The Prey (27 page)

Sissy starts to move toward that sound. I grip her hand tighter, stopping her. She pauses. Then tugs my hand. I grip harder.
Don’t move
.

But she’s insistent. I crawl up until my body is pressed up next to hers, my mouth by her ear.

“Don’t,” I whisper.

Then she’s moving, scuttling closer against me until her lips are grazing against my ear. “Where are we?” she whispers.

“Don’t know. Dangerous.” I feel something pressing up against the side of my leg, in my pocket. I reach down, take it out. A plastic tube. I examine the contours using my tactile senses. A GlowBurn, it has to be.

Sissy’s arms move down, stopping at her boots. I hear the whisk of leather, then the short clink of metal. She’s taken out the daggers she keeps hidden in her boots.

“I have a GlowBurn,” I whisper. “It was in my pocket.”

I hear a faint rustling of clothes, then Sissy says, “Me, too. What’s going on?”

“We need to be quiet. And still.” I feel her nod against my cheek.

“Don’t use the GlowBurn,” she says. “Not yet.”

I squeeze her hand back.

We lie still for another minute. Again, I hear the breathing, louder now, disturbed, less rhythmic. Sissy starts moving ever so slightly. She’s sweeping her legs, trying to figure out her surroundings.

What’s going on?

Our eyes scan the blackness, urging shapes to emerge out of it.

Instead, there is a sound: a cough in the darkness, short, almost like a sneeze. Sissy’s body tightens like a cord. Another cough, this one somehow transforming into a short snarl that fades gradually into silence again.

Then the recommencement of small puff-snores, more labored and frail now.

Sissy’s hand grips around mine. I know her need; it is the same as mine.
Get out of here
. Wherever
here
may be.

Carefully, we stand up. We edge away from the faraway sound of breathing, our arms stretched out in front of us. We shuffle our feet slowly, careful not to trip over any object that might be lying unseen on the ground. My hand hits glass. A pause as Sissy’s hand also touches glass. Then she gasps.

“Gene.” It is the quietest, most whispery scream I have ever heard. “I know where we are.”

She drops my hand, and just like that I’m alone in a sea of darkness. “Sissy?” It’s absolutely silent. Not even the sound of faint snoring.

I spread my arms out to where Sissy was last. Empty air, as if she’s vaporized. I edge forward, swinging my arms about, meeting only a vacuum. No sign of Sissy, no swirl of gray movement in the blackness.

A heinous snarl shatters the silence, salivary and slicing.

A shout—Sissy’s—then a scurrying noise, followed quickly in succession by the scuttled sound of kicked-up sand hitting glass.

I snap the GlowBurn. A sickly green light blossoms around me.

I’m in the Vastnarium.

Inside
the glass chamber.

Inside with the dusker.

A blur. Sprinting across the prism, right at Sissy. Its raven hair flowing back from its white face, fangs protruding out.

Sissy’s hand is already flinging a dagger. A glint of reflected light as the dagger twirls toward the dusker girl.

Midflight, the dusker doubles over, crumpling to the ground and screaming a loud, high-pitched wail.

A
clink
as Sissy’s thrown dagger smacks against glass. She missed.

I look back at the dusker. It’s crouched and wailing, shielding its eyes. And then I realize. It’s cowering from the green light. Strange: its reaction is more pronounced now compared to yesterday when more than a dozen GlowBurns were shining. Must be because the glass wall filtered out the more painful wavelengths. But now with no glass between it and the light, the dusker is fully exposed. This pale faint green is like razors in its eyes.

“Your GlowBurn, Sissy! Use it! The light blinds it!”

She whips it out, snaps it into operation. Green light fans out, illuminating even more of the chamber. The dusker screams.

I waste no time. I pivot, run to the glass.
The door, where is the door?
But the glass wall’s smooth and unbroken surface offers no hint of a door. I bang on the glass in frustration. Diamond-hard, no give at all. And then I see it, right there in front of me, the outline of a door, faint, as if merely etched into the glass. My hands scamper all over it, trying to find a latch, a handle, anything.

