Chapter 27
I’m running back toward Lucan as he’s trying to formulate his next question. Grabbing his wrist, I charge toward the door. I’m about to scream for help when he flings a glove off and his bare hand clamps over my open mouth.
Releasing him, I turn and glare. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“What if it’s part of the challenge?”
“Have you lost your mind? They wouldn’t expose us to the scourge just to see if we’re cursed.”
A shadow passes over his eyes as his chin tips downward, severity overtaking his gaze. I shake my head.
“No,” I whisper. “There’s no… There’s no way.”
“You know what the vicar is capable of. Dismantling a dragon to get it into the chute should’ve prevented the scourge.
” Lucan speaks with such authority that all I can think is that he knows something I don’t.
“And if we call for help, I’ve no doubt they’d use it against us, claiming we’re overly sensitive to Ethershade. ”
“Everyone is ‘overly sensitive’ to literal death! What in the dragon-burned hells are we supposed to do?” Even if I’m not screaming for help, I can’t stop my voice from pitching up. “Die?”
“Even if it’s not a test, you know they won’t open that door. They won’t risk the scourge getting out.”
Disappointment and despair unlock every joint in my body, and I nearly collapse.
They will let us die in here if they think opening the door would let the scourge spread farther.
I stare up at him and wonder if his is going to be the last face I ever see.
Is this it? My final moments are to be spent in a room filled with rot and blight, staring at a guy I’m not even sure I like?
He flings his other glove off and grabs my shoulders, holding them tightly. “You figured out the automatons; you can figure this out. Death isn’t ready for us yet. You’re going to get us out of here, Isola, and I’m going to help by doing whatever you tell me to.”
“I’m not—”
“Isola Thaz. You are going to get us out of here.” There’s something familiar in the way he says my name that makes me realize it’s how he’s always called me. Isola. Not Valor Reborn. To him, I’ve always been Isola.
He’s telling me to save us. Not me as the vicar’s well-trained favorite. Not as Valor Reborn and whatever legendary powers I may or may not possess. As Isola. The girl who has been trained, not just by the Creed, but by her mother. Her father. As someone who can.
Damn it. Why does that work on me? Why does him saying he’s putting his trust in me suddenly have my mind searching for a way out of a hopeless situation?
I drop low, speaking hastily. “We have ten minutes, maybe, before the scourge haze replaces the air in this room. Before that, our lungs will start burning. Our skin will itch and peel. We will go mad as we begin to rot from the inside out until we’re nothing but mindless, moving husks before we’re completely consumed.
” And that’s all assuming neither of us is cursed, I don’t say, deeming it unnecessary and unhelpful.
“A great summary of a horrible death. Now, how do we stop it?”
“Well, if I knew how to do that, our world would be saved.”
“No time like the present to figure out how to save the world,” he quips far too easily when facing down near-certain death.
I glare at him. He just smiles in a way that says, Go on. And…I do. I look at the room, not with the eyes of the Creed but with the understanding of the scourge as my mum always taught.
To the masses, the scourge is a festering blight, a plague upon the earth itself. And that’s not wrong…but it’s also not completely accurate, either.
Think of the scourge as the by-product of a void, my mum would say.
Places where Etherlight has been sucked dry can create an imbalance toward Ethershade.
That’s how the scourge forms. It is, in that way, like a rot.
It manifests where death is—where life has left.
Once the scales of our world were no longer balanced, it was impossible to put them back.
And that’s why the scourge runs rampant.
It continues feeding on life until there is nothing left. Which, right now, is Lucan and me.
So I have to do three things:
Put the room magically back in balance.
Protect Lucan and me while doing so.
Not. Die.
Frantically, my mind searches all I know—all I’ve learned from Mum and Father and, as much as I hate to admit it, the vicar. And as I stare into Lucan’s hopeful eyes, it hits me like the sun piercing the clouds.
“I think I know how we’re going to survive this. But you need to do exactly as I say.”