Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The dark had a taste.
Polly lay where she’d fallen, her whole body bruised and aching, and the first thing that reached her was that taste—old dust and rusted iron and something acrid underneath, chemical and sour, the smell of a place that had been dead a long time.
It crawled into the back of her throat and there, instantly, was the thing she’d spent a year outrunning.
The mine. The recycled air. The dark that never ended and the walls that never moved and the bone-deep knowing that no one was coming to save her.
Her chest locked. Her hands started to shake. The scream built somewhere below her ribs, the old scream, the one that used to fill the whole of her until there was no Polly left, only the fear wearing her like a coat—
Njkall’s voice reached her.
It came down from above her, distant and muffled through the stone, but she knew the sound of it the way she knew her own heartbeat.
She couldn’t make out the words. She didn’t need to.
She only needed the fact of it—that low, steady rumble, unhurried even now, and she clung to the sound of it the way she’d once clung to his fur in the dark.
I am coming. She couldn’t hear him say it. She knew he was saying it anyway.
The scream in her chest loosened, just enough. Just enough to breathe.
“Njkall!” She dragged herself up onto her elbow and shouted it towards the faint grey wound of light far above, where the world was. “We’re here! We’re okay!”
She didn’t know if it was true. But she said it, and saying it made her spine straighten a fraction, and that was something.
Then she heard the crying.
Not loud. That was the worst part. It wasn’t the loud, gulping cry of someone who expected comfort. It was the small, awful, choked-off kind, the kind a person made when they’d learned long ago that no one ever came for the tears so you swallowed them, and only the overflow escaped.
“Tess.” She turned towards the sound, groping through the black. Her palm found rough fabric, a shoulder, a body curled tight against a broken slab of concrete. “Tess. Hey. I’m here. I’ve got you.”
“Don’t—” Tess’s whole body flinched away from the touch, then convulsed. “Don’t touch me, don’t, don’t—”
“Okay.” She pulled her hand back at once. She knew that flinch. She lived in that flinch for a long time. “Okay. I’m not touching you. But I’m right here. You feel how close my voice is? That’s how close I am. I’m not going anywhere.”
“We’re going to die down here.” Tess’s breath came in short, tearing hitches, faster and faster. “We’re buried, we’re buried, there’s no air, there’s no—I can’t—I can’t get a breath, Polly, I can’t—”
Polly recognized the panic attack the way you recognize your own face in a cracked mirror.
The runaway breath. The hands scrabbling at nothing.
The eyes gone wide and blind, seeing not the dark room they were in but every dark room they’d ever survived, all of them at once, stacked up and pressing down.
She’d fallen into that pit a thousand times.
She knew exactly what it felt like from the inside.
Which meant, she realized with a strange, floating clarity, that she knew the way out.
The panic that had been clawing up her own throat didn’t vanish. It was still there, cold and patient, waiting. But Tess needed her, and for once Polly’s fear wasn’t the biggest thing in the room.
“Tess. Listen to my voice.” She kept it low and even, and she heard something she hadn’t expected coming out of her own mouth, an echo of Njkall’s cadence.
The slow, unhurried certainty he used when the whole world was falling apart and he’d simply decided not to let it rush him.
She’d absorbed it without knowing. It had been sinking into her every night for a year.
“You’re not on the ship. You’re on Hothrest, and the air down here is cold and it stinks, but cold, stinking air is still air.
Feel it. It’s moving. Right now, on your face. You feel that?”
“I—” A hitch. “I can’t—”
“You don’t have to breathe deep. Don’t try to breathe deep, it won’t work, I know.
” Cera had taught her that, in the healer’s cave, in the bad early weeks.
Warm hands, cool voice, endless patience.
You don’t have to fix the whole breath. Just make the next one one heartbeat longer than the last. “Just the next one. Just make it a little longer. In through your nose. Slow. Slower than you want to. Like you’re smelling something. ”
“There’s nothing to smell but death—”
“Then smell the death slowly.” A wild little laugh cracked out of the dark, and that laugh was the first good thing. The first crack of a door. “That’s it. There you are. Again. In—slow—and out. You don’t have to do anything except that. I’ll count. In, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four.”
She counted. She kept counting, low and steady, while Tess’s breath fought her and lost and fought again and, slowly, slowly, began to lengthen.
Somewhere above them, faintly, Njkall’s voice came again through the stone, and Polly used it—timed her counts to the rise and fall of that distant rumble, so that the three of them were breathing together, mate and rescuer and rescued, one rhythm stretching from the light above down into the dark.
By the time Tess’s breath came smoothly, Polly’s eyes had adjusted enough to see her huddled shape, knees to chest, the whites of her eyes gleaming faintly in the thin grey light that leaked down from far above.
“There,” she said. “See? You’re breathing. You did that.”
“You did that.”
“No.” She surprised herself with how sure it came out. “I just counted. You breathed. That was all you.”
Tess wiped her face with the back of a filthy hand and stared at her through the gloom like she’d never seen her before. “How are you—” Her voice broke. “How are you so calm? You. You should be worse than me down here. This is your… This is everything that ever happened to you.”
Yes. She looked around, and it was. The dark, the metal and stone, the buried air, the walls closing in with no door she could reach. Once, this exact room would have been the end of her. She’d have curled up in the corner like she’d done in the mine and waited to disappear.
