Rivers of Fire (Atherton, Book 2) (10 page)

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A "Your plan gets us all through today and into the first night in a changed world," said Wallace. "Who knows what another morning will bring that will force us to change course?" Wallace had hit on precisely the thing Horace had been stewing about all morning. Atherton was changing rapidly and unpredictably. It was a variable that had to be accounted for.

"You said there were three advantages we held over the Cleaners. What is the third?"

And then Horace told of what he thought this third advantage was, and in the telling he could see that Wallace thought the same thing.

"It's time I said goodbye to a good many of my sheep," he said, a weary pitch to his voice creeping in. "We must be on our way."

***

Cleaners were on the move, a wild fury boiling between them as they climbed over one another to get in front of the pack. The slippery suction cups on their long underbellies were scouring the dust as they went, searching for the trailing scent of food. They made a terrible slurping sound that blended with their clattering legs and snapping jaws. A deadly smell hung in the air.

The Cleaners lunged at one another, biting with their sharp teeth. They were almost three hundred in number, heading directly for the Village of Rabbits, and they had never been in such a rage. It was a slow journey, because one of the beasts would lash out at another and a war would break out between them until one

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was felled, and the Cleaners that were near heaped into a pile over the victim and devoured it. The race for fresh food sizzled in their tiny brains like acid, driving the Cleaners into an unprecedented frenzy.

They smelled food, lots of it. It was food they would have.

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PART TWO MULCIBER

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Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman's Song
of Myself
as quoted by

Dr. Maximus Harding

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*** CHAPTER 12 TWO PARTIES UNITE

Dr. Kincaid went directly to Mead's Head when they entered the main chamber in the House of Power and ran his hand along the chiseled hair of the statue.

"Just as I left it," he said with some satisfaction. He glanced at Edgar, who was looking back and forth between the bust and Dr. Kincaid.

"Is that you?" Edgar asked.

"It most certainly is," said Dr. Kincaid. The old scientist was in a high state of anticipation. "And it appears to be unharmed, which means it might still work as it once did."

"But how ..." What Edgar was seeing threw his mind into a state of confusion. How could a statue of Dr. Kincaid's head have been in Lord Phineus's chamber all this time, while Dr. Kincaid was in the Flatlands?

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Before Edgar had a chance to voice his puzzlement, the floor beneath the group of three began to quake, slow at first but growing more violent. The three stumbled across the room to steady themselves by grabbing vines on the ivy-covered wall.

As the quake grew in intensity, Edgar glanced out the window of the main chamber. The Highlands were crashing fiercely, faster than he had ever seen or imagined any part of Atherton falling. It felt like a near freefall, and as they descended, shadow fell on the Highlands. Edgar could not understand the sound it made. If ever he had heard a massive wave breaking against a shore, he would have said it sounded like that, only the wave would have been filled with boulders the size of houses, exploding all around him.

The Highlands came to a brutal stop, which threw the three companions onto the floor of the main chamber in a heap. Edgar banged his head against Lord Phineus's table on the way down and it nearly knocked him unconscious. The sound of liquid and stone lingered, slowly dying in the air, and Edgar felt as if the brains in his head were sloshing back and forth.

Vincent was the first to rise and look out the arched opening, but soon all three were standing there. Dr. Kincaid put his arm around Edgar.

"Are you all right?" he asked, examining the round bump forming on the boy's forehead. It was bruised, but there had been no blood.

Edgar nodded, but looking out the window made him think differently. They were so deep inside Atherton now, deeper

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than he could have imagined was possible. Light poured in weakly from above, but frightening shadows now filled the once majestic Highlands.

Edgar looked directly at Dr. Kincaid, rubbing the bump on his head. "I'm not sure I can climb out of here," he said. He could see that the walls in the distance were wet and slippery, and rock fragments were crumbling off and falling into the Highlands as he spoke. "This might be beyond what I can do."

Dr. Kincaid knelt down before Edgar and put one hand on each shoulder, examining Edgar's head. In his mind he pronounced the boy fit for travel.

"One disaster at a time," he said, and then he was quickly up on his feet and moving toward Mead's Head, He turned it back and forth, unlocking the secret passage in the floor, and then he turned to Vincent.

"Have you got what we need?"

"I do indeed," said Vincent. He had been carrying a pack and two spears all along, but now he dropped the spears as if he planned to leave them behind. From the bag he removed a selection of weapons Edgar had never seen. One was a whip, long and leathery, which Vincent coiled in a circle and held in one hand.

"He's quite talented with that," said Dr. Kincaid. "Sort of like you with the sling and the black figs."

Edgar was so confused that he simply watched as Vincent held his bag in the same hand as the whip and put his other hand inside. When his hand emerged it clutched a magnificent

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knife the likes of which Edgar had never seen or imagined. The blade was a foot long, made of something that reflected the weak light in the room.

"What are you going to do with that?" said Edgar. "You can't get close enough to a Cleaner to use it."

Vincent didn't answer but instead looked at Dr. Kincaid. "I'm ready," he said. "Open it up."

"Open
what
up?" said Edgar. There was a deep ache in his forehead and it was making him irritable. He was growing tired of being kept in the dark.

Dr. Kincaid stepped over the ivy-covered floor near the wall and removed the cover to Mead's Hollow.

"We'll need light," he said.

