“We should move. Now,” Candy said.
“Good plan,” said Zephario.
Pigs were jumping and scrambling under them and scrambling to free themselves of two stitchlings’ grips. The chaos was good news. It distracted the stitchlings long enough for Candy and Zephario to reach the door. Their luck, however, quickly ran out. At the last minute, Shaveos flung his claw about wildly and accidentally entangled itself in Candy’s hair. The stitchling turned to see what it had snagged. Its face went slack.
“Uman Been!” the stitchling said.
He turned Candy toward him, and she was treated to her first close-up view of a stitchling’s face. It was a mixture of genius and crudity: the stitches were large and uneven, but there was an uncanny realism in the way it moved. This was no simple brute. The Todo mud that gleamed in his eyeholes, forming his shiny-wet eyes, had intelligence in it.
“I knows yous,” Shaveos said. “Chickumtomb girl! Candy Quackenbush!”
It said her name with remarkable clarity. But the words had barely escaped his lips when Candy felt a wave of force, like a narrow wind, rush past her. The air ignited all around her, just for a second, then the ring of light and power passed her by, closing like an iris as it did so. It struck both stitchlings in their chests. They loosed a shock of rage and pain. Shaveos’s claw went limp, freeing Candy’s hair from its grip.
She instantly turned to look for Zephario.
“Are you all right?” she asked him.
He was reaching into the interior of his jacket, mumbling to himself as he did so.
“Can I help?” she said, reaching toward him.
Though her fingers didn’t touch him, she sensed how close they were, and retreated from him with guilty haste.
“That power surge,” she said. “It was you.”
Behind her, Shaveos bellowed:
“Oh, great,” Candy groaned.
And so saying, he stood, picking up his machete as he did so, and ran for Candy, swinging his machete in the air.
She saw the machete coming, and tried to throw herself out of its path through the door into the next hold. But the thresholds of the doors between the holds were abnormally high, and she stumbled. She might well have cracked her shinbones had she not reached out and caught hold of the door frame. Shaveos swung at her again, and this time she might have perished had he not lost hold of his dinner. At that moment, a pig a charged into him, knocking him over, and taking Candy with him in the process.
Candy was shoved aside by the stitchling’s bulk. She lost her grip of the door frame and fell back among the pigs. There were several seconds when all Candy could see was a blur of wet snouts and curly pink tails, then she sat up, in time to see Lummuk stagger away from Shaveos, whose machete was buried deep in Lummuk’s head: so deep that the blade was entirely hidden for several inches of its length before its painted end could even be seen.
Shaveos reached out and caught hold of the machete’s handle as his companion toppled backward. This had two consequences. One, it stopped Lummuk from falling backward; indeed it pulled him back into an upright position, where he teetered for several seconds, while Shaveos twisted the machete this way and that, attempting to free it.
Candy was watching Shaveos’s face when he finally worked the blade loose. She saw his expression shift from frustration to pleasure—there! The blade was coming free!—only to decay seconds later into puzzlement, more than puzzlement. Fear. And Candy knew why.
It was only common sense.
She saw Shaveos try to push his machete back into the hole he’d just unstopped, like a man with a fat cork trying to fit it back into the narrow opening of a bottle from which a djinni was escaping. It was a lost cause. Still he pushed, and as he did so the mud from Lummuk’s head leaped at him. So fast. So horribly fast! Tentacles, black as the stitchling’s eyes had been, but shot through with smears of vivid color that had surely never been in gray-brown muck mined on Gorgossium. Shaveos knew he was in trouble. He let go of the machete and instead used his free hand to stem the flow of mud.
“Lummuk! Shaveos ams sorry! Accident! Oopsies! Lummuk! She ams to blame! The—” He drew breath and yelled: “CANDY QUACKENBUSH!”
The mud that had once been Lummuk didn’t care about his explanations. It continued to crawl up Shaveos’s arm, leaping over his fingers, and then—just as Shaveos drew breath to yell Candy’s name one more time, Lummuk oozed into his open mouth.
Candy shook herself out of her trance of curiosity and turned to Zephario.
“We should get—” she started to say.
But the blind man had already gone.
Chapter 64
No Plan B
“WHY HAVEN’T WE FALLEN out of the sky?” Gazza said.
“Maybe because we haven’t stopped moving?” Malingo suggested, though there was precious little conviction in his reply. “How far have we come?”
Gazza looked back over his shoulder. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“We’re a lot farther from Scoriae than I thought we were.”
Malingo got to his feet and turned around to look back through the glyph’s semitranslucent walls. It was a beguiling, rapturous spectacle, with layer upon layer of figures, their colors shimmering toward the stern of the glyph. There were people in all directions, some assembled in groups, many solitary. But he resisted the temptation to study them too closely. He needed to focus his attention on the northern coastline of Scoriae.
Gazza had been right. They were indeed a lot farther from Scoriae than he thought they’d be. If he squinted, he could just see the area of flat ground where the internment compound had been located, and beyond it, Mount Galigali, which was no longer the inert rock it had been for as long as any of these people could remember. A gaping hole had been torn open in its flank, and liquid magma blazed from the wound, hawking up phlegm-fire to spit at the sky.
“Galigali’s gonna go bang,” Malingo said.
“Hasn’t it already?”
“I think it’s got more destruction in it than the few fireworks we’ve seen so far.”
“Really? Funny, I feel like Galigali right now. I’m going to go bang. But a good bang. No . . . a
“Oh? What’s brought this on?”
“Not what, Malingo,
“Oh,
“But each time, a different blue.”
“A different brown.”
“Lordy Lou,” Gaz said.
Malingo’s smile withdrew, only lingering in his eyes.
“I didn’t realize. I’m sorry,” Gaz said.
“What’s to be sorry for?” Malingo asked.
“You don’t look very happy now. I didn’t realize—”
“We geshrats seem to always want more than fate has given us.”
