Broken Angel (23 page)

FORTY-EIGHT

P
ierce cinched a life jacket on Billy. “This should do it.”

Because of Billy’s size, it had been a struggle to adjust the straps. He held another life jacket in his arms, in case the first one didn’t provide enough buoyancy.

Theo, Gloria, and Pierce already wore theirs. The group had reached a long, low cavern with a river flowing strongly through the center.

Jordan had to raise his voice from his wheelchair. “I need to repeat this, in case you’ve forgotten already. The river runs through about a half mile of rock until it reaches Outside. Most of the way, there’s enough room to keep your head above water. In places, though, the water level reaches the ceiling of the rock. You’re going to have to hold your breath and trust that there’s only ten or twenty seconds until you have clearance again. When you reach open air, you’ll be Outside. People there always watch the river for refugees. You’ll be taken care of. I promise.”

Pierce laughed too. Billy thought laughter seemed out of place for Pierce anywhere, but particularly in an underground cavern. Particularly now.

“Hey,” Pierce said, “the man sending me down this river is the man I was sent to arrest. But I guess I won’t even remember that he saved my life.” Billy watched Pierce look at Jordan. “You’re still a wanted man. If you ever get Outside, I’ll have to hunt you. If I’m allowed to keep my job, that’s my duty. You know that.”

Then Pierce stepped away from them and fell backward into the river.

Billy helped lower Gloria into the river. Then Theo.

Jordan trained a flashlight on Gloria and Theo, showing them in life jackets as they bobbed down the subterranean river. Within seconds, the current took both of them into a passageway that had only about a foot of clearance above the surface.

“Your turn,” Jordan said to Billy.

“Okay,” Billy said. He pointed upstream, where it appeared that the river simply came from a wall at the far end of the cavern. “Where does this water start?”

“On that side, the passageway is completely underwater for about a hundred yards.”

Billy nodded as if it mattered. It turned out that it did.

Jordan cared a great deal about the river’s flow. They’d come in through a tunnel that bypassed the waterfall. But on the other side of the cavern, a hundred yards upstream, was where the giant subterranean waterfall fed this river.

Where Caitlyn would be making her escape.

Jordan had a sense of unease. He’d half expected she would already be here.

“You ready?” he asked Billy.

“Yes sir.”

Jordan turned the flashlight toward the river to guide Billy’s steps. That’s when he saw it.

A snake riding the current.

No, not a snake, but thick rope.

He played his flashlight on it. It took several seconds to realize that the rope was part of a long ladder, undulating with the water.

The rope ladder from the other side. Nearly instantly, Jordan realized the implications. If the rope ladder had fallen from one of the ledges, there was no way down.

Caitlyn!
He needed to get to the other side, to the base of the waterfall.

He grabbed Billy’s life jacket just before Billy stepped into the water.

“Pick me up!” Jordan said. He trained his flashlight beam on an exit tunnel. “Run with me! There!”

FORTY-NINE

C
aitlyn was in the air. She felt it rush against her face. A roar in her ears from the waterfall.

And stabbing pain in her right shoulder from Mason’s knife.

She’d seen the shift of his knife hand and had been preparing to jump even as Mason took the first step toward her.

She shouldn’t have answered when he said she wouldn’t jump. She should have just jumped, as her instincts screamed for her to do, and coldly left him there to die. She had done enough, offering that they both could live.

But he was a killer and she wasn’t, so she hesitated.

When his hand began to move, she’d finally leaped toward the chasm. Too late to avoid the knife, but enough of a shift that the knife struck her shoulder instead of the center of her chest, below the throat.

Now she was in the air, the spray of the waterfall reminding her that the water would slam her down if she ventured too close.

She banked away from it.

Banked. As in soaring. Through the air.

That’s when she realized what was happening. The pain had distracted her. Until now, discovering the sensation of banking in the air, with the updraft of cool air holding her aloft, making instinctive moves that she couldn’t have explained to anyone except herself.

Her arms were spread in the Iron Cross that she’d spent her entire life perfecting, and not even the embedded knife could diminish the strength in her locked joints and muscles.

Her outstretched fingers supported another incredible sensation. The ends of the wings that pressed against her arms, with tips that flexed as easily as moving fingers, subtly making adjustments to the flow of air.

Her wings.

She gloried in the sensation of freedom. The miner’s light on her forehead gave ample illumination for what she needed, bouncing off the face of the rock as she approached in a slow, wide circle.

She banked again, riding the updraft.

The light glinted off the waterfall, showing scattered diamonds of moisture as spectacular as a shower of stars.

Another slight flexing of her wing tips and she soared away from the danger.

She felt no fear. Just amazing comprehension, an understanding of the trembling that had first taken place at the edge of the chasm, the urge to throw herself into the depths, an understanding of the ache for freedom she’d always felt on mountainsides with Papa.

This was her destiny. Where she belonged.

That hideous bursting of her back had been like stepping from life through death into life again. Even then, she hadn’t quite comprehended what had sprung forth, folded inside the hunch, growing until her time had arrived.

But now she understood.

Her arms pressed against the wings, and her wings pressed against her arms, a fit so secure that by bringing her arms forward, her wings moved with them. It was a tentative movement, but she discovered that even this slight attempt gave her lift.

Another beat of her wings, levered by chest muscles that had become indefatigable through all the years of holding the Iron Cross. Another upward lift. She wasn’t just riding the draft like a glider but was actually able to move at will.

It gave her a deep, unspeakable peace. She longed for open air, a place to swoop and dive and rise again.

Yet even as she gloried in the realization that this was who she’d been meant to become since birth, the pain in her shoulder grew.

