The Brink of Darkness (The Edge of Everything)

by Jeff Giles

  For an hour, they found nothing. Then, as Zoe ducked behind one of the last waterfalls, she found an oval opening in the rock. There was a handprint beneath it. It had to be a sign.

  Zoe swam back to X. She thought about how the powers that Regent gave them protected them from everything around them. She wished there was something that could protect X from everything inside him, too: the fear, the pain.

  X treaded water, waiting.

  She showed him the palm print on the rock.

  Judging from the size and the elegant way that the fingers tapered, it was a woman’s hand—and it was made of blood.

  The tunnel was only four feet wide and had a low, jagged ceiling. X didn’t want to let Zoe go in first. They argued. X pointed out that if he was behind her and got stuck, she wouldn’t be able to get out. Zoe pointed out gently—okay, maybe not that gently—that she knew how to cave and he didn’t and that he should suck it.

  As they talked, a wind rolled out of the opening in the rock like a cold breath, followed by the unmistakable sounds of something approaching. By the time Zoe figured out what it was, there was no time for words. She pulled X under the surface with her as a torrent of water and debris shot out of the wall.

  X hadn’t realized it was coming.

  “Who’s going first?” said Zoe, when they surfaced again.

  “Perhaps you should,” said X.

  It turned out that water blasted out of the tunnel every five minutes, flinging dirt and rock like buckshot. Zoe lit the passage with her hands and gazed inside. It’d be a straight belly-crawl for 500 feet. She’d never crawled more than 75. There was no way she and X were going to get in and out between the blasts of water, and they had no ropes, no drills, no bolts, no Survival Sh*t to anchor themselves. They’d have to press against the walls when the current came, and hope it didn’t blow them out of the tunnel.

  She didn’t say any of this. It was obvious from X’s face that he knew.

  Zoe slipped into the tunnel on her stomach. The flood was muddy and slick, which would actually be an advantage: it’d be easy to glide. The first time she pulled herself forward, she forgot to factor in her new strength, and shot 50 feet without stopping. Behind her, X, who’d been unconsciously picking up bits of her vocabulary, shouted in a mash-up dialect: “Seriously? Is that indeed how it’s gonna be?”

  She smiled to herself, and slowed down.

  At first, Zoe gazed straight ahead, moving quickly but carefully, listening for the telltale wind and the scary drumroll of the water. But then her father’s voice returned. She’d pushed him out the door, but he had climbed in through a window: “Zoe, you’re in a tunnel in the freakin’ four-billion-year-old mantle of the earth! Are you really not gonna look at the walls? Are you really not gonna check the place out? What you’re doing is epic, girl! Ponce de León only discovered Florida!”

  Zoe shoved her father back out the window, and slammed it shut.

  But he was right.

  She lay still a second, and allowed some wonder back in. Yes, the air was sour with the smell of rotten eggs (she named the gas herself, so her father wouldn’t: hydrogen sulfide). Yes, her eyes stung from the sand in the tunnel. Yes, her clothes were getting shredded. But thanks to the gifts that Regent had given her, she was sliding over busted calcite like it was nothing. She was curling around stalactites, stalagmites, and snottites as if her body were liquid. (Zoe’s father had preferred, for the gooey strands of bacteria that dripped from the ceiling, the term “snoticle.”) Zoe remembered how much she loved exploring. And X was with her. Every so often, he put a hand on her leg to let her know that he was there. It reminded Zoe of her mother saving her when the snowbank fell in.

  For the first time, she truly looked around. The ceiling of the tunnel sparkled with gypsum crystals. The walls were embedded with the fossils of sea creatures. One looked like a tiny Christmas tree, another like a squid with human teeth, another like a mutant shrimp, another like an inch-long bear with eight legs. Zoe ran her fingers along their spines, over their legs and snouts and tentacles. She’d never seen any of them before. Probably no living person ever had.

  She was mesmerized.

  She didn’t notice that the wind had come back.

