“What? No, don’t do that. Why would you want to do that?” Zander must have been thinking about the skin on her cheek, too, because he blinked once, looking dazed, as though he’d just woken up. He put his hands out in front of him and started walking toward her. “We don’t even know your name.”
“Stop. Don’t walk any farther,” she said. The bow was up, the string taut under her hand. But she said, “My name is Halla.”
Zander tried to smile, but it looked more like a strangled grimace. “Please don’t kill us. I don’t understand. Why would you do that? We just want to find our sister. She’s out there somewhere. She was with us and we don’t know what happened to her. We’re worried one of those cats attacked her.”
The girl hesitated, as though she was trying to figure out if he was making it up. “Where did you see her last?”
“She was heading in that direction,” he said, pointing, “where the cat was. I’m worried one of them got her and she’s hurt and can’t call for help.” Zander didn’t usually show too much emotion on his face, but I could see how worried he was and she must have seen it too.
“I’m sorry about your sister. I just wish they hadn’t seen you. They’ll be worried you’ll tell someone about us. If they hadn’t…” Whatever she said was drowned out by a loud grinding as the gears in the ceiling started moving again.
It took only a minute or so for the ceiling to open completely, filling the canyon with glittering, golden light again. “Oh, maybe that was just one of your flying machines. If they’d seen you, they wouldn’t have opened it up again.”
Finally I realized what she’d said. “‘Tell someone about us’?” I asked her. “Who’s ‘us’?”
She pointed down the canyon toward the cliff city.
We looked at the sparkling buildings, high in the canyon walls, and I couldn’t believe we hadn’t noticed it when we’d looked up at them before.
They weren’t the abandoned dwellings of an ancient people. If I squinted, I could just barely see movement on the terraces and in the windows of the buildings. Past the structures, on the canyon floor, a couple of horses grazed in the hot sun.
“You mean…?” Zander started to ask, but I already knew what she meant.
The city was full of people.