by EM Kaplan
“What boat?” Jaine asked, hands on her hips, which made his brow furrow even more. He looked back and forth between them, and Mel waited to see if his comprehension would return on its own.
“Is this the river?” he demanded to know, standing up in the cycle, which made it tip because of its precarious lack of stability in the soft riverbed. “What happened to the water?”
“We don’t know,” Mel said.
Still standing at the back of the cycle, Charl gave a violent shudder and turned pale despite the warmth of the day.
“I think he needs water. You said he’s been passed out since last night? He’s all dried out, is what he is,” Jaine said, rooting around beside her for the water pouch they’d been sharing. She offered it to him, but he wasn’t looking at her. Rather, he was staring north.
At last reaching the cycle, Mel laid one hand on the floorboard, and leaned over to scrape the mud from her feet, one at a time. Such a thick layer of dirt clung to the sole, she had to use the side of her finger to find the edge of her sandal. If she stepped up into the cycle, she’d stand a couple inches taller than usual. With a sigh, she worked at the straps to remove the sandal altogether. While she was still wary of Charl, he seemed more himself, more recovered than before.
“Do you remember being on the boat, Charl?” she asked, blowing a strand of muddy hair out of her eyes. Her hands were dirty, so she had to use either breath or her shoulder.
“Of course I do,” he said, his low voice thin and hoarse. “We almost reached Navio. I was looking forward to seeing the port. Although I love the water—I used to love sailing with my father—I’d been getting tired of being trapped on the boat after so many weeks.” He looked south now. Then north again. “This is the river? It can’t be. This isn’t right.”
Mel could have laughed at the understatement.
“This isn’t right,” he said again, with more force. Enough so that Mel straightened up and prepared herself for a sudden change if he were to revert back to his feral state.
“Of course it’s not right,” Jaine scoffed from behind him. “There’s no bloody water, is what. I mean, where can that much water disappear to? It’s not like the river’s a tub and someone unstopped the drain, is it?”
Charl muttered for a second, but Mel heard him.
“That’s exactly what it’s like,” he said.
“What are you doing, Charl?” Mel said. She reached out toward his ankle, ready to pull him off his feet if he turned violent.
Though she had been watching him like a sharp-eyed Falcun worshipper and was sensitive to the vibrations of the velocycle’s engine, she missed the first tremors underfoot. The sludge, perhaps, muted them. As Charl continued to scowl, to the south now, his anger at the missing water growing into outrage, Mel heard a low rumble from the distance. From the north now. Almost as one, the three of them faced north, and now Mel felt another tremor through the mud under her feet.
One muddy sandal in hand, the other still glued to her foot, she shoved Charl back as she clambered onto the back of the cycle. Pushing him down on the bench next to her, she pounded the driver’s seat.
“Drive! And fast. As fast as you can go.” They still had half a mile before they made it to the other shore. She hoped they would reach it in time, if she was right.
Charl struggled to stand. “No, I need water,” he protested, his voice changing, sounding lower and louder, as if it came from more than just one throat.
Jaine jumped to release the cycle brake. Grasping the steering handles, her slight form crouching low to avoid the inevitable splat of mud, she opened the cycle to its full steam.
On the back of the cycle, Mel grappled with Charl, who had clearly lost his mind as he’d regained his full consciousness. Half-barefoot, but slippery from neck to toes, she wrestled with him, trying to get him to remain seated as they bounced and jostled with the cycle over the muddy pits in the riverbed.
“No. No water,” Mel shouted above the engine noise.
“Yes, I want water,” Charl said, his voice resonating all around them in the riverbed, the mud, and against the sludge. He hooked Mel, grabbing her by the neck, and his eyes turned black. Overcome by him, his hand clamped down on her air passage, she slowed her need for breath…though the impulse to choke was urgent.
“No, no! Water!” Jaine shouted. She pointed northward, where, far in the distance, Mel saw a great gray wall of foam, white ice chunks, and dirty waves hurtling toward them. Jaine’s glance snagged on the struggle in the back of the cycle. A grim smile crossed Charl’s face. Then his limbs went loose. His grip on Mel’s neck released, and he collapsed forward onto her.
