“That stream should be shallow enough if you want to wash up a bit.” He points to a ditch at the side of the road. “Just keep an eye out, and if you hear something rattling, don’t move.”
I eye the vegetation-choked trickle. Cadence cackles. A whole section of the weeds start thrashing.
There’s something alive in there.
I stumble back, yelling for Ash. The bike falls with a crash. He sprints over, twin blades flashing silver.
After yesterday’s river monsters, I’ll happily let him take the lead. The Mara might be deadly, but they aren’t nearly so disgusting.
He dives over the edge. Weeds fly. Foul-smelling mud splashes in great, greenish-brown globs.
Stillness.
“Ash?” Rubbing my arms against crawling revulsion, I peer into the ditch.
He’s knee-deep in brackish water and crumpled reeds, shaking. His head is bent, and he seems to be trying to get up, but he slips further into the muck with every movement.
I edge closer, in danger of sliding in myself.
I really don’t want to go in after him, but if he can’t get up . . . “Ash? You okay?”
He makes a choking sound and finally looks up. His face is painted with mud, teeth bared. He kind of wheezes in my direction.
“This.” He lifts an unidentifiable mottled clump. “Your monster.”
He waggles it, first gasping, and then howling with laughter. The thing in his hand is roundish. Stubby, wiggling bits poke out around the edges.
“That—you—gah—” Cadence joins in, speechless with giggles.
They’re laughing at a water monster. Granted, it’s a lot smaller than the river monsters we ran into yesterday.
A lot smaller. Call it a ditch monster? But I bet it could drown you just the same. It’s certainly not funny.
Ash shouts and flings the thing away. It glops back into the mud.
“It bit me!” He snatches his hand to his mouth, gets a good look at the mud covering it, and starts chortling again as he scrambles up the slippery bank.
“What if it’s poison?” I back up to give him space. If he passes out, I’d rather it happen up here where I might have some chance of helping him and not in the bottom of a monster-infested ditch.
“Poison,” Cadence chortles. “It’s gonna get you, Ash. Eat you right up. Just stand still for a few months and you’ll be sorry!”
“Don’t be rude. I’d take at least a year to digest, and you know it. Besides, I’d have to be the one eating it to get poisoned.” He shakes his hand, spattering mud everywhere. “Ouch, I think it drew blood.”
Then he looks past me. His smile drains away in an instant. Ditch water spatters the dust. “My bike!”
He races past, monster bite forgotten. I check the bank for signs of pursuit.
Ash hauls his evil, two-wheeled contraption upright easily enough. Unfortunately, one of the charging panels stays behind. In pieces.
A lot of pieces.
“Ouch is right,” says Cadence.
Ash scrubs his face, smearing mud, and jerks his hand away with a hiss.
Not sure how a little more mud in the monster bite could hurt at this point, but what do I know?
I nudge the shards of the bike’s charging panel with my toe. “Maybe we can fix it?”
“Sure. I’ll just carve some moulds, melt it down over a campfire, and rewire it with plant fibres.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Not in a million years. No, don’t kick it. We’ll take the pieces back for scrap. Someone will be able to do, uh . . .Well, something. Can’t leave it here or the turtles might really turn into monsters.”
“Turtles?”
He raises an eyebrow. “You don’t remember them either? Of course not.”
“They bite,” Cadence sputters, clearly still overcome. “Turtle-monsters. Venomous snapping turtles . . .” She dissolves into giggles.
“You know we don’t get those. Probably just a little love bite from a Northwestern Pond or Western Painted. Must’ve given the poor little guy a good scare.” Ash looks at his bike and sighs. “This’ll slow us down, though. Give me a few minutes to change before we hit the road. And—maybe just stick close. The turtles won’t do you any harm, but there could be rattlers around.”
I nod intelligently and wait until he’s out of earshot. “Not a monster?”
“Not even close. Just an animal. They have those out here.”
“But it hurt him.”
“Wild animal. They’ll do that.”
“Are there many?”
