The Dark Light (17 page)

“Hold tight!”

The sentinels’ thundering strides drew closer on both sides. A strong current of beastly odors thickened. Six feet was all that separated us from the beasts sprinting at our side.

“They’re too close,” I yelled.

“Just hang on!”

Five feet. Four feet. I was within reach of the sentinel at my side. Blackened fingernails—
claws—
grazed my arm.

“Delane!”

The horse, as if sensing my terror, lowered its head and charged again. The sentinel fell back.

I risked a glance over my shoulder. The pack had formed a wide arc behind us. Maintaining their pace, they pressed forward, forcing us from the path Sol had found through the woods. Though they moved as one, never did they shout an order or command. It was as if instinct guided them.

“They’re cutting us off from the valley,” yelled Delane. “Solandun, they’re pushing us north!”

Obviously, Sol had noticed it too. “They’re herding us,” he shouted back. “Just keep moving.”

Herding us
away
from the valley? “Why are they doing that?” I cried.

“They’re trying to corner us,” said Delane.

But I didn’t see any place where they could trap us, only the sentinels and the trees. On we went. A mile. Two. The sentinels drew no closer.

The trees began to thin. Rocks appeared underfoot. Daylight beckoned. I focused on what lay ahead, conscious that with one mistake, one stumble, they’d be on us. They were pushing us somewhere, and we had no choice but to oblige.

The trees were now sparse. No leaves covered their branches. Their bark was gray, as if it had withstood a wildfire, though the ground was not charred and the lengthening grass showed no sign of damage. A fine layer of silvery ash blew from the trees and was carried away by the wind.

Ahead, Sol’s horse whinnied, then stopped. Confused, I realized that Delane had slowed too. We pulled up at Sol’s side. Both horses turned to face the sentinels.

The creatures stood behind us in a line, blocking the route to Bordertown with an impenetrable wall of bodies. Beyond
them lay the woods, the canopy a thick, deep green. Before us lay the desiccated trees with their jagged, leafless branches. It was as if someone had drawn a line across the ground. On one side, where the sentinels waited, was life. On the other side, our side, was death.

“We could fight,” whispered Delane.

I caught Sol watching me, and as if that had sealed the deal, he shook his head. “There’s too many,” he replied. “We’ve barely enough decimators to get through the valley.”

“Then it’s your decision,” said Delane. “They’ve got us where they want us. They don’t think we’ll go on.”

I glanced over my shoulder to where gently rising grasslands spread away from the forest. It was the perfect place to gain some speed and put the sentinels behind us, or for the sentinels to charge us down. But no sentinel moved.

I looked at Sol. His head was high, his back tall and straight. There was no fear in his eyes. Old Man Crowley’s words returned to me:
Trust Solandun. Trust Delane. They know what they’re doing.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Sol. Never once looking away from the sentinels, he leaned in to his horse’s ear. I didn’t catch what he said, but it must have done the job for the horse took several faltering steps back.

“Delane,” he said, his voice low.

We too retreated.

Feet stomped in the sentinels’ line. Teeth bared. Black eyes stared. Toward the center of the pack, one of the sentinels took a forward step. The one beside it shot out an arm to block its path. Then came a bark, a sound I recognized from when we’d tumbled through the Barrier on the Ridge.

“The Wastes,” it snarled. “Leave them. They’re as good as dead.”

I
’ve changed my mind,” said Delane. “This was a bad idea.”

About ten minutes had passed since the sentinels had abandoned their pursuit. The last time I’d looked, the woods had been visible behind us, the sentinels a shrinking line of pale flesh. Clearly, they weren’t about to give up their post, leaving us no choice but to press on. Not that we were making much progress. For every step the horses took, we had to coax them into taking one more.

The landscape changed little. Knee-high prairie grass, endless clear sky, and the occasional barren tree was all I could see of the gently sloping hill that we climbed.

Sol’s horse bucked. “It’s no good,” he said, and dismounted.
“We’ll have to lead them. They might be better if they have something to follow.”

“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.

Delane twisted in the saddle to face me, and for the first time since I’d met him, his expression turned completely serious. “No animal willingly sets foot in the Wastes.”

Yet here we were. Wherever here was.

