I throw myself forward while he throws himself back, and for a moment I think we are airborne, soaring, and then the boat hits water and we tumble around inside it, water drenching us from every side. The wood creaks, and when I open my eyes I am on my stomach and the boat is alive with spilled light, glowworms floating in a shallow pond of water, lighting it like white fire. Beckett is beside me on his back, my face near his chest, Jillian lying on my legs, but when I try to lift my head to see beyond the boat, Beckett pushes it down again. He points up, and I see black rock zooming close above us.
I keep my chin above the glowing water, with Beckett’s hand on my head, and for the first time consider that we really are going to drown. That the boat could fill and sink. That this tunnel will become nothing but water and leave us no surface to float on at all, a pipe we can never find the end of.
The boat lurches, we take another dousing spray, and then I leave my stomach behind me as we fall. Beckett grips my hair and I hear Jillian shriek once, clinging to my legs. We hit bottom, my face is underwater, bright behind my closed eyes, and then I am up, gasping, and the boat is shooting forward, smooth, making two plumes of white spray. The roar dulls, the boat slows, the current from the waterfall we’ve just ridden pushing us across a calm pool. Once again the ceiling is far above us, natural red light filtering down from an opening somewhere that I can’t see. We bump into a shoreline, stuck, the back end of the boat turning just a little in the remaining flow.
I look at Beckett, his hand still full of my hair, the glasses speckled with dripping water. He uses his other hand to lift them from his face, dark eyes wide and surprised, and I watch the smile come, not even a little guilty this time.
He says, “Does anybody want to do that again?”
And then I am laughing, and so is he, echoing over the noise of the short waterfall.
Beckett sits up, shakes the water from his head, Jillian on her knees while the boat rocks, dripping like the rest of us. She frowns, looks down, and says, “Beckett, you drowned our lights.”
We all laugh this time, and I think the sound is relief. I scramble to find the jars while Jillian and Beckett try to rescue the remaining glowworms. The boat is stuck on a muddy, pebbly beach, and farther down, in the dim redness of the cavern light, I can see two more boats tied to stakes in the shore. Then I remember my pack.
I give the light jars to Beckett and snatch it out of the water, stepping lightly up the length of the boat to the shore, leaping out over the waterline to the firmer stony ground. The pack is soaked through, but the book is dry, protected by the blanket. I sigh with relief, and then I hear a splash and look up. Jillian has jumped over the side into the shallow water, heading toward the shore. But she’s gone still, her blue eyes large.
“Beck?” she says, voice small. And then she screams.
I hear Jillian yell my name at the same time Samara shouts, “Hold her!”
I drop the jar of light and wish I hadn’t, because the redness coming in from the ceiling hole is dim and Jill is in shadow. But what I can see is that she’s up to her chest in water, when I thought the level should have been barely above her knees. Then I understand. Jill is sinking. Sinking sand.
I nearly tip the boat getting to her. The front end is grounded on the shore rocks while the back has floated away, out of Jillian’s reach. But my arms are longer than hers. I stretch out, get her hand, and she is so stuck the boat actually comes to her when I pull. I hook my arms below hers while she clings to my neck, feel her shallow, frightened breaths.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay, I’ve got you … ”
But I don’t have her. Not really. I can feel the force I’m working against, sucking her down. I pull again, and it’s not enough. More than not enough. My arms are in the water now, too, little ripples lapping her neck. I look in her eyes. She’s going to panic, and if she panics, I may not be able to keep my grip.
“Hold tight,” I whisper. “Pull with me … ”
“Beck … ” Jill whispers, then she hisses. “Something moved! Against my leg. There’s something in here!”
I tug Jill again, and feel arms go around my middle. Samara.
“Together,” she says. I heave backward, Samara adding her weight, and a little more of Jill comes out of the water. I readjust my grip, and we do it again. Jill’s body is rising up, and up, and then she screams again, flails so hard I nearly lose my hold, and slides downward.
“It bit me! Something bit me!”
I don’t see how anything could have bitten her, not through the jumpsuit. But that really doesn’t matter if she doesn’t hang on.
