Asunder (Incarnate)

by Jodi Meadows

  She might as well have stabbed me; it hurt the same.

  There was a whole list of things I shouldn’t do, including asking if she could find his skeleton among all these—I could—and telling her about his reaction when he found out how she felt. But I didn’t do any of them, because it would be cruel and petty. Not that I’d been much above cruel and petty so far, but I didn’t want her to hate me forever. And, romantic feelings aside, she was still Sam’s best friend.

  “There’s no point in arguing about it, Stef.” My voice was more level than it had ever been, but surely she could hear the strain. “Because we’re trapped. We’re never leaving this room.”

  29

  IMMORTALITY

  AFTER STARTLING STEF and Cris into silence, I marched over to Meuric’s skeleton and kicked the skull.

  Whatever magic had been holding it together must have failed when the shackles came off. The skull skittered across the floor and dropped into the pit beneath the table.

  I kicked an arm, and several bones cracked against one another, the floor, and a table leg. Pieces of Meuric dropped out of sight, making no sound on their way down. If they ever reached an end, I didn’t hear the clatter.

  Still angry, I kicked his ribs, hips. Smaller bones turned to powder as my boot hit them. “I hate you,” I hissed, as the last of Meuric vanished.

  Stepping around the dust, I almost felt bad for kicking Meuric down a pit again.

  “Okay,” I whispered to myself, and knelt by the skeleton now caught in shackles. Deborl. I hated him, too. More than I hated Meuric. The hate twisted inside me like a snake, uncomfortable, but clean and sharp and determined.

  I reached for the tarnished silver cuff to search for a lock. If Janan didn’t have a Hallow, maybe he couldn’t ascend on Soul Night. It would make being trapped in here worth it, if I could save everyone else from the fate hurtling toward them.

  As I touched the shackle, electricity zapped through me. I screamed, and lost feeling in my right side. My arm hung uselessly.

  “Ana?” Cris hurried toward me, looking around for whatever had attacked me.

  I shook away the buzzing in my head. “Don’t touch the chains.”

  He sat with me until feeling in my fingers returned, and then, more carefully, I climbed onto the table and tried to kick Janan off.

  He might have been a human-shaped lump of silver himself. He didn’t move. Cris even joined me, but no matter what we tried, we couldn’t budge him.

  The knife, however, did come away when we worked together. Cris pried Janan’s grip off the handle just enough so I could slip it out. The blade was silver at the base, but the end looked as though it had been dipped in liquid gold. Janan’s hands returned to their original position, but now they held only a memory of the knife.

  I didn’t have anything to do with it, though, so I left it on the table.

  “You will die!” shouted the walls, incorporeal Janan.

  “Why don’t you lick my shoe?” I propped my boot on dead-Janan’s face. “You won’t do anything to us. Not here.”

  Red light swirled around the chamber, and Janan’s screams resounded through the room as he called me names I’d never imagined could be put together like that.

  But he was without substance, and we were already trapped.

  “You’re just a human, like us!” Not quite true—he was powerful, incorporeal, and consumed and reincarnated souls—but he’d started out human. Reminding him of that was satisfying. “Just a short human!”

  “Is that your plan?” Stef asked when the screams faded. “Annoy him until he kicks us out?”

  “No. I’m working on a better one.” I flashed a tight, fake smile. “This is just the beginning.” I kicked dead-Janan’s head, but numbness rushed through my toes as though I’d kicked a block of ice.

  I hopped off the table and marched around the perimeter of the room.

  A few minutes or an hour later, Cris fell into step beside me and I said, “If you’re here to chastise me for being mean to Stef, I don’t want to hear it.” I twisted my scarf in my hands, hating my obvious fidget, but I couldn’t stay still.

  “No, I thought you’d probably done enough of that yourself.”

  “Mmm.” Noncommittal. I’d picked it up from Sam, and it seemed to work for whatever the other person wanted to hear.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out how to get out of here,” I said. The archway was still missing, and there weren’t any signs. No words or pictures to indicate what we should do next. “No key means we can’t control the walls. We can’t make doors or do anything useful. The good news is we won’t get hungry or thirsty, as long as we don’t think too hard about it.”

  “Great, thanks. Deborl didn’t feed us before he trapped us. Do you have any idea how long it’s been?”

  “A day? A week? Five minutes?” I shrugged. “Time passes differently here, and not even at a consistent rate.”

  Moriah had told me time mostly mattered to the person measuring it, which had made me laugh because she built clocks. SEDs and clocks didn’t work in here, but now I was extra aware of every second and how they carried me closer to my end.

  “So what we need is someone who can make doors.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Well, yes. Pretty much.”

  “Stef?” He waved in her direction. “You don’t happen to have anything on you that would make a door in the wall, do you?”

  Her glower was dragon acid. “Go roll around in rosebushes, Cris.”

  “I don’t think she appreciates your humor,” I muttered. As if I could blame her. At this rate, we’d be out of Janan’s way in a few days because we’d have killed one another. Well, Stef would kill me, then Cris, and then she’d be here all by herself. And I wouldn’t feel bad for her.

  “Few really do.” He kept pace with me easily. “Why are you walking?”

