Gaston kneels next to the body. “No, let me. The look on your face makes me think you might throw up. And if there’s one thing nastier than a corpse, it’s a corpse covered in puke.”
I’m more than happy to let him do it. I don’t want to even look at another dead body, let alone touch one.
Gaston tries to move the bracelet. The stained fabric has dried to it—he has to give it a little bit of a tug before the fabric pulls free with a crackling sound.
“Eww, gross,” he says. He gently slides the bracelet off the skeletal arm. He stands, starts to offer the prize to me, then stops and holds it close to his face.
“Uh-oh,” he says. “This can’t be a good thing.”
He points at the base of the long rod. The white jewel there is cracked in several places. A few small pieces of it are missing.
I reach out a fingertip, feel the broken lines.
“When the monster pointed his bracelet at me, the jewel glowed,” I say.
Everyone looks at the device in Gaston’s hand. We don’t know how it works, but it is obvious to all of us that this jewel is never going to glow again.
Aramovsky sighs.
“Brilliant work, Savage,” he says. “You dragged us all this way and what do we get for it? Nothing. Instead of going after Bello, we did this. She’s probably dead by now. Maybe we could have saved her if we’d acted quicker, but now it’s likely too late.”
He didn’t want to go after her in the first place. He wanted to abandon her to the monsters to please his “gods.” Why is he changing his story? Is he trying to make me look bad again?
Bishop is staring at me. His eyes narrow. He wanted to try to rescue Bello, but I wouldn’t let him. Now I understand—Aramovsky’s words weren’t meant to make me look bad, they were meant to remind Bishop that coming here was my choice.
Aramovsky is trying to turn Bishop against me. Not that doing so will take much effort, I suppose: Bishop was right, and I was wrong.
I wasted precious time. I split up the group for nothing. If I don’t fix this, they’ll replace me as leader. I can’t let that happen. I have to admit it to myself; I want to be the leader. I am the one who makes decisions. I know I’ve made mistakes, but I don’t trust anyone else to do a better job than I can. If we’re going to stay alive, if we’re going to make it out of this awful place, if we’re going to survive the monsters, I know our best chance is if I stay in charge.
Aramovsky sighs again, louder this time. The sound makes me want to knock him down. It must be so easy to judge the decisions of someone else when you sit back and do nothing.
He strides to the middle pedestal, runs his finger along the flat top. He looks at his fingertip like he’s checking for dust. He turns his back to the pedestal and smiles at me.
“We don’t have the Grownups’ weapon,” he says. “If it is a weapon at all, which we don’t know, because we’ve learned nothing. Bello is gone. Yong and Latu are dead. Perhaps Bishop isn’t the only one who wonders who would win a new vote.”
The middle pedestal begins to glow.
I take a reactive step back. The others do the same. Aramovsky realizes something is behind him, turns sharply, sees the glow and lunges away from it.
The glow increases, a buzzing cloud that hovers in midair. The light doesn’t come from the pedestal itself, but rather from the empty space above it. Dozens of black spots appear within that glow, spots that shift and change.
I point my spear at it.
Bishop and El-Saffani hold their bone-clubs toward it. Gaston scurries behind Bishop. Aramovsky hides behind me.
I want to run, but I stand my ground—by choice this time, not because my feet won’t obey. The glow is mesmerizing, almost hypnotizing.
The floating black spots swell and bloat. They meld together, merge even as the glow itself begins to fade. The shifting black shape forms a circle…no, an oval.
Inside that black form, two red dots take shape.
And then the image above the pedestal becomes clear.
I am looking at a monster.
And that monster is looking back at me.
THIRTY-TWO
The monster is so real I step back and bump into Aramovsky.
Only the head and shoulders are visible. Its black isn’t a color as much as it is an absence of light. Wrinkled, gnarled, leathery…vile. The thing is repulsive. Simply looking at it makes me want to destroy it, the same kind of instinctive reaction I’d feel if I saw a hairy spider crawling across my arm.
Bishop creeps closer to the pedestal. He pokes his thighbone at the face, tentatively, as if he knows the monster isn’t really there but he has to be sure. The bone goes right through, distorting the face in a little puff of multicolored sparkles. Bishop pulls the bone back; sparkles cling to his club for a moment, then dissipate into wisps of nothingness.
If Bishop can be brave, so can I. I step forward to stand at his left side.