But it’s all a smooth nothingness. The handle is on the other side of the glass, the keypad on the other side, everything is on the other side. And that is when I see the elders. And Krugman. Sitting on the other side, gazing at us with excitement brimming out of their eyes. Faces lit up in the faint glow of green. They gave us the GlowBurns for their entertainment. To better view the spectacle of our deaths. I pound on the glass in anger.

“Gene!”

I spin around. The dusker is crouched, eyes crunched shut against the light, its pale skin greenish and splotchy.

“Don’t speak, Sissy! You’ll give away your position!”

And proving me right, the dusker propels off its hunched legs, leaping toward me, arms flung out, fingers with pointy black nails splayed out like poison-tipped arrows flying toward me. I fling my body to the side, ungracefully landing on the side of my face.

The dusker flies by me, its long hair gliding across my arm like a caress.

It smashes into the glass, its head whiplashed violently backward. For a split second, it’s glued to the wall like a splattered frog before sliding down, limp. But even now, it is pushing off its arms, concussed eyes squinting to find me. It shrieks with a rabid, earsplitting screech.

I roll over, jump to my feet. Sissy is grabbing me as we race to the other side.

“There’s only one way out of this,” she says with grim lips.

“It’s coming back—”

“No, listen!” She wrenches my arm down, almost right out of the socket. “There’s only one play. Let it come to me. I’ll hold onto it as long as I can. While it’s distracted, you slice its neck from behind with this,” she says, handing over the dagger.

I try to pull my arm away even as I feel the cool handle slide into my palm. “No—”

“There’s no other way! Rip it true and deep—”

“—
I’ll
grab it then!
You
slice it, you’re better with the dagger.”

“Just listen, listen,
listen
! Don’t fight with me. Only one of us is surviving this. You know that!”

“Then you—”

“Don’t let Gene die!”
she shouts just as the dusker hurdles toward us with wet bloodlust.

Instinctively, I throw the dagger; at the same instant, Sissy throws her GlowBurn. The dagger strikes the GlowBurn right in front of the dusker’s face. The GlowBurn explodes in a spray of glowing green, splattering right onto the dusker’s face.
Into
the face, burrowing deep like spits of molten lava into a sheet of ice.

A hellacious scream screeches along the glass walls. The dusker lands between us, balled in pain, its hands scrabbling, crawling at its eyes. A pungent smell rises, burning and corrosive. The dusker will want to, will need to, wash off that burning liquid.

My eyes immediately shift to a flat, mirrorlike plane of water. At the far end of the chamber. It’s the opening to the U-shaped well through which it receives food delivered from the other side of the glass chamber. Where, just yesterday, the teacher had pushed through the sack of meat. Down one vertical shaft, across a short horizontal bridge at the bottom, and up the other shaft.

The dusker starts crawling toward the water.

And suddenly, I realize: that’s our way out. It’s so obvious, fear must have cramped my brain. It’s our
only
way out. And we have to get there before it. We have to get there now, already, done, finished.

I grab Sissy’s arm, pull her. No time to explain.

But she’s trying to get to the dagger on the ground, thinking this an opportunity to kill the dusker. I pull her against me, half carry her to the other side.

“What are you doing?” she yells. “This is our chance—”

“I’m saving
us
!” I say. We’re at the well now, less wide than I thought it’d be. Looks to be just wide enough, for her. For me, we’ll have to see.

“Remember this well opening? U-shaped, goes ten meters down, curls around at the bottom, then up the other side.”

But she’s already shaking her head. “We won’t fit, it’s too tight, too deep, we’ll drown.”

The dusker is crawling toward us now, arms outstretched and swaying along the ground. It hears our voices, hisses venomously. The light from the GlowBurns is fading. And with it, time; with it, our lives.

Sissy sees this. “You first,” she whispers.

“No.”

“Gene.”

“I’m not leaving until you get in there.”

“No.
Don’t let Gene die,
” she says, her eyes fierce with determination.

“And Gene is not going down until you do,” I answer, every bit her equal in resolve.

“Damn you,” she hisses, then grabs me around the neck, her smooth cheek pressing against mine. Then she pushes off and slides over to the cusp of the slot. Taking a deep breath, she submerges herself headfirst. The last I see of her body is her feet, then her toes, submerging underwater, down the well.

For a second, I’m confused. Why is she going down headfirst?