  “It feels like if I stop, then I give up. But I don’t know what to do.” My throat tightened with the confession. He was going to think I was weak, just like Stef did.

  “Hey.” He tugged my arm. I stumbled and he caught me, one hand on my back. “Sorry. Hey.” He faced me, expression serious. “We’re going to find a way out, okay? And then you’ll rescue Sam from the angry mob, reclaim your books, and find a way to stop Janan from ascending.”

  “So while I do all these miracles, you’ll be where?” My whole body ached, and I really wanted to lose myself in the piano, but it was gone. Smashed. And my flute? Sarit had put it in the Councilhouse, but they might have found it.

  Cris said, “I’ve been remembering, too.”

  I waited.

  “Being here has made me remember a lot of things we’re not supposed to know. The memories are so old they feel like dreams or someone else’s life, but I know they’re real.” He looked more serious than I’d ever seen him. No hint of a smile, no friendly stance. He looked sad. “I remember what Janan said he was going to do.”

  “What is that?” I whispered.

  “He wants to be immortal.”

  “But—”

  “True immortality. Not like we are, trapped in an endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth. And not like what he is now, trapped in these walls. Before, when he was still human, there was nothing in this tower. No rooms or light or shifting walls. It was meant to be a prison.”

  Even before he started switching old and newsouls, he’d been imprisoned? “Why was he here? Who put him here?” Whatever he’d done, it must have been terrible, and as far as I could see, he was only getting worse.

  “Before all this”—Cris gestured around—“Janan took his best warriors on a quest for immortality. People were so afraid of everything, like dragons and centaurs and trolls—”

  “And sylph?”

  Cris cocked his head. “No, we hadn’t seen sylph yet. Only after.”

  “Okay.” That was odd, though. “Go on.”

  “Well, he said he discovered the secret to immortality, but that phoenixes were jealous:
they didn’t want anyone else to know their secret. They made this prison—and prisons all over the world—and locked Janan and his warriors away, one in each tower so they’d never band together again.”

  “Phoenixes.” I’d known they were real, but I’d never heard of them making prisons or really doing much besides flying around, burning up, and rising from their own ashes. Well, Meuric had said a phoenix cursed the sylph, but Meuric had been crazy. Maybe. “The other prisons were towers, like this one? With a wall around?”

  “I never saw them, but I think so. I think when we came to rescue Janan from his prison, it was just a tower and a wall.”

  “Like the one you saw in the jungle.”

  He nodded.

  And like the one Sam had seen in the north, I guessed. But none of those towers had anything like Janan. If they did, they wouldn’t have been affected by weather and life. So what had happened to those prisons and prisoners?

  Cris seemed somewhen else, heavy with his memories. “We all went to rescue Janan, but instead, he said the secret to immortality meant he had to stay in the prison—for a while. He said phoenixes had made this tower, so it was already infused with their magic. And the rest of us were to wait for his success and return.” Cris gazed around the red-lit chamber. “Can you imagine five thousand years existing only in stone, just waiting?”

  “He’s eating newsouls.” I clenched my jaw. “I’m having trouble sympathizing with him.”

  “I didn’t mean—” Cris lowered his eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, five thousand years. That’s a long time.”

  So long I could hardly imagine it. “I shouldn’t have snapped. I’m just exhausted.”

  “I understand.” Cris flashed a pale smile. “Janan shed his mortality, but souls still need something to contain them.”

  What did that mean for sylph, then? It seemed hard to believe that anything without a soul could love music as much as they seemed to.

  “All this time, he’s been waiting, growing, gaining power. If he ascends on Soul Night and becomes truly immortal, no need to consume newsouls to survive, then he won’t need to reincarnate us.”

  “What about the Hallow? Meuric said if he had the key, he would live.”

  Cris smiled grimly, voice low and filled with hurt. “Why should Janan bother? We’ll be unnecessary, even Meuric and Deborl. With Janan free of the temple, there will be no need for someone to guard the key.”

  The key. Another thousand questions revolved around that little box. Where had it come from? “The night of Templedark, Meuric said that birth isn’t pretty. It’s painful.”

  “Add the Range caldera to that,” Cris said, “and you have—nothing. When it erupts, there will be nothing left but Janan.”

  I wanted to be sick. I hadn’t even considered the caldera, but the earthquake swarms, the lake level…

  The caldera beneath Range wasn’t just moving through one of its natural cycles. No, it was getting ready to erupt. There should have been lots of warning. There should have been years of evidence beforehand. But nothing about Janan was natural; the unrest in the caldera must have been his doing.

  When Range erupted, the devastation would be complete. The ground would be ripped apart. Lava would pour across the forest, killing everything in its path. Ash would fill the air, blocking the sun. The world’s temperature would drop dramatically.

  Not that anyone would be around to see that happen.

  Heart—even Range—would be a hole in the ground.

  Cris shoved his hands in his pockets, frowning at nothing. “Soul Night is still months away. There’s still time to stop him if you can escape.”

  “By ‘you’ I assume you mean ‘we.’”

  “No, I mean you. And Stef if she’d like to escape as well.”

