Awoken

by Timothy Miller

Jericho darted forward, closing his glassy fangs on Michael’s seatbelt. “The Fallen come, Awoken,” he mumbled. “The People must flee.”

  The resilient fibers tore open and Michael landed with a thud! on the pickup’s ceiling. His head ringing like a dinner bell, he resisted the urge to throttle the dollman. Jericho was right. If VEN was coming, they needed to move, Diggs or no Diggs. “Thanks, Jericho. Now, cut Lina loose, and hurry. The light means it’s morning. We’ve been here too long already.”

  Lina braced her palms against the ceiling while Jericho cut her free.

  Michael found his backpack wedged behind the backrest and tugged it clear. Pushing it ahead of him, he squirmed out the passenger window on his belly. Lina followed, with Jericho bringing up the rear.

  Outside the truck, a faint morning mist was rising in a small glen surrounded by evergreens and pine. A trail of upturned soil and torn foliage climbed a steep slope behind the pickup. The wreck had taken them quite a ways down from the highway above. The path of devastation left by the wreck disappeared in the brush several hundred yards uphill.

  Michael shrugged on his backpack. There was no sign of Diggs, or the highway for that matter. They really had fallen far.

  Lina began brushing wet dirt from her knees and hands. “The highway’s got to be up there somewhere. Should we start looking for Diggs?”

  The stonesong twitched.

  Michael went down to one knee. “That sounds like a good idea,” he said. “Just let me tie my shoe first.”

  “We must flee, Awoken,” Jericho argued. “The Fallen are near.”

  “We can spare a few minutes, Jericho.” Michael released a small portion of the stonesong into the ground as he fiddled with his shoestrings. He felt Lina first; the earthbone in her blood called out with seductive harmony. He pushed past her, downward and outward. The hills were filled with rock, sandstone mostly, and a throbbing hummed just beneath the soil. Flowing across it, he sought out the melody that did not belong.

  The stonesong was stronger than ever. It took only seconds to find the cluster of discord near the top of the slope. But there was something else, something closer…

  There.

  He leaned over to Jericho.

  “Something is watching us from those trees, Jericho,” he whispered.

  The dollman’s eyes glimmered. “This one shall find out what, Awoken.” Dropping to all fours, Jericho sprinted away into the brush.

  “Where’s he going?” Lina asked.

  Pretending to finish the knot on his sneaker, Michael stood. “He’s too antsy. I sent him to scout ahead.”

  Lina looked upslope, and her eyes grew troubled. “Maybe he’s right, Mike. There could be VEN agents up there. Maybe we should just—”

  A bloodcurdling shriek pierced the air, and Lina dropped to all fours. Teeth bared, she growled at the trees like a cornered cougar. Michael made calming motions with his hands. “It’s all right, Lina,” he soothed. “It’s only Jericho back there. We’re all right.” But the words left a sour taste in his mouth. Lina was getting worse. The whites of her eyes were getting greener, and her skin was the snowy white of polished marble.

  Lina’s growl trailed off, and she slowly rose to her feet. She stared at her muddy hands as if she’d never seen them before. “What’s happening to me, Mike?” she whispered. “What am I turning into?”

  He swallowed down the dryness in his throat. “We’ll fix it, Lina,” he promised. Taking her hands, he began to wipe away the mud with the edge of his shirt. She didn’t resist, but her eyes looked dull and hopeless. “The dollmen will make it right.”

  Jericho loped out of the trees. There was blood on his claws. “The tracker is dead, Awoken.”

  Taking her hands from his, Lina gave Michael a tired smile. “I thought you sent Jericho to scout.”

  “There was a VEN cat hiding in the trees,” he explained. “It would have led the others to us. I sent Jericho to deal with it.”

  Jericho wiped his wet claws clean on his kilt. “Shall this one search for the friend of the People, Awoken?”

  “No, Jericho. We aren’t going to look for Diggs.”

  Lina frowned at him. “Why not? You think he’s dead?”

  “I don’t know,” Michael looked up toward the unseen highway, his expression grim. “Maybe. Maybe not. After the crash, we were both unconscious. Diggs might have decided then that the only way to protect us was to lead VEN away from the crash. Either way, I don’t think we have time to look for him. The stonesong is telling me there are a lot of VEN agents up there.”

