light fled the sky. She tried to find a place to climb it, but the wall was too steep.
“Spread out and look for a way over,” she said.
She made it four meters up in one spot, but she couldn’t find another handhold and tumbled back to the ground. Dash was more tentative as he moved the other way, poking at the pile with his good hand and squinting to see in the darkness. Hoku stood where she had left him.
“Here!” Dash said.
She jogged over. He was kneeling by a filthy rag draped over some garbage at the base of the wall. With his good hand, he pulled the rag aside.
“A tunnel!” she said.
Dash nodded. “You go first. Then the boy. It will take me longer to crawl.”
Aluna’s talons would be useless in the tunnel. She pulled the knife from the sheath on her thigh and clamped the blade between her teeth. Dash and Hoku said nothing. She dropped to all fours and crawled into the darkness.
THE GARBAGE BENEATH Aluna’s hands and feet had been packed and smoothed. Unfortunately, the walls of the tunnel were less groomed. She bumped her head on a metal pipe and felt a sliver of plastic scratch her arm as she wriggled forward. The knife blade in her mouth made it impossible to talk, so she stopped and pointed at the obstacles for Hoku.
The tunnel had obviously been carved for bigger people. There was enough room for her to avoid dangerous-looking debris, now that she knew to look for it. They’d certainly swum through tighter holes and hidden in smaller spots than this back in the ocean.
She heard a whimper from behind her and paused. Behind Hoku, she could see Dash clambering on his three good limbs. But he didn’t look good. Even in the darkness, her eyes picked up the beads of sweat on his face. He jerked his head from left to right. His breath came out in ragged, uneven gasps. Apparently, the horse folk didn’t do well in confined spaces.
She pulled the knife out of her mouth and said, “Keep moving. Don’t stop. Focus on Hoku’s feet in front of you. Nothing else. Just Hoku’s feet.”
She kept the knife hilt in her fist and crawled forward, faster. Hoku kept pace with her — he’d always been agile, like a crab scurrying over a coral reef. He shifted from side to side, just as she did, trusting her to avoid the worst of the dangers.
They moved fast, but it wasn’t fast enough. They were losing Dash. His breathing had become labored, and Hoku had been forced to grab him by the hair and pull in order to keep him moving.
“Tell me about the horse folk, Dash,” she said.
No answer. Hoku looked at her, his brow furrowed with worry.
“Tell me about your mother,” she tried. “Or your father.”
Dash gulped and shook his head.
Too personal. He had some pain there, and now was not the right time to stir it up. She kept them moving while she tried to think of something else to ask.
“Tell us about running across the desert,” Hoku said. “Tell us about sunsets.”
They crawled another few meters before Dash started to speak.
“The sun,” he said, his voice cracking, “she commands the sky. She is our great mother, gifting life and granting death as she wishes. At night, she abandons us to darkness so that we may understand the world without her. We make bonfires and let our bodies become one with the cold. Our word-weavers tell stories to lure her back into our sky. They take turns sleeping so that their stories last the whole night, until the great mother returns and again grants us her gifts.”
His voice was not only stronger; it was beautiful.
“Were you a word-weaver?” she asked.
Silence, and then, “No, though I would have liked to be,” Dash said. “Many things would have been different had that path been open to me. But it was not meant to be.”
Meant to be, she thought. So many things were meant to be. She shouldn’t have been creeping through some tunnel of garbage trying to escape from an ancient, broken-down dome full of once-Human scoundrels. She was meant to be in the ocean, swimming around with her grown-up tail.
“I smell fresh air,” Dash said.
She hadn’t noticed, but he was right.
“Quiet now,” she said. “If the Upgraders came this way, they probably left someone behind to guard the exit.”
They crawled the rest of the way silent as sharks. Ahead of them, a rag