“Yes,” she said clearly. “I’m sure.” If having Myrinne to lean on, to protect, would help Rabbit find the man the Nightkeepers needed him to be, then it was worth the risk.
Or so she told herself.
Strike glanced at Jox, then at Nate and Alexis. “Arguments?”
“Numerous,” Alexis said dryly. “But none on this particular matter. Fact is, the options are pretty much all equally risky, and this is the one that’ll keep the Nightkeepers intact.”
“Agreed,” Nate said without looking at her.
Sitting on the other side of Strike, Jox nodded. “I’ll do what I can to help,” he said to Anna.
Knowing the royal winikin as well as she did, she could tell he hated the added exposure she was piling onto herself, but knew it was the only and best option within a culture where both debt and responsibility were weighty matters.
“Then it’s settled,” she said, pushing the words past a sudden tightness in her throat. She sat back down and waited until Strike and Rabbit had done the same before she said to Rabbit, “Okay. Myrinne described her experiences to Leah pretty thoroughly, but I think it’d be good if you start from the beginning and walk us through what happened, what you learned from Iago.”
“There’s a second archive,” Rabbit said quietly, looking at his knuckles, which had gone white with fisted tension. “A library. I found out that much.”
Anna’s breath froze in her lungs, and the world seemed to contract to just the two of them as she whispered, “Iago has it?”
“No. Not as of last night, anyway. He used my powers to . . . question a woman.” Rabbit’s tone and the disgusted twist to his lips made the word “question” into a curse. “He kept asking her where her father hid the stuff.”
The connection sparked on a gasp, and Anna blurted, “Sasha!”
“Did she tell him where to find the library?” Nate asked quickly, his eyes going dark and intent.
Rabbit shook his head. “No. Her mind is super-strong.” He paused. “It was, anyway.”
Anna went still. “Why do you say that?”
“She was linked to Iago when I reversed his mind-bend and tried to fry his cortex.”
Horror gathered in Anna’s gut, alongside despair that they might’ve already lost their next-best chance at finding the library, and the woman Lucius had sought for reasons she didn’t yet understand but wasn’t willing to ignore. “Is she dead?”
“She was breathing when I left her. They both were.” He looked to Strike. “I can take you back there.”
The king nodded and stood. “Let’s go.” But they returned within twenty minutes, empty-handed.
Sasha and Iago were gone.
Lucius didn’t know where he was, didn’t know how to get back to where he was supposed to be. At times he wasn’t even sure he knew where he was supposed to be, only that it wasn’t where he was, so he kept walking, even though he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
His legs ached, but the road he traveled along never changed. The surface was smooth-packed dirt unmarked by tire tracks or hoofprints, though he occasionally saw the tracks of other pedestrians, always headed in the direction he was going, never the other way. On either side of the road, rocky, gray-brown plains stretched out to join somewhere in the distance with a gray-brown sky that held no clouds. There was only gray-brown everywhere, and the road that stretched out in front of him and behind him.
A part of him wondered if he’d died, if this was the journey the Maya spoke of, where the dead traveled through Xibalba to be sorted according to their actions in life. Those who died a violent death went straight to the sky, while everyone else had to meet a series of underworld challenges, and cross a river whose overlord needed to be paid with the jade pebbles buried over the eyes of the dead.
So far, though, Lucius hadn’t been challenged by anything worse than boredom, nor did he remember dying, and he had to imagine that wasn’t the sort of thing a guy forgot. Last thing he remembered was—
Oh, shit. Calling Anna for help as the green haze descended on him. Had he gone makol? Had the Nightkeepers sacrificed him while he’d been caught up in the Day-Glo fugue?
Amidst a strange sort of calm that had him continuing onward instead of freaking out and running screaming into the distance—or just standing still and screaming—he found he didn’t blame Anna and the others if that was what they’d decided. Risk was risk, and one grad student’s life didn’t matter much when balanced against the dozen Nightkeepers who needed to save the world. If he’d gone makol and put the Nightkeepers in danger, then they’d done what they’d needed to do.
If that was the case, he decided, he was okay with dying.
The moment he thought that, a shadow appeared in the distance, growing closer as he continued walking. Pretty soon he could make out a high stone arch stretching over the road, with huge, openmouthed serpents carved on either side.
Beyond it was a wide, sluggish river.
On instinct, Lucius reached into his pants pocket and found two hard, round objects in there. Pulling them out, he stared at the jade beads. That’s it, then, he thought, sadness breaking through the fog.
Game over.
“Turn around,” a multitonal voice said, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. “She needs you.”
Lucius stopped dead, and the fog blinked out of existence. He could see details all of a sudden, could see that the rocky plains on either side of him were painted curtains writhing with reptilian movement from the other side, and the archway was cracked and broken and black, the water brackish and stinking.
A pit opened up in the center of his stomach, yawning, dark, and terrifying.
“Who said that?” he called, his voice falling flat in the echoless space.
There was no answer, but suddenly he had control over his limbs again and could turn around on the path. He took a step back in the direction he’d come. The moment his foot landed, a terrible scream arose from the waterway, then another.
Lucius didn’t think, didn’t look back. He just started running toward the light that appeared in front of him, at the other end of the road of the damned.
Back to the land of the living.
It took most of the day for the members of the royal council to debrief Rabbit and Myrinne, alternating between them when Jox announced it was time for one of the exhausted, malnourished kids to eat or sleep, or both. By the end of the day, as Alexis headed to her rooms to change, shower, and generally take a big breath, she wasn’t convinced they knew much more than they had going in. Or rather, they knew more, but what they’d learned probably wouldn’t go very far toward helping them the next day, when they would ’port to the intersection beneath Chichén Itzá and defend the barrier against Iago and Camazotz.
The plan was for the Nightkeepers to ’port to the safe house early in the morning and stake out the tunnel entrance. Problem was, they weren’t even sure Iago would be working his magic through the intersection. Rabbit didn’t know if the mage had found the actual hellmouth, the place where the Xibalbans had called the Banol Kax through to earth in A.D. 951. If Iago knew where the hellmouth was, then he had direct access to Xibalba, do not pass go, do not collect, no need for the Nightkeepers’ intersection and its tortuous connections to the sky and underworld.
If Iago didn’t show at the intersection—which Alexis strongly suspected would be the case—the Nightkeepers would do as they had done during the winter solstice and eclipse, uplinking and banding together to hold the barrier that separated Xibalba from the earth. Strike and Leah would call on the power of Kulkulkan, and Alexis would add Ixchel’s strength to the mix. The barrier was a psi-entity that stretched everywhere and nowhere at once, which meant that if they managed to fortify it with enough power at Chichén Itzá, it should prove impenetrable at the hellmouth. In theory. In reality, they had no frigging clue. And that was the worry that had Alexis unable to settle in her rooms, and had her pacing from one to the next, touching a light fixture here, a book there, somehow needing the tactile reminders, the solidity of the earth plane.