A groan signifies my displeasure with the question as I turn forward again, watching the woman. But then I can’t help myself. “You know I am.”
Dyer gives me a whack on the back, knocking a smile onto my face. “Atta girl. Hey—” She steps on her toes, searching. “Where’d she go?”
We search for several minutes, but the woman has disappeared.
“People don’t hide when they’re nice,” Dyer says, standing a little more vigilant. “We’re not hiding.”
“But we are armed,” I point out.
“So what’s the plan, then?”
“If she maintains her pace, and follows our trail, she’ll reach us in thirty minutes. If she’s not here, or doesn’t show herself within two hours, we’ll leave.”
Dyer nods and grunts her agreement.
We stand sentinel, but our wait is far less than expected. Twenty minutes into our vigil, Dyer goes rigid beside me. “Umm, Vee?”
I turn toward her and spot a blade tip pushed up against her back.
A feminine, but gruff voice says, “I am Bake of Queensland, descendant of the great Tremble. Drop your weapons, or I will gut you both where you stand.”
43
“Call me crazy,” Dyer says, “but I already like her.”
The woman is far enough behind me that I can’t see her face without turning around, and I suspect my action will only lead to conflict.
“Drop. Your. Weapons.” The woman pokes the tip of her sword into Dyer’s back.
Dyer winces and hisses, but absorbs the pain and speaks through clenched teeth. “Not going to happen.”
“Then you will die where you—”
Dyer spins around slapping machete against sword. Unprepared for Dyer’s speed and strength, the woman named Bake loses her sword. The weapon falls too far for her to reach without me, or Dyer, cutting her down.
Bake leaps back, taking up a fighting stance I’ve never seen before. She looks unperturbed by the loss of her blade. “The women of Queensland are more dangerous with their hands than any—”
“Are the women of Queensland also trained to be drama queens?” Dyer asks. “Because holy cupcakes, you are—”
A kind of righteous rage flows into the woman. She charges Dyer, showing no fear of the blade already cutting toward her. And Dyer isn’t holding back. If she lands the blow, it will be deadly.
But she doesn’t land the blow.
Doesn’t even come close.
Bake dives to the ground, rolling beneath the machete. When she comes up, Dyer is overextended. She gets a fist to her exposed side, and when she doubles over forward, the rest of her body is flung backward when Bake swipes out her legs with a low, spinning kick. She fights with the fluidity and ease of Shua, but faster.
With Dyer on the ground and momentarily subdued, Bake turns to face me as I charge. She could have gone for her weapon. She’s fast enough to have reached it after dropping Dyer, but she just makes two fists and waits.
KA-BAR gripped in my right hand, the blade turned down, I throw a punch with my left. Unlike Dyer, I’m not going for a killing blow. I want answers, not blood.
Bake ducks the punch, as I knew she would, and attempts a counterstrike, just as she had with Dyer. Her fist connects with my ribs at the same time my true punch impacts the side of her head.
We both stumble back, recovering. I give my ribs a push. Bruised, not broken. But the pain awakens the wounds I’ve worked so hard to ignore. My body is covered in bruises, scrapes, cuts, and punctures. At my best, this woman might be enough to undo me, but now?
I caught her off guard once. I don’t think that will happen again.
She goes on the offensive, moving back and forth, throwing me off balance. And then she strikes with a series of punches and kicks. I dodge some, block others, but generally take a beating.
She’s wearing me down. No one blow is enough to impair me, but collectively, they’re taking a toll. A solid kick strikes my shoulder, bringing a shout of pain from my mouth.
Bake smiles. Anyone could see that I’m just about done.
And that’s exactly what I want her to see.
She leaps at me, open hands outstretched to grapple. Once I’m in her strong arms, the fight will be over. What I should do is lean back to avoid her. What I actually do is lunge forward, into her arms, slamming my forehead into hers.
A kind of vibration moves through my head. Lights, like fireflies, dance in my vision, blinking in and out. As bad as it is, Bake got it worse. She stumbles back and drops to one knee, staggered but not out.
I stumble-run and tackle Bake onto her back, holding my knife over her throat, ready to plunge it in. Instead of speaking, I just catch my breath. I’m halfway to passing out, and I’d rather her not know that. The knife does all the talking for me.
“You fight well,” Bake says. “Dying by your hand is honorable.”
“I’d rather not kill you at all,” I say.
“Your friend—”
“Had a sword tip in her back.” I glance at Dyer, who’s picking herself up. She’s angry and embarrassed but no closer to death’s door than she has been for the last week. Of, course, her arm is covered. There’s no way to tell how far the Golyat infection has progressed.
Bake looks ready to argue, but her eyes lock onto my blade and then slowly widen. I glance down at my knife. She’s looking at the symbol.
“You carved the trees,” she says, no doubt talking about the path we left, that apparently led her straight to us. “Who are you?”
“Davina,” I say, and when she waits for more, I try to match her introduction. “Davina of Kingsland.” It feels strange using the name, but also right. New Inglan, I now know, is a bastardization of New England, the name given to this part of the world by people long since dead. “Descendent of…” I have to reach back in my memory, to the few times my father spoke of our family’s ancestors. He always seemed proud of our lineage, but never really gave a good reason why. “…of Sig.”
