If he hadn't been so utterly exhausted, Will would have launched into a thousand questions about this Pore and the ancient race Drake had mentioned. As it was, his mind was on more immediate matters. He shifted uneasily on the metal trunk, and then spoke up. "You… um… haven't really answered me… about why you're helping us."
Drake looked at him and, for the first time, gave a genuine smile. It seemed a little incongruous with his steely gaze.
"You're a stubborn little sod, aren't you? Can't see your chum Chester being so pushy." He leaned back, a contemplative expression on his face. "Where some lead, others follow," he said under his breath.
"Huh?" Will said, not catching what he was saying.
"In answer to your question," Drake said, straightening up, "life is hard down here, but just because we live like animals doesn't mean that we've lost our humanity. There are renegades a lot less accommodating that Elliott or me, who would kill you just for your boots, or keep you alive for — how can I put it? — their own diversions. I snatched Elliott from a similar fate many years ago." He rubbed his chest as if recalling an injury he'd received on the occasion. "I wouldn't want to see that happen to any of you."
"Oh," Will uttered.
Drake sighed, a long, deep sigh. "You and Chester are not like the walking wounded that are usually Banished from the Colony — you've not been maimed or tortured or broken from years of service." He rubbed the palms of his hands together as he continued. "I didn't count on being saddled with the three of you, I admit." He stared into Will's eyes. "But we'll just have to see how your brother shapes up."
As tired as he was, Will caught the implication.
"And you, sonny boy, could be a big liability with the White Necks after your scalp," Drake said with a yawn, his face becoming expressionless as he glanced around the room. "But I need to find out more about what the Styx are up to before we move from the plain. It'll give some breathing space for your brother to get his strength back. And when we get to where we're going, we could certainly do with some extra hands around the place."
Will nodded.
"The fact that you're Sarah Jerome's son and know the ropes Topsoil could be a real asset."
Will nodded again, but then stilled his head as he wondered why this was so important to Drake. "What do you mean?"
"Well, if my instinct is correct, this thing the Styx are working on might have big implications for Topsoilers. And I don't think either of us would just sit by and let them get away with it, would we?" He raised a quizzical eyebrow at Will.
"No way!" Will burst out.
"So, what do you say?" the man asked pointedly.
"Huh?"
"Well, are you in or not? Are you going to join us?"
Will chewed his lip in confusion. He was completely thrown, both by the offer from this formidable man and the suggestion that Cal might not be part of it. What would happen if his brother didn't recover fully? Would Drake just ditch him? And Will wondered what would happen if the Limiters really were out to get him. If it proved too dangerous to have him around, what them? Would Drake simply hand him over? But Will also knew he'd do anything he could to stop the Styx. It would pay them back for Tam's death.
He didn't have any alternative but to accept Drake's invitation. Besides, he, Chester, and Cal were hardly in a position to go it alone, certainly not with the state his brother was in, and not with the Limiters everywhere.
As Drake watched him, waiting for a response, Will knew he shouldn't hesitate — that wouldn't go down well. What else could he do but say yes? At the very least, if he played his cards right, then this man might be the key to finding his father.
"Yes," he said.
They talked some more and then Will was dispatched back to his room, where he found Chester fast asleep on the floor by the bed in which Cal was stretched out.
Will had wanted to say something to Chester, to apologize for being so hasty in dismissing his friend's hunch about Drake and Elliott. But Chester was dead to the world, and there was no way he was going to wake him. Will's fatigue caught up with him, too. He curled up on the unoccupied bed and fell into a dreamless sleep.
25
In the days that followed, Will and Chester looked after Cal, serving him the nondescript food Drake and Elliott provided. All he wanted to do was sleep on the narrow bed, but the boys forced him to exercise. Taking fumbling, clumsy steps as if he couldn't quite feel his feet, he glowered resentfully at them.
His speech became less slurred and the blue hue gradually left his skin. Drake came in every day for updates on his progress, then would whisk one of the others off on reconnaissance expeditions so they could begin to learn the ropes, as he put it.
When Chester was away on one of these outings, Will took the opportunity to have a word with his brother.
"I know you're awake," Will said to Cal, who was lying on the bed, facing the wall. "What do you think of Drake?"
Cal didn't respond.
"I said, what do you think of Drake?"
"Seems OK," Cal mumbled after a while.
"Oh, I think he's better than that," Will said. "He told me there are others in the Deeps that would cut your throat for the clothes on your back. That's if the Limiters didn't get to you first."
"Hmm," Cal grunted, unconvinced.
"I just thought you should know that if you don't stop moping and get yourself back on your feet, Drake's patience might run out."
Cal spun around to face Will, his eyes filled with a sudden fury.
"Is that a threat? Are you threatening me? What's he going to do, send me packing?" He sat up quickly.
"Yes, something like that," Will answered.
"How do you know? You're just saying that."
"No, I'm not," Will answered resolutely. He stood up and started for the door.
"So you'd just let him dump me?" Cal was staring daggers at his brother by this time.
"Oh, Cal," Will groaned, turning around in the doorway. "What can I do if you won't help yourself? You know that Drake's talking of moving on soon. He and Elliott don't live here permanently. And he says he's going to take us with him."
