Windrunner's Daughter (22 page)

His face was white even in the gentle solar light and his lips were compressed with barely suppressed rage. His scars had darkened in the water; they were blacker than she had ever seen.

“You could have warned us.” He poked Orel viciously in the chest. “We went in there completely unprepared.” His teeth were chattering as badly as hers and his lips were blue.

Orel knocked his hand away. “I told you why I didn’t tell you. You made it, didn't you?”

Only then did Wren look round. They seemed to be inside a cave, but like no cave she had ever seen. She touched the wall with tingling fingertips. It was smooth but her bulb showed tiny cracks where blocks had been mortared together. “What is this place?” she stuttered.

Orel dropped to his haunches. “We’re inside the wall, within the watercourse. When it filled, the colonists invented a way through for the river that wouldn’t affect the seal on the biosphere. This cave was built for the workers.” He gestured with hands that still shook with cold.

Wren rubbed her hand over the stone. “We’re
inside
the wall.”

Orel nodded. “To get to the other side, there’s a small, one-man, airlock further down. It was built for the original engineers but it won’t be guarded. Since the water level submerged it, they’ve forgotten it even exists.”

Raw’s shadow suddenly fell over the torch. “Fascinating as this is, how do we get to that airlock?”

Orel’s eye twitched angrily and Wren stared around her. There was no other way out of the cave. “We have to go back in the water, don’t we?” Her dismay brought Raw to her side.

Orel nodded. “And now you’ll see why the other Runners couldn’t come with us.”

Chapter seventeen

At some point the cavern they were in had been blocked off by a huge grid. When Orel pointed, Wren held the solar light higher to see that there was a gap about the length of a man’s body between the grid and brick wall. Debris nudged up against the grid: bones that bobbed and banged, floating ferns and pumice-like stones unable to move further in.

Raw frowned at the barrier then folded his arms. “We’re trapped.”

Mischief glimmered in Orel’s eyes. “Looks like it, don’t it?” Orel knelt down and reached his arm into a gap between the wall and the grid. He tugged and the grid peeled upwards.

Raw nodded understanding as Orel tugged until there was a gap big enough for the three of them to slip through.

“The wall doesn’t go down to the bottom of the river. Water has to get into the settlement. And as I said, there’s a small airlock down there, beneath the wall, drowned and forgotten.” Orel glanced at Wren. “Be careful, the edges here are sharp.”

Wren bit her lip and Orel leaned down to squeeze her shoulders. “I’ll go first. I’ll open the airlock and keep it cycled green for you, so you won’t need to do anything but float through. You’ll need to be quiet though, so no-one hears you on the other side. Leave the light.”

Reluctantly, Wren moved out from beneath his arm and propped the light against the wall nearest the hole. Then she looked at Raw. He was glowering at the black water as if it had offended him. “You all right?” she murmured.

Raw turned the force of his glare on her. “Fine,” he snapped.

There was a gentle splash as Orel slid beneath the grid and into the river. Wren watched his muscles flex as he fought for control against the sucking current.

He glanced at Raw and pushed his water-darkened hair back from his forehead. The light caught on his chiselled cheeks and turned them to copper. Wren’s breath caught and she had to struggle to focus on his words.

“We won’t be coming back this way, so last one down needs to pull
that
back into place.” He gestured at the grid, registered Raw’s curt nod, then turned with the current and dived. His feet kicked once on the surface; then he was gone.

Wren’s breath shortened.

“I don’t want to go back in either.” Hesitantly Raw patted her shoulder. “You’d better go next if I have to pull this thing shut behind us.”

She pressed her lips together, skin already crawling at the memory of the cold. Then she thought of her family. Somewhere past that wall her brothers needed rescuing and she had to get hold of some of the cure Orel had mentioned.

“Suck it up, Runner,” she muttered to herself. She sat on the rock, careful not to trap her wings beneath her. Gingerly she slid one foot into the sucking water. Immediately it was pulled away from her. She tugged it back out and took a deep breath. The cold didn’t seem as bad as she’d remembered: her skin was still numb. Before she could change her mind, she threw her whole body into the current.

