The first spiraled lower and she took aim. She hit it somewhere under the wing, and the creature faltered, then righted itself before it could crash. It zigzagged off, too wounded to continue its assault. The next came, a huge aggressive animal that tried to crash right into her, flying so fast she didn’t have a chance to restring a new quarrel. So she dropped the bow and took the quarrel in both hands and rammed it into its breast. The beast screamed and its head collided with her and drove her to the floor of the cave. Sasha skittered backward, away from it. It floundered on the muddy ground and the others descended.
While the birds fed, Sasha picked up her bow and quiver and prepared a new quarrel. One of the birds landed atop the dead pterosaur and she shot that one in the throat. The impact knocked the second bird back into the mud. Now the pterosaurs had two birds to feed on.
Unfortunately, she was quickly running out of quarrels.
The birds were back two hours later. She missed two, shot a third one. The third one lumbered off across the ground in defeat, a quarrel sticking out of its side, probably to be picked to death by its comrades. Or so she hoped.
She was out of quarrels. She scratched around by the fire for some kindling she could use as a quarrel, but there was nothing straight enough to be made into an arrow. She tossed the bow aside. It was now useless to her. She picked up her javelin, and not a moment too soon. A small pterosaur had made it through the opening and slithered wetly across the floor, its jaws gaping wide open.
Blanked, erased of all emotion, Sasha roared and jammed the javelin right into its maw. The bird snapped down on the javelin, breaking it at the midpoint, half of it still stuck halfway down its gullet. It began to gag, to die. Sasha helped it along by beating it to death with the broken javelin. She screamed and cursed it out the whole while. She was probably mad; thankfully, she felt absolutely nothing, like a spectator forced to watch some ancient, bloody sport. When the bird was sufficient dead, she kicked it over and over until it was crammed into a dark corner of the cave. The smell would probably bring others, but she dared not try to drag it out of the cave.
She knew the others would be waiting.
Panting and wheezing, she retreated to the fire that was slowly guttering out and grabbed up a thick dry branch, the fire spurting at the end in flecks of yellow and crimson, sparks flying. In her other hand she gripped her survival knife, the only weapon she had left. Resolved, trapped, and thus armed, she stepped outside the cave and let fate take its course.
CHAPTER 15
She had seconds, if that, before the rain put out her fire. But it only took seconds for the birds to spot her and react.
She gasped. More nests and wounded young were strewn along the ground. It was no surprise the birds were in such a state. And though she pitied them their plight, she found she could hate them too. None of this was her fault.
As the first one descended, she lifted her torch high and felt a profound sense of satisfaction when it screamed and darted away. More came at her. She swished the burning, guttering torch at them too, making a half circle about her. The torch was almost out, hissing in the rain, so when something fluttered at her back, she dropped it and turned, her knife at the ready.
All she saw was screaming blackness and the beat of wind and rain. She had a distinct advantage, she realized, a saving grace, if you will. The bird was confused by its target. It wanted to attack her, someone, and though aggressive, it was not designed to do more than scoop up fish in its enormous beak. At this close a range, such a long beak was inconvenient, at best. Sasha stabbed at the bird, aiming her knife low as Quinn had aimed low when he stabbed the first bird. The blade of the Moja hunting knife was long, almost a short sword, really. It went in smoothly at the juncture of the neck and breast. The bird fell back into the mud, its enormous wings beating rain and mud at her compulsively as it floundered.
The others screamed and wheeled in confusion. She had an opening. Biting down on the edge of the blade covered in pterosaur blood, Sasha ran as fast as she could, tearing through the wet sheets of river grasses, dodging trees, and vaulting rocks as the birds squabbled behind her. She reached the river in seconds. She did not think. She leaped into the air and sliced deep into the numbingly cold waters. And for once, all was still and quiet.
CHAPTER 16
Swimming against the storm current was fruitless, she quickly learned. Sasha tried, and failed miserably. She then diverted all her energy into keeping afloat as the freezing cold water ripped her downstream at a tremendous pace. Up ahead was a fall-off. She curled herself into a ball as it pushed her right over the edge. Then she was in free-fall, screaming as she was carried in a shining arc over fifty feet down into the frothing pool far, far below.
It was water, but the impact felt like she was hitting packed earth. She instantly hurt all over. She went all the way to the bottom and twisted at the last moment to keep from conking her head on the bottom of the riverbed, then shot straight to the top, so dizzy that for a moment she wasn’t sure which way was up. The only thing she was aware of was light. Then her head broke the surface, and she found the rain was less a slashing curtain and more a gentle trickle.
She could see the sun beating down, something she hadn’t experienced in close to a week.
She drifted, the knife still clenched in her aching jaw. She was sore and tired, and so weak she felt like she could sink. But sinking wouldn’t help Quinn, assuming he was still alive. So instead of giving up, she breaststroked to the nearest short, dug her fingers into the muddy bank, and hauled herself onto the long, wet tangles of marsh grasses. She spit out the knife and collapsed, so exhausted she didn’t have the strength to seek shelter and couldn’t have cared less if some large predator came along and found her.
