The Last Hunter: Collected Edition (Antarktos Saga #1-5)

“Are you sure?” Em asks.

Apparently, neither did she.

Kainda shakes her head, looking angry and confused. None of them noticed.

“The eyes,” Kat says. “They had your eyes.”

“That’s all they have,” I say. “I should have killed them before we ran.”

Silence falls over the group as we jog downhill for what feels like several hours, merging with the High River’s vast tunnel, full of stalactites and stalagmites, and continuing down. I can still smell the group following us. When we slow, they slow. They’re keeping what they believe is a safe distance, so they won’t be detected. They’re following our scent trail, left every time we step on the stone floor, determining our distance by the odor’s strength.

Wright jogs up next to me. The glow of his flashlight bounces over the terrain ahead with each step. “So I think I have this time paradox licked.”

It’s the last thing I’m expecting him to say, and I stumble when I glance at him.

He looks at his watch. “We’ve been running for twelve hours. I’ve never run for twelve hours straight before, have you?”

“Occasionally,” I say, recalling the times I have fled for my life in the underworld.

“Down here, right?”

I nod. Good point.

“I’m tired, but I’m not about to collapse,” he says. “I should have passed out from exhaustion long before now. And I sure as hell shouldn’t be able to have a conversation right now. So my mind perceives the passage of time the same way it would on the surface, just like my wrist watch. But my body perceives time differently. I feel like I’ve been running for an hour. Not twelve.”

His observations are sound. I’ve experienced these things in the past.

“But, here’s the kicker. Assume we’re the world’s best marathon runner, able to complete a twenty-six mile race in just over two hours. Hell, lets round it to two hours. I’m no good with math.”

I smile and don’t bother telling him that I am, in fact, good with math. I sense he’s getting somewhere and don’t want to ruin his train of thought.

“If a marathon runner could keep up the pace for twelve hours he would travel...”

When his pause lingers, I say, “One hundred fifty-six miles.”

He shakes his head at the absurdity of it all. The idea that we’ve run so far is—I gasp.

Wright smiles. “You’re figuring it out? Using that memory of yours?”

When I run, I subconsciously count my steps. I always have. Since leaving Hades’s chambers, I have taken one million, two hundred twenty six thousand, nine hundred and sixty steps. With an average three-foot stride, that’s three million, six hundred eighty thousand, eight hundred and eighty feet. Divide by five thousand two hundred eighty feet in a mile and you get, “Six hundred ninety-seven miles.”

Wright smiles. “Which is—”

“How far we could travel in two and a half days on the surface if we maintained the pace twenty-fours a day and never took a break.”

“A little more precise than my guess, but yeah. So now we know that two and half surface days have passed in the last twelve hours.”

“But the effect grows more significant the deeper we go.”

“Then it’s been growing more significant this whole time. As long as you keep moving, and counting your steps, we can figure out how much time has passed.”

He’s right. It won’t work if we’re standing still, but we can guesstimate how much surface time has passed based on the number of steps we’ve taken. Our minds and bodies don’t perceive actual time down here, but miles are miles and it takes the same number of steps to cover them.

A distant sound tickles my ears. The rushing water of the High River sounds muffled ahead. Quieted. I pull the air from below toward us and smell it. Water and stone. That’s all there is. There are no hunters cutting off our passage.

I test the air from behind, counting the seconds it takes the hunting party’s scent to reach me. My eyes go wide. “They’re closing in.”

“Are the others near by?” Kainda asks, testing the air. “I smell nothing.”

“No,” I say, “they’re gone.”

“Gone?” Em sounds flabbergasted. It doesn’t make sense to any of us.

Then we reach the strange silence of the river and everything is clear. The downward sloping tunnel ends at a flat pool of water that rises several feet by the minute as the river adds to it.

The New Jericho chamber has fully flooded and the waters are rising up toward the surface. There’s at least a half mile of water between us and the chamber and then several more to cross to the other side.

“This is the trap,” I say.

“What about the—”

I cut off Em’s idea, saying, “The side tunnels leading to New Jericho will be flooded, too. To get to the gates, we need to backtrack—”

The sound of slapping feet on stone rises in the distance.