Cadence makes a sound I can’t interpret. “Once. Maybe again, one day.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The wind rustles the roadside plants. Dirt skips across my shoes and patters against my legs.
“They’ll fill you in when we get home.”
“You mean when we get to Ash’s home.”
“ . . . whatever.”
I FALL ASLEEP ALMOST as soon as Ash lets me stop walking.
The connection to the charging unit on the other side of the bike turns out to have been damaged as well. That, along with a cloudy—and, more than once, rainy—afternoon, means we won’t be able to ride again for another day at the earliest. At least Ash strapped the stupid pack to the back of the bike while he pushed it. I got hot enough just carrying myself all day.
I’ve been learning a lot of new things: there are wild animals outside the city—yet another bit of nature I’m not too keen on. They can hurt you, but that doesn’t make them monsters, and there used to be lots of them, and might be again one day. I hope “one day” isn’t anytime soon . . .
Also: if you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything. The spicy stuff Ash carries, isn’t all that bad, actually: kind of savoury, and chewy. Though I sort of miss Noosh—Refuge’s bland, ground-bug-based liquid diet. Cadence says it’s because I was indoctrinated and lost all sense of taste.
I fold another piece of smoke-preserved dried something-or-other into my mouth to prove her wrong.
Another thing I never really wanted to know: ditch water smells even worse after a few hours in the sun. Sweat is also unpleasant. There’s something called “chafing” and also, similar but evidently worse because it’s on your feet, “blisters.”
Morning comes with a whole new crop of small hurts to add to the too-slowly healing old ones. I let out a yelp when try to I stand. Ash hurries over to help. Cadence won’t stop laughing.
“Should’ve let Hatif come along after all, huh?” Ash says cryptically, if sympathetically.
“Liam, right? I don’t see what good hauling him along would do,” Cadence says.
“Mm? Oh, right. You were gone by then. Hatif can dream-weave too, now. He’s not as strong as you . . . were. But he’s the best healer on our squad. Qareen—Orisa, you’d remember her as—can do a little weaving, too, but she likes fighting a little too much to really master it.”
Dreamweavers can heal? Why did no one tell me this before I lost my magic?
“Didn’t seem important at the time,” Cadence says unrepentantly. “I never really trained as a healer anyway. Boring stuff. All chores and no fun.”
Ash gives me a strange look. I flinch at its intensity, and discover a sudden need to inspect my fingers. It’s obviously her he’s really trying to see.
“I didn’t know you felt that way,” he says quietly.
“Sounds like things turned out for you, anyway,” Cadence says, louder, brasher, as if to make up for his careful tone. “Two healer-gifted on your squad? Impressive. They’d come in handy right about now.”
It’s Ash’s turn to flinch. “Not their fault. They’d have wanted to come, if they’d known there was a chance you’d survived. We were told you’d died, but I knew you had to still be alive.”
He trails off—giving me time to wonder just what would have happened if he hadn’t stubbornly clung to belief in my survival. Most likely, I would have proved him wrong sooner rather than la
ter.
“It’s just . . .” He takes an uneven breath, lets it out again. “Mogwai is captain now. You know her—or, Cadence, you remember Zoe. She’s great. She just doesn’t really know it yet. It wouldn’t have been fair to her if I’d hijacked our first solo mission.”
“So you thought you’d, what, sneak off on your own and make sure I was really dead?” she says.
“You’re not dead, Cady.”
“No? Then what am I?” She sounds more exasperated than angry.
I don’t buy it. But I’m more curious about something Ash said. “Did you?”
He blinks at the sudden change in topic. “Did I what?”
“Sneak away to come find us. Won’t that get you into trouble?”
Ash’s injured bike seems to summon him—he turns to it without answering. He takes his time inspecting the remaining charging panel in the morning light and brushing dirt from the grimy spokes.
“We should get going,” he calls over his shoulder. “I’d hoped to reach home today, but the power’s only up to five percent. Could take us another two, three days if we have to walk most of the way.”