CHAPTER 17
Something did find her, in the end.
She jerked awake as something closed firmly about her upper body, instantly regretting her short nap. She just knew it was something that had come up from the river, or the birds who had followed her. She started to scream and to fight. Her knife, still clutched in one hand, sliced upward in a shining arc.
A human hand caught it. A human voice said, “Sasha…Sasha, stop. Stop! You’re safe!”
She knew what the words meant, she knew she could probably trust the speaker, but when her vision began to clear and she saw who held her, she couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t seem to convince herself of the fact. It all seemed too good to be true. She writhed, clawing at Quinn—or the vision of Quinn—trying to hold her down. She screamed and sobbed and choked, her whole body electric with fear, so that he was forced to hug her entire body against his, to hold her so tightly she could barely breathe. “Sasha,” he kept saying. “Sasha, Sasha, Sasha…” He clutched the back of her head, stroked her braids, which were mostly undone.
Finally, the familiar timber of his voice began to penetrate her. She started to think that maybe he was real. Maybe she was actually safe. Maybe they both were. She dropped the knife and brought her hand up, clutching him across the back. She sobbed helplessly into his shirt.
They stayed that way for some time.
CHAPTER 18
Quinn carried her back to the cave where he’d made camp. He carried her easily—he’d gotten quite strong in their last month here, and Sasha quite thin. It was just as well, as she was quite incapable of walking at the moment. He set her down beside the beautiful warmth of the fire and started to undress her, peeling the freezing-cold wet clothes off her one piece at a time. She didn’t mind in the least. It wasn’t the first time he had disrobed her. He did not have extra clothes, and everything in the pack she’d been carrying on her back had been soaked in the river, so he stripped off his shirt and pulled her arms gently into the sleeves, pulling it around and buttoning it up tight. It was as big as a chemise on her, and tattered and full of holes, but it was warm, and it smelled like Quinn. She was shaking with cold, trembling with fear and spent adrenaline. She was sore and hungry and tired, and she knew
she was going to cry again.
Quinn forced her head down between her knees. “Breathe,” he told her. “Breathe, Sasha, breathe.”
She breathed. Slowly the tension in her shoulders eased, and she felt her body go limb the longer he held her. She was still shaking, but not so bad.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice coming out in little hiccups. “I’m sorry, Quinn.”
“Why are you sorry?”
She choked up some more river water. An hour later, and she was still vomiting up water. “You must think I’m very weak.”
“A seven mile journey, a swim in the river, and a battle with…something, based on the blood all over you…yes, Sasha, I think you’re incredibly weak,” he said with a wry smile.
She looked him over, barely able to believe he was alive, that they were both alive. “Oh, Quinn,” she said, grabbing him around the neck and pulling him close. He felt so good pressed against her, warm and safe and familiar and dear and everything she wanted in the world. “How did you…?” She didn’t even know how to say it. She swallowed. “How are you alive?”
“Same as you. I wound up in the river, nearly drowned. But I’d remembered some of what you’d taught me. I was able to stay afloat until I got here.” He slowly pried her off him so he could hold her at arm’s length and look at her. She wondered if she looked as surprised and desperate as he did. “Do you come all this way to look for me?”
“Yes, of course.” She frowned. “Did you think I would not?”
“But what about the gate?” Suddenly he looked angry. “Sasha, that was a very foolish thing to do. There’s barely a day left to use it before the storm season is over.”
She felt like she might cry again. “I wasn’t about to leave you here!”
“Oh Sasha. Don’t you realize how easily I could have been dead, drowned? You’ll probably be stuck here another whole year with me now.”
“I don’t care.” She sniffed, then told him about her progress on the gate, how she had left John in charge of it. “We have a little time left, ten or twelve hours. We should be able to get back.”
He shook his head, slowly. “If I could have gotten back, don’t you think I would have tried?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
She let him pull her to her feet and lead her out of the cave. She clung tightly to his arm, partly out of weariness. Mostly, because she was still scared.
The rain was nothing but a light drizzle now. She didn’t feel it at all after her swim in the river. The river itself fed into an enormous lake, and they stood on its banks. It must have been a half mile across and at least three times that wide. On the far side, she could see canyon walls at least four hundred feet tall. They ran the full circumference of the lake, enclosing it completely. Quinn pointed. “I haven’t gone very far yet, but I don’t see any breaks in the canyon walls. For all intents and purposes, this canyon is entirely isolated.” He pointed down the river, feeding furiously into the lake. With the storm season flooding it, there was no land mass leading into the canyon, only a few lone trees sticking up out of the river where a narrow strip of dry land used to be.
