Mossfeaster shifted its shoulders and changed its direction. “Follow me,” it said. “This other path is an old military trail, and it will take us quite close to where we wish to be. The tower is only part of the fortification.”
“You’re telling her too much,” Nia said too loudly. “Don’t you understand? You can’t trust her with these things—you can’t trust her with anything.”
“What do you care?” Mossfeaster asked. It leaned its astonishing bulk forward and across a tangled stash of grass and low-growing bushes. “You’re stronger than she is by far. There’s no treachery she can wrangle against you, and yet you behave as if she holds you at knifepoint.”
Even Sam objected to that statement. “No treachery? You obviously don’t understand people very well.”
“I’ve been watching your kind since before you could carve your names into rocks, and if there’s one thing I have learned, it’s this: You don’t know yourselves at all. You’re an oblivious bunch, deluding yourselves from insecurity, or love, or anger. Afraid of your own strength, and afraid of your own weaknesses, too. It’s a wonder you’ve managed to survive for as long as you have.”
“At least we’re not obtuse,” Sam grumbled.
While the rest of them bickered, Nia was observing Bernice and feeling uneasy. It wasn’t her cousin, this time; it was something else—some strange quiet that filled the place. There was a sense of effort and pressure, as if they were walking uphill.
And then, there were no more birds.
Nia stopped, and Bernice went only another step or two before she followed suit. “What are you doing?” she asked, but Nia waved her quiet.
“Something’s wrong,” she whispered.
The thick but scraggly grass around them did not rustle at the edges of the rough road, and the ordinary sounds of rodents had vanished into a distressingly obvious silence. The air around them was heavy, but it was always heavy. And now there was nothing flying through it, nothing singing or calling from it. There was nothing but the tyrannical humidity and an overwhelming sense of foreboding.
But it wasn’t until she saw the snakes and turtles charging across their path that Nia noticed the swampy patch of earth out in the middle of an otherwise bleak and featureless field. It wasn’t a lake, and it could scarcely be described as a pond. It was only a spot where the ground was soggy enough to shine with a thin coating of stagnant damp.
Everything that prefers to swim but sometimes crawls was fleeing the water, running from the disturbance that bubbled at its center.
Mossfeaster froze, and then whirled around to face the rest of them. When it spoke, it was so quiet that they barely heard its words, even though they stood mere feet away.
“It isn’t enough water,” it assured them. “Even if she’s found us, there’s little she can do to us.”
Bernice was rallying a good panic. “We’ve got to run. We’ve got to run!” she squeaked.
Nia grabbed her by the arm and pulled her close to keep her from bolting. “You heard the big dirt monster. We’re out of reach.”
But the wet patch was swelling and rising. It was bubbling as if it were oil, coming up out of the ground black and viscous. The boundaries where water and swamp grass met became more distinct as a nebulous shape struggled out from the center.
Mossfeaster shook its head and spoke directly to Nia, who was trying to hold Bernice. “If she sees me, you are lost. If she realizes you weren’t made by another such as herself, she’ll figure out that you’re no threat to her.” Then it said to the rest of them, as it sank into the ground and vanished, “Head for the tower. I’ll meet you there.”
Sam was transfixed by the boiling black blob in the field, surrounded by grass and black mud. He couldn’t take his eyes off it until Mossfeaster was gone and Nia grabbed his shoulder. She pushed him and he stumbled, but when she pushed him again, his feet found their rhythm.
Without meaning to, she outpaced him in a matter of seconds—even lugging Bernice beside her. She stopped and looked back at Sam, who was slowing again.
“Come on!” she told him. “Come on, let’s go before she gets her act together!”
“Can she just do that? Anywhere it’s wet?”
“I don’t know.” Nia released Bernice and doubled back. Bernice kept running in her loping ungraceful gait, all the more awkward for its franticness. “But she’s doing it there, and we need to move.”
Sam rubbed his face with his hands, and Nia remembered how tired he must be, and how much she’d asked of him over the last few days. “I can’t keep doing this,” he said, and in the set of his eyes there was a looseness, like something elastic had stretched too far and snapped. “How are we supposed to run away from . . . from water? How can we keep that up?”
“We don’t have to run forever,” Nia promised him, although she had no authority to do so. “She won’t follow you. She doesn’t want anything from you. It’s us she wants, Sam. You can walk away from this.”
“How?” he asked, and there was pure confusion and resignation all over his face. “How am I going to go back to my real life after this?”
“We can talk as we go, Sam.” Nia pulled at him again and he let her draw him forward. “It looks like a mess right now, but we’ll sort it out.” She tugged him along with every word, and he resisted, but not very hard.
He wanted to watch the lone patch of shifting swamp as it oozed and poured, as it slid from whatever banks had mostly held it. There wasn’t enough water to give her a good shape; there was too much mud and muck to make a body like a woman’s, if that was the one Arahab preferred. But there was water enough to move. The ground was as much sand as dirt, and it siphoned moisture away where the blob tried to crawl, so she came slowly, and with great weight.
