“Are you able to see?” Kre asked, curious if it were true that Ylveryans had the sort of demon sight they were often believed to possess.
“No, but I can echolocate using the sound of your whining.”
Kre knew that she was making fun of him, but he couldn’t help the words that came out next. “What in the world is an echolocate?”
“Echolocation is how bats and other animals find their way around without being able to see very well. They emit a sound and listen for the reflected echo off of nearby objects.”
“Interesting. I’ve never seen a bat.”
“You might get a chance. We are pretty far underground now, and this seems to be some sort of underground network of caves. Whether natural or man-made, I cannot yet tell.”
“How far down do you think we are? It felt like we were falling for at least a minute.”
Kitalia snorted and Kre could imagine the look of pity on her face for his complete lack of knowledge on the topic of surviving outdoors. He earnestly believed that the primary thought in her mind at that moment was that this poor fool of a boy should never have left his sheep farm. In all honestly, he wasn’t too far from the truth there, but she would thankfully never confirm that for him.
“We are probably eighty or ninety feet underground. Thankfully we were on a slope, so we did not break our necks. Still, the slope was steep, meaning it will be nearly impossible to climb back up that way.”
Kre sighed, having just thought that maybe they could escape back up the same way they came down. “I’m sorry Kit,” he said softly.
“Why apologize?”
“Well, I shouldn’t have fallen in the first place. If I could have just stayed quiet and still, we wouldn’t be stuck down here.”
Kitalia patted him on the shoulders and back, making it seem like she was brushing dirt from his clothes but was, in reality, comforting him in her small way. “You forget, we were being hunted and they were closing in fast. Had we not fallen down here I have no doubt we would have been discovered.”
“Who were they? They seemed to know you.”
“They are still up there, likely trying to find a way down here. I say we move on a bit, find a way out and away from them while we have the advantage.”
“You’re just avoiding the question,” Kre said accusingly. “You always avoid the question.”
Her retort was as fast as a whipsnap and stung just as much, “If you learned to avoid the question, we would not be fleeing right now.”
She grabbed his arm and started to pull him along with her. He had no idea what direction they were going in, and he stumbled more than a few times trying to figure out his footing in the complete darkness.
They had gone maybe thirty slow steps before Kre managed to piece together a few bits of what he had just heard. “So, wait… were those Rangers back there?” Even though he had some of the pieces, he still could not manage to fit them together.
“No,” Kitalia replied. “Those were most assuredly not Rangers.”
Another fifty or so steps and a ludicrous thought came to his mind. “The only other person I’ve talked to this whole trip were the guys I ate with at Red’s place and Red herself.”
“And I await with bated breath to see if you pick the right one,” Kitalia muttered under her breath.
Now that he thought about it, the voice in the forest did seem familiar. Gutteral, true, but also feminine in a way. “Red is hunting us?”
“More accurately, she is hunting you. I am just something in the way of her getting what she wants.”