Broken Dreams (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 5) Read Online Free PDF

clapboard boxes of one configuration or another—a settlement town, something from the mid-to-late 1800s, she guessed.
    Another whistle—this one more distant—blew behind her, and she turned to see the last car of the train trundle in the distance. It didn’t move as fast as she had first thought.
    How did it get past me?
    Turning east toward town, she struck her heel on the steel rail, which reminded her where she stood. Since the tracks were elevated on a mound of dirt and fine gravel, she let gravity pull her down the incline in three loping steps, kicking up a small cloud of dust that gathered around her feet when she came to a quick stop at a field of tall grass.
    Something was odd about the town’s skyline ahead. Behind one of the taller buildings extended the tail of something quite large, sticking up at a sharp angle. It had fins. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought it a gigantic whale, diving into an unseen pool. She squinted into the late-morning sun to get a better view, putting her hand to her brow to temper the glare. She couldn’t discern any more details.
    Was it morning when she entered the receptacle? She stopped peering at the town and lowered her hand. It didn’t matter now that she was here .
    What mattered was finding Ping and Sam, and then figuring out what the Aphotis was up to. The logical next step was making her way to town. She could follow the railroad tracks, but they appeared to run in an arc around the settlement, and, since the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, she decided to cut across the three miles of grassy plain. She needed to find a path or a road. The tall grass would slow her down.
    Tick-tick-tick.
    Mara cocked her head and scanned the area for the sound.
    Tick-tick-tick.
    She couldn’t tell where it came from. Turning, she examined the slope up to the railroad tracks, kicking at the gravel to see if she could uncover the source of the noise.
    Scratch-scratch-scratch.
    Something pulled at the hem of her jeans, and she jumped. A brass-colored spider, the size of her hand, sat on the ground next to where she had been standing. The creature held up its front two legs and click ed them together, as if applauding her leap.
    Tick-tick-tick.
    It skittered toward her. She backed up the gravel slope of the train tracks. And it followed.
    Hoping to discourage it, Mara toed some gravel at it. The tiny rocks bounced off its back with a metallic bing . That didn’t appear to hurt it, but the creature stopped advancing. It straightened its articulated legs and raised its pill-shaped body higher, to the height of Mara’s knee. A seam appeared along the spider’s back and its shell split open like a flower blooming. From the center of the opening, a small tube extended about three inches and stopped. A clipped hiss came out of it, followed by a small puff of steam.
    The tiny cloud floated up, level with Mara’s face, and lingered there much longer than expected. Then it dissipated and floated away.
    The tiny tube disappeared into the back of the spider, and it squatted back down to ground level and skittered away.
    “What was that all about?” Mara said aloud as she watched the spider disappear into the grass.
    She was about to turn away when the grass moved, not in tandem with the breeze, but in different directions, as if something pushed each blade aside one by one. Another spider emerged and crawled toward her. Before it reached the base of the slope where Mara stood, another spider emerged from the grass. And then another. They converged on her.
    Deciding that walking through spider-infested grass toward town was not such a good idea, she followed the railroad tracks, stepping from tie to tie outside of the rails. When she heard the approaching click ing, she glanced over her shoulder to see dozens of the brass spiders jockeying past one another to get to her.
    She sped up, jogging, even though the distance between ties, and the gravel and