Wes’s shoulders shake as he cries.
I go to bed, crying on the inside.
Chapter Eleven
Today’s the day. The special cargo delivery from fire country. Regardless of whether Nebo would answer our questions, we’ll find out soon enough what we’ll be collecting. As usual, it’ll be a night job, so Buff and I have got the whole day to kill.
Neither of us can take another day of knocking doors and getting them slammed in our faces, so we decide to go sliding for fun. It feels like forever since we’ve felt the freedom of the mountain without Abe and his gang surrounding us as part of a job.
We tackle the west slopes, where the pines thin out and leave a relatively unobstructed path of fresh powder. It’s not as cold as it was even yesterday, a clear sign that spring is here to stay. The snow might melt off in a few months, if it does at all, but today it’s as thick as Looza’s stew—perfect for sliding.
We trudge to the top of a steep hill, panting heavily by the time we reach the crest. Sitting next to each other, we grin like a couple of well-fed dogs as we strap our sliders to our feet. For a moment I feel like a child again, back when things were simpler, and my only responsibilities were having fun and getting in trouble. Although I still seem to have the trouble part down pat.
“Ready?” I say, as we push to our feet.
“Chill yah,” Buff says, still grinning.
“Go!” I yell, and we slip over the edge, letting gravity do all the work, practically sucking us down the mountainside.
“Woohooo!” we cry, giddy as schoolboys.
The cold wind whips against my face, bright and fresh and alive, and I’m glad I didn’t wear a slider’s mask. A small patch of pines runs toward us, like they’ve got feet and they’re the ones moving, not us. I cut hard to the right, carving a curving line in the snow, while Buff goes left.
We whip around the trees and then come together on the other side. I lean forward to gain speed, edging in front of Buff, and then angle across his path, switching sides. The game is on, cat and mouse we used to call it, and Buff passes me, swapping sides. Again and again we trade places, ripping a continuous zigzag down the slope.
The hill begins to flatten out, to a perfect landing area for this particular run, but I’m not ready to stop, not ready for the distraction from real life to end, so I lead Buff across a swatch of ice that gives us enough momentum to get to another slope, one that slices through the forest. It’s not intended for sliding, but I feel invincible, like I could slide right through a tree or boulder or anything else that tries to get in my way.
With a whoop, I lift the tip of my slide up and over the edge of the next hill. I’m forced to half-skid/half-turn hard to the right when a sharp gray boulder rises up directly in our path. Powdery snow sprays all around me as I hit a soft patch, cutting back to the left to avoid the edge of the trees on the right hand side.
The challenging natural course doesn’t get any easier from there. A couple of times I think I’m freezed when the slope narrows and trees and rocks close in on all sides and sometimes right in front of me, but I always barely manage to squeeze through even the tiniest gaps. I can still hear the scrape and whoomp of Buff’s slider behind me, so I know he’s managed to follow in my wake so far.
Invincible. That’s what we are. Indestructible.
Such are my thoughts as I cross a trail that leads away to the east, back toward the village. That’s when something grabs me from beneath the snow.
~~~
One second I’m invincible, a slider warrior, and the next I’m airborne, like some icin’ snowbird, except with a broken wing, unable to fly, flipping and spinning and going so fast that there’s only one thing to do.
Crash!
My right shoulder hits first and it feels like I’ve landed on sheer stone, except for the fact that it’s white and my bones crunch through it—and I know for a fact that my shoulder isn’t hard enough to break through rock. So it must be snow. Well, more like a mixture of snow and ice, hard packed and without much give to it.
Then I tumble end over end, arse over heels, shoulders to tailbone to knees to bones and parts I don’t even know the names of. It hurts like I’m getting a beat down from Abe all over again.
Eventually though, the friction of my coat and slider against the snow pinches in enough to bring me to a stop, leaving my head spinning and my heart pounding. I stare at the gray-covered sky, which seems to be moving a chilluva lot more than usual. Or maybe it’s me that’s moving. Or something else entirely.
Buff skids to a graceful stop beside me. “Whoa, man, you all right?” he says.
I go to nod, but my neck feels stiffer than a wood plank. “Urrr,” I say, which obviously means yah.
“What happened?” he asks
Even if I knew, I wouldn’t be able to tell him. “Hurts,” I manage. And then, “Urrr.”
“Anything broken?”
More like everything broken. But I’m just being a baby. The wind’s knocked outta me and I got a few bruises—nothing major. I’ve had worse. “Need…a second,” I say, whistling in breaths between puckered lips.
“What the chill?” Buff says, but this time he’s not speaking to me. He’s looking back up the hill, back toward where I fell, where something—I swear to the Mountain Heart I’m not making this up—grabbed me. It was like it reached up from beneath the snow and clamped down on the front of my slider.
“Urrr, what?” I say, trying to twist my sore neck to see where he’s looking.
“I think…” Buff trails off. I think what? I want to ask but it seems I’ve spent all my words. He unclasps his slider and starts walking away, back up the hill. I groan, meaning “wait”.
But he’s already off. Whatever’s up there, I want to see it too, want to know what caused my fall. Burning holes in the clouds with my eyes, I lean forward and rip off my slider, feeling sharp pain hitting me everywhere, in places I didn’t even know I had. I laugh because it hurts so badly and I wonder if I’m becoming like Abe, laughing at pain.
“Holy shiverbones,” I hear Buff say as I crawl on hands and knees to where he’s standing, looking at something stumpy and dark, like a section of tree trunk, blotched against the snow. I could swear it wasn’t there a minute ago.
“What is it?” I rasp as I approach him one hand and knee at a time.
“Not what,” he says, not making any sense.
The thing comes into view and I gasp.
“Who,” Buff says.
It’s Nebo. Frozen harder than a snowman and deader than a fallen tree.
~~~
“Nebo’s dead,” I say to Abe that night.
“What?” he says, brows curled. He looks surprised. There’s something else in his expression too, but I can’t place it, or maybe he’s just hiding it too well.
“We found him in the woods. Looked like he was bludgeoned to death, his head all mashed up.”
Buff’s staring at his hands. We didn’t know what to do, so we pulled him into the woods, dug a hole in the snow, and stuck him in it. Neither of us really liked the idea, but if we’d brought him in, the lawkeepers would’ve had questions—questions we might not be able to answer. Like why we were in the Blue District knocking on Nebo’s door not a day earlier, just before he showed up dead.
“Mountain Heart,” Abe says. There’s a twinge of something in his voice—something not normal for how you should sound just after hearing about someone you know having died. He’s shocked, yah, but not as much as I’d expect him to be.
“Do you know something about this?” I say sharply, stepping toward him.
Brock and Hightower move forward at the same time, penning me in.
He looks at me absently, like he’s not seeing me. “Heart, I never thought they’d…” He trails off.
“Never thought who would what?” I ask, bumping Brock.