Those Who Fall

by Rachael Arsenault

  A few feet away, Tara opened her eyes, the glow of scrying fading. “Still not much. It looked she was searching the woods for something, though.”

  “Well, then go back in until you actually find something,” Emily snapped.

  Tara glared at her, but didn’t argue. She didn’t always take Emily’s bait, and I was grateful for that — if she did, they would fight twice as often as they already did and I may have actually been driven to throttle both of them. A couple seconds later, she was focused and scrying once more.

  Emily grabbed my elbow and dragged me a couple more feet away, hissing, “She’s texting someone. All the time.”

  “That’s not exactly a crime.”

  “You don’t get it! Look.” She pulled a phone from her back pocket. The case, which was white with galaxy-overlaid text reading the limit does not exist, made it instantly recognizable as Tara’s cell. “I made her take the password off her phone, so I can check it whenever. She was texting like crazy before we went to sleep last night. But look at her messages.”

  I sighed, but took the phone anyway. While I looked through her text conversations from last night, Tara came out of her second scry complaining that she still wasn’t positive where Farida was and Emily once again yelled at her to continue scrying. When Emily turned her attention back to me, I held the phone out for her to take, shrugging. “So what? She was texting her mom and one of her brothers. Big deal.”

  “Yeah, and she only sent, like, three messages between the two conversations. That doesn’t make sense, Amber. She has to be texting someone else and deleting the messages.”

  I scoffed and shoved the phone at her chest, rolling my eyes again as I grumbled, “God, you’re paranoid.”

  “I’m not—”

  “I think I got something!”

  My stomach churned with a strange mix of nausea and fear and elation as I rushed over to where Tara was sitting against a tree. “Where? Where did you see her? Is she okay?”

  “Calm down! Give me a sec,” Tara panted. She wiped a shaking hand across her sweaty forehead. It was the first time I had ever seen her look truly strained from scrying; a twinge of guilt pierced my gut. “Okay. So, she’s near some kind of campsite, I think. There was one of those lean-to things you’ve been making, and she bent down to pick up a tin cup or something.”

  That was a punch to the gut.

  “What’s that expression?” Emily asked cautiously, eyes darting between Tara and me. Obviously, she was still on edge from our earlier conversation. “She still didn’t give us a real location.”

  “No, but I think I know where it is. It… It might be where we camped before Masika…” I swallowed thickly. First the bridge, and now the campsite. We had given it a wide berth during our long days of walking after we left the farmhouse, but I knew we had travelled relatively close to it. Passing through that area a third time couldn’t be a coincidence. Drawing a deep breath to still my nerves, I looked between the two of them as I added, “This is the second time Tara has described a place that sounds like somewhere Farida and I have been before. I think she’s retracing her steps.”

  Emily frowned, crossing her good arm over her slinged arm with a wince. “Why?”

  “I dunno. But if we can catch up to her, we might find out.” I was buzzing with anticipation, a mix of hope and excitement and dread. Turning to Tara, I said, “Thank you. Seriously.”

  She stiffened and laughed awkwardly, gaze flicking to Emily and then to her feet. I stifled a sigh. I really needed to work on Emily’s over-the-top paranoia.

  “Let’s hit the skies, shall we?”

  I stepped away from the two of them to focus in on my stone. I couldn’t help the nervous fluttering in my stomach. I hadn’t used any magic since our last flight and I couldn’t help worrying that I was about to screw it up somehow. Maybe calling him last time had been a fluke. It wasn’t like I had a good track record with this sort of thing.

  But as I closed my eyes and concentrated, I found it was actually easier — the stone burned less and it didn’t feel quite as much like a section of my chest was being torn open when Ddraig burst into existence.

  “Ddraig,” I murmured, eyes fluttering open. The beast turned to me, looking a little less massive now that he was surrounded by towering trees. His golden eyes were keen. I remember Farida calling her grey heron something — Bennu? I’d never questioned it or considered where the name came from. Now it seemed like I was learning that same kind of knowledge from attuning myself deeper and deeper into my creature’s magic.

