The Dark River fr-2
Page 34
When the men reached the far end of the park, a second group appeared. Maya expected a fight, but the two groups greeted each other and headed off in the same direction-away from the river. Maya decided to follow them. She stayed off the streets and passed through the ruins of the city, stopping occasionally to glance through a shattered window. Darkness concealed her movements, and she stayed away from the gas flares burning from broken pipes. Most of these flares were small and sputtering, but a few larger ones were twisting columns of fire. The flares left black soot on the walls and the smell of burned rubber filled the air.
She got lost in a half-destroyed office building. When she found her way to an alley, she saw a crowd of men forming near a gas flare down the street. Hoping no one would see her, she dashed across the street to an apartment complex with oily water flowing like a stream through the concrete hallways. Maya climbed up the staircase to the third floor and peered through a hole in the wall.
About two hundred armed men had gathered in the central courtyard of a U-shaped building. Names were carved into the building’s façade. PLATO. ARISTOTLE. GALILEO. DANTE. SHAKESPEARE. She wondered if the building had once been a school, but it was difficult to believe that children had ever lived in this place.
A white man with braided hair and a black man wearing a torn lab coat stood on chairs beneath a wooden frame that served as a crude gallows. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and ropes were around their necks. The crowd milled around these two prisoners, laughing at them and jabbing them with knives. Suddenly, someone shouted a command and a separate contingent marched out of the school. A man wearing a blue suit led this group. Directly behind him, a bodyguard pushed a young man tied to the frame of an old-fashioned wheelchair. Gabriel. She had found her Traveler.
The man in the blue suit climbed onto the roof of an abandoned car. He stood with his left hand in his pocket while his right hand jabbed and gestured at each word that came out of his mouth.
“As the commissioner of patrols, I’ve guided you and defended your liberties. Under my leadership, we have hunted down the cockroaches that set fires and steal our food. When this sector is finally rid of these parasites, then we will march on the other sectors and take over the Island.”
The mob cheered, and several men thrust their weapons in the air. Maya stared at Gabriel, trying to see if he was conscious. A line of dried blood ran from his nose down to his neck. His eyes were closed.
“As you know, we have captured this visitor from the outside world. Through rigorous interrogation, I have increased my knowledge of our situation. My goal is to find a way for all of us to leave this island together. Unfortunately, spies and traitors have sabotaged my plans. These two prisoners made a secret alliance with the visitor. They betrayed you and tried to find their own private means of escape. Should we allow this? Should we let them run away if we remain captive in this city?”
“No!” shouted the crowd.
“As commissioner of patrols I have sentenced these traitors to-”
“Death!”
The commissioner moved his fingers as if a fly had landed on his hand. One of his followers kicked out the stools, and the two prisoners were strangled to death, jerking at the ends of the ropes while the others mocked them. When the prisoners finally stopped moving, the leader raised his palms and quieted the crowd.
“Be alert, my wolves. Watch those around you. All the traitors have not yet been discovered-and destroyed.”
Although the man in the blue suit was supposed to be in control of the wolves, he kept jerking his head around as if he expected to be attacked. When he climbed off the car, he hurried back into the school with Gabriel and the bodyguards.
Maya remained in her hiding place as the crowd dispersed in different directions. The patrols had been unified at the moment of execution, but now everyone glanced at one another with a certain degree of wariness. The two prisoners were left hanging from the ropes, and the last patrol in the area stayed around long enough to steal the dead men’s shoes.
When everyone was finally gone, Maya crossed the empty street to the building next to the school. Some kind of bomb had exploded, and the staircase was reduced to a metal frame with a few crossbeams. Climbing with her hands and feet, Maya reached the top floor, and then jumped across a three-foot gap to the roof of the school.
When she entered the third-floor hallway, she found a skinny man with a beard chained to a radiator. He had a green silk tie around his neck, the knot pulled so tight that it looked like a noose.
The man looked unconscious, but Maya crouched beside him and jabbed his chest with the handle of her sword. He opened his eyes and smiled. “Are you a woman? You appear to be a woman. I’m Pickering, the ladies’ tailor.”
“I’m looking for the man in the wheelchair. Where did they-”
“That’s Gabriel. Everyone wants to talk to the visitor.”
