Sadie spits and sucks air. Adam works on the remaining ropes and gives her the water. She slugs it back. Hands him the canteen. Wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “Didn’t need help,” she gasps. Her voice comes from her throat like a cough.
Same old Sadie.
Now she turns and looks at Kane and Levi. Her brothers.
—
They tie Levi to the tree—the same way Sadie was tied. His eyes are shut. His head hangs limp, chin pressed into his chest. “I should kill him,” Adam says.
An eye for an eye. Blood for the blood he spilled.
Sadie shakes her head. “You’re not like that.”
“Maybe I am. Maybe that’s exactly what I’m like.”
“He’ll die here soon enough.”
“No he won’t,” Kane says. “Airships will send a message to the Colonel. He’ll free him.”
Adam looks up at a lone airship and then back at Kane. The brutal evidence of his beating is everywhere in his face. His bruised cheek. The darkness under his eyes. His swollen lip.
“When I left, you were—”
“Half dead?”
“I didn’t think you’d make it.”
“Nakoda meds. In the package you brought up for me. Thunderbolt to the heart stuff.”
Adam notices Sadie staring at Kane. Her almond eyes carry a barrage of messages. He reads anger in them. Resentment. Bitterness. Joy. Love. Too many emotions to battle at once.
“You could’ve told me,” she says. Her voice is quiet.
Kane looks at her. “I wanted to. Woke up early, the morning after bunking in Adam’s shelter. Aimed to come see you and make it plain.”
“But you didn’t.”
Kane looks away, across the desert. “Guess I didn’t know how.”
Sadie watches him. “We swam the lake the day before you left….Do you remember?”
Kane says nothing.
“I was five. But it feels like yesterday. We swam all day, until my arms ached and my fingers wrinkled. We drifted out so far, you let me hang on to your shoulders and you swam us back to shore. It was one of those perfect days. You called it a pearler. I’m not sure why—the sky was bluer than glacier ice. Then the next day you were gone.”
Kane shifts his weight. “I’m not the same kid anymore. I’ve seen things. Done things.”
“You ran away! Without a word. It killed Ma. She died of a broken heart.”
Kane shakes his head. “I didn’t run. Colonel came for me. Before dawn. Said he wanted me to see some business deal in Providence. Said I was a man now. I was seven! I didn’t pack nothin, just took what I was wearing. Rode on the back of his byke. He rode a Badhammer, back then.”
“I remember.”
“We got to Providence late the next day. Colonel took me out to meet some mean-looking devil. I had a bad feeling about it. Came up all of a sudden. I should’ve bolted then. But I didn’t. Instead I watched the man I called Pa take a payment of cash money and shove me away.”
Adam stares. “He sold you? You were just a boy. His own boy!”
Kane looks at Sadie, his eyes ablaze. “Turns out I wasn’t. Turns out Ma was already pregnant when the Colonel took her in. Then, eventually, after all them beatings, I guess Ma was gonna leave him. S’pose it all came out then. She told him. Selling me was his revenge.”
Sadie sighs. Long and deep. “I…I had no idea.”
“I didn’t neither. Not till then.”
She reaches out and puts a hand on his cheek. And, to Adam’s surprise, he allows her to. “You’ve been through hell,” she says. “How did you survive?”
“I made a list.”
“A list?”
“All them who were gonna pay. The one who sold me, the one who branded me, the one who beat me, the one who worked me, the one who shackled me, the one who threw me in the river, and the one who let them do it. It’s the list that’s kept me alive.”
“And you took ’em all down?” Adam says.
Kane turns to him. His eyes are pools of fire. “Came to Blackwater to kill the last.”
Silence. No one speaks.
Sadie drops her hand from Kane’s face. “Why haven’t you?”
Kane looks at her. “Oldest law we have. Anyone with enough base points secures a legal, one-way ticket to the Ark of Sky-Base. No matter who you are or what you’ve done. They have to send you up.” He taps the Plug in his head. “No one can touch you. You start new up there.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying the Colonel will pay his debt to me. But first I’ll take my points.”
