The Prey (7 page)

“This is what we’ll do,” Sissy says. “We break up into two groups. We look for a clue, a sign, anything. The Scientist must have left us something.” She looks around, then hikes into the depths of the cave, Ben and Jacob in tow.

“All right, you two,” Epap says to David and me. “Let’s go this way. Eyes peeled, guys.” We head off perpendicular to Sissy’s direction, along the bank, following the river.

*   *   *

Hours later, there’s nothing to show for our efforts. The terrain makes walking difficult, with loose rocks seemingly designed to sprain our ankles scattered everywhere. David, Epap, and I proceed slowly, not wanting to miss anything, but we spend most of the time with eyes fixed in a narrow cone of vision on the ground, negotiating around stones and slippery moss. And though we’re heading toward what we hope is the cave’s exit, after two hours, there’s still literally no light at the end of the tunnel. If there even is an end. The river plunges down into a succession of large bowls at three different tiers, the descent steep and treacherous. Several times, we have to sidetrack considerable distances to get around huge boulders. We slip often on moss-laced rocks, our hands flailing wildly, grabbing at towers cloaked with flowstone and at tall rocks with scalloped surfaces. Eventually, our path is completely impeded by a wall of fluted limestone, massive and algae-skinned, ten stories high. The river snakes through a relatively narrow opening and into another tiered series of waterfalls. We head back, bodies hunched over with fatigue, starvation, and discouragement.

The other three are sitting in a column of sunlight near the waterfall when we return. Judging from their drooped shoulders and dour faces, they haven’t fared much better. They hand us our share of lunch: a few berries they’d found that we scarf up eagerly.

“So much for the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine,” Epap says. “No food, no milk, no honey. Not even any wood to burn.”

“We should head outside,” Jacob says. “Follow the river out.”

“We just did that,” I reply. “Tried to, anyway. It’s farther and more difficult than you think.”

“It’s our only move,” Jacob says, glancing at the waterfall. “We can’t backtrack—we’d have to climb up the sides of this waterfall, and they’re way too steep and slippery. But we can’t just stay here, either. We need food. We should leave now.”

“No.” Sissy says this without looking at us. “We stay here.”

“Sissy—” Jacob begins to say.

“Look! I’m staying,” she snaps. “You go if you want. I’m staying.”

Jacob clams up, hurt shooting into his eyes. “I only meant—”

“I’m not arguing with you, with any of you! There’re only two things we need to do, okay? Find some kind of sign left by the Scientist, and keep Gene alive. Is that simple enough for you to understand? This is our life distilled down to its rawest elements right now. Find a sign, keep him alive. Two things, people.”

We sit stunned by her outburst. She walks away, her chest heaving, disappearing behind a large boulder.

I follow her. She’s staring into the waterfall, arms crossed against her chest.

“Hey,” I say, as gently as I can. I step through a short narrow pathway between two boulders.

She doesn’t reply, only bites her lower lip, just half of it; the other half loops out in a fat curl. Her eyelids shut halfway, and a tear spills out that trails down over her cheekbone. She doesn’t turn away as I thought she might. Her hand rises—to wipe the tear away, I think—but stops in front of her lips. She half-cups her mouth, her fingers quivering, her lips collapsing. Now she turns away from me, just as I see her face breaking.

The pressure has gotten to her. The burden of all their lives carried squarely on her shoulders alone.

I place my hand on her. She doesn’t move away as I thought she might, but leans into my hand, the curve of her shoulder fitting perfectly into the cup of my hand. Her flesh is soft, but there is a fierceness in it, too, in the thin coat of hard muscle and the solid protrusion of jutting shoulder bone. She turns and looks at me with a fierce intensity. It is the kind of attention my father taught me to always avoid. Eye contact meant you were at the center of a person’s attention; get out of it, fade out of it, move away.

But I cannot look away. I never realized how aquiline and beautiful her eyes are.

“I feel like I’m failing everyone, Gene.”

“You’re being ridiculous. We’d all be dead by now if it weren’t for you.” I move closer to her until I can feel heat thrumming off her body. “I’m with you, Sissy. I want to find him as much as you do. If not more.”

For a moment, something swims across her eyes that is yielding and soft.

It’s too much for me. I flick my eyes away.

