Empire of Bones (6 page)

Not too far above an altitude of ten thousand feet, Cyrus blinked, squinted, and shielded his eyes. Flying due west, the little plane had caught up to the setting sun.

“Bright,” Diana said simply. She reached beneath her seat and handed Cyrus an old pair of aviator glasses. “Push her a little faster and climb. This is the only way you’ll ever see the sun rise in the west.”

Cyrus put on the shades and did what she said. He pushed the plane harder and climbed higher, until the sun rose above the horizon. Diana actually laughed, and even though the sound was quiet and crackly and filtered through a headset, it made Cyrus feel better.

The plane shook a little more at this speed, battering its way through rough air.

“Did Rupe ever tell you about the Sun Chaser?” Diana asked.

“No,” Cyrus said. “He doesn’t do a lot of telling.”

“It was the first time Jeb helped him,” Diana said. “There was this Greek family, in the O of B but never that active. Close with some of the goofier, more harmless transmortals. Big money. Not just private-island people. Private-islands-all-around-the-world people. But they went nuts. Decided they were descended from the god Apollo and would only let their kids marry kids from families as wacked about descending from gods as they were. So they got more and more inbred, and weirder and weirder. Finally, one son goes nuts and starts killing people.”

“Wow,” Cyrus said. “I thought this was a funny story.”

Diana shrugged. “The Avengel doesn’t usually get involved until a story stops being funny. Anyhow, they’d named this kid Icarus, like in the myth. And he always freaked out in the dark. That’s when he killed people, but he never remembered it when the sun came up. So he gets the fastest plane he can, and he starts flying west, chasing the sun like we are, only he actually keeps up and would even get ahead of it. He only touched down to refuel, and he just flew and flew. He burned through millions in fuel and replacement planes and a network of rogue ground crews, always changing where he touched down, and he just kept going. It took Rupe eighteen months before he caught him.”

“Seriously?” Cyrus asked. “He flew with the sun for a year and half? He was never in the dark?”

“Nope,” Diana said. “Not once. Icarus the Sun Chaser. Rupe said he was all the way nuts and practically blind when they caught him. He thought the guy would be angry or depressed, but he’d burned his eyes so bad, he always had this huge flaring afterimage. He thinks the sun follows him now.”

“Where is he?” Cyrus asked.

“Back in Greece, in a hospital. Jeb said the guy was the saddest killer he’d ever seen. Tons of money, no mind, and the last survivor in his crazy family.”

Even behind shades, Cyrus blinked and turned away from the bright horizon.

“Don’t worry,” Diana said. “It’ll go down again. We’re not flying that fast.”

The sun did set again, but slowly. And the sky held on to its blue for hours, while down below, the ground was swallowed up by the darkest shadow Cyrus had ever seen.

Diana yawned and looked over at Cyrus’s leg. An hour into the flight, Antigone had dragged him back into the cabin and their mother had bandaged it, warning him that they would have to dig the pellets out later. Just a little something to look forward to, Cyrus had thought. And Dan had rubbed his head like he was still a kid. Which he guessed he was.

Horace had been surly, refusing to even look at Cyrus. Antigone had hung the two paper globes from the ceiling to dry, where they looked like a pair of enormous, ridiculously droopy socks. Cyrus hadn’t seen a drop of ink left on either of them.

Nolan and Niffy had been sleeping side by side. Dan had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, both eyes on Flint, who was hog-tied with Niffy’s belt and curled up on the floor. All the vents were open and blasting cool air, but the little cabin had still smelled an awful lot like people.

When the sky had grown black and the time had
finally come to descend, Diana was asleep. Her arms were open in her lap, her head was tipped just a little back, and her shades had slipped two freckles farther down her nose. Her lips were parted slightly. Cyrus twisted in his seat and looked back into the cabin. He couldn’t see Nolan and Antigone, but the others were all asleep. Only Flint’s shoulder was in view, but even he was still.

Cyrus turned back to his instruments, and the darkness on the ground below him. He could see a city web of pinprick lights in the distance, but not a big city, and they weren’t flying that far anyway. He had the coordinates Rupert had given Diana, but nothing else. There were stars above him, but no moon. He hoped there would be lights wherever they were supposed to land, because coordinates were only going to help him so much.

He nosed the plane down a little too quickly, and Diana’s head lolled forward, then tipped toward him. Cyrus leaned over and pushed it back up. No good. Her chin hit her chest.

Oh, well. He’d have to wake her up soon anyway. He wasn’t about to just pick a spot in the darkness and try to land.

“We overshot.” Diana’s voice was quiet in his headphone. She yawned. “Get low out over the lake and come back around.”

“Lake?” Cyrus asked.

“We’re just over it. That town out there is at the far end.”

Cyrus leaned forward and stared at the ground. Then he looked out of his side window. Nothing. All blackness.

Diana tapped a little screen down at knee-level between them. And there it was. Small 3-D mountain ranges made of green lines, clicking slowly forward. A flat space was growing between them, broadening and extending. Cyrus hadn’t paid any attention to the screen before because he hadn’t known what it was, and no one had told him to.