“Jesus,” Sam said. He couldn’t stop looking. He couldn’t tear himself away from the sight of the crawling, lurching, growing menace. First the size of a horse, then the size of a room. Now the size of a small house, and flopping itself forward, almost rolling.
“Sam, we can fix it,” she said. The twisted chains that coated her forearms like a pair of gauntlets jangled. They’d been all but forgotten, but they gave her an idea. “I’ll give you these things. They’re worth a fortune. You can sell them, and go anywhere you want. You can start over somewhere else.”
He was faltering along behind her, while Bernice had panted her way down to the bottom of the hill.
“It isn’t the money,” Sam said. He didn’t say it with certainty, though. He said it like he felt he ought to, on principle.
“Sam, faster.”
And then a muddy tendril the size of a tree trunk crashed against them both.
Nia hadn’t even seen it coming.
She couldn’t see it when she stopped, headfirst and facedown in a patch of scrub that made for an itchy, miserable landing even for a woman with skin that was tougher than leather.
Nia scrambled to her feet. Her clothes were torn, and she’d held on to the scarf with the precious bronze shell tied up inside it, but she’d lost one of the jeweled gauntlets. Pearls and brightly speckled flecks of gold and gemstones rained from her arm and scattered in the dirt, lost in the knee-high brush.
“Sam!” she cried with all the volume she could muster. “Sam!”
But she could see him then, and she knew he couldn’t answer. He had landed a few yards away against a tree. Back-first and horizontal, he’d been pitched like a baseball, and the tree had stopped him—the gnarly old orange tree with a trunk like a column of twisted paper had cut short his flight.
And even though she knew, could see how his back was curled around itself, slung around the trunk of the tree where he’d fallen at the bottom . . . even though she could see it from twenty yards away, she couldn’t just assume. Seeing would not be enough to justify leaving him, if he was dead, because he was the only person she knew anymore, and she would not just go without him on the mere suspicion that he could not follow.
It was prepo
sterous, to call it a suspicion. She knew before she saw the way his bones had been shattered, and she was all too aware of it before she spied the clumpy puddle of internal tissues and blood that had been forced out his mouth when the tree trunk had stopped him.
Since she had to tell herself something, Nia started repeating the only thing of comfort that she could find.
“Quick,” she babbled. “Quick, it was quick.”
Maybe the strike itself had even killed him, and the rest—the hundred-foot glide through the air, the crushing crash against the tree, that final dashing set of seconds—hadn’t even registered.
Like falling off a building, only sideways.
When Next Time Comes
Nia tried not to be sick, and she tried not to stand there and stare, but her legs had gone almost as uncooperative as Sam’s had been, and she couldn’t seem to direct them. The shell chimed beside her, dangling in its scarf. It hummed a funny, distressed call that was too high-pitched to be called a purr and too quiet to be called a message.
The shell was shaking, objecting. Hanging loose in the scarf, Nia could feel it pulling against her, wanting away from the tower and back to the shapeless, malevolent muck.
Its small resistance moved her, and made her angry.
Its protest was just one more thing acting against her, but the shell was the one thing she held in her hand, and so far as she knew, it was in no position to assault her. But it would destroy the world if she let it. So she let it complain, and it swung unhappily in its brightly colored silk sheath.
Nia was shaking, too. She was objecting, too.
And she was not prepared to take any shit from a small brown shell or a big, gelatinous puddle of muck that could scarcely lumber across the ground.
In the distance she could see Bernice’s staggering shape as it cut through the trees around the great hill—the only true hill for miles.
Nia dashed across the grasslands, dodging small trees and leaping over the bushes. She grasped the shell so hard that she thought she could feel it surrendering under her grip, softening or caving to the pressure of her fingerprints. She swung her arms, and the shell in her hand pumped back and forth as she ran.
When her feet first hit the Iron Mountain, she felt it through her shoes.
It shocked her. It jabbed up through the soles of her stolen footwear and sent a current of something like revulsion, something like recognition, up through her toes and into her torso.
She tripped and caught herself, then kept running up the hill, which was something she’d never done before—because how many hills does Florida have, anyway? And what was this one doing here?
It didn’t seem natural, the way it shot up sharply out of the ground—that sudden and steep plateau. Oranges grew around the base and up it. The neatly groomed trees were laid out in rows, all of them leading the way up to the top; all of the straight-line paths between them pointed up at the tower.
Nia didn’t look back to see how closely she was being followed, and she didn’t slow down, even when she noticed how the earth under her feet was changing. With every fiercely planted footstep, the earth under her shoes was red and fleshy.
Halfway up the hill there were more paths, though they weren’t straight like the orchards. They smelled like blossoms and they were wide, scraped into the crimson soil and smoothed for foot traffic. They curled from here to there and split, and branched, and came together in artistic ways.
She skipped over them and barreled headlong through the bushes, past the trees, around small buildings and walls, and alongside fluffy, manicured forests of moss-covered trunks.
And then, directly in front of her, there was a gate. She crashed against it, stopping herself with her hands against the iron bars. The bars were twisted and black, and there were stylized animal heads—maybe dragon heads—topping every other one. She’d dented the place where she’d stopped herself; pushed the bars several inches until they’d distended out over the moat.
