Without letting go of her, Walker spun her around and crushed his mouth against hers. One of his hands cupped the back of her neck, pulling her tight into his kiss. The other, splayed against the skin of her back, held her against him tightly enough that she could feel the button of his jeans pressing into the bared skin of her stomach.
He was all she could feel, all she could smell, all she could taste. The places where their skin touched burned and Keira melted into them, wanting more. Walker was everywhere and everything and she was with him, completely. The ocean slipped away like an outgoing tide, leaving only Darkside in its wake.
Keira whimpered with desire and relief. Walker broke the kiss, slid his hands up to cup her face, and leaned his forehead against hers.
“I felt you slip. Is it gone?” he asked. “What did you see?”
“It’s gone.” She closed her eyes, breathing in the mineral, almost metallic smell of the rock around them. “And yes, the cave mouths line up. I think it must be the place.”
Something thundered through the air, beating against Keira’s eardrums like a shock wave—noiseless but unbearable, a sound she felt rather than heard. She clapped her hands over her ears, trying to block out the pulsing that rolled across the Darkside landscape.
“What is that?” she asked, wincing as the aural assault battered her hearing again and again.
Walker’s lips pressed into a grim line. “It’s the alarm,” he said. “They only trigger it during large-scale emergencies. Everyone’s supposed to stay where they are until they can be accounted for. Only the Reformers’ guards can travel.”
Keira struggled to think beneath the soundless wailing of the alarm.
She had crossed over. Multiple times. Enough to cause a rip that would most certainly be noticed.
“The alarm is for us, isn’t it?” she asked.
“I think so, yes. I think they’ve realized where we are.”
“Then why not just come for us without setting off an alarm?” Keira lifted her hand from her ear to wave toward the reverberating sound. It was a mistake to leave her ear unprotected—her brain itself seemed to pulse with the alarm.
Walker grimaced. “I don’t know. But I think we’d better start climbing, and fast. It won’t take the guards long to get here.” He looked at her, a question glowing in his eyes. “Unless you want to double back? We can get to the beach near where we parked the car if we go that way—”
She interrupted him.
“No! What are you talking about? If we leave now, we can never come back—you know that. They’ll search for us and what about my father? If they find him . . . ” Keira shook her head, unable to finish the sentence.
The soundless waves came to a sudden stop. Keira’s eardrums thrummed in relief. With her head feeling clearer, she looked Walker in the eyes. “It’s too late for me to turn back now.”
He stared at her for a long moment before nodding. “Then it’s a good thing your ankle’s healed.”
The two of them turned in unison, faced the jagged rocks in front of them, and began to climb.
Chapter Forty-Eight
THE SLOPE STEEPENED ABRUPTLY, and Keira grunted as her shoes scrabbled for purchase against the slippery rock. The irregular face of the mountain at least offered hand-and footholds, though she felt more like she was crawling up the incline, rather than climbing it.
She could hear Walker behind her, his breathing heavy with exertion. By the time the cave seemed within reach, Keira’s arms shook with the effort of the climb. She paused, clinging to the rocks. Her gaze jumped from handhold to foot-ledge, measuring gaps and drops and spans of smooth, flat rock. She needed a path. A connect-the-dots way to get to the black mouth of the cave.
Come on—just find a pattern—like notes on a staff.
She squinted at the rocks, trying to see the right outcroppings to grab while keeping the ocean—the whole crushing, rolling enormity of the ocean—out of view.
And then it appeared, the same way she could hear music when she rolled her gaze over the notes.
Walker pulled up short behind her, panting hard. “You need to head to the le—”
“I see it,” she said, reaching for the first handhold in the chain, holding her breath the same way she did when she reached for the first note in a piece of music.
“Okay. I’ll add free-climbing to your list of skills, then.”
They climbed the rest of the way in silence. Keira moved from rock to rock, pretending the whole way that she was simply playing a new concerto, or an unfamiliar étude. There were the expected hesitations and near misses, the fear of the unknown combined with the need to keep going at the expected pace. As long as she pretended her fingers were striking keys instead of curling around bits of rock and kept up the illusion that her feet were pressing pedals instead of feeling for toeholds, she would be okay.
She could keep her fear from swallowing her.
At least, until the floor of the cave appeared in front of her, interrupting her fantasy. Then, she hesitated.