Reva Pitch's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Reva Pitch promised her town a god in the sand, and tonight they wanted to see it. Forty of them stood in the dry wash below her, lanterns shaking. She walked barefoot along the ridge, smiling the way she always smiled, wide and unblinking. For three years that smile had been enough. It filled their water barrels with hope and emptied their doubts. But a smile cannot survive a desert march of ninety miles. They needed proof the thing underground was real. She had heard it first as a hum under her feet, a voice without words. It called her west, to a place she had never dug but somehow knew. She meant to lead them all there. Now a man in the crowd shouted up at her. "Show us, Reva. Show us one thing." Others took up the word. Show us. The lanterns stopped swaying. They waited. Reva did not argue. She pointed to the far edge of the wash, where two slabs of pale rock leaned together into a tall, narrow shape. From the ground it looked like a letter standing in the dark, wide at the top, pinched at the bottom. "It marks the door," she said. "It has waited for us." The crowd turned. They had passed that rock a hundred times and never looked twice. She climbed down and crossed to the base of the leaning stone. The hum was loud here, buzzing up through her heels. She knelt and pulled away loose sand with both hands. The town pressed in behind her, breath held. Her fingers struck something hard and dry. Not rock. She brushed it clean and lifted it into the lantern light. A skull came up in her hands, then a shoulder, then an arm bound in gray leather skin. The body was a man, or had been. His flesh had gone the color of old rope. Red wounds marked his chest, but no blood ran. His jaw hung open. His eyes caught the lantern and shone back yellow. Then the arm moved. The fingers curled against her wrist. The crowd screamed. Two men fell back into the sand. But the thing did not lunge. It turned its yellow eyes up toward Reva and went still, as if it knew her. She held it the way a mother holds a found child. "You see," she said, loud enough to carry. "It kept this one for me. It keeps everything we lose." No one ran. The screaming thinned into weeping, then into a low, hungry murmur. They crept closer to touch the gray skin, to be near the proof. Reva felt their doubt break like a fever. The march was theirs now. But the dead man's grip on her wrist did not loosen, and she understood she could not set him down. Whatever slept in the west had sent her a guide, and a guard, and a leash.