The Bridge: Chapter Four

We pressed on into the forest until well after sunup. It was much easier to see our surroundings in the full light of day. The supple grass beneath our feet, darker than the grass from home. The unfamiliar trees, dissimilar to each other and alien in comparison with anything I’d ever seen, leaves broad and uneven, ranging in color from pale green to almost black. The blood on my hands, Amis’ face, Cahira’s bow. Blood was easy to see in the sunlight, filtered as it was by the strangely shaped leaves. There had been a brief discussion about using some of our drinking water to try and wash it off, but we decided against wasting what was arguably our most precious resource.

Amis had gone on the whole time without complaint, but he would need to rest soon. We all would. None of us had slept since we left the village, and we needed to restore as much energy as possible. For whatever was next. Something I couldn’t bring myself to think about. I couldn’t quite bring myself to stop either. My body was moving without thought, without me consciously directing it. I just knew I wanted to put as much distance between us and the village as I possibly could. We wound our way through the woods with more focus on speed than discretion.

“Reva.” Cahira called out

I ignored her and kept going.

“Reva,” she said again. I could hear her jogging to catch up.

“Reva!” she snapped, grabbing my arm and spinning me around. “Reva, we have to stop. Amis needs to rest, we all do. We’ve been walking almost all night, we can stop for an hour or so.”

She looked into my eyes searchingly. I wondered what she saw in them, or if she saw anything at all. If she saw a murderer. If that’s what I saw when I looked at her. I tapped my fingers restlessly on the handle of my knife and looked at Amis. He was leaning against a tree, his glassy eyes unfocused. He was pale and sweaty. He likely lost more blood than we realized in the aftermath of the skirmish. Cahira’s hands were shaking, probably from exhaustion. I wasn’t in much better shape. “Alright,” I said quietly. “We’ll stop.” Amis slid down the trunk of the tree and settled in, falling asleep almost instantly. The corner of Cahira’s mouth twitched upwards and she went to sit with him.

“I’ll keep watch,” I said firmly, crouching down to clean my weapons while keeping my eyes fixed on our surroundings. Cahira could probably tell there was no point in arguing, so she just nodded and rested her head on Amis’ shoulder. The forest was peaceful, and when we were stopped I could hear the sound of the ocean again. I tried to find a dry spot on my shirt to wipe my knives on when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed movement. Incredulous, I watched as a small insect made its way over a leaf an onto my shoe. I let it continue all the way up until my knee, at which point it took flight and disappeared into the trees. That was the first living thing we had seen in the forest, not including the homicidal villagers who had followed us here. It wasn’t exactly shocking, the idea that a large forest with fairly dense undergrowth could sustain some small measure of life, but it was still intriguing. And a bit comforting. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel a bit of excitement about what could lay on the other side. Food, maybe people. Just like we hoped. Or, maybe nothing. Maybe people weren’t a good thing. Maybe the people were good, and introducing them to our evidently corrupted leader would only be for the worse. Still. We had to have made it farther than anyone else on the bridge. That wasn’t nothing. Even if there was nothing on the other side, we had already survived a lot just to be here.

I kept running over what I did in my mind. I know Cahira and Amis had collectively killed eight out of the ten, but for Cahira, at least, it was from a distance. Impersonal. An arrow she sent spinning to its mark without feeling the life leave her prey. I had my hands on his neck, felt his pulse, first beneath his skin and then released from the confines of his veins, released by my hands, my knife. When I was pinned underneath him I could feel his heart racing, as it rapidly pumped the lifeblood from out of his body. I felt him go still. He was alive, and then I unmade him. I knew he probably deserved it, but I don’t think that mattered. I had never killed a person before. None of us had. Now, we all had. My stomach churned and my head spun, and I couldn’t stop watching him die, forcing him to die, killing him over and over again in my mind. I couldn’t tell if it was cathartic or punishing. And then all the bodies, Sora, Arduk, people we knew. People we had inherently trusted. Sent by Vis to stop our progress by killing us. What did my parents think, I wondered. What was it like for them when they realized? I wondered if they had been scared, surprised, hopeful that they’d come to help. I wondered if they had the time to be anything at all before going together into death.

I wondered if that’s where my friends and I were headed.

˜ ˜ ˜ ˜ ˜

“Reva?” a voice gently broke through the fog of sleep, and the gentle motion of a hand on my shoulder. “Reva?”

My eyes snapped open and I shot to my feet.

“M’sorry, fell asleep.” I stated unnecessarily, groggily struggling to force my brain to catch up with my body.

“Relax, its fine. You needed it,” Cahira said kindly. “Nothing happened, everything’s fine, I just figured you’d probably want to get going soon.”

I looked up. From what I could tell, the sun was almost directly above us. I nodded and gestured vaguely towards Amis. “You good?”

He grinned and nodded. “Practically healed.”

Cahira rolled her eyes. “You still need to take it easy. Don’t push it.”

He nodded with false solemnity and made a face once her back was turned. I tried to smile, to want to, but I couldn’t.

