Arena (15 page)

She flinched away, unnerved at having her feelings read and noted so casually. His smile did not fade. He wasn’t handsome, but he was strong and bold. A man who could protect you—or not, if he wished.

She backed another step. “I . . . uh . . . have to go.”

Whirling, she strode blindly up the hill, desperate to escape him.

She didn’t like the feelings he ignited in her, feelings she’d never had, didn’t want to have—didn’t think she
should
have. He was on the rebound from Rowena at best—more likely still involved and using Callie as a pawn. If she went on this ride he was suggesting, she would only be hurt. And he was suggesting—no way around that.

“You feel it, too, don’t you?”

Yes, yes!
Pulling at her like nothing ever had. How could this be? She barely knew the man, wasn’t even sure she liked him. And she knew he didn’t care about her. Yet she wanted to surrender, to let him carry her away and—

Callie stopped, drawn from her desperate musings by a sound— something that didn’t belong.

Her companions’ voices echoed as they searched for firewood. Their muffled voices were punctuated by the crackle of branches as they moved and the hollow thunks of their axes. In her immediate periphery, though, all was silent.

Her heart pounded. What had she heard?

Trogs like to sneak up on a person, stalk them unawares.

Stop it!
But the sense of being watched persisted. It reminded her of her first day in the Arena, when she’d glimpsed the alien Watcher. Her new friends assured her that all the Watchers did was watch, thus presenting no real threat. Perhaps one was watching now. Except— she’d
heard
something.

There! A faint buzzing from the stand of juniper to her left. It sounded like electronic sputter. She started toward it, her mind cataloging possible explanations and coming up with few. The last thing she expected to find was Meg.

Her friend stood in the clearing, facing her, still wearing the cream-colored jumpsuit.

“Meg!” Callie cried. “What are you—” “Callie,” Meg interrupted. “It’s me—Meg.”

Strangely her eyes did not focus on Callie but instead on something beyond Callie’s shoulder. And she was too bright, almost glowing in the lavender twilight.

“You must go back to Manderia,” Meg told her. “The canyon is a trap. If you—” She wavered like water, her words drowning in static. “—all be killed—” More static. “—road and go back—”

Slowly the ivory jumpsuit turned gray. Meg’s green eyes swelled and darkened. Her black hair became a bald dome. And suddenly, gleaming against the dark junipers, stood an alien, its black eyepits stalking her.

Gasping, Callie staggered back on leaden legs.

The Watcher lurched toward her, a swift, sharp feint, black pits probing. A dissonant tone rose and fell in her ears—laughter? Panic dissolved the paralysis, and she stumbled away, crashing through the brush, heedless of the branches whipping her face and tearing at her sleeves.

Pain in her throat and cramps in her chest finally returned her to her senses. She stopped and sagged against the rough bark of a silverleaf oak, realizing suddenly that she had no idea where she was. Oak and juniper surrounded her, blocking the canyon rim from view. She couldn’t even hear the river’s roar. In fact, she couldn’t hear anything— no birdsong, no insect chatter, nothing but her hammering heart and labored breathing.

But of course it was dusk, so the birds wouldn’t be singing anyway, and she couldn’t be that far from camp.

The sense of being watched still plagued her, and she searched the shadows intently, determined not to let panic have her again. What had happened? Obviously that wasn’t Meg back there. But it wasn’t all the Watcher, either, for why would it have interrupted itself? Unless it couldn’t maintain the illusion of being Meg long enough. She didn’t think that was the case, though. More likely Meg had tried to send a message—one the Watcher didn’t want Callie to receive.

“Go back. It’s a trap.”

Was the answer in Manderia, then? Was Meg already through and sending Callie one of those holograms Wendell had mentioned? But she couldn’t have served a term in Mander’s temple—or any other temple— this soon. So there must be another way.

Unless it was a trick.

The sense of unseen eyes shivered between her shoulder blades. The shadows were thickening. Soon it would be too dark to find her way back to camp. Fresh fear revitalized her, and she pushed away from the tree, starting back across the ravine in which she’d stopped. As she stepped onto its sandy bottom, a rattle of rock downstream brought her up short. She stood rigidly, listening.

Another rattle. Panic swelled like a chemical reaction, bubbling up and out of its vessel. She was on the verge of bolting when a voice called to her.

“Callie? You okay?”

Fifty feet downstream, Pierce emerged from the oak trees, SLuB drawn. Relief made her weak-kneed. “I saw a Watcher,” she said as she came up to him, embarrassment warming her face. “I guess I overreacted.”

His brow furrowed, but he only put away the SLuB and said, “It’s getting dark. We should head back.”

She went with him gratefully, her mind soon returning to the extraordinary visitation, or illusion, or whatever it was. “You know those holographic messages that are supposedly sent by those who’ve passed through the Gate?” she asked after a time. “Do you think they’d be able to send one out here?”

“Wouldn’t they need a screen or projector?”

“I don’t know. I saw one in Manderia, and there wasn’t anything like that.”

Branches snapped and leaves crackled under their feet, the sounds echoing around them.

“Why do you care?” Pierce asked.

She told him what had happened. “It seemed like an interrupted transmission,” she concluded.

“Maybe it was.”

“You think Meg
was
trying to reach me?”

“Or they wanted you to think that.” He pushed aside a branch as they pressed through a stand of oak and held it until she took it from him. Moments later they came out of the woods into a wide, down-sloping clearing. At its far end, campfires sparkled through a screen of trees, and the warble of John’s harmonica threaded the quiet air. The light was better here. It washed the cliffs a dusky blue gray, except at the rim itself, which was bright orange.

“She told me to go back to Manderia,” Callie said.

“Maybe you should. Maybe we
all
should.” He paused to study the rock walls looming around them and rubbed the back of his neck. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Meg said it’s a trap.”

He looked at her sharply, his hand still on his neck.

She had a sudden suspicion. “It’s not . . . you aren’t feeling—” “Trogs? Not yet.”

Garth and Rowena had another shouting match that evening. It didn’t last long, but it soured the mood, and most everyone turned in early, Callie included. Her sleep was fitful, though, plagued by unsettling dreams. She was motoring along the white road in a golf cart when Garth appeared beside her at the wheel. Suddenly the road turned steeply upward and she gripped his arm in fear, only to find he’d become her father, who told her not to be a baby and stomped on the accelerator. The cart engine squealed, and they lurched up the vertical road until gravity overwhelmed them, pulling the cart off backward, tumbling down and down and—

She screamed and woke up.

When the screams kept on she realized they weren’t hers. The whole camp had roused, in fact, some resting on propped elbows, others sitting up, clutching their weapons and staring at Pierce. He thrashed and raved on his bedroll, and for the first time, Callie made out some of his words. “No! Leave her alone. Leave her—noooo!” The last word keened out in an agonizing scream that abruptly cut off.

No one moved. Pierce lay on his back, panting, one arm flung up across his face. Callie felt sick and cold. What
had
he endured?

After that, sleep was impossible. The hard ground pressed against her hips and shoulders, and she couldn’t get comfortable, could only lie there, mind racing from worry to worry. It was a relief when dawn finally came.

They crossed the Fire River using a hidden shelf tucked behind a waterfall. By noon they had settled at the juncture of two rugged canyons, waiting there while Garth, Whit, and Thor went downstream to Hardluck. They returned several hours later with the confirmation Whit had sought, Garth strutting and crowing his confidence. In three days, he declared—a week at most—they would reach the rim.

The trio brought back flasks of ale with which to celebrate, and before long things got wild and crazy. Callie sat in the shadows and watched. Afternoon cloud cover had turned the world gray, misting them with a light drizzle, and whether because of that or her dreams or the two Watchers she’d seen earlier that day, she found herself reluctantly sharing Pierce’s sense of approaching disaster.

The next day they set out for the elusive Canyon of the Damned. As Garth consulted his map they crossed one deep ravine after another until they came to what the map labeled
Thornwall
. It was aptly named, for as far as they could see, thick, thorny growth scrawled across the slopes, curling around a graveyard of fallen trees. Sometimes they walked hundreds of yards without touching the ground, clambering over dead trunks and thickly matted branches. By midmorning Callie’s dragon-hide vest was a net of scratches, the sleeves of her T-shirt torn in a dozen places. Her hands, arms, and face were bloody, and her right knee throbbed from when she had slipped and slammed it against a hidden log. She was battered, bruised, and exhausted, and her only consolation was that she was not alone.

Around noon they dropped into another canyon and came to a deep, swift-running river.

Pierce forded it first, riding the current downstream and across, and then returning to play anchor on the opposite bank as everyone else pulled themselves over. Afterward, as he and Garth stood together on the bank coiling up the rope and speaking quietly, Callie grasped something of the relationship they must have had before Pierce’s encounter with the Trogs. Garth had been on a downslide after the failure of his mountain expedition, reviled and deserted by most of his friends. But not Pierce. It said a lot for Pierce’s sense of loyalty and courage—maybe for the stock Garth put in him, as well. Or had at one time, anyway.

Leaving the river, they climbed again into the matted underbrush and fallen logs. After hours of toiling up and down and around Callie was ready to drop. More than that, she understood clearly how impossible it would be to find one’s way through this nightmare web of drainages without a map. They spent a chilly, miserable night trying to get comfortable on beds of brambles. With no place to build a fire, they ate trail rations and drank cold water. Sleep, difficult before, became impossible.

The morning dawned damp and colorless, and the group roused their stiff, protesting bodies to continue on. Mutiny rumbled in the ranks, as doubts about the map’s validity were voiced with increasing frequency. The only thing stopping an eruption was the fact that going back was unthinkable.

And then, as the afternoon waned, they slogged over yet another ridge to find their troubles were just beginning. The thorn wall finally ended in an open meadow, beyond which rose the cleft they sought— an immense dark slash carved into the bowels of the earth. Massive curtains of stone overlapped in a gray giant’s corridor hung with shifting mist. Distant harrylike shapes soared through its ragged fringes, and they could just make out the trail, snaking threadlike across the sheer walls until it disappeared into the clouds.

One by one they staggered to a stop, gaping in astonishment and dismay.

Callie swayed with dizziness. The thought of climbing that edifice, of perching on that narrow trail with all that space below made her stomach churn and her hands go cold and damp.

It was a long time before anyone spoke.

Then Rowena exploded. “A road? There’s a road here and we’ve been busting our rear ends for two days over all this”—she motioned to the rear—“
garbage
?”