  Zoe had just enough time to thrust her palms against the walls and brace herself.

  She’d never been hit by a car screaming down a highway.

  Now she had.

  The instant the water struck, she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. The wave pushed her head up and back, like someone had yanked on her hair.

  She didn’t know the limits of her powers, didn’t know what she could withstand. A very specific fear shot through her mind: the water was going to break her neck.

  Zoe forced her head back down again, amazed that she had the strength, and pushed even harder against the walls.

  A new fear: the water was going to tear off her arms.

  And how long would it be before she needed to breathe? Why hadn’t she tested her new lungs before now? Rock and sediment glanced off her. Something bigger—a stalactite, maybe?—broke off the ceiling, and flew past. Why had she wasted time on the fossils? Why had she listened to her father?

  The last of the water raced past them and out of the tunnel.

  Light reappeared. Air.

  She felt X’s hand again. He had never let go of her.

  Two hundred feet ahead, the tunnel veered up steeply. Zoe wanted to get to it, and see what was up there, before the next flood. She moved faster. Occasionally, a jutting piece of rock, sharp as razor wire, would grab at her shirt and tear it—but the pain never reached her brain. Whatever happened to her body they could fix later.

  A hundred and fifty feet to go before the tunnel swung upward.

  She pictured X’s mother urging them on.

  But what if the woman had lost her faculties, like Dervish said? What if she was feral, deranged?

  An old story came to Zoe. A hopeful one.

  It was about six Jewish families who hid from Nazis for 18 months in an underground cave called Priest’s Grotto. Zoe had done an oral report on them for school once. Half the kids in class rolled their eyes because of course Zoe Bissell would figure out a way to talk about caves, even in World History.

  A hundred feet left to go.

  The families lived in darkness, as the Germans marched over their heads. They dug toilets and showers. Foraged for food in the countryside at night. Nearly all of them survived, even when sadistic villagers blocked the entrance to the cave with dirt so they’d suffocate.

  Fifty feet to go.

  One of the people in Priest’s Grotto was a girl whose name Zoe loved: Pepkala Blitzer. She was four. When the families finally emerged from the cave after a year and a half, Pepkala shielded her eyes, and asked her mother to please put out the bright candle.

  It was the sun.

  Zoe got a B+ on her oral report. The teacher said there was too much about the cave.

  Just before the tunnel swerved upward, there was a giant hole on the floor of the passageway. The rock, weakened by water, must have caved in.

  From behind her, X said, “I will make a bridge of my body so you can cross.”

  “No,” said Zoe, “I’ll make the bridge.”

  “Someday I will actually win an argument,” he said.

  She smiled, though he couldn’t see her.

  “Not with me,” she said.

  Zoe guessed they had maybe three minutes before the water returned. She pressed her palms against the walls, and leaned out over the hole.

  Beneath her, there was a 50-foot drop.

  She was feeling less invincible now. For a second, she thought she felt the wind coming. No, she was imagining it.

  She walked her hands slowly forward. Her legs tightened as she stretched over the emptiness.

  When she’d reached as far as she could, she inched her hands down from the walls and toward the far edge of the hole. She felt a rush of fear—but then her bones locked in
to place.

  X slid over her back on his stomach. Her body held strong.

  When they came to where the tunnel rose upward into a chute, Zoe saw that there was a small cove off to the right, where they could wait out the next deluge if they had to. Zoe shimmied up the chute. It was tighter than the tunnel. She had to contort her body, and grease her arms with mud to get up it. At last, she climbed into the chamber up above.

  It was stunning. Snow-white crystals covered the floor in waist-high mounds. They looked like a dragon’s treasure or like flowers—chrysanthemums made of ice. There were bigger crystals, too. Massive ones. They were roughly blade-shaped—hence the name Cave of Swords—but to Zoe they looked more like toppled trees. The crystals tilted in every direction. Some stretched as high as the ceiling, as if they were holding it up.

