by T. S. Graham
“Yeah . . . Actually, I feel incredible.” Sophina squeezed her fists as she rose up, confident that she could crush golf balls if she had them in her hands. “I feel like I could fly.”
“We’ve sustained a massive dose of radiation,” Mrs. Tanner explained. “The euphoria you’re feeling should pass quickly.”
Sophina looked at Mrs. Tanner’s eyes—and was shaken by what she saw. The whites of her eyes now glowed almost as red as her irises. The effect on her appearance was profound.
“There’s nothing wrong with our eyes,” said Mrs. Tanner, knowing why Sophina had gasped. “This is what happens when we’re exposed to such a heavy concentration.”
“You mean—my eyes look like that too?” Sophina asked, touching her face.
“They’ll return to normal soon,” Mrs. Tanner assured. “Well, normal for here anyway.”
Sophina’s drahtuah-enhanced ecstasy began to wane as she noticed that the fractured branch of a giant tree lay just a few short yards from where they stood. A skyscraper tree had snapped in two halfway up its decayed trunk. If it had broken off any lower, the bus-sized limb would have crushed her.
She turned to Talfore and Jantu, who sent troubled stares toward the southern horizon. At that very moment, the city of Trellah was likely being ravaged by the red winds. She wanted to comfort them, but words escaped her.
“That tree has been dead for years,” Mrs. Tanner pointed out. “The towers of Trellah were built to withstand the worst of conditions. I’m sure they’ll all be left standing after the storm.”
The men kept staring through the dust cloud that hung in the air as Tahra snarled at a mother vacharo who was nudging a wobbly-legged calf beneath her belly. Beyond the vacharos, a herd of tortoise creatures sniffed the chalky air with star-shaped nostrils.
“Talfore,” said Mrs. Tanner, “I was in Thomasville when the last storms struck. How much stronger was this one than the previous two?”
Finally, Talfore’s eyes met Mrs. Tanner’s. “Much.”
“Then I’m afraid my suspicions were correct. The children’s hands are powerful tools, and the vrahkoles must be using them to mine the drahtuah. Only a day separated this storm from the others, so the ones to follow should form even more quickly.”
“One day?” repeated Sophina. “But you said that the storms here are connected to the ones back home, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then we can’t have that much time! Yesterday, the storms were just twenty minutes apart; if the space between them is even less this time, then the next one could happen any minute!”
“Not necessarily,” Mrs. Tanner said. “According to the Trellian archives, when the amount of drahtuah collected in one spot reaches a certain threshold, the storms are cast off in one large event rather than in multiple smaller ones. So it’s likely there won’t be a second storm this time.”
“You mean those storms back home were small?” Sophina asked in disbelief.
“Compared to what just happened, yes,” said Mrs. Tanner. “And they’ll grow even more destructive with time.” She set her eyes on Talfore. “I’m afraid we have no choice but to keep going. We have to release the drahtuah today, or the toll on both our peoples could be catastrophic.”
Talfore nodded in agreement.
Sophina wanted nothing more than to sprint all the way up to Mount Vahkar’s summit, but she needed some reassurance first.
“Mrs. Tanner, will everyone at home be okay?”
“I wish I could say yes,” Mrs. Tanner said, “but a storm is blowing through Thomasville as we speak—the likes of which hasn’t been seen in modern times. . . . Now, we have a choice: We can worry ourselves sick over it, or we can use it as motivation to get up there and put an end to this.”
“So why are we standing here?” Sophina asked.
Without another word, they strode off toward the point where Mount Vahkar’s eastern ridge met the valley floor.
* * *
Gail Murray ached all over as she exited the gymnasium and slogged through the oppressive rain. She’d arrived at the school shelter five minutes before, with the hope that things had changed since her last visit. But nothing had. Not one person had seen or heard from Sophina or Eliot.