Then it occurs to me. But of course. Of course she’d have to go down headfirst. Had she gone in feet first, the U-curve at the bottom of the well would prove to be far too narrow to curl around. Only swimming down headfirst would enable her to inwardly curl her body around the bend at the bottom before coming up headfirst on the other side.

It’s also an all-or-nothing plunge. There’s no possibility of backtracking now, of coming back up for air, of second-guessing yourself.

A snarl from behind, claws and nails scuffing dirt. Then a silence that can mean only one thing: the dusker is airborne.

I know better than to waste time glancing back. I throw myself to the right, rolling hard even as the dusker hits the ground next to me. I spin my body, unhooking my right arm that’s caught behind my back, fling out my arm. The one still holding the GlowBurn.

The stick is barely glowing, a dying ember that’s barely casting light. But it has enough juice to illuminate the dusker: its face startlingly close to mine, its right eye puffy with white discharge pouring out, but its other eye clear and hungry as it glares at me.

I have one more card. I ram the stick into my mouth and clamp down on it. Then I twist my face away, ripping off the tip. Liquid gushes into my mouth, gooey and sticky and vinegary. I hold it in there.

The dusker leaps at me—

—is on me, straddling me, pinning my arms down, its one good eye shining with victory, saliva sputtering out of its mouth like boiling water out of the kettle spout.

It has me.

And in that split second—as its head drops swiftly down toward my neck, its fangs bared—I’m spitting out the GlowBurn fluid, shotgunning it out of my mouth. Wads of glowing green fluid splatter onto the dusker’s face.

It screams, leaps back, hands covering its face. The sound of something crackling the air, a raw sizzle.

I’m already scrambling for the well’s opening. Can’t find it, not in the darkness. There! A few steps away, where its gray surface ripples ever so slightly. My fingers break through the water’s surface, and I waste no time. I plunge myself in, water—biting cold—rushing past head, jawline, my neck, my shoulders.

And just like that, I’m in. I’m underwater.

The icy embrace of water is a shock to my system, cold fists clenching my lungs, shriveling up the air carried within. The sudden change in environment madly dizzying.

And it’s a tight squeeze. The well barely wider than my shoulders. A panic threatens to overtake my mind even as I try to ignore the terrifying disorientation of being upside down, underwater, inside out with fear. At least I had the presence of mind to go in with my arms stretched out in front of me. If I’d gone in with my head leading, my arms would right now be pinned against my side. I’d be trapped.

Small comfort, though. And certainly no time to be patting myself on the back. Because I’m still hemmed in. My lower (upper now?) body is still above water, my legs kicking air, futilely trying to find purchase. They feel like separate entities, twirling about like tentacles, a thousand miles above me. I envy them, for their access to air. I want to inhale through them like they’re straws.

I hear the snarl of desire, muted, but frightening. Even underwater, I feel the rumble of its intensity rippling through the ice water. It is coming for me. For my legs, anyway. For a moment, I feel an irrational sense of relief. That I’m safe behind my legs, for the buffer they will offer me. The dusker can have at them, so long as it doesn’t get to me.

My brain. My thoughts. Scattered. Not thinking straight.

I start to thrash from side to side. I need air. In my panic, I’d forgotten to take deep breaths before diving in. I’m short of air. Already. I’m only scratching the surface—almost literally—of the distance I have to cover underwater, and I’m already sucking on emptiness.

I twist and turn, trying to dislodge my trapped body, now thinking that I should have stripped out of my bulky, cumbersome clothing before plunging in. I jiggle, squirm. Somehow it works: the twisty motion causes me to slide down a few feet. My palms slide over the smooth, enclosing metal, searching for a grip. I find something, the smallest protrusion: nothing more than a nail incompletely screwed in. But it’s enough, just enough leverage for my finger to pull against and sliver my body down another few feet.

Inch by inch, I pull myself down, until my whole body is underwater. But this is too slow, it’s no good. My eyes open, seeing nothing but blackness, the icy cold like a thousand pins pricking the skin of my body, void of air, this was all a mistake, I have to backtrack somehow, have to resurface, get air, precious air—

From above, something grabs my foot.

I scream. The last remnants of air bubble out of me, like a release of a half-inflated balloon.