There was a moat, just beyond the metal fence.
It snaked around the tower in a smug, shiny band perhaps thirty feet wide. The water smelled awful, with a rusty scarlet tang that seared the back of Nia’s nostrils.
And then she saw Bernice. Her cousin was huddled and cowering beside the gate, knees drawn up and elbows bent tightly around her legs, and her hands were clawing at her shoulders. She was making a noise that sounded like breathing except that it gurgled and hissed.
Nia’s legs quivered as she walked to Bernice’s side.
She bent down and crouched in front of her, waved her hand in front of the other girl’s face. Bernice tracked the motion with her eyes, and Nia saw that the whites around the iris had gone a sickly orange. “Bernice?” she asked the name like a question.
“What did he do to the water?”
“What?”
“The water,” Bernice insisted. “It’s poisoned. All of it, over there, and around here. You can smell it. It stinks like blood.”
It isn’t blood, said a thin, reedy voice no louder than a whisper. It’s rust.
Nia stood upright. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
She saw him, then—the older man with the white hair and the rounded barrel for a chest. He was wearing nice clothes, but you could see right through them. You could see through him, too, if you could see him at all.
He says it keeps them out.
“It keeps who out?” Nia instinctively knew whom “he” referred to, and wondered for a moment where Mossfeaster had gone. The creature had said to meet at the tower, but it didn’t seem to be there.
Them. The nasty ones, the bad old ones. They want to end the world, but they don’t like the rust. It’s something about iron, or oxygen, my friend said. I never understood it very well.
“Where is your friend?” Nia watched the ghost and did not blink, for fear of scattering him. He was so fragile and translucent, the very first breeze or quick motion might banish him.
He was so barely there. Yet he started to sing.
Underneath the flesh of the earth
Below the skin of the sky
Deeper than death the Leviathan sleeps
All children must let the king lie
“Edward,” came a louder voice. Nia was surprised when the spirit lingered despite the sound. “Who taught you that song? It wasn’t me.”
I hear things now.
“Do you?”
Sometimes. Then he continued:
He shifts his back and the mountains fall
He shakes his head and the oceans cry
Give him no dream and don’t bid him wake
All creatures must let the king lie
Nia didn’t like it, the way the tune rose and fell like the lifting and dropping of the waves. Even if the words hadn’t been so ominous, it would’ve been a rickety tune; it would’ve been the sound of a ship’s chains swaying in the wind.
Mossfeaster was standing near the ghost, who was all but oblivious while he sang. The old man seemed to be aware that he was being watched and spoken to, but if he cared, he didn’t let on.
He sang a third verse, and Nia thought it was the worst of all.
Thousands before and thousands more
The centuries pile themselves high
We bury and bind him with quiet hands
All gods must let their king lie
“Is that all of it you know?” Mossfeaster asked. It cocked its rough-edged shoulders and stared intently at the ghost. “Have you heard no other verses? There are more, if you’d like to know them.”
I like the song.
“There’s more of it for you to sing. Go and find the rest, Edward, or go back to sleep.”
This tower. It’s going to save the world, just like you said.
“Yes, and very shortly. Go on, Edward.”
Edward nodded, and he dissolved into the air around them, leaving no trace that he’d ever been there.
“Where have you been?” Nia asked
Mossfeaster. “What took you so long, and why did you leave me down there? Sam’s dead, and—”
“I know he’s dead. I saw it. And I told you why I left.”
“You could’ve helped.”
The creature glanced down at Bernice, still shuddering on the ground.
“You,” Mossfeaster told her. “You’d feel better if you’d sit on the grass. The dirt here is what burns you, you little fool. And you,” it said to Nia. “I am answering your question, too. The earth that this hill comprises, it is too dense and dead for me to navigate in my usual fashion. I move through it slowly, so it is faster for me to tread upon it like a beast. And you are better built for running than I am.”
Bernice lifted her chin, and Nia was almost certain that her face was mostly the right shape now. There was still that atrocious dent in her head, but it was filling out.
“It’s the dirt?” she asked.
“It’s the dirt. Stand up and move, before the natural toxin weakens you further. It is as I said: This is a safe place. This soil burns the water, makes it an acid. I don’t know the mechanics myself—the whys and hows of the mystery. I only know that it is so, and if you look down there, over by the swamp pit, you can see how she lingers. If she could come closer, I promise you—she would.”
From the relatively high vantage point of the Iron Mountain, Nia could see down across the plains for what felt like miles. And down in the mucky, wet depression where there were no trees and no brush, a soggy mass was struggling against the terrain and losing.
“She can’t come here?” Bernice asked again. She sounded small and cornered, and she still hadn’t moved.
“No, she can’t. I’m quite certain of that.”
“Quite certain?”
“Get up, unless you want to hurt yourself further. I’m tired of helping you if you’re just going to argue with me. Do as I say, or don’t.”
“I can stay here,” she said. There was a faraway note to her declaration that told Nia she hadn’t been listening.