She pushed the head to the side again, thinking she should hide it in case any of the boys wandered over.
"Need any help?" Will called out.
"No," Elliott replied, "just stay put."
"it's a Styx, isn't it?" Will shouted, his voice a little tremulous.
"I think so," Elliott called back after a slight pause.
She hesitated, looking at the blood-soaked head, weighing up whether she should tell Will. With a pang of recollection, she thought of her home back in the Colony. She remembered the heartbreaking moment when she'd been forced to leave her own mother, knowing in all likelihood she would never see her again.
Filled with indecision, Elliott regarded the piece of paper once more. She couldn't keep this secret to herself. She couldn't live with it on her conscience.
"Will, Cal, over here!"
Will came jogging over, with Chester following behind. "You really nailed him," Will observed, eyeing the body with some trepidation.
"You might want to look at this," Elliott said quickly, thrusting the bloodied broadsheet into his hand.
He scanned the sheet as it flapped in the wind. Recognizing the sketch of himself at the bottom of the page, he shook his head in disbelief. "What is this?" Then his eyes alighted on the name at the top. "Sarah... Sarah Jerome," he read out loud. He turned to Chester. "Sarah Jerome?" he said again.
"Not your mother?" Chester asked as he leaned in to see the broadsheet.
Elliott kneeled down beside the body. Without saying a word, she very gently turned the head, pushing the damp hair aside to reveal the face. Then she stood up. "I thought it was a Limiter, Will."
"Oh! It's her! It is her!" Will exclaimed, glancing between the broadsheet and the body on the ground. He didn't really need the picture; the similarities between his own face and hers were remarkable. It was as though he was seeing his reflection in a dusty mirror.
"What's she doing down here? And why was she carrying that?" Chester asked, pointing at the rifle.
Will shook his head, overwhelmed. "Get Cal," he said to Chester as he stepped closer to Sarah. Squatting down by her shoulder, he put out a hand to touch the face that was so very much like his own.
He drew it back as she gave a small moan.
"Elliott, she's alive!" he gasped.
Then her eyelids flickered but remained shut.
Before Elliott could react, Sarah's mouth opened and she drew a breath.
"Will?" she asked, her lips moving weakly, her voice so quiet that he could barely hear it over the desolate howl of the wind.
"Are you Sarah Jerome? Are you really my mother?" he asked in a cracked voice. His emotions were in a complete tumult. Here he was meeting his biological mother for the first time, yet she was dressed in the uniform of the soldiers who were after him. And in the picture she'd been carrying, he had a noose around his neck. What did that mean? Had she been about to shoot him?
"Yes, I'm your mother," she groaned. "You must tell me..." Then her voice failed her.
"What? Tell you what?" Will asked.
"Did you kill Tam?!" Sarah screamed, her chest heaving and her eyes flicking wide open as she stared at Will. He was so shocked that he almost fell backward.
"No, he didn't," Cal answered from beside Will, who hadn't even noticed he was there. "Is it really you, Mother?"
"Cal," Sarah said, tears spilling from her eyes as she squeezed them shut and began to cough. It took her several seconds before she was able to talk again. "Just tell me what happened in the Eternal City... Tell me what happened to Tam. I need to know."
Cal found it difficult to speak, his lips trembling. "Uncle Tam died saving us... both of us," he said finally.
"Oh my God." Sarah wept. "They were lying to me. The Styx were lying to me all the time." She tried to sit up.
"You need to keep still," Elliott told her. "You're bleeding badly. I thought you were a Limiter. I shot—"
"That doesn't matter now," Sarah said, rolling her head with the pain.
"I can dress your wounds," Elliott offered, shifting uneasily on her feet as Will looked up at her.
Sarah tried to say no but broke into another coughing fit. When it had passed, she continued. "Will, I'm sorry I ever doubted you. I'm so very, very sorry."
"That's... that's OK," Will stammered, not really knowing what she meant.
"Come closer, both of you," she urged them. "Listen to me."