“Nothing’s that flat but water,” Diana said. “I normally hate these things. I’d rather fly with my eyes. But it’s nice on a night this dark, and without a lit strip.”

Cyrus nodded, as if he had often flown and landed at night, let alone without a lit runway to land on.

He brought the plane lower and lower, until they were just below a thousand feet, and halfway out over the invisible lake. Then he went into a slow right turn.

“Tighter,” Diana said. “We’re between mountains here.”

Cyrus banked harder, pointing his right wing down at water he wished he could see. His altitude dropped, but Diana didn’t seem worried.

When he straightened out, he was below five hundred feet and aiming his plane at … he had no idea.

“Do you want to take it in?” Cyrus asked.

Diana looked at him and smiled. “You’re doing fine.”

“Yeah, right until I smack us into a mountain.” Cyrus exhaled. The cockpit was cool, but his forehead was suddenly damp.

“Lower your gears and come in slow.” Diana made it sound so simple. “Then I’ll tilt the rotors and set her down.”

Cyrus climbed slightly, just for his own sake, leveled back off, and then slowed until he thought they were going to stall.

“Nice,” Diana said. And then she took over.

Cyrus flopped back into his seat, wiped his forehead, and tried not to pant. He felt the plane scoop and slow even more as the engines rotated up. It felt like they were in a helicopter, in a plane that could twist and slide and shuffle through the air as slowly as he could walk.

And then Diana flipped three switches, and spotlights on the wings and nose of the plane bathed the lake surface in icy halogen. Cyrus could see smooth dark water shooting past beneath them.

“Seriously?” Cyrus said. “Those were there the whole time and you didn’t say anything?”

“You didn’t need them,” Diana said. “They would have just distracted you.” She flipped a joystick down out of the instruments and pointed at it. “Find us a parking spot.”

Where Cyrus swiveled, the spotlights swiveled. And up ahead, wedged between the still black water and a jutting mountain clothed in firs, there was a small cluster of cockeyed cabins. Huge cedar trees loomed between them, draping shadows over roofs and chimneys with heavy limbs, shielding structures from the spotlights where they could. Off to the right of the camp, there was a mountain stream descending into the lake, and beside it a small meadow.

“Right there,” said Cyrus, but Diana had already seen it.

As the plane rose to hop the trees and settle in the meadow, down below the front door of a little cabin opened, and an old man rolled out onto the tiny porch, seated in a wheelchair.

He had a long rifle in his lap.

 four 

EMPIRE OF BONES

C
YRUS WOKE FACEDOWN
on a bare mattress that smelled like dog. He blinked his eyes into focus and managed to lift his head. There was a brown Australia-shaped stain just beneath his face. The entire southern half of the continent had been flooded with his drool.

The mattress hadn’t looked nearly so disgusting last night. With a little darkness and a lot of exhaustion, any flat surface can look pretty good. Last night, Cyrus would have given the grimy cabin floor four stars, let alone the bottom of a bunk bed.

Cyrus pressed himself slowly up onto his elbows. His right calf was shrieking with every heartbeat, which was probably what had woken him. Or maybe it had been the woodpecker doing major construction right outside the cabin’s open window.

Cyrus sniffed, wiped his damp chin, and eyed a little window across the room. The sun was up, but big trees hid most of the light. He was pretty sure that Antigone had been on the bunk above him, but he wasn’t even
sure why he thought that. He could remember the plane landing in the meadow and sinking in the mud almost to its belly, and the crooked cabins, and the old man in the wheelchair pointing a rifle at him.

Llewellyn Douglas
. The old free-diving kook who’d trained bull sharks in Lake Michigan. He’d forced Cyrus to drink something black and nasty. Then Cyrus had staggered into the closest cabin and picked a bed.

“Tigs?”

Nothing. He rolled slowly onto his side and lowered his bare feet to the floor. His right calf screamed with the increased blood pressure, and muscle fibers began to twitch and quiver beneath his skin. His bandage was new, but a dozen little bloody dots had soaked through.

Cyrus carefully slid his finger beneath the gauze and pulled it away from his leg. The top two puckers had been stitched shut.

The cabin door banged open and Rupert Greeves stepped inside. Cyrus squinted up at him.

“How’s it feel?” Rupert asked.

“Like a shark bite,” Cyrus said. “When did you get here?”

“An hour ago,” Rupert said. “We got Jeb to a safe hospital and then stayed with him through most of the night. It’s almost noon now.” Rupert leaned his back against the wall by the door. “You’ve had a lot of shark bites, then?”

“Oh, yeah. Tons. Somebody stitched it up last night.” He straightened his leg out slowly. “How’s Jeb?” He wasn’t sure he wanted an answer.

“Sorted,” Rupert said. “For now. It was bad. If not for Arachne, he wouldn’t even have made it to hospital.”

Cyrus exhaled relief. “And my mom?”

“Tired. Resting now.” Rupert rubbed his jaw and smiled. “Three years asleep, two months awake with nurses all around to keep things calm and easy, and then yesterday … her first day back with you lot.”