The woman’s already white skin turns even more pale, and for the first time, I really see the blueness of her eyes. Her capacity for violence is matched by her striking beauty.
“I am sorry,” she says. “I would not have attacked had I known you were a king.”
“A what-now?” Dyer says. She’s recovered my machete and Bake’s sword.
“A king,” Bake says.
Dyer chuckles. “Vee is a lot of things, but she’s not in charge of anything in Kingsland, and doesn’t have anything swinging between her legs.”
“As a descendant of Sig, you are granted the title, king,” Bake says. “Just as I am a queen.”
“In Kingsland,” Dyer says, “She’s called an ‘eight,’ and it’s not a compliment.”
Bake looks aghast. “You are disrespected despite your heritage?”
Growing weary of holding a knife to Bake’s throat, I ask, “If I move, are you going to—”
“I would never,” she says. “Though we have not met before today, we are bonded through time by those who came before us.”
When I lift the knife away, she doesn’t move. I slip away and sit. She does the same. Dyer stays standing, holding the two weapons, still ready for a fight.
“I am the eighth child of an elder and eighth wife of another elder,” I explain.
She doesn’t seem to understand the significance of either, though she asks, with an appropriate level of disgust, “Men take more than one wife?”
“The Prime Law says that elders can.”
“You still live under the Prime Law?”
“Well…” Dyer points to the cliffs above us. “We don’t, but everyone else up there does.”
“The Prime Law was created to restore a natural balance to humanity, to return us to a more simple way of living, and to ensure that the Golyats did not discover the people hidden in the five purged territories. It was meant to be eliminated after a period of one hundred years, at which point the Second Law came into effect.”
“And what is the purpose of that law?” I ask.
“Reunification,” Bake says. “But…it was not meant to be. Our ancestors had no way of knowing the Golyats would resist time’s assaults. There was to be a conclave four hundred years ago. Only representatives of Queensland arrived at the location specified in the Second Law. To reach the conclave, we exposed ourselves to the Golyats and were forced to defend against periodic attacks for four hundred years. And then, they got through. After the Golyats destroyed our homes, we fled into the wild, dispersed over a great distance. As a queen, I led my people here, in search of…well, in search of you. But the Divide was too great a barrier to surmount. Or was, until you left that rope.”
“Where are your people now?”
“To my knowledge, I am the last queen of Queensland. Perhaps the last survivor. There’s no way to know where the others are.”
“How long have you been in the wild?” I ask.
“I escaped from the north when I was eighteen,” she says. “I am now twenty-nine.”
“Eleven years?” I ask. “You survived among the Golyats for eleven years?”
“Not alone,” she says. “Not at first. The last of my people died two years ago. I have been patrolling the Divide ever since, hoping to make contact, or find a way across. I was convinced it would never happen until I saw the balloons in the sky.”
Bake seems very well educated on our history—both as a people, and personally. Her knowledge lends credence to the idea that her people were privy to the Prime Law’s contents, and this Second Law’s contents. What she doesn’t know is the history of Kingsland, or how its customs and laws have been changed over the years.
I’m about to ask her about the symbol on my knife when I feel a vibration beneath my feet.
While Dyer and I snap to attention, Bake rolls back, gets to her feet and looks ready to bolt. Her instincts are sharp and her reaction time quick.
“Where’d that come from?” Dyer asks.
Bake points to where the distant orange rope reaches the cliff’s top. A lone figure is sliding down the rope with none of the speed or grace demonstrated by Bake. A second appears at the top as the ground shakes again. Far above the small figure, a Golyat head slides into view above the trees, black eyes downturned, oblivious to anything else.
A massive black hand severs trees as it reaches out. Rather than be caught by the massive hand, the desperate person leaps out over the cliff and plummets. The person dangling from the rope screams, the high-pitched sound echoing through the valley.
The Golyat reaches out for the person falling in silence, resigned to his or her fate. When it steps on the cliff’s edge, stone crumbles. The rope breaks free, sending the second victim falling, pursued by a wave of boulders, and then…the Golyat.
As the giant topples, I see a second form rushing up behind it.
And another.
The battling Golyats, having seen new prey, have given up the fight for the chase, and it’s leading them straight into the Divide.
When the first Golyat lands, crushing the two fallen people, the ground shakes with a violence I have never felt. A cloud of dust explodes up and out, concealing the monster and any clue as to whether or not it survived the fall.
But a moment later, I have no doubt that it did.
In the dark shadow of the miles-deep valley, the orange glow from countless Golyats is easy to see. It builds in brightness as the ancient beasts wake to find themselves partially contained in soil, and as hungry as ever.
44
“Go!” I shout, backtracking several steps before turning to run. While I’ve never seen a volcano, my father taught me about them. Stone so hot it melts, glowing orange. The shaking earth. The explosions of ash into the air. That’s what the Divide looks like now, full of rising dust from the fallen Golyats, orange light from the monsters waking up, and a continuous, violent quake as more of the beasts plummet.
I wonder if that’s what my father will see. With his clear view of the Divide atop his hill, will he think the Divide is erupting?