“Jill! Listen! You’ve got to pull with me. Lift up your legs! Ready? One, two … ”
I can feel Samara’s locked hands digging into my chest. She’s giving it all she’s got and so am I. Jill’s face is screwed up with effort. I feel when one of her legs comes free, then the other, and Samara and I lose our balance backward, rocking the boat, though I’ve still got a handful of Jill’s jumpsuit.
“Do not put your feet down,” Samara warns her, jumping over the bow to the dry part of the shore, tugging on the boat before it comes loose and we take another ride to who knows where. I get Jill back in one leg at a time. I think she has tears running down her face somewhere in all the dripping water, and her boots are gone. But where the leg of her suit is pushed up there’s a single puncture mark, blood running pink and watery down her leg. She leans over to look at it, then starts up her expert cussing, though soft this time, I think only for herself. Or me.
“Can you walk?”
She nods, and I help her to the safe ground, where she collapses onto the pebbles. The suit is mud-stained to her waist. Samara kneels down, examining the wound on Jill’s calf with the same sort of focused expression she gave my ankle.
“It is deep,” Samara says, “but small. It will not need sewing.”
She’s right about that. Samara may be good, but I’m not about to let her sew Jill’s skin like a handmade shirt.
“There was something in there,” Jill whispers, “something below the sand … ”
Samara looks back over her shoulder, like something might come crawling out of that pool, which is disturbing. I look through the glasses and can’t find a thing. But the place where Jill was sinking is such a perfect blend of water and sand it’s hard to see through. Then I look at Jill again. Her cussing has turned to murmuring. Like she’s falling asleep.
“Jill?” Her eyes flutter closed. “There’s something wrong with her,” I say, but Samara is already examining Jill’s face. Her eyes have gone red and a little puffy, I thought from crying but now I’m not so sure. I turn over Jill’s leg. The puncture mark is swelling so fast I can almost watch it rise. Then Jill coughs, gasps. Like she can’t breathe.
“Samara! What lives in there?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t Know … ”
“Quick! Is it poisonous?”
But Samara just closes her amber eyes, serene, kneeling at Jill’s side as if she were carved from stone. And she’s gone. Perfect.
I run for the boat at the same time I go to the database of the glasses, searching. Poison. What do we have for poison when we don’t know what the poison is? I grab Jill’s pack from the water while I scan the information, get the medical kit in my hands, and drop to my knees at her side again. She’s wheezing now, gasping, her face reddening and swelling. She can’t get air. She’s not going to be able to breathe. I change the search in the database, looking for something, anything. Jill can’t die. That cannot happen.
“It’s not poison,” Samara says suddenly. She’s back, eyes open, panting like she’s been for a run. “Allergy. She is allergic.”
“Are you sure?”
Samara nods as she slips her hand beneath Jill’s head, tilting it, trying to open her airway. Jill is twisting, choking for breath, while I toss infusers left and right trying to lay my hands on the one for anaphylactic shock. Samara is using both hands to force Jill’s he
ad back, staring down into her wide-open eyes as she flails, and I see Samara go stiff, her hands slipping.
“Samara, stay here!” I yell.
But she’s leaving again. I find the right infuser, press it against Jill’s neck to let it calculate the dose. She’s moving too much.
“Samara, hold her still. Hold her arms still!”
Samara holds one arm, though not hard enough. Jill is struggling, and Samara’s gone rigid, breathing hard, looking down into Jill’s wide-open eyes, but I’m not sure she sees her. Jill isn’t wheezing anymore; she’s not making any noise at all, the redness paling from her face. I lay my body on Jill’s other arm, pinning her down. The infuser gets the dose and I hear the whoosh as it goes in. Jill twists beneath me for another second and then she doesn’t move.
Everything pauses. My heart, the river, time, a long moment that squeezes inside my chest, that hurts like I’ve been hit. I care about Jill, I realize. A lot. Jillian was everything there was to have on the ship. I care, just maybe not in the way she wanted me to. And that hurts, too.