“So where can I find him?”
“Downstairs-in the old auditorium.”
“How many guards?”
“There are twelve or more in the building, but only a few in the auditorium. The commissioner of patrols doesn’t trust his own wolves.”
“Can you guide me?”
Pickering shook his head. “I’m sorry. The legs won’t move.”
Maya nodded and began to walk away. “Remember my name,” the man said. “I’m Mr. Pickering. Gabriel’s friend.”
Standing at the top of the stairs, she breathed evenly and prepared herself for a long, continuous attack. Both her father and Mother Blessing had always made the distinction between observing and perceiving an enemy. Most citizens spent their lives passively observing what went on about them. In combat, you had to use all your senses and focus on your opponent, anticipating their next move.
Maya took the first flight of stairs slowly, like a student who didn’t want to go back to class. Then she heard someone moving below her and she picked up speed, taking the steps two at a time. One of the commissioner’s bodyguards was trudging upward and she caught him by surprise, driving the point of her blade through a gap in his ribs. A few seconds later, she reached the ground-floor hallway and ran toward two more wolves. She slashed the first guard in the neck, ducked a blow from a club, and stabbed the second wolf in the belly.
Clutching her sword, she ran into the auditorium. One of the wolves was near the front of the room. She stabbed him and leaped onto the stage. The commissioner of patrols was getting up from his desk and reaching for his revolver. Before he could aim, Maya swung the sword downward and chopped off his hand. The commissioner screamed, but she brought the blade up hard and silenced his voice forever.
She turned. And there was Gabriel in the wheelchair. He opened his eyes when she cut the ropes off his arms. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Can you stand up?”
As Gabriel opened his mouth to speak, a creaking sound came from the back of the auditorium. Four armed men had entered the room, and more followed a few seconds later. Six wolves faced her. Seven. Eight. Nine.
43
Gabriel got up from the wheelchair and took a few clumsy steps toward the men. “What about the food?” he asked. “Now that the commissioner is dead, you can have all the food that you want. The storage room is on the other side of the courtyard.”
The wolves glanced at one another. Maya thought they might attack, but then the man standing closest to the exit slipped out of the auditorium. Everyone lowered their weapons and hurried after him.
Gabriel reached out and touched Maya’s arm, then smiled as if they were back in the Chinatown loft. “Are you really here, Maya? Or maybe I’m just having another dream…”
“It’s not a dream. I’m here. I found you.”
Maya placed her sword back in its sheath and embraced him. She could tell that he had lost weight. His body was fragile and weak.
“We can’t stay here,” Gabriel said. “Once they divide up the food, they’ll come looking for us.”
“So they�
�re like human beings back in our world? They can get hungry and thirsty?”
“And they can die.”
Maya nodded. “I saw the execution in front of the building.”
“These people can’t remember their past,” Gabriel said. “They have no memories of love or hope or any other kind of happiness.”
Gabriel put his arm around her shoulder, and Maya helped him out of the auditorium. Out in the hallway, they stumbled past the two men she had killed.
“How did you get here? You’re not a Traveler.”
“I used an access point.”
“What does that mean?”
Maya told him about the sundial of the Emperor Augustus and her journey to Ethiopia with Simon Lumbroso. She decided not to mention that the Tabula had attacked Vine House and almost killed his Free Runner friends. There was a time for these revelations, but not now-when they had to escape.
Gabriel opened a door to a room filled with rows of green file cabinets. A musty smell reminded Maya of old books rotting in a cellar. The only light came from two gas flares burning from pipes that had been ripped out of the walls.
“This doesn’t look safe,” Maya said. “We should get out of the building.”
“There’s no place to hide on this island. We have to find the passageway back to our world.”
“But that could be anywhere.”
“The commissioner of patrols said that the legends about Travelers were always connected to this room. The passageway is here. I can feel it.”
Gabriel grabbed a metal table and pushed it against the door. He seemed to gain strength as he found boxes and chairs and piled them on the table. For weeks, Maya had fantasized about this moment-when she and Gabriel would be together in this strange world. But what would happen now? When Simon Lumbroso first told her about the access points he had stressed, You have to go back the way you came. Maya never considered the possibility that her only way back would be lost within the dark river. Could she leave with Gabriel, or would she be trapped in this place?