  Zoe was so surprised by the beauty of the crystals that it took her a moment to see the bodies chained to them.

  There were a dozen prisoners.

  All their heads were covered with black hoods.

  X’s mother was here somewhere.

  Zoe called down to X, just as he was reaching up into the narrow chute to follow her. It broke her heart to tell him that he was never going to fit. She’d have to find his mother alone.

  X refused to believe it.

  He started to climb, twisting his body.

  Zoe felt the wind creep down from an opening in the rock over her head. She could hear the water gathering power behind it.

  “Get out of the hole, or you’ll get stuck and drown,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”

  He punched the wall to widen the chute. The rock shattered.

  “Stop!” said Zoe. “You’re gonna cave it in! I’ll find your mother. Just tell me what she looks like.”

  The first drops of water fell past.

  “She will appear to be thirty-five, though she’s seen nearly a century,” said X. “And, according to Maud, she looks … She looks like me.”

  “Okay,” said Zoe. “That’s all I need.”

  The prisoners had been left standing, their arms pulled back and chained around the crystals. Zoe moved among them as quietly as she could. Their hooded heads hung low. They made no sounds at all. If Zoe hadn’t seen their chests moving, she wouldn’t have known they were breathing. Only two of them were women.

  She thought about how far away her own mother was. She pictured her and Jonah on the living room floor, begging Uhura to eat. The pain of missing them was so sudden and sharp that she had to force them into the Do Not Open box in her brain. They didn’t want to go.

  The first woman wore a pale green, medieval-looking linen dress that had been embroidered with pearls, though most had fallen off or been stolen.

  “I’m a friend,” Zoe whispered.

  She went to remove the woman’s hood so she could see her face, but her hands were shaking. She calmed herself, and tried again. The woman’s silver-white hair fell down past her shoulders. She was in her seventies.

  She wasn’t X’s mother.

  The woman had a soft, round face and gray-blue eyes, which she immediately closed against the light. There was a reason she hadn’t spoken: there was a large gray stone wedged in her mouth.

  Zoe wished she could have freed the woman—she wanted to free all of them—but she had no idea what the repercussions would be if she did. She touched the woman’s hair on impulse. She couldn’t imagine what someone like her had been sent to the Lowlands for. Without opening her eyes, the woman tilted her head and rubbed Zoe’s hand, like a cat.

  Zoe was close to tears when she walked away. It was partly because she missed her own mother. But it was mostly because there was only one woman left in the Cave of Swords.

  Zoe had no doubt that this was the one: she could see her pale hands in the manacles and her black hair trailing down from her hood.

  When Zoe got to her, she swept the crystals on the floor aside, making a clearing where she could stand.

  “It’s okay,” she told the woman, as if she were calming a frightened horse. “I’ll be gentle.”

  She pulled up the hood.

  She saw a face so much like X’s that, for a second, she couldn’t breathe.

  twenty-four

  Zoe eased the stone out of the woman’s mouth. It was scratched and scored all over: tooth marks.

  The woman coughed, gulped in air, winced at the light.

  “Is your name Versailles?” said Zoe.

  She had to speak louder than she’d wanted to because the water was falling again.

  The woman looked at Zoe but her eyes didn’t seem to focus. She didn’t answer. Zoe wondered if she could.

  Even after 20 years in a hood and chains, the woman was astoundingly beautiful—more beautiful than Ripper. More beautiful than X, even. She looked like a portrait that had been painted to flatter a queen. She had the same hair as X. She had the same dark, questioning eyebrows, the same nearly black eyes. Her clothes were simple. Functional. She wore a frayed, blue-and-white gingham dress and sturdy work boots. Zoe had expected something fancier from a lord, but maybe, like Regent, the woman refused to steal from the weak.

  Her lips were cracked. Zoe took off her thin sweater, which was still drenched from the last flood. She went to wipe the woman’s face. The woman jerked her back, suspicious. Zoe reminded herself that the prisoners here hadn’t seen another human being in years—and that the last one had been Dervish, who barely qualified.

