The Rivers of Zadaa

by D. J. MacHale

  I tried to get a sense of how long we had been sealed inside the dygo. Ten minutes? Fifteen minutes? Saangi, Alder, and I made a point of not talking. We didn’t want to disturb Loor’s concentration. She drove the dygo as easily as if she were driving along a quiet country lane. If she was nervous, she didn’t show it. Then again, she never looked nervous.

  We kept digging. My teeth were chattering from the constant vibration. I hoped the fillings in my teeth were strong. I had no idea where to find a dentist on Zadaa. A few minutes later I learned there was something more important to worry about. I felt something tickling the back of my foot. I looked down to see…

  “Water!”

  The floor of the dygo was wet. The flood had caught us.

  “Close the vents!” Saangi shouted.

  Loor quickly flipped the air vents shut, stopping the leak. I noticed a trickle of water creeping its way onto the windshield. I looked to the far side, where another trickle of water pushed across the outside of the glass.

  “Do you see that?” I asked Loor.

  “The water is filling up the tunnel behind us,” she said.

  “Is that bad?” I asked.

  “I do not know, Pendragon,” she said. “I have never done anything like this before.”

  Good point. This was a new experience for all of us. All we could hope was that the water wouldn’t hit us with such force that the dygo couldn’t take it and we’d be squished. I forced that gruesome possibility out of my head, only to realize there was yet another gruesome possibility to worry about. If we had to keep the vents closed, we had no air. We had to make it to the surface before our air gave out. It had become a race.

  Loor angled the dygo steeper and drove it faster. The drill whined in protest. I saw smoke coming from the rock in front of us. Loor wasn’t taking any chances. This was the final push. We had to get to the surface, fast. We were pressed back into our seats. I felt like an astronaut being launched into space. I was sweating. Breathing was getting difficult. There was no way to know how much air we had left, but it couldn’t be much. The situation was dire. If we didn’t break through the surface soon, we would suffocate. We all sat still, trying not to waste any energy that would burn precious air.

  I was getting dizzy. I knew I was about to pass out. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something other than death. My head went back to Second Earth. Home. I didn’t do that often; it was just too sad. But I did then. Why not? If these were going to be my last thoughts, I wanted them to be good. I thought of my family, and Marley. Man, I missed them. I thought of you guys. We were hanging at the beach. All of us. It was a beautiful sunny day. The sun was so bright, I had to cover my eyes. I felt its warmth on my face. This was a good last thought. The strange thing was, it was like I could really feel it. I wondered if this is what people talked about when they were at the moment of death? Was this the bright light at the end of the tunnel that I was supposed to walk into?

  It wasn’t, I’m happy to say. I opened my eyes to see bright sunlight blasting through the windshield. For real. That’s what I was feeling. We were out! But we weren’t safe, not by a long shot. The dygo had stopped drilling, but we continued on upward, lifted by a powerful jet of water that was pushing us from behind. Rather than settle down to the ground on our treads, the force of water lifted us into the air. We couldn’t have gone very high, but it was high enough to flip us over. We crashed back to the ground, upside down. It was a good thing we were strapped in or we’d be dead. The dygo hit, bounced, and flipped over more than once. With one final shudder, we landed…on our treads. It was a rude arrival, but we were upright and alive.

  “Open the vents!” I shouted to Loor.

  Loor flipped the switches, letting in fresh air. Truly fresh air. Surface air. We all took a deep breath to fill our lungs.

  “Where are we?” Alder asked.

  Through the windshield we could see that we were in the middle of the desert. Only a few yards away was the geyser of water that had rocketed us out of the tunnel. The ground rumbled. Right next to us another geyser burst out of the ground, shooting into the sky like a huge water cannon.

  “It is not safe here,” Loor said.

  That turned out to be a huge understatement. We weren’t even close to being safe. Geysers of water burst out of the ground everywhere. It was like the underground couldn’t contain the massive pressure that the water had created. It had to go somewhere, so it blasted up. All around us. There was nowhere for us to go. Nowhere to hide. We didn’t know if we were safe, or sitting on the next geyser. All Loor could do was react to what was happening.

