But I didn’t say any of that to Madison, who was missing her baby. Who was one crazy, creepy thing away from having a meltdown.
“There’s nothing you could’ve done,” I said. “I mean, I know that doesn’t help, but you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I dropped him,” she said again, and then she looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Did you ever visit Sky Island, Amy?” Lang cut into our conversation as if she hadn’t been paying attention, but I knew she’d been listening. She was giving Madison something else to think about. For the first time, I felt almost grateful to her.
“No,” I said.
“Amy learned magic in the caves,” Nox said. “After you—left, it got too dangerous to take people there. Maybe when all of this is over, Amy, you can see it.”
“What’s Sky Island?” Madison asked.
So, as we walked, Lang told us. About the place where she’d learned magic from Mombi, the old, abandoned tourist resort: a floating island, clear as glass, that drifted through rainbow-colored clouds that changed colors to the beat of your heart. The river made of lemonade, the clear blue sky, the way it was always sunny and never too hot. After all the time we’d spent underground, even just the thought of blue sky seemed so impossibly, unreachably beautiful, but the way Lang talked about the swirling, colorful mists that moved across the island was so vivid I could picture myself there. Next to me, Madison sighed softly.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing that,” she said.
“It’s hard here, I know,” Nox said. “But there are beautiful things, too. That’s what we’re fighting for.”
I could see Lang’s back stiffen and I knew Nox had said something wrong. “Is it?” she said, her voice low and hard. “Is that what the Order does, Nox? You’d think you would have at least changed the speech after all these years.”
“Langwidere . . . Lanadel,” he said, and then sighed and shrugged. “Believe what you want,” he said. “For now, we all want the same thing. To take care of Dorothy once and for all.”
“For now,” Lang agreed in that same rough tone.
All visions of Sky Island were pushed aside by the harsh intrusion of reality. Because I knew that Lang was only protecting us to protect herself. And as soon as she found a way to leave us behind, she would. I had to find a way to convince her to fight with us, or we were screwed.
Luckily, we didn’t have to walk much farther before the tunnel ended in a solid iron door. Lang placed one palm on the metal and murmured something that sounded similar to the chant her boatman had sung. At first, nothing happened. Then the door swung open with a creaking groan.
“Need to oil the hinges,” Lang remarked. “Haven’t had to use this place in a while.”
On the other side of the door, the tunnel broadened into a room off of which branched out several hallways. One led to a little kitchen, another to a bathroom where, I saw happily, there was a tub. Others led to small sleeping chambers. The main room had a rough wooden table and few comfortable-looking chairs scattered here and there. The whole place was lit by glowing veins of crystals in the walls. It was small and modest, but extremely cozy.
Lang showed us the pantry, where shelves practically groaned under the weight of jars and barrels of preserved food.
“You could last a long time in here,” Nox said.
“That’s the point,” she said coldly.
“Well, I’m passing out now,” Madison announced, and Lang softened.
“You can take any of those rooms,” she said. “Mine’s farther down the hallway. Help yourself to anything you want to eat or drink. I need to figure out what to do with you. It’s almost morning. It won’t take long for the Nome King to realize he doesn’t know where I am—and put two and two together.” She glanced involuntarily at the silver bracelet around her wrist. She saw me follow her look.
“It tells him where I am,” she said quietly. “But the wards around this place are too strong for it. He’ll figure out soon enough that I’ve gone somewhere he can’t find me.”
I still didn’t completely trust her, but I realized how much Lang was risking to help us even this much. She could just as easily have thrown us out of her palace—or turned us over to the Nome King. She didn’t care about helping us, she cared about hurting Dorothy. But for whatever reason, she was keeping us safe, no matter how she talked to us.
Somewhere, some part of her was on our side. Enough to keep us alive, anyway, even though it put her in terrible danger. For the first time in a while, I started to actually feel hopeful. Maybe there was a way out of Ev for us. Maybe we could defeat Dorothy after all. And when we did, I was getting out of this underground hell as quickly as I could.
Lang might be used to the unending, unrelenting darkness, but I ached for open air and sunlight, the smell of flowers and growing things. Anything but cold stone and blackness and dark, cold water full of unseen, terrifying creatures.
Lang brushed past us and was gone, her footsteps swallowed up by the stone as she walked down the hall.
“Okay then, good night, I guess,” Madison said.
Her voice sounded small and sad. But I knew there was nothing I could say or do to make it better. I’d check in with her in the morning, but it wasn’t like I could reunite her with her kid or send her back to Kansas with a snap of my fingers. She disappeared into one of the bedrooms, closing the door behind her with an unmistakably firm snick. She didn’t want to talk, and I wasn’t going to push her.
“I’m going to look for some tea or something,” I said. I was exhausted, but too jittery to sleep. I had suddenly realized that I was alone with Nox for the first time in a very long while and I was nervous. Despite all the drama with witches trying to separate us and pit us against each other, and then dying and not-dying, Nox and I were getting closer.
The truth was, I didn’t have much—okay, any—experience with guys, aside from fending off my mom’s creepy ex-boyfriends and their super-inappropriate interest in her teenage daughter. When it came to someone like Nox, I still had no idea what I was doing.
“Tea sounds good,” he said.
I poked through Lang’s pantry until I found something that looked vaguely tealike—a jar of small, dried gray-brown twigs that smelled like the green tea my mom drank by the bucketful when she got clean—and hoped I wasn’t accidentally brewing up a potion that would turn us into frogs, or beetles, or something even worse.
While I heated water on the stove, Nox threw together some odd-looking green batter and poured it into a pan.
“Who are you and what did you do with Nox?” I joked.
He smiled. “Mombi never stopped being a witch, even when I was a little kid. She kept odd hours and was sometimes gone all night—but whenever she came home, she would make these.” He plated two green pancakes and handed one to me.