by Jodi Meadows
“Meuric told me,” I said. “He might have lied, but I don’t think so.” Even as I said it, cries grew louder, thicker on the smothering air until they were like black smoke clinging to our clothes and skin. Cris and Stef said nothing, just looked like they wanted to be sick.
It was painful, watching them react to the truth about newsouls. I changed the subject. “I found the guesses you left in your house, Cris. For the symbols.”
Cris looked up. “You were in my house?”
“We couldn’t find you outside and it was snowing. None of your plants were covered, so we were worried.”
“Ah.” He glanced nowhere, as though he could see his frost-coated roses. “I was studying the symbols again when someone knocked. I tucked the paper under the tray, and then Deborl, Merton, and a bunch of others took me.”
“Why would he take you?” I stepped off a narrow stairway, onto a floor that looked like white water. It held my weight. For now.
“I don’t know.” He eyed the floor like it might change its mind about being solid. “Well, Deborl did ask about books and symbols. He said he wanted to know what I knew, which wasn’t anything, since you didn’t give me details.” The last part sounded a little accusing, but I forgave him because it was my fault he’d been kidnapped.
“He asked me the same questions,” said Stef. “But I really didn’t know anything, because you didn’t give me even a hint.” That definitely sounded accusing, but I forgave her because she was right and it was my fault she’d been kidnapped, too.
Deborl must have assumed Sam and I had told her because they were best friends. If Sarit hadn’t left for Purple Rose Cottage, would they have taken her, too? And I couldn’t stop wondering what they were doing with Sam right now.
I found an archway out of the water-floor room quickly, before I lost control of my stomach. Stef looked green, too.
The souls around us continued weeping.
“I didn’t remember the symbols from anything in Range like you thought I might.” Cris’s voice was low as we entered a long hall, white everywhere; I dragged my fingers along one wall to make sure I didn’t walk into it. “The symbols came from writing I’d seen in the far south, in jungles. I was collecting samples of plants for medicine and experiments, and found giant ruins. A white wall…” His voice grew soft and faraway.
I’d been right the day of my gardening lesson: the wall had been white, like the wall Sam found in the north.
“I climbed to the top of one of the tallest pieces to get a good view. It was hard to make out with trees and vines and creatures everywhere, but it looked like the wall had once been a ring, like the one around Heart, but there was no evidence of a city inside. Only a razed building in the center, with enough rubble it might have been as big as our temple.”
“The ruins looked like a circle with a dot in the middle?”
Cris nodded.
That was the symbol Meuric had said meant Heart or city, but there’d been no city in the jungle. There’d have been some kind of evidence otherwise, even if the jungle had mostly overgrown it. “And the symbols?”
“They were etched into the stone, though erosion made them difficult to see. When I left, it was so hard to remember.”
Meuric had said no one wrote the books, that they were simply written. But the language seemed to be from the jungle, where phoenixes lived and burned and died and lived again. So what were the books doing here?
Cris focused again, confusion magic evaporating. “Did my guesses help? It was a long time ago.”
“Yes, definitely.” I wished I’d actually been able to study them, now that I’d acquired a few translations. “You helped a lot. I hadn’t realized I’d been looking at some of the symbols sideways.”
He offered a warm smile. “I’m glad you trusted me enough to ask.”
Stef shot me a dark look, a vivid contrast to the white all around. I wanted to say something comforting to her, but I didn’t know what. We were stuck here together, me and two people who loved Sam, and the object of our affections on the outside. Maybe hurt or imprisoned. Who knew what else Deborl had told everyone?
The truth was bad enough.
The hall ended in a black archway. I hesitated, uncertain about this one, though I couldn’t tell why. It was the same as all the other black archways, midnight on white.
“That’s easier to look at, at least.” Cris rubbed his eyes.
“The crying stopped.” Stef glanced at me. “Are we going through?”
She was asking me? Perhaps I’d inadvertently given them the idea I knew my way around. “Yeah, I suppose. Keep watch for anything that might help us escape.”