“Jill?” I say, like I’m asking a question. Asking if she’s alive. And then I feel movement beneath me, a tiny wheeze, a gasp. Jill coughs, and the relief leaves me too distracted to think about anything else. I get off and see her chest moving, the color coming back to her face, though her eyes are still closed.
She murmurs something I can’t understand, and then I glance up at Samara. She’s still on her knees beside Jill, staring, but she is gone. Something else is in her vision. And then she opens her mouth and screams. Not just a yell or a shout. She screams from the pit of her stomach, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. She draws breath and starts to do it again. I step over Jill and take her by the arms.
“Stop it!”
She doesn’t. This time I shake her a little.
“Samara!”
She stops, blinks, looks at me, and she really sees me, not the terrible something else. She’s shaking beneath my hands, one tear streaking down a cheek. Then she pulls away and turns back to Jill, like she wasn’t just shrieking her head off.
“She breathes?”
“Yes.” I may never get over the relief of it.
I watch Samara lift the lids of Jill’s closed eyes, feel for a pulse, see her inspect the little red dots on Jill’s neck where the infusion went in. Then she takes her wet pack and mine and stuffs them under Jill’s legs, raising them. Jill doesn’t respond to any of this. She’s breathing without the awful wheeze, and the swelling is going down almost as quickly as it came. She seems peaceful, but I don’t know whether I can trust that.
“Will she be okay?”
“She’ll need to sleep,” Samara says. She’s still shaking. “And she is cold.”
I hadn’t had a chance to feel it yet, but the glasses say this cavern is twenty-seven degrees cooler than the one we left, and there’s a draft pulling from somewhere. The suits are waterproof on the outside, and I’m mostly dry, but Jill was up to her neck at one point. She’s probably wet inside and out, and that water is not anything like warm anymore.
We go to work like we’ve talked about it. I get the blanket out of Jill’s pack while Samara discovers the art of the magnetic zipper, working Jill out of the jumpsuit while keeping her legs in the air. Jill isn’t moving, and Samara isn’t okay, either. She’s at least half not with me.
I give Samara the blanket, go to the boat, and grab one of the light jars. The water in the boat is barely glowing now. We’ve let most of our light drown. I gather what we have left, give that to Samara, too, then go to stand beneath the hole in the ceiling, about ten meters beyond the other boats. Straight above me is a beautiful, fiery sky, clear and shining like a ruby. I don’t know how close we are to Samara’s city, but those boats mean people, and if we can’t go far, we have to at least get out of sight while Jill gets better.
Please let Jill get better.
It’s drier near the hole in the ceiling, and I think light must shine in, because beyond a small mountain of fallen rock, probably the rock that fell in from the roof, there are plants growing, thick tufts like coarse grasses, tall, almost to my chin, dying off in blues and yellows now that the sun is gone. We’re only four or five meters from the riverbank, but out of sight and out of the draft. I think this will have to do. I go back and help lift Jill onto the spread blanket, wrapping her in it like a cocoon. She murmurs something incoherent as I carry her. I kick away the loose stones and lay her down in the grasses.
Samara brings the rest of our stuff. She’s put the infusers back into the medical kit, stowing it all away in Jill’s pack. But she doesn’t question me. At least not yet. And I’m not questioning her. I’m pretty sure we’ll get to it. This time she puts my dry pack under Jill’s head.
“How long will she be like this?”
“She has been dyspneic, and—”
“What does that mean?”
“That she could not breathe, and shock has caused muscular function of her blood vessels to fail. Now that the reaction has stopped, her body will recover on its own, but she may still have some of the allergen in her system, so we need to watch her carefully, especially her pulse and her breathing. Do you have more of what you gave her?”
I look at Samara. She’s just standing there, waiting for me to answer, shaking. Not from nerves or whatever she saw inside her head. She’s soaked, and freezing, and this is nothing like being a little uncomfortable beside the lake.
