Chapter 29
Neck craned, I stood under the opening to the vault, bracing myself against the cold as I stretched my fingers apart and the single thread of dark matter wound between my index and pointer fingers like dental floss glowed brighter.
The light barely reached the distant ceiling, but I could see enough to tell that the once one-way valve was now a no-way valve, having been both soldered shut and coated with hot liquid glass.
We weren’t getting out that way. Not without some help.
And help, I had reluctantly decided as hunger pinched my middle, wasn’t coming.
Thirty minutes, my ass…Thoth had played us, and my naivete had let him.
Cold to the bone, I eased the tension and the light dimmed.
If I kept it to a soft glow, the chill was tolerable.
It was hard to tell, but I had a bad feeling that the air was beginning to get stuffy in the huge, echoey, shiny space.
The light in my hand made weird shadows, and the rippled layer of glass on everything reflected gold and black alike.
I didn’t have a phone, and I doubted it would connect to anything if I did.
Lack of a watch meant I had no idea how long we’d been down here.
There were no escape valves, no new air intakes.
Without air, I wouldn’t live long enough to dehydrate.
“Pluck?” The shadow sat at the far end of the glass-walled room, staring at literally nothing. He was still in his human shift. Still fighting, I guessed. “Pluck, I can’t reach the valve. Will you just…”
The fizzy thread of his emotion billowed as if given a sudden wind: frustration, heartache, dread, but mostly anger. “There’s no need,” he said, his words echoing as they bounced off the wall in front of him. “We are in a vault. It’s shadowproof by definition.”
My light faded and I tried to muffle my own thoughts as confusion joined Pluck’s feelings.
No one was coming to get us out or it would have happened by now.
The not knowing was awful, leaving my imagination to invent all sorts of ugly scenarios.
Thoth had succeeded in quashing the truth.
Benedict helpless in a mage jail. Herm on the run or in the cell next to him.
Lev and Cameron on trial for the gall of telling the truth. Marty…
My heart ached at the thought of Marty and Aasta. They might be safe in a militia compound, but they would be used, turned into a weapon.
I scuffed across the featureless glass floor, the glow of light coming from my fingers running like fish before me.
Pluck tilted his head to acknowledge me, and yet his eyes never met mine as I sank down beside him with a heavy sigh.
“You shouldn’t be down here,” he said, and I stifled a shiver at his low, rumbly voice.
“You think?” Sitting so our knees almost touched, I played with the single string of dark matter between my fingers, making the energy ziming and zoumong, ziming and zoumong, feeling the cold swell and ebb with it.
“I do.” The shadow stared at my fingers until I quit and held the light steady. “He had been willing to let you live until I encouraged you to find a way around the damage. You shouldn’t be down here.”
“Finding a balance was my dream, too,” I said, trying to ignore his anger bubbling like acid.
“You will die because of me.” Pluck’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Thoth would have let you live if not for me.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ticked, I pulled my fingers apart to make the thread sing.
“I’ve got news for you, shadow. This saving thing goes both ways.
” He said nothing, and I added, “Hey, when I’m good and dead, promise me you will use my leg bone to beat a crack in the glass. One of us should make it out of here.”
“Stop!”
I jumped at his shout, the light in my hand faltering as his voice reverberated until it subsided into an uncomfortable hiss. “I have had this conversation before,” he added, head bowed as he refused to look at me. “Though not at the bottom of a glass-walled hell.”
My own anger flared, now that his was lost in an ancient heartache. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said bitterly. “I’ll just go over there and try not to breathe.”
I gathered myself to stand, slumping back down when he put a hand on my knee.
“Stop,” he said again, whispering it.
More cold seeped into me where we touched, but it was a familiar sensation, and a melancholy thread of his grief wound through it, little sparkles of his unshared memory coloring it.
My anger slowly faded, and for a moment, we were both silent.
“I never realized how devastating an air mage could be,” I said as an odd peace seeped from Pluck to me.
“I hope Thoth took Benedict and Herm out of the floor before he left.”
Pluck’s shoulders shifted in a breath he really didn’t need. “I’m sure he did. Dana called for reinforcements. He would have to adhere to basic human decency laws to maintain his deception.”
I glanced at the ceiling, trying to estimate how much air was in here. “How long do you think we’ve been down here?” I’d drowsed and slept and drowsed again, but the pinch of hunger in my gut said it had likely only been the better part of a day.
