“Old train tunnels, remember?” Cadence says. “They’re mostly flooded, but Ash waited until the tide was at its lowest, swam as far as the barrier, and dreamwalked to the other side. Trust me. You’re better off swimming from right here if you want to go that route.”
“Are there more sea monsters in the tunnels?”
“Nah. More bodies. The trains were still running when it flooded.”
I shudder. As it happens, I do remember Ash mentioning something about that. Great. Like I needed more ghosts to haunt my dreams.
Ravel steps closer, looking worried. Instead of bringing him up to speed, I head for the water. “How fast can you swim?”
“Not fast enough.”
I make it two steps into the water before he tackles me. I land on my shoulder. Wet sand and slimy water plants spray up into my face. I roll to my knees and scrub a sodden and gritty sleeve across my face. He doesn’t back off, wrestling in the sand to drag me further from the water’s edge.
When my vision clears, I see why.
There’s only one at first, its head a sudden stillness in the relentless motion of the waves that separate us from our goal. And then it surges, up out of the water and toward the shore. There’s a flash of too-many-too-sharp-too-white—
I shoulder Ravel aside to scramble up the shore faster.
It keeps on coming—so fast, too fast, what were we thinking—and stops. The waves surge toward us, and subside.
Ravel and I clutch at each other and stare as the sea monster submerges, all those teeth and tentacles vanishing under the waves until there’s just the glittering eyes and slick dome cresting.
It’s watching us.
“It has been watching for a while,” Cadence says. “You just weren’t paying attention.”
Easy for her to sound calm. She’s not the one at risk of getting her arm chomped off by a vicious sea monster. Or twisted off. Or chomped-and-twisted at the same time. My imagination is capable of coming up with several possibilities at once, each worse than the last.
“Can it come on land?” I back away slowly, without taking my eyes off of that eerie stillness amidst the waves.
“Probably?” Ravel has a death grip on the back of my shirt as if he thinks I’ll make a break for the water at any moment.
Yeah, not likely.
But then I have the most horrible idea.
“Go find something to float on.” I point inland.
“Lame,” Cadence complains. “My ideas were better. Those things can definitely knock you off a boat if they want to.”
I wait as Ravel stalks off. Every few steps, he cranes his neck to make sure I’m not making another suicidal run for the ocean behind his back. I shoo him along and turn to scrape together armfuls of seaweed from the stinking piles heaped along the shoreline.
“Um, if you’re planning to distract them, I’m pretty sure they’d rather chew on you than rotting plants,” Cadence says.
I keep right on heaping up the weeds, grimacing at the way they squish between my fingers. Small creatures skitter from their hiding places in the rubbery fronds. I grind my teeth to keep from shrieking when some sharp-legged thing scrabbles across my hand.
But, by the time Ravel returns dragging a large chunk of debris, I’ve amassed a pile of the stuff large enough to hide behind—if we hunker down and get cozy.
I wave for him to drop his makeshift raft and join me behind the newly assembled seaweed bunker.
“I’m afraid to ask.” He wrinkles his nose against the fetid reek.
I tug him closer, whisper: “Camouflage. We’ll wait until it’s too dark to see, pile it on the raft, and float across.”
He’s shaking his head before I can finish. “Never going to work. They might not be able to smell us or see us, but they’ve been watching the whole time. I’m pretty sure even a monster can see through this plan. Besides, the water level’s different on the other side. If I walked across at low tide, that means we’d have to dive to cross now. Why don’t we just wait—”
“No. We do this tonight.”
I know he thinks I’m being unreasonable, but something is telling me we can’t afford to wait much longer. The nightmares are calling me back for a reason—to regain my lost powers, to save the lives of my friends before it’s too late, to return to who and where I’m meant to be . . .
Or that’s what I want to believe—and Cadence’s silence in the face of my delusions gives me hope that we really are still special, still necessary, still destined to be heroes.
Because the alternative is that I’m truly haunted, or going crazy. The harsh reality is Ange, and Lily and her dad, and all the others on the other side of that barrier might be able to survive another night without rescue, but I’m not sure I can.
Chapter 30: Crossing
Ravel isn’t happy about it, but when I threaten to get on the crude raft by myself if I have to, he gives in and helps me shift the heap of decaying weeds onto it and drag the whole mess to the water’s edge.
We can’t help the scraping, much as I wish we could. When Cadence calls out a warning, it’s alarming, but not surprising. Our pathetic attempts at stealth have still tipped off our pursuers, but maybe we can turn that to our benefit.
Shouts ring out in the distance, clouds cover the moon, and we slip into the water. Our first attempts at paddling succeed in little more than knocking seaweed over the edge, but with a little whispered negotiation—and a lot of yelling on Cadence’s part—we work out a system.
Belly down in seaweed, icy waves lapping over the edge, I clutch a smaller bit of debris in my left hand and draw it carefully through the water, counting slowly in my head before lifting and starting the next stroke. On the other side of the raft, Ravel does the same. We’re not moving fast, but that’s kind of the point. We want to fly under the radar until our diversion arrives.