She looked down at the squishy ground they stood upon. A small ring of solid land lead down toward the river. There had probably been a ring of land all about the lake at one point, and leading up to the foothills of the canyon, but now it was mostly underwater except for the higher ground they stood on. “We’re losing ground,” she said.
“Yes, I think we are.”
“Another day and the whole canyon will be under water.” She looked up the sheer rock walls. There were caves pocking the canyon walls farther up. It wasn’t a solution, but it might be a temporary fix. She could foresee them moving upward as the caves closer to the lake flooded, maybe surviving on fish for a few weeks until the water table dropped and they were able to escape the canyon. That’s if they could find enough dry kindle to burn to keep a fire going. It would be cold and claustrophobic, but she knew they’d get by, if they had to.
But Quinn saw her looking and said, “Don’t bother with that. They’re up there.”
“They?”
“John’s Velociraptors. They nest up there, but they only come out at night. There’s thirty of forty of them, about the size of geese. They went into a frenzy yesterday when I shot down a pterosaur. In fact…” He turned and returned to the cave, Sasha still clinging to his arm. He bunched up her wet tunic and tossed it onto the fire, which was practically a sin when they had so little clothes between them. “Even dry blood draws them on, so we mustn’t hurt ourselves at all.” He took her arms and looked her over very carefully. She was covered in bruises and scrapes, she knew, but the river had washed her clean of blood, thankfully.
“I’m afraid to say we’re really very trapped here.”
She thought about that, then spotted her pack on the floor. She finally released Quinn and knelt down to rummage through it. Everything was soaked through, but the handmade rope the Moja had given them, all three hundred feet of it, was there, and it was intact. If anything, the river water would only have make the homemade hemp rope stronger.
Quinn knelt down, looking hopeful, and took the rope from her. “Good girl!” he said.
CHAPTER 19
“We’re climbing up the canyon?” she said dubiously, watching Quinn uncoil the rope and secure it to a homemade quarrel. Quinn had known bushmen in Africa who used similar methods to scale difficult grades upwards and down, he said. He’d also made a homemade bow with some of the catgut in her pack and a quarrel out of a thick, mostly straight branch.
Quinn checked the sun, which had only just crested the canyon wall. It was edging toward midday. “Yes,” he answered, shielding his eyes. “I’d have preferred starting out earlier, but I don’t think the water table will wait another day.” He looked at her. “Still afraid of climbing, my dear?”
She blanked her face. “No,” she said. She was frightened to death, but the alternative—drowning in the flooded canyon or eaten by raptors—didn’t appeal much to her either. At least climbing she had a chance. She sat down on a rock and watched Quinn secure the quarrel. When he was satisfied the rope was as secure as he could get it, he aimed for a line of scraggly horsehair conifers at the top of the canyon. He had a good eye, but the first ten or twelve times he tried to land an anchor he either snagged some branches that were far too fragile to hold any weight or missed the trees completely. Each time, he reeled in the rope and tried again.
After an hour he was sweating and cursing. The canyon was too far up, and gravity was working against them. He checked the sun, which had just moved past the midpoint of the day, sweat trickling down his forehead and into his eyes. Sasha could see the strain in every line of his face. “I am never going to get this bloody thing right,” he insisted.
“Yes, you will. You can,” she said. She stood up and came up behind him, close, and put her arms about his waist. His entire body thrummed like a bow strung too tightly. “Slow,” she told him, speaking low and intimately in his ear. “Take your time.”
His body relaxed inch by inch in her arms. Finally, he let the quarrel fly.
The quarrel hit dead enter, embedded in a tree protruding at an odd angle over the canyon, its roots securely gripping the rocks.
“I told you,” she said.
Quinn pulled on the knotted rope with all his might, but it held firm. He turned to Sasha. “Yes,” he said. “You did.” Then he took her in his arms and kissed her.
CHAPTER 20
The climb up the canyon wall was an agonizing experience. Sasha had to use muscles she did not even know she had. Had she been a little fatter, a little weaker, she never would have been able to do it. As it was, she had scarcely gone half the way up before she felt like giving up.
She secured her grip around the next knot in the rope and pulled down, while pushing at the knot beneath her booted feet. It inched her up a painfully
tiny distance before she was forced to rest again. Meanwhile, the rope she clung to swayed sickeningly like a pendulum against the almost perfectly flat canyon wall as the wind buffeted her. She had to force herself to keep from looking down. If she looked down, she would be sick, freeze, fall, or all of them at once. The one saving grace was the extra weight that Quinn put on the rope. As he climbed after her, his weight pulled the swaying rope taut. His voice encouraged her to climb another inch up.
The sun was sinking low, the light beginning to mellow and fade. They had maybe six hours before the gate closed, six hours to get back to camp. Sasha pulled down and squirmed her way up the rope another few inches, putting everything she had into it. Above her head lurked a narrow shelf of rock, not quite a ledge. Sasha aimed for it, pulling herself up and over it.
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