be extremely high right now. Each time she was exposed to it, it would take even more to affect her the next time. But she did not want to experience a next time.
She captured the last big dreamsnake and put it in her bag, tied the cloth shut with one strip of material, and tied the whole thing to her belt with the other, leaving a long tether.
Snake could see only one way to escape. Well, there
Something tickled her bare foot. She looked down and saw the eggling dreamsnake gliding away. She bent down and picked it up, gently so as not to startle it. The horny tissue had fallen away, and the scales beneath were pale pink all around its mouth. In time they would turn scarlet. The tiny serpent tasted the air with its three-pronged tongue, butted its nose against her palm, and flowed around her thumb. She slipped it into the breast pocket of her torn shirt, where she could feel it moving only a layer of material away. It was young enough to tame. The warmth of her body lulled it.
Snake braced herself in the narrow space. Leaning back, she pressed her shoulders and her spine against the rock. The wound had not yet begun to hurt again, but she did not know how much stress she could stand. She set herself not to feel the injury, but exhaustion and hunger made concentration difficult. Snake put her right foot against the opposite wall and pushed, bracing herself. Carefully, she placed her other foot on the wall and hung suspended between the two faces of the crevasse. She pushed with both feet, sliding her shoulders upward, pushing back and down with her hands. She slipped her feet a little higher and pushed again, creeping upward.
A pebble came free beneath her foot and she slid, falling sideways. She scratched at the wall, scrabbling to keep herself in position. Rock tore at her elbows and back. She slammed down, landing hard and badly. Struggling for breath, Snake tried to rise and then lay still. Down and up reversed and shimmered. When they finally steadied, she drew in a long breath and pushed herself to her feet again. Her bad knee trembled slightly with the strain.
She had not, at least, fallen on the dreamsnakes. She put her hand to her pocket and felt the little one moving easily.
Gritting her teeth, Snake leaned back against the wall. She pushed herself upward again, moving more carefully, feeling for broken stone before she put any pressure on a new spot. Rock scraped her back and her hands grew slippery with sweat. She kept herself going; she imagined being able to look over the edge of her prison and she imagined hard ground and horizons.
She heard a noise and froze.
It’s nothing, she thought. One piece of stone hitting another. Volcanic rock always sounds alive when it clashes against itself.
The muscles in her thighs trembled with strain. Her eyes stung and her vision sparkled with sweat.
The sound came again. It was no clattering rock but two voices, and one of them was North’s.
Nearly sobbing with frustration, Snake slid back into the crevasse. Going down was just as hard, and it seemed to take an interminable length of time before she was far enough to jump the rest of the way. Her back and her hands and feet scraped against stone. The noise was so loud in the enclosed space that she was sure North would hear it. As a rock clattered down the side of the crevasse, Snake flung herself to the ground, curling her body around the sack of dreamsnakes. She froze there, by sheer will concealing the tremors of fatigue. Needing desperately to pant for breath, she forced herself to breath slowly, as if she were still asleep. She kept her eyes nearly closed, but she saw the shadow that fell over her.
“Healer!”
Snake did not move.
“Healer, wake up!”
She heard the scuff of a boot against stones. A shower of rock fragments rained down on her.
“She’s still sleeping, North,” Snake’s crazy said. “Like everybody else, everybody but you and me. Let’s go to sleep, North. Please let me sleep.”
“Shut up. There isn’t any venom left. The serpents are exhausted.”
“They could give just one more bite. Or let me go down and get another, North. A nice big one. Then I can make sure the healer’s really sleeping.”
“What do I care if she’s really sleeping or not?”
“You can’t trust her, North. She’s sneaky. She tricked me into bringing her to you…”
The crazy’s voice faded away with his and North’s footsteps. As far as Snake could hear, North did not bother to reply again.
As they left, Snake moved only enough to put her hand over the pocket of her shirt. The eggling was, somehow, still all right; she could feel it moving slowly and calmly beneath her fingers. She began to believe that if she ever got out of the crevasse alive, the tiny dreamsnake would too. Or perhaps she had the order reversed. Her hand was shaking; she drew it away so it would not frighten her serpent. Turning slowly over on her back, she looked at the sky. The top of the crevasse seemed an immense distance from her, as if each time she had tried to scale the walls they had risen higher. A hot tear trickled from the corner of her eye back into her hair.
Snake sat up all at once. Getting to her feet was slower and clumsier, but finally she stood in the narrow space between the walls and stared straight ahead at the face of the rock. The scraped places on her back rubbed against the stone, and the wound in her shoulder was perilously close to tearing open. Without looking upward, Snake put one foot against the wall, braced herself, wedged herself in with her other foot, and started up again.
As she crept higher and higher, she could feel the cloth of her shirt shredding beneath her shoulders. The knotted headcloth rose from the ground and scraped up the wall beneath her. It started to swing; it was just heavy enough to disturb her balance. She stopped, suspended like a bridge from nowhere leading nowhere, until the pendulum below shortened its oscillation. The tension in her leg muscles increased until she could hardly feel the rock against her feet. She did not know how near the top she was and she would not look.
