Fear (Gone 5)

“You’ll have to take your chances. The Darkness commands.”

Pack Leader’s tail flicked. “Bright Hand is there.” He pointed his muzzle at the houseboat. “Rock That Lives is close. Pack Leader does not see Whip Hand. Does not see Darkness.”

Brittney gritted her teeth. So that was it. The coyotes were calculating the odds and not liking what they saw. Cowards.

“Are you dogs?” Brittney taunted.

But Pack Leader was unmoved. “Pack almost gone. And only three pups.”

“If Drake was here, he would whip the fur off you!”

“Whip Hand is not here,” Pack Leader said placidly.

“Fine. Then wait here. I’ll go alone.”

Pack Leader did not argue. Neither did he agree.

Brittney began to pick her way quietly, cautiously down toward the shore. She stayed under the cover of rocks when she could and hunched down low when she had no choice but to cover open ground.

She kept a sharp eye on the houseboat. She didn’t need Drake’s memories to know that was where Sam would be. And she listened carefully for Orc.

The last fifty yards there was no cover, nothing she could do to hide as she crossed the pebbly shore to the rowboat. She crouched and looked hard at the houseboat. She saw no one on the top deck. That didn’t mean eyes weren’t watching from the houseboat’s windows. But if she could only barely see them it stood to reason they could see her only if they were staring in her direction.

Once the boat started moving…

She rushed to the rowboat and crouched in its shadow, eyes on the houseboat. If she tried to move the boat, she would be caught. Maybe Drake could have done it, moving swiftly in a way that she could not. But she had no idea how to row a boat and was likely to make noise.

If she tried to swim, it would be even worse. She knew how to swim, but she knew only the crawl, and the splashing would draw every ear in the small fleet.

Then Sam and his people would hear and they would catch her and Sam would burn her to ashes.

She would fail Drake. She would fail the gaiaphage.

Then: a flash of genius. Brittney almost laughed out loud.

She breathed, but she did not need to breathe.

Brittney began picking up small rocks and stuffing them in her pockets. She tied off the bottom of her shirt, as tight as she could make it, then dropped more rocks down the front of her shirt, using her arms to hold them all in like a pregnant woman’s belly.

Weighed down, she walked into the water. As the water rose around her she kept her gaze on the sailboat. She walked directly toward it, fixing the direction in her mind.

The water rose over her waist, over her chest, to her mouth and nose. And then it closed over her head.

She was almost completely sightless in the water. The only light was from the moon, and it seemed to reach only a few feet into the lake.

Brittney focused all her energy on walking in a straight line. The rocks controlled her buoyancy, but still she tended to float just a little, which made holding to a straight line very hard.

Freezing water filled her lungs. She could tell that it was cold, but the cold did not bother her. What did bother her was the certainty that she was off course. How many steps should she take? How far out was the sailboat? It had seemed like perhaps two hundred steps, but she had lost count after stumbling and losing some of the rocks that held her down.

No choice now but to surface. She opened the bottom of her shirt and let the rocks fall free. Her feet came up off the stony lake bottom and she floated upward.

It took a very long time. She was not very buoyant.

All the while she looked around and saw nothing until she was near the surface. Then she saw a rope slanting down into the darkness below.

She swam underwater, silent, no bubbles issuing from her mouth. She gripped the rope and began to pull herself upward, careful not to yank on that line.

She came up face-first. The twisted wires of her braces glinted with moonlight. A boat—a boat with a tall mast and what might be green trim—was directly above her.