Adam worries a stone in his pocket with his right hand, looking at Levi, thinking about Kane’s words. The Colonel will pay his debt to me. He knows Kane’s right about Levi. They’ll find him. The Colonel won’t let him die like this. He’ll get his son cut down. Or maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll resent his son’s failure and let him suffer.
He watches Kane and Sadie returning from across the sand. Coming back from hiding Levi’s byke. Adam picks up Kane’s canteen and throws a splash of water in Levi’s face. Levi groans and lifts his head. He blinks his one good eye. Blood courses down his chin.
Neither boy speaks.
Levi winces as he shifts his weight against his bonds. The rope around his neck is tight and the more he struggles, the tighter it chokes him. He looks into Adam’s eyes and perhaps he sees some change in them, something that tells of a hardening of purpose, or perhaps the rope choking him induces a sudden tightening in his guts, a spurt of panic. In either event, a vestige of fight leaches from Levi. Adam sees it go from his eyes.
“Untie me,” Levi croaks, putting up a show. “No harm done. Not yet.”
Adam remains silent, watching him.
Levi looks at him with cold hate. His tone changes. “All right, look. I didn’t want to insult you, but we can settle this. I’ve got means. You know that. We’ll work something out.”
Adam feels his pulse quicken. “You killed my brother. You were gonna kill Sadie.”
“What? That’s absurd. I’d never kill my own sister….It was just to…to scare you.”
Adam thinks about Kane and Sadie—brother and sister.
Isn’t Levi their brother too? Wasn’t his pa a mean bastard to him too?
“And your brother, Frank,” Levi says. “He just…got in the way, is all.”
Adam feels his heart harden. He removes something from his jacket pocket. Holds it in his hand, turning it. Nate’s ceramic knife.
Levi’s eyes pop. “Please, no. Not like this.”
Adam, without sympathy, watches his face contort. He presses the tip of the knife into the soft flesh under Levi’s chin. Levi flinches. Adam nicks the flesh with a quick flick. A drop of ruby blood hangs, swells…and falls.
He lowers the weapon. Cuts open Levi’s riding suit. Runs the knife down to his stomach, watching the way the point draws a thin line of seeping blood and the way the blade carries his reflection.
Levi’s eyes track the knife’s progress. He blinks and clenches his jaw. Sweat runs from him. Then his face turns white with fury. “Go ahead,” he says. “Kill me. Do it. Because if you don’t I will hunt you. All the days of my life. I will spend everything I have to find you. I was a fool. I toyed with you. I should’ve ended you. I should’ve cut out your heart.”
Adam’s fingers curl round the knife’s handle. His grip is violent.
“Open your mouth,” he says.
“Why? What are you gonna do…you crazy bastard.”
Adam notes with satisfaction how Levi’s dropped his condescending bravado.
“Open,” he repeats. “Or I’ll make this slow.”
Levi opens his mouth. His teeth are covered in blood.
Adam lifts the knife and wedges it sidelong into Levi’s mouth. Levi clamps it in his teeth and stares at him with his one eye shut and the other hot with rage. Adam walks round the tree and unties Levi’s hands. He forces both his arms round the front of the tree tr
unk and reties them, tight.
“You’ll be able to cut yourself free. Just drop the knife in your hands.” He bends to place the canteen at the foot of the trunk. “Should be enough water to survive a few days. It’ll take you a while to cut free. This is tough rope. And a while longer to find the bykes. But they’re out there.”
Adam watches him, saying nothing more.
Then he turns to leave and never looks back.
They blaze west across a blighted earth. Sadie riding the Sandeater. Kane molded to the Drifter. Adam back on his trusted Longthorn. The byke feels as comfortable as a worn-in pair of jeans. He feels the connection. Feels Frank’s familiar presence in the machine.
The landscape shifts. The lava ground falls away and they swoop through a flat pan, shimmering white-hot under the sun, and they ride, elongating, shifting in the heat. No boundary lies here between earth and sky; the lines are fluid, indistinguishable.
By evening, they come to a valley with rust-colored cliffs and powdery red sand. It’s a warm, breezeless night and the sky is clear. They make camp. Build a fire and watch a pillar of smoke rise on the windless air.
