Through the End

by Parker Jaysen

  We keep the churning silhouette of the hellhole to our right and the hours fly. At midnight I dowse an unmapped oasis, and with no one else around, we fall into our accustomed pattern in perfect harmony. We refill canteens and top off the water tanks in the raptors’ bellies, passing the valve between us without a word.

  I find my eyes drifting to Dinah’s forearms, pure feminine muscle in the glow of the solars. And a half-healed scorpion welt, of course.

  We ride on. Dinah is my best friend, not my lover – bootcamp shenanigans aside. A quick shared kiss when we were practically girls isn’t a romance.

  It’s not even unfinished business anymore.

  I’m the luckiest person on the planet, to have someone like Dinah always ready to sign up for a run with me. We run together so great.

  Okay, Charlie. Simmer down.

  Daybreak. We still haven’t skirted the edge of the hellhole. How big is this thing?

  Tents, pinned to rock. A meal of fruit ration and something light, because you can’t eat something heavy before sleeping in a hot tent.

  Years, we’ve been doing this.

  Dinah stows our supper dishes in the belly of her raptor so nothing will be attracted to them while we sleep. I’m checking comms, which are still nothing but static. My anxiety is ramping up as if coupled to my yearning. Does the guild even know about the hellhole? My brain is off somewhere, calculating kilometers and nights and worried about dragons and secrecy.

  “I just think,” Dinah says suddenly, “they’re sweet.”

  I pause to parse her words. Dragons? Lucy and Thea? Fruit?

  “They’re all over each other, but it’s sweet that they have each other,” Dinah says. “They’re lucky.” She gives me the closest thing to a significant look I’ve ever seen from her, and slips into her tent and seals the flap.

  How am I supposed to sleep now?

  I toss and turn in my own hot tent, Dinah’s recent words in my ears. You get me. It’s sweet. They’re lucky.

  Is she talking about how cute Thea is? Is she dropping hints? She’s not a drop hints type of person, she’s damn the scorpids, full speed ahead. So what the hell?

  I flip over and hit my pallet in frustration.

  When dusk comes and the rads abate, I’m up first, as usual. I get a scratchy signal through to Thea and Lucy. The hellhole hasn’t moved up on them. Thea says something about ley lines, but I miss most of it and don’t really care. Marsh magic doesn’t work out here.

  They seem fine, possibly distracted.

  I glance at Dinah’s tent, distracted myself.

  I top off canteens, loudly enough to wake Dinah.

  But when Dinah emerges from her own tent, there are no more meaningful looks or comments about lucky lovers.

  Maybe I was just tired and misunderstood her. I’m flustered and off-balance, and I fumble with packing up our tents and stores while Dinah gets caffeine.

  I was just taken off-guard, that’s all. It’s Dinah, for god’s sake. There was nothing implied, we have nothing unfinished.

  On our second night of travel away from the other two, we start to descend off the continental plateau and the stench of hellhole fades. In its place I begin to feel the ocean, still days distant. It’s a looming essence that threatens to overcome every other node nearby. So much water! My dowsing sense pinging away constantly puts my nerves on edge.

  We reach the “tunnels” before midnight. They don’t look much like tunnels. Scarred slabs of cement rise above the sand like the bows of sunken ships, and fade back into the dark all around us. Propped on these canted surfaces and jutting up like a broken forest are ancient struts that might once have supported weapons or antennas, now overwhelmed by toxic blue brambles and falling into rust. Everything is silhouetted against a sky blazing with stars.

  We pace our raptors slowly through the shattered maze looking for anything like a tunnel entrance, staying alert for any demonic hazards. I’m dowsing a symphony of metal, mineral, gemstone, from under us, too much to distinguish at first. Bone, too.

  We find a sloped pit down to something like an entryway, blacker than the surroundings, and Dinah hops off her raptor. “Try here?” I read hesitation into her tone. But she grabs her flamethrower and pushes back blue vines with boisterous glee.

  Oh, yeah. Dinah is never uncertain.

  I set the raptors to pause/ready, and we head down.

