Cat turns to me. “Mickey? He told you about those things?”
“No,” I say. “Well, maybe. He did say something about diggers, but what does that mean? He didn’t say what diggers are or what they do. If he’d said that diggers are things that come up out of the ground and tear your guts out we would have kept walking.”
“I warned!” Speaker says. “I warned! Why would I warn if diggers are harmless? Do I warn about ferns? No! Do I warn about rocks? No! You are strangers here. If I warn, you should listen!”
I open my mouth to respond, but …
But he’s not wrong.
“What else is there?” Cat asks. “What else do we need to know about between here and wherever the fuck we’re going?”
“What else?” Speaker says. “Who can say? The world is wide. There are many species in it, and your people are soft and fragile. Nearly anything here could kill you.”
“Soft and fragile?” Cat says, her voice a flat monotone now.
Speaker rises up, seems to hesitate, and then drops back to the ground. Is he actually learning to read the room? “No,” he says. “No. Apologies. That was not called for. You need not be soft for diggers to kill you. Diggers kill us. Diggers kill almost anything. This is why I wanted not to stop there.”
“Fine,” Cat says. “Apology accepted, I guess. So what else is there? What do we need to know?”
“Difficult to say,” Speaker says, “but I promise to warn you. If anything bad comes along, I will warn you like I warned you of the diggers, but louder.”
“Thanks,” Cat says. “Warn us all next time, huh? No matter what you think, Mickey isn’t actually our Prime.”
We walk on. After another few minutes, Cat sidles up to me.
“Lucas was my friend,” she says, her voice pitched too low for anyone else to hear. “He was my friend, and I killed him. I’m going to see the look on his face when I shot him for the rest of my life, however long that turns out to be. Is that on you, Mickey?”
“I…” I look around. Nobody else is paying any attention. Even Nasha has drifted away, shuffling along with her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her. “I don’t know, Cat. Maybe. If it is, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m sure.”
I’d like to say something more then, but Cat is clearly done with the conversation. I sigh, and duck my head, and keep walking.
WE WALK.
The sun makes its way across the sky. The mountains in the distance never seem to get any closer.
Sometime after noon, I give Nasha the last of my water. She downs it without pausing. Her eyes are half-closed, and her face is a rictus of pain.
Cat and Berto have our remaining two accelerators strapped across their backs. I’m carrying one of Nasha’s burners. Jamie has the other. None of us is paying the least attention to anything other than putting one foot in front of the other. It occurs to me that if the spiders find us now, we’ll probably die without getting off a shot.
“How much farther?” Jamie asks, for what must be the twentieth time.
“Not far,” Speaker says. “Almost there. Almost there. If we could move more quickly—”
“We can’t,” I say. “Stop asking.”
Nasha takes my hand. The air has a chill to it now, but her palm is slick with sweat.
“We’re gonna die out here,” she says. “You know that, right?”
I sigh. “Maybe.”
She stumbles, and has to use my arm for balance. “We’re out of water, we’re exhausted, and how much food are we still packing? A few protein bars and some slurry? It’s a hundred klicks back to the dome, and getting farther every step. There’s no maybe about it.”
“The creepers must need water,” I say, although Speaker hasn’t yet shown any evidence of that. “Maybe our friends to the south will let us fill up a few bottles.”
Nasha coughs out a short, sharp laugh.
“Right,” she says. “We’ll be lucky if our friends to the south don’t just dissect us on the spot.”
I sigh again, a little louder this time.
“YOU SEE?” SPEAKER says. “Almost there. Just a bit farther now.”
I look up from my feet for the first time in hours. The sun is halfway down, poking wanly through high, thin pink clouds. The mountains, which had been steadily receding, are suddenly on top of us.
“There,” Speaker says. “You see?”
What I see is a near-vertical granite cliff rising directly out of the plains, stretching across our path like a wall marking the end of the world and rising high enough that I have to crane my neck to see where it rolls off into an ordinary mountain slope.
“Please,” I say. “Tell me we don’t have to climb that.”
“Climb?” Speaker says. “No. No climbing. This is our goal. You see? We have arrived here with no more dying.”
I give a quick look around. That sounds like the sort of thing that you say right before doom rains down on your head. No spiders, though. No diggers. No monsters of any kind—just five half-dead humans and an overly chipper creeper.
“Just to be clear,” Cat says from behind us. “The cliff is where we’re going?”
“Inside the cliff,” Speaker says. “In the cliff is the entrance.”
We keep walking. After another ten minutes or so, Speaker says, “Very soon now. Almost there.”
We keep walking. The cliff blocks out the sun now, and rises up high enough that it almost looks like it’s looming over us. The ferns have died back here, probably from lack of light, and the ground has turned to packed earth and pebbles.
“There,” Speaker says. “You see?”
And much to my surprise, I do. There at the base of the cliff, maybe two hundred meters distant, a black mouth gapes.
“Great,” Nasha says. “Another labyrinth.”
I shrug. “What did you expect?”
We slow our pace as we get closer, until finally, by mutual unspoken agreement, we come to a halt twenty meters or so from the entrance.
“What now?” Cat says after a long silence. “Do we just walk in?”
“No,” Speaker says. “No, I would not recommend that. That would be unwise.”
“So we wait?”
“Yes,” he says. “We wait.”
Those words are still hanging in the air between us when a wave of meter-long creepers comes boiling out of the entrance. We fall back, Cat and Berto scrambling for their weapons, while Speaker holds his ground, dancing. They ignore us and fall on him, latching on to his limbs with their mandibles and dragging him toward the cliff. He tries to keep dancing at first, then begins to struggle when they bite through one of his legs.
“Friends!” Speaker says. “Please! Defend me!”
I have one of Nasha’s burners in hand now. I aim and fire, play the beam across the body of one of the creepers tugging at his rearmost segment. It ignores me for two or three seconds, then releases its grip on Speaker and turns toward me. Berto’s accelerator barks, and the creeper shudders and drops, its first two segments now just broken wreckage. Cat picks off another that’s moving around Speaker’s body, but they’re both using explosive rounds and they can’t hit the ones that have hold of Speaker without hitting him as well. Speaker is thrashing now, rearing up and then being pulled back down, until one of them climbs up onto his back and sinks its mandibles into him, just below his first segment.
He falls limp.
The creepers swarm over him and drag him toward the hole.
“Mickey?” Berto says. “What do we do?”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. The fact is, I have no idea.
By the time I close it again, it’s over, and Speaker is gone.
018
FOR A SOLID two minutes, none of us moves or speaks. Finally, Berto walks over to one of the dead creepers and rolls what’s left of it onto its back with the toe of his boot.
“Look,” he says, then crouches and pries a chunk of shattered carapace away. “You can actually see where the organics end and the mechanics begin.”