Renegade Red

by Lauren Bird Horowitz

  It was too much for Noa—too much like Marena, in that terrible cell, where Noa couldn’t go to reach her, where Noa had to watch and witness. This time she fell to Hilo’s side, tried to put an arm around the rocking shoulders.

  “Lost and dead, lost and dead…”

  But instead of pulling Hilo free, it was Noa who was pulled under. Into the black place, the despair place of collapsing currents, the place with Marena and Hilo and…

  Isla?

  Isla stood tall across from Noa, stared into Noa with her imperial gray eyes. Isla’s eyes were darker than Hilo’s and fiercer too. Pallas Isla. Those eyes yanked Noa up until she broke the surface, breathed again. This was not Noa’s world, these Tunnels were deadly, dark, and deep—but Isla’s ghost was Noa’s. Isla was inside and outside her, magic no other place or time could ever swallow, ever claim.

  Noa pulled Hilo and herself up, shook Hilo by the shoulders. “So we can’t go back anymore. That’s not what’s important, it never was. Retreat was never our goal. It was never even an option.” Hilo’s face rippled under Noa’s forcefulness. Noa pressed harder. “Forward, Hilo. Only forward. We find the Seer. Then, and only then, do we worry about getting out.”

  Hilo’s eyes were wary but she nodded minutely. Noa released her and stepped into the lead. Isla’s ghost shimmered away, and Noa felt a little flutter—like she did every time Isla left—but she knew she had to do this on her own.

  Hilo mumbled something behind Noa, but Noa couldn’t quite hear it. It sounded like:

  Told you. Brave.

  • • •

  The first night, Judah tried to talk to Callum. Something about seeing him there but not there, happy in his delusions, made Judah suddenly unable to tolerate his own. This place was not some safe cocoon. It was not even the network of damp, dark Tunnels. This was prison. They both were in prison.

  And they both had to get out.

  “Wake up, Callum, come on! You just have to try—a prat like you can do anything if you try!” Judah urged, the effort painful with his stupid slackened muscles. “Look, I know it’s all happy times and pretty rainbows to stay asleep. Simple and easy and all that boring crap you love. But we can’t anymore, neither of us, we have to remember what’s important—”

  “I know what’s important.”

  “Callum! The stupid Clear movement is not important! Politics is not important!”

  “I’m not talking about the movement. I’m talking about you. My family. Rescuing you, saving our father—” Callum cut off, smiled, catching himself.

  “Our father is dead! Corpse! Kells killed him!” Judah shouted in exasperation.

  “It’s okay, Judah. Kells told me you’d say that. I know you lie when you’re scared. You’ve always done it.”

  “That is not—”

  “I can’t let you pull me into your cave, Brother,” Callum continued patiently. “I have to pull you back up into the world. I have to be brave for you, and see for you what your eyes can’t.”

  Judah screamed behind his gritted teeth, ignoring how it burned the muscles in his throat. “I don’t need you to save me—”

  “I know it looks like that to you,” Callum nodded, infinitely understanding. “It’s not your fault. You were born that way. But that’s why it’s my job to protect you.”

  Judah grasped the bars so tightly his knuckles turned white, every bone in his hand protesting. He swallowed another scream. “Okay Callum, you want to save me?” He nodded, squinted his eyes, ignored the pain that exploded everywhere. “Then save me, Brother. You’re right, I want you to. And I want you to start by saving … me … from this cage!” Judah’s scream escaped; he rattled the bars with all the pathetically weak strength he had. “You say you love me, right? Then free me!”

  Callum smiled again, that infuriating, knowing smile. “I am freeing you, Brother. You just can’t see it yet.” His eyes became so light they almost looked saintly. “But soon, Brother, with my help, I think you will.”

  • • •

  Now in the lead, Noa made turn after turn, not knowing why she chose the ones she did, just knowing that when she got to the branching end of a pathway, she knew which direction she wanted to go. It was almost eerie; she wasn’t sure if she was listening to some inspiration or simply had to feel that way in order to keep them moving forward. She had a feeling—she wasn’t sure if Hilo felt it too—that if they stopped, the fear would slip back in. And she would not allow it to, not again.