"All of us?" Cal asked.
"That depends. Do you think he wants to look after three of us, especially when one's a real pain?"
Cal swung his legs over the side of the bed and stared nervously at Will.
"Do you mean that?"
Will nodded. "Just thought you should know," he said as he exited the room.
Cal took Will's words to heart and, in the days that followed, was a changed person. He threw himself into an exercise regime, hobbling around on a dark wooden cane that Drake had given him. The left side of Cal's body seemed to be the problem, the arm and leg taking longer to recover than their right-side counterparts.
On one occasion, disturbed by the constant tap-tap of the cane and the abrupt blurting snores of Chester, Will was finding it impossible to sleep. The heat and closeness weren't helping although they had all pretty much acclimatized to it by now. Eventually Will decided it was useless and got up, scratching as he felt lice on his scalp.
"Well done, bro," he called quietly over to Cal, who gave a mumbled "Thanks" in response, continuing his circuit of the room.
"I need some water," Will decided aloud, and headed out into the corridor toward the small storeroom where the bladders were kept. He heard something and drew to a halt. As he stood in the dim half light, Elliott loomed into sight at the far end of the hallway. She was wearing her usual dark jacket and pants and had her rifle in her hands, but hadn't yet covered her head with the shemagh.
"Oh… hello," Will said self-consciously, dressed as he was in just his shorts. He folded his arms protectively across his chest, trying to cover up his lack of clothing.
With an expression of sheer indifference, she looked him coldly up and down. "Trouble sleeping?" she inquired.
"Uh… yeah."
She did a double take at the wound on his shoulder.
 
; "Impressive," she said.
Feeling even more uncomfortable under her scrutiny, he slid his hand over the injury he'd received from the Styx attack dog. The heat of the Deeps made it itch like crazy, and Will couldn't stop himself from scratching.
"Stalker," Will said eventually.
"Looks like it was hungry," she observed.
At a loss for words, Will took his hand away to inspect the red patch of newly healed skin, and nodded mutely.
"Want to come on patrol with me?" she asked, in a non-commital sort of way.
It was about the last thing on Will's mind at that time of night, but he was intrigued because he had seen so very little of her and thrilled that she had offered. Drake spoke of her skills with such respect, telling them she had achieved a level of skills of "field craft," as he called it, that Will and Chester would have to work very hard to attain.
"Yeah… great," he gushed. "What gear do I need?"
"Nothing much — I travel light," she said. "Hurry up, then!" she urged, since Will showed no sign of moving.
He returned to the room, where Cal hardly seemed to notice him as he continued with his exercises, and got dressed in a mad flurry. A minute later, he went back to Elliott in the corridor. She offered him one of the pads of cylinders that Drake always carried with him.
"Are you sure?" Will hesitated, recalling the incident at the Place of Cross Staves.
"Drake seems to think you'll be sticking around, so you're going to have to learn how to use them sooner or later," she said. "And you never know, we just might bump into some Limiters."
"To tell you the truth, I don't even know what these things are," he admitted, attaching the pad to his belt, then looping and knotting the stay around his thigh.
"They're stove guns. Bit more basic than this," she said, lifting up the long rifle. "And you should try this out, too." She handed him something else.
It was a device consisting of a larger and a smaller tube alongside each other, the two looking as though they had been melted together so that the join between them was barely detectable. The whole device was made from a rubbed, dull brass, its surface covered in tiny scratches and dents, and it was about a foot and a half long, with caps on either end of the larger of the two cylinders.
"It's a scope, isn't it?" Will said, glancing at her rifle, which had an identical device mounted on top of the barrel. The only difference was that his version had two short straps attached to it.
She nodded. "Put your arm through the loops… makes it easier to carry. OK then, let's go." She turned to face the exit and, in the blink of an eye, had swept into the shadows at the end of the corridor.
Will went after her, shinnying down the rope to find he was submerged in total darkness as he reached the bottom. He listened by could hear nothing. Unclipping his lantern, he turned it up a notch.
He was startled when the light fell on Elliott — she was several feet away, standing still as a statue.
"Unless I say so, that's the last time you use an orb on my patrol." She indicated the scope on his arm. "Use the scope, but just remember to shield it from bright light, as it'll frazzle the element inside. Also, be gentle with it — they're rarer than slugs' teeth," she said.
He extinguished his lantern and unhooked the device from his forearm. Flicking up the metal caps at either end, he held it up to his eye, looking around him.
"Wicked!" he exclaimed.
It was amazing. As if illuminated by a pulsing, slightly diffuse amber glow, the scope cut through the pitch-blackness. He could see the tiniest detail of the rock wall across from him, and when he pointed it down the length of the tunnel he could see way into the distance. There was an eerie glow to the floor and walls, making them appear as if they were shiny and wet, even though everything in the immediate area was bone-dry.
"This is so cool. It's like… like everything's in a weird daylight. Where'd you get these?"
"The Styx snatched someone from Topsoil who could make them. But he escaped and came down here to the Deeps. He brought a whole load of the scopes with him."
"Oh, right," Will said. "And what powers it? Batteries?"
