“Which way do we go?” he asked, and that was when I realized Tanko had carried a map.

  “We warn the settlement.”

  “Won’t we be too late?”

  “Not if they’re waiting for someone to come back.”

  “You’re that sure it’s a trap?”

  I wasn’t, but I was. I nodded all the same.

  “Let’s go,” I said, pulling what I remembered of the map to mind.

  And so we did. We walked until dusk, and then we kept walking. Both of us had stopped beside a likely camping place, and stared at it. I had sighed, and he had laid a hand on my arm.

  “We needn’t stop,” he said.

  “But I have no stims,” I said. “I’m not sure we can make it in one hit.”

  I stared at the campsite, and added, “Or get away if we did.”

  I did not want us to work ourselves to exhaustion to get to the township, and then collapse, only to wake under an orange sun. From the look on my companion’s face, he was feeling the same way.

  “Why don’t we push it until midnight, and see how we feel, then?”

  His words echoed my thoughts, and I nodded.

  “I’m Miranda,” I said, taking the first step away from the camp site.

  “And I’m Geordie.”

  I’d known his name, just as I knew the name of every seeker we rescued, but it was better for him to introduce himself—reaffirmed his identity, or so the psyches said. I just thought it was more natural. I didn’t know if Geordie could keep the pace, but I broke into a trot, settling into a pattern of jogging a hundred meters and walking until we caught our breath.

  “You guys travel like this all the time?” he asked.

  “Only on the way back home,” I replied. “Can’t do it with seekers in tow.”

  “Why not?” Even puffing, Geordie sounded mildly offended.

  “You’re usually unconscious.” And that was the end of that; we really didn’t have enough breath for talking.

  We arrived at the township just before dawn, jogged down the deserted main street. I kept going until I reached the headman’s house. It was deserted, perfectly preserved, not a speck of dust on the lintels, windows gleaming, beds made with hospital corners, but deserted. The kitchen cupboards were also bare.

  “Damn,” I said, the word emerging on barely a breath.

  Beside me, Geordie echoed the phrase.

  “Do you think the demons got them all?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We’d better get out of here.”

  “Yup.”

  And get we did, running as fast as we could, the warning nausea of an impending incursion roiling in our guts. We threw ourselves behind a hill, just as grey outlined the horizon. Rocks protruded from the ridgetop and, remembering the safety of the caves, I belly-crawled my way up to them. By wriggling carefully, I was able to peer around them to the town below. The nausea grew worse, the rift pending, but not yet open.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Do you think we’re far enough away?” Geordie whispered.

  He was lying beside me in the dirt, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps from the run around the edge of the low cliffs overlooking the town, and then up the steep hillside. Glancing east, we saw the edge of dawn pushing the grey further out into the sky. Looking down, we could see the soft, shadowed outlines of the country below. The rift came when the first touch of pink stained the sky.

  “I wonder how long they’ve been coming,” Geordie whispered, as orange light blazed in the centre of the main street.

  “Not long,” I whispered back, watching the first demon emerge. “The town was perfectly normal last time we arrived.”

  “How long ago?” As Geordie spoke, another demon followed, and another.

  “Two months, by this world’s time.” I stopped, watching five more demons fan out to form a perimeter.

  “Well, it explains why the first campsite wasn’t safe.”

  I let that comment drift into silence, both of us watching as ten more of the interdimensional demons emerged to search the buildings, me remembering how Geordie had been one of the first to wake, and one of the last to stop whimpering in his sleep. He had been the reason we’d travelled for two days, instead of one.

  “How do you know?” I asked, and he looked at me, puzzled. “How do you know they are coming?”

  “I can hear them,” he said. “There’s some kind of ceremony they conduct to open up the pathway.” His face paled. “For gates like that one, they take at least five lives.”

  He swallowed, squeezed his eyes tight shut, opening them again to watch the activity below.

  “They torture them for hours, drawing power from the pain, the anguish…the very fear.”

  I glanced at him. His face was milk white, his dark hair contrasting with the pallor of his skin. His voice cracked, all the more heartbreaking for the way he suppressed the sound.

  “It’s the way they power their world. They know no other.”

  I looked at him, forgetting, for just a moment, the necessity of keeping an eye on the threat within the town.

  “How do you know?”

  He returned my stare, tears running down his face, unchecked.

  “I’ve seen inside their heads,” he said. “If they knew…”

  He shuddered, his body shaking all the way down to his toes, and I couldn’t blame him. For just a moment, I’d caught sight of the images haunting his mind, and I understood just how deeply he wished he could remain underground. I couldn’t bear it; I looked away, back to the town, just in time.

  “Oh shit.” Keeping my voice low, I laid a hand on Geordie’s shoulder. “You up for a run?”

  We only had to keep the demons off us long enough for their gate to run out of power. Once they had no hope of dragging us back through, they’d give up the chase. Or so I hoped. Geordie’s words ‘If they knew…’ haunted me.

  He looked down at the town, as well, and I was only just in time to stop him from leaping to his feet. I kept my hand on his pack as we scuttled backwards down the hill.

  “They don’t know we’re here, do they?” he asked, and I had to assure him that I didn’t think so.

  Even then, I was quick to pull him to his feet, and drag him along the gully floor and further into the hills. Don’t ask me why we kept running along the gully. I think it’s because we didn’t notice how much narrower it became. The hills around us were clothed in low scrubby trees, interspersed with thigh-high bushes and large, round balls of spiky grass. The dry creek bed was the easiest place to move in—and the one place we saw no webs.

  I wondered if spiders ate demons, and then decided I didn’t want to run into one that big. The gully wound around a bend, and the hillsides steepened into cliffs. I welcomed the sight of red stone shot through with overtones of purple, and wondered if these rocks would protect us from the demons, just as they protected our underground homes.

  The rocky creek bottom became treacherous with larger rocks replacing the pebbles, and we took to the creek bank, working our way between the spiky tussocks along an animal track. We slowed our pace, our breathing sounding harsh in the gully’s confines.

  I gestured towards where the cliffs drew closer together.

  “You okay to go through there?”

  Geordie looked at the gap, looked at the open sky above, and nodded.

  “That, I can manage.”

  I looked at the way his eyes measured the space between the cliffs, sought the sky, and had my doubts. I didn’t voice them, though. We’d be safer if he could convince himself to handle the gorge.

  “Do you think they’re still following us?” Geordie’s question came between gulping sips at his water flask.

  “Let’s keep going,” I suggested.

  It wasn’t avoidance, not exactly; I just didn’t want to admit I didn’t know.

  We kept going, moving through the shadows of the small gorge, and skirting deep pools of water, using shelfs of rock. The cliffs seemed endless, but it was hard to tell, and the sun only just brightened the western rim. We marked the passage of time by the way the sun extended its reach into the chasm, and pushed on.

  “You know we’ll have to stop soon,” Geordie said, when the light reached nearly five meters down the cliff wall.