  Our solars light up a dusty passage in shuddering blue shadows. This is more like a tunnel, slanting gently downwards.

  It’s old, of course, from before. Who built it? What was here? There’s concrete, none of it stable. Critters love the taste of concrete now, and they burrow through it like maggots in bread. Dinah smacks a pillar as she passes it, and huge centipedes scatter in her torchlight.

  “You are going to get us buried alive and eaten,” I say.

  “Probably not both at once,” Dinah says. I’m on dowser overload, trying to make sense of the signals coming from all directions, and she’s being jolly.

  But she turns, aiming her light at my visor for a second and then turning it aside so as not to blind me. “Char? You okay? What are you getting?”

  “Don’t know yet,” I say. “Everything.”

  “Garnets?” Dinah asks. She yips and leaps out of the way of a huge grub, knee-high, but it doesn’t seem hostile. It trundles away down a side-passage without even pausing or sniffing, or whatever it does with that snout.

  “I’m not sure if you should be insulted or honored that it ignored you,” I say.

  “It probably thought I’d taste bad,” Dinah says. She blinks behind her helmet visor, and turns away.

  It’s cool down here, cooler than the desert night. I shiver and pull my arms in.

  “Got your pendulum?”

  Dinah watches intently as I pull the crystal from where it lives over my heart. I zip up my coverall immediately – last thing I need is a centipede down my shirt.

  I’m having trouble focusing. There’s something different about Dinah. Her eyes on my face, then looking away. Or is it just me? I can hardly keep my eyes off her myself.

  Thea and Lucy are lucky. It’s sweet.

  What about us? Are we also sweet? Also lucky? It’s like Dinah has posed half a question and left it for me to fill in.

  The crystal is not going to do the job by itself. I have to concentrate. I turn my eyes resolutely to the pendulum.

  Dowsers say the power is not in the crystal, but that’s just the simple way to explain it to people. There’s power in the crystal, and in me. Things aren’t always only in one vessel.

  I breathe and share the search with the pendulum. With a tug against my hand, the pendulum dips, making wide ovals over the floor as if pulled by a magnet.

  I plant my feet on the tunnel floor, and reach out my mind like a searchlight, following where the crystal aims.

  There’s a lot down there. Think of bones, and there are the scattered remains of ancient unfortunate rodents, tiny ones, from before. Think of water, and some is almost shallow enough to dig by hand, along with the ever-present overlay of salt sea in the distance.

  Think of stones.

  I breathe again, out, and then inhale deeply so I can hold my gaze long enough to tease apart all the signals.

  Some stones that were formed in the earliest days, when the stars were younger and the planet was buffeted with meteors.

  The lavas.

  The life, the death, the life again. Deep, deep strata that once were mountaintops.

  There it is. Ruby. What is ruby doing in this place of grubs and bones?

  It is not even all that far, and the tunnel seems to bend that way. I exhale in a burst and tell Dinah what I sensed. Ruby would be a prize, indeed.

  “It’s a trap,” Dinah says, and heads immediately in that direction.

  “You are going to get yourself killed,” I mutter and follow my most exasperating partner.

  But we see nothing like ruby where the pendulum said it would be,
although there’s a scattering of more minor gemstones on the dusty floor, glittering in our lamplight.

  “Do you think a miner was killed here and dropped these before he could stash them?” I suggest.

  “Well, that’s very dark,” Dinah says.

  We scoop up the little stones, but I’m still puzzled. I know the difference between a ruby and a bauble. So does the pendulum.

  In the sweep of Dinah’s light there’s a broken construct, something manufactured. “Machines,” she says. “Would the guild be interested in some of this stuff?” She looks at me dubiously.

  “Possibly.” I rummage in my belt and pull out a nylon sack. “Load it up?”

  We vie with centipedes and one very large spider, and settle on a hunk of optics caked in grime, and a couple of small metal containers, much corroded.

  “This was fun,” I say, “but is this tunnel going to get the four of us and a dragon into Sand City?”

  “I don’t think it’s even a tunnel,” Dinah says, sweeping her lamp across the low-ceilinged chamber. “That’s a door.”

