Free Havah by Tosca Lee Page A

Isha!” He yanked me to my feet, and I realized that he was on the cusp of falling down with fear or grief, from which he might never rise. “We cannot stay here!”
    The sky had gone black, the roiling mass of it struck through with lightning like white-hot veins. As though to emphasize the adam’s words, two mighty cracks collided above the mount, shaking it to its foundations so that my ears rang. The wind came in like a living thing, clawed at my hair, slapped the pelt against my thigh.
    If we wore the skins of Adah and her mate, and if they lay upon the ground as fruits moldering . . . how could they exist without their skins? I craned to see beyond the adam, tried to pull the terrible thing off, to give it somehow, horribly, back. But when the sky flashed, there was only a blackened patch of earth where once the animals lay.
    “Don’t look.” He turned me away. “They’re gone.” Then I smelled it—something other than the charred remains of fire. Something not as cleanly burned as dried grass or wood.
    Struggling not to vomit, I turned my face to the sky, seeking any trace of the One, most loving, most terrible. But the churning dark held no God, no sun, no eye, no ear for us. Lightning—now an unnatural green—flashed in ragged streaks like talons clawing for the dark heavens. The western end of the valley was a hunchbacked beast.
    “Go! Run to the eastern gate!” the adam shouted over a distant rumble. “Run!”
    Run? My body had rebelled against food and consciousness already—and how should I run wearing this terrible trophy?
    “I am going for our things.” He pushed me away. “Go!”
    I took one last look at the face I both loved and abhorred and then turned on my heel and ran.
    I bolted along the river. It ran with uncanny turbulence beside me. I had the sensation of eyes upon me and thought I smelled the charred and sickly smell of that burnt patch of earth following me in the unnatural air. At least my burst of motion, even beneath a blackened sky, stunted paralyzing gall. I knew nothing but the pounding of my feet, the heaving of my breath, the horrible hide flapping against my thigh, encasing my torso in its unnatural sheath.
    Just as I reached the terraces, the skies opened. This was no rain as rains had been known to me—drizzling, sweet and warm—but a deluge, as though the earth would flush itself of all the life that polluted it. It came in droves as though I stood beneath a fall, driving beneath the garment and down my spine.
    Impossibly, I ran faster.
    The thunder rolled away as though it would take itself to the eastern sea, then doubled back, one wave crashing upon the heels of the last, beating at the skies. Before my inner eye I saw again the rising of the land, the heaving of the mountains, and wondered if the One meant to put them back.
    I slipped on the wet earth, and my foot slid into a rock. Pain shot up my leg, startling the breath from me. I skittered but ran on. I could barely see, rain and sodden hair in my eyes. I thought I made out the shape of a hare darting through the brush, and, a moment later, the boar, though whether they were truly there or a trick of the rain and lightning, I could not know.
    I scrambled toward the natural terraces. Water sluiced past me from above as I climbed upward, trying to get a view of the valley behind me to watch for the adam. The mount and the range to the north hunched like hulking giants. The river was well over its banks in some places. Lightning flashed, and I recognized one of the ewes struggling in the river, flailing as the current carried her away. I cowered on the terrace, wondering if the valley, roused to monstrous life, would devour the adam as well.
    Was this my world now? Was this how it would forever be, never to see the sun again or lift our faces to the heavens without rain driving into our eyes?
    Let the adam come quickly, I begged the One. But if he heard me, I did not know it.
    After a while, the rain abated.