Ren #2
The one in front of me comes again. I drag the warmth out of the gap between us and its arm hitches—half a beat, no more—and half a beat is everything.
I drop under it. Its hand closes on the air where my throat was.
I come up at its side and chill the shoulder joint.
The whole arm seizes, locked, useless. Atlas's whip takes it across the back and throws it into the shelving.
Glass goes. A leash dies in the noise. One more heartbeat flees up to the daylight it belongs in.
"Left," Atlas says.
I pivot left without looking. Two of them, shoulder to shoulder, soundless.
I throw the cold wide this time, a whole sweep of it.
Both of them go slow at once. Atlas is already there—the charge coming off him in a sheet, catching them mid-stride, scattering them into smoke.
They don't stay smoke. They never stay anything.
The shadow gathers off the floor, finds its edges, stands.
We don't wait for it to finish. We move.
A third gets a hand on me before I taste it coming.
The grip lands on my bad shoulder, right where the glass opened me, and the pain goes white and immediate.
I let it be. It's just my blood again, the only blood in this room with anything left to say.
I twist into the grip instead of away. I get my palm flat against where its chest should be and pull every degree of heat out of it at once.
The thing goes brittle. Atlas's storm does the rest. It comes apart like frost off a windshield.
We fight up the corridor like that, back to back without deciding to be, his charge throwing them wide and my cold buying the gap to move.
He takes a blow meant for my spine and grunts and stays up.
I freeze the joint of the one closing on his blind side.
It stumbles into the wall and loses its shape against the stone.
We don't talk past the one word at a time the work needs.
Loud and quiet, his storm where my cold can't reach and my cold where his storm can't hold, and the mark burning on both our hands the whole way for the crime of being this deep, this long, this close to her.
Nobody woke this guard by accident. Constructs like this don't stand a post; they're set, and held, and answer to one hand only, which means somewhere below us she felt the leashes go out and reached up out of her working and put men made of nothing between us and the stair.
Which means she knows where we are.
Which means she's stopped pretending she doesn't.
"Move," Atlas says, and shoulders a construct into the shelving, and the rack goes over in a long bright crash of breaking glass, a dozen leashes failing at once in the noise, a dozen heartbeats fleeing back up to their owners in a single freed breath—and in the gap that opens we run, both of us, toward the black mouth of the stair that goes down to the Sepulchre and the Hollows and past them to the place none of us can feel each other.
I've still got the bond.
I check it the way you check a tooth with your tongue, without deciding to, the same reflex I've run every few minutes since September.
She's down. She's ahead. She's a warmth four levels of stone away and dimming as she descends, the Well already starting to drink the thread thin the deeper she goes, and that's normal, that's the place doing what the place does, I told her it would and she nodded and went anyway—
***-
The thread goes quiet.
My own pulse stutters trying to fill the space where hers should be, a half-beat of my heart reaching for a rhythm that isn't there anymore.
This isn't the thinning I know—the slow fade of distance that still leaves a hum under everything.
This is total, the dead kind of silence I've felt exactly once before, in exactly one place.
The Deep is closing over her the way water closes over a dropped stone, and there's no ring left on the surface to say which way she went down.
My blood goes cold and it has nothing to do with the fight.
I stop. In the middle of the corridor, with a thing made of shadow swinging at the place my head was, I stop, my whole body gone colder than anything the fight has managed yet: she's reached the bottom.
She's past the Hollows. She's gone where I can't taste her, can't read her pulse climbing or her fear spiking or whether she's still standing, where the bond that has been the one constant fact of my body for nine months simply ends—and the Well only takes what crosses into it on its own feet, and she crossed.
"Ren." Atlas has my arm. The charge is coming off him in sheets, his face gone white under the storm-grime. "What."
I taste for her again. Nothing. The cleanest nothing in the world.
Nine months. Nine months I've had her under everything else, a warmth running below the blood sense and steadier than it, there when I sleep and there when I don't, there through every wall on this campus and every mile of the summer road before it.
I learned to live with it the way you learn to live with a sound in your own house: the furnace, the pipes, the thing you stop hearing until it stops.
It's stopped. The house has gone silent and the silence is the loudest thing in it.
A construct's hand closes on my shoulder and I barely feel it. There's a worse hand than that one already on me.
My phone is already in my hand. I don't remember reaching for it.
The screen lights the dark between us and there's one word on it, from Felix, from the choke point above—he saw the branch before I felt the silence, he always does, that's the whole curse of him—one word and then the rest a half-second behind it:
Everly.
Then: We have minutes.
I'm already moving. Past the construct, past Atlas, down toward the dark that ate the only heartbeat I've ever chosen to keep listening for—because there are a hundred dead things on the shelves behind me and I freed every one of them, and not one of those mattered the way the silence ahead of me does, and I will put my own blood on every stair between here and her if that's the toll the stone wants.
It can have it.
Catalina can't have her.