As they leaned in to hear what their mother wanted to tell them, Elliott set about applying some gauze pads to Sarah's hip, tying them in place with bandage strips.
"The Styx have got a deadly virus and they're going to spread it Topsoil." She stopped talking, clenching her teeth together with a moan, then resumed. "They've already tested a form of it there, but... but it was only a trial run... The full-strength virus is called Dominion... going to cause a terrible plague."
"So that was what we saw in the Bunker," Cal whispered, looking at Elliott.
"Will... Will," Sarah said, staring at him with an intense desperation. "Rebecca carries the virus around with her... and she wants you out of the picture. The Limiters" — Sarah tensed her body, then relaxed again — "won't stop until you're dead."
"But why me?" Will's head reeled — here was the confirmation he was dreading. The Styx were out to get him.
Sarah didn't answer but, with the greatest effort, looked at Elliott as the girl put the finishing touches to a bandage on her temple. "They're coming for all of you. You've got to get away from here. Are there others you can call on for help?"
"No, there's only us," Elliott answered her. "Most of the renegades have been rounded up."
Sarah was silent while she tried to steady her breathing. "Then, Will, Cal, you have to dig yourselves in deep... somewhere they can't reach you."
"That's what we're doing," Elliott confirmed. "We're going to the Wastes."
"Good," Sarah croaked. "And then you must go Topsoil and warn them what's coming."
"How..." Will began.
"Oh, it hurts," Sarah groaned, and her face went limp as if she'd blacked out. Only the occasional flutter of her eyelids told them she was hanging on to consciousness.
"Mum," Will said hesitantly. Addressing a complete stranger in that way felt so incredibly foreign to him. There were a thousand things he wanted to ask her. "Mum, you've got to come with us."
"We can carry you," Cal said.
Sarah's response was resolute. "No, I'd only slow you down. You've got a fighting chance if you get going."
"She's right," Elliott said, picking up Sarah's rifle and belt kit and handing them to Chester. "We have to leave now."
"No, I'm not going without my mother," Cal insisted, seizing Sarah's limp hand.
As Cal talked to his mother, tears flowing freely down his cheeks, Will took Elliott aside.
"There's got to be something we can do," he pressed her. "Can't we take her with us some of the way and hide her?"
"No," Elliott replied emphatically. "Besides, moving her isn't going to help her any. She's probably going to die, anyway, Will."
Sarah called Will's name, and he immediately rejoined Cal by her side.
"Never forget," Sarah said to the boys. She was really struggling now, her face contorted with pain. "I'm so proud of both of..." She didn't finish the sentence. As Will and Cal watched, her eyes slid shut and she was still.
"We've got to go," Elliott said. "The Limiters will be here soon, very soon."
"No!" Cal shouted. "You did this to her. We can't—"
"I can't undo what I've done," Elliott answered him evenly. "But I can still help you. It's your choice whether or not you let me."
Cal was about to object again when Elliott began to walk away, with Chester close behind.
"Just look at her, Cal. We wouldn't be doing her any favors if we tried to shift her," Elliott added over her shoulder.
Despite Cal's continuing protests, both he and Will knew in their hearts that Elliott was right. There wa
s no way they'd be able to haul Sarah with them. They, too, began to move away. Their mother might stand a better chance if another renegade were to find her and tend to her injuries, as Elliott had told them. But both Will and Cal knew just how unlikely this was and recognized that Elliott was trying to give them what little comfort she could.
As they rounded a corner in the tunnel, Will stopped and turned to look back at Sarah where she lay. With the mournful, unremitting howl of the wind all around him, it was such a forlorn and chilling thought — that she could die there in the dark, with no one by her side. Maybe his fate would be the same, to breathe his last in some far corner of the earth, alone.
Maybe he should have been suffering the most intense sorrow that his real mother was bleeding to death there in the tunnel. But all he felt was just a cloud of confused emotions. To Will, Sarah was little more than a stranger who had been gunned down due to an unfortunate mistake.
"Will," Elliott urged him, pulling him by the arm.
