by Liv Daniels
Then Sam came.
“Sam!” Edward fumed. “Can’t you see that I’m busy?”
Sam, however, paid no attention. He stepped forward from the doorway where he had been listening, a calculating smile on his face. Leina stepped back, frightened. After one glance at his face she knew that her hope for his help had been ill-founded. He bore no sign of comfort for her, only the delighted malice that she was all too familiar with. Leina remembered now his vow to give Edward his full support if it ever came to this. His true loyalties didn’t matter. He was no longer her ally. From here, things could only get worse. Overcome with fear and fatigue, she sunk into a nearby chair. The one ray of light that shone into the room caught on her magnetic suit as she moved, and both Sam and Edward covered their eyes compulsively in the ensuing flash.
“Get up!” Edward snapped. “This isn’t a leisurely party!”
Leina didn’t move. “Is it really going to matter to you ten years from now whether I was standing when you ordered my death?” she said wearily.
Edward raised his fist in anger, but then only lowered it and shook his head disagreeably. Meanwhile, Sam was pacing methodically around the office, tapping his fingertips together.
“Fine, what is it?” said Edward.
Sam stopped pacing. He looked deliberately at Leina as he spoke, even though he was addressing Edward.
“My, my, Your Majesty, have you gone soft? Last I checked the person in question was your most dangerous enemy. And did I just hear you give her a chance to live?”
Edward glowered. “Stay out of this, Sam.” But Sam clearly wasn’t listening to anything Edward said.
“I mean no disrespect, Your Excellency.” Sam turned to Edward, and took on the voice of a concerned counselor. “I am only trying to protect you. If this fiend has the chance, she will destroy you. If you were to ask for my opinion—“
“Which I didn’t.”
“—I would say, finish her once and for all while you still can. Take her to the Bottomless Pit of Doom.” A malevolent light glittered in his eyes.
“Sam, how could you?” Leina said wildly, unable to control herself. As the Masked One, she shouldn’t have known who Sam was. But more than likely none of the three of them was in a rational enough mood to notice.
Sam glared at her. “Silence, prisoner! This doesn’t concern you.”
Leina was too dazed even to point out the obvious irony in Sam’s comment. Wouldn’t agreeing with Edward have been enough for Sam to prove his loyalty? Why did he have to make this worse for her? Had his alternate persona totally possessed him? This went far beyond maintaining his cover.
Sudden panic took hold of Leina again. “I know it’s not in you to kill me,” she said, but instantly regretted it. She hadn’t meant to say it in that way, but now she couldn’t take the words back. They were as a seal on her fate.
Edward inevitably took them as a challenge. Any hint of indecision on his face disappeared. “Oh, really? Watch me.”
Chapter 15
Leina had always thought that those near death gave it a lot of thought. But now she found herself number on the topic than she had ever been. The reality of the situation hung in the air about her, but it could not penetrate her. She felt only a desolate sense of nothing, which was worse even than writhing fear. She thought of Max’s words when she was clinging to the flying machine for her life, before she knew about the magnetic field. You’re not scared like the rest of them after all, are you? Is that what he would say to her now?
She could not escape. The monsters that escorted her back to her cell had made sure of that, and though she had frantically tried every means of escape in her power upon their departure, nothing had worked. Surely she could escape if she had the time to twist events in her favor, but time was one thing that she no longer had.
Leina had never really been afraid of Edward since leaving the Desert for the first time. Everything between them had been a game. She did not think that he would take it this far. That her death would come at the hand of a delusional nineteen-year-old dictator would have been beyond anyone’s power to predict.
And Sam? Leina didn’t even know how to begin with Sam. What had possessed him to do this to her?
Thinking won’t help you anymore. No conclusion that you come to will matter. In the end, that was the thought that ripped at Leina’s heart at last, and brought her to tears. Now twice in this place she had known true despair, but this time there was no comfort for her.
***
It was Sam who came in the morning. He dismissed the monsters with a vague wave of his hand. When he opened the door to Leina’s cell, the hinges cackled, laughing at her. Leina’s face was as of stone. She pulled the mask, which she had taken off during the night, back over her eyes. Sam was whistling with disturbing nonchalance, but Leina was past feeling any kind of anger. Past caring. She did not protest as he bound her hands behind her back.
“Why are you doing this, Sam?” she said quietly.
“I told you I’m not your friend. Why did you allow yourself to be caught?”
“I lost a game.”
“From what I’ve heard, the Masked One can only be caught if she wills it. She has quite the reputation.”
The great weight that Leina had often felt was heavier than ever. She had failed. She had failed to save Drexel, failed at the question game, failed to escape. And they called her the Masked One? No, she could never be that. It was easy to pretend that she could shrug it off, but when she did it only cut deeper. Slower.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the Agency. If Edward followed through on his threat, it would be her fault. Above all, that haunted her.
“Sam, I don’t know what you think you are doing,” Leina said, “but do one thing for me. Save the World from this madness. I still think that you’re not the person you’re trying to be. Not really.”
Sam’s hands stopped moving for a moment, but he didn’t speak.