  From the other side of the room, Stef called, “What?” and stood. “You thought of a way out?”

  Cris nodded as she rounded the stone table. “Ana, I have to confess something first.” His tone made me shiver.

  “What?”

  “Please understand the last thing I want to do is hurt you, but”—he glanced at Stef, who didn’t react—“I think you need to know.”

  I waited.

  “Janan is using us, yes, switching oldsouls and newsouls to feed himself. But he didn’t deceive us or trap us, in spite of these chains. We were told he’d gain knowledge and power to protect us when he returned, truly immortal. All we had to do was bind ourselves to him and he’d do the rest. We were afraid of the world, and of him, so we said yes.” Cris gestured around the room. “We all made the agreement to be bound. We chose to be reincarnated.”

  It must have seemed like such an easy decision; after all, who wanted to die when you could live forever? “You didn’t know about the newsouls?” Surely they hadn’t known. Sam had been horrified when he learned the truth, and Stef and Cris were the same. The people I knew would never make that trade.

  “Understand that we were young,” he whispered, his face ashen. “We were young and in a dangerous land that spat boiling water and mud. There were dragons and centaurs, trolls and rocs, plus the regular animals that live in Range. Half our number had already been killed on the journey here. We were—still are—terrified of death.”

  Stef dropped her gaze. “It was selfish and desperate, but those were wilder times.”

  “No.” I spoke as if denying it would change anything.

  My heart beat itself into knots. I wanted to say I’d never make that decision, but how I felt now—knowing that no matter what I did, my life would be short—I might accept such a bargain. One more life with Sam, with music, with everything I ever wanted. All it would cost was someone who’d never know what they missed.

  This would have been so much easier if I could have hated everyone for what they’d done.

  Cris closed his eyes. “I don’t want to think about how many souls that is, especially considering how frequently some people die.”

  “Hundreds of millions of newsouls.” Stef’s voice turned raspy. “I’m so sorry, Ana.”

  I was sick and aching. Sam had made the deal, too. Sam who loved me.

  It stabbed like betrayal no matter how I reminded myself it was so long ago. My Sam. My friend Sarit. Lidea, who loved Anid so much. Geral, who thought Ariana was the most precious creature. All my friends. Everyone I’d ever trusted.

  They’d all made the deal.

  The people of Heart were so terrified of newsouls replacing them, but in truth, they’d been replacing newsouls for five thousand years.

  A sob choked out, but I wiped my cheeks and tried to put the grief and anger aside. I was too worn to deal with it now. “Okay. So what’s your plan? How does remembering how Janan started all this help?”

  Cris was quiet for so long I thought he didn’t really have a plan. “Someone needs to be able to open a door. I’ll do it.”

  “Without the key?”

  He closed his eyes. “A key. Not the key.”

  It took me a minute to follow. “No. You can’t.”

  “I’m the only one who can.”

  “No.” I scrambled to my feet, heart collapsing in on itself. “I won’t let you sacrifice yourself.”

  “I’m sorry, Ana.” He stood, too, with ten times more grace. “It has to be me. The world still needs Stef.”

  “The world still needs you.” I was yelling at a rock, because he just shook his head. “Society would have never understood farming without you. Greenhouses. Fields. Orchards. That’s because of you.”

  “That was thousands of years ago.” He touched my arm, but I batted him away. “Now I grow roses. A noble endeavor, but not necessary for survival.”

  “What?” Stef peered between us. “What are you talking about? Why don’t you want him to open a door?”

  “Because without the key, there’s only one way to make a door,” I said.

  She shook her head, looking weary. “Please remember I’ve been kidnapped and starved.” />
  “Cris”—I pointed and growled his name—“thinks he’s going to do whatever Janan did: get rid of his body; become part of the temple.”

  “What?” Stef was on her feet in an instant, shrieking at Cris.

  “If you do it, you’ll be as bad as him. You’ll have to consume souls to survive, and someone will have to be the Hallow, and how will both you and Janan fit in the walls? I’m sure he won’t be happy about sharing his space with you.”

  Stef stood inches from Cris, yelling as loud as she could while he stayed silent, waiting. “Why do you think this is going to work? For all you know, you’ll just stick a knife in your chest and die.”

  “Even if it does work,” I said, “in five thousand years everyone will have to stop you and they’ll feel bad because you’re otherwise nice.”

  Stef and I both stopped to breathe at the same time, and Cris cut in.

  “First of all, I don’t have followers like Janan did.” He motioned around the room at our skeletal audience. “If I’m not reincarnating anyone, I won’t get souls. These skeletons are bound in chains. They’re bound to him.”

  “What if it changes?” My throat hurt from yelling, and my head throbbed with anger and betrayal. “What if suddenly you’re supposed to switch souls?”

  “I wouldn’t do it.” He sounded so calm and certain, like he didn’t think it would be a temptation. “Ana, I promise. Knowing what I do, knowing you, I understand what we sacrificed so long ago.” He touched my hand, softly enough that I could barely feel his fingers tremble. “I’m so sorry, Ana. We don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I can try to put things right.”

  “How is that?” I wanted to hate him and his stupid plan, but now that I wasn’t yelling, my body felt limp and heavy.