  I nodded to Ddraig. “Let’s go.”

  He responded with a slight bow of his scaly head.

  ~

  It was easier to appreciate the scenery sprawled out below us now that it was light out and I wasn’t on the brink of unconsciousness. Still dizzy, yes, but not at risk of falling off the dragon and plummeting to my very messy death.

  A chill wind bit at our cheeks as we flew, the dim sunlight unable to warm us at this altitude. The rivers were glittering serpents winding along forests and rocky outcroppings, occasionally bridged by the cold grey concrete of roadways that filled with gleaming, ant-like cars as morning traffic got under way. I wondered how many people noticed us flying overhead, how many realized we weren’t a plane or a giant bird.

  “Down there!” Tara called back to me. We were in the same arrangement as before, since Emily still had limited grip and balance while her arm was healing. “Can we land that close to the highway, though?"

  Now came the tricky part. Last time I landed Ddraig, I had just picked the first clearing that came into sight, purely so we could get some sleep. This time, I needed to be a bit more careful, especially since we were in broad daylight. Tara was right: Landing Ddraig too close to the highway would cause mass panic.

  “If you need to land us into the woods,” Emily said, “I should still be able to use my data to look up where we are on a map, as long as I have some sort of signal. We can reroute on foot from there.”

  “Is your data good for that?” Tara shouted back.

  “5 gigs, baby! I’ve got data for days.”

  “If we can even land in the woods,” I said.

  “We’ve done worse.”

  She wasn’t wrong, unfortunately. There wasn’t much worse than being sideswiped and earthquaked.

  I mentally instructed Ddraig to descend. We managed to crash our way down through a mostly leafless section of the canopy a few kilometers east of Farida’s last known location. Thankfully, Ddraig bore the brunt of the impact, though I still had to shield my face from the debris of shattering branches.

  “Okay,” Emily said, pale and shaken as I helped her down from my dragon’s back, “I may have underestimated how much that would suck.”

  “You need a minute?” I asked gently once Ddraig had vanished back into my stone.

  She shook her head.

  “Too bad,” Tara said, already sinking to a seated position. “I need a minute to scry again.”

  “You just scryed!” Emily said.

  “And I want to make sure we’re still on the right track. Or would you rather wander blindly through the woods for a while?”

  While she settled in, Emily and I walked over to one of the nearby trees to sit and lean against its massive trunk. The trees around us had lost most of their leaves, so that the canopy wasn’t green or the vibrant colours of fall, but instead a series of skeletal branches clawing up at the blue sky. The fallen leaves that littered the ground were damp and slimy from recent rain, and I somewhat regretted sitting on them.

  “It’s still bothering you?” I asked, gesturing to Emily’s shoulder.

  “Yeah. The guy who snapped it back in place said I should take it easy for a few weeks and should probably get a sling. The sweatshirt is working alright for that, but…” She gave an awkward tilt of her head that I think was supposed to substitute for shrugging. “It’s gonna be shitty for a while yet.”

  “No, it won’t — we’ll
get to Farida soon. She’s a healer.”

  “You’ve mentioned that.” Her lips quirked up in the slightest of smirks. After an uncomfortable pause, she said, “I sure hope I approve of her once I finally get to meet her.”

  I frowned. What was that supposed to mean? Emily had always been a pretty open and accepting person — her vitriol and distrust toward Tara was as odd as it was annoying. So why would she be concerned about “approving” of Farida?

  Before I could question her on this, however, Tara was shouting, “She’s in trouble!”

  I scrambled to my feet. “Is it the police again?”

  “No — worse. Someone else who works with Arman. I think. I’m not sure. I didn’t know anyone very well aside for Patrick.”

  “And Destiny,” Emily grumbled, accepting the hand I offered to help her up. I chose to ignore her comment and, thankfully, Tara did, too.

