Sam hesitated. “Yes. I remember the wall.”
“Cris told me about another white wall in a jungle.” I’d repeated this story to Sam already, and Stef knew it, but Whit hadn’t heard it. “He said he was collecting plants and came across crumbling white stone. When he climbed on top of a tall piece, he realized the stone had once been a huge wall, which circled a collapsed tower. There was enough rubble around the tower to indicate it had once been as tall as the temple in the center of Heart.”
“But there were no other buildings,” Stef added. “It was like Heart, but without our homes and the Councilhouse, if you looked at it from above, it would look like a circle with a dot in the middle.”
“Right. And I’m guessing they were all prisons, like the temple inside Heart originally was for Janan. Cris told us that all the warriors with Janan were imprisoned separately so they’d never join forces again. That also begins to explain why Heart is built over a caldera that size, even though it’s entirely impractical.”
“Why?” Whit asked.
“Because it was a prison. It was meant to deter people from coming to rescue him. The other prisons we know of are in the frozen north, and in the jungle where not even the water is safe to drink. Who knows where the others are?” None of my friends would be able to remember the locations, even if they’d seen them. Not without a lot of prodding and leading questions, and I could only offer leading questions if I had an idea of where to start. Like Sam’s death. Or symbols Cris might have seen. “Maybe under the ocean, or in deserts, or high on a mountain where the air’s so thin you can’t breathe. They could be anywhere.”
“To be fair to us, though, Heart didn’t look dangerous at first.” Stef frowned. “Except for the geysers and mud pools and fumaroles . . .”
I nodded. “You were on a quest to find your leader, anyway. You believed he’d been wrongly imprisoned, because that’s what you were told.”
“Who told us?” Whit asked.
“I’m not sure. Cris didn’t mention.” I frowned and tried to recall everything he’d said, but those hours in the temple were a blur. I’d been so afraid and depressed.
“And how’d we get the key?” Stef asked. “Someone must have taken it, because otherwise, Janan never could have gotten out to speak to us, and we never could have gotten in.”
I doodled spirals in the margins of my notebook. “If phoenixes built the prisons, it seems likely they would have had the key, as well. Someone must have stolen it from them.”
“That seems like a reasonable conclusion,” Whit said, but I wondered how much of the conversation he was actually retaining. “Perhaps your books will give us the answers.”
“That’s my hope.” I turned the page. The spiral of writing was easy to see now, and I’d gotten better at spotting the symbols I knew, without having to search for them. But it wasn’t enough. Time was running out, and what if I deciphered the text only to realize it was a list of complicated instructions that I couldn’t possibly complete before Soul Night?
What if the books only told me I was too late to stop Janan?
I couldn’t think like that.
“Well, let’s keep working for now.” Sam turned my notebook toward me again. “Just tell us what you need us to do, and hopefully the sylph will show up soon. It took them about a week when we were here before.”
“Thanks.” But we’d been here a week and a half now. Either they’d come, or I’d misinterpreted their actions before, and they wanted nothing to do with us.
Shrill beeping jerked me from my slumber.
In his sleeping bag next to me, Sam squinted around the front room, looking just as confused as I felt. “What’s that?” Whit echoed the question from his place on the sofa.
It was Stef’s turn on the bed. We all looked up at her as SED light illuminated her face, making her skin eerily white. “We have to go.” Her voice was rough with sleep, but something in her expression snapped. “We have to go. Now.”
Everyone scrambled up, elbows and knees thudding on the floor, and within five minutes, we’d swept our belongings into backpacks and rolled up our sleeping bags. When everything was ready, we turned off the lights and headed outside, leaving the soft thrum of the machine in the lab.
The night was crisp but motionless as we headed east down an overgrown path, continuing away from Heart. Darkness made the unfamiliar ground difficult to navigate, but moonlight shone down, reflecting off ice and snow. Our breaths misted, reverse sylph.
When the lab was out of sight, I adjusted my winter clothes, which I’d thrown on too hastily, and took in the midnight surroundings. “What was that alarm, Stef?” My voice sounded so loud in the darkness.
“A warning that someone had overwritten my commands for the drones. Before, I could keep them away from the lab, searching other areas of Range. But someone else is in control now.”