Unable to stop a gasp, Wren at least managed to keep her head above water by holding onto the grid with fingers turned to claws. Her wings floated out behind her, then slithered underneath, tugging her down, in league with the current.

“Go.” Raw was sliding his legs into the river, just as she had. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

Wren released the wire. She barely had time to turn her face in the right direction before she was pulled down. Pretending that she was flying, she shaped herself into an arrow and let the river tug her towards the wall. She forced her eyes open, saw the gap as a darker hole and reached towards it. Her fingers jarred against stone with a thud that made her whole arm shudder. Her hands were too deadened for her to tell if she’d broken bones and she had no time to try bending them.

She groped for the gap and pulled herself through, easily clearing the stone breach.

As soon as she thought she was past, she started to kick. Her heel smacked against brick, but she kept going, aiming herself upward and breathing through the halfie in her nose.

And then there was the light of an airlock, flashing green, cycled open as Orel had promised. Struggling towards, it, Wren managed to grab the edges and haul herself inside. She floated in the lock, her wings streaming around her. Orel was on the other side of the aperture, his palm pressed against the reader, holding it open.

He gestured to her to come forward, his arm laggard in the dragging water. Wren nodded and kicked, bubbles streaming out behind her as she reached him.

He gripped her shoulder with one hand and steadied her against him.

Wren looked behind her. The water was black and there was no sign of Raw. She squinted into a darkness that was alleviated only by the glow of the airlock, seeking the brightness of his silver wings. Where was he?

She shook Orel’s arm and pointed, trying to get him to understand. He shrugged, eloquently uncertain.

The airlock began to beep. Wren’s eyes widened: the automatic cut off was kicking in and it was going to cycle closed with or without Raw.

Raw couldn’t swim much better than Wren; if he was left behind, would he manage to operate the reader and turn the handle underwater as Orel had done?

Wren wanted to shout for him, the words bubbled in her chest, but water pressed against her from every direction, filling her mouth. Was it possible to get lost in the tunnel; what if he was turned around?

She watched in horror as Orel pulled his hand from the now useless palm reader and the airlock cycled shut, leaving nothing but murky water on the other side.

She kicked to the door and, as the water drained out, she pressed her face against it. As soon as air touched her face she shouted his name: “Raw!”

Orel pulled her back and pressed his hand over her mouth. “Quiet, someone might hear you.”

His fingers dug into her cheek until Wren nodded acknowledgement. He released her and she stepped back, her wings pooling around her like a cape, the water already at her knees.

“We can’t just leave him.” Tears burned on Wren’s icy cheeks as she whispered.

“Once he reaches the airlock, he can open it himself.”

“What if he can’t?” Wren thought of Raw thrashing in the water, fighting it as thoroughly as he fought the air with his wings. “What if he’s hurt?”

“He’s got his canister on.” Orel tried a smile. “He won’t run out of air. Worst case he’ll go back to the cave and wait for us.”

“But there’s no other way out of there.” Water sucked at Wren’s ankles, foaming in the blinking airlock light, as it was pulled through grids to either side of her. She looked back up to see Orel watching her with a strange intensity to his gaze.

Then Wren remembered the stone gap. She had cleared the brickwork easily enough, but Raw’s shoulders were almost as broad as Adler’s. Orel had refused to bring the big man, telling them he couldn’t use the route he planned.

“You knew this would happen,” she gasped. “You knew he wouldn’t get through to the airlock.”

Orel leaned over her, his breath warm on her face. “Do you want to save your brothers, or not?”

“Of course -” Wren stepped backwards, her feet splashing gently on the drying floor.

“He wouldn’t have let you do this without him. He wouldn’t even stay behind for a damaged wing. It’s easier this way. He’ll wait in the cave and we’ll come back for him when we’re out. He’s safe.”

“No,” Wren hissed. She flung herself back at the airlock and pounded on the palm reader.

“It won’t open until the floor is completely drained,” Orel sighed.

Desperate, Wren peered through the scratched window and out into the endlessly moving darkness beyond. Was that a flash of silver? She pressed her nose to the glass.

The silver was gone, if she’d ever seen it.