There wouldn’t be anything. The key was gone. Nothing would help us escape, but they needed the comfort.
We walked through the archway.
The circular chamber beyond was not like the rest of the temple. Here, the walls glowed red, and inky shadows lurked beneath skeletons chained in tarnished silver shackles. Thousands of skeletons. Maybe a million.
A wide pit waited in the center, large enough for a piano to fall through. Like a spider straddling the hole, a white table stood above it. One body, perfectly preserved, rested on the table with a knife thrust into his chest. His own hands held it in.
Stef’s voice dropped low and heavy. “What is this?”
“I’ve never seen it before.” I couldn’t move. Everywhere there were skeletons, yellow bones clean of flesh and fabric. They sat on tiers around the room, heads lolled to the sides, bound hands on their laps or the stone beside them.
I’d never seen so much death before, not even in graveyards Sam had shown me. Those had been peaceful, all iron and stonework, flowers and vines. They were bodies kept in mausoleums and caskets where they belonged.
“This one is different,” Stef called from across the pit and the man on the stone table.
I stared at the table man as I rounded the pit, not too close. He was short and thick, with bushy brown hair on his head and face. His jaw jutted forward as though he’d died focusing on something important. Mostly, he looked strong, like he could wrestle a troll and win.
“Ana.” Cris touched my shoulder. Where Stef crouched, another skeleton slumped in its shackles, but away from the rest. It lay prostrate in the middle of the floor, arms outstretched as though bowing to the man on the table.
“That’s not the weirdest part.” Stef stepped away from the shackled one to reveal a second, which appeared to have been cast aside. Limbs flailed, bones barely held together by worn ligaments. It looked like if anyone touched it, the skeleton would collapse into a pile of dust.
I gazed along the walls, along the ranks of gaping eye sockets and lower jaws hanging precariously. “There.” I pointed to an empty spot. Silver shackles sat unlocked on the white stone. “Someone put that one over here.”
What Deborl had said about replacing Meuric—
“What’s a Hallow?” The question was out before I realized I’d spoken. Deborl actually had replaced Meuric. Physically.
“That’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time.” Stef cocked her head. “Meuric claimed the title in the beginning, saying he had a special connection to Janan, but he didn’t seem to do anything, really. He eventually stopped talking about it.”
I fiddled with my scarf, the cool length of silk only a pale comfort. “Meuric was the first Hallow,” I said, gazing at the skeletons on the floor. “Whatever he was supposed to do, he failed when I trapped him in here. Deborl replaced him.”
Cris stood next to me, towering. “But why? What does it matter?”
“Meuric and Deborl both said something about Janan rising. Ascending.”
“That sounds familiar,” Stef muttered. “Ascending.”
I waited, but she didn’t elaborate. “Meuric was convinced that if he had the key, he would survive Soul Night.”
“That’s in three months.” Cris shook his head. “But we have a Soul Night every fifteen years. We all survive it. What
makes this one different?”
Time? Whatever Janan was working toward, was five thousand years long enough? Meuric had been convinced it was happening soon, even before the temple turned him crazy. “If surviving Soul Night requires the key, and the Hallow gets the key, that would certainly be motivation to do whatever Janan wants.”
“And what does Janan want?” Cris asked. “Rising? Ascending?”
Not rising like a phoenix, Meuric had said. Something else. Something sinister.
I pointed at the two on the floor. “Those two are Meuric and Deborl.” I swept my arms around the room. “And the rest of these are you. All of you. Sam, Sarit, Orrin, Whit, Armande, Sine—everyone.”
Cris and Stef gasped.
“What happened here?” It was probably mean of me to ask, since they couldn’t remember. Janan didn’t want them to remember, or know about the other white walls and towers around the world, or consider certain paradoxes enough to know they were ridiculous.
He did something to them every time they were reincarnated, but maybe now that they were inside the temple, memories would return.
Stef focused inward, a line carved between her eyes. “Janan was our leader. He used to be a man. A human.”
