Halla looks at me doubtfully.
“I know, easier said than done.” I’ve had a day and a half to think about it, and I’m beginning to realize that gaining access to the kind of facility that houses a DNA database is going to be very hard now that I’m a runaway with no official affiliation. Maybe I can bribe someone to run my sample? With what? I have no electricity or food ration cards to offer. “I’ll think of something,” I say with fake confidence.
Halla nods and doesn’t push. I think again that my problems aren’t as big as hers. I may not know how to identify my parents, but at least I’m not pregnant and traveling toward a boyfriend who probably won’t want to become an outlaw in order to be with me and our baby. I wonder what Halla will do if we can’t find Loudon or if he’s not willing to risk his freedom by deserting the IPF to be with her. She’ll stay with me and Wyck, I decide. We’ll all become pioneers. I deliberately don’t think about what will happen when the baby comes or how hard it will be traveling with an illegal infant.
The shadows are lengthening, making it harder to discern boggy patches from solid ground. We should make camp for the night. It’s still early, but there’s no ghost town here in the swamp to provide shelter and we’re going to have to rig something, possibly up a tree. As I’m looking about for a likely spot, Halla steers us out of the trees into a clearing. It’s a stretch of open land with a small stream on the far side. Water! Moving water is good—less likely to be contaminated, or harbor prehistoric reptiles who could swallow us down in a single gulp.
As we move into the clearing, Wyck zips from the strip of trees on the far side, crowing, “I found clean water.”
He sounds proud enough you’d think he combined the hydrogen and oxygen atoms himself. Halla and I exchange the kind of long-suffering looks that girls have to share sometimes when they’re around boys.
He cuts the scooter back and forth across the stream, the air cushion spraying rooster tails of water behind him. Then, he leans deeply and starts toward us, going flat out across the stretch of ground between us.
“You should conserve your electricity,” Halla calls. Her gentle face wears a disapproving look.
Wyck ignores her. “Watch this.” He spins the scooter in a circle, laughing.
The ground beneath him ripples sluggishly away from the air current and I recognize the danger too late. “Wyck—!”
Pulling out of the spin, he leans forward a hair too much and the nose of his scooter strikes the ground. The air cushion cuts out and Wyck goes flying. The scooter falls, not with a metallic clatter, but with a hideous sucking sound. It begins to sink. Quicksand.
Chapter Twelve
Wyck lands several feet from the scooter and tries to right himself. His lower half is trapped. He flails, bewildered, and sinks further. “Wha—?” His confusion turns to panic as he realizes he’s caught. “It’s quicksand,” he yells. “I can’t get out. Help me!”
Halla screams, “Wyck!” She starts to skim us toward him, but I stop her.
“It’s not safe. We need something to probe the ground. We can’t help Wyck if we get stuck, too.”
She stops the scooter and we leap off, letting it fall. Halla frantically hunts for a branch or something to test the ground with. I rip into my pack, remembering the metal stakes from the lab. Finding one, I poke the ground three feet in front of me. Solid. I step forward. Wyck is thirty feet away.
His furious effort to swim, to propel himself toward solid ground, are only dragging him down faster. “Get rid of your backpack and be still. You have to be still,” I tell him. “We’ll get you out.”
“Everly.” His eyes plead with me as he shrugs out of his backpack. Mud streaks his face and weighs down his brown curls. His hazel eyes are haunted.
I move as quickly as I can, jabbing the stake at the ground before every step, until it sinks in. I’m still fifteen feet away. Too far. I stretch my arm out anyway, and Wyck reaches for me, but our fingers are still a body length apart. He’s sunk to his armpits now.
“Here,” Halla says.
She’s come up behind me, breathing hard, and she hands me the dead tree limb. Hope lights Wyck’s face. “Hold onto me,” I tell Halla, grasping one end of the branch and extending it across the quicksand. Halla puts her arms around my waist as my foot moves perilously close to the quagmire. Wyck’s left hand latches onto the limb and we all exhale with relief.
“Pull, pull,” he says.
Taking a firm hold of the rough wood, I brace myself and pull. Wyck’s torso begins to emerge from the muck. He grabs the branch with his other hand. There’s a slurping sound as the quicksand releases him, and then a sharp snap. Wyck’s mouth drops open as he stares at the fragment of splintered bough in his hand. He’s still too far to reach. He sinks down to his neck and despair darkens his face.
