Water slams against the side of my head again like an icy wave, stinging my ear. Large chunks of ice are breaking up everywhere. I struggle to outrun them as water seeps and surges between moving slabs of ice.
Ahead of me, I see Markus reach land, sliding onto the frozen mud at the shore. He stands at the edge of the lake, yelling for us to run. David is hopping and jumping over chunks of ice, desperately trying to make it too, despite the splint on his foot.
I ignore the terrifying cracking and snapping noises, and just focus on the edge of the bank. My eyes fix on an icy crystalline oak tree, its frozen boughs shimmering in the gray light. If I can make it to that tree, then I’m going to be okay, I tell myself. I just have to keep moving.
But my body is barely responding to my commands anymore. I try to move my feet, but I’m so cold, it feels like I’m running in molasses.
I glance back to see the others struggling forward. The lake has claimed Sinxen’s body already. I see his pale hand slip off a slab of ice and into the water.
Gone forever.
The feeler has completely disappeared too, its tentacles sucked into the ever-widening hole created by the impact.
Now there are only five of us left, plus the Monk and his drone.
I keep my eyes locked on that icy oak tree. I’m getting closer as I dodge ice chunks and dance over pools of water. Underneath the ice, the lake is far from placid. It’s roiling and dark, like an ocean. I feel its currents wanting to suck me in and pull me under.
Then I hear frenzied screaming, and I chance a final look back.
While Gadya is practically alongside me, and the Monk and his drone are off to my left near David, Rika is now lagging badly. She’s trapped on an ice floe, with water spraying up all around her.
“Rika!” I yell. I don’t want to stop moving, but I pause for an instant as the ice cracks around me.
“Help!” she calls back, too scared to move in any direction. More water cascades upward, and she almost loses her balance. The piece of ice she’s stuck on tilts sideways and she screams again.
My survival depends on getting to the bank. I spin around and see that Gadya and Markus haven’t heard Rika’s screams. No one else is going to save her.
Suppressing my fear, I realize that I don’t have a choice. Not if I want to live with myself. I’m only alive because Gadya brought me to the village, with David’s help, and because Liam saved me during the feeler attack in the orange sector. Our survival depends on helping one another. So I race back across the ice, lunging toward Rika.
I slip across the surface, which is disintegrating under my feet. I inch as close to her as I dare, and hold out my hand, swaying as the ice moves with me. “Come on!” I yell. “Jump toward me!”
She’s crouched on all fours, pressing herself against the stray piece of ice so she doesn’t get tossed off into the water.
I creep a bit closer, still hearing those explosive cracks. If any more ice breaks up, I won’t be able to get to the shore either.
“Grab my hand!” I scream.
“I’m scared!”
“Me too!” I stretch my arm out as far as I can, while water billows up around me. I’m so cold, I don’t feel any pain. My whole body has gone numb.
I don’t think my plan is going to work. I think Rika is just going to sit down on the ice and give up. But then I hear footsteps next to me, and a voice yells my name. It’s David. He has turned around and come back to help us.
“Give me your hand!” he calls out to Rika. “You can do it.”
She’s sobbing hysterically. “I can’t.”
David looks at me. “I’m going to get her.”
“How?”
“Watch.”
He takes a few steps back and then runs forward, leaping up and throwing himself over the water. He barely makes it, landing on Rika’s sheet of ice with a crash, flailing to keep his balance. Wincing in pain from his foot.
She turns to him, shocked.
“If I can do it, so can you,” he yells, grabbing her. “Look at Alenna, okay? You’re going to have to jump. Just like I did.”
Rika starts to whimper, but David forces her forward.
I lean down, stretching out my arms. “C’mon, Rika!” I yell. “I’ll catch you.”
David whispers something into her ear. Maybe words of encouragement. Maybe even a threat. Rika looks at me. She shuts her eyes, and then pushes herself off the sheet of ice, right at me.
For a terrifying moment, I think she’s going to fall into the widening abyss between the two sheets of ice. She lands right at the edge, and is about to teeter backward into the water.