Slowly she turned back to Orel. “You tricked us.”

Orel had the grace to hang his head. “I had to. I’m sorry, but I have friends in here too. I need you to help me get them out. This isn’t a one man job.” He looked up at her, his brown eyes damp and pleading. “Forgive me.”

“He’d better be all right,” Wren snapped, but her heart was melting as fast as her skin was drying in the cycled air.

Orel nodded. “He’ll be fine.” He kept his voice low. “We’ll get the rest of the Runners out and then go back for him. I can take a rope through and Adler can pull him out along the river.” He nodded, pleased with his idea.

Wren leaned her forehead on her arm. “I can’t believe we have to leave him. What if something happens to us? No-one will know he’s trapped there.”

Orel didn’t move.

Finally Wren looked at him again. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and she shivered with more than the cold.

“He’d want the Runners rescued, wouldn’t he?”

Wren rubbed her aching fingers and nodded. If nothing else, Raw would want to stop the war. “If I don’t make it out, promise me you’ll go back for him.”

Orel squeezed her hand. “I promise. He might even find another way out.”

Hope warmed Wren’s frozen chest. “You think so?”

“Sure.” Orel turned and pressed his palm against the opposite wall. The door cycled open with a sigh and he stepped through, pulling her with him. On the other side there was a tunnel, in it the water came up to Wren’s knees once more. She splashed towards lights that glimmered at the other end.

The tunnel ended and Wren moved out of the shadow of the wall with Orel at her side. He gestured at the city beyond as if he were offering her a gift. “Well, we’re in.”  

Wren followed his gaze, her heart pounding. She had never thought to see a colony other than Elysium and now, with Tir Na Nog, she was seeing two. Part of her shrank back: Tir Na Nog, despite its exotic beauty, had been horrifying. What if Vaikuntha was the same, or worse? But excitement made her pulse race. She was going to see inside the great walled colony, perhaps even the giant pyramid her brothers had told her about.

Ahead the water channelled in different directions; creeping in squelching boots, Orel led her along the widest course. The river’s complaint formed a backdrop to the more familiar sounds of human habitation.

True night had fallen and the settlement was lit wholly by solar lamps and the flickering glow of gas hobs that burned through windows like blue eyes.

“It’s so quiet,” Wren muttered. Her wings moved over her sopping jacket. “Is it always like this?”

Orel shook his head. “There’s a curfew - it’s part of the quarantine.”

They slunk between the first clusters of houses huddled in the gloom and Wren was hit, almost physically, by how different they were from those she knew. Like Elysium and Tir Na Nog, Vaikuntha had been built by colonists who assumed their biosphere would be coming down and it had been built to withstand Martian storms.

The wall was the first of their defences, a vast barrier against the Creatures and the wind. Its presence allowed the houses to grow taller: two-storied, rather than one. The ground floors were each broader than the next floor up and they reminded Wren of a child’s brick tower.

The streets themselves were protected from the winds that would one day come, by canopies made from a thick material. Wren could imagine them snapping with a night breeze, but they had remained unstirred for more than a hundred years.

As they scuttled along on numb feet Wren hunched her shoulders, feeling trapped by the boards over her head.

She looked up between the warp of two mismatched sheets and saw the biosphere far above her, so high that it looked like part of the sky. Near transparent from this side, she could see Phobos almost at apex through the metal joists at the top. The amorphous silicon made it seem stained and decayed.

Wren swallowed back a moan, unable to banish an image of Raw trapped under the wall. She should have made him stay behind. She clenched her fists. One rescue at a time: first her brothers, then her Running-partner.  

A loud cry cracked her determination. Orel’s hand closed around Wren’s wrist and they froze. The wail sounded again, close by and he pulled her into him and leaned them both against a wall, trying to melt into the shadow of an overhang. Her wings trailed in the dust, so Orel caught them up and wrapped his own wings around them both.

"Creatures?" Wren whispered.

"They can't burrow beneath the wall and most of the colony's on rock. Just to make sure, the Council let off concussions directed into the earth every few months. The Creatures come no closer than the Runner Station. They don't dare."