We don’t speak for a few seconds. Then she shakes her head. “I feel like I’m missing something obvious,” she says. “Something he’s left behind. A clue, a sign. Something right under my nose. Like the games he used to play with me.”

A strange jealousy rises in me. So he had played the same game with her. I thought I was the only one.

“Everything okay, Sissy?” It’s Epap on the other side of the narrow passageway. Sissy pulls away from me as Epap slides between the boulders.

“Is everything okay?” he asks again, peering intently at her.

She wipes quickly at her tearstained cheek. “Fine,” she murmurs and brushes past him. She slips through the narrow passageway.

Left alone with me, Epap gives me a sharp look. I tuck my head down, walk by him. When I return to the group, Sissy is already sitting next to Jacob, ruffling his hair, smiling. Jacob laughs.

*   *   *

We’re too tired to move. The beams of sunshine have held up so far, but there’s no telling how much longer they’ll last.

An hour passes; a few of us drift off to sleep.

Sissy suddenly sits up. “Oh, so stupid!” she says, smacking her forehead.

“Sissy?” Epap says.

She doesn’t reply, only walks toward the waterfall. She steps carefully on the wet bedrock around the perimeter of the plunge pool. One slip into the pool so close to the waterfall, and she might find herself pinned underwater by a deadly undertow.

The other boys are waking up now. “What’s she doing?” Ben asks.

Pressed up against the wall to the side of the waterfall, Sissy pauses. Then she steps forward and disappears into the curtain of water.

“Sissy!” Ben shouts, and in the next second we’re all rushing over to the waterfall. Ben is beside himself with worry and it takes two of us to hold him back. We peer anxiously through the heavy sheets of crashing water.

“There!” Jacob yells, pointing to the side of the waterfall where the curtain of water is thinner and frayed.

She is a hazy blur behind the cascading sheet of water. Her arms stick out first, then her head, hunched down against the pummeling water. When she’s pushed through, she’s completely drenched. But she’s smiling with the widest, most sparkly grin. “You guys coming in or not?”

“Huh?” Epap says.

“C’mon, don’t be so scared,” she teases. “I found a cavern back here.”

“Hold on, Sissy,” I say. “How do you know we’re supposed to go in there?”

“Just a guess,” she says, laughing loosely. “And maybe because I found a whole set of dry clothes
and
a rope ladder leading away.”

*   *   *

It’s dark in the cavern. Only a single hazy column of sunlight illuminates the interior. Our clothes are soaked through, and already we’re starting to shiver.

“About those dry clothes you mentioned…” I say through chattering teeth. Sissy smiles, takes us to a basket hidden in the shadows. There’s enough clothes for a dozen people of varying sizes.

“How did you think to look behind the waterfall?” I ask her as we change into the dry clothes.

She slips on a pair of wool socks. “If you’re trying to keep hunters from discovering the Land of Milk and Honey, a waterfall would just about be the most effective lock and bolt. No hunter—assuming it could even survive the waterfall—would ever think to look back here. The Scientist is smart like that.” There’s a twinkle in her eye. “Try to keep up with me, okay?” she says with a smile.

After we’ve changed, she gathers us in the column of sunlight and points up. For a moment, I don’t see anything unusual. Just the single beam shining down like a spotlight from a ceiling overrun with dangling vines. Then I see it: lost among the vines, barely noticeable, a rope ladder.

It’s inside the column of sunlight. In the one place hunters would never think—or dare—to glance up. Yet another lock and bolt.

Using Epap’s clasped hands as a foothold, Sissy hoists herself up. She’s able to grab the lowest rung on the ladder, then swing her feet upward, flipping upside down, her ankles twisting and securing themselves around higher rungs. Her body dangling down, arms outreached, she grabs Ben, now sitting on Epap’s shoulders. It’s not easy, but Sissy is able to heave him up. And in like fashion, we launch ourselves onto the ladder and start ascending, without an inkling of how long and arduous a climb it’ll turn out to be. Had we known, we’d not have set off at so quick a pace.

Only half an hour later, our excitement flagging, our exhaustion gaining, the tubelike walls close in on us. Claustrophobia comes thick and fast. I, being broad shouldered, feel it most keenly. My elbows jab the jagged walls, and even my deltoids get scuffed up. It’s such a tight fit, we’re tempted to jettison our bags. In one particularly narrow spot, I get stuck; even with my arms raised above my head, I can’t squeeze through the funnel. Epap has to push from below, his hands on my buttocks, a supremely awkward moment.

