Die and Stay Dead

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  Arkwright blasted at the wall again from the other side. The chamber floor quaked and shifted under my feet. Through the muddy river water I saw the crack in the floor grow bigger, spiderwebbing across the chamber. I expected to see more water bubble up from the crack, but instead the water began to drain through it, forming small whirlpools in the surface. Was there empty space under the chamber? Another room, maybe? If there was, and the water kept rushing through the already structurally weakened floor like that …

  “Ah, shit,” I said.

  A section of the floor crumbled and gave way with a monstrous noise, opening a hole into darkness beneath us. The sarcophagus fell through. Rushing water poured into the hole and pulled us with it. The emerald charm was torn from Bethany’s hand as the flood swept her up. The barrier disappeared instantly. A roaring tide of water came crashing into the chamber. Bethany and Isaac went under.

  I sucked in a deep breath and held it. The current dragged me down through the hole in the floor. The freezing water closed over me. I was pulled in free fall for several long, panic-filled seconds. Then I dropped into another room far beneath the chamber we’d left. I landed on my back—but not on the floor. I hung suspended above it, floating on a web of netting over the smashed remains of the stone sarcophagus. If I hadn’t stopped, I would have broken my back on them.

  Isaac stood on the floor below me. He’d saved me with a spell. Bethany stood beside him. They were both drenched, their hair plastered to their heads, their clothes sopping wet and muddy with Hudson River silt. A new fireball floated near the ceiling, lighting the chamber.

  But water was still coming down on me with the force of a fire hose. I coughed, nearly swallowing a mouthful of the Hudson River. I tried to scramble away, but the force of the water was too much. I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs—

  The web shifted as Isaac swung me away from the waterfall. He set me down gently on my feet on the water-covered floor. The web vanished. Then he cast another spell, up at the hole this time, and sealed it over with a big, glowing, blue disc. The water stopped.

  “It won’t hold for long,” Isaac said. “We’re going to want to be gone by the time it gives way.”

  I coughed more water out of my lungs. I took out my gun and inspected it. It didn’t look damaged. I tipped it forward, pouring a stream of water out of the muzzle. I didn’t know if it would fire now. The ammo was high quality, which meant it was waterproof, or damn close to it. The crimp was airtight and the primer sealed. But as my lungs could attest, that had been a hell of a lot of river water. It could have washed away the oil and injected silt into the action. When we got back to Citadel, I would have to clean it, oil it, and just to be safe, replace the ammo.

  I holstered the gun again and took in the room around me. It was long and narrow with walls fashioned from marble blocks. Much larger than the chamber above, the water spread out over the floor and only came up to my shins. A row of tall, standing candelabras lined both sides of the room, unlit. At the far end, on a slightly raised marble platform, were three chairs of heavy, polished wood. The one in the middle was bigger than the other two, more ornately designed and with a taller back.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  Bethany pushed her wet hair out of her eyes. “Is that a throne?”

  “Never mind that, I found the door,” Isaac said behind us. He was standing in front of two tall, metal doors in the wall. “It’s a tight seal,” he groaned as he pushed them. They swung outward, and the water flooded out of the room. Isaac glanced up at the glowing disc on the ceiling one last time. “Come on. We should get out of here while we can.”

  “Arkwright’s not going to give up that easily,” I said. “Is there any way he can follow us through that seal?”

  “The Thracian Gauntlet could blast through it easily,” he said. “But in doing so, he would flood this whole place and risk losing the fragment. Let’s hope he’s more concerned about putting the Codex back together than killing us.”

  Bethany and I followed him through the doors into a marble-walled corridor, sloshing through the water at our feet. My wet clothes weighed me down. The waterlogged trench coat on my back felt like a hundred extra pounds, but I wasn’t about to leave it behind. The coat had belonged to Morbius once, founder of the original Five-Pointed Star. I was probably the last person anyone would call sentimental, but I didn’t want to give it up.

  The fireball floated along with us, lighting the way through the pitch-black surroundings. Other passages branched off from the corridor, their metal doors closed to our prying eyes. What was this place? And where had everyone gone? It looked deserted.

