Rift (50 page)

A swamp. Mitya’s imagination grabbed hold of Marie’s words, spinning them into a vid. He saw the great trees with their feet in brackish, black water, the nets of moss, the darting hordes of gnats, and—far in the distance—the screams of the savages come to claim the booty of ship and crew.…

And that was the least of her tale, followed as it was by the pursuit of the savages across the Forever Plains; then her hooking up with two oddball clavers, an addled fellow and a grimy girl; and finally being captured by pirates and imprisoned in the old Jupiter Dome. Marie described the hideous jinn, and their bloodthirsty leader who called himself Dante. Mitya was horrified and fascinated by the vision of the ruined dome with bodies hanging outside and children being hurled from the towering vats of the terraform plant.

By subterfuge Marie had persuaded the leader to take her and Reeve Calder to the Rift to rejoin the Stationers, a journey on a great river through canyon lands with birds swooping over the deck of the three-masted sailing ship. Then Reeve had been lost when enemy clavers swarmed the ship late one night, and Marie, alone and bereft of Reeve, whom she loved like a son, had sailed on in the company of pirates, who’d threatened to kill her if she should fail in her promise to persuade “King Gabriel” to make the Jupiter Dome whole once more.

When the time had come for Marie to leave the ship and head overland to the camp, she persuaded Dante that King Gabriel might take alarm at an armed force
approaching and that therefore he should accompany her personally—and alone—to the great meeting between kings. There Dante could explain the extent of his realm and all the benefits of trade between their two people, and describe how the holds of his ship were bursting with rich presents. So Dante and Marie set out on foot, leaving the jinn to guard the ship and wait for their return, when they would bring along with them King Gabriel’s finest engineers, for whom fixing the “dome home” would be as easy as turning on a flashlight. She told of how their long hike through the toxic red lands of the Rift made Dante sick, despite the breathers they used, and how, in a rage, he threatened to kill her for the suffering they endured. And how finally she had fled from him and how, with Dante gaining on her and fearing for her life, she’d called out her name to Frank Dias, who, when he saw the claver stumble into the clearing, shot him, and nearly killed Marie as well, for by then she was dressed in rags and looked nothing like the old Marie, a close associate of Cyrus Calder in the life before.

When she had finished, a long silence fell over everyone as each listener thought of all Marie had endured and all she had been privileged to see. Finally someone ventured, “You are a lucky woman, Marie. To survive the crash and such a journey.”

She smiled a thin, mirthless smile. “It should have been Reeve Calder sitting here telling this tale. I wish it had been.” She looked down at her hands. “I am an old woman.”

“A good night’s sleep fixes most things, Marie,” someone said softly.

“Sleep fixes nothing. You’re a fool to think so.”

As someone helped her to the showers, the crowd watched her leave, the rousing tale soured by the ending. But for Mitya nothing could spoil the wonder of it all, and he went to his pallet thinking of how he would
have faced the dangers of that journey, and if he would have done so half as bravely as Marie Dussault.

“Extra guards tonight,” he heard Lieutenant Tsamchoe say, and a squad of crew hefted their rifles and filed out of the air lock to guard against jinn.

5

Dooley skittered along like a rabbit in his burrow. “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” he urged. The lamp hanging around his neck swung wildly, making the tunnel walls appear to pulsate as though they were crawling through the gut of a gigantic—and never-ending—snake.

“A man wasn’t meant to run on his knees,” grumbled Spar.

“If Gregor catches us, you won’t
have
any knees,” quipped Dooley, “and if you don’t think Gregor is coming after us, you don’t know him very well. As soon as they find the hole in the wall, they’ll be after us. And after he makes me clean up the mess, he’ll bust me back to ranks and make my life miserable, which he’s really good at—if being good at misery makes any sense.”

“Young nitwit,” Spar muttered.

They had been on the move for an hour, with Loon following Spar and Reeve bringing up the rear. Reeve’s hands were already bleeding, torn by sharp rocks and by a splinter of bone from a previous tourist of the grand tunnels. But in spite of the discomfort, from the moment Dooley’s head had emerged out of the misty lake, Reeve had been filled with exaltation. The tide had turned. Somaforming in the Mercury Clave was not to be their doom, not if these tunnels led upward to daylight.

Loon stopped in front of him. “Bleeding?”

He didn’t think she could see his bloody hands in the semidark, but he held them up to her. “Yes, a little.
You?” He was starting to speak like her, he noted: the short phrases, speaking exactly what he felt, no room for embellishment—or pretense. She answered him by touching his face with her hands, dry and dusty, and not torn. In many ways she was tougher than he was, and he loved that toughness, her natural relation to the wilderness and its rigors. And now, as Reeve knew, her relation to the new, reverted Lithia.

Dooley had taken a turn into a side tunnel, one in a series of tributaries that led ever upward. As he turned the corner, it threw Reeve’s portion of the maze into sheer blackness. He stumbled into Loon. He patted her leg by way of apology and crawled on, thinking of the shape of her calf, her legs, strong and muscular and wrapped tightly around him.…

Up ahead came the sound of swearing.

When Reeve and Loon joined the other two, Spar was cursing Dooley, and then suddenly he was lunging for him, so that Loon had to insert herself between them to save Dooley from a blow to the face.

“You son of a jackass!” Spar barked, reaching past Loon to plant a swipe at Dooley’s head.

“What?” Reeve asked.