Jaine shook out the fingers on the hand she’d just used to punch him in the back of the neck. With a straight face, she said, “All passengers must remained seated during the entire duration of the journey.”
Chapter 33
Balanced on her slim strong legs as she clutched the steering handles, Jaine cranked the velocycle as fast as it could go. She drove toward the riverbank trying to beat the wall of gray water and debris that barreled down on them. If they encountered no more obstacles, they had a good chance of making it and not being swept away.
As they came within sight of the shore, they spotted a crowd of people on foot who were making their way down the steep embankment into the riverbed from the Navio side. Why they wanted to cross the waterless mud pit was a mystery to Mel. She clung to the bench underneath her as the cycle hit a sandbar with a violent bounce.
What were those people doing? Didn’t they see the water rushing toward them?
Now they spilled into the muddy river, like ants on a crumbling cliff. They overflowed the embankment, tumbling, falling over each other, collapsing some of the muddy cliff. A woman landed facedown in the muck, and the others pushed past her, stepping around her, but not bothering to stop and help.
Mel had seen behavior such as this before—at Cillary Keep when the trogs attacked. Panic drove people to act in this manner. Alarmed, she scanned the shore for imminent danger. She saw nothing out of the ordinary, but they were deep in the riverbed. The growl of the velocycle covered any sounds that may have warned them. Likewise, the potent river smell prohibited Mel from detecting any scent of trogs or otherwise.
“Go back!” Jaine yelled, waving an arm at them, which caused the velocycle to jerk to the right.
“Easy now,” Mel shouted at her, but she had to grasp Charl by the arm so that his once-again limp body did not slide off the bench and into the mud.
“They are going to drown when the water reaches them,” Jaine said, panic making her voice high and strained. She stood up in her seat and waved her arm in frantic bursts.
“Sit down!” Mel yelled and lurched forward, trying to grab the back of Jaine’s pants by the waist. She missed as Jaine’s feet left the floorboard for an instant, propelled upward by another rough jostle.
The velocycle gave a drunken bobble, and for one brief minute, Mel thought it would right itself and they’d continue on the path to the Navio. The bank was just a couple hundred feet ahead of them. They were so close. Jaine over-corrected with the steering handles. The front wheel swerved to the left and struck a raised ridge of mud.
With a shout, Mel released her grip on Charl and gave him a rough push. Jaine had let go of the handles and flew off to the side. For an instant, it seemed to Mel as if everything slowed down. Jaine’s arms circled in futile orbits, her legs kicked, all between heartbeats, as Mel watched, cocooned within her enhanced perception. Charl’s body made a simpler arch, his shoulder pitching ahead in the direction Mel had pushed him, out of the trajectory of the cycle. Yet, his path would have him land face first in the muck. Mel pushed power to her legs and jumped clear, hoping to land on her feet, but without a solid ground beneath her doubting it very much.
The three of them hit the wet mud with a smack hard enough to create three mud explosions. Great splatters of the wet silt rose behind them, like brown-black, lacy shawl
s. The velocycle rolled once, a wheel and a bench cracked apart. Then the whole thing came to an abrupt stop, anchored by its heavier rear end in the thick silt. Mel raced to Charl and pulled his face out of the sludge so he could breathe.
“They’ll be killed.” Jaine shouted, “Everyone, go back to the shore.” She stood and waved both arms, trying to catch their attention, but they didn’t see her. When she tried to run toward them, the ground sucked at her feet. Mel had enough trouble moving with her enhanced strength—she could imagine how difficult it was for Jaine.
Farther north, the gray wall of water churned toward them, growing larger. Without the roar of the cycle, Mel could hear the deluge now. The front waves rolled over themselves, crashing as the next rode in on their backs. A low growl came through the soft ground, much like the sound of the maelstrom. Mel’s head shot up at that as she stared northward. The deluge and the whirlpool were related?
