Chapter 30
Consequences
Iwoke up disoriented in darkness, a musty stench assaulting my nose.
I was no longer at the outpost. That’s right, they’d drugged us.
I blinked, trying to understand where I was.
There was only black in every direction, had the drug blinded us too?
No, as my eyes adjusted I could make out a faint light in the distance. They’d taken us somewhere underground.
I reached up to try to brush sand off my cheek, frowning when my arm didn’t move. Tugging more forcibly, rope binding nipped my arm.
Bound. They’d tied us up. My ankles and wrists were both bound together behind me, I was hog-tied.
The faint light in the distance was undulating. It was familiar, but I couldn’t pin down exactly why.
I tested the rope’s tightness, wriggling until I was able to pull my arms forward over my feet to the front of my body.
Feeling the knots with the tips of my fingertips, I recognized the pattern.
It was a figure eight knot. Pulling at the edges of it with my nails, I grimaced when the knot only pulled firmer on the other side.
The lesson details on knots came back to me in a rush.
This knot couldn’t be untangled with my hands restrained, only cut.
I didn’t know where I was. I was tied up, alone, and had no idea how much time was left until sunset.
The caustic lights in the distance continued shifting. My inner thigh warmed as I channeled Perception Skinscript. There was something recognizable about the dim and distant light. The ebbing and brightening paleness was identical to miasma waves.
Panic sharpened my fear. I slammed it down.
Stay calm and take inventory.
First, I needed to free myself from the rope. There had to be something I could use to cut myself loose. Using my elbows I pushed myself up onto my knees, groping, rocking, and hobbling in the dark.
Sand, more sand…a rock that was too small and smooth to help me, and yet more sand. A wriggling millipede. Shuffling and hopping forward on my hands and knees, I kept going. Progress was slow.
There, a wall. It felt like it was made of rock. This was a cave, likely near the coast. The rock’s surface was rough, maybe rough enough to fray the rope.
I cupped my hands toward me, rubbing my wrists against the wall where the rope stuck out.
Pain bloomed along my wrists, skin scraping apart with the rope.
Clenching my teeth, I tried to angle the rope closer to the rock, but I was still nearly blind in the darkness.
The cord binding my feet and hands snapped loose.
The swooshing and hissing of miasma as it hit the sand reached my ears. A terrifying thought struck me. If miasma was nearby, Sanguirs might be too.
My heartbeat thrashed against my ribs.
I froze, moving my arms higher so I could lick at my skin. It was torn, but it tasted grainy and salty like sweat and sand, not coppery like blood. I released a small sigh of relief, I wasn’t bleeding.
Best not to borrow trouble.
Using my teeth, I twisted the rope around my wrists until the frayed edges were facing me instead of the rock wall. Biting at the rope, I tore at it with savage desperation. It was almost halfway torn apart already. Holding my hands as far apart as the rope allowed, I pulled it taut.
Spitting out chunks of cord, I kept going, minutes pressing down like weight on me as I did.
There was no way to tell how long I’d been here, or if it was high or low tide. No use thinking about it, or where here was until I was mobile again.
Briefly, I wondered where everyone else was. Were we all bound and scattered throughout this cave? Even though I had managed to stop myself before I started to bleed, that didn’t mean the others had reached the same conclusion.
Relief washed through me as the rope ripped with a satisfying snap. I yanked my wrists apart, reaching down to explore the knot between my ankles. The sting of sand against my raw skin burned, but I could feel the rough ends of a square knot. This could be untangled with my bare hands.
It took longer than I expected given my relative blindness, but as I pulled the rope away from my boots, I couldn’t help feeling more confident now that I was ambulatory again.
Bracing my palm on the rock wall, I slowly stood, not sure how high the ceiling was.
At full height, I couldn’t reach it with my hand stretched out above me.
I chewed my lip, turning over the next problem. Should I go toward the miasma, or deeper into the cave away from it?
If I went toward the miasma, which was the closest light source, I could orient myself and figure out how much time I’d lost. There was a risk I could get trapped into this cave if the tide was coming in though, and I’d lose extra time backtracking.
And of course, there was the risk of encountering miasmic monsters.
