The Rift - Howard Chris. Страница 51

“They brought me water,” Crow said. “Fed me corn with a spoon. They’ll be back, you hang in there.”

“No.” My arms were tingling. Bloodless. Bound too tight. “I don’t want their food.”

“Ain’t theirs, man. It’s GenTech’s.”

“I don’t want GenTech’s food, neither.”

“You gonna be hungry a long time, you wait for them apples to grow.”

“Been hungry my whole life,” I muttered. “Should be used to it.”

I struggled up next to the bars so my back was against them. I strained at the cornhusk ropes. No use. GenTech grown and poacher woven. I slammed myself at the dirt, then rattled the bars with my knees.

“Save your strength,” called Crow.

“For what?”

We were trapped down here beneath the cornfields. Locked inside this poacher den. And I cursed the filthy scum and their rotten colony. They were like the creatures at the Rift, I reckoned. Hardly human. And they had their dirty hands on the trees now. Every single one of those saplings. A hundred years of stealing from GenTech, and now they were stealing from me.

“They question you?” I asked, my head throbbing, my arms numb.

“Aye,” Crow said. “They poked at me. Picked at me all over.”

He meant his legs, of course. They’d made a freak out of him. I remembered how Kade had ogled the bark when we’d been freezing on the side of that lake. And I remembered how a poacher had once prodded Hina in the cornfields, his eyes full of disbelief at the beauty he’d found.

They just steal, I thought. They just scavenge. They’re worse even than GenTech. All they do is take, and they don’t give back a damn thing.

I sank back against the dirt.

“What they ask you?” I called out.

“About Promise Island, and how we ended up there. About your mother. And about your old man.”

“What you tell ’em?”

“Everything. You will, too. You’ll see. I’m telling you, don’t fight them. Not now. Gotta bide our time.”

“Yeah? That what you been doing?” I shouted. I mean, what a sick freaking joke. “Biding your time while you dragged your ass behind us?”

“Take it easy, Banyan.”

“We could have used some help, you know.”

“I couldn’t walk.”

“Walked good when you had the trees, though,” I yelled. “And you could have done something in the tunnel. You had Namo. What happened to you being a warrior?”

“They were gonna kill you, man. ’Less I gave up.”

There he went again, acting like he was my friend.

“So where is Namo, anyway?” I said, picturing the mammoth’s big, shaggy face and small, blinking eyes. Was he one more miracle the poachers would let rot in a cage?

“Wait,” Crow said. “I hear something.”

There was a dragging sound and the clink of metal. Sounded like padlocks crunching.

“Alpha?” I screamed, struggling back to the bars so I could see down the passageway. “You there?”

Two poachers hobbled towards my cell. They carried long cornstalks carved like spears, and they wore the gnawed scars of locusts, the mark of the swarms. Hell, one of them had a hole in his cheek.

They jangled at the chains and locks, then yanked the door to my cell open with a rusty screech. One of the men jabbed his spear at my throat while the other leaned down with a plastic canteen.

“Better drink, boy,” said the man with the spear.

I took a gulp of the water. Pumped up fresh from beneath that last damn peak, I guess. I sucked another gulp down. Then I sipped awhile longer. And when I’d gotten enough water in me, I leaned back from the canteen and spat in that poacher’s face.

The man screwed the cap back on his canteen, and then he slapped me, hard. Bony fingers. Long, dirty nails. I didn’t cry out or nothing, though. I’d made up my mind.

I wasn’t giving these people a thing.

Crow’s eyes shone through the bars of his cage as I got carried down the passageway by those two poacher guards. The other cells were too dark for me to see inside, though. And when I called out again for Alpha, no answer came.

As we turned into a new tunnel, the guards dropped me on the ground and began dragging me behind them, gripping the ropes that tied my feet together and bouncing my aching head through the dirt.

I could see the crooked roots of corn plants in patches above us, sticking out through the ceiling like flaky brown plastic, peeling and thready.

And these poachers were as busy and unruly as that tumbled mess of roots. I watched them all as I got dragged through the tunnels. They were everywhere, scrabbling around in their shabby rags. Barefoot, most of them. Their skin stained with dirt.

Clumps of folk worked their fingers inside oily salvage. Hordes of little kids ran around, crap in their eyes and snot in their noses. It was chaos and noise, and the whole place stank of old piss and sweat, and I hated each one of them. These bastards had stolen any chance that we’d had.

The two guards pulled me though the tunnels, prodding folk aside with their cornstalk spears. And none of those ragged freaks seemed to even notice, just kept their heads down and their eyes turned as I was dragged through the dirt. They were too busy working by the light of their crappy lanterns. Too busy digging and hiding and hoarding their corn.

Folks were sweating as they chipped away at the walls. Making more room to scuttle around with their mine carts and shovels and pickaxes, hidden from the agents and safe from the swarms.

And the folks that weren’t digging were taking care of the poaching business. Stripping the husks off stolen cobs, boiling the GenTech-branded kernels in big vats of water.

There were women drying out the corn after they’d cooked it, sorting it in piles and boxes. There were others weaving tools and fabrics from the leftover stalks and husks.

And it almost reminded me of the Kalliq, the way these people used every bit, every precious last resource. But there’d been music and hope in the lives of that ice tribe. And there weren’t none of those things down here.

We entered a chamber that was more sprawling than the rest. Even busier, too. Crammed full of people and busting at the seams. I mean, you never seen so many folk jammed together. Was like the worst shantytown, but bundled up and shoved under the ground.

High ceilings in this chamber, and nothing but shadow up there, beyond the white lights. The lanterns were connected by red wires that wrapped around the walls in a thin strip, and below those wires curled that water pipe we’d followed straight into this trap.

Middle of the chamber, there were rusty ladders and a mess of scaffold, and that jumbled tower led all the way up into the dark. Alongside the scaffold ran a pulley system. Nearly a hundred feet to the top, I reckoned. And I figured they’d have hatches up there. Ways out. But I couldn’t see the folk working at the top of the scaffold. All I could see was the buckets coming down, filled to the brim with corn.

The guards hauled me through a crowd of scrawny poachers, and when I smashed into the side of an iron vat, boiling water splashed out, steaming on the dirt and scalding my skin.

But still, no one paid me no mind.

Then suddenly, the footsteps around me froze and all the work stopped. Even my guards quit moving.

For a second, the whole place was still.

Because a wailing sound was coming down from one of the side tunnels and echoing all around the chamber. And that sound weren’t human. Not even close.

It was the sound of our mammoth. My old pal, Namo.

And I swore to myself, if they were hurting him, if they were causing him pain, then god help who was doing it. Because I didn’t need another reason to hate these people. And I only needed one way to get free.

I got yanked to my feet by the guards. And up ahead, set in the dirt on a pair of hinges, was a door made of metal salvaged from the side of a crop duster, the faded GenTech logo in one corner of the once-purple steel. The guard with the hole in his cheek slammed a fist at the metal, pounding at the heavy door and shoving it until it creaked inward.