[First in Genre, Action/Adventure - The Shadow Awards]
[Best Heartbreaker - The Shadow Awards]
Alema (aw-leh-may) is the dominant male of a small African wild dog pack, dedicating every day of his life towards his family. He has remained blissfully...
Almost forgot! This chapter is dedicated to BloodyTurtle for writing an extremely helpful review for this book!
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"That's the city?" Alema asked in shock.
Hadley glared at him. "Change your mind, Reservie?"
Alema blinked and shook his head. "Not at all," he rasped.
The dominant female narrowed her eyes, looking half-amused. "Very well then," she hooted and continued leading the pack, Bahadur by her side.
Alema peered up at the boxy structures that reached into the sky. "Are those upwalker dens?" he whispered to Laleh.
"Sort of," Laleh murmured. "Upwalkers enter them throughout the day and then leave at night. It's strange, but then again, anything upwalker-related 's odd."
Alema slowly nodded, not taking his eyes off the sky-reaching dens. "Sure is different," he muttered. His heart lurched as he saw the sheer size of the city. Sky-reaching dens and other upwalker dwelling-places stretched far into the distance, even farther than the dens in the Upwalker Place.
"Do you think you'll find your family here?" Laleh asked, her voice oddly cheery.
"Uh," Alema sputtered. "How-how big is this city?"
Laleh looked at the far-reaching upwalker territory. "I don't know," she admitted. "I don't think I've ever explored the whole place."
Alema felt his heart sink. Where was he ever going to find five wild dogs in such a massive center?
The sound of roaring picked up in the breeze, and for a moment, Alema thought it was a typical sign of hunger from his ever-so-empty stomach. But no, as he picked up his head, his eyes immediately landed on a collection of upwalker and sky-reaching dens, all of which were cut off from the pack by a racing riding-beast herd.
Alema suddenly felt dizzy. He had thought that the Upwalker Place dens looked monstrous, but up close the larger dens of the city appeared capable of holding hundreds of upwalkers; the sky-reaching dens, thousands. Rectangular holes lined the walls of the dens farther up, allowing Alema to hear creatures, perhaps upwalkers, stirring within the towering structures.
His hackles rose. He had pictured at most a hundred or so upwalkers wandering the city, but even that number seemed stretched in his mind. And now—he didn't even want to consider the count. He lowered his gaze to the Black Path, where he saw the herd of riding-beasts—no, Tramplers—running in a straight line, their rolling black feet kicking up leaves and gravel as they roared past. "This is where you hunt?" he asked Laleh, having to raise his voice over the noise.
"Yeah," Laleh hooted back. "Bahadur knows the best places to find food."
"Find?" Alema shouted over the roars. "Like—scavenge?" The word felt filthy on his tongue.