  “How far is she?” I asked.

  “I dunno, exactly. Probably a few kilometers. We’ll have to double check on a map.”

  As Tara rattled off the approximate location to Emily so she could plug it in on her phone, I bit my lip to keep from screaming as crushing, desperate panic consumed me. “A few kilometers” was far. “A few kilometers” took time. And we didn’t have time — Farida needed me right now. “We’ll never get there in time on foot!”

  “Then call your dragon again.”

  Just the thought made me feel exhausted; my head was already throbbing, my limbs stiff and twitchy. “I can’t. I’m tapped out.”

  “Well, we’re not getting any closer by standing here worrying about it,” Tara said.

  I looked at her properly then, meeting her steady gaze. Her eyes were wide and filled with fear; she was terrified to walk into whatever fight she had glimpsed through scrying. But I also knew she would do it anyway. For me. For Farida.

  She was right. I wasn’t going to get anywhere by complaining and panicking. I would have to put one foot in front of the other, as fast as I could, and hope I wasn’t too late. Squaring my shoulders, I said, “Alright, let’s go.” And I set off into the woods.

  “Map said we should go this way!” Emily called.

  I whirled around, cheeks burning, and followed her lead.

  Chapter Eleven

  “How are we doing for time and distance?” Tara asked. She was walking ahead of Emily and me, not encumbered by a backpack (like me) or an injury (like Emily). As she spoke, she turned to face us, walking backward. Just watching her made my calves hurt. I was glad we had a few days rest so the bruising on my left leg could settle into a persistent but manageable ache.

  “Hang on. Let me check.” Emily deftly unlocked her phone with one hand, something I had never been able to do with my own phone because of my short fingers. Once she checked the map again, she said, “We’re a little over halfway there.”

  “How much longer is that?” I asked.

  “Half an hour-ish?”

  “Half an hour,” I sighed, wiping sweat from my eyes. “Cool. Great. We can make that.”

  But whether or not we could keep going for another thirty minutes wasn’t really the question. The question was whether or not Farida would still be around after that much time had passed. The fight was probably long since over by now, which meant she was either victorious and well on her way, or she had lost and was—

  I didn’t want to think too hard about that.

  As we continued walking, moving further and further away from the highway that I was used to following the edge of, the trees around us grew less skeletal and became intermixed with evergreens, forming a thicker and thicker canopy to block out the sun. It made the air in the woods cooler and easier to breathe through our exertion, pleasantly scented with pine needles, but the underbrush was also getting denser. It tangled persistently around our legs, determined to stall our progress, and I found myself wishing, not for the first time, that there was a nice, clear-cut hiking trail that could lead us straight to Farida.

  And then, miraculously, there was one.

  “What the hell?” Emily muttered. We all slowed to a stop.

  A path had been carved through the undergrowth, stretching out on our left so far that it disappeared into the darkness of the dense trees and we couldn’t see where it began. It curved past us and continued on straight ahead. But it didn’t look like someone had cut their way through, or like a car had plowed through here, or anything like that. It was like everything had been uprooted and tossed aside, leaving the dirt below exposed and crumbling — and much, much easier to walk over.

  “Should we follow it?” I asked hesitantly.

  Emily did her strange head shrugging motion again. “It’s going in the right direction, at least for now.”

  “But this might be from whoever’s fighting Farida,” Tara said. When Emily and I both turned to look at her, she bit her lip and sort of wrung her hands. “Well, it was hard to tell from what I saw during my scry, but it seemed like the other person was making plants grow up around Farida to trap her.”

  “Great,” Emily bit out sarcastically, her part-curious, part-suspicious stare shifting into a full-out glare. “Could have told us a little sooner that being completely surrounded by trees might be dangerous with this person.”

  “Give her a break, Emily,” I said with a tired sigh. “Farida’s gone deep into the woods. There’s no way we can follow her without surrounding ourselves with trees.”

