The Rift - Howard Chris - Страница 33

I reached a junction I recognized, but I couldn’t go that way. Couldn’t face Crow.

And I couldn’t even think about Alpha.

I knew what it’d be like—the drowning. I knew that feeling all too well. Something clogging you up and cramming your insides. There could be nothing more wicked and no worse way to die.

Suddenly, I was crashing out of the tunnels and back into the bottom of the crater. The party had ended. The Festival of Lights all but burned out. Folks were fading into the holes in the rock, done for the night, and I glanced at the ledges that wound out of the earth above me. I saw stars, but no sky lights flashing. And too late, I turned back to the mud. Too late, because she’d seen me. I heard her hoot and holler, and then my pirate girl was running down the rock ledges towards me. Until she ran straight into my arms.

“Where’d you go?” she yelled. The music had stopped, but Alpha still seemed to be dancing. She reached her hands towards the sky, and she beamed and rolled her head back as she brought her arms down around me. I could feel her breasts shaking through the fur she wore. Her flesh warm and wet. She kissed me, and she tasted so smoky and sweet.

But I was numb. Cold. Like I was the one who’d turned solid.

Alpha pulled at me, easing us together.

“What’s wrong, bud?” she said.

I shook my head.

“This about Kade?”

Guess my head shook some more. Hell, I don’t even know.

“He’s all right, and that’s all. You don’t need to be jealous.”

“I ain’t jealous,” I whispered. I glanced around at the stragglers who had yet to retire. Too-tired angels. Eyes half closed and dreaming.

“So you want some privacy?” she asked, a sly look on her beautiful face. And her skin was so radiant. So perfect. And so precious to me.

She was too juiced up to see the panic eating at my insides. “Come on,” she whispered. “I know just the place.”

As we walked, Alpha tugged off her furry jacket and made me swap it for the shaggy pink vest they’d given me.

“That’s more like it,” she said, pulling the vest on, and she looked so much like she used to. Like she had when we very first met. And that crazy vest looked gorgeous on her. It killed me. I mean, I should have laughed. Should have laughed so loud that I howled at the moon.

Couldn’t even force a smile.

She led me upwards. Higher. Around and around the inside of the crater. We walked without speaking. Her hand in mine. Alpha hummed the tunes that the steel drums had been playing, and her voice sounded so pretty, it smashed a hole in my heart. I wondered how much longer she’d be able to sing and talk to me. How much time did we have left? Months? Weeks?

Till the spring, I thought. Just like before, when I’d been searching for Pop. I’d had until springtime. Only I’d found Pop early, and had still been too late.

When we climbed out of the crater and into the night, the strange world greeted us in silence. I stared up at the black sky and the distant stars, and I glanced at the frozen trees I had made. The branches had lost their sparkle and were so easily broken, and I knew they were just faking at something. Just holding on to what was not meant to last. Because in the spring, these trees would melt and they’d vanish, and just be a tale to be told.

But I remembered how this place made things whole again—the silvery mud had fixed me and Pop, flesh wounds and saplings. It had healed us, this Burning Wheel medicine straight from the earth.

The Healer could figure it out, I thought. Clutching for some hope to hold onto.

Yeah. She’d work it out. We just had to give her enough time.

Alpha pulled me into the trees, and we huddled beneath the canopy of a shimmering oak. Our breath puffed white, the air coarse and cold, but I was sweating against the thick fur on my skin.

“They’re stunning,” she said, staring up at the brittle limbs of the ice-carved trees. “Every one of them. Metal forests, ice forests. And next, it’ll be the real thing, right?”

She turned to a tall spruce, ran her hand at its frozen needles. “What kind’s this?”

“Evergreen,” I said. “Means it stayed the same through the seasons.”

“You build any fruit trees? Apples?”

I shook my head, and she turned to me, her hand finding mine. “I don’t want you to stop building, you know, even if there are real trees all over someday. You can’t ever stop.”

“Like anyone would give a damn if I quit.”

“I would. I couldn’t stand it—it’s a part of you, Banyan. A part that’s so special to me.” She leaned in close, shutting her eyes and lifting her face to the thin light of the moon, and the rays caressed her cheekbones and the tops of her shoulders, and I knew she was nearly as beautiful as the world was cruel.

“Aren’t you gonna kiss me?” she whispered.

When I opened my mouth, no words came. Our lips touched instead, sealing the words inside me, and as I kissed her, the words seemed to writhe in my gut. Because I’d meant to tell her. That had been my first instinct. But then I reckoned this was my burden, an ugly cross I should bear by myself. It was the least I could do, to protect her from knowing. I would keep her close by me, and try my best to snatch us ahold of some cure.

She pulled me towards her. Tighter. Pressing her body against me. She was so soft and so warm in the cold sharp night. And when she tugged open her vest, the moonlight slipped down her body.

It should have been everything. It should have felt like every dream I ever had, coming true. The huge moon and bright stars, the trees and mountains. Two hearts beating, and two bodies moving as one. My hands on her hips. Suddenly knowing what I was supposed to be doing, feeling such purpose. It should have been perfect. But it was ruined. Twisted and tainted. As if the purple fist of GenTech probed in my belly, snatching out all my goodness and switching it for spite. GenTech and their backwards science. Their power to give life and then steal life away. This was their fault. All of it. And I should never have hunted them trees to begin with. I should have stayed in Old Orleans and just been happy only ever wanting this girl.

I kept kissing Alpha until I was drunk on her kisses. Until my brain quit hurting and my heart slowed down. And my mind grabbed hold at that one thought before it drowned in all of them. The one thought that just might keep me afloat.

I thought of the Healer and her moss and mud potions. There would be a cure, and she’d find it. It had to be so. If this was a disease, we’d make a remedy. And I’d not lose Alpha. I swore that inside me, right next to the secret that made me so heavy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I woke up the next morning to a kick in the shins.

“Come on, hotshot,” Kade said. He was standing above me, and Zee was stood right beside him. “They’re waiting.”

“Who’s waiting?”

“Your friends,” he said. “The old fossil and the rest.”

I stood up, uncoiling my limbs from Alpha’s. The two of us had been sleeping in the cave I’d started to call my own, and I stared down through the steam at her, wishing I could shut down and start over.

But this nightmare weren’t one that let you wake up.

“What do they want?” I said.

“Called a meeting.”

“Who? The Elder?”

“Not the Elder.” Kade stuck his thumb at his chest. “Me.”

“Well, you can go on without me. I got nothing to say to you.”