We turned to run back toward the hill where we had left our friends. Anatoly and Amal reached the hilltop before I did. Edie shouted a warning, and I turned to see a knee-high spider on my heels, its pale body like a skull on legs. I had no weapon but my flashlight, so I nailed it with a light beam. To my surprise, it recoiled onto its hind legs, waving its front legs in the air. It gave me time to reach the others.
“They’re repelled by light!” I shouted. “Form a line and shine them off.”
The wave of spiders surged up the hill, but we kept them at bay with our lights. They circled us, and we ended up in a ring around Bucky, madly sweeping our flashlights to and fro to keep them off while Sally barked from behind us.
Far across the land, the horizon lit with a silent flash like purple lightning. The spiders paused, then turned mindlessly toward this new light source. As quickly as they had swarmed toward us, they were swarming away. We watched the entire lake of them drain, heading toward some signal we could not see.
“Quick, let’s cross while they’re gone,” I said.
We dashed as fast as we could across the plain where they had gathered. From time to time we saw other flashes of unlight, always far away and never followed by thunder.
In our haste, we let our vigilance lapse, and one of Bucky’s wheels thunked into a pothole. The other wheels spun, throwing up loose dirt and digging themselves in. I called out, “Bucky, stop!”—but he was already stuck fast.
“Let’s push him out,” Amal said, but I held up a hand. The buggy was already dangerously tilted.
“We’re going to have to unload some crates to lighten him up, and dig that wheel out.”
Everyone looked nervously in the direction where the spiders had gone, but Amal said, “Okay. You dig, we’ll unload.”
We all set to work. I was so absorbed in freeing Bucky’s wheel that I did not see the danger approaching until Seabird gave a cry of warning. I looked up to see one of the gauzy curtains bearing down on us from windward. It was yards wide, big enough to envelop us all, and twinkling with a spiderweb of glowing threads.
“Run!” Amal shouted. I dropped my shovel and fled. Behind me, I heard Edie’s voice crying, “Sally!” and Amal’s saying, “No, Edie! Leave her be!”
I whirled around and saw that the dog had taken refuge under the buggy. Edie was running back to get her. Amal was about to head back after Edie, so I dived at his legs and brought him down with a thud. From the ground we both watched as Edie gave up and turned back toward us. Behind her, the curtain that had been sweeping toward Bucky changed direction, veering straight toward Edie.
“Edie!” Amal screamed. She turned, saw her danger, and froze.
The curtain enveloped her, wrapping her tight in an immobilizing net. There was a sudden, blinding flash of combustion. As I blinked the after-spots away, I saw the curtain float on, shredded now, leaving behind a charcoal pillar in the shape of a woman.
Motionless with shock, I gazed at that black statue standing out against the eastern sky. It was several seconds before I realized that the sky was growing bright. Beyond all of us, dawn was coming.
In the early morning light Anatoly and I dug a grave while Seabird and Davern set up the tent. We simply could not go on. Amal was shattered with grief, and could not stop sobbing.
“Why her?” he would say in the moments when he could speak at all. “She was the best person here, the best I’ve ever known. She shouldn’t have been the one to die.”
I couldn’t wash those last few seconds out of my brain. Why had she stopped? How had that brainless, eyeless thing sensed her?
Later, Amal became angry at me for having prevented him from saving her. “Maybe I could have distracted it. It might have taken me instead of her.”
I only shook my head. “We would have been burying both of you.”
“That would have been better,” he said.
Everyone gathered as we laid what was left of her in the ground, but no one had the heart to say anything over the grave. When we had filled it in, Sally crept forward to sniff at the overturned dirt. Amal said, “We need to mark it, so we can find it again.” So we all fanned out to find rocks to heap in a cairn on the grave.
We no longer feared the return of the spiders, or anything else, because the Umberlife had gone dormant in the sun—our light being as toxic to them as theirs was to us. Everything had retreated into their shells and closed their sliding covers. When we viewed them in our own light they still blended in with the stones of the crater floor.
We ate and snatched some hours of sleep while nothing was threatening us. I was as exhausted as the others, but anxious that we were wasting so much daylight. I roused them all before they were ready. “We’ve got to keep moving,” I said.
We resumed the work of freeing Bucky where we had left off. When all was ready, we gathered behind him to push. “Bucky, go!” I ordered. His wheels only spun in the sand. “Stop!” I ordered. Then, to the others, “We’re going to rock him out. Push when I say go, and stop when I say stop.” When we got a rhythm going, he rocked back and forth three times, then finally climbed out of the trench that had trapped him.
Amal helped us reload the buggy, but when it came time to move on, he hung back. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you.”
“No way,” I said. “We all go or none of us.”
He got angry at me again, but I would not let him pick a fight. We let him have some moments alone at the grave to say goodbye. At last I walked up to him and said, “Come on, Amal. We’ve got to keep moving.”
“What’s the point?” he said. “The future is gone.”
But he followed me back to where the others were waiting.
He was right, in one way: nothing we could achieve now would make up for Edie’s loss. How we were going to carry on without her, I could not guess.
When we camped, there was no music now, and little conversation. The Winding Wall was a blue line ahead in the distance, and as we continued, it rose, ever more impassable, blocking our way. We did not reach the spot where the gully path pierced it until we had been walking for thirteen hours. We were tired, but resting would waste the last of the precious sunlight. We gathered to make a decision.
“Let’s just leave the buggy and the crates, and make a run for home,” Amal said. He looked utterly dispirited.
Davern and Seabird turned to Anatoly. He was the only one of us who was still resolute. “If we do that, we will have wasted our time,” he said. “We can’t give up now.”
“That’s right,” Davern said.
Amal looked at me. There was some sense in his suggestion, but also some impracticality. “If we leave the buggy we’ll have to leave the tent,” I said. “It’s too heavy for us to carry.” We had been spreading it as a tarpaulin over the crates when we were on the move.
“We knew from the beginning that the wall would be an obstacle,” Anatoly said with determination. “We have to make the effort.”
I think even Amal realized then that he was no longer our leader.
We unloaded the buggy, working till we were ready to drop, then ate and fell asleep on the ground. When we woke, the sun was setting. It seemed too soon.
Each crate took two people to carry up the steep path. We decided to do it in stages. Back and forth we shuttled, piling our cargo at a level spot a third of the way up. The path was treacherous in the dark, but at least the work was so strenuous we had no need of coldsuits until Umber should rise.
The life-forms around us started waking as soon as dark came. It was the predawn time for them, when they could open their shells and exhale like someone shedding a coldsuit. They were quiescent enough that we were able to avoid them.
Fifteen hours later, our cargo was three-quarters of the way up, and we gathered at the bottom again to set up the tent and rest before trying to get Bucky up the path. The X-ray alarm went off while we were asleep, but we were so tired we just shut it off and went on sleeping.