Rift (52 page)

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1

Day sixty
. A cold wind battered Reeve’s face, a wind full of carbon dioxide, fatigue, and headaches. He and Spar trudged along the cliff tops, carpeted with tough, rust-red bubbles that made for slippery going and sometimes collapsed under their feet.

Loon had been gone for hours. Though she had fashioned a new sling, and ranged far in search of game, she often returned with nothing, not even an insect. But she ate, Reeve knew. And she had fuel to spare, racing along the cliffs, bounding from rock to rock, effortlessly covering six times his distance, unnaturally thriving where he and Spar sickened. Reeve swelled his chest, trying to find sustaining breath, but the air was hardly more nurturing than saltwater to a thirsty sailor. He gasped, wheezing like an old man.

“Don’t go wobbly-kneed on me now, boy,” Spar said, narrowing his eyes.

Reeve grinned in response, tearing his dry lips. After not eating for a day and a half, sustained only by water from the occasional stream, and without a breather, Reeve needed Spar’s goading. Sympathy would kill him now; he needed to muster every hard instinct he’d
ever learned just to continue. He found himself checking his fingernails, looking for blue traces, telling himself that as long as his nails were pink, he wasn’t a walking dead man.

They’d argued about whether to head straight north over the plateau or continue on to the great valley. It was no doubt a shorter route to stay on the plateau; but a short route to death as well. Here there was little food, only the Lithiaform flora that claimed these lands in deepening hues of red, an index of Reeve’s ability to breathe. It was an inverse relationship.

Nearby lay the Rift Valley, the goal of all their striving. But they would enter it at the middle tract of that vast sunken plain, whose northern reaches harbored the great plume. In that valley, Spar maintained, was the great city Rhea, where food might be found, though the habitation had been abandoned since the Dark Days, when clouds of ash had hounded enclavers from the valley forever. Water was less of an issue so far. Spar had devised an elaborate straining system to render stream water drinkable, but this also entailed waiting for the water to pass through the matted sieve and, cumulatively, hours of delay.

They had been heading west for days now, precious days, when eight weeks of their allotted ten had already passed. By his reckoning it was day sixty since landfall, since Grame Lauterbach had told his story and changed Reeve Calder’s personal catastrophe into the world’s. It was an ugly fact that when you desperately needed it, time clicked by at the same unrelenting pace as when you pared your nails or did any other trivial thing. There was no quarter given for human extremity, and the trudging of Reeve’s feet marked off the indifferent seconds, minutes, and hours. Sometimes, covering the miles in a kind of trance, his father reproached him.
What are you going to do, Reeve?
Cyrus would ask, as he had so often over the years. Now, at twenty-four, Reeve finally had an answer:
I’m going
to walk up the valley of the shadow of death. Going to stop Gabriel Bonhert once and for all, if I can. Or die trying. Is that good enough, Cyrus?

The only answer was the audible rush of the Tallstory River, frothing in the canyon below.

He could only hope that the river took Marie to the confluence with the Gandhi, and then north, with her ambiguous protectors. He could only hope that she would forge on to the Stationer camp and find a way to thwart Gabriel Bonhert’s plans. Practical Marie, with her quiet courage and survivor’s instinct—she just might get the job done. As for himself, thinking of the long journey still ahead, he wondered what the valley would be like, and whether it could sustain them for another week. He cursed Brecca silently, for her foolish impulse to release them without any breathers.

He watched Spar leading the way over the rocky terrain. Though his nails were flat and violet-hued, though his lips sometimes looked black and blue, Spar never faltered. He was better adapted than Reeve, and perhaps more determined. Reeve knew what kept Spar going, and envied his faith in Loon and that safe harbor he would help her find. Meanwhile Reeve was sustained by a different hope: that Loon was not the last of her kind, but the first.

Loon had not told Spar Pimarinun’s story, the story of her parents and the old orthong chief. There had hardly been leisure to talk. During the day she disappeared to hunt, and in the evening they struggled to make temporary shelter and quickly fell asleep. Once, around a small campfire they’d built to cook up a millipede, Loon started to tell Spar that story. She said outright that there were no others like her. But Spar had become agitated, and wouldn’t hear more. “That’s what we been doin’ all these months,” he said, “goin’ toward your people.… Without that, we got nothin’. I may as well lay down an’ die.” He stared at the campfire, sinking into a mood. “ ’Bout time, anyways.”
Loon looked up at Reeve, and they said no more.

Now Spar led the way, head into the wind. With his beard and long staff, he looked like some prophet wandering in the wilderness. But he was ever a warrior-prophet, with one end of his staff fire-hardened and sharply pointed.

Now Spar was waiting for Reeve on a promontory, carpeted in muddy-brown polyps that Reeve recognized from the red wall in the Jupiter Dome. Spar stretched out a hand to heave him the last step onto the rise. When Reeve straightened from his climb, he saw that Loon stood a short distance away, perched on a ledge gazing out on a great vista.

The Rift Valley.

It was the largest thing Reeve had ever seen. No mere
rift
, or tear, it was a stupendous plain beside which the canyon of the Tallstory was only a gully. The Forever Plains might have been larger, but like deep space itself, the plains didn’t seem so much vast as endless. This valley was bounded and defined by its matching escarpments—the one on which they stood, and the distant black cliffs of the western rim. Sprawling between lay the stupendous valley, in glistening red hues, as though the planet’s surface had been ripped away, exposing the raw flesh of a new land.

A city commanded the juncture of the Tallstory and the Gandhi Rivers, a clave built close to the ground, and surrounded by a ruined wall. From a communal hub of buildings at the core, streets radiated outward. And clinging to the city, the signature colors of Lithia bled out in maroon and carnelian.

Across the Gandhi River arced half a bridge, with twisted girders suspended from its severed edge. If the Tallstory had been deep and fast-flowing, the Gandhi was wide and stately, flowing southward, mocking their need for progress north. Looking up-valley, the
merest wisp of cloud teased the image of the fire spigots and the great plume to mind.

For many months the valley had held their hopes and fears. Now, it might bring them very much less than they desired, or very much worse, but they had earned the right to enter this place and claim their fortunes. Despite all that Lithia could throw in their path, they had arrived, following Loon and her imperatives. For a moment Reeve heard in his memory Spar’s simple dictum:
Yonder, yonder by the soil
.

Reeve moved to Loon’s side to share the moment with her, but Loon had more mundane things on her mind. She turned to him, holding out something, her face lit up with an impish grin.

Here was their dinner, dangling by its tail: a rat. Reeve’s mouth watered.

The lava had not come this far in the Dark Days. The city lay structurally preserved, aside from the spectacular ruin of the bridge and collapsed portions of the defensive wall. Walking through narrow residential streets, they passed a bizarre tree—sprouted in the middle of the street—that looked like plates on a stick. The breeze wafted a pink pollen from it. Vines with heavy red fruit clung to the faces of buildings. But some dwellings still boasted decorative tiles set into adobe-like building materials. Reeve could imagine a matron coming to one of the doors, broom in hand, to peer at the strangers or sweep up the remains of a flowerpot, now all dust and shards where blooms should have been.