“Better than the breath of a burned-out null.”
I rolled my eyes, but my frustrated comeback evaporated as energy surged through my veins. I raised my hands to stare at them, half expecting to see them glowing, but they remained reddened and dull. I took a step on legs that had transformed from pudding back to muscle and experimentally pulled the elements to me. They came in a rush.
“This is amazing.” I jumped up and down. My mind, body, and magic felt as fresh as if I’d had a week off.
Without warning, Marcus sent me stumbling with a blast of heated air that pulled the moisture from my clothing and dried me at the same time. I closed my eyes against the stinging wind but didn’t protest. When he finished, I was chapped but dry and warm. My smile seemed to irritate him, if the tick of his jaw muscle was any indication. I grinned wider.
“Stop bouncing,” he ordered. “This isn’t a game. We still don’t know if you can fix a baetyl. We could be walking into a trap, so keep your wits sharp.”
“Oh, good advice,” I said, my voice heavy with cheery sarcasm. Giving him a flippant response was easier than letting his words sink in. The scary unknown of the broken baetyl loomed in my imagination, feeding my fears. Psyching myself out about it wouldn’t help. “You know me. Always running into danger without a thought. But since you’re telling me to be cautious . . .”
Marcus swiveled his head to glare at me, and the words died in my throat. I spun on a heel and marched up the incline to the tunnel entrance.
Peering into the dark opening, it was harder to maintain a sense of detachment from my fear. The wild storms had all but drained me. My arms were cut, my legs and feet bruised. I’d been burned and frozen. And that had only been what had escaped the baetyl. What horrors lurked inside?
*
Marcus insisted on going first and Celeste fell in at his heels. Oliver and I trailed after them, and I wondered if Marcus could feel the heat of my glare between his shoulder blades. Our moody leader also insisted I conserve my strength for whatever was ahead, so all five glowballs illuminating the tunnel were his. The walls were rough and asymmetrical, run through with veins of quartz and shale. Only the floor was smooth, polished by thousands of stone footsteps. I expected a challenge around every bend—a physical obstacle or more storms—but we strolled into the mountain without issue.
The cool air grew more humid the deeper we went, until moisture clung to the rock walls and dripped on our heads from the ceiling.
“It’s too cold,” Oliver said, his chiming voice hushed. I shivered at the creepy shush-shush echoes of his words.
“Is it supposed to be this wet?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Marcus’s back stiffened and he halted at a turn in the tunnel. Celeste crowded up next to him and he stepped aside to make room. My feet ground to a halt beside her. We’d found the baetyl.
Marcus’s glowballs illuminated a field of citrine crystals barely as tall as my hand and packed more densely than blades of grass across the sloped floor. Darkness swallowed the rest of the cavern to our left and right, but bulky shapes loomed beyond the light. Squinting, I could make out flat planes and sharp angles, and when my brain put the pieces together, I gasped in wonder.
The baetyl was filled with crystals.
Six-sided prisms longer and thicker than a freight car crisscrossed the baetyl at the edge of the light, overlapping compact crystals no larger than Celeste. Even smaller crystals filled the gaps, and everywhere I looked glistened as endless facets caught and reflected the glowballs’ fiery light.
“It’s so dark. It’s worse than I feared,” Celeste said.
I reached for fire to form a glowball, and it flickered and wobbled before steadying into a sphere of light. Even then, the element stretched, skewing the light.
The warp of the baetyl was in full effect.
“Careful,” Marcus said when I pushed the glowball into the cavern.
The light twisted, the element growing harder to control across the distance. Shadows guttered along the geometric lines of the baetyl, giving shape to crystal-coated alcoves and ledges of every color and type of quartz. The golden glow of the shifting light made the tigereye and agate crystals appear to ripple like liquid, and the jewel-bright spears of amethyst, citrine, prasiolite, and rose quartz refracted their colors across smoky quartz and shimmering clear crystals. The alien structure looked like the inside of a mountain-size geode, and the beauty of it stole my breath.
Even the air felt different, smooth and ancient. The humidity of the tunnel gave way to a cooler texture with a scent as unique as the baetyl. Part undisturbed earth, part weighted air, and part mineral, the odor pooled in the back of my throat, and I took deep breaths to savor the aroma. It was the smell of pure quartz—and up until that moment, I hadn’t even known quartz had a smell, let alone that I had been craving it.
In the clutter of quartz and dense shadows beyond my glowball, I couldn’t determine the boundaries of the baetyl, but Celeste’s comparison of its size to Focal Park seemed about right.
The glowball twisted out of my grasp and imploded in a burst of sparks. Darkness coated the baetyl once more, hiding all but the tiny bubble of space Marcus’s lights illuminated. I smoothed my hands down my thighs.
“Now what?” Marcus asked.
I don’t know, sprang to my lips, but Marcus already knew I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of saying it out loud.
“We keep going,” I said.