I glanced at the body on the table. “Him?”
“Him,” she repeated. “He wasn’t even anything special. He was our leader, but he was just a human.”
How incredible, all this because of one man.
Stef’s jaw muscles clenched, and her knuckles turned white with strain. “Every time I think I have it, it slips away.”
“It’s all right.” I laid my hand on her shoulder. “Just tell me whenever you know something. I won’t forget.”
Sometimes, being new had its advantages.
“You said he was your leader. Just a man.” I spoke as much for their benefit as my own. Maybe it would spark more memories. “Had you discovered Heart yet?”
“No.” Cris frowned. “And we weren’t in tribes across Range like I thought. We were all together. All of us except for Janan. We were going to him.”
“The story I was told was this: no one agrees how you got here, but you lived in different tribes. Then you all discovered Heart and fought over it until you realized it was big enough for everyone. That was the first time you came together, all million of you.”
“Yes, that’s right.” Cris shook his head. “But that’s not right. That’s not what happened. Janan was our leader, but he’d been wrongly imprisoned. Everyone came to free him. The city appeared later. After…after we did something.”
I motioned to the table. “Somehow he ended up there. And somehow you all ended up sitting around the room with chains connecting you. How?”
“I don’t remember,” Stef whispered. “I know Meuric bound us in the chains, then bound himself beside the altar and told Janan we were ready. I remember white and wind everywhere—and the very next thing is standing just outside the city wall. We all thought we’d just arrived, but no one knew why we’d come.” She gestured around the room. “Whatever happened in here, it tied us to him forever. It changed him, made him both less and more at the same time. It made us reincarnate.”
Unsilence thickened in the moments between her words, and all of us realized the answer to my biggest question.
I wasn’t going to be reincarnated.
Definitely not.
I hadn’t been here five thousand years ago. I didn’t have a skeleton chained to the walls.
When I died, I’d be gone. Gone, and no one would remember me but through pieces of music and the few notebooks I kept.
I wanted to sit, or speak, or breathe, but it seemed ice radiated from the blue rose in my hair, freezing first my thoughts, then every other piece of me. No matter what I did now—whether or not I escaped here, saved newsouls, and stopped Janan—when I died, that was it. No lifetimes with Sam. No helping to rebuild his instruments, no learning how to play them all, no writing music that sounded like snowfall.
My heart shattered, glass on stone.
Then Janan spoke.
28
TRAPPED
“MISTAKE. IT HAS returned.”
Janan’s voice hit me from all directions, huge and deep and overwhelming. I blinked away threatening tears and glanced at the man on the table, but he remained dead.
Despair splintered through me. I was a mistake. Asunder. And after this life I wouldn’t return. I would never be like everyone else.
“You must leave. This place is not for you.” Janan’s words ripped around the room, and red light gathered on the domed ceiling. It brightened, sucking all the crimson from the walls until they glowed hot white.
The presence faded, leaving the red to bleed back into the walls. Everything became how it had been a few minutes ago. Except my new knowledge of my…temporariness.
“Was that Janan?” Stef’s face was pale and drawn as she gazed around. She lowered her voice. “He knows we’re here?”
“He does now.” I hugged myself. “Usually he doesn’t pay attention to me unless I’m fiddling with the key. He can’t touch you—he’s incorporeal—but he can change the walls. Once he locked me in a small room.”
“How did you escape?” Cris asked.
“I threatened to keep pushing buttons on the key.” Deep breaths. In and out. I focused on anything but the idea of dying and never coming back. “I don’t know how it works, but it must make Janan uncomfortable if he didn’t want me poking at it.”
Cris nodded. “I suppose if the walls are his body, it’d be like me making your arms move around for you. A trust you’d only give your Hallow.”
Janan’s voice boomed again, violent as thunder shaking the ground. “You do not belong here!”
I jumped, my bones feeling like they might vibrate out, and tried not to stare at the body on the table. Or the skeletons along the walls. There wasn’t really a safe place to look.
