I ran.
The wailing grew all around, tangible, and Janan whispered right by my ear, “You wanted somewhere to go. Now you have everywhere.”
I pushed my legs harder, away from his voice, but the fingernails scraping my skin never ceased. If I stopped, he’d hurt me worse. He didn’t have to say it.
When I slowed enough to wrestle out my SED, hoping for some kind of illumination, the onyx air only swallowed the light. If anything, the darkness closed in further, though I couldn’t fathom how complete blackness could become even more perfect.
Hours passed. Or longer. It was impossible to measure time, if time even mattered in here, but my hips and legs ached and I had the vague sensation that I should be hungry or thirsty.
And then I was, because I knew I should be. I slowed to grip my stomach. I was starving, though Meuric had said before that I wouldn’t need to eat or drink in here.
“I am hungry, too,” Janan murmured, “and I am sure you are delicious.”
My hiccups fell flat on the liquid air. I wished Sam were here. I wished we didn’t know about Janan. I wished we were sitting at the piano playing a duet, our legs pressed together because neither of us were thinking about music, not really. I wished it all so hard that for a moment I thought I was there, but then a scream cut through the blackness, and I remembered the temple and running and Janan.
“No tears.” Not Janan. Not a real voice, either, but a thought that wasn’t mine. “The Devourer is incorporeal. He has never been able to touch the other one.”
My feet caught on themselves and I stumbled, dropped, and hit the floor. Stabbing pains raced up my palms and knees as I searched the darkness for the non-voice. If it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Janan, perhaps it was one of the weepers.
I struggled to catch my breath, then fumbled through my coat for the bottle of water and drank half of it. The sensation of claws on skin never faded, but the non-voice was right. The feeling was just in my mind, and stopped when I rubbed my palms over my face and neck and hands.
Janan’s words, and the weeper’s—they meant something, but my head was too fuzzy to let me think clearly. The darkness remained overpowering.
Maybe I was blind. No matter how I forced my eyes open wider, I never caught light. I tried my SED again. A white glow pierced the dark, but illuminated only blackness when I held the screen to the floor. And blackness all around.
Trembling, I tried to send a message to Sam, but the SED beeped in error. I put it away and pushed myself to my feet. I couldn’t let the screaming get to me, or the crying, or the fingernails raking across my skin. They weren’t real.
They weren’t.
Determined not to let Janan stop me, I stepped forward, and the whole world changed.
16
TRUTH
BRIGHT WHITE SURROUNDED ME.
I crumpled to the floor, clutching my face and stinging eyes as pressure drained and the weeping no longer followed. Now just the hiss and scrape of cloth, ragged breathing that wasn’t mine, and a reek like copper and ammonia so strong it made my head spin.
I wasn’t alone.
“What are you doing here?”
The voice was broken, garbled and raspy at the same time, and came from across what appeared to be the bottom of a large hole, though a stairway spiraled up.
I wiped tears from my eyes and focused on the dark lump of bones and rags. Blood stained his face and hands, and a rotted wound hunched like a spider where I’d stabbed his eye out. But the other seemed to work, and it watched me.
“Meuric.”
“Nosoul.”
He couldn’t be alive. It wasn’t possible. I’d shoved him under the upside-down pit. The fall must have shattered every bone in his body. It had been months. And still.
I felt only a little better knowing I hadn’t actually killed him. And then I felt much worse, imagining the pain he must have been in all this time, trapped at the bottom of a pit with stairs offering a way out—except his bones were splintered and he couldn’t move from this spot.
Blood and other fluids seeped around his filthy clothes, but the rest of the floor was clean. No, he definitely hadn’t moved.
“You tried to kill me,” he gasped.
“After you tried to trap me in here so you could tell everyone I was dead.”
Dried blood cracked and flaked when he smiled. Black rot filled the creases between his teeth. “And now I’m trapped. Does that make you feel better?”
“No.” His stench made my head spin. I squatted on the floor and leaned against the wall for balance. It didn’t help the dizziness, but my back and hips creaked with relief.
The pit was ten paces across. A fair size. When I looked up, the opening was invisible with the everywhere-light. It must have been deep enough to shatter all his bones, and shallow enough so he wouldn’t die. How cruel of Janan to arrange that.
“Why aren’t you dead?”