by s. Behr
“Crimson clovers, how can there be this much water?” I exhaled at the relentless devastation this second flash flood unleashed. I held my breath, realizing how lucky I was to have survived the first one. The fox let out a tiny yowl, and I looked down to see the level of water was steadily rising uncomfortably close to our ledge.
“We have to get higher.” The fox’s eyes twinkled with understanding as the kit turned and started up the mountain wall following a path, it seemed to know, dashing with precision and landing each step perfectly on the precariously looking pile of stones.
“Wait for me!” I squeaked. Following clumsily behind, I barely kept up. If I had time to be humiliated, I would have been. The tiny kit displayed more grace and determination than I had on most days. Even if I had been chased by a river after a night in the wild sleeping in the mud, it was no excuse.
“I think it’s safe to slow down,” I managed between breaths. But the kit ignored me. How does something with such short legs run so fast? I wondered determined to keep up.
When I pulled myself up to the next landing, I had lost sight of the red ball of fur. I sat ready to give up the chase when I heard a yip that sounded more like a broken whistle. I looked skyward, spotting the kit peeking over the edge of a rocky lip more than twenty feet above me. Even though I was not fluent in fox, I still would have bet a bowlful of cherries it had just called me slow. The fox’s pink tongue hung out of the side of its mouth in an expression that looked suspiciously like a grin.
As I reached the final landing, I found the fox patiently waiting, showing no signs of just having sprinted eighty feet up a mountain. Exhausted, I sprawled out on the flat surface with my eyes closed and panted, “Show off.”
As soon as my need for oxygen was not so desperate, I sat up and saw nature doing what it does best evolving and creating change. We had the perfect view of the carnage the river flooding had caused in either direction and suddenly I felt ill.
“If you hadn’t woken me up…” I whispered to the fox. I shuddered at the thought of what could have happened. “Thanks.”
Gazing upward, I studied the unnaturally straight rise of the stone above our ledge. It was as if the cave we had climbed into was a crooked grin cut into the face of a devious mountain god. Scanning the cave from where we sat, the shadows made it impossible to see exactly how big it was, but the roar of the water below pulled my attention away from the cave and outward to the wide expanse of the forest across the river.
On a clear day, I was sure I would be able to see the entire city of Hattan from here. I could only imagine what was happening there now. A wave of grief smothered my heart, and once again, I could barely breathe. This time, not because of fear, or running, but because I hated myself. I hated myself for being a coward. I hated myself for running away. But mostly, I hated myself for what I had done to my family.
How could I have done any of this? I didn’t recognize this person I had become. Tears spilled over my cheeks as my heart broke all over again when the fox climbed into my lap and nudged my chin.
Over and over, my chin was bumped by soft fur as if the kit was trying to stop me from crying. Fur stuck to the tears on my nose and around my mouth making it hard to breathe.
Eventually, after each nudge, the kit stared at me with its round brown eyes. A laugh escaped me despite my grief, and through blurred vision I asked, “Do you have superpowers you aren’t telling me about?” The fox answered with another bump against my chin, then turned and curled into my lap. I wrapped my arms around it, and a sudden need to keep the little thing safe kept my shame at bay.
Both of us watched as the water roared below. My fingers kept time with the ebb and flow of the current, rubbing the fox’s ear until it eventually fell asleep.
Puffs of even breaths escaped the tiny fox, and I sighed. “How can I be jealous of a fox sleeping?”
“Seems like a silly thing to spend your energy on,” my inner voice said in his usual way.
“You’re back! Where do you go when you’re quiet?” I asked, even though I already knew what he would say.
“Does it matter?”
“I’m too tired to argue with you,” I replied, closing my eyes.
“Good. That means you can just listen.” When I didn’t answer, he continued. “You need to consider going home.”