  Indeed, there’s a door, complete with knob – but only a door. Any wall that might have stood around it is long gone. It’s a freestanding frame with a closed door like a fairy portal in a children’s story. What’s left probably holds this part of the tunnel up.

  Not a tunnel or a mine. A room. A building.

  I reach out again with my senses. With this perspective, everything I’ve dowsed falls into place. “This whole place is a city,” I say.

  “Cool,” says Dinah happily.

  I dangle the pendulum once more. At last, I discern human structures, a lattice of mineral remains in the ground below us like an inverted timber frame. Did its builders burrow down, to make these dozen or more sublevels? Or did it stand tall before being buried by desert over centuries?

  There are not just building remains – there are human remains. Skeletons I’d missed before, deeper still. Just old enough to ping my dowsing sense, almost fossilized. Hundreds of people died here, and were left.

  Do city elders have records of this place? Does the guild know about it? Maybe Thea knows.

  Or maybe we’re the first to discover some grim history. I shudder.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I say. Dinah hoists the sack of machines over her shoulder, and we follow our own footprints in the layered dust to the exit.

  Outside the ruins, we reach Thea and Lucy on comms.

  Thea sounds genuinely surprised by our finds. “The guild uses ruby lasers for some precision work. Maybe you found a lab.”

  A lab where something terrible had happened, to a lot of people. “Did they have lasers back then?” I ask. Nobody knows.

  But we all agree the tunnels won’t get us any nearer our goal, and Dinah and I should return to Thea’s camp. The hellhole is retreating, according to measurements Lucy has been able to make using ley magic.

  “Good enough for me,” I say. “Everything else okay? Keeping clear of scorps?” I could swear I hear a smile in Thea’s voice when she answers in the affirmative.

  Well, they’re practically honeymooners, right?

  “Good, then. And the dragon?”

  “She’s great.”

  A happy little family in the hell desert, Thea and Lucy and Mouse.

  As we mount up, Dinah is quiet, her motions brisk. I guess the failed side-mission has made us both fretful.

  At a flat sprint, we make it to the previous day’s campsite just as the horizon is obliterated in the sun’s glare. We throw up our tents in the shadow of a boulder and retreat to our pallets, panting.

  The hellhole is only the faintest rumble in the distance, so I can hear every time Dinah shifts even the smallest amount in her own tent next to mine. It’s agonizing. She’s centimeters from me.

  She’s not asleep. Or maybe she is.

  I could make a list of all the tiny noises Dinah makes when she’s falling asleep. Add it to the log.

  I roll over and hit my bed roll in frustration.

  “Char,” Dinah says. “I have to tell you something.” It’s just her voice through the stillness of the sweltering tent fabric.

  I hold my breath.

  “This is my last run.” And she says nothing more, even when I say “why?”

  I lie awake for a long time, dry-eyed. The mere idea of such a loss is pain. It’s a first pain, the first sting by which all subsequent stings are measured.

  Never ride with Dinah again? It’s a wrongness.

  I imagine awful scenarios. Dinah is sick. Dinah has discovered how I feel. Dinah has fallen in love with someone at a faraway station, wants to start a family.

  Eventually I doze, but my dreams seethe with scorpids and toads and hellholes chasing Dinah – a different hazard each time, but every one ends the same. Dinah runs. Dinah runs away, from me.

  At dusk, I wake, surly and heartbroken at once. I hadn’t expected to sleep at all.

  “Why?” I demand again, as soon as Dinah emerges.

  Dinah doesn’t pretend not to know what I’m talking about. “Rads.” She rubs her face and reaches for a canteen.

  No. Dinah has years before she hits retirement level on rads. My rads are fine. “What was it? How did I not know? Were you trapped in the open? A raptor crash? How?”

  “Char, it’s me. Nothing simple like one flukish emergency. It’s the way I am.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Charlie, you know me. The way I rush in not thinking all the time. Early starts. Late arrivals, like yesterday. It’s added up. They’ve double-checked.”

  “Station medics? What do they know?”

