"I see Rico," she said. "The kelp has saved him. He is well."
"It's the dust," Ben muttered, and shook his head. "If the kelp has him, he's probably drowned. We need to get out of here. There are demons, Flattery's peopl..."
He doesn't believe me, she thought. He thinks I'... I'...
A vision gelled in front of her out of thin air, one of Rico wet and gasping in the cavern. Rico tipped back his head and laughed, surrounded b... friendly feelings. It was a side of him she hadn't seen. Someone approached him, a friendly someone.
"Zavatans," she said, cocking an ear, "they will be coming up from the caverns."
"It's the dust, Crista," Ben insisted, "it'll wear off. These are hallucinations. We've got to find Rico and get out of sight. Flattery's peopl..."
"...re here," she said. "They're already here. It's not hallucinatio..." she giggled, "...t's cellophane."
She had unraveled some cellophane in her mind and she saw the sinister figures looking down from the clifftop. Two of them. She reeled her vision closer and saw that she knew them both from Flattery's compound: Nevi and Zentz. Zentz's face and body were grossly misshapen. With Nevi, it was his soul. This she could see in the boiling black aura that seethed from him and sought her out. It sniffed the wind with its black snout like a dasher on the hunt.
She felt Ben pull her backward through the rip in the Flying Fish. The bright sky trailing the storm forced her to squint and focus on a double rainbow that lazed in the sky above them. She wondered whether Ben might be right about the dust. The pink of the rainbow's arch blazed brightest of all the colors and it pulsed in time with her own pulse.
"Do you see it?" she asked.
"The rainbows?" Ben said. "Yes, I do. Give me your hand, I'll help you down here."
"Don't rainbows mean something?" she asked. "A promise of some kind?"
"Supposedly God placed a rainbow in the sky as a promise that he would never destroy the world by flood again," he said. "But that was Earth, and this is Pandora. I don't know whether God's promises are transferable. Here, give me your hand."
The impatience in his voice just made her move slower.
Rico's safe, she thought. He doesn't believe me, so he's worried.
She shielded her eyes from the glare and scanned the cliff. The clifftop was identical to the one in her vision, except for a void, a nothingness where she'd seen the images of Zentz and Nevi.
Another image of Rico, in the cavern. He reached out for the kelp frond that had brought him there and she felt him transported to the dead hylighter at their feet. He stood there, facing them, head cocked and hands on his hips. It was as if he were impatient, waiting for them to make up their minds.
"Look there," she said to Ben, "can't you see Rico?"
She pointed to his image, seating itself at the point where the hylighter touched the sea. He was smiling at her for the first time and beckoned her with a finger.
"I see the sun shining off the water," Ben said. "It's too bright to look at. You'd better be careful of your eyes."
"It's Ric..."
"We're dusted enough," Ben said.
He stepped down from the foil to the ground and reached up for her.
"Try not to touch the hylighter. We're probably safest scaling the cliff."
"No!"
The word was torn from her throat before she could think about it.
"Not the cliff," she said. "I feel something there. I saw them up there, Nevi and Zentz. They're after us."
Ben pulled her free of the wreckage and they stood on the unsteady footing of the slickrock beach.
"OK," he said, and sighed, "I believe you. If not the cliff, then where?"
She couldn't help looking at the sea.
"We can't go there," he said. "Please don't ask me to take you there. Maybe you can live in there, but I can't."
He glanced quickly around them, biting his lip.
"If you can see Rico, how do we get to him?"
She couldn't resist caressing the remnant of hylighter draped over the foil. Though a plant, and clearly dead, it emanated a warmth that pleased her. It tickled something in her memory, something distant about her childhood. The kelp had protected her, nurtured her, educated her chemically in the customs of her fellow humans. She knew at a touch that this hylighter was from the same stand.
She turned in a slow circle, scanning the beach. She knew Ben was wise in some things, that she had to have faith in him. Without the kelp's cilia, she, too would have died in the sea. Much was rushing back to her, in fragments and colors. What she wanted more than anything was to run to it, to bury herself in the kelp's great body, death or not.
That is selfish, some voice warned her. Selfish is no longer acceptable.
She had heard about the barrenness of the upcoast regions, and at first glance black rock was all she saw: sheer black cliff, then black rubble, then a foaming churn of green sea. But there was life among the rubble. Little bits of green squatted among rocks, clinging to crevices in the cliff side. Something, maybe the something that spoke inside her head, pointed her upcoast.
"There."
She took Ben's hand and pointed out a huge black boulder with a single silver wihi clinging to its top. It was about thirty meters upcoast, halfway between cliff and tideline.
"That's where we want to be."
That was when Nevi and Zentz stepped out from behind the boulder, lasguns drawn, picking their way across the rocks toward them. Crista wasn't surprised, nor frightened. She heard Ben mutter "Shit!" under his breath and saw his head twitch quickly left to right, looking for a dodge. But she knew it wasn't necessary. She knew.
The moment came together for her like a great conception. All the world silenced itself - the waves, the breeze, the cautious footsteps of two murderers clattering across wet stones.
"Hands on top of your heads, step away from the foil." Zentz delivered his orders with a shaky voice tinged with slobber.
"Yes," Crista told Ben, "that's where we want to be."
They clung to each other's hands in the stone-still afternoon and watched the huge boulder lift itself back from the ground behind Nevi and Zentz. It came up smoothly, quietly, as though on hinges. Neither man heard a thing.
"Hands on your heads!"
The boulder laid itself carefully down behind them and out of the shadow beneath it climbed a half-dozen men armed only with ropes and throwing nets.
"Tell me you see it, too," Ben whispered. "Tell me I'm not still dusted."
"It is as it should be," she whispered back, her voice a singsong. "There is a great moment at our feet, and it will not be stayed."
Something about the way Nevi's gaze met her own must have given it away. Without a backward glance he sprang sideways, beachward, and whirled. The first net was already settling over the surprised Zentz and another, poorly thrown, grazed Nevi's arms. Two flashes from his lasgun brought down both netmen, but Zentz flailed in a hopeless tangle. When Nevi whirled back, Crista Galli stared down the business end of his lasgun. Even at thirty paces it looked huge.
"I'll kill her," he announced, just loud enough for all to hear. "Trust me. I am very quick."
Everyone froze, and in the silence that went with this stillness Crista felt that they were all graceful subjects inside some great painting. She knew who the painter must be.
Nevi half-crouched in careful aim, his colorful face unreadable, his eyes fixed only on Crista Galli. She felt her head clearing, the return of wave-slaps against rock.
But there's somethin...
It was something she hadn't felt since she'd been dredged up from the sea, something familia...