Black dawn (5 page)
CHAPTER 5
Maggie woke slowly.
And painfully.
I must be sick, she thought. It was the only expla
nation for the way she felt. Her
body
was heavy and achy, her head was throbbing, and her sinuses
were completely stuffed up. She was breathing
through her mouth, which was so dry and gluey
that her tongue stuck to the roof of it.
I was having a dream, she thought. But even as
she grasped at bits of it
,,
it dissolved. Something
about
...
fog?
And a boy.
It seemed vaguely important for her to remem
ber, but even the importance was hard to keep hold
of. Besides, another, more practical consideration
was overriding it.
Thirst.
She was dying of thirst.
I need a glass of water
...
.
It took a tremendous effort to lift her head and open her eyes. But when she did, her brain cleared fast. She wasn't in her bedroom. She was in a
small, dark, smelly room; a room that was moving jerkily, bouncing her painfully up and down and
from side to side. There was a rhythmic noise com
ing from just outside that she felt she should be able to recognize.
Below her cheek and under her fingers was the
roughness of unpainted wood. The ceiling and
walls were made of the same silvery, weathered
boards.
What kind of room is small and made of wood
and...
Not a room, she thought suddenly.
A vehicle.
Some kind of wooden cart.
As soon as she realized it, she knew what the
rhythmic sound was.
Horses' hoofs.
No, it can't be, she thought. It's too bizarre. I am sick; I'm probably hallucinating.
But it felt incredibly real for a hallucination. It
felt exactly
as
if she were in a wooden cart being
drawn by horses.
Over rough ground.
Which ex
plained all the jostling.
So what was going
on?
What was she doing
here?
Where did I go to sleep?
All at once adrenaline surged through her-and
with it a flash of memory. Sylvia.
The incense
...
Miles.
Miles is dead
... no. He's not. Sylvia said that
but she was lying. And then she said I'd never find
out what happened to him. And then she drugged
me with that smoke.
It gave Maggie a faint feeling of satisfaction to
have put this much together. Even if everything
else was completely confusing, she had a solid
memory to hang on to.
"You woke up," a voice said.
"Finally.
This kid
says you've been asleep for a day and a half."
Maggie pushed herself up by stages until she
could see the speaker. It was a girl with untidy red hair, an angular, intense face, and flat, hard eyes.
She seemed to be about Maggie's age. Beside her
was a younger girl, maybe nine or ten. She was very pretty, slight, with short blond hair under a
red plaid baseball cap. She looked frightened.
"Who are you?" Maggie said indistinctly. Her
tongue was thick-she was so
thirsty.
"Where am
I? What's going on?"
"Huh. You'll find out," the red-haired girl said.
Maggie looked around. There was a fourth girl in
the cart, curled up in the corner with her eyes shut.
Maggie felt stupid and slow, but she tried to
gather herself.
"What do you mean I've been asleep for a day and a half?"
The red-haired girl shrugged. "That's what
she
said. I wouldn't know. They just picked me up a
few hours ago. I almost made it out of this place, but they caught
me."'
Maggie stared at her. There was a fresh bruise
on one of the girl's angular cheekbones and her lip
was swollen.
"What
place?" she said slowly. When nobody
answered, she went on, `Look. I'm Maggie Neely. I
don't know where this is or what I'm doing here,
but the last thing I remember is a girl named Sylvia
knocking me out. Sylvia Weald. Do you guys
know her?"
The redhead just stared back with narrowed
green eyes. The girl lying down didn't stir, and the
blond kid in the plaid cap cringed.
"Come on, somebody talk to me!"
"You really doe t know what's going on?" the
red
haired
girl said.
"If I knew, I wouldn't be asking over and over!"
The girl eyed
her a
moment, then spoke with a
kind of malicious pleasure. "You've been sold into slavery.
You re
a slave now."
Maggie laughed.
It was a short involuntary sound, and it hurt her
aching head. The blond kid flinched again. Something in her expression made Maggie's grin fade
away.
.
She felt a cold ripple up her spine.
"Come on," she said. "Give me a break. There
aren't slaves anymore!"
"There are here." The redhead smiled
again,
nas
tily. "But I bet you don't know where
you
are,
either."
"In
Maggie felt her stomach tighten.
"Wrong. Or right, but it doesn't matter. Techni
cally we may be in
ally are is hell."
Maggie was losing her self control. "What are you
talking
about?"
"Take a look through that crack."
There were lots of cracks in the cart; the pale
light that filtered through them was the only illumi
nation. Maggie knelt up and put her eye to a big one, blinking and squinting.
At first she couldn't see much. The cart was
bouncing and it was hard to determine what she
was looking at. All she knew was that there seemed
to be no
color.
Everything was either phosphorescent white or dead black.
Gradually she realized that the white was an overcast sky, and the black was a mountain.
A big
mountain, close enough to smack her face against. It reared up haughtily against the sky, its lower
reaches covered with trees that seemed ebony in
stead of green and swimming with mist. Its top was
completely wreathed in clouds; there was no way
to judge how high it was.
And beside it was another mountain just like it.
Maggie shifted, trying to get a wider view. There
were mountains everywhere, in an impenetrable
ring surrounding her.
They were
... scary.
Maggie knew mountains, and loved them, but
these were different from any she'd ever seen. So cold, and with that haunted mist creeping every
where. The place seemed to be full of ghosts, mate
rializing and then disappearing with an almost
audible wail.
It was like another world.
Maggie sat down hard, then slowly turned back
to look at the redheaded girl.
"Where is this?" she said, and her voice was almost a whisper.
To her surprise, the girl didn't laugh maliciously
again. Instead she looked away, with eyes that
seemed to focus on some distant and terrible mem
ory, and she spoke in almost a whisper herself. "It's the most secret place in the Night World."
Maggie felt as if the mist outside had reached down the back of her pajama top.
"The
what?"