Chapter 8
He looks surprised, clearly not expecting us and maybe looking a little guilty about it.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“What are you doing here?” Tara says.
I love conversations like this, I type. Tara saw a god last night. We’re trying to find where it emerged. Or whatever.
“Oh,” Arrow says. “I’m doing the same.”
“You saw the one last night?”
“It came to my house.”
This pulls us up short.
“What?” Tara asks. “What happened?”
And then we see Arrow’s been crying. He wasn’t at school today, but he’s got to look after his sister a lot of the time.
His dad is a fisherman who goes upriver for weeks on the trot.
They live out in a hut I’ve never been to, but I can guess from where it sits that it’s poor even by New World standards.
Are you okay? I ask.
He shakes his head. “It took my sister.”
“What?” Tara says, eyes wide.
What do you mean took her?
“What do you think I mean?” Arrow nearly yells. “It smashed down our house, picked her up, and took her to the river.”
“Holy shit,” Tara says.
Holy shit, I type.
“What did you do?” Tara asks him.
“I ran after it. I tried to fight it.” He holds up his hands. They’ve got healing burns all over them, the gel we use still fresh. “But it just kept going.” He closes his eyes. “She was screaming. She was screaming for me.”
“Oh, Arrow,” Tara says.
Where was your house? I type.
“You climbed over it on your way up here.”
“Holy shit,” Tara says again.
Did you tell Burly?
“Fuck Burly!” Arrow says, raging. “He didn’t believe me. He thinks she fell into the river, and he’s got people searching downstream. But we’re fishers. We know how to swim before we know how to walk, and we sure as hell know how to get out of a river.”
“I saw it, too,” Tara says. “If we both went to him–”
“Your mom herself called me a liar,” Arrow says, his eyes almost glowing.
Tara frowns. “I’m sorry.”
You didn’t see the god take Echo? I ask Tara.
She shakes her head. “I was too far. I saw it slow down once, but that’s all. Its screams must have covered up Echo’s.”
“It didn’t even stop,” Arrow says. “We heard it coming and we had barely run out of the house and it walked right through it. It snatched her off the ground and went into the river.”
When the one me and Max saw went into the lake, it disappeared. No trace of it.
“I was at the river when they went in. It fell into the water, and it was too big for the river to hold. It wouldn’t have sunk all the way down to the bottom, you see what I mean?”
We both nod.
“I dived in right after them.” Arrow shakes his head. “I know how rivers work. I know that current like the back of my hand, and I’m telling you, I swam to where Echo would have been, should have been.” His face looks haunted now. “But they were both just gone.”
“So you came up here,” Tara says. “Trying to find it.”
“Trying to find something. Where did she go? And what the hell was the thing that took her?”
And that’s the first time I notice he’s carrying a rifle. You want to kill it, I type.
“Of course I want to kill it! Isn’t that what you want?”
“We were just seeing if we could find out where it came from,” Tara says.
“And if we do that, we can kill it.”
I see that Tara looks as unsure about this as I feel, but how can you argue with Arrow? Jesus, poor Echo.
Does your dad know? I type.
“They called him in from near the ocean. He’s out there searching the river for her.” He turns back up the trail. “He won’t find her. But maybe I will.”
Without another word, he carries on in the direction we were heading. I look at Tara, she looks back at me. We both follow him.