At least that much of the note was crystal clear: The 'coaster' had to be the roller coaster.
When the towering ruins gave way to flatter ground, Tally opened up the hoverboard.
Reaching the roller coaster, she took the entire circuit at full speed. Maybe 'straight past the gap' was the only important part of the clue, but Tally had decided to treat the note like a magic spell. Leaving out any part might make the whole thing meaningless.
And it felt good to ride fast and hard again, leaving the ghosts of the Rusty Ruins behind.
As she whipped around tight turns and down steep descents, the world whirling around her, Tally felt like something caught in the wind, not knowing which direction the journey would ultimately take her.
A few seconds before she took the jump across the gap, the metal-detector lights winked out. The board dropped away, and her stomach seemed to go with it, leaving a hollow feeling inside. Her suspicion had proved right-at top speed, there hadn't been much warning.
Tally flew through the air in the silent darkness, the rush of her passage the only sound.
She remembered her first time across the gap, how angry she'd been. A few days later it had turned into a joke between them, typical ugly stuff. But now Shay had done it again, disappearing like the track below, leaving Tally in free fall.
A count of five later, the lights flickered on, and the crash bracelets steadied her as the board reactivated, rising smoothly up under her feet with reassuring solidness. At the bottom of the hill the track turned, climbing into a steep corkscrew of turns. But Tally slowed and kept going ahead, murmuring, 'straight past the gap.'
The ruins continued under her feet. Out here they were almost completely submerged, only a few shapeless masses rising through the grasp of vegetation. But the Rusties had built solidly, in love with their wasteful skeletons of metal. The lights on the front of her board stayed bright.
'Until you find one that's long and flat,' Tally said to herself. She had memorized the note backward and forward, but repeating the words hadn't made their meaning any clearer.
'One what?' was the question. A roller coaster? A gap? The first would be silly. Where would be the point of a long, flat roller coaster? A long, flat gap? Maybe that would describe a canyon, complete with a handy river at the bottom. But how could a canyon be flat?
Maybe 'one' meant a one, like the number. Should she be looking for something that looked like a one?
But a one was just a straight line, anyway, kind of long and flat already. So was I, the Roman numeral for one, except for the crossbars on top and bottom. Or the dot on the top if it was a small i.
'Thanks for the great clue, Shay,' Tally said aloud. Talking to herself didn't seem like such a bad idea there in the outer ruins, where the relics of the Rusties struggled against the grip of creeping plants.
Anything was better than ghostly silence. She passed concrete plains, vast expanses cracked by thrusting grasses. The windows of fallen walls stared up at her, sprouting weeds as if the earth had grown eyes.
She scanned the horizon, looking for clues. There was nothing long and flat that she could see. Peering down at the ground passing below, Tally could hardly make out anything in the weed-choked darkness.
She might zoom right past whatever the clue referred to and not even know it, and have to retrace her path in daylight. But how would she know when she'd gone too far? 'Thanks, Shay,' she repeated.
Then she spotted something on the ground, and stopped.
Through the shroud of weeds and rubble, geometrical shapes had appeared-a series of rectangles in a line. She lowered the board and saw that below her was a track with metal rails and wooden crossbars-like the roller coaster, but much bigger. And it went in a straight line, as far as she could see.
'Take the coaster straight past the gap, until you find one that's long and flat.'
This thing was a roller coaster, but long and flat.
'But what's it for?' she wondered aloud. What fun was a roller coaster without any turns or climbs?
She shrugged. However the Rusties got their kicks, this was perfect for a hoverboard. The track stretched off in two directions, but it was easy enough to tell which one to take. One led back the way she'd come, toward the center of the ruins. The other headed outward, northward and angling toward the sea.
'Cold is the sea,' she quoted from the next line of Shay's note, and wondered how far north she was going.
Tally brought the hoverboard up to speed, pleased that she'd found the answer. If all of Shay's little riddles were this easy to solve, this whole trip was going to a breeze.
She made good time that night.
The track zoomed along beneath her, tracing slow arcs around hills, crossing rivers on crumbling bridges, always headed toward the sea. Twice it took her through other Rusty ruins, smaller towns further along in their disintegration. Only a few twisted shapes of metal remained, rising above the trees like skeletal fingers grasping at the air. Burned-out groundcars were everywhere, choking the streets out of town, twisted together in the collisions of the Rusties' last panic.
Near the center of one ruined town, she discovered what the long, flat roller coaster was all about. In a nest of tracks tangled up like a huge circuit board, she found a few rotting roller-coaster cars, huge rolling containers full of Rusty stuff, unidentifiable piles of rust and plastic.
Tally remembered now that Rusty cities weren't self-sufficient, and were always trading with one another, when they weren't fighting over who had more stuff. They must have used the flat roller coaster to move trade from town to town.
As the sky began to grow light, Tally heard the sound of the sea in the distance, a faint roar coming from across the horizon. She could smell salt in the air, which brought back memories of going to the ocean with Ellie and Sol as a littlie.
'Cold is the sea and watch for breaks,' Shay's note read. Soon, Tally would be able to see the waves breaking on the shore. Maybe she was close to the next clue.
Tally wondered how much time she'd made up with her new hoverboard. She increased its speed, wrapping her dorm jacket around herself in the predawn chill. The track was slowly climbing now, cutting through formations of chalky rock. She remembered white cliffs towering over the ocean, swarming with seabirds nesting in high caves.
Those camping trips with Sol and Ellie felt as if they'd happened a hundred years ago. She wondered if there was some operation that could make her back into a littlie again, forever.
Suddenly, a gap opened up in front of Tally, spanned by a crumbling bridge. An instant later she saw that the bridge didn't make it all the way across, and there was no river full of metal deposits beneath it to catch her. Just a precipitous drop to the sea.
Tally spun her board sideways into a skid. Her knees bent under the force of braking, her grippy shoes squealing as they slipped across the riding surface, her body turning almost parallel to the ground.
But the ground was gone.
A deep chasm opened up under her, a fissure cut into the cliffs by the sea. Boiling waves crashed into the narrow channel, their whitecaps glowing in the darkness, their hungry roars reaching her ears. The board's metal- detector lights flickered out one by one as Tally left the splintered end of the iron bridge behind.
She felt the board lose purchase, slipping downward.
A thought flashed through her mind: If she jumped now, she could make a grab for the end of the broken bridge. But then the hoverboard would tumble into the chasm behind her, leaving her stranded.
The board finally halted in its slide out into midair, but Tally was still descending. The last fingers of the crumbling bridge were above her now, out of reach. The board inched downward, metal-detector lights flickering off one by one as the magnets lost their grip.
She was too heavy. Tally slipped off the knapsack, ready to hurl it down. But how could she survive without it? Her only choice would be to return to the city for more supplies, which would lose two more days. A cold wind off the ocean blew up the chasm, goose-pimpling her arms like the chill of death.
But the breeze buoyed the hoverboard, and for a moment she neither rose nor fell. Then the board started to slip downward again….
Tally thrust her hands into the pockets of her jacket and spread her arms, making a sail to catch the wind. A stronger gust struck, lifting her slightly, taking some weight off the board, and one of the metal-detector lights flickered stronger.
