“This way.” She started forward. Behind her, Bastian quickly lit his own torch and followed.
It didn’t take them long to come across the first piles of bones, old and dry and wrapped in a ratty cloak of indeterminate color. Bastian frowned, toeing aside what looked like a femur. “Foul,” he murmured. “I’ve already had quite enough of corpses, and we haven’t even found the stash yet.”
“Imagine how I feel,” Lore replied.
They lapsed into silence. When she glanced over her shoulder, Bastian’s brows were knit, the flames of his torch casting his face in wavering shadow. “You haven’t told Gabe, have you? About growing up down here?”
“Does it matter?” The question came out sharper than she intended.
“No. It’s your business, you tell whoever you want.” He shrugged, but it didn’t quite mask the pointed look in his eye, a spade delving into dirt for answers buried. “It’s just interesting, is all. Since you two are so clearly pining after each other.”
“I am not pining after Gabriel Remaut.”
“Well, he’s certainly pining after you.”
“No.” Her laugh was short and harsh. “He isn’t.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“Fooling you is not a difficult task.”
Now it was his turn to bark a harsh laugh. “Not for you, maybe.” A pause. Then, softer, “Why’d you tell me, then?”
“Because you threatened to send me to the Burnt Isles if I didn’t.” The path ahead forked, split into uneven halls. Lore stopped, breathed. Hung left.
“That isn’t all of it,” Bastian said behind her. There was a quality to his voice she hadn’t heard before, though. Doubt. “You trust me, Lore. Despite everything, despite yourself, you trust me.”
“You haven’t given me much choice.” But it didn’t come out like an accusation.
“I didn’t feel like I had much choice, either.” The doubt in Bastian’s tone grew a harder edge. “I keep trying to figure out why I wanted to know about your childhood, about who you were. Why I needed to know. To protect myself from August, sure, but it was more than that. It was like… like something pushed me. Like it had happened before, it would happen again, and I was part of it whether I wanted to be or not.”
They weren’t the same words Gabe had used by the well, but they were an echo all the same. The sense of things falling into place around them, the sense of being moved into position by forces so much bigger than themselves, bigger even than kings and wars. She and Bastian and Gabe, comets that couldn’t help colliding.
Lore turned around. Bastian’s eyes glittered, angry and lost.
“I know you.” Bastian said it like a sentencing. “And you know me. Why is that, Lore? Why does it seem like I’ve always known you?”
It could’ve sounded romantic, in any other context. But here, it just sounded like pain and confusion, one more unquantifiable thing. Lore stared at him and said nothing.
“Tell me I’m not alone in that.” The Sun Prince wasn’t one to beg, she knew; Lore thought this was probably the closest he’d ever gotten. It splintered in her, a wound that had been healed and reopened time and time again. “Lore, tell me I’m not alone here.”
And wasn’t that all she’d ever wanted? Not to be alone?
She stared at him across the dark and the torchlight, the rocks and bones. “You aren’t.” It came out hoarse; she swallowed. “You aren’t alone, Bastian. I feel it, too.”
Then she turned and started forward again. Behind her, Bastian pulled in a ragged sigh, and followed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Nothing is new.
—The Book of Mortal Law, Tract 135
Lore could tell the first chamber they came to wasn’t the one they were searching for. The map in her head told her to walk straight past it, to keep winding farther into the dark.
But Bastian paused, raising his flickering torch to the splintered wooden door. “Should we check this one out?”
“It isn’t the right one,” Lore said, pushing ahead. It was cold this deep beneath the earth, and numbness tingled in her fingertips. “And we need to keep moving if we want to be back by sunrise.”
“How can you tell?” Bastian gave the door one more glance before ambling after her. “I don’t think we’ll be able to see when the sun rises down here. Bleeding God, I don’t think we’d be able to tell if the whole world ended.”
Hyperbole, but Lore’s shoulders still inched toward her ears. “I can tell.” Her intuition was a spark in her chest, a torch that didn’t lead her wrong. Part of her was at home in the catacombs in a way she never was anywhere else.
All she’d ever wanted was to find somewhere she fit that wasn’t in the dark. But shadows and death were the only things that held space for her.
“You never did tell me exactly how this navigation thing works.” Bastian stepped up so they were level, adjusted his longer stride to keep it that way. “I assume it has something to do with being born here?”
Lore shrugged, studying the dark before her rather than the Sun Prince beside. “I assume so.”
“Then you’re the only one who knows the catacombs like this, because you were the only one born in the catacombs.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
His brow cocked.
Lore sighed, rubbed at her eyes. It was a good thing Bastian was the one to come down here with her; she didn’t have the energy to keep secrets. “There were other babies born to the Night Sisters,” she said. “More than one unmarried pregnant person thought hiding in the catacombs was preferable to dealing with their families on the surface.”
“Doesn’t say much for their families.”
“Or society in general. It takes more than one person to make a baby, but the onus always falls on the one who bodily carries the proof.”
“True.” Bastian dipped his chin in acquiescence. “But I assume children born here aren’t all able to use Mortem?”
“Nope.” Lore gave a halfhearted attempt at a laugh. “I just got lucky, I guess.”
He snorted, then inclined his head to her moon-marked hand, swinging by her side as the other held her torch. “Did all children born to Night Sisters get marked?”
Her hand curled closed. “No. Only those chosen to go into the tomb on the eclipse and see if Nyxara’s body has stirred.”
His eyes darkened at the word eclipse, knitting it together with the planned ball, synchronicities that itched.
A few steps of silence. Then Bastian swallowed. “You shouldn’t go to the ball on the eclipse, Lore.”
“I have to. If I don’t, it will be obvious that we—”
“No, you fucking don’t.” The words shredded in his teeth, vehement and bladed. “You don’t have to jump when August or Anton says jump. Remaut and I can come up with cover if we have to. Pretend you’re sick, lock yourself in your room, hells, run through the storm drain and go find a tavern to get raging drunk in, but I don’t think you should come.”
She stopped. “Do you know something?”