Page 80 of The Luminaries
She aims south, and doesn’t slow. The shore is flatter, but softer. Each pounding step demands more spring, more energy from feet encased only in flimsy leather. Ahead is the camera—a lone tripod staked into the earth, set back ten paces from the silent shore. She has to squint to make it out, but it isthere.
She hears the manticores clear the forest behind her. She feels the ground vibrate with their legs, and without trees to muffle it, she hears the chitinous clacking of their wide mandibles.
She will reach the camera, though. She will reach it and she will scream into it, and maybe someone will come for Emma. Maybe at leastshe,the generous, kind one, will make it out of this forest Winnie was never meant to go into.
Winnie is almost to it. A red light blinks as it transmits footage. And for the first time since entering the night, Winnie screams.
“Help!” she shrieks at the camera. “Help us! Emma is in the forest—”
A kelpie erupts from the water to Winnie’s right. It is taller than she is, almost vampiric in its bipedal, skeletally skinny form. But there are the tentacles: two of them as long as its body now rushing for Winnie like it wants a supremely messed-up hug.
Winnie slices off both tentacles. It’s even more graceless than her hacking at the manticores, but it does what she needs it to do. Arm up, knife out. Tentacle one, tentacle two.
The kelpie roars, a strange sound meant for watery depths, and in the fraction of a second before Winnie sprints onward for the camera, she spots gills on its neck. Behind it, more kelpies erupt from the water, bellowing watery roars. Then comes a smashing and cracking like manticore exoskeletons giving way.
Winnie reaches the camera. She snaps it off the tripod and instantly starts running again.
Her plan has worked, but only partially. The kelpies are fighting the manticore hatchlings, but the mom is still coming this way. Winnie sprints, trying to shout and pant into the camera with each step. “Emma! Near… Stone Hollow! Badly hurt—find her! Find her!” She says this again and again until she can’t hold on to the camera anymore because she needs at least one hand available to face the mama manticore. Though what good will a single knife do against a creature the size of a car?
And now the lake is ending, the trees reclaiming their territory ahead, while the waters move and twine, building toward the falls.
Wind slaps against Winnie in time to the manticore’s whips. They will slice right through her, cleave her body in two like too many nons Winnie has never considered much before.
They died like this,she thinks. Whip-whip-whip.They died like me.All this time, she has thought vicious death was a fact of life for all Luminaries, and that by inoculating herself against it, she wouldn’t fear her own.
She does fear it, though, and she doesn’t want to die.
Winnie is so focused on moving, on getting ahead of this manticore—on maybe reaching the trees ahead and trying to find areallytall one—that she doesn’t notice the white charging toward her. Not until it slams into her and knocks her to the hard shore.
Werewolf,she thinks at the same time the manticore’s whips fly over her. Right where her body had been.
Winnie stabs at the wolf, only to realize she has lost her knife—and only to realize the wolf is leaping off her and charging toward the manticore. It is a blur that even with glasses Winnie wouldn’t be able to follow. It moves too fast, and she doesn’t try to watch it. If this is what the forest is going to give her, then she will take it. And she will run.
She doesn’t see her knife anywhere in the second it takes her to rise, so she leaves it. Her arms pump, her knees—bloodied and scraped and attached to a different body with a smarter mind—kick high.
She is almost to the trees and the cover they will provide when the wind scrapes against her. It is unnatural, and she knows by the way everything inside her drops that it’s not a natural wind.
Her temperature drops. Her organs drop. The hair on her arms and on her headdropslike it’s all been attached to tiny, icy weights.
Then come the whispers.
She doesn’t see it. It’s just suddenly there. Directly before her, gusting wind at her along with a coughing, scratching sound like Mathilda when she won’t start. It is huge—that much she can sense, even if she can’t see it—and it is hungry.
Winnie dives right, toward the lake. It is her only course, because the Whisperer is careening toward her in a way that cuts her off from the trees, like a dog herding sheep. She has no choice but to run right for the water.
If she gets in that water, she will die. If she stops here, she will die. The wind is flaying against her, charged and smelling of melted plastic. It sets everything inside her on a high-pitched edge, like she has just clamped her jaw on an open wire.
Somehow, she is still running, but she’s going to have to choose. Lake or Whisperer.
She chooses lake. Her legs splash, cold punching into her—distant, though, and drowned out by adrenaline and electric whispers. She is calf deep, but it is too shallow to dive and the water pulls at her as it sweeps toward tumbling falls she cannot hear.
She splashes onward. The Whisperer follows. She needs to move faster, but the water isn’t getting deeper—whyisn’t it getting deeper? And why is the substrate hard?
She’s on a rock, she realizes. Like the one Jay had walked her onto only four days ago. Like that overhang he’d shown her, this rock leads to the waterfall. And the Whisperer is herding Winnie toward it. Somehow, the running water isn’t deterring it at all. It is still coming at her with a voice made of black holes and broken glass.
The water is pulling fast now, shards of granite slick and rough at the same time. Her foot gets caught in an invisible hole. She trips. Hits the water in a splash of cold. It carries her a full second before she gets back up again, soaking and frozen and missing a shoe.
She looks back, wondering if she can cross the whole lake this way. Maybe she can reach that outcropping on the other side if she just moves fast enough.