My eyes fix on his and I swallow hard. He can’t die. I can’t let him die. I stand frozen for a split second and then realize what I have to do. There isn’t time to find another branch, and they’ll all be rotten, anyway. The quicksand pulls Wyck down so it covers his mouth. His eyes remain fixed on mine and I think I see acceptance in them. No time. “Halla, grab my feet.”
“Why?” She realizes. “Oh, no, Everly, you can’t.”
“Just do it!”
I strip off my clothes so I’m wearing only a bra and panties—less for the muck to grab onto. Then, I sink to my haunches and ease into the quicksand on my back, staying as flat as I can and distributing my weight over the largest surface by spread-eagling my limbs with Halla holding tight to one ankle. It’s surprisingly cold. The muck clamps onto me, pulling me down an inch, and I fight panic.
“Don’t let go, Halla.”
“I won’t.”
I hear the steel in her voice and it helps me reach one arm over my head. It feels like moving through a soupy, bottomless bowl of grits. I’m partly on my side, fighting to hold my face out of the quicksand. Only the tips of Wyck’s fingers are visible above the surface. He can’t die. He can’t die. Don’t die. I grab for his hand. His fingers mesh with mine. He’s alive. I’m pretty sure I’m crying. I put everything I have into my grip. Trying to lift him drags me deeper. “Halla, pull, pull!”
Her hands tighten around my ankle and I slide back a couple of inches. It’s not fast enough. Wyck will drown. I manage to work my spread leg inward so she can grasp both my ankles. “Lift,” I gasp, knowing that when she does so my head will slap into the muck and it will cover my face. Wyck’s fingers have loosened. Don’t die. I clench my hand harder around his.
Halla hooks her arms under my knees and drags my legs to waist height, forcing my head under the quicksand. I’m ready for it, so I’ve taken a deep breath and closed my eyes and mouth, but the shock of it, of not being able to see or breathe still panics me. It’s all I can do not to kick. I can feel myself moving backward, and I concentrate on holding onto Wyck whose hand has gone totally slack in mine. His weight makes my shoulder ache. It seems like hours, but is probably only twenty seconds, before my thighs scrape against solid ground. I scootch forward on my butt and sit up, and then Halla is grabbing onto Wyck’s arm and we’re pulling with all our might. I reach beneath the surface and feel for his hair, pulling him up by it until his head is free, then we’re catching him under the armpits and hauling upwards. The quicksand releases him reluctantly, with a thwuck. His torso hits solid ground.
He lies still.
Frantically, I scrape the mud off his face. I reach into his mouth and clear it. “Water,” I tell Halla. While she races to get one of the water bladders, I roll Wyck onto his side and pound his back. Murky water dribbles from his mouth. I turn him onto his back, straddle his waist, and begin to compress his lungs. “Breathe,” I command with each push. “Breathe.”
Halla returns and rinses his face and nose with some of our precious water. I keep pumping his chest. My arms are on fire. The quicksand caked on my face, arms and torso is drying. It itches.
Wyck coughs, gasps, rol
ls over and vomits a trickle of water, mud and bile.
I stand. Relief floods through me and my knees buckle. Halla is crying, patting Wyck’s shoulder, and smiling all at the same time.
“You saved us,” I tell her.
“I don’t know where the strength came from,” she admits. “I didn’t know legs could be so heavy. I kept telling myself ‘I can do all things in Him who strengthens me.’ Then I’d take a step backwards, then another. My thighs hurt.” She rubs them.
Wyck struggles to his knees and looks up at us. “Thank you,” he tells Halla. His eyes lock on mine. “Thank you.”
A lump rises in my throat, but then anger swamps my relief. He was showing off, wasting the scooter’s electric charge, goofing around, and he almost died. He almost died. I fold my arms over my chest. “You lost the scooter and most of our supplies.”
Turning my back on him, I march toward the burbling stream. I need a bath.
