stay safe and cozy all the time. He'll come back. He always
does."
Isabel stewed a little more. Samuel looked in every direction to
be sure they were alone by the water's edge. Satisfied, he lifted
the tablet from where it had been placed between the rocks.
"What do you think it is?" asked Isabel.
"It's two-sided," said Samuel, trying to pry the two halves apart
with his fingernails. "And they come apart, or at least I think they
do. Maybe there's something hidden inside."
"Here, let me see it," said Isabel. Samuel reluctantly handed it
to her. Isabel gave it a brief glance, then held it over her head
so she could smash it against the rocks.
"What are you doing!" cried Samuel, reaching up to take it from
her. "We have to be careful with it. There's a lot that needs to be
read on there."
"Here, you can have it," she said, pushing the tablet into
Samuel's hands and beginning to walk away all in one fluid
motion. She felt he was punishing her for not knowing how to
read better.
"Wait--Isabel, please. I didn't mean anything by it. Let's look at it
together and see what we can figure out."
Isabel ignored him. Neither Edgar nor Samuel seemed to
understand how a friend was supposed to act.
"Come on, Isabel. I said I was sorry. I need your help on this. I
can't do it alone."
Isabel stopped but didn't turn around right away. She took out
her sling, set a dried fig inside, and began swinging it over her
head. Fwoosh, fwoosh, fwoosh--faster and faster it went until
snap! she let it fly out over the water. Samuel watched until it
went so far he almost lost sight of it, a tiny black speck against a
deep blue sea of water. The effort made Isabel feel better.
"Let me see it again," she said, turning. She would leave if he
wouldn't trust her with the tablet.
Samuel hesitated before holding it out toward her. When Isabel
took it she ran her fingers over the letters that covered one side.
She could feel them, etched as they were, and it was a new
sensation she liked. Like Edgar before her, she quickly figured
out the second word at the top. A-T-H-E-R-T-O-N. "Atherton!
That's what it says," she said proudly.
"You're right," said Samuel. "Let me have a look."
She held it out.
"And that other word, I think you know that one as well." Isabel
wrinkled her brow so it fell low over her eyelashes. Her long
black hair fell over the sides of her face as she concentrated on
the letters. First, she said something that sounded like in-sid,
but right after, without any help, she changed her mind.
"Inside--inside Atherton!" cried Isabel. But then she realized
what she'd read. Samuel saw that she was shaking, a look of
terror on her face he'd only seen once before.
"It's all right, Isabel. Don't think about it."
Isabel handed the tablet back to Samuel and turned away. The
inside of Atherton held the Inferno, which had almost killed
Isabel not that long ago.
"It's just a tablet, Isabel. We don't have to do anything with it."
Deep down there was nothing Samuel wanted more than to
read the tablet top to bottom, to absorb every single word and
number. It fascinated him beyond all reason.
"I think we should set it on fire," said Isabel. "Whatever it says
can only bring trouble."
"We can't do that. And I don't think we should just give it to Dr.
Kincaid. There must be a reason Edgar wanted us to have it."
"I still say we should get rid of it," said Isabel. "We can't do that!
What if there's something important here? This is the work of Dr.
Harding--that's obvious. We can't just destroy it, Isabel."
"Then you read it. I don't want to read any more."
Samuel was secretly glad Isabel didn't want to read the tablet.
He offered to let her sit by the water's edge while he gave the
tablet a good long look.
After what seemed like hours to Isabel but was actually only a
little over thirty minutes, Samuel set the tablet aside in the
rocks. He moved over next to Isabel and the two gazed out over
open water.
"I don't want you to overreact," said Samuel, "but there are
some things you need to know."
Isabel squeezed the hard, black fig in her hand, trying to stay
calm.
"Promise me we're not going back through the Inferno," she
said. If Samuel could guarantee that this message didn't lead to
a river of fire with firebugs and cave eels, she was willing to at
least listen.
He smiled the smile of someone who knows something special
and is dying to share it. "I promise," he said. He saw Isabel nod
ever so slightly, and taking the cue, he began pointing to
different parts of the tablet.
"There are a lot of numbers, mostly in sets of five, so they must
have unlocked some part of Dr. Harding's brain. You remember
when we were inside his laboratory before, how there were so
many five-digit numbers, and how he used them to lock things
away in his mind? Well, I think the ones on this tablet must be
important. He obviously carried this around with him in the
absence of journals. These numbers are burned in. They're
permanent."
Isabel became more interested in the tablet and pointed to a
group of words trapped inside a circle. "What's that say?"
Samuel recited the words he'd already read and thought about.
