He was gone.
She sat blankly, shivering, her hands touching him, then pulling away. She kept expecting him to open his eyes, for it all to be a dream or a joke—anything but reality. But the stillness in him was utter, and it was the stillness that finally got to her. She backed away on her knees. “No!” she murmured. “You weren’t supposed to leave me. We were supposed to go through together. How can I do this? I can’t. I can’t!”
She stood up, wanting to run or scream or do something, but she could only shake her hands helplessly.
Peripheral movement drew her eye as two Aggillon emerged from a lighted opening in the rock, a gurney floating behind them. Chilled, she watched them place Pierce’s body gently on the table. As they left one of them looked into her eyes, jolting her as nothing else had.
He wasn’t totally lost to her. Not yet. But if she didn’t reach that portal, he would be.
Seizing his SI, she fled up the corridor. The passage undulated, angling increasingly upward, and soon the steepness slowed her to a walk as she struggled to control the noisy rasp of her breath. She wanted to hear whatever might lie ahead—and at the same time, not give her own approach away. She rounded a bend and stopped in surprise at finding two more Aggillon with another body—Meg’s this time. Numbly she watched them bear her friend away and close the door behind them. It was splattered with blood. So was the floor.
Garth must have caught them here.
She continued cautiously as the Splagnosians’ distant shouts echoed behind her. From ahead she heard nothing, but the blood was fresh, and there was lots of it.
Suddenly a Watcher stood in her path, laughing at her. You’ll never make it without him. You’re too weak and stupid. You have no friends to help. You’ll never do it.
Rage swelled in her, fueling a desire to hurt this creature as she’d never wanted to hurt anything in her life. But the only way to really hurt it was to get through the portal, so she walked straight ahead. The Tohvani vanished before she reached it, but still her heart pounded with the anger it had triggered. Her thoughts roiled with vengeance and I’ll-show-yous until she realized she was still letting her emotion distract her. Her priority was to get up this corridor alive, and she’d best concentrate solely on that if she wished to succeed.
She rounded another bend and stopped in the doorway of yet another grotto, much larger than those she’d encountered earlier. Great mounds of blackened bones piled the floor to either side of her, gleaming in the light of the center stripe. Forty feet ahead, the piles ended and the ground sheered off into a moatlike chasm spanned by a narrow footbridge. The stripe ran straight up to and over the bridge, ending at a man-sized doorway cut into the far wall and covered with what appeared to be clear plastic wrap.
Callie stared in disbelief. Was this the end?
Then she saw the Watchers—thousands of them clinging to the walls and ceiling. Sudden suspicion sent her gaze back around the chamber, and now she saw a figure sprawled among the bones—tall, dark-skinned, wearing a bloodied white tunic—Whit. She also spotted Evvi and John and Brody, the latter’s chest stained with blood. John had something wrong with his leg. Evvi, nearest of the three, worked her way across the bones toward a jutting wall of rock, her weapon clamped under one arm as she pulled herself along with the other. There was no sign of Garth.
Callie hesitated in the doorway, SI leveled, ready to fire. But there was nothing. Maybe he’d gone through.
Except, he couldn’t go through. Had he fallen into the pit?
She started toward Evvi, and the woman finally saw her. “Callie, no! He’s waiting—”
Callie whirled a second too late as the gun was slapped from her hands and she was hurled to the ground. The wind driven from her lungs, she shuddered as hard hands groped her through the linen shift. Bright sparkles danced across her vision, but she recognized the black beard and coal-bright eyes of her attacker.
“I told you I wasn’t done with you,” he said. Holding both her hands above her head in one of his, he used the other to scrunch her shift up toward her hips.
“The Splagnosians are coming,” she gasped. “Don’t you want to go through the portal?”
“This won’t take long—”
She slammed her knee between his legs, loosening his grip enough to twist a hand free. Trying to shove him away with her upraised knee, she watched his eyes turn black as the Tohvani within him asserted itself. Its psychic power crushed her like a rock. Gasping and whimpering, she clung to the link for dear life and kept on shoving and hitting. It did no good.
He yanked her arm up, and she felt his full weight upon her, driving the air from her lungs. With her free hand she boxed his ears and poked his eyes until he caught it. His breath rushed hot and sour on her neck and the side of her face.
Once more transferring her wrists to one hand, he reared back and slapped her so hard the stars returned. “Now, hold still,” he grated.
Blue fire came out of nowhere, searing the stars and flinging him off her. Rolling blindly in the opposite direction, Callie tried to crawl away. A lance of green light glanced off the side of her head, spearing pain down her neck as he grabbed her heel and dragged her back, kicking and struggling.
