by Rhys Ford
“Right up until now, I really doubted the two of you were related.” I snapped the latch on the seat belt and buckled myself in. “But you guys argue like Jonas’s kids do.”
“Anything to keep you entertained.” Ryder carefully eased the centipede into first gear, pressing down tightly on the brakes. I’d given him a quick rundown of automatic shifting but thought it would be a good idea to run him through the gears before we got into rougher terrain. “I appreciate your trust in me, letting me do this.”
“The more kinds of shit you know how to drive, the more often I can take a nap in the back,” I confessed. “Just go slowly and follow the tracks on the screen. It’ll tell you where we need to head and if the ground is stable enough to take this kind of weight. Mink might be a pain in the ass sometimes, but he knows how to map and always tests for stability. That’s why his patches cost so damned much.”
The centipede was pretty easy to drive, and when we punched in the calibrated map diagrams, the drive system laid out a green line on the main screen for us to follow. Sparky had built in beam indicators around the front of the vehicle, a handy thing to have underground, especially since the dim light projected out to the end of our safe zone. It was kind of like training wheels for a new driver or a visual guide for tight passes. But all of it depended upon how accurate the map was, and this route was going to be virgin territory because no one except for Mink—that I knew of—had ever tracked a clear path through the third quadrant from San Diego to the outer regions.
“Just be sure you keep an eye on the ground in front of us. We’re probably not the only ones down here, and this thing can roll over practically everything.” I settled back in the chair, mourning the fact I’d left my chocolate stashed away in my duffel bag. But it was considered rude to eat in front of somebody, and I didn’t want to share. “Do you see that bend? You’re just going to turn slowly to the left. The back end takes a while to follow, so you’ll want to straighten out quickly to bring it all back in line.”
“It vibrates through you,” Ryder murmured as he eased into the curve in the passageway. “I would imagine after a few hours, your muscles would ache.”
“Just go slow and try to keep the bumps down to a minimum. Then you’ll be okay,” I reassured him.
It felt good not to drive, and more importantly, sitting in the passenger seat gave me a chance to watch Ryder’s face when we entered the second large chamber. Until that point in the connecting caverns of the third quadrant, the rock ran to a dull beige or gray, often wet… with water or other things I never truly investigated. While I’d been through quite a few of the side passages in the area, hunting one thing or another for a museum or collector, I always made sure to stop and marvel at the chambers.
The small cave we’d spent the night in was a child’s broken-down planetarium projector compared to what Ryder was about to experience for the first time. His gasp of wonder did not disappoint, and I leaned over to put the transport into Park before he drove us off a cliff or something. Kerrick murmured, either in awe or maybe in envy of the glorious display. It didn’t matter as long as he was quiet while Ryder communed with the beauty around us.
“Can we get out?” He glanced at me and then ducked his head down to peer out of the windshield. “Do you mind? I know it takes time off of our—”
“Could you just get out already?” I swung my door open. “We made good time today, but I’d like to get through this area and over to a spot that Mink marked with usable water. I give you one hour. After that, we’re back on the road.”
Our boots crunched through the tiny rocks that littered the cavern floor. The second chamber was bisected with a natural road that curved through the enormous space that stretched up above us to the sky. Deep gulches dropped off on either side of the one-hundred-yard-wide mesa, and the cave ceiling was open in several areas above the flat expanse, letting in streams of watery afternoon sunlight. The rays were diffused by nearly translucent cave kelp, and their crystalline threads cast out rainbow sparks to dance across the sheer red-rock walls of the cavern.
Wind or water shaped the cave, much like the ribboned canyons in Antelope Valley. The variegated strata glistened crimson and sunset, and the diffused brightness threw its juts and weaves into sharp contrasts of shadow and light. It also exposed the most glorious collection of dragon bones embedded in the beautiful stone of the natural cathedral.
