I lay on my back in a bed of sand. The cloudless, cobalt sky harbored a sun, bluer and cooler than the one I thought I knew, hanging high over distant hills. There were plants around me—real plants. Not those fake, botanically inaccurate replicas that Luther used to decorate his little cavern.
All of this surprised me. I had expected to find myself immersed in darkness and stench, tangled in a pod, deep in the tunnels of Root. I was ready for the Reapers, but I guess they weren’t ready for me.
I rolled over onto my knees, startled by the sudden absence of pain. My body still bore signs of the damage Mark had inflicted, but its impression on my senses had become muted and distant, like a faded memory of an old injury.
The unexpected reprieve made a smile grow on my lips. I felt empowered and free. It felt like coming come. It was like being on leave from a war.
I was naked as usual, but the air was balmy and still, like a mid-summer’s morning in Ft. Pierce. I stood up and stared across a barren plain pocked with sinkholes leading to the underworld. Beyond the pits, sheets of windswept stone stretched to a horizon as smooth and curved as a billiard ball.
The opposite direction led to another world altogether, complex and corrugated with tier after tier of ridges and peaks that vanished into blue mist. The intervening landscape was gently undulant and creased with shallow channels and fan-like washes.
Though I had only seen it at night, silhouetted by stars, the profile of the land before me struck a chord in my memory. A cloud-shrouded, glacier-sheathed massif dominated all, looming over tiers of foothills gashed with canyons. A larger valley opened to the left, bounded on the far side by a tableland of flat-topped ridges and mesas.
As I had done with Bern and Lille a month and a half ago, I started walking towards the hills. There was no other choice, really. Nothing about the desert plains made me want to go there. At least the hills offered some signs of life in the scrub and trees that clothed them.
I came to a deep, narrow pit, and steered well clear, but couldn’t help sneaking a glance as I went by. I instantly regretted it. The matrix of roots and tunnels came disturbingly close to the surface. A thin crust of stone and soil separated me from the domain of the Reapers.
Knowing how they roamed below my feet made me pick up my pace. I hoped the crust grew thicker in the heights. I would sure feel a lot better with a mile of stone between me and the Reapers.
A broad but shallow channel offered the path of least resistance. It also felt familiar. Either all these channels looked alike, or this was the same one we had followed my last night in Root.
A grove of trees appeared around a bend and behind them, the glint of a pond. Glimmers of remembrance told me I knew this place. Here, Lille had gathered water for tea. On a terrace of gravel and silt tucked against the gully wall, she and Bern had laid the cornerstones for the cabin they had intended to build.
I saw no sign of any cabin, but that didn’t worry me at first. Maybe they had found a better spot upstream. Maybe they had made their way to Frelsi.
The trees were sad little things with limp leaves and sagging branches. The leaves were oval and whitish-green. The grove smelled faintly of turpentine.
I went over and stood by the pond. There was no wind. The glassy water looked more dead than placid. The stillness disturbed me. I walked along the shore and stepped onto the low terrace, and what I found roiled my mood with the first shadings of anxiety.
The cornerstones remained in place, connected by a simple foundation of flat stones. Between them was a rectangular patch of fine, yellow dust; inches thick in most places with lumps here and there. The dust lay deepest along the outermost edges of the foundation, where walls would have been. I stared, trying to make sense of what lay before me.
