*
Vivia led the way, though Stix held the lantern behind. Vivia’s shadows drifted long across the limestone tunnel, which ran in a single direction: down.
Aside from her first questions, Stix—ever the perfect first mate—asked no more, and Vivia offered no explanations.
Each step they moved deeper, the more a familiar green glow took hold. Until Vivia and Stix no longer needed their lantern. Foxfire illuminated everything, trailing ever onward, a constellation to track across the sky. Then the tunnel ended and a stone door waited, cracked ajar.
Hewn from the glowing limestone, six faces peered out from the door’s center. One atop the next, smoothed away, yet unmistakable all the same. Noden’s Hagfishes.
Vivia paused here, swallowing and breathing and swallowing again, for a black whirlpool had opened in her belly.
All she had to do was push through. Then she could have her answers. Then she could have what she’d been hunting for all along.
A steeling breath. Vivia pushed through. The stone gritted against its frame, the faces darkened as the green glow fell away.
Then she was there. The under-city. It spanned in the cavern before her, narrow roads radiating outward, with buildings—three stories tall—rising up on both sides. Some jutted out of cavern walls, others rooted up straight from the limestone floor. Windows and doorways gaped empty, save for the cobwebs strung inside.
All of it was lit by foxfire. The fungus climbed cavern walls and the jagged ceiling, wound up columns, and fanned over doorways. Some even shimmered from within the empty homes.
Empty. Habitable. Vivia could fit thousands—tens of thousands—of Nubrevnans in here. The spinning in her belly resumed. Twice as fast. A happy pain that swelled in her lungs and pressed against her breastbone.
Stix clapped a gentle hand atop her shoulder. “What is this place, sir? It’s as big as Hawk’s Way.”
“It’s bigger.” Vivia gripped Stix’s hand, towing her forward. “Come on.” She had to keep moving. She had to get answers.
They explored further, passing signs of life. Footprints through dusty webs or smears in the foxfire, as if people had dragged clumsy hands through. The houses were all the same, one after the other. Tenements built identically to the oldest structures aboveground. So much space—finally, finally.
Yet just as Vivia and Stix crept through an intersection, a clank! sounded through the city. Like iron on stone. Like an old blade fallen to a distant floor.
Vivia tensed. Stix froze. There they waited, breaths held, while green light and cobwebs whispered around them.
Then came a voice. Yelling and near—much too near. Vivia and Stix dove for the nearest house. Just in time, for the shouting speaker was soon dragged past.
Vivia peeked around the ancient doorway she and Stix hovered behind. A boy, short-haired and lanky, fought against the two people who hauled him down the road. He was bound at the wrists, yet he kicked. He pulled. He spat. And over and over he hollered, “It doesn’t have to be like this! It doesn’t have to be like this!”
Vivia met Stix’s eyes in the dark. “Is that the boy?” she mouthed.
Stix nodded.
One of the men, a bearded beast of a Nubrevnan, finally lost his patience with the boy. He gripped him by the collar and punched him hard across the nose.
The boy coughed—and coughed some more, but it quickly melted into a frenzied laugh. “You’ll … regret this,” he said between gasping chuckles.
“More like you’ll regret it,” the beast snarled. “Comin’ back here was the stupidest thing you could’ve done, Cam. He’ll make you pay, you know.”
“That’ll be fun to watch,” said a second voice. Female and gruff. “This time I doubt he’ll let you leave.”
“Who are you working for?” the boy demanded, all laughter gone. “Who hired you to kill the pr—”
Crack! The boy’s voice broke off. A thump sounded, as if his knees had given way.
“Be a good girl, Cam,” the enormous man said, “and shut your blighted mouth.”
No response, and when Vivia peered out once more, the huge man was hefting the limp girl onto his shoulder.
Vivia waited until they were out of sight before turning to Stix, who murmured, “Did you notice something about their hands?” At Vivia’s pinched brow, Stix wiggled her left hand. “No pinkies.”
Vivia’s forehead relaxed. “Just like the corpses the Fury killed. I guess the Nines are back.”
“Or,” Stix said pointedly, “they never left. They might’ve been hiding here all this time…” She trailed off, eyes widening. More voices approached. More light too, orange in the way that only lanterns’ fire could produce.
People. Lots of them. In Vivia’s city, and presumably working with the Fury.
So Vivia made a decision. She scooted close to Stix. Close enough that no one else could possibly hear as she said, “Go back to Pin’s Keep. We need soldiers.”
“What will you do?”