“What? What?” Spar growled. “It goes
down
, that’s what. The tunnel is headed
down
again, and nitwit here, he don’t know where he’s goin’!”

Dooley had pressed as far as he could into the dirt of the tunnel wall, whimpering.

Reeve sidled next to him. “Dooley, where are we headed? Is down the way to go?”

“I … don’t know. I
told
you I don’t know.”

“We thought you did.”

“Well, I don’t. I was just hurrying to get away from Gregor. He’ll be after us, him and his thugs. Then we’ll be in for it!”

A snort from Spar punctuated a longish pause, and Reeve whispered, “We thought you knew.”

“Turn off the light,” Spar said. “Save the juice or we’ll be worse than lost—we’ll be lost in the dark.”

Dooley obeyed, plunging them into absolute black for a few minutes, each with their own thoughts. A spindle of dread poked at Reeve as he considered the unpleasant possibilities.

“All Brecca said was
Go north
,” Dooley said, “and when we first set out from the room I knew which way north was, but then we got all turned around and everything, so I …”

“So you just kept crawlin’ to the middle of nowhere!” Spar finished for him. “I’d throttle you now, ’cept I owe you our lives, stinkin’ little that they’re worth.”

“
Brecca
is behind this?” Reeve asked.

“Yes, Brecca—who did you think? She said to get you two and slice you out of the Pool. She said Loon is her own genetic destiny, and no one should tamper with her, not even the ministrator herself. So then I came and got you, but I brought along your friend—that was the part I decided, to bring your friend so you wouldn’t be separated. Now I wish I hadn’t.”

“Dooley,” Spar said.

For a moment Reeve thought Spar was going to apologize. But he said: “What was that Brecca said ’bout north?”

“She said we should go north, just north, and the tubes would feed outside.”

Reeve slumped against the wall, knees drawn up to his chin in the confining space. “What good does
north
do us? We’re blind as moles.”

“No we ain’t,” Spar said. “Not blind at all, long as we got Mam.”

“You know the way out, Loon?” Reeve asked.

“No, she don’t know the way out—how could she know?” Spar snapped. “What she knows is
north
.”

“Turn north, then,” Loon said.

“We’re not going north?”

“No.”

In the profound silence that followed, Spar said: “All the way down from the Stoneroots, she kept us on course for the Inland Sea. Straight as an arrow flies. Mam knows which direction is which, and she don’t need no little gadgets. She just knows.”

The sound of scuffling, and Reeve felt his legs stepped on. Loon was crawling past him, heading back the way they’d come.

Dooley snapped on the light to watch Loon scuttle away.

“How does she know?” Reeve asked.

“By the taste,” Spar said, heading out after Mam.

Dooley was pulling on Reeve’s foot. “Here’s the lamp. The leader should wear it.”

“I don’t think she needs it, Dooley.” But he took it for himself, strapping it around his neck and lighting the way for the three of them, trying to keep pace with Loon, now far ahead in the tunnel.

Reeve wasn’t sure if Loon could get them out of their maze, and if she could,
how
she could. It didn’t seem likely she could taste direction, but it might have something to do with magnetism, he reasoned, and if she could sense that, they might have a chance—that is, if the rock they were traveling through had not cooled at a time when the planet’s magnetism had reversed, as it had occasionally in its geologic past. But their choices were slim to none. He followed Spar, trusting in Loon’s good sense and her extraordinary body.

Side vents gushed cool air at them from time to time, announcing alternative corridors that sometimes led steeply upward. But Loon never paused, taking a route that soon was impossible to remember, sometimes plunging downward and once involving their digging out a collapsed section—requiring the group to pass rocks along, one to the other, before crawling on.

After several hours they agreed to rest. They
switched off the light and lay exhausted in the sensory-deprivation chamber of their dirt prison. Loon crept into Reeve’s arms and seemed to rest, while Dooley’s unnaturally amplified breathing filled their ears.

Reeve must have dozed. He awoke to Loon’s voice. “Many people,” she said.

Trying to wake up, Reeve repeated: “People?”

Loon was scuttling down the tube.

The three men followed her, catching her excitement. Reeve could smell a change—a freshening of the air, infused with oxygen. He gulped it in with conscious gasps. His eyes started to work again as he made out the contours of the labyrinth, and then a searing hole in the dusky world appeared up ahead. Reeve slumped against the shaft for a minute, staving off a ferocious headache, letting his eyes adjust.

“By the Lady,” came Spar’s whispered voice.

And then Loon’s throaty, triumphant voice: “The sun is back.”

Indeed, when Reeve slithered forward to join them at the egress hole, the first thing he saw was the sun, a startling gold disk commanding a blue sky cleansed of ash. The four of them gaped at the world.

“I
thought
I had one life left,” Spar said, smiling, “less I can’t count no more.”

They looked out on a narrow canyon filled with a ragtag mass of people, many huddled around campfires and others sitting and chanting.

“Curry, curry,” the chant came from far below them.

“We gone crazy or what?” Spar muttered.

“Mercury,” Dooley said. “They’re chanting for Mercury Clave, because they’re hoping to be let in. This happens every time there’s an eruption—people line up to get in.” He tittered, his old enthusiasm returning. “Not like you folks, so eager to get
out
!”

A movement outside, and they craned their necks to look along the flank of the cliff. Below them, Brecca
had emerged onto a rock shelf to view her new batch of volunteers. The crowd stirred below her, and the chanting intensified.