Vincent handed the knife to Dr. Kincaid and went into the outer hall without hesitation as Edgar approached the hole in the floor. He saw the words chiseled into the stairs leading down but could not read them.

"It's called Mead's Hollow," said Dr. Kincaid. Vincent returned with a torch from outside and held it down into the dark passage. "It's here, beneath the House of Power, that we shall find Dr. Maximus Harding."

Edgar was thunderstruck. "What's he doing down there?"

Vincent uncoiled the whip in his hand, playing it back and forth on the stairs like a snake.

"That's exactly what I've been wondering," said Dr. Kincaid.

***

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From the moment the door to Mead's Hollow had been closed Isabel was unable to shake the feeling that she would never get back out again. It created a knot in her throat that would not leave, a knot that was telling her to cry and curl up into a ball in the dark where no one could find her. But Isabel forced the knot deeper down her throat, willing herself to go on.

She and Samuel had been in Mead's Hollow for hours. At first there had been a steep switchback path surrounded by walls on every side. Down, down, down they'd gone, past the bottom of the House of Power and into Atherton itself. In the silence of her own thoughts Isabel wondered just how deep the Highlands had fallen into the middle of Atherton.

There came a moment when the air turned cold and the space changed in tone. Without warning, their way went from confined to abysmally wide open. There was but one wall to lean their bodies against, and as Samuel held the flame out and away from it, the darkness seemed to go on forever. Isabel had the feeling that if she walked out into the open space it would swallow her up. And what was worse, there was an almost unbearable sensation that the whole world of Atherton was crashing in around her. She clung to Samuel, desperate to find a way out of Mead's Hollow.

"How much farther?" she asked, her voice drifting softly in the wide open space.

"We've got to be getting close," answered Samuel. "I can't imagine it being much farther."

The two had followed the instructions that had been given

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to Samuel by his father a long time ago, and Isabel was beginning to think Samuel had read them wrong.

"Are you absolutely sure we're going the right way?" she asked. There was a part of her that had no idea why she was trying to find the source of water to begin with. It was a journey begun with a purpose, but the purpose was starting to feel a little beside the point. Even if they could find it and make the water flow once again, the Highlands were sinking, so what good would it do? And how would they ever get out?

Samuel didn't answer Isabel. She'd already asked him the same question three times. The truth was, he wasn't at all sure. He only knew what his father had written down on the note, most of which he didn't think he should share with Isabel:

-- Find the blue line and follow it. Never waver from the blue line.

-- If you see the Crat, click your teeth fast and loud; it will keep them away for a while. This is a secret known to me alone.

-- Do not allow yourself to be bitten by the Crat. A scratch can be overcome, but a bite cannot.

-- If the Crat attack, you must not try to run. Put your back against the wall and fight them.

"What about the yellow line?" asked Isabel, startling Samuel from his thoughts. He held the flame out from the wall of moist stone they walked beside. There, on the floor of rocks they walked along, was a line of yellow running off into the

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darkness where they could not see. The air felt vast and open in that direction, as if it might go on for miles.

"My father said to never leave the blue line," said Samuel. "Wherever the yellow one leads, I don't think we want to follow it."

He brought the flame back in front of him and saw that it was waning. The sticky fuel supply, a substance like a glob of black mud at the tip of the torch, was growing smaller and wouldn't last forever. Soon it would be out, and then what would they do?

"I think we should go back," said Isabel. She eyed the blue line on the wall, which snaked like a thin ribbon of translucent blue rock cutting through the wall at eye level. It would lead them out of this place.

"We have to be close now," said Samuel. "My father said it would take a few hours, so it has to be ..."

The sound of the Crat crept up on them like a shadow and Samuel was cut short.
Eeeeeeeeek! Eeeeeeeeek!
There were three or four of them, and they were near. The Crat made a shrieking sound, though not very loud, like a tiny person with a head the size of an eyeball screaming. It was, strangely, a sound of bitter sadness, as if whatever were making the noise wanted not to kill them but to rub up against their legs and be picked up.

Isabel and Samuel began slamming their teeth together in the air, opening their mouths as wide as they could, and the Crat seemed to stop. Samuel held the torch out, putting his back up against the wall, and peered into Mead's Hollow. He

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saw something move, darting across his line of sight and then back into the dark where it was lost. Whatever it was had a very long, hairless tail and black eyes that shone in the firelight.

Isabel was surer than ever that they should turn back. It would take hours to follow the blue line out of Mead's Hollow, but at least they knew the way. She dreamed of going back to her parents, to the grove, to her life the way it had been before Atherton started crashing in on itself. But she also knew that none of these things were possible. Even if she could get out of Mead's Hollow, she was still trapped in the Highlands, and even if she could find a way out of the Highlands, there was still no water in the grove.

"Why are we doing this, Samuel?" she asked. "Do we really think we can find the source of water? And what if we do? What difference will it make?"

Samuel didn't listen. There was something else occupying his every thought.

"Look there," he said, pointing into the darkness. There was a dot of light, flickering but steady. It was not moving. "What do you think that is?" asked Samuel.

"Maybe it's the source of water. There might be a door by that light."

Samuel held out the torch and looked at the ground before his feet. There was another yellow line leading out into the dark. In fact, there were many yellow lines, all leading away from the safety of the wall at their backs.

"We can't go out there," said Samuel. "It's not what my