Hopelessness overwhelmed her as she stumbled her way across the soccer pitch. Until now, she had been confident that she would find her children. She had always known Thomasville as a tight-knit community. A child was never lost for long, because, no matter where they wandered, a set of trusted eyes was always there to keep watch over them. It takes a village to raise a child wasn’t some old cliché in these parts; it was an accurate description of life as it was meant to be.
But this utopian image of her beloved town had crumbled as she’d scanned the faces at the shelter. That’s when she had realized it was all an illusion.
Yes, most of the faces were familiar, but not as familiar as they had seemed just a day ago. Seeing someone every day doesn’t mean that you know them—at least, not enough to trust them the way she had. While there, she had witnessed Tad Longfellow speaking harshly to his ten-year-old son, Adam. She had never dreamed he’d be capable of such a thing given his calm persona and his position as the school’s guidance counselor. Why was he so angry, anyway? His child wasn’t missing.
She’d also noticed that Joan Peaks, the jovial woman who worked behind the meat counter at Harbor Grocery, had looked away when their eyes met. Her skills with a knife would’ve made dispensing with a child a simple-enough process . . .
Truth was, any one of those people could be hiding a dark secret beneath their pleasant exterior—a secret that could forever keep her from finding her children.
Gail’s sense of place had also been shattered. She thought she knew Thomasville like the back of her hand, but after just one night of searching, she had come to the sobering realization that there were thousands of nooks and crannies she never knew existed: hundreds of backyards, an equal number of dingy basements, and untold acres of woods, fields, and gullies that lay between the beaten paths. The town was less than five miles across in any direction, but when that entire span had to be scoured by foot it might as well have been five thousand.
Gail fell to her knees beside a flooded gully. The thread of hope she had been clinging to was coming unraveled, and nothing could stop it. No amount of rationalizing was going to restore her faith.
The air became still, and she looked down to find that her reflection on the water was no longer blurred by raindrops. This unexpected respite from the elements might have come as a relief, if not for one thing: The same thing had happened just before each of yesterday’s deadly microbursts had exploded out of the sky.
So it came as no surprise when she heard a roaring sound approach from the north. She leapt to her feet as a wall of horizontal rain overtook the field, stinging her face like a swarm of angry hornets. As she turned to run, she noticed that the precipitation pinging off the grass wasn’t rain at all; it was sleet.
Gail leapt over the gully as the tiny pills of ice gave way to hailstones the size of marbles. When she arrived in the yard of an adjacent Victorian home, golf ball–sized stones pelted her body with skin-ripping force.
Welts formed beneath her rain gear as she staggered up the front steps and onto the covered porch. She slumped against the front door, gasping for breath as the now-baseball-sized hailstones pulverized everything in sight. The sound was excruciating, like a jackhammer was going off inside her head.
Then, there was silence.
Gail stood, stiff and swollen from the onslaught, and surveyed a landscape that had been transformed by millions of bluish-gray balls of ice. It was impossible to grasp the scope of the destruction that sprawled before her. Roofs were splintered, power lines were ripped from poles, and cars were dented almost beyond recognition.
A muffled ringing sound built in her ears as she stepped to the edge of the porch. She thought the noise was a symptom of damage to her eardrums caused by the ra
cket of the storm, but she quickly realized that wasn’t the case. The ringing was brought on by something that was stirring in the atmosphere. And that something was big.
There wasn’t a hint of wind, yet the air still moved. Actually, it rose. She knew this because the cold of the newborn ice was creeping up her legs. It then washed over her face, filling her nose with air so thick it felt like it could hold her in place against her will.
The ringing was triggered by an abrupt and severe drop in atmospheric pressure. Something similar had happened to her years ago when she’d flown in the unpressurized cabin of her uncle Lew’s Cessna airplane, but this was coming on far more swiftly and powerfully.
Gail shuddered as a frightful howl came out of the sky. The sound had no clear point of origin; it seemed to come from everywhere.
Then, she saw it—a cone of rotating debris materializing out of the clouds. She stood transfixed as a yellow van lifted up off the side of the road and soared into the sky, spinning like a helicopter blade as it vanished into a swirling mass of wreckage.