I swung my leg over the horse’s rear end, preparing for an elegant dismount. It didn’t quite work out. My foot caught in the folds of my skirt, and I slid sideways, almost taking Delane with me.

Sol must have noticed me falling. “Careful,” he cried.

He dashed over and grabbed me tightly around the waist. My back against his chest, he lifted me down.

Though I was safely on solid ground, Sol did not let go. I turned in his arms, hugely aware that he was still holding me. “I slipped,” I muttered sheepishly.

A flicker of amusement entered Sol’s eyes. Undoubtedly, he’d pictured me landing on my butt with my skirt around my shoulders. But there was softness in his expression too, like when he’d joked about the bus outside school. It was a welcome change from his usual serious silences.

“You have to take care of yourself,” he said. “Land badly on your ankle and this will be a really long trip.”

Delane jumped down beside us and Sol let go of me, as if
he’d just realized that he was still holding my waist. He headed for his horse and gathered the reins. “It’s time to move,” he said, back to business.

I was about to follow when a squeak came from somewhere close by. Surprised by the sound, I peered behind me to the spot where I thought it had originated. I almost hurled.

It might have been a rabbit—once. That is, a rabbit that had spent a fair bit of time in a pit bull’s mouth. A little fur remained on one of its hind legs, but other than that it was just a mess of flesh and bone. But it was alive. Somehow. It lay, twitching on its side, its bloodied front paws occasionally tapping the ground. I stumbled back.

“What the hell is that?” I gasped, and shot out a hand to grab Delane.

Delane peered into the grass. “It must have wandered in and gotten lost,” he said. He wrinkled his nose. “Looks like it’s been here a while.”

“Something’s been at it,” I said. Its paws twitched. “We need to put it out of its misery.”

My cries brought Sol back with his horse. He took one look at the rabbit and then turned his head in disgust. “It can’t be killed,” he said. “Not here.”

I frowned. Uneasy, I scanned the prairie, noticing the stillness, the silence.

“The Wastes,” I whispered.

“The Wastes are the places in our world that the Barrier has abandoned,” said Sol. “It is reality shattered. No life. No death.” He glanced at the rabbit, his expression of disgust gone. He looked sad. “It’s being absorbed by the Barrier.”

My stomach lurched again, my mouth dry. “They did this on purpose,” I said, panic rising inside of me. “The sentinels. They knew they’d trap us. That we’d give ourselves up rather than come here.”

“It is the Wastes,” said Delane. “Get stuck in here for too long and the Barrier will begin to absorb you too.”

I straightened, imagining the three of us collapsed on the grass, our flesh melting, too far gone to ever escape the Wastes. Already, we’d stood here too long!

“Then we have to move,” I gasped. I immediately headed up the hill, picking up the pace with each step, chased by something intangible, yet far more dangerous than Duddon Malone or the sentinels at the forest’s edge.

Sol called me back. “Mia, wait! There’s something else you should know.”

Freaked, I glanced back over my shoulder. “Sol, I think we know enough!” I cried. “Or do you want to end up like that?”

The land flattened as I approached the final rise. I stopped. A quarter mile in front of me was a second hill, taller than the one
on which I stood, and wider, too, its plateau shaped like the outline of a man dozing beneath the sky. I would have recognized it anywhere. I’d seen it from the Ridge a hundred times. There was no mistaking the Sleeper Hill Giant.

To the side of the giant lay a dense, jumbled mess of buildings. Some were in sharp focus, like the unmistakable white wooden cupola above the Onaly Free Church. A hazy nothingness covered other parts of the town as if I saw it through condensation on the inside of a window.

Though I saw no cars, muffled sounds of traffic came from a distance. Every so often, the sounds would stop abruptly and silence would fall.

Sol, Delane, and the restless horses came to my side. “It’s Onaly Crossing,” I said, breathless. “Sol, it’s
Onaly
.”

A flash of light sped past the front of the church. A blue car burst into focus and then vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

“I tried to warn you,” said Sol, regret clear in his tone.

Sol had tried to prepare me for what I was about to see, and once again, I’d ignored him, charging off on my own as if I knew better, when clearly I knew nothing at all.

