54. Maren #2
Grout dust coated his hair and clothes. Cuts and scrapes from Thaan’s earlier attack had half-healed, soft-pink lines the only evidence he’d been dragged and thrown and beaten.
But new nicks along his knuckles had slurred blood with dust, thick and chalky.
The flagstone he was rocking loose was the sixth one he’d worked out of the floor, and he huffed softly as he labored, the sleeves of his shirt tight against his biceps when he flexed.
We hadn’t all come back after the meeting with Theia and Darkness.
Nori and Olinne returned to the sea, Nori careful to avoid my eyes as she left.
Cebrinne had walked Ano to his little room.
I could only imagine the conversation between them tonight—my father hadn’t stopped his covert string of stares at her the entire walk back to the palace.
I wondered which shocked him more: working out that Cebrinne had spoken to Mihauna sometime in her past, or that she’d sold herself to Darkness.
Diara slid in beside me at Selena’s table. “Should we try to stop him?”
“No idea,” I exhaled. Exhaustion dragged its heels over every thought in my head, the energy from my limbs. I felt like a slab of beef boiled in a pot, the meat dripping from my bones. My eyelids sagged, and my body only cared to lean—against the wall, the chair, Kye’s shoulder.
The rest of them looked as tired as I felt, lumpen and bloodied. We should have drifted to our rooms. Moons knew we needed sleep.
But none of us could seem to leave Pheolix.
Hadrian stood with Aegir at the office door, the drone’s shaky breaths streaming out from behind the wall. The crown prince scratched the side of his jaw with split knuckles. “Cebrinne asked Theia where Selena is.”
The scrape of stone grinding against stone paused. “What did Theia say?”
“We don’t know exactly. Theia said she’s at the divide.”
Pheolix sniffed once, loudly. “The divide of what?”
Hadrian lifted a shoulder. “I thought maybe you would know.”
“I don’t.” The grating sound returned.
Aegir rubbed his fingers roughly over an eye. “Maybe it would come to you after a night’s sleep.” Pheolix didn’t answer, and Aegir blew air from the side of his mouth. “There’s nothing in here, gnat. You’re tearing up the floor but there’s nothing here.”
“If you’re all tired, you can go to bed,” Pheolix answered, his words wrapping loudly beyond the door, delivered to the rest of us with a sharp acuity that made Aren grimace.
Hadrian swallowed. He rolled one sleeve to his elbow, then the other.
Watching him, Kye swung a leg off the chair beside me, following Hadrian inside the office, Dimas and Leal behind them.
I slanted a glance at Diara, and then we entered as well, finding a place along the floor to try and pry stone from stone.
Pheolix straightened, not bothering to lift bloodshot eyes to level with ours. “I don’t need help,” the drone said, the hush of his voice like a blade sliding quietly through stalks of grass. “I’ve been waiting. Over twenty years."
His words dropped off. His mouth hardened like the stone under his fingertips, losing himself in thought. Then roused with a small shake, ignoring all of us as he set himself back to his task.
Dimas pushed under a groove, and rock split in a loud crack as he tilted it up.
Dust plumed, and through it, Pheolix laid a hand over the human’s arm.
He didn’t try to look up at Dimas. He didn’t look at anyone.
His clouded eyes were fixed beyond us, overcast with something as cold and encompassing as rain in the dark.
“Everything I do, or don’t do, or wish to do, or wish to avoid but have to do—everything calls for help. Please. Please. Let me do this alone.”
Across from each other, our eyes met. No one spoke, but heat pricked in the back of my nose. Kye cleared his throat. “At least let me find you a prybar.”
Night passed, the sound of stone shrieking as it left its bed the only words between any of us.
We didn’t leave the office. Instead we leaned our backs against corners and walls, my cheek against Diara’s ear as I dozed through the turn of stars outside the single window.
When Pheolix moved into our corners, we nudged each other awake, or helped clear rubble and sand from the waste, staring down to the bare joists below.
It was nearly morning when the sound of Hadrian’s voice stirred me awake. “Pheolix,” he said, and nothing else.
Diara laid a warm palm over my hand, a bid to wake me. My eyes peeled open, reluctant amid the crick in my neck and an ache in my low back.
Pheolix had finished with the floor, had begun stripping the walls, the bottom half of the room like flesh carved from a ribcage, beams and slats exposed to open air.
A rod of iron in his hand, Pheolix sagged slightly, tracking Hadrian’s voice back to him.
But everyone else stared at the same thing I stared at.
A single piece of parchment that had landed at my foot, folded and crammed under the frame of the window, which had fluttered loose like a dying butterfly falling to the floor.
I dusted my knees, rising to my feet to hand the parchment to Pheolix. My breath caught as he took it, a raw blend of disbelief and fear in his unseeing eyes. He ran his thumbs over the creases, slow and unmoving like he’d suddenly forgotten how to breathe. It crinkled loudly as he unfolded it.