The cool, clear stream water is a huge relief. Algae- and alligator-free. Huge old cypress trees overhang it, with moss draping down like a curtain. It’s only knee deep, so I remove my boots and wade in. I splash water over my torso and duck my head under. That reminds me too much of being in the quicksand and I jerk upright, my hair flinging water droplets. I gasp, then resume sluicing my upper body, removing my bra to rinse it out. When I’m clean, I wring out my bra and slip into my clothes, draping the wet bra over a branch to dry. I pull on my boots and rejoin the others. They’ve moved away from the quicksand to the far side of a cypress tree with a trunk big enough for all three of us to lean against. Our remaining scooter is parked on the right, forming a semi-barrier against anything approaching from that direction.
“My turn,” Wyck says, not meeting my eyes. He walks toward the creek.
Halla is sunk down on a mossy hummock, resting, and I busy myself finding firewood, worrying about what the loss of our supplies will mean. It’s catastrophic. By the time I return with an armload, Wyck is back from the stream, hair flattened, clothes dripping.
“There are fish in the stream,” he says. “Big ones. I could probably catch one for dinner.”
He hefts the metal stake I dropped; he’s talking about spear fishing. “I’ll make a fire.” My tone is cool and he pauses for a moment, but then heads back to the stream without saying anything.
I’ve got a crackling fire going and have collected enough wood to last the night, and Halla is still asleep when he returns with a large catfish with yellow whiskers drooping from his makeshift spear. My tummy grumbles, but I say, “One fish can’t replace everything you lost.”
Without replying, he gets to work scaling and filleting the fish, cursing when his bare hands come in contact with the catfish’s barbs. He wields the knife with dexterity, and I’m caught up in how efficiently his hands move when Halla groans.
I turn my head to look at her. “You okay?”
“Cramps.” She grimaces and presses a hand to her side.
“Wyck caught a fish.”
“Excuse me.” She stumbles past the fire, into the woods, far enough for privacy. I’m not worried about her getting lost because the fire will lead her back.
She’s back five minutes later. “I’m bleeding.”
"Did you cut yourself on some—”
“The baby.” Her forehead scrunches with pain. “I don’t want to lose my baby.” Her distress makes her drawl more noticeable.
Oh, no. I have never felt so totally inadequate. I don’t know what to say or do, how to stop the bleeding or deliver a pre-term baby. Any baby. “Are you . . . are you in labor?”
“I don’t know.”
She’s on the verge of tears, so I get her to sit close to the fire and join her. “Is there a lot of blood, like gushing?”
She shakes her head. “No, just spots.”
I relax a little. It doesn’t seem like she’s going to bleed to death immediately. Forgetting my animosity, I look at Wyck.
“I’ll get a blanket,” he says. He drapes it over Halla’s shoulder and she leans against me. Wyck stands there for a moment, and then says, “I’ll finish cooking the fish. Maybe you’ll feel like eating in a bit.”
Halla nods gamely, although I can tell food is the farthest thing from her mind. Soon, the aroma of broiling fish fills the air and my mouth waters. Even with no spices, it’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten when Wyck hands me a slightly charred chunk. Halla gets a smaller piece which she nibbles at while Wyck and I wolf our portions down. At intervals, Halla winces or hunches forward slightly. I rub her shoulder; it’s all I can do.
“Is it getting worse?” I whisper.
She thinks a moment. “No, I don’t think so.” She looks a little cheered by the realization, but then arcs forward with a low moan.
It’s deep twilight by now and we need to decide what we’re doing for the night. I had hoped to be able to find some way to sleep above ground, in a makeshift hammock, but the cypresses are too tall, their branches too high to reach. We’re stuck on the ground.
“We should keep the fire going,” I say, “and get rid of the fish remains. Who knows what their scent might attract?”
We’re all thinking about the dog pack, I’m sure, even though we haven’t seen any mammals all day. Wyck quickly gathers up the fish offal, walks a few yards, and flings it into the quicksand. “Nature’s trash can,” he says.
“I’ll take first watch tonight,” I say. I’m tired, but I’m not gray with exhaustion from near death like Wyck, or worried about miscarrying like Halla.