“They can’t hear you.” Mel said, though her voice broke with agony. So many people would be hurt. So many would die. “We need to keep moving or we’ll be crushed by the flood. No time to argue.” She gave Jaine a push, and with one last look at the people crowding into the river, unaware of the danger, they began dragging Charl to drier land.
Jaine reached the bank first, and with some difficulty and sliding, climbed up. The wall was soft and crumbly, but Jaine had a small, light body. Mel wasn’t sure how they were going to get Charl to the top. If the water wasn’t moving toward them at such a violent rate, she would have waited for it, hoped for the best, and tried to float to the top. She glanced over her shoulder. A hundred yards north, the townspeople, some of them looking bloody and battered—and stained with black soot—were still sliding down the embankment while she was trying to shove Charl’s body upward.
Mel picked him up with a half grunt, half scream. Carrying him in her arms as if he were a babe and not a full-grown man, she looked one last time at the people north. The wall of water hit them at that moment. Abrupt screams were cut off as the crushing wave of froth and debris struck them. Heavy tree branches, planks of wood, the remnants of a great disaster rode on its crest. In the flood’s grip, these broken pieces became deadly weapons, dealers of pain and greater injury than the water alone.
Then it bore down on her.
With another scream, sweat running down her muddy face into her mouth and eyes, she jumped and landed on the edge of the bank, Charl’s body right on the edge. Hanging onto the muddy cliff by just her elbows, Mel shouted. Incomprehensible, wordless yells of frustration.
Jaine grabbed Charl’s arm and leg and dragged him farther inland.
The wall of water hit hard. The force of the tidal wave could have broken her legs had she not fortified them. A normal person would have been battered beyond repair. She clung to the embankment with everything left in her. But even the rocks and roots she held were being stripped away at a furious pace by the rushing water. She could feel the bank loosening under her fingers as the water eroded everything in its path.
As the thrashing waves began to sweep Mel away, a big hand clamped onto her arms and lifted her out of the foam.
Chapter 34
Sprawled on the floor of the tent belonging to Brakah Ashonti, Zunee was in danger of her impotent anger sucking her down into a black despair. Trussed and immobile, she raged, blood pounding through her. Her fury spiraled in her belly, pulling her down just as she’d once seen a sandpit swallow a man. He’d been covered up to his wild, panicked eyes within seconds. Then gulped down alive. One minute there, the next taken down into the bowels of the desert. A spell of dizziness nearly overcame her, but she blinked until she came into herself again. She would not lose control. Not now. Not ever.
Like a bird attracted by a shiny trinket, pecking at it, she’d swallowed the pretty sandstone pin with its sharp clasp. The one thing that may have saved her from violation. The one thing that might have saved her sisters. And Deni. Down her throat into her stomach. With not even her hands free to try to make herself gag it up. Her anger made her dizzy. Or maybe it was lack of breath. A breath in. A breath out, like a tiny gust of wind.
Now her father’s enemy, Brakah Ashonti, had her pinned facedown on the rug in his tent, his knee in the center of her back. Hands wrenched behind her and trussed up so she’d lost sensation in them and arms trapped under his knee, Zunee’s shoulders protested in pain, pulled beyond their limit.
She heard her captor rustle behind her and braced herself for the dreaded and inevitable feel of his flesh against her. If he touched any part of her body with his, she would kill him. Outside, the wind picked up and pushed the tent flap inward, hitting him in the face. He grunted, rose to his feet, knocking her once in the head with his closed fist. Her chin hit the rug hard enough to sting.
“Don’t you move. Not a muscle. Stay exactly as you are. Or I will give you to my men. All of them.” He fastened the tent flap shut, securing each of the clasps up and down the edge. The fabric would keep out the gusts and the dirt, but it would do nothing to hide her screams. Well, she would not give him that victory, she vowed. She would remain silent no matter what he atrocities he committed against her.
When he returned, he straddled her back with his full weight, pressing down her bound arms further, making her gasp at the pain to her shoulders. Leaning close to her neck, he began to whisper disgusting threats and promises to her, his breath crossing the outer edge of her ear.