"I don't understand. What's she doing down here?" he said. "And why did they give her Bartleby?"
"The Hunter belonged to Cal?" Elliott asked.
Will nodded.
"Then it's simple, really," Elliott said. "The White Necks knew you and Cal were together. So what better than to let Sarah use the animal to track its master and lead her straight to you?"
"I suppose that's right," Will said, frowning. "But what did the Styx think—?"
"Don't you see? They wanted her to find you and kill you," Chester cut in, his voice measured and dispassionate. He had remained silent until now and was thinking more clearly than Will. "They obviously tried to make her believe you were responsible for Tam's death. It's another of their vile little schemes. Just like this Dominion thing she spoke about."
"Now can we just hurry it up?" Elliott said, sprinkling some Parchers on the trail behind her.
They continued along the main track with Cal walking apart from them, his prancing and overjoyed cat by his side.
And before long they emerged out onto a thin strip of a ledge, the wind still blowing hard. They stopped. They could see nothing before them, and no way down.
48
"What now?" Will asked, trying to put all thoughts of Sarah out of his mind and focus on their current situation. Elliott had brought them to the edge of a crevasse, but what lay beyond or below, he couldn't tell.
Will was aware of Chester's cold stare upon him, and it made him extremely angry. It still felt as though his old friend was silently blaming him for everything. Considering what Will had just been through, he'd have expected Chester to cut him some slack. Clearly he was expecting too much.
"So, are we going to jump for it?" he said, peering at what he assumed was a sheer drop.
"Sure, be my guest. It's several hundred feet down, as the stone falls," Elliott replied. "But you might want to try over here instead."
At the very edge of the ledge they saw two prongs. They went as near as they dared, the combination of the high wind and the sheer drop making them move with caution, and discovered that it was the tip of an old iron ladder.
"A Coprolite ladder. Not as quick as jumping, but much less painful," she said. "This place is known as the Sharps — you'll see why when we get down."
"What about Bartleby?" Cal suddenly piped up. "He can't climb down this ladder, and no way am I leaving him here! I only just got him back!"
Cal was kneeling with his arm around the cat, who was rubbing a huge cheek against the side of the boy's head and purring so loudly it sounded like an overcrowded beehive.
"Send him along the ridge. He'll find his own way down," Elliott barked. "If he's any kind of Hunter, he'll seek us out at the bottom."
Cal humphed indignantly. "What do you mean? He's the best Hunter in the whole Colony! Aren't you, Bart?" He ran his hand affectionately over the creased, hairless pate of the cat's domed head, and the beehive sounded as if a riot had broken out.
Elliott went first, followed closely by Chester, who pushed past Will to the front. "Excuse me," he said brusquely.
Will chose not to say anything, and as soon as Chester disappeared from view, he went next. He found it disconcerting as he took hold of the two rusty uprights and edged his legs over the brink until he found a rung with his foot. But once he'd started to move, it wasn't too bad. Last to follow was Cal, who had dispatched Bartleby on the longer journey down via the ledge but was having huge misgivings himself as he descended the ladder, stiffly and deliberately.
It was a long climb and the ladder trembled and creaked ominously with their combined movements, as if some of the fixings had broken loose. Their hands soon became coated with rust and so dry that they had to be extra careful not to lose their grip. The wind gradually dropped off the lower they went, but after a while Will noticed that he couldn't see or hear Cal above him.
"Are you OK?" he shouted up.
There was no reply.
He repeated the question, louder this time.
"Fine," came the begrudging reply from Chester below.
"Not you, you dork. It's Cal I'm worried about."
As Chester mumbled something in response, Cal's walking stick swished past Will, spinning end over end as it fell.
"Cal!" Will exclaimed, thinking for one awful moment that his brother had slipped and was going to follow after it. He held his breath and waited, but still there was no sign of the boy. Reversing his direction, Will began to climb. He soon came across Cal, who was completely stationary, both arms wrapped tightly around the ladder.
