Callie awakened the next morning to Garth’s loud voice issuing cheerfully from the ground floor. Groans and protests greeted his efforts as she sat up, picking straw from her hair. Across from her, Pierce belted on his weapons, looking more rested than she’d ever seen him, and it occurred to her that last night was the first in weeks he’d slept without a nightmare.
“Pierce?” Garth called. “You up there?”
“Yo.” Pierce slid on his new dragon-hide cuirass and headed for the ladder.
“You wouldn’t know where Callie is, would you?” Garth continued. “Nobody’s seen her since she left the tavern last night.”
“She’s up here, too.”
Garth was a moment replying. His voice, when it came, sounded strangled. “Really?”
“It’s not what you think.” Pierce swung onto the ladder and started down.
Choking with mortification, Callie watched him disappear. She wanted to rush down and explain, but knew her babbled defense would only make things worse. Instead she lingered in the loft for a while and went to breakfast late. Only Whit and John remained by the time she arrived, and neither said a word, though John was definitely smirking at her.
An hour later Garth led them out of Manderia, following the Fire River south along the base of the cliffs. For three days they made good time; then the river tumbled into a steep-walled canyon choked with boulders, thick brush, and a particularly robust subspecies of redclaw. When John inadvertently stepped into a hidden capture pod, the thing retracted toward its digestive center with such force he was dragged six feet before they could cut him loose. After that, they kept to the canyon’s rocky but barren sides.
No one mentioned Callie’s night in the loft with Pierce, though she caught Garth watching her intently several times. His estrangement from Rowena was lasting longer than usual. Rowena repeatedly complained to Callie and LaTeisha that their relationship had soured, that he was too controlling and arrogant, that she wasn’t going to let him use her anymore. Callie said nothing to encourage reconciliation, and felt vaguely guilty for it.
On the evening of the fourth day Garth approached her.
They’d camped on a wide ledge bounded by the soaring canyon wall on one side and a forty-foot drop-off to the river on the other. There was room to spread out and plenty of firewood in the juniper-oak forest that surrounded them. Some questioned the wisdom of building fires, but Garth assured them no Trogs would trouble them here.
Callie was heading out to gather wood when he stepped into her path from behind a juniper. “Hi,” he said, smiling down at her. “Still sorting things out?”
She shrugged. “I guess not.”
They started up the hill. “So what’s the deal with Pierce?” he asked.
“Deal?”
“Your night in the loft—”
“I went up there to get away. I didn’t even know he was there.”
“But you stayed.”
“Being with Pierce is like being alone.” Not entirely true, but he’d avoided her these last days as assiduously as she’d avoided him.
“So . . . you didn’t sleep with him?”
“No!” Indignation raised the pitch of her voice. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
Garth chuckled. “I gotta admit, I found it hard to believe. I mean, Pierce?
” Annoyed anew, Callie changed the subject. “How much farther do we have to go?”
“We should reach Hardluck tomorrow morning.”
“Hardluck? I thought we weren’t going there.”
“We’ll pass right by it, and Whit won’t trust the map without confirmation.” He stepped over a hummock of rock. “Not that Hardluck will give it to him.”
“You have no doubts yourself?”
“I knew Tom—the guy we got it from.”
“And the others didn’t?”
“Pierce did. We met him after the trip to the Edge, while the group was split up.”
Things had gone badly on that trip. She’d heard that many blamed Garth.
“Me and Row and Pierce decided to try the cleft on our own,” he said. “All we did was get lost. We ran into Tom on his way down from the rim, hurt bad. We took him to Hardluck, and while he healed he drew the map.”
“What happened to him?”
“Mutants got him. Same time they got Pierce, only they didn’t let Tom go.” Bitterness crept into his voice, and he fell silent.
They walked on. Callie picked up several dead branches before he spoke again. “But we’re moving forward now, and that’s what counts.” He took the wood from her arms. “I’m glad you decided to come.”
She smiled slightly, then stooped to pick up another branch.
He continued to watch her; she could see his half smile out of the corner of her eye. “You amaze me,” he said.