"Birth of the Nubian, the making of the Inferno, the fall of
Atherton, the flood, an altered state of Cleaners, the chill of
winter."
"That sounds--I don't know, it sounds like a list of some kind,"
said Isabel.
"Maybe it's a list of things that are going to happen. If that's what
this refers to, then the list appears to be in order, or at least it
could be. Maybe the Nubian came first, at the beginning--you
remember those?"
How could Isabel forget the giant winged creatures inside
Atherton, the way they had tucked their wings and dove, their
glistening black beaks as sharp as arrows aimed at her and her
friends?
"Then came the making of the Inferno," said Isabel. "The fall of
Atherton and the altered state of Cleaners--those have both
happened," he said.
"That only leaves the last one," said Isabel, looking at the words
and trying to remember what Samuel had said. "The... chill of
winter, right?"
"That's the strangest of them all," said Samuel. He looked at
Isabel. "Do you know what winter is?"
She did not, because there had never been anything like winter
on Atherton.
"Some of the books I used to read in the Highlands talked about
winter. It's a time when every thing turns very cold and --"
"And what?" asked Isabel. She pierced right through Samuel
with those brilliant dark eyes of hers. It was impossible for him
to keep secrets from her. He couldn't figure out how Edgar had
done it.
"In the time of winter every thing dies," said Samuel. "When you
&n
bsp; say every thing, you mean every thing?"
Samuel didn't know how to respond. He hadn't ever had any
real experience with winter, so he didn't really understand it.
"I don't know for sure. But there's something else about winter,
and it might be more important given what these words say.
Winter is really cold."
"And you know what else is really interesting?" said Isabel.
"The chill of winter is the last thing on the list. What do you
suppose that means?"
"It means we're coming to the end of one thing and the
beginning of another. This is really important."
"I wish we could show it to Dr. Kincaid."
Samuel and Isabel trusted Edgar more than anyone else. Until
their friend returned, the tablet was theirs to protect. They
weren't sure exactly why, but they couldn't share it with Dr.
Kincaid or anyone else just yet.
"There are all sorts of things on this tablet. I haven't even begun
to understand it all. The other side is full of things that are
completely beyond me. The Silo, Station Seven, Spikers, the
lost garden--it's all so confusing. And then there's this."
Samuel pointed to the left corner of the tablet, where he saw a
collection of lines and markings and words almost too tiny to
read.
"What is it?" asked Isabel.
"It's the key to Mulciber," said Samuel, reading some of the
words. Seeing Isabel still didn't quite understand, he spoke
more directly, pointing to a long word of eight letters.
"That word right there--THEYARDS--that's the word, Isabel. It
will open the yellow door."
The yellow door. They'd long wanted to open it but had never
known how. The eight-letter combination had been kept from
them by Dr. Kincaid and Vincent.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" asked Isabel.
Samuel just smiled. They had the key to Mulciber! They could
actually get back inside Atherton.
"We could just take a quick look around," said Isabel. "We don't
have to go very far, right?"
"Absolutely!"
Samuel loved the idea of adventure almost as much as Edgar
did, and going back inside Atherton was the most adventurous
thing he could think of.
"You see there? That's the Inferno," said Samuel, pointing
down a path on the map so delicately burned into wood. "But
this map leads in the opposite direction."
Isabel could see that he was right.
"But where does it lead to? And why would we go back in
there?"
She secretly loved the idea of having an adventure of her own
to tell Edgar about when he got back and was beginning to
hope it would work. There was something very appealing about
taking up this challenge while their closest friend was on a
faraway quest of his own.
"It leads here," said Samuel. His finger followed the jagged path
of a burned line. It went every which way, rising and falling,
passing words and markings. Near the end, the markings
increased and took on the form of something Samuel had read
about in books.
"I think those are snowflakes," he said. Isabel crinkled her nose
and leaned in closer. She'd heard of snow but had no memory
of having ever seen it or felt it.
At the very end was a set of four words Isabel had seen only a
moment ago.
"'The chill of winter,'" she whispered.
"There's a secret hidden inside Atherton that no one else knows
about. Not even Edgar. Maybe not even Dr. Kincaid."
"We'll just have a look, that's all," said Isabel. "We can always
turn back and get help if we need it, can't we?"
The two smiled at each other and nodded.
"Of course we can," said Samuel. But he had no intention of
turning back. His mind was aflame with curiosity. He wanted the
chill of winter to be his discovery whether Isabel went along or
not.