When Gabriel finished blocking the door, he hurried past the cabinets to a workstation in the middle of the room. Suddenly, he stopped and stared at a bookshelf pushed against the wall.
“See that black line? It might be something.”
He grabbed an armful of ledger books and tossed them onto the worktable. Then he pushed the bookshelf sideways, exposing a wall. The Traveler smiled at Maya like a math student who had just solved a difficult equation.
“Our way home…”
“What do you mean, Gabriel?”
“Right here. This is the passageway.” He outlined the shape with his index finger. “Can you see it?”
Maya leaned forward and saw nothing but cracked plaster. She knew at that moment-knew without words-that she was going to lose him. Quickly, she stepped back into the shadows so that he couldn’t read her face. “Yes,” she lied. “I see something.”
A thumping noise came from the entrance to the file room. The wolves had opened the door a few inches, and now they were throwing their bodies against it-forcing back the barricade.
The Traveler grabbed her hand and held it tightly. “Don’t be frightened, Maya. We’re going to cross over together.”
“Something could go wrong. We might lose each other.”
“We’ll always be connected,” Gabriel said. “I promise, no matter what happens, we will be together.”
He took a few steps forward, and then she watched his body pass through the plaster as if it were a waterfall with a cave hidden behind it. He pulled her along: Come with me, my love. But her hand struck the hard surface of the wall and Gabriel’s fingers slipped away.
With one final shove, the wolves forced open the door. Gabriel’s barricade slipped sideways and everything hit the floor. Maya hurried away from the workstation and stepped between two rows of file cabinets. She could hear deep breathing and whispered voices. A warrior would have picked a familiar battleground, but these men had allowed anger to influence their choices.
She waited for five heartbeats and then came out into the side aisle. A man was standing about twenty feet away from her holding a steel pole with a knife blade lashed to one end. Maya returned to her previous spot between the two rows of cabinets as a second man with a spear came around the corner.
Her hands moved without thought or form. Running forward, she aimed the sword at the man’s eyes, then flicked her wrists and knocked the spear blade downward. She stepped on the blade, holding it to the floor, and jabbed upward, stabbing her opponent in the chest.
The dead man fell backward, but he had already perished within her mind. She pulled out two drawers and used them as steps to climb onto the top of the cabinet. Maya was in a three-foot space between the cabinet and the ceiling, watching the first attacker move cautiously down the aisle. Time slowed down. She felt as if she were observing everything through two eyeholes in a mask.
When the spearman reached his companion, she jumped behind him and slashed down the length of his backbone. Now one body lay on top of the other and the room was quiet.
MAYA LEFT THE school and walked down the street to a twisted stop sign. A hundred yards away, an enormous gas flare trembled like a candle flame near an open window. She turned in a slow circle and surveyed her new world. It no longer made a difference whether she went to the left or to the right. The wolves roamed through every part of the island. Occasionally, she might find a hiding place, but this would be only an interlude in an endless battle.
Two men carrying clubs and knives appeared at the end of the street. “Over here!” they shouted. “She’s right here! We found her!” A few seconds later, three other men joined them. They circled the gas flare and stood in front of the light.
Standing alone, Maya understood the full meaning of her choice. She would be trapped in this realm of anger and hate until she was destroyed. Damned by the flesh. Yes, that was true. But had she also been saved?
Maya remembered what Gabriel had told her about these men-they had no memory of the past. But she could still recall her life in the Fourth Realm. It was a world of great beauty, but it was also filled with glittering distractions and false gods. What was real? What gave life meaning? At the point of death, everything was lost except love. It could sustain you, heal you, make you whole.
The five men were talking to one another, organizing a plan of attack. Maya drew her sword and swung it around so that the light from the flare was reflected on the blade. “Come on!” she shouted. “I’m ready for you! Come toward me!”
When the men didn’t move, she stood up straight, gripping her sword with both hands and concentrating her power in her lower legs. Saved by the blood, Maya thought.
She took a deep breath and ran toward the wolves as her shadow passed across the broken surface of the street.
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