I almost laughed at the insanity of the suggestion, but my lips pressed together painfully as I directed my thoughts at his voice. “How exactly am I supposed to do that? We barely escaped both flash floods. I’m from the Neyr Realm, not the Angel Realm; I can’t burst into pure energy and fly. Wait, let me guess! You think I’ll suddenly develop transporter skills just because my great grandfather is from Ico?”
“I don’t expect you to be anything more than you are, but the water will recede,” he replied, ignoring my sarcasm.
Suddenly, the truth was as plain as the gray dust on the rocks around me. “I’m not ready. I can’t...” Remembering Lily’s face when she said she would see me soon, I realized I knew even then that this was a one-way trip.
“You can, and eventually when you’re ready, you will.” He sounded certain.
“Please stop,” I begged. I couldn’t think of the past or the future. I was just trying to make it through each second of the present.
“Okay,” he said simply, and I was left with the sound of a snoring fox.
I sat rubbing the fox’s ear and chin, it stretched out and flopped happily on its back, encouraging my fingers to rub at spots I had apparently missed.
“So, you’re a girl,” I discovered. The kit’s eyes opened, and she responded with a small yip while nosing my fingers. My lips cracked in a tiny grin, making me feel as if I hadn’t smiled in years. “Do you have a name?” She nibbled on my thumb, and her belly replied with a grumble.
“Hungry,” I surmised, then with another steady look from the kit, I wondered how hard I had hit my head in the river because it really felt like she could understand everything I said. Another rumble sounded, but this one didn’t come from the sky, the river, or the fox. It came from me. “I guess that makes two of us.”
The fox sat up with a small shake and yipped again. “I know, but I don’t have any food on me,” I said, gazing across the horizon. The first ray of sun burst through the clouds shining in the distance. Worry bloomed in my chest. If the sun broke through completely and burned off the clouds, it would be warm soon and as the temperature rose, so would our need for food and water.
Staring at the river, I took a deep breath. “All that water…” I muttered.
“You can’t drink that water; you don’t know what runoff came from the mountains.”
“Couldn’t stay away? Have you returned to state the obvious as usual?”
“You’ve never been sick a day in your life. Now is not the time to start.”
“No, I haven’t,” I said out loud, thinking of every bump, bruise or fever that never stood a chance against my mother. I wasn’t even sure how bad I would feel if I drank contaminated water, but I didn’t want to find out.
The fox stretched and yawned as I scratched her chin. “You’re probably used to the water out here.”
“You have to find a fresh water source,” he chimed in.
“I know,” I answered curtly.
The Fox pressed her lips together as if she was in deep contemplation. I wondered what she was thinking as she sat looking out at the vast lower forest. Following her gaze, the irony was not lost on me that everything we needed was on the other side of the river, and though it had been my plan to escape, I didn’t expect to have a baby fox in tow, or how she would sprout a place inside me that cared about living.
“With the water this high, every bridge has to be submerged,” I assumed. “I’m going to see what I can find around here,” I declared to both the fox and my inner voice.
“The Wild Steel Mountains are dangerous.”
“You don’t have to remind me,” I huffed, even though I knew he was right
.
Sliding the fox off my lap, I stood and started searching the trails, but there were barely any weeds, and none of them were edible. Next, I searched the cave, hoping to find something we could use, but that proved fruitless as well. The ground was barren of any plant life, no weeds or even moss on any of the stones. In fact, I was surprised to see how dry this cave was, despite the torrential downpour we had been through for the last day. It was almost as if the dirt in this mountain range rejected the water. It was no wonder hardly anything grew anywhere in the Wild Steel Mountains.
“Nothing yet, little one.” I frowned, and while pacing back and forth, I was unable to break my gaze from the green that was so close, yet beyond my grasp.
Defeated, I turned to the fox. “Do you have any ideas?” Her head tilted as she gave me a curious look. Then, without hesitation and the same determination I had chased up the mountain wall, she padded into the cave. Ears pricked, without fear, she bounded into the shadows.
“Um, where are you going?” I called after her. She hurried into the darkness as if she knew exactly where she was going. Then, like magic, she disappeared into a wall.