  We weren’t alone. Dygos kept popping up out of the sand. It reminded me of when Bokka and Teek and the others had magically appeared out of the sand at the farm. I didn’t know if the drivers of the other dygos were Batu or Rokador. It didn’t matter. With each new dygo that appeared, it meant that more had survived. Now we could only hope that we would all live through the onslaught that was roaring up from below.

  The ground continued to shudder. Loor came to a quick stop, barely avoiding a cave-in directly in front of us. Another dygo wasn’t so lucky. It teetered on the edge and tried to reverse. The sand gave way beneath it and it tumbled over the edge, falling into the deep crevice that had appeared out of nowhere.

  Loor positioned the giant drill bit directly overhead. It gave us a better field of vision. What we saw was Armageddon. The sand rolled in every direction like there were giant serpents moving beneath. Dygos were flipped around like pinballs. We nearly went over a few times, but Loor was able to keep us upright. I don’t know how. All around us giant geysers kept spewing up from nowhere, without warning. One blasted up so close to us that it pushed us up on one tread. Loor drove us away from harm on the one tread before we bounced back down.

  The most frightening thing of all was that we had no idea how long this would last. Every second seemed like a lifetime. If this continued, I was afraid that every dygo that had escaped from the underground would be destroyed here on the surface. How wrong would it be to make it this far, only to be scrambled inside the very vehicle that got us out. As it turned out, this frenzy didn’t continue much longer.

  It got worse.

  We had rallied together with what looked like a dozen other dygos. The ground had stopped moving. There were no more geysers.

  “Is it over?” Saangi asked.

  Nobody answered. We didn’t dare believe that we were safe. There was a rumbling. It was like nothing we had experienced so far. It was deep, and low, and coming from somewhere underground.

  “Does anybody feel that?” I asked.

  “I hear it too,” Loor answered.

  Sure enough, it sounded like there was a rumbling freight train coming closer. We looked around at the desert, but there was nothing unusual. Aside from the dozens of geysers that were spewing water into the sky, that is.

  It was Saangi who saw it first. She didn’t say anything; she simply pointed. We looked straight ahead to see something far in the distance. It appeared as a jagged line in the sand…that was headed directly for us. The line moved fast. Behind it, the desert opened up wider and wider like some giant, demonic zipper.

  “It is tearing the desert in two,” Loor said in awe.

  “Move!” I shouted.

  All the dygos reacted at the same time. Some moved left, some moved right. The idea was to get away from the growing chasm as quickly as possible. There was no telling how wide it was going to get. Loor spun the dygo and hit the throttle. We bounced over the sand, desperate for distance. I could lean forward and look out the far end of the windshield to see that some dygos weren’t fast enough. The widening chasm caught up with them and they fell back into…what? We had no idea what was beneath this rip in the desert.

  I said one word to Loor. I said it calmly, but I felt as if she needed to hear it. “Faster,” I said.

  Loor poured it on. There was a fine line between speed and loss of control. If we hit a rise in t
he sand that was a little too steep, we’d crash, and the crack in the earth would catch us. It was a chance we had to take. If the growing chasm caught us, we’d be doomed for sure. The point of the tear moved behind us and continued on. I looked out the other side of the window to see it continue to rip its way across the desert. We didn’t dare stop. If the gap continued to grow, it would get us. We churned our way across the sand, along with more and more dygos that we picked up along the way. It became clear that there were many survivors of the disaster below. It remained to be seen how many would survive the disaster on the surface.

  I don’t know how long we rumbled across the desert. Five minutes? Ten? I had lost all track of time and reality. At one point I looked back at the chasm to see that we were actually pulling away from it.

  “Look,” I shouted. “I think it stopped.”

  Everyone else looked, but nobody wanted to quit moving.

  “We will continue for a while, to be sure,” Loor said. Nobody argued.

  Another few minutes went by. Loor had gradually been slowing down. The other dygos around us were also slowing. We were pretty sure that the chasm had stopped growing. Finally Loor brought our dygo to a halt. The race was over. We had won. The four of us sat there, our senses tuned for any new sound, or movement, or rumbling or earth-wrenching disaster.

