Scavenger of Souls by Joshua David Bellin

Author:Joshua David Bellin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

10

Mercy and I ran for hours, the black land a solid darkness around us.

We must have covered ten miles before we finally slowed down, but I didn’t feel the least bit tired. Neither did she. Her strides were steady and strong, her eyes shining with the same determination that gripped me. As soon as we were out in the impact zone I brought her up to speed about my conversation with Udain, though I left out the goriest details of what I’d seen in the power station. She’d been less angry than I anticipated when I told her Udain’s true reasons for not attacking the canyon. But now I put everything out of my mind as our feet moved in tandem, each step bringing us closer to the canyon and whatever lay in wait for us there.

Long past midnight the moon struggled free of its cloud cover, and the impact zone gleamed a liquid silver in its path. With the landscape’s peaks and ridges, fathomless craters and shining pools of stone, the plateau looked like a mirror moon, spread out for us to explore. Though I knew the shapes in the rock were the bodies of people long dead, fossilized by the catastrophe that had claimed Mercy’s family, they held a weird and peaceful beauty in the moonlight, a stillness like natural sleep settled to stone. I wondered, as I watched Mercy surveying the land, if she could find beauty here too. And I wondered why the little bits of beauty left in this world—the glass desert by night, Mercy’s smile—had to come at such a terrible cost.

Mercy kept her inspection brief. “We should get going. Udain will be after us before we know it.”

I nodded. “Mercy, I—about Udain—”

“Nothing to say,” she cut me off. “He made his choice. We made ours. And it was about time, too.”

I spoke the thing that was gnawing at me. “Do you think he’ll do anything to my colony? Zataias and . . . the others?”

She shook her head. “He’s not stupid. He knows if he hurts them, he loses his hold over you.” Nodding to the west, she said, “Now let’s get cracking. There’s a canyon with our name written all over it.”

She held out her hand. I took it, and we headed due west, running as if we’d never known tiredness before. The moon paced us, slipping through the sky like a comet. After a time it fell below the horizon, and we continued in complete darkness. Still I didn’t doubt a step. Mercy squeezed my hand, and a laugh bubbled from her, choked at first, then pealing high into the night.

“Not bad for a pipsqueak,” she said breathlessly. “You sure there’s not something you’re not telling me?”

We ran on, and Mercy’s laugh lit what the moon no longer showed.

We rested once more for a drink and an energy bar, and by the time we were done with our skimpy meal, dawn had sliced the sky at our backs. The altar stood

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