Fathom (27 page)

As she ran back toward town, dodging trees and ducking away from the low-hanging locks of moss, Mrs. Engle wondered what the desert was like.

She’d never seen a proper one, baked brown and dry. There were places she knew where the sky almost never opened, where the ground was so parched that it held nothing green or alive, and certainly nothing that could swim.

She was focused on her flight even as her mind wandered to thoughts of a more permanent escape. Night still hung heavy over the woods, but once she made it to the road, it was easy to see the white gravel and dirt that passed for paving.

She saw, but she did not have time to register, the shark-gray skin and slime-shined teeth of a creature that was woman-shaped, but no woman at all. She noticed the clawed hands and the stretch-mouthed monster with the wet blond curls, but there was no time to react or resist.

Bernice seized Mrs. Engle and with a lightning twist and a tearing bite, she broke the fugitive’s neck and tore out the best-bleeding veins.

Mrs. Engle was dead before her eyes had finished blinking. She was gone before her fists had time to uncurl.

Bernice dropped her body and left it where it fell, between the road and the trees. She didn’t care if it was found. She didn’t care if it was investigated. The fleeing woman was just a loose end in a bigger story, one that needed to be closed for form’s sake and for Bernice’s own safety.

There had been a moment of nervousness. There had been a minute of fright when the wretched minister had gazed into Mother’s face and tried to lie.

Bernice had done her best to coach him and teach him what little she’d learned, but she should’ve known that the man’s mind couldn’t withstand the very meeting that he’d sought to bring about.

Still, it had worked out well.

The minister had lied. Mother had lied. Everyone was lying, and Bernice was gleaning information even from all the half-told truths and full-blown falsehoods.

Arahab had been right: Everyone wants something, and it’s always more than it first appears.

Beginner’s Luck

N
ia hit the ground running, and dragging Sam—who wasn’t nearly so fast or coordinated as she was.

She had no idea how strong she was until she realized that Sam was yelping with every step; and then she saw that the wrist she was holding belonged to a man who had long since lost control of his feet.

But since she was nearly to the tree line, and since she could hear something awful happening in the water behind her, she did not stop to let him pull himself together. It might have been more graceful to carry him, but picking him up would have required her to pause.

And the more Nia heard behind her, back across the water and
over at the other shore, the less she wanted to stop. It buzzed in the back of her head, radio static transmitting bits and pieces of a calamity she’d narrowly escaped.

She didn’t know where the leaf creature was, exactly, but she had a pretty good idea. Alongside the radio static and stuffed into some back-brain compartment, she could hear it, or feel it, or sense it with some other sensory word that she’d never needed before.

Once, when she was a child, she’d had an uncle explain to her the way homing pigeons worked. He said it was like they had a little string in their heads, and the string was planted in the ground at their home roost—and no matter how far they flew, no matter where they went or what happened to them, the string always tugged them back home.

She imagined that the bird’s string felt something like her vague but definite connection to the creature. It hadn’t been there before, had it? Before she could move? Or was it only that she couldn’t remember it?

Sam jangled and banged along behind her, his wrist bruising and his knees breaking themselves against the ground.

“Wait!” he gasped, but Nia wasn’t interested in waiting.

She wasn’t sure where she was going, but “away from the water” had sounded like a very good instruction and she intended to follow it.

She couldn’t help it. She was driven by blind panic and pure exhilaration. And yes, there in the background—almost overwhelming her awareness of the creature—there was that incessant, atrocious humming.

Back by the shore, something big was swooping under the water and through it—faster than anything finned or feathered. Whatever it was, it was alive and it was impossibly large.

“Run,” she said to Sam.

“I’m trying,” he said, but he could barely get his feet up under himself in time to trip over them again. “Let go, and I’ll follow you.”

“No.” They were almost to the trees, and the thing at the edge of the other shore was gathering itself.

As Sam bounced along behind her, he tried to object, but he couldn’t find the words; so he argued instead. “But why would we be safer in the woods?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “Faster,” she said, and it wasn’t a command so much as it was warning that she intended to speed up and she was taking him with her.

“But we’ll lose . . . that . . . that guy. That thing.”

“That thing knows what’s it’s doing.”

She didn’t know how far she needed to go, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She didn’t know where she was precisely, but she could guess that this was the mainland and that she could head quite a ways east without hitting another ocean, so east was where she went.

Between the trees she dived and weaved, no longer hearing the confused cries of the ferryman behind her and no longer striving to listen to whatever chaos was unleashing itself across the water, back on the island. It didn’t matter. Nothing could make her move faster with Sam in tow, and nothing could persuade her to release him. He was the first person she’d met in her present condition, and she would bring him with her wherever she went. To whatever end. However far.

A particularly loud yelp from Sam made her look back long enough to see that he was battered and now bleeding.

She slowed her frantic run to a nervous jog, and then to a stop. When she released his hand, there were bruises where her fingers had pulled him. There were holes in the knees of his pants, and scrapes around his elbows and knuckles. His glasses were hanging by one ear-hook, their lenses dangling under his chin.

He picked them up and plucked them off his ear; wiped them on a corner of his shirt and put them back on.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. And she looked him up and down, wondering what he was made of.

“It’s . . .” He wanted to say that he understood, and that he didn’t take it personally, the way she’d hauled him through the forest without concern for his well-being or comfort. He
did
understand. But he was too wobbly and beaten from their flight to communicate more than a nod. “It’s . . .”

“Who are you?”