  Passing through an arch at the end of the corridor, we found ourselves in a huge chamber with redbrick walls. The earthen floor was muddy from the water that had preceded us down the hall. In the center of the chamber was a wide, deep, stone pit. Dark stains painted the pit’s walls and floor.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  Isaac stared at the stains. “It’s blood.”

  “Whatever this place is, it reeks of death,” Bethany said. “The sooner we get out of here, the better.”

  She and Isaac kept walking. I lingered a moment, looking into the pit. If the stains were blood, there’d been a lot of it. Someone had died in there. Probably more than one person. Why? What was this place, a slaughterhouse? A torture chamber? The room grew darker as the fireball followed Isaac away from me.

  “Trent, come on!” Bethany called back.

  “Lucas,” I corrected her, so softly I barely heard it myself.

  I tore my gaze from the pit and followed them. How many had died here? I had a bad feeling about this place, a terrible sense deep in my gut. I wanted to get out as quickly as I could and never think about this place again.

  I caught up to Isaac and Bethany in a tunnel off the pit chamber. There was graffiti all over the walls, some carved crudely into the brick, others written in chalk. Much of it was in languages I couldn’t read, let alone identify. They didn’t look like any alphabet I’d ever seen. Only one was in English, a poem written over a large section of the wall:

  Rich or poor

  With most or least

  You’ll never go wrong

  Betting on the Beast

  I didn’t know what it meant, and frankly I wasn’t interested in sticking around to find out.

  Bethany pointed down the tunnel. “Look!”

  In the distance, the thin shape of a ladder stood upright in the tunnel. We hurried toward it. As I passed another tunnel that branched off to the left, I glanced quickly down it. It was a habit I’d picked up while on Underwood’s crew, when I’d had to make sure no one was waiting in an alley to slip a knife between my ribs. I barely registered a tunnel extending deep into the darkness before I continued on.

  Then I froze.

  My heart jammed itself into my throat.

  I backed up a few steps and looked into the tunnel again.

  Something had been etched into the brick wall, near the tunnel’s mouth.

  An eye inside a circle.

  The Ehrlendarr rune for magic.

  I swallowed, my throat as dry as sandpaper. I walked up to the rune. I touched it, traced it with my finger. I’d seen this before. I knew it very well. An eye inside a circle etched on a brick wall. The image had haunted me for the past year.

  It was my first memory, the very first thing I’d seen after losing my identity—the Ehrlendarr rune for magic carved into a brick wall, along with sparks in the air and a wisp of smoke, as if something had just happened, something I couldn’t remember.

  But this wasn’t a coincidence. This wasn’t déjà vu. This was the wall. This was the symbol. I was certain of it. I felt it in every fiber of my being.

  I’d been here before.

  Twenty-Two

  Isaac and Bethany doubled back, rounding the corner to find me standing in the mouth of the tunnel. The floating fireball followed them, casting a brighter light on the rune etched i
n the brick wall before me.

  “What are you doing?” Bethany asked.

  “We have to go, we don’t have much time,” Isaac said. He gripped the Codex fragment tightly in one hand.

  I didn’t turn from the wall to look at them. I couldn’t. All I could do was stare at that damn rune. I tried to tap into what I’d felt the first time I saw it, the confusion and fear, the sense of something having just happened before I woke. I tried to force the lost memories to come back, but they wouldn’t. They were gone.

  “There are a thousand things I don’t remember. My family. My home. But this I remember,” I told them. “I’ve been here before.”

  Bethany looked at me, astonished. “What?”

  “This is where I woke up without knowing my name. This is where I lost my memories. I was right here, in this spot, in this place.”

  “How do you know?” Isaac asked.

  “Because of this.” I pointed at the rune etched in the brick.

  Isaac came closer to examine it. “It’s Ehrlendarr. What’s it doing here?”

  “It’s the symbol for magic,” I said. Though not just magic. Calliope had told me it also meant change and transcendence. “It’s my earliest memory. This rune, on this wall. I was here.”