  Emily let out a huff of air through her nose but didn’t say anything else.

  We headed off along the path.

  ~

  We were able to pick up the pace now that we weren’t stumbling and struggling through undergrowth, which had been especially difficult for Emily since her pained arm and makeshift sling was making it challenging for her to rebalance every time she got tripped up.

  It was certainly a nerve-wracking hike, though. I was all too aware that this path had been made by someone and that someone had attacked Farida — and would probably attack us if we ever caught up to them. My senses were on high alert. At one point, a bush to the side of the path had rustled suddenly and I’d screamed, whirling around to go into the defensive. But it turned out to just be a squirrel bounding through the woods, as startled by our presence as we were by it. Later, shafts of weak sunlight filtering through the canopy gleamed off something slick and red and my heart stopped — but it was just a brightly coloured fall leaf still wet with the morning’s dew.

  I hoped Farida was okay.

  I wasn’t sure how much time passed when I started to hear a faint rushing sound that I couldn’t identify. It grew louder the further we walked, not quite the same as the roar of the distant ocean when I would walk down the road to the beach from my grandparents’ house. That sound was more rhythmic, where this one was constant and relentless. Was it traffic? Had we accidentally hiked straight back onto the highway?

  Then the path ended, but the weirdness did not.

  A tangled mass of roots and wildflowers were wound around a tree trunk. It looked like something had torn free from them, leaving their severed ends blackened. More patches of black dotted the ground and surrounding trees, and there were odd, too-straight-to-be-natural clusters of vegetation shooting up from the earth. The scent of burning wood hung heavy in the air, mingling with the smells of fresh mown grass and churned dirt.

  “This must be where they fought,” I said.

  Tara was frowning as her eyes darted around, taking in the scene. “This isn’t where I saw them. There was water nearby — a river or something. I couldn’t tell.”

  The rushing noise suddenly made sense.

  “Come on,” I said, pushing forward through the undergrowth, heading toward the sound. “Let’s keep going. See if we can find anything.”

  We only had to walk for a few more minutes before the glimmer of water peeked at us from between the trees. The roar had grown to the point of being near deafening when the trees parted to reveal not merely a river, but a waterfall. O
ur footing was precarious as we approached; the ground shifted into a steep hill that the trees stumbled along, growing at harsh angles and digging their roots in stubbornly. Massive rocks waited below, ready to split our heads open if we fell. And the fast-moving water would wash it all clean, carrying the blood down stream.

  “There’s no one here!” Emily said, raising her voice to be heard above the crash and roar of the waterfall. She kept a careful distance from the incline. I didn’t blame her — I didn’t trust my balance on it even without an injured arm.

  I kept scanning the area anyway, desperate for some sign of her. I couldn’t shake the image of her tumbling down that embankment onto the rocks. If she had fallen, her body probably would have been swept away in the current. My eyes caught on every gut-twisting, heart-stabbing clue like a macabre game of I Spy or Where’s Waldo. The scorched branches of a tree, the long line of charred dirt streaked across the ground, the trunk of another tree gnarled and warped into a grasping cage.

  Then I caught something on the other side of the stream — down the embankment. Red, smeared across the bark of an evergreen.

  My heart stuttered. Blood. Whose? Farida’s? Or the kid she had been fighting?

  When I pointed it out to the others, they were less enthused. Shrugging one shoulder, Tara said, “That’s kind of to be expected. They fought. There’s blood. We haven’t found anything new.”

  “It could be a trail!” I insisted. “We need to see if there’s more bloody patches like that.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  It occurred to me that, with the steep hill and huge rocks, that was a distinct possibility in this endeavour.

  “I don’t think we can risk anyone climbing down there to check a hunch,” Emily said, pinning Tara with another one of her scowls. When I opened my mouth to protest, she held her hand out in a “hold on” gesture. “You guys have magic. Isn’t there a way you can use that to see what’s down there?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. I don’t have Harry Potter magic. We can’t—”