She wasn’t disappearing now.
“Because I’ve done it before,” she said slowly, working it out even as she spoke.
“The being trapped. I’ve done it, and I lived.
But I didn’t do it alone. Cera counting my breaths.
Yasmin coming to sit with me when I couldn’t make myself go outside.
” A wobble caught her voice and she pushed through it.
“And Njkall. A whole year of Njkall, just being there. Not fixing me. Just being there until I could fix myself. And before all of them, I fought anyway. On the ship, when they came for me, I bit. I got hit for it. But I bit. There was always a piece of me that fought.”
She reached out into the dark, slowly, telegraphing the movement, and this time when she found Tess’s shoulder, Tess didn’t flinch away.
“I’m not calm because I’m not scared,” she said. “I’m terrified. But I’ve got you, and you’ve got me, and that’s the difference. We don’t have to survive the dark alone. We just take turns being the one who remembers there’s a way out.”
For a long moment Tess didn’t say anything. Her shoulder trembled under Polly’s hand.
“We can’t stay here,” she went on, before the silence could pull them both back down.
“This section’s not stable—feel the dust still coming down?
Come on. On your feet. We move away from where we fell, find a wall that isn’t about to come down on us, and we wait for them.
We don’t wait here. Here is the bad spot. Up now. With me.”
And—miracle of miracles—Tess moved.
She got her legs under her, and Polly got an arm around her, and the two of them shuffled through the wreckage together, testing each footfall, her free hand out against the wall the way Njkall had shown her once, reading the stone with her palm.
She found it almost funny, in a distant way—all those skills she’d thought she’d never need, that she’d learned only because he’d patiently offered them and she’d stubbornly refused to be useless.
This is how you check if rock will hold.
This is how you tell settled ground from loose.
Not because you’ll ever need it, little one.
Just so you’ll know. He’d never once said because you might be trapped in a collapsed offworld laboratory someday.
But he’d given her the knowing anyway. He was always doing that.
Handing her tools and never once telling her she had to use them.
They found a corner where two intact walls met, well back from the raw new pit of the collapse, where the ceiling above was solid metal instead of fractured stone.
She pressed her hand flat to the wall behind them and felt nothing—no shudder, no grinding, no whisper of coming down.
Solid. Safe. As safe as this dead place could offer.
She helped Tess down against the wall and slid down beside her, shoulder to shoulder, and above them, faint but constant, Njkall’s voice went on and on, and now she could almost catch a word here and there. Coming. Ours. Polly.
“Polly.” Tess’s voice came small in the dark. “I have to say something.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I do.” A long breath, in for four, out for four—she’d learned it fast. Tess had always been quick. “I didn’t understand. You and Njkall.”
Polly turned her head towards her.
“The way you trust him. The way you sleep in his bed and let him follow you around and watch over you.” Tess swallowed. “I kept thinking there had to be a price. That nobody gives you that much without expecting something back.”
She remembered Doren saying almost the same thing. Everyone keeps a ledger. Sooner or later, they come to collect.
“I kept waiting for him to prove me right,” Tess continued. “For him to tell you what to do, or decide where you could go, or get angry when you didn’t do what he wanted.” A ragged breath escaped her. “And then you came out here after me. And he let you.”
“He didn’t exactly like it,” she muttered.
A shaky sound came from Tess that might have been a laugh. “No. I’m sure he didn’t.” She was quiet for a moment. “But he let you choose anyway. I don’t think I understood before that someone could be that afraid for you and still let you choose.”
She said nothing, letting the words settle.
“I thought needing someone meant giving them power over you,” Tess whispered. “And giving someone power meant sooner or later they’d use it.” Her voice thickened. “Maybe I was wrong about that.”
Tess was right.
Sitting in an actual cage—a collapsed prison of metal and stone and darkness, the nightmare of everything that had ever been done to her—she finally understood the difference.
It arrived whole and simple, the way the deepest true things always did, so obvious once you saw it that you couldn’t believe you’d ever been confused.
This was a cage. Walls that held her in against her will. A place she couldn’t leave. A dark that pressed down and gave her no door.
Njkall had never once been that.
He’d always given her a door, and every day for a year he’d left it open and waited to see if she chose to stay.
“It’s okay,” she said, and her voice came out steady and warm and completely without doubt. She reached over and took Tess’s cold hand in both of hers and held it. “You weren’t wrong to be afraid of it. You just had the wrong door. A cage is a place you can’t leave, Tess.”
She looked up, towards the sound of his voice, towards the male who had spent a year holding a door open for a woman too frightened to walk through it, and who was, right now, keeping himself from rushing to her for exactly the same reason he’d kept himself from everything else—because he loved her too much to risk her.
“I can leave any time I want. I’ve just never wanted to. That’s not a cage. That’s a home.”
Above them, the distant rumble of Njkall’s voice stopped. For several long heart-stopping minutes, the dark went silent, but she held Tess’s hand and she believed.
Then from somewhere off to their left came the grind of stone shifting, the scrape of something huge and careful moving through a space too small for it, and finally, growing louder, coming closer, a voice she’d have crawled through the whole world to reach, saying her name.
“Polly.”