I keep hold of him, moving us both toward the compartment door. Left down the stairs, right at the landing, left again.
The door swings open on oiled hinges, revealing an empty passage quite like the ones on the mersive. Sparse and clean, with metal walls and piping above us. Electricity bleeds overhead, pumping through a wired network of veins. It’s coming from the shore, feeding the lights and other machinery.
Like Farley said, there’s no one down here. No one to stop us. I suppose, as the Colonel’s daughter, she would know firsthand. Quiet as cats, we follow her instructions, mindful of every single step. I’m reminded of the cells beneath the Hall of the Sun, where Julian and I incapacitated a squadron of black-masked Sentinels to free Kilorn, Farley, and the doomed Walsh. It seems so far away, yet that was only days ago. A week. Just one week.
I shudder to think where I’ll be in seven more days.
At last we come to a shorter passage, a dead end with three doors on the left, three doors on the right, and just as many observation windows set in between. The glass of each is dark, but for the window on the end. It flickers slightly, casting harsh white light through the pane. A fist collides with the glass and I flinch, expecting it to crack beneath Cal’s knuckles. But the window holds firm, echoing dully with every boom boom of his fists, showing nothing more than smears of silver blood.
No doubt he hears me coming, and thinks I’m one of them.
When I step in front of the window, he freezes mid-motion, one clenched and bleeding fist poised to strike. His flame-maker bracelet slides down his thick wrist, still spinning from his momentum. That’s a comfort, at least. They didn’t know enough to take away his greatest weapon. But then why is he still imprisoned at all? Couldn’t he just melt the window and be done with it?
For a single, blazing moment, our eyes meet through the glass, and I think our combined stare might shatter it. Thick, silver blood drips from where he struck his hand, mixing with already-dried stains. He’s been at this for a while, beating himself bloody in an attempt to get out—or burn off a little bit of his rage.
“It’s locked,” he says, his voice muffled behind the glass.
“Couldn’t tell,” I reply, smirking.
Next to me, Kilorn holds up the key.
Cal starts, as if noticing Kilorn for the first time. He smiles, grateful, but Kilorn doesn’t return the gesture. He won’t even meet his eyes.
From somewhere down the hall, I hear shouting. Footsteps. They echo strangely in the bunker but grow closer with every heartbeat. Coming for us.
“They know we’re here,” Kilorn hisses, looking back. Quickly, he jams the key in the lock and turns it. It doesn’t budge and I throw my shoulder against the door, slamming into cold, unforgiving iron.
Kilorn forces the key again, twisting. This time I’m close enough to hear the mechanism click. The door swings inward as the first soldier rounds the corner, but my thoughts are only of Cal.
It seems princes make me blind.
The invisible curtain drops the moment Kilorn shoves me into the cell. It’s a familiar sensation but I can’t place it. I’ve felt it before, I know I have, but where? I don’t have time to wonder. Cal surges past me, a strangled yell erupting from his lips, his long arms outstretched. Not to me, or the window. To the door as it yanks shut.
The click of the lock echoes inside my skull, again and again and again.
“What?” I ask the heavy, stale air. But the only answer I need is Kilorn’s face, staring at me from the other side of the glass. The key hangs from one clenched fist, and his face curls into something between a scowl and a sob.
I’m sorry, he mouths, and the first Lakelander soldier appears through the window. More follow, flanking the Colonel. His satisfied smirk matches the one his daughter wore in the photograph, and I begin to understand what just happened. The Colonel even has the audacity to laugh.
Cal hurls himself at the door in vain, driving his shoulder against solid iron. He swears through the pain, cursing Kilorn, me, this place, himself. I barely hear him over Julian’s voice in my head.
Anyone can betray anyone.
Without thought, I call for the lightning. My sparks will free me and turn the Colonel’s laughter into screams.
But they don’t come. There’s nothing. Bleak nothing.
Like in the cells, like the arena.
“Silent Stone,” Cal says, leaning heavily against the door. He points with one bloody fist to back corners of the floor and ceiling. “They have Silent Stone.”
To make you weak. To make you like them.
Now it’s my turn to pound my fists against the window, punching at Kilorn’s head. But I hit glass, not flesh, and hear only the cracking of my own knuckles instead of his stupid skull. Despite the wall between us, he flinches.
He can barely look at me. He shivers when the Colonel puts one hand on his shoulder, whispering into his ear. Kilorn can only watch as I scream, an indecipherable roar of frustration, and my blood joins Cal’s on the glass.
Red running through silver, joining into something darker.
8
The legs of the metal chair scrape against the floor, the only sound in the square cell. I leave the other chair where it lies, upended and battered after being thrown against the wall. Cal did quite a number on the cell before I got here, hurling both chairs and a now dented table. There’s a single chink in the wall, just below the window, where the corner of the table hit home. But throwing furniture is no use to me. Instead of wasting my energy, I conserve it, and take a seat in the center of the room. Cal paces back and forth before the window, more animal than man. Every inch of him yearns for fire.
Kilorn is long gone, having left with his new friend the Colonel.
And I am revealed for exactly what I am—a particularly stupid fish, constantly moving from hook to hook, never learning my lesson. But next to the Hall of the Sun, Archeon, and the Bowl of Bones, this might as well be a vacation, and the Colonel is nothing compared to the queen or a line of executioners.
“You should sit,” I tell Cal, finally growing tired of his vengeful intensity. “Unless you plan on wearing your way through the floor?”
He scowls, annoyed, but stops moving all the same. Instead of pulling up a chair, he leans against the wall in a childish act of defiance. “I’m starting to think you like prisons,” he says, idly knocking his knuckles against the wall. “And that you have the worst taste in men.”
That stings more than I’d like it to. Yes, I cared for Maven, cared for him far more than I want to admit, and Kilorn is my closest friend. They are betrayers both.
“You’re not too good at choosing friends either,” I fire back, but it glances off him harmlessly. “And I don’t have”—the words jumble, coming out wrong and stilted—“any taste in men. This has nothing to do with that.”
“Nothing.” He chuckles, almost amused. “Who were the last two people to lock us in a cell?” When I don’t reply, shamed, he presses on. “Admit it, you’ve got a hard time keeping your heart and your head separated.”
I stand so fast the chair falls backward, clanging against the floor. “Don’t act like you didn’t love Maven. Like you didn’t let your heart make decisions where he was concerned.”
“He is my brother! Of course I was blind to him! Of course I didn’t think he would kill our—our father.” His voice breaks at the memory, letting me glimpse the ragged and broken child beneath the facade of a warrior. “I made mistakes because of him. And,” he adds quietly, “I made mistakes because of you.”
So did I. The worst was when I put my hand in his, letting him pull me from my bedroom, into a dance and a downward spiral. I let the Guard kill innocents for Cal, to keep him from going to war. To keep him close to me.