Many were a jumble of shapes that took a moment to understand, but there were a few breathtaking stretches where it was easy to follow the sculpt of a magnificent lizard with its talons out and wings spread behind it, its tail whipped about as though to balance it on its endless flight through timeless rock. There were a couple of smaller skeletons, a bit larger than the average elfin, woven around a column close to the entrance of the chamber, but it was the enormous warlord dragon with its spine curved in nearly a figure eight and its impossibly large wing expanse stretched out on either side of its embedded body that stole Ryder’s words.
I knew how he felt. It often stole mine.
“Can you imagine how big that would’ve been when it was alive?” Ryder whispered as he crossed the flats to get closer to the dragon skeleton bathed in scintillating flecks. “If you get too near it, you can’t see all of it.”
I tried to see the dragons through their eyes, but I knew I would never truly understand their worship of the beasts who hunted me through Pendle Runs. I had a healthy respect for anything that could outfly a powerful engine and had teeth longer than my body. They made my life difficult, but I loved to watch them fly.
There was a brutal grace to their forms, and whether fighting or mating, a dragon’s no-holds-barred way of life called to me. They ran the gamut from ugly to the heartbreakingly beautiful, but what I loved most was their honest, stark existence. Not overly sentimental—hell, most of them hardly ever sat on their eggs to hatch them—they took life and their opponents as they came to them. But my imagination couldn’t wrap itself around the existence of lizards the size of the ones captured in the walls of the cavern.
It wasn’t hard to see our alleged draconian ancestors in our features and structure. Or at least I could see it in Ryder and Kerrick. I was thicker-bodied than they were—taller and brutish-looking compared to their sleek elegance. It could have been the way they held themselves or maybe even the “how to float on air when you walk” lessons they probably got as kids, but both Sidhe reminded me of the prismatics that glided on the thermals above Pendle’s lava fields.
“This place is sacred. No one should be here,” Kerrick finally whispered. When his awe took the edge off his arrogant tone, his Singlish failed him, and he reverted to Sidhe—a burbling, potent string of veneration mixed with wonder. I didn’t understand all of it, but it sounded like a prayer, a plea for his soul to be lifted and his troubles calmed.
Yeah, we all want that, but I’m not praying to a wall of dragon skeletons hoping to get it.
“It’s a protected area, and, well, you can’t get down to the bones. Cliffs are too sheer, and the rock’s too hard to punch into, so coming down from the top is practically impossible.” I pointed up at the ceiling as a rush of air from the natural skylights sent the cave kelp into a gentle sway and started a faint concerto of harpsichord chimes through the chamber. “It’s not like you can get any heavy equipment down here, or at least not without someone noticing. People have tried a lot of things, and those gulches go down forever. No one’s all that interested in retrieving their bodies.”
“You have, as always, a very morbid way of looking at things.” Ryder spared me a quick glance. “How much time do we have? I’d like to walk a bit.”
“Maybe half an hour.” I checked my link. “The encampment spot’s a bit of a hard ride down the pass, so get what sunlight you can now. We’re going to be heading into the dark after this.”
Ryder slid his hand under my jacket and rested it against the small of my back but didn’t pull his gaze from the cavern walls. His breathin
g fell into the kelps’ sweet-ringing melody, and despite the fabric of my T-shirt, I felt his pulse slow through the press of his palm.
“Thank you for this, Kai. We’ll have to come here again some time when there is nothing tugging us along.” He sucked in his breath as a flock of birds broke through the kelp to shoot across the cavern and exit out another opening moments later. “I will make you chocolate every month, enough so you don’t have to hoard it.”
“Hell, hoarding’s half the fun.” I chuckled. “Go take your walk, lordling. I’ll be here when you get back.”
WE EMERGED from the caverns a day and a half later, desperate for sunlight and fresh air. It’d been a hard push to get to the open prairies, but I was grateful for the long hours of driving and short sleep shifts. The Sidhe fell to the darkness first, or that could have just been Ryder and Kerrick rubbing against each other wrong. Cari spent a lot of time napping when she wasn’t driving, and I took the longer hauls, listening to the books she’d loaded into the system.