Sunlight in this narrow, vertical tunnel is short-lived, lasting only a half hour longer. The light recedes upward on one side of the tunnel, curved and slow at first; then, with a sudden acceleration of speed, it catapults up and away. Visibility gone, we’re plunged into a heavy grayness. And with the dark comes a precipitous drop in temperature. It’s a strange sensation; the increasing darkness and cold make it feel as if we’re descending into the earth, and not climbing upward, out of it.

“Sissy, can you see an opening from where you are?” Epap asks from below me.

“All I see is a dot of light. A pinprick. Too small to be able to accurately judge distance. But it looks really far away.”

After a few hours of climbing, we take a long break. We loop our limbs in and out of the ropes, securing ourselves. Arms ready to drop off, hands rubbed raw by the coarse ropes, we carefully pass the remaining berries up and down. Ben, above me, can’t still his arms. “They keep shaking,” he tells me, “I can’t make them stop.” His elbows are sandpapered into bloody gashes.

Our bodies are broken, our spirits are down.

Ten minutes later, we start climbing again. After only five seconds, all the searing pain rushes back. It doesn’t feel like we’d rested at all.

9

N
IGHTTIME.
FRIGID AIR
flows down the narrow well. I’m sick. My head is clogged with phlegm. Heat hums off my forehead, melting the ice on the walls into rivulets, like the inside of my drippy nose. We’re paired off, Ben with Sissy, Jacob with me below them, and David and Epap below us. Jacob snores away in front of me, on the other side of the rope ladder, secured by rope, my arms slinked under his armpits. Our bodies are further secured in place by our snug fit against the walls of the well.

“You okay?” Sissy whispers. A long moment of silence passes. “Psst. Gene. You awake?”

“I am. Thought you were talking to Ben.”

“Nah. He’s knocked out. Like a baby. How’s Jacob?”

“Fast asleep. Epap and David, too.”

“That’s good. Are they secure enough?”

“Yeah. Checked them twice.”

“Good,” she says. “Good.” The rope creaks slightly as she adjusts her position. “Tomorrow we’ll be out of here.”

“Think so?”

“Pretty sure,” she whispers. “I know something you don’t.”

“Tell me.”

“Snowflakes.”

“Naw. Really?”

“Yeah. Started about ten minutes ago. Just a few flakes. Felt them on my face, prickling my nose. We must be closer to the top than we think. Snow can’t drift too far down.”

“I haven’t seen or felt anything.”

“I think I’m blocking most of it.”

“Yeah, your hippo butt
is
kind of blocking the way.”

“Ha ha, so funny.”

“I mean, from down here, your hip is so big, it’s, like, caused this total and complete eclipse.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Any bigger, it’d cut off air circulation,” I add.

The rope ladder shakes a little. Finally, she busts out, unable to contain herself. “Stop,” she pleads, giggling. “You should talk. Your butt is so huge down there, it’s like its own entity.”

“That’s Jacob you’re looking at.”

“I said stop,” she says, laughing quietly.

We fall into an easy silence. Ben and Epap snore in rhythm with Jacob’s breathy puffs on my shoulder.

“Hey,” Sissy whispers a few minutes later.

“Yeah?”

“I think we’re getting more light.”

“It’s morning already?”

“No. The light’s silvery. Must be moonlight.”

She’s silent for a few minutes. When I glance upward, all I see is darkness.

“It’s really coming down now,” she says.

“The light or snow?”

“Both. Hold on.” The rope shifts slightly as she moves into a different position. “Okay, now look up, tell me if you can see anything.”

I see the silhouette of her legs pushing against the wall, allowing a faint rim of silver light to filter through. Through that small opening, snowflakes drift down. One lands on my cheekbone. It pricks my skin; I touch it, feel a small dab of water. Minutes pass. More flakes fall through, dreamily, like silver shavings of the moon. A weight lifts off my chest. The space around me expands, slows. The world purer, the angles cleaner.

“Hey, can you tell me something?” Sissy asks. Her voice is as soft as moonlight.

“Go ahead.”

“When we were attacked at the river, one of the hunters mentioned a girl.” She pauses.

For a long time, I’m quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I didn’t mean to pry.”