90_Minutes_to_Live (20 page)

“Do you think we lost them?” she asked.

“I don’t-”

His foot slipped out from under him. He teetered, his heart in his throat, unable to regain balance. Below, the lava rose up as if in greeting.

Lina grabbed his shoulder, steadying him. “Careful,” she said but she was smiling. “It looks hot down there.”

Not trusting his voice Colton nodded his thanks and then baby-stepped the rest of the way across.

“So,” she said, jumping lightly to the other side, “did we lose them?”

Colton shoved the beam over the edge and it tumbled down into fire and darkness.

“The gap will slow them,” he said as he stood, “but they’ll find a way around. I have a feeling they’ll keep chasing us until the next rain or firestorm washes away our scent.”

She stared up at the ceiling and the ashy clouds visible through the wide cracks. “When will that be?”

A reaver’s shriek echoed again through the Maze.

Colton’s jaw tightened. “Not soon enough.”

Several passages branched out from the room and Colton suddenly realized he recognized this place. As Odin’s pupil, he used to trap goats in this same room. He glanced back at the chasm, understanding the lava-filled gap had not been present five years ago.

“Come on,” he said, moving to the passage furthest to the right. “I have an idea.”

They ran down a trash-cluttered corridor for several minutes before Colton stopped next to a thin metal plating resting against the wall. Moving the plate aside, he exposed an opening in the ferrocrete wall, a hole barely wide enough for a man to squeeze inside. He whistled to Rags, and the worlhound obediently ran into the hole.

“Inside,” Colton said to her. “Hurry.”

She gazed at the dark opening uncertainly. “Where does it lead?”

A distant shriek answered her.

He cursed. “Do you want to die? Get moving or I’ll leave you to the reavers!”

Pursing her lips, she dropped to her knees and scrambled into the hole. Grasping the metal plate, Colton backed in after her, covering the opening before moving further into the narrow tunnel. After a dozen meters, the tunnel opened and he was able to stand.

“I can’t see,” Lina said, sounding very young in the darkness.

“Give me a minute.”

Removing his raingrease tin, he ignited it with his flicker. The flame was small but bright enough to illuminate the maintenance shaft. Unlike most of the Maze the ceiling was intact here, which explained the darkness. Rubble blocked the shaft in one direction but the other continued into the black beyond the tin’s light.

“What now?” Lina asked.

He crouched down beside the hole in the wall. “The reavers know they’re closing in. I’m hoping that means they’re overeager and they’ll run past us before they realize they’ve lost our scent.”

“And then?”

“We’ll head back the way we came. Even if the reavers come back, our new trail will overlap the old. It will be like we disappeared into thin air.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” she said shortly. “But what if they don’t pass us? What if they find the tunnel?”

He nodded down the shaft. “That has to go somewhere. If they come we’ll just have to find out where.”

She chewed her lip thoughtfully and then shrugged. “Guess so.”

Colton smiled. “Take off that coat Lina. It’s too heavy and will only slow you down.”

“And too hot,” she added, shrugging it off, then dropping it to the floor.

Underneath she wore a sleeveless vest of the same green hide. There was a small tattoo on her upper arm of a winged creature with a hooked nose.

His eyes widened. He’d heard of such markings but never seen one himself. “Is that an eagle?”

Lina glanced at the tattoo. “It’s our clan mark. Everyone in the scraper has one.”

“So you’re a skyper,” he said. Unlike the street-dwelling scavengers skypers lived in scrapers, the frozen towers of the old world. Reclusive and aloof, they were rarely seen outside their fortified buildings. He rolled his eyes. “The giant coat, the hair, I should have known the minute I saw you that you were a scraper hugger.”

“Well, I knew you were a scavenger right away,” she said, pinching her nose and looking at him over her fingers, “from the smell.”

Colton laughed. “So what are you doing so close to the Maze? I thought your kind never strayed far from your scrapers.”

“We don’t, usually,” she admitted. “We don’t need anything down here.”

He patted his canteen. “What about water and food?”

“Our scraper is high,” she said, “higher even than the fire clouds. It is cold above but there’s rain, clean rain that freezes to ice at the highest levels. We boil it for drinking and use it for our gardens.”

His brow furrowed. “Gardens?”

“We grow many things in the inner chambers, vegetables mostly, some fruits.” Lina patted her vest. “We even make our clothing from plant fibers.”

He could hardly believe what he was hearing. “Food, water, no firestorms or reavers….” he shook his head. “No wonder you stay in your scrapers.”

“Yes,” she agreed, and then her shoulders sagged. “But skypers can’t hide anymore, not now.”

“The firestorms can’t have affected you that much, not in your scraper,” he said. “Even if they have, the lava fields are always spreading. They’ll settle down eventually and the clouds will thin out again.”

She gave him a curious look. “You don’t know where the fire clouds come from do you? Janitor Carlos said that scavengers don’t understand about the storms.”

“The fields make the clouds. Everyone knows that.”

“Then everyone is wrong,” Lina said firmly. “The power plant produces the fire clouds and it is the reason the storms are getting worse. The plant has drilled too deep, the crust is failing.”

“Is that so?” Colton grinned, amused by the skyper’s bizarre superstitions. “Okay, I’ll bite. What exactly is a power plant?”

She didn’t return his smile. “You think I’m making this up?”

He shrugged, still grinning.

“Well, then let me tell you something else. There is no World Wall.”

“Not to call you a liar Lina, but we could see the wall clear enough from the Maze.”

“But it’s not a wall,” she insisted. “It’s a cliff, one that circles the entire city.”

“A cliff,” echoed Colton, with just a touch of sarcasm. “Who knew?”

“I’m telling you the truth. Look.”

