Prophet of the Badlands (The Awakened Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

her to run carelessly forward. Something sharp caught the inside edge of her foot and she came to a hopping halt, gritting her teeth to muffle her yelp of pain.
    The passage was just out of reach. A nearby box served as a convenient stepstool, and she got her fingers over the lip of a protruding pipe. With her uninjured foot scrabbling at the wall, she hauled herself up and into a tunnel too small for her to sit up in. A line of dried muck colored the bottom darker grey than the rest of the world. The other end appeared to lead to another underground passage. Satisfied it was not a dead end, she crawled, smiling as she heard the man outside continue right past her.
    Twenty yards later, she peeked out of the other end, finding a huge round tunnel made of the same white stone as the first, with a tiny stream running along the bottom. Althea slithered forward, and slid hands-first down the curved wall, coming to rest at the bottom with a splash. With a moment to breathe, she sat cross-legged and pulled her right foot up to look at it before focusing her power into her body. The cut stood out as a clean black line through the red shape of her foot, tracing from below the ankle to the center of her sole.
    A warm tingle spread through the area as the cut foamed. A sick had gotten into the wound, but it had not infiltrated her body enough to come out in the usual manner. An ill-scented ichor dribbled down over her heel, directly from the closing injury.
    The dirty water had bad things in it. For a moment, she worried the man chasing her had found a sick as well; however, the pipe she crawled through was twice her height away at the midpoint of an immense round shaft. She could not climb the wall to go back, no matter how guilty she felt. Raiders with guns had come for her; now she knew what caused the dream.
    The Seekers must be warned.



mid several inches of frigid water, she sat and rubbed her foot to chase away the phantom pain. No light pierced the gloom of this subterranean tunnel; it was hard to tell which dark smudges were blood and which were dirt when everything looked grey. Althea stood, feeling with tentative fingers on the sloped wall. The slosh of the disturbed water as she walked made her cringe as it echoed in both directions. Drops, falling from her skirt, reverberated like a herd of tiny buffalo, thundering as if to tell the man right where she was.
    The flowing water left the molded concrete free of slime, and offered sure footing as she crept ahead. Despite chattering teeth, she kept her feet underwater, lifting them just enough to slide forward without breaking the surface, so she did not splash louder. After about a hundred yards, the giant tunnel ended at a square chamber many times the size of Den’s hut. A spot of color caught her eye, glimmering from within a pipe protruding from the distant wall at the top of a ladder. The water in the space ahead was at the same level as the few inches she stood in. Grinning at the promise of daylight, she ran forward.
    Unfortunately, the chamber’s floor lurked much lower than the bottom of the tunnel. She closed her eyes and clamped her mouth shut as she submerged in old rainwater that had no business being anything but ice. A shriek filled several bubbles as she sank, paralyzed by the bone-chilling liquid for a few seconds before collecting the presence of mind to start swimming. She broke the surface with gasping breaths and wiped a hand over her face. The room looked different from that angle, but after three rotations, she oriented herself and paddled to the base of a ladder.
    She gripped the rusted metal and probed with a hesitant toe until she found the nearest rung. Althea climbed with great care, easing her weight down on each step, careful not to cut herself again. Two stories above the water, she sat shivering at the edge of another molded concrete tunnel, running her hands through the scraps of leather and squeegeeing the water out to make the burdensome