  So they kept moving, and Noa kept leading, until they found themselves in one particular Tunnel that slowly began to shrink around them. The ceiling grew so low, the walls so close that Hilo and Noa had to crouch to continue—then crawl. Noa had to use every ounce of discipline she had to avoid a flashback to the MRI machine after her and Isla’s accident.

  I will not go back to the sandpaper place.

  They crawled and crawled in silence—a whisper, like a pause, might let fear free—until their knees were achy, filthy, bloody. But the Tunnel finally leveled, small as it was. It didn’t squeeze them to oblivion, even if it did not exhale them either. As Noa had decreed, forward was the only option, apparently on hands and knees.

  The Tunnel didn’t shrink again, but after a time it did start to tilt upward. It soon became so steep, they had to use the small struts on the floor as handles to keep from sliding backward.

  Noa closed her eyes—it was dark anyway—and pulled herself up, rung by rung. It was easier by feel. But as Noa climbed blind, she slowed.

  Hilo sensed it. “Only forward,” she reminded Noa from behind, her voice stronger again. Noa gritted her teeth: Hilo wasn’t Isla, but she was right.

  Finally the Tunnel leveled again. She spoke over her shoulder: “Hilo, I think the incline end—”

  Noa’s last word, and her whole body, plummeted suddenly down, sliding through the suddenly sharply-declining Tunnel. Apparently the small Tunnel had traced a kind of peak, and now she slid and sped and tumbled down the grade on the other side. It was very steep—much steeper than the incline—and slick, slick, slick, with no struts to slow her down. Even Hilo, who knew the drop was coming, could not help but crash down it wildly, limbs banging off the tubular walls.

  The slide went on and on until Noa was sure they’d hit the core of Aurora itself—she even had time to wonder if the core would be molten and volcanic or icy like the air—when quite suddenly she slammed into the ground, Hilo bowling over on top of her.

  Hilo bounced up quickly on light Fae feet. “You okay?”

  Noa groaned and rolled over. “I’ll live.” She rolled up and looked around. The Stellabugs flew down the passage after them, just in time to reveal that they had landed on some sort of rocky island, surrounded by an enormous, seemingly bottomless underground chasm.

  Hilo looked up to where they’d been spit out. She pointed to what looked like a tiny tunnel opening, a long way away in the distant ceiling. “It almost looks like a garbage chute. It emptied us here.”

  Noa grimaced. “I hate chutes.”

  Hilo looked strange. “There’s really no going back now. Not the way we came at least. But I think … I think this may actually be good.”

  Noa squinted at her as she tested out her bruised muscles.

  “Look around,” Hilo urged her. The Stellabugs had continued down the path of Noa and Hilo’s fall, drawn by their warmth, and as more gathered, their glow spread more widely around the chasm. Noa saw that the rocky island that had broken their fall was not the only island; several others were dotted around the sea of apparent emptiness. “That’s one way to survive the flushes.”

  Noa frowned. “But how do we get across? It’s way too far to jump to the next rock, even for you….”

  “If we’re even supposed to go across. Think about it. If this is how the Seer escaped…,” Hilo said, growing excited. Noa looked around, tried to
imagine the most logical path.

  Her stomach fell. “We’re … supposed to go down?”

  Hilo looked happily at Noa. “I know we are.”

  “How?”

  “Down’s the scariest way,” Hilo said gleefully. Her eyes were shining. “Noa, for the first time … I think the Seer might actually be real!”

  Not nearly so excited by how Hilo had landed on this conclusion, Noa followed her to peer over the edge of their island. Islands, Noa remembered from elementary school, rose from mountains beneath the sea; they did not simply float flat on the surface of the ocean. The rocky area that held them was like the summit of a mountain peak. Theirs must have a base somewhere far, far below them.

  But when Hilo and Noa looked over, they both gasped from vertigo, clutching at each other’s hands. They exchanged a look. The decline from their landing summit fell so sharply, it nearly looked sheer.

