Scorched Earth
One will find a love that shakes
the earth itself.
Super-duper book blurb here.
Chapter 1
He was used to the weightlessness by now, but
even 800 years couldn’t dull his body’s scream for the touch of earth. Trapped
in a cave but cocooned in a cell of air, he could never touch the stone that
remained forever tantalizingly out of reach. He was hungry, starved, and he was
not alone. Two others shared his hell, though their cells reflected their
nature.
Fire sat on a bare patch of
floating earth surrounded by a sphere of water. Black as night and skeletal, he
stared unseeing at the water.
Water’s cell was bone dry.
Severely dehydrated, he looked like a sad old man and rarely spoke, unwilling
to force the words past his parched throat. Once blue as the ocean, he’d faded
to a sickly gray.
They’d long ago tried everything
they could think of to break free. Over the years hope had dwindled, leaving
them empty, despairing. If they could have ended it, they’d have welcomed
death.
The earthquake was the first
harbinger of change. Earth’s eyes snapped open as he sensed the earth shake.
Though he couldn’t physically touch the ground, it gave him a brief burst of
hope. Maybe…
As days went by, hope became
depression…until, abruptly, he sensed the woman.
Cara
wiggled her way through the crack in the earth, calling herself a fool.
Something tugged at her, a music barely felt, a longing unfulfilled. Using her
pen light, she navigated the fissure, turning sideways once to ease through.
She’d planned a simple walk this morning to contemplate her twenty second
birthday and exploring a cave wasn’t on the agenda.
She knew there was a cave at the
end of the tunnel, and it bothered her that she was so certain. She was equally
certain the quake that formed this crack had left it stable, but couldn’t have
said how any more than she could ignore the urge to explore it.
The day had been so ordinary. Her
parents had gone to Mexico to visit family, leaving her to watch the house.
She’d made coffee, read the news online and checked the mail. The plain brown
box inside intrigued her. Lacking a return postmark, it had been filled with
popcorn packing and jewelry. The earrings were gold with a green stone that
twinkled when she admired them in mirror. Delighted, she’d slipped the matching
gold cuff on her left wrist and admired the way the “emeralds” sparkled in the
early morning sun. It was when she’d tried to slip the cuff off that she
discovered it wouldn’t budge. For all intents, it seemed welded to her wrist,
and the clasp she’d sworn was there had melted away.
She’d assumed the gifts were from
her parents, but now she suspected someone had pranked her. She wondered which
of her friends was behind it, and who she’d have to skin.
Cara grimaced as she shimmied past
a skinny place, strangely unconcerned about what would normally be a
claustrophobic press of earth. She wondered now what would happen if she tried
to remove the earrings. She’d been so distracted by the cuff she hadn’t tried.
The tunnel ahead began to
brighten, and it had nothing to do with her penlight. She clicked it off,
thinking she was approaching daylight…and stepped into a dream.
The cave was lit, but not by the
sun. A glow illuminated three pitiful looking men in the oddest “cells” she
could imagine. At least, she sensed they were cells, though only one resembled
one in the traditional sense. She glanced at the one encased in a bubble of
water, noting his intent stare, but it was the one floating before her that
stole her attention. Pale and chalky, he appeared cracked like a weathered
statue, a ragged cloth wrapped around his hips. His hair was white and sparse,
but his eyes were very alive. Bronze with copper chasing, they focused on her
with a single-minded intensity.
“What are you?” she whispered. Her
instincts would normally caution her about releasing him, would make her
question why he was locked up, but today everything in her cried out with the
need to help. She looked around, but there was no obvious way to free him. She
looked at the huddled figure in the cell to her left and winced at his obvious
dehydration. That was something she could do. Taking her water bottle from her
pack, she loosened the top and reached past the bars to set it on the floor.
The man stared at her and slowly
unfolded his limbs. Moving painfully, he crawled like an arthritic old man
across the stone floor, and it was all she could do not to try to move the
water closer. Apparently she still had some shreds of caution, for she kept a
respectable distance.
He reached the bottle and feebly
undid the cap, inhaling like a junkie snuffing his latest hit. Astonishingly,
the water rose out of the bottle as if he really were inhaling it, flowing into
his mouth in a steady stream. He shuddered and bowed his head with a dry sob,
clutching the empty bottle.
Cara swallowed her astonishment
and looked around with wide eyes. She flushed as she met the intense stare of
the chalky prisoner, glancing quickly to the water surrounding the withered
black man. Moving to him, she cautiously undid her belt and flicked it at the
water sphere, braced to let it go quickly if it tried to suck her in. Instead,
the belt flicked the water and came away wet, dribbling water on the floor.
“Okay.” She slicked the water off
her belt, put it back on and went back to the shriveled gray man. Did his color
look a little better? That was assuming blue was his natural color, of course.
“If you give me back the bottle, I can get you more water.”
He quickly pushed it through the
bars.
Cara began to trek from the water
to his cell, water dripping down her arm and forming a trail along the floor
between cells. As soon as she got close, the withered man sucked the water to
him. He was looking better all the time, and she glanced between the other two,
wondering what she could do for them.
“Throw him a rock,” the blue man
suggested, following her gaze to Chalky.
She started at his rough croak,
but after a moment’s hesitation, set down the bottle and searched the cave
until she found some loose stones. Lugging them to the floating man, she set
them down and considered while he watched her with heart pounding intensity.
Taking a breath, she lobbed the rock underhand, arching to his left.
He grabbed it like a lightning
strike and held it to his chest, protecting it like a precious child. A green
glow surrounded his hands, and when his hands fell away, the rock was gone.
Cara blinked, astonished, but
quickly tossed him the rest. One by one, they were absorbed, and he began to
look better, less corroded. Pleased, she turned back to fetch more, only to
stop dead. A trickle of water was flowing from the water sphere along the trail
of drips, slowly building as it went to the blue man. A glance showed the
sphere seemed to be thinning around the black man.
The hair on her neck prickled in
warning. She may have felt the need to help these guys, but she didn’t know
them, didn’t even know what they were or why they were here. Not only were
there three of them, but they had abilities she didn’t. It was time to leave,
because from all appearances, they had things under control.
Acting like she was going for more rocks, she calmly
stepped over the small stream and headed to the far wall. She passed the rock
pile and kept on walking, hurrying through the tunnel.
