Alight (The Generations Trilogy #2)(68)

“Spin, gather up the muskets,” I say. “And take the bags of the two dead ones.”

Booted feet splash through the mud as she runs to obey.

I look at Purple, nod.

It grunts something unintelligible. We both get under the wounded Springer’s arms, and we lift.

Good gods, it is heavy.

Struggling to stay upright, I let Purple guide us down the trail.

The wounded Springer, it’s warm. The Grownups were cold, disgusting. The Springer is neither: if I close my eyes, I could believe I was helping one of my own kind. It would feel much the same.

It is all I can do to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. The wounded Springer’s weight is harder on Purple than it is on me. He can’t hop, he has to put one foot in front of the other—a movement that turns him from graceful leaper to stumbling, awkward walker.



We struggle on for a long while until Purple finally stops. He points off to the left. Through the trees and the pouring rain, I see a six-sided ruin. Most of it is knocked down, vine-strangled like everything else on this planet, but part of it still stands. Matilda’s memories call up something from our childhood—am I looking at a church steeple?

At the very tip, a copper sphere. Two rings surround it, the inner one with two opposing dots, the outer with four.

Spingate catches up, struggling under her load of muskets and bags.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she says, staring up at the steeple. “That’s the same symbol we saw on the Observatory. If we’re the first people here, how can the Springers have that same symbol?”

I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want to help keep this wounded Springer alive. Maybe that will balance against all the killing I’ve done.

Maybe.

Purple adjusts his position under his injured friend. I do the same. Together we walk toward the steeple.





I use the tiny scissors to cut the last stitch, then put them back into the white case Spingate brought.

“All done,” I say.

Spingate sighs. “How does it look?”

It looks awful. The bump on her head has a jagged red line across it marked with six ugly black stitches. It would have looked bad even if I didn’t have two broken fingers, swollen and screaming each time I move.

“It looks fine,” I say.

“Liar. Gaston will think it’s hideous.”

We’re inside the steeple, the base of which is a decent-sized room with an uneven floor, part stone, part dirt. We sit on chunks of broken wall surrounding a small, crackling fire. The place smells of smoke, dampness and burned toast. Rain drips in through multiple cracks, creating several twitching mud puddles.

The wounded Springer lies near the fire, asleep. Spingate stitched his cuts first, then mine, explaining to me how to do it as she did. Five stitches on my cheek, three on my chin. The fire warms us some, but I’m still cold, wet and hungry. It’s been a full day since my last meal, which I threw up after I killed that Springer.



I hurt all over. They beat me so bad. Except for my fingers, though, I don’t think I have any broken bones. For that, at least, I am grateful.

Two dead Springers lie at the base of a wall, both covered in vines. One is only a partial body, a decapitated half-torso with one arm still attached. Purple brought his dead friends here, one at a time. After the second corpse, he pantomimed that Spingate and I needed to stay here, then left yet again. He’s been gone for over an hour.

Strange, waist-high stone statues line the room’s edges. The statues are chipped and cracked, streaked with dirt. Many limbs are broken off. Some statues lean against the old wall, as they are too damaged to stand on their own.

Most of the statues are Springers. The stone is carved to show they wear long coats, pants covering their strange legs, long sleeves for their tails. Ruffles, folds, pleats…the clothing seems formal. Were these Springers important? If so, how long ago did they live?

A few of the statues aren’t Springers at all. I don’t know what to make of them. Legs that bend the wrong way, like those of a praying mantis, but much thicker. Narrow body with a middle set of arms positioned just above the hips, arms that end in heavy, clumsy-looking hands. The trunk rises up to a misshapen head with one large eye and a vertical mouth below that eye. From the sides of that head, just under the eye, another set of arms, these thinner, more delicate. They end in dexterous-looking fingers.

“Those statues seem weird,” I say. “What do you think they are?”



Spingate shrugs. “Maybe Springer gods. Or their demons. What I want to know about is that symbol on the steeple. This building must be older than the ones in our city, so how can we have the same symbol on the Observatory?”

She touches the bump on her head, winces. “I wonder if Smith’s coffin will heal my cut so I don’t have a scar.”

I think of O’Malley, so concerned about fixing his face.

“That scar is yours and yours alone,” I say. “Your creator didn’t have one like it.”

She thinks on that for a moment, then gives me a smile and a funny look.

“That’s good,” she says. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

I should be pleased, but I’m not. That funny look happens when I say something smart. Spingate is my friend, we work well together and she seems to accept me as leader, but deep down inside she doesn’t consider me an equal.