  Nearly.

  There was the tiniest, most-unhelpful-in-history, basically-meaningless, grade widening outward as it descended. But that was it. The base of this island would not be much wider than the peak. They were in for a straight-down climb—or fall, most likely. The surface wasn’t smooth as glass—but there didn’t seem to be many handholds either.

  “I really wish I was a Blue right now. Sticky palms would be so useful,” Hilo said.

  “Too bad fear sweat is slick, not sticky.”

  Hilo looked at Noa. “Forward only, Noa.” Noa nodded, but inwardly rolled her eyes at how quickly Hilo had recovered her usual bossiness. Granted, they were Noa’s words, but still.

  “I’ll go down first since my Fae reflexes will make me steadier. Then if you fall, I may be able to stop your slide.”

  Or get taken down with me. Noa shook the thought away. Forward only.

  Hilo was already hoisting herself over, much more eager than Noa to begin climbing/falling into an unknown abyss. Hilo spread her body like a spider and moved down the first few feet of wall carefully but steadily, searching out makeshift hand- and footholds. Each inch took careful consideration.

  When there was enough room for Noa, she took a deep breath, swallowed hard—forward!—and lowered herself over the edge. The wall was black—deep, deep black—and so cold it almost hurt to touch it for too long. Even breathing with her face so close seemed to chill her breath and gust it back at her, so that as Noa clung to the obsidian face, it enveloped her in icy mist laced with stalactites from her own lungs.

  As black and cold as the wall was, it was not quite as slippery as ice—there were faint variations in the surface, though nothing Noa, with her mortal eyes, could ever have picked out easily. She said a silent prayer of thanks for Hilo’s willingness to descend first—the pixie had left smudges of crusted blood from her palms as she’d navigated carefully downward, searching out the handholds. They also—so faintly—were warmer to the touch from Hilo’s recent holds, and Noa’s shivering fingers gratefully grasped for them. The Stellabugs followed her and Hilo’s body heat down the rock face, but Noa didn’t dare look around, knowing that whatever they illuminated would be something far more frightening than she wanted to see.

  Noa slid slowly down the wall, handhold to handhold, breathing icy shards of her own breath, and her heart began to pound—from the cold, from the dark … and mostly, she knew, from fear. I’m there, she tried desperately not to admit, though it beat with her heart, I’m back in the sandpaper place … Aurora was full of them, it seemed, starting with her cell….

  Piercing tears welled in Noa’s eyes as she kept moving slowly down the wall with shaking, labored breathing. She couldn’t stop, though her mind was reeling; she needed to stoke a fire inside herself, or she knew her mind would overtake her body, her limbs would give up, and she would have nothing left but to fall.

  It was the sandpaper place. But Noa knew how to get out of those places, and she would do it now, even as she climbed down blackest ice, into the unknown. She wrote herself a poem. She made the words her kindling, and fired herself onward from within:

  I have been here before, in this Sandpaper Place,

  I know these stones by chilling heart.

  Sometimes they are ragged, slicing my palms,

  Sometimes smooth,

  or bars,

  bright clear windows,

  locked doors.

  There were times I curled under, away

  From the Sandpaper place.

  Built my nautilus outward,

  spun from bone.

  Fingertips in, pill-bug snug, soft worm skin

  Chrysalis’d tight—

  But it’s been long since my wings broke that skin.

  Cocoons cannot fit me

  (nor this Sandpaper Place),

  pinkened palms can’t survive in the sun.

  I grow suction cups now, inside hands, down both wrists,

  Reach out wide, splay myself to cold:

  Starfish-to-starfish,

  Sister-limbs fuse as one

  Girl-beast chain, sister-strong, woven tight:

  Isla and Sasha, Marena, Hilo’s siren song:

  No fear, be brave, Forward fight!

  Noa repeated the words to herself, becoming the starfish, linked to Isla and Sasha, to Marena, even—she realized—to Hilo, and her panic eased. She continued, handhold to handhold, even as her arms ached, even as she could hear Hilo panting below her.

