River: A Novel (44 page)

 The reality
of it all crashed down on me with the first acrid whiff of smoke. Asher looked
back and shook his head in disbelief. He could feel it, too.

 We stopped
just at the edge of the woods when Asher turned and wrapped his hand around my
neck. His eyes swept mine before he whispered, “Elodie, I want you to stay
here. Please. Dan was able to turn the perimeter off, but something’s
happened.” He nodded over his shoulder to the border of the town. “Do you see
the buildings? The slope that led into town is… gone. I don’t know how else to
explain it.  I don’t know
how
to explain it.” Though he hid it well, his
eyes were panicked. I tried to see what he meant, but my poor vision only
discerned varying degrees of white and black. The snow and smoke were the
lightest parts, yet they didn’t brighten the view enough for me to see details.
It was dead silent.

 I shook my
head once. “Asher, there is no way I’m staying here,” I repeated. Pushing my
eyebrows up, I felt my face crumple. “I’m going with you.”

 He saw that
my resolve was tempered with fear, and I watched as he contemplated abandoning his
own plan to go into River. After a moment, he nodded. “Okay, but if something
happens to me, run in that direction,” he pointed to the east of where we
stood. Intensity radiated in his words. “The way to the huts.” He closed his
eyes. Without looking at me, he pleaded, “Won’t you just go there instead and
wait for me?”

 Silently, I
waited until he looked at me. He was so earnest that my heart ached. And he
didn’t get it. Still. “How many times do I have to tell you?” I gestured toward
River. “If there are people broken and bleeding and being tortured, won’t you
need all the help you can get?” I drove my argument down a more altruistic
path, beyond the two of us, and my bargaining worked—he couldn’t disagree. Together,
we could possibly fix what went wrong, and he wasn’t going to take that away
from the people of River. Our People.

 He barely nodded,
surrendering, but I could see his reluctance. If something threatened me, he
would be there in the path of any danger to try to save me. What he failed to detect
beneath my tenacity was that I would do the same for him.

 Locking
hands, we left our sheltered grove. Cautiously, Asher surveyed the distance,
walking at an even pace. I followed, my mind screaming for hope that what he’d
described had been some kind of mirage. As we crossed the nullified perimeter,
I could finally see what he had been talking about. The immense, bowl-like
plane River resided in was almost level with the ground we walked on. Instead
of the steep slope that accompanied the Lulling border… it was barely an
incline. The change made both of us pause in amazement. We were only on the
edge of town, but it looked as though River had disappeared.

 “Look
there,” Asher said in a low voice, pointing to the west. I could see smoke billowing
thicker than in other places. It was where the downtown area should have been. A
horrible realization dawned on me just as we both saw it. It was the rooftops
of buildings that were smoldering. 

 “Asher,” I
whispered.

 “I know,” he
said almost at the same time before starting to run across the level clearing. We
were only a few steps in when I lost my footing in the snow, my feet flying out
from under my body.

 “Oh!” I
yelped. One instant I was upright, and then I was on my back. Asher caught me
before my head cracked on the hard ground.

 Holding me
up, he examined where the powdery snow had been pushed away by my fall. “It’s
ice. All of it,” he gasped out, his eyes widening. I let out the breath that
had been caught in my throat.

 “How?”

 Asher was
very still. “The Speakers, Elodie. They did this.”    

 “But… Gwen?”
I barely said it. “Danny?”

 “Something must’ve
happened while we were running here. In between the time that Dan shut off the
Lulling,” he said in the same bleak tone, peering toward town. “We need to see…
if anyone is here.” 

 Up and
moving again, we walked gingerly over the ice. I knew I held him back, but
Asher didn’t push me to move faster. We remained quiet; each of us so tense
with worry and confusion that I was pretty sure we were thinking the same
thing:
Where is everyone?
 

 In the spot
where a tram station would have been, we could see several buildings whose roofs
smoldered with smoke, but no fire. The ice reached maybe six feet below the
peak of the tallest structures. Asher nodded to a particularly smoky area, and
I saw his face clearly for the first time since we’d entered town.

