Chapter 50
EVER
We reach the separation point deep within the passages as planned.
I spent two hours drawing a massive map in the dirt while we worked out our approach.
It was ruined when Eli tackled me to the ground.
We shed our clothes and rolled over my meticulously formed passages and mounds of dirt pinched into walls while trying to avoid the sticks and stones that marked hot springs and thrones.
Fortunately, everyone had already thoroughly studied the map.
I was able to piece together a number of areas from what I’d seen, and Eli filled in what he could from his lifetimes of memories and anything he could gather from Kelter’s days there.
Despite the planning, it’s a chaotic implementation.
“Sypher, Mav, that way to the lower passages,” Milo directs. “Kaleida, you’ll come with me.”
“Wait. I thought Kaleida was with us,” Sypher says. “She has the biggest pack.”
Eli leaves my side and stomps over to them. “You would know the plan if you weren’t so distracted by your Hollow.”
Maverick J. confronts Eli as if he had a death wish and completely forgot about the close encounter of his balls with Eli’s knife. He’s only an inch shy of Eli’s height, chin up, vest zipped. “Got a problem with me?”
Sypher’s face blanches.
Eli pokes him in the throat. “I do have a fucking problem with you. You stuck your dick in my woman.”
Not now. I open my mouth to remind him that was years ago, but Milo flips around and shoos Atom and me away amid the ensuing drama. I try to stand firm and wait for Eli, even call out to him, but Atom takes my hand, tugging me around the corner and down another passage.
“Where is she?” Eli’s voice echoes after us, but he knows exactly where I am, where my heart is, how it’s panicking at our separation.
Milo’s gentle explanation follows. “It’s all part of the plan. You just didn’t know about this part. We can’t risk you stopping for a quickie, pal.”
Eli growls. “Would you rather me kill someone?”
“Milo planned this?” I whisper to Atom.
He guides us around another corner beyond the sound of their voices. The ceiling lowers. The walls close in. I struggle to connect the path before me to the map in my head. This isn’t the way.
Atom skips his fingers along the wall, still pulling me along with his other hand. “Don’t worry, Milo’s safest with Eli. And I know my way around.”
“How? Zandrite locked you up.”
“I snuck in here hundreds of times before that.” He stops to grin at me then hauls me down the passage with unexpected force for such a small guy.
“Where are we going? This wasn’t one of the routes on my map.” I try to capture the quick turns and find uniqueness in the endless dirt of the walls so I can track our path, but my head seems to constantly be two rights and a left behind.
“I know. This way.” He stops short in front of a square entrance level with the ground, gesturing to it proudly with both hands.
Everything about it boasts bad idea. The side edges are worn away and rounded, as if countless fingers had held on, scrabbling and scratching to get out.
A scraping sound echoes from the dark depths, and the scent of raw meat permeates the air inside.
I can almost hear the regretful voices of the dead, warning me not to go a foot farther.
“You want me to go in there?” I ask.
“I’ll go first, since you look like you’re about to upchuck a bar.”
“No, Atom, let’s—” I give up with a resigned sigh as his feet disappear, then drop to my knees and crawl after him. I’m not letting him go alone, and he’s already out of sight. Dammit. “Wait up.”
His voice carries through the dank tunnel, ten degrees cooler than the passage. “I hate waiting.”
A flash of fondness flutters through my chest. Me too, kid.
We crawl on, and as the last of the passage’s light fades around a sharp corner, a new light appears.
“I’ve been collecting light stones left in the woods for months and bringing them here,” Atom explains, repositioning the glowing stone. A one-eyed smiley face is drawn on the front in what looks like finger paint made from blood. “This is Wallace. He’s a guardian.”
His loneliness strangles my heart. “How long have you been on your own?”
He passes his thumb over the stone’s smile and turns to continue, avoiding my prying gaze. “A little more than a year.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Not really, if you compare it to forever.”
It’s a strange response from a child, maybe a strange response from anyone. “I can’t really grasp forever.”
“What about never?” he asks.
I understand never. The absence. The endless void. The defeat. It’s familiar, hopeless and without expectation. “Yes.”
“Well, you can’t have never without forever because never lasts forever. And it goes the other way too. Forever never ends.” He stops at the next light stone, another face with two bloody fingerprints for eyes and a squiggly mouth. “This guy is Wart. He makes me answer riddles if I want to pass.”
I’m still turning his words over in my mind when Atom looks over his shoulder. “So what do forever and never have in common?”
“Huh?”
“That’s Wart’s riddle.”
“Oh.” I scratch the dirt, staring down at my rings that aren’t actually there. At least I’m not talking to stones. Yet. “I don’t know. Keep going.”
“Ever.”
“What?” I ask, urgency pressing in from all sides. “We have to get to Zandrite.”
“That’s the answer.”
“Me? I’m the answer?”
“You can’t have forever or never without ever,” he explains, much too seriously for the answer to the imaginary riddle of a bloody-faced stone. “Never ever forever and ever.”
I can’t tell if the combination of words is ominous or encouraging. “Now we can pass?”
Atom beams. “Wart says yes.”
The dirt walls around us slowly fall away as we advance, a thick weave of roots emerging from the top and curving down the sides and below us, painful under my knees.
My hands are rubbed raw. We pass six more light stones, one with a head full of moss and two with chipped bones for teeth, all with names and personalities—Atom’s only company over the last year.
“You forgot Whiddles,” he says when I fail to name them all in one go for the eighth time. “Start over.”
His innocence is refreshing, a spark of life and light among the darkness, the death. “Okay, okay. Wallace the one-eyed guardian. Wart the riddler. Wendon the worrier. Whiddles the—”
A growl rattles my concentration. The skin on the back of my neck prickles with fear.
We’re not alone.