As I approached the spot where she had vanished, I saw the optical illusion. An opening in the wall hidden perfectly in the shadows.
“Don’t go in there,” my inner voice warned.
I shrugged. “Maybe she knows something I don’t. She did find this cave after all, and if I’m going to be honest, I have more faith in her than I do myself.”
Ignoring my inner voice, I followed the fox into the unknown.
“You better know what you’re doing,” I called out to the fox. If something happened, I knew I would never hear the end of it from him.
The kit moved with the same speed as she did up the mountain wall, and while I had my doubts, there was this strange, intense feeling that I couldn’t ignore. I couldn’t even put it into words, and so my feet moved along the same path as the baby fox.
The red ball of fur traveled deeper into the tunnel and the light that stretched from the way we came cast odd shadows making the tunnel seem unusually straight. “Have you been here before?” I asked, trying to slow her down. She looked back at me for just a moment, yipped, and kept moving.
“Flowers and ferns,” I muttered to myself. What am I doing?
“Turn around Violet,” the angel in my ear urged.
“You can’t feel it?” I queried, taking careful steps.
“Feel what?”
“How is it we can share a brain, but I still have to explain things to you?”
“Boundaries remember?”
“I remember.” With a small grin, I recalled the long rainy day when we made a list so detailed anyone who read it would think I was declaring a new law.
“What about your feeling?” he reminded me.
“I don’t know how to explain it, but— Ahh! Crocus!” I yelled as I fell face first into the dirt. I had been concentrating so hard on following the little red dot as she scurried ahead that I didn’t see the knee-high jut in the wall. When my shin discovered it, the impact sent me flying, and I hit the ground sending plumes of dust into the air.
“Don’t say it,” I huffed before my inner voice could speak. The throbbing in my legs was just as surprised as I was that he obeyed. I didn’t need him to remind me of every warning I had ever heard about these mountains; they were already flooding my thoughts.
Unlike other fallen buildings in the rest of the realm, this area had not completely decayed and settled, which created pockets that could make even one step in the wrong direction a fatal decision. My professor of Antiquities of America spent an entire year drilling into my imagination how I could fall into an ancient elevator shaft or lean against the wrong wall and have the entire mountain above me crash down.
I coughed, turning in a slow three hundred sixty degrees, peering through the dark. “Perfect. Now I’m standing in a cloud of dust at an intersection of not one but two tunnels.”
“This was a bad idea.”
“Really? You had to say it?” I snapped at him.
The dust in the air was unlike anything I had seen before. Like the ground outside it had a strange grayness about it. But in this dim light it seemed to sparkle, and the cloud I had stirred up was so thick I couldn’t tell which tunnel was the brightest. Which was the one I needed to lead me back out?
“What is this stuff made out of?”
“Crushed glass, concrete, Nano silicon. There were thousands of materials used at the end of the last civilization.”
“Thanks for the history lesson. But if you’re going to speak can you at least be helpful?”
He was quiet for a long moment, then with measured patience in his voice, he asked, “Why did you follow the fox?”
My hand came to a rest on my hip. “I was out of ideas, and she had one. I know it sounds stupid, but I went with my gut.” I still couldn’t put it into words, and intuition didn’t quite cover it.
Crouching down to the ground to see if I could make out my tracks, I found that my fall swirled away my treads. I was going to have to check each path until I found the footprints I made getting here.
While something inside me held on to the idea there was more to the fox, that I didn’t just follow her out of blind faith, I also had to admit my inner voice was right. I could not go any farther. I had to turn back.
For what seemed like an eternity, I waited for the dust to thin, but after a long while the motes in the air didn’t seem any less dense. It was if the dust was made to float. I closed my eyes and tried listening for the river, but the sounds vibrating through the tunnel could have been coming from any of the four paths.
“Perfect,” I chided myself. “If there was a way to make things worse, I’m just the princess to find it.”
“Take it one step at a time.”