She was higher than she had got before; here the walls of the crevasse gaped wider and it was harder for her to brace herself. With every tiny step she took up the wall she had to stretch her legs a little farther. Now she was held only by her shoulders, by her hands pushing hard against the rock, and by the balls of her feet. She could not keep going much longer. Beneath her right hand, the stone was wet with blood. She forced herself upward one last time. Abruptly the back of her head slipped over the rim of the crevasse and she could see the ground and the hills and the sky. The sharp change nearly destroyed her balance. She flailed out with her left arm, catching the edge of the crevasse with her elbow and then with her hand. Her body spun around and she snatched at the ground with her right hand. The wound in her shoulder stabbed her from spine to fingertips. Her nails dug into the ground, slipped, held. She scrabbled for a toehold and somehow found one. She hung against the wall for a moment, gasping for breath and feeling the bruises over her hipbones where she had slammed into the stone. Just above her breast, in her pocket, squeezed but not quite crushed, the eggling dreamsnake squirmed unhappily.
With the last bit of strength in her arms, Snake heaved herself over the edge and lay panting on the horizontal surface, her feet and legs still dangling. She crawled the rest of the way out. The torn headcloth scraped over stone, the fabric stretching and fraying. Snake pulled it gently until the makeshift sack lay beside her. Only then, with one hand on the serpents and the other almost caressing the solid ground, could Snake look around and be sure that she had climbed out unobserved. For the moment, at least, she was free.
She unbuttoned her pocket and looked at the eggling, hardly believing that it was unharmed. Rebuttoning her pocket, she took one of the baskets from the pile beside the crevasse and put the mature serpents in it. She slung it across her back, rose shakily to her feet, and started toward the tunnels circling the crater.
But the tunnels surrounded her like infinite reflections, and she could not remember which one had let her in. It was opposite the single large refrigeration duct, but the crater was so large that any one of three exits might have been the one she wanted.
Maybe it’s better, Snake thought. Maybe they always go in through the same one and I’ll get another that’s deserted.
Or maybe no matter which one I take I’ll meet someone, or maybe all the others lead to dead ends.
At random, Snake entered the left-hand tunnel. Inside it looked different, but that was because the frost had melted. This tunnel, too, held torches, so North’s people must use it for something. But most of them had burned to stubs, and Snake crept through darkness from one vague, flickering point to another, trailing her hand against the wall so she could return if this did not lead her outside. Each new light had to be the tunnel’s mouth, but each time she found another fading torch. The corridor stretched onward. However harried she had been before, however exhausted she was now, she knew the first tunnel had not been this long.
One more light, she thought. And then — ?
The sooty smoke drifted around her, not even revealing an air current to show her the way. She stopped at the torch and turned around. Only blackness lay behind her. The other flames had gone out, or she had rounded a curve that blotted them from her view. She could not bring herself to backtrack.
She walked through a great deal of darkness before she saw the next light. She wanted it to be daylight, made bargains and bets with herself that it would be daylight, but knew it was merely another torch before she reached it. It had nearly died; it flickered to an ember. She could smell the acrid smoke of an ebbing flame.
Snake wondered if she were being herded to another crevasse, one lying in wait in the dark. From then on she walked more carefully, sliding one foot forward without shifting her weight until she was sure of solid ground.
When the next torch appeared she hardly noticed it. It did not cast enough light to help her make her way. The basket grew heavier and a reaction to all that had happened set in. Her knee ached fiercely and her shoulder hurt so much that she had to slide her hand beneath her belt and hug her arm in close against her body. As she scuffed along the untrustworthy path, she did not think she could have lifted her feet higher even if caution had allowed it.
Suddenly she was standing on a hillside in daylight beneath the strange twisted trees. She looked around blankly, then stretched out her left hand and stroked rough tree bark. She touched a fragile leaf with an abraded, broken-nailed fingertip.
Snake wanted to sit down, laugh, rest, sleep. Instead, she turned right and followed the hillside around, hoping the long tunnel had not led her half the hill or half the dome away from North’s camp. She wished North or the crazy had said something about where they had put Melissa.
The trees ended abruptly. Snake almost walked into the clearing before she stopped herself and pulled back into the shadows. Thick low round-leafed bushes carpeted the meadow with a solid layer of scarlet vegetation. On the natural mattress lay all the people she had seen with North, and more. They were all asleep, dreaming, Snake supposed. Most lay face up with their heads thrown back, their throats exposed, revealing puncture wounds and thin trickles of blood among many sets of scars. Snake looked from person to person, recognizing no one, until her search reached the other side of the clearing. There, touched by the shade of an alien tree, the crazy lay sleeping. His position differed from that of everyone else: he was face down, stripped to the waist, and he had stretched out his arms before him as if in supplication. His legs and feet were bare. As Snake skirted the clearing, moving closer to the crazy, she saw the many fang marks on his inner arms and behind his knees. So North had found an unexhausted serpent, and the crazy had finally got what he wanted.
But North was not in the clearing, and Melissa was not there either.
A well-used trail led back into the forest. Snake followed it cautiously, ready to slip between the trees at any warning. But nothing happened. She could even hear the rustling of small animals or birds or indescribably alien beasts as she padded barefoot over the hard ground.
