Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 19 of 150

Two days later they stood at the foot of the slide. Al pointed up the slope. Broken rock ran from ridge to draw, wide as a village. Somewhere under it sat the tooth relic and the box it once lived in. Ben tried to picture digging through that much hill and could not. "I marked where I dug," Al said. He showed them cairns spaced across the lower face. "I went down eight feet in three places. Hit more stone every time. The slide is stone on stone on stone. No air under it." Justin walked the base and pressed his ear to the rubble. "I don't hear the hum. Not one bit." Anita opened the map on a flat rock and weighed the corners. She looked at the tooth mark, then up at the slope. "If the relic is buried whole, we can't reach it. If the box broke, the relic is loose in there and the creature already knows." Ben sat on a cairn. Three boxes at his hip. Three relics in. One relic gone under a hill. Something moved in the scree above him. A small shape crawled down between two slabs, one leg dragging. Cracked hide. One eye too big. A tail that ended in a stump. It was the same kind as the rock creature from the low house, but wrong. Half made. Pieces missing. It stopped at Ben's boot and looked up. "The set," it said. The voice was thin. "You know the tooth," Ben said. It nodded once. Something ground inside its chest. "I was in the box when the hill came. Box broke. I broke. Relic went deeper. I climbed out over years." It lifted a claw and pointed, not up the slope, but sideways along the base. "No tooth here now. Slide crushed it. Powder in the seams." Ben's throat closed. "Crushed." "Gone," it said. "Twelve, not thirteen. The list was wrong. I am what is left of the count." Al sat down hard on a slab. Ten years of digging landed on his face at once. Anita crouched by the small creature. "You're sure." "I felt it end." Ben looked at the slope. He looked at Al. He looked at the broken thing at his boot. Nine sources had said thirteen. All nine had counted this one. He reached into the pack and lifted out a split wooden crate Al had carried the pottery shards in. He tipped the shards onto the cloth. He set the small creature inside the crate and lifted it up. It fit. "You come with us," Ben said. "You're the piece we get." The creature settled against the broken boards. It closed its big eye. Ben stood. Three relics in his coat. A twelfth in a broken crate. The set was smaller than he had feared and finished sooner than he had planned. "South," he said. "We finish the three that are left."