  “I’m afraid to look down to see how much farther,” Hilo gasped upward after what felt like hours. Emboldened by her inner mantra, Noa impulsively decided to look up instead, to see how far they’d come—and immediately regretted it.

  The summit they had landed on after the tunnel chute had been completely swallowed by blackness. There was no longer any sign of surface—or light—at all. The sight was so startling that Noa’s hand slipped off its hold. She swung outward, suspended by one arm only, and her shoulder strained under her weight. She bit back her wails and fought to swing herself back into the wall, kicking and scrabbling, wishing she really did have suction cups on her limbs. Just as her stomach slammed into the freezing rock and her other hand caught a hold again, her foot broke through a loose rock—which tumbled down at Hilo.

  “Hilo!” Noa cried into the wall as she clung to it for dear life, her momentum still vibrating up her spine, the surface burning her with its cold.

  “Don’t worry, it missed me!” Hilo called up. “But one inch closer and Judah’s choice would have become much simpler.”

  Noa flushed even though Hilo couldn’t see her. “Hilo!”

  “You ready? Come on!” Hilo cried from below. Noa heard her climbing again.

  Noa took a breath, tried to calm her heart, and began to climb again. Sasha’s arms. Starfish arms. Her arms strained so hard, her brain absurdly conjured the idea of a massage. She could almost feel the vibrations now….

  “Uh, do you feel that?” Hilo’s voice called up.

  “Wait, that’s real? That vibrating?” Noa held herself against the wall. “I thought I was imagining it.” Noa turned her head and pressed her ear against the rock: it was buzzing. Before she could stop herself, she looked up again and screamed—though this time for a different reason.

  “Avalanche!”

  “What?”

  But there was no time to explain, no time to describe the falling rocks plummeting like giant boulder hail from above them.

  Some massage.

  “Slide!” Noa screamed, letting go of the wall, letting herself fall down the rock face. She smashed into Hilo, who screamed and tangled with her into a human tumbleweed of flesh and bone. They crashed faster and faster down the grade; Hilo started to squeeze and push roughly at Noa’s body, and Noa realized she was forcing Noa into a ball, trying to wrap her own body around Noa’s more fragile limbs. As best as she could, Noa stopped resisting and let Hilo become her pixie
shell. They flew down like that, bumping against the grade, Hilo wrapped around Noa. Each jolt made Noa yell, but Hilo never loosened her grip.

  Finally, Noa and Hilo felt themselves slide out onto some kind of floor—they had reached the base of the island, but thunderous rumbling told them there was no time to look up or back. Noa got gingerly to her feet and saw Hilo dazed with pain—her shoulder clearly broken, hanging absurdly from her side—but the rumble was too loud, too fast; it shook the floor, the air. Noa grabbed Hilo’s other arm and stumble-sprinted them away from the imminent blast zone as best she could—in what direction and toward what she did not know or care. Isla didn’t appear to guide her, no Stellabugs had made the fall; there was only one word: Run.

  Noa heard the first crashes smash the ground behind her just as they dashed from it, the impact so massive it lifted the stone floor itself into a rocky tidal wave. Noa pressed her legs harder, praying for something, anything to run to—

  —and there it was, the anything, winking from the blackness: another circular entrance to a tunnel, glinting with white, set a few feet off the ground.

  Noa sprinted Hilo toward it, skidding to a stop just before they smashed into the sheer black wall around the tunnel entrance. Hilo read Noa’s body and swung forward, leaping up and into the tunnel without missing a stride, then reached back to pull Noa in too with her good hand. Noa squirmed and struggled to get up over the heightened ledge. Hilo heaved, and Noa’s foot slipped in just as the rock tsunami crashed into the wall, obliterating everything behind them and blowing them backward with a blast of dust and wind and rock and black.

  • • •

  The second night under Callum’s guard, Judah tried evoking Noa to wake his brother. Even as his mind—or heart—urged him not to name her. Even though it meant remembering what he’d done, and risked giving her away.

  But what good was Noa to Judah, really, if he could only keep her in a place no one—not even he—could reach?