Leina turned her head so she could see him, and whispered, “He knows.”
***
Edward and two monsters were waiting outside. Sam handed Leina over to the monsters, who secured her firmly between them, and then they ascended to the Desert above.
Leina found herself more perceptive to her surroundings than she had ever been before. Dust swirling through the air in a mesmerizing dance, stone pillars that served as monuments to the malice of this place twisting skyward in agonizing contortions, the pungent tang of salt that permeated the air and crystalized on her parched tongue, the rays of the sun stabbing her with their heat—all was a million times more vivid on that day. She wished that it would rain, that the harsh sensations that overwhelmed her could be cooled and washed away. She had always been at home in the rain. But no rain came to the Desert.
It was strange, now, that the three of them should be alone in this place. They were still so very young, in a vast Desert that they could not control. And they were akin in a way. Dictator, Tyrant, Hero. All playing parts that were not their own, locked in this deadly game.
They passed a stagnant salt-lake splattered with toxic colors. Caustic though it was, the surface of the water itself was like glass, a clear layer unaffected by the frozen tumult below.
A rare hot wind swept over the Desert suddenly, upsetting the dust of ages that lay heavy on the ground. The air barely skimmed the surface of the lake, creating a sea of minute ripples. Leina stopped to watch, ignoring the threatening growls of the two monsters. Even as the ripples waxed, she felt a deep kind of helplessness about them. She had no power to affect them, to make them stay even an instant longer than the wind willed, nor could she create something so delicate by any art of her own. The ripples faded away, and the surface of the lake was left as if they had never been.
“Come on,” Edward grumbled, and at his command the monsters jarred her back to walking.
Leina turned toward him, her unchanging eyes glassy like the surface of the disturbed lake. “You would be afraid,”
she said quietly. It was not an accusation. It was simply a faint observation, meaningless as a wind that comes and is gone. Indeed, Leina felt increasingly like an observer of a story that was no longer her own. Maybe it had never been.
He stared at her for a length, then turned away abruptly, indifferently. “I can make things much worse for you.”
“I’d like to see you try.” That kind of banter was Leina’s weak attempt at diffusing her own sense of helplessness, at insisting that things were as they had always been. But her words were blown away with the dust.
***
The Bottomless Pit of Doom was not, in fact, a pit. It was more of a fissure or canyon, stretching across the Desert as far as could be seen, and easily a mile in breadth. Leina doubted that it was bottomless, either. Things rarely were. The name was completely ridiculous, but in some strange paradoxical way it fit. Nothing here was as it seemed.
The Bottomless Pit of Doom had worked its way into the legends of the Desert that Leina knew as a child. A rhyme that she had seen in a book came to mind. It used to seem harmless, but now it sent a chill through her.
The Bottomless Pit,
or so it is writ,
is a place of deep fear
pays no heed to grit.
The staunchest of hearts
will tremble and break
in such a place as this.
And what could happen
in the depths of the pit,
to change the way the rhyme is writ?
The monsters forced Leina closer and closer to the edge of the monstrosity. For a moment she thought that they were going to send her over just like that. In spite of herself she struggled, digging her feet into the ground. The gaping emptiness below drew closer and closer. It seemed that she was no longer moving at all, but the blackness itself was rising to engulf her.
Then, suddenly, she was jerked to a halt. She shuffled her feet to keep her balance, precariously near the edge. Pebbles fell from under her feet and were swallowed up in the black abyss. Then the monsters turned her around to face her two captors.
“No crowd?” Leina observed, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “That’s unlike you.”
“Unfortunately, everyone likes you, so no,” Edward hissed.
No one moved or made any indication of speaking. Leina was intensely aware of the dark gaping thing at her back. She had the uncomfortable feeling that it would jump out at her if she wasn’t looking.
“Well?” she said at last, in desperation. But she instantly regretted it. Why should she be the one to hasten this? “You know,” she added quickly, “in civilized places, most people in my position are offered a chance to speak.”
“Speak, then, if you must,” Edward grumbled.
Leina nodded, firmly shaking free of the monsters’ grip and stepping forward. The monsters growled, but Edward held up his hand to stop them. Then Leina cleared her throat, and she found in her voice more strength than she had expected to find there. “I will give none the victory of my blame. I know not why I am here, nor when this stopped being a game. But it is fruitless now to talk of such things, so I will let them rest.
“If I were speaking to the World, I would say look up. Too many, worn down by oppression and darkness, have turned their eyes away to the ground and no longer see the road ahead of them. And so they continue to travel down the same way, and they put their trust in it because they have no other hope. Look up, I would say, and see the other road that you pass and miss. A hopeless road it seems, but the end is so much brighter than the darkness to which you hasten. It is not the Masked One that will save you, but let any small degree of hope that she may have inspired live on. That may save you still.
“But I am not speaking to the World. My words fall dead to the ancient sands of this place, where dark secrets lurk that now I shall never know. And yet now I can speak clearly, without fear. There is no peace here. I wish it to you and to this whole Desert, but you will not find it like this. Seek it while there is still hope.”