“Should we go?” Stef asked, once the rumbling died. Her voice trembled. I hated seeing Stef frightened; she was always so confident.
“No. If we leave this room, he’ll trap us somewhere. I don’t have the key. There’s no way I’d be able to get us out.”
“So we stay here?” Cris looked dubious.
“Doesn’t that trap us here instead?” Stef eyed the door like she might run for it.
“I’ve never been here.” I didn’t want to be here now. “Maybe Deborl made a mistake when he left. Maybe going somewhere in the temple makes it more likely to be available again. All I can tell you is that I’ve been in the temple twice before, and I’ve never seen this room.”
Stef shook her head. “We’re still trapped.”
“Important things happened here. This place holds answers. We won’t find anything in the rest of the temple.”
“I just want to go.” Stef edged toward the archway. “There’s no way out from here, but the rest—”
“There are no exits.” I balled my fists. “I know it’s hard to understand, but there is no way out. I don’t have the key.”
“Sam will free us.” Cris looked hopeful.
“No, he won’t.” The temple had no temperature—not too hot or cold—but chills raced across my body, and I shivered. “He won’t save us, because he won’t be able to. It was a mob out there. I don’t even know if Sam’s okay.” The last words choked me.
Both of them wore pinched expressions, and Cris touched my elbow. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably working out a plan to take the key right now.”
I shook my head and described what I’d seen. No need to go easy on them. I didn’t see how our situation could get any worse.
“Ana!” Stef jabbed a finger toward the archway we’d come from. It was gone. “He locked us in. Now we really can’t get out.”
“We wouldn’t have gotten out anyway!” The constant pulse of the temple made my head throb. “What about that is so confusing? No matter where we are, we’re not leaving. Sam can’t rescue us. Deborl wouldn’t free us
if his life depended on it. No one else knows how to use the key. We’re stuck.”
“All right!” Cris rubbed his forehead as though to press a headache into a smaller, more manageable size. “Both of you, please. We need a plan.”
“Like what? Escape?” I scowled and gestured around the room. “The only thing I see is the hole under the altar, and I don’t recommend it.”
“We’re just as bad off as if we’d left,” Stef muttered, just loud enough that it was meant to be heard.
I shook my head. “If we’d left, we would be stuck in a tiny box.”
“You don’t know that. You’re guessing on all of this.” Stef loomed over me. “You’ve been leading us nowhere the whole time, with no idea where you were going or what you wanted to accomplish.”
“At least I was doing something.” My fingernails dug into my palms, carving crescents into my skin. “You’d have just stayed there all confused. Did you even try to escape Deborl? Or were you too busy being mad because Sam and I didn’t tell you what had been going on?”
“Don’t pretend like you know anything about me or the way I feel.” Her face was pink in the red glow, and I had pushed too hard.
I didn’t care. “I know enough.” She kept antagonizing Sam about his closeness to me, but she was the person keeping a stash of his photos and letters. I wanted to hurt her. “I know how you disguise your feelings for Sam. You fooled him, but he’s used to your flirting and never took it seriously. But I know you meant it.”
She stared at me like I’d said she had chicken feet or hands growing from her head, but that was Stef. Pretending even now she didn’t really care.
I knew I shouldn’t, but I said it anyway, my voice low and too calm. “I told him that you love him.”
Her face went blank.
A wiser person would have stopped there, but I went on anyway. “If you were as brave as you claim, you’d have told him lifetimes ago.”
“And I suppose you have? No, that would ruin your tortured newsoul existence.” Her voice grew stronger, angrier. “You can’t let yourself be happy, can you? Well maybe this will fix it: you’re not coming back. There’s no skeleton in here with your name on it, so when you die, that’s it. Gone. I’ll still love Sam, and thanks for telling him, by the way. Now he’ll have time to figure out a response in our next lives when you’re not here. Are you happy now? You really are as tragic as you think you are, butterfly.”