The Blood Racer (The Blood Racer Trilogy Book 1) (19 page)

              Silently, I wondered what it would be like to take it all away from them…to give it to the people that actually deserve it.
              “Which way?” Darby asked breathlessly, pausing in the middle of the intersection that we had come to. I didn’t much wind in my lungs, so I just pointed straight ahead. We clumsily plodded our way through the next few streets, until we were suddenly on grass. Our footsteps were muted and soft, and the impact on my feet was much less painful. Beside me, Darby let out a wild giggle.
              “Elana, this is grass!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never been on grass before!”
              Still too winded to talk, I smiled over at her. In truth, I had only walked on grass twice before, and both of those times had been in this exact park. I shared her enthusiasm for genuine soil under my boots. In my head, I decided that I would make my own grass park if I were to win the race, and I would let everyone walk on it as much as they wanted.
              Up ahead, the Wall of the Fallen loomed as large and impressively as it had before. Seven massive, stone slabs, each of them with the names of every contestant that had lost their life in the race, all arranged in a semi-circle in a small concrete courtyard. The slabs were divided into sections of ten races each. As this year was the 70
th
competition, they’d be forced to start a new slab of names after this race ended. With luck, my name wouldn’t end up on it.
              Already, the contestants that I had seen at the docks had their back to me, and were poring over the wall, hurriedly searching through the names and scribbling things down on the papers in their hands. Toward the middle of the wall, I saw Rigel, writing furiously with his charcoal. I changed directions and headed straight for him, resisting the urge to shoulder check him into the wall. Instead, I simply grasped a handful of his hemp shirt and spun him around to face me.
              “What are you doing!?” I shouted at him. “You left me!”
              His facial expression didn’t show as much fear as I would have liked. All I could see in his hazel eyes was guilt…and something that looked like sorrow. It caught me off guard, stealing away much of my anger. Between us, during my silence, he tore his paper in half with one swift motion and handed me the numbers that we had worked together to collect.
              “I’m sorry,” he said sadly. Before I could reply, he quickly pried himself from my grip and dashed away, back in the direction we had all come from.
              As I watched him go, Darby emerged right next to me, huffing loudly as she tried to catch her breath. “What happened?” she asked, leaning against the wall for support.
              “I got the numbers,” I told her, watching Rigel vanish around a distant street corner. “We need to figure out what to do with them.”
              “From what I gather,” Killian said, appearing behind Darby, “the numbers are in groups of three. The first number corresponds to a panel. The second number is the name, and the third number is a letter in that name.”
              I looked down at the paper in my hand, reading over the numbers that had been scrawled in Rigel’s sloppy handwriting. “Six…seventeen…six,” I read aloud.
              “So the sixth slab,” Darby said, shuffling all of us over toward the end of the wall. “The seventeenth name.” Using her slender index finger, she silently counted down from the top left column of names, stopping at the correct one. “Percival Fellows,” she announced. “The sixth letter…V!”
              She looked up at me excitedly, a smile spread wide across her face. It took me a moment to realize what she was waiting for, and I gave a small start as the thought hit me. Fumbling a bit, I reached into my pocket to fish out my piece of charcoal. I was very glad that I had saved it. Flipping the half-page over, I hastily scrawled a ‘V’ onto the finger-smudged paper.
              Killian nodded. “Well done, ladies.”
              “Thanks, Killian!” Darby spouted.
              “Cheers,” he said, giving a nod before turning and jogging in the direction Rigel had gone. Just a few seconds behind, I saw Grace Buchannon barreling after him. In addition, a couple of unfamiliar racers were now on their way to the wall. We needed to hurry this up. The thought of falling behind was making me crazy.
              “Here, take half,” I said to Darby. Carefully, I gently tore the paper as close to the middle as I could, making sure that I didn’t split up any of the number combinations. I gave her the smaller half, along with a sliver of the charcoal, and we both set off to collect the rest of the letters. Whatever the finished code was, we would gather in in half the time if we worked together.