Why hadn’t she bolted while he was shutting the tent flap instead of shuddering in relief at his sudden absence from her back?. Anger roiled and twisted within her again, at her missed opportunity. At everything—her failure to protect her sisters, Lena’s battered face, her broken promise to her older sister Rav to take care of everything until she returned. At their father for dying and leaving them alone and unprotected.
Anger, black and bottomless, swirled up inside her belly. Heat raced up until her throat and slashed across her face. Zunee jerked her head backward and butted him. She made contact with something hard that gave a crunch against the back of her skull. He howled in pain. And then in displeasure, wrenching her upward by her bound arms so her shoulder popped, and her vision went black as agony speared through her. The wind kicked up outside, billowing the tent walls, almost in time with her sharp pants of breath. She gasped, trying to measure the pain, to expel it in small increments so that it did not wash her into unconsciousness. Each inhalation she made, each tiny movement jolted through her misaligned shoulder, magnifying it, amplifying it.
A breath in. A breath out.
He spun her around, both of them on their feet now. While she fought the urge to fall to her knees, bowled over by the new eruption of white-hot misery from her shoulder, his fist connected with her jaw. On impact, her face whipped to the side. She’d been unprepared. Now she had a swelling cheek and eye to add to her misery. His other fist met with the ribs on her opposite side, and this time, she did collapse to her knees.
A breath in. A breath out. Faster now. Light and fleeting like the wind.
As she fell to the ground, her anger consumed her. The rustle of the wind rose to a whistle. The top of the tent lifted and the sides buckled. The supporting wooden poles strained at their braces and at the points in the ground in which they’d been anchored.
One last time, his fist came at her, connecting with her ear. The whistling stopped for now, and as she sprawled to the side, she thought she had lost her hearing.
This is how I die. Deaf. Tied up. At the hands of my father’s enemy.
A blast of wind roared then—she heard it. A spinning blast of air lifted the tent off the ground, collapsing its beams. Zunee, hands tied behind her back, was not able to protect her head as they crashed onto her. With a roar that might have been the wind, not her, she rolled across the billowing rugs and out the door flap.
Falling. Falling, light as the wind.
She landed on the ground on her back, on her tied hands, eyes wide from the pain—though it was suddenl
y bearable. Free. She lay on the dirt, gasping and panting. Released from the tent, out from her prison, she panted, feeling the blood run from her mouth where she had been struck. More blood dripped down her neck from her ear—another strike from Brakah Ashonti. Above her in the sky, the sandstorm loomed, undulating in an odd fashion, hovering in place, vibrating from side to side as if waiting for her command.
Above her, Brakah Ashonti’s tent spun like a battered bat, wings torn and folded in on itself, with him wrapped up inside. Trussed. Captured. Just as she had been. How the tables had turned for him. She wondered if he screamed now, but she could not hear him through her ruined ear.
She stared at the mass of swirling tent fabric with the writhing body inside it. Behind her, her sisters amassed, all of them accounted for, as she looked around at them. Lena helped her stand and, with care, undid the ties that bound Zunee’s arms. Deni stood with her as well, his hand soothing her injured shoulder. She drew strength from his touch. Lena gathered closer on one side, Deni on her other.
All the while, the sandstorm loomed, spinning, but awaiting her direction as it toyed with Brakah Ashonti, her enemy. Zunee watched the tent, her mind aswirl with heretofore unfelt potential—with the power to harm. To take a life. To defend herself and her family.
Could she do it?
“Kill him,” Lena said. Her battered face expressionless. Blood ran from her swollen nose and mouth. At her sides, her bruised knuckles hung, limp and loose.
On Zunee’s other side, Deni stared at the towering storm. She saw the movement of his throat as he swallowed in shock. His jaw hung open—partly because he could no longer close it. Dark purple bruises rose under the gashes on his forehead. His gaze met hers and within, she saw nothing but determination. Pride. Fury.
