“There’s no hand rail, like your grandpa had,” said Alex.
Adam nodded. “I know. But there’s us.”
Both girls nodded at this. Alex sat up a little straighter.
“I always wanted to be a hand rail,” said Eve.
“I’m not an old man,” Dominic said. “I don’t need a hand rail yet.”
When Adam first stood up, his legs felt so wobbly, he didn’t know if he would be able to move at all. Then he forced his legs into action and found that he could, but every step caused a pain to shoot through his side. He kept stepping anyway. They all did.
For a while Dominic did fine, but even after the rest climbing was hard for all of them. It was much slower going this time, but that was actually worse. It gave Adam more time to think about how much he wanted to sit back down. His calves were aching, and this time there was also a stiffness in them that worried him.
Adam didn’t blame Dominic at all when he leaned forward and said quietly, “Kinda need a hand rail.”
The girls were a couple of steps behind, so they hadn’t heard. Adam knew Dominic hadn’t wanted them to hear. Without saying anything, Adam stepped back down onto Dominic’s level and put his arm out. Dominic grabbed Adam’s arm and hauled himself up another step.
“My bad leg feels fine,” he muttered. “But now that the other leg is doing all the work it’s getting cramped up.”
“Tell us when you need a rest,” said Alex. She was right behind them now and had obviously heard that last bit.
“Let’s just get this over with,” Dominic growled.
Twenty minutes later, Adam was sure that the stairs were never going to end. Dominic had refused to ask for a rest, but they did sit down one time when Eve begged for a water break. It was only a couple of minutes, but after that the cramping in their legs was worse. Doggedly, they kept climbing, stopping only a few times when Alex’s right calf seized up. No one sat down now. Adam doubted they would get up again if they did. But they waited a moment while Alex massaged life back into her leg before climbing on.
Now the girls were leaning on each other. Dominic still held onto Adam’s arm, using it mostly for balance as he pulled his bad leg along. Step, drag, step, drag. Up and up and up. No end in sight. No way to stop now. Adam thought longingly of escalators or, even better, elevators. He imagined himself just standing wonderfully still as the rocks under his feet pulled him upward.
This happy picture shattered when he tripped. He would have fallen, but Dominic tightened his grip on Adam’s arm and pulled him back. Still, he bashed his shin on the step and yelped.
“Are you okay?” came Eve’s tired voice from behind them.
Of course he wasn’t okay. He was out in the middle of nowhere in the pitch black looking for a friend who didn’t want to be found. His side hurt, his head hurt, and hurt wasn’t even a strong enough word for how his legs felt. Now, on top of that, he could feel a trickle of blood running down the front of his right leg.
“I’m fine,” he said.
They kept climbing. What else was there to do?
The girls were so close behind now that Adam could feel them. Without that and Dominic’s firm grip on his arm, he was sure he would have just sat down and never gotten up again. Instead he climbed on.
The stairs had started to zigzag now, or maybe they always had, only now the turns happened often enough that Adam noticed it. Either way, he had no idea which direction they were going, other than up. Each time the stairs disappeared around a corner felt like a personal insult, like someone was taunting him, telling him he would never make it to the end. There were always more stairs around the corner.
It’s just a staircase, he told himself. Everything comes to an end sometime. He didn’t believe himself.
Adam was so wrapped up in this personal war that he didn’t notice the water until Eve cursed loudly behind him. She had slipped and cut her own shins open on a step. “It’s wet!” she cried. “The steps are wet!”
Adam looked down. The stairs were shiny, and water was dripping slowly from one step to the next. He groaned as despair settled over him. Hadn’t he said at the beginning this was impossible?
“Just keep going,” Eve snapped from behind him, as if she weren’t the one who had stopped them. “We’ve got to get this over with.”
Adam knew they were never going to get it over with, but arguing would take too much effort. He dragged himself up another step.
They stepped very carefully now. Even so, from time to time someone would slip. If they hadn’t been so close together, they would probably all have been bloody messes, but somehow they managed to catch each other in time to prevent more injuries. For a while at least.
Another corner. Another. The water was getting deeper as they climbed. At first it had just been enough to slick up the steps, but now Adam could feel it trickling over his toes. His tennis shoes were soaked. The extra effort it took to climb carefully made him feel shaky. His legs had passed from intense pain into a kind of trembling numbness that matched the feeling in his brain.
Another corner. Water up to his ankles now. Another corner. Another. Up to his calves. The water was freezing cold. He could barely feel his toes. Adam wondered hazily if he would soon be unable to feel anything at all. Another corner. It was getting harder and harder to lift his legs. Each step took all his effort.
Strangely, Dominic’s steps seemed to get firmer as the water rose. Instead of leaning his weight on Adam, now Dominic was helping to pull him along. Adam didn’t have the energy to ask where Dominic was getting this sudden strength, but he felt a vague gratitude for the help just when he needed it.
The tug of the water flowing down the steps was getting stronger. Now Adam was glad for the many corners. If this water got much higher it could sweep them right down the stairs. The corners might be all that kept them from a deadly fall.