  She had to show the woman that she wasn’t a threat. She circled behind the crystal column and, without even wondering if she could do it, broke the chains. It gave her a rush to feel the iron come apart in her hands. The woman slid to the ground, rubbing her wrists and staring at her hands like she’d never seen them before. She nodded gratefully to Zoe, then looked at her feet, which were still bound.

  Zoe ripped those chains apart, too.

  She picked up the damp sweater again. She cooled the woman’s face with it, then pressed it against her dry lips.

  Zoe repeated her question: “Is your name Versailles?”

  The woman’s voice was raw.

  “No,” she said.

  Zoe slumped to the floor. A few of the other prisoners had heard voices, and were stirring. Maybe the woman was too far gone to remember her name? Or maybe Zoe had the wrong woman? She thought of X down in the tunnel, waiting. She’d promised him that she could do this.

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  It was a ridiculous question, but the only one she could think of.

  The woman gestured for the wet sweater again, pressed it to her face, and sighed into it.

  “Versailles,” she said slowly, “is only what they call me. It’s not my name. My name … is Sylvie.”

  Zoe shot forward and hugged her.

  Sylvie was shocked, but after a second Zoe could feel her relax into the hug and return it.

  “I haven’t had a conversation in a long time,” Sylvie said. “But I don’t remember them being like this.”

  “Sorry,” said Zoe. “We’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

  Sylvie rubbed her throat.

  “Who is ‘we’?” she said.

  “I’m—I’m trying to think of a way to tell you,” said Zoe.

  “My eyes are weak from wearing the hood,” said Sylvie, “but you seem very young. Just a girl.”

  “I’m seventeen,” said Zoe.

  “That’s not possible,” said Sylvie. “The Lowlands never take souls that age.”

  “I’m only visiting,” said Zoe.

  Sylvie shook her head in disbelief.

  “My god, you do have a story to tell, don’t you?” she said. She began folding the sweater. “The way you broke the chains … I assumed you were a lord. Now I don’t know what to think.”

  After a lifetime of blurting, Zoe truly did not know how to begin.

  Sylvie handed back the sweater.

  “Thank you for this,” she said. “Why
have you been looking for me? Why did you break my chains?”

  “Because I’m getting you out of here,” said Zoe.

  Sylvie looked at her warily.

  “This is some joke of Dervish’s,” she said.

  “No,” said Zoe.

  “Do you know why I was brought here?” said Sylvie. “Do you know what my ‘crime’ was?”

  “You had a baby,” said Zoe.

  “That’s right,” said Sylvie. “A boy. Did you know it was a boy?”

  “Yes,” said Zoe.

  “I gave birth almost a century after I died,” said Sylvie. “Not a bad trick, if you think about it.”

  Her smile disappeared. Memories seemed to be crowding in.

  “I named my boy before they took him away—just for myself. Just so I’d remember he was real. They couldn’t stop me from doing that, the bastards.”

  “What did you name him?”

  Sylvie withdrew from her memories, and looked at Zoe, as if she’d just realized she was there.

  “You haven’t even told me your name,” she said.

  “I’m Zoe Bissell.”

  “And the lords know you’re freeing me?”

  “Sort of? I’m not great at asking permission.”

  “I never was either,” said Sylvie. “Be careful. This is where it landed me.”

  “I’m always careful,” said Zoe. “Well, semi-careful.”

  “If we only ‘sort of’ have the lords’ permission,” said Sylvie, “how are we going to get out of here?”

  “We’re just going to walk out,” said Zoe. “Actually, we’re going to crawl, swim, climb—and then walk. Are you up to it?”

  She stood, and reached down to Sylvie.

  “Probably not,” said Sylvie, “but fortunately, I’m stubborn—and any cell at all will be paradise compared to this.” She took Zoe’s hand, and stood now, too. “You have to tell me why you came for me. Please. Who are you to me?”