The Survivor by BRIDGET TYLER

Author:BRIDGET TYLER
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

The Solace feels sour. Anxious. It’s as though the dense hum of Sorrow voices that flows through the cavern city is out of tune.

“What is that?” Jay asks, rubbing his head.

“A city full of beings hating us,” Chris says morosely.

“Not hate,” I say, feeling the mass of sonar pressing against my skin. “Fear. They’re afraid.”

“Just one of many things our species have in common,” Beth says grimly.

“Goodie,” Leela says.

The city reminds me of a toy Teddy had when we were kids—a building kit made of magnetic sticks you could use to build three-dimensional geometric shapes. The asymmetric scaffolding structures are crowded together in a way that seems haphazard but isn’t. If you look from the right angle, the city is a huge shadow box that paints moving images of Sorrow fighting phytoraptors on the walls of the cavern.

The mural of light and darkness stands ten or twelve stories tall, and the ceiling is at least twice that here at the outer edges of the cavern. It slopes downward to the city’s center—low enough that the massive bioluminescent root clusters that light this hidden world almost brush the cavern floor there.

The discordant ambient melody seems to be putting the Takers who brought us here on edge, too. None of them speak English, but until we got into the Solace, they had seemed pretty low-key about having just captured a bunch of space aliens.

The whole flight back, they were tossing spurts of conversation back and forth between themselves that sparked and bubbled like the air was carbonated. I didn’t understand any of it, of course, but the conversation felt familiar. I could have been listening to my friends trading barbs and stupid jokes to keep from being scared.

But now our captors are quiet. They’re keeping to the outer edges of the grand boulevard that wraps around the city, probably trying to avoid attracting too much attention. This close to the walls, the shadow figures cast by the city’s intricate buildings are warped and lopsided. I know I’m just looking at them from the wrong perspective, but it’s unsettling.

A sharp sound pops against my skin, exploding into a froth of anxiety-barbed chatter from our escorts. They fall into two lines. At attention, I realize, as a glowing figure strides toward us.

Ord! my brain shrieks reflexively. But the flowing robes radiate soft yellow, not Ord’s icy violet. Ord is dead. Tarn is the Followed now.

Tarn doesn’t even slow down as he slings me over his shoulders like a sack of beans and carries me away into the shadows of the Sorrow city.

“Tarn,” I say. “Please. Listen. We came to—”

“Quiet!” he bellows. Then he leaps straight up, catching the cross bar of a skeletal building and swinging a long, triple-jointed leg past my head to grasp the scaffolding above us with the wide-spread digits of his foot. He crouches deeply against the beam, then pushes us up again with another great leap that leaves my guts feeling like they’re somewhere around my ears.

The cave floor

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.