Then she spoke in a language out of the dark reaches of the past, so old that its name had long been forgotten. “Haec est mea carmina.”
Sam had been tapping his foot the whole time, and now he rolled his eyes. “Your Excellency, are you going to finish this or not?”
Edward turned to him in a sudden, swift movement. “Do you take me for a coward?”
Sam held his hands up and shrugged in indifference. Of course that meant yes.
When Edward looked back at Leina, there was a venomous look in his eyes that haunted her dreams long after. And yet she herself was still, and calm.
Why am I not petrified? she wondered.
Because you have too much faith, said a bitter voice in her head. Because part of you still believes that you’re going to be alright. Because you never got over believing you could fly.
And then Edward motioned to the monsters, and Leina was over the edge, and that was all.
Chapter 16
Maybe the pit was bottomless after all. Leina had been falling for a very long time. Or maybe it hadn’t been so long. Seconds, minutes, hours—all had lost value to her. A second could span countless ages, and an hour could be over in a moment. Length and time and space had diminished to nothing, and everything. It was a scarring sensation, one that took all the insecurities of one’s existence and magnified and condensed them like time itself, radically reshaping what existence even meant.
Her eyes were closed. At length she opened them, warily, fearful of what she might see. At first there was only darkness. But then she realized something.
Nothing was moving.
For a long time, Leina stared as if dumb, trying to reconfigure in her mind how things should be. Surely she should be seeing a blur of some kind, not… stillness.
Leina tilted her head down, and could barely make out a rough dusty surface several feet below her face. The bottom of the Bottomless Pit of Doom. But she was above it, and she was not moving. She was suspended in the air.
Why is it that whenever you doubt the most, you find that you can fly?
Leina was still very confused, and unsure how this was possible or if it was real. But suddenly that didn’t matter. She laughed, and the clear sound rang out through the dark of this deep place.
But her laugh was met with a voice. “Why do you laugh?” it asked.
Leina started, and tried to jerk toward the source of the voice, behind her. But she was as stiff as a statue, and grunted in pain at the harsh resistance to her sudden movement.
“Who are you?” Leina asked. “Let me see you.”
With startling suddenness, a face appeared level with hers. It was that of a girl, probably sixteen years old. Her pale countenance was pinched and hard, but there was some kind of locked-up imploring in her eyes. She was carrying a dim torch that illuminated her face.
“Oh,” Leina breathed. “What is this place?”
“The bottom of a very deep fissure.” The girl’s voice was barely more than a mutter.
“Yes, I know that. But why are you here?”
“Because I live here.” The girl paused, her deadlocked eyes moving ever so slightly to scan Leina’s face. “You’re suspended in the air. You have some kind of power of levitation?”
“No,” Leina said. “I think it’s magnets.” She craned her head to look at the nearest wall. “See? The rock is black, but only at the very bottom. Probably magnetic. The suit I’m wearing is covered in tiny magnets. I guess the field is strong enough to hold me up. Now who did you say you are?”
Without any kind of outward hesitation, the girl waited a long time to answer. “I’m a princess,” she said finally.
Leina didn’t respond for a moment. The girl was certainly dressed for the part, in a long red satin dress that trailed in the dust. “Last time I heard someone make an introduction that ridiculous, he was right,” Leina said. “So I’ll have to take your word for it. Princess is better than Dictator, anyway.”
T
he girl’s face remained exactly the same. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You don’t think I’m very funny, do you?”
“No.”
“Hmm.” Leina found this girl very provoking. Something about her was intriguing, and yet continually out of reach. With a sigh, Leina said, “You know, I’d really like to get down from here.”
“Oh.”
Leina waited, but the girl only looked on in her unchanging way. “Can you please unfasten my magnetic suit? I can’t move at all. Don’t worry, I’ve got something on under it. And can you untie my hands?”
The girl made a barely perceptible nod and moved to unfasten the suit. Leina gasped at the release of pressure. A moment later, after much twisting and struggling, Leina had fallen face flat on the ground. When she got up, she was coughing and sore, but nothing worse. She laughed again. “Not bad for a fall of”—she looked up and was met with impenetrable darkness, and her voice fell to a mutter—“um, a really long way.” When Leina looked down again, she met the stony eyes of her mysterious rescuer. “So I get that you’re a princess, but what is your name?”
“Cora.” With that, the purported princess turned and began to make her way down the length of the fissure’s subterranean base.
After struggling to free the floating jumpsuit from the firm clutch of the magnetic field, Leina scrambled to follow. “Where are we going?”
“Home.”
“Okay, then. Good a place as any.”
***
Leina didn’t try to make conversation with her stoic newfound friend along the way. Instead, she scanned her surroundings as they were illuminated in the scant torchlight, and then swept into the darkness behind.
They kept to the wall, and Leina could not see the other side. At its base, the entire wall of the fissure was lined with a layer of the dark magnetic rock about as high as Leina’s head, embedded with strange glimmering gemstones. Leina had to hold the jumpsuit over her head to be able to carry it with her, and even then she could feel the magnetic field pulling on it with crushing weight. Her arms burned as she carried it.