Having some skill in redirecting uncomfortable conversations myself, I know a diversion when I hear one. I also know what it means—it had cost Ash something to come for us.
Just how much, I have no way of knowing, but judging by Cadence’s conspicuous silence, it could be a lot. Or maybe she has no idea either and she’s just being mysterious to mess with my head. The smothered snicker she lets out at that thought doesn’t clear matters up.
I do what I can to help Ash get us packed and moving again. Just walking hurts at first, until I loosen up enough to take in my surroundings. We’ve moved away from the river, and the mountains, though I can see higher bits of land in the distance, when I can see anything at all.
As far as I can tell, nature consists of tall, dark, spiky trees that cut off the sun, lower, fluffier trees and bushes that make it hard to see where you’re going, not to mention nearly impossible to actually get where you think you’re going, and dry flat bits where there’s mostly dust and low-growing stuff like grasses and little patchy bushes that snag your toes and scratch your calves and trip you up when you least expect it.
Then the whole thing repeats—big trees, little trees, flattish, dryish bit, more trees—oh, and also the other kind of flattish bits that are very, very wet. And extra-bug-infested.
Between the boggy patches of our route and the intermittent cloudbursts Ash insists on marching straight through, I’m not sure my clothes ever fully dry out. We’re getting low on food, we’re completely out of clean clothes, and both sitting and standing are now equally miserable, which is making me bizarrely jealous of Cadence’s smug incorporeality.
So, of course, she can’t help rub it in at every opportunity.
To keep us from bickering, or maybe just to distract me, Ash tells stories about his home. Some are about us as kids. Cadence likes those ones because they’re all about her. Even when they’re about her getting in trouble, or more frequently, her getting Ash and everyone around her in trouble, I can tell she loves it. But there are other stories, stories about what it’s like in Nine Peaks now, and what it’ll be like for me when I get there.
I know these aren’t real stories the same way I knew Cadence’s tall tales couldn’t be real even back when I was trying to be a good, mindless drone in Refuge. They’re too bright, too warm, too perfect. Things aren’t like that in real life. And every time he tells me how much everyone is going to love me, and how great it’s going to be, and how happy I’ll be once we get to Nine Peaks, all I can think about is how they’re really all waiting for Cadence. How disappointed they’ll be when I show up instead.
But three things keep me going past the dread and the bugs and the blisters and the chafing and the itchy, sweaty, too-many-days-without-a-wash grossness of it all.
There’s Ash. He’s just so happy about all of it, even the miserable bits. And also, utterly relentless. Part of me hates to disappoint him.
There’s Refuge, and Freedom, and Ange, and Under. They’re counting on me. If Ash’s home is where I can get help and regain my powers, the sooner I get there, the sooner I can get back to defeating the Mara.
And then there’s that stupid, hopeful part of me that keeps getting me into trouble. That guilty, childish wish for someone to take all my troubles and make them all better.
What if I get to Nine Peaks and everyone is just as happy to see me as Ash says they’ll be? What if it’s like coming home—for real?
I know better than to believe it’ll be as great as he says. But I can hope.
Chapter 8: Cloudburst
A new crop of blisters later, I’ve been unwillingly introduced to rattlers (reportedly dangerous, obviously horrifying, avoid in future), not to mention squirrels (less dangerous, actually kind of cute), spiders (only sometimes dangerous, but extra next-level horrifying), and an alarming number of very-dangerous-looking creatures with spikes sticking out of their heads that both Cadence and Ash insisted were not only animals and therefore not monsters, but generally harmless. I’m pretty sure they were joking.
Decidedly not harmless are the assorted water monsters we have encountered inhabiting everything from a marshy patch on the flats to a stagnant, overgrown pond, to a barely-there trickle of creek and a small but bridgeless river. That last time, we barely managed to drag the bike through without further damage or loss of life. So far, speed, caution, and Ash’s blades have carried us through safely, but I’d hate to be out here without him.