  “You’re sure?” Bethany asked.

  “I’ve never been more sure of anything,” I said. But why had I been here, in the same underground complex as that awful, bloodstained pit? And why did I have such a strong urge to get the hell out? I studied the rune, desperate for answers.

  A loud crash came from somewhere deeper in the complex. Isaac and Bethany jumped, but the noise barely registered with me. I was lost in my thoughts.

  What had taken me from Norristown, Pennsylvania, to this hellhole beneath Battery Park? Why had I lost my memories here? I wanted to stay. To explore, to learn everything this place had to tell me. I needed to know why I’d been here.

  “Trent,” Isaac said from a thousand miles away. He repeated it, loud enough to pull me out of my thoughts. “Trent! We have to get out of here. That noise was the seal giving way in the throne room. The water is breaking through!”

  “I’m not leaving, not yet,” I said, only half listening.

  Another crash came from somewhere behind us. I heard a rushing roar in the distance, the sound of things being knocked over.

  “We have to go! Now!” Bethany cried. She grabbed my arm and tried to yank me away.

  I resisted, pulling myself out of her grasp. “I was here, Bethany! Don’t you get it? I have to know why! What if there’s something else here I recognize, something that sparks another memory?”

  Isaac glanced down the tunnel in the direction we’d come from, then back at me. His eyes were big and wild. “Move!”

  He grabbed me by the trench coat, dragged me back into the main tunnel, and pulled me along with him toward the ladder up ahead. I tried to break free, tried to brake with my boots against the floor, but Isaac wouldn’t stop. He pulled me farther and farther from the rune on the wall, and I hated him for it every step of the way.

  A loud rumble behind us made me glance over my shoulder. A wild, rushing wave filled the long tunnel, barreling after us.

  That brought me back to my senses. I stopped resisting and sprinted down the tunnel toward the ladder. Was this the way I’d run before? A year ago, when I awoke without my memories in front of that Ehrlendarr rune, I’d been so confused, so scared, that all I could do was run. I didn’t have any memory of my escape, only that suddenly I was outside. I risked a glance back at the rapidly approaching floodwaters. Had something been chasing me then, too? Was that why I’d run?

  Ahead of us was the ladder, bolted to the floor in the middle of the tunnel. It extended up into a wide, round shaftway in the ceiling. I didn’t know where it led, but we didn’t have much choice. The ladder was our only escape from the flood. Bethany reached it first and quickly ascended. Isaac tucked the Codex fragment inside his duster and followed her. The fireball went with him. In the dimming light, I looked back one last time. A hundred feet back, the rushing wall of water slammed into the corner where the two tunnels diverged, and then the place where I’d had my first memory was gone. There was only the water, pushing forward, coming at me. My chest went tight with anguish. The Ehrlendarr rune, the first physical clue I had to my past—I had no idea if it had been destroyed, lost forever.

  The water rushed toward me. I jumped, grabbing high rungs of the ladder, and pulled myself up after the others as quickly as I could. As soon as I had climbed into the shaftway, the floodwater swept by beneath me. The force of it shook the ladder. If I’d been a second slower, I would be dead. Again.

  I started climbing up after the others. My heavy, waterlogged clothes slowed my progress. Water dripped out of my hair and into my eyes. I tried to wipe it away with the back of my coat sleeve, but the sleeve was wet, too, and only made it worse. Water, water, everywhere. If I never saw water again, I would be happy.

  My heart felt like a dense cannonball sitting in my chest. I hated leaving the underground complex behind without knowing why I’d been there before. But what choice did I have? We had to get the fragment back to Citadel before Arkwright made another attempt to steal it. All the answers to my questions were underwater now anyway, inaccessible, even if we had the time to go back and look. I knew all these things, and I hated leaving anyway.

  The ladder went up three or four stories into an enclosed, dimly lit space. By the time I reached the top, my arms and legs ached from the effort of climbing. I rolled onto my back on the blessedly dry floor to catch my breath. We were in a room big enough to hold maybe ten men. In the center of the room was the brick-lined hole in the floor I’d crawled out of. There were no windows, but there were horizontal slits in the wall high above us that let in a little air and a small amount of light. There was a door in one wall. Isaac’s fireball was gone, no longer needed.