CHAPTER 12SPIKERS
Edgar didn't have to walk very far before realizing he'd made a
terrible mistake. The smog of the Dark Planet swirled on a sea
breeze, and the sound of giant, pounding feet came from behind
him. As Edgar turned in a circle, every direction looked exactly
the same. Grey tree trunks, sick with disease, rose all around
him. Here the world was colorless in the extreme, a deep
monotone fog pervading every thing. And he was having
trouble breathing.
Edgar had made the catastrophic error of walking away from the
safety of the Raven without leaving himself a trail to follow back.
He couldn't have imagined how quickly the vessel would
dissolve away in the haze.
I'm lost, he thought, coughing into his arm as quietly as he
could. Something was tracking him as he moved.
The sound of approaching creatures was coming from more
than one direction now, but in the soupy smog Edgar couldn't
say for sure where the first attack would come from.
Time to climb, he thought. The idea of climbing calmed him
down at first, but when he dug his fingers into the tree trunk in
front of him, he had an unpleasant surprise: Things he'd never
seen before began crawling out of the rotting wood. They were
the color of dirt and decay, a shade above monochrome. It took
all of Edgar's will to hold back a scream as he released the
trunk and shook his hands.
The sound of pounding was coming from three directions now-or was it four?--and Edgar spun around. When he faced the tree
trunk again he knew he had run completely out of options.
Whatever was after him had arrived.
Don't think, just move! Move! thought Edgar. He took hold of the
tree trunk and climbed fast and furious into the smog above.
The bugs were long and many legged with slippery shells that
twisted and turned like a snake. As they emerged from the
rotting tree trunk with startling speed, one of them crawled over
Edgar's hand. He froze, holding his breath and expecting to be
pierced or pinched with unseen claws. But it only left a slimy
path on the back of his hand as it passed over.
While Edgar looked at the bug crawling away he felt another
moving up his arm and heading for his armpit. Edgar held on
with his other arm and shook it free, watching it twist and spin
toward the ground in the open air.
This must be what the Cleaners are eating out here, thought
Edgar.
He'd only climbed six or seven feet up the side of a dead tree
but already the ground was invisible below. Looking up, Edgar
saw that things were a little bit brighter, and so he quickly
scaled another ten feet, flicking creepy crawlies as he went.
Now he could see the tops of the stand of trees in every
direction, a sea of weather-beaten spikes emerging from a
boiling cauldron.
He was startled by the sensation of a slimy creature that had
made its way under his shirt and around to his back. "Get off
me!" he cried.
He realized right away that he'd spoken too loudly, because the
sound of giant steps from below came quickly to a stop. All was
quiet in the forsak
en wood and Edgar knew something had
heard him. He thought he heard sniffing from twenty feet below,
but he couldn't be sure.
Without warning, there was a loud chopping sound from below
and the tree in which Edgar was perched was cut free at the
bottom with one swipe. As it toppled, Edgar had no choice but
to jump. He slammed flat into another trunk, smashing his face
hard and nearly bouncing free into the air. Another loud thwack!
and a second tree toppled over to his left.
He climbed higher still where the air became brighter, and then
Edgar began leaping from trunk to trunk, making his way across
the forsaken wood as trees fell behind him. Looking back, he
saw the shadows of something from below that looked like a
giant hammer rising and crashing into the earth.
Edgar jumped three more trees away and then stopped,
clearing all the crawling bugs from his arms. A second bug had
traveled all the way to Edgar's head and made a nest of his
floppy hair. He was trying to disentangle its squirming four-inch
body with shaking fingers when he heard a sound he knew all
too well.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! The sound of breaking
bones.
"Cleaners," whispered Edgar.
The clanging of thousands of bony legs rushed beneath him.
He could see the shadows of Cleaners shooting past in a herd
toward the falling trees.
I've never seen ones that big, Edgar thought in awe. He could
only make out their shadows, but it appeared these Cleaners
were two or three times bigger than any that had lived on
Atherton.
They must be thirty feet long or more! he thought. Two bites and
Cleaners this big could remove every trace of Edgar from the
Dark Planet.
Edgar had to leap with all his strength in order to get across the
gap between dead trees--maybe ten or eleven feet--each time
grabbing a lower hold on the next trunk, forcing him to climb
back up again. At each landing the bugs would churn out as if
trying to escape an approaching menace. But Edgar scrambled
on, just ahead of the falling trees behind him.
All at once, there was a commotion like nothing Edgar had ever
heard before. It reminded him of the sound of crashing cliffs on
Atherton. The earth shook and trees snapped. A fight between
monsters was on.
Edgar heard the screaming and ripping and biting. He could
see the shadows moving like awful puppets in a violent show of