Firewing by Kenneth Oppel Read Free Book Online Page A

control his words, maybe he could control other things, too. “What we have here is a cave-in kind of situation. Perfectly straightforward. The earthquake just shook loose a bunch of rock and dirt and dumped it here in my tunnel, so all I need to do is, um …
move
some of that rock and dirt so I can squeeze by. That really sums it all up. So. Let’s just do that.”
    He scuttled towards the wall of debris. Clawing at it, butting it with his head and shoulders, he managed to dislodge some smaller bits of rubble, but mostly just churned up more dust. He prised out a larger rock, and an ominous tremor moved through the wall; the roof of the tunnel wobbled and sent down a meteor shower of dirt.
    “Not too good,” he muttered, taking little sips of air to avoid coughing. “I keep digging and I might trigger another cave-in. If I don’t dig, I don’t get out. So we’ve got a bit of a dilemma here. But if I just sit around, another earthquake might bury me, anyway, and I really have no idea how much air is left down here….”
    Words were no longer helping, and he started gasping, panic squeezing at his lungs. He couldn’t stave off the terrible truth any longer. He was trapped, and there was nothing he could do about it, and no one even knew he was here!
    “Help!” he called hoarsely. “Help!” But now the fear in his voice just upset him more, and he stopped. He tried to calm his breathing. He would have to think of something. He felt cold, very cold, especially at his tail and legs, and then realized there was a gentle breeze nudging past him.
    With difficulty he turned himself around again, and fixed his sonic gaze towards the dead end.
    It wasn’t a dead end anymore.
    In what had once been a solid slab of stone was a broad gash, big enough for him to fit through. He hurried towards it, sniffing. The breeze wasn’t coming from the hole, it was going
into
the hole with a faint shushing sound.
    “This is good,” wheezed Griffin. “This is really good. A breeze. That means air. That means outside. That means we’ve got an escape kind of situation here….”
    He hurried to the opening, but when he sang sound into it, his returning echoes showed him that the passageway angled down, deeper beneath the earth. He didn’t like that. All that earth and stone above him, and what if there was another quake?
    He took a look back over his shoulder at the cave-in. He could still try to claw through, but how long would that take? This other tunnel
must
lead back to the surface, or there wouldn’t be a breeze. “Nice fresh little breeze,” he said. That decided it.
    Cautiously, he squeezed into the crack. It was as if the earthquake had effortlessly opened a long fissure through solid rock. His claws clicked against the stone. The breeze was getting stronger, gently tugging the fur on his face and shoulders. After another minute, he paused, troubled that the passageway was still sloping downwards. He’d go on a little further, and then, if it didn’t angle up, he’d …
    What?
    Turn back? Return to the cave-in, and wait around until all the air was sucked out of the tunnel and he suffocated?
    “It’s okay,” he said to himself. “Air comes from the sky. This has got to take me back to the sky.” It would just take a little longer than he’d thought. But he was far from reassured, and for just a moment his mother hovered before his mind’s eye and he felt like crying. It was fear that stopped his crying—a sudden attack of breathlessness in the cramped tunnel, deep beneath the earth.
Don’t
, he told himself.
Don’t think about it
.
    He hurried on, trying to outrun his terror. At least the breeze was getting stronger now, a steady low moan, with the occasional sharp whistling edge, which reminded him of high winds in a summer storm. Little bits of stone were skittering across the tunnel, dragged by the wind, and Griffin could actuallyfeel it speeding him along whenever his thumbs or feet left the