Arena Read Online Free PDF Page B

could supposedly sit motionless for hours awaiting their prey. But several careful inspections of the surrounding rock walls revealed nothing, and when no further sound followed the first, she exhaled deeply.
    “Wimp,” she muttered, her voice grating in the quiet. “It was probably just—”
    Something scrabbled among the boulders and burst from the gray weeds—a blood red lizard? Insect? Crustacean? Whatever it was, it scuttled crablike across the sand, zipping by her and back along the road, then darted left into a crack in the rock.
    Callie stood very still, struggling to put a name to the creature and failing. Another engineered bioform? Curiosity prodded her to investigate, but caution stood in the way—she’d have to leave the road to do so.
    “Curiosity killed the cat,” she reminded herself and set off briskly down the lower path. Only when she’d put a curtain of rock between herself and the gloomy cleft did her uneasiness abate.
    She soon encountered a second branching where the canyon widened briefly. Again she chose the low option, proceeding along a small stream through a field of pungent yellow wild flowers. Six Ys later, however, she was decidedly uncomfortable. The sheer walls loomed close, and the sun—or whatever was substituting for it—was clearly descending. She’d been prudently staying on the canyon floor, but now impatience flapped its dark wings, demanding more results for the time and effort she’d expended. If she went up, maybe she could see the arched gateway she sought. “Okay,” she said. “Next opportunity, I’ll do it.”
    Only now the opportunities stopped.
    Worse, her road had acquired an unsettling dinginess. The incoming paths she’d passed earlier had been similarly discolored, which she’d taken as indications of heavy use. Now she wondered if they might have been tricks, side spurs to confuse and distract. What if, at that first juncture, she’d chosen the wrong path?
    The thought of backtracking nearly brought her to tears. As far as she’d come, she’d never make it back before dark. And there was that rock dragon to consider as well.
    But if she was off the path . . .
    Maybe she was just being paranoid again. Maybe it was the light reflecting off the surrounding red rock. Or dust. She paused at yet another turn and squatted to rub her fingers across the pavement. Sure enough, they came away coated with a fine red grit. “See?” she told herself. “It’s still white underneath. Nothing to worry about.”
    And then that sense of being watched poured over her again, thick and stifling. Nape hairs erect, she eyed her surroundings—sand, rock, a few weeds. Nothing at all alarming. Yet the feeling persisted. Creepy. Invasive. Almost . . . evil.
    Slowly she arose, rubbing her fingers on her thigh.
    Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw it standing twenty feet upstream, half hidden by a boulder. It jumped immediately out of sight, but the afterimage remained—humanoid, hairless, all arms and legs, with luminescent gray skin and two pitlike eyespots.
    More alien than the cactus grass or the red crustacean—or even Alex and his vanish-into-thin-air trick—this thing’s very aura reeked of otherness. It struck a chord of such primal terror, she had backed ten yards downstream before she knew it.
    She stopped and pulled herself together. It hadn’t attacked her. Maybe it couldn’t. Maybe it was in another dimension. Maybe it wasn’t even dangerous.
    No. It was dangerous. Intuition, perhaps, but definitely as strong a feeling as she’d ever known.
    Fighting panic, Callie hurried along the path, desperate now for an escape route. No matter what heights she had to brave, it was better than being down here with that thing .
    But the canyon snaked on with no new branches—as if the creature had waited until she was trapped before revealing itself. It followed her steadily, and she glimpsed it now and then, peering from behind the rocks, an unnerving hunger