While Brewster was talking, Josh examined the rest of the group. He was no longer sure what he had seen the previous night. But if his eyes had not been deceiving him, who could it have been?
His first choice, from what he had seen recently, was Sig and Sapphire, sneaking off together. Since that wasn’t the case, then who?
The twins were game for any sort of wildness, but they would surely have gone together, not one at a time. Ruby and Amethyst had been asleep when he crept into Topaz’s bed. That left two people: Sol Brewster and Winnie Carlson. He grinned at the idea of those two going off together. He didn’t believe it for a moment.
His pondering ended when he was given one of the test kits and walked by Brewster to the area assigned to him. It was closer to the fissure than he had been before—quite a bit too close, in Josh’s opinion.
Brewster then moved him to a point thirty meters closer yet, well past the place where all plant life ended. “This is a little farther than you should go. It’s perfectly safe here, but I can’t vouch for what happens if you start fooling around here. Take a good look. Then go back up and get to work.”
He left. Josh took a look, a very good look, and wished that he were back at the main compound, or Burnt Willow Farm—or anywhere else at all. From his position the ground sloped down, steeper and steeper, to become a vertical wall that dropped to the bottom of the fissure. The opposite side was a couple of kilometers away, and the length of the chasm stretched out of sight in both directions. A thin pall of yellowish smoke sat over the great rift in the surface. It never dispersed, even though Josh could feel a steady warm breeze on his face.
He stared along the steepest line of descent. Nothing grew or moved, except at the very bottom where a dark something churned and smoked. In daylight it was all blacks and grays. He knew from the previous night that when the world was dark, the fissure bottom glowed with its own dull red fire. If it were not hot enough to make the rocks molten, it was close to it. A human who fell to the fissure floor would not survive more than a few seconds.
He heard a sound beside him, and turned in alarm. It was Amethyst, peering down toward the fissure bottom.
“Brewster told me I could,” she said defensively “I’m working just up from you, but this is a lot more interesting. Do you know how hot it is down there?”
“No. But if you look at it at night it glows a sort of dull red.”
A mistake—Amethyst might ask him how he knew. Instead she merely said “Interesting” again, craned forward, and added, “For something naturally black, like the rocks there, a dull red heat means it must be at least five hundred Celsius. Fall down there, you’d be burned to a crisp.”
A fact that Josh had no wish to hear again—Topaz had said almost exactly the same thing. But Amethyst was apparently marking time on the way to her real subject, because she added, still without looking at Josh, “You know where Topaz went, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
It was literally true, but it didn’t work. Amethyst said, “All right, maybe you don’t know where. But I bet you know why she went. And I bet I do, too. She’s gone off with your cousin. They’re looking to catch a rupert.”
“Why would you think a thing like that?”
“I don’t hear you denying it. I’m not an idiot, you know. You’ve been babbling about ruperts ever since that first night at camp. You try to give everybody the impression that you’re totally cool and you don’t care about anything, but Topaz says that’s not true, inside you care an awful lot. You really want to prove you’re right about the rupert. Saph says you hide your feelings like this because of the way you were brought up, with your mother and everything. You’ve learned not to let things show, ’specially when you care a lot.”
“Have you finished? How I feel about things is my business, not yours. And what I said was true. I don’t know where Topaz is.”
“I believe you.” Amethyst sighed, heavily and artificially, and oddly it reminded Josh at once of his mother. “Topaz is so lucky, you know. The rest of us really envy her. She can talk anybody into anything.” She studied Josh as if she had just discovered a new Solferino life form. “You seem to have your head screwed on the right way, but you went along with it. Do you mind my asking, what did Topaz do to persuade you?”
Josh did mind. He minded this whole conversation. He was saved from having to answer by a bellow of rage from farther up the hill.
“Are you two going to stand there and bullshit all day long? I said a quick look at the fissure. Get working.”
“Topaz is so lucky. Talks anybody into anything,” Amethyst started back toward her assigned territory. “Except maybe for horrible old Frankenstein’s monster up there. I’d like to do something to his fissure. He’s immune to all human feelings. Nobody mentioned him when Saph asked us if we’d like to go to Solferino. If she had, we might have stayed home. At least we’d have thought about it twice.”
Chapter Sixteen
The work with the test kit was interesting at first. You picked a likely looking piece of plant, popped it into the top, and waited. After a while, the yellow light came on. That was the trouble. Yellow, yellow, yellow. No matter how much you willed the red or blue light to appear, it never did. And after a while, what had started out interesting became just boring.
The day was warm. It was easy to imagine that half the heat came from the hidden fires of the Avernus Fissure, only a few hundred meters away. The red disk of Grisel crept across the sky with terrible slowness. As the hours wore on, Josh found he had plenty of time to think and plenty to think about.
Where were Topaz and Dawn at the moment, and what were they doing? They were probably miles and miles away. He was sure they wouldn’t have stayed near the fissure, where the other trainees were working and Brewster might find them. They would surely have gone the other way, up to the heights surrounding Avernus. That’s where the shape of the land suggested you might find plants—and animals—more like those in the Barbican Hills.
By now he’d bet that all the other trainees knew what had happened to Topaz and Dawn. He’d as good as told Amethyst, and she wouldn’t have kept it from Ruby. And Sig would know, too, because Saph seemed to tell him everything. And Sig would have been bugged by Hag and Rick, and he had no reason not to tell them whatever he knew.
So they all knew—except for Sol Brewster and Winnie Carlson. It was curious that those two had not grilled everyone harder about Topaz and Dawn’s disappearance. Maybe they had worries and secrets of their own. Josh still hadn’t come up with a plausible explanation for the two dark figures he had seen while he waited in the dark for Topaz.
Brewster was far more focused now that they were at the Avernus Fissure. He had stopped running people off their feet in pointless work, or shipping them off somewhere before they’d even had time to settle in. He was purposeful and organized. And even Winnie Carlson seemed less of a sad sack here, in the scary volcanic region surrounding the fissure.
Were all these things connected? It seemed odd to Josh that they would be testing plants close to the edge of the fissure, and not in the forests where growth was more abundant. That’s where you would expect to find more plant types.
Maybe he ought to talk things over with the others, especially Amethyst—old bulge-brain, Topaz called her (but not when she was there). Maybe Amethyst would be able to put everything together and make sense of it.