  “Char. I’ve been pushing it. And if I want to live to a ripe old age I have to stop now.”

  No, no. I need Dinah out here. “They should have caught it sooner.” I want to scream, or spit. I want to hold her.

  “Yeah, well.” Dinah chugs a full canteen and refills it from her raptor. “This one’s getting low. We should keep an eye out for water on the way back to the dragon.”

  As dark descends, the slithering increases. It’s like birdsong. Listen for the sound of scales on sand and you know it’s time to wake up, time to ride.

  And I feel like I need to wake up – but I am awake. The feeling that Dinah was preoccupied about something has lifted, but the thing she was hiding is terrible.

  I try to keep any accusing tone out of my voice. “I dreamed about you leaving.” I’m empty. Where will she go, a station? Riders don’t go home, to Sand City or anywhere, not after a lifetime in hell.

  I can’t think of anything to say other than “please, stay, I will keep you safe,” and that feels completely inadequate. So I say, “let’s get back to the others.”

  Dinah leaps up onto her raptor as though she doesn’t have a care in the world.

  I follow soberly.

  “You know what really pisses me off?” Dinah says over comms. “I did kind of want one last glory run, for old time’s sake.” The line crackles in her pause. “But this mission – too much politics.” She slows her raptor until I draw even, and she looks across at me through her visor. Her voice sounds in my ears. “Too much company.”

  Looking back at her, I answer almost without thinking. “Why can’t we?”

  There’s a long silence while we ride along, each of us alternately looking ahead and glancing at the other. Dinah finally speaks. “Okay, let’s do it.”

  I’ve heard “let’s do it” from Dinah a million times, but always about “let’s hop into this river of lava, see what happens” kinds of topics. This seems somehow more momentous than any of those, and not just because this once she may actually have given it some thought.

  What’s a glory run?

  “We need guidelines,” I suggest.

  “Nuh-uh,” says Dinah. “Are you seriously trying to plan a glory run? I think that kind of misses the point.”

  The first time we rode together, we kissed under the moon, while vipers watched. I’d d
o that again.

  “Okay,” I say. “What then? Memory lane?”

  “Remember the first cistern?” says Dinah.

  “I was so thirsty!”

  We’re still reminiscing when we realize our way is blocked – the hellhole has sent a finger of chaos across the desert, cutting us off from Thea and Lucy.

  “Here’s trouble,” says Dinah. “It’s a glory run now, for sure.” She shakes out the last of her water onto her face.

  I’m fiddling with the transmitter, trying to get a clear signal to Thea. In the moonlight, droplets of water roll down Dinah’s arms and disappear into cool sand. I give up on the radio.

  “Well, the only way open is further east,” I say. “If we don’t find something else first, I think we can get to Maura Pool. Then double back to Thea and Lucy tomorrow night.”

  Maura is a ratty shanty on a patch of scrubby sand – with the best pool in the world, fed by a geothermal spring and graced with a little beach under a sandstone overhang.

  “Okay, Maura it is,” Dinah says. “For the glory.”

  I picture us missing it by minutes, the sun cooking us, filling what’s left of Dinah’s rads quota.

  We ride hard through the night, cold and quiet, finally leaving the errant hellhole behind, and when we see the solars of Maura Pool it feels like coming home.

  We reach Thea on comms and about the only thing we can make out is a sly “sleep well,” and why does everyone always assume we’re together? I don’t look at Dinah.

  We update our maps and set up camp.

  If the universe is telling Dinah to slow down, then it’s arranged a perfect three-hour vacation before sunrise. But it’s a strange feeling indeed to be kicking back in the middle of this frenzied mission.

  “Okay, what else?” Dinah says as we refill canteens and raptor tanks.

  I frown to remember. “We ran into trouble with my raptor.” Neither of us had had enough experience to diagnose the raptor’s servo: acid ants in the workings. So we’d radioed Transit station, reported a down raptor, and ridden on together on Dinah’s.

  “Glory nights, Char,” Dinah says. “Are we doing it all?”

  Does “all” include kissing Dinah under the moonlight? Again?