THE MARK Page 11

  The fire legs were soft underfoot, cushioning their steps. At first, the ceaseless buoying of Chris’s stomach threatened to make her seasick. She noticed that when she stepped on the larger ones she bounced higher, and after she started avoiding those it got a little better.

  Digs and she had fallen in step with each other. “So,” she said, avoiding a particularly beefy fire leg, “have you ever been away from home, outside of the northern kingdom?”

  His cheeks flushed pink and Chris hoped it was just from exertion, not his sunblock fading. “Moles don’t travel, really. There’s too much work. There is always demand for more coins, especially in the northern kingdom, so we’re always mining. Not to mention the inconvenience of only going outside at night.”

  “Did you just call yourself a Mole?”

  “Yes. That’s what we’re called. At least that’s what Toppers call us.”

  “Don’t you find that a little offensive? I mean, a mole is an animal. At least it is back on Earth.”

  He laughed a little. “We have moles here too, but I’m not offended. It’s a description like any other, I suppose. We need different names for different kinds of people here. How else can we talk about someone other than our own kind?”

  “Hm.” It was all Chris could think to say. Here she was walking on what were basically jellyfish spread across the hills like a giant sheet of black bubble wrap, and all she could think was how Earth-like Kellet really was.

  She tried to avoid the occasional tentacles that raised up out of the black sea to sting her legs. Digs was right. They were just small shocks, not unlike shuffling your feet across the carpet then getting zapped by a doorknob. She navigated the tentacles until around midday when their group happened upon a lone tree on one of the hill’s crests. Its bare branches swayed gently as if in a breeze, but there was no wind. The tree was moving on its own.

  “Is it okay if we take a break over there or is the tree going to eat us or something?” Chris asked. Her feet ached after walking most of the day and there was nowhere to rest unless they were all okay with sitting on fire legs and getting zapped on the butt.

  “It should be fine,” Megland said. Chris thought she didn’t sound entirely sure, which she had learned was very unlike Megland.

  They walked closer and Chris realized that the tree’s branches weren’t bare after all. Transparent, glasslike leaves hung from its branches. Raised lines of veins looked as if they’d been etched into each leaf. When the tree moved, the leaves clinked together like wind chimes.

  Carefully, Chris reached out and touched the trunk. The tree swayed, never losing its rhythm, and they finally decided it was safe to use a bare, low branch to rest. It was only a couple of feet off the ground and didn’t move as much as the others. Sitting on it was like sitting in a rocker on her front porch back home listening to wind chimes. The only thing that was missing was some lemonade.

  Micah sat next to Chris. Digs sat on the other side, Megland on the end.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Digs said. “There isn’t much room.”

  “You’re fine,” Chris said.

  Digs opened up the burlap sack he’d been carrying since Laetus and pulled out a round loaf of bread, some kind of dried meat, and a wheel of bright orange cheese.

  “You think we have enough for the whole trip to the Swamplands?” Chris asked.

  “It should be enough until we reach the next village, but I don’t know how many there will be between here and the swamps,” he said, using a small knife to cut off hunks of cheese then passing them out. Chris patted her makeshift pocket. The dagger was still there.

  “Have you ever been out of the northern kingdom?” Chris asked Megland.

  “Never,” she said.

  “That’s crazy,” Micah said.

  The cheese Digs had handed them was sharp, musty like feet but with a kick. Pretty good. Chris’s legs dangled from the branch and she swung them back and forth, enjoying the tinkling of the glass leaves and the welcome respite from walking.

  “I can’t believe you two have never been out of the north,” she said. “Back home, that would be like never leaving your home state.”

  Digs shrugged, tearing off a bit of bread. Megland said nothing.

  “In fact,” Chris said, “we hardly know anything about you guys.”

  “We could say the same,” Digs said around a mouthful of bread.

  “Does it really matter?” Megland asked. “If things go according to plan, you’ll go back to Earth and we’ll never see each other again.”

  Chris hadn’t thought about their journey in quite that way. Sure, she’d thought about going home, a lot, but she never really thought about the fact that doing so meant that she would never see Megland or Digs ever again.

  She was not on a picnic or on the front porch with her friends. She was in a place she didn’t belong. They were on their way to retrieve Hannah’s body for burial and to kill Leroy, and here she was enjoying lunch and making conversation like everything was going to be alright.

  Something shifted in the tree’s uppermost branches, upsetting a couple of leaves. They dropped to the ground below, shattering on the fire legs which in turn oozed an ink the color of midnight. Chris looked up and saw a brown, amorphous mass above their heads. The memory of the brown-cloaked figure in Polaris’s courtyard flashed in her mind, and her heart raced. The mass above them burst out of the treetop and broke into birds that ascended and flew away, their chirps blending with the sound of breaking glass. Chris covered her head with her hands, sheltering it from the plummeting shards.

  When the last of the leaves had fallen she and her friends all slowly unfurled. “Is everybody okay?” Chris asked as she carefully picked glass off her clothes and out of her hair. None had managed to cut through her dress. Her friends were doing the same, checking each other for cuts and picking glass out of each other’s hair. They had all somehow managed to only sustain minor nicks.

