The Rift - Howard Chris - Страница 41

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I shielded my face and pushed closer. Blinking my eyes open, trying to get used to the sting. It was like getting too close to the flame on a blowtorch. Reminded me of building with my old man, welding branches together in the tops of our trees.

And then I could see it, all up close and in person—the flame of legend, the molten rivers of myth. A moving wasteland of lava. Hell, it was like this was where all the lava got born.

“We’ve reached it,” I hollered back at the others, but the heat burned my words right out of the air. So I just waited for them to catch up to me, as I stared out across the tumble and roar of the Rift.

The tunnel had ended on the high edge of a cliff. And below, everything was orange and gold and tar black and smoking. All of it bursting in bubble and flames. It was like being trapped inside an engine as its circuits got blown. Crackling sparks gushed upwards, then fell like a burning rain.

I could barely see the black cliffs that marked the far side. Must have been a mile across at least. And the slabs of lava rumbled and surged before me like a mighty river. Like blood boiling too thick for its veins.

I pressed back into the tunnel, waiting till I could see Namo’s shiny eyes, his shaggy shape, and the silhouettes of bodies bundled upon him. I swear, you couldn’t even tell which one of them bodies was dead.

“We’re here,” I called. “We made it.”

Alpha slid down Namo’s crusted fur, then staggered towards me through the heat, her skin coated in soot.

“We’ll have to follow this ledge,” she said, pointing along the top of the cliff. “See if it crosses somewhere. But I reckon there’s something we gotta do first.”

She stared down at the lava. Sweat and tears ran down her face. Then she went and untied Zee’s body from the top of the mammoth and gently pulled it down.

The fiery light burned in Kade’s eyes when he joined us at the cliff’s edge. And Crow came crawling over, too, pulling himself along with his hands.

“Help me up,” he whispered.

“You sure?” Alpha asked him.

“Course I’m sure. A Soljah stands for a funeral.”

She got beneath him and hauled him upright, and then Crow was leaning on me, stinking of mud and sweat, his splinted legs quivering.

I had to hold him steady. I mean, he’d have pitched over the edge if I hadn’t given him a hand. And as I steadied him against me, I checked out Alpha’s handiwork—the purple thread woven around the busted brown bark of his legs. Looked like it was holding things together, all right. Almost looked like the fur had begun to fuse to the wood.

“Who’s gonna say something?” Alpha had Zee bundled in her arms now, my sister’s once-beautiful face covered in dried blood and cracked full of dirt. Her eyelids were drooped shut, as if she might only be sleeping. But, no. You’d have never thought that.

I kept waiting for Kade to speak up. It seemed to me like he would. But then I realized Kade was going to be too busy crying. He had his one hand hiding his eyeballs and his stump jammed in his mouth.

Waves of heat ruptured the air around us. Black rocks crumbled from the cliff, crusty and smoking, and they splashed in the lava and got swallowed in flames.

But beneath all the noise was a silence. And it was Crow that broke that silence in the end, his voice bright and clear. He weren’t speaking, he was singing.

It was an old song my father had taught me, and I weren’t much of a singer, but I joined in on the chorus. Alpha did, too.

“Now let me fly.”

I remembered what I’d told Zee on Promise Island—that I was going to fix her. That I’d get trees growing around her and never leave her behind.

“Now let me fly.”

I was going to grow her trees from these saplings stuffed in a pack on my back.

“Now let me fly to Zion.”

But it hadn’t been me breaking up the team, ruining everything.

I felt Crow slump against me, suffocating me, wrapping me in a sweaty cloak made of sorrow. And I began to sense this sorrow would destroy us. If we didn’t stop the blame and the guilt.

“Now let me fly.”

I put my arm around Crow’s waist to help him stand taller. Started to think we were all trying to do our best with this task we’d been given. We were all bent beneath the same curse.

“Now let me fly to Zion.”

Alpha let go of Zee’s body, and my sister’s hair fanned out and her limbs spun as she fell. And I had wanted to touch her one last time, even though she’d been made ugly, and as foreign as the first day I saw her.

But now she was twirling and tumbling. And I was holding my breath as she got further and further, and further away.

We worked our way out along the ledge, following the top of the cliffs the only way we could go. The burial had left us numb amid the buzz and sizzle. Cold amid the heat.

I glanced back along the cliffs, making sure we weren’t being followed, remembering that noise that had sounded like footsteps, behind us in the tunnel. But all I’d seen in the tunnel was shadows, and all I saw now was the air shimmering like a fever, as if the heat was devouring everything in sight.

Kade stumbled into me, his eyes pointing straight down at the blaze, and I grabbed him, pulling him upright.

“You need to ride up top?” I called, yelling above the lava’s crackle and roar. Crow was the only one still huddled on the mammoth, gripping its fur as it shuffled and swayed, keeping as far from the cliff’s edge as it could.

“It’s more likely to fall than we are,” Kade shouted back at me. “I’m not getting up there. This is suicide.”

“We have to follow the heat.”

He cussed at me.

“Take my hand,” I said.

“For what?”

“You’re getting too sloppy.”

“And what do you care?”

“Maybe I don’t.” I gazed into the inferno. “But Zee did.”

His head slumped against his chest like his neck just got broke. And when he started scratching real bad at his arm, I remembered old Frost doing the same thing—reckoned it was a crystal-junky move and maybe Kade was craving a fix.

“It’s bad, man,” he said. “All of this. It hurts so raw, and feels so heavy.”

“I know. Might get worse, too.”

“There’s worse?” He quit scratching himself, tried to smile. I could see his face fighting to do it.

“Take my hand,” I told him, and when he did, our fingers made a fist.

We fought on. Above us, just smoke and jagged black rocks. And below us, the river of fire getting wider, and the far cliffs receding further each time I looked.

The lava was so bright it was blinding, and it singed your nostrils and droned in your eardrums, so you got full of it, became a part of it, moving inside the flame. And I started to reckon somewhere that lava would cool and turn into rock, and someday, perhaps, that rock might be mountains. For every end, there’s a beginning, I guess. And maybe all that burns comes back.

And as if to mark this chaos and creation, people had once built walls here. Long ago, before their sky was encased in this hot, rocky tomb. Before the lava had burst forth and ruptured. Before the Darkness, I suppose. Before the stars fell from the sky.

Somewhere in those distant days, in the glory of the old world, people had built walls, homes and roads here at the dormant gates of hell. Because up ahead, below the ridge we were on, stood the singed carcass of a dead settlement. And while the buildings back in the lake had been sunk and frozen, these buildings looked like they’d been cooked alive.

They were just shells, really. Blackened ruins, surrounded by lava and stripped naked by fire. But it weren’t the buildings that interested me, it was the slab of roads that was tethered to the city. A gnarled old network of highways that seemed to bounce and float upon the lava. A mess of old asphalt strips, clogged full of cars.

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