The Sum of Her Parts by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online

frowning. “Do you hear something?”
    Besides the warm liquid honey that is your voice, you mean?
He forced himself to concentrate on the surrounding reality—and then he also frowned.
    “Yeah, I hear it.” He was suddenly alarmed. “Sounds like a truck, or at least a 4×4. Not a floater, and too loud to be a drone.”
    The noise grew louder, a steadily rising roar. “Awfully big truck, if that’s what it is,” she commented uneasily. “Especially for a place where there’s no road.”
    “Could be a freight transporter. Big one.” He began searching the flanking, winding walls of the ravine for another hiding place.“Anything like that out here, it would have to belong to the company.”
    Another long moment passed while they stood standing motionless and listening. The growl continued to grow in volume.
    “That’s no truck,” he muttered. “Too consistent, too loud, too …”
    He never finished the thought, as it was interrupted by the raging wall of brown and white water that came thundering around the nearest bend in the canyon.
    Flash flood.
    The atypical downpour that had temporarily soaked them had been far more intense off to the east. There, on the westernmost slopes of the Jakkalsberge, the deluge had filled rivulets and streams, arroyos and canyons, gathering volume and strength as it made a doomed rush toward a shore it would never reach. Instead the water spread out over the vast gravel plains, soaked into thirsty spongelike sands, and briefly filled to overflowing every dry gulch and desiccated gorge that striped the mountain slopes.
    Including the one up which they were presently hiking.
    “RUN!”
    She followed his lead as he turned and bolted back the way they had come. As they ran they frantically scanned the passing stone walls for signs of a way out, a way up, or even simple handholds. There was nothing; only the slick curving rock walls like waves frozen in time, whose sides had been scoured smooth by thousands of years of churning, rushing, polishing water. Predecessors of the thundering flood that was closing rapidly on them right now.
    “Here, doc, over here!”
    The several fissures in the rock wall that Whispr had found were too narrow to admit human fingers. Natural human fingers. The desperate street Meld jammed the bony pitons that were his attenuated digits into the barely visible cracks and started to pullhimself upward. With his slender body flattened against the cool stone he looked like some skeletal desert arachnid.
    Hurrying to follow him, Ingrid stumbled in the sand and gravel, regained her footing, and tried to start up in his wake. Even with heavily trimmed nails her fingers were unable to gain a purchase on the rock. She screamed, but the apocalyptic bellow of the oncoming water drowned her out. Keeping the fingers of one hand firmly jammed in the deepest fracture he could find, Whispr reached down and grabbed her fluttering right hand.
    “Climb! Use your feet, doc!
Move!
”
    The water slammed into her, bursting upward over her shoulders as she turned her head away from the brutalizing current. The thin cablelike muscles in his arms strained as he strove to maintain his grip. Water surged all around them, tugging at her and stretching her out like a beige-colored flag with her legs like tatters pointed downstream. She was too heavy, he was too weak, the flood was too strong. Her fingers slipped from his.
    “Whispr!”
    All the high-tech trekking equipment in his pack could do nothing to strengthen his grip. He could only watch as the powerful current swept her away from him and carried her downstream. He saw her go under, come up with her head tilted back, and, spitting water, go under again. She reemerged at the first bend, trying desperately to get a purchase on the indifferent stone. Her hands flailed at the smooth rock. If she could hold on until the initial rush started to subside it would be okay, he told himself. His heart was pounding.
    For a moment he