which Atla could not put words. Though the Route remained undisturbed as yet, his eyes found menacing patterns in the mist below, vague shapes beginning to drift away from the cliff that hid whatever-it-was.
Then, clear as day, shining white-golden in through the haze, a thick metal rod began to slide out from the rocks. It emerged almost horizontally at first - or, as his contorted Gift insisted, vertically relative to the Realm as a whole - then bent downwards. Slowly, it coiled around into a spiral, until Atla's mind managed to resolve it as a giant spring.
The rush of fear from both Chag and, more worryingly, Pevan was instantaneous. Even outside his Gift, Atla felt the thrashing burst of Pevan's adrenaline. Chag's shout - "No! Rel, stop her! Atla!" - was redundant; Atla was already leaning back against the air, trying to put himself in Pevan's way. She'd clearly chosen fight over flight.
She barrelled down towards him, and he resisted the urge to twist his neck and try to get a glimpse of her. Instead, he braced for an impact that never came. Rel got there first, steam hissing and crackling off his Clearsight-guided path. Odd that he'd trust Chag over Pevan, but maybe he'd read the rashness in her charge.
Now Atla did turn to look up, and with some sideways slippage in the air, he was able to get a fairly clear view of the Atcar siblings struggling. Below, the spring - what kind of Wilder could be so massive and yet so simple? - had completed a full second coil and was still emerging. Had it spotted them yet?
Rel and Pevan pulled apart, exchanging vigorous hand signals that Atla couldn't read from his angle. He managed not to lose his balance or his cool as Pevan suddenly dropped back into a steep dive, this time without an emotional spike of warning. Flapping his arms, he fought for balance so he could make another intercept attempt, but Pevan pulled up short, level with him. For once the wildness in her eyes didn't seem joyous.
Eyes fixed staring at the Wilder below, she shouted, "Can you do anything to speed us up?"
Atla shrugged, mimed a dive with one hand. "What is that thing?" Even though there was neither wind nor air in the Second Realm, it was impossible to speak without the expectation that the words would be snatched away; you had to shout, or physics would bend to that expectation. It was only the shouting that kept his voice steady.
"Delaventrin." The name stabbed downwards as a spray of scarlet daggers as it left Pevan's lips. "The Separatists' Clearseer. Tell me we're close to the First Realm."
All Atla could do was mime the dive again. His entire wind-pipe felt like a rod of cold stone running through his chest. He couldn't swallow. Even if Delaventrin was still more than half-trapped in the ruins of the white cave, the Wilder's powers were insurmountable.
Pevan nodded, starting to lean forward gracefully in the air. She pressed her hands to the sides of her legs, just below her buttocks. Between that and the air resistance, her clothes were pressed tight against her body, flattering all her best qualities. She looked sleek and strong - not beautiful, exactly, but something more powerful than that. Awesome, perhaps, or at least awe-inspiring.
The Route changed, suddenly and without warning. Atla's feet struck hard, ridged ground, and the stone-grey, hard light of the Second Realm turned a syrupy yellow. He stumbled, but the ground felt right in his Gift, and something guided his feet to good footing. Behind, there were shouts of alarm from Rel and Pevan. Why hadn't he felt this coming?
Ahead, the ground resolved itself into a honeycomb web of... actual honeycomb, from the look of it, albeit giant, its cells each a couple of feet across. The sky stayed harsh, but reflected off the deep pools of honey, the light from it mellowed. His feet seemed drawn to the narrow ridges of comb between the pools, and he closed his eyes to keep from thinking too hard about it.
He could feel Rel and Pevan, both now steady on their feet behind him, bubbling with irritation for his lapse. Behind them, the change in the Route hung like fog, the mangled corpse of a Wilder unfortunate enough to have been in the way when the Route formed. He should have felt that. What had distracted him?
It was a long, agonising moment before Chag emerged from the fog, his legs barely underneath him. What would happen if the thief fell into the honey? Atla shouted, "Pevan, get Chag!" and watched his words burn an angry zig-zag into the air.
Pevan responded just barely quickly enough to keep Chag upright. Rel joined them, his aura of fury fading behind grim, frantic resolve. Twisting to look back over his shoulder, Atla stubbed his toe on the edge of a honeycomb and toppled forwards into a running, tumbling stagger that took long, aching seconds to recover.