"You dropped your stick. What's up?"
"I can't do this... " Cal gasped. "Feel sick... just leave me alone for a minute."
"Is it your leg?" Will asked, concerned. "Or are you still upset about Sarah? What is it?"
"No. I just feel... feel dizzy."
"Ahh," Will said, remembering. There'd been signs of it before when they were Topsoil. Cal wasn't used to heights after spending his whole life in the Colony. "You don't like being up here; it's the height, isn't it?"
Cal swallowed a yes.
"Well, just trust me on this, Cal. I don't want you to look down, but we're almost at the bottom... I can see Elliott there right now."
"Are you sure?" Cal said skeptically.
"Absolutely. Come on."
The deception worked for about a hundred feet, until Cal again came to a standstill.
"You're lying. We should be there by now."
"No, really, not far now," Will assured him. "And don't look down!"
This went on several times, Cal becoming more and more distrustful and angry until Will really did reach the bottom.
"Touchdown!" he announced.
"You lied to me!" Cal accused him as he stepped from the ladder.
"Yeah, but hey, it worked, didn't it? You're safe now," Will replied with a shrug, happy that he'd been able to talk his brother down, even if he'd resorted to deception to achieve it.
"I'm never going to listen to you again," Cal threw huffily at him as he began to hunt around for his walking stick. "You're a lying slug."
"Oh, sure, feel free to take it out on me... just like everybody else around here does," Will replied, more for Chester's benefit than Cal's.
Will turned from the ladder, his feet making a glassy noise as if he were treading on pieces of broken bottle. Indeed, as they all moved around, the ground produced a grinding and vitreous ringing. From what little Will could see, before them seemed to be a colonnade of closely packed pillars spearing up into the darkness, each one more that 200 feet in girth.
"I'm only going to do this because the Limiters should be far enough behind that it doesn't matter, and I want you to know what we're getting into," Elliott said, turning up her lantern and holding it on the area before them.
"Wow!" Will exclaimed.
It was like looking into a sea of dark mirrors. As the beam from Elliott's light struck the nearest column, it was reflected onto another. The beam crisscrossed around them, cr
eating the illusion that there were scores of lanterns. The effect was staggering. He also caught sight of his and the others' reflections from all angles.
"The Sharps," Elliott said. "They're made of obsidian."
Will began to study the nearest column. Its circumference wasn't rounded after all, but composed of a series of perfectly flat plains that ran vertically up its length, as if it had been formed by many longitudinal fractures. It didn't seem to taper in the slightest toward the top.
Scanning around, Will came across a different style of column. The flat plains along its length were gently curved, like some gargantuan licorice twist. Indeed, as he looked further, there were more like this in between the straight columns, and a small number that were pronounced in their curvature.
His mind was awhirl as he started to speculate on the factors that could have produced such a unique natural phenomenon. Although he was bursting to say something about the columns, he checked himself, remembering only too painfully the reaction from Chester when he'd waxed lyrical about the flying lizards. But if ever anything resembled a setting for one of Chester's precious fantasy stories, these crystalline monoliths had to be it. The secret lair of the dark fairies, Will thought wryly. No, better still: the secret lair of the dark and extremely vain fairies. He suppressed a chuckle at this, keeping the notion firmly to himself. It wouldn't be wise to antagonize Chester any further; relations with him were at an all-time low as it was.
Chester picked that moment to speak up, sounding distinctly unimpressed with their surroundings, most likely in a bid to tweak Will..
"Uh-huh. The Sharps. So now what?" he asked Elliott, who turned her lantern down again, dousing the confusion of light beams and multiple images. Will was actually relieved because it was so incredibly disorienting.
"It's a maze in here, so do exactly what I tell you," Elliott replied. "Drake and I set up a cache halfway through, where we can replenish our food and water and also stock up on munitions from the arsenal. It's not going to take us long, and then we're heading on to the Pore. Once we're past that, it's a couple of days' haul to the Wetlands."
"The Pore?" Will asked, his curiosity piqued.