  Nothing happened.

  Minutes passed. We didn’t move. If something new started, we wanted to be ready to roll. Saangi cracked the hatch open to get more air. Still, nobody moved. More time passed without so much as a tremor. After what felt like around half an hour, I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “I want to see,” I said.

  Before anyone could talk me out of it, I unclipped my seat belt and climbed over Alder to get to the hatch. I didn’t even wait for Saangi. I pushed it open myself. The first thing I saw outside were hundreds of dygos all parked around us. Many hatches were opening and cautious noses were beginning to peek out. I saw many Ghee warriors. I also saw many Rokador. Neither cared that they were among their enemy. They had a much bigger enemy to deal with at the moment. It was an eerie sight, seeing so many dygos in the middle of nowhere like that.

  I climbed out of the sphere, hopped onto the tread, and turned to look in the direction of the chasm. What I saw was impossible. It was made all the more bizarre by the fact that all around me, hundreds of Rokador and Batu were staring at the same thing, and probably thinking it was just as impossible as I did.

  We were looking at an ocean.

  It spread across the horizon in either direction. I couldn’t tell how far on either side of us it went, but the shore began barely a hundred yards behind where we had stopped. What made it seem even more surreal were the dozens of powerful water geysers that continued to shoot into the air. It was like some incredible, natural display.

  “It is the Kidik Ocean,” Loor said. She was standing next to me. So were Alder and Saangi.

  Alder said, “The ceiling of the cavern must have collapsed.”

  “Or got blown apart,” I suggested.

  As we stood watching in awe, the water geysers grew weaker. They no longer shot hundreds of yards into the air. One by one they lost power and shrank down. Within minutes they disappeared.

  “It’s over,” I said.

  “Is it?” Loor asked. “Or has it just begun?”

  JOURNAL #23

  (CONTINUED)

  ZADAA

  You’ve heard the term “earth shattering,” right? I don’t think I’ll ever use that phrase to describe anything else again. How could I? Nothing could be more “earth-shattering” than what I witnessed that day on Zadaa. Literally. Or maybe it was more like Zadaa-shattering. Whatever. It was amazing. The underground realm of the Rokador was destroyed, and out of that destruction was born an entirely new world. I’ll do my best to describe it to you, but I know that my words won’t even come close.

  We drove the dygo along the shore of the new ocean, headed back toward Xhaxhu. At least we thought we were headed there. The best we could do was make an educated guess based on both the route we had traveled to Kidik and the sun. We had survived, that much was certain. Many hadn’t. As we sped along the shore, we had no idea what we would find in Xhaxhu. Had the flood and the cave-in also destroyed the Batu city? More important than the city itself was the question of how many Batu died in the underground? For that matter, how many Rokador made it out alive? This story was far from over.

  The new ocean stretched for miles. It soon narrowed down to a river. Yes, there was a new river on Zadaa. Above the ground. I looked through the water-spattered windshield to see that the new waterway continued on through the desert for as far as I could see, but not before skirting around what looked to be giant sandstone pyramids far in the distance.

  “Xhaxhu!” Saangi exclaimed.

  Yes, Xhaxhu. The city hadn’t crumbled. We all exchanged relieved looks. The future seemed a bit brighter.

  “If this waterway is being fed from the rivers to the north,” Loor said, “Xhaxhu is no longer a city in the desert.”

  “I want to see this in a couple of years,” I said. “I’m thinking farmland, trees, pastures for grazing—”

  “Is that possible?” Saangi asked, wide-eyed with wonder.

  “Possible?” I answered. “I think it’s probable.”

  What we saw next was further proof of the possible. We abandoned the dygo outside the walls of Xhaxhu and walked into the city on foot. No sooner did we enter than Loor stopped cold. We all did. What we saw was truly incredible.

  Xhaxhu was back. The troughs that lined the streets flowed with clean, clear water. The fountains around the statues had come back to life, spraying ornate patterns of water high into the air. The people of Xhaxhu weren’t exactly celebrating. I think they were in shock. They lined the troughs, scooping up handfuls of water and drinking their fill. Children splashed and played. I saw more than one person crying with joy. Their nightmare was over. It seemed like it was almost too much for them to get their heads around. I wondered what they would think when they discovered that a river of fresh water was now flowing not far from their doorsteps.