One step. Another. Around another corner. No end in sight. Pull feet through water, find a firm place on the next step, haul up the rest of his body. Again. Again.
Suddenly, Dominic pulled him to a stop. “The girls,” he said.
Adam looked back. The girls had fallen behind by several steps. They were leaning on each other more than ever and looked about to collapse.
“Let them get in front of us,” Dominic said. “They might need our help before this is all over.”
Adam nodded. “How are we going to…?”
“We’ll make it,” Dominic said. “I feel a ton better. This water is helping my leg.”
The girls had caught up now, and Dominic was waving them ahead. If Adam had thought they would argue, he hadn’t counted on their exhaustion. With no change of expression, the two girls just squeezed past and kept climbing, slowly but steadily.
Another step. Another corner. More steps.
Adam had given up looking for the end. His whole world was the next step, the girls’ feet in front of him, the swirling water, and Dominic’s hand on his arm. Everything else faded before the effort of lifting his legs against the water, which was still rising with each turn.
That was why it was a total surprise when they suddenly passed an opening in the rock wall with water gushing out of it. Three dry steps beyond that the stone walls on either side dropped away and they all collapsed onto level ground.
16
Whispers and Shouts
Eve wasn’t sure which was going to kill her first, her throbbing legs or the pain shooting through her side. Either way, she was sure to die soon, and right now that sounded okay. It would spare her the painful necessity of breathing.
After a few minutes, she noticed the pressure of Alex’s hand on her arm. Thank God for Alex. Eve never would have made it up without someone to lean on. Especially after she bashed her shins. That reminded her, shouldn’t her shins be hurting, too? It was all a bit hazy, but she was pretty sure they had been bleeding there for a while, at least before the water numbed her legs completely.
With the thought of the water
, the cold started to make itself felt through the haze of pain. She started shivering uncontrollably. There was a bunch of rustling and then Alex handed her something soft and warm, an extra sweatshirt maybe. Eve was so grateful she almost broke down crying.
There was a groan next to her in the darkness. Lifting her head just a bit, Eve could make out the shape of Adam just a couple of feet away. He was massaging his leg, and judging from the sounds he was making, it wasn’t helping much.
“You okay, Adam?” asked Alex weakly from Eve’s other side.
“Cramp,” he grunted.
“Dominic?”
“I’m fine,” Dominic said, his voice surprisingly strong. “You?”
“I’ll live,” said Alex.
They all just lay there as the minutes stretched on.
The pain in Eve’s side was now only horrible when she breathed in, so possibly that wouldn’t be life-threatening. But the longer her legs rested, the stronger the ache in her calves felt, and now she was beginning to feel the blood pulsing in the scrapes on her shins even through the bone cold. She wouldn’t be able to ignore that forever, but she would try for a few more minutes.
“At least there’s one good thing,” Eve managed.
“There is?” groaned Adam.
“Logan can’t be far,” she said. “No one could move very far after climbing those stairs.”
“How high up did we climb?” said Alex. “I feel like my lungs don’t work right.”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Eve said.
She heard Adam fumbling with the map next to her.
“Seriously?” she said. “Ready to move on already?”
“I don’t ever want to move again,” he said, “but lying here until I die probably isn’t an option, so next best is finding Logan fast and getting home to my bed.”
“Good point,” Eve conceded.
Alex was shining her light on Eve’s legs now. “We need to see what happened here,” she said.
Eve gritted her teeth and looked down. Wearing jeans had seemed like a good idea for hiking in the mountains, but seeing them ripped and plastered to her legs with water and her own blood was almost enough to make her wear shorts for the rest of her life.
“Looks like the water kept them clean at least,” Alex said. “Your left leg is still bleeding a bit. I’ve got some bandages left.”
“I’ll cut the wet parts off so you can get to it better. It’s already ripped anyway, and I’m freezing.” At the doubtful look on Alex’s face, Eve raised her eyebrows. “What? Cutoffs are all the rage this summer.”
“What are you going to cut them with?”
“Oh. Right. Well…I’ll just use Adam’s pocket knife. That ought to be sharp enough.”
Fifteen minutes later, wet jeans no longer sticking to her legs, a double layer of sweatshirts around her shoulders and fresh bandages on her cuts, Eve felt better than she could have imagined. Ready to walk, even.
She scooted over to where the boys were huddled over the map. Every muscle in her body protested. Well, okay, they could wait a few more minutes before moving on.
“None of that changes the fact that we don’t know where we came out,” Adam was saying.
“I’m just saying that if we know that way is north, the flowers should still be in that direction.”
“Unless we came out way up here,” Adam jabbed at the map. “The stairs are just a symbol on the map, but we came a long way in some direction. It twisted and turned so much, I don’t know which direction it was.”
“Up, from what I remember,” said Eve. No one laughed.
Alex was looking back the way they had come, and Eve turned too. From where they were now, the staircase was just a gash in the ground, getting deeper as it led away. What you could see before it disappeared into the darkness was a giant crooked crack like one of those cartoon earthquakes where the earth just splits apart.
