Exquisite Ruin (The Labyrinth #1)

Chapter 15

I WRENCH away from the Other-Me’s alarming grip, feeling something tear in my shoulder. Deos struggles to rise on one leg, but he slips on the slick ground and falls with another sharp crack. Other-Me has no such difficulty despite her missing pieces, lunging forward to swing at me. I stumble back once more, my breath, or perhaps a scream, caught in my throat.

Her face … the split-wide mouth baring too many teeth… I never thought I could look so horrifying.

My fear chokes me before I scrabble to collect myself. I’ve known I was powerful from the beginning, even when I remembered nothing else. And if I can’t recall at least that much now, I’m going to die. She’s a nightmare, yes—but one made of ice. I’m a witch who can summon fire.

And I have plenty of pain for the offering. So I raise my hands, and I bring fire. The answering torrent of flame makes me gasp in reflex, and in no little relief. The blast takes Other-Me head on.

Her gaping grin melts away, followed by her head and shoulders, then the rest of her, puddling where the broken stumps of her legs once stood. My fire is so hot, it’s as if she were facing a forge.

And yet, the heat I’ve summoned isn’t so contained as that. I wish I could call it back as it spreads in a billowing cloud, but it’s too late. The walls begin to run like spring melt from a cliff face. The ice thins before my eyes, water pooling across the floor of the corridor.

I hear the crackling pops soon after, and I trace the fractures branching out through the walls where the other figures are encased. The dozens of Other-Mes, each one as horrifying as the last, just waiting to be free.

My body jerks with the urge to run, but Deos is still struggling to stand, slipping in the layer of water atop the already-slick ground. Even if he was a distraction—even the voice of my adversary—I can’t just leave him. I won’t.

I can do many things that would make this easier. For better or worse, I’ve never chosen easy.

I dive down to help haul the statue upright. His marble is hot from the fire, but I seize his arm anyway. He’s grown no lighter, and I transmute the pain from my bindings into force to assist me. He moves brokenly as I try to drag him into a hobbling run. Too slowly, as the walls continue to crack behind me. Shaping his stone would cost me too much—I’m not Daesra with an endless wellspring of pain—but, gaining inspiration from the Other-Mes, I hold tighter to the statue, burning my hand enough to move a layer of water into a peg shape beneath his broken leg. Removing heat is trickier than generating it from aether, but I know how, using air to freeze the peg. I have to throw the resulting warm gust ahead of me down the dripping corridor, which makes me cringe. I use more water—soon ice—to solidly attach the frozen peg to Deos’s leg.

I don’t know how long it will hold, but it’s enough to get him moving in a loping gait, faster than before.

The spreading fractures have made spiderwebs within the ice walls, growing finer as we race past them. The light tinkling sound they make dances ever more delicately in the air—the quiet warning glass gives before it breaks. And then heavy silence falls in the corridor behind us.

I wish I could outrun what’s coming.

Like a furious storm, the thunderous crash of raining ice roars at my back with a rush of cold wind. I’d prefer it were only the walls coming down, like in the maze aboveground, when massive chunks of stone tore through the towering trees. That was bad, but this is worse. It’s not even that the ceiling is likely falling as well. It’s that the ensuing scraping and thudding and violent splashing means more than simple destruction.

They’re coming.

I don’t turn to look. I only keep running with Deos. When he surges to the left as I’m going right at a forking staircase—one of the hard choices—I change course blindly, both of us juddering and slipping down the icy steps.

Perhaps absurdly, I trust him to guide me now.

Another crash of ice against ice resounds—too close and gaining on us. It’s not a crumbling of walls but a cracking tumult on the stairs behind us.

Unfortunately, the Other-Mes don’t need to run faster than us on the slick steps; they only need to fall faster. A rolling body swipes my legs out from under me, its icy limbs as hard as stone clubs. I would have followed after, tumbling down the stairs, if Deos’s rigid arm hadn’t caught me brutally around the neck. The force of it gags me and slams my backside into the edge of one of the steps, but at least I don’t fall farther. The other figure shatters on the lower stairs.