"I've no idea what batteries are," she said, pronouncing the word as if it were foreign. "In each scope there's a small light orb that's been joined to some other things. That's all I know."
Will swiveled slowly on his heels, peering through the contraption toward the other end of the lava tunnel. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of Elliott's face.
In the ethereal amber glow, her skin was smooth and radiant, as if bathed in the softest sunlight. She appeared beautiful and so very young, her pupils shimmering like twin points of intensely sparkling fire. Even more striking was the fact that she was smiling, which he'd never seen her do before. Smiling at him. It filled him with a kind of warmth — a sensation that was new and unfamiliar. He involuntarily took a sharp breath, then, hoping she hadn't heard, managed to control his breathing again. He continued to move the scope in an arc toward the other end of the tunnel, as if he was getting used to the device, but his thoughts were a million miles away.
"Right," she said gently, coiling the shemagh around her head. "Follow me, partner."
* * * * *
They trekked along the lava tube, pausing briefly in the golden cavern to protect their gear in a small waterproof satchel Elliott was carrying before they swam through the sump. Once on the other side, they stopped again to get themselves organized.
"Can I give you a piece of advice?" she asked as he was tying the pad of stove guns back onto his thigh.
"Sure. What?" he replied, not knowing what was coming next.
"It's the way you move. When you tread, you're like the others — even Drake. Try to use the ball of your foot… stay up on your toes longer, before you lower onto your heel. Watch me through the scope."
He did as she told him, observing how she took each step, moving like a cat sneaking up on its prey. Through the scope, her pants and boots, drenched from the water of the sump, glimmered with a shifting green of pale yellow light.
"It cuts down on the noise and even the tracks you leave, a little."
Will watched her legs as she demonstrated, marveling at what seemed to be second nature to her.
"And you'll need to learn about foraging," she said suddenly, noticing something on the rock wall beside her. "There's plenty of food around if you know where to look. Like this, a cave oyster."
She went over to what he thought was merely a piece of rock jutting from the wall. With the blade of her knife, she began to pry around it. Then she resheathed the knife and put on a pair of gloves.
"The edges are sharp," she explained, tucking her fingers into the gap she had made. Bracing herself, she pulled with both hands and, with a slow sucking noise, the rock gradually came away from the wall. With a final sound like an egg being cracked open, it suddenly came free and she staggered back a couple of paces.
"There!" she said triumphantly and held it up so he could see. It was roughly the size of half a football, and as she flipped it over, Will recoiled. The underside was leathery and pulpy, with a band of small filaments rippling at its circumference. It was an animal of some kind.
"What the heck is it?" he said. "A giant limpet or something?"
"I told you — it's a cave oyster. They feed on the cinder algae around water holes. It tastes disgusting raw, but it's OK boiled." As she poked her thumb into the middle of the pulpy mass, it heaved and the animal began to extend a large, fleshy trunk, like the foot of a snail but many times bigger. Elliott stooped to carefully prop the animal upside down on its shell between two stones. "Should keep it from straying until we get back."
* * * * *
Their journey across the Great Plain was uneventful, although they were forced to cross several canals using the narrow lock gates as bridges. Will worked hard to keep up with Elliott, who moved at an astonishing speed. He practiced treading as she'd shown him, but it wasn't long before his insteps began to ache so
badly he had to give up.
She slowed as the cavern wall came into sight. Carefully checking the surrounding area with her rifle scope, she led him along the wall and into a low, wide tunnel. She stopped when they'd gone a few hundred feet.
A wall of smell stayed them.
There was the most intense reek of rotten meat — sour blasts of it assailed them. Will tried to breathe through his mouth, but the horrific stench was so strong in the air, he could almost taste it.
Then, through his scope, he caught something that made his heart skip a beat.
"Oh no!" he gasped.
On one side of the tunnel, there were the bodies of what, from their clothes, had to be renegades. On the other side, facing them, were Coprolites, still in their bulbous dust suits. Will knew instinctively that the Styx had been responsible, and that the corpses had been decaying for some time. The odor could mean nothing else.
He counted five renegades and four Coprolites. The bodies in both ranks were on thick wooden stakes. The victims' heads sagged forward onto their chests, their feet supported by small timber crossbars nailed to the planks approximately two feet off the ground. This gave an eerie effect, as if the dark and silent bodies were actually suspended in air.
"But why did they do this?" Will asked, shaking his head at the terrible loss of life.
"It's a warning, and a show of their power. They do it because they're Styx," Elliott replied. As she walked down the line of renegades, Will stepped over to the Coprolites.
"I knew this man," Elliott said sadly, standing motionless before one of the bodies.
Holding his breath, Will made himself look at a dead Coprolite. The mushroom color of the suit showed up clearly in the amber of his night scope, but there was a darker texture smeared around the eye holes. The luminescent orbs were missing from them. It was evident that the thick rubber of the suit had been slashed to get the orbs out. He shivered. It brought home the full horror of what the Styx were capable of. "Butchers," he mumbled to himself.
"Will," Elliott said suddenly, breaking into his thoughts. She wasn't looking at the bodies now, but glancing up and down the wide tunnel, as if all her senses were straining.