She knew what loomed before her, but her mind wasn’t ready to accept it. Rarely did such things touch down in Maine, and when they did, they seldom packed much of a punch. But this one was different. One look and she knew it was a killer.
The tornado surged forward. Two blocks away, a beautiful home was reduced to splinters as its base swayed back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch—a watch that could lull her to sleep for the last time.
Every synapse in her brain fired at once as hailstones that had fallen moments earlier started to zing back into the sky. She remembered something she’d heard long ago: The safest place to be during a twister is underground. Most of Thomasville’s older houses had basements with walls constructed of solid stone, and this old Victorian home was no different.
Frozen missiles smashed against the house, sending icy shrapnel into her face and hands as she grasped the doorknob. She tried to turn it, but the door was locked. Then, for the first time in her life, Gail committed an act of vandalism. She raised her elbow and punched a hole through the window with a vicious strike. She reached through the void, unlocked the door, and threw it open.
There’s still time! Gail told herself as countless fissures snapped to life in the plaster walls of the foyer. Just find the basement door!
Every window in the room exploded at once, ushering the storm inside as she careened into the hallway and threw open the first door she saw . . .
It was a pantry.
She moved on to the next door, ignoring the sickening clatter of walls being pulverized behind her. The house was being torn apart. Her time was up.
Please God, she prayed, let this be the one!
She yanked open the door and the cellar stairs appeared before her. With no thought to what lay below, she dove headlong into the dark as the world around her dissolved into a blur of splintered wood and plaster dust. She tumbled down the stairs and landed face-up on a concrete floor. If there was pain to be felt, she was oblivious to it as she watched the support timbers of the basement ceiling tear off the foundation and disappear into the whirling vortex that towered overhead.
A flash of yellow shot past her eyes as the van slammed against the foundation wall and dropped onto the concrete floor beside her with a resounding crash. Pools of gas and oil spread out like blood beneath its crumpled body as the remains of the once-regal home were carried away in a roiling hodgepodge of rubble.
The wind slackened as Gail struggled to her feet. She was sore all over and bleeding from somewhere over her left eye, but was otherwise unscathed.
She took a moment to gather her senses, and then ascended the bulkhead steps as a column of debris thousands of feet high was released by the dying funnel cloud. The clatter of the initial impacts against the ground was loud, but the racket swelled to beyond deafening as waves of wreckage from the upper altitudes battered the earth at terminal velocity. Cars tore through roofs; stoves, refrigerators, and couches smashed onto the road; and entire tree trunks split apart as they knifed into the waterlogged ground.
But Gail didn’t lose herself in this spectacular display for long, for her interests lay one mile to the north, where the old Grange Hall was tucked into the trees near the head of that horrible wooded path. Sophina and Eliot hadn’t been there when she checked this morning, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there now.
Her heart sank as she turned to face the swath of devastation that stretched off toward Jagged Mountain. An entire neighborhood of historic homes was gone. All that remained were their stone and brick foundations. Every tree was uprooted, telephone poles were snapped in two, torn water pipes shot arcs of liquid high into the air, and lawns had been scoured away, exposing once-hidden outcrops of granite ledge.
Not one negative thought, she promised herself. Sophina and Eliot are alive. Bad things shouldn’t happen to good families twice.
She could only pray that the Grange Hall had been spared a direct hit as she hurried northward on quivering legs. If her children were there, they’d need her now more than ever.
* * *
They had traveled several thousand vertical feet since Sophina had looked anywhere but straight up. They’d left the clearing behind almost an hour ago and had been ascending Mount Vahkar’s eastern ridge ever since, pausing only once as they cleared the tree line to confirm that, indeed, all of Trellah’s towers still stood.
Her boots gripped the slope like Velcro as she and Mrs. Tanner followed Talfore and Jantu, who were invigorated by the sight of their intact city. With the drahtuah having healed her wounds and restored her strength, Sophina felt like she could climb forever.
