Vivian was quiet for a minute, aware of the extent of his pain and what she was about to ask.
“We really need that book, Weston. And if there were dreamspheres—”
“Now you’re insane! Are you proposing what I think you are?”
She waited, keeping silence. It was something she’d learned early in medical school, effective on patients and staff alike. Just wait it out and let their own consciences do the talking.
“Oh, all right!” he said. “What difference does it make? I’ll help you. And then you’ll let me die.”
“Do we need to call somebody about the fire?”
“It’s a little late to salvage anything.”
“I was thinking about fire risk. You know—the forest.”
“No wind to speak of—trees are still well back, ground is damp. Should be okay. Anonymous tip maybe, when we get to town.”
“Here. You might want this.” Vivian held out the pendant.
He stood looking at it for a long moment, and she thought he would refuse. But at length he took it from her and slipped the leather thong over his head. “Guess I really didn’t deserve to be free of it. Not yet anyway.”
Vivian ached for her own pendant but managed a bleak smile. “Great. You’re driving. We’ve got some digging to do.”
Nineteen
Wishing was for fools and Zee knew it.
Nothing would be accomplished by wishing the winding paths of the labyrinth straight, or by conjuring up soft beds and healing hands and Vivian’s face. Action was all there was, and so he put one foot in front of the other and kept himself moving forward.
He had spent the night lying on the forest floor, sharing the blanket with Jared. About the time the moon rose above the trees, the sick man began raving with delirium. His body burned with fever, and Zee had dribbled all of the water from the canteen into his mouth, reserving only one precious swallow for himself.
When the sun first came up and he’d willed himself to get moving, he’d collected some of the heavy dew from the leaves of the trees. Not enough to slake his thirst, but enough at least to wet his mouth. Knowing he needed energy he’d eaten one of the protein bars, but they were dry and went down hard without water. When he’d offered some to Jared, the sick man turned his head away, gagging.
By means of some serious goading, he’d managed to get Jared crawling, and they’d been lucky enough to come across another path. Or at least it had seemed like luck, until the sun changed from a pleasant source of warmth to a cruel and blazing heat. The trees thinned and vanished until they entered an endless prairie intersected by impassable hedges.
All through the morning Jared had grown weaker, his body heated by fever, his eyes dull. About the time they hit the open fields and the sun was directly overhead, he collapsed, unconscious, and could not be roused.
There was no water, no shelter, nothing Zee could do to help.
He thought about walking away. He had a job to do—find some way to get back to Vivian, find the one who had stolen the Key. Jared was holding him back. Who would blame him if he left the coward to fend for himself? Who would even know?
Bending down, he grasped the wounded man under the arms and tried to haul him up over his shoulder. He failed, the heavy body too much for his own decreased strength and wounded arm. Again he tried. Again he failed. On the third attempt he managed to stagger onto his feet with the unconscious man a dead weight over his shoulder, limp arms flopping, head bobbing.
He’d been walking for only a few minutes when the path he was on came to a dead end; nothing for it but to choose one way or another, which was not easily done. The hedges were tall and blocked his view. There was no rhyme or reason to the maze, and a nagging sense of familiarity prickling beneath his skin was not helpful. It never said, Take this right and that left and the middle path when the way turns into three. It just burrowed into his brain like a chigger, a thing he mentally scratched without ever shaking it loose.
At last he settled on a plan—he would take a left alternated by a right at every crossroads. If the way split into three or more, always take the middle. The goal was to go as straight as possible, although he couldn’t say why. Only that he needed some sort of direction.
For the first time in his life he had absolutely no sense of either place or time. His wounds ached, burned, throbbed, and sometimes bled under the weight of the burden slung over his shoulder, inanimate and irksome.
A fly buzzed around his head, lighting on his bleeding arm, then Jared’s leg. Another fly showed up, and then another, until the air around him buzzed with small black bodies. They crawled thick over Zee’s head and shoulders, swarming over the bandage on his arm, buzzing around his side. At first he brushed them off, but they were too many and it took too much energy.
Time ceased to exist. No past, no future, only this step, and then the next. Always, there had been the buzzing of the flies crawling at the edges of his eyes and mouth. The sun had always beat down on the top of his head. There had always been pain, had always been the weight over his shoulder and the endless twists and turns of the paths he followed.
There came a time when he realized he had ceased all forward motion and was standing perfectly still. Not doing anything, not resting, just standing, with his burden still heavy on his shoulders.
He felt that there must be some reason for this.
His eyes sent back a message that the path in front of him was blocked by a hill of dirt, perhaps as high as his knees, reaching from hedge to hedge, with no room to pass on either side. As his attention focused in, he saw that the dirt was moving. Small red crawling things coming and going, in and out of a honeycomb of holes.
Ants.
Zee had a thing about ants. There were too many of them and they moved too fast. He’d read The Once and Future King in first grade, and the Wart’s adventures among the ants had instilled a lingering fear of their ruthlessness.
There was a choice to be made. He could turn around and backtrack to the last turning and take a different route. Or he could wade knee deep through a nest of pissed-off ants. The balance of decision was skewed by the promise of shade. Beyond the anthill, not far in the distance, he saw trees. Nice tall, shady weeping willows. And beyond them, a glint of something that might be water.
As he stood in a stupor, unable to act on this simple choice, an ant separated itself from the nest and scurried toward his foot. He observed its single-minded approach. It stopped at the barrier created by his boot, indecisive, and Zee felt a sudden kinship with the tiny creature. To go forward, or to go back?
But the ant didn’t share his problem with decision making, and it was only the matter of a single breath before it climbed up onto the toe of his boot. A tiny tendril of smoke followed behind it, along with a hot smell of burning. Zee watched its progress, mesmerized by the sooty trail it left behind as it explored this new territory. It was just beginning to register on him that if the ant could burn leather it would not be good to have it crawl up his pant leg, when the entire anthill exploded. Flying ants surrounded him, burning his skin wherever they touched. The hedge next to him began to smoke and then burst into flame.
Zee ducked his head low and charged forward, toward the fragile promise of water. Through the swarming ants, through the anthill, pumping his rubbery legs as fast as he could manage. A thousand pinpoints of fire covered his body. His clothes began to smoke. The smell of singed hair rose up around him.