“Do you know anything about dams?” Micah asked, shielding his eyes from the torrential downpour.
It had taken a day and a half for Lucia to manipulate the surviving humans out of the city and into the mountains where our warriors resided, and just a couple hours for us to trek the distance to the South Fork Dam once we were sure she had cleared as many as she could.
“Not much. We simply need to plug the drains and let it overflow.”
Micah glanced at me nervously. “Sounds simple enough. I doubt it will be, though.”
The stone wall was massive as I scanned it, searching for any weaknesses we could exploit through the rain pelting us with near blinding strength in the early-morning hours before the sun’s rise. The weather would only benefit us, the rivers swelled beyond their limits with the excess water that had been dumped on us in the last twenty-four hours.
A hawk shifter darted through the air past me, landing on the ground before shaking off some of the excess water. “There’s a spillway on the north sideof the dam!”
“We start there,” I said, and Micah nodded before we hurried along the dam wall to find the river full of rushing water.
“Gods,” Micah groaned as we pressed on through the rain and wind, trees moaning as they swayed against one another in the dark around us. “I’ve never seen so much rain.”
Neither had I, and I wasn’t sure if this weather was a gift from the gods or a curse of The Fates to see us fail. There had to be a way to sabotage the dam, force it to fail in a way that looked natural. Surely, the humans wouldn’t know whether the dam had simply failed due to poor stonework, or?—
A loud crack cut through the air, and my eyes shot up. “Watch out!”
The tree crashed down on us, and Micah’s arm wrapped around my waist as he dove forward, pulling me out of the way of the trunk as it plowed into the ground. We hit the muddied path and twisted around in time to watch as a dendron user trapped the tree with roots before it could roll over top of the other warriors at our back.
“Thank the fates,” Micah breathed as he released me.
“Don’t thank the old crones yet,” I groaned as he helped me to my feet, and mud slicked down the front of my leathers. “Is anyone hurt?”
“All accounted for!” one of the warriors shouted back.
“Let’s get this done!” I shouted, and we all hurried along the river toward what I hoped might be a way to bring a flood. We couldn’t suffer any further delays; word would eventually get out of the damage in the city by an unsuspecting human wandering from a nearby town. Lucia and the others would only be able to intervene so much; someone might slip through the cracks, and we would be left with an even bigger mess to clean up.
“Did Lucia seem off to you?” Micah asked, his voice barely loud enough to be heard over the downpour, over the roaring winds and rushing waters.
“It’s not as if we just lost countless of our kind,” I said, giving him a look.
“You know what I mean.”
I couldn’t deny that he was right. Something was bothering her, that much was certain, and it was more than the battle. But what?
“She did,” I admitted unsure what else to make of it.
She’d always been a little off, working in strange ways in the background. The look in her eyes, though, spoke of someone burdened with knowledge too great to bear.
The trees parted, and we found a small bridge where water crested the top of the hill before flowing down the mountainside and forming the river that eventually crossed through Johnstown. There was so much water, the river flowing with furious energy as it crashed over the river rocks and boulders, swallowing up downed trees and debris as it tore through the land along its edge.
“I’m sure it’ll be all right. She’s likely just exhausted from the battle,” I said, praying my words were truth.
I scanned the bridge before my gaze landed to the water flowing under it, and I narrowed my eyes to see through the heavy rain. There appeared to be something stretched across the opening beneath the bridge, the woven ropes bulging against the heavy flow of water. “Is that a net?”
Micah tilted his head at the edge of the overflowing creek to look. “It would appear so.”
The hawk shifter who had scouted ahead came to a stop at my side. “The lake is already threatening to spill over the dam.”
“If we clog up that net, the water will have nowhere to escape...”
“And the dam fails,” Micah said, finishing my trail of thought, and he turned to the warriors at our back.
“Hopefully. It could burst through here instead of the dam, and then we’ll have to find another way,” I said, praying I wasn’t putting too much faith in this one solution. “Water and earth wielders! See if there is anything in the lake to clog this net.”
Our warriors raced to the top of the hill, and I followed after them, the ground so saturated that our boots slipped and tore through grass and mud. I came to a stop at the top, looking out over the lake, waves surging in the storm like an angry creature eager to devour us all. The water wielders fell to their knees at the lake’s edge, throwing their hands into the raging tides as the earth users planted their palms in the soil.
