The ground shuddered under my knees, under my palms when I touched the dirt. The movement was long and sustained, not like a troll plodding down the path. This was something else, maybe vehicles rumbling nearby. Our friends should have been far away, so if the shudder in the earth was vehicles, was it drones or people?
Either way, they wouldn’t be friendly.
I snatched the sleeping bags from the hollow and quickly rolled them up to fit over my backpack. There was no chance I’d find this tree again on my own.
But before I took off, I needed to find Sam. I called his SED, and he answered immediately. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” I shook my head and peered through the dark forest. “You’re not here. That’s what’s wrong. Where are you?”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I went to check on the path. The roc is gone. Flown off, I guess. I’m on my way back now. We can meet up with Stef and Whit soon.”
The rumble in the earth was fading. “Did you see anything? I heard something. Like thunder, but—”
“I heard it.” Sam paused, seeming to focus on something else—walking or climbing, probably—and dragged in a long breath. “I heard it, but I don’t know what it was.”
“Okay. Raise your flashlight in my direction. Maybe I can see it and start walking to you.”
“Just a second.”
While he was quiet, I peered through the forest. Faint light glimmered in the north. I secured my backpack and the sleeping bags and began picking my way around trees.
“Did you see it?” he asked.
“Yep.” I ducked around trees and crumbling boulders and clicked off so I could use my SED as a flashlight; mine was in my backpack, and I didn’t want to stop and remove it. Not with something out there. Frozen pine needles rustled and twigs snapped as we approached each other. “Next time,” I said, huffing, “wake me up to tell me you’re leaving. As far as I knew, something came by and ate you.”
“Sorry.” Sam hugged me and kissed my cheek. “Let’s head this way. There’s a pond not far off. Stef and Whit are waiting for us there.”
I nodded and crept through the woods with him. Being outside Range made me jumpy. It seemed like anything could happen. There were no traps in these woods, meant to capture or deter other dominant species, and no drone patrols. This place was strange and wild, though hauntingly similar to the forests of Range.
Vibrations traveled through the ground again, low and steady. An odd scent rode the air, like animal sweat mixed with pine and dirt. “Sam.”
His nod was barely perceptible in the darkness, but it was enough. He sensed it, too.
Maybe it was only a herd of deer or bison. There were lots of large animals in and around Range. But as Sam and I approached the pond he’d spoken of, the rumbling grew louder, and a deep murmur filtered through the woods. Like voices.
Hundreds of voices.
Sam and I glanced at each other. “The pond is just ahead,” he murmured.
Lights danced through the trees, uneven and orange-red, like fire. Chills prickled up my spine as we crept forward.
Sam turned off the flashlight so the glow wouldn’t attract attention, and a few minutes later, we halted on a small ridge overlooking a valley where the pond waited. And there, we saw the source of the lights.
The roar of voices rolled across the water, where ripples glinted in the flickering illumination of hundreds of torches, revealing a thousand bodies. At first, I thought they were people on horseback. Then, as my eyes adjusted the dark figures resolved into more coherent shapes, I realized the people were too far in front of the horses to be riding them. And the “horses” had no heads.
“Centaurs.” The word came out a breath, but Sam nodded. Even in the dim light, he looked pale.
“Stef said she and Whit are there.” He pointed across the pond, toward a break in the trees where trolls had carved the path. “So we’ll have to go around the herd.”
This was what I’d felt in the ground earlier: a thousand centaurs heading toward the pond. They’d probably cut through the forest within sight of where I’d been sleeping. And I’d shouted Sam’s name. I was unbelievably lucky they hadn’t heard me.
“Do they really make clothes out of people’s skin?” I whispered.
Sam just shuddered and guided me back into the forest.
“Maybe Stef and Whit could come here instead of us going there.”
“We’re heading that way anyway.” Sam kept his voice low and consulted the map on his SED.
We were only heading that way because it was away from Heart, not because that way necessarily had answers, or clues about where to find the sylph.
“I really want to know why all those centaurs are this far from their territory. Perhaps they’ve broken away from the main herd or they’re picking a battle with trolls. . . .”
“Maybe they can sense the caldera is unstable.” My SED showed at least five new earthquakes since the last time I’d checked. None of them were as large as the first, but some were sizable enough that people would notice. Centaurs’ territory was south of Range, so they’d probably felt the big earthquake as the Year of Souls began.
“That seems likely.” Sam pointed at the map. “We’ll go down the hill this way, keeping to the woods. With luck, the wind won’t shift. Centaurs have a powerful sense of smell.” He glanced toward the herd and wrinkled his nose. “And powerful smells.”
I stifled a panicked giggle. “Yes.”
“Once we’re off this ridge, we’ll head toward the troll path here. We’ll be visible when we’re crossing, but if we keep far enough back, they shouldn’t notice us. It looks like they’re getting ready to stop for the night, and they can only see as well as humans in the dark.”
“So no flashlights.”
He nodded. “But once we’re across the path, we’ll be fine. The rest of the way seems to have enough foliage to cover us.”