But if I went deeper into the cave, there was no guarantee there was any other exit.
And I’d be equally trapped if that happened when the tide came in.
There was also the possibility I’d get lost, depending on how deep this cave was.
And given the proximity of this cave to the miasma, I didn’t want to rule out the chance that some miasma inhabitants might have taken refuge deeper in this cave.
Better the known danger than the unknown. I walked toward the flickering light.
It wasn’t a long journey, but as I approached the maw of the cave, the miasma was indeed quite close to the entrance. Only a few yards separated the corrosive waves from the sand at my feet. Luckily, no dark shapes moved within the nearby waves.
In the distance, I could barely make out the shape of grand sails, skimming across the surface of the miasma like a petal atop water. An Arc, returning to Mesmoria.
This area of the island had several coves tunneling through it, and I could make out Talissa farther away, feet beating against the sand as she ran along the edge of the outer perimeter.
I couldn’t find the sun’s glare beyond the crowded clouds, it must already be sinking.
The rocky cliff was too smooth. If it started to rain, that wall would become a death sentence.
Well, shit.
The caves jutted out of the cliffside, which was a sheer rocky rise between the shoreline and the outer perimeter. It erected a natural barrier against the miasma.
The immediate threat was the miasma, but I didn’t see any nearby shadows moving beneath its nacre sheen.
One eye stayed on it as I searched for the best way through the outer barrier.
There was no telling how far the cliffs extended before the shore would be traversable to reach a gate in the outer perimeter.
The cliffside had several craggy outcrops, but looked mostly smooth.
No doubt from miasma waves breaking against it and melting it down over years.
Someone I didn’t recognize was halfway up, climbing the wall a quarter league away.
Another choice, whether to try to climb the cliff face or follow the coast until it merged with the outer perimeter wall. That had to be part of this test, to see how many sound choices we could make with limited information.
I eyed the cliff, glancing at the sky. It looked darker than it had this morning, rain might erupt any minute. Distantly, I heard someone scream, high and shrill. My mind flashed to Rosa, pulse racing.
Don’t panic.
First thing first, what side of the island was this? It might give me some idea how close Lake Mirae was, and which direction to go.
The waves were slightly angled from my current position.
If the wind this morning had been blowing northwest, and the prevailing winds on Mesmoria were westerly, it would be a reasonable assumption based on the angle of the water that I was on the south or southeast end of the island. Furthest away from Lake Mirae.
Of course they’d put us as far away as possible.
Before I could make a decision, someone nearby shouted. Turning toward the noise, Izaiah backed away from the miasma toward the mouth of a cave he’d just exited, a lone Sanguir lurching toward him from the waterline. If he kept going, he’d be trapped in the cave with it, blind and defenseless.
Rosa’s mangled eye socket danced behind my vision.
I was moving before I could even think through what I was doing, racing toward him, shouting to get his attention. “This way!” I waved my arms above my head, frantically trying to pull his terrified gaze away from the Sanguir.
His head jerked toward me, and for a paralyzing moment I didn’t know if he would listen. Then he was sprinting toward me, Sanguir still following after him. At least there was only one. When he reached me, I turned on my heel, grabbing his arm as we hurried in the opposite direction.
“Where did you get cut?” I panted, risking a glance at his reddened wrists and ankles as we ran.
He held up his left wrist, which had a jagged line down the side.
It looked awful. And deep.
“Broke the rope on a sharp rock,” he explained, looking over his shoulder at the Sanguir which was still trailing us but at an increasing distance. “Nicked my arm too.”
Nicked? It looked deep enough to scar.
“Wrap it in something.” I slowed to a jog when we had a few yards of safety between us and the leech. He nodded, tearing the bottom of his shirt near a moth-eaten hole and using it as a bandage around the injury.
It was only once the wound was covered and the Sanguir a blurry dot behind us that I slowed enough to catch my breath.
With a curse, I realized we’d been running in the opposite direction of Lake Mirae, and there was still a steep cliff wall separating us from the outer perimeter.
“We’ll have to climb.” The cliff edge rose at least fifty feet above us.
We had at least a few minutes before the Sanguir caught up.
“Shouldn’t we just follow the shore until we reach a break in the cliff?”