Page 100 of Moon Chosen

“Let’s hold here,” Sheena said after they’d made it safely past the stone hulks. “We should pass the Triangle as a group.”

“Some of the Triangle has shifted again,” Crystal explained as they paused the boat. “Sheena will guide us through it. The others should follow pretty close.”

“Okay. No problem.” Nik hoped he sounded nonchalant, even though he couldn’t stop wiping his sweating palms on his pants and rolling his shoulders, trying to work some of the tension out of them before they had to continue.

“The run-offs make my skin crawl, too,” Crystal said.

“They’re a pain in the ass, and the prime reason the damn river changes so much,” Sheena said.

“I thought nothing about the Killum ever rattled you river types,” Nik said.

“Are you kidding? They rattle me!” Crystal said. “They’re unnatural.”

Sheena laughed. “They’re just water that’s found a strange way to escape.”

“You know what they remind me of?” Crystal asked Nik, though she didn’t wait for his answer. “It’s like the bridges pierced the skin of the earth, causing it to bleed from underneath the floor of the river. The run-offs are the earth’s cut veins, shooting currents of water and dirt and sweepers and bodies,” Crystal paused to shudder with disgust, “into the land.”

“I can’t say I disagree with you.” Nik’s gaze found the frothing water that marked the foundation of the next bridge. Even from this distance, he could see the whitecaps spouting off of the river and cutting a swatch of turbulent, flotsam-filled water shooting inland. “I’ve never seen anything like the run-offs in any other part of the river.”

“They’re just here, at what’s left of Port City’s bridges. I talked with one of the Elders a little over five winters ago when I really got interested in understanding the river. He said the theory is that the run-offs were created during the last of the major earthquakes. He didn’t have a theory for why they’re only here, and only near the bridges,” Sheena said. Then she shrugged. “I see them as just one more problem that needs to be handled when we’re scouting the river.”

Crystal sent her mate a lingering smile. “It’s Sheena who’s brave about everything.”

“Just because you’re beside me,” Sheena said.

Nik looked away while they kissed sweetly and intimately, giving them some small measure of privacy, and wondering what it would be like to be mated to someone who believed he was brave about everything.

“All caught up and ready to take on the Triangle!” Wilkes called as he led the rest of the group to join them.

“It’s shifted some, probably during that last big storm,” Sheena said.

“But Sheena knows how to get us through. Stay right behind us and you’ll be fine,” Crystal said. “Okay, Nik, give us some manpower!”

“Will do!” Nik bent to the task of paddling, keeping his focus on Sheena and the directions she called out to him. Nik respected and appreciated the confidence with which both women navigated the river, even if he did wish vehemently that he were elsewhere.

They approached the Triangle with practiced care. There was little left of the original bridge that was visible, but much that waited, just below the surface. It had been named Triangle for the shape of the huge steel fragments that littered the river. Deadly and sharp, they shifted and drifted, as if the shattered bridge was sentient, and it stalked those who dared to pass over its watery den.

“It’s going to look like we’re getting too close to the run-off,” Sheena shouted over the sound of rushing water. “But we’re just going to head toward it so we can get around a big piece of metal there, to the left of us. When I sayNow,Nik will break and turn us—fast—toward the center of the river. But put your backs into your paddles. Don’t want that run-off to snag any of you.”

Nik swallowed hard, feeling sick to his stomach.

“Now, Nik!” Sheena yelled. Nik did exactly as she commanded, and they shot past the sharp edge of the rusted metal as well as the frothing run-off.

“Well done, Sheena!” Wilkes said after they were all free of the Triangle’s territory. “Take us through the rest of them.”

“Will do!” Sheena shouted back.

“That’s my girl!” Crystal smiled and, half asleep still, Captain’s tail thumped, brushing the surface of the water and waking him fully so that, with a start that almost sent him over the side, he tucked his tail up under him, causing the two women to laugh and tease the big Shepherd about being scared of a little water.

Nik didn’t say anything. He only wiped his palms again and silently agreed with the canine. If he had a tail he’d be keeping it tucked up and away from the seething river, too.

The next bridge had broken apart in huge steel plates the color of old blood. The only ones that had not sunk to the bottom of the river were the two that had been caught on the hull of a ship, capsized against what was left of an enormous stone column. As they glided past, Nik thought he’d be eternally grateful that those who’d come before him had long since scavenged anything of use from the rusted corpses of all the ships in the Port City waterway.

They were entering what was considered the heart of the ruined city and as Sheena had him slow the pace so that the others could keep up with them more easily, Nik’s gaze roamed over what was left of Port City.

A thick, living blanket of green covered everything. Storytellers still told tales about the ancients and their cities of glass and concrete and metal. It was known that Port City had been different—or at least different enough for the ancients to note. It was an accepted fact that those who built the city, and the people who had lived there, had at least some measure of appreciation for the forest, so that they included in their world of metal and glass and concrete trees and green space within the city itself. The Elders even agreed that the first Tribe members had, indeed, come from Port City, fleeing into the forests because they believed the trees could succor them.

Nik studied the city. Once in a while he caught a flash of sunlight on something that could be glass or metal, but mostly all that was left of Port City was great mounds of rubble that had been shrouded by plant life. Nik shivered again. The verdant vines and overgrown ferns, brambles, and trees were like sweepers in the river. Beneath them held countless ways to die, and not simply from the ruins under the plants and the mutated beings who chose to live there. In the city, the plants themselves were changed. Much like the treacherous run-offs, they were deadly and unnatural.