He panted and leaned forward, hands on his dirty, scuffed knees. “Sam,” he rasped.

“Sam. I’m Nia.”

“Mia?” he peeped.

“Nia. It’s short for something longer. You’re bleeding.”

He nodded. “Bleeding.”

“Did you break anything?” she asked, though the question should have been,
Did I break anything of yours?

“Don’t think so.”

“Good. I don’t know if we’re far enough inland or not, but my money’s on not. Whatever that was, it was—”

“What? Whatever what was?” His breath was catching up, but every word sounded thirsty.

“There was something else, after we left. The creature tried to tell us before we got off the ferry. It was talking about a ‘she,’ and I think I saw her. I heard her,” she said, even though that wasn’t the right word either for the pressing feeling in the back of her brain.

And then they heard a remarkable crash, an infinite weight of water being smashed down against something soft.

Both of them froze.

Nia could hear the final trickling splashes as the last of the liquid drained, spilling between the boards of the pier and washing
away all evidence of something brutal. She doubted that Sam could hear it.

Sam was anxious—even more anxious than Nia was. “Maybe we should wait for it. For him. For . . . for whatever, you know. That guy.”

“I don’t think we need to.”

“Why?”

“I think he’s anywhere he wants to be.”

“Then where should we go? We did what he said, right?” Sam looked around, but it was dark and there wasn’t much to see. He’d been hauled unceremoniously thus far and he hadn’t had a chance to scope the scenery. “We got away from the water.”

“Not far enough,” Nia said. She turned away on her bare heels and started to walk farther into the darkness. “Even if we don’t run, we should keep going. I’ll go slow if you need to rest.”

“But I don’t think you need me, exactly. Why do I have to stay with you? Maybe you should just, um, drop me off at the . . . at the nearest . . . at wherever there are people,” he finished weakly. “That guy, that thing—he only wanted me to help him move you. And now you don’t . . . you don’t need any help.” He rubbed at the darkening skin on his wrist.

“Why do you think that?” she asked without turning around to see that he was coming.

He was coming. “Because, I think, he told me. Or if he didn’t, he certainly gave me that impression. Look, ma’am—”

“Nia. I told you.”

“Nia. Look, Nia. I don’t know what’s going on here—”

“Neither do I.”

“And I don’t know what you are or anything—”

“Again, that makes the pair of us.”

He faltered, and rallied. “But I’m pretty sure that it’s very different from, uh, my areas of expertise. That thing, he just needed
someone who could drive a truck. I don’t think—” He tripped over a long-reaching root and scampered to walk closer behind Nia, who could see better in the dark than he could. “I don’t think I need to be
involved
.”

“You’re already involved. But for all I know, you’re right, and I can drop you off at the nearest town. We can’t be far from St. Petersburg, can we?” She hesitated and spun in a circle, trying to get her bearings.

“Uh, no. Not far, I don’t think. We’re closer to Bradenton, though. I think. Then again, you know what? I’ve never tried to walk it in the dark before. You’ve got me completely turned around.” And then a miserable thought popped out of his mouth. “You didn’t get us lost, did you? Oh God. We’re lost.”

“We’re not lost,” she murmured.

Her uncle’s homing pigeons were crawling to the front of her mind again. She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to navigate the unfamiliar fields, threads, and currents running around behind her forehead. She could feel a tug inside the earth; it was deep and integral, and flowing in lines, or waves. If Sam had asked, she couldn’t have described the sensation, but she didn’t have to describe it to grasp what it was. She was feeling the poles, and the earth’s magnets that ran between them.

North gently yanked, and South tugged more gently still.

“Then where are we?”

“We’re in the woods,” she answered. “And we’re east of the Gulf. We’re going to go farther east, because that will take us farther from the water, just like he told us we ought to be.”

“You’re just going to obey? Just like that?” asked Sam, who was tagging along behind Nia like a puppy off its leash.

“Do you have any better ideas?”

He was quiet for a few steps as he picked along. “Don’t you think, well . . . I guess you couldn’t. Or anyway, you
wouldn’t
.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Wouldn’t go to the authorities. Find the police. Report what’s happened here. Those people back there, they were going to kill us. They had a gun, or one of them did. And I know, I know, there’s a lot we’d need to leave out, but I’m all right with that. I don’t mind passing along a bare-bones version of events. I can leave out the big dirt-monster and the . . . and the . . . and you. Ma’am, there are people chasing us, and there are things chasing us, too—and if we can get even just the people off our case, I’d feel like that’d be great.”

She didn’t answer immediately. She was remembering what the creature had said about foolish people who get what they ask for. “The people have been the least of our problems.”

“Oh. Oh really? Then, then why—” He stumbled over a rough tangle of palmetto roots and a small stump. “Then why was it so amazingly important that those guys back there didn’t break you up with a hammer?”

“I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t know. Maybe it was just important that they didn’t try it. We can ask our guide when he finds us again.”

“What if he doesn’t? And where are we going?”

“He won’t leave us for long.” She put her hand on the side of a tree and used it to push herself forward.

Sam tried to copy her, and succeeded only in scraping his hand. “Why not?”

“Because he’s gone to a lot of trouble. He won’t abandon us now.” Or he wouldn’t abandon
her
, at any rate. She felt uncommonly confident on this point—that even despite its repeated statements to the contrary, it had preserved her in part to keep from being alone.

“So where is it? He, I mean. Where is he?”

She twisted her shoulders in a shrug. “If I were him, I’d want
to see what’s going on back there. He probably stayed to watch and make sure.”