The shouts get closer. I catch my name, and Ravel’s, over the pounding in my ears and the creak of our raft. There’s splashing as the voices near, and then crashing and a kind of hollow roar as the monsters go hurtling past, disrupting the wave pattern we’re only just getting the hang of. We paddle faster in their wake.
A sudden jolt sends me rolling off the side of the raft. I lose my makeshift paddle trying to scramble back up. Something grabs my leg and yanks.
I shout. Water closes over my head, filling my mouth with brine. I flail, hitting out in every direction.
One of my blows must have connected with something important. My hand breaks the surface, and then my head. I suck in a lungful of air before something new gets ahold of me.
“Quiet.” Ravel hauls me against the raft.
It takes several breathless seconds of scrabbling, splinters digging under my nails and into the soft undersides of my arms, but I manage to get a reasonably firm hold on the waterlogged surface.
The raft bumps against the barrier with the motion of the waves. I curl my legs to my chest, and float, unable to climb back into our seaweed nest but wary of teeth in the depths beneath us.
Now we’re here, this seems like a stupid plan.
Ravel uses the raft to pull himself toward the barrier. He flattens one hand against it, and the dingy tint ripples as if he’s dipped a finger in still water. He presses harder, his hand sinking into the surface, sending yellowish waves pulsing along the glassine surface.
I inch closer. Ravel notices me coming and pulls back to help me balance while I press my own hand against it. The barrier offers a spongy, dense resistance. When I push harder, it oozes up around my fingers with a strangely vibrating pressure.
He drifts back, letting go of my arm, and the sensation changes, the surface hardening instantly around my hand with a buzzing sensation that rapidly escalates from mild to excruciating. I’d scream, except the buzzing has taken over, knotting every muscle in agony and freezing my breath. Cadence shrieks for me, though the sound of her voice is distant, dimming—
Ravel’s touch snaps the barrier’s hold.
We must have shoveled that stupid knot of wood onto the raft along with the seaweed. The cold water, or maybe shock, seems to have numbed the pain of my burn, but at least on my second try I remember to heave with my elbows instead of my hands.
“What happened?” Ravel trails his fingers against the barrier.
I shudder. “Don’t touch it.”
He taps the surface. It ripples. “Did it do something to you?”
“It tried to kill me!”
He raises an eyebrow. “Are you sure? You seem fine.” The eyebrow goes down when I shove my injured hand in his face. “Huh. That’s kind of cool.”
In the sickly illumination of the barrier, it doesn’t look so much burned as scarred, or maybe tattooed, undulating patterns etched from my fingertips to my wrist. I make a fist, the heat fading, the pain cooled to mere stiffness.
So I’m floating in sea monster-infested waters beside a mysterious, faintly luminescent dome that seemingly wants to kill me, and I don’t know how to swim. But we still haven’t reached the best part, which is when Cadence reminds us: “You know there’s nothing on the other side, right? Except rocks? Because you have to dive down to the tunnel Ravel used?”
WE DON’T DIVE SO MUCH as sink in tandem, Ravel pulling us down the side of the barrier until Cadence tells me to stop. I squeeze his hand twice in the agreed-upon signal.
My lungs feel like they’re going to burst, which helps distract from the certainty that a sea monster is about to take a bite out of us every time something brushes past.
It doesn’t stop me from dreading the barrier and wondering if I’ll burn up or drown first. Which is silly. Obviously, I’ll burn while drowning.
I tense so hard against the impending anguish that I miss the moment we cross over. Ravel has to prod me into opening my eyes and breathing again.
The air is stale, with a noxious tang that tastes like coming home. I run my fingers along the rough floor and try not to sob with relief. I try to stand and get no further than a crouch before I knock into something with a dull clang. My head rings.
“Sorry,” Ravel’s voice is muffled by the scrape of his movements. “It’s a little tight in here. Just a sec.”
There’s rustling, a click, and then a bluish glow outlines Ravel’s silhouette. More rustling, as he digs through a well-stuffed pack. Apparently, he planned ahead for our return. I’m impressed despite myself.
The glow of a small lamp lights up the side of his face as he reaches back to me. “Eat this. It’ll help with the shivering.”
I’m shaking so hard my teeth chatter. My stomach cramps at the idea of food after far too long. The packet jumps from my hand when he passes it to me and lands on the floor with a small but pronounced crunch.
“Probably poisoned anyway,” Cadence says.
Not comforting. Or helpful.
Ravel fishes it out of the dust, unwraps, and holds the oblong thing until I can get a grip on it. It’s painfully sweet. I don’t recognize it from my time in Freedom, where food tended toward the sparse and decorative, nor does it resemble the pale but plentiful stuff grown by Under. All the shaking makes it hard to chew, but if it is poison, it must be slow acting.
Ravel produces a blanket for each of us and munches his way through a few bites of the sweet, dry food before turning away. “It gets bigger up ahead. We can change there.”
The walls curve around us, explaining why I’d bumped my head when we first came through. It’s not so much a small tunnel as a very large pipe, but it opens out into another that’s big enough to walk side by side without brushing the walls.
Ravel drapes his blanket over the light to dim it and we peel off waterlogged travel clothes. We leave them in a heap, little more than rags, and fumble into blessedly dry fabric. When he uncovers the light once more, I realize the dark, loose garments must’ve come from Ange. Huh.