  “You can feel them?”

  He nodded. “I don’t know how. Maybe it’s because they use earthbone to make the hybrids.”

  Jericho sniffed at the air, and then made a face. “This one cannot smell the Fallen.” He swiped impatiently at the thin mist all around them. “The floating water conceals their scent.”

  “Good,” said Lina. “If you can’t smell them, they probably can’t smell us either. The question is, what should we do now?”

  “Like Diggs said,” Michael replied. “We get you to the dollmen. After they fix you, we seal up the entrance to their city to keep any more earthbone from leaking out. How far is it to the entrance, Jericho?”

  Jericho’s flat nostrils flared, as if he were testing the air. “Not far, Awoken. This one will lead you.”

  “How long before we get there?”

  Jericho pointed north. “The friend of the People brought us close. If we make haste, we will find the entrance before nightfall.”

  Michael turned to Lina. “One more day. We can do this, Lina. We can fix you and save the world. Will you trust me for one more day?”

  “One more day,” Lina echoed softly. She glanced down at the waystone in her palm, and her bleak expression hardened into something that resembled determination. “I’ll race you both.”

  Michael smiled. Diggs might be gone, but VEN hadn’t won yet. “Last one to the city has to kiss a dollman.”

  Lina snorted a laugh. “You are so losing this race.”

  Jericho trotted toward the trees. “Come, Awoken. Come, thief. The city of the People waits.”

  With Jericho leading the way, they left the clearing and disappeared into the trees.

  31

  The Forest of Earthbone

  “Hold up, guys,” Michael said.

  On the trail ahead, Jericho and Lina skidded to a halt.

  “What’s up?” Lina asked. Tense as a wary mountain lion, she sidled up next to him. Her jade gaze flicked this way and that as she searched the surrounding foliage for whatever danger might be lurking nearby. “What do you see?”

  Jericho sniffed the air. “Is it the Fallen, Awoken?”

  Michael leaned heavily against a crooked tree and shook his head. “No. I just need a minute to catch my breath. You two are killing me.”

  Lina’s posture relaxed. “Well, as long as we’re stopping, maybe you should check to be sure.”

  He groaned. “I’m beat, Lina. I don’t know if I could hold onto it.”

  They’d been on the run for what seemed like hours, along narrow deer trails and treacherous goat paths, on and on, ever deeper into the mountains. Occasionally, they stopped to drink from icy streams or to allow Michael to use the stonesong to locate and avoid the VEN agents speckling the countryside like a dark pox. But controlling the stonesong grew more difficult with each passing mile.

  “Take a few minutes to rest,” Lina suggested. “You’ll get a handle on it.”

  “Thanks.”

  Michael’s legs felt like two lumps of lead, and a painful stitch had been growing in his side for the last ten minutes. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep on. Exhausted, he rested his forehead against a nearby tree

  The stonesong surged, and he jerked back. The humming was coming from everything lately, even the tree. It was hard to think straight. “How much farther, Jericho?”

  “We are very close, Awoken.”

  Lina pull
ed back her hair. Using a small strip of cloth torn from her dress, she tied her silver tresses into a gleaming ponytail. “You’ve been saying that all day, Shorty. Do you even know where you’re going?”

  Jericho gave her a petulant look. “We are close, thief.” Plucking a leaf from a nearby sapling, he trotted over to Michael. “You see, Awoken. Behold, it is the touch of earth and bone.”

  Michael took the leaf, and suddenly forgot all about his fatigue. The leaf was hard and nearly transparent, like thin crystal or glass. He held it to his nose and inhaled a peculiar scent reminiscent of fresh cinnamon and hot asphalt.

  Lina gasped. “Look at the tree.”

  Michael stepped back from the tree. What he’d taken to be bark was in fact a rough fur. His gaze rose slowly up the hairy trunk. High in the tree’s branches, grayish pinecones opened and closed in a slow, steady rhythm.

  “I think…I think it’s breathing,” he said.