              For nearly ten minutes, we scoured the Wall of the Fallen, our fingers running along the carved surface, racing over names long forgotten by the Dominion. Without a word to one another, we gathered our letters, bumping shoulders with other contestants as we tried to hide our pages. We didn’t want anyone piggybacking off of our work, after all. Finally, after the wall had begun to get much more crowded with racers, Darby slipped in next to me.
              “I’ve got them,” she whispered in my ear.
              I nodded, scratching a black C onto the paper slip in my hand. “On my last one now,” I muttered. “Seven...forty two…five.”
              With my breathing becoming more labored by the minute, I shuffled past several unknown contestants and made my way the seventh and newest slab of the wall. As fast as I could, while still confident that I could keep track, I counted out the correct number of names. “Here. Forty two. Amelia Sil…ver.”
              Immediately, in my peripheral vision, I saw Darby’s eyes flicker across my face.
              “Mom,” I whispered, gently sliding my calloused fingers across the etching of her name. Tears were already obscuring my sight, but I couldn’t seem to look away. It was the first time in three years I had seen her name in writing. The workers had made a small memorial for her in Adams, for my father, too, down at the plant that they had both worked in. I avoided that place, though, so I had never seen it. But here, my mother’s name was right in front of me, and I couldn’t suppress the memories of her that suddenly began to blossom forth from my mind. At once, they threatened to overwhelm me. Mercifully, Darby placed a ginger hand on my trembling arm.
              “Elana,” she said softly. “Elana, we - I’m sorry, but we need to go.”
              Her words were just strong enough to pull me out of my thoughts. I whipped my head over to her and sniffled loudly. “Yeah,” I said, blinking away the tears. “Yeah, you’re right. Letter number five. It’s an I.”
              “Come on,” she said, turning to jog away from the wall. I gave my mother’s name one last glance and followed after her, making a sloppy ‘I’ on the edge of the paper. Once we were far enough away from the wall to not be overheard, Darby stopped and turned to me, holding out her paper.
              “Okay, what do you have?” she asked.
              Unfolding my smeared, crumpled paper, I squinted down at it, suddenly realizing that I was still wearing my goggles. Pushing them up onto my forehead, I looked again. As I was gathering the letters, I hadn’t been able to tell where the spaces would go. I had just written them down one after another. It looked like one giant, screwy word, and I was suddenly afraid I had picked some, or all, incorrectly.
              After a moment, though, I was able to identify one word, which made the rest easy. “Villefort Cargo,” I said. “And then just ‘F-I’.”
              Darby nodded. “All right. I’ve got R-S-T and then ‘ascension’.”
              “Villefort Cargo, First Ascension,” I said.
              “What’s Villefort Cargo?” she asked, scratching the back of her head.
              Somewhere in the deep parts of my brain, the name sounded a tiny bit familiar. Maybe I had seen it stamped on a box somewhere. Had I delivered it? Or had I seen it on some parcel that Sparks had brought by the shop? It didn’t matter at the moment. What I did know, is that we had to get back to the docks.
              “Any kind of cargo company is gonna be by the docks,” I told Darby. “Especially if it’s a warehouse, which I’m betting it is.”
              She seemed to find my reasoning sound. Nodding, she fell in beside me as we both took off at a jog. I hated the fact that I’d be jogging for another ten minutes, but I needed to catch up. I had fallen much further behind than I had ever planned to. I didn’t want to be left behind by all the others, especially Rigel.
              Rigel. I needed to give him a piece of my mind. He stole a clue from me and left me practically in the dark. What if I hadn’t caught up to him at the Wall of the Fallen? I doubt he would have left the numbers for me. He would have taken them, and I would have been put in last place, probably.
              My renewed anger was enough to keep me moving through the Shiloh streets at a steady pace. Darby stayed right by my side, and we emerged back onto the docks, where the crowd was still all too eager to erupt into cheers and jeers at the sight of us. Together, Darby and I turned our backs to them and searched the buildings along the wharf, despite the fact that neither of us knew what we were looking for.