“Thank you,” I gasp, coughing and rubbing my throat. I’m not sure I could have shielded myself in time, and I’d much rather my arse take the beating than my head.

Deos—or Daesra—doesn’t have time to signal any sort of response before there’s more clamor up the stairs behind us.

I turn, this time finding at least a half dozen ice figures, those Other-Mes, thrashing and clattering down after us in an avalanche of screaming grins and severed limbs.

I don’t think; I move, pivoting to slam my knee into the sharp edge of the step as hard as I can. The pain in my throat and backside is a useless distraction from what I otherwise might have gathered from my bindings, but this pain is intentional and oh so fresh. When I let out a choked cry of agony—dear fucking gods I forgot how much hitting my kneecap can hurt—I also release a burst of force like a thunderclap. No heat this time; I learned my lesson there. The swirling tumult of air careens up the stairs and slams into the Other-Mes, blasting them backward with such pressure that they explode against the steps in a sparkling shower of body parts and ice dust.

I think some of those bits and pieces are merely tumbling back down the steps until I notice the widening hole with only inky darkness beyond. The stairs are crumbling, too. Collapsing, even, as cracks spread and chunks break off, vanishing into the void below. It’s as if they were being eaten away by nothing.

It’s not black stone beneath us.

Not only the walls and ceiling can fall, apparently, but the very ground out from under us. This is what’s waiting for me below these interwoven halls and staircases of ice. I feel like my guts are already dropping away at the sight.

I don’t spare time to shriek a curse before I’m running onward—and down—hoping Deos will follow. I don’t care that I slip and slide down half the stairs, bumping along until I can catch myself and pitch forward again. That darkness beneath the floor scares me more than tumbling to a bruising death at the foot of the stairs. Certainly more than getting crushed by ice. Even more than the Other-Mes.

That it’s my fault this horrible new portal has opened makes me feel sicker as I run. The more I’ve fought against these cold, monstrous versions of myself, the more I’ve freed them. Now I’ve shattered the very ground that sustains me—perhaps freeing something worse.

Maybe fighting isn’t the answer. I’m not sure if fleeing is, either, but that’s what I do.

Perhaps it’s the collapsing maze or the bodies of the Other-Mes piling up in pursuit, but even after I—and miraculously Deos—reach the bottom of the stairs, the chaos still gains on us, as I turn down yet another seemingly endless flight of steps.

An insane idea strikes me. If I can’t run faster than my pursuers, I can at least move as fast, if we’re all on even footing. These icy steps make it too unsure—but perhaps I can change that. I gather my pain, lifting my hand. And I send fire sweeping down the stairs, followed by an icy blast of freezing air.

The steps melt before me and refreeze in a smooth downward slope. I slip off my feet almost immediately, cracking the thin ice beneath me. Luckily, I don’t weigh on it for long before I slide down what becomes an ice chute. I keep one palm raised and my fire burning, the other flattened beside me not just for balance, but to refreeze the surface beneath me, so I fly along at blurring speeds. I hear Deos scraping down after me.

No doubt the creatures behind us are traveling just as fast down the chute. Or falling through the weakened ice, I hope.

I realize, soon, that I’m moving too fast to hit the stairs’ landing, which widens into an expansive disc of ice—of course it’s ice—but this time only hemmed in by darkness like the deepest of night skies. No walls. It’s simply surrounded by nothing, a strange platform seeming to float over an endless abyss. This is where the maze has led me. Perhaps where Daesra has led me.

I don’t want to punch through the floor or go sailing off the edge, so I stop sending fire ahead. The last couple of un-melted stairs catch my heels, flipping me end over end. I manage to bring up a shield in time, saving my face from smashing into the floor.

My shield catches me with a cushion of air and lets me skid a short way from the landing. I have enough time to lessen Deos’s impact, halting his momentum as well, and to scramble out of the way before everything that was following us comes tumbling down the chute after him.

So many of those monstrous shapes that look like me.