“No!” I howl, lunging forward to grab her.
And then her hand catches mine, and I’m yanking her forward to safety. Her feet and legs get soaked, but her body makes it onto the ice.
She tumbles into me, and we lurch backward. By now, Gadya and Markus have realized something is wrong, and I can hear their voices yelling at us.
I roll sideways. I sit up, dazed.
“David!” I scream, as I see the sheet of ice he’s on starting to disintegrate. He’s looking around wildly. His sheet of ice and ours are separating, with only freezing water left between them. “Jump! Do it now!”
David hears me and runs forward. He has enough momentum that at first it looks like it’ll carry him over the water. Then his injured foot slips at the last second and he stumbles.
“David!” I scream, automatically moving forward.
He falls straight into the water. His hands claw at my sheet of ice for an instant and then they let go. He disappears completely. Then his head reappears, choking and gasping.
I lay down on the sheet of ice, aware that our lives could end at any second, and throw out my arms. He grabs my wrists, hard. I start moving backward using my elbows, pulling him out of the water as his feet kick violently.
Within a couple of seconds, he’s back on the ice with me and Rika, shivering and soaking wet. He’s so cold, he can’t even speak. I know that without him, Rika probably would have died.
“We still have to run,” I tell him and Rika firmly. They both look like they’re going into shock.
We start hobbling toward the bank. Everything goes all strange and distant, too surreal to actually be happening. The only sound I hear is the noise of my own frantic heartbeat, blotting out everything else.
We move as rapidly as we can. I look for my icy oak tree on the bank, but I don’t see it anymore. My vision is just a blurry frozen haze.
I can barely make out Gadya, standing on the bank with Markus. The Monk and his drone are almost there too. I run toward them, half-dragging Rika and David along with me.
Somehow we make it off the lake, through a combination of luck and perseverance. A few moments later, we’re out of danger, collapsing onto the frozen shore next to the others.
I fall to the ground near Rika, chest heaving for air. David is coughing up water. Gadya and Markus crouch over our shivering bodies.
“Oh God, that was close,” Rika says.
Markus and Gadya are trying to get us warm. David is soaked from head to toe. He’s not going to make it long out here unless he gets warmed up. None of us are. Hypothermia is going to kick in soon.
“We need to start a fire,” I say, teeth chattering. “David fell in saving Rika.”
“I saw,” Gadya says. She’s looking at David in a new way now, with new respect. Like she’s reevaluating her opinion of him.
“I’ll get the fire started,” Markus says. “I have a lighter.”
It’s too cold to stay lying down, so I stagger to my feet, colder than I’ve ever been in my entire life.
I glance over and see the Monk sprawled on the icy mud of the beach. His drone is sitting next to him. Somehow in the chaos of escaping the lake, the drone lost his blade again.
Gadya looks at me, her face ghostly white. I think she’s going to say something about David and his act of heroism, but instead she says, “The Mo
nk is dying, from the cold and his wounds. He can’t survive here. We need to find out everything he knows before it’s too late.”
She looks over at the drone, studying him. But the drone doesn’t notice, because he’s too busy attending to his master. Ice crystals have formed on the Monk’s mask.
“I can’t believe Sinxen is dead,” I murmur, looking back out at the water and ice. This awful lake has become his grave.
Gadya just nods, trying to hide her pain. I know the emotions are too much for her. She turns away from the lake and gestures at the weird shimmering wall about a thousand feet beyond us, in the forest ahead. “If the Monk’s right, then we’ve almost made it to our destination. We might still find a way off the wheel.”
Off the wheel. It’s what I thought I wanted. That, and information about my parents. “Unless we get warm and dry, I don’t think we’re going to make it,” I reply.
Markus has gathered a few pieces of wood and is trying to get them lit. It’s going to be hard, because everything is cold and wet. David is trying to move around, swinging his arms and legs so they don’t freeze up.
“Please—” I suddenly hear a voice say. To my surprise, I realize it’s the Monk’s drone. We all stare at him.
