I shifted my weight forward and backward, forward and backward, to get the cage swinging, and I reached behind me. My neck burned and my shoulder screamed with pain, but I didn’t cry out or let the voices distract me. At the apex of my backward swing, I snatched the hand vise with the tips of my fingers. Carefully, I brought the vise around the front of the cage and grabbed it more securely with my other hand. I set the vise over the two bars on the front and turned the handle, tightening, tightening. The bars were about as wide around as my pinky. The tighter the vise got, the harder the handle was to turn. I was sweating, pushing, and pulling. The bars creaked and bent. I felt giddy.
Then I pushed the handle too hard, or at too odd an angle because the grip slipped, and the momentum of pushing the handle sent the vise flipping through the air, end over end. It caromed loudly off a metal shelf and hit a large, crystal punch bowl, which shattered with a startling crash.
There was stomping from the floor above. My stomach seized. The basement door opened, and the otalith tramped down the stairs, cursing. When she saw the vise and shattered bowl, she shouted, “I warned you!” Then she snatched a lance from one of the loot piles and charged toward me, teeth bared, eyes raging.
I twisted and shook in my cage, and it hopped around on the chain. I screamed for help.
The otalith jabbed the lance between the bars, cutting my shoulder, and she let out a maniacal laugh. I screamed again, and she cut me again, this time in the thigh. She faked another thrust, laughed at my flinch, tossed the lance aside, and went to the winch. She raised me to the ceiling, climbed the stairs, and turned off the lights, leaving me in the dark.
Blood poured from the wound in my shoulder. My sleeve and coat were sodden with it. I vacantly wondered when Craig would heal me. Despair and despondency were creeping in when I felt something hot touching my waist and noticed a yellow glow showing through the fabric of my coat pocket, also soaked in my blood. I reached in and grabbed the Rekulak Coin, which was glowing in the dark with rekulak bile. It burned my hand, and I instinctively dropped it. And I winced, expecting a clang that would attract the otalith again, but instead, the coin landed on the floor with a wet plop.
The bile on it increased, piling over itself like lava, only moving much faster, and making dry, sloughing noises. In seconds, the pile had grown three feet high. In under a minute, it was the size and shape of a human. Then the glow dimmed and extinguished. I heard steady breathing. “Hello?” I whispered. The human shape, a shadow, shrank as it walked away and up the stairs with soft footsteps. “Hey,” I whispered louder. “Come back.”
The lights turned on, and a naked woman descended the stairs. She was short and old, with wrinkled, loose, tawny skin, long white hair, and a broad, flat face. Her eyes were pale blue, striking. She picked up the vise from the punch-bowl wreckage, walked over to my cage, and raised it over her head, exposing the hair under her arms.
“Thank you,” I said, reaching down and grabbing the vise. I was confused and in awe. This was the First Sojourner if the scrapbook was to be believed. Was she a facsimile or the real thing? How had she been resurrected? By my blood? Just add blood? She seemed to want to help.
After handing off the vise, she walked behind me without saying a word. As I reapplied the vise to the bars, I heard her rummaging around. She made a satisfied grunt, then came back carrying bolt cutters longer than half her height. I almost dropped the vise again in my excitement, and I had to stifle a cry of celebration.
She went to the winch, and I cringed with every click as she lowered my cage to the floor. Her crotch was at my eye-level when she came back. I looked away as she readied the bolt cutters. I heard grunting from her, followed by a soft, satisfying snap from the lock. It was cut. I removed it and crawled/rolled out of the cage. I stood, then immediately sat. My legs were numb. But I could straighten them. The relief!
The First Sojourner didn’t give me much time to recover, nor did I want it. She helped me to my feet, and I offered her my coat. She shook her head, pushed it away. I grabbed the lance the otalith had used on me, and the First Sojourner and I tiptoed up the stairs, me in the rear.
She inched open the door. The hall was dark, except for fluttering and trembling blue-tinted light coming from an open doorway ten feet to my left. A TV was playing, sounded like football analysts analyzing football. I heard raucous snoring over the TV—a good sign.
The First Sojourner led me the other way, past two other rooms, to the back door. She unlocked it gently, and we slipped out into the night. The air had changed. It was warm. There was a breeze. A storm was coming. I felt wonderful. But I knew I had to go back inside to check those other rooms for a typewriter. I needed to free Kaliah from Brad, and I needed to know for certain, for maybe the first time in my life, if my mother had my best interests at heart. And now, while the otalith was snoring away, was my best opportunity.
The First Sojourner stepped into the snow with bare feet.
“Aren’t you cold?” I said.
“Wonderfully so,” she said, eyes sparkling at the cloudy
