by Philip Webb
And if I yield to her now, humankind will be swept from the face of this world. The bodies of every last person will be taken to hatch a new race of Visitors.
But I still have a knife. I still have a choice, and it is as clear to me as the forever sunset. Immortality in the shoes of a queen or a fight to the death. It is the choice my pa knew I would have to make.
The tentacles around my throat tense again.
I stare at the White Shell Woman, at her eyes of fire. She waits — calculating, assessing my intent. Do I really have the guts to challenge her?
And I thrust the knife upward. Straight through the collar of tentacles. Tether sinews snap and fly apart. A great wash of amber liquid spills down my front. My blood and hers. It fizzes on the sand.
For a moment I stand tall — I feel free, strong almost. The hacked tentacles writhe and thump the ground. But then a terrible burning seizes my throat — the pain of all those tiny barbs ripped from the skin. I reach up to stem the flow, and blood cascades over my fingers.
A demonic screech fills the air.
And I see it clearly in all those hissing pools of amber leaking into the dust. She cannot survive without me. Without my blood, she will die.
I force my gaze upward. Luis and Kelly dangle at the mouth of the hive — they hang motionless, perhaps too terrified to fight anymore. The opening glows with luminous secretions. Inside there are undulating fronds, coralline twists, oxbow folds — all pulsing. They unfurl slowly — the petals of a hideous flower. Stacked up to the sky and beyond, I can see story upon story of cells, regular as lizard scales, beating soundlessly. And trapped inside them, the shadowy forms of abductees.
What will become of them? This thought arrives slowly, coming to rest unspoken on my lips.
The largest breath I can take is pitiful. My choice is made. And here comes the price.
It is astonishing how quickly life begins to desert me. Each beat of my heart is so much feebler than the last. And as I gaze through faltering eyes, I see the White Shell Woman. Her face collapses in landslides of white. Above me, fractures run along the great tether walls, opening rents of fire. Detonations race up to the clouds — stays and ties and frames buckling into accelerated collapse.
The knife tumbles from my hand.
Noise retreats on an outgoing tide.
Already my blood runs cold.
I see it as I fall — the tether whiplashing into low banks of cloud. Mile-long sections of it unzip and plummet gracefully westward. Abducted towns puff to Earth in the far distance. It is like watching a divinity make a range of mountains, sowing them into a straight course over the horizon.
Tentacles spill down into giant worm-casts.
My face thuds into the dirt.
More lives than a cat. Not this time.
My breaths are red; they bubble away.
A boy screams over me. I feel his hands at my neck, my face, my lips — searching for a way to staunch the flow. He bellows my name so close, I feel his breath on my cheek. I know this boy, but his name escapes me. If I could just remember it, I would live. I picture him in the light of the forge. De nada, he says, over and over again. And I have hurt him with my thoughtlessness. But he came with me anyway.
Luis. His name is Luis.
I awake in a cocoon of blankets, with only enough strength to open one eye. My throat throbs with a raw pain. A thick dressing covers the wound.
A makeshift camp surrounds me — low-slung tents fashioned from ponchos and branches. Around me, tied horses whinny and jostle. One of them tugs at his rope, straining to reach me. Cisco!
I struggle to sit up. In every direction, men, women, and children lie in rows as in a vast field hospital. The survivors of abduction. Some joke and chat and cough, propped up on their elbows, or are being fed by others more able.
A hundred yards or so away lies the wreckage of the toppled alien tether. People are still emerging from it dazed and stooped, propping each other up.
One of them walks slowly toward me — a man. He brushes away offers of help. His long hair and beard are streaked with gray. It takes an age for me to recognize him. Because he is old beyond his years. A castaway stranded in the Zone.
I call out to him. “Pa?”
He embraces me gently and whispers in my ear. “Megan. My Megan. I’m so sorry.” He brushes the hair from my eyes.
“Sorry?” Delicious fatigue tugs at me, drawing me to sleep.
“For calling you here.”
“You had to.”
“But …” He looks away to steady himself.
He cannot explain, but I know already. Back in Marfa I was … lost somehow. The journey was necessary. The Zone has forged me. My companions were necessary. I could not have made the choice I made without them.
He peers into my eyes as if to check and check again that I am truly alive. “Can you feel it?” he says at last.
Only then do I truly sense it. I have been immersed in it so long, reading its unfolding fronts, maintaining a perimeter, that to conceive its demise is hard. The Zone is no more. That spring-loaded presence is gone. The feeling that every mark and smell and sound is weighted with peril has just dissolved. The world is ordinary again. What takes me by surprise is my sudden grief at its passing. With the Zone goes its trackers, its mystery, its beguiling terror. For these past years we have been alive to it, or we have perished.
Pa consoles me. I see it in his eyes, too, the loss. He clasps my hand and allows me the sweet devastation of the moment. I can at last be just a daughter.
My first steps are uncertain. Pa urges me to rest, to conserve my energy, but I cannot lie like an invalid anymore.
The sight of the fallen tether is mind-numbing. Always, our triumphs are bittersweet. Not every abductee has survived. Towns and cities have dropped like windfall fruit, fit only as seeds now. But for Kelly there is joy. I watch her from a distance tending to her mother and father. She runs over when she spots me, stops for a moment, then hugs me as hard as she dares.
“Hey, Megan,” she whispers through her tears. “Humans: one. Aliens: zilch.”
Over her shoulder I see Luis. His smile is shy. In it I can tell that he does not care who or what I am now. We are together, three again.
At first I am too spent to move from the survivors’ camp. But there are plenty of supplies commandeered from fallen towns. Away from the throng, we three build a bonfire. The only talk then is of practicalities — tending the flames, cooking the food. As we share a can of pineapple chunks, I make a point of remembering the taste of the fruit — tart sunshine dribbling from my lips.