  “What was that thing?” Micah asked.

  “I don’t know,” Digs said.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” Micah said, his voice shaking. “You live here.”

  Chris wanted to tell him to calm down, that panicking wouldn’t help anything, but she was feeling the same way.

  Digs must have heard the fear in Micah’s voice because he stopped checking Megland for glass shards and turned to face Micah instead. “I don’t know everything about the world in which I live. Just as I’m sure you don’t know everything about Earth.”

  “I think it was a mercenary,” Megland said. And, for once, Chris agreed with her.

  Digs thought for a moment. “If it was then we’re in danger. It may be going to tell others where we are and come back with more.” He jumped off the branch. The fire legs had already sucked up the pieces of glass through the slashes that were leaking ink. Chris wondered if they would be able to break the shards down in their bodies until the glass was nothing more than sand or if the pieces would shred them from the inside.

  “Digs is right,” Megland said. “If that was a mercenary, we need to get moving before more of them come.”

  They packed up their things and started walking again, mindful of where they stepped, knowing that if mercenaries did show up they had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  * * *

  There seemed to be no end to the black hills in front of them. The Barren Stretch rose and dipped far into the distance, and Chris hadn’t seen a single tree since the one on which they had sat. Above her, the sky thickened, its dark clouds lowering. There wasn’t any thunder or lightning, nothing to signal an impending storm but the ceiling that loomed, dense and puffy like the wool of some great black sheep. They had nowhere to go if the storm broke.

  Everyone else felt the pressure of the clouds as well. That, and the threat of mercenaries, had them all nervous. They walked faster. It was too quiet. There was no breeze, no music, no talking. Nothing to distract from what was threatening to come down on their head
s. Chris wanted to talk to Digs again, get him to tell them more about his life underground, his work, anything to interrupt the thick wall of silence, but they were walking so fast they were nearly jogging and she knew she would do well to save her breath.

  They were at the bottom of the hill before she saw the trench. It blended in with the darkness around it. You had to be right up on it before you even realized there was a break in the fire legs. She stuck her arm out behind her, signaling the others to stop.

  “Careful,” she said, peering over the edge.

  Digs and Megland stopped beside her, and Chris heard Megland gasp.

  “What?” Micah said.

  “This happened when I was a child,” Megland said. “Digs was just a baby. I never thought I’d see it myself.”

  Digs took a step closer to the edge, looking down, and Megland grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

  “It was the biggest mine in the world,” he said in awe. “Everybody knows about it. Older kids would tell the story to the little ones to scare them.” He pulled free of Megland’s grasp and walked the edge. “Its tunnels run the length of continents. When it collapsed long ago, the ground was split for hundreds of miles. It was the worst structural failure in Mole history.”

  “How many people were down there when it happened?” Chris asked.

  “No one knows,” Megland said.

  Chris wanted to ask if they were related to any of the dead, but after the whole thing at the inn when she’d asked about why Digs got sunburned and Megland didn’t she thought it would be better if she left it alone. Instead, she walked as close as she dared and peered into the fissure. At first all she could see were roots and soil on the chasm’s edge, but further down, much further down, she could make out the slivers of red and yellow gemstones that infused the rocks. She searched the depths for skeletons, feeling guilty as she did so, but she couldn’t see anything with the naked eye. It was too dark. Maybe the bones had dropped even further down. She wondered if anyone else was thinking the same thing.

  “We should stop for the night,” Digs said, his voice thick.

  “There’s nowhere to sleep and nothing to start a fire with,” Micah said.

  Megland put a hand on her little brother’s back and stared into the trench with him. “Digs is right. We should sleep here tonight. Going around this will take a while. We’ll need our rest.”

  “But the mercenaries—” Chris began.

  Megland turned to her and her expression was terribly sad. “The mercenaries will find us or they won’t,” she said. “We’re staying the night.”

  * * *

  Chris woke just in time to receive a small zap on the forehead by a tentacle that immediately retreated, worming away from her and diving back into the ground. It was early morning and Micah lay on his cloak next to her, but Digs and Megland’s own cloaks were lying on the ground, creased and twisted. Looking around, Chris spotted the two of them sitting next to the collapsed tunnel. Their chants must have been what woke her, their low and melodic open vowel sounds filled the space around them while they rocked back and forth on their knees, heads and shoulders slumped forward. It was hard for Chris to be there, to be in the presence of their open mourning. All she could do was keep a respectful distance and let them do what they needed to do.

  The fire legs didn’t sting them, or maybe they were and Megland and Digs didn’t notice or care. Chris worried that the ground they were sitting on wasn’t stable. The two of them were so close to the edge. But the energy they were emitting kept her from saying anything. She could almost see it, it was so potent. And she wasn’t usually like that, either. She didn’t believe in auras or telepathy, but she could physically feel their sadness nonetheless. If she could have seen it, it would have been a wave just like the ones above the asphalt on a really hot day, except that it would have been blue. And she would have seen it float over to her before it covered her head to toe like a real wave. Except when it washed over her she wouldn’t feel refreshed. It would just lay inside her, on her organs, in her gut, and she would never get it out.