I don’t cushion their landings, which means I have to dodge several figures and flailing limbs as they go sliding across the platform and over the edge, plummeting into nothing with silent screams on their twisted faces. The next two drop through the hole they smash with their impacts, the ice already having cracked beneath the first few.

I don’t feel sorry for them, especially as more Other-Mes pile down the chute—enough to bridge the gap at the base of the stairs with their bodies, despite the widening hole. Cracks zigzag across the ice, stopping just shy of my toes even after I’ve backed away. For a moment, all I can do is stare at the darkness lurking beneath my feet.

They have me cornered. There’s no way off this platform except the way I arrived—other than falling off.

The damaged floor still bears the weight of at least one Other-Me as she claws her way toward me, using her shattered wrists like ice picks to drag herself along, too many teeth bared in that rictus of a grin. Her translucent figure is slick with water—melt, I realize, from the chute. I reach for pain, but either my body has gone numb or I’ve gotten used to the sensation of my bindings, and so I bite my hand until my teeth break skin.

Better my teeth than hers , I think, and I freeze her to the ground. She can’t crawl, after that.

But more like her keep coming, a few already hauling themselves across the floating platform, and I know it won’t bear too many more bodies piled atop it. I can’t freeze them in place because of the weight, I can’t melt them, and I can’t break or hurl them without damaging the terribly fragile structure—which already is supporting me over the darkness with all the security of an open hand cupping a seed in a gale. Even if I had time to insert all of my needles in exchange for more power, I wouldn’t know what to do.

“Why won’t you just stop ?” I screech at my broken selves clawing and kicking their way toward me on the jagged stumps of their limbs, grinning all the while.

I could be asking you that , comes Daesra’s voice from the marble statue alongside me. But we already know why. Deos himself appears to be watching our oncoming death—as crawlingly slow as it is—without any expression other than his usual placid serenity.

“Shut up,” I hiss. “Unless you have any better ideas.”

The statue turns, gestures behind me. Reluctantly, I glance over my shoulder and gasp.

Another mirror stands at my back in the center of the platform where it hadn’t just a moment before, like a quicksilver curtain suspended from nothing. Instead of running for it, which would perhaps be wise, I take a startled step away, stopping when the ice creaks under my foot. I don’t know whether to keep my eye on that strange, liquid surface, as if something could reach out and grab me, or on the creatures dragging themselves—and the fissures in the floor—ever closer. Those will most assuredly reach me. And soon.

My breath comes in faster cloudbursts against the surrounding darkness, bordering on panicked. “How can there still be more mirrors? I already saw the beginning of us! There’s nothing else.”

I’ve let myself imagine I’ve already unveiled the worst of my forgotten past—the worst of myself, and of him. I doubt I could have led so monstrous a childhood, which is all that remains for me to see. What, did I torture animals for sport? Roast infants for food on my aunt’s island?

Nothing else but the end , he says mysteriously.

Does he mean this mirror is the last?

I turn back to the Other-Mes, one of them now less than a body length from me. Soon, she’ll be able to reach for me with a shattered hand—or what was once a hand and now might be the remains of tentacles. I’m almost more willing to face that than what the mirror might have to show me.

Almost.

I’ve survived the mirrors until now, while I’ve proved I can’t rid myself of these Other-Mes without eventually falling with them. I don’t have the strength—or finesse or intelligence, whatever might be required—to put them down properly, in this place.

But I don’t know if I have the ability to face the last of the mirrors, either, if these creatures are any indication of what lies deep inside me.

Deos raises both arms, one merely a broken stub, the other extended like a barrier. He plants himself between me and my determined pursuers. Leaving nothing but a short step between me and the mirror.

Go, Sadaré , says Daesra’s voice, a frightening resignation weighing on it . Discover the truth about yourself. And then come find me.

Either I face the memories or fall into the darkness lurking below the ice, waiting to catch me.

I let out an agonized cry and fling myself into the mirror.

Just as the silvery surface closes over me, I hear something shatter behind me, feel something hard and cold catch my ankle—