“You can speak?” Gadya says derisively, her voice as cold as the ground under our feet.
“The Monk needs my help.” The drone looks away for a moment. “I need to take off his mask. Ice got underneath.”
“Then do it,” I tell him.
He hesitates. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the drone felt sheepish. “Can you please not look?”
“Why not?” Gadya asks. “He’s gonna die anyway, just like my friend Sinxen did. And before he does, I plan on interrogating him.” Her hands become fists. “You can’t stop me anymore.”
The drone blanches. “You know he has the Suffering. We can’t gaze upon his holy face. No one can.” He knots his fingers together nervously.
“You’re completely nuts,” Markus says. “Are you aware of that?”
“And you really thought I was one of them?” David mutters, his whole body trembling from the cold. “You couldn’t see the difference between me and some brainwashed lunatic?”
Markus doesn’t reply. He just keeps trying to get the fire started.
“If you gaze upon the Monk’s naked face, you’ll be blinded forever by the sight!” the drone continues gibbering. “It is our way. It’s our belief.”
“Okay, fine, whatever,” Gadya says, sounding disgusted. “Do what you want. We won’t look.”
So we turn away to give the Monk his undeserved privacy. I hear latches clicking, as the drone removes the Monk’s mask and starts uttering soft, soothing words.
Right then, Gadya spins back around and leaps at the drone, kicking him off the Monk and pinning him to the ground. The Monk’s mask was in the drone’s hand, and it goes flying across the icy mud.
I turn, startled. Gadya is crouching over the drone with a small knife at his throat. She took it out of her ankle sheath, where it must have been hidden this whole time. “I’ll kill you right now!” she snarls, teeth bared. The drone looks shocked. The Monk curls up, covering his ruined face so we can’t see it.
Markus moves forward. “Gadya, I hate the Monk too, but we might need him later.”
“Stop!” she snaps. When Markus pauses, she turns her attention back to the drone. “You have two choices. I can cut your throat right now. Or I can let you go—if you promise not to stand in my way.”
“The Monk is the one true path to salvation,” the drone murmurs in a well-worn litany. “He is the doorway to life after death. He is the eye of the needle, and we are the threads! The multicolored threads!” He shuts his eyes and starts muttering faster and faster, his lips moving with increasing speed. It takes me a second to realize that he’s praying ferociously, maybe even speaking in tongues.
Gadya leans back and slaps him across his freezing cheek. His eyes snap open. “There’s no time for that nonsense! Do you want to live? Or do you want to die? I know you believe in the Monk, but I can make your death incredibly long and painful. Do you want my knife carving your throat out, slice by slice? Besides, we’ll probably all die out here anyway. Do you really want to get killed right now? By a girl? What would your Monk think of that? At least wait awhile. Maybe you can die a glorious death in battle later on.”
The drone hesitates for a moment.
Gadya presses the knife tight against his throat. “It’s your call.”
I notice that David does nothing to intervene. He certainly doesn’t seem interested in helping the Monk or the drone. He has obviously been telling the truth about his identity the whole time. No drone or spy would risk their life like he did for Rika. I just hope that Markus finally sees this.
“I want to live,” the drone finally gasps, as he starts crying. It’s clear the choice is incredibly painful for him.
“Good.” Gadya pulls back her knife and slowly gets up. The drone shuts his eyes. “That’s right. You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to.”
“Gadya—” I begin, worried.
“I’m just gonna ask the Monk a few questions. He owes us some truth.”
Gadya steps toward the Monk’s cowering body as all of us watch, except for the drone. He remains on the ground, eyes still tightly shut.
I follow Gadya and stand with her, Markus, David, and Rika around the Monk’s shrunken body. For a moment, I think he’s already dead, but then I see his arm twitch slightly.
“Uncover your face,” Gadya instructs, because he still has both hands over it.
“You might not like . . . what you see. . . .” He breathes haltingly, between his fingers. Some blood comes up with each word.
“Do it,” Markus commands.