  Lina shrank back, and then gave a shriek as a cluster of ten-legged mushrooms scuttled away from her feet. The cry drew an angry whistle from above them. A blue-feathered squirrel exploded from cover and flapped away on four overlapping wings. Bizarre animal calls followed the squirrel until it disappeared in the distance.

  Lina crouched low, her gaze darting from one mutated plant to the next. “What is this place?”

  Michael rubbed his thumb against the crystal leaf, sampling its seductive melody. “It’s the earthbone. It must be mutating all of this. We must be getting close to the source. I think—”

  A spark of silver leapt from his thumb to the leaf, and suddenly, his hold on the stonesong flexed and cracked. His eyes blazed silver and he fell to his knees. Clutching his head in his hands, he fought to contain the roaring in his mind.

  Lina ran over to him. “Mike, what’s wrong?”

  He couldn’t answer her. The earthbone was everywhere—in the leaves, the ground, even the air. It was like fire in his head.

  “What is it, Mike?” Lina hovered over him, her expression tight with concern. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Jericho’s eyes widened and he began to back away. “You must not, Awoken. You have no waystone!”

  Michael fought against the stonesong’s swell, but it was too strong. He couldn’t hold it. Steeling himself, he forced words through his trembling lips. “Get…away.”

  “What?”

  He smashed his fist into the dirt, and the ground bucked like a waking dragon. “Get away from me!”

  Jericho darted into the trees.

  “Run!” Michael screamed. Thick ropes of silver fire burst from his body, snaking into the ground and over it, merging with every earthbone-tainted thing they touched.

  Finally, Lina ran.

  The furry tree split with a thunderous crack, its grey pinecones detonating in quick succession. The scuttling mushrooms burst, and the forest shook as if caught in a tornado.

  Lina swerved, narrowly avoiding the stonesong’s fiery tendrils. The silver vines followed her, drawn by the singing earthbone in her blood. One snaked in front of her, and she sprang over it and into the trees. Leaping from branch to branch, she fled as the world erupted in silver fire beneath her.

  Still kneeling in the dirt, Michael rode the stonesong, bearing helpless witness to the violent destruction of hundreds of plants and thousands of insects. Every death sickened him, but he couldn’t stop, even when he began to feel the power tearing things inside him. The stonesong had been feeding on the earthbone for hours. Now, it was too powerful to control.

  A line of silver shot up from the forest floor, striking Lina in midair and merging with her ivory skin. She screamed, but did not fall. Held up by a crackling net of silver light, she writhed in agony ten feet off the ground.

  In the depths of his mind, Michael knew her pain. He felt the stonesong take her, felt the earthbone inside her spreading like wildfire, changing her bones, muscles, and organs. It was too much. In moments, she would shatter like the crystal leaf, another victim of the stonesong’s fury.

  “No!” The vehement denial bursting from his lips, Michael smashed his fist into the ground in a shower of silver sparks. He would not let this happen. Lina would not die because of him. “No. No. NO!”

  Suddenly, he realized what he must do. There was too much power for him to control. So instead, he would use it. He would pull the stonesong away from Lina and send it somewhere it could do her no more harm.

  Burying his knuckles in the soil, he focused as he never had before, pushing the stonesong deep into the dark earth. The power resisted, slow to give up the earthbone all around him. Snarling, he bent it to his will, merging it with the untainted rock so near the surface. He pressed deeper, down, down into the rock and stone, straining to bury every iota of his power inside the earth.

  The silver fire covering the forest dimmed, and then vanished. The ropey light supporting Lina died as well, and she dropped limply from the sky.

  Michael felt his connection to her break, but silver fire still bled from his fingers, and he continued to pour the deadly stonesong into the earth. His breath came in short gasps, and blood dripped from his ears and nose, but he pressed on. He touched bedrock, the hard skin of the world. Its rumbling music was slow and vast beyond measure. He drove through it, pushing, stretching, reaching, until he touched…

  There was a massive surge of molten power, as if he had touched all the rock in the world in a single, blinding instant, and then a stinging backlash of white-hot energy crashed into him.

  The connection broke, and Michael fell back with a pained gasp. Lowering his head, he wiped the blood from his nose and tried to catch his breath. Strange. His power was spent, but he didn’t feel sick. Maybe he was getting used to the stonesong, or more likely, the earthbone was changing him like it was changing Lina.