“He’ll come for you,” Kane says, his face lit by the flames. “Not today. But one day.”
Adam nods. “Let him come.”
—
The following day is long and punishing. Adam and Sadie trail Kane by some distance. The Drifter has too much pace for them. They come to a standstill in the dust and listen to their whirring bykes. Adam wipes the sweat from his forehead and pulls the air-filter mask from his mouth.
Up ahead, Kane slows. He looks over his shoulder, turns and rides back.
“Three of us and only one ticket to Sky-Base,” Adam says.
“That’s a fact.”
“Will coming in second or third give you enough points?”
“Nope.”
“Then you need to win.”
Kane nods and stares into the dust.
“How many Riders ahead of us?” Sadie asks.
“Far as I can figure, just the two Hawks.”
“They’ll be gunning as fast as they can.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re the one to catch ’em,” Adam says. “You and that Drifter.”
“Yep. She can ride.”
“They’re not gonna like you catching ’em.”
“Nope. Reckon they might put up a fight.”
Nobody speaks. Kane looks away from them and squints into the glare. “When I saw you ride that day at the jetty, I knew then you were the one to beat. That’s why I rode with you. Keep your enemies close, right?” He throws a crooked grin and glances at Sadie. “See you on the line, sister.”
Before either responds, he gives a quick, two-fingered salute, pulls a fierce wheelie and cuts out across the hard-packed sand, tearing away from them, throwing up a plume of dust. More spirit and shadow than flesh and blood.
“There goes the Race winner,” Sadie says.
Adam nods. “You can’t beat what death can’t beat.”
—
Adam and Sadie blast past two wrecks in the afternoon. Two fallen Riders, dead in the dust beside their carcass bykes. Hawks. The perfect circle of their stone wounds clear as day. They don’t slow down. They don’t stop. They keep going. And they don’t see another byke until the finish line.
Dusk falls as they enter Blackwater Canyon. The same as when they left it, but in reverse. Soft river sand gropes their tires and they hear the beat of drums…and a sound blurred in with the beat…a rising chorus of cheers. The Watchers have gathered to hail their survival, to draw them home.
High above them horns are playing. Ribbons take the wind and propeller down from the cliffs. Airships float in the hazy sky and the trykes sail up alongside them. Referees lean from the crossbars, cheering them on as they motor through the narrow channel.
Adam remembers the cries as he stepped up the line to shake the Colonel’s hand.
One day. Long odds. Dead before the sun sets!
Yet they cheer for him. Blackwater allegiances shift like river sand.
“We did it!” Sadie cries over her shoulder as they round a bend and enter the last straight.
The air is hot and close and the sun throws golden light into the canyon, painting the walls so orange they are almost tangerine. Adam’s eyes climb the walls to the top, where the multitudes are gathered. Where he would have been, years before, with Pa and Frank. His eyes scan the crowd, the faces. He’s waiting to see one man—Colonel Mordecai Aesop Blood.
“Aim was to win!” Adam shouts over the wind in his ears.
“Think about the cash,” Sadie hollers back. She’s right about that.
All top three placed Riders receive a thousand-dollar cash prize. Kane, Adam and Sadie.
Here come the motley crew. The referees, the Watchers, the GRUBs. The assembled masses erupt into a cacophony of noise as Adam and Sadie complete the final yards. Urchins run alongside them, throwing wilted flowers at them as they come to the line. Cheers echo from the canyon walls. Hooters blast and the drums beat.
Now the final approach. They cross together—side by side—sharing second place. Second place out of eighty-one Riders. Adam glances over his shoulder. The track behind him is empty. At last count, he remembers nineteen dead and fourteen presumed dead.
How many Riders left alive?
Here stands one of them now. The outright winner.
“Took your time,” Kane says.
On either side of him loom two GRUBs, with their cipherlike stares and their alert, metal fingers, ready to claw out fusion shooters at their robot whim. Their limbs clack as they walk. They come to a stop and stand straight-backed, like a pair of gate gargoyles, guarding their puny human.