The chamber flared again, and again she was released. She scrambled toward Evvi and happened, as she did so, upon her own weapon. She pushed up to bring it around—
Only to be tackled from behind. Garth’s laugh rasped in her ear as he flipped her onto her back and caught her wrists again. Desperately, she turned her head and bit his arm. Howling outrage, he released her wrists and gripped her throat. Within seconds lights flared around her field of vision, and her lungs screamed for air. But though she fought wildly, she could do nothing to free herself. Her strength ebbing, she finally sought the link again, and its power flowed into her, even as her hand fell aside onto something familiar—Garth’s riot gun. Awkwardly, weakly, she managed to drag it up and over her thigh. With no idea where the thing was even pointed, she found the trigger and squeezed.
He toppled away, releasing her throat to life-giving air. At first all she could do was lie there and gasp, wondering why he didn’t come back and disarm her. Only when she’d regained her breath enough to sit up did she see that he lay motionless on his back beside her, one arm flung wide, the other limp across his ruined belly.
Nauseated, she stumbled over the bones to where Evvi lay drenched in blood. She was still alive, but the Aggillon were taking Brody.
“Where are you hurt?” she asked Evvi.
“My arm’s broken.”
“But all this blood on you—”
“Most of it’s Meg’s. How’s Whit?”
Callie looked up the pile. At the chasm’s edge, Whit had begun to moan and stir. “Alive.”
“And Garth?” Evvi glanced toward his body.
“I shot his guts out.” Callie shuddered.
“Head shot’s the only sure kill, Cal.”
“He doesn’t have an abdomen anymore. I’ll check on Whit and John, then I’ll see about him.”
Whit sat up as she approached. A red crease angled along his temple, but beyond that he seemed fine. John was not so fine. Garth had jumped them, shot Brody point-blank, and threw John across the chamber into the wall. His leg was broken, the white tibia jutting through the skin below his knee. He was in a lot of pain, but they had nothing to give him. His only relief lay in crossing the bridge and walking through the portal—which he had to do on his own power.
She and Whit lashed two femurs into a shaky makeshift crutch, then Callie picked her way back to Evvi. As she bent to help the woman up, a shadow erupted from where Garth had lain. Incredibly, he stood erect in the light, his abdomen a bloody mess, his eyes still Tohvani black, piercing her heart like arrows of malevolence. Never had she sensed such hatred, such pure incandescent rage. Around her the Watchers shifted on the walls, chittering eagerly.
Without the slightest warning, he flew at her. She almost didn’t fire in time—her beam caught him in the shoulder a mere five feet away. It flung him back onto the bones, but he got up screeching blasphemies. She braced for another attack, but instead, he whirled and raced across the bridge into the portal. It flung him out with a high-pitched scream. Like a blazing effigy, his remains sailed across the chamber and bounced off the wall, falling onto the bone pile, a smoking, stinking nightmare that would never rise again.
Choking down bile, Callie sank weakly to the ground.
Evvi sat down beside her. They eyed the gleaming portal, and Evvi swallowed. “Well, now we know where these bones came from.”
Laughter echoed around them, overlying the rustling Tohvani on the walls. Do you believe me now? It’s all a lie. Cephelus now stood, gray and naked, over Garth’s skeleton. His eyepits were deeper, darker, more mesmerizing than those of other Tohvani, and he was considerably bigger. But beyond that, Callie saw little difference between him and the creatures who served him.
No one escapes from here, he said in her mind. No one.
Callie snorted. No one can go through the Exit without being Changed. Of course he was flung out. My question is why you let him try. A last-ditch effort to trick us? Or merely a fit of pique because you’ve lost?
Turning her back on the Tohvani leader, she stood and said, “Who wants to go first?”
The others were still staring at Cephelus. Now they refocused on Callie. Whit grinned. “You do, I think.”
NO! Cephelus shrieked.
Her friends stood beside her and she sensed them focusing on the link as she was, using it as a shield against the sudden cacophony of protests in their brains. Callie faced the portal, then glanced back at Evvi. “You know . . . about Pierce. I never meant you to be hurt. I just didn’t realize—”
“It’s all right.” Evvi smiled. “I’m over it. You go home and find him.”
Around them the Tohvani skittered across the walls, screaming furious abuse. As Callie stepped toward the bridge, Cephelus flew to block her path, radiating all the violent menace he could muster. She hesitated but then, at the link’s urging, walked through him. His obscenities, no doubt shrieked at full volume, sounded small and tinny in her ears. She mounted the bridge. Black depths plummeted on either side, but she hardly noticed as the portal blazed to life. A visible version of the link within, it reached out and enfolded her.
Enraged Tohvani flung themselves upon her as she moved forward. Their bodies shredded impotently against her flesh. The portal loomed ahead, its light spilling over the walls, filling up the darkness, enfolding her in glory. She could see figures within it now, silhouettes cloaked in familiarity—Aggillon waiting to welcome her. Eagerness quickened her steps, and she crossed over the threshold, out of the Arena and into a world of cheers and smiling faces and that wondrous soul-deep sense of approval.