Page 78 of Into Ember

“What is this? What do you want?”

A grunt. Not even a word. Just proof that he heard me.

“Please.” I hate how it comes out. “Please, whatever this is, whatever they told you — people will come looking for me. They’re probably already—”

“They won’t find you,” he says.

His voice is young. That’s the horrible part. He sounds younger than me, and tired, and absolutely certain, and then he stops talking again like I’m not worth the trouble.

We walk. I stumble. He hauls me up and the dark goes on.

“You don’t have to do this.” I try it soft. I try it the way you’d talk to a spooked animal, which is rich, because I’m the one shaking. “Whatever they’re paying you, whatever they said—”

“Nobody’s paying me.” Offended. Genuinely offended, like I’ve insulted his mother. “This isn’t — you don’t understand what you are.”

“Then tell me!” It cracks out of me louder than I mean it to, and the tunnel throws it back in pieces. “Nobody tells me anything! Everyone keeps deciding things about me and around me and for me, and I don’t — please. Please just let me go. Please. I want to go back. I want—”

I’m crying. I don’t know when that started. The dark is smearing and my breath is going ragged and his hand tightens like my falling apart is an inconvenience to the schedule, and he says, quietly, almost gently, in a voice people use in churches —

“It must be done.”

Cold walks straight up my spine.

“What must be done? What must—”

“This was promised.” His pace never changes. The words come out worn smooth, like something recited at bedtime by somebody older. “Before any of us. Before all of this. It has to be tonight, and it has to be you, and I am so sorry, my queen, but the future depends on it.”

The future depends on it.

I don’t know why that sentence lands so much harder than everything else, but every hair on my body stands up at once, and something else stands up with it.

Deep in my chest, underneath the fluttering panic, low and slow, my dragon moves. Not the warm settling from the gold room. The other direction. A rumble starts somewhere below my lungs and rolls out into the dark ahead of us, long and low and animal, and it fills the whole tunnel, and his hand spasms on mine and his step stutters for the first time since the wall.

My dragon isn’t happy. I know it as much as I know she loved the gold and fuck if I’m going to try and change her mind because I’m not happy either.

“Please,” he whispers, and it takes me a second to realize he’s not talking to me now, he’s talking to it, to her, “please, we’re almost there, it’s almost done—” and he’s afraid, he’s been afraid this whole time, not of getting caught.

Of me.

I don’t know what that means or why it matters.

She growls again and I won’t stop her.

His hand tightens and he pulls me faster.

The floor starts to climb. Air moves against my face, cool and green-smelling, night-smelling, and the dark thins from black to charcoal to a dim gray mouth ahead of us, and then we’re up, out, stumbling into open night, and I get one enormous breath of sky before I see where he’s brought me.

Flat rock, pale in the moonlight, stretching away in every direction like a parking lot for giants. And out of the middle of it, a mountain — not a mountain, a wall, a single vertical face of stone that goes straight up and up and doesn’t lean, doesn’t taper, just juts out of the flat ground like something that was pushed through from underneath, so tall the top of it eats the stars.

And arranged in a half circle before it, gray robes silver in the moonlight, hands folded, faces turned toward me like they’ve been holding this pose all night.

The Vestry.

All of them.

And behind them, between the half circle and the great stone face, stands a doorway. Freestanding stone, an arch that goes nowhere, holding nothing but darkness that doesn’t move — and the ground around it is dead. Perfectly dead, in a wide gray circle, like the earth there gave up in an orderly fashion.

Just like the one I fell through back in Chicago.