27. Where the Lost Ones Go
Alex
Iwoke on cold stone, in the dark, in the last place I remembered. I knew at once how wrong it was.
That was the only way to describe it.
Wrong.
As if I had woken up in an entirely different world.
Yet at first, it was all there, the buried chamber beneath the castle, the pedestal, the low stone walls, the stone steps that led back to the iron-banded door I had been fool enough to open.
I was lying where I must have fallen, my cheek against the floor, and for one stupid, hopeful moment, I thought all I had done was faint.
That any second now, Atlas would come crashing down those steps and gather me up and call me his impossible, infuriating queen.
I lifted my head, and the moment died, evaporating right before my eyes as if the world was dying… as if it had been infected.
Because the chamber was wrong. The stone had gone soft and dark. Its walls were weeping, slick with a black, wet substance that ran down in slow threads and pooled around my fingers without ever quite touching them. The pedestal had cracked and slumped like something melting.
And the box was gone.
But the place where it had sat still pulsed faintly, a dull and sickly red, like the last ember of a fire starved of oxygen.
The air was thick and cold. The type that seemed to penetrate right through to the bone.
I licked my dry lips, and I swore the air tasted of old pennies, like blood and rust and rot combined.
But that wasn’t the weirdest part, as the silence seemed to have a kind of texture to it, like a held breath that was weighted.
It was as though the whole of the dark were leaning over me and waiting to see what I would do.
“Atlas.” It came out cracked, as if my voice was broken. I pushed myself up, and my hands shook. I hated how small my own voice sounded down here, so I cleared my throat and tried again, louder this time,
“Atlas!”
It echoed through the space, but no one answered, met only with deafening silence. Some part of me already knew why. Which was why I needed to move, as I wasn’t built to just lie still and let the dark decide my fate. I never had been. So, I did the only thing I knew how to do.
I ran.
I found the stairs, and I took them two at a time, up out of the deep, calling his name as my heart slammed against my ribs.
If I could just reach the upper halls, the bright halls, our bedchamber…
if I could just find him… find Aster… find one, single living face…
then all of this would resolve itself into something I could survive.
That was the plan.
Find Atlas.
Everything else came after.
But the problem with this plan was that the castle waiting at the top of those stairs wasn’t the one I knew.
No… It was a ruin.
It was the corpse of the place I had so nearly come to think of as home. The grand halls stood gutted to rubble, its stone charred black. The tapestries hanging in tattered rags, the great windows blown out into jagged teeth of glass, and through them poured a light the color of a dying bruise.
Ash drifted on a wind I couldn’t feel. The stone itself was scorched and split, as though some unstoppable fire had walked these corridors at its leisure, taking its time to cause the damage.
Something whispered then, a voice that was almost my own. ‘This is what would have happened if you had been a little slower. A little weaker. If you had not been there at all. This is the world you so nearly made.’
“No!” I said out loud, to no one. “No. This isn’t real!” I shouted louder even though the sight mocked me.
But my feet kept carrying me forward, because grief had hollowed me out and left only momentum behind, and I went on calling his name into the dark. And that’s when I realized…
I wasn’t alone in it.
I saw the first of them at the end of a long, ruined gallery.
A shape, hunched and shuffling, turning in slow and aimless circles as though it had forgotten what it was looking for.
It wasn’t a man. It had too many joints, and its edges smoked.
When it lifted what passed for its head, I saw there was nothing in its face but a dull and desperate confusion.
I froze in fright, but it didn’t come at me.
It only looked, lost and pleading, and then went back to its hopeless circling.
Somewhere deeper in the ruins, I saw the others. A low, broken chorus, moaning, scratching, wandering aimlessly like ghosts. Every one of them was trying and failing to find a way out of a place I could already tell had none.
And I understood, the way someone understands things in a nightmare, all at once and without being told. Understood who they were.
These were the taken.
Where the lost ones went.
The ones the darkness had worn, used and emptied of their souls.
The soldiers and Myths, all the creatures I half recognized from hundreds of terrible nights spent hiding from them.