“Okay, we’d better get going.”
We picked our way down the ridge as quietly as possible, cringing every time a branch cracked or evergreen needles rustled. But if the centaurs noticed movement in the woods, they must have assumed we were one of the many nocturnal creatures that lived here.
Our progress was slow, especially without light, but we had time to be cautious, so we took it. Two hours later, we reached the path.
It was wide enough for two vehicles to drive side by side. That hadn’t seemed so wide when we’d been walking on it yesterday, but now that we had to cross in full view of a herd of centaurs, we might as well have been crossing the Range caldera.
Sam tested the wind. It still carried the centaurs’ stink and fractured voices. I couldn’t make out their words, but it seemed unlikely they’d speak our language, anyway.
“We should crawl,” I whispered. “So they don’t see two tall creatures go walking by.”
“One tall and one unusually short.” He said it with a smile, but his humor was strained. “You’re right. We’ll crawl.” He sighed and flexed his injured hand.
We adjusted our belongings and lowered ourselves to the ground. Frosty grass reached up to my elbows, blocking too much of my view—and not blocking enough. Though we were far back on the trail, around a bend to keep out of view, by the time we reached the center of the path, I could see the centaurs’ fires and their silhouettes as they moved about the field. There were so many. They wouldn’t have to worry about rocs swooping down on them.
The ground trembled under my palms, vibrations from all the movement to the east. Faintly, I saw startlingly graceful movements as a group of centaurs chased one another. They called out and laughed, their hooves beating the ground in rhythm.
They’d seemed awkward at first, so forward-heavy with their human halves in the front, but firelight glistened off muscular horse halves and sturdy legs. A pair of centaurs embraced. One reared up and spread his arms to the stars and moon and sky.
None of them looked like they were wearing human skin as clothing.
We’d been wrong about the sylph. Sort of. They had attacked people for thousands of years. They’d attacked me on my birthday last year, too. But there was something about them. They loved music. And now Cris was one.
What if we’d been wrong about centaurs?
Hoofbeats pounded on the ground, coming closer. Sam twisted to look back at me, and in the darkness, his eyes were wide. “Go,” he mouthed. “Fast.”
I scrambled across the path as quickly as I could, aching to get up and use my legs. But if they were coming our way, I didn’t want to be seen.
The hoofbeats thumped and a high, thin voice shrieked.
I jerked my face up to find a young centaur staring down at me, wearing a shocked expression. Another stopped next to the first. They both screamed.
I screamed.
Sam reached back and grabbed my wrist, and together we lurched for the other side of the path, but the centaurs were following—
And then the ground shuddered. Not from the herd. No, this was from the opposite direction. One solid thud followed by another.
The young centaurs stared past Sam and me, and the herd went quiet.
A hush fell over the entire area as the thuds came louder, faster. Then Sam climbed all the way to his feet—making the young centaurs jump back—and dragged me into the woods.
“Troll!”
At once, the area turned loud with centaurs shouting and metal clashing. And when I glanced over my shoulder, the young centaurs were just standing in the middle of the path, staring up with their mouths wide open as a human-shaped beast three times my size came roaring toward the field. Ice and branches flew away from the troll’s destructive passage.
“Wait!” I shook myself away from Sam and darted back to the path. The young centaurs—colts? children?—both snapped their attention to me. “Come on!” I had no idea if they understood me, but when I reached for them, one of the boys clasped his hand around my damp mitten, and we raced into the woods just as the troll thundered into the place where they’d been standing.
Sam opened his mouth, but shook his head and began running through the forest as cacophony erupted by the pond. Screams and roars spurred us through the woods. The children surged ahead, shoving branches and bushes out of the way. Sam and I hurried to keep up, but the dark forest was only brokenly lit with torches on the battlefield.
My SED buzzed in my pocket, but I couldn’t answer it. I focused on jumping over the tangle of roots the centaurs jumped over. On ducking ice-white limbs. On putting one leg in front of the other.
Shouts filled the area. Then a thundering growl. And the world thudded hard as something dropped. I stumbled, but one of the centaur children reached back and took my arm until I was balanced and running on my own again.
“Ana! Sam!” Stef’s voice came from just ahead. “There you are! I—”
Blue lights flared, targeting the young centaurs as we broke out into the open. The rest of the herd was far to our right, gathered around the fallen troll, so now it was just four humans and two scared centaur kids.
One of the boys screamed. The herd’s attention shifted.
“No, don’t!” I moved in front of the boys and held out my hands. They tried, unsuccessfully, to hide behind me. They were both much bigger than I was. “Don’t shoot. They’re just kids.”
“They’re centaurs.” Whit kept his weapon up. No one else moved, either.
Sam stayed off to the side, looking between us. “Don’t shoot Ana.”
“They’re just kids,” I said again.
The herd of centaurs rumbled closer, swords and spears lifted and glinting with blood in torchlight. Suddenly, we were surrounded. All of us humans. The young centaurs.
Stef swung her laser pistol toward the approaching army, but there was no way she’d overcome a thousand centaurs.