  A few seconds later, Jericho trotted out of the brush beside him, his pale skin spattered with fragments of broken leaves and the viscous pale sap of mutated plant life. “Are you well, Awoken?”

  Michael nodded. “I’ll live, Jericho.” At least he hadn’t merged with the dollman. He would have known if he had. Drawing his hand from the fist-sized crater he’d left in the earth, he pushed himself to his feet. “Let’s check on Lina.”

  A lithe form with long silver tresses dropped from the foliage above them and landed next to them. “This one is well, Awoken,” Lina said.

  Michael’s heart skipped a beat.

  Lina’s eyes glowed like tiny green lamps and her silver hair writhed as if with a life of its own. Lifting her hand, she pushed back a strand of her squirming hair with a talon-tipped finger.

  Michael’s vision blurred with tears. “Lina, I…I couldn’t…”

  Her ghostly fingers touched his cheek. They were cold and hard as stone. “It’s not your fault,” she said softly. “We just have to find the tunnel. The People will fix it.”

  Michael nodded, but in his mind, he cursed the day he’d first laid eyes on the dollmen. “They had better,” he choked. “Or I’ll bring their whole stupid city down on their bald heads.”

  Lina smiled, revealing a mouthful of pointy white teeth. “As you command, Awoken.”

  Awoken, she called him. She sounded like Jericho.

  Michael shivered. “We better get moving. With all the noise I made, VEN won’t take long to find us. Let’s find the entrance before they get here.”

  “It is too late, Awoken,” Jericho said. “Come, this one will show you.”

  Michael and Lina followed the dollman through torn brush and into mutated foliage that had escaped the stonesong’s destructive touch.

  Seconds later, they climbed up the side of a small hill. Jericho paused near the summit to press his palm toward the earth, gesturing for them to stay low. Laying flat on their bellies, they squirmed up the last dozen yards to the crest.

  Beneath a setting sun, the narrow valley below was home to a bone-dry creek bed, perhaps fifty feet wide, and a tall cliff. The face of the cliff was a smooth wal
l along one side of the valley, save for a narrow crack at its base just below the hill.

  Lina pointed to the opening. “Is that the entrance to the city?”

  “Yes, little sister,” Jericho answered. “And we are not the first to find it.”

  A shadow moved inside the tunnel, then another. The stonesong jerked, confirming the identity of the animals before they even stepped into the light.

  Michael swore under his breath. They had finally found the passage to the dollmen city, and VEN hounds guarded the entrance.

  32

  The Cave

  A low growl sounded beside Michael. “Stop that, Jericho,” he said testily. “I’m trying to think.”

  Jericho gave him a blank look. “This one has done nothing, Awoken.”

  “Sorry,” Lina apologized sheepishly. “I’m a little worked up, I guess. So what’s the plan?”

  Michael watched the two hounds move into the creek bed. “I’m not sure, but we have to get into that tunnel.”

  Lina chewed thoughtfully at her lower lip, her tiny fangs putting small indents in her pearly skin. “That creek is full of rock. You could use the stonesong.”

  “No! How can you even ask?”

  “Look,” Lina began, “we need to get to the dollmen city, and those dogs are in the way. You can do this. That thing in the woods was a fluke. You were tired. You’ll control it better this time.”

  Michael scowled. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. The earthbone is all around us, and it’s feeding the stonesong. I won’t let it hurt you again.”

  “Well, we have to do something. We can’t just sit here and wait for more VEN to show up.”

  Jericho glanced nervously at the cloudless sky. “More will come, Awoken. The claws of the Fallen will find us if we stay.”

  “You see,” Lina said. “Even the gremlin agrees with me. Look, if you’re worried about us being too close, Jericho and I will head back into the woods. But you have to take out those dogs, and fast.”

  A snail with a shell that resembled a purple acorn oozed onto Michael’s pinky. Even the colorful slug hummed with the earthbone’s call. “It’s too risky.” He pried the snail from his finger, setting it atop a nearby branch. The acorn shell split the moment he released it, and the snail buzzed away on dragonfly wings. “We’ll find another way.”