She tucked a tendril of hair behind her ear, reluctant to meet his gaze. “I do?”
“You’re so small and weak looking, but you never come unglued. The Ice Lady.”
She had no idea how to respond.
He traced her cheek with the roughened finger of his free hand. Suddenly she could hardly breathe. Blood beat thickly in her throat. Again she felt that powerful sexual awareness.
“You feel it, too, don’t you?” he murmured. “Fire burning beneath the ice.”
She flinched away, unnerved at having her feelings read and noted so casually. His smile did not fade. He wasn’t handsome, but he was strong and bold. A man who could protect you—or not, if he wished.
She backed another step. “I . . . uh . . . have to go.”
Whirling, she strode blindly up the hill, desperate to escape him.
She didn’t like the feelings he ignited in her, feelings she’d never had, didn’t want to have—didn’t think she should have. He was on the rebound from Rowena at best—more likely still involved and using Callie as a pawn. If she went on this ride he was suggesting, she would only be hurt. And he was suggesting—no way around that.
“You feel it, too, don’t you?”
Yes, yes! Pulling at her like nothing ever had. How could this be? She barely knew the man, wasn’t even sure she liked him. And she knew he didn’t care about her. Yet she wanted to surrender, to let him carry her away and—
Callie stopped, drawn from her desperate musings by a sound— something that didn’t belong.
Her companions’ voices echoed as they searched for firewood. Their muffled voices were punctuated by the crackle of branches as they moved and the hollow thunks of their axes. In her immediate periphery, though, all was silent.
Her heart pounded. What had she heard?
Trogs like to sneak up on a person, stalk them unawares.
Stop it! But the sense of being watched persisted. It reminded her of her first day in the Arena, when she’d glimpsed the alien Watcher. Her new friends assured her that all the Watchers did was watch, thus presenting no real threat. Perhaps one was watching now. Except— she’d heard something.
There! A faint buzzing from the stand of juniper to her left. It sounded like electronic sputter. She started toward it, her mind cataloging possible explanations and coming up with few. The last thing she expected to find was Meg.
Her friend stood in the clearing, facing her, still wearing the cream-colored jumpsuit.
“Meg!” Callie cried. “What are you—” “Callie,” Meg interrupted. “It’s me—Meg.”
Strangely her eyes did not focus on Callie but instead on something beyond Callie’s shoulder. And she was too bright, almost glowing in the lavender twilight.
“You must go back to Manderia,” Meg told her. “The canyon is a trap. If you—” She wavered like water, her words drowning in static. “—all be killed—” More static. “—road and go back—”
Slowly the ivory jumpsuit turned gray. Meg’s green eyes swelled and darkened. Her black hair became a bald dome. And suddenly, gleaming against the dark junipers, stood an alien, its black eyepits stalking her.
Gasping, Callie staggered back on leaden legs.
The Watcher lurched toward her, a swift, sharp feint, black pits probing. A dissonant tone rose and fell in her ears—laughter? Panic dissolved the paralysis, and she stumbled away, crashing through the brush, heedless of the branches whipping her face and tearing at her sleeves.
Pain in her throat and cramps in her chest finally returned her to her senses. She stopped and sagged against the rough bark of a silverleaf oak, realizing suddenly that she had no idea where she was. Oak and juniper surrounded her, blocking the canyon rim from view. She couldn’t even hear the river’s roar. In fact, she couldn’t hear anything— no birdsong, no insect chatter, nothing but her hammering heart and labored breathing.
But of course it was dusk, so the birds wouldn’t be singing anyway, and she couldn’t be that far from camp.
The sense of being watched still plagued her, and she searched the shadows intently, determined not to let panic have her again. What had happened? Obviously that wasn’t Meg back there. But it wasn’t all the Watcher, either, for why would it have interrupted itself? Unless it couldn’t maintain the illusion of being Meg long enough. She didn’t think that was the case, though. More likely Meg had tried to send a message—one the Watcher didn’t want Callie to receive.