She felt faint as she banked again to dodge the other side of the chasm. Edges of blackness crept in at her vision.

Her light showed another ledge with a rope ladder in place for her to descend. This would be safest. If she lost consciousness in the air, she was dead.

But she would be just as dead if she crawled onto the ledge and let the blood seep from the knife wound in her shoulder. Except that death would be the death of a creature of the earth. Not one born for the sky.

She banked away again.

At the bottom of the chasm was the river that Jordan had described, a tremendous flow of water that disappeared into the rock, flowing for a mile underground before it came out. It would sweep her to a different kind of death, where water filled her lungs and matted her wings.

But also at the bottom of the chasm was the second rope bridge that Papa had promised, the one that would take her to the others.

If she could reach it, or reach the tunnel the bridge led to, she’d find the others. She didn’t want to die now, not so soon after discovering this glory.

She blinked away the pain, concentrating on the beam of light that came from the coal miner’s lamp. She didn’t know how long she could fight the blurring at the edge of her vision. But she couldn’t dive down. She didn’t know the limits of what she could do with her wings, didn’t know if she’d have the strength to pull out of a dive. And the river below was waiting to drag her into a different kind of darkness.

She circled and circled downward, her light showing the rock face, the fall of water, the rock face.

Each turn brought more weakness. The black edges continued to press into her vision. Then, dimly, she saw the rope stretched from one side of the chasm to the other, like a strand of web, shadows of the rope thrown onto the slickness of black water below it.

With a fierceness she didn’t know she had, she willed herself not to fade into oblivion. Her conscious mind screamed to keep at bay the encroaching walls of death, and her subconscious flexed her wings where she needed to hold herself aloft, doing it as naturally as the act of breathing.

Then the rope bridge was looming in front of her light, suddenly upon her, and she nearly overshot it. In her weakness, and in the newness of flight, she didn’t have the coordination to come down lightly and move her hands and arms separately from her wings to grab at the rope.

She tumbled into the bridge, entangling herself in the rope, nearly sliding through and off.

There was a horrible wrenching at her ankle again. This new sensation of pain was her last moment of awareness.

FIFTY

M
ason could not climb down from his ledge, but he could climb back to the top, where he’d dropped the rope bridge.

He kept his mind on the physical labor of pulling himself up. His cast rasped against the rope, and he welcomed the sensation as a distraction. He knew if he allowed himself to think of his position—in the dark, hanging on a rope ladder hundreds of feet above the bottom of a chasm—he’d go insane.

There was no hope downward, unless he jumped too.

That only left up.

He was panting when he reached the upper ledge. Slowly, he crawled forward. For a dizzying moment, his hand reached into the void, and his entire body shook with the adrenaline of his fear of heights.

He shuffled back, away from the drop-off, until his feet hit the rock wall behind him.

Like an old man, he rose on weak legs. He faced the rock wall and shuffled sideways, toward the waterfall. Maybe there was a way behind it, a place were the limestone had worn away, like behind the waterfall where he first believed he’d captured Caitlyn.

A few steps later, he slid his foot into air and nearly toppled into the abyss.

With a sob, he pulled his foot back. Then crumpled to the ground in relief that he hadn’t fallen. A snake wrapped itself around his thigh. He pushed it away but felt nothing in his fingers. He realized it had been a product of his fear, as if his nightmares were coming to life at the realization that he’d die on this ledge. It would be thirst that took him, and the thought of it made him lick his lips.

The waterfall was so close that mist hit his face. Yet he was unable to reach across the last few feet to that water.

He crawled back to the rope ladder. He found the two iron hooks, the two loops.

Then a thought hit him and jolted him with hope.

He could cut the ladder in half! He’d leave one loop on this hook, and with the matching half coiled around his body, he’d slide to the ledge below. He’d loop the other half at the hook below and slide down again. Then he’d be at the next ladder, and he could climb all the way down.

It would work!

He slapped his hip for his knife.

Gone.

He felt a snake curl around his belly. He screamed, pulled at it, but found nothing. He bit the inside of his cheek, trying to hold on to his sanity, and whimpered with frustration, remembering what hope had caused him to forget. He’d thrown the knife at Caitlyn.

All that remained was his backpack, holding the canister he’d intended to use for the harvest of eggs from her body. There was nothing to cut rope.

After the exertion of climbing the rope ladder, thirst had intensified to torment him. Now there was something else to torture him.

The offer that echoed in his mind.
Life for a life, or death for a death.

If he hadn’t been so determined to kill her, the knife would be in his hands. He’d be able to escape this horror of slow death, alone in the absolute black of hell.

Easy death was a mere step or two away, into the void. But he was too much of a coward for that.

He thought of hanging himself and had a vision of climbing back down the ladder and trying to wrap one of the rope rungs around his neck and letting go. But the fear of heights was too overwhelming.

If only he had kept his knife.

Snakes of terror seemed to crawl over his body. He imagined tiny snakes, worming into his ears, pushing at his brain.

He began whimpering again, almost reduced to catatonic fear.

The rope, the rope, the rope. If only he could find a way to cut it.

Crying, he began pulling the rope ladder up until there was enough of it to rest on the ledge beside him.

Whimpering, he lifted one of the rungs to his mouth.

He clamped his teeth on the rope. His mouth could barely get around it, and immediately the coarse strands cut through the edges of his lips and the taste of copper streamed onto his tongue.

Didn’t matter. Didn’t matter. Didn’t matter. He was an animal. He would gnaw through it. This rung. The next. And dozens and dozens more. Yes. Yes.

More tendrils of terror and insanity curled through his brain. He fell on his side and curled into a ball, rope in his mouth.

Chewing. Chewing. Chewing.