After the meal, none of us speaks for a long time. Cisco huddles close to the blaze for warmth. And we three watch as the sun sets at last. The spread of night is a salve to the soul. The stars that pass overhead are new ones. We point out the shapes they make — naming them.
Kelly says, “Ice cream sundae.”
“What?”
“Can’t you see it? Tall glass, vanilla scoops, cherry on top.”
“You can’t name a constellation after a dessert.”
“And why the hell not? Look, it’s even got a straw, with a bend in it.”
“Is just what you want right now to eat,” complains Luis. He searches my eyes as he says this. And when I meet his gaze, this time I don’t look away.
Kelly fills the silence. “Who says we gotta have the Great Bear or whatever? It’s whoever sticks a label on it first, I reckon.”
Our games go quiet as the first of the crescents rises.
“Moons or planets?”
None of us knows.
“Sure are pretty close, huh?”
There are three of them — pulling across the velvet black. One has rings. One is like a blue pearl. One is pitted and cratered like our long-lost moon.
We usher in the dawn. The day strengthens into a punishing heat that we are not used to. The passage of the sun is like a miracle to me, and as I watch my shadow shrink and grow, I am impatient t
o break out of the camp, to see what world we live in now.
Our progress is slow by necessity. I can bear only a few hours in the saddle before I need to rest. But my strength returns with sleep and food. For days at a time we linger in the newly released land, hunting or fishing. The weather is fierce and changeable, as if goaded on by the spin of day and night. Life that has kept only a foothold in the old realms of Arizona and New Mexico burgeons again. Bats and birds return to their rhythms.
At Spider Rock we come with dread to the cottonwood and the cemetery. But all signs of battle have been erased. If Marshall fell in his last-stand situation, then someone else must have buried him. It gives me hope, because the Visitors would not have laid anyone to rest. So perhaps he lives still.
My father listens to our tales again and again. He revels in them, in the way Kelly plays each part, embellishing and exaggerating. They will, I’m sure, become folklore the way she steers them further from the truth. He is reticent about his own experiences. We will perhaps never learn how he navigated his way to confront the White Shell Woman of the Zone, how he sent Yiska into the wilderness with the keys to her destruction.
Once, alone, in that quiet cold before dawn, while the others are asleep, he tells me about my mother. He speaks of her with awe and warmth, about how they met and survived together in the Zone, how they worked to uncover its secrets.
“She was taken, Megan.” His voice is a whisper. “I could not prevent it. The abduction was … slow. Though she fought it, she could not win. But she resisted long enough to give life to you. The birth was difficult. She kissed you and named you. And then she died in my arms.”
He gazes at the gray east light. “I thought to keep you clear of the Zone, to protect you from it. I thought if you could stay on the border with your aunt, you’d be safe. But … the Zone was part of you. And over time, I suspected you even had the strength to fight it.”
“Pa, I … I nearly gave in.”
“Hush now.”
I think about my choice then. How I nearly embraced the Zone. What would I be now? A dark myth. My blood absorbed into the tether. A tyranny unfolding through the human race.
He takes my hand, but he does not look at me. Instead he waits for the sun.
There is an ease about my pa — the way he laughs or outquips Kelly. Nothing left to prove, I suppose. And yet at times on that long journey back toward civilization, I catch him staring at the new configurations in the night sky, and his face is fixed in concern. He won’t discuss it, but I know the threat remains. We will have to pick through the pieces of Visitor technology. We will have to rearm.
A quiet unspoken dread seeps into me as we approach the Deadline border. I mourn the Zone — its wildness. How long before the skies are parceled up by flight paths? How long before we hear the sound of helicopter blades? I think that Marfa holds nothing for me, though I am hungry for news of the sheriff who saved my life.
At White Sands, though, the shadow that hangs over our future is banished, for now at least. The land rivers have run dry. And tilting at a rakish angle on a sand bank stands Marshall’s house. His mule looks up from the trough on the pier. I throw off my hat in the race to reach his doorway. He stands there smiling, waiting for us on the porch, his arm in a sling, Nugget draped over his shoulder.
There is a new sign swinging in the wind. It says THE KIMBERLITE SALOON.
And we are his first customers.
Many thanks to my agent Veronique Baxter, who believed in this book from day one. Also Barry Cunningham, my fantastic editors Imogen Cooper and Christine O’Brien, and everyone at Chicken House who worked to help bring my western of the future to fruition.
Finally, I could not have reached “The End” without the love, patience, and insight of my wife, Rebecca, who endured early drafts and supplied me with tea and wine where necessary.
PHILIP WEBB works as a user experience consultant, helping his clients bridge the gap between technology and humanity. He has a computer science degree and a master’s in human-computer interaction. He lives with his family in West London.
www.thisisteen.com/books
Text copyright © 2014 by Philip Webb
All rights reserved. Published by Chicken House, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. CHICKEN HOUSE, SCHOLASTIC, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
www.scholastic.com
First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by Chicken House, 2 Palmer Street, Frome, Somerset BA11 1DS.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Webb, Philip, 1967–
Where the rock splits the sky / Philip Webb. — First American edition. pages cm
Summary: Long after the Visitors split the moon and stopped Earth from turning, Megan and two friends mount their horses and set out across the Zone, where laws of nature do not apply, hoping to solve the mystery of her missing father and of the paralyzed planet itself.
ISBN 978-0-545-55701-6 [1. Science fiction. 2. Missing persons — Fiction. 3. Voyages and travels — Fiction. 4. Extraterrestrial beings — Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.W3834Whe 2014
[Fic] — dc23
2013026045
First American edition, April 2014
Cover art and design © 2014 by Phil Falco
e-ISBN 978-0-545-55702-3
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
