Cold Springs(105)
Her mom had never dealt well with female stuff. She was too damn busy being headmistress to be female. Maxi-pads? Trainer bras? Forget it. Mallory remembered how ashamed she'd felt, walking into the lingerie department by herself because her mom wouldn't take her, and then walking out again, scared of the salesclerk. Finally, Norma had taken her under her wing, bought her the right training bra—Norma Reyes, the woman who had lost her br**sts to cancer. She could buy a bra, and her mom couldn't. Thinking about it still made Mallory angry.
Of course at the moment, everything made her angry. Her hormones were boiling over. Maybe all the women at Cold Springs were on the same cycle—her, Morrison, Olsen—all of them ready to tear somebody's throat out. Maybe Hunter had been wise to send them off into the wilderness for a while.
She skirted the base of a large hill, using a dry creek bed for a road. She wanted to avoid the underbrush—dense pampas grass and wild rye that grew waist-high on either side. Leyland had warned them about rattlesnakes. They were less active in winter, but they were still out there, living in the high grass.
How far had she walked? Miles, anyway. She hadn't known there were still open places like this in the world, where you could walk all day and see nothing—no people, no buildings, no civilization.
Her calf muscles were sore. Her knife chafed against her thigh. She'd eaten her only ration bar three hours ago, and now her stomach was a hole, slowly burning larger and larger.
Still, she'd felt proud of herself, for the most part. They had taken her compass away before she set out, but she'd used stick-and-shadow readings to find her cardinal directions. She was fairly confident she had remained on an eastward course, though the clouds had rolled in during the afternoon—and she could now only guess she was heading the right way.
Her stomach did a slow twist, trying to write the word FOOD on the back of her rib cage. They should've given her two ration bars. They should've taken into account she'd been on the run all night with nothing to eat, unlike the rest of the team. It wasn't fair.
Nothing's fair, she told herself. Stop blaming and find a solution.
Water. Her canteen was empty. She should find a way to fill it. At least that would give her something to put in her belly.
She followed a streak of slushy gravel up the creek bed to a bathtub-sized puddle of standing water. The surface was webbed with floating algae that piled up at the edges, making shirred lace on the granite. Young frogs darted around in the silt. Water bugs streaked through the ripples. It seemed strange that there could be so much life in the middle of winter. Surely it would freeze tonight. Could frogs live under ice?
Mallory knew she shouldn't drink from here. Amoebas, bacteria—shit like that could make her sick. Then she noticed the capillary of water trickling into the pond, feeding it. She followed it up into the rocks and found the spring, almost choked in moss, but there it was, bubbling right out of the ground—one of the cold springs the school was named after. Supposedly hundreds of these sprouted up all over the ranch, lacing together to form the river. But this was the first one Mallory had seen. Weird, that something so small could make a river.
She squatted down and the cramps tightened. Black spots danced behind her eyes. She wrapped her fingers around the GPS bracelet on her wrist, squeezed the metal band. But she wouldn't push that button. She wasn't going to give up. Not this time.
She steadied her breathing, looked for something to focus her eyes on. The ground here was littered with flint chips. Chert—worked stone, just like Leyland had told them to watch for. Several pieces had been chipped to a point—discarded Indian tools. She was kneeling at a two-thousand-year-old drinking fountain.
She cupped her hand into the water and took a drink. It tasted cold, earthy—what the heart of a tree would taste like, if you could drink it.
Her dizziness subsided. She filled her canteen.
Under her hand, the moss felt like a horse's muzzle, and she remembered the evening she'd stood with Olsen at the pasture, feeding apple slices to the filly.
She thought about Olsen's secret—her stepfather, her little sister.
Mallory didn't want to be anybody's substitute little sister. She'd played that part before, with Katherine.
But she also couldn't help being touched that Olsen had opened up.
She'd never had a girlfriend—like a real slumber-party paint-your-nails kind of friend. Katherine had ruined that for her. Mallory got too close to another girl and she started thinking about the silver chain around her neck. She backed away, found a boy to hang out with, like Race.
She was sorry she hadn't told Olsen her own secret—about Katherine's last night, the figure on the Montroses' porch. But she felt relieved, too.
How could she be sure of a memory from when she was six? Her parents used to tell her things she did when she was small, until she started to believe she remembered them. The dream about the Montroses' porch could be the same kind of thing. A traumatic experience, combined with a new situation—you superimpose someone's face and start believing they were there.
She wondered how Olsen would react—whether she'd laugh it off, or take her seriously, or maybe even get angry. The hungrier Mallory got, and the more tired, the more reasonable her dream seemed. She'd heard Katherine—she'd called her friend she. Mallory was sure of that. But if Mallory said something, and she was wrong . . .
Rick Riordan's Books
- The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)
- The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo #3)
- The Ship of the Dead (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard #3)
- The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo #1)
- Rick Riordan
- Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)
- Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)
- Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)
- The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)
- The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)