citrus peel at the frizzy-haired kid.

  The rhythm stopped. Rebecca’s kid brother, Joshua, twirled the drumstick in his fingers and waved it at me. “She’s awake, Becca.”

  Becca? As in Rebecca? Where was I? I struggled again, fighting the blanket’s stranglehold. “Help...me up...”

  Wolfe pulled me into a sitting position and kept his arm around my blanketed back. I felt my pupils dilate, taking in my crowded surroundings.

  Trinity leaned against a cardboard box across from me and sipped from a flowerpot. Water from her braid dripped down the front of her leopard-print blanket. The worker girl from the store in Portland gazed at the flat electronic in her lap and ignored the guy jostling her. Hunter. He’d grown a beard since I last saw him at the Council. Clothed in a black rubber suit, he twisted a cord around three torpedo-shaped cylinders.

  “I need another length to secure them, Becca.”

  “We’ve got no more. Better make i
t work.” Rebecca tilted back in a wooden chair and peeled an orange.

  In the middle of our cramped circle, a single electric lantern wearing a tasseled hat projected a yellow moon-shape on the low ceiling and illuminated the objects crowding the tight space. Like the stuffed rabbit with antlers that grinned into Trinity’s left ear. And the half-towers of books whose other halves appeared to have toppled around Joshua.

  I flopped against the nest of sleeping bags behind me. My eyes flickered back to Rebecca. “Not heaven?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re not dead. How?”

  She grinned lopsided at Wolfe and sighed. “Didn’t you and me just have this conversation?”

  “Don’t laugh. Stone told Reed he killed you.”

  Creak, creak. Her chair rocked on its hind legs. “Did it occur to anyone present that Stone didn’t tell the truth?”

  Stone had lied?

  He’d lied. My slow brain struggled to accept the idea. It conjured up a picture of the giant’s pale skin tinged with sweat. His unsteady hands—a result of lying to his brother. Not a result of murdering his friend. Of course, Rebecca was right. He’d lied. Warm relief flashed over me, and I shuddered.

  “Here. Drink. It helps.” Trinity leaned across the space to hand me the navy flowerpot. Its brown contents sloshed in her unsteady grip.

  Wolfe rescued the container and tilted its rim against my chattering teeth. I swallowed pure, sweet warmth. Chocolate.

  “Good...good flowerpot. Um. Glad you’re...you know. OK. Trinity.” My voice cracked on her name.

  In a blink, everyone’s eyes were riveted on me. Even the round blue ones from Portland. I nodded at Joshua. “What are you waiting for? Drum.”

  Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a... I gulped chocolate again, waiting for Hunter to finish his imitation of a nosy owl.

  “So? Where are we? And you.” I untangled and thrust my heavy arm at the blue-eyed, Portland girl. “You definitely should not be here.”

  “Whatever. It’s my van.” As if that explained everything, she went back to her electronic.