  I coughed, feeling completely waterlogged. I sucked air into my lungs, grateful for it even if it was the stale air of this room.

  “Where are we now?” Bethany asked.

  Isaac looked down into the shaftway. “The entrance to wherever we just were, I’d say. This must be how you get in.”

  I got on my knees and stared down into the shaftway. I couldn’t see anything down there. Whatever lay below, I’d lost it.

  “I was so close,” I said. “So fucking close.”

  “I’m sorry, Trent, I truly am, but we can’t stay,” Isaac said. “Arkwright’s still out there somewhere, probably looking for us. We need to go. But I promise you, we’ll come back when we can.”

  “Provided there’s anything down there anymore that the flood didn’t wash away,” I said, shaking my head. “No. You two can bring the fragment back to Citadel. I’m staying. I have to know.”

  Bethany knelt down in front of me and looked me in the eye. “If there’s anything to find, you’ll find it. That’s what you’re good at—figuring things out, putting things together that no one else sees. Which, come to think of it, is pretty remarkable for someone who tends to punch first and ask questions later. But you can’t go back down there now. It’s not safe. And neither are we, not until we get back to Citadel.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I knew she was right, but what I was feeling was too big to let go of just yet. “I was there, Bethany. Back when I was Lucas West. Whatever happened to me, whatever made me like this, it happened down there.”

  “We’ll come back,” she said. “If we survive this, if we stop the world from ending, we’ll come back.”

  “Those are some pretty big ifs,” I said, but I nodded. She squeezed my hand.

  Bethany stood and walked to the door. She tried the handle and found it unlocked. She pulled the door open a crack and peeked outside.

  “I don’t see Arkwright,” she said.

  She pulled the door open wider, revealing trees and grass in a corner of Battery Park. We hadn’t traveled all that far underground. T
he three of us left the little room and walked out into the cold, hammering rain. I looked back and saw we’d been inside a tall, angular, concrete structure in the middle of a lawn. It was white and featureless, aside from a patterned black trim around the top. A ventilation building for the nearby Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, most likely. When Bethany closed the door again, it blended seamlessly with the rest of the concrete slabs in the building’s façade, utterly camouflaged. The secrecy only made me more curious. Whatever the underground complex was, it had been deserted, its entrance left unguarded. Whatever it had been used for, it no longer was.

  I thought about the bloodstained pit again. Something violent and terrible had taken place down there. Why the hell had I been in a place like that?

  As we walked away from the structure, I kept an eye out for Arkwright. The autumn treetops made excellent hiding places, and I already knew Arkwright had no fear of heights. But there was no sign of him. That surprised me. He didn’t seem the type to have just gone home. He was desperate for the fragment. He wouldn’t give up that easily. No, if Arkwright was gone, there was a reason for it. Something had driven him away.

  When we turned the corner of the ventilation building, a group of people were waiting for us, blocking our way. The stench of wet, rotting flesh hit me before I realized what they were.

  Revenants. On quick count, there were seven of them. Now I had an idea what must have spooked Arkwright.

  Standing front and center amid the revenants, with his arms crossed smugly across his chest, was Thornton. Or rather, his reanimated corpse. His pupils glowed red from Reve Azrael’s magic. His pale, bloodless lips parted in a grin.

  “Hello, little fly,” Reve Azrael said through Thornton’s mouth.

  I had my gun out in a flash, pointed right at her head. After being submerged in all that river water, I didn’t know if the gun would fire, jam, or blow up in my hand, but one shot to the head was all I needed—

  A revenant I hadn’t seen came up behind me and yanked the gun out of my hand. I glared at the revenant, a male corpse whose mouth was frozen in a twisted, rictus grin. Smiley tossed my gun to Reve Azrael, who tucked it into her belt. Then Smiley yanked my arms behind my back and held them there. Looking over at Isaac and Bethany, I saw two additional revenants had restrained them the same way.