Ash has also taken to singing a marching song called “Sunny Sunshine Coast” every time it rains, which happens at least once a day. Feels more like once an hour. Cadence joins in with excessively creative harmonies whenever she feels like it—which seems to be most of the time, despite the fact that she’s not doing any of the actual marching.
I didn’t notice at exactly what point they drifted into making up their own lyrics, having tuned them out for the sake of my sanity—Cadence drops a few beats to cackle at that—but I just caught them rhyming “Mara-taken” with “eggs-and-bacon” and now I can’t stop listening.
I think I might’ve been humming the tune in my dreams last night.
Okay, maybe not just in my dreams. It’s catchy, even if I refuse to learn the lyrics. Or make any up. Though I do think they could’ve come up with a better rhyme for “taken” than “bacon.”
“Cole thinks we’re bad songwriters,” Cadence says. “She thinks she can do better.”
“A lyrical battle the likes of which the world has never known,” Ash chants to the rhythm of the song, which by no coincidence whatsoever is also the rhythm of our steps. “As we march through the mountains hmm-somethin’r-other alone.”
“Weak,” Cadence says, at the same time that I look pointedly over my shoulder and say, “I thought the mountains were back there?”
“Something-something-something-and-genius-all-un-shown,” he continues sadly, but with a glint in his eye.
I snort, and then he snickers, and suddenly all three of us are howling ourselves to tears in the pouring rain.
I lean on the bike to keep upright, my stomach aching with laughter. The frame shifts under my arms, nearly dumping me to the wet ground. Ash grabs my shoulders and pulls me away, shouting the song’s lyrics again from the start over the sound of rain and our laughter as he gallops in circles with me in tow, spinning us in dizzying whirls up and down the road. Between the singing and the laughing and his prancing antics, it takes me until the end of the sixth verse to realize we’re dancing.
I jerk away with a gasp and stand swaying, the rain suddenly sharp against my skin.
“Cole? What is it?” Ash comes a little too close.
I take a quick step backward, hit a slippery patch, and go down hard.
“Don’t,” Cadence says when he reaches for me again. “She just needs a minute. We’re fine.”
So he just stands there i
n the middle of the road, shoulders bowed, looking lost and suddenly, terribly tired. His hair is slicked down with rain and his power is sleepy, barely a shimmer in the depths of his eyes.
And I sit in a puddle and watch him, wondering about what could have been.
What we could have had, if I hadn’t lost who I was and become who I am in a world where you weren’t supposed to look, never mind touch. If I hadn’t learned that dancing was all about desperation and power and control instead of the natural outpouring of joy and freedom and fun that Ash had made of it, if only for a few careless moments. If I had become someone who had learned to heal, instead of someone who only knows how to hurt and be hurt.
Ash sits down beside me, apparently without regard for the wet ground soaking through his pants like it has mine. Not too close, and not angled in. Not watching me, just . . . there.
“Sorry,” I say, small and so quiet I’m not sure he’ll hear over the drumming of the rain.
“Don’t you dare,” he says without turning his head. “Don’t you apologize for how you feel or what you need. Not to me. Not to anyone.”
My face gets hot and my eyes sting, and I’m glad he’s not looking at me. I feel . . . miserable.
It would have been better if he’d yelled, or hit me, or ignored me altogether. Now I feel like he’s done all of those things and more, and I can’t even blame him for it because, as far as I can tell, he was trying to help.
But instead, it’s like he’s just put one more expectation on me that I have no idea how to live up to. One more way that I can’t be who and what I should be. And I hate it. I hate feeling this way and I hate thinking these thoughts and I hate that the one thing I thought I was meant to do was ripped away from me almost as soon as I found it.
And I hate the cold fear that whispers all day and all night that Cadence is right, and she would have done better.
“You’re right,” Ash says, as if, like Cadence, he’s taken up permanent residence in my head and is listening in on every thought. “I came back for Cady. Finding—finding what I did was . . . It was a shock, sure. There’s never been anything like this before, not that I know of. How could I have prepared for—for you? But, Cole—”
Black the Tides Page 5