That’s when Kerrick discovered how explicit sex scenes got in romance books.
The constant dark wore us down, and the natural lamp lights could only do so much. I purposely chose smaller alcoves to park the centipede and illuminated the camping niches as much as possible to defray the agitation that was growing among us, but the ceilings and walls of the caverns pushed down on us constantly. It was oppressive, driving deep into the bowels of the earth and then slowly climbing back up toward the surface.
Ryder and I spent the first shift mostly sitting quietly, thankful for the running lights and the occasional creature that skittered just outside of the illumination range. We grew quieter with each passing hour until it seemed as though we would forget how to speak. Then the words would rush out of us when someone broke the silence—anything to create a ripple in the tightness that sealed us in.
We’d drowned in the shadows for so long that Cari broke into song when we rolled out into the late afternoon sunlight. I didn’t blame her. I would’ve sung too if I didn’t sound like a mostly thawed-out seagull being torn in half with a rusty chainsaw.
It took me a little while to orientate myself on where we came out, so I parked the centipede and opened the doors so the fresh air could wash over us. We were miles from the canyons where we would meet this Unsidhe whose name no one seemed to know, but we had firm coordinates, and unless there were hordes of women fleeing the Dusk Court with elfin children at that exact spot, I thought we would recognize her.
“What are you doing?” Kerrick stood up in the cabin behind me but bent over slightly to study the screen on the dashboard. “Do you know where we are?”
“Theoretically, yes. I’ve made a lot of runs down in this area, but it’s constantly changing, and I’ve never come out of that gulch before, so it’s going to take me a while to pinpoint in my mind where we are.” I shot a quick look at Cari, who was about to leap out of the centipede. “Hey! I’m going to turn up the light-sensor sweep, but it’s going to be dim because of the sun. Ground here is kind of shaky. I don’t want you wandering off. There’s a lot of pockets of caves and tunnels beneath us, so give me a few minutes to plot out a solid course. Then we can head to a campsite I know about nearby.”
“Does this campsite have hot and cold running water? Or better yet, a margarita bar?” She pursed her lips at me.
“Funny you should say that, because there is a hot spring, and it’s drinkable once you let it cool off.” I shrugged and wiggled my hand back and forth. “It’ll have to go through the filters, but we can top off there. I want to start moving in fifteen minutes. If we get there while it’s still light, maybe I can snag us some fresh meat.”
“Now that’s the best idea you’ve had ever.” Cari grinned at me. “I don’t want to go far. I just want to stretch my legs and drink in some air that doesn’t smell like boy.”
“I happen to like how some of the boys smell,” Ryder teased her as he opened the passenger door. “Or at least one of them. I’ll join you on your stretch, but I agree, not eating rations would be heavenly.”
We’d come out on the rolling prairies, stretches of hillocks and small mounds covered with fragrant seeded tall grasses and pockets of cotton-candy-colored bushes. It was late enough in the season for the herds of bison and antelope to have migrated through, leaving vast swaths of cropped vegetation in their wake. On a rise a mile or so in front of us, a tower of spotted giraffes kept company with a dazzle of zebra, their long necks sticking up out of a scrub-brush stand frilled with black-and-white-striped equines. I didn’t realize how far the escaped wild animals had strayed from the defunct safari park in Escondido.
“I fought a battle near here.” Kerrick slid into the seat Ryder had abandoned moments before. His eyes were hooded and troubled, his handsome face a mask of hard porcelain. His attention was focused on memories instead of the landscape outside. I’d seen that look on a thousand faces, usually on veterans nursing a drink in a dive bar where they paid for cheap beer with a few coins and a part of their liver. “The spot… in Underhill… was where my father and I would capture wild horses—our kind of horses, not Earth’s—and spend the season gentling them. I wonder if the outpost we used is here or if it was swallowed up in the Merge.”