 Drained of
all color in the grim, hazy night, he looked like a ghost. “That’s an entrance
to the Underground.” Without speaking, I just brought my other hand to his,
tightening my hold. This seemed to break him out of the shock. “Elodie, I have
to see if anyone is down there.” His eyes were feverish.

 “Of course,”
I agreed, nudging him toward the wreckage.

 Asher moved
quicker than before, but with carefully masked reluctance. Or fear of what we
would find. When we reached the edge of a tiled roof, I coughed and covered my
mouth to keep out the smoke while Asher tested a window.

 “The ice is
almost all the way up,” he said, frustrated, his forehead creased with worry. “I
have to try to find an opening that will reach one of the staircases. Elodie,
will you wait here?” His voice was so full of stress that I didn’t want to be
the cause of any more.

 “Just hurry
back,” I said, squeezing his hand. “And yell if you need me. In five minutes
I’m coming to find you,” I added after terror struck at the thought of
something happening to him when I wasn’t there to help.

 “Five minutes,”
he agreed, gravity underscoring the words. We stared at each other before he
turned away.

 After I
watched him round the corner of the building’s rooftop, a surge of helplessness
raced through me as I frantically turned in a circle. The quiet was unnerving, and
the smoke gave the landscape a quality very much like the end of the world. The
people had to have gotten out. The Speakers wouldn’t just destroy the town with
everyone still in it, would they? I wrapped my arms around my sore ribs and shuddered,
holding back sobs threatening to break the armor of numbing cold and denial. I
only knew one Speaker personally, and yes, he was capable of this.

 I blinked
tears away, only for more to escape. The smoke made everything shaky and
surreal as the desolated vista of what had been River seeped into my blurred
vision. Closely watching my surroundings, I willed someone to walk out of a
ruined structure intact. The soundless minutes stretched. No one appeared. 

 I had to
move. I had to look for survivors. I had to do
something
. People were probably
trapped or unconscious in the remains of the building tops. There was a pole
sticking out of the ice a few feet from me, followed by another and connected
to a cable that continued in a straight line. It was the tram line. I slid my
way to the first pole and deduced it was the end of the line that exited in the
middle of town. Grabbing the pole, my nearly-frostbit fingers latched on to the
cable for support. I used the posts to get to the nearest building top without
falling too much. Unable to just stand around while someone could be in dire
need, I planned to stay in sight for Asher to find me when he emerged. My feet slid
around as I concentrated on making it to the next post, clearing through snow
to the ice under my path. I was glancing down to get a foothold, clenching my
teeth together in an effort to stay vertical, when I saw him. 

 The veil
was deceptively thin, but a few inches down he was there. I didn’t feel myself collapse,
though in an instant my face was right next to the ice, right next to Danny.

 My own
reflection was double-exposed over Danny’s features, confusing me. Unrecognizable.
My mouth was open as if I were trapped under the ice, too. I didn’t feel my
hands banging and scraping, didn’t hear my own broken screams that strangled from
my throat as I tried to free him. The tomb might as well have been concrete. I
squeezed my eyes shut, praying to be alone in the mirror of ice when I opened
them again.

 It was a
quiet horror I witnessed with sudden unyielding clarity. Dan’s eyes were
closed, but his mouth open. His hand pressed an inch under the surface. As I began
to shake uncontrollably, I saw a wave of lacy blond hair feathering above the
seal of ice. Petra. 

 Pressing my
hands against my head, I tried not to listen but heard them anyway. Their unspoken
cries echoed in my mind from voices they’d possessed in another realm. I
brushed the light snow from the ghastly scene with trembling hands before covering
my own ears. The screams mingled with hitching sobs. Hot tears hit the ice, but
it did not break. Petra’s filmy eyes held mine. They were dead.