“S—so, uh, when did you actually start working together?” I garble the words, but all the shivering does seem to be dying down. Marginally.
“Together?”
“You and Ange.”
He quirks the kind of grin that brings back memories of black paint and gold ornaments and dancing the night away in the fever-dreamtime between one of my worlds shattering and the next. “When have we not been working together?”
“You’re not part of Under.”
“No?” He turns and leads the way down this new, wider tunnel. “I’m the one who brought it to life, flame. How did you think Ange and her band of runaways survived down here?”
I still don’t believe his story—he was nobody’s friend or ally last time I was in this city—but it’s a good question. I’ve seen the boundary close up and have the—scars? The marks on my hand certainly don’t look like burns anymore, or not fresh ones at least—anyway, the evidence to prove it. Nothing and nobody from this city gets in or out.
Except for Ravel, apparently.
Between the flooding and the monsters, it’s not easy to survive here, especially without access to the rigorously maintained life-support infrastructure of Refuge. Ange’s people have built some ingenious solutions from scavenged materials, but there were enough of them—and enough survivors clinging to life on the surface—that they couldn’t be getting by solely on foraged scraps from the bones of the old city.
Could they? Or had Ravel really been slipping them resources behind Refuge’s back all this time?
He can say what he likes for now, but I’ll have other means of getting the truth soon. “So that’s where we’re headed now, right? To Ange?”
Ravel leads the way through the maze of tunnels without answering. I remember too late that this is my mission. I hadn’t planned to tag along behind him—or Ash, or Ange, or even Cadence—like usual. But I’m lost in these tunnels, and he’s the one with the ability to cross the barrier, and I don’t know how to take back control, or if I even should anymore.
“Is that what you want,” he says, finally. “To see Ange first?”
My steps stutter to a halt, and he looks back over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised as if he’s actually interested in what I want. As if it really is up to me to decide what we should do next. As if he’s waiting on me, instead of pushing for his own way.
It’s what I need from him—but it’s not how Ravel operates, which means this is a new trick of his, pretending to let me choose while actually being the one in the lead the whole time. It almost gets me.
But two can play at this game. “Where do you think we should go?”
“. . . Ange is fine.”
“This is painful. What are you even doing?” Cadence grumbles, missing the point of the game.
“Changed my mind,” I say, testing my theory and him at the same time. “I think we should swing by Freedom first, check on the situation.”
He perks up. “Yeah? I think that’s the right call, too.”
Score one for me?
Chapter 31: Ghosts
We don’t even make it near the edges of Freedom before the ghosts descend.
I’d hoped the attacks, or nightmares, or visions, or whatever would stop when I returned to the city. Wasn’t that what they wanted?
So much for that. One moment I’m stumbling along behind Ravel, and the next I’m caught in the void, the faces of the familiar dead and strangers alike making their deafening pleas and accusations before the darkness swallows them one after the next.
But this time, I don’t wait in agony to see who’s joined their ranks.
I made it within the boundary. If it’s a warning they want to issue, it’s misplaced; I’m here now. I’ll do what I can to stop the dying and save the living.
My resolve doesn’t silence the ghosts, though. It takes Victoire to do that.
I pull on the icy mask of h
er self-assured poise and dismiss them. They go, fading into the shadows of my mind. Their message remains, a hollow echo bouncing through the empty spaces: We’re coming—for you.
That’s new.
Victoire smiles a slow, hungry smile that says, not if I get you first.
I wake gasping, one hand to my face to hold the memory of a mask I no longer wear from slipping and exposing my vulnerability.
I haven’t been Victoire since before I fought the Mara in Freedom—and won. I haven’t spared her so much as a thought since I woke in Under after that battle, even when Ravel showed up, called me by her name. Because that’s all she was: a borrowed identity, a convenient shell to hide the parts of myself I couldn’t accept or acknowledge.
Wasn’t she?
The timing is too suspicious. Is Victoire connected to the loss of my ability to tap the dreamspace, somehow?
I reach a shaking hand out in breathless hope. For a moment, I see them: countless threads drifting and twining through the air. But these phantoms too fade before my eyes. I drive my fist into the ground in disappointment, and hiss at the pain. Ravel turns to look.
“You finished?” he says, tense. He shifts his gaze back toward the dim tunnel ahead. “We should hurry.”
I scramble to my feet. “How much further?”
IT FEELS LIKE WE WANDER in the tunnels and abandoned halls below Refuge for hours. Is it still night? Will we feel the hollow thumping of music as we near? Or will we emerge into an empty shell, the decadent club’s ornamentation furled away for all the long, quiet hours of day?
But when the sweet-sharp scent of Freedom floats through the air, neither music nor cavernous stillness greets us. The thick wall hangings of the club are still on display, though ragged and stained, the swirling lights picking out heavy damage to both floor and ceiling. There are no screams, no voices of any kind to mark the Mara’s attacks, though their work is evident.
Freedom is open—and empty.
Ravel looks stricken, eyes wide and jaw slack as he takes it in. I touch his arm, but he makes no attempt to hide his horror from me.
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