“Well, you and your dad can take a trip out here and check,” I suggested. We’d come to a détente of sorts. Mostly we avoided talking to one another, and I tried not to stab him out of respect for Ryder’s wishes. He’d toned down the imperious proclamations about half a day after we left the dragon chamber, but every once in a while, he would say something to get on my nerves, and I would have to take a deep breath. “Just be sure you get a good mapping system, because the ground is unstable in places.”
“My father and I will not be doing anything together. He did not… he was not among the elfin who….” Kerrick huffed out a sharp hiss and twisted his mouth into a mocking smile. “He is not on the side of the Merge. He and one of my mothers were traveling to Auberdain—that is San Francisco here—but they are like many people who are unaccounted for. Perhaps there is a world where I am missing from their family. Just as Alexa is… and her daughter.”
“I guess I never thought about those losses,” I admitted, my focus shifting from the map plotting to the Sidhe lord sitting next to me. Of course families were torn apart when the worlds intersected that day. The confusion and chaos of the sudden shift of land was something I couldn’t imagine. I’d seen footage, but the tremors were the only warning each side got before the world unfolded and then filled in with massive amounts of elfin landscapes and cities. It was over in a matter of minutes, but it brought a cataclysmic change no one seemed to have recovered from. “I’m sorry about your dad. No matter what, it’s shitty when family is taken away from you. I didn’t have family until Dempsey, and while he’s definitely not the most prizewinning pig at the county fair, I’m kind of used to him being a part of my life.”
“Dempsey is the human who won you, yes?” He cocked his head and bit his lower lip. “Alexa told me a bit of the story, but she didn’t have a lot of details.”
“There’s not much detail to tell. Dempsey doesn’t remember most of it, but that’s not that unusual with him.” The map glitched, and I tapped the screen again to work out a different route. “Dempsey was three sheets to the wind, and an Unsidhe guard put me up on the table as part of the pot. Even drunk off of his ass, Dempsey can play cards, so next thing he knew, he was stuck with me.”
“That is what confused me. Where was this guard, and how did he come to have you with him?” Kerrick eyed me in a way people normally reserved for selecting lobsters out of the tank or choosing which dog to bet on in a race. “You were mostly uncivilized, and from the little I know of what you are, I can’t imagine Tanic letting you slip out from between his fingers. Not that I know the Lord Master of the Hunt personally, but his reputation precedes him. He is as disciplined as he is cruel. Didn’t you ever ask?”
“No one to ask. The gu
ard was gone before Dempsey woke up the next morning, and I was chained to one of the metal loops welded on his truck bed to secure the ainmhi dubh he brought down.” I was nearly done with the course and craned my neck around to see where Ryder and Cari had gone. They were only a few feet away from the back door of the centipede, laughing about something—probably the half-grown zebra colts prancing along the hillside. “If you want to stretch your legs, you better do it now. I’m almost done here. Just stay inside of the green-light marker.”
“I think I just want to stare at the hills for a while.” Kerrick reached behind me to grab the long coat he’d left on his seat. It was elaborately embroidered and typically Sidhe, much more formal than anyone needed to be out in the middle of the prairies, but it’d taken Ryder a long time to change how he dressed, and he still favored his fancy trousers over a pair of jeans. “I will try not to wander too far.”
“Try not to wander at all,” I muttered, mostly to myself, as he stepped out of the cab and walked toward a nearby clump of bushes. “I don’t want to be chasing any of you around the place. I still got to find us something for dinner.”
Most of my attention was on the screen… like nearly all of it. At least it was until I heard the cracking of the ground. The air filled with plumes of red dust, and the prairie wind caught the tiny storm flurry and carried it away. Panicked, I looked up and saw Ryder and Cari turn around. Then the ground shook, and Kerrick disappeared.
Sixteen
RED DUST choked me as I sprinted toward the growing crevasse. The grit stung my eyes as I shoved Ryder aside, not wanting him to follow down the rabbit hole after his cousin. I shouted for Cari to get me a climbing rope from the centipede. Then I lay on my stomach and inched toward the still-crumbling opening and hoped he hadn’t fallen into a dark pit stories below.