              As we wandered around, both of us looking hopelessly lost, I caught a fleeting glimpse of John Deseo dashing across one of the narrow alleyways of the Shiloh pier. He had clearly finished gathering the code at the wall. As I noticed a glint of morning sunlight twinkling off of his huge metal hand, I suddenly remembered Reed and Lex mentioning him at the beginning of the race. He was
from
Shiloh! If anyone knew where they were going, it was him.
              I instantly tore off after him. Without even a word to her, Darby was right on my heels within a few seconds, and we went booming down the same alleyway I had seen John in. It was a long street, and as we turned in the direction he’d gone, we saw his distant figure vanish around another corner. At buster speed, Darby and I barreled down the alleyway, pumping our fists and legs as hard as we could to catch up. After a few seconds, we made it to the corner and swung around it, somehow managing to keep from losing our balance.
              In front of us, another alley, slightly wider, stretched back toward the docks. On the right side of it, though, a man in a black suit - dressed exactly like the guy by the cables had been - was placing a large combination lock on a door that he was standing next to. On the door, I could see a large “VC” painted in black and green.
              “Villefort Cargo!” I gasped, pointing toward the door. “We found it!” With what little energy we could muster, the two of us staggered toward the well-dressed man. He was balding on the top, but what silver-flecked hair he did have was neatly trimmed, and rolled down the sides of his face into mutton chops. His eyes, though, were a deep, dark brown, and scrutinized us as we approached him.
              “Can we…please enter?” Darby asked, resting her hands on her knees.
              The man politely nodded, then gestured to the lock on the door. “Of course you may enter. If you know the combination, that is.”
              I let out an exasperated sigh, but did what I could to keep my composure. I was so exhausted from my journey, though. Hungry and thirsty, too. Not to mention the fact that I looked totally haggard, and I was starting to smell pretty ripe. It was all I could do not to grab this frail little man and throttle him until he opened the door.
              “All right, what was the clue?” I asked, turning to Darby.
              “First ascension,” she breathed, already sounding defeated.
              I nodded. “They obviously mean Shiloh. It was the first to ascend.” Of course, this was common knowledge in the Dominion. Shiloh was never quiet about the fact that it was the first city to ascend from out of the war and chaos of the surface all those centuries ago. The citizens here fancied their city as the Dominion flagship.
              “We need the date,” Darby said. “The combination lock is four numbers. They want the date that Shiloh ascended.”
              I rubbed my hands together. “Stellar! That’s easy. It was…oh, no. What was it!?”
              Darby shrugged, looking sadder than I had ever seen her before. “Do you want me to run back to the Mother Stone and see?”
              I shook my head. “No, I know this. I know it! It was…let’s see, it was 21…something.” I ran my fingers through my cropped hair and sighed. “2120?” I asked, looking up at the man hopefully.
              With a blank face, he just shook his head.
              I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to envision the big ugly Mother Stone at the docks. What had that stupid thing said?
Beacon of excellence,
I thought to myself.
Hope for humanity’s future
…
Shiloh ascended in
…
              “2119!” I shouted, suddenly seeing the date clearly in my mind.
              Mutton Chops gave a tiny smile and then nodded his head. Without a word, he turned and entered the combination into the lock, popping it open with a loud
clank!
              “Way to go!” Darby exclaimed happily, grinning a lazy grin.
              Together, she and I rushed forward and shoved the door open, ready to throw ourselves at the next challenge. As soon as we entered the building, though, we stopped in our tracks. Neither of us had expected this.
              Food. That was the first thing I noticed. Along the wall nearest to the door, a long series of tables had been constructed, and was lavishly set with all kind of exquisite looking dishes. I could see half a dozen cooked fowl, baked and browned to perfection. There were meatloaves, breads, and even crisps. There was also a rainbow of various fruits and vegetables, as well as several kinds of pies and other sweet treats. Aside from the food, there were large flagons and canteens, all filled - presumably - with water. I felt my stomach desperately trying to pull me towards it.