Brushing the soot around her feet into a pile, she created a small mound.

“This is the city,” she said. Putting her finger in the center, she made a small impression. “This is the power plant, right in the center of the lava fields.”

Colton rolled his eyes but decided to play along with her little game. At the very least, it kept his mind off the reavers. “Okay. So why doesn’t the plant melt?”

“I don’t think it can. Janitor Carlos said it was a thing of the old world, made to bring up the heat of the earth to create power for the ancients. No fire can harm it, but it is dying.”

“How do you know that?”

“You can see the smokestacks from my scraper,” she answered. “Three weeks ago there were seven, all of them wider than my scraper, spitting black fire clouds all day long. After the eruptions two weeks ago, there were only three.”

“What happened to the others?”

She pushed two fingers into the soot. “They sank into the clouds, and that’s when the fire clouds began to get worse.” Drawing up her fingers she made a fist and pushed it into the mound. “After that, scrapers near the fields began to sink, one by one. That’s when Carlos realized the plant had finally dug too deep. It has cut a hole so vast and hot the fields are spreading out like water from a tapped spring.”

He wanted to laugh but found he couldn’t as he remembered his den’s hunting grounds sinking slowly into the hot mires of the spreading fields.

“I still don’t understand what that has to do with the World Wall. Why do you call it a cliff?”

“The Plant has been digging a long time. Long ago it caused a massive earthquake that dropped the entire city into a vast sinkhole. There is no World Wall Colton. We are living in a hole in the ground, one that’s going to get very hot, very soon.”

He snorted but was secretly glad to find a flaw in the girl’s logic. Lina scowled at him but he raised a hand to forestall any argument.

“No offense Lina, but the World Wall is no cliff. It’s a barrier that was built to protect us during the Great War. I have seen the World Gate that leads outside, myself.”

“You’ve see the Gate?” she asked sharply. “What does it look like? Have you opened it?”

“No one has,” he replied. He thought of Odin and his many lectures concerning the wastelands beyond the city. “Nothing survives beyond the Gate, not even air. The world is dead.”

Undeterred, she leaned closer to him. “Janitor Carlos said after the first great earthquake struck, many of the ancients died. Those who survived created a machine at the foot of the World Wall, a box that could carry people to safety. The box had golden doors, and rises like an eagle to the top of the Wall.”

“A golden box that flies people to safety? Do you hear yourself?”

She drew her fist from the soot, gesturing to the impression left behind. “If you were an insect down in that soot, what would you see? Would you see the cliffs all around you? Would you recognize them for what they were?”

He couldn’t suppress a shiver. “No,” he said softy. “No. I’d see walls.”

The shaft trembled and the soot collapsed in on itself, burying the hollow in burnt darkness.

Colton met Lina’s eyes, seeing in them the certainty behind her words.

Could it be true? What if Odin, teacher of scavengers and guardian of the World Gate was wrong? What if the Gate wasn’t a gate at all?

The trembling ceased and Lina sat down the floor. “Carlos was going to lead us to the machine. But we only just reached the Maze when the reavers found us. We fought but there were so many. Carlos...the reavers...He told everyone to run. I...I….”

“You were separated from the others,” Colton said, hearing the pain in her voice and already knowing where her tale would lead. “The reavers caught up with her later.”

“In a stairwell,” Lina said miserably. “I left the others behind. And the reavers found me anyway.”

Guilt cut into him like a dull knife and for a moment, the face of a small boy superimposed itself over Lina’s own. He blinked and the apparition faded.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said roughly, unsure if he was speaking to her or himself. “There was nothing you could do.”

“I should have tried.”

Perhaps drawn by her tears, Rags moved closer to Lina and sniffed gently at her greasy long hair. She slapped him on the nose.

“Stop it!”

Rags jerked back and threw Colton an aggrieved look.

“You’re not afraid of him. That’s rare. Are all skypers so brave?”

“We raised worlhound in the scrapers,” she said. “They protected us for as long as they could, when the reavers came,” she smiled apologetically and patted Rags’s head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Rags wet her cheek with his long black tongue.

She made a sour face and giggled.

“Alright, I give up,” Colton said. “I’ll bring you to the Gate. I don’t know if it’s your machine or not but we’ll find out together.”

She started to speak but then Rags’s ears pricked up and Colton waved her to silence.

A clanking scrape sounded from the hole in the wall. Someone was moving the plate, uncovering the tunnel.

“They’ve found us.” Rising from the floor, he helped Lina top her feet. “We have to go.”

They hurried down the shaft, Lina and Rags leading while Colton’s tin lit their way from the rear. They hadn’t gone far before the sounds of many shuffling feet pursued them.

“Faster,” he urged.

The shaft turned and they came to a door, its surface thick with grease and red corrosion. Ducking through the portal, Colton handed her the tin.

“What are you doing?”

“Slowing them down,” he replied.

He put his shoulder to the door but the rusted hinges resisted until Rags added his own significant bulk to the task. The door squealed shut and Colton quickly dropped the locking bar in place. No sooner had it clanged down than something struck it hard from the opposite side, denting the rusted metal.

A reaver shrieked and another dent joined the first.

Colton took back the tin. “It won’t hold long.”

She needed no further prompting and they ran on as reavers struck at the door behind them.

Suddenly, Lina skidded to a stop.

He was about to tell her to keep moving when he spied the oily sheen of raingrease in front of them. The shaft ahead was flooded.

The banging grew louder behind them, followed by the whining screech of tearing metal.

“We’re trapped,” Lina gasped.

Colton stared hard at the flooded shaft. “No, we’re not. I’m not going to die like a cornered lizard rat.” Setting down the burning tin well clear of the flammable pool, he stripped off his coat. “We’ll swim it.”