They soon arrived at the foot of a giant stone stairway which ascended sharply for more than a mile before it disappeared behind a dome of rock. Talfore and Jantu rested at the base of the first eight-foot riser, giving Sophina a chance to turn around and see how far they had come.
The panorama was stunning. The distant towers and battlements of Trellah looked like a scene from a fairy tale. The animals that grazed the patchwork of clearings below were now just specks against a backdrop of browns and greens, and the crystal-blue lake reflected the image of Mount Vahkar’s cliff and glorious waterfall, which were no longer directly visible from where they stood.
But the most stunning sight of all lay to the west, far beyond the valley, where a majestic mountain range soared into the atmosphere. Massive ice caps reached high above the clouds, which masked just a portion of the purple slopes below. Sophina had never seen anything so grand.
“This is my first time seeing it, too,” said Mrs. Tanner, breaking the silence. “Talfore tried to describe it to me, but only now do I understand.”
Sophina was speechless.
“The entire Northern Appalachian Range,” Mrs. Tanner continued with wonderment, “as it may have looked millions of years ago. I’m glad I have you to share it with.” She smiled at Sophina, who found it easy to return the gesture.
Talfore moved to the edge of the drop-off and stared at a plume of smoke that curled into the sky many miles beyond Trellah.
“That smoke is coming from Mahlian City, isn’t it?” Mrs. Tanner asked him.
Talfore nodded. His unblinking eyes remained fixed on the smoke. “Only the Darlocks and the Umbyans attack with fire,” he said with quiet anger.
“Then it was the Darlocks,” growled Jantu with spite. “The attack must have happened too fast for the Mahlians to signal for help. They have feared a strike by the Darlocks ever since the Umbyans resumed their attacks on Trellah.”
Talfore nodded again. “Two hundred years have passed since Trellah last went to war, but perhaps our time has come.”
“Who are the Darlocks and the Mahlians?” Sophina asked.
“The Mahlians are a people of the outer valley, and an ally of Trellah,” explained Talfore. “The Darlocks dwell in the far mountains, and fought side by side with the Umbyans for a thousand years to destroy our peoples. They woul
d have succeeded had Mosi not chosen to break their alliance. But now Mosi is dead, so there is nothing to stop them from renewing the slaughter.”
“What about me and Mrs. Tanner?” Sophina asked. “Couldn’t we stop them?”
“Yes,” replied Talfore with a warm smile, “I can see that you have the soul of a peacekeeper. But your battle lies here on Mount Vahkar, with the vrahkoles who have stolen your children, and no place else in this world.”
Sophina had expected her offer to be turned down, but she was pleased with how gently Talfore did it. Not wanting to waste another second, she leapt up onto the first stone step as easily as a cat jumping onto a sofa.
“Then let’s finish this and go home,” she said, extending a hand down to Jantu. She took him by the wrist and pulled him up with just enough momentum for him to land on his feet beside her. Tahra, who hadn’t expected the sudden upward rush, scolded her from his perch on Jantu’s shoulder.
“Perhaps our climb will go faster than expected,” Jantu said. “Then I will have more time to complete my task.”
“Your task?” questioned Sophina. “We’re in this together, remember?”
“Of course,” Jantu said with downcast eyes.
It was clear that Jantu felt most of the burden was on his shoulders. His expression reminded Sophina of the one he’d worn the night before as he’d knelt in prayer. There was little anger in his voice, but it showed clear as day on his face and in his eyes.
Mrs. Tanner landed on the platform beside them, drawing Sophina’s attention away from Jantu. The older woman offered her hand to Talfore, who gladly took it.
They scaled the entire staircase in what felt like minutes as Sophina and Mrs. Tanner leapt up one level at a time and then reached back to help their friends along. The path that led up from the top riser was less steep than the stairway, but looked even more treacherous on account of the loose boulders that littered the way. The air at this altitude was much colder than in the valley, but Sophina’s cloak kept her plenty warm.
“We must leave the path,” Talfore informed them. “Mount Vahkar’s north face cannot be seen from Umbyan City.”