The roaring chaos outside the Route rose in his mind as his concentration strayed to his footing. When it reached his ears, it buzzed, and immediately conjured up thoughts of swarming bees. By the time he'd realised what had happened it was too late.
A swarm boiled in at the tail of the Route, anger driving it beyond sanity. Its bees were scattered fragments of Delaventrin's awareness, every one of them suffused with incoherent emotion, all focussed into the Wilder's primal will to lash out at the Gifted who tormented it. The sound and sight of them was overwhelming.
Atla put on a burst of speed, driven by the fresh rush of ice in his blood and a child's utter terror. Despite his best efforts and burning lungs, the other humans gained ground on him. It was impossible to measure the speed of the swarm as it pursued.
Rel caught him up first, having apparently left Chag to fend for himself. Atla could just about make out the little man's mood through his Gift, and it seemed like he'd found his feet at least. Rel waved his hands, attempting to gesture something, but it threw his balance off and he stumbled. His curse nosedived into the honeycomb and lifted the smell of burnt sugar to their noses.
Falling back into stride, apparently so fit that the dead sprint was comfortable for him, the Clearseer shouted, "Where's the Sherim?"
Good question. Between the fire in his lungs and the spreading jelly in his knees, Atla could barely concentrate on his Gift at all. It took all his will to push his awareness forward ahead of them, trying to shake away thought of the deadly pursuit behind.
They were past the vortex at the white cave. The sudden clarity was surprising, welcome except that it revealed a gut-wrenching expanse of emptiness. Wildren ahead of them were scattering before Delaventrin, and there was no sign of the Sherim anywhere near the end of this Route. He pressed out further, but there was a limit to his strength, like the black wall you see when closing your eyes and trying to picture something you can't imagine.
"Atla?" Rel's voice, somehow conveying even more urgency, cut through his effort.
"I'm looking!" It took all the breath he could muster even to wheeze the words. His wrists were flapping uselessly with the pumping of his arms. Behind him, shouting from Pevan probably indicated a forlorn attempt to delay Delaventrin - the Wilder was simply too big to be stopped.
"You don't... know?!" A squeak on the final syllable revealed a fear that Atla had never seen in Rel before, a fear he wouldn't have imagined possible in Federas' Gifted. A new chill spread out through him, even as Rel finished, "Where... is this Route... to, then?"
Atla screwed up his face, every muscle in his jaw and neck tight. He managed, "It... got us past... Delaventrin..." and had to give up, while the feeble sounds dissolved into black motes in front of his face.
Rel actually turned to look at him. It was all Atla could do to snatch a quick glance at him, but that was enough - between exertion and real anger, the Clearseer's scowl could have melted through stone. He even had breath to sound scornful. "We're going... to die... out here... if you don't... do... better than that!"
"Trying... as hard... as... I can." Atla's breaths became whimpers. How could he be expected to do more than this? Even without Rel's scolding, he could barely feel the ring of Sherim at the edges of the Realm, never mind find the particular Sherim they were after.
"Try harder!" The urgency and fear underlying Rel's hostility made it worse. "Come on... we can't... afford... to die... without... warning... t
he First... Realm. It's not... just... our lives... on the line here!" The Clearseer's voice rose into a squawk of alarm as he finished, but Atla couldn't muster the courage to look, to find out what new disaster had struck.
He closed his eyes, head suddenly full of images of home and mother. Bersh and his family. Lefal and Vessit. Realmquakes and devastation, injury and death. The swarm of bees rumbled in his ears and thundered in his mind. The Separatists wanted another Realmcrash, and the only humans who knew about it were behind him. All about to die.
A new tightness gripped his chest, smothering the pounding of his heart, making him curl forward, shoulders sinking. His step shortened and slowed, his arms flapping even more pathetically than they had. The soles of his feet burned; he felt like he was wearing lead flippers. All the bone seemed to have vanished where the top of his knees met his shins. He wasn't running anymore - just staggering.
An arm fell across his back, tightened in his shirt just below his armpit, and lifted. Skin under his arm pinched enough that he had to shrug, but he managed to bring his head up enough to look to his benefactor. Pevan, her face pinched with the tension of a warrior in battle, grinned back. If her expression was mirthless, it was utterly fierce.
Atla braced for more scolding, but Pevan's