Kane gives a lopsided smile. “Like my new friends?”
“Wouldn’t trust them as far as I could spit them,” Sadie says.
Kane’s amber eyes have lost none of their fire, but there’s something else in them now. A flicker of hurt. Not physical pain…the pain of unresolved anger.
“You haven’t seen the Colonel, have you?” Adam says, over the noise.
Kane shakes his head. “He’s gone.”
“He must be out there,” Sadie says. “With Levi.”
Kane shrugs. “Doesn’t matter if he is. There’s no time.”
“He’ll pay for what he did,” Adam says. “One way or another.”
“Maybe. But not by my hand. Not anymore.”
The Debriefer appears in the dust, loping towards them. Ungainly and stoop-shouldered. He looks out of place with his white skin and his dark suit. He nods at the GRUBs and they jerk to life again. Instantly. The Debriefer stands there, stroking his thin lips.
“It’s ready. We leave now,” he says, taking Kane’s elbow. A gesture that seems more possessive than guiding.
“We’ll see you,” Adam says, pointing to the sky. “Up there we will see you. We’ve got two hundred base points each.”
“Yep. That ain’t nothin.”
Sadie reaches out and grabs hold of Kane’s hand, as if to draw him back. Tears brim in her eyes. Kane opens his mouth to say something. Then shuts it again.
The GRUBs force him away and, together with the tall Debriefer, they march him through a crowd straining forward to touch him. For the first time Kane looks vulnerable to Adam, escorted this way. He looks small, diminished somehow. A prisoner, rather than a victor.
Then he’s gone.
Adam and Sadie arrive at a ruined shell of a home. It squats under the red-rock cliffs, a forgotten corner of a nothing town on the edge of nowhere. They park their bykes at the well and Adam looks at the old oak, at the mounds of earth in the shadow of the tree’s bone-dry trunk.
He stares at Frank’s grave. The grave he dug himself. Frank, killed in a hail of stones. He thinks of his ma and her death by toxic skies. Dead before he knew her. Then Pa, whose mound of earth holds no bones. His true grave down at the bottom of Blackwater Lake. A death by water.
Then he thinks about Nate. Lying dead in the desert.
Adam doesn’t feel anger or bitterness. All he feels is emptiness. Above him the sky rumbles. A cold wind cuts through the hills. He turns to face his birth home.
A flash of lightning and thunder. It begins to rain. Huge drops spatter the porch and pummel the pockmarked walls. The cabin crouches on its foundations, absorbing the blows. Sadie takes cover under the oak. Adam looks up at the torrent, blinking, pooling rainwater in his mouth. He can’t put his finger on the emptiness he feels inside. It’s not just the graves behind him. It’s something else.
He looks at the cabin and sees himself reflected in shards of glass and he realizes. It’s because the Race is finished. And nothing will ever make him feel like that again. The Colonel was right.
You won’t live more than you live in the Race.
Adam trudges through the mud, reels back the busted front door and plunges into gloom. A smell of earth and damp hits him. He pinches his nose and wades into the murk. Thunder breaks and raindrops clatter the remaining sheets of corrugated-iron roof. Most of the roof has been peeled away, probably salvaged for other homes, leaving huge gaps for the rain to sluice in. Lightning flashes, revealing devastation. Shadows rise up and come at him.
Adam is engulfed in noise, shattering and crashing. He slams his hands to his ears. He tries to shut out the sound, but the stones pound and they pound and they pound. But he knows the stones are in his head.
He makes his way outside to the shelter, opens the trapdoor and descends the steps into earthy warmth. The air is close. Musty. The inside of a coffin.
His eyes grow accustomed to shapes. A spade. Broken barrels. The husk of chicken wire, throwing crooked shadows. In a dark corner, he sees some indistinct creature scurry low at the wall. Quick. Furtive. Then a blast of wind and a silent black shadow swoops past him. A keening squeak.
Another beat of wings and the dark shape gusts up into the shadowy support beams. Adam throws back his head and looks up. Moon-yellow eyes stare down at him.
Owls, roosting.
Stone Rider Page 21