"Better?" she asked.
He nodded in acknowledgment, seeing in her eyes not the concern of a friend, but something cold and detached, a clinical professionalism. She needed someone to assist her; she didn't really care about him.
"Try the headset," she ordered as he continued to chew.
He nodded, flipping down the eyepiece, then fumbling for the switch on the box in his pocket. There was a faint tone — it began to build, reaching a high pitch and then descending in octaves to a lower sound, so barely audible that he couldn't tell if he was hearing it or just feeling it through his cranium.
"Shut your left eye — just use the one behind the lens," Elliott directed him.
He did as she said, blinking his left eye shut, but could see nothing at all through his right eye, the lens tightly pressed to it. Just as he was beginning to think the device might be faulty, dim points started to swirl, as if ocean waters were being stirred to reveal an eerie phosphorescence beneath their depths. From an initial amber, it rapidly transformed into a brighter yellow, until it almost hurt. Everything was intensely visible, as if bathed in stark sunlight. He looked around, at his dirt-ingrained hands, at Elliott securing the shemagh over her face, at the wisps of blurry darkness rolling toward them.
"Have you been in a Black Wind before?" Elliott asked.
"Not in one," he said, remembering when he and Cal had watched the clouds from behind closed windows in the Colony. Cal's words came back to him: The boy had mimicked a nasal Styx voice: "…pernicious to those that it encounters, it sears the flesh."
Will quickly looked at Elliott. "Aren't they, like, poisonous?
"No." She snorted derisively. "It's only dust, garden-variety dust, blown up from the Interior. You shouldn't believe anything the White Necks tell you."
"I don't," Will replied indignantly.
She hefted up her rifle and turned toward the Great Plain. "Let's roll."
He followed behind her, his heart yammering against his rib cage from both the effects of the strange root and anticipation. The X-ray-like vision that the headset gave him, cutting through the darkness like an invisible searchlight, lifted his spirits.
As soon as Will emerged from the water on the other side of the sump, he saw that the landscape was already laced with feathery tendrils of darkness. The spumelike clouds would soon blot out everything. Drake's night-vision device would be of no help whatsoever in these conditions.
"These storms are really thick — won't we get lost?" he asked Elliott as the blackness bled toward them.
"Not a chance," she said dismissively, passing a length of rope around her wrist, knotting it, then giving him the other end to tie around his waist. "Where this goes, you go," she said. "But if you feel me tug twice, you stop dead. Got that?"
"Righto," he replied, feeling a bit removed from the whole situation.
They moved fleetly, sinking into the inkiness so that he couldn't see her even though she was only a few feet in front of him. The smokelike fog clogged his nostrils and coated his face in a fine, dry dust. Several times he was forced to clutch at his nose to stifle a sneeze, and his left eye, unprotected by the night-vision device, was clotted and watering.
He felt two tugs and halted immediately, crouching low while he scanned around alertly. Elliott slipped out of the mist and kneeled down, signaling with a finger pressed to her lips that he should remain silent.
She leaned into him until the shemagh over her mouth brushed his ear. "Listen," she whispered through it.
He heard the faraway howling of a dog. Then… a horrible scream.
A man's scream.
Of the most acute agony.
Elliott's head was inclined to one side, and her eyes — the only part of her that he could see — told him nothing.
"We must hurry."
Horrible prolonged wails of suffering wafted backward and forward as if channeled between the palls of smoke, which sometimes cleared to give them a fleeting view of the ground or made strange, shifting corridors down which they moved.
Louder and louder the cries came, accompanying the low howls of dogs, as if some grisly opera of perdition were being sung.
The ground began to rise under Will's feet and his boot crunched on a pink crystal — a desert rose. They were climbing the slope of the large amphitheater-like clearing where Drake and Elliott had first sneaked up on him and Chester. The same place he had witnessed the horrific slaughter of renegades and Coprolites by the Limiters.
There was a high keening — more animal than human — immediately followed by a sudden, soul-searing scream. Will couldn't pinpoint from which direction it had come — it was as if it had hit the stone roof above and was falling and scattering in a rain of noise all around him. The combination of that noise, which made his stomach churn with fear, and the memory of the Styx's murderous actions made him want to fall to the loose surface of the slope and wrap his arms over his head. But he couldn't; the rope between him and Elliott was uncompromising, urging him on, drawing him toward something he knew he didn't want to see.
She tugged twice and he stood still.
She was at his side before he knew it. She waved him forward with a slow gesture of her hand, ending it with a patting motion. He nodded, understanding: She wanted him to advance cautiously, keeping as low as possible.
As they crawled, she kept stopping without warning. He bumped his head against her boots several times. But she never stopped for long. Will assumed she was listening to check for anyone close by.
The Black Wind seemed to be abating. Little stretches of the slope opened before them, fuzzy scenes of the moonscape surface. Will's night-vision device occasionally blanked and then became a static snowstorm before it reset. These blips only lasted for fractions of a second, but they brought back memories of the times his mother — his adoptive mother, as he had to keep reminding himself — flew into a rage because her beloved TV was on the fritz. Will shook his head — those days were so easy and carefree, and so ridiculously inconsequential.
The appalling screaming rose again from somewhere up ahead. They could hear it so much more clearly now. Elliott froze and looked back at him over her shoulder, her eyes furtive and terrified. Her fear was infectious — he felt it wash through him like a cold wave.
Why had they come here? What was it? What was wrong?
He was confused by Elliott's reaction. If the massacre he'd witnessed here before, with Chester, was being repeated, then it wouldn't have warranted such a response. She'd kept cool on that occasion, disturbing as the incident had been.
They continued to crawl on their bellies, arm over arm, across the gypsum, inching up the incline until the wind blew harder on their faces and whipped up tiny dust devils around them.
The carbon pall of the Black Wind was retreating.
They came to the rim of the crater.
Elliott's rifle was already up.
She said something, muffled and indistinct under the layers of cloth covering her mouth. She pulled back the shemagh, pressing her cheek hard into the stock of the rifle. She was shaking, the barrel of the gun quivering unsteadily. Why? What was wrong?
Everything was happening too fast.
The lens over his eye crackled with static again, like a machine blink, and then he focused on the scene. There were lights on tripod stands, randomly arranged, and a decent number of figures, too far away for him to make out in any detail. A haze of dust clouds drifted in the intervening distance, like random curtains sweeping across his view, sometimes drawing apart to reveal the scene, sometimes closing to obscure it.