“This is what happens when the Barrier encounters one of your towns,” he said. “The Barrier embraces nature. Life. Where it finds those things, both our worlds exist undisturbed, one within the other. But the Barrier was created thousands of years
before all of this.” He gestured to Onaly. “It didn’t know what was coming.”

It was overwhelming. Sol’s shrinking world lay bare before me. The shading over Onaly and Crownsville on the map at Old Man Crowley’s finally made sense.

“The Barrier can absorb
some
things on your side,” said Delane, with a shrug. “The occasional road, a farm. But your towns and cities are too dense. They’re too packed with materials it doesn’t understand. It loses itself, unable to understand what exists on the Other Side. Lands we have once shared have become yours.”

It was monstrous, grotesque, unfair. Below, another car appeared and then vanished. Two houses stood fused together, one a Brakaland house, judging by its stone walls. Two worlds colliding.

“We won’t make it out, will we?” I asked. “That’s why the sentinels let us go.”

“We’ll make it,” said Sol. “We have no choice but to pass through the town. North takes us too far from our trail. South, and the land turns craggy and steep as it approaches the valley. We’d never get the horses through. The quickest way is to forge straight on. In less than an hour, we’ll put the Wastes behind us and reach the Shorlan Pass. From there we can enter the valley.”

Bookended by the two guys, I looked from one to the other.
Sol, strong and restrained on one side, Delane, energetic and optimistic on the other. It was time to trust them.

“Then let’s do it,” I said.

Maybe my resolve had surprised him, but when I looked at Sol to confirm that we should move, I caught him watching me with admiration. He pulled back the look as if realizing that I’d noticed. His gaze turned to Onaly. “We stop for nothing,” he said. “Every minute we spend here, the Barrier is trying to absorb us.”

I glanced back down the hill toward the rabbit. “And what about him?”

“It’s not truly alive, Mia,” said Sol, softly. “It’s probably been here for months, even years. I’m sure it reached the point of oblivion a long time ago.”

The walk into Onaly was the strangest of my life. The closer we came to the town, the more I caught reality turned on its head. Remains of the Brakaland homes that had once stood there appeared more frequently. Few were intact. A wooden wall with a window at its center bisected a picket fence in the garden of one of the Onaly homes. A sidewalk had half swallowed a wooden door, like a tooth sticking out of concrete gums.

Voices and traffic noise burst from the air. An invisible car door banged. Footsteps followed, then faded away, a snippet of a ghostly half-life that existed unseen. On the other side of the Barrier, it was just a normal day in Onaly.

“How do you feel?” asked Delane.

My skin tingled. My ears buzzed. “Weird,” I replied. “I know these places.”

As we passed through downtown, I touched the wall of Harper’s Ice Cream Parlor. I always got my favorite combo there—black raspberry, chocolate chip, French vanilla. Two doors down, a pale pink fog covered Rainy Days, the junk shop where Willie and I had bought gag gifts for the volleyball team last year.

About fifteen minutes later, we were at the junction of Main Street and Third. A couple of blocks and we’d pass the church and Onaly would be almost behind us.

“It’s not far now,” I said.

Finally, the buildings receded and the road disappeared beneath a blanket of grass.

Once clear of town, I took a final look back. Onaly lay under a hazy mist.

“There’s nothing that can be done,” said Sol, with a rueful shake of the head. “You should put it from your mind.”

But how could I when all over this world a short-circuited Barrier was struggling to maintain its hold?

Back on the horses, we pressed on across the prairie. Soon a cool breeze touched my face. Reality returning. Forested peaks waited ahead, the landscape turning from grassland to rock. Patches of red mist appeared in pools.

“It comes from the valley,” said Delane, gesturing to the fog. “We’re close to the Shorlan Pass.”

Riding behind Delane’s broad back, it was difficult for me to make out the pass until we were almost on it. Pine and spruce grew beside a rocky path. Little more than a few feet wide, it descended steeply into dark forest below. Two life-size male figures, carved from wood, guarded either side of the trail. One faced in toward the valley, the other out toward the prairie. The red mist covered their feet.

“Freemen,” said Delane. “Here to welcome us to the valley.”

It wasn’t much of a welcome. There really wasn’t anything here. The mist thickened as soon as we entered the forest. Little sunlight penetrated the canopy above.