  Seeing the Batu reveling in their new fortune had another meaning. The tribe had survived. There were ordinary citizens in the streets, as well as Ghee warriors. That was important. Whatever happened during the invasion, at least some of the Ghee had turned back before it was too late. The Batu tribe would survive. The Ghee were intact to protect the city against the marauding, cannibal tribes. Civilization on Zadaa would continue.

  Saint Dane had lost.

  “There is an irony here,” Loor said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Xhaxhu has been reborn, perhaps better than before, thanks to Saint Dane,” she said.

  It was true. Saint Dane had tried to destroy two tribes and ended up creating new life, and new hope, for the territory.

  Saangi added, “It is only fitting that it happened during the Festival of Azhra!” The young acolyte gave us a huge, satisfied grin. I had to laugh. Alder did too. Even Loor chuckled and shook her head.

  Of course, Saint Dane didn’t act alone. The Rokador played a big part in this, and paid a steep price. Over the next few weeks we learned the extent of their misfortune.

  Their underground civilization was no more. And more devastating than the destruction of their world of tunnels was the loss of life—multiple thousands had died because of the virus that swept through them like the plague. The Rokador had come within a whisper of being obliterated. But there was some good news. Most of those who survived the virus escaped the destruction of the underground. They used the thousands of escape routes that had been carefully dug for generations.

  Ironically, it was determined that those same tunnels were the ultimate cause of the grand collapse. Miles of hard rock were honeycombed with so many tunnels, it had become unstable. The Rokador world was a disaster waiting to happen. When it was tested by the pressure from the rising ocean, it failed. T
he area that was most developed, Kidik, collapsed. The ruins now lay at the bottom of a brand-new ocean in the desert.

  The Rokador elite survived. They were put on trial and sentenced to prison terms for attempted genocide. I wondered how those kids were going to do in jail. I figured they wouldn’t be there long. They really had no say in what had happened. The engineers were put on trial as well. They tried to argue that they were only following orders. It didn’t fly. They were sentenced to prison.

  I thought the decision was sort of unfair. After all, it was Saint Dane who planted the idea in their heads. He should have been put on trial too. Yeah, right. Like that would happen. But I guess in the end it was the decision of the elite and the engineers to go forward with the horrible plot. There had to be some form of punishment. There was special consideration given to the fact that they were in such a desperate state due to the virus. Their sentence could have been worse. Way worse. The Batu weren’t above execution. These guys were lucky. They would eventually be released and returned to their tribe.

  The royal family of Zinj presided over the trials. Throughout, the family echoed the words and wisdom of their hero son, Pelle, who preached peace and tolerance. To that end, the surviving Rokador were promised help and protection, so they could rebuild their civilization—on the opposite side of the new river. There would be no more tunneling. The royal family of Zinj recognized the advances of the Rokador society, and how valuable the two tribes could be to each other. They hoped that this tragedy would begin a new era of cooperation.

  Not all the Rokador were punished. Many of the Tiggen guards were proclaimed heroes. Most had no idea of the plot to destroy the Batu until it was too late. Once the destruction began, they were credited with saving every single Rokador who made it out of the underground alive.

  More than that, we were surprised to learn that it was the Tiggen guards who saved the Batu invaders. Testimony from both Ghee warriors and Tiggen guards confirmed that the Ghee warriors had made it all the way to Kidik. They were preparing to cross the ocean and attack Kidik Island when they were met by a band of Tiggen guards. These guards had learned what was about to happen. They had been prepped by Teek. Teek had convinced them of how wrong the mad plan was. When Teek returned to help us take over the master control station, several Tiggen guards risked their lives to cross the ocean, meet the Ghee, and warn them of the impending danger. The Ghee leaders at first thought it was a trick, until the water started to rise. The order to retreat was given, and the Batu quickly fled to the surface. The Tiggen guards didn’t flee with them. They risked their own lives by staying to help their fellow Rokador escape.