Not if he can see the Golyats falling into it.
I’m not sure how far we are from Essex and my father’s hill. I know we were aiming further north, but we also reached the Divide far sooner than planned.
I hope he can’t see it.
I hope no one can.
A volcanic eruption would be preferable to the Golyats.
“This isn’t good!” Dyer says, running between me and Bake. “They’re waking up! I think they’re all waking up!”
While I disagree about the number of Golyats waking up—some are definitely dead for good—there are more than enough to take care of us, and the rest of humanity.
I follow the trail left by Shua and the others. It’s a winding path through tufts of resilient grass and scrub brush, waking Golyats, and ancient human remains.
Hard packed soil explodes against me as a twenty-foot long arm bursts out of the ground. A two-fingered hand reaches for me, but falls short. The monster controlling the limb is locked in the ground, its mouth chewing on dirt, its partially buried torso glowing bright. But with half of it still underground, it fails to rise. It will eventually, of that I have no doubt, but for now, the solid earth trapping the Golyat is our salvation.
The stench of the Golyats fades with a cool breeze blowing northward through the valley. When I hear the sound of rushing water over stones, I understand why. We’re about to reach the Karls River offshoot that spills into the Divide before reaching Boston.
Cresting a small rise, the river comes into view. It’s fifty feet across, but only a foot deep. Easy to cross, but no help against the Golyats. Not that it could help, even if it were one hundred feet deep. There are Golyats on both sides, all of them waking up.
“Keep going!” I shout, rushing toward the river. At a sprint, we can catch up to the others and regroup at the wall. If we’re lucky, they’ll find an alcove, or a cave for us to hide in. While most of the waking Golyats can’t see us, those we pass can. When they pull themselves from the ground, maybe they’ll tear each other apart in anger.
Then again, thousands of raging Golyats could very well collapse the Divide completely. Without sheer cliffs, the distance would be crossable.
We should have never come, I think. Micha and the Law were right all along. We’ve doomed humanity.
But we could still save it.
And set it free.
If we can survive long enough.
Traversing the river is harder than I thought it would be. The bed of round stones is slick and loosely packed. Every step is a twisted ankle waiting to happen.
“Shit,” Dyer says with each cautious, but hurried footstep. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Halfway across, a loud slurp draws our attention downstream. A Golyat rises from the river. At thirty feet, it’s not nearly the tallest, but it’s deadly enough. Water sluices around the body as rocks tumble away. The saturated riverbed gives way far faster than the crusted earth, allowing the beast to rise to its full height in moments.
The creature’s stomach flares bright, the color snaking down through its bowels.
Teeth chatter and all throughout the valley, Golyats struggle to stand, returning the hungry call.
Dyer’s string of curses increases in frequency as we speed. If we don’t risk injury now, we’ll die.
But then, none of us are moving, and it’s not because of the stones, or the water, or injury. We just can’t turn away from the Golyat as it takes a step toward us and loses most of the meat on its leg. Great sodden sheets of black, rubbery flesh peel apart and slap into the water, carried downstream.
The Golyat doesn’t seem to notice and brings its other leg forward. Its foot, still contained in mud, remains in place, detaching from the limb with a pop. Muscle, sinews, and skin slurp away from bone like a tall boot. When it lands on its exposed, blackened ankle, the rest of its waterlogged body starts to come undone.
Great heaps of once
-desiccated, now swollen, flesh fall into the river. Lumps of viscous liquid ooze from broken and exposed veins. The stomach and entrails fall from its core and burst upon a rock, the orange glowing contents surging downstream.
“Wow…” Dyer says, fear morphing into fascination.
With a final step, the Golyat pulls its skeleton right out of its body. The bones waver for a moment as the eyes slide from their sockets and splash into the river. Then it collapses in a heap.
“That’s why they avoid water,” I say to myself.
“It was under there for a long time,” Dyer says. “I wonder how long it would—”
“A minute,” Bake says. “A minute in the water and they start to come undone. Three minutes and they fall to pieces. Walking through this water, some will lose their feet, but the big ones will make it through.”
Most of the Golyats in the valley are smaller than the behemoths seen above. Thinking about them pulls my attention back. I turn around just as another plummets from above, the impact shaking the stones beneath my feet. It nearly drops me. The creature lands atop two Golyats that had already fallen, pushing them back down. But there are others, to either side, including the moss-covered giant, that are getting to their feet.
In a valley filled with thousands of Golyats, those falling from far above are the greatest threat.
When yet another great beast follows the line over the edge, I can’t help but watch. It doesn’t look frightened. Doesn’t flail. It just reaches out—toward us—and falls.
“They know we’re here,” I say.
“Of course they do,” Bake says. “They all do. With nowhere to hide, we will not be safe until the night, and with this many of them, even the night will not be dark enough to hide us.”
The falling Golyat strikes the mound beneath it. One of its outstretched arms impacts the shoulder of a much larger, now rising giant. The limb is wrenched away from the body and catapulted in our direction.
“Shitty cupcakes,” I grumble, and I start running across the river. I stumble a few times, but don’t stop or slow.
The Divide Page 26