“No time. Get the fuck back.”
The Shadow set to work on the mesh, a blowtorch eating through where the steel had been soldered into place. And all the while, the now not-so-distant explosions were going off, one by one, a drumbeat of devastation.
Ahmare yanked against the bars even though that did nothing. “Why did you come?”
“I don’t know.”
“You killed the guards.”
“I did. But I couldn’t make myself go into that compound. My body refused—besides, that was your business in there, not mine.”
“Duran is still—”
“I can’t think about that right now.”
In the light from the sparks that kicked up where the torch was eating its way through steel, the Shadow’s concentration was complete, her eyes locked on the mesh, the planes and curves of her face strobed, her hundreds of braids falling forward. She was going fast as she could.
“You’re going to have to calm yourself,” the female said. “I’m only going to peel back a section, we don’t have time to do anything else. Close your eyes and get calm, I’ll let you know when. You’ve got one shot.”
Ahmare shut her lids tight and tried to get control of the adrenaline rushing through her veins. All she could hear was the rumbling. All she could feel was the hot breath on her back, the gust getting stronger. And now the ceiling was splintering and hitting her head and shoulders.
It reminded her of Duran crashing out of the ductwork to save her— Calm. She needed to be calm. Calm. Calm . . .
Oreo cookies did the trick.
It should have been the Scribe Virgin, but she tried that and got nowhere. It should have been Duran’s face, but that only made her want to weep. It was most certainly not the fact that he’d told her he loved her— Had he done that? Had he really said the words— Oreo cookies. The original ones. The old-fashioned original kind, fresh out of the blue cellophane wrapper, unrefrigerated, though some people liked them from the icebox, Oreo cookies. She pictured one in her hand and watched as her fingertips gripped and twisted, pulling off the top, leaving her with one side that had all the frosting and one side that had just the shadow of the vanilla center.
You always ate the frosting first.
Then the two hard cracker-cookies, the one that was fresh and dry and the other that you’d had to scrape with your front teeth.
The taste was youth. And summer. And treats.
It was the contrast of the dark chocolate and the fluffy white inside— “Now!” Nexi yelled.
Just as the corridor was crushed by thousands of pounds of dirt and rock, the mountain reclaiming the hollow spaces that had been carved out from beneath its ascent, Ahmare dematerialized her physical form and traveled in a scatter of molecules, ushered by the explosive wind, out into the night.
31
AHMARE RE-FORMED A QUARTER of a mile away from the tunnel’s cabin, and from that distance, she watched the mountain sink into itself, a great cough of dust and debris expelled over the tree line as the components of dirt, rock, and tree found a lower level. The sound was thunderous, and then there was a silence so consuming that a mosquito dive-bombing her ear was loud as a dirt bike.
She thought of the moths, now gone.
Of the skeletons, now buried.
Of Duran . . . now dead.
As the pain hit, there was a part of her that railed against having met him at all, under the guise of Haven’t I been through enough—as if his fate had been predetermined and she could have avoided this agony now if only destiny had recognized that she’d already lost her parents, and maybe still her brother, and accordingly provided her with an alternative path to the pearl because she’d given at the office. So to speak.
But that didn’t last.
Especially as she heard his voice in her head: I don’t want it to be like I never existed.
The fact that she could be so devastated at the death of someone she hadn’t even known two nights ago was a testament to the male.
“We have to get your injury fixed before we go to Chalen’s.”
Numbly, Ahmare looked over at Nexi, who’d rematerialized right next to her. “It’s my shoulder.”
There was a lame cast to her voice, and she left that right where it lay, lacking the strength to inject some show of resilience or strength. She was utterly depleted.
“Can you dematerialize back to my cabin? Do you remember where it is?” the Shadow asked.
Abruptly, Ahmare thought of the beginning of their trek through the woods, when Duran had set those two broken branches on that stump. He’d done that for her, she realized. So that she’d have a marker in case she was lost on the way back.
“He never intended to come out of there.” She stared back at the collapsed mountain. “Did he.”
“It’s always where he was going to end.” Then the Shadow added with bitterness, “Even when he was out, he never left it, and it was the only thing that ever mattered to him.”
“He went back for his mahmen’s remains. He found them, he said.”