  She sat back down on her cloak and tried not to think about waves anymore. She didn’t want to think about water or drowning…

  When Chris was little she used to imagine she was a toucan. She never knew what prompted her fascination with that particular bird but it had probably had something to do with one of the cartoons she used to watch. Chris would get pieces of construction paper out and stripe them with all kinds of bright markers: oranges, blues, purples, reds. Then she would roll the paper into a cone, tape it so it would stay, and poke a couple of holes to pull some string through to wear for a beak. Then she would tie her worn blue blanket around her neck, grab the edges of it, and flap her arms, flying through the house. Claire would inevitably tease her for being a baby, and her mom would tell her to play outside, that she was going to make the cake in the oven fall.

  So Chris would be liberated from the house, free to fly outdoors, unencumbered by the walled and ceilinged cage of man. She would soar, following her nose to the trees, the flowers, the basketball goal—wherever there was something worthwhile to be discovered. Then one day she thought it would be a good idea to follow her nose all the way to the creek at the back of their property. She had been told never to go down there. But, she thought, they told Christina that and she wasn’t Christina, she was a toucan.

  Chris flew through the back yard until she couldn’t smell cake anymore or hear her dad’s piano rattling the study’s windows. The smell of vanilla clung to her blanket, and every time she flapped a wing she thought of birthdays.

  All around her the grass was a soft spring green. A mower was running in the distance even though the ground was still damp from recent rain. It had stormed overnight, and as she neared the creek the soil began to squish under her sneakers.

  The water was high, though it may have just seemed that way to her, the same way rooms and people always seem bigger when you’re little. The water rushed like someone was running a bath. It coursed with mud, sticks, and leaves. Occasionally a plastic bag or beer can floated past where she stood on the bank.

  She wanted to see how deep it was. There was a decent-sized stick poking out from the mud and Chris carefully excavated it. The wood was wet and a little rotten but it would suffice. She stuck it down into the water and stirred, thinking that was how you gauged depth. Then someone started whistling. It was only three or four notes, sweet and clear, looped over and over. She only realized it was a bird when she saw the flash of red on the far side of the water. Its song swooped up twice then the same staccato note punctuated the end. Almost like laughter. This bird’s funny, she thought, and she immediately wanted to hold it.

  There were a few larger rocks in the streambed that jutted out above the water and Chris was confident that she could use them to cross. She was no baby. She was a toucan. Unfortunately, she couldn’t just fly across because having a giant toucan swooping toward you would be terrifying and she didn’t want to scare the little red bird off.

  She stretched her foot across the first gap and barely reached the nearest rock. Chris made sure to use the old stick for balance. Her sneakers threatened to slip off the sides. They were still wet from the grass and mud that lined the creek. She wobbled and the noise of blood rushing in her ears competed with the sound of the water rushing around her. For a moment, she thought about turning back. The next rock was further away than the first. But then there was the red bird, sitting tantalizingly close, twitching its head one way then another, assessing her. It sang again, this time clearer and louder, the machine gun notes at the end calling her. That settled it. There was no turning back.

  She really stretched this time, left foot near the front side of the slippery rock. Her right foot reached toward the next in line, toe pointed like a ballerina. She just needed a little leverage, so she leaned heavily on her walking stick. It was so close. Just a little bit further.

  The front of her shoe touched the rock, s
he felt the stick she was holding buckle, and then she was falling. She hit the ice cold water sideways, her blanket snagging a branch that was half in and half out of the creek, and then she was underwater, the blanket still tied around her neck, starting to twist. She gagged, muddy water rushing into her nose and mouth, the blanket squeezing her neck tighter and tighter. She rolled under the surface like an alligator after a meal, one direction then the other, as she bounced off the nearby rocks. Then, just as abruptly as she’d fallen, there was nothing.

  Chris didn’t remember anyone yelling for her or pulling her from the water, but her mom said she was nearly dead when she found her. Her skin was the pale color of oyster meat. Her mother had always ended the story of Chris’s near-death experience by telling her that she had to do CPR, and that when Chris had finally spit out the water in her lungs and started crying it was the biggest relief of her life. She had hauled Chris in, risked her own life to save her daughter’s that day.

  Chris kept thinking about her mother’s bravery, how she wished she were more like her, as the day dragged on. They walked The Barren Stretch, following the fissure, until they had to stop for a bathroom break or to eat. Then they walked some more, keeping the jagged line. Eventually, the fire legs began to have spaces between them. Green tufts of grass broke through their ranks, becoming denser until the patches became large. Then the fire legs appeared only occasionally, then finally not at all. The grass got taller as they walked. It was fine, green, and soft. The wind bent it easily, and it swayed to an inaudible tune like the glass tree had.

  Her group rustled through the blades of grass as she trailed her hands over them. A wagon crested the hill. For a moment, Chris thought it was The Last Resort, far from home, but when the wagon got closer she could see that the driver was an old man. He bent forward as if the sky’s weight was pressing down on him. A wiry, white beard draped down the front of his body, tapering to a point on his stomach. When he offered them a ride to the nearest village they didn’t even hesitate.