“They are,” he said. “They were. Everyone down there believes in them, but there’s little proof, little to tell the truth. Moments in history, but history is easily distorted. They’re our gods and our demons.”
“All gods and demons make themselves heard or felt from time to time,” Alishia said. She cursed inwardly, stunned at her clumsiness in conversation. This poor man was mourning his mother’s death, and the deaths of those he knew and loved, and here she was spouting her naive librarian’s philosophy. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean-”
“No,” he said. He was looking at her properly for the first time now, holding the blanket above his eyes to shield them from the sun. “That’s all right. I’m sorry I said you were a little girl. I can see that I was wrong.”
Alishia turned away, blushing. She felt so inept. She was not used to talking to people, especially strangers.
Especially fledge miners!
Trey Barossa ate little, and after food he thanked Alishia and said that he needed to sleep, to travel, to warn…
She watched confused and fascinated as the miner took a chunk of fledge from his shoulder bag and chewed it as his eyes closed, his breathing slowed and his body seemed to relax, molding itself to the ground. She sat nearby and looked back across the plains at Noreela City. It was still visible in the distance, a bruise on the land with a brown haze of smoke marking the sky above it. The city was less than a day distant, and yet it already felt a lifetime away.
Later she wandered over to the sleeping miner and gathered his things. His shoulder bag fell open. She caught sight of a lump of yellow fledge within.
Alishia looked back at the city again. More than a world away.
IT DID NOTtake long for Trey to drift away. He felt the heat of sunlight on his skin, even through the blanket the girl had erected above him, and he smelled a hundred smells he did not know, heard wind brushing through nearby trees, felt the cool smoothness of grass beneath him, a thousand experiences he had never known living underground where the air was cool, the cavern filled with man-made smells and the breeze came from deeper within the caves, bringing only rumor. He should be reveling in this place. There was so much to see, yet he had barely opened his eyes.
But sleep was welcoming for him, and the travel that came with it. He had to move his mind across mountains, try to touch the awareness of miners farther away, deeper down. He had to warn them.
The sounds and smells faded as sleep took him, and Trey rode the power of the fledge. He moved away quickly, shifting straight up into the air like a cave bat gone wild, flailing invisible limbs to try to regain a sense of balance. His mind spun, and with it his perceptions. Up and down ceased to exist. There was simply around: an all-encompassing awareness of being surrounded by space, unhindered by rock, a million different routes open to him from where he hung, unplanned, unrestricted. Trey’s mind exulted and rose higher, touching clouds that tingled his skin and made him shiver where he slept on the hillside far below. Shapes circled him for a while, black birds with cruel curved beaks, and he was aware that they had something of the talent he possessed. They knew of his presence, though they could not see him. They circled some more and Trey shifted away, watching as the birds dipped and rose, trying to find him again. They called out and he heard them twice, up here in his mind and down below with his sleeping man’s ears.
He felt more free and unimpeded than ever before in a fledge dream. The space around him was staggering, the potential overwhelming. He wished Sonda could have experienced this; he wished that they could have been here together. But Sonda was dead, slaughtered by the rampaging Nax.
Trey tried to rein in his mind and steer it across the mountains. He passed between peaks, dipped down to touch a tumbling stream that came from deep within the mountains, wondering whether it was connected with the underground river that had played the background to his life forever. He went farther from his body than he ever had before. The distance was frightening-he could feel the space between his conscious mind and his subconscious-but it also felt safe. It was no wonder, as his mother had once told him, that so many of the fledgers who visited topside decided to stay forever. Up here there was such freedom.
He passed the cave and shaft in the hillside where the rising had brought him to the surface, raging and mad with grief, sending him out blind into this new world. The rising had halted in its tracks. Way down below, the mules were dead.
Trey moved on, eager to put distance between himself and that evidence of his former life. He flew into the mountains, passing a small lake speckled with signs of thousands of fish breaking the surface. A scar on one hillside told of a recent landslide, and the ground revealed below glowed and glittered, as if the blood of the land was drying in the sun.
Onward, farther into the Widow’s Peaks. On one steep slope he spied a herd of creatures rolling uphill. He moved closer and made out something of their makeup; they were like shifting plants, great balls of growth that hauled themselves effortlessly against the slope with barbs and hooks and sharps stems. Closer still, and then the whispering began. Deep down in his mind voices rose up, some in languages he could not understand, a few relating words he could. There were many whisperers, and although Trey was sure they were not actually directing their speech at him, he felt exposed and vulnerable floating high in the fresh mountain air. He went even closer and the voices grew louder. Their whispers were rhythmic and spellbinding, drawing him in. He tried to make out whether they were talking in pleasure or pain, glee or grief, and when he saw some of the shapes decorating the outsides of these tumbling things-the flash of bone, old cloth flapping as the things moved, the occasional damp darkness of rotting things-he realized whose voices they were.
He rose quickly, escaping this band of things as they tumbled inexorably uphill, and within minutes he was out of range of their muttering victims.
Trey flew on until he found what he was looking for; a wound in the land, a mine shaft, cauterized by time and continuous usage. There was no evidence of any sort of rising here. A huge machine sat dead and pointless way beyond the mouth of the shaft. Great chains, links as long as a man, lay rusted into the soil, mostly overgrown but visible here and there as a reminder of old times. They connected the redundant machine with whatever means had once been used to haul the mine’s product to the surface.
He dipped down, hovered at the mouth of the mine and took a mental sniff. It was fledge, but old, little sign of any new batches of the drug having been brought to the surface in a while. He drifted inside, immediately finding the going harder now that he was confined once again in tunnels and shafts. He stopped suddenly, his incorporeal self standing at the black entrance to some unfathomably deep pit.
Out of the darkness came silent screams.
Trey reeled, spun back, passing into rock and out again, his movements slowing, and for a few rapid heartbeats he was terrified that he was becoming stuck down there, caught in the sickening outpouring of pain and agony, trapped in the knowledge that slaughter was happening at that exact moment. The mental anguish poured up and out like an eruption of pure torment, scalding him where he lay.
Somehow Trey withdrew from the mine. He fled into the sunlight, letting its heat bathe the screams from his floating mind.
ALISHIA DRANK WINEsometimes. Nothing else. She had certainly never tried fledge.
She knew of some who used it, and she was more than aware of its effects: nullifying, dulling, somnambulistic. In her readings about the fledge-mining communities that had existed for generations belowground, there were hints at its spiritualistic properties, the idea that its real use was as a perception-expanding compound more than as a mind-numbing drug. She had been drawn to the conclusion that its effect depended largely upon the user, what they desired from the drug and what drove them to sample it.