Slowly, the Monk lets his hands slip away from his face, down to his side.
“No freaking way!” I hear Gadya gasp.
When I see the Monk’s face for myself, I stumble sideways, like I’ve been punched in the gut.
I go down to my knees. The others aren’t far behind me. All except David, who murmurs, “So the rumors are true.”
I’m not just shocked because the Monk’s face is grotesquely blackened and scarred, which it is. And it’s not because of the mocking sadistic smile he wears on his blistered lips.
It’s because, against all odds, I recognize his face. And I realize why his voice sounded weirdly familiar.
Despite his grievous injuries, an older, deeper mark gives his identity away. A unique diamond-shaped white scar on his left temple.
The Monk is Minister Harka.
THE HOUSE OF ICE
RIKA STARTS WAILING BEHIND me, in horror and disbelief. We have all seen this man’s face thousands of times back home—on posters at school, on billboards, in government-sanctioned textbooks. It’s the face of the UNA’s totalitarian regime. We all know exactly who this man is, despite his disfigurement.
But it doesn’t make any sense that he would be here on the wheel with us.
“I don’t understand,” I hear Gadya saying, her voice just a gasp.
Markus leans over, gagging.
I stand up again. “How is this possible?” I ask in a barely audible voice. If Minister Harka is here, then who is actually running things back home? I dare to look down at Minister Harka again. No wonder he hid his face all this time.
He doesn’t even have the Suffering, I slowly realize. It’s true his face is deformed—as though someone doused his head with gasoline and then put a match to it—but up close I can see that he doesn’t bear the sores and pockmarks of disease. In fact, what I thought were sores on his arms are actually old scars.
He has been pretending to have the Suffering so that he never had to show his face. I guess that explains how he has lived so long with a disease that usually kills its victims within a few months. It’s not because he has supernatural powers. It’s because he was lying all along.
His eyes catch mine. “I c
ame here . . . six years ago.” He chokes out the words around his cynical smile.
“But how?” Markus manages. His eyes look dazed and far away. Rika has stopped screaming.
“I was condemned and sent here. Just like you,” Minister Harka rasps. He coughs, and more blood bubbles up. He doesn’t have long to live, and he knows it. He doesn’t seem to care, though. Maybe he’s even glad that he can finally reveal his true identity. My mind is filled with a million questions, but there’s only time to ask a few.
“Why did they send you here? You run everything! You’re the prime minister!”
“In the end I was disposable. My staff betrayed me when I tried to make changes . . . when I told them the UNA had become too corrupt. I was arrested and tortured by men more cunning than myself. Men who feared I was growing soft. . . . I woke up here on the island.”
“But we saw you back home. You can’t be in two places at once!” Gadya says.
“Lookalikes and body doubles, am I right?” David asks. “That’s what they always said. In my resistance cell.”
Resistance cell? I’m not sure what he’s talking about.
“Yes,” Minister Harka answers, his smile finally fading. “I always had them. For security. Now they use them as my stand-ins. As human puppets to make people believe I’m still in charge.”
“Couldn’t you get off this island?” I ask, realizing that the lookalikes and body doubles explain why he seemed so ageless. “It’s a government island. As far as we know, you practically designed it! Why didn’t you find the way off? Why did you need us? And why did you start a crazy cult?”
He’s coughing, his chest making strange sounds. “I never even knew this island existed,” he whispers. “It was a secret colony, set up years before. By another regime in Old America, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. For political prisoners. They told me it had been abolished.” His lips curl upward again as more blood seeps out. “I know less about its geography than you do.”
David is nodding.
Minister Harka keeps talking, and we listen, riveted: “When I got here, the prisoners recognized me and burned me alive. They hated me . . . and I deserved it. But others rescued me and kept me alive. Made me part of their encampment. Then everyone started getting sick. Dying. Teenagers began turning up. I pretended to be sick . . . but because I knew so much, and because I never died, they thought I had mystical powers. That I was a supernatural being. I played along—”
The Forsaken (Forsaken - Trilogy) Page 24