Edgar sat bolt upright. "What?" He slammed the general alarm circuit, and across the entire camp, klaxons began to scream.
Justin heard the alarm and shot a look at Jessica, who narrowed her eyes. There was a paired series of electronic screams, not the dreaded single bleats that would have indicated visual sighting by guards at the periphery. Still, it was enough to raise the hair at the back of his neck.
Grendel guns, never far away, were snatched up by eager hands. The entire population of Shangri-La emptied into the square. Eyes alert, heads swiveling, voices raised in alarm.
Trish appeared in the door of the communications shed, and searched the crowd until she found Jessica. She headed straight for her friend. Justin watched the two of them huddle. When Jessica turned around, the blood had drained from her face.
Justin scanned the crowd quickly. Sylvia Weyland was nowhere to be seen. He remembered that she was up at the mining site, supervising.
The faint burr of a skeeter worked its way into his consciousness. Before he could fully register it, Jessica turned toward him, took a halting step, and then froze. Her face tilted to the ground. It tilted back up. Her eyes streamed.
They met in the middle of the press, and she leaned sobbing into his arms.
Skeeter Twelve landed four minutes later. Four dozen anxious Star Born surrounded the skeeter pad, silent as Aaron Tragon emerged.
He was muddy, and bleeding, and bruised. His shirt was torn almost completely away. He looked like a man utterly lost.
Justin was the first to his side, and said, "Tell me."
Aaron looked at him. "I tried. I tried, Justin."
Justin grabbed Aaron's shoulder. "Tell me, goddamn it!"
The autogyro's rotors slowed, then stopped. Aaron leaned back against the cab.
"We were heading back along ridge twelve. The clouds were looking bad, and we wanted to make better time. There is a cliff there above the river. Chaka stopped, told us to look down. God." Aaron's shook as he wiped his brow. "The grendels were spawning. The samlon. They boiled in the river. It was... it was spectacular. They were so far down, I thought we were safe. Then the ledge gave way under our combined weight. Cadmann and I jumped back in time, but Chaka went over."
He paused, and during that pause. Big Chaka pushed his way through the crowd and came to stand before Aaron, looking up at him with an expression Justin found unreadable. Justin started to speak, but Big Chaka put a hand on his arm, imploring silence.
"He slid halfway down before he caught himself. He twisted something. He was too close to the river. Cadmann and I went after him. There were roots poking out. We used those.
"It had been raining up there. The bank was unstable. Cadmann got to Chaka, helped him up. They slid. Cadmann stopped their slide, and I got down closer. Then the grendels had us spotted."
"Grendels," Big Chaka said.
Aaron nodded with infinite regret. "They boiled up out of the water. Six, seven, eight of them. Little ones, but a flood, once they realized that there was food. Cadmann screamed at me to get back. I ignored him and tried to get to them. There wasn't enough to hang on to. I shot one with the grendel gun. Cadmann shot two more with his rifle, and then one with his pistol. They got to Chaka first..."
He buried his head in his hands. "They screamed. They screamed. Oh, God, I never want to hear anything like that again. They were screaming curses, and killing grendels. For every one they killed, two more appeared. And they both slid down into the water, and then there was nothing but blood.
"I don't know how long I hung there, watching the water. Then I climbed back up. I was numb." He held up his hands. They were torn and bloody. "I lost my grip a few times, but I made it back to the top. I'd . ...'d torn my shirt. Lost my comm card. By the time I got back to the skeeter, the weather was turning bad. I called in a Mayday. I couldn't think straight anymore. I flew back."
He met Jessica's eyes. Then Justin's. Then Big Chaka's. Jessica moved up to hold him.
The group was silent. Justin was shaking.
Big Chaka looked up at the sky. It was massed high with dark, angry clouds. "How long before the storm?"
Almost in answer, drops began to fall.
He hung his head. "When it is over, we must go out, and see what we can recover of my son." He looked at Aaron again. Something—not anger, not grief—stole across his dark face, and then was gone.
There was pain. Pain in his back, his head, a great tearing, burning ache that threatened to consume all of his thoughts, all of his life. It was just too large, bigger than anything he had ever experienced in his life. More than all of his previous pains combined.
There was cold. Wet. There was water around him. Near him. Flowing over him.
Little Chaka awoke.
Is my back broken? It was a natural question, one that he couldn't answer at the moment. In his entire universe, nothing existed but agony. Such questions would come later—if there was a later.
His eyes wouldn't focus. All he got were patterns of shadow and light.
What was there to remember? What had happened?
He remembered...
He remembered.
Aaron. Oh, God. Aaron had shot him. Was that memory correct? And if it was, why wasn't he dead?
He struggled to move. What could move? He remembered a flash of light, the struggle to get his own gun up to the aim, Aaron's rifle coming up . .
.
No, he was thinking backward, now. From the last thing he remembered to the beginning.
Calm. Try to remember. Aaron shot him. And then--? And then Cadmann would have shot Aaron. Chaka went quite calm on thinking this. He might be dead. (Was he already dead? Was this what death felt like? Just a slow sinking into the earth? Was there pain and wetness? Certainly he had been shot in the head. Certainly he was dead now.)
He had no hope of truly being alive... did he?
But he knew that he had been avenged. In fact, if Cadmann had killed Aaron, and if he, Chaka, was still alive (as he began to suspect that he might in fact be), then there was the chance that he would be rescued. Cadmann would burn in hell before he would allow one of his own to—
Chaka's eyes finally cleared.
He managed to catch the whimper in his throat before it escaped, but that didn't make his world a better a place to be.
There, in the water before him, was Cadmann.
He looked so like he always did, except his tanned face seemed pale. Cadmann's blue-green eyes stared at him, almost as if he were about to speak. Almost. The hole in his throat said that there would never be another word from him. Chaka squeezed his eyes shut. It took all of his strength, but he had to do it. He had no choice. He couldn't cope with this. It was worse than death.
He opened his eyes again, praying that it was a hallucination. It could be, couldn't it? It would change when he opened his eyes again, the way objects in a dream change if you look away and then look back again.
But Cadmann still floated there. Water flowed over the staring eyes. Cadmann's mouth was open just a little as if caught in midword. Trying to speak, to say one more thing, just one more before silence fell for all time.
Chaka wept.
Blackness came for him.
He didn't know how long he was unconscious. He woke to a nightmare. He felt it moving through the water. He couldn't bring himself to open his eyes.
It was there in the water with him.
A grendel. He felt the heat wash from its body, could hear its sinuous splashing. It looked as big as a house.
Coming to consciousness meant returning to the house of pain. Chaka yearned for death. This was the passage. This was crossing over into the other world, a world without pain. A world where Cadmann awaited him, watched him now. Be brave, my friend. Don't fear the dark...
He heard the breathing, and then no breathing, just a hissing gurgle.