“Please don’t leave me again,” Leeloo said to her mother.
“But I never left you.”
“I couldn’t see you. We weren’t together. I was lonely.”
“We will always be together now.”
“And Dean?”
“You like him, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’s your Prince Charming.”
“He’s wonderful. He’s brave and smart. I don’t want to lose him. Can he come with us? Please?”
“He’ll be with us, too. When you get released, and he gets released, we’ll all be together.”
Leeloo understood without being told that “released” meant being freed from her body. “But what happens then?” she asked.
Tater Bunny put a hand on her daughter’s head.
Leeloo beamed up at her adoringly.
The facial resemblance between mother and daughter was uncanny. Daughter could have been mother at age eight. Mother could have been daughter at age twenty-six. And their expressions mirrored each other exactly, reflecting absolute joy.
“You will climb,” Tater said, “like a cloud of smoke. Straight up into the sky. You will be everywhere at once. Flying.”
“Like a bird?”
“Much better than a bird. Faster. Freer. There will be no wind you can’t fly through. No height you can’t soar to. No place you can’t go by just thinking about it.”
“You can do all those things?”
“I can. And so will you.”
“Will I have to wait long?”
“No, my darling. Not long.”
“And will I always be safe?”
“Always.”
Leeloo reached up and with her wooden tool pried free a huge lollipop, the flat disk of candy much bigger than her face. It was red and green and white, the colors swirling in a pinwheel shape. She closed her eyes tightly and touched it with the tip of her tongue.
“It’s peppermint!” she exclaimed.
Leeloo eagerly licked the scratchy gray skin of the nodule, the clear sap from its cut surface sheeting off her tiny chin.
JAK SENSED that he was being stalked, and by something big. He advanced alone through the dark cave; the light of the torch he carried dwindled away fifteen feet ahead of him and fifteen feet behind. Deep inside the mountain, there were no openings to the sky to let in light or air. The farther and deeper he went, the warmer it became. The cave he had picked to follow angled down into the earth. The water that trickled over the cave floor ran in the direction he was headed. He paused to listen for his pursuer. Although his hearing was very sharp, it picked up no scrape of boot on rock, no rustle of dirt as a body brushed a wall. There was only the steady hiss of the burning torch in his hand, and the babbling-brook sound of the water flowing around his boots.
Jak pressed on, looking for what he had been told to look for and was eager to find. Whether it was called “bounty” or “dinner,” what he’d been given at the burn barrel was some of the best roast pork he’d ever eaten. He was looking forward to stuffing himself with more.
After he had traveled perhaps ten yards, the sensation of being followed returned. He felt it as a tingling at the back of his neck and across his shoulders. It didn’t make him nervous that he was being trailed. It made him curious. He adjusted the ride of the Colt Python in its holster.
When he found a likely looking tendril, he stuck the end of the torch in a cleft in the rock and started prying on it with the wooden tool. It didn’t take him long to break the thing free from the wall. Under its armpit was a bounty the size of his head. As he plucked the ripe nodule, he knew that someone or something was watching him from behind. He put the bounty on the floor and picked up the torch. Holding the flame out in front of him, he took several steps toward it.
“Who there?” he demanded.
There was no answer.
Then in the shadows of the next bend in the walls, he saw something shift. It was big. The same size as the lion. As he advanced on it, whatever it was retreated out of the reach of the torchlight.