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And gave us a chance.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Ray, who was staring at me.
“Wait—you did that?”
“These things seem to respond to thoughts.”
“S
ince when?”
“Since always?”
He scrunched up his face, then looked around. “Doesn’t work for me.”
“But it does for me, and we need to go.”
“Not out there,” he argued, checking out the wildly slinging weapons’ fire. “We could get hit as easy as them.”
“Then what’s your plan?”
He thought for a second. “You can control this thing?”
I nodded.
“Then send it back where it came from—after we get off.”
“Get off? But—”
“Trust me. Just do it! Do it now!”
I didn’t understand the urgency in his tone until I looked up. And noticed that all of the remaining vessels were charging back in, weapons blazing. A consensus had obviously been reached to sacrifice the rogue ship, despite the fact that some of their compatriots were still on it.
Which was a better distraction than anything I’d been able to come up with, I thought, as the cave lit up.
Ray threw me over his shoulder, and as soon as we cleared the ship, I sent the little vessel zipping back across the cavern. That led to mass confusion, as several of the fey crafts continued with the attack, while the rest broke off and tried to follow our speeding bullet. Ray didn’t hesitate; he started climbing up the rocks beside the falls, while I hung over his back and tried to keep the chaos going.
It was getting harder. I managed to cause another vessel’s weapons to fire briefly, which set a second on fire. I also caused the lead vessel fleeing after ours to stutter and falter for a moment, and almost get run into by another. But then I lost the connection, and it tore away into the darkness.
And when I tried a new command, all that happened was that I felt dizzy and unwell.
I didn’t think we’d be getting any more help. But then, perhaps we didn’t need it. Ray had indeed found a backdoor: a tiny crevasse in the rock that we could barely fit through, with the dark, wet stone close on both sides. At one point, he had to put me down, turn sideways, and drag me through an especially narrow area, but I didn’t mind.
Particularly when I saw what was on the other side.
“What is it?” I asked, hearing the awe in my voice.
He stared upwards. “I think . . . it’s a river.”
“It can’t be a river. There’s nothing holding it up.”
Ray didn’t answer that time. He just started climbing, taking us higher and higher and closer and closer. The not-a-river continued to sparkle like a vein of pure emerald, cutting across the ceiling of the cavern like another huge piece of stained glass. Only this glass moved.
Sunlight speared down through it as it shifted, dappling our faces as well as the rest of the cave we approached, until we came close enough that I could have reached out and touched it.
I looked at Ray, who had put me down on a protruding rock for a moment so that he could rest. He either read my mind or saw the wish on my face. He shrugged.
“Might as well. We gotta get out of here somehow.”