Every one of them was once a creature, with a body that even now was being made to do unspeakable things in a whole world away.
This was where the part of them that was left had gone. All of them, together. A world’s worth of the lost, gathered into one endless place, left forgotten in the dark.
I couldn’t look at them any longer. And the truth was, I didn’t have to because there was still a part of me, the stubborn, hopeless, stupid part, that flatly refused to believe this wasn’t just all in my head.
That this was just some horrid nightmare.
That was all it was.
Just a bad dream wearing the bones of the worst things I had ever seen, and there was only one way out of it, and that was to simply wake up. I only had to reach him.
I only had to reach Atlas.
If I could just find our bedchamber, if I could just get back to the bed where I had fallen asleep safe and warm in his arms, then surely all of this would come apart like smoke.
That I would open my eyes to find Atlas curled around me, and the darkness would be nothing more than a cruel thing I had dreamed.
I clung to it.
But then, what else did I have? I had nothing else to cling to.
I turned down a corridor I half remembered, toward the place our bedchamber had been, and there at the end of it stood a door I knew.
The heavy, carved door of the room where I had slept curled into Atlas’s side, where I had felt safe, actually safe, for the first time in longer than I could remember.
The sight of it broke something loose in my chest.
He would be there.
He had to be there.
Of course, he would be. I would wake, and it would all be over. I crossed the last of the distance at a run, seized the handle, and threw it open.
I tore it open, and suddenly, my hope shattered as I was now standing on the battlefield surrounded by the worst of my crimes against his people. Because yes, there may have been no other way to stop the war, but that sickening feeling always assaulted me when I asked myself…
What if there had been another way?
The smell hit me first. The wet copper reek of it, so thick I gagged. Then the cold, gray light, and the endless churned earth, and the dead.
Oh God, the dead.
They lay where they had fallen, in their hundreds, in their thousands, heaped and tangled and sprawled to every horizon. Every creature, every person I had ever run from in the long nightmare of crossing two worlds to get here was dead on the ground. Each one decaying forever in the muck.
The great twisted shapes of the corrupted.
Lycans with their jaws frozen open. Centaurs broken at the joints.
Spiked and scaled creatures, a mangled twist of limbs.
A vast, coiling ruin of serpents that had been the Typhon, and among them, everywhere among them, ordinary soldiers with ordinary faces.
Men, women… people who had marched out under a banner and would never go home.
A wall of the dead. A whole world’s worth of dying, and every cold and staring face of it seemed, somehow, to be turned toward me.
And I knew them for what they were.
The ones from the battle. The taken, the corrupted, the stolen bodies burned clean out of the world by a dagger I had driven into the earth because I couldn’t find another way to save a single soul.
Again, I told myself there had been no other choice.
But standing here now, in the reek and ruin of it, I could no longer remember why I had ever believed that.
There had been so many of them. And there were so many more still.
Somewhere on the far side of this hell, hollowed out and walking.
Screaming silently inside their own stolen skins, and a great many of the dead I looked on now, I had put here myself.
You did this, the dark said gently.
You.
The lightning was in your hands. You chose this. Look at what your choosing cost his world.
I backed away. I couldn’t breathe. My heel caught, and I nearly went down among them, into that cold and grasping tangle of the dead.
I bit down on a scream, hauled the door shut, and ran as fast as I could.
I ran in blind panic, away from it all and deeper into the dying castle with the smell of it still clinging to the back of my throat.
I should have learned my lesson. I should have known better than to open another door.
But there was one ahead of me, and footsteps somewhere behind me now.
Steps soft and unhurried, as if certain enough they would find me.
But a door, a door is the promise of somewhere else…
anywhere else! So, I wrenched the next one wide and flung myself through it.
And the castle was gone.
I stood in a corridor of cracked linoleum and flickering fluorescent light, in the gutted shell of the old jail where Riley had led me when injured.
Right back to the very beginning of what would be my new life.
Back to when every day mattered, and the next was all about keeping yourself alive.
It was about learning to fight to make it happen, and no longer just about running away to hide.