“Too long,” he said, gaze flicking toward my makeshift latrine.
“I should have worked harder getting those shadow escape valves put in,” I muttered, and he sighed heavily. “Hey, I’m sorry you are down here, but selfishly, I’m glad I won’t be dying alone.”
His lip twitched, and an odd sensation fluttered through the folds of my brain as he stifled a memory.
Fine. We could talk about something else. “Um, so Thoth possessed Dana.” I glanced at him, seeing a stoic nothing. “Where is Dana when he’s in charge?”
Pluck’s brow smoothed out as he lost a sliver of tension.
“Still there.” He fiddled with his shoes, and they solidified enough that laces appeared.
“He walled her off from her consciousness much as he did Cameron. It’s a nightmare he will likely never free her from, as Thoth will obtain much sway over the university in her name.
” He glanced at me, green eyes catching the light, reflecting it. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your doing,” I said. I put my free hand to the floor and tried to feel something, anything, past the rippled glass.
The universe still rang in my thoughts, obviously, since I had used it to make a light, but beyond that?
Nothing. “Hey, if we get out of here, could we make him let her go, like we did for Cameron?”
At that, Pluck turned away again. “There is no if,” he said softly. “We can’t escape, and that’s what pains me the most. You didn’t have to die. You could have survived.”
I pulled my knees to my chin. “I doubt that,” I said sourly. “Okay, I wouldn’t suffocate, but there is no way I could survive Thoth, especially if he’s walking around St. Unoc in a brand-new Dana suit. And certainly not without you. At least it’s quiet down here.”
Pluck’s lip twitched. “I made you dangerous to him.”
“I made myself dangerous,” I muttered, the light in my hand glowing stronger as I became angry again. Threads of dark matter lifted into existence, glittering in the light I created until they snarled and knotted about themselves.
Pluck rose to his feet, the motion liquid as he probably evaporated somewhat to do it. “I don’t see it that way,” he said, voice gaining strength as his own anger swirled through my frustration. “If you hadn’t tried to work around the damage he did to your magic—”
“I was not going to stay like I was. Broken!” I interrupted, pushing to my feet as well.
“If Thoth hadn’t seen you as a threat, you might be on the other side of the vault and free me as you did before. Now we are both trapped.”
“You’re blaming me?” The light in my hand burst into a harsh glare, illuminating the snarled threads threatening to tangle about it. “You, sir, have been bottled twice in one day because you were protecting me. Stop protecting me!”
“I don’t think that’s going to be an issue anymore!” Pluck shouted, and I squinted at the harsh glow lighting both of us and the tangled dark matter our anger had pulled into play. “You shouldn’t be here! You are not a shadow to be stuffed in a glass vault to die a slow death!”
I stood toe-to-toe with him, so close I could see his edges fraying and feel the universe chime through him as his feet phased into mine.
“Hey!” I barked, ticked. “I got news for you, Pluck. It’s not going to be a slow death but a fast, painful one as I drown in a room of carbon dioxide.
But you know what? I’d do it again in a heartbeat because there’s no way in hell I would stand by and do nothing when some wackadoodle is trying to hurt you, so get over it! ”
“You…” Pluck faced me, green eyes wrathful as he lost his grip on solidity. “You are infuriating! Why can’t you admit you were wrong!”
“Because I’m not!” I shouted. And then I yelped when the snarled knots of energy around my glowing fingers suddenly organized under an influx of weave I could no longer make. A field formed around the dark matter, snapping into a tight sphere around my fingers and then exploding.
“Pluck!” I shouted as I staggered back, the afterimage the only thing I could see. I froze, my pulse hammering at the sudden dark, and my ankle cramped with cold. “Pluck?”
Here, echoed in our joined thoughts, calming me.
But what was that? I thought, his confusion tracing through mine.
Perhaps…he began, and fingers shaking, I cautiously inhaled to bring a new mass of dark matter into existence between my hands, wrapping a thread around my fingers and tightening it until it began to glow again.
“Pluck?” He was at my feet, nothing more than a dark puddle. “Shit, are you okay?”
He pulled himself together, a cobra head rising to consider me. You made a field, he thought, his wonder bright sparkles in my mind. I saw it.
“I couldn’t have,” I said, but I’d seen it, too.