Amis began to shift his feet. “Hey should we, uh, talk about this or anything? I mean we all just killed people and lost faith in the leadership at home so, I don’t know, do we need to make sure we’re all good or are we just…good?” he asked hesitantly.

Cahira and I studied each other and turned back to Amis. He nodded and kicked the ground “Right,” he muttered, “I forgot I was with the queens of fortitude and resilience. Also denial.”

“You know we should probably get-“ I started, before Cahira cut me off.

“You don’t have to be good, Amis. And we can talk about it, we will talk about it, but for now we have to go.”

“Sounds about right,” he smiled faintly.

Impatient, I turned around and stomped into the trees. Since the immediate threat had been handled last night there was definitely less of a looming sense of dread. The forest even seemed more beautiful than threatening now, and I could appreciate its exoticness rather than fear its peculiarity. However, we still didn’t know what the rest of the journey would hold, and we also didn’t know how close behind us more warriors were, if there were any. They couldn’t take the horses into the forest, so we definitely had a solid head start, but we still had to be quick and careful. Now was not the time to figure out every minute detail of all of our feelings. Although, I did feel for Cahira. Her aunt had lied to her for her entire life. She was a murderer. Maybe Cahira’s parents were privy to the dark secrets of their leader as well. There was no telling how deep the deception went. Either way, it must feel like her entire life had been ripped out from underneath her. The same way I felt. We didn’t need to talk about anything; it was pretty clear that everything that had happened the night before hit us all pretty severely.

“Guys?” Amis called out from the back of the imprecise line formation we had adopted. “Is it just me or do those look like rainclouds?”

Cahira and I tilted our heads up towards the sky. It was hard to see clearly through the trees, but sure enough the distinctive dark shape of thunderclouds was clearly visible.

“Great,” I muttered.

“Should we go a bit farther into the trees? Try and stay as dry as possible, maybe even start a fire?” Amis asked, a note of hope worming its way into his words.

Cahira shook her head, “No, we should stay here, set our bottles out and try to catch some of the rain. We’ll be running low on water soon.”

I looked back up towards the rapidly darkening sky. “I don’t think it’s just going to rain; it looks more like a storm. And technically we’re on the open ocean.” I frowned. Back home, if it started to rain on a hunt, we would just wait it out, hoping the weather would drive prey into the path of our weapons, confident that a fire and some dry clothes awaited us at the village. We had no such luxury now. It would take us forever to dry off if we got soaked through now, not to mention the chafing that would no doubt follow. I doubted we could stay completely dry, but we certainly needed to protect any and every slight advantage that we had. On the other hand, having enough drinking water was essential.

“Right,” I began, trying to infuse my voice with a confidence I didn’t feel. “We’ll leave half of our bottles here where there’s less foliage to refill, and one of us can come switch them out in a little while. We won’t go far, just deep enough towards the center of the bridge for the branches to provide us with some shelter. We can hang the tarp to help us stay as dry as possible. I don’t want us to keep moving when we don’t know how bad the storm will get. Plus, rain will wash away any tracks we may have left, in case anyone else comes looking.” I swallowed, hoping and doubting that my plan was tenable, but both Cahira and Amis nodded and went to work.

I didn’t say what we were all thinking. During summer and through the early fall, the village would sometimes see huge storms strike the coast, bringing a lot of damage. We called them raiders. Years ago, we constructed an evacuation point to go to during these storms, outside the village but on much higher ground with sturdy buildings, built low to withstand the storm. People still died sometimes, and there was at the very least always a lot of rebuilding that had to happen afterwards. If a storm like that could prove to be such a danger on dry land, how much trouble were we over the open ocean?

I had no idea how elevated we were; the walls of the bridge were far too high to consider checking. It did seem like as we went along, oddly enough, that the bridge got wider. I hoped that was a point in our favor. I tried to be optimistic, to believe that maybe this would just be a rain shower that would only mildly impede our progress. I wanted to believe. However, the season was right for a raider, and the sky was beginning to take on the specific tint that always seemed to herald a particularly bad one.

After Cahira and I had finished securing our bottles to the trees, so they wouldn’t blow away, the three of us moved in towards the denser part of the forest. Rain had started to fall, mildly at first, but it quickly became more aggressive. We were protected from most of the wind by the towering walls of the bridge, but we could still hear it beginning to shriek. Somewhere below us, what had been the distant and mostly comforting sound of calm seas became a thunderous roar. The ground beneath our feet seemed to sway ever so slightly, not necessarily uncommon for a bridge but disconcerting nonetheless, especially given the circumstances.

We fastened the tarp to a close-knit group of trees and the three of us huddled beneath it, none of us saying a word. I doubt we would have heard each other even if we tried. It was clear that riding out the storm would be no easy feat, although the same was true of anyone coming after us to see what had become of Sora and his group. I closed my eyes.

And almost immediately opened them as Cahira jammed her elbow into my ribs.

My gaze was met by a large pair of unblinking yellow eyes, belonging to a creature unlike any I had ever seen before.