Roderick Gordon - Deeper

Like firecrackers going off, there was a volley of gunfire. A hail of lead peppered the columns around them, the impacts sometimes sending plate-sized fragments gyrating into the air. Will instinctively bent his head and began to slow down.

"No! Keep going!" Elliott yelled.

Bullets ricocheted and whined from the mirror surfaces as they fled. Will felt tugs on his pants legs, but couldn't stop to see the cause.

"Get ready!" Elliott shouted above the barrage.

It came.

The explosion was huge. A blinding light scorched around them, sent in a thousand different directions b the reflective surfaces, and then, as soon as the reverberations of the initial blast subsided, a tremendous crashing began.

Broken columns came toppling down, colliding one into the other, like dominoes in a chain reaction. A goliath section of fractured column slammed into the ground directly behind them, sending up a dust storm of powdered glass that sparkled like black diamonds in their lights. It clogged their throats and stung their eyes. The ground itself rocked with each impact.

The bedlam and crashing continued unabated, and before any of them knew it they were speeding after Elliott into a tunnel. Will jerked his head around just in time to see a column collapse against the entrance and completely seal it off. They were submerged in a miasma of glass sleet for several hundred feet. Then the air cleared and Elliott brought them to an abrupt halt.

"We have to go, we have to go," Chester urged her.

"No, we have a few minutes' grace. They can't follow us in here," she said, picking fragments of glass from her face. "Drink some water and get your breath back." After taking a large swig from her canteen to rinse out her mouth, she swallowed several gulps and then passed it around. "Anyone hurt?" she asked as she set about checking each of them over in turn.

Chester couldn't breathe through his nose, but Elliott told him she didn't think it was broken. His mouth was also badly swollen and split at the corner where the Limiter had crooked it, and his head tender from the catalog of punches. As Elliott used her lantern to examine him, he saw his knuckles were red and bruised, and his forearms soaked through with blood. She examined them carefully.

"It's all right. It's not yours," she said after a quick inspection.

"The Limiter?" Chester said, giving her a wide-eyed look and shivering as he recalled how he'd pummeled the soldier with the chunk of obsidian. "That's terrible… how could I have done that… done that to another person?" he whispered.

"Because he would have done worse to you," she said curtly, before moving on to Cal.

The boy appeared unhurt except for some very tender ribs. But he was slow to respond when Elliott spoke to him, still shocked that he'd shot the Limiter.

She took him by both shoulders, her voice sympathetic.

"Cal, listen. Drake gave me some advice once, after a horrible thing happened to me."

The boy looked vaguely at her.

"He said that our skin has a dead layer on it."

She had his attention now — he frowned quizzically at her.

"It's the cleverest thing. It dies and the top layers flake off, to protect us from infection." Straightening up, she lifted her hands from his shoulders and brushed one over the back of the other to illustrate what she was saying. "The bacteria — or germules, as you call them — they settle, but can't get a hold."

"So?" Cal said, intrigued.

"So right now, part of you is dying, just like your skin. It might take a while — it did with me — but it will die to save you. And next time you'll be tougher and stronger."

Cal nodded.

"So let it go and just move on."

Cal nodded again. "I think I see," he said, his face losing its rigidity and his eyes regaining a measure of their vitality. "Yes, I see."

Will had been listening and was impressed with the way Elliott had been able to comfort the boy. Cal already seemed to be back to his old self, chatting enthusiastically to his beloved cat.

Elliott checked Will next. Considering what he'd been through, he was relatively unscathed except for some angry red bruises and grazes on his neck, a number of abrasions on his face, and a mountain range of bumps on the back of his head. As he gingerly touched them, he thought of the tugs he'd felt when they'd been running and, probing his calf with his fingers, discovered a couple of small tears in the fabric of his pants legs.

"What's this?" he said to Elliott. He knew they hadn't been there before.

Elliott inspected them.

"They're bullet holes. You should count yourself lucky."

The shots had punched straight through the material, and he could stick a finger in the holes to show where they'd landed. Relieved that he hadn't been hit, that he'd indeed dodged another bullet, he broke into laughter. Cal gave him a curious look, while Chester just clicked his teeth dismissively. Elliott regarded him with quiet disapproval.

"Keep it together, Will," she rebuked him.

"Oh, I'm together all right," he came back at her, breaking into a fresh peal of laughter. "Against all odds."

"OK, to the Pore!" she announced. "Then the Wetlands."

"Where we'll be home and dry?" Will asked with a chuckle.

"Is that you, Will?" Sarah moaned as she felt someone gripping her wrist. Then she remembered that he, Cal, and the others had long gone, just as she'd urged them to do.

She opened her eyes to darkness and the most excruciating agony she'd ever experienced in her life.

Every single pain and ache, every single toothache and headache and discomfort that comes during a lifetime, all accumulated together into a single moment of unendurable agony: This was how it felt. A thousand times worse even than childbirth.

She cried out, battling to stay conscious. Her eyes remained open despite the fact that she couldn't see who was there. She didn't know how long she'd been out for — it was as if she'd pushed her way between a pair of heavy curtains and something ineluctable was pulling her back through them so they could draw together again. It was the most tremendous struggle, because the pain was forcing her back behind the curtains, a place so tranquil and warm and welcoming. It was all she could do to resist the temptation to go there. But she wasn't going to allow herself that final bow, and with each labored breath she fought against it.

The grip on her wrist tightened, and as she heard the rasping sound of the Styx language, her heart fell. A light appeared somewhere in the very periphery of her vision, and there were more Styx voices as she saw shadowy forms flitting around her.

"Limiter," she said, recognizing the camouflage on the arm that was now checking over her body.

In confirmation, a harsh voice snapped at her.

"Stand up!"

"I can't," she said, forcing herself to focus in the dim light.

There were four Limiters there. She'd been found by a patrol. Two of them hauled her to her feet. She felt the crippling pain in her hip and screamed — it reverberated through the tunnel, but it was as though someone else was crying out. She came close to losing consciousness again, the curtains parting a little to allow her through.

The Limiters forced her to walk, suspended between them. The pain was unbearable. She felt her hip grinding, fractured bone upon fractured bone, and nearly blacked out. Sweat trickled down her forehead and into her eyes, making her blink, making her close her eyes.

She was dying and she knew it.

But she wasn't going to die yet.

As long as she was breathing there was still a chance she could help Will and Cal.

Drake slipped through the tunnel as fleetly as the winds that swept around him. He paused every so often to search the path for any sign that it had been used recently. The constant gale ensured the sand and grit didn't lie undisturbed for long, so he knew he was unlikely to be confused by any old tracks along the way.