New Lands (THE CHRONICLES OF EGG) (31 page)

It felt odd to not even try to hide myself, but when we’d discussed it earlier, Dad had pointed out that I hadn’t done anything wrong yet, so there was no reason to fear being seen. In any case, I didn’t see a soul until I got near the pit and made out the hazy outline of the rock that the guard usually sat on.

I was surprised to see nobody was sitting on it, and for a moment I dared to hope the guard had left for the evening. But as I got closer, I saw the body of a Moku lying splayed on the ground, unconscious, beside the rock.

Dad had started without me.

I hurried past the guard, and the first person I saw was Adonis, watching Dad haul someone up out of the pit. Adonis glanced at me, and from what I could see in the dark, something looked out of kilter on his face—like his eye was swollen, or maybe his cheekbone.

I wondered if he’d had a run-in with one of my friends.

But I didn’t have a chance to look closer, because just then Dad pulled Kira up. She stepped past him, and he quickly fed the rope down for the others.

“You know a way out of the city?” I whispered to her.

“There’s a tunnel. Shhh. Stay quiet.”

Millicent came up next, and she gave me a quick hug. Half a minute later, Guts joined us.

Just like that, we were done. Dad was breathing hard from the effort. He reached out and grabbed my shoulder with one of his big hands, then pulled Adonis to him with the other.

“Look out fer each other. And git that plantation back,” he said in a low growl, squeezing my upper arm hard to make his point. “See ye there soon enuff.”

Then he vanished into the night.

Kira beckoned us to follow her. We tiptoed past the still-unconscious guard and went to the main avenue. Kira led us across the road, between a pair of low stone buildings. A hundred feet farther on, we reached a back road.

Kira started us down the back road in the direction of the temple, moving so fast it was hard to keep up with her and not make noise. Most of the buildings we passed were abandoned, so there wasn’t any firelight, and when she turned a couple of times, I nearly lost her.

As we weaved our way closer to the temple, a few scattered cooking fires began to appear, and Kira slowed her pace so we could move more quietly.

We came upon a street that felt familiar even in the near-darkness. When she turned us down it, I realized why—it was the same street where Dad had his house. Kira led us right past his place, away from the main avenue and toward the city wall.

When she stopped us, we were close enough to the wall that I could make out its silhouette against the sky. There was a small stone building on either side of the road. The embers of a cooking fire smoldered in front of one.

Kira took a few tentative steps toward it, her neck craned as she stared at it.

Then she turned and led us to the second building, directly across the street. A few feet from the entrance, she held up her
hand to stop us. She continued forward alone, peered into the open window, then cautiously stepped inside.

A moment later, she reappeared and beckoned us to follow her inside.

It was pitch-black in there, with just enough junk on the floor and people to bump into that it quickly started to get noisy.

“
Shhhhhh…,
”
Kira whispered.

I picked my way over to the back wall, where her voice had come from, until I bumped into someone I was pretty sure was Kira.

“What are we doing?” I whispered in the direction of her ear.

“There is a problem,” she whispered back. “The tunnel is in the building across the street.”

“Someone’s living there.”

“That’s the problem.”

I
t was two hours past sunrise, and the old man who lived in the building across the road was still eating his breakfast.

I’d never seen such a slow chewer in my life.

Everything about him was slow—from the way he shuffled out of the little stone house just after dawn, to the way he carefully rebuilt his fire from a pile of kindling around the corner of his house, to the way he turned the stick he used to roast some kind of potato over the low flames.

Now he was savoring that potato like it was the last meal he’d ever eat. And judging by the dark scowl on Kira’s face whenever she raised her head to check on him through the little window, if he didn’t clear out of there soon, it might
be
his last meal.

Or it might be us who’d eaten our last, if the Moku found us. There was only one way out of the little one-room shack where we were holed up, and nowhere to hide among the bits of broken furniture littering the floor. If anyone showed up at the door, we’d
be trapped, with no weapons except the stones I’d brought and the lengths of wood the others had scavenged from the floor.

We knew the Moku were looking for us. Once we realized someone was living inside the tunnel building, I’d told Kira about the tree I’d seen growing near the wall. It was nearby, and she had agreed it was worth trying to get out that way instead. We’d set out to find the tree, but we hadn’t gone more than fifty feet from our hiding place when we heard voices shouting in the distance. It sounded to Kira like the guard at the pit had come to and raised the alarm, so we’d beat it back to the house in case the streets filled with warriors searching for us.

And they had. Within minutes, we’d seen torchlights flickering down the road by the main avenue. At first, they’d clustered near Dad’s house, making me terrified that we’d doomed him. But soon, they’d left his place and fanned out through the city. Every time we’d poked our heads out, there were torches bobbing on the main avenue, and occasionally search parties would pass by on the path that ran beside the city wall, so close to us that their lights danced on the walls of our hiding place.

But they never came up our street, and when dawn had broken and the old man had first appeared, I started feeling hopeful that we might be able to make a dash for it soon.

But the old man never went any farther than around the corner of his house, and when he did, it was only to pee or gather wood.

So we had no choice but to wait him out, praying all the while that no warriors would come down the street searching house-to-house for us.

With the sun up, the others all looked filthy and exhausted.
Adonis turned out to be sporting a nasty black eye, along with a pretty good cut near his chin, but under the circumstances I had to swallow my curiosity about who had slugged him. Nobody was talking, for fear of giving our position away.

