Vault of Shadows (17 page)

As Milo prepared for his journey, the other survivors offered what they could, and a few of the adults
volunteered to go, but none of them were fit. Milo, Shark, and Lizabeth were the only completely uninjured humans in the camp. Mook was strong but slow, and besides, he was standing guard over Evangelyne—and over the whole camp. That was the sole bit of relief for Milo, because there wasn't much that could get past the stone boy. Even the gators had stopped creeping up the banks. Milo had a compass, his knife, some wire and tools, signal flares, a camouflaged rain poncho, and a canteen. He pulled on the poncho and knelt by the water's edge to fill his pouch with sturdy stones for his slingshot. There wasn't even a spare first-aid kit to take, because all those supplies had already been used.

Milo exchanged a nod with Mook and received a vigorous face-licking from Killer, a hiss from Iskiel, and a fist bump from Shark. Then he took his bearings, set his mind, screwed up his courage, and ran into the forest.

As he left the camp, he saw a pale figure standing beneath the arms of a weeping willow. He smiled and waved to Lizabeth, but she merely turned and watched him go. She never said a word.

For reasons he could not explain, just seeing Lizabeth struck him deep in the chest, and for half a mile he tried to understand what exactly it was that he felt. Sadness? Sure, there was some of that, especially if Lizabeth's mind had been damaged by everything that had happened. Anger? A lot of that, too, because the
harm she had endured was a perfect example of the kind of damage the heartless Bugs inflicted.

But there was another emotion there too.

Fear.

Not for her.

No.

Milo realized that he was afraid
of
her.

Thinking those—and even darker—thoughts, he ran into the twilight forest as the first rumbles of a coming storm reached his ears.

FROM MILO'S DREAM DIARY

I dreamed about the kid in Gadfellyn Hall again, and just like always my dream was about me reading a book. I wrote down everything I could remember. . . .

There were many, many rooms in the big old house. Rooms filled with dusty furniture in which cockroaches crawled and over which moths did their slow, hungry aerial dances. There were rooms filled with suits of rusty armor, some still occupied by the ghosts of the ancient knights who had died in them. There were kitchens and sculleries, butlers' pantries and closets. There was a great dining hall with a vast table on which were set a service for thirteen people and silver trays heaped with enough food for an army, but only worms and flies had dined upon it. There were bedrooms by the dozen, but none of the beds had been slept in. Except one, and it was too big a bed for a boy as small as him.

There were rooms with chairs for sitting and having
conversations, but the shadows in the room had nothing to say to each other. There was a room with dozens upon dozens of animal heads mounted on wooden plaques on the walls. Some of the animals snarled, some looked surprised, others stared with indifference through their glass eyes. None of them made a sound to stir the air of Gadfellyn Hall.

The boy wandered from room to room to room. He knew them all. Every corner and niche. Every closet and secret stair. Every couch and chair, every lamp and lantern. His wandering footprints were recorded in layer upon layer of dust. They told a story of someone who was looking and looking but had not found the room that waited for him. The room that wanted him.

A single line of his footprints, however, led through a doorway at the end of a forgotten wing of the vast old house. The prints went up to the door, seemed to mill outside for a while, and then the dots of someone walking on tiptoe went inside.

There was no sign at all of the maker of those footprints ever coming back out again.

Never ever ever.

L
ike all the kids in his pod, Milo had learned how to judge both time and distance. If the run to Mandeville had been a straight line with no forest landscape to contend with and no aliens to be wary of, he might have made it in well under a couple of hours even at a leisurely jog. Probably in about half that time if he'd wanted to push it.

However, this wasn't that kind of world.

He found an old bike path that snaked its way through the woods, but it didn't run in a straight line at all. After taking it for a while, he realized that it was circling back into a series of switchbacks that would have been nice if he'd been out cruising around on a bike. It wasn't plotted out for speed, so he left the overgrown concrete path and picked a more careful route through dense undergrowth. This part of Louisiana was a swamp, and when the vegetation was left to run wild, it did so with enthusiasm. At times he had to fight his way through dense stands of bamboo and sugarcane; at other times he had to slog through knee-deep streams. Ultimately the way became so cumbersome that he went south and found the bank of the lake again and followed that. It was less
safe, though, which meant that even though the route was more assured, safety was not.

Three times he had to run inland to avoid little marshy inlets where alligators lurked with only their eyes and nostrils visible above the brown water. And once he bumped into what he thought was a low-hanging vine, only to have it suddenly try to drop on him. Milo shrieked and backpedaled away from a huge green anaconda.

The big snakes were not native to America, but here, and in Florida and other warm wetlands, anacondas that had been let loose from private collections or had escaped from zoos had become a real threat. He'd heard that in Florida, they were a major predator even before the hive ships arrived, and they were big enough to bring down a wild pig, an unlucky deer, or a skinny preteen dumb enough to walk into one.

Milo ran inland more than two hundred yards to get away from the snake.

By the time he circled back to the banks, twilight had covered the lake with a thick blanket of black storm clouds. Rain began slowly, pattering on the leaves and popping on the lake. Then a bolt of lightning forked across the sky. A heartbeat later a blast of thunder shook the forest. It was so loud that Milo actually reeled and clamped his hands to his ears.

That's when the real rain began.

Not just a downpour but a deluge, as if an ocean were falling from the sky to try to drown the world. Milo cried
out as a second blast of lightning burst above him and the rain came down even harder.

Within seconds Milo felt like he was back inside the sunken red ship, drowning. He staggered through a world of rain and mud, his clothes feeling like lead weights. It was impossible to see more than a foot in front of him, and within seconds he lost all sense of direction. He could use the compass if he could find a place to stand where it wouldn't be slapped out of his hand by water.

Standing under trees in a lightning storm was stupid and dangerous, he knew, but he was in a forest and there was nothing
but
trees. The only other option was the lake, and with this kind of rain, he knew he'd never spot a hungry gator. So, what to do when every choice was a bad one?

Milo forced himself to keep going, to find somewhere to hide, somewhere he could wait out the heaviest of the rain. The thunder and lightning were continuous, evidence that the storm was directly overhead.

“Please!” he heard himself say, but he didn't know who he was asking for help. “Please . . .”

And then he heard something. A voice.

Faint and strange, nearly hidden by the roar of falling water and the artillery barrage of thunder.

“Here . . .”

Milo whipped around, and even in his desperation and panic his hands followed countless hours of training and he whipped out his slingshot and a stone, fitted the rock into the pad, and drew.

The woods were a gray smear of shadows and rain.

“Who's out there?” he demanded.

Lightning flashed, casting everything into stark lines of white and black.

“Here,” whispered the voice.

And it was a whisper. How he heard it through the rain was a mystery to Milo, though he was half sure that he was imagining it. Or that he was crazy.

“Here . . .”

The voice seemed to be coming from straight ahead of him, from the shadows inside a narrow circle formed by three ancient elm trees. When the lightning flashed again, Milo thought he saw something deep inside that opening. Something that seemed to want to hide in the darkness.

Something.

Or someone.

The rain was too heavy to let Milo see anything clearly.

“Who's there?” he called again, trying to make his voice sound older and stronger. “I'm armed.”

“Milo . . . ,” came the voice. “Over here.”

That's when he recognized the voice, and that realization was like a punch in the gut. It was impossible, but Milo
knew
it.

Absolutely impossible.

“Milo, it's okay,” said the voice. “Everything's okay now.”

When the lightning flashed again, he saw the figure that matched the voice. The blood in Milo's veins turned
to icy slush. His knees buckled and he sagged down to the ground as the figure was revealed by a flash of lightning. Milo could feel his heart beating so fiercely that pain shot through him, darting down all the way to the pit of his stomach and up to his head.

The figure did not venture out of the shadows but instead raised familiar hands and smiled with a familiar mouth.

“It's okay, Milo, I'm here now.”

Milo burst into tears.

The figure beckoned him gently, all the while smiling, nodding, reaching.

“Come with me, son. I'll protect you.”

Milo stared past his own tears as pain turned knives in his heart. He raised his hands, reaching out, needing to touch those hands. Needing everything that the figure could offer.

“D-Dad . . . ?” he whispered.

M
ilo felt like his mind was breaking. The world tilted and spun around him in a sickening whirl.

This was simply
not possible.

His father had gone missing more than three years ago. He'd been a gentle man, not a fighter, even though he'd carried a gun and gone out on patrols like every healthy adult had. Before the war his dad had taught music, and the Silk home had always been filled with music. Rock, jazz, classical, indie, reggae . . . everything. Music and happiness. Then the Bugs came and ruined all of that. Even so, Dad continued to play his music in the quiet hours in the refugee and resistance camps. He wore a gun at his hip but always had his guitar slung across his back. That was his real power, and his tunes and songs kept the shadows from ever getting too dark.

Then one day his patrol had vanished. The Bugs took them. No bodies were ever found. Just a smashed and bloodstained guitar.

Milo's nightmares were often filled with horrific images of what the Bugs had done to his father—or were still doing to him. Sometimes Milo dreamed of his father
pinned to a giant display board along with other interesting humans in a perverse alien collection, the way some humans used to collect butterflies.

Aboard the hive ship the Huntsman had taunted him by saying that the Swarm didn't
collect
anything. The Swarm
use
, he'd said. Then he'd offered to help Milo find him, to save him, if Milo would join his campaign of evil.

Milo had been tempted. So tempted.

But in the end he had fought the Huntsman.

And afterward, when the Orphan Army was back on Earth, Milo had a dream of the Witch of the World and in that dream she said those two terrible things.

There are horrors more dreadful than the Huntsman, Milo Silk.

That was bad enough. Then she said one more thing.

Your father lives.

Those two statements kept beating at him, every hour, every day.

Which is why he stared at those beckoning arms and into that smiling face and did not move.

Could not move.

Dared
not move.

Because of the witch's words and because of what he was seeing.

His father was dressed in the same clothes he'd worn the day he disappeared. Jeans, scuffed Timberland boots, an LSU T-shirt. Three years later and after who knew what horrors, and Dad was still wearing the same clothes?

That seemed wrong. Not possible.

“Milo,” said his father in a light, happy, encouraging voice, “it's fine, kiddo. Come on in here, under the trees. It's dry in here. It's safe.”

“Dad . . . I . . .”

“It's okay, kiddo, it's safe and warm. C'mon, get out of this rain before you catch your death.”

Milo did not look into his father's eyes. Instead he stared at the strap of hand-tooled leather that crossed his body from left shoulder to right hip. The leather was dark, and all along it was a rippling music staff on which notes danced. Milo remembered the Christmas morning when Dad had unwrapped the gift. It had been a joint present from Mom and Milo, and the joy in Dad's face was so great they all laughed and cried, and there was music in the house all day.

The strap was connected to the body of the Gibson guitar that hung, neck down, across Dad's back.

Milo stared at it and tried to make sense of it.

That guitar.

The same guitar. The same strap.

Somewhere, back in camp, in the ashes of his mother's burned-out tent, was that same strap. It was the only thing Mom had left of her husband, of Milo's father. She'd touched her fingers to her lips and brushed them along those dancing notes every single morning and every single night since Dad had gone missing.

How could it be here?

How could Dad be wearing it on
that
very guitar?

And how could his father have found him out here in the forest, in the rain, so far from where anyone would know to look?

“Milo,” said his father, the smile flickering for the first time, taking on a hint of impatience, “I told you to come here.”