  A fierce
whisper muffled through my covered ears as I felt my body lifted. This did not
break the shock; it only focused what was left of me to him. “Elodie, we have
to go.” Only one voice could drown my hysteria enough to make me move from my
friends’ grave. The pungent smell of smoke engulfed me as Asher held me so
tightly that the screaming ebbed. He freed me enough to look into my eyes, a
reflection of my terror and grief. I could only imagine what he had seen in the
destruction that used to be his home. Another emotion was slowly building as he
took my face in his hands: fury.

 “Just look
at me, don’t look around.” As he said this, my eyes automatically flitted to
our surroundings, and I thought I saw lights cutting through the smoke in waves.
He shook his hold on me, forcing me to see only him. His eyes were tight with
hatred and something else that he was desperately trying to hide. Fear. I
thought that maybe I should be afraid, too, because we were probably going to
die, but all I could feel was emptiness.  

 Before my
mind registered it, we were running. Frozen feet moved without my command while
I stared at Asher’s white collar, smudged with soot.

I tasted
blood in my mouth with no idea how it could’ve gotten there. I tried vaguely to
remember, to place the origin. Slowly, the hours came back to me in painful,
circular fragments: Mace throwing me around on stage, and then again in the
Dark Room before locking me in to view his torment of my friends. My mind darted
in all directions and picked apart the night to find a different route we could
have taken, a different outcome. I didn’t dare grasp on to the pain of the
knowledge that the people of River were dead because of us… no, because of me. My
abdomen twisted as I saw Dan’s face in my mind. Petra.
No. They are alive
.
They have to be
. Images of them living blew away with the cinders
floating through the air like dirty snow. My eyes stung with tears shielding
them from the smoke Asher pulled me through as we ran.

 
 The
moon peeked through the near-dawn light while my vision adjusted, mesmerized. Everything
appeared different. The world was not the same as I remembered. The basic
threads of life had been changed into something foreign. I was surprised to
realize we were in the woods, dodging spidery roots and sliding in the snow. The
stark trees flew by us like a flip-book, and suddenly I knew we were almost to
the huts. I gripped Asher’s hand tighter. He’d gotten us out. After we made it
past the forest, to the clearing that was a frozen lake, his eyes shifted to
mine. He had aged ten years since the last time I’d looked at him.

 Slowing to
little more than a walk, we both saw smoke mixing with air, dissolving the
lines of the trees. Asher let go of my hand and threw his arm around me,
pulling me close. When Mace exited one of the huts, I probably should’ve been
surprised, but it just seemed inevitable. As we pivoted around to the way we’d
come, dozens of men separated themselves from the trees. Mace began to laugh
balefully, some of the others joining him while the muted clapped and stomped. They
materialized everywhere in the haze.

 “So cozy,” said
Mace, gesturing to our huts. Most of them were on fire, the remains wafting through
the air, miserable bits of confetti. I felt something deep inside of me drop,
past the pit of my stomach, all the way to my feet. “I think I could live here,
don’t you agree, boys?” The men hooted and clapped, and I began to feel sick. Asher’s
arm tightened around me, the tension in his body nearly breaking us in two when
Mace crossed the clearing. I slowly placed my other hand on his arm to restrain
him. The bodyguards behind Mace had weapons of some kind.

 As for
weapons, I didn’t think we had any until I watched Asher loosen the sleeve of
his free arm. Something glinted in the hazy moonlight, and it looked sharp. At
least one of us had a weapon. Of course it was the pacifist, but I had the impression
his practice was on hiatus. Vowing to keep Asher safe, even by using my body as
a human shield, I gripped him tighter. I had nothing else, except my voice, and
I wasn’t Gwen. Mace was barely moving forward—as if waiting for something. I
stole a glance around us. Asher stood stiffly, a step in front of me. We were
surrounded. I waited for him to shove me in the direction we were going to run,
our best chance for escape. Subtly, I shifted my weight when he angled to face
me, ready to sprint. He had to know of a safe place. The huts were out, but he
had to have another plan….