At one point, I stuck my head out the window to look down the street at Dad’s house. Before Kira yanked me back, I got a glimpse of what looked like Dad’s Moku shadow, cooking breakfast in front of the house.

That was a relief. If the Moku was cooking his breakfast, Dad must still be there. Which meant they hadn’t hauled him off on suspicion of helping us.

After that, I tried not to move unless there was a good reason to do so. Time dragged on. As excruciating as yesterday’s waiting had been, this was worse.

Finally, when Kira checked the window for what felt like the hundredth time, I saw her eyebrows jump. I leaped up to see what was happening.

The old man had finally finished his breakfast. He was standing up, stretching his legs like he might be getting ready to use them.

All around me, the others got to their feet, ready to run for it the moment the old man walked away.

Then he started tidying up.

It was endless. Just putting away the big roasting stick seemed to take him five minutes. One by one, we sat down again, dejected.

Then I felt Kira’s hand tap my head. I stood up and looked out.

The old man was shuffling down the road toward the main avenue. Just before he passed out of our line of sight, I saw him turn down a side street.

We were all up now, clustering behind Kira by the door.

She poked her head out to survey the street.

Then she drew it back with a sharp intake of breath.

“Warriors,” she whispered.

I stepped around her and took a look for myself. There were a dozen buildings on either side of the street between us and Dad’s house. Three Moku warriors with rifles were coming up the road in our direction, halfway between the abandoned house next to Dad’s and its closest neighbor.

As I watched, one of the soldiers approached the house and poked his head in the door while the others paused to wait for him.

They were searching every house, on both sides of the street. At the rate they were going, they’d reach us in a couple of minutes.

We had to make a choice. Should we run for it? Or stay and try to ambush them?

Either way, the odds were terrible.

Kira stepped to the far side of the doorway and raised the length of wood she’d taken from the floor. She wanted to fight.

I shook my head. She scowled at me.

“They’ve got guns,” I whispered. “And they’re spread out. We can’t take all three of them.”

“If we cross the road, they will see us,” she said.

“What if we hide behind the house?” suggested Millicent.

“It’s open to the road behind us. Anyone could see us.”

Then, in the space of a second, Kira changed her mind.

“We have to run,” she said decisively. She set down the piece of wood. “In the house, at the bottom left corner of the back wall, is a stone. This wide.” She held her hands up, shoulder width apart.
“It slides out. That’s the tunnel entrance. There is a ladder down and only one way to go at the bottom. Follow it to the end as fast as possible. Probably they will see us and give chase.”

She took a deep breath. “Stay close.”

She turned back to the door and was getting into a crouch when we heard the hoofbeats.

They grew louder by the second—a steady rumble of riders, dozens of them from the sound of it, moving into the city over the paving stones of the main avenue.

The Rovians had arrived.

Kira turned her head to peek down the road, then looked back at us. To my surprise, her face showed relief.

“They are turning away.”

I poked my head out. The three Moku warriors had their backs to us as they walked together toward the avenue.

“Go!” I said.

Kira took off like a shot. The rest of us followed on her heels. The sound of hooves on the paved avenue was loud enough that we didn’t need to worry about anyone hearing us. Whether they saw us, I couldn’t say, because I was running too hard to turn my head.

The old man’s house had an odd musty smell and no furniture. There was a straw sleeping pallet in the far left corner, where Kira had said the tunnel would be. By the time I entered, she’d already yanked it aside and was working to pull a heavy stone block from the wall just off the floor.

The stone looked like it weighed as much as she did. I would have offered to help, but she managed to pull it free in just a
couple of seconds. I helped her push it to one side, revealing a wide, dark hole.

“Feet first. On your stomach. Go!”

Millicent was closest, and she dropped to the floor on her stomach and wriggled backward into the hole. Guts followed her. Then Adonis.

“You go. I’ll close it,” Kira told me.

I lay down on my belly and shimmied backward. When I got far enough in to drop my legs, my feet quickly found the rungs of the ladder. I climbed down into the darkness.

The tunnel wasn’t far underground. Ten feet, maybe. When I reached bottom, I couldn’t see a thing. But Kira was right—in the narrow space, there was only one way to go. I started off, one hand on the side of the dirt wall and the other out in front of me so I didn’t plow into anything face-first.

I could hear the others moving up ahead. Right in front of me, Adonis let out a curse of surprise. A moment later, my head brushed the ceiling, and I realized he must have hit his head when it suddenly dropped. I bent my knees and kept going.

Pretty quickly, I bumped into Adonis. He growled at me.

Half a minute later, he came to a sudden halt, and I bumped into him again.

“Watch it!”

“Why’d you stop?”

“No place to go!”

“There’s a ladder!” I heard Millicent say.

Kira’s hand touched my back. She called out to Millicent. “When you reach the top, push hard on the ceiling!”

As we waited for Millicent to climb up and get the ceiling open, Kira gave a sigh that sounded like relief.

“We are close now.”

It was good to be able to talk again. “I hope my dad’s all right,” I said.

“Why does he think the Rovians will save him?”

“Save him from what?”

“Being killed with your sister.”

“What?!”

“It just pops off?” Millicent called out from up the ladder.

“Yes! Push hard!” Kira answered.

“Who’s killing my sister?”

“The Moku. At the next thunderstorm. I thought you knew this.”

“If they’re going to kill her, why are they treating her like a queen?”

“They think she is a goddess. Of the Okalu. The Princess of the Dawn. Come from the sky to save my people. And your father serves her. They treat her well to make her happy until the next storm, when Ma comes to earth—”