“Are you trying to be funny, or do you just enjoy telling me what I already know?” Turning in one direction then the other, my breathing became shallow as worry bloomed into a full panic attack. My fingers wrapped around my right wrist. I cursed remembering I had taken off my citizen’s bracelet before I had jumped into the river. Besides the commlink to Neyr, it had other features like sensors for pathogens and the one I needed most right now, a source of light.
A mad laugh escaped me. I wanted to get lost so no one could find me, and as I stood frozen in the dark, I thought, “Mission accomplished.”
“This is not funny, Violet,” he scolded me.
“If you think about it long enough, it is.” The dust covered my skin as a perfectly aimed particle landed in my right eye, making it water.
“Okay, you win. Following a fox into a cave is going on my list of things not to do again.” Especially since she seemed to be doing better than I was. This was just embarrassing.
“Okay, I’m just going to pick one,” I declared, blinking rapidly to clear my vision. “And you don’t have to tell me; I’ll be careful.” Taking a cautious step forward, I pushed my foot along the ground, shifting my weight and edging my way one foot at a time.
Stretching my legs for another precise step, I noticed the light didn’t seem any brighter; if anything, I was sure I had gone the wrong way. “Okay, one down three more to go.
“Why won’t this dust settle?” I muttered when I made it back to the intersection. The cloud of dust was still thick and lingered in the air. Blowing a hair out of my face, I chewed on my lip, trying to decide which way I should try next. But before I could pick a tunnel, my dusted-filled lungs spasmed and I coughed causing the ground underneath me to shift.
“Oh, no! Please stop coughing,” I ordered my body. But just as stubborn as my inner voice, my coughing worsened, and the ground under my right foot gave way. I fell, twisting my ankle as I came crashing to the ground. “Ugh!”
A fiery pain exploded behind my eyes and just like by the river last night, everything around me blazed to life in wild, vivid color.
Colors of the rainbow swirled frozen in t
he rock around me. I saw golds and greens with stripes of amber and blue. The cave was no longer dark and distressing, but bright, brilliant, and startling. The pain subsided as I turned and saw the cloud of dust sparkling like rainbow glitter in the air. The floor had tiny shards of every color you could think of. I scooped up a handful and watched it fall from my fingers like neon sand, but other than the color, it acted like ordinary dirt.
In every direction, I could see every detail of the rocky corridors. If I was hallucinating, it was both mundane and beyond my imagination.
“What is happening to me?” I asked, unsure what was more alarming, walking through the dark of a cave in the Wild Steel Mountains or whatever this vision was.
“I have no idea.”
“Helpful, thanks.”
“This is new.” He ignored my sarcasm but added his own brand of stating the obvious. “On the bright side, you can see where you’re going.”
“This doesn’t seem like cause for a little worry?” I asked wondering how seeing in the dark in vivid color didn’t seem alarming to whatever part of my brain he lived in. The rest of me, on the other hand, my chest, my muscles, even the hairs on my neck were all rigid with fear and confusion.
In his magical way of calming me down, he said, “You have options. You can stay here and wait for a cave in or a sinkhole. But since you can see, discussing this can wait.”
“Point taken.” I punctuated those words with a cough. Crawling to the wall closest to me, I ran my fingers against the colorful rock, gasping when I saw that my hands also glowed with color. “My skin!” I shrieked.
Having been so transfixed by the colors of the walls around me, I had never noticed my skin. I would have mistaken them for bruises, except the deep blues, with shades of purple and red mixed in, swirled and flowed in a slow ethereal way. Holding up both my hands, I found they matched in color but not in patterns. Looking at my body, I saw my uniform—that had been a pristine ivory when I put it on the morning before—was tattered and glowing a marbled gray with splatters of amber that looked suspiciously like mud. Down to my shoes, shades of my skin glowed through torn fabric. I touched my face, wondering what it looked like; were my eyes still violet? Then, in the distance, a muddled squeal echoed.
