Chapter 35-The Escape(5)

Chapter 35: 35-The Escape(5)

Instead, she raised a massive, twenty-foot mound of aerated, powdery snow-slush right out of the center of the rapids half a second before their bodies slammed into it.

SPLASH-CRUNCH.

The impact knocked the wind completely out of Valera’s lungs, cracking the mound of slush in half and plunging both of them ten feet deep into the freezing, pitch-black current of the Slag River.

Above them, two hundred feet up at the top of the canyon wall, Lord Cassian Vane stood at the iron railing, holding a silk handkerchief pressed tightly against the smoking, blackened gash on his left forearm.

Beside him, his First Captain peered down through a pair of silver spyglasses at the black rapids disappearing into the thick, impenetrably dense silver fog of the Deep Wastes half a mile downstream.

As they watched from the cliff, something massive moved beneath the surface of the river where the chute emptied-a dark, serpentine shape thirty meters long, its dorsal ridge lined with glowing, jagged purple crystals that pulsed with the terrifying pressure of a Level 2 river-beast drawn by the sudden splash of blood and mana.

And further out on the snowy riverbank in the fog, the deep, earth-shaking bellow of a Level 3 territorial monster answered from the ruins.

"Shall I have the engineers lower the winches, My Lord?" Ren asked quietly, lowering the spyglass. "We can send a recovery team down to drag the riverbanks before the beasts eat them."

Cassian looked down at the silver blood soaking through his white handkerchief, where the boy’s pig-iron axe had burned through a Level 2 guard.

Even now, the wound refused to freeze shut, aching with a dull, lingering heat that felt like an infection in his immortal blood.

"That river runs straight through the nesting grounds of three Level 2 Gorgers and the Pale Stag’s territory,"

Cassian said, his voice returning to its flat, icy calm as he turned his back on the railing and walked toward his waiting carriage.

"And the boy burned his own core out just to scratch my arm. He was unconscious before he hit the water."

"So they’re dead," Ren said.

"If the fall didn’t break their necks, the river-beasts are already tearing their meat apart," Cassian said, stepping into his carriage without looking back at the blood-stained slaughterhouse.

"Seal the waste-chutes. Put the surviving slum laborers back to work in Sector Four, and tell the Council that Voss’s gang killed Captain Kael and died in the reservoir flood. This matter is closed."

Three miles downstream from the walls of Hearth City, where the canyon cliffs flattened out into a jagged graveyard of collapsed pre-collapse highway overpasses and frozen marshland, the Slag River widened and slowed down.

There were no city walls here.

There were no streetlamps, no Harvest Houses, and no Enforcer patrols.

Above the broken concrete pillars of the dead world, the Silver Eye hung huge and unblinking in a sky the color of wet slate, its pale light reflecting off miles of unbroken gray snow and thick, rolling banks of raw lunar mist.

In the shallows beneath a collapsed concrete bridge pier, where the current piled up rusted car frames and dead silver-wood branches, something broke the surface of the freezing black water.

A matte-black Night-iron gauntlet reached up and hooked its fingers over a piece of rusted rebar jutting out of the mud.

With a wet, rattling gasp, Valera pulled herself halfway onto the frozen gravel bank, dragging two hundred pounds of dead weight behind her by the belt.

Her lips were dark blue.

She had lost her canvas cloak in the river, her shirt was in ribbons, and her legs were trembling so hard from dragging both of them through three miles of freezing current while dodging the river-beasts that her knees gave out the second she got Sol’s shoulders onto dry land.

She collapsed face-first into the gray snow beside him, spitting out a mouthful of foul river water.

For two minutes, neither of them moved.

The only sound under the collapsed bridge was the lap of the black river against the gravel and the distant, hollow wind whistling through the ruined highway above their heads.

Then, slowly, Valera pushed herself up on one elbow and looked at Sol.

He was lying on his back in the gravel, half in and half out of the water. His chest was barely moving, rising and falling in tiny, shallow hitches.

The bronze tint of his Late-Stage skin had faded to a sickly, ash-gray, and the cracks across his chest where the fire had leaked out during the Override were crusted with frozen black blood.

"Sol," Valera croaked, reaching out to slap his cold cheek lightly with her bare left hand, having pulled off her wet gauntlet. "Sol, wake up. Look at me."

Sol didn’t open his eyes, because even his passive thermal sight was completely dead.

Wait-not completely dead.

Deep inside the center of his chest, buried under a mountain of wet ash and exhausted muscle, a single, stubborn coal the size of a fingernail pulsed once against her freezing palm.

Sol’s cracked lips twitched.

His eyes stayed shut, his face pale and drawn against the gray gravel, as he let out a breath that barely fogged the air.

"Did I..." Sol whispered, his voice so faint she had to lean her ear two inches from his mouth to hear him over the river.

"Did I get... the bastard?"

Valera looked down at this blind, stubborn, suicidal butcher who had dragged her out of a meat pen, eaten a dozen noble crystals raw, and just split the arm of a Level 2 High Lord with a piece of slaughterhouse scrap iron so they could jump off a two-hundred-foot cliff together.

She let out a wet, exhausted laugh, dropping her forehead down onto the center of his scarred, lukewarm chest and closing her eyes.

"Yeah, Sol," Valera whispered into the dark under the bridge, wrapping her arms around his ribs to share the last tiny scrap of heat they had left between them. "You got him. Now shut up and sleep before I drown you myself."