“Here.” I kick off my boots, unzip the suit, and start peeling it off. I opted for my jogging clothes underneath like Jill, but at least mine are a little warmer than hers were. Samara is taking a step back. “Don’t argue,” I say, even though she hasn’t made a sound. “You can’t stay that wet in here. I’ll use the blanket this time.”
She takes it, and I’m not sure if her reluctance is because of the suit or me. It ought to be the jumpsuit, because it may be dry, but it’s not really all that clean. I turn my back to her and sit cross-legged beside Jill, so she can change.
I watch Jill breathe, still relieved to see it, and listen to the sound of Samara taking off her wet clothes behind me, which is weird and a little uncomfortable. And it really is cold in here. After a few minutes, there’s no sound of movement. And she isn’t saying anything, either.
“Samara?” I don’t know if I can turn around.
Nothing. I peek over my shoulder. And then I’m up. She’s in my jumpsuit, but she’s also flat on her back in the grasses, eyes wide open, staring at the hole in the ceiling. Only she isn’t seeing it. I take her by the arms, sit her up, and shake her a little, like I did before.
“Samara!”
It doesn’t work this time. She blinks, stays upright, but she isn’t where I am. She’s lost in her head. And she’s still shivering. I grab my blanket from around her book, shake it out, and sit beside her, face to face, her knees at my side and mine at hers. I wrap the blanket around both of us, hold the ends together with one hand, and take her chin in the other.
“Samara,” I say, softer this time, “wake up.”
She doesn’t come back, but her expression changes, and it’s like a story. A terrible, silent story told from the inside. I try to put a name to what I see. Fear, confusion, maybe revulsion, and then she whispers, “I don’t want to see … ” And whatever it is that she doesn’t want to see, I know when she sees it, because the reaction in her face is pain. Anguish. Raw, naked grief. She rocks, eyes still closed, grabbing fistfuls of her own hair.
Her scream was the worst thing I’d ever heard, but this is definitely the worst thing I’ve ever seen.
Then she gasps, and her eyes flutter open. She looks at me, breathing hard, sees me, and closes her eyes again. Tears spill down her cheeks. I move my hand to the back of her head, bring her forehead to rest in the crook of my neck, her back heaving beneath my arm. I don’t think she was just seeing those things in her head, I get that now. Samara was living that memory, minute by minute, like it just happe
ned.
I feel the tension leaving her body as she calms, Jillian breathing deep and slow right behind us. I want to pull the blanket tighter, but I don’t want Samara to remember where she is. I don’t want her to move. She doesn’t for a long time. Air breathes around us, and I catch the faintest scent of something fresh like lemon, or rain, only neither. Her breath is warm on my skin.
Finally I say, “What was the last thing you saw?”
“The body of my brother,” she says against my neck. “Burning. Mother said I had to watch, that … the Knowing need to see … to understand when someone is gone, or we can’t cache the memory.”
“How old were you?”
“Six.”
“And how old was your brother?”
“Seventeen.”
I hesitate to ask, but I want to know. “How did he die?”
“Poison. I heard his jaw … and his legs … break.”
I wince, thinking of that story she told with her face. Is that what it means, to never forget? To have an experience forever? Over and over again?
“Samara, how many times have you seen him die?”
“Five hundred and eighty-two.”
I tighten my arm. I don’t know what to say to her. But I was right to think she was traumatized, because that is nothing short of torture. I try to imagine what it would be like to watch Mom or Dad suffer like that. And then watch it again, when you know what’s coming. What has happened to these people, to make them like this?
She whispers, “There is a way … to Forget. I ran to the Cursed City looking for it.”
A way to Forget. Yes, I can see why she’d want that. Need it. “Did you find it?”
“No.”
“Then let me help you find it.”
She doesn’t answer, just lifts her head to look at me. Her cheeks are streaked, her hair tickling the bare skin along the edge of my shirt, breath still coming a little short. She lifts a hand and takes the glasses off my face. I don’t even know what she does with them. She’s looking right into my eyes, and when she raises her hand again, she lays it, very gently, on my cheek. I don’t think I could move if the cave fell in. When her question comes, it’s more breath than words. “Are you from Earth?”
The Knowing Page 16