Wyck nods, says, “Wake me in four hours,” rolls himself into a ball near the fire, and falls asleep. He doesn’t have a blanket since his is buried in who knows how many feet of quicksand. The nighttime chorus of insects strikes up as the last vestiges of twilight fade to black, and I can hear the creek’s burble and the squeaks of hunting bats. I strain to hear more ominous sounds. Almost as if I willed it, a grumbling bellow sounds and it takes me a moment to recognize it as an alligator’s call. Fighting? Mating? Hunting? It’s far enough off that I’m not too worried. I stay by Halla, stroking her hair.
I think she’s asleep until she says in a low voice, “What if I lose my baby, Ev? This would all be for nothing. You, Wyck—all of us with nowhere to go, outlaws. I would have dragged you into this, put all our lives in danger, for nothing.”
She sounds anguished and my only concern is to calm her. “First of all, you didn’t ‘drag’ anybody away from the Kube. I came for my own reasons and Wyck came for his. Yeah, we wanted to help you find Loudon, but we’re each here for our own reasons. I want to find out about my parents, remember? And Wyck’s dodging sentry service. If”—I swallow hard—“if you lose the baby, we’ll take care of you, and we’ll get you to Loudon one way or the other. You’ll still want to find Loudon, won’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” she says on a sob. “Everything will be okay then. Everything will be okay then.”
I’m thinking that she’s deluding herself, that finding Loudon will not even begin to solve all her problems—in fact, it will create new ones—when it dawns on me that I’m thinking the same way. I haven’t looked past identifying my parents to what that means. Potentially nothing. I might not be able to find them once I know who they are. I make myself stop thinking about all the possible negatives by staring into the fire’s flickering flames. They cast shadows over Wyck, twitching as if he might be dreaming. Nightmares about quicksand. They warm Halla’s face and exaggerate the curve of her lashes where they rest on her cheeks. I ease away from her now that she’s finally sleeping, albeit restlessly, and massage my stiff shoulder. Stretching my hands toward the fire, I’m unbearably grateful for its light and warmth in the middle of this vast, unfriendly swamp.
Without warning, the rain that’s been threatening all day begins to fall. The fire fizzles. I endure it for four hours, wake Wyck, and wrap myself in my blanket, convinced I'll never sleep.
I wake to a hand clamped over my mouth and a body pressing down on
me. My eyes pop open but I can’t make out anything but a pale blur above me in the dark. Panic burns through me. I start to writhe and kick against the strong hold until Wyck breathes against my ear, “Soldier.”
Chapter Thirteen
I still, and Wyck cautiously removes his hand from my mouth. I strain to listen and hear voices behind us, near the quicksand.
“. . . got to be there . . . transponder . . .”
“It’s a blasted bog—there’s nothing here, for crap’s sake.”
I move cautiously to peer around the tree trunk. Wyck joins me. An IPF soldier, gray uniform ghostly in the first light of dawn, is scraping quicksand off his boot with a stick. He repeats, “The scooter’s not here.” His own ACV scooter stands at the clearing’s edge.
I am overwhelmingly grateful for the rain I had cursed when it doused our fire hours ago. Almost simultaneously, I realize that the scooters must have transponders that communicated with micro-drones we never noticed, and that the soldier must be talking to a comrade via radio since there’s only one man visible. He’s fifty feet away, walking the edge of the quicksand, poking at it with his stick. He’s headed away from us, but when he turns, he’s going to find us. I wonder how far away his buddies are, and how many of them there are. I motion for Wyck to wake Halla, and pull my knife. My mind whirs with escape options. We’ve only got one scooter, Halla’s ill . . . For a moment I despair. If we give ourselves up, will they go easy on us, maybe let us return to the Kube, serve a few zillion detention hours, and let things go back to the way they were?
Even as the defeatist thought crosses my brain, I remember Halla and her baby. I can’t let them catch Halla. They’ll take her baby away. My mind clears. I have the least to lose of our threesome. Halla will lose her baby if she goes back and Wyck will be tried as a deserter. They need to take the scooter and try to outrun the soldiers. I will have to make my escape on foot. We can attempt to meet up on the northwest edge of the swamp. It’s not much of a plan and I don’t have much hope that if we split up we’ll be able to find each other again, but nothing better comes to me. The rain’s patter hides the slight sounds I make as I crawl to where Wyck and the now-awake Halla are stuffing gear into her bag. I whisper my plan to them, emphasizing that they’ll have to dump the scooter as soon as they get far enough away.
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