“It’s too late,” I cry. “We’ll never get out of here now.”
His voice has all the passion and determination that I have lost. “It isn’t too late. We’ll walk upstream in the direction we saw the light. Ro and I entered the complex at a pool that had four streams flowing out of it. This has to be one of those streams. We’ll tie ourselves together with the rope and I’ll lead. You and Cook carry your mother. Your sisters will each take a baby.”
His plan makes sense, and his firm tone steadies me. I sniffle, sucking up my tears as a pinch of hope lightens my heavy heart.
He whispers in my ear as intimately as if we were alone. “Instead of telling ourselves what we can’t do, we have to believe in what we can do. Let’s go.”
He unwinds the rope and loops us together into a shuffling centipede with ten legs, everything done by feel. To my amazement Amaya volunteers to go last.
“I’ll scratch and bite anything that tries to eat us from behind,” she hisses, poking me in the side with a finger. We all laugh nervously.
Kalliarkos takes the lead, followed by Maraya holding our baby sister. Cook and I make a basket with our arms to carry Mother. We stick close to the water and creep forward with slow sweeps. Small stones and uneven bits of material crunch and slide under our feet. Mother weighs like an unwieldy sack of lead. Amaya sticks so close behind that she notices when Cook or I shift at all and is there to steady us.
Kalliarkos and Maraya give warnings over their shoulders: “There’s a dip in the ground.” “Careful, to your right, something hard and round that rolls.”
Suddenly Kalliarkos grunts in pain.
“Hold on, I just kicked a big rock.” The scrape of a heavy object on stone shudders through the darkness, then he mutters a curse. “There’s rubble we have to climb over.”
We untie Maraya and give her both babies. She waits alone in the dark so we can shift Mother by feel up a rugged ridge of what feels like collapsed stone columns and down the other side. It’s exhausting, and if we didn’t have all four of us working together we couldn’t manage it. But we do, and when we get down on the other side Cook and I sit with Mother’s limp body braced between us as Kalliarkos goes back over the rubble to fetch Maraya.
“Do you want me to take a turn carrying Mother?” Amaya asks, squeezing my hand. “I know I’m not as strong but I can manage for a little distance.”
“No, it’s all right, Amiable, I’d rather you take rear guard since you’re not afraid of the monsters and I am.” The truth is I don’t want to hold our brother, but I can’t tell her that.
“That’s because I’m too sweet, and they’ll just spit me out. I’m not really afraid of the dark, you know. The only times I ever said I was, it was just to get my way.”
Maraya’s voice floats down from above. “We already knew that, Amiable. Father was the only one you ever fooled.”
“I don’t want to talk about him!” she snaps.
“We should go on, if you can,” says Kalliarkos.
I feel him press in beside me. His hand taps my arm in a secret signal, and I tug on his sleeve in answer. I swear to the gods that I can hear him smile. His cheek brushes mine. I press a kiss randomly that touches the corner of his mouth. Then we set back to work tying us all into a line again so we can go on.
Each slow step along a cracked and uneven floor we never see is a victory as long as Mother still breathes. Her weight on my arms, the way my shoulders feel like they are pulling out of their sockets, all is a triumph as long as she still breathes.
By degrees a pallid glow begins to rise like mist off the ground. A hazy silver light clouds the air ahead of us, and we climb stiffly over a second mountain of rubble to see an oval pool gleaming below. The water shimmers like silk. Down we stagger. When we reach the rim of the pool Cook and I have to rest, so we set Mother down as Kalliarkos explores farther along the shoreline.
Her eyes are open, and with what seems her last strength she reaches until her hand meets the liquid. Lustrous mist twines up her arm until it paints her face with an eerie luminosity.
I hold my breath, not sure what will happen next.
With unlooked-for strength she sits up, seeking her children.
“Maraya. Jessamy. Amaya.” She beckons us closer and we each touch a hand to our heart in the Efean way as we kneel so she can touch our foreheads one after the next. “Where is Bettany?”
“We’ll find her and bring her back, Mother,” I say.
She nods regally, accepting my promise, and lays her left hand on the boy’s head and her right on the girl’s. “This fine boy will be Wenru. This fine girl will be Safarenwe. Let it be as I say, for it is my responsibility to name them. I birthed their flesh into this world to be a vessel for the five souls the land who is Mother of All gives to them.”