The ground they were sitting on was rock, but it was only a rocky area in the middle of what was apparently normal springy earth. It wasn’t exactly a forest, but there were trees here and there and things growing in every direction. Eve imagined that if you followed the edge of that crack, you would eventually get to the cliff, but it wasn’t anywhere in sight. They could be anywhere.
Looking at the short soft grass just a few feet away, Eve wished she had the energy to move. It looked like a much more comfortable seat.
Alex was still staring at the steps. “You guys, the water,” she said. “It’s gone.”
Eve whipped her gaze around. The place where the water had been shooting out of the wall should have been in plain sight, but there was no water. Not even any sound of water. Ignoring her body’s screaming, Eve got up and hobbled back to the steps. The others were right behind her. At the top of the steps she stopped. She could see the hole in the rock wall a few steps down. Nothing was coming out.
Dominic brushed past her and walked down to the hole. He stuck his hand inside. “It’s still wet in here,” he said. “But I think it’s just wet from before.” He shined his flashlight into the hole. “It’s too deep to see anything.”
Eve noticed that Adam and Alex had stayed at the top of the steps with her. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who thought three steps was too much to climb down and back up. Watching as Dominic stuck his arm up to the shoulder into the hole, she wondered if there was anything he was afraid of.
“Nothing,” he said. For a minute she thought he had read her mind, but then she realized that he was saying he couldn’t feel anything in there.
“It’s like someone turned it on just to stop us,” said Adam.
“And then turned it back off when it didn’t work,” said Eve.
“Which means that someone is watching us,” Alex concluded.
Dominic came back up the steps. “Probably. But it doesn’t really change anything. We knew someone was out here as soon as we found Logan’s flashlight.”
So someone was working against them, someone who had the ability to make water flow out of rocks whenever they wanted it to, someone who could make animals attack them, someone who had probably taken Logan away. The idea should have been terrifying, but Eve didn’t feel afraid. She felt angry. Furious. So furious that the pain in her body suddenly seemed like nothing.
“It’s time to go,” said Alex quietly, and Eve heard the edge in her voice.
Dominic was beside them again. “If they turned the water off, they aren’t far away.”
Adam was handing around everyone’s packs. “We’ll head north. It’s our best guess. Seems like it won’t matter much at this point.”
Up here, the moon gave them a bit of light, and the thousands of stars were so bright and clear that the darkness felt less oppressive. With the help of their flashlights and the soft springy grass that was now beneath their feet, Eve found walking easier than she had expected. In any case, Dominic was right. They didn’t have far to go.
After only about ten minutes walking, they stopped at a wide meadow of flowers. The ground sloped gently down, and from what Eve could see the whole place was like a giant bowl, so large she could barely see the shadow of trees on the other side, filled rim to rim with small flowers, each with their petals wide open even in the dark.
“This has to be it,” said Adam. He hesitated. “In the picture there are little curly, wispy things coming up off the flowers.”
“You think they’re poisonous or something?” asked Eve. A slight breeze was rustling the blooms, and Eve thought she could detect a faint trace of flowery scent, but it certainly wasn’t strong. She bent down and picked the nearest flower. It had small round petals of deep purple. Cautiously, she sniffed it. It smelled like a flower. “I’m not turning blue or anything, am I?” she asked.
“You seem fine,” said Adam. “What do you think, Alex?”
“I think it doesn’t matter what I think,” she said. “We have to do this anyway.”
“There might be a way around,” Adam suggested.
>
“There isn’t,” snapped Alex. “There isn’t time. I don’t feel that great about these flowers, but we need to hurry. Time is running out.”
Eve felt the same sense of urgency inside. She stepped forward among the flowers. “Hold your breath if you want,” she said over her shoulder.
After a few dozen steps and a few deep breaths with no ill effects, Eve began to relax. It was actually quite peaceful in the meadow, a brilliant sky of stars above and a sea of flowers at her feet. The others were right behind her, but no one was making much noise. The wind whispered among petals in a soothing way.
Suddenly she stopped. The wind wasn’t the only whisper she heard. “Someone’s here,” she hissed. Everyone froze.
For a minute, Eve heard nothing and began to think she had imagined the voices, but then they came again, so softly that she had to strain to make out the words.
“They’re right out in the open…”
“…doesn’t matter now anyway…”
“…easy targets…”
“Send in the …”
“…finish them off…”
Eve turned to her friends. “Do you hear that?” she breathed as quietly as she could. They nodded. Adam put a hand out to silence her.
“…the perfect place…
“…nowhere to hide…”
“…be here soon…”
The whispers seemed to be coming from up ahead and to her right. Was someone hiding in the trees at the rim of the bowl up there? But how would she be able to hear them whispering this far away? They had to be closer. Eve stayed motionless, barely breathing, not even moving her flashlight for fear of giving away that she could hear them. Her friends behind her followed her lead.
Her mind raced. She couldn’t see anyone else in the meadow. If someone was close by, they must be lying down. The sudden image of enemies lying hidden among the flowers clenched her heart with horror. Were they walking into some sort of trap? She could still feel the urgent need to hurry building up inside her, but now it was battling with her fear of making a wrong step.
The Broken Circle (The Book of Sight 2) Page 19
