“You need not tell me that we don’t have to do this,” said X.
“I wasn’t gonna say that,” said Zoe. “We totally have to do this. She’s in a cave. I’m a caver. I think it might be why I’m here.” A thought came to her. “Are you afraid you’re going to be disappointed?”
“By my mother?” said X. “No. Just wait until you hear the story Maud told me. My mother is loyal, kind, and brave. It cannot be a coincidence that I was so drawn to you.”
Zoe waved away the compliment.
“Ripper is all that stuff, too,” she said. “So is Banger—it’s just that he’s also drunk a ton of beer.” She paused. “So if you’re not afraid of your mother being a disappointment to you, what are you afraid of?”
X considered the question. A cold mist rose off the water, like a cloud coming to swallow them.
“That I will be a disappointment to her,” he said.
“Shut up,” said Zoe.
“I’m entirely serious,” said X. “When I am with you, I feel like … I feel like I’m worth something. Other times, I wonder if I have ever done anything that was not violent or selfish. I dragged fifteen souls to the Lowlands—and enjoyed their suffering sometimes.”
“Stop,” said Zoe.
“I endangered Maud,” said X. “I endangered Regent and my friend Plum. I endangered you. I endangered a cat! I watched the Ukrainian get pulled down a burning river. If I did not love you so much, I would wonder what my life was for. When I stand in front of my mother, what can I tell her that I am not ashamed of?” He paused. “I apologize for the soliloquy. I do not expect you to answer.”
“Oh, I’m gonna answer,” said Zoe. “You can tell your mother that your heart survived this place. You made Jonah really happy when we lost our dad and nothing could make him happy. You kissed me like I always secretly hoped to be kissed.” She stopped for a second. “Your mother is going to be so proud of you she’s never going to stop crying. Trust me. I know what moms are like.”
X smiled in a way that told her he believed her.
“Thank you,” he said. “Your soliloquy was superior to mine.”
“It was really good, I’m not gonna lie,” she said.
“And I truly did kiss you like that, didn’t I?” he said.
“Don’t get cocky,” she said.
What neither of them had said was that even if Zoe got out of the Lowlands alive, there was no reason to think he’d be coming with her. Zoe remembered what it was like to sit in her weird room at Rufus’s with the torn posters and busted trophies. She remembered what it was like to miss X—and to worry about him—so much that it dug into her, hollowed her out. Standing close to him now, she tried to record every sensation. His skin smelled so much like his skin.
“I have to ask you,” said Zoe. “When you say you’re going to rescue your mother—do you mean just from the Cave of Swords? You don’t think you can get her out of the Lowlands completely, do you?”
“In truth?” said X. “What I want most dearly, most fiercely, is for you to leave this wretched place. Then my mother. And then? If I have not used up all my wishes? I will happily go myself.”
Zoe wanted X to have everything he hoped for, but feared he was asking too much.
She looked to see if he was ready to jump.
“Keep your knees bent when you fall,” she said.
They plummeted down, sliced the surface, and kept falling. The water was frigid. Zoe waited for the shock, but it never came. Her body was now immune to the cold. She was 30 feet under before she stopped shooting downward. Ordinarily, she would have fought her way back to the surface, but her lungs weren’t aching. She wasn’t desperate to breathe. She opened her eyes, and could see everything in high-definition. The statue’s shoulders and torso lay in front of her, like a sunken ship. Its legs disappeared into the dark.
X waited for her at the surface. Because of all the rivers falling into it, the water was wildly choppy—a cauldron. But the chaos didn’t frighten Zoe. It energized her. She gestured for X to follow her, and they swam the circumference of the canyon, threading in and out of the waterfalls and searching for the Cave of Swords. Tree hadn’t known exactly where it was or what it looked like—when he and Dervish took X’s mother, he had waited up on the canyon’s edge. The water was so cold that, without powers, he’d have drowned within minutes.
Zoe assumed the name Cave of Swords had something to do with stalactites or stalagmites. Her father’s voice, which always came to her when she went caving, bubbled up in her head now: “The name could also refer to ice formations, Zo. Don’t forget all the cool freakin’ stuff our friend ice can do!” Zoe hated that her father could still insinuate himself into her thoughts. She pictured herself pushing him out of a house, swearing at him, slamming the door on his fingers.
There were dozens of fissures in the rock along the waterline. Any of them could have led to caves. Zoe and X took turns crawling into the bigger ones and looking for something, anything, that looked like swords. Zoe didn’t know the extent of her powers, but found that when she needed a particular ability it would appear, as if she had willed it into being. She’d never felt anything as weird and cool and exhilarating as the sensation of light pouring out of her palm.
For an hour, they found nothing. Then, as Zoe ducked behind one of the last waterfalls, she found an oval opening in the rock. There was a handprint beneath it. It had to be a sign.
Zoe swam back to X. She thought about how the powers that Regent gave them protected them from everything around them. She wished there was something that could protect X from everything inside him, too: the fear, the pain.
X treaded water, waiting.
She showed him the palm print on the rock.
Judging from the size and the elegant way that the fingers tapered, it was a woman’s hand—and it was made of blood.
The tunnel was only four feet wide and had a low, jagged ceiling. X didn’t want to let Zoe go in first. They argued. X pointed out that if he was behind her and got stuck, she wouldn’t be able to get out. Zoe pointed out gently—okay, maybe not that gently—that she knew how to cave and he didn’t and that he should suck it.
As they talked, a wind rolled out of the opening in the rock like a cold breath, followed by the unmistakable sounds of something approaching. By the time Zoe figured out what it was, there was no time for words. She pulled X under the surface with her as a torrent of water and debris shot out of the wall.
X hadn’t realized it was coming.
“Who’s going first?” said Zoe, when they surfaced again.
“Perhaps you should,” said X.
It turned out that water blasted out of the tunnel every five minutes, flinging dirt and rock like buckshot. Zoe lit the passage with her hands and gazed inside. It’d be a straight belly-crawl for 500 feet. She’d never crawled more than 75. There was no way she and X were going to get in and out between the blasts of water, and they had no ropes, no drills, no bolts, no Survival Sh*t to anchor themselves. They’d have to press against the walls when the current came, and hope it didn’t blow them out of the tunnel.
She didn’t say any of this. It was obvious from X’s face that he knew.
Zoe slipped into the tunnel on her stomach. The flood was muddy and slick, which would actually be an advantage: it’d be easy to glide. The first time she pulled herself forward, she forgot to factor in her new strength, and shot 50 feet without stopping. Behind her, X, who’d been unconsciously picking up bits of her vocabulary, shouted in a mash-up dialect: “Seriously? Is that indeed how it’s gonna be?”