“Go back. It’s a trap.”
Was the answer in Manderia, then? Was Meg already through and sending Callie one of those holograms Wendell had mentioned? But she couldn’t have served a term in Mander’s temple—or any other temple— this soon. So there must be another way.
Unless it was a trick.
The sense of unseen eyes shivered between her shoulder blades. The shadows were thickening. Soon it would be too dark to find her way back to camp. Fresh fear revitalized her, and she pushed away from the tree, starting back across the ravine in which she’d stopped. As she stepped onto its sandy bottom, a rattle of rock downstream brought her up short. She stood rigidly, listening.
Another rattle. Panic swelled like a chemical reaction, bubbling up and out of its vessel. She was on the verge of bolting when a voice called to her.
“Callie? You okay?”
Fifty feet downstream, Pierce emerged from the oak trees, SLuB drawn. Relief made her weak-kneed. “I saw a Watcher,” she said as she came up to him, embarrassment warming her face. “I guess I overreacted.”
His brow furrowed, but he only put away the SLuB and said, “It’s getting dark. We should head back.”
She went with him gratefully, her mind soon returning to the extraordinary visitation, or illusion, or whatever it was. “You know those holographic messages that are supposedly sent by those who’ve passed through the Gate?” she asked after a time. “Do you think they’d be able to send one out here?”
“Wouldn’t they need a screen or projector?”
“I don’t know. I saw one in Manderia, and there wasn’t anything like that.”
Branches snapped and leaves crackled under their feet, the sounds echoing around them.
“Why do you care?” Pierce asked.
She told him what had happened. “It seemed like an interrupted transmission,” she concluded.
“Maybe it was.”
“You think Meg was trying to reach me?”
“Or they wanted you to think that.” He pushed aside a branch as they pressed through a stand of oak and held it until she took it from him. Moments later they came out of the woods into a wide, down-sloping clearing. At its far end, campfires sparkled through a screen of trees, and the warble of John’s harmonica threaded the quiet air. The light was better here. It washed the cliffs a dusky blue gray, except at the rim itself, which was bright orange.
“She told me to go back to Manderia,” Callie said.
“Maybe you should. Maybe we all should.” He paused to study the rock walls looming around them and rubbed the back of his neck. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Meg said it’s a trap.”
He looked at her sharply, his hand still on his neck.
She had a sudden suspicion. “It’s not . . . you aren’t feeling—” “Trogs? Not yet.”
Garth and Rowena had another shouting match that evening. It didn’t last long, but it soured the mood, and most everyone turned in early, Callie included. Her sleep was fitful, though, plagued by unsettling dreams. She was motoring along the white road in a golf cart when Garth appeared beside her at the wheel. Suddenly the road turned steeply upward and she gripped his arm in fear, only to find he’d become her father, who told her not to be a baby and stomped on the accelerator. The cart engine squealed, and they lurched up the vertical road until gravity overwhelmed them, pulling the cart off backward, tumbling down and down and—
She screamed and woke up.
When the screams kept on she realized they weren’t hers. The whole camp had roused, in fact, some resting on propped elbows, others sitting up, clutching their weapons and staring at Pierce. He thrashed and raved on his bedroll, and for the first time, Callie made out some of his words. “No! Leave her alone. Leave her—noooo!” The last word keened out in an agonizing scream that abruptly cut off.
No one moved. Pierce lay on his back, panting, one arm flung up across his face. Callie felt sick and cold. What had he endured?
After that, sleep was impossible. The hard ground pressed against her hips and shoulders, and she couldn’t get comfortable, could only lie there, mind racing from worry to worry. It was a relief when dawn finally came.
They crossed the Fire River using a hidden shelf tucked behind a waterfall. By noon they had settled at the juncture of two rugged canyons, waiting there while Garth, Whit, and Thor went downstream to Hardluck. They returned several hours later with the confirmation Whit had sought, Garth strutting and crowing his confidence. In three days, he declared—a week at most—they would reach the rim.
The trio brought back flasks of ale with which to celebrate, and before long things got wild and crazy. Callie sat in the shadows and watched. Afternoon cloud cover had turned the world gray, misting them with a light drizzle, and whether because of that or her dreams or the two Watchers she’d seen earlier that day, she found herself reluctantly sharing Pierce’s sense of approaching disaster.
The next day they set out for the elusive Canyon of the Damned. As Garth consulted his map they crossed one deep ravine after another until they came to what the map labeled Thornwall. It was aptly named, for as far as they could see, thick, thorny growth scrawled across the slopes, curling around a graveyard of fallen trees. Sometimes they walked hundreds of yards without touching the ground, clambering over dead trunks and thickly matted branches. By midmorning Callie’s dragon-hide vest was a net of scratches, the sleeves of her T-shirt torn in a dozen places. Her hands, arms, and face were bloody, and her right knee throbbed from when she had slipped and slammed it against a hidden log. She was battered, bruised, and exhausted, and her only consolation was that she was not alone.
Around noon they dropped into another canyon and came to a deep, swift-running river.
Pierce forded it first, riding the current downstream and across, and then returning to play anchor on the opposite bank as everyone else pulled themselves over. Afterward, as he and Garth stood together on the bank coiling up the rope and speaking quietly, Callie grasped something of the relationship they must have had before Pierce’s encounter with the Trogs. Garth had been on a downslide after the failure of his mountain expedition, reviled and deserted by most of his friends. But not Pierce. It said a lot for Pierce’s sense of loyalty and courage—maybe for the stock Garth put in him, as well. Or had at one time, anyway.
Leaving the river, they climbed again into the matted underbrush and fallen logs. After hours of toiling up and down and around Callie was ready to drop. More than that, she understood clearly how impossible it would be to find one’s way through this nightmare web of drainages without a map. They spent a chilly, miserable night trying to get comfortable on beds of brambles. With no place to build a fire, they ate trail rations and drank cold water. Sleep, difficult before, became impossible.
The morning dawned damp and colorless, and the group roused their stiff, protesting bodies to continue on. Mutiny rumbled in the ranks, as doubts about the map’s validity were voiced with increasing frequency. The only thing stopping an eruption was the fact that going back was unthinkable.
And then, as the afternoon waned, they slogged over yet another ridge to find their troubles were just beginning. The thorn wall finally ended in an open meadow, beyond which rose the cleft they sought— an immense dark slash carved into the bowels of the earth. Massive curtains of stone overlapped in a gray giant’s corridor hung with shifting mist. Distant harrylike shapes soared through its ragged fringes, and they could just make out the trail, snaking threadlike across the sheer walls until it disappeared into the clouds.
One by one they staggered to a stop, gaping in astonishment and dismay.
Callie swayed with dizziness. The thought of climbing that edifice, of perching on that narrow trail with all that space below made her stomach churn and her hands go cold and damp.
It was a long time before anyone spoke.
Then Rowena exploded. “A road? There’s a road here and we’ve been busting our rear ends for two days over all this”—she motioned to the rear—“garbage?”
“That’s not s’posed to be there.” Garth pulled out his map.
Map or not, Callie could plainly see the wide earthen path beaten into the grass along the meadow’s outer edge—headed back the direction they had come.
“It’s not on the map,” Garth proclaimed.
“I thought the stupid map was supposed to have been confirmed,” Rowena snapped.
“It was. And anyway, why assume that road would’ve helped us? It probably peters out in a few miles.”
“Ha! It probably heads right into Hardluck.”
“Aw, you’re just looking for something else to gripe about. If you don’t like it, go back. You can always kiss up to one of those wimps at the temple.”
“Better than kissing up to you!”
Rowena stalked down the hill toward the road. The rest of the group shifted uncomfortably, exchanging uneasy glances. Then Pierce struck off toward a group of trees on the far side of the meadow, triggering a general exodus. Before long they’d made camp, their fires snapping cheerily beneath bubbling stew pots.
The group was uncharacteristically quiet that evening. Sight of the canyon had sobered them, Callie most of all. She had expected a boulder-clogged cleft in whose bottom they would walk, not this ghastly, sheer-walled gash with its spider’s thread of a trail. The appeal of returning to Manderia beset her with a vengeance, countered immediately by the knowledge that she’d never be able to find her way back. Not over the terrain they’d just come through. And she couldn’t imagine Garth agreeing to copy his map just so she could go back.
There’s the road, though, she thought. Rowena had not yet returned from her investigation. Maybe it did lead to Hardluck.
She stood up.
And sat down again. How can you be such a coward? The only reason you’re considering this is because you’re scared of the heights. Which is pretty sorry, don’t you think?
Rowena had still not returned by the time Callie finished eating, so she went out into the dusk to look for her. Following the road along the base of the ridge they’d labored over earlier that afternoon, she came eventually to the edge of the thorn wall, and sure enough, the road tunneled straight into it, dead and living branches woven into dense walls around a passage whose end she could not see.
“Having second thoughts?” Garth’s voice startled her, and she turned to find him coming up behind her.
“Yes.”
“Reckon you’re not the only one,” he said. “But this doesn’t look much better.”
“No.” Rubbing her arms against the chill, Callie started back toward camp, uneasily aware of the fact that they were alone out here.
“The hardest part’s behind us, though,” he said, moving in step beside her.
Not for me. She considered telling him about her acrophobia. It helped to have one person who understood—a “safe person,” one therapist had called it. Someone to talk sense to her when the fear overwhelmed her, someone to cling to until the panic passed—or get her to safety should she need it.
“We’ll be at the top in a day,” Garth said. “Two at the most.”
“And then what?”
He smiled at her. “Why, I’ll walk you through the exit gate myself.”
“But you don’t know where it is.”
“I’ll know when I need to. I can feel it.” He gazed up the road toward the ominous cleft, obscured by the gathering gloom above the trees and the slope of the meadow. “Of all the things I’ve done, all the ways I’ve tried to escape, this one feels most right. Come on.” He caught her hand and led her faster along the road. “I wanna show you something.”
They passed the camp and the trees, then crossed a grassy slope downside of the road and entered another grove of spindly pines. “I figure they put us here to test us, see,” he said as they entered the wood, “to find out which of us will figure it out.”
She regarded him doubtfully.
“It makes perfect sense. The stories about the Inner Realm, the fact that every single false benefactor has forbidden his followers to try the cleft, all the mumbo jumbo about not being able to get out on your own. It’s a ploy.”
And Meg? Was she a ploy?
“And even if it turns out we do have to go through one of those Benefactor’s gates, at least we’ll be up there. Ah, here we are.”
She came around him to find a quiet glade and a gleaming pool of water. In the gathering darkness it glowed with a green phosphorescence. “It’s beautiful!” she cried.
“Warm, too. Feel it.”
She dropped to her knees. “Incredible! How did you know about this?”
“It’s on the map.” He sat on the grass beside her.
“And you didn’t tell the others?”
“I’ll tell ’em in the morning.” He leaned back on his elbows, grinning at her.
A thrill went through her, excitement and fear—and a small voice telling her she was a fool.
“Do you ever wear your hair loose?”
His regard was so frank and suggestive, Callie blushed and averted her eyes. “Sometimes. It’s not very practical out here, though. I’d probably get it caught in a bush and have to cut it off to get free.”
“And what a shame that would be.” He fingered the end of her braid, rubbing the plaited texture. She sat very still, galvanized by his touch, its indirectness all the more stimulating.
“Rowena had long hair when I met her. She cut it off a few years ago.” He lay there, tugging at her braid, then said, “There are no bushes around here. Least not that you’d get caught in.”
She shifted uneasily and glanced around. “Maybe we’d better go back.”
He released her braid and sat up. “Maybe we should.”
Somehow he had gotten very close to her. Blood pounded through her again. A wild, sweet song surged to override her voice of reason. You’re getting in over your head. You really don’t want to do this.
Garth watched her intently and, when she didn’t move away, leaned forward and kissed her.