He points down the warehouse’s main aisle. “I got it from the end, next to the far wall. And I looked inside probably a hundred bins along the way—they all have the red powder.”
Spingate shakes her head. “The powder is a microorganism so small it can get into the containers, even get through the wrappers and right into the food. If we hadn’t acted as fast as we did, Farrar would be dead.” She looks up at me. “Once the mold contaminates food, there’s nothing we can do to make it edible again.”
She looks down, as if it’s her fault that we’re in a building full of food, yet we can’t eat any of it.
At least we have the shuttle’s supplies. We have time to figure out other answers.
I remember Brewer’s strange words back on the Xolotl—Hopefully you can break the mold. If you can’t, that was one very long trip for nothing.
Break the mold. He knew. One long trip for nothing…
“The mold,” I say to Spingate, “how does it spread?”
She stands up, brushes off her hands and shrugs. “My guess is the microorganisms probably make little eggs. No, that’s not quite right…they make spores, little bits so small they float on the air. They land on things and the process starts over.”
If it spreads through the air…
I grab her arm. “Could these spores get into the shuttle’s stores?”
Spingate’s eyes widen. “Yes, they could.”
A few minutes ago, we thought we had enough food to last for years. All we have is what’s on the shuttle—if that goes bad, we’re doomed.
Spingate looks at her water container. She turns it upside down; two drops come out, then nothing. She emptied it—and Coyotl’s as well—further cleaning out Farrar’s mouth. I emptied mine washing my hands until they stopped stinging. Bishop did the same with his.
Just like that, we’re almost out of water.
Spingate stares at the empty container.
“If the water in this city carries the same spores, we can’t drink it,” she says. “We’ll die of dehydration long before we get hungry. We have to find fresh water and test it.”
She looks at me, and I know what she’s thinking: the river. I remember the pilothouse map.
That waterfall isn’t far from here.
We stop and stare. The distant waterfall’s soft roar echoes through the streets, but no one is paying attention to that.
Coyotl breaks our silence.
“Those are some big godsdamned doors.”
I glance at him, annoyed. Does he need to curse? I can’t remember much of school, but Matilda’s memories give me the sense that cursing brought discipline. The paddle. Or something even worse…I vaguely remember a phrase…the rod.
He sees me staring, stares back. He raises an eyebrow, daring me to correct him.
In school, he’d be in trouble. But we’re not in school anymore. And I have to admit, he’s right—those are some godsdamned-big doors.
We stand in the middle of a wide street, facing east. The waterfall is somewhere off to our left, to the north. Buildings and ziggurats flank us, reaching up to the sky. Far ahead of us, the street ends at an archway set into a massive, vine-choked wall. The wall is as tall as twenty of us standing on each other’s shoulders. Towers spot its length, each of them rising up even higher than the wall itself.
In that archway, metal doors half as high as the wall. They look like they swing outward. No vines on them, although a few dangle down from the arch above. Maybe plants can’t grip metal like they can stone.
I see a sliver of yellow between those doors. The door on our right looks slightly open. I remember Gaston’s map—that yellow must be the vine-choked ruins that lie beyond.
We’ll have to explore that gate soon, but first we have something more important to worry about.
“Let’s go,” I say. “We need to find the waterfall.”
We turn north. We follow a narrower street, moving toward the river’s roar.
—
It looked a lot smaller on the map.
The waterfall soars above us, white froth crashing down into a clear pool. The red sun is just above the waterfall’s edge—only a few hours until nightfall. Spray hangs in the air, catching the afternoon light. Brightly colored blurds dart in and out of the hanging mist.
A set of switchback steps carved into dark stone leads up the waterfall’s right side: ten steps to the right, sharp turn, ten to the left, and so on, all the way up.
Vine-draped boulders, each as tall as my chest, line the pool’s edge. A ring of smaller rocks runs along the outside of the boulders. A second ring—glistening wet from the water that splashes against them—runs along the inside. Vines cover the flat ground. Buildings and ziggurats rise up all around us. Perhaps this place was a plaza of some kind, open and welcome to this lost city’s forgotten residents.
Coyotl hops onto a boulder. His covering of caked ash is almost gone. He’s more filthy than fierce now, a dirty boy with reddish skin and taut, fluttering muscles. He looks into the pool, then raises his thighbone high and whoops.
“I’m going swimming!”