Page 23 of Bent Heavens

Liv nodded, still shaken, and displayed bloody fingers.

“Ah, a wounded soldier,” Doug said. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to put you down.”

He grinned, and Liv knew he was trying to set her at ease. She forced a laugh, and it did help break the paralyzing shock. From his pocket Doug withdrew a giant-sized Swiss Army knife. He set down Maquahuitl, extracted from the knife a set of mini pliers, and knelt beside her. He took gentle hold of the wire and, after a couple of twists, a barb popped free.

“Maybe three more. Stand still and try not to bleed to death.”

“As opposed to what?”

Doug pincered the next barb and shrugged. “Going back.”

He didn’t look at her when he said it. Radiating from her gut, as if released by the punctures, Liv felt the broil of abashment. Doug was far from stupid. He knew she didn’t believe. But if anything was clear from the careful way in which he held her hips so as not to pinch her skin, he wanted her there anyway. With the quickness of a Black Glade wind gust, her every anxious emotion was overcome by gratefulness for this friend, who had, in some ways, given her back her father, and who, despite their divergent beliefs, had never quit believing in her.

“Freed,” Doug announced, “to crash into other fences.”

“So chivalrous of you, sir.”

Doug pocketed the tool, picked up Maquahuitl, and handed her Mist, first using it to gesture into the shadows.

“We better catch up. He’ll worry.”

“Right.” Her dad would indeed worry, but for a make-believe reason: It was an encirclement of skinners that had waylaid Liv, not a remnant of some farmer’s failed attempt to keep Black Glade in check.

They followed bad, crackling coughs until they came upon Lee standing dead center in a clearing, taking readings from his compass. He blinked heavy lids, looking at Doug and Liv through yellowed, red-veined eyes.

“It got away,” he said.

Doug nodded, accepting his culpability, and choked up on Maquahuitl as a promise to do better.

“What did I say about pocket formation, Doug? If you’re on left wing, you need to stay ten or twenty yards ahead, not behind.” Cough. “And Liv. We need to be quiet out there.” Cough, cough. “The closer we get to one—and we were very, very close—the more critical it becomes.” Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough. “You can’t be screaming like that.”

“She ran into barbed wire,” Doug explained.

Gone along with the flesh that illness had peeled from Lee’s face was his ability to hide any emotion. Liv watched the drill-sergeant points of his eyes diffuse as the dad she remembered resurfaced. He beckoned with a thin, trembling hand, the compass rolling loosely around his skinny wrist.

“Let me see.”

He had, of course, a first aid kit in a coverall pocket, and as he set to cleaning and bandaging her gouges, he walked back his critiques. Maquahuitl was the heaviest weapon; Doug’s slowed speed was understandable. Liv’s startled yell was not, after all, entirely inadvisable; war cries were meant to immobilize foes with fear. Liv nodded but suffered a hunch that this was the last of their quests. The wildness of this hunt had to be some sort of climax.

Lee consulted Resurrection Update, as well as a topographic map folded inside it, then tucked both back into his pack. He then picked up the useless bow and quiver, weighed them in opposite hands, and placed them upon the forest floor to be left for future adventurers. Lizardpoint was his natural weapon; anything else would only continue to complicate the hunt.

“Arrowhead formation,” he said. “Doug, you up to taking point?”

It was dusk when the three of them crowded together at one of Black Glade’s edges. It was a literal borderland, a taut wire fence separating them from an abandoned farm. The house’s white paint had been shredded by time. The outbuildings were hammocks of rusted spoil. The dual silos had become dead gods wearing bird-nest crowns. The place was deceased, though it was surrounded by life: hilly grazeland for cows and rich, rolling cornfields. Liv had an eerie sensation that they were trapped inside a maze, bigger than the one Doug dreamed of mowing into the Monk Block and with a gimmick better than the Trick: They hadn’t even known they’d entered it.

Liv looked to her dad for guidance, the last time she’d ever do so.

Lee’s face, pale already, had gone a chalky white. His eyes had gone wide and unbelieving. His lips moved like a fish’s mouth, unable to find enough air to breathe.

“I remember,” he whispered.

“Remember what?” Liv asked, terrified of the answer.

“This place.” He covered his horrified mouth with a hand. “This place.”

Lee’s eyes, looking big enough to drop from his skull, skittered across the outline of the farm, as if each building they landed on gave off invisible, painful rays. It didn’t matter how old Liv was or wasn’t; seeing a parent so terrified triggered a primordial response of equivalent terror.

“Dad,” Liv said.