Arena (7 page)

As she came over the top Callie staggered to a halt, astonishment sucking her breath away. A range of rugged, snowcapped mountains reared up to the left, presiding over an endless expanse of barren mesas, wind-scoured spires, and terraced sandstone cliffs. A hot breeze whipped her face, tousling tendrils of hair before her eyes. Clearly her Disneyland theory had to be revamped. This was no mere stadium, no “arena” in the usual sense of the word.

“Imagined something a bit smaller, did you?” Pierce stopped beside her and squinted at the vast landscape. The wind pressed back his brown hair, exposing a white wedge of untanned skin on his forehead. “I figure this Arena, as they call it, is about the size of the western half of the U.S.”

“And we’re supposed to cross it in a couple of hours?”

“If that’s what you’re thinking, Miss Hayes, you’re in for a major disappointment.” Slinging his rifle over one shoulder, he started across the sandstone, paralleling the mountains.

Maybe time’s skewed here
, she thought as she hurried after him.
Maybe five years here is only a few hours back home
.

Pierce set a brisk pace, but Callie matched him easily. She had taken pride in being one of the strongest girls in the university hiking club, often outdoing most of the guys. Feeling the need to redeem herself after the bumbling of yesterday, she kept abreast of him and spoke conversationally.

“So if you’re not looking for a gate, what are you and your friends doing out here?”

“Hunting. Townspeople will give fifty E-cubes for a dragon horn.”

“Townspeople? There are
towns
here?”

“Lots of ’em, once you get past the Outlands.”

“And where is that?”

“Couple hundred miles that way.” He waved toward the vista on their right. “These mountains are the Arena’s outer boundary. Everything’s inward from here.”

They walked in silence for a bit, and then she said, “What about that Benefactor the manual talks about? The one that’s supposed to help you get through the Gate?”

He grunted.

“It plainly says you need his help to get through it.”

Pierce kept his eyes on the rumpled terrain. “Too bad it doesn’t say what he looks like or where you’re supposed to find him.”

“Well, I’d think somewhere around the Gate—”

“Like sitting under it?” He flashed her a disgusted glance. “Lotta good that does if you can’t get up to it.”

“Maybe he’s the one who—”

“Besides, how could one guy be in fourteen places at once?”

“Maybe it isn’t one guy.”

“It specifically states there is only one legitimate Benefactor.”

“He wouldn’t have to be in fourteen places at once. They probably know when someone’s approaching.”

“Oh, and they just beam him to the right place, is that the idea?”

“You don’t have to be snide about it.”

He shook his head. “You’re just a rookie. What do you know?”

“At least I’m not choking on cynicism.”

“Wait a few years.” He paused, then added, “You’d better walk behind me. A person can stumble into lots of nasty things out here if she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

Stung, Callie dropped back.

They hiked all morning, saying little. Not only did the wind make talking difficult, but Pierce’s unflagging pace became a challenge for her, after all. He only stopped to point out potential dangers—and he had not exaggerated the perils of the mesa top. Stretches of apparently solid ground hid holes of “dry quicksand” that could swallow the unwary traveler in less than five minutes. A head-sized rock tossed onto one such deceptive pan vanished in an instant.

Then there was the redclaw—low thickets of thorny, ash-colored branches from which stretched hidden runners. Each ended in a woody, football-sized pod that lay open and ready for action, its jaws snapping shut with enough force to drive their serrated edges into the demonstration branch Pierce used to trigger it. After that the runner slowly retracted, dragging its prize toward the distant thicket to be digested. It presented little threat to a man with a SLuB, but the pods were devilish to pry loose from one’s boot.

There were also a number of cacti, from ankle to shoulder high, all equipped with poisonous spines. The plumes of cactus grass, called fountainweed, she had already met.

As for the fauna, the primary predator in this region was the rock dragon. A big female with as many teeth as a crocodile stalked them for an hour before Pierce dispatched it. Callie watched in morbid fascination while he deftly skinned it out.

She learned that the red crustacean-insect things were sand mites, and they flushed tens of them at a time from the grass throughout the morning. Pierce shot every one of them, and finally Callie asked if he was trying to impress her or something.

“They’re drawn to your book,” he explained, ignoring her jibe. “If I didn’t shoot them, they’d be climbing all over us.”

They stopped for lunch near a seep in a bank of tiered sandstone. Pierce stomped through the surrounding weeds, flushing out mites and killing them before he settled beside her on a flat stretch of rock. “There’s probably a den nearby,” he said, portioning out flatbread, lizard jerky, and dried fruit. “There usually is around water.”

As Callie poured him a handful of cookie pellets from her second Snak-Pak, she asked why the sand mites wanted the manual.

“To eat it. I think they like the ink.”

“So they bite.”

“A big one can take off your thumb. They get agitated enough and a den of ’em will clean your bones in half an hour.”

They ate in silence after that, Callie nervously eyeing the weeds.

When he finished, Pierce stretched out and fell instantly asleep. She regarded him with amazement.
Surrounded by perils, and he just switches
off?
Of course, he had lived five years in this world. Maybe it was safer by day than by night.
Now there’s a cheery thought
.

She ate the last of the pellets, then stretched her shoulders and pulled off her soft-soled boots to massage her battered feet. Though the boots showed surprisingly little wear, they provided neither support nor protection against the hard ground, leaving her toes bruised, her heels aching, and the balls of her feet already blistering.

Rubbing the arch of her right foot with both thumbs, she squinted across the down-sloping mesa. In the distance loomed the blue-shadowed face of another canyon wall. Beyond that, the red and ochre plain stretched to infinity. There was no sign of any gate, though without her glasses, she couldn’t be sure.

The vista reminded Callie of a family vacation taken before her parents’ divorce. It had been desperately hot and the car must have overheated, because they’d stopped in the middle of nowhere. She remembered how the air had danced and jittered over the dark, empty road as it ribboned through a vast white salt pan.

Mom had panicked and blamed Daddy. Why couldn’t he think for once? Why couldn’t he be responsible? He’d slapped her silent. Callie remembered how red and sweaty Lisa’s face had been, her eyes round and wide as she’d watched her parents argue. Mom stomped off to the other side of the car, but Daddy gathered Callie and Lisa on the shaded side of the car and drew them stories in the salt. He often entertained them with his stories, drawn as eloquently with his finger in the soft white sand as with pen and paper. Once the car cooled, they went on. And afterward Daddy had made a painting of that day—white ground under a hot orange sky with a tiny car and four tiny people beside it. He’d called it “Breakdown.” Only recently had Callie understood the metaphor he’d intended it to be.

Grimacing, she put away the past and pulled out the manual.

Pierce sat up fifteen minutes later. His eyes flicked to the book, his expression stony. Then he said, “This would be a good time for you to try out the SLuB.”

“Try out the—but—”

“Killing and bloodshed don’t appeal to you, huh?” Irony laced his voice. “Well, that was home. This is here.” He reached across her to snag her pack and pull out the SLuB. “You should know how it works.”

He showed her the black ON button beside the trigger. “You line up peg and notch on your target to aim. Fire in short bursts or it’ll overheat. The blue E-cube is your power source. When it turns pink, you have to replace it.”

He popped the cube out in demonstration, snapped it back in, and offered her the piece.

She eyed it distastefully.

He cocked a brow.

Well, he had a point. Right now she was totally dependent on him. If they ever did see another road, she wanted to be able to go to it with or without him.

Gingerly she took the weapon.

He showed her how to hold it and how to stand, adjusting her hands and shoulders until she had it right. His touch and nearness made her acutely self-conscious, and she was relieved when he stepped back and permitted her to shoot.

She wasn’t as bad as she expected to be, and even Pierce seemed impressed. When they finished, he suggested she keep the weapon out, so she slid it dutifully under her belt—

And noticed her manual scuttling across the ground toward the sandstone bank.

As she leapt after it, understanding caught up with perception—a sand mite had it, lofting the slim volume with dark blue pincers. She followed the creature around a bend in the rock and saw it was headed for a large hole in the bank ahead. Pierce yelled something, but her attention was focused on the manual. Without thought of what might lie in that hole, she dove for the manual and caught it on the threshold. The mite released one claw from the prize to snap at her. Sitting down hard, she dodged the snapping pincer and worked to pry the other off the book. Abruptly the creature let go and clamped on to her thumb. Gasping, Callie dropped the manual.

A rapid clicking issued from the den as a second, larger mite burst from the darkness to seize the fallen prize. Suddenly Pierce was at her side, stomping book and bioform with a heavy, booted foot. She heard the crunch of exoskeleton as he jerked her upright and pulled her away.

“The manual!” she cried.

Cursing, he snatched it up and shoved her forward with his free hand. “Get out of here!”

Eyes smarting with the pain of the pincer still clamped to her thumb, Callie hurried around the bank. As she reached their gear on the rock she was panting hard. Pierce was already there, scooping up the packs and his rifle and urging her onward.

Together they scrambled over the tiered bank and up the mesa. Glancing back, Callie was horrified to see a tide of red bodies inundating the flat rock and clambering over the first bank in pursuit of them. With both packs slung over his shoulder, Pierce fired into the advancing tide, spraying the mites with a line of light that left the front edge of the hoard charred and smoking, while those behind recoiled in a rush of clicking claws. Pinning his weapon to his chest with an arm, he drew his knife, grabbed the mite still hanging from Callie’s thumb, and severed the insect’s body from its pincer. The mite landed on its back, legs writhing. He crushed it.

For what seemed like hours, they raced over hummock and ravine without pause. White light was creeping into the edges of Callie’s vision when Pierce finally let her stop. She collapsed against a mound of sunwarmed sandstone, gasping and dizzy, hardly noticing when he seized her wrist and pried off the disembodied claw with his knife tip. She sagged back, nauseated by a renewed rush of pain, while he rustled in her day pack. Through the pain and exhaustion she felt him apply something slick to her thumb, and blessed numbness swept away the fire. Reveling in relief, she slid to the ground.

“What’s the matter with you?” Pierce’s voice came low and tight. “Didn’t you hear me tell you to stop?”

She looked up at him. “It had the manual.”

“You should’ve let it go.” His blue eyes flashed. “The stupid thing’s not worth dying for—and they would’ve killed you.” He tossed her pack into her lap and walked away.

Callie pressed her lips together, smarting from the reprimand and feeling unjustly accused.

How was I supposed to know?
she thought at his back as she pulled herself upright.
I’m just a rookie, remember? And I’m not losing the manual,
no matter what you say
. I’m
not the one who’s spent five years wandering
through this nightmare because I didn’t follow instructions
.

She followed him up a steep grade, nursing her indignation. Gradually, though, other thoughts intruded—that he was partially right, that she should have used more sense, that he could have hung back and let her pay the consequences of her folly but instead had come to her rescue. Again.

Most curious of all was that he was the one who’d saved the manual.

Some time later, he stopped so suddenly she ran right into him. Recoiling in embarrassment, she started to apologize, then saw he wasn’t listening, at least not to her. He stood rigidly, staring over the sunbaked mesa.

She scanned the landscape in sudden alarm. What was it? Rock dragon? Harry? Something else? Something worse?

She glanced at him again. The breeze toyed with his hair and parted his beard, but beyond that he might have been stone, his eyes glazed, as if he searched with an inner sixth sense.

At length he unslung the rifle to hold it before him and started on.

“What?” Callie asked, moving at his side. “What’s the matter?”

He regarded her as if he’d forgotten she was there. An expression of—horror?—spasmed across his face.

He shook it off. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

“Don’t tell me it’s nothing.”

“It was a false alarm, all right?” Irritation sharpened his voice. “Forget it.” He lengthened his stride and drew ahead of her.

They crossed a rocky ridge and dropped into a ravine, heading up its dry bed toward the cloud-wreathed mountains. Callie’s abused feet welcomed the smooth sand, and she hoped they might stay on it awhile, but Pierce soon stopped again, crouching over something on the ground. As she peered over his shoulder he touched an apelike footprint in the sand.

Humanoid, but not human. Could a Watcher have left it?

His fingers—long and expressive—moved to a depression beside and behind the first track, then to another farther away. Telling her to stay put, he climbed the hill, occasionally stooping to peer at